Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz wrote an interesting blog post exploring the question, “Which Internet marketing channel would you choose if you had $1 million?” Or something along those lines.

This is an interesting question because most small businesses don’t have a million dollars to invest in their marketing plan. But by asking the question you can imagine what the most important marketing channels are for your business. Every business is different so the answer depends a great deal on what your individual goals are. But there are some principles behind each marketing channel that you’d want to base your decision on as well.

To sum up, Rand identifies the following Internet marketing channels:

• Display advertising
• E-mail marketing
• Pay per click advertising
• Online public relations
• Search engine optimization
• Affiliate marketing
• Social media marketing
• Viral content campaigns
• Conversion rate optimization

Some of these channels, like affiliate marketing and viral content campaigns, just aren’t feasible for most small businesses. But some of these are absolutely essential.

For instance, why you’d do away with SEO - search engine optimization - is beyond me. E-mail marketing is another channel that I’d say is almost essential no matter what your business is. The optional channels are PPC and display advertising. The rest of us could be left to personal preferences.

So which is right for you?

To answer the question, you have to ask yourself some very serious questions, starting with “What is your budget?” If you don’t have a large budget for Internet marketing - and most small businesses don’t - then you’ll be limited in what you can accomplish. You also need to ask, “What kind of time do I have for performing tasks myself?” Time and money are perhaps your two most precious resources. It helps, then, to identify early on just how much of both that you have to contribute to Internet marketing. Before you do anything else, those questions must be asked.

Next, what kind of internal resources do you have? If you’re not going to do it yourself then you’ll need someone who can do it for you. Will it be a staff person? Will you outsource it? *If you have more money resources than you have time or internal human resources then outsourcing it is your best option. If you are limited in money, but you have a staff person who is underutilized then you might dedicate someone internally to the tasks of Internet marketing that you have identified to be of interest to you. So you can see that it isn’t all cut and dry.

If you feel yourself to be in need of a second head then why not ask for an Internet marketing consultation to help you figure out the best direction to move?

WebProNews wrote an article in April where Chris Crum interviewed a few SEO/Internet marketing types and asked them how social media and SEO relate. The answers were diverse with a few saying social media is great for link building and some saying it has little to no SEO benefit. Some say that social media is best used as a branding tool. Then there were the specific social media site mentions such as Facebook is not good for SEO and Twitter is, etc. So what’s the answer?

Internet marketers have a tendency to disagree on just about everything. Ask any question and you’ll get ten answers from as many Internet marketers working the Web. SEOs, in particular, have vehement disagreement. One thing they can all agree on, however, is that both SEO and social media are important for Internet marketers.

Personally, I believe social media has all the benefits mentioned - link building, branding, off site marketing, and driving traffic - but it often depends on which social media site you are discussing as to which benefit is most prevalent. Also, how you approach marketing through those sites makes a difference.

To make the most of your social media campaigns, you should first identify what you hope to gain from the campaign and identify which social media sites will deliver those benefits to you. Then you can intelligently choose how to approach your marketing efforts through those media to make the most of the benefits you are seeking. Strategize then monetize.

When it comes to building links for your small business, I can think of two surefire ways to build great links over a long period of time. And that’s really how you should do it - gradually over a period of time.

Why are links important? Because the search engines analyze links for value. They rank web pages based on a number of factors, but one very important factor is the quantity and quality of your inbound links. Of course, I’d say that on-page ranking factors are more important. But link building shouldn’t be discounted.

As a local small business, you don’t have to put out as much effort or expense as other businesses. Your pool of competition is likely smaller. That’s why you need to be careful about how you go about performing your search engine optimization. Nevertheless, there are three sound link building methods that I’d recommend for most small businesses at the local level:

1. Blogging - Blogging is all the rage. But there’s more to blogging than what the hype suggests. Blogs build links. And you can have as many blogs as you want. You can use those blogs to build links back to your main website. Those links will be figured into the search engines’ formulas for ranking web pages.
2. Article Marketing - Yes, articles are very important. Even for a local business. You can write articles and distribute them online to promote your business. You should. Use links in your author resource box to build inbound links to your important pages. That’s how you use article marketing for link building.
3. Directory Submissions - Some people say directory submissions are not important any more. I disagree. I think you need quite a few directory submissions. But I wouldn’t rely on directory submissions alone. People who say directory submissions aren’t important any more haven’t learned the value of link diversity. They’re beneficial, but not all by themselves.

There are lots of ways to go about link building, but if you stick to these three methods, you can’t go wrong.

Small businesses today have many more options for web hosting than we used to. Of course, you have to make the decision about what is best for your situation, but here are a few alternatives to consider.

Shared Hosting - This is basic web hosting. The downside to shared hosting is that it is the least secure and least expensive kind of hosting. Most small businesses will do fine with shared hosting, but it isn’t for every one. If you feel that you may need more space or tighter security then you should discuss your options with a hosting expert.

Dedicated Hosting - Dedicated hosting is more secure. You can opt for managed or unmanaged hosting. If you go with unmanaged hosting you’ll have to provide the resources to manage the servers. That will save you money, but if you don’t have an IT department, network administrator, or access to personnel to manage your servers for you then you should go with a managed hosting service.

Dedicated hosting is more expensive than shared hosting. Managed is more expensive than unmanaged hosting. But the security is much, much tighter.

Cloud Computing - Many companies are now starting to use cloud computing, which is essentially a decentralized way of storing data. Small businesses can benefit from this type of computing, but it too has its disadvantages.

One of the main advantages to cloud computing is that it opens up opportunities for small businesses to take advantage of some of the same resources that large companies have enjoyed for a long time with minimal cost. You pay as you go for the services that you use. This way you don’t have to pay for huge packages of services that you have no need of. It can be less expensive than dedicated hosting or more expensive depending on the services you need. Security is often not as tight as it is with a dedicated server, but if you shop around you can find an adequate service provider with excellent security on its servers.

There are other options as well, but I’ll leave a discussion of cluster server environments for another time. These are perhaps the best options for most small businesses. If you think you may need more options beyond your basic shared hosting plan then call an expert and get a professional opinion.

Twitter has been providing real time communication for a couple of years now. Facebook has flirted with it, but they’ve just upped the stakes. Quite frankly, I like this.

This could very well lead to some stiff competition. Facebook has far more users than Twitter and the ability to use Facebook for real time communication with privacy settings could attract even more users. What’s more, it could lead to some Twitterers abandoning that service to migrate over to Facebook. After all, Twitter is quickly becoming a haven for spammers and not everyone who joins Twitter really dives in and makes the most of it.

Facebook is real social networking. Twitter is being used largely for mass communication, so there is a bit of difference between the two. I still think that savvy marketers will, and should, use both. Even small businesses. The power of local branding can best be ascertained by using the two in combination.

Security is very important for any Web business or website. If you have a blog that runs on an open source platform like Wordpress, it’s even more important. Hackers tend to target open source systems to gain access and do bad things like drop spam files and so on.

If you want to stop spam from entering your comments area then you need to use Akismet, a WordPress plugin that stops 99.9% of the spam that tries to get through. But beyond that, you can make your WordPress blog more secure by using a password that makes it difficult to hack. If you use a simple password that is a dictionary word then you make yourself vulnerable to hacks and attacks. Make your password longer and more difficult to guess.

A good password should consist of numbers, letters, special chacters, and lower and upper case letters. A word like “wordpress” is not enough as that is easy to guess, particularly by a robot that runs through the dictionary automatically guessing passwords. If, instead, you added numbers and characters as well as upper case and lower case letters then you’d have a more secure password. For instance, “W3ord&p2rEss!4″ is a lot more secure and more difficult to guess. For every character that you add you make your password exponentially more difficult to crack.

Blog security begins with your password. Make it something that is easy for you to remember but difficult for hackers and robots to guess and you’ll be much more secure.

One often overlooked method of link building is to use press releases to drive traffic to your website, but don’t make the mistake of using press releases solely for link building purposes. That’s not their primary purpose.

Still, a well placed press release can be a big boost to your search engine marketing by providing one or more high quality, relevant links back to your website.

The first thing to remember is to only submit a press release if you have something newsworthy to promote. Your sale on corned beef next weekend is not newsworthy. Sorry.

However, if you sponsor a community Corned Beef Hash banquet and invite the entire community then that could very well be newsworthy and therefore worthy of a press release. But make your event attractive before you start promoting it. Invite some local talent to give a show, have one of your employees dress up as the Corned Beef Hash Man and waslk around your store’s parking lot giving out free samples of corned beef and other goodies, and throw in some unique festivities and even games with door prizes. Make it a huge event.

The more spectacular you make your event the more likely you’ll get people to come, and the more likely you are to get your press release noticed. Once you start promoting your event, write up a press release with the pertinent information in it and submit it to several press release distribution websites. Get your press release in the right places and you’ll likely find some news agencies picking up and running it as is or calling you for an interview. Those activities can lead to inbound links to your website as well as high quality traffic to your event.

A few days ago Mike McDonald wrote a blog post about ranking factors in 2009. I completely agree with most of what he says in the article. To summarize, here’s what he says, with SEOmoz Rand Fishkin’s blessings, is important this year:

• Title tags
• Anchor text
• Link diversity
• Social media and mobile marketing

I would completely agree. I think Title tags have always been important as has anchor text. Link diversity hasn’t always been at the top of the list, but in the last few years it has risen to the top as Google has refined its link quality algorithms. Social media and mobile marketing as ranking factors are new on the scene and I think they’ll rise in importance. But probably not in ways that most of us will imagine.

So what do Mike and Rand agree are not important? Check this out:

• H1 tags
• Keyword density
• W3C validation

Again, great points. But I still think H1 tags are somewhat important. Not as important as they used to be, but important nonetheless. It isn’t even so much that they are bigger than everything else, but if your H1 tag is at the top of the page like it is supposed to be then it becomes a lot more important. If you fill your page with H1 tags then those H1 tags look spammy and become less important. The proper way to use H tags is in declining size from the top to the bottom, which is the same way that newspapers traditionally size their article heads, in the order of importance. If you do it that way then all the H tags are more important.

Still, good article. Thanks to Mike McDonald and WebProNews for a good discussion on ranking ractors.

Small business branding is really a simple matter. You may not need to spend thousands of dollars on a huge marketing plan. In fact, spend too much and it will cut into your budget too hard, leaving little room for profit. That’s why many companies opt not to bother with marketing at all. But marketing doesn’t have to be expensive, even for small businesses.

Branding can be as simple as putting your logo on your letterhead. For a rather reasonable fee you can have a graphic artist design you a logo and that’s a one-time fee that allows you to use the same artwork over and over again for the life of your business. That logo will speak volumes about what your business stands for and you want it to be something that will be memorable and recognizable for many years to come. Once you brand yourself in the minds of the people you want to do business with in your local area, it will be difficult for them to forget you. And that’s when you know you’ve done a successful job at branding you business.

Other small business branding practices include simple things like a slogan or tag line that appears on all of your marketing copy, a color that can be associated with your business, a particular style that can be associated with your business and sets you apart from your competition, or anything that establishes you as unique and professional in your niche.

Branding is really all about putting yourself in the minds of your customers so that they remember you even when they aren’t trying to. I’m sure you picture the logos of McDonalds, Coca-Cola, Proctor & Gamble, Abercrombie & Fitch, Exxon-Mobile, and a couple dozen other large corporations without much effort. You can do the same thing for your small business with just a little branding effort and the people you want to remember you will, just when they least expect it.

When it comes to marketing your small business website, there is no one right way or a single wrong way. There are effective and ineffective ways. What we try to do here on the Small Business Mavericks blog is to give you an overview of the online marketing options available to you and let you choose the ones that will be most effective for your business. Since every business, and every small business website, is different, they all require different marketing strategies to maintain an effective online marketing campaign.

For many small businesses, a simple strategy of blogging and article marketing can be very effective. For others, you might be better off with an intensive PPC campaign. Or you may require a strong social media marketing effort. But almost all online marketing should begin with a well-optimized website and move out from there.

Even after building your small business website, you can probably benefit from all of the above marketing strategies. But your budget may stand in the way of performing some of the tasks you want to accomplish. That happens. The important thing to keep in mind for any small business is to work within your budget to design the most effective online marketing strategy for you. If you need help with this, we’re here to be your guide.