Traditional marketing is interruption marketing. These days, it is much more effective if you can earn a customer’s interest (as opposed to forcing them to look at your advertisement). This is called inbound marketing. In a recent presentation, Rand Fishkin from Seattle SEO company SEOMoz hadsome great tips on on successful inbound marketing. Here are the notes I took.

1. Create sharing incentives. Make something people will want to link to, or a directory they can list themselves in. For example, UrbanSpoon has a “spoon back” program. They feature reviews by bloggers who link to the site.

2. Mine the social web for engagement opportunities. Watch for people signaling their interest and intent for your product.

3. Embeddable content (or make your content embeddable). Distribute embeddable content like video, images, and slide shows.

4. Make your data interesting / controversial etc. Simple, but easy to forget. Focus on the type of stuff that fits your audience well (as evidenced by what they like on Reddit, etc.)

5. Mine your followers. Work the people that already like you. See which people have tweeted you, which have linked to you, which ones you have email addresses for. Work ’em.

6. Followerwonk twitter user search engine – use social to connect with journalists and bloggers.

7. Implement a referral system like dropbox. When you refer you get more storage… no – what you really want is to give someone else something for free. Same for getting/giving access early

8. Give your community a platform. Profiles and user generated content. Forums and tools.

9. Adopt the new rel=”author” tag and use video xml site maps to get a thumbnail next to your link in search results. SeoMOZ uses Wistia. A 3rd ranked result with video thumbnail gets more traffic than the first two.

10. Create a monthly top x influencers in your industry list. Like the Seattle 2.0 startup list or the techmeme leader board. Everybody on the list links to it. we’re vain, we can’t help it.