anyone analyze the effectiveness of their site and online marketing. Marketo has all kinds of free training and educational resources. Landslide has an online tool that helps organizations design a sales process for free. Practically every software-as-a-service company out there has some kind of free trial. If there’s a way to take a part of your service that is useful by itself and make it free, this will generate more leads and become your best sales tool. Even if you’re a company that doesn’t sell software, what kind of free trial can you offer? A free consultation? Free online training videos? Samples of your work? Sample product? Organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) This one takes the most patience, but if it is done right, it is simply a byproduct of doing everything else right. SEO requires thorough keyword research and search engine rank monitoring. If you do this well, blogging, public relations and social media can support your SEO efforts without an expensive SEO consultant, and without a lot of work dedicated “just” to SEO. The name of the game is to pick keywords, optimize pages with those keywords (could be blog posts) and build links. The effect of SEO on inbound lead generation is cumulative and compounding. In other words, month after month, as long as you keep creating great content and building smart links, the number of leads generated from SEO goes up and up. Blogging You must “enter the conversation” (be a part of online discussions) if you’re going to do inbound marketing. There are so many people who start a blog and think it’s just about saying smart things or about writing. It’s not. It’s about having a 2-way conversation. Any good salesperson knows that an effective prospecting call requires the prospect to be talking more than the salesperson. It’s the same way with a blog. It’s imperative to be a resource for people and to proactively network with your blog by reading other blogs, linking to other blogs and leaving comments on other blogs, if you want people to do the same thing for you. It’s not necessarily the law of reciprocity, but it’s the law of participation. Set a simple goal, such as meeting one new blogger per week.