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In every business, one fundamental constraint always exists: resources. I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t use more budget, bodies or time. More, more, more! You can get more, but it starts with making the most of what you have now. Resources don’t materialize out of thin air; you have to earn them. You can do this by maximizing the value of what’s already at your disposal, driving more sales and increasing the budget available to invest in marketing as a result.

The key is optimization. Take a look at your team and your budget. Then, measure everything. How much does it cost to get a lead? How about a sale? Which techniques are most effective? Figure out where your winners are – and note the gaps. The second part, in particular, is where enter:marketing differs from the rest of the IT marketing community. We’ll help you build a marketing program that plays to your capabilities and addresses your needs, all within your budget.

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One of the top concerns we’ve heard about blog-based marketing is scope. Most IT manufacturers and VARs do everything they can to build targeted lists and zero in on exactly the audiences they want. Blogs, it seems, go in exactly the opposite direction, giving you the entire web, even if your needs are limited to a company of a certain size, industry or region. A marketing blog can deliver on this, though it might not seem intuitive. The difference comes in how people use the web and find sites.

The fact that the web is worldwide doesn’t mean that everyone in the world is looking for your company or your blog. In fact, depending on how you write your blog content, the visitors who find it can be rather specific.

There are basically three ways to find a blog (or any website): direct access, online referral and search. The first, direct, means that the visitor either knows about the blog already or has learned about it offline (e.g., by word of mouth) and has decided to take a look. A referral occurs when a visitor hits your blog by clicking a link to it, either from an e-mail message or another website. Finally, there’s search. You top a few words into Google, Yahoo! or another search engine to find information or a particular website.

Let’s take a look at what this means for the people who come to your blog:

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