Here are four key steps you can implement now:

1. Find the hidden players. Search and find those independent bloggers and thought leaders in the industry and get them involved in your brand. It’s possible that you have assets to offer that would be useful to them. Likewise, it’s probable you can offer a platform to give that blogger additional exposure. Find them, partner with them, and enlist them to help tell your story.
   

    

2. Make rock stars out of your rock stars.  You know who your experts are.  Help them set up their blogs and social media sites. Teach them how to tell their story (which will, in turn, tell your company’s story). Take a page from Indium.  Look at how they are showcasing their stars.  Very powerful.
   

    

3. Where’s your editor? Yes, your company experts have the knowledge, but it’s likely not all of them can write well or communicate clearly.  Hire an outside editor work with them and their content to position them like the pros they are. If you are asking your company experts to share content, you need to give them the tools to be successful…editor included.
   

1. More is better (as long as it’s great and relevant to your customers and business).  No matter how much online content you create, it’s probably not enough.  More content pages lead to more Google indexed pages equals more ways that buyers and prospects can find you.  It’s not rocket science. And, the more content you have being shared by more people will drive more interest in your products, as long as the content is relevant to your business (don’t forget this last point).
   

Make doing the above a budget priority for this year and into 2011.

A loyal customer base is key to building a successful startup. 

If there is one mantra you should adopt now and plan for in your business, it should be that repeat business equals profit.

The reality of business is that it costs anywhere from six to eight times as much to generate a new customer as it does to sell to an existing customer. And profits only start to accrue from new customers after a second, third or even fourth purchase.

So how can you plan for repeat business in your startup?

First, you must determine upfront the cost of "buying" a new customer for your business. What do I mean by "buying" a customer?

Exactly that.

Instead of guessing how much to spend on sales and marketing, determine how much you are willing to spend to "buy" a customer. This will give you a more concrete way to create your budgets for marketing, customer appreciation strategies and referral programs.

So how do you determine the acquisition cost of getting a customer?

Say your $1,000 ad generates 100 phone calls. For each call or lead, you're paying $10 to drive people to your business. If 20 of those leads turn into buyers, you're paying $50 to capture each sale.

Let's also say you can plan for each customer to spend $500 with you, with $100 of that profit. How often would you continue to invest $50 into marketing? If you wanted to profit continually, you'd invest those dollars over and over again.

Knowing how much it costs to buy a customer also allows you to plan for and master the numbers around the lifetime value of your customer.

Years ago, I owned a dog food business. My average customer would spend $800 a year on their dogs, and the average dog lived about 10 years. I presumed a customer would stay with me half that time, meaning the lifetime value of my dog food customer would be $4,000.

Imagine if I created a repeat business program that both produced and rewarded referrals. If a single customer could be incentivized to buy on a monthly basis and was also prompted to refer two new customers to me, that would make a single customer worth $12,000.

What if those new referrals sent more referrals? How much value is that initial contact worth now? More importantly, what would I be willing to do to keep that single customer?

This long-term view of customer value is essential. Only when you realize a customer's lifetime value do you see the importance of developing great relationships with your customers. The goal of all that effort is, of course, to build a loyal base of raving fans–the ultimate key to building repeat and referral business.

So what should your repeat business plan look like?

Here are five key action points:

1. Be diligent with your database. This is extremely important. In fact, the biggest asset for most companies long-term is their customer database. So plan for it, protect it, add to it and communicate with it at every opportunity.
2. Make your communication personal and personable. Whether it's a letter, a brochure, a frequent buyer's card or an e-mail, make your communication to your database reflect the culture and personality of your business. Make everything represent the core principles of your company vision and mission.
3. Make it easy for your customers to buy and keep buying. Lower the barriers to purchasing from you. A great way to test this is to pretend you are a customer trying to buy from your own company at least once a month. What, as a customer, would you change? Another way to lower buying barriers is to simply ask your best customers how you can make doing business with you easier.
4. Decide what you can promise your customers. Make sure it is something you can deliver consistently each and every time. The basic rule is to "under-promise and over-deliver."
5. Test and measure everything. From your ads to your numbers to your loyalty programs, make sure the numbers work at every level. Because whenever your marketing ROI fails to deliver, you can tweak or change your programs.

In the end, people buy from people they like and stay with companies they perceive care about them and stay connected with them. People are also willing to pay more for good service–when it's the service they desire.

Having all of these components driving your repeat business will allow you to develop a great competitive advantage for your company, and it's the foundation for referrals and word-of-mouth advertising, and that form of advertising continues to be the least expensive (and most effective) marketing you or anyone can "buy."

As it turns out, the rules they expect brands to follow are distinct from the code they expect “normal” users to follow.

Check out these dicta and caveats, and let us know your experiences and best practices in the comments.

1. Don’t Be a Showoff

Give Twitter users your features and benefits. Let them know about special deals. Don’t post links to your latest press release, promote articles written by your CEO or make extravagant claims. A good rule of thumb to determine whether a tweet is user-friendly or brand vanity is to ask yourself, “If I didn’t work here, would I care about this?” If you’re not sure, ask a brutally honest friend who doesn’t work at your company.

2. Don’t Use Poor Grammar or Spelling

If your replying 2 a user make sure ur social media intern doesnt do it like this LOL!

Seriously, grammar Nazis abound on the web. Write words out in their entirety, don’t use confusing abbreviations or too many of them, make sure punctuation is pristine and try to keep “lolspeak” and emoticons to a minimum.

3. Don’t Get Too Personal

You might be a real person hiding behind your brand’s Twitter account, but depending on the size and nature of the company, this isn’t likely the best place to share your favorite band’s latest track, or compliment a user’s hairdo. Keep your conversations warm but professional; it’s what users expect from a brand ambassador, and anything else comes off as creepy.

4. Don’t Auto-Tweet

It’s OK to set up tweets to roll out while you’re away from your desk, but think long and hard before you automate an entire feed to stream into your Twitter account. Users can smell a bot from miles away, and the point of Twitter is to be personally engaging more than blatantly promotional. Also, this might go without saying for the tech-savvy marketers among us, but don’t automatically DM new followers; it’s seen as spam. And never DM someone your account doesn’t also follow.

5. Don’t Leave Air in the Conversation

If you’re carrying on a series of @replies, don’t wait a day or two between messages. This isn’t the Pony Express; users will want a reply within a few hours. If you wait longer, they may have already forgotten what you were talking about. And be sure to use standard reply mechanisms so the Twitter web interface and other applications will thread the conversation, in case either party needs to reference a previous comment.

6. Don’t Overtweet

If you’re using Twitter as a 24/7, one-way broadcast system, you’re not having a conversation — you might be just “shouting” at your followers. While some brands have successfully maintained one-way, broadcast-only, no-@reply accounts, many opt to engage directly with their followers. Whichever method you choose, make sure you’re not tweeting too often and flooding your followers’ timelines.

7. Do Shout Out to Users Who Mention You

Especially if that mention is favorable, don’t be shy about tweeting thanks, tips or promotions to someone who’s shown your brand some Twitter love. Most of the time, users are surprised and delighted to find a name brand in their stream of replies. Exercise caution, however, when engaging with users who’ve made negative comments. Those conversations can go very well, or they can backfire. Always remain empathetic but professional.

8. Do Monitor Keywords and Competitors

If someone expresses issues with a competitor or poses a general question about your vertical, you should be all over it within a few hours. It’s a great opportunity to win new fans, convert seekers into customers and develop a reputation as a knowledgeable and responsive resource in your industry. Just make sure you keep off-brand replies to a non-creepy modicum.

9. Do Make an Informative Profile

Use your company or brand logo as your avatar, and state the purpose of the account clearly in your description. Your profile’s main link should direct Twitter followers to the most informative, engaging and user-friendly part of your website.

10. Do Fish Where the Fish Are

Let’s be honest: Not every brand needs to be on Twitter. Every brand should be monitoring Twitter — and we’ve written a lot about social media monitoring tools for brands on Mashable — but not every company’s customers are going to be on this site or be open to being contacted this way. If your brand has an older demographic, or if your product is of a more sensitive nature, you might want to be a silent observer of this ecosystem rather than an active participant.

Things get a bit more complicated when you want to print something from a mobile device, like an iPad, or from a laptop based on Google’s Chrome OS, which relies entirely on web apps and services. This is why Google is working on Google Cloud Print, a service that enables “any application (web, desktop, or mobile) on any device to print to any printer.”

Google Cloud Print is still in the early days of development, but Google made the code and documentation public as part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects. The documentation reveals how Google plans to solve some of the issues it will inevitably face, such as making Cloud Print work with legacy printers.

“The ideal experience is for your printer to have native support for connecting to cloud print services. Under this model, the printer has no need for a PC connection of any kind or for a print driver. The printer is simply registered with one or more cloud print services and awaits print jobs. Cloud-aware printers don’t exist yet, but one of our main goals in publishing this information at an early stage is to begin engaging industry leaders and the community in developing cloud-aware printers and the necessary open protocols for these printers to communicate with cloud print services.

“We want users to be able to print to legacy printers via Google Cloud Print. This is accomplished through the use of a proxy, a small piece of software that sits on a PC where the printer is installed. The proxy takes care of registering the printer with Google Cloud Print and awaiting print jobs from the service. When a job arrives, it submits the print job to the printer using the PC operating system’s native print stack and sends job status back to the printer.”

There are obviously some obstacles ahead, but it’s an amazing idea. If print jobs are handled in the cloud you won’t need drivers, and most of the problems users have with printing from devices like smartphones and tablets will be solved.

In every recessionary economic period, there are winners and losers. Those of us still in business seem to have it good as 2010 pushes on – Very good! And why is that? Well the answer for many of us is strategic marketing plans.

The notion that some businesses will benefit from a recession isn’t new – and that’sexactly why it’s worth revisiting. Keen C-suite executives and savvy marketing pros will face the current economic crisis head on: with one cautious eye on historical lessons and theother on opportunities that abound in a changing, newly emerging marketing environment.

Today, it takes steely nerve to resist the pressure to cut marketing spending at all costs.But solid historical evidence proves that companies that reduce marketing spending in arecession enter the post-recession future far weaker. Conversely, historical data also showsthat companies that continue or increase marketing and advertising spending during arecession come out the back end with stronger brands and increased market share.

But then the question arrives: "Which marketing strategy(ies) will work for my business in this new economy?"

Enter Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and Social Networking…

Historically, Search Engine Optimization, Social Networking and Social Media Marketing were considered separate activities and separate programs. As of now they are actually becoming more related and more components of one comprehensive Online Marketing Campaign.

As best and as briefly I can explain it, now is working like this. Search Engines make their money be selling ad space. They have traditionally managed this revenue by selling ads on their search engine pages. Over the last one or two years as the social platforms have skyrocketed in popularity and in usage by consumers, search engines are now selling ads on the contextual social networks.

This brings about a severe shift in the way marketing dollars are leveraged moving forward. So I ask you this:

How have you implemented your Strategic Marketing Plan for 2010 and beyond?

The end of 2009 showed a record high in online ad spending – $6.3 billion for Q4. This is the largest amount ever spent on online advertising in a single quarter, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).