2) Utilize plain vanilla text link advertising - find web sites or portals that have traffic that is comprised of customers who are in your market segment. Then, add a text link (banner ad or graphic button if you will) to a page or pages and negotiate a media buy that is based upon a "cost per click" basis; i.e. paying only for traffic that clicks through to your web site.

3) Creating and deploying a "link strategy" campaign (i.e. getting a site listed via other web sites) is one of best self-sustaining interactive marketing processes available to any company seeking to drive qualified traffic to a web site. This process is not based upon more traditional "reciprocal links" procedure but incorporates some web-based competitive analysis. You start by analyzing links that are pointing back to your top 3-5 competitors' web sites and then establish relationships with these sites and also submit your site to top and second tier directories to augment number of links.

4) Newsletter insert advertising used to be considered rather mundane and not very effective. But, if you contrast effectiveness of this process versus new opt-in e-mail response rates heretofore-lowly newsletter advertising has new and vastly improved luster! Also, in past it was difficult to track when and if people clicked on a text link ad in a newsletter - but new technology enables virtually any publisher to provide you with this information, enabling you to track your ROI for media buy. Finally, real beauty of newsletter text advertising is that it is very targeted and people want to receive information so you can be confident your ad will at least be viewed by some finite number of prospects.

5) Search Engine Ranking has come of age in last 12-24 months - you can now easily create and deploy a traditional (title, description, keywords inserts in content, submissions and optimization) search engine ranking process that is augmented with a pay per click ("PPC") process. Deploying both ensures you derive long term (traditional rankings) and short term (pay per click) results, with latter being driven by amount of funds you have in your marketing budget.

5) Making competitive analysis a low priority: Too many companies forget about their competitors after business plan has been written. They don't take time to review them on a periodic basis and try and figure out how to deliver goods and services differently, which in turn drives competitive advantage and a long-term sustainable business model.

6) Poorly thought out Investor Relations press release: Do companies actually think investors are just plain stupid and don't really read an IR (Investor Relations) directed Press Release carefully? Investors are typically very bottom line oriented - they want to know about revenue growth and real strategic partnership developments that help company grow and not much else. Just throwing fluff out in market and hoping this will drive investors to invest is just plain shortsighted stupidity.

7) Thinking any/all consultants know your business better than you: Reporters and consultants (including this one) have driven just as many companies into ground with bad advice as much as they have helped them - companies must realize a consultant is typically not down in trenches and they can make some bad calls - it's important to filter their advice.

8) Letting inmates run asylum - customers should help a company refine its product marketing strategy by working as partners. If engineering tells marketing "the customer doesn't really know what they want but we do" red lights should start flashing danger - company may be in serious peril and at very least need new focus and direction for product marketing.