Yield Software is offering its new free e-book, The Link Economy and Why It Matters to Small & Growing Businesses (no registration required).

(Full disclosure: Yield is my client and I helped put the book together.)

The 70-page e-book explains why small and medium-sized businesses need to sit up and pay attention to the Link Economy.

As authors Matt Malden and Derek Gordon state in the book, it’s no longer enough to simply have a website.

These days, you must understand and employ the Link Economy — which means you must create content that other site owners will want to link to and in turn, you must link out to other content.

The Link Economy concept is something I knew about based on my own business and how people find me but I didn’t connect the dots in a big picture way until I began working on the book.

What hit home for me: links don’t just happen between website and website.

They happen when someone includes a link to your blog post via a Tweet, another blog post, a news article, a Facebook or LinkedIn comment, or an e-newsletter article.

They happen in iPhone apps, in YouTube videos, and within e-books like this one.

And they happen when someone comments on your blog and you comment on theirs.

In short, we are a Linked Economy and the sooner you as a business owner or marketer understand this — and take advantage of it — the further ahead you’ll be.

A Silicon Valley start-up, Yield Software offers its Yield Software Web Marketing Suite.

The software enables small and mid-sized businesses to automatically perform multivariate testing for SEO, PPC, and landing page optimization across all three search engines — and then serves up the best performing pages automatically in real time.

Based on my own experience working with small companies, this type of software is desperately needed as many small mom and pop shops are losing their shirts on PPC campaigns and have no clue to how to maximize SEO and landing page tactics.

Be sure to download the e-book (it’s chockablock full of Web marketing info) and do check out Yield Software.

You can test drive the software via a risk-free, no obligation demo.

I’ve given about six or seven presentations since November . . . what used to be a scary, nerve-wracking experience has now become quite a bit of fun.

Although I enjoy public speaking, I know I can do better. So I was very happy to read David Meerman Scott’s blog post, 10 Tips for Becoming an Incredibly Successful Public Speaker, a while ago.

I used a few of his tips, especially the one about not using PowerPoint as a teleprompter. (Guilty as charged.)

David followed up his initial 10 tips post with another post about his colleague, Nick Morgan, offering a free e-book, before you Open Your Mouth — the keys to great public speaking. It’s a free download — meaning no registration required.

Nick discusses the four keys that make a speaker a *great* speaker, and one of those key elements is rehearsing your speech.

This is something I learned early on. I usually spend a good three to five hours rehearsing. I rehearse getting up to the podium or stage, my introduction, any stories I’m using, and my transitions.

Most importantly, I rehearse how to click through to things like YouTube videos and Websites — because technological snafus are the worst, something I learned at the last presentation I gave.

I share my mistakes with you, and what I learned, so that you can learn from me (as I learned from David).

BIG MISTAKE #1: Instead of using my own laptop, I used the laptop provided. The laptop had Vista, which I haven’t used, thus, I fumbled around a lot with the unfamiliar environment.

BIG MISTAKE #2: Because I didn’t have my own computer, I didn’t check to see if I could access Websites such as YouTube before my presentation.

Thus, I couldn’t show my great social media examples. And, I couldn’t get into SM sites such as Twitter because I couldn’t remember my passwords.

BIG MISTAKE #3: I kept pointing at the laptop versus using a laser pointer to point things out on the screen. An audience member pointed it out to me — a tip for which I am eternally grateful!

The audience was very nice and we all laughed about the snafus, but I learned a huge lesson.

That night I gave another presentation and made sure everything was working before the audience arrived. I also opened all of the sites I would be accessing during the presentation so that they were ready to go before-hand.

What the lessons have you learned while giving presentations?

Five B2B MarCom Strategies to Increase Sales Now – You can download this e-book now. No registration required!

YouTube. Twitter. Blogs. Podcasts. White Papers. Search. Direct Mail. Trade shows. Webinars. Networking. TV commercials. Prints ads. LinkedIn. Facebook. Digg.

Some days I want to scream, “STOP!”

To say that marketing today is fractured and fragmented is a total understatement.

Where are people (our customers and prospects) congregating? How do we reach them? What works? What doesn’t?

Does it make sense to run ads in trade publications? No wait, maybe we should dump all our money into search. But wait, some gurus are still advocating direct mail and white papers.

What’s a marketing professional to do?

My new e-book, Five B2B MarCom Strategies to Increase Sales Now, won’t help you decide the best channel for disseminating your messages.

But, it will help you with strategy. That’s because no matter what the communication channel, the strategies for developing messages and campaigns that resonate with buyers and customers have remained the same:

1. Understand your target market

2. Determine your campaign objectives before you start writing

3. Integrate online and offline tactics

4. Build your Website around what Buyers and Prospects want

5. Focus on your Customer, not on your company

These strategies aren’t rocket science but in today’s fragmented marketing world, they’re often forgotten in the rush to get a campaign out the door.

You can download this e-book without having to register, provide your name, nada, nothing.

I hope you enjoy it. I enjoyed putting it together!