Whether your project is a startup or small business site, you should stay away from marketing at all costs. Marketing is basically spending money to promote your site by buying advertising space, paying for editorial features, mail outs, and the list goes on. Your Marketing effort is measured by ROI - Return of Investments and since as a startup to small business your level of brand reputation is low all your marketing efforts will go to waste anyways. Instead of marketing you should Campaign. Campaigning doesn't necessarily cost money, there are a lot back alley ways to getting your name out there without needing to spend a dime!

Campaigning is much harder than marketing which is one of the biggest reasons why most businesses take the easier way out. My philosophy is "No Sweat, No Result" meaning you have to work hard, you should NOT start thinking of cheating the system right from the get go, in other words stay away from the lazy route.

To Campaign first measure your competency with available opportunities, know where you are most strong and leverage your strengths to enhance your brand by giving it personality. I know an entrepreneur who was great at public speaking, so to promote his business/brand/product he kept participating in all sorts of forums and conferences. He aligned his speeches so that he can integrate a part of his brand into them. In a way his was selling his brand indirectly and was getting paid a lot of money to promote his own business.

Focus on speed, develop a competitive instinct, know that it's a jungle out there, you either kill or be killed. In this world R&D does NOT mean Research and Development, R&D means Rub and Duplicate as soon as possible, never let your business lose it's competitive advantage to another party. Come out with a simple idea you can stamp into everyones brain then expand the idea by adding more aligned products and features. Do NOT tangent into off topic industries, for example, if your site is about cars, don't tangent off into talking about politics, but instead expand by adding motorcycles, or motor sports and so on, keep everything relevant because your existing customers are the most profitable ones.

Campaigning is time focused. you cannot expect a campaign to last you a year, most campaign run for only a few months. The beginning of a campaign is a critical time, you have to be able to come out hard and fast. To do so, Exploit the gravitational center of your industry with space and energy. Find out what drives your industry and try to be controversial, or critical and at best interesting. People love to read about controversy and cannot stand criticism while they constantly seek better benefits, and blogs love to write about what people like to read.

Forget about soft selling. Replace soft selling metrics like satisfaction, delight, impressions and gifts, with hard campaigning metrics like big benefits, revolutions and evolutions all with revenues and margins in mind. Your business should be focused on building revenue streams rather sales channels.

Don't just run an ad for 3 months while thinking you have 3 months of nothing else to do. In 3 months you should constantly update and upgrade your site, enhance the user experience, experiment with different campaign strategies, and live in a suitcase going from city to city, newspaper to newspaper, radio to radio. You have to let everybody know that you are serious about this. This is no longer the time where you can get away with BETA software and half baked business ideas. Each business idea has only one chance to make an impact, sitting around and spending money on ad dollars wouldn't get you there! It's you against the whole world!