A key part of getting found is making sure you show up on the first page of a Google search. The lazy marketer’s approach to doing this is to purchase Google Ad words, and pay by the click (referred to as SEM, Search Engine Marketing). However 85% of people ignore the paid ads, so to be really effective, you will need to perfect your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) skills.

SEO requires you to develop great content that your buyers will find sufficiently interesting, different or insightful, that they will want to remark on it. (The authors of Inbound Marketing refer to that as remarkable content.) When your readers remark on your content on-line, using tools like Twitter, Facebook etc., they spread the word virally to other readers and broaden your reach. These comments lead to links back to your site, which lead to ever increasing page ranking in the search engines.

SEO and SEM are key to being discovered with a cloud solution. Marketplaces aid discovery, but they are still immature and eventually when they reach maturity they will be over colonized (see iTunes). SEO and SEM can be used to drive traffic, but the most crucial factor impacting conversion is design of the company’s home page. We can drive thousands of hits to a site buy optimized Ad word purchases and building a library of tagged value content, but that investment will be for nothing unless we can convert those hits into purchases. In reality Experience Design is ‘king’.

As we move up the cloud channel curve to the enterprise space conversion becomes less automated. Discovery and great content are crucial even for enterprise solutions, but the conversion requires more human touch. Whether that human touch is executed directly by the ISVs or by the channel the flow of that conversion needs to be seamless and well thought out.