Number 10 is not as well defined, but the most important. You can do everything else, but, without patience and tenacity, the other points will not matter.

Chris is spot on -- this is a very organic process which requires a lot of patience and tenacity. You need to go into this assignment/project with a solid two year commitment in order to make a difference. 
 
 

@Chris & Doug, you are both right on, and thanks for your comments. Step 10 of my article could have had a bit more emphasis to it, because Inbound Marketing does take lots of time and effort when compared to other methods such as pay per click where the focus is on purchasing temporary visibility. PPC requires less of your time, but when a PPC campaign ends, so does a sites visibility on Google and other search engines. 
 
Building a web-presence from scratch into one with a high level of authority using Inbound Marketing methodology can be challenging, and certainly not quick, but the rewards can be huge and long lasting for those who manage to stay the course.

Determining keywords is a difficult part of the process. Any recommendations how to determine what really works? (say using google adwords) or does it come down to trial and error?

Hey Peter - Once you commit to the time and effort, the reward has a very, very long tail (agree with you). From my vantage point the next most important discipline is to constantly review a dashboard of tools to measure your successes and failures. As Melanie highlights in her comment, there is a bit of art and a bit of science when trying to evolve to an optimal solution.

@Melanie, I agree with you on keyword research being one of the more difficult parts of Inbound Marketing and certainly one of the most important. When selecting keywords, it can be a good strategy to cast a broad net and consider many keyword possibilities, and then focus in on a few of those that you believe generate at least some amount of traffic, that also have a low level of competition. Remember that there are huge volumes of people typing a broad spectrum of search terms into their search engines so you should feel comfortable testing keywords that may seem more remote or tangential to your product/service than you would like. Once you start ranking for these more remote terms, you can start to trim them to be closer to the more mainstream terms that were, perhaps too difficult for you to rank for in the beginning. Monitoring performance and tweaking your approach accordingly is central to your success at this.

Simply Awesome Pete. You have highlighted each and every points of online business promotion to check and how to market online to get maximum output. These are basics and must to follow.. 
 
Must to say that I'm all agree with Chris Zdunich...

That's true. When starting an SEO campaign one should be sure that your expectations are actually True! Don't look for instant rich solutions instead be willing to invest in a long-term strategy! But you miss one important platform that helps in online marketing for business it is the Blog because linking to the main site will have the chances to lose your customers specially when it is on social media and going to the blog simply provides more information without the sales pressure.

@Sean, thanks for pointing out that there is no explicit mention of blogging in the article because it is indeed one of the most powerful tools in your content generation tool box. It's difficult to compress everything in a single blog post, but blogging should have been called out under the content generation section. Good catch.

Many SMB owners do not have dedicated staff to manage their marketing activities and outsource various aspects of their marketing on an ad hoc basis. They likely have used a website development firm that may or may not have significant SEO or marketing experience and may have also dabbled with an internet yellow pages or PPC firm, as these firm have aggressive sales forces. 
 
 
 
The most basic step and what is quickly becoming a major component of a the SMB "local presence" is the Local Business Listing, specifically the Google Local Listing. The seven pack, web 2.0 links, and thrid party directory and review links can dominate the Google search results. Most SMB's have not begun to understand the growing relevence of this.  
 
 
 
We discuss this more in debth at: 
 
http://www.localmarketinginternetsecrets.com/free-leads-from-local-business-listings- 
 

11th Step: Think big. Make no visible distinction between your "small" business and your big competitors.

How does #1 correlate to the recent change in using Bing rather than Google for measure KW ranking?