"If 2008 was the year social media went mainstream, 2009 should be the year of content marketing, the corporation as media company, the brand as publisher and broadcaster," says Junta 42 publisher Joe Pulizzi.

It's true that much of what you read these days about online marketing is about using Twitter, Facebook and social sites effectively. And most of what experts are saying about using these sites has to do with the quality of your messages and how to tie into building your brand and relationships.

If you haven't been keeping up with all this, don't worry. Some of us just aren't early adopters. We can wait for the dust to settle and just learn from the mistakes of others, after the best practices are ironed out. But get prepared because much of this will become as mainstream as email.

What is becoming crucial is that we can no longer afford to NOT pay attention to content marketing, be it on a blog, email newsletters, or on Twitter.

It doesn't matter if you're part of a big corporation trying to brand and market your products and services, or a solo professional or small business owner.

Creating content that engages readers is the challenge. You can forget going out and buying an ad. You've got to write – or hire someone to write for you.

Joe Pulizzi writes from a corporate perspective and gives 10 Content Marketing Tips to Start Now for 2009.

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What’s the easiest, fastest, smartest way to get marketing results for your business on the Web?

Here’s a clue…it’s in the tag line of this blog: Content Marketing! Here’s why I say that…

Imagine you’re starting out online – maybe you’ve been in business forever, but you’re just taking your business onto the web. You don’t have a large staff or a big budget. You look at the Web from your own perspective and try to imagine how your potential customers would search for you.

They’d use certain keywords, wouldn’t they? Maybe you don’t know squat about "keyword optimization" or "search engine marketing" or any of that. But I’ll bet you can guess how your prospects might look for your products and services, can’t you?

Okay, that’s step one. You might want to use a keyword tool like the one at www.freekeywords.wordtracker.com to see which keyword phrases are more popular. Or not.

You can guess what the next step is… put up lots of pages on your site writing about what your company can do for people. What are the benefits they get from using your products and services?

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