It wasn’t long ago that you could effectively grow your business or share your ideas by interrupting prospective customers with "push" methods such as advertising, cold calling or email spam. But today most business people have grown weary of being targeted by outbound marketing and promotion, and they have become much better at blocking these methods.

Businesses and people in general have also changed the way that they shop and learn, primarily utilizing search engines, social networking sites and blogs to find the information that they need. "Pull" or inbound marketing helps companies take advantage of these shifts by helping them get found by customers in the natural way in which they shop and learn.

Here are five tips that you can use to help yourself "get found" online:

1. Start with an extraordinary idea. Most realize that the days of needing a large advertising budget to spend on marketing and PR to promote your idea(s) are long gone. Today, truly unique or extraordinary ideas can find many ways to spread like wildfire on their own online, without any significant expenditure. And by comparison, those ideas that are not extraordinary usually languish unfound regardless of how much advertising or PR that you do. Make sure you have a unique, remarkable offering and it will spread like wildfire on the Internet if it's truly different.

2. Create LOTS of content. Once you have found an extraordinary service or product, you need to create lots of content about it. There are many ways to distribute your content – blogs, tweets, videos, podcasts. Great content about a great product or service will attract the links you need from other sites. These links generate traffic, which in turn tells Google you should be ranked more highly.

3. Optimize your content. All of your content should be "keyword optimized," both for search engines like Google and also for users of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc who will be spreading it. Be sure to include some of the most important keywords within the title of your piece so it will be easy for Google to find and identify it. But you also need to make the titles enticing for human eyes as well, with a subject line that will elicit responses. Some good ones that arouse the curiosity of readers are using phrases like "Everything you need to know about…" or statements that can only be answered by reading all of the content, such as "How to", "What can" or "Why do". Because of the popularity of lists, other titles that work can begin with "5 tips on how to" or "10 easy steps." Provocative titles such as "7 things your bank doesn’t want you to know" can also work well.

4. Share your content. After you have created a remarkable piece of content and optimized it, now you need to spread the word. Email it to your E-Newsletter subscribers, post the content on your blog, tweet it to your followers, update your Facebook page and LinkedIn profile with it. If your content is truly extraordinary, others will share it online for you. And as your content spreads, you will have more people subscribe to you or follow you, so that the subsequent content you publish in the future will have an even greater audience.

5. Measure the results. If you cannot measure your results, you’ll never truly know which channel works best for you. For example, you should compare your results for Google organic search (both branded and non-branded), Google paid, your E-Newsletter and Twitter feed, Facebook, LinkedIn, and any other campaigns you conduct to each other. You should track visitors, leads and customers over time for every campaign. Then increase resources spent on campaigns that are working, and discontinue the ones that are not.

The way in which people inform, shop and entertain themselves has changed drastically in the last three or four years, primarily due to the expanding influence of word-of-mouth and Google search. To compete and be successful in the future, you need to modify the way you market your products to match the way that people find out about them.