Ask HN: Inbound marketing - Publish and they will come?

My startup is in the b2b social commerce space; we are building an onsite widget for retailers to thoroughly socialize their storefronts. Basically, access your social graph while shopping to obtain advice and recommendations and view archives of your friends activities on the website (likes, reviews, comments, purchases, contemplated, etc.). We are approaching the public Beta phase and would like to create some awareness early on. We have a blog, we published slides, datasheets, white papers, looking into eBooks as well, etc. Then we tweet about them, post on Facebook, Digg, Slideshare. Would this be sufficient? Is this what inbound marketing is all about? Anyone who has had success with inbound marketing, mind sharing your experiences? P.S.: We're totally bootstrapped, just a bunch of college kids hacking away at stuff. We just want some highly-qualified leads for Beta testing; paid advertisements are quite beyond our needs right now. Even AdWords makes us think twice.