Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Inbound Marketing depends on two things -- Creating valuable content and driving traffic to your site. Great content is useless if nobody sees it!

It's a never-ending process. You have to constantly think of ways to increase traffic. Inc.com's article talks about the many platforms you can use to drive traffic to your site. You can brand your products or services, upload photos, create blogs or use social media.

They believe that social media actually drives more traffic to your site. In today’s modern world, everybody’s engaged with social networking. Promoting your products or services in social networks actually gives you more potential customers.

Another great fact about social media is that, people have the chance to like or even share information, photos or pages with one another. Let's say a customer likes your service and you have a social network page. What will likely happen is, that customer will "like' the page you've created and refer you to her social network friends.

Social networking is used by people to communicate and, what better way to promote your business, than let people talk about it? Just always remember never to take things for granted. Constantly challenge yourself to develop strategies to help you attract more site visitors. After all, more visitors mean more customers.

Read the full article: "How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website"...

Are you already using social networks? LinkedIn? Watch a video on how to get visitors to your site using LinkedIn. Then, when you're really ready to see your traffic grow, join our LinkedIn content promotion program.

If you care about getting traffic to your website, you care about Google's new Penguin update!

The Penguin Update affects the ranking of websites that don't comply with Google's SEO guidelines. It's already impacted the traffic for many sites. What's the quick summary? Google wants sites to create great, relevant content! Over-optimization and SEO tricks get you penalized.

In "How To Survive Google Penguin Update with Content Writing, Amrit Hallan's provides a checklist to use when creating and promoting your content. 

If you want good search engine rankings, be sure to create content that deserves reading. See the full article on "How To Survive Google Penguin Update..." for guidelines on creating and promoting your content.

Here's another article on over-optimized marketing and the Google Penguin Update by Clarke Bishop: "Inbound Marketing Trap--Over-optimized Marketing".

Has the Penguin affected you? What did you do about it? Please leave a comment.

Combining inbound and outbound strategies will help your content spread further, a technique we refer to as the Inbound Marketing Multiplier.

Marketing automation enhances and amplifies inbound marketing and leads to shorter sales cycles, increased revenue, and better overall marketing ROI.

As Niel Spencer points out, don't fall into the trap of focusing solely on inbound marketing. All your marketing should work together.

Combine your inbound and outbound resources to create content which is interesting, informative and yes, even entertaining. Buyers are unique. They like and engage with different types of content.

Great content is essential. Use all forms of marketing to generate more subscribers, more shares, and more customers.

Read more on "How To Build A Better Inbound Marketing Machine"... 

What's your greatest marketing challenge? Please, leave a comment.

Our researchers and writers are continuously searching the web for better ways to improve results from Inbound Marketing. Here are some recent articles we've been reading.

One key to Inbound Marketing is measuring your results with web analytics and continuously finding improvements. That's our topic for today. Web Analytics.

Know Your Customers by their Digital Footprints

John Walker of JPL Creative offers tips on how to learn more about your customers through web analytics. Key points:

• By 2017, the chief marketing officer will spend more money on information technology than the chief information officer
  
  
• Review your traffic flow graphs to see when traffic goes up. Then,discover why and repeat.
  
  
• Check your bounce rate to see if your home page needs improvement. Also see where your visitors go next.
   
• Review your most popular pages. Should you have more on popular topics? 

Driving traffic is important to get visitors to your site so they can learn about your products and services. But then, it doesn't end there. It's not just about increasing site visitors.

For your business to be effective, what you should do is to convert visitors to leads.

To give you some new ideas, here's an article on 30 ways to convert visitors to leads.

Lead Generation is not just about obtaining data but having permission to talk about your products and services. 

It is essential that you give people a reason to talk to you and these reasons will then generate genuine desires to talk about your products and services. One example is making your site interactive and use that interaction to increase relevance. The more relevant you are, the more interested your visitors are.

Always remember that it's important to keep people interested. Once people visit your site and you get their interest, what will most likely happen is, these visitors will become loyal customers!

Read this article on 30 Ways to Convert Visitors into Leads... and your business will surely be more profitable! 

Which of these 30 ways did you pick? Have a better idea? Either way, leave a comment.

All business marketers want to increase website traffic. Finding the right and suitable ways to do so is just not easy.

Here's a good introductory article on how to increase traffic to your site. 

Search engine optimization is about ways to get your website to the top of search engines. To accomplish this, what you have to do is to focus your content to the keyword related to your topic. Doing these will definitely improve your ranking in search engines! 

You just have to remember to be creative to increase your site traffic. Write a good content, focus the right keywords and even add image to make it more attractive and readable. 

Read the full article on "How to Increase Website Traffic..."                                                 

I'm a guitar player -- Well, sort of. I was thinking of buying a special learning guitar from Fretlight. It has LEDs built into the neck to show you where to put your fingers!

Here's what happend, Fretlight lost my trust due to over-optimized marketing. I'm no longer a prospect.

Like many people, I rely on reviews and opinions from other people. And, the reviews were all great -- This thing was supposed to play just like a Fender guitar. Plus, it would help you shorten your guitar learning curve.

The reviews were so good, I got curious and did a search for "Fretlight negative review." That's when I started seeing stories about how Fretlight was aggressive in suppressing negative reviews and getting non-guitar players to write glowing reviews. Then, I found people talking about some serious quality problems and playability problems.

Fretlight may have a good product, I don't know. The point is that I'm too put off to find out! If their product really does help you master guitar, I wish they had put more effort into improving their product than perfecting their marketing.

The safe way to get search traffic is to create great content that helps your prospects solve their problems. Anything else and Google will getcha.

Google's Penguin Update and SEO

Speaking of over-optimized marketing, you may have heard about Google's recent Penguin update. Google is now penalizing sites for having over-optimized links.

Let's say you want to rank for a keyword like "inbound marketing." And you have lots of links that all have the same exact anchor text that includes the optimized keywords. 

Google figures this couldn't have happened naturally -- You must be manipulating the links. If it were natural, at least of few of the links would say "Click Here" or something equally irrelevant. ("Click Here" is the anchor text even though this link doesn't go anywhere.) 

Takeaways

What works and will always work is creating great content and serving your prospects. Anything else can work against you.

• You can't fool Mother Google. Don't try.
• Always, Always, Always, make sure you are serving your customers first.
• Have a great product. If you don't, improve the product until it is great.

Learn how to grow sales the right way with our free special report: Boost My Sales.

Driving traffic to your site is a good way to attract more customers but sometimes, it's just not enough. 

It's important that you understand the behavior of your website visitors so that you can have better advantage and knowledge.

Sinead's article, "The Easy Way To Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Website & Get More Customers", provides insight on improving your site rather than merely driving traffic. More visitors that are annoyed by your website won't help you!

In-page analytics is a report in google Analytics which allows you to see which links users click, thus, allowing you to see how effective the links on your pages are and track where your visitors go.

Google Analytics will help you determine the links which are effective in your site and the ones you need to improve on, for you to get more site visitors, thus, generate more customers.

Read the full article on "The Easy Way To Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Website & Get More Customers."

What's your best Google Analytics tip? Please leave a comment and let us know.

Great content is essential for Inbound Marketing. Still, you have to get visitors to your site or your great content is useless!

Marc Pitman has an interesting article on Social Media Examiner on how Google+ can send you more traffic.

Google has developed a new and advanced way to drive traffic to your site. They call it, “Search, plus Your World”. It’s all about tailoring a person’s search to include results based on their social media profile.

Google knows that people would want to see results based on their own personal history and things their friends like. Now, when you search, you may see a post from someone you know, or someone who also knows someone you know. 

Google+ will definitely help you get more traffic.

Read the full article on 8 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Site Using Google + ...

Leave a comment and let us know the best idea you get from this article.

I've been training a new Inbound Team writer and gave her a challenging topic to write about. She struggled with it some and then said, "I honestly don't know where to start writing."

Writer's block, where to start, is a common problem for business bloggers. Here's what you can do about it!

Writing Isn't the Problem!

First, know this -- Writing isn't the problem. Instead, what's really happening is that we don't have a clear idea of what we want to communicate. 

Here's the solution ...

Start thinking about your audience. Who would want to read your article? Why? What are their problems or questions. What are their goals and challenges?

Imagine as many questions as you can. You see, it's easy to answer questions -- At least if you know the answer. If you don't know the answer, do some research!

Revisit Your Marketing Persona

If you're an experienced Inbound Marketer, you already have some good marketing personas for your audience. Reconnect with your personas. Who are they? What do they need?

If you don't already have marketing personas, see the links below for a short course in how to create personas.

Audience Analysis or Marketing Persona

Two terms that mean essentially the same thing. The point is to know your audience and write for them. 

• Whiteboard Friday: Creating Marketing Personas - A very useful 20 minute video from SEOMoz. Well worth watching.
  
  
• Precise Prospect Profile - Our resource for taking your persona to the next level.
   
• 6 Core Benefits of Well Defined Marketing Personas - HubSpot's take on how to use your marketing personas to improve your business results.
   
• Develop Personas - Who knew the government cared about Usability! Personas are also used to make usable software. Even though it's not about blogging, this article has good advice and an example persona.
   
• How to Conduct an Audience Analysis - Step-by-step guide to knowing your audience.
   
• How to Write an Audience Analysis - A similar step-by-step guide.

Takeways

What's most important for blogging is the value of your ideas. Value only exists for a specific audience -- Write for them!

If you're ever stuck:

• Remember your audience. If it's a new audience, imagine who they are.
• Know their top questions, problems, or concerns.
• Answer their questions.

Do you ever get writer's block? How do you get unstuck and how do you use personas? Please leave a comment and let me know.

Image Credit: whitakerc1985