Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

Do This For More Traffic, More Leads, & More Sales

Posted by Kami Valdez

March 8, 2016

When companies decide they need increased traffic to their website, they start blogging regularly, but searchers and search engines all too often don’t seem to care. There’s a reason why. The company isn’t focused on creating the right content. 

Content will always resonate more with a potential customer if you’re viewing things from their point of view. Issues that need addressed most are typically “hot button” issues, but most businesses don’t want to touch these topics. 

The_Big_5.jpg

For many companies, creating content around these "hot button" issues means breaking away from traditional business marketing practices and feels too taboo.

In The Big 5: Blog Article Topics Guaranteed To Drive Traffic, Leads, & Sales, Marcus Sheridan states there are 5 subjects that move the needle in every single industry. They are the things that when a consumer is looking to make a buying decision, "they are searching it, they are asking it, they are thinking it, they are saying it, they are going to Google and typing it!"

For many companies, creating content around The Big Five means addressing subjects many don't want to talk about. But these topics have been proven to increase traffic, leads, and sales.

So what are they? Here they are:

  1. Cost Questions. You don’t want to talk about cost or price on your website, but of course when you are getting ready to buy something you want to know, “What does it cost? What is the price?” Cost is at the root of all transaction considerations, so you need to address it with your content.
  2. Problems, Issues, Negative Reviews. A lot of companies don’t want to address these. You have got to be willing to address the elephant in the room. If there are problems or issues about what you sell, you need to address them.
  3. Versus or Comparisons. Have you ever been asked, “So which one would you choose?” Or, “How do you compare versus your competitor down the street?” We only like to talk about our stuff, but you can’t do that. You have got to talk about what the consumer wants to know, and consumers want to know how the competitive choices stack up against each other.
  4. Reviews. How often do you and I search for reviews online? We are constantly searching for reviews to help us understand how products and services pan out in the real world, so do the research and become the go-to resource for helping customers make decisions faster.  
  5. Best. We love to search for best. Consumers use "best" queries to help identify top choices. 

When you create content focus first on The Big 5. They require you to address things that you are not used to addressing, but if you want to truly increase trust, traffic, leads, and sales, The Big 5 will help you do it.

To learn more about what The Big 5 are, and how you can use them to keep your efforts from ending in yet another tragic content marketing story, watch the video.

If you need help writing Big 5 content for your site, sign up for a free Lead Boost Review or give us a call. We’d love to help.

Schedule Lead Boost Review

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Topics: Blogging, SEO, Content Marketing


Attract Readers With Powerful Headlines and Optimized Content

Posted by Kami Valdez

October 31, 2015

Do you struggle to write great headlines and optimize your content to attract more readers? If your headline does not grab the attention of your prospect, your content won't be read. If your content is not optimized correctly, search engines won't find it and you won't gain traffic. 

Online content creation is difficult. There's a lot to it. Fortunately, there are some excellent tools available to help you maximize your effort. In the article Tools to Help You Optimize Blog Headlines and Content at ProBlogger.com, top tools are listed that will help you create powerful headlines and optimized content for increased visibility. 

Attract Readers With Powerful Headlines and Optimized Content

All the tools listed in this article can help you develop your headlines and optimize your content. For even more marketing information, read the CEO's 2016 Guide to Marketing and learn how to create and execute your own 2016 marketing strategy.

  CEO's 2016 Guide to Marketing

Are there other headline and content tools you've found helpful? Share your favorites with everyone in the comments!

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Topics: Blogging, Inbound Marketing, SEO, Content Marketing


Inbound Marketing Versus Search Engine Optimization

Posted by Michael Karp

September 29, 2015

The “Inbound Out Marketing versus…” series has been an eventful one.

So far, we’ve found that Inbound Out marketing can make a valuable addition to trade shows, direct mail advertising, and social media marketing in your overall strategy.

Let’s add another competitor to the mix:

Search Engine Optimization.

I love SEO. I think any smart digital marketing strategy takes it into account. You simply can’t beat search engines’ potential for sending loads of targeted traffic to your site.

And the best part?

Once you’ve got this traffic, it’s completely passive. You can let it be and focus on other parts of your business, or work on increasing it even more.

However, certain characteristics of Inbound Out marketing make it a smarter play than SEO. Here they are:

  • Inbound Out marketing can be implemented immediately. While SEO is a long-term tactic with valuable long-term results, Inbound Out marketing can achieve measurable results right away.

  • The variables to consider are simple -- response rates, lead generation, sales.

  • Almost immediate feedback allows you to continually optimize your strategy and improve your results.

Inbound_Marketing_vs_Search_Engine_Optimization

And we’re off!

Inbound Out Marketing vs. Search Engine Optimization — Time to See Results

In order to see results from SEO, a number of things need to happen:

  1. You need to optimize your page(s)

  1. You need to build/attract links and social signals

  1. You need to wait for these links and social signals to be indexed by Google

  1. You need to wait for that link juice to pass on to your page(s)

  1. And finally, you need to wait for that link juice to be reflected in your rankings. If it’s not enough, you need to attract more (or higher quality) links and social signals.

Only a few of these steps are under your control. Once you have carried out a step, the rest is up to the search engine’s algorithm. It’s a waiting game.

And there isn’t a distinct end to the game until you hit that first page. Until then, you have to continually guess whether or not you need to put more effort into the campaign, or whether you need to wait longer for those signals to sink in.

For this reason, many people dial back their SEO and focus on other tactics to grow their business -- like Inbound Out marketing.

Inbound Out marketing can be implemented immediately. There are preparation phases (Strategy, Precise Prospect Profile, gathering a list of targeted prospects, and creating buyer-focused content), but all of these phases are entirely under your control. You control how long they take.

Then you immediately transition into the Targeted Outreach phase. This is where the magic happens and the results begin. You establish connections with your direct target audience, entice them to become leads, and convert them into sales.

No waiting. Just direct results from your efforts.

Inbound Out Marketing vs. Search Engine Optimization

— The Variables

When conducting an SEO campaign, there are many variables to consider:

  1. On-page SEO (keyword placement, content length, title tags, external linking, internal linking, etc.)

  1. Off-page SEO (social signals, number of links, PR of those links, DA of those websites, anchor text variation, relevancy, etc.)

  1. Search engine algorithm changes

All of these variables affect your results. And since search engines keep their algorithms secret, much of this is guess work (even for SEO “gurus”).

But here’s what we know about Inbound Out marketing:

The variables are concrete.

You know your response rates in real time, you know how many leads you’ve generated from each campaign, and you know the percentage of sales that came from those leads.

This makes budgeting for your campaigns much easier. And because these variables are easy to measure, you can continually optimize and improve your results.

Which leads us to our next battle:

Inbound Out Marketing vs. Search Engine Optimization

— Iterating and Improving

It’s inherently tough to measure what’s working best in SEO until 6 months to a year down the line.

This is because 1) it takes a while for your efforts to be reflected in your rankings and traffic, and 2) you don’t truly know which efforts contributed more or less to those results (since the algorithms are secret). Things that are tough to measure are tough to improve. 

With Inbound Out marketing, since you get almost immediate feedback from your prospects (even if they don’t respond to your marketing, that’s still feedback you can use), you can continually optimize your strategy.

You can consistently analyze what’s working and what isn’t. In terms of business growth, this is the most valuable information to have at your disposal.

Wrap Up

The benefits of SEO are too great to ignore:

  • Targeted traffic

  • Long term traffic growth

  • Passive traffic

But it has certain pitfalls that Inbound Out marketing can make up for.

Inbound Out marketing can be implemented immediately and achieve results much faster. The variables involved are simple and easy to measure, and since you get almost immediate feedback from your marketing, you can optimize your strategy and improve your results in real time.

Traditional marketing is changing. Why? Because buyers have changed. Download the CEO's 2016 Guide to Marketing now to learn and execute your own 2016 marketing strategy today. 

CEO's 2016 Guide to Marketing

Takeaways

  • Inbound Out marketing can make up for a lot of the pitfalls of SEO.
  • SEO is a long term strategy, while Inbound Out can be implemented immediately.
  • The variables are more measurable, allowing you to get feedback and optimize your strategy more efficiently.
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Topics: Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing, SEO


Top 3 Strategies For Inbound Marketing Success

Posted by Kami Valdez

June 20, 2015

Inbound marketing is about producing relevant, helpful content and placing it on the web where your ideal prospect can discover it. Inbound marketing is not just about getting traffic to your website, it’s about drawing people in who are actually interested in what you’re selling.

Top-3-Strategies-for-Inbound-Marketing-Success-InboundTeam

Inbound marketing will help you attract the right people through the use of blogs, keywords, and social media that feature content relevant to your target audience. And if you create the right content, the right people will come.

Before creating any piece of content, you must have a clear picture of the following:  

  1. Who your buyer personas are.
  2. The characteristics, demographic attributes and personal interests that influence their buying behavior.

If you have not done so already, create a precise prospect profile for your persona(s). Use the Precise Prospect Profile Kit to help clearly define who your ideal prospects are so your marketing will have success.

Precise Prospect Profile Kit

Let’s take a look at the top three strategies that will help your inbound marketing to be successful:

Blogging

Inbound marketing is a strategy that is most successful when done consistently. The most important part of that strategy is your blog.

With your blog, you decide what information you provide your readers and how often you distribute it. The information you provide needs to address your prospects frustrations with the clear solution being your product or service.

You need to blog for two reasons:

  1. To get readers who learn to seek you out for your expertise.
  2. To get others to link to your material…thereby bringing more readers who will learn to seek you out for your expertise.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an integral part of inbound marketing. You don’t have to know everything about SEO, but you do need to know what the right keywords are for your market and how to use them effectively.

The goal is to increase your search rank. You want to be on the first page of search results when internet users type your keywords.

SEO can be tweaked and worked on to help your visibility. Over time, you will be able to determine what your effective keywords are, the words that are bringing visitors to your site.

Social Networking Platforms

There are many social media platforms out there. Start with two or three and build from there. Don’t assume more is better.

You should only have as many social media profiles as you can manage. Your main goal needs to be to promote your brand and distribute content, but don’t forget that these platforms are interactive.

They invite a conversation with the internet visitor. That’s something you never want to lose sight of.

In my next post, I will talk about the next steps you need to take to convert the visitors to your site into leads.

Takeaways:

  • Know as much as you can about your ideal prospect before you write.
  • Use blogging to provide answers and to become the expert in your field.
  • Use keywords to help visitors find your site.
  • Promote your content on only as many social media channels as you can manage.
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Topics: Inbound Marketing, SEO


4 Steps to Generate Qualified Leads From Inbound Marketing

Posted by Michael Karp

May 28, 2015

Have you noticed?

Doing business online has changed drastically in the last several years. With the growth of social media, search engines, and the information available online, buyers have become much smarter about why and how they spend their money.

They don’t want to be sold to anymore.

4 Steps To Generate Qualified Leads From Inbound Marketing 

Many businesses have relied on commercials, print ads, tradeshows, and cold calls. Unfortunately these methods get less and less effective every year.

People have the power to research everything about a product or service before they buy it. They don’t want to hear sales pitches anymore. This changes the lead generation landscape:

How do you get qualified leads if prospects aren’t receptive to traditional marketing?

The answer is Inbound Marketing -- a marketing methodology based on providing value to customers first before presenting your products and services. It’s the best way to attract qualified leads online, and you’re about to learn how to do it.

Are you ready? Then let’s get started.

Step 1. Get to Know Your Ideal Customer

To market effectively, you have to know the prospects you’re targeting. This means gaining intimate knowledge of your audience’s personality and professional ideals.

Here are a few things you want to nail down:

  1. Their goals. What are they aiming for? What are they trying to achieve?

  1. Their biggest challenges. What’s stopping them from reaching those goals? (And how can your products/services help them?)

  1. Their strongest pain points. What do they complain about the most? Which issues would they love to have disappear?

  1. Common objections to your products/services. What is stopping them from pulling out their wallets?

Discovering this information involves diligent research. There are two types of research that you want to conduct: passive research and active research.

Passive Research

To conduct passive research, you want to dive into online hubs where your target audience hangs out. This is where they discuss their wants, needs, desires, and challenges -- the exact information you’re looking for.

Find forums related to your ideal customers. Head over to Quora and other Q&A sites. Hop on Twitter and search for conversations your prospects are having. Join Google+ communities and Facebook/LinkedIn groups.

In each of those online hubs, read through the conversations that are going on. Then jot down these three pieces of information: their goals, challenges, and pain points.

This information is marketing gold that will make your prospecting much more effective.

Active Research

Active research involves communicating with your target audience directly. You ask them insightful, open ended questions to find out all four pieces of information (especially common objections to your products and services).

Here are some methods to try:

  1. Send a survey to your email list.

  1. Respond to comments on your blog and ask people questions.

  1. Create a promotional deal for your products and services. Afterwards, contact the people who didn’t buy and ask them why they decided not to. (This will uncover common objections.)

  1. Contact people directly on social media and ask them if they wouldn’t mind giving their opinion on your product, service, blog post, etc.

Strategies like these will uncover your audience’s strongest pain points AND help prospects create a stronger bond with your brand.

Using all of this knowledge, you can create buyer personas that will permeate all of your marketing materials and lead generation.

For an example of a buyer persona and a complete guide to create your Precise Prospect Profile, download our kit.

Precise Prospect Profile Kit

Step 2. Create Content That Attracts Prospects

Too many marketers create content without thinking about their ideal prospects. They come up with articles ideas, write those articles, and publish them without considering which people they’re trying to attract.

But you won’t make this mistake. Why? Because in Step 1, you just gathered all of the information you need. By creating content that solves the same problems your prospects are having, you will naturally attract these people to your business.

All of your content ideas should be based around the goals, challenges, pain points, and common objections you found in the previous step.

However, you also need to base your content around your own products and services. Here’s the catch: your content should solve the same types of problems your products and services solve.

This is how you attract qualified prospects who are predisposed to want and need what you offer. If you help them fix the same types of issues your products/services do, these prospects begin to trust your authority in the space.

They trust that if your free content can help them solve this problem, your paid products and services will solve an even bigger problem they’re having.

Now you know how to create the right content, but how do you get it in front of your ideal customers?

This involves cunning content distribution.

Step 3. Distribute Your Content and Make Your Business Visible

It’s not enough to create content that’s targeted to your prospects. Not even close.

They won’t visit your website unless you distribute it in channels where they hang out. I mean, how else would they find it?

Distributing content the right way makes you visible on the internet. It makes it easy for your ideal customers to find you.

Your qualified leads are searching for solutions to their problems RIGHT NOW. These are solutions that your content, products, and services can solve. The #1 issue: they just can’t find you.

Yet.

Here are four types of distribution you should take advantage of:

  1. Social networks

  1. Forums

  1. Search engines

  1. The Inbound-Out style of outreach

Social Networks

At the very least, you should share your content on each social account you have. This is the bare minimum to make yourself visible on the internet.

However, you should be doing much more than that. You should be reaching out to influential people in your space who have large followings and present your content to them. Odds are, if they like it, they will share it with their audience.

You should be reaching out to those same prospects you found on social networks in Step 1 and present your content as a great place to get more information.

You should head over to the Google+ communities and Facebook/LinkedIn groups and share your content with those people (because you’ve already qualified them to want and need it).

Social media marketing methods like these tap into the true viral power of social media and the benefits it can bring to your business.

Forums

Forums can be packed with your target audience. They exist to bring people with similar interests together to discuss those interests and help each other out.

They want to find and share amazing content with the community. Your content can elevate the community. All you have to do is share it there.

Here are three ways to do this:

  1. Create a thread that introduces your content. Then, link to your content at the end if they want to read more.

  1. Create a thread describing the main ideas of your content, and link to your content at the end if they want to learn more.

  1. Link to your content in the signature, then become active on the forum by answering questions and helping people.

Your content acts as the lure, but you have to cast the rod for it to attract people to your website.

Search Engines

Search engine optimization -- the process of creating assets that search engines like and want to rank on the first of their results.

This process still eludes many people, but it’s some of the highest quality traffic you can get. Where else are people naturally turning to again and again to solve the problems they suffer from most?

Here is a general process you can follow:

  1. Base each piece of content you create around a keyword with a high search volume.

  1. Scour the internet for link building opportunities. “Links” pages and weekly roundups are two of the best backlink sources.

  1. Reach out to the site owner and present your content as a nice addition to the page.

If your content is of high enough value (relative to the content already ranking for that keyword), and if you can build a solid amount of authoritative links, you give your content the best chance to rank on the first page.

Once it ranks, you get to reap the benefits of long-term, qualified traffic for as long as your content remains there.

The Inbound-Out Style of Content Distribution

Inbound-Out Marketing is a new marketing philosophy that involves active prospecting and outreach. It takes the best parts of sales and incorporates it into effective inbound marketing.

To distribute your content this way, you actively reach out to prospects. You establish micro-rapport by communicating with them directly, and you get in contact by phone and through personal emails.

Then, you present your content to them. This is where they can get more information if they need it, which will eventually expose them to your products and services.

Steps 1-3 will help you drive qualified traffic to your website because this process is based on helping people with the same types of issues that your products and services do.

However, these prospects might be qualified, but they’re not leads yet.

That’s where Step 4 comes in.

Step 4. Convert Qualified Traffic Into Qualified Leads

Your site must be optimized to capture the traffic that’s coming in. These people may have a need for your products and services, but they’re not convinced quite yet. They’re still wondering if you’re the one to choose.

To convince them, you need to be able to establish long-term communication. You need their contact information.

This involves incorporating 4 crucial elements into your website:

  1. Lead magnets

  1. Sign-up forms

  1. Clear calls-to-action

  1. Landing pages

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are downloadable freebies that you give away in exchange for contact information. They typically come in the form of ebooks, but they can be checklists, free trials, mindmaps, spreadsheets -- anything that a prospect would find valuable.

These need to be sprinkled around your website to entice visitors to give up their contact information, join your sales funnel, and convert into leads.

But how do you facilitate this exchange?

You do it through sign-up forms.

Sign-up Forms

Sign-up forms are the gateways to your sales funnel. They facilitate the exchange between your lead magnet and a prospect’s contact information.

You need at least one of these for each lead magnet you give away.

Clear Calls-To-Action

A call-to-action lets a prospect know exactly what you want them to do and when you want them to do it.

“Sign Up Now For Immediate Access”

“Buy Now!”

“Download Instantly!”

These calls-to-action come at the end of each sign-up form. They let the prospect know that once their information is filled out, they must click this button in order to finalize it.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are the final piece of the conversion puzzle. They combine lead magnets, sign-up forms, and calls-to-action in one highly-optimized location.

These pages have one job: convert the traffic you’re generating into leads. Make sure your landing pages are easily accessible from every page of your website.

In Closing

Inbound Marketing is the best way to sell without selling. It leaves your prospect's lives uninterrupted by pushy sales pitches and ads. It allows them to slowly but surely build trust in your business.

By following this process, you become an asset to your prospects lives, rather than a burden. Not only that, but you attract high quality, qualified leads at the same time, which grow your business as well.

Takeaways

Follow this process to consistently generate qualified leads:

  1. Do in-depth research on your ideal customer.

  1. Create content that solves 1) the same problems your prospects are having and 2) the same types of problems your products/services solve.

  1. Distribute your content in multiple channels and use various outreach methods.

  1. Optimize your website to capture leads with lead magnets, sign-up forms, calls-to-action, and landing pages.

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Topics: Inbound Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Content Marketing


How Building Links Will Improve Search Results

Posted by Devine Mae Loredo

November 21, 2012

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the smartest and most effective strategies for positive results with your inbound marketing. Having a high, organic SEO ranking will not only demonstrate your trustworthiness and reliability, but it can distinguish you from your competitors. With the possible drawbacks coming from changes by search engines like Google’s Penguin Update, how will this affect your future marketing campaigns?

Link-building is one of the strongest ways you will improve your search engine optimization. When Google recognizes you as highly relevant for a particular search, this is the “secret sauce” you want in your marketing mix to drive ideal buyers to your site – because of your “popularity” with Google.

Courtney Eckerle wrote an article about a recent MarketingSherpa webinar, where Alex Dunks, Manager of Business Development with Webmarketing123, whipped up five link- building steps that can improve your search engine ranking. Some of his concepts are:

  1. Lay a strong foundation by setting groundwork and understanding how to properly measure what is and is not when working with keyword selection. He believes that the anchor text of a link is important because Google and other search engines evaluate it when they follow a link.
  2. Put tracking in place. Tracking is important in the same way we want to have our keyword rankings benchmarked - we want to know exactly where we’ve come from and where we’ve gone. According to Dunks, you what to figure out which keywords are actually making a difference. What if it’s just two of the 20 keywords that are delivering conversion? Hone your campaign and focus on only the two that are leading to conversions, and find some new variations that are very similar to those words.
  3. Make your links as diverse as your keywords. He advices marketers to think of external links as entry points to your website, and especially to those deeper points in your website. He said a good strategy to employ is to make sure that the content on your website is organized into themes. An example would be “silo one” for men’s shoes, “silo two” might be women’s shoes, and by grouping things into silos, Google is better able to understand that theme.


Check out all the steps mentioned by Alex Dunks in the article, “5 Steps for Building Links that Improve Search Results”. Would you add other steps? What link building strategies have you found to work especially well for your business? Please share them here by leaving your comment.

Many business owners and marketing professionals struggle to implement link building, especially with the myriad of consistently changing factors search engines use to rank pages – such as Google's new Penguin update. Use these steps to establish a specific plan for strategically building links that will improve your ranking.

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Topics: Inbound Marketing, SEO, Sales & CRM


Increase Your Landing Pages for a Better Marketing Experience

Posted by Devine Mae Loredo

November 19, 2012

inbound_marketing_and_landing_pages-resized-600If you’re happy with the amount of traffic your site is receiving but not with the number of visitors that are being converted into customers, you’re probably wondering where you should focus your time and resources. Since you want your site to generate more sign-ups or purchases, the best thing you can do is add more landing pages. If you already have a main landing page, you’re probably wondering why you need more.

While it’s not the only reason, the most significant one is because it’s hard to speak directly to every visitor with just one landing page. Even if you have a highly targeted message, there’s still going to be a significant number of your visitors who don’t connect with it. In order to give your website a more successful conversion rate, you’ll want to create targeted landing pages for your specific audience, that is based on specific goals, such as, sales, registrations or sign ups. When you’re able to give your visitors what they are looking for in a simple and clear web page, you’ll earn their undivided attention – which will help you when trying to move the visitor through a process for a successful sale.

Since landing pages are so important to your lead generation and conversion rate, it makes sense to increase the amount of the landing pages on your website. The more landing pages you have, the more conversion opportunities you’ll gain. When you have a variety of landing pages offering different messages, various offers and call to actions that you can test – this gives you feedback that will prove to be vital to your marketing.

The goal of most landing pages is to get someone to sign-up or make a purchase. For your landing pages that fall into the latter category, when someone clicks that page’s call to action, they’re going to be taken to your site’s checkout. If you look at your analytics and notice that a significant of the people who click the call to action don’t actually complete the checkout process, it’s probably an indication that your checkout needs to be streamlined. In addition to having a reliable merchant provider, you want to ensure that this process is as painless as possible. Eliminating any unnecessary steps or form fields can significantly boost your conversion rate.

One of the reasons many businesses only have one landing page is because they assume it’s going to take a lot of time and effort to create additional ones. While that may be true for brand new sites, since yours is already established, chances are you already have a significant portion of the content you need. All that will be required of you is putting it together and formatting it in a way that properly targets that landing page’s demographic.

Below are several ways you can easily increase your number of landing pages:

  • Invest in a Landing Page Creation Tool that enables you to quickly and easily create optimized landing pages
  • Create more offers to go along with your landing pages that provide a variety to allow you to test feedback and responses
  • Adjust your existing offers to cater to different personas by revising previous offers and customizing them based on the needs of your site visitors


To help you understand why you need more landing pages for your business website, check out this article from HubSpot entitled, “Why You (Yes, You) Need to Create More Landing Page” What other questions do you have regarding multiple landing pages? Leave your comments below, and share with our community.

More landing pages only means more opportunities for your business. It can help improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), provide you a higher conversion rate, while allowing you the chance to speak to all the different needs of your prospects and clients.

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Topics: Inbound Marketing, SEO, HubSpot Tips


7 Easy Steps for Creating Buzzworthy Content

Posted by Devine Mae Loredo

October 9, 2012

If you’re using education to reach your targeted audience, you know that quality content is vital for online marketing. But your prospects are constantly being bombarded with distracting content that clutters their attention, so what are you doing to make yours relevant and outstanding amongst your competitors online?


You’ve probably heard that “content is king”, yet so few marketing professionals seem to understand how to create useful content that isn’t overly promotional. For your blogs, articles or landing pages to be read and shared, you need to be relevant, informative and entertaining enough to capture the attention of your prospective customers. Your content can be promotional, but in a highly educational way - enough that it is passed on by your readers

Erica Swallow said that most business owners and online marketers find it hard to create useful content that isn’t overly promotional for the brands supporting it. There are seven steps that can be your basic guide to kicking off content creation for any business. She wrote an article entitled, “7 Easy Steps for Creating Buzzworthy Content” that will guide you in creating buzzworthy content.

How has your company gone about the content creation process? Let us know in the comments below.

There are many benefits in producing buzzworthy content: 1) it will drive more traffic to your website 2) it can help you rank higher in search engines results 3) it will get your pages shared more often. It can also be used as a platform to interact and engage with your audience, making you more open to business opportunities.

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Topics: Blogging, Inbound Marketing, SEO, Conversion


How To Establish A Better Online Presence

Posted by Devine Mae Loredo

September 29, 2012

Inbound Marketing and Establishing Online Presence

Online marketing doesn’t end with just creating a website alone. You have to exert all kinds of effort to make your website well known and established online.

Every day new technologies are being developed and it’s important that as a business owner, CEO or the person responsible for your company’s marketing, you keep up with the advances and changes. It’s not enough just to build a website that publishes resourceful content. You really have to distribute your helpful content in places where your prospects are located.

The key to this strategy is getting found online where your prospects might be searching. Your potential customers or clients should be able to easily find you because of the placement of your content. But how do you establish a better online presence?

Let’s start with a well-designed and better developed website. Appearance is not everything, but it can be a great contribution to set the professional “tone” for prospects. Your functionally, well-designed website needs to be appealing to keep your visitors interested, engaged, and wanting to come back again for more!

1) Know how you want your business to be known Is your brand recognizable? You should know what your prospective customers or clients want in order for them to choose you among the variety of competitors in your marketplace. It is important that they clearly see your business as the only answer to their needs and wants. Better branding will make your business more identifiable than your competitors in the market, and makes it much easier for them to find and recognize you online.

2) Publish great quality content with targeted keywords and phrases Always keep in mind that the excessive use of keywords is a detriment to you by search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others. Be sure that you incorporate your keywords and phrases sensibly without compromising the quality of your content. This will also help improve your search engine (SEO) ranking. A high search engine ranking will certainly improve your chances for getting found online.

3) Drive traffic , generate leads and convert leads to sales Once you have an appealing, relevant and “sticky” website  people can go to for their searching needs, website traffic will come (and stay)! The next step therefore is for you to turn these visitors into customers, and these customers into sales. To do this, make sure that your website has a “call to action” in order for your visitors to move to the next step. Your call to action should be relevant, specific and it must encourage them to respond. It’s also a good idea to reward them for responding. You could reward them with a free download of valuable information, access to a “private” area of your website or something else to thank them for taking action. Once they respond, you’ll likely have sales you never experienced before. When you begin a system of moving prospects smoothly through this process, you’re influencing your industry and beginning to capture a larger segment of the marketplace – for good!

4) Use social media to interact and engage with your audience More and more people are engaging in social communities like Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter to research, find their needs and connect with other like-minded people. Because of this, social media communities are the best place to position your business while educating, informing and empowering prospects about your business. Become regularly involved in the social media networks where your prospects “hang out”, and take the time necessary to interact and become involved in their questions, comments and discussions. It’s a great way of advertising and presenting your business in a “soft sell” way, while making your products or services more accessible for your audience. It’s also a sure way of getting found online.

Establishing a better online presence can be done by following tried and true steps that take time, effort and patience, but the fruit of your labor will surely be rewarding. An established online presence will position you above your competitors, and make your company a highly recognized and trusted brand that people will want to buy from and share with others.

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Topics: Inbound Marketing, SEO, Marketing Automation


How to Measure Your Success: Google Analytics Explained

Posted by Devine Mae Loredo

July 9, 2012

Useful analytics are your best friend when it comes to measuring and improving your inbound marketing.

  • Who are visiting your site?
  • Where they are coming from?
  • Where are they going
  • What they are viewing on your site.

Confused with how Google Analytics works? Leave a comment and share to us the questions you have and we’ll help you the best way we can.

 

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Topics: Lead Generation, Inbound Marketing, SEO