Inbound & Digital Marketing Blog

After college, you need to find the perfect place for you to grow and become a better person. Lucky for me, I’ve found just that.

It's a competitive world. Finding your niche is very difficult. Having proper education is never enough to land you a job. It takes a great deal of determination and patience to find the right one for you.

Though I have finished College, it wasn't easy to find a job. 

I’ve always had the passion for writing, evident in the fact that I joined campus publications since I was seven. I would’ve taken Journalism, but my parents wanted me to study nursing.

However, after I graduated, I realized that writing is what I want to do for a living.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity I’ve been long waiting for. I got my first full-time writing job, being a part of Inbound Team. I thought this job will be easy for me, but, I was wrong!

I read somewhere a quote that says: “Find a job that you love and you’ll never work one day in your life.” I finally found the job I’ve always wanted. But, I was feeling uncertain if I’d be able to do it right.

Business Blogging is nothing like I’m used writing. I’ve been writing feature articles for campus publications, but now, I have to write blogs to help people make their business more successful. How can I ever achieve that?

It wasn’t easy at first. I was struggling. But then, I was lucky to get all the help I need from my mentor. With his patience and perseverance, plus my dedication and hard work, I finally learned how the whole process works.

I’ve realized that it’s easy to write about anything, but what’s hard is to write about something! At least something you have to learn about first. Here are a few tips which helped me finally become the Business Blogger I aimed to be:

Discover and Know your Marketing Personas.

Before you start writing, you need to know who you are writing for. You need to discover who your readers are. Once you achieve that, the next step is to empathize. Put yourself in their shoes. Who are they? What are they feeling? What questions do they have? Once you’ve got that figured out, you know you’re on the right track.

Create Great Content.

Always write something worth reading. Create content which is interesting and informative. Your content should answer all the questions your readers have and more importantly, it should keep them reading. Moreover, when you create your content, make sure it will trigger a response from them. What do they need to know? What have they learned? What do you want them to do? Once all these questions are answered, you know you’ve done a good job.

It’s not impossible to find your spot, even in the most unexpected of all places. After all, you can be whoever you want to be.

Who would’ve thought? I became a Business Blogger. All it took is my computer, great ideas, and bit of practice.

How did you start blogging? Leave a comment and tell your story. 

Image Credit:stuck4ideas

There are a lot of ways to get more leads through your webite. One of the best is to drive more traffic. However, there are many tools and strategies available. You may feel uncertain about what really works.

Elance Alex shares his idea on how to drive more traffic. He cited Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as the most effective.

Read the full article on “5 Ways to Drive…”

The point of SEM is to promote your website through paid advertisement. It may be costly but definitely worth it. It can bring a positive result in your website traffic.

There are many ways for you to increase site traffic. Some are free, and some may cost you money. But then, always keep in mind that sometimes, spending money is a small price to pay to have a more effective and profitable website.

Do you use Pay-per-click advertising? Did it work for you? Please leave a comment and tell us your experiences.

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.

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? 

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 

It's 2012, and most companies realize that Inbound Marketing works much better than old-fashioned interruption marketing.There's only one problem -- The number of worthwhile marketing intiatives is overwhelming!

I know, just Google for "best marketing initiatives." Now you're overwhelmed again. And, some of the recommendations you'll find are just plain wrong.

Here's what doesn't work: Trying to trick Google and the other search engines. Google has billions of dollars and over 30K employees including some of the smartest people on the planet. What definitely does work is creating remarkable content that help your prospects -- As long as you do it consistently.

Inbound Marketing Priorities

Here's what I do to set priorities. Have you seen HubSpot's new Marketing Grader? It's free -- Even for non-HubSpot customers. It's the upgrade for their old Website Grader.

The best thing, is that the good folks at HubSpot have already done the hard work of seeing what's important for your Inbound Marketing in 2012. Just don't be disappointed if your score is lower than it was in the old Website Grader. HubSpot is being tough on us to help us have the best possible inbound marketing!

Here's the marketing grader for Inbound Team:

OK, a 76. Maybe, I should have hidden our results. Oh, wait. This is all built from public information. You can run a marketing grader on anyone you want, including Inbound Team! You can even run this report on your competitors (And they can run a report on you!).

I benchmarked us against HubSpot, and they only got an 87! HubSpot created the tool, and even they can't ace it. It's a pretty tough scale after all, so maybe a 76 isn't that bad.

The best part is that HubSpot provides detailed coaching on how to improve your score. In fact, we orginally scored a 74. We were missing some mobile optimization. In another post, I'll show you how, in just a few minutes, we added Apple icons and Meta Viewport tags. As a result, Marketing Grader gave us two more points.

Besides the coaching, Marketing Grader groups the results by Top of the Funnel, Middle of the Funnel, and Analytics. They'll even show how you compare to your competitors in each area. Sure, all of your Inbound Marketing works together. But, it really helps to be able to focus on one key area at a time.

The 2012 Inbound Marketing Challenge

Run, your own Marketing Grader. If you can beat our 76, leave a comment and brag about it! Of course, we're not going to accept our current score, and it will be improving. So you'll have to stay on your toes.

If you can't beat us, then call 800.609.9669 and get some help with your Inbound Marketing.