Inbound Marketing Meeting Agenda - Content Marketing Brainstorm Session
Image by Tiarrescott
Read more
August 26
August 22
Having Clear Desired Outcomes Makes Blogging Easy
Blogging and writing educational content for a website is often looked at as a dreaded task. It's on par with many people's excitement to go for a run after work! The problem is, much like the run, you know you should be doing it, but you still don't. If there's one thing that will truly help you start and continue blogging on a regular basis, it's having clear outcomes you are trying to achieve from blogging. I don't mean the general outcome of more website traffic. I mean specific outcomes. Notice I said outcomeS, plural. Increasing website traffic might be one of your outcomes, but you should be more specific than that. When it comes to website traffic, your outcome should be more along the lines of increasing organic search traffic from Google, for a specific list of keywords, by a specific percentage, over a specific period of time. If your outcome is to get more website traffic, you've succeeded if you get 1 more visitor than you did last month. That's not success. Defining ...
Read more
August 15
4 Inbound Marketing Articles You Should Have Read This Week
Holy smokes! It's Friday already! Here're some inbound marketing articles you should have read this week: The 5 Biggest Content Marketing Lies - Inc. This is a quick read and well worth the time. John Hall hits on 5 very common misconceptions about content marketing and does a good job of clearing things up. As a teaser, my favorites are "Content marketing is just a buzzword" and "If you create it, they will come". Author: John Hall 8 Blogging Rules You Should Probably Ditch - Search Engine Watch Still not blogging for your company? That's a shame. You're missing a huge opportunity... Maybe this list of don'ts will help you get started on the right foot. They actually take blogging and make it easier. Already a blogger? Great! You're probably already following what Salma Jafri lists, but it's worth a double-check. Author: Salma Jafri 3 Components Every Value Proposition Must Have - JillKonrath.com With content marketing being such a useful tactic in your inbound marketing strategy, ...
Read more
August 15
How To Find Out Who Is Using Content Marketing In Your Industry
I bet you've said it... yep, you. You've made the dreadful mistake of saying no one in your industry (competitors, vendors, etc...) use content marketing yet. No one baits in high quality prospects with valuable content they've written in hopes of generating leads... OH REALLY!?!?!?!? I'd be willing to bet with a little Googling we can prove you wrong. You just need to know how to start looking. Here's a quick way to do some competitive research on who is using content marketing in your industry.
Read more
August 07
The Path To A Small Business Website Conversion
A website conversion takes place when a visitor to a website takes the action the website owner wants them to take. This action could be anything from starting a real time chat or downloading a valuable piece of content to submitting an RFQ (request for quote), making a donation or completing the buying process through ecommerce. To make your website a lead generating machine, you need to understand the path to a small business website conversion. Step 1 - Quality Website Traffic If you want to generate quality leads, you need quality website traffic. Yes, quantity can be important, but the quality is even more important. We tell our clients that it would be better to have 1000 quality visitors that are actually interested in their offering than have 2000 visitors that have little to no interest in their offering. Through small business SEO, search engine pay-per-click advertising and/or social media paid advertising, you can really hone in on your ideal buyers and generate quality ...
Read more
July 30
Myth Busters: Content Marketing Edition
Do a quick Google search of “content marketing” and you will surely be bombarded with facts, statistics, personal stories, how-to’s, and countless claims by “professionals” about the wonders of content marketing.
Read more
July 18
Curated List of 4 Great Web Marketing Resources This Week
Feeling guilty that you didn't read any web marketing resources this week? No worries, we've compiled some of our favorites to give you some weekend reading material. Enjoy! Google Will Now Detect if a Website Won’t Work on Your Device, Warn You Have you ever tried to view a website on your phone and found the experience to be really bad? Yes, you have, don't lie. Google is now helping it's Android brethren by giving you a warning in the search results to let you know if a site won't work right on your phone. For now, they are focused on flash sites. Don't be surprised if that extends to non-flash sites in the future. Responsive design anyone? Thanks to Kellex at Droid Life for the great update. Infographic - Smart Ways To Combine Content Marketing With SEO One of the great things about content marketing is that it doesn't live in a silo. It feeds so many other tactics!! It's great when you get more mileage from a time investment. This infographic shows all of the channels for content ...
Read more
July 18
Social Media Allows You To Fish With Multiple Poles
In my last post, I compared web marketing without content to fishing without bait. Everyone would agree that fishing without bait is not very smart. Everyone SHOULD agree that web marketing without content is not very smart.Let's assume that we can all agree that we need content to make web marketing effective. What's Your Bait? So what should you be using for bait? Ideally, your content would be a good mix of larger content assets like ebooks, webinars, and resource kits along with smaller content assets like blog posts, new pages on your site, videos and social media updates. If you're just getting started with content marketing, your first step HAS to be setting up a blog and writing a post at least once per week. We've discussed in the past that adding blog posts increases your SEO surface area and gives you the ability to speak directly to your best buyer with your own personal message. A blog is easy to setup and leads to the next fishing analogy... Social Media And Content Is ...
Read more
July 16
Web Marketing Without Content Is Like Fishing Without Bait
As web marketers, we're constantly pushing the need to generate valuable content as a means to generate leads. While clients technically "get it", they are still reluctant when it comes to actually doing it. They may update their contact page when someone new gets hired or the history page when another year passes by, but the creation of value added, lead-generating content is simply not an area of ongoing focus. This is despite the fact that 9 out of 10 clients are looking to increase leads/sales/profits online.
Read more
July 02
What is a Website CTA?
Yes, another blog post using an acronym. With the amount of acronyms in this industry, it's almost like speaking another language. This one is important, yet overlooked far too often. CTA stands for call to action. In regards to inbound marketing a call to action is exactly what it says...a call out for someone to take an action. A website CTA can be either graphical in nature just text. It would exist on a website or email for the purpose of getting the reader to take another step in some sort of process.
Read more
How to Audit your Online Marketing
If you are executing digital marketing, congratulations! You are most likely already one step ahead of your competition, and making strides to meaningfully connect with prospects online. But, how do you know if you’re seeing continual success year over year, and improving your metrics?
Without the tools in place to analyze and benchmark your efforts, it is impossible to scale your online marketing and ensure continuous success.
