Inbound Marketing Blog

From the recent webinars and research Ive been involved with, 2010 appears to be the year of the website redesign. If you're planning on a new website or a redesign in 2010 it's important to think about why? What are your objectives, what do you hope to achieve? Don't lose site of the fact that you're in business to make money, not to have the best looking website. Research shows that a good looking website doesn't equate to more traffic or more leads.

The most overlooked marketing tool that (almost) every business has is their website.  I continue to meet many business owners, especially in small business, who have a misunderstanding about the purpose of their website, and as a result aren't seeing the results they should and can get.

Understanding Inbound Marketing could be your best advantage in 2010!

... the customer! Not YOU, not your company, not your brand, not your product nor your service.

We're living in a revolution and Inbound Marketing is at the forefront of this revolution, says David Meerman-Scott in his Foreward of the new book Inbound Marketing Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. He goes as far to say that traditional marketers need to unlearn what they've been taught, in order to learn the new rules of Inbound Marketing and continues with saying that the outbound marketing era, also known as interruptive or push marketing is over. 

When I asked this at a recent business networking function no hands went up. 

Two days before the event I learnt Social Media FTW ‘09 was sold out, completely full with 225 delegates and a waiting list. Wow! I was impressed I had no idea so many people in Maine were so hungry to learn about social media. I was pleased I had decided to go, I was curious to meet all these people who also have in interest in Social Media.

Several years ago I identified the need to optimize our website with keywords so we could rank higher in the search engines.  Through my research in looking for the ‘best' search engine optimization company to employ, I quickly learnt that SEO wasn't something that you do once, it was ongoing and continually changing.  Not only that, the seo experts I was speaking with charged in excess of $1000 with no guarantee.  I decided it was going to be cheaper and better long term, for me to learn seo and make the changes myself.  So I spent a considerable about of time studying SEO until I knew what we needed to do with regards to optimizing the website, headings, page titles, meta descriptions and rewriting the website copy.  But the next challenge I ran into was updating our website.  Our web developer charged $100 p/hr to make the changes. This didn't provide me with the flexibility I needed to upload new content, test and measure results and change offers, calls to action. Also we needed to start a blog, but again the cost factor outweighed any financial benefit we could foresee.  It was frustrating and expensive, to say the least.

Search engine optimization (seo) is an integral part of effective social media marketing. Done well it will drive qualified traffic to your website.  But an increase in traffic means nothing to your business if they're not converting.  Before you spend any more money to drive more traffic to your site, think about what you want your visitors to do and how you can encourage them to convert to a lead. If your traffic is not converting, it's not a numbers game, you need to go back to the planning stage and focus on leads.  Here's some basic pointers on how to convert your traffic to leads.

Today, the technology introducing the new era of marketing is the internet and more specifically social media marketing. The internet has created a platform which has changed distribution, advertising, consumer needs and buyer behavior, introducing a new psychology and approach to marketing. In order to run a successful business, understanding how this technology is influencing and changing your market is paramount to guaranteeing marketing victory. It's the marketers and business owners that harness this change in marketing and the psychology who will be the ones that build sustainable businesses and not only survive these tough economic times but position themselves to prosper in the future.