So this relatively new “internet marketing term” is being used a lot lately.
But what exactly does Inbound Marketing entail and how can you use it to build a successful website and grow your existing audience?
By definition, inbound marketing is a way of attracting prospects and customers to your business by providing content that they find valuable.
It requires you to first grab their attention, spark their interest, build desire and get them to act. But the key to doing it ‘Right’ is to avoid interrupting that potential customer.
Sounds tricky, don’t it?
So how are you suppose to get people’s attention online, without annoying them? These 17 ideas will get you on the right track.
We’ll look into the 3 major inbound marketing strategies that I use on all of my blogs.
Content Always Comes First
1. Inbound marketing is about attracting your target market to you. The way you do this is by creating content that they’ll find useful. If you’re a personal trainer, create articles that will help your audience lose weight and get fit.
2. Don’t worry about giving away too much for free. This content will pay for itself many times over as new people find your articles and videos online. The more information you can provide to your market, the more authority and credibility you will gain.
3. There are many different types of content you can create. Here’s a few of them:
- White papers
- Blog Articles
- Audio podcast
- Online Video
- Downloadable Ebooks
- Newsletters
- Flow Charts
- Worksheets & Workbooks
4. Stay consistent with your content marketing plan. If you’re going to start a blog (which you absolutely should), keep it updated with new articles. If you’re going to start a podcast, record new episodes for your listeners regularly. Give away downloadable PDF’s every now and then to increase your likability and trust in the marketplace.
5. Get ideas from other content producers. Stay in tune with what your market wants by reading other blogs, listening to other podcasts and staying in the trenches. ie. Fitness bloggers will have a better and much deeper connection with their audience if they talk about what’s working for them right now.
6. Think long term. What can you create now that will still be relevant a year from now. Those are your big money ideas. Those are the articles that will help you grow your site and authority.
Don’t Ignore Email
7. Email is NOT dead. I still use it and I’m sure you do, too. Your visitors aren’t any different so ask for the email to stay in contact.
8. You need permission. Permission based marketing is probably the best way to go if you want your audience to give you their undivided attention when you’re making offers and launching a new product or service. By giving you their email, they’re saying it’s OK to send them marketing messages.
9. Make it a priority. I do this on every single one of my blogs. I make sure that two things are easy to do once they get to the site. (1) They can find the content, and (2) they can subscribe to my email list without jumping through any hoops.
10. Make it good. The idea is to entice your visitors to sign up to your email list by offering something in return for their email address. Don’t just say, “sign up for free email updates” – offer them an exclusive interview with an industry expert, or a downloadable ebook or an 8part marketing course.
11. Try different content offers. Not every offer will work. So if they’re not signing up for the fitness ecourse, they might want a downloadable “muscle building” ebook or a step by step workout plan. (Yea I’m sticking with the fitness bloggers)
12. Study the market by visiting other popular blogs. Go through their email marketing process and (if you like it), model what they do. Don’t steal their content, that’s not cool. But you can model their process and create your own unique offering.
13. Don’t use crappy tools. I use Aweber because it’s awesome and easy to use. I’ve tried other email marketing services and Awebers seems to be the best one out right now.
Blogging Makes Your Social & Search Engine Friendly
14. So you’re creating content people want to read and have an email marketing process in place to grab visitors email addresses. What’s next? – Optimize your content. Make sure that your content is easy to read and easy to find. People will be searching for your content online, you’re job is to make sure you get found.
15. Promote your stuff. Don’t expect a big name blogger to pick it up and share it with their audience. Be proactive. Tweet your content. Post it on Facebook. Social Bookmark it. If you want a step by step plan, check out this post.
16. Interact with people who retweet your articles and comment on your posts. Engagement is the key to building a community around your blog and brand.
17. Have fun with it. These ideas should get you on the right track, but don’t be afraid to construct your own track. Experiment with blogging, email and content. You can model others or create a new way of marketing that other will one day model.
Leave your comments below. Share this on Twitter. Pin this on Pinterest. Thanks in advanced.
Good outline!
Regarding MailChimp, any specific reason to go with Aweber instead? I use and find MailChimp great and recommend it for beginners because of its ease of use and generous free account. But I’m always looking to improve if there’s something better out there.
Was interested on strategies for #15 but there’s no clickable link.
Thanks!
-Rich
Thanks man. I signed up for MailChimp’s free service but haven’t used it much – so I can’t say much about it. I have used Constant Contact and Get Response – Aweber’s user interface is much easier to grasp in my opinion. I added the link, thanks for the heads up.
As for your Mailchimp vs AWeber question, as far as I can see it would come down to personal preference. I discovered Mailchimp first when it was almost unique in providing RSS Feed to e-mail service, so I stuck with it and have yet to find a reason to change to any other email marketing system.
I think that the second pointer should be the main take away for many bloggers here. This is because, although many people have a lot of useful insight, but they’re usually hesitant to share it with their readers. I think if you eliminate this then a blog can be on a better path to a bigger readership.
Yup.. and those things that they are hesitant to share might just be the things that can grow their audience and get them the authority they deserve.
We are our own worst enemy sometimes..
Thanks a lot for the very interesting information, it is nice to find new things to learn and writen so clearly and easy to understand.
Thank you,
Ben
This is a great article – thanks for posting. If I may, I would like to add a few comments:
1) In some cases, a tool, such as a special-purpose calculator, can be an extremely valuable item of content. Not sure if “workbooks and worksheets” in your list of content types was meant to include this type, but I’m referring here to a standalone calculator rather than a spreadsheet. For example, the ROI calculator on our site brings in a steady stream of people who want to know what their Return on Investment will be, if they use an Inbound Marketing Automation system.
2) We use the email component of Marketing Automation tools such as Pardot or Loopfuse, rather than standalone email packages. Sure, they can be more expensive (although Loopfuse is free until your contact database > 2,500 leads), but if you’re Inbound campaigns are successful, you will need automation to help cope with the increased level of inquiries.
3) Your point (14) suggests that one should optimize one’s content to make it easy to find. Many people make the mistake of making their content “findable” on site via only one form of categorization; usually to group the content by type. It’s a good idea, for example, to group all your white papers together and all your videos together. But you should also design the layout to make it easy to find all the content on a specific subject or issue, too. So all the white papers and videos and blog posts on SEO, for example, (as a marketing service company example).
We find its best to think of Inbound Marketing Automation as a Process consisting of 4 phases. You have mentioned some of the following activities in your article, the difference here being the way they are grouped. This list assumes that you have a detailed marketing strategy in place already. If not, you must start there.
1) The Attract Phase – the “Get Found” part. Creating and refining the strategies for Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing and Pay-Per-Click, if you need it, to bring the right visitors to your site.
2) The Engage Phase. Your Content Strategy must engage people on the site so that they don’t bounce away. All those items of content which you mention in your long list become the fuel which drives the whole machine. As the effort involved in creating all this thought-provoking content is high, the strategy must identify only items needed to make it all work.
3) The Convert Phase – Changing a faceless visitor into a named prospect by getting a valid email address (the prospect’s “permission”). Your strategy must persuade visitors to exchange this information in return for downloading some of your valuable content.
4) The Qualify & Nurture phase – Qualifying leads by scoring and grading them to separate out the chafe, and then Nurturing them with drip emails campaigns which result in feeding sales with hot leads only. The Inbound Marketing Automation system feeds these hot leads into your CRM system and returns the resulting sales opportunity values back to the IMA system to enable ROI calculations.
The benefit to this approach is that all processes can be operated according to the dictates of Continuous Process Improvements: Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat. By doing this, you’ll achieve better and better results as time goes by, and because Inbound Marketing Automation systems allow real-time calculation of every campaign’s ROI, you can use this metric as the basis for improvement.
Creating the content is usually the most difficult part. Our website provides a free, no registration required 42 minute video on how to go about designing your own Content Strategy. Look for it under Resources>Videos.