Inbound Marketing Blog

How much focus have you applied to your conversion strategy?

As a certified inbound marketing consultant I am consistently evaluating online or Internet marketing strategies. I'm sure it comes as no shock to any reader that in the past 12 months, almost every (if not all) KPI (key performance indicators) have shown significant increases in:

1. Overall search traffic
2. Blog readership
3. Blog creation & posts
4. Social media accounts
5. Social media communications
6. Paid advertising
7. Products & services offered
8. Websites launched
9. Etc, etc...

My point is that all players in all ends have increased dramatically. In my own mind, and from my own perspective, this simply means more competition for attention as well as more opportunity for the savvy marketing professionals.

All of this overview leads me to the focus of this particular blog post and that is a perceived weakness or oversight in many inbound or Internet marketing strategies.

If getting found, converting & analyzing are the staples of a good Internet marketing process, this blog post is about the middle element or conversion strategy as I see that in many cases, this area needs the most attention. It's considered a great success to improve your search engine positions, increase your inbound links, double your traffic and reach but in the end, if your conversion process is sub-standard, it's not as big a success as it could have been.

With all of this in mind, it is important to understand the traditional sales funnel and sales cycle.

1. Top of the funnel = Tier one traffic from all sources including:
   • Organic traffic
   • Referral or link traffic
   • PPC traffic
   • Direct traffic
   • Email traffic
   • Blog traffic
   • Social media traffic
2. Middle of the funnel = Lead generation or conversion. This is the process of qualifying or filtering all traffic into interested or lead traffic. Once tier one traffic is converted to a lead, they have moved from the top of the funnel to the middle of the funnel.
3. Bottom of the funnel = Customers

In my next blog post I will discuss the process and methodology available to manage the middle of the funnel and convert tier one traffic into leads.

Other resources available to help you expand your reach:

How To Get Found Online: Search Engines Presence

As I normally state in these Inbound Marketing blog posts, the information below was created for businesses & professionals looking for inbound marketing strategies. Inbound marketing professionals should already be familiar with this information but I do encourage marketing professionals to share this blog post with their readers.

There are generally two forms of search engine results:

1.    Sponsored or paid results
2.    Organic or natural results.

Sponsored Results:  Paid search engine results (sponsored results) are those listings that require a fee for the search engines to list their link for specific, selected keywords or keyphrases. The most widely used form of paid listing is Pay Per Click (PPC). This is where you pay each time someone clicks on the link in your advertisement on the search engine results page (SERP). The price increases with the level of competition of the selected keyword.

Organic Results: Natural or organic search results are gathered by search engines’ web crawlers and ranked according to relevance to search terms. This relevance is calculated by criteria such as:
•    Extent of keyword match
•    Keyword prominence
•    Keyword frequency
•    Keyword relevance
•    Number of links into that website or web page

Ranking in the organic search results is better because not only is it FREE, but research shows that people click on the organic results 75% to 84% of the time and paid results only garnish 16% to 25% of the attention. Part of the reason for this is that consumers are intelligent enough to understand that money alone can get a web site to the top of a page through these sponsored ad purchases but organic results are dictated by the direct relevance as determined by Google or the other major search engines. This gives organic search results and those web sites that achieve these results much more credibility.

How Do The Major Search Engines Decide Page 1 Rankings?
Google and the other major search engines rank websites in search engine results pages according to relevance to the search terms. This relevance is calculated by looking at both on-page factors such as the content on your site and off-page factors in the form of inbound links to your website. Off-page factors (number of links to a given web page or web site) are the biggest influences in your website’s ranking in search engine results. With these factors as the primary influence, any web site with inbound marketing as a priority, needs to learn how to do some or all of the following:

1: Research & Develop Master Keyword Inventory    
•    Search Volume – Given two different keyword phrases, optimize for the one with the larger number of searches.
•    Relevance – Choose keywords that your target market is using to describe and search for your products and services.
•    Difficulty or Competition – Consider your chances for ranking on the first page of Google for that keyword phrase. Look at the sites ranked in those first 10 slots, their authority and relevance to search terms, and gage if you will be able to overtake them to secure a spot on that first page.

2: On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
•    Place keywords in the page title, URL, headings, and page text.
•    Optimize your page description for maximum click-through-rate when your site ranks in Google searches.
•    Place keywords in other “invisible” places on your web site, including meta-keyword tags and alt-text on images.

3: Off-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
•    Build more inbound links from other sites into yours. Each link serves as a recommendation or a reference.
•    Build more links within context, i.e. those with valuable keywords in the link anchor text (the text that is hyperlinked to your site). Link anchor text provides context for the search engines to understand what your site is about.
•    Build more links from trusted websites. Just as references from well-respected friends and experts offer more value, so do links from trusted and well- respected websites.
•    Link-building tips:    
      o    Submit your website to directories like the Yahoo! Directory and Business.com
      o    Communicate with others in your industry through blogs and other social media    
      o    Create compelling tools (such as an interesting calculator) and content (via a blog, for example)

4: Measure, Evaluate, Analyze  & Modify
•    Track number of inbound links, keyword rank over time and compared to competition.
•    Measure real business results: number of visitors, leads, and customers from SEO.

Below is an example of search engine ranking results produced for my company. This is some of the data I use to help understand my inbound marketing productivity.

Blogging For Dummies... even if you're no dummy.

In my circles (inbound marketing), there has been a lot of discussion lately about the optimum frequency of a web site's blog posts. What are the best practices for blog creation and development?

Even though I consider myself an expert in the world of inbound marketing, I must admit I don't know all there is to know about blogging. I am not extremely familiar with the technological options when setting up or creating a blog that include all the bells and whistles. But, I can tell you that most of the productive inbound marketing components revolve around the creation and development of content and your blog may be the most powerful way to do so.

As I have explained in the video above, a well crafted blog accomplishes many inbound marketing (SEO) objectives all at one time. For more visual assistance, you can use this blogging for dummies equation I have created. It is a great illustration of what can happen when you post a well written blog. I realize that this is a skill that must be developed over time and a subject for another blog but understand this formula.

Blogging For Dummies Formula:

New Blog Post
= New Web Page
+ New Twitter Tweet
+ New LinkedIn Update
+ New Facebook Update
= New Keyword Ranking Opportunity
+ New Inbound Linking Opportunities

These are a significant amount of birds that can be targeted (don't care for the word killed) with only one stone.

As an inbound marketing professional, I have a task list that never ends and this kind of productivity proves to be extremely attractive. If you are managing your own site or just your own blog, this weaponry shouldn't be ignored.

I am more of an old school marketing professional and I can relate to all of you who have a difficult time starting the blogging process or can't understand the benefits or even ask yourself, "why will people care to read my blog about pluming supplies"?

Although I will detail the answer to these and other questions in more detail, I leave you with this simple fact:

Blogging works and you will find interesting subject matter for your target market and audience.