Book Review: Inbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing was written by the founders of Hubspot, Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan.  If you are new to online marketing this is the book I would recommend you start with. It gives you all the basics and explains how inbound marketing works in plain English. There are steps and checklists throughout the book designed to simplify and to help you keep organized with the lessons taught. At the end of each chapter you are presented with a case study and tips on how to track your progress. Many people struggle with the issue of tracking social media. If you are one of these people here are 5 Social Media Monitoring Tools you should check out from The Online Marketing Blog.

Inbound Marketing is organized similarly to the theologies preached by Hubspot: get found, convert, and analyze. The book is broken down into four parts:

• Part 1: Inbound Marketing gives an introduction to what online marketing is and a brief explanation of how it works.
• Part 2: Get Found By Prospects explains how to promote your site and how to get your site to be seen by as many people as possible. It also talks about on-page and off-page SEO.
• Part 3: Converting Customers shows you how to convert visitors and prospects to leads, and leads into customers.
• Part 4: Make Better Decisions ties in the loose ends and explains additional things you can do and work on.

At the end of the book there is a section full of tips for startups which I would think is extremely useful to companies who have yet to get a grasp on the whole social media and online thing. Essentially, this book shows you how to get Google, social media, and blogs on your side and teaches you to use them effectively. Even if you already know about inbound marketing, this is still a great book to have as a reference or just for brushing up on. Like the title states, Inbound Marketing is here to help you get found with the use of search engines, social media, and blogs.

Happy New Year!

I know… I’m a bit behind. Thought I’d share anyway.