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.

9 Marketing Lessons from the Pink Ribbon Breast Cancer Campaign

October (aka. Breast Cancer Awareness Month) has just ended and I found it appropriate to share this short slide presentation. Here are a few marketing lessons that we can all take away from the success of the Pink Ribbon Campaign. This was created by Rohit Bhargava who blogs at Influential Marketing Blog.

How Many Websites Actually Rank 10/10?

I just attended a webinar today hosted by Crexendo. They offer a free analysis report of your website.

Parker Garlitz, President of Garlitz Consulting, LLC and VP of Living Whole Foods, Inc. was the speaker.  Here are a few things I found interesting:

• About a dozen websites score a Google Page Rank  of 10/10
  • ex – Govenmernt websites, Cnn, Google
• How many are PR 9/10? Out of the trillion webpages out there, several dozen rank as a 9.
  • ex – Amazon.com, Bing, Yahoo
• Several Hundred rank 8/10
  • ex – ebay
• about 98% of the web has a PR of 0
• What if it says that your Page Rank is Unavailable?
  • This happens to most newly created pages. That doesn’t mean that your page is a 0. It just means that your page is not indexed yet or google can’t find it.
  • For example, if u have a secured page like a shopping cart, the ranking will not be available.  Spiders have probably been instructed by the robot.txt, created by your webmaster, to not crawl that page.

Search Engine Relationship Chart

This is a chart I took from Bruce Clay, Inc. that shows where each major search engine gets their results from. By looking at this you can decide which search engines to put most your efforts in.

I just love charts. It simplifies everything.
Here is what Bruce Clay believes is the “SEO Hierarchy of Needs“.
This helps you prioritize your SEO campaign. I agree with the elements of this pyramid. The spaces between each level are very close and you need to concentrate on all of these things in order to run a successful website. So i can’t say that one is more important than the other, but only that you need the base before you begin to move up the pyramid.  

Harry Potter: An Example That Marketing Is Viral

Today I ran into a person who told me blogs do not work and that Facebook and Twitter are only occupied by young folks. As this is our first post, I find this an appropriate topic and hopefully an ironic one.

When Harry Potter’s Wizarding World was first announced, only 7 people knew about this. These 7 people blogged and discussed this exciting new project to the world. Within 24 hours 350,000,000 have already heard of Harry Potter’s Wizarding World at Universal Studios. Tell me viral marketing is nonexistent! I dare you. (But of course it is all about the content.)

Now to address his second statement… Facebook and Twitter are only for young people…? Who is this guy?!