Based on multiple recommendations I ordered the book Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. They’ve both done some pretty big things when it comes to software, so I was interested to see what was in the book.
Initially the book seemed too basic, but the further in I read, the more nuggets of wisdom began to appear. There were many ideas that I wasn’t executing on my blog, and some that are good ideas for the future, and this post is a list of those nuggets for me to remember, and you to enjoy:
Track Your Progress & Measure Everything You Can
- RSS feed, email list, Facebook followers, LinkedIn Connections, Twitter followers, Diggs, Delicious links, number of links back to your webiste, organic keywords, visitors to your blog; measure anything you can!
- Track the number of qualified leads over time that came from your blog.
- Track the number of customers that signed up that originally found you via your blog.
- For measuring blog posts include: date, author, visitors, comments, links, tweets; and create analytics to determine the best articles, then iterate to improve the blog content over time.
- Use website.grader.com
Site Search
- Monitor your search data: when people search for something specific that doesn’t have a landing page, manually add it.
- Tailor your search results so that people land on what they’re looking for (EG: Zappos will only show size 18 shoes on results page if that was what was searched for.)
Engage With Relevant Blogs
- Use Google’s blog search to find blogs that suit your industry. Use website.grader.com to narrow the results (Grade > 90).
- Comment on relevant articles. Disagreement is okay. The author may then look at your site, or their readers may; yielding relevant traffic.
- Join linkedIn groups that are relevant.
Keywords
- Build up as many keyword variations as you can come up with.
Blog SEO
- Write meta-descriptions that are < 154 characters (google truncates them), unique, and contain relevant keywords.
- Use a single h1 on each page, and multiple h2, and h3 headers.
- Put an alt attribute on your images.
Build a following
- Use twittergrader.com to find the most influential Twitter users, and then engage with them.
Convert leads to customers
- Monitor referral channels to determine: How did the lead find you? via google, blog link, social media site…
- Watch website visits to see if the lead visited once, or many times, recently or was it a month ago, and which pages they looked at.
- Track calls to action for the ones that are generating better leads, and which ones aren’t generating leads.
- Use any interaction with the customer to gather a better picture of your audience.
- Leads in your nurturing program should want to hear from you, because for them you should be creating value.
- Segment your leads via levels and definitions; The key to an effective sales funnel is to have one, and to consistently measure it.
Misc
- Configure a sub-domain that redirects to your facebook, twitter, other page. This will make it easier to communicate the URL of those pages
- Configure your site so that you can track the company for whom someone works for (they say it can be done… I’m not sure how. If you know, please leave a comment!)
Overall there’s a lot of good stuff in inbound marketing. Some of it is repetitive, but I think that’s because the audience of this book is people who are unfamiliar with topic. For those of use that know a bit more, the book is a good reminder of all the stuff you could be doing, or could be doing better.