Inbound Blogging

A business blog is a collection of articles that provide helpful content for your target audience. Blogging has become a major part of a companies online presence. 79% of marketers with a company blog reported inbound ROI for 2013. Blogging is a fundamental way to attract qualified website traffic. Every time you write a blog post, it is seen as an index on your website, and each one of those pages leads to better search engine optimization. 43% of companies have acquired a company through their blog.

The content that is worth being talked about is called Remarkable Content. Inbound links are like votes to your site, the more you have the better off you are. The best practices to create this content can be defined below.

 Keep your buyer persona in mind. You must know your audience and what stage they are in in the buyer line. You should also keep it one topic per blog post. This will help so that you can keep the theme simple. You must have these blogs able to optimize your search engine hits. Blogging is the most effective inbound marketing strategy.

One should be more concerned with the content in the blog, rather than the word count. Make sure your formatting is welcoming and able to draw in readers. Embrace the white space in your blog, it makes the blog look clean and easy to look at. Quality content is the most important aspect of blogging,

Google Campaign

Google. is one of the biggest search engines in the world. When creating a campaign you can select where you want your ad to be viewed. When making an ad you must create a title and description of what you want the consumer to see. It is important to keep the ad short and simple, in order to keep the consumer interested. You then say how much you want to pay per click. 

You then need to type in the words that people would search that would fit your companies persona. For example, for a boat marina, the words you would use are Boat Slips, Boating, Marinas. If you are targeting more family fun boaters then you may want to search: Family Boating, Children Friendly Marina. These words are important because the more vague the words are, the more unneeded clicks you will get. This will cause you to pay a significant amount of money when you don't need to be. 

It is important to study your AdWords and keep up with them. If you do not study the words and the clicks you can potentially lose customers and money. You may learn your campaign is not working and may need to adapt it to better fit your target consumer. 

Traditional Vs Inbound

In class we watched the videos from HubSpot.com. We learned that their are two types of marketing. There is Traditional marketing as well as inbound marketing.

Traditional marketing is marketing that interrupts the consumer. the consumer is well aware they are being marketed to and often is met with negativity. This type of marketing is like cold calling clients for telemarketing. Consumer would prefer not to be interrupted but as marketers this has been the way to reach consumers for years.

There is also Inbound marketing. This type of marketing makes the consumer unaware that they are being marketed to. Consumers only see content when they are searching for that specific content. Consumers tend to like Inbound marketing better because they are not interrupted and this type of marketing seems to be more successful in obtaining consumers.

Website Optimization

Website optimization is when you make your website able to be seen easier by your target consumer. Marketers try to make the website more accessible through search engines. There are many ways to optimize your website.

You can add videos to your website that are connected to YouTube. You also can add a link of your website to all of your social media accounts. You should also update your website frequently, maybe around 2 or 3 times a week. The longer your website goes without being updated the less optimized your website will be.

I learned most of these during my internship, but we will be learning more and more over the next 3 months in this class. it is important to know because many companies are looking for people to optimize their websites.

AdWords

I have had experience with Google AdWords in the past. I worked with a small marketing firm in Northwest Indiana, that helped local small business market their products. I was in charge of helping to market and existing Marina as well as a newly opening restaurant in that Marina, called Latitudes.

We used the AdWords to help with selling boat slips at the marina. I was in charge of coming up with the words that would be searched on Google to find the marina. I was unaware that if i were to pick words that were to generic that i would be wasting the money of the company. I ended up wasting about $200 because the words i chose were so generic that the people clicking on the website were not necessarily looking for boat slips.

After this blunder I learned that the more specific the search words were the better return on the money used. For the next campaign i was able to increase the turnover per click as well as helped to increase the overall traffic that hit the companies website. It was exciting to feel as though i was helping the company grow.