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"To be successful and grow your organization, you need to match the way you market your products to the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products, and you do that by generating leads through inbound marketing.”
There are three primary ways people learn and shop online:
The goal is for you to make your business readily available, search-able, share-able and like-able on all of the above. If you’re focusing your marketing efforts on billboards and radio ads — then it’s time to switch things up.
Here are some key insights on dominating your industry or niche on the inter-webs.
Become The Mayor of Your Website
Think of websites as if they were cities. Some cities have lots of roads and highways leading to them, with lots of people driving on those roads and highways… like Los Angeles, or Las Vegas, for example. Other cities don’t have nearly as many roads and highways as LA or Vegas, and naturally, nor do they have as many people on them either. If your website were a city, you’d want it be the Vegas of cities… you want to build as many roads and highways as possible leading towards your website and pack as many people as possible on those traffic lanes.
Bridges, Roads & Highways = Your Content.
Number Of People Driving On Your Roads = Your Content’s Quality.
Build Lots Of High-Traffic Bridges, Roads & Highways
Do NOT waste time focusing on tweaking and redesigning your website. No one cares about that… people care about information that benefits them directly. So, rather than wasting six hours thinking about where to put your navigation bar, focus on the following three things instead:
Actionable Insights:
(*Side Note: In case it’s your first time reading a FlashNotes book summary — “Actionable Insights” are sometimes included at the end of a chapter summary to serve as a note-to-self or ToDo list task to prompt you towards taking action.)
“Watch your competitors, but don’t follow them.” ~ Arnold Hax
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Instead of interrupting your target market — create remark-able content that attracts them to you. The authors refer to content as “remark-able” in a clever way, with remark italicized every time they use the word, to serve as a reminder to ask yourself if your content is worthy of driving lots of remarks… signaling that lots of people are consuming, sharing, and linking to it.
Actionable Insights:
“Twenty years ago, your marketing effectiveness was a function of the width of your wallet. Today, your marketing effectiveness is a function of the width of your brain.”
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There are several ways you can go about creating content. Here’s a list of recommended examples:
• Blog (ex: articles about trending topics)
• White papers
• Videos
• Webinars
• Podcasts
• Webcasts
• Visual content (ex: visually appealing, infographics)
Give & Take
When you pay for advertising, the traffic stops when the marketing money stops… But when you create remarkable content and publish it online, the traffic never stops. In fact, it grows over time. When you publish something on the web, it’s up there forever. If your content is valuable, it’ll be advantageous for you and your business. If your content sucks, you’ll hear crickets. Put your best information out there. Don’t hide it.
Track Your Progress
Use www.grader.com to track where you are now — shares, traffic, etc. — vs where you WILL be in the future!
Actionable Insights:
The beauty of Inbound Marketing is that you no longer have to spend money interrupting potential customers—instead, you can:
The best way to get found in the blog-osphere is to, ehem, start a blog. Blogging is important because it:
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Blogging Do’s & Don’ts:
Create Catchy Titles And Headlines
If you want your content to be “read and spread” it’s not enough to create great quality content — it’s got to be catchy and compelling to become contagious. You make your content contagious by tweaking your headlines and titles so that they’re click-worthy. Here are some examples of catchy titles:
Actionable Insights:
…In a nutshell, the stats above should tell you how important it is to rank high on Google. But it’s likely you already knew that, right? So the question isn’t about “why” as much as it’s about “how” — if being ranked high on Google is so important — how do you do it?
Two Steps To Climbing The Google Ranks:
Step 1) Become Relevant.
Step 2.) Gain Authority.
“You shouldn't just solve for one factor. For example, picking a relevant keyword that has very high search volume is not going to mean much if the difficulty is so high that you'll never be able to rank. Similarly, picking very easy words that have very weak competition is not going to generate much traffic if only a few people a month use that term to search. When picking your keywords, you should start with a list of relevant keywords for your business. Then, determine what the estimated volume is for those keywords and how much competition there is for that keyword. If you're just getting started, you should probably begin with keywords that have relatively low competition. Choose keywords that have relatively low competition instead. Then, as you build authority for your web pages, and start ranking for these keywords, you can move up to higher volume keywords that have more competition.”
There are three things contribute to picking the right keywords to optimize your website:
Here's a few tips for picking the perfect keywords:
- For competitive keywords, the strength of the competition may be high, and ranking on the first page may be very difficult.
- When picking keywords, try to strike a balance between a keyword's Relevance, Volume, and Difficulty:
Actionable Insights:
“If a tool isn't working, shut it down. Don't spend precious marketing and development resources on a project that isn't working. It is easy to feel that you have to “make it work” because you put a lot of time and effort into building the tool. Resist this feeling. Admit it didn't work and move on to the next free tool idea or marketing campaign. The key to inbound marketing is to iterate and improve.”
Create A Useful Tool For Your Audience
When you visit a website, you’ll often see a give-away or free gift of some kind being offered to you in exchange for your email address. This is called an “Opt-In Page” or “Value Page”. The idea is this: create a useful tool for your audience (this is know as a “Lead Magnet”) and then give it away in exchange for their email. For an example of what this looks like, visit: www.MeaningfulHQ.com. You’ll want to create something along these lines that adds value to your visitors.
Use Email Marketing Software For Leads
To capture email addresses from your visitors, you’ll need to install an email capture form to collect the info.
Actionable Insights:
Once you start getting traffic, you’ve got to learn to keep it around. You do this by applying effective conversion methods that engage visitors.
Develop Killer Calls To Action
In order to convert visitors and turn them into leads, and then eventually into customers, you’ve got develop high converting Calls To Action (CTA), and then capture their contact info. Effective CTAs have four qualities in common:
Configure your website to setup and edit forms regularly WITHOUT any help from IT personnel.
Work to build clean, convincing landing pages that:
“Once you have a steady flow of leads coming in due to your inbound marketing efforts, you can then start to convert these leads into paying customers.”
Measure Market Reach
LIVE LIKE YOU GIVE A DAMN,
Dean Bokhari
"Dean Bokhari's Meaningful Show is the Self-Improvement Podcast I've been
waiting for. It's actionable, inspiring, and BS-Free." —Brett Silo
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