Effective Inbound Marketing Tips

Believe it or not, one of the single best advertising and PR investments your company can make is simply hiring a good content writer.

After all, we're living in an age of information. Whether it's “right” or not, the online public expects a steady stream of information about the companies they're interested in. You have to write blog posts about your thoughts on the industry and your upcoming products. You have to make Facebook posts with pictures of your latest event, Twitter announcements of new promotions, and more. It's enough to drive one to distraction.

Fundamentally, you have to work harder to attract online customers than in just about any other area of marketing. You have to be putting out new content constantly.

And that's why a good content writer really can be your business's best friend.

Why You Need a Quality Content Writer

• Good content brings good leads.

  It's easy to forget in all the numbers and statistics of SEO, but at the end of the day, you have to be putting out content writing that people want to read. Blog writing that is going unread and uncommented-upon isn't doing you much good at all. Maybe it's attracting eyeballs, but they're bouncing away almost immediately. (Now there's an odd mental image...)

• Content writers understand different markets.

  Good content writing is very much an art, and a difficult skill to learn. It's not just a matter of stringing words together in a grammatically correct fashion; it's about picking the right words to appeal to specific audiences or markets. A piece of rhetoric aimed at Boomers, for example, would fall utterly flat if sent to Millennials, because of differences in how the different generations view the world. It takes years of practice to begin to master this process, but this is where great content writers excel.

• They probably understand SEO nearly as well as you do.

  Professional content writers have to be well-versed in the theories of SEO, or they're not going to get much work. Concepts like keywords, viral marketing, search page rankings, and social sharing are part of the business. Further, they also understand how to integrate these into content without distracting from the ideas and messages being pushed. Fundamentally, good SEO should be invisible to your visitors, like sleight-of-hand, and a content writer knows how to do this.

• They know how to write for different mediums.

  A blog post is not a Facebook update is not a Tweet. Copy on your landing pages is going to look totally different from copy on a newsletter. Every medium you could use for your message has its own attributes and focus, and a good content writer knows these differences and can make sure that you stay on-message while still adjusting your content to fit the format.

• Content writers come cheap.

  There's no reason to beat around the bush here. It's not even necessary to hire a writer full-time to work in your office, although that's certainly one option, especially if you want to be hands-on. However, freelancers abound, and there are dozens of brokering services such as Zerys and Textbroker which have stables full of hungry writers looking for their next big opportunity. With rates generally well under 5c a word (at least for all but the most technical subjects), they can be easily afforded by virtually any business.

Content Writers: Smart, Productive, and Inexpensive

A good content writer is your ticket to more visitors, more leads, and higher-quality content all around. They get your message out to the people you want to see it, writing to specific markets as needed, and save you from having to do it yourself. Considering how cheap good writers come these days, there just aren't many good reasons why you wouldn't want to hire one.

How have you used a content writer to increase your leads or communicate more effectively?  

 

 

Companies that only do things halfway rarely amount to much. To succeed in business, especially given the cutthroat nature of the Internet, you have to commit and you have to be dedicated to making sure that every aspect of your business is top-notch.

This is absolutely true of blogging.

Business blogging is one of the most powerful weapons in your online marketing arsenal, but there's more to it than just putting an article together and calling it a day. The companies putting out the best blogs engage in heavy blog optimization, tweaking and refining their blogs to make sure they're performing at their peak.

So if you have a blog but you think it could be doing better – which should be everyone reading this! – here are some blog optimization tips to help get the most out of it.

Blog Optimization Strategies For Maximum Returns

• Invisible keyword usage: Don't write blogs centered around keywords which are blatantly ungrammatical, such as “best used car dealers Charlotte.” People may be searching for you with terms like that, but putting them in a blog just makes it look like poor writing. This drives off readers. Save such keywords for “hidden” elements, such as HTML headings and metatags. And speaking of which...

• Make full use of metadata: Don't forget that your blog is being “read” by two different creatures. One group is your human visitors, but it's also being read by the search spiders who index the web. You should be making good use of HTML tags, rich snippets, and other forms of metadata to get your keywords seen by the spiders.

• Don't exclude mobile users: Mobile browsing is constantly on the rise, with some experts predicting it becoming the dominant form of web usage in just two or three years. Make sure your blog is optimized to use as little bandwidth as possible, that it has a mobile-friendly layout, and that it doesn't rely on plug-ins like Flash that not all mobile users can access.

• Get analytical! Analytics products, such as Hubspot or Google Analytics, are invaluable in blog optimization. Track the performance of your pages. See which get the most views. See which garner the most leads. Use this information to fine-tune your content and to try to deduce what your visitors most want to see.

• Include multimedia elements: Photos, infographics, video, slideshows, or even music can all be used to spice up a blog. Every blog post should have at least one or two pictures, to break up the text and attract the eye. Use other multimedia forms to enhance your arguments, add information, or illustrate points not easily written out.

• Keep your sitemap up to date: XML sitemaps are a great tool for attracting search spiders and ensuring your content continues to get indexed. You should periodically update your sitemap, so that it includes all new content. This is a dead simple way of increasing your blog's presence on search engines.

• Encourage feedback. Don't let the “comments” section of your blog become a ghost town. You want an active community of people responding to your posts, since it encourages return visits and helps establish your site as a valuable resource. Write blog posts that are open for discussion, and consider including a question at the end to help spur conversation.

• Make social sharing easy. Every blog post you make should include buttons for sharing your content on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and any other social services you might use. This is an extremely cheap and easy way to increase your exposure.

Always Strive For Improvements

The great thing about marketing online is that you can always tweak, refine, and improve your strategies. Every blog can do better, and with good blog optimization, you can make it happen.

What changes have you made to your blog that made it a more effective marketing tool? 

 

 

"Extra! Extra! Read all about it!" This was a simple call-to-action that a newsboy would use to draw in customers and sell papers. He knew that just standing on a street corner wouldn't get the job done. He had to go the extra step.

People often talk about “growing” their online business, as though it were a plant. If that's the case, than I suppose one could say that seeing results is like rain to the plant.  If you get results, you will continue the growing.  If you don't then the no rain and that plant dies on the vine.

A smart content creation company knows that, fundamentally, the main way to grow your online business is to have a steady stream of new online visitors learning about your products. Some of these leads won't ever convert, but with sufficient nurturing, a number of them will blossom into sales and therefore growth for your company.

The trick, however, is increasing that flow of traffic in the first place, which is the main problem faced by any marketing agency.   So, to put our already-tortured metaphor aside for the moment, here are a few ways you can help direct more useful traffic to your site.

Pick quality keywords. Since the road to your virtual doorstep often begins at search engines, it's vitally important to pick keywords that will attract the sort of visitors you want and you feel are most likely to convert. It's about the little details. The right keywords, mixed in with quality content writing, can make rankings have a steady rise. If you're focused on providing a high-grade product rather than cut-rate prices, you'd want to sneak words like “quality” or “superior” into your keywords. If you're aiming for the cheap seats, you'd want your keywords to include “inexpensive” or “value.”

Have a lot of internal links. This is called the “silo” technique. If you've gotten a potential customer to your site because one article interested him, you want him to stick around. Putting internal links to more articles on your site on related subjects helps establish you as an authority and encourages the lead to explore your ideas further. It also helps boost your search result rankings as well.

Make social sharing easy. Make sure you've got embedded links on all your content pages that make it simple to share the post on Facebook, Tweet it on Twitter, submit it to Reddit, and soforth. It's bad form – and frankly looks a bit desperate – to ask people to share your material, but you want to make it as simple for them as possible. Social media optimization is great for creating organic traffic flows, since people trust their friends' recommendations.

Plus, of course, if you want even more help driving organic web traffic to your site, consider contacting this Atlanta Internet marketing agency for a free consultation. We're happy to help any size business, large or small.

Finally, have you got any particularly good tricks for driving traffic to your website? Let us know!   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It gets old receiving emails from entities who want to put them on top of Google, Yahoo and Bing. Then when you actually get down to checking these companies most ask for a hefty startup amount or just sell you some software that may not even work for you. It is funny to believe that at this stage of “pull marketing,” a lot of the companies are still using “push marketing” methods. These days, hardly anyone wants to receive any emails pushing them to buy anything. No one even looks into their junk mail folder anymore. Now people have comfortably settled into their social media lifestyles, where they can find all they are looking for. So, do away with the old school types and look up Atlanta internet marketing that is actually working for others.

Did you know search engines like optimized sites with fresh content, proper keyword density, appropriately done meta tags and most of all good traffic?  If you do not get good traffic other websites will beat you in rankings. Google in a way counts outbound links as votes from others, and the more visits you get the more it ups your keyword rankings. It is viable to place yourself at social media sites where people can find you easily and if they like what you have on offer they will visit you. This is also called inbound marketing and it allows people to compare offers from a variety of vendors and decide in their own time. Social media networks are jamming these days and their large user base makes marketing easy. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Foursquare are popular must-do destinations for the modern internet marketer. Companies that wish to expand their marketing footprint will find great results with an Atlanta internet marketing company that specializes in inbound marketing.

Things are moving really fast in the social media jungle. Companies are opting for communities based marketing to save on cost.  Facebook PPC is cheaper as compared to Google PPC and also brings in good results. Companies that are experienced with the social networks know the traffic sources for a business and are able to channel these to their client website easily. So don’t take a shot in the dark, first look for a reliable Atlanta internet marketing company that has at least 10 years of experience and has a proven track record of getting good results for clients.  Experts create and manage your online marketing campaign to drive more traffic to your site. When your online business is nearly dying out due to low traffic, contact the Internet Marketing Specialist and they will put it in top gear so you can get busy with work again.