Effective Inbound Marketing Tips

It's good to step back and review the basics every now and then. We've been writing about inbound marketing for quite awhile now, and it's easy to forget that everyone still has to start somewhere. So, rather than discuss more high-level SEO strategies, let's sit back and talk in general about how small business blog marketing works and why you should get into it.

Obviously, if you're an experienced SEO pro, you may not see anything new here, but we'd still love to see you pitch in your own ideas in our message forum!

How Small Business Blog Marketing Works

If you were on the Internet ten years ago, you probably remember how lousy the marketing was - nothing but annoying pop-up advertisements and distracting banner ads that, half the time, tried to put malware on your computer to boot. (And let's not even talk about email spam.)

It didn't work, and the Internet at large responded by coming up with a variety of tricks to block these advertisements from appearing.

What marketeers figured out is that people on the Internet wanted marketing that was relevant to them. People don't mind advertisements so much when they involve products they're interested in. So, inbound marketing was born.

Inbound Marketing Basics

Even today, the majority of web searches are for information. So, the theory went, if you put information that people want on your website, they'll be grateful to you and stick around to see what your sales pitch is. This is where small business blog marketing comes in.

By maintaining a blog on your website that addresses issues that are relevant to your customers, you're putting information out there that people want to see. It's a little like giving away toasters to new customers at a bank, except you're giving away content rather than gizmos.

That's the basic theory, but it still leaves a challenge to be resolved: how to bring people to your website in the first place. That's where SEO comes in.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Because of the nature of the Internet, the search engines - especially Google - are effectively the gatekeepers to the Internet. Since less than 2% of visitors actually click past the first page of search results, you have to make your site rank highly in searches to put it in front of potential customers.

Strategies aimed at boosting your results on search engines are called, appropriately enough, Search Engine Optimization.

Most of SEO revolves around the use of keywords. These are words and phrases that relate directly to your business, which people use to search for information relevant to you. If you ran a pet food company, terms like "dog food" and "healthy coat for cats" might be among the keywords you'd want to target, for example.

So, having found some keywords, you just have to sprinkle them around your blogs where relevant. Generally, this should only be around 1%-2% of your total word count. You should also look at including variations on your keywords as well, like using "food for dogs" and "dog kibble" alongside "dog food."

Lastly, you want people sharing your content and linking to it. Shares and links boost your website's rankings further, so you want to make sure it's easy to share.

Bringing It All Together

So, this is what a basic small business blog marketing plan looks like:

• Research your market and discover their interests.

• Pick keywords relevant to your business that your market will search for.

• Write blogs with good, informative content that includes these keywords.

• As you attract people who visit, enjoy your content, and share it, you'll see better search rankings and attract more people.

• The more people who visit, the more become leads or sales.

Blogging for business is easy, inexpensive, and it brings in leads. If you're unsure of how you want to market yourself on the Internet, it's the best place to start.  

Small business blog marketing isn't easy, but it's one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways of growing your online business. It requires persistence and hard work, but fundamentally, anyone can do it if they put their mind to it.

Here are three strategies we constantly see utilized for great effect. These are the things that successful blogs do, and you should too!

1 - Blog Consistently!

If there is any reasonable way of defining small business blog marketing strategies that work, it has to be based around customer acquisition. Fundamentally, you only get a return on your investment if someone buys something.

On the matter of converting visitors into viable customers, Blogspot's 2012 "State of Inbound Marketing" report makes one key element quite clear: The more you blog, the more likely you are to gain customers.

Among companies with blogs, only 43% those who posted less than monthly reported gaining a customer through their blog. Among those who post multiple times a day, that number rises to 92%. And it's a pretty smooth progression the whole way. The more often and consistently you blog, the more likely your blog is to attract actual paying customers.

Maintaining this level of output can be tricky, especially for small operations. That's one of the biggest reasons we recommend those who are serious about content marketing investigate article writing services as a way to obtain quality content in the quantities needed to make your small business blog marketing strategies pay off.

2 - Pursue Social Media

As we've mentioned before, we strongly feel that your online marketing strategies are best served by pairing blogging and social media strategies, using one to reinforce the other. There's no reason for it to be an either-or game when they both have so much to offer.

You should ensure that you have social media sharing buttons available for every blog you post, to encourage people to share them. A popular link shared on Facebook, Twitter, or Linked-In can result in a huge influx of hits. Likewise, while you probably should not use your social media accounts to announce every single blog you post, use it to promote major articles that you think have the potential to "go viral" or might genuinely provoke debate.

Social media can also be used indirectly to aid your small business blog marketing. The wealth of user information they have is generally put directly into your hands, and you can use it to leverage your market research. Check out Facebook Insights, PeopleBrowser for Twitter as well as their new targeted advertisements, along with other social-tracking systems like Klout to learn as much as you can about your audience.

3 - Become an Authority

Easier said than done, right? Well, while truly becoming a respected expert authority is quite hard, it's still quite possible to create the appearance that you are one, and that's one of the main ways to go about actually becoming one.

The key is to structure your blog and website to encourage people to continue reading your content once you're there. The more you can create an air of authority, the better that will go, and the more likely they are to either share your content, decide to make a purchase, or (hopefully) both!

Here are a few general tips:

• Blog on a wide variety of topics relating to your own industry. The more ground you can cover with good articles, the better it looks.

• Use plenty of internal links. When you mention a topic you've talked about previously, link back to the past article.

• Utilize intelligent tags with a sidebar map allowing users to easy access information on specific topics.

• When adding external links, link to the highest-quality sites you can find.

• This last one's a toughie: be willing to admit when you're wrong and post updated blogs when needed.

What other effective small business blog marketing strategies have you discovered?