As a Denver online marketing company, one of our focuses is inbound marketing.  What is inbound marketing though? Inbound Marketing is focused towards putting companies in a place to be found.  There are several facets of Inbound Marketing and over the next few weeks we will look in depth into each subject and how they fit into the inbound marketing umbrella.

There are four main areas of Inbound Marketing: Content, Opt-in Communications, Landing pages & Conversion Optimization, and SEO.  However as you can tell each of these four areas reach deeper into the web.

With Content you have Blogs, E-Books, and Videos.  Then in Opt-in Communications you have things like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Location based services, email marketing and Blogs. With Landing pages & Conversion Optimization comes the opportunity to convert site viewers into leads for potential business.  Finally in SEO there is keyword traffic and competition analysis, on-page content optimization, and off-page factors such as link building.  Each of these four sections, with their multiple modes behind them, overlap.

The point where all these areas overlap is where Inbound Marketing begins to take its grasp. Inbound Marketing for companies can’t be effective with just one of these areas — all four must be in action to some capacity (whether it’s realized or not) before it can work for a company.  However Inbound Marketing last longer and appeals to more people than Outbound Marketing.  The unique thing about Inbound Marketing is that it meets the consumer where they are.  Inbound Marketing allows for people to search for a company and then find them in several different capacities.  Whether that’s via their links in a search engine, their social media sites, or their blog content.  Then when a potential client reaches a company site, they can hit a landing page, which will encourage them to submit their contact information to gain an eBook, more information, or whatever it is for which they are searching.  Each area of inbound marketing can reach a different audience segment, all looking to see your company’s services or products.  It’s the combination of these three areas working together that makes for a successful Inbound Marketing campaign.

The unique thing about Inbound Marketing is that the main cost is labor, as most of the tools are very low-cost.  The most frequented blog and social media sites are free.  The amount of labor however pays off in long term benefits, placing a company where they can be found for years to come.  So not only does Inbound Marketing meet consumers on their terms, with no flashy items, it is also done in a manner that stands the test of time, which helps increase the amount of revenue and traffic that it should bring to a company.

These next few posts we will dive deeper into each area, looking to see what each part, what each section of Inbound Marketing can offer a company.

Free e-Book: Inbound Marketing Success Stories

Not 100% convinced? We have compiled success stories from customers who have used our Inbound Marketing services. Read it today to find out how successful your business could be!

Download Now

To the left you’ll see we have inserted an image of a map.  When you think of a map itself, something like this probably comes into your mind.  However, when you really think about it, you probably don’t use a whole lot of paper-crafted, hand-held maps anymore.  Sure, maybe if you’re in for a long car ride across a couple of state borders, you’ll grab a road map; but really, these days we are all turning to tools like Google Maps and MapQuest to lead us forward to new places.  And, hey, it’s easy to use — a “to” location and a “from” location can pull up a number of routes on a frequently updated road map.  You can now even do this on your smartphone, so it’s easy to pull up a map wherever you are!  Being a an online marketing company, we can sure relate to the convenience factor.

Now on the subject of maps, there’s a particular topic we’re going to give a little insight into today: Google Map APIs.  API stands for application programming interface.  APIs are used as tools for interactions between two different kinds of software.  So, the Google Map API family tools are a set of ways to embed various user-generated maps with Javascript, Flash, or other programs.  Each tool in the Google Map API family comes with a “developer’s guide” and “tutorial” on the Google Map API website.  It certainly takes some trial and error when you are working with these tools, but all the same, they are free for non-commercial use and certainly have a wide range of possible uses.

Let’s talk a little bit about what you can do with Google Map APIs.

With the Google Maps Javascript API, you can create map overlays of everything from shapes to icons to animations.  You can see how this would obviously be helpful if you’re working in the realms of internet marketing.  Maybe you could demonstrate some sort of strategy plan for your target market location with corresponding animations and icons.  Google Maps API also has a tutorial for setting up the API in Flash with action script.  Google Maps APIs in Flash can be used to create 3D maps and do overlays as well.

Anyway, now that you’ve got the basic idea down, we will give you a week to brew some ideas, then we will discuss specifics of one of the Google Map APIs: the Google Earth API.  Because, seriously, Google Earth is really cool, and there’s no reason why you wouldn’t want your own Google Earth API on your website!

Free e-Book: Website Fundamentals

Download our free e-book to learn what you need to know about building effective websites.

Download Now

Image courtesy of foto.bulle, under a CC by 2.0 license

As a Denver internet marketing company, we are constantly looking for the most effective way to spread the message about ourselves and our clients.  This is the main reason why we post questions every week day to our Facebook and Twitter accounts.  However, we also do testing behind the scenes as well.  This month we ran a test to see which email newsletter title was the most effective.  Here are some things we learned from it:

For version A, we sent our email newsletter out with the traditional title style, which states the Month and then the newsletter. As seen below:

• A: May Newsletter: Modern Lessons from Ancient History, Facebook Events Upgrade, and More

Then for version B, we removed the date and “newsletter” and just went with the main subjects covered in the newsletter.

• B: Modern Lessons from Ancient History, Facebook Events Upgrade, and More

This is traditionally referred to as A/B testing.  When running an A/B test the “control” or usual specimen is offered and then a new specimen is offered and then the results are tracked.  We learned from this A/B test that removing the “(Date) Newsletter” language is extremely instrumental in the amount of click-thru’s that are seen.  The unique thing about this graph is it only runs just past mid-day.  To see the spread over the span of time, we would see a gap widen between the two.

This not only shocked us, but also gave us a stark reminder that we should be taking the time to test how we market ourselves in order to reach the greatest number of our followers.  This is something that we believe every company should do, in order to assure that they are maximizing the potential of their marketing campaigns.

We also do this with our social media posts as well.  On a bi-monthly basis we assess our post response and determine if we should continue to post at the same time or see if there is potentially a better time to post our daily questions.

As a continued reminder we use answers to those questions to help shape what we do, so if you have an opinion feel free to enter the conversation.  This week we learned from one Facebook fan that he is subscribed to six email newsletters and at least skims through each of them. We learned from a few other Facebook fans that the only reason why they sign up for newsletters is because of free gifts promised with the sign-ups.

So please enter the conversation on our Facebook or Twitter pages.  We’d love to hear your opinion! It helps us better ourselves, so that we can better serve our clients.

Free e-Book: Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals

You have a website, but is it getting found? Find out what you need to know about search engine optimization in our free e-book.

Download Now

Lab beaker image courtesy of Svengraph, released under a CC By 3.0 license.

Online marketing and RSS feeds, online marketing and social media… they’re all just a few peas in a pod!  Since we are an internet marketing company, we are going to share a little secret with you…shh…RSS feeds are a perfect tool for any online marketing organization!  Sure, you’re on Facebook, Twitter, and every other social media site that’s popping up around the world wide web, but are you utilizing RSS feeds?  If the answer is no, then hop on the RSS bandwagon — it’s efficient, easy, and all around excellent.  Let’s go into a little more detail…

Why so efficient?

When someone subscribes to your company’s RSS feed, your feed url will be added to the subscriber’s feed reader program (for example, Google Reader).  Each time an article, piece of news, etc. is posted to your site, the new content will magically (okay, not magically, but you get the drift) appear on the subscriber’s feed reader.  Not sure about you, but if you ask us, that’s a whole lot simpler than having to email your subscribers with titles, pictures, the article itself, and anything else that might go along with your new content!

Wait…is it really that easy?

Well, yes.  It is that easy.  Either you create an RSS feed designed for your content and your content alone, or you add your content to an RSS Feed that also pulls articles from other sources.  A lot of RSS feeds are all about content related through keywords, tags, etc. so your articles might be pulled into a feed that is being updated with articles of similar subject matter.  So really, when you’re creating your RSS feed and managing the content that goes into it, you’ve only got a few things to think about:

• a title or headline (presumably whatever your article or entry title is)
• keywords!  (or tags, we talked about this a little while ago)
• the actual content (well, obviously…plus, you get to decide how much of your published content is published to the RSS feed as well — you may want the content on the feed to just be a “teaser,” convincing readers to click and go straight to your url to read the full version)

Yes, yes, we told you it was easy!

And we told you it was excellent…

Since we do often delve into the realm of search engine optimization, let’s discuss one more perk of RSS feed use.  What we’re talking about is search engine presence and visibility.  When you update your content regularly and have it published to an RSS feed (or multiple feeds), you’re much more likely to get your site picked up by Google Crawlers and similar tools around the internet.  So, basically:

regular content + RSS feed + search engine crawlers = web prevalence

That equation is easy enough to work out.  Start using those RSS feeds, folks.

Free e-Book: Search Engine Optimization Fundamentals

You have a website, but is it getting found? Find out what you need to know about search engine optimization in our free e-book.

Download Now

Icon courtesy of Aha-Soft, released under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.