After reading ZMOT and Inbound Marketing: Perfect Together?, you should have no doubts about the criticality of getting found online.
[If you do, we need to talk!]
The next step, then, is focusing on how to get found online - also know as 'inbound marketing 101'.
The 3 principles of 'inbound marketing 101' for getting found online
If you're serious about figuring out how to get your business found online by potential customers, you'll want to focus on these three inbound marketing principles:
1. Create glorious, delicious, memorable and relevant content on your website and on your blog. This includes in-depth or advanced content [what Mike Stelzner refers to as 'rocket fuel' in his book Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition] as well as blog articles and website page content. Your content needs to be meaningful to potential customers.
2. Make your content easy to find online. In other words, optimize it for search engines by associating web pages with unique titles and descriptions that truly make sense based on what's on page; focus each page of your website on just a few related keywords; write your content so human beings can read it and appreciate that what you've published actually matches up with what they were searching for. Make your content so delicious that others will link to it from their websites. Be consistent in how you refer to your business and website in the profiles you create online on other platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or Google Places.
3. Promote your amazing content in your email communications, on your social platforms, in your email signature, on business cards that you hand out at trade shows, on newsletters and in offline and online advertisements.
Inbound Marketing 101 Resources
Here are several blog articles I've written about getting found online. They provide more perspective on the three principles of inbound marketing 101 mentioned above.
1. Create Content
- How Do I Create Content?
- Blogs Are Now Mainstream Media
- Digital Visibility: The Reason Behind Content Marketing
- How To Think Like a Content Marketer
2. Make Your Content Easy to Find Online
- SEO Primer: Nurturing Your Online Digital Visibility
- The Business of SEO: Get Found
- How Do I Avoid Bad SEO Techniques
3. Promote Your Amazing Content
- Improving Visibility Online: Advice For Businesses
- Facebook Marketing for Business Tips: MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2011
- Get Found Online Locally Using Google Places
Inbound Marketing 101 Big Picture
I've detailed three areas to focus on to get found online. Before you go and put Create Content, Optimize Content and Promote Content into practice, here are three last articles that offer a big picture perspective on why it's critical to get found online.
- John Battelle and the Conversation Economy
- 10 Tips For Being Found & Connecting With Customers
- How Are You Finding New Customers?
How are you getting found online? What have you found works best?
Thanks for reading!
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Photo Credit: A spider trapped in amber, this photo's taken looking through a magnifying glass about the size of a 10p coin on Flickr.