Inbound Marketing Primer part 1: Tips for Building Traffic

One of my clients is working with an Inbound Marketing company called HubSpot. Coincidentally, I participated in sections of their Inbound Marketing University program a couple of weeks ago. While this hardly makes me a social media ‘expert’, I have already discovered some useful things that you might want to know about for your website.

As I offer these tips I must acknowledge that I haven’t implemented all of them myself. Building a website is like building a company; it’s a process. But these should help to get you started on the right path.

Tips for building traffic:

1. Content is king; you might be able to find short-term followers by pulling the right levers and pushing the right buttons, but will they stay engaged? In most cases it is better to focus your time developing highly relevant and useful content for your audience.

2. Blog. If you don’t, the voices of other people blogging about your company will become more visible than your own. You want to shape the conversation.

3. Update regularly, at least once per week. Search engines are based on complex algorithms that include inbound links, relevancy, frequency and a whole lot more. If you don’t stay current, your site rankings will fade.

4. Write about things that matter to your readers. I know this sounds obvious, but many companies approach their blogs as an extension of their marketing platform. That’s somewhat misguided. Instead, think of your outreach as an opportunity to engage visitors in areas that you might not typically reach. For example, a carpet company could blog about interior decorating instead of limiting their scope to flooring. See what I mean?

5. Allow comments. Many companies fear negative responses. While that’s a valid concern, it’s also an opportunity for transparency. More often than not you can use your platform to identify and resolve customer service issues, thereby presenting your company in a better light.

6. Build a community. By allowing comments you are also opening the door to a two-way relationship with your customers and prospects. That’s an important first step, since they are often the experts you should be listening to anyway. This leads into crowdsourcing, which I’ll save for another discussion.

Coming up next: Tools You Can Use…