1. Getting Found: Increasing visitors
Create Remarkable Content:This is the first and most important part of Getting Found by your prospects. This includes; blog articles, web pages, videos, photos, webinars, whitepapers, presentations, press releases, ebooks, samples and tools that are useful, interesting, thought-provoking, controversial, and entertaining. This is no small feat, and it's the most critical step if you're serious about generating more traffic and leads. You need to determine your content creation strategy and schedule, and then stick to it.
Optimize: As you create remarkable content (which you'll continue to do for your entire inbound marketing career), you will want to optimize that content for search engines (SEO) as well as for other channels, like YouTube & Twitter. The foundation of your inbound marketing program is compelling content creation. Optimizing that content is a key step to ensure you give your valuable content the best chance possible of drawing traffic from the web.
On-Page SEO is the process of placing your selected keywords in the right places on your web pages so that Google and other search engines know what each page of your website is about, and what keywords to rank you for. On-Page SEO makes up about 25% of how you rank in search engines.
Off-Page SEO is the process of building links and getting other sites on the Internet to link to you. The more links you have from other popular sites, the more important your site appears to be to Google and other search engines. Links are your online reputation to the search engine. Off-page SEO makes up about 75% of how you rank in search engines.
Think of it this way: Without off-page SEO, you could have the best-optimized site in the world, but nobody would know about it. Without on-page SEO, you'd be missing out on great opportunities to tell Google and other engines what your site is about.
Promote: Social Media Marketing
Social media sites are a great tool for promoting your online content, specials, new products, etc. You can use social media sites to drive traffic, leads, and links, and to connect with your market and establish credibility and thought leadership for yourself and your brand. Social media marketing is not something you do once and then forget about. To be done right, social mediasphere engagement needs to be part of the regular routine of you and everyone on your team.
2. Convert: to leads and customers
Once you have visitors to your site you want to convert these visitors to leads. A lead is different for each business, for one business it might be an enquiry email, another could be a free download or consultation. In order to be successful at converting your visitors to leads you need to;
- Provide the information they're looking for
- Have a clear and compelling call to action
- Provide a quick and easy process
3. Test and Measure
One of the most important parts of any successful inbound marketing strategy is continually measuring the progress of your efforts and optimizing accordingly.