The Inbound Marketing Bounce Pass: Ideas to Put in Play
The first time I heard the term Inbound Marketing, my mind’s eye envisioned a scrappy NCAA point guard taking out the ball, then inbounding it to his teammate with a sneaky underhanded bounce pass. Now that I’m a student and practitioner of inbound marketing, I realize that my first impression was not too far off – figuratively, anyway.
The goal of inbound marketing is to position your website as your marketing hub, so that your prospects and customers find and connect with you through the many remarkable content options you’ve syndicated across the web. They “bounce” onto your website after seeing “open” links placed in a tweet by someone they follow, a LinkedIn group discussion, or the comment section of a trusted blogger.
With inbound marketing, instead of having a single player toss in the ball, it’s like the whole arena is making inbound passes. You’ve drawn the whole crowd into your game. OK, I admit that would be one crazy basketball game, but with your website, it’s one score after another; visits become leads, and leads become sales. By maintaining content that is remarkable, relevant and consistently updated, you can increase your site’s inbound links, and everyone wins!
If you want to get in the game, I recommend making Inbound Marketing, your definitive playbook. For warm-ups, here’s some tips from the book:
Add something collaborative to your site like a blog
Create compelling content your audience wants to consume, like white papers, case studies or webinars.
Track your traffic-producing keywords with Google Analytics
Converse with your audience on social media, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook
Contribute to social media and industry blogs with comments
Pay attention to your site’s inbound links
Monitor and track your progress
Be patient
