If you are into online marketing field, inbound marketing should not be an unknown term for you. Read on my blog post on ultimate cheat sheet on inbound marketing.

Honestly I am doing inbound marketing for my own websites, my client’s websites and for many other websites of my friends and followers as well, since around 2004 only; but I was not at all aware about the terms inbound marketing. Recently one of the gentlemen asked me about it, and I felt humiliated that I am not aware about it.

This is the reason why I came up with this post on inbound marketing, so that my followers and friends should also know about it.

Inbound Marketing

In simple language inbound marketing is a concept in which we try to do the marketing of any website, without investing direct money for it. It is like investing whatever efforts you can do is on the website of the company or business itself so that it should attract visitors. You can say that SEO is also a part of inbound marketing, but inbound marketing is far more than doing Search Engine Optimization of your website.

To be very honest it is nothing new, only the terminology being new. Inbound marketing is a thing through which we attract the visitors to our website and earns the attention of our customers. After all marketing is all about selling yourself and your services to your customers. We discussed about the Zero Moment of Truth in our last blog, and similarly inbound marketing is also increasing your presence among your potential customers.

What is Inbound Marketing?

It is a normal concept in online marketing that you should go out to market your product or services so that your potential customers should reach to you. You can invest your marketing budget on banners, PPC ads, links, paid reviews, articles, etc. to increase your presence in your potential market. On the other hand with inbound marketing you try developing your own website in a way that potential customers should reach to your website.

How to do Inbound Marketing?

The million dollar question is that how can we do it? What are the ways to do inbound marketing?

Let me tell you a few ways to do so:

Content Creation

The best way to do inbound marketing is to develop content in a way that it should market your services and products to its potential customers and prospects. Try to resolve the issues faced by your potential customers and see how you can be popular among your prospects.

Let me give you an example. I am a blogger who blogs on blogging tips, WordPress related queries, etc. My target audiences are those bloggers who are facing issues with their blogging journey, so I try to prepare blogs which can help them to do some tasks. This targeted content which actually helps my prospects gives me customers and this process is inbound marketing.

Content Distribution

Creating useful content is not the only thing which can gives you potential customers. You must need to know how to distribute it so that it can spread far and wide. You can also read my blog on how to distribute your blog content; I guess it should give you a fare idea about content distribution.

Remember that if you failed to distribute your content to your potential customers you are actually losing a huge margin of your business.

Relationship Building

With direct online marketing when you advertise on banners, and links, you are actually directly targeting your customers, but with inbound marketing you are actually targeting the potential customer though at first they don’t even know that they are your customers. So relationship building plays a crucial role into the success of inbound marketing. You must need to interact with your potential customers so that you can convert them from visitors to customers.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO or search engine optimization plays a crucial role in inbound marketing. Do you remember that with ZMOT, I mentioned that PPC ads or advertisements can be used to reach potential customers when they research about it, while with inbound marketing the only difference is not using the direct advertisements.

So the first time a person want to purchase something (product or services) they start researching about it online, and this is the Zero Moment of Truth, and at this moment your presence is very much required. SEO plays a great role in achieving the same.

This is the reason why you need to pick up the keywords analytically, place them beautifully on your website, optimize different pages of your site, and earn links for your website (as I already told you to avoid link building, you can check my blog on why to avoid link building) so that you can feature on those keywords in search engines where your potential customers are searching for.

Blogging

Blogging and blog plays one of the most important roles in inbound marketing. It is one of the finest tools to attract new visitors to your blog, and if written in a proper way, it is the finest way to convert them into customers as well.

When it comes about any business and the business is not looking for spending money on advertisements, then blogging becomes the most necessary part of their marketing campaign.

Social Media

As I already discussed about content distribution, social media becomes a very important tools for us to achieve the same. The focus of inbound marketing is to spread your content on social media as much as possible.

If you never heard of the term inbound marketing, reading this blog might have given you the feeling that oh I was already aware about these things, but I was not aware about the term. And it is true to so many people, they all know about all these things, but they were not aware about what are they actually called as.

I am sure after reading two of my blogs on ZMOT and inbound marketing, your concept about online marketing must have changed. Please do share your opinion and thoughts about these blog posts of mine. I am sure you must have enjoyed reading them, but I wanted to hear your feedback on the same too.