Increase Your Sales with Intelligent Inbound Marketing

Business is tough right now, particularly for small organisation. Increased sales is vital for businesses but a constant flow of opportunities is even more vital to a modern business. You need to create a mechanism that keeps your business moving forward. This is why you need to learn and utilise the power of inbound marketing

The traditional way to increase sales was through advertising, in all of its many forms.  This means pushing your message outwards to as many people as possible, since the law of averages dictates that at least some of them will buy.  Although this undoubtedly works, it can be very haphazard.  Consumers have become increasingly sophisticated at recognising and blocking out unwanted advertising - and make no mistake, most advertising is unwanted.  It's often said that only 20% of advertising works, but nobody knows which 20%!

Inbound marketing is a more refined way to promote your business, since it more accurately reflects the way that modern consumers look for goods and services.  As the name suggests, it's designed to bring customers to you, rather than you going out to find them.  The basic principle is that potential customers are already looking for what you have to offer, you just have to help them find you.  This is done by providing targeted, useful information that will show up in the search engine rankings.  Inbound marketing tactics include social media, blogging and search engine optimisation and marketing.

The emphasis is usually upon providing information and value, rather than direct sales messages.  However, it would be a mistake to believe that inbound marketing has nothing to do with sales - it does.  It's just more subtle about it!

So how can these techniques help you to increase sales?  In the first place, they act to qualify your leads.  Somebody who wants to buy a widget is highly likely to go online to do some research first. They find your blog, which you've optimised for the search terms that your potential customers are likely to use.  Here they read your useful article on "10 Tips To Get The Most Out Of Your Widget" from your web site.  This immediately demonstrates that you know what you're talking about, so they click the relevant links to land on your main site.  This will also be optimised for the relevant search terms and contain valuable information that demonstrates your expertise, reliability and trustworthiness.

At this point, it's highly likely that your visitor will buy there and then, since they're already in the mindset to do so.  Even if they don't choose to buy at that point, you have a chance to develop an ongoing relationship with them.  Perhaps they subscribe to your regular "Widget News" newsletter, or your Twitter feed, where you share further interesting articles, tips and resources.  This keeps you in the customer's mind, until the point where they are ready to make a purchase. 

In this way, inbound marketing techniques will help you to increase sales.  At no point have you demanded "buy from me" in direct, advertising style.  Nevertheless, everything is geared towards turning an interested visitor into a satisfied paying customer. Igneous Marketing can help your business develop an inbound marketing strategy, visit our site today.

Generating Inbound Links

So we all know that Google loves inbound links and if you want your website to succeed you need to build these...and lots of them! So many small businesses see this as a one of task usually undertaken when the site is launched. Wrong!

I would say that the majority of small businesses are not implementing a cohesive inbound link strategy on a daily basis. The good news is that about 80% understand the importance of inbound links and about 30% actually have plans for generating them, but a mere 10% are actually doing something about it.

Why Inbound Links Are Important
If you want to reach the top of major search engines, then you're going to have to tell the search engines why they should rank you. Do you have unique content? Are you a credible website? Can you provide a good user experience? These are all important questions you should be asking yourself as you consider developing an inbound linking strategy.

So here are a few top tips on how to build a profitable link strategy:

1: Right Here, Right Now.
Start with an idea of where you are. Regardless of what type of tool you use (free or paid) to evaluate your current SEO status: rankings, keywords, sites linking in, etc., make sure you have a good idea of where you're starting from - and ultimately where you want to get to. Additionally, plan to check your progress at least once a week. You want to see if your inbound links are helping you success on search.

2: Begin With Your Competitors
One of the best link building strategies is to start with your competitors. Who's linking to them? Are the links from high Google PR sites? What else can you learn about your competitors linking strategies? Start with your competitors or who is already ranked in the number one position for the keyword term or phrase you're optimizing for.

3: Focus on Anchor Text
Another great SEO tip for inbound linking is to evaluate all of the existing inbound links to your website. Whether you use the simple "link:" code via the Google search box, Alexa, or some other tool, create a list of sites linking in and work with them to apply the proper anchor text to the link associated with your keyword.

4: Quality Content and Social Media.
If you provide quality content on your site or simply cover something that would be of interest to your target market, allow others to comment, bookmark and share. Quality content is what search engines like and so will your readers. Develop quality content and encourage others to share it. This creates quality back links to your website.

5: Three Way Linking
Okay, "reciprocal linking is dead". Yeah, I get it.. don't necessarily agree but we won’t debate that here. The good news is that we don't have to talk about it since the best linking option is one-way linking. This can be achieved through a 3 way link. Trying to make a difficult to explain concept relatively simple, exchange links with another website but do it using a 3rd site, not your own. This allows one-way links in either direction.

These tips cover a great deal and have worked for me when it comes to helping my websites and blogs, as well as others, build a significant number of inbound links to their website steadily over time.
WARNING: You may be the anxious type, looking to build hundreds or even thousands of inbound links to your website(s) in the next 48 hours - DON'T DO IT! Although I successfully did this in the past, Google is penalizing sites who are too fast out of the gate when it comes to link building. You should look to ad 3 - 5 quality links to your site on a weekly basis. Slow and steady wins the race.