Social Media Forum Review

Rick Burnes of HubSpot on Inbound Marketing using Social Media

A forum hosted by BTV Social Media Breakfast Club

Twitter account: @rickburnes

Here are my notes (and some elaboration, corrections, and expansions on my part; very little editing or checking was done)

1. Interruption marketing is the old media model
2. Inbound marketing takes time but eventually saves money for a business (Inbound marketing being defined as providing great content, surrounding the content with on and off page search engine optimization, and letting your customers and prospects find you)
   Invite people into your website instead of “interrupting their lives”
3. Rick made a big mistake by declaring unabashedly that ALL traditional media is dead. He got hammered b/c he suggested that all traditional marketing is bad and online is the only way to go
4. Including direct mail and Pay Per click that don't work effectively
5. While I think Rick goes too far to suggest that internet marketing is the only way to go, I wish all my clients had been there to hear how effective and inevitable a content rich web presence is for all businesses if they want to compete in the long term.
6. I suggested to Rick and in my opinion it is more accurate to suggest that it is the effectiveness and ultimately the return on investment of traditional marketing that is diminishing. That on the rise is online marketing which includes providing lots of free content about your industry and business and your specific business approach.
7. I went on to tell him not to trash traditional marketing but talk about the trends in marketing. Traditional marketing still works but the trends all point to a diminishing return on investment. Starting now with online marketing means you'll be a player down the road when the trend lines get more severe.
8. There was a lot of conern in the audience about the quality of writing (the “I can’t write” problem) Writing content for the web does not have to be elegant. Just use the same language you use to sell your services, promote your products, and talk to your customers. Start a conversation about what you know. It does not have to be complicated.
9. As you live your life and business, put yourself into the content mindset.
10. Repurpose every interaction in your business into a content opportunity.
11. Probably the strongest analogy that Rick made was the Lottery Ticket. It's all about content. Each page or article of content from your website that appears in the search engines is a lottery ticket. Would you rather have the same 8 static pages as lottery tickets or a 100 new lottery tickets per year as you write 2 blog posts per week about your business?
12. Every business is different in terms of measuring success of your online presence. What are the metrics for your business? Customers? Subscribers? Diners? Do you make large one time sales? Do you have recurring revenue clients? Set your metrics and then measure them (and he wants you to use HubSpot).
13. Rick finished by giving a relatively subdued pitch for the $250 per month HubSpot online marketing software. $3000 per year might seem steep but if you were able to prove positive ROI (return on investment) on the $3000, it would be worth it.
    
    Questions from the audience:

Question: I use direct mail. It works. Why should I stop?

Rick: Online is better. Which was not a great answer. What he should have said…keep doing direct mail. But put effort into online marketing and continue to measure the return on investment for both channels. Over time, you will probably learn that the online marketing approach will provide much higher rates of return.

And in fact, use direct mail to build your list of email addresses so that you can continue to follow up with your direct mail prospects for almost nothing with email marketing.

Question: Must a business have your own blog on your own domain?

Yes. And I agree with Rick. Absolutely. That doesn’t mean that you might not put the same blog entries (or a shortend version pointing back to your main website) on a blog hosted at blogspot or wordpress. But you want all that wonderful blog content to be credited to your main Domain (aka, website address or URL or URI).

Question: Do I need a website and a blog?

Rick didn't answer this as we ran out of time. However, a blog can in fact act as a website. They can be one and the same. However, the blog format does not always lend itself to providing some of the basic information about your business nor advanced functionality that a full website can offer. Having just a blog is always better than nothing and some blogs are hard to differentiate from full websites! And a blog is always better to have than to have a web site that never gets new content or updates.

That’s all for now. I will surely touch on these topics more in the future. Content is king!

Please contact me if you have any specific questions about these issues.

Google to change inbound link policy

Links on websites that point back to your website are one of tools that Google uses to find new websites and rank the importance of web pages. Google also uses the "anchor text" that is placed in the link to tell Google the topic of a particular web page.

For example, TerrysTips.com. When someone wants to place a link on their website or blog or forum to Terry's Tips, Google will look at that link and attribute credit to Terry's Tips for the link. How much value is much debated. http://www.terrystips.com/ is one way to link. A better way for Terry's Tips is to link stock options trading strategies at Terry's Tips. This way, Google knows that the owner of the website believes that the Terry's Tips home page is about "stock options trading strategies".

However, there has been much abuse of this kind of linking. Link pages that just have a series of links are common these days and have been a bit effective with getting good rankings. And pages that have hundreds or thousands of links (called "link farms") have spread around the web and have been ignored out of hand by Google for years.

Google has recently hinted that they are adjusting the way they follow and give credit for inbound links. No longer will a list of links on a page give much or any credit to a site. Google wants to see links within the body of a web page that gives the web visitor more information on a topic but will clearly be related to the page that the visitor is currently reading.

So "relevant" links are now even more important than ever. Google has stressed relevant since the beginning of time (OK, well not exactly...there was actually a time before Google). "Black hat" search engine optimization folks have been abusing inbound links for years and Google is finally putting their foot down.

Cheers.

What are Internal Links? - SEO Basics

Internal links are links primarily within the content area (body) of each page that link to other, oftentimes deeper, pages within the same site. Usually, Internal Links can weave into the web page copy in a logical manner that points the visitor to further or deeper information that would logically flow from the page they are already viewing.

Since most Search Engines including Google follow links to other pages, internal linking is a great way to provide users with logical next steps for accessing information from your site and to expose as many of your webpages to the search robots as possible.

Ok, so now you say "internal links provide good additional ways for users to access information they might like but...": Can you drive good web ranking or page rank from Internal Linking? What kind of juice is there with internal links?

By no means does Internal Linking ensure that your website will be well ranked. What internal linking can assist with is guiding the search robots once they have visited your site. Once landing upon an individual page, the search robots will follow other links in the content area. So if your more popular, or better positioned web pages had internal links to deeper pages within your site or pages that get less attention from visitors, you are providing opportunities for these pages through Internal Linking.

Ok, now for some examples of our bad, good, better, best ranking system.

Bad
Linking to dozens of other internal pages from each page on your site with little thought or logical flow to the other pages. You already have (hopefully) a well thought out navigation structure and a site map built into your site so we don't recommend taking Internal Linking to this extreme. For example, on a mortgage company site, having internal links to every loan program offered (there are dozens of combinations) on every page would probably not pass the smell test with the search robots and it will drive the user insane. Why would a website visitor think that there was any difference in a applying for a mortgage in South Burlington, VT versus Burlington, VT? Having 2 separate links to these pages is purely for search engine purposes and could "turn off" a website visitor.

Essentially, you can't stuff internal links just to try and get a boost from the search engines. It lowers your integrity with website visitors and with the search engines.

Good
Providing a link or two within the site content where appropriate. if you reference a program or a webpage that is on your site, go ahead and set up a link to that page.

Better
Not only would you provide the link when mention content or pages that might be of further use to the visitor, you optimize the "anchor text" within each internal link to provide keyword juice to those pages.

Instead of "In order to check out our section on jumbo mortgages, click here: http://www.mortgagecompany.com/loan-programs/jumbo-mortgages", you would write the internal links smoothly within the flow of the sentence: "And from our South Burlington, VT office, you can learn more about our jumbo mortgage programs." The optimized "anchor text" for this link scores points for the jumbo mortgage page and still provides a clear path of action for the website visitor.

Best
To get the most from Internal Linking, work with your website content to make sure that you are able to add at least 3 internal links on every page and use optimized "anchor text" to point the way! (of course, by using keywords from your master keyword list). One part strategy and one part execution will combine to give you, your website visitors, and the search robots an optimized internal linking strategy that works.