Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

This article originally appeared as a guest post on The Fundable Entrepreneur. Angel investor, entrepreneur and business mentor Ken Steinberg has created a site that is dedicated to providing early stage entrepreneurs with assistance because “You don’t know what you don’t know.”

Moustrap game photo courtesy of Glogger via Creative Commons

The best product or service doesn’t always win. Sorry, but the road to success it littered waist-high with better mousetraps that never sold and in the vast majority of those cases, they failed at marketing. A superior product with inferior marketing is a Betamax. An inferior product with superior marketing is a Shamwow. A superior product with superior marketing is an iPod.

If you want to be fundable, you need to be findable. This article will let you in on five tactics you can use in order to implement an inbound marketing strategy that will level the marketing playing field between you and your competitors, regardless of budget.

You Lucky Dog!

We live in the greatest times in the history of business startups. If you are in the early stages of getting a business off of the ground, you may not exactly feel like it right now but you are lucky to have access to a truly amazing array of resources and opportunities. But if you won’t take my word on that, maybe you’ll take Guy Kawasaki’s.

If you’re an entrepreneur and unfamiliar with Guy Kawasaki I strongly suggest you become familiar with him ASAP. Guy earned his wings as the original “Technology Evangelist” for Apple Computer in the early days of the Macintosh. His job was to convince software developers to write programs to run on Apple computers. His success at Apple allowed him go on to form a venture capital investment firm, Garage Capital, and to also found several successful startups himself. Guy wrote a blog article called, “How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09,” in which he described how quickly and cheaply he was able to launch one of his online ventures, Truemors. He concludes, “1) There’s really no such thing as bad PR. 2) $12,000 goes a very long way these days. 3) You can work with a team that is thousands of miles away. 4) Life is good for entrepreneurs these days.”

While there are countless examples of free and low cost web technologies that can help get your company off the ground, in my opinion the most important, least understood, and most poorly implemented is inbound marketing. If you learn what it is and how to do it properly, it can be your secret weapon to leapfrog competitors and put distance between yourself and them.

The Problem with Outbound

Before explaining inbound marketing, it’s useful to explain its polar opposite; outbound marketing. This is the “traditional” approach to marketing in which companies try interrupt people from doing what they wanted to do in order to watch, hear or read a message they wouldn’t otherwise care about. These interruptions include television and radio commercials, print advertisements, web banner ads and popups, cold calls, unsolicited emails’ etc…

While these techniques can certainly be effective they have three major flaws:

• First, people are getting much better at ignoring and/or blocking these interruptions. DVRs allow us to skip commercials, satellite radio does away with commercials, and spam filters help keep our inboxes clean.
• Second, traditional outbound marketing is linear: In order to reach more eyeballs, you have to pay more. A small advertisement in the local newspaper is affordable to most but a 30 second Superbowl commercial isn’t.
• Finally, it’s rude. As a new business trying to establish relationships with new customers wouldn’t you love to start by some means other than trying to shove an unsolicited message in their face?

Inbound to the Rescue

Implementing inbound marketing means pulling people into your site by creating remarkable content and then converting visitors to leads and leads to customers. This approach counteracts the three problems I just listed with outbound marketing. You’re not trying to interrupt people so you don’t need to worry about all of those roadblocks. Inbound marketing is nonlinear because it relies on people sharing your content with others; one person tells two friends, they tell two friends, and so on… Finally, it starts off your relationship with potential customers with an act of generosity, not interruption.

But wait, there’s more! In addition to having the positive attribute of not being outbound marketing, it has the added benefit of being much less expensive.

Do I have your attention yet?

Five for Finding

OK, hopefully you’ve bought into the idea that to be successful, you need to be findable and that the best strategy for getting there is inbound marketing. So let’s meet the rubber with the road and list those five tactics of inbound marketing:

1. Create Remarkable Content – The key word here is “remarkable,” which means something worth remarking about. While there are lots of tips, tricks, and techniques involved in creating remarkable content there is one golden rule that will help get you started. Make sure the content you create qualifies as being a “gift.” In other words, does your content provide something valuable to the reader? Does it improve her day? Give him something that makes his job easier? Provide advice for solving a problem or making more money? This should clue you into the fact that the most common form of content companies shower upon us – the press release – is not a gift. In fact, if you think of it in that light the whole concept of a press release starts to feel a little silly and a lot antiquated.
2. Optimize for Search – Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated process that is very poorly understood. But the reality is that about 85% of how well your site will rank for given keywords breaks down to just three factors; inbound links (65%), URL structure (10%), and page titles (10%). Obviously, the most important factor, by a long shot, is inbound links. This is why creating remarkable content is the cornerstone of an inbound marketing strategy. On the Internet, people remark about your content with links. If you create great content with keywords in the URL and page title, you’re 85% of the way there.
3. Promote Online – Once you’ve created your content and made it search engine friendly, you want to get out there and spread the word. This primarily means using social media to get people sharing and talking about your content.
4. Convert – This step could also be labeled “paydirt.” There is a reasonably famous clip of former New York Giants football coach Bill Parcels motivating his players on the sidelines during a Superbowl in which he yells, “This why you lift all them weights!” If you’re going to go to all the trouble of diving traffic to your website and not go to the effort of converting visitors to leads and leads to customers, then why bother in the first place? So how do you convert? With landing pages. A landing page is contains two key elements; a strong call to action and a low-friction conversion form.
5. Analyze. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Having a good analytics package installed on your website is a good first step, but it only provides metrics, not analytics. The difference is that metrics are relative indicators of behavior whereas analytics are absolute measurements of desired outcomes. For example, unique visitors and depth of visit are important and meaningful metrics, but they only indicate traffic volume and patterns which may or may not correlate to actually improving your business. However, conversion rates on landing pages, for example, give you a measurement of a very specific desired outcome; new leads.

Simple, Yes. Easy, No.

These steps sound simple enough, and they are. However, simple does not always equate to easy. In fact, simplicity is pretty hard to pull off. Each of the five inbound marketing tactics mentioned here involve hundreds of sub-tactics and techniques in order to be successful. Some are common sense, some are counterintuitive, but all of them are free or low cost.

That’s why inbound marketing levels the playing field: it’s more about the width of your mind than the depth of your wallet, according to Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot and co-author of “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs“. If you want to learn more about inbound marketing, I recommend you get started by picking up a copy of his book.

Now go forth and be remarkable!

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I occasionally post subjects with the subtitle, “I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”  The subtitle pays homage to one of my favorite sources of movie quotes, The Princess Bride (you can view this particular quote on YouTube).

I’ll be conducting an inbound marketing workshop at the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in a couple of weeks. We’ve just launched a blogging contest that is giving away an iPod Touch. Although I’m judging and not eligible to win, I’m linking this article to help spread the word.

Browser content (i.e. HTML on port 80) now accounts for less than 25% of all Internet traffic.

Your entire Internet marketing strategy may be based on a mirage. Many companies are focused on search engine optimization and pay per click campaigns. This is all well and good as long as Google remains the gatekeeper of the Internet. But here’s the thing; there’s a new sheriff in town and the entire 18 year old ecosystem of the world wide web is in danger. This is according to Wired Magazine who today published “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.”

The premise of this article is that we are willingly giving up the freedom and openness of the traditional world wide web in favor of a more closed, less free version; apps. Wired argues that like the rail system and electrical grid before it, the Internet is entering a period of consolidation and domination by a few power brokers.

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

Now. let’s keep in mind that Wired is not entirely unbiased in this debate. They and their publisher, Condé Nast , have put a large portion of their eggs into Steve Jobs’ basket. But to paraphrase the late Kurt Cobain, “Just because you’re biased doesn’t mean they’re not right.”

Tilting at Windmills

We laughed at Prince when he said it, but this article should make every marketer’s blood run cold. If our usage of the Internet is indeed moving from open, HTML-based web sites to the walled gardens of applications and streaming content, it means that search engines are indexing an increasingly small piece of the pie. They simply aren’t the ubiquitous arbiter they once were, since much of the Internet’s activity is happening outside of their field of view. Basing an entire Internet marketing strategy on search engines is like looking at a windmill and seeing a dragon.

That doesn’t mean that you should halt your search engine marketing tactics. It does, however, mean that it should be a shrinking share of your overall marketing strategy. The question then becomes, “What fills that vacuum?”

Gift Marketing

Moore’s Law has resulted in bandwidth and storage costs that are becoming too cheap to meter. This enabled the Web 2.0 sites we’re all using today and led to the emergence of social networking. Consequently, we’re able to scale our peer groups and get increasing amounts of information and recommendations from trusted sources instead of advertisements and algorithms. The problem for marketers is that much of this takes place inside the walled gardens of Facebook. As the old saying goes, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

And so we have brands jumping into social media. However, one of the problems they’re grappling with is the juxtaposition of norms; economic versus social. They’re not used to this whole social thing and many of them are trying to transplant the old advertising models that were based on economic norms into the world of social networking.

Think of it this way…  You’re having a dinner party and invite some close friends. Your doorbell rings and it’s a smarmy, uninvited used car salesman. He lets himself in and starts denigrating the car in your driveway and listing all of the special deals they have. While this behavior may have been tolerated on his lot, it certainly doesn’t belong at a dinner party and you kick him out. Imagine, instead, your best friends call ahead of time and ask if they can bring this really cool guy who was great fun at their last barbecue. He shows up and in the course of normal conversation finds out you’re having trouble with your headlights. He takes a look and shows you how to adjust their alignment and fixes the problem. You find out later (from your friends, not him) that he works at a car dealership and you commit to visiting him when it comes time for you to upgrade your vehicle.

In this new trust economy, companies are going to have to start thinking much more in terms of social norms. Even though the name of the game is making money, they are going to have to follow a different set of rules than they’re used to following. The first rule of inbound marketing is creating compelling content that people want to share. The secret to creating this content is thinking of it as a gift.

Is repackaging your brochure into a blog post a gift? Not so much.
Is showing up unannounced polite? Definitely not.
Do gratuitous, insincere compliments build trust? Not exactly.

Search engine optimization is certainly not dead. But as Hans and Fanz said, “Hear me now und believe me later,” that giant sucking sound you hear in your marketing strategy is the vacuum being created as search shrinks. You need to be prepared to fill it with content marketing that focuses on building new customer relationships socially.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Welcome to the “Threats and Opportunities” version of the High Five.  This week’s links describe some things to be concerned about in 2010, and some trends to be excited about.  The last link is an absolute must watch video!

#5: Hackers are defeating tough authentication, Gartner warns

Another day, another scary article about how online identities are being compromised. The takeaway here is to become a more intelligent Internet user and take responsibility for your online accounts (for more information on this subject, see “How to Spot Phishing.”

Link: Computer World

#4: Green light for internet filter plans

From the “Big Brother Is Watching” department, Australia is considering forcing Internet service providers to install web site filtering to remove criminal content. All the same questions apply here. Who decides what’s criminal? How do you implement it? The reality is that this very easily thwarted and kids, criminals, and deviants will be able to get around it within hours of the filters being put in place.

Link: ABC News Australia

#3: The 12 Days of Christmas: Website Disaster Style

This is a very creative and effective article that describes some fundamental yet all to common mistakes that are being made with regard to web site design and architecture. It makes them very understandable to the noob (newbie).

Link: SEO.com

#2: What Matters Now

Meaningless coincidence; last week’s #2 position was also a post from Seth Godin. This is a free e-book that is a compilation of observations and advice from scores of the leading thinkers of our digital age.  I don’t even know where to start with this, as there is so much information, advice, and inspiration in this document.  You must check it out.

Link: Squidoo

#1: Forecast for 2010: The Coming Cloud ‘Catastrophe’

This is a really unfortunate title that appears to be a typical “least common denominator” appeal to fear mongering. However, this video and article provide ten predictions for next year that are fascinating and extremely thought provoking. In fact, the cloud catastrophe prediction is just on of ten, and in my opinion the least interesting.  There is one prediction about journalism and the media with which I completely disagree. However, I’ll be authoring a post soon on the trends that are predicted in this story, and many of them can be summarized with this recommendation; “THINK SMALL.”  This is a must view video!

Link: Business Week

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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