The Unfair Advantage of Inbound Marketing

The Unfair Advantage of Inbound MarketingHow marketers can use sweat equity instead of $$ to earn outsized returns on their online traffic efforts.
Download at http://bit.ly/mozinbound
Rand Fishkin, CEO & Co-founder, SEOmoz| June 2011

makes SOFTWARE!!
We don’t offer any consulting.

Where DoesWeb Traffic Come From?

Every Marketer Sees This:
But That’s Not Reality

Referring + Other = 50% of our traffic? But this chart is basically saying Twitter, Facebook, blogs, feed readers and every non-search site that sends traffic is exactly the same.

All the traffic we receive that isn’t the result of paid acquisition or advertising (in SEOmoz’s case – 95%+)
comes from Inbound Marketing!

Inbound Marketing
Outbound Marketing
Organic Search Rankings
Paid Search Ads
Social Networks (Facebook, Twitter)
Display Advertising
Inclusion in Universal Search Results
Contextual Ad Networks (AdSense)
Blogs + News Sites
Buying Email Lists
Links from Partners + Friends
Site Sponsorships
Opt-In Email Newsletters
Video Ads
Forums + Discussion Sites
Demographic Targeting
Viral Content
Facebook Ads
Q+A Answers w/ a Link
Affiliate Marketing
User Profiles + Comments
Viral Content
For more on Inbound Marketing, check out Brian + Dharmesh’s awesome book: http://www.amazon.com/Inbound-Marketing-Found-Google-Social/dp/0470499311

You Must Become a Hub for GreatContent in Your Niche
Answers on Q+A sites reference its resources
Referenced by industry blogs
Site that offers:
Unique Research
Informed Opinions
News/Trend Analysis
Multimedia Content
Authentic Expert Contributors
Quality Discussion/Interaction
Mentioned in news publications
Forum discussions link to its pages
People email links to each other
Links are Tweeted
Liked/Shared on Facebook
Cited at conferences + events
Sometimes, a single piece of content or just a few, can yield these results but, more often, it takes dozens to hundreds of attempts to become a resource hub.
http:/googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

Inbound Marketing Channels

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

# of Searches/Day in Google
Currently, there are more than 3 billion searches/day on Google
Data via Google’s occasional public statements and some inference (for 2006 + 2009)

Robust, Accessible, HTML Text is Key
Users see a wealth of potential content
Google sees a small number of words that don’t tell much of a content story.
You can see what Google sees by using the “cached snapshot” functionality from their search results, or by using the Mozbar (http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar) and browsing as Googlebot.

“Good” Content vs. “GREAT” Content
Satisfies the searcher’s basic information requirements
Surprises and delights the searcher by being remarkable
Written by a human and not duplicated elsewhere
Produced by extraordinary writers/designers/producers
Long enough to fulfill basic needs of engines for depth/uniqueness
May leverage video, audio, graphics & photos to convey a unique, shareable experience
Grammatically correct; free of spelling/punctuation errors
Produced by extraordinary writers/designers/producers

Keyword Research
Make sure to use “exact” match!
Visit https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and start experimenting. You’ll learn amazing things. http://www.seomoz.org/article/keyword-research-guide is a good guide.

How to Know What People Want:
This post - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/great-content-for-seo-simpler-than-you-ever-imagined goes into detail about how to leverage this tactic to build great resources people will love.

Pages/Sites Need Links to Rank, But Not All Links Are Created Equal
Post is here – http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-linksand check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4 - for tons of ways to earn awesome links.

Social Signals Influence Rankings
Bing + Google have said publicly they use Twitter + Facebook for rankings: http://searchengineland.com/what-social-signals-do-google-bing-really-count-55389 and Moz’s correlation data suggests they’re telling the truth: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

Social Data’s Directly in the SERPs, Too!
Geraldine’s blog is awesome, but it would never rank on page #1 for this query without the power of the social connection.
Check out http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/merging-of-search-social-wappow for more on how search engines and social media are mixing together.

Social Media

Facebook
More fans = more people potentially exposed to your content.
But… You also need to create posts that will show up in “top news” on your fans’ walls. That’s more challenging.
For some great Facebook-focused marketing tactics, check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-facebook-marketing-tactics-you-might-not-know-about

Twitter
It’s not just about the follower count. Your tweets have to count for something and drive actions/awareness.
I highly recommend http://www.slideshare.net/danzarrella/the-science-of-re-tweets which helps show the correlation between activities on Twitter and your ability to have the message spread.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn’s “Groups” are a powerful way to grow your network and spread a message.
Like Facebook, LinkedIn now has a wall that drives “likes” and comments (as well as traffic).
Good advice on LinkedIn profiles here - http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/optimize-your-linkedin-profile-for-best-results-howto (also, don’t miss the comments which discuss how the links work).

Reddit
Reddit’s grown to be in the top 100 most visited sites on the web, and even smaller subreddits can send remarkable traffic (and result in tweets/FB shares/etc.)
The travel subreddit has nearly 19K registered subscribers - http://www.reddit.com/r/travel - and thousands more browsing. Full list of subreddits, sorted by # of subs here: http://metareddit.com/

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon reaches more than 15 million active monthly users, and drives massive amounts of outbound traffic.
Two great activities on http://www.stumbleupon.com for beginners: #1) Discover content that people share in your niche. #2) Find great stuff to share/tweet that will earn you more followers.

Participating in the Blogosphere
Using http://www.google.com/reader, you can see how many GG Reader users subscribe + average # of posts/week. Those with fewer than 50 subscribers and 1 post/week often are too tiny to be worthwhile.

The “Long Tail” of Social
http://tumblr.com + http://hunch.com + http://del.icio.us + http://etsy.com + http://wikipedia.org + http://www.newsvine.com + http://care2.com and 100s of other social sites can potentially provide value for sites/marketers who participate; there’s no shortage of opportunities to explore.

Content Marketing

Blog Readership is Up, But to Fewer Blogs
Data via http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Social-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx and http://www.slideshare.net/DianeRayfield/social-medias-shocking-statistics. See also Hubspot’s awesome slide deck: http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/how-to-be-the-awesomest-marketer-ever

Great Blogs Rock.
Mediocre Blogs are Useless.
Research for this statement via PEW Internet & Captain Obvious

Evergreen Content
Every two years, we put out http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors but leave the URL the same, so it continues to accrue great link/social/sharing signals.

Research + White Papers
Stats for launch day of Startup Genome project’s research
Research like http://startupgenome.cc/ gets tweeted, shared and cited, meaning you earn links, traffic + all sorts of good inbound marketing metrics.

Infographics
After producing what is, admittedly, an awesome graphic - http://www.paralegal.net/judge-judy/ - Paralegal.net rose to page one in Google (and got bjillions of drive-by visits, too).

Multimedia + Interactive
The Nissan Leaf http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index site uses HTML5 to its full capability, and it’s pretty as heck, too.

Fostering Community

User Profiles
Progress Bar
Highly customizable profile details
Custom Photo
Links to other web profiles
These (http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/) emulate the success of places like LinkedIn, Quora, Stackoverflow and others. They’ve increased participation and traffic to the profiles dramatically.

User-Generated Content
When users contribute content (as with http://artistmarketplace.moleskine.com/en) they’re invested in the promotion and success of their work, and thus, your site!

An Incentive to Share
These “spoonback” were key to Urbanspoon’s growth (now ahead of Citysearch in traffic!)
Because Yelp + Citysearch had taken the “badges” angle for local businesses, http://urbanspoon.com incented foodie bloggers to link to the site by featuring those bloggers’ posts + content on the site.

Gamification
The genius game-like badges, points and progress at http://stackoverflow.com has helped make it one of the most successful sites in the Q+A world.

Content Subscriptions
I use email to subscribe to http://www.avc.com/ and am 1 of 100K+ who read Fred’s posts on a daily basis. That’s a powerful inbound channel!

Newsletters
The Moz Top 10 http://www.seomoz.org/moztop10 attracts lots of readers, who then consume and share content. One big key to success – don’t just promote your own material.

Promotions
BTW: Write down that email address; it’s a good one to have.
Deal sites like http://groupon.com have had huge success. Private models like http://gilt.com and http://appsumo.com run interesting variants that also work well.

RSS + XML Feeds

Blog Content Feeds
On average, this many people actually read a post via feed
Feeds aren’t just useful for subscribers. They “ping” search engines, enable easy syndication and can be used by lots of content aggregators that send traffic, too.

Anything with Regular Updates
Etsy makes it possible to subscribe to a feed of anyone’s shop on the site!
I was actually tempted to subscribe. http://www.etsy.com/shop/ThisYearsGirl has some awesome stuff!

Presentations

Live Events
I did a brief, 4-minute presentation at the Seattle 2.0 Awards - http://www.geekwire.com/2011/seomoz-ceo-rand-fishkin-googles-panda-update that promoted our hiring + growth (focused on that audience’s values rather than trying to sell to them)

Webinars
Our webinars http://www.seomoz.org/webinars attract 500-1,000 attendees and earn lots of tweets, blog posts and links. Hubspot’s get 10K+ attendees http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-webinars/

Online Presentations
I put many of my presentation on http://slideshare.net where they earn thousands of additional views.

YouTube
Don’t be a honey badger. Care about YouTube’s potential!
YouTube actually ranks as the second largest “search property” in the US, behind only Google: http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/05/25/youtube-hits-3-billion-views-per-day-2-days-worth-of-video-uploaded-every-minute/

The “Long Tail” of Video Sites
Long tail of video sites get 50% of all online video traffic/views!
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/08/long-tail-video-half-viewing-minutes/

Self-Hosted Video Content
At SEOmoz, we use http://www.wistia.com who submits our video XML sitemaps to Google for us - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=80472

Local + Mobile

Google Local / Maps / Places
Fox Sports Grill? I’m sorry Google, but that is not barbecue.
To register, go to http://www.google.com/placesforbusiness. Also check out http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml for great local ranking tips.

Yelp
Yelp’s results quality is much higher than Google’s and their interface is better, too. Impressive stats as well -http://officialblog.yelp.com/2011/02/via-yelp-mobile-yelpers-call-a-local-business-every-other-second.html

FourSquare
http://foursquare.com has pretty awesome stats for local businesses participating with them.

Mobile Subscriptions + Tatango
http://www.tatango.com/ makes it possible for locally-focused sites to have cellphone “text lists” the same way web companies have email lists. It’s powerful stuff for local businesses.

Q+A, Forums + Discussion Sites

Yahoo! Answers
Granted, not all the questions (or answers) on http://answers.yahoo.com are of exceptional quality, but due to very high traffic, participation can yield solid results.

StackExchange
The StackOverflow Q+A platform is one of the most engaging, attracts high quality folks and offers lots of connection/marketin opportunity. See list of sites here - http://stackexchange.com/sites

Quora
Quora’s audience tends to be startup-y, techy and very well-connected.
If you haven’t yet started contributing on http://www.quora.com, the Google social integration is a great excuse 

NameSake
Truer works were never typed.
The platform at http://namesake.com is quite impressive and some of the contributors equally so. Whether it achieves critical mass remains to be seen.

The “Long Tail” of Discussion Sites
Whoa! Cool.

Public Relations, Guest Authoring and Comment Marketing

Guest Blogging + Writing
Guest blogging (or contributing content to any type of publisher) is a great way to build your brand and earn links. Tools like http://myblogguest.com/ can help make the process easier.

Direct Connections to Journalists
HARO (http://www.helpareporter.com/) is a popular service that lets you get contacted when relevant reporters/journalists need sources.

Classic Public Relations
If you’re seeking a PR firm, http://prfirms.org/ can help, but it pays to get references. PR is a field where a few firms have the right connections and the rest can’t help nearly as much.

Comment Marketing
This post has a list of recommendations for blog commenting as a marketing tactic: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recommendations-blog-commenting-marketing-strategy

Inbound Marketing is

Inbound Marketing isAll Connected

Original Audience: 250
Total Reach: 10,000
Buh.. Zam.

Some Favorite Tools

Google Analytics
Check out some interesting and useful ways to customize Google Analytics via http://www.seomoz.org/blog/seomoz-google-analytics-setup-whiteboard-friday

PostRank
Via https://analytics.postrank.com/ - PostRank will measure the social sharing activity on any URL in a feed, so you can see what content works (and doesn’t) on the social web

Survey Monkey
Survey Monkey is inexpensive, scalable and accurate. It’s less beautiful than other platforms, but far more flexible – http://www.surveymonkey.com

SEOmoz PRO
I know I’m biased, but it’s really useful for tracking and improving SEO stuff  http://pro.seomoz.org

MailChimp
http://www.mailchimp.com is perfect for most small-medium businesses, but once you get over 100K susbcribers, it doesn’t work quite as well. Great analytics, deliverability + reporting, though!

Trunk.ly
http://trunk.ly keeps track of all the links I share on Facebook/Twitter/my Blog/etc. without any effort on my part. It then builds a searchable index so I never forget/lose a link.

FacebookInsights
Place Facebook’s Insights widget on your website + see demographic data about your site’s visitors, just like you can w/ your Facebook fans. http://www.facebook.com/insights. Learn more about Insights here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/4-facebook-marketing-tactics-you-might-not-know-about

Facebook Comments
Comments left here appear on Facebook + replies to those are posted here!
You can find developer info for how to add FB comments here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/

Disqus Comments
Whoa! Cool.

WistiaVideo Analytics
Problem w/ video is it’s hard to measure engagement w/ traditional analytics that show only pageviews. http://www.wistia.com fixes that in an elegant way.

Bit.ly PRO for Short URL Tracking
If you use shortened URLs on Facebook + Twitter, http://bit.ly can help track and segment out the portion of the traffic that’s direct vs. referral (but hidden due to desktop/mobile apps)

FollowerWonk
These folks have tons of followers; we should connect with them!
A terrific tool to research high-value targets on Twitter: http://followerwonk.com/

Open Site Explorer
See who links to who on the web, and how important those links are via http://www.opensiteexplorer.org

GetListed
Using http://getlisted.org, I can see which local data sources may not have my business included (or may have inaccurate information). Fixing/including can help w/ local rankings + traffic.

Feedburner
Via http://feedburner.com – though it hasn’t been updated in a long time, it’s still the best free software for monitoring feed activity and growth.

Google Alerts / Blogscape
Using http://www.google.com/alerts, I can set up daily email notifications of word mentions. http://www.seomoz.org/labs offers several options to track fresh web notifications as well.

Summify
http://www.summify.com sends me a daily digest of the most tweeted/shared things from the people I follow. Oftentimes, it’s really useful stuff that I’m glad not to miss.

MozBar for Firefox
Firefox 4 compatible, the Mozbar - http://www.seomoz.org/seo-toolbar - combines nearly every feature I’ve ever wanted in a toolbar into one (and it has a pretty aesthetic, which I appreciate)

Wistia
http://www.wistia.com not only has great analytics on videos, but also automatically creates video XML sitemaps so Google can show our rich snippets for video directly in the SERPs.

KnowEm
http://knowem.com checks the availability of a username across dozens of social sites automatically and provides direct links to register them.

Unbounce’sLanding Page Platform
Using http://unbounce.com/ allows us to create hosted versions of landing pages to test without needing to bug our dev/engineering team.

The Inbound Marketing Process

Step #1: Discover
Find inbound marketing paths that look promising and make a list.
Step #2:Test
Invest a few days/hours building authentic value in that niche/sector.
Step #3: Measure
Use your web analytics to track primary + second-order impact
Step #4: Repeat
Throw out low ROI projects; repeat high ROI ones.

Q+A
Download at http://bit.ly/mozinbound
You can now try SEOmoz PRO Free!
http://www.seomoz.org/freetrial
Rand on the Web
Twitter: @randfish
Blog: www.seomoz.org/blog
Email: rand@seomoz.org

http://blog.hubspot.com	13210
http://s1-suchmaschinenoptimierung.de	391
http://www.bumpzee.com	304
http://www.linkedin.com	252
url_unknown	103
http://www.s1-suchmaschinenoptimierung.de	93
http://www.urbanmedia.co.uk	65
http://paper.li	61
http://www.touchwork.com	59
http://blog.buyersbyemail.ca	54
http://www.g4be.com	42
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	36
http://www.slideshare.net	34
http://www.conseilsmarketing.fr	25
http://chiperoni.ch	19
http://twitter.com	11
http://virtual-sales-channel.com	7
http://inbound.business.wayne.edu	7
http://www.twylah.com	6
http://urbanmedia.co.uk	6
http://www.conseilsmarketing.com	6
http://virtualblackswanmarketing.com	4
http://hmasystem.wordpress.com	3
http://reddoor.posterous.com	3
http://neuroplasticity.mobi	3
http://johnkrol.mobi	3
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	2
http://www.typepad.com	2
http://gabegemignani.tumblr.com	2
http://www.theplatform.info	2
http://www.mongodb.org	2
http://aprendersociales.blogspot.com	2
http://contautp-anthony.blogspot.com	2
http://howtogetbacklinks.easywaytodoit.com	2
http://us-w1.rockmelt.com	1
http://your-secret-wealth.info	1
http://red.ifor.es	1
http://www.onlydoo.com	1
http://contautp-anthony.blogspot.mx	1
https://twitter.com	1
http://XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX	1
http://www.prettyeating.com	1
http://tweets.jaypalter.ca	1
http://newinboundblog.hubspot.com	1
http://blog.seedcamp.com	1
http://virtualblackswanmarketing.org	1
http://flow3.typo3.org	1
http://trunk.ly	1
http://www.partybluprintsblog.com	1
http://andregrilo.com	1
http://feeds2.feedburner.com	1

The Unfair Advantage of Inbound Marketing

by Rand Fishkin

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

59 Embeds 14,848

Statistics

The Unfair Advantage of Inbound Marketing Presentation Transcript