By now, most marketing professionals are familiar with the concept of inbound marketing vs. outbound. Briefly, outbound marketing sends your message out to prospects who don’t necessarily want to hear it. Think cold calling, trade shows, billboards, etc.

Inbound marketing, conversely, involves drawing visitors in. This automatically results in prospects who are pre-qualified: they choose to visit your site, meaning they are already interested in what you have to say. Moreover, if they are visiting your site, they are likely looking to buy your product/service already – you don’t have to convince them that they need what you’re selling.

The $64,000 question, then, is: how do you attract visitors to your site?

1. SEO

Search is central to any inbound program. General wisdom holds that search engines are the new yellow pages – people go there first when they’re looking to buy. To be found, you have to be in the mix of search results. Preferably you’ll be on the front page for your target keywords, as a whopping 75% of users never go past the first page of results.

The key to SEO is patience; it may take several months after you begin your campaign to really start seeing results.

2. Inbound Links

Aside from the SEO benefit of having links coming to your site from reputable third-party sites, links from other sites also boost your visibility to human users. You can get inbound links in a variety of ways:

1. Write guest posts for others’ blogs, with an attribution link back to your site
2. Comment on others’ blogs, again with a link back to your site (but, be sure your comment is relevant and not spam)
3. Write articles and submit them to online repositories such as ezinearticles – it’s true that Google has stopped giving as much weight to these links, but real people read these articles as well

Be judicious in setting up these links; remember that quality trumps quantity. Create these links yourself or hire a reputable firm to create them for you, but do your due diligence and be sure the firm does not engage in black-hat spam techniques.

3. Social

Meeting your audience where they hang out is a great way to build awareness around your brand. Build your company pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and develop a strategy to build a following around them. Create a Twitter account and put out useful, relevant tweets that your market will find interesting. Above all, remember that social media is more about listening than about talking,  so your audience will more likely click through to your site if you’re interacting with them rather than talking at them.

4. Video

Search engines and human users alike love video. Search has been favoring video more and more over the last few years. And, here’s a quick look at the benefits realized on the human side:

• Visitors stay on your site an average of 2 minutes longer when there’s video
• Visitors are 64% more likely to buy when your site has video
• 90% of online shoppers say video helps them make purchasing decisions

Next week we’ll look at ways to make sure you engage your site visitors once they’re there.

photo by Jake Miller