7 Inbound Marketing Strategies That Work
Seven concrete ways to earn attention instead of buying it in 2006, built around blogging, search-driven content and permission-based email.
Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing made the case years ago that earning attention beats interrupting for it. In 2006 the tools to do that have finally caught up with the idea: blogging platforms are mature, search engines reward useful content and RSS has made subscribing to a company’s updates as easy as subscribing to a friend’s. Here are seven strategies that turn that groundwork into real traffic and leads, not just theory.
1. Run a blog on a platform that doesn’t get in your way
WordPress 2.0 just shipped, and along with Movable Type and TypePad it’s made publishing simple. The blog should be the center of your content, not an afterthought bolted onto a static site, because it’s what search engines have the easiest time indexing and ranking.
2. Write around the exact terms your customers search
The biggest gap between blogs that drive traffic and blogs that don’t is whether the writer bothered to think about what a real customer types into Google before buying. Answer the specific question, in the specific words, and search sends you the exact people who were already looking.
3. Start a podcast if your audience already listens
Podcasting support landed in iTunes last year, and adoption has grown fast enough that it’s no longer a fringe format. If your audience already commutes, exercises or drives while consuming other podcasts, a modest, consistent show can build a kind of loyalty a blog post rarely does on its own.
4. Publish an RSS feed and make subscribing obvious
RSS lets an interested reader pull your updates automatically instead of you having to push email at them, which is a fundamentally lower-friction relationship. A visible, clearly labeled feed link converts a casual visitor into someone who sees everything you publish going forward.
5. Participate in existing communities before pitching anything
Forums and niche discussion boards where your buyers already gather are worth genuine, unpaid participation. Answer questions honestly for weeks before ever mentioning what you sell, and the credibility built there carries far more weight than an ad ever could in that same space.
6. Build a permission-based list, never a bought one
An email list built one voluntary signup at a time behaves completely differently from a purchased list: higher open rates, fewer complaints and people who want to hear from you. It grows slower. It’s worth it.
7. Get your announcements where search and journalists can find them
Distributing releases through a wire service like PRWeb means they get indexed and discovered independently of whether a reporter happens to see your email pitch. It’s a small, cheap habit that pays off in exactly the moments a bigger campaign can’t buy: unplanned coverage.
What ties these together
None of these seven require a large budget. What they require is patience and consistency, publishing, answering and showing up in the same places over months rather than running one campaign and moving on. That’s the actual difference between inbound tactics that compound and ones that fizzle after a single post.
More strategy coverage is here, along with everything published in 2006 and the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
