Wait, There’s More?!

5 things that have come to my awareness in the past three months due to the world of digital marketing.

1. The unveiling of a new self

In my past four years attending WWU, I have become many new and different things:

• A good talker

• A good writer

• An unlimited thinker

• An active voice

• A vessel to pursue my dreams

Until recently, I never thought of myself as particularly technologically adept, or analytically focused.

I thought this way because my entire past life has given me evidence and feelings of negativity towards both ideas. I am smart and fairly good with numbers, the internet, etc., but my lack of passion for visualizing the world through quantitative data had kept me at a distance from really learning how I could use it to my benefit and advantage.

It was not until I realized that no matter how good of an idea I could come up with, or how confident I was that it would work, my enthusiasm would mean nothing if there is no analytical data to back it up.

I then also realized how fairly frequently even my most inner gut instincts have led me astray from actual results.

Numbers don’t lie. If you can compile and analyze them properly, you have the ability to make a lot of positive change.

2. The importance of analytics

Data is not just data. It is people. It is every person who has ever visited your site. You know:

• What city they were in when they were looking at your page

• What web browser they used to get there

• Wow many pages they viewed

• If they were on their mobile device or pc when viewing

• if they visited for the first time or have been repeat customers

• A lot more

To me, numbers and statistics in themselves are not very interesting, but the people behind them are.

And to know the people, you have to know what all of them are doing, all at once, at any specific point in time.

The numbers condense and filter the people you are interested in most so that you can best serve those who are loyal to you most. Or figure out why the ones who aren’t, aren’t.

Nobody trusts nobody but themselves, so if you wanna be good, you gotta back your claims. You gotta own your words.

That means you have to prove results. To prove results you need to track data You need to test, analyze, tweak, and repeat. Data is a lot of fun when you realize it’s all just one big science experiment.

3. The importance of learning a new language

I always wanted to learn a new language. The trouble for me doing so was that I couldn’t justify the benefit of taking so much time to learn only one. There are so many out there, and so many different ones that I will interact with in my life, that I would have to learn at least 20 to really benefit from spoken language in travel.

The great thing about programming languages, is that they are universal languages. Someone with knowledge of how to program could build a website or app for someone in Brazil just as easily as they could in the U.S..

I love speaking and I love creating and using language. Building and creating with html and css have opened my eyes to whole new world of creativity though the universal language of digital code. I can now see its importance in connecting our world and how I can use it to do just that.

4. What inbound marketing is all about

Everyone knows what good marketing is.

We may not know why it’s good, just that it is. We may not know that the conversion goal was achieved most likely because after an entire year of A/B testing, it is now possible that the red “buy now” button (as opposed to the green or yellow one) is the best color for instigating conversions.

But we can tell when someone is authentic. When they know what they are talking about. When they are saying what they believe to be truth

It is these types of companies, which speak truth to the best of their knowledge, that are able to most effectively connect with customers and build a truly loyal customer base.

They are able to do this because they truly believe that they have a good idea other people will be excited about and stand behind them for. They believe that their idea can help to change peoples lives for the better.

They are real people. They have real stories, real experiences, real questions and answers. Not ones hidden behind layers of financial statements, legal documents, bricks and mortars of the industry cut throat monkey chase to the top of a corporate ladder to nowhere.

They share to inspire, inform, educate. Their voice is through the company which represents them. If what is attractive to you is attractive to someone else, they will join you in attractiveness.

Business is about relationships. Marketing is about value. We must build more valuable relationships.

Crowdsourcing and product co-creation have allowed just that. No longer do companies guess whether or not their product will be a hit. They now ask the people what they want from the get go. An idea is presented, a prototype shown, and then those who have an interest in the potential that the product has can offer insight as to how the company could make it better for their needs.

With enough input from followers, a company can create a product which caters to a wide enough audience of loyal customers and clients. Since the relationship with a follower has already been established by the co-creation process, a business can more easily and effectively support them after product launch so as to ensure that the next and best thing they create will even better be able to satisfy those customers’ needs.

When you authentically care about the well being of others, uplift and educate them by sharing educational and engaging content, and do your best to share your vision by building mutually beneficial and healthy relationships, you will be engaging in effective inbound marketing.

5. How to follow my dream

I feel like I have the toolkit now. I know what has been done, what needs to be done, and what I can do. Many things that need to be done cannot be done now because I am unable to do them.

Yet I do know what I need to do to be able to have the skill to do what needs to be done.

After being in this class, I feel like I have real and applicable skills and ideas that I can bring to any company of any industry.

Most importantly, I have benefited most from this class because I now have the resources to market my own ideas.

That is why this is all so exciting to me.

I have always known this is what I’m good at, and this is what I will need to learn, and what mindset I will need to have to do it. I just never knew that this was how it would turn out.

Thanks a lot, Mark. It’s been fun. I look forward to keeping you updated. See you all soon.

Here are some screen shots of my site stats for the quarter:

I typed a total of 12,922 words.

Why Edgerank Rocks and Mark Cuban is Wrong

Did you realize that not every post from your Facebook friends appears on your every updating newsfeed? Even though it makes sense that stories I interact with are highlighted on my news feed, I didn’t know that a majority of them didn’t even make it to the feed at all.

But now I know, and I have found that Facebook’s Edgerank is the reason why.

According to Facebook, Edgerank is an algorithm used by them to determine where and what posts appear on each individual user’s news feed so that they see the most relevant and wanted content.

There are three variables that make up the Edgerank post ranking algorithm: affinity, weight, and decay.

Affinity score is based on the relationship you have with the user who created the post. The more interconnected you are with that person, the more likely their story is to appear on your news feed.

Weight measures and ranks what type of engagement a post is getting. For example, shares and comments require more effort to post than a simple “like” and therefore are higher ranked interactions.

Decay factors in how long ago the post was posted and how much recent interaction it has had. A post will generally disappear from the newsfeed after a certain amount of time unless it has had recent engagement.

So if you want your posts to appear in your followers newsfeeds as often as possible, you need to consider it’s content and whether or not your followers will engage with it.

When it all comes down to it, Interactive, relevant content = quality content. Naturally, the way to build social authority on the internet is by sharing content. Naturally, posts that link to relevant, helpful content are of higher value than those that don’t. And while developing quality content is important, it is just as important what you do with that content that gives it a high Edgerank. To ensure your post are quality, check out These 7 Good practices from Social Backers to make your Edgerank soar!

1. QUALITY CONTENT – Since EdgeRank directly relates to your Engagement Rates, the more engaging your posts are, the more people will see it, and your affinity will continue to increase.

2. FOLLOW THE RULES – Breaking the rules has only short-term benefits. The more people report your Page, the more Facebook will penalize your Page which can result in a rapid drop in future reach and cost you the reputation of your brand.

3. POST FORMAT – Photos and videos have proven to engage most users, but a link to a great story or a clever status can do the job as well. Use Facebook savvy by not creating too long posts, take advantage of questions and call to actions, play with words and fill in blanks,…

4. POST FREQUENCY – More than 90% of Fans never come back to visit the Facebook Page again after Liking it. You want to post enough to maintain fan relationships, but not so much that they are overwhelmed.

5. POST TIMING – You need to find out when your audience generates the most activity. With Analytics PRO, you can easily track your most engaging days of the week and hours of the day to optimize your posting strategy based on previous results.

6. RESPONDING TO FANS – Do not forget that social media is a two-way channel. Avoid overwhelming them with advertisements, and create open communication. Every time you respond to a fan, not only are you investing in an actual brand-customer relation but you are also investing in the affinity of his/her Friends.

7. KEEP AN OPEN MIND! Measure, analyze, and optimize your strategy, analyze your competitors’, and try different techniques that work for others. Understand that Fans’ behavior will change just as frequently as the Facebook algorithm does.

These principles apply to businesses as well as individual users. However, businesses need to ensure that they are careful to represent themselves in as humanistic of a way as possible in order to be best connect with individuals. Social web sharing companies like Facebook and Google want the best experience possible for the core of their users, people. No one likes to be spammed. This why Facebook and Google focus on tailoring their algorithm towards showing users content they most care about, not what their followed businesses want them to care about. The key to giving people what they care about is authenticity. Companies will reach more people when their content is motivated by relevance and authenticity rather than profit.

This article  shows the idea of NFO and NFM (News Feed Optimization and News Feed Marketing). The ideas and strategies involved with these two fields are very similar to SEO and SEM as with Google’s algorithm. Both within Facebook and through Google, providing a high level of high quality, authentic content will give you the best chance of it being seen by your followers.

However, just sharing good content based on Edgerank score will not guarantee that a follower sees your post. Because Facebook only shows the most relevant content for each individual user, a lot of stories and posts get lost in the flow of the newsfeed or are never shown at all. This article states that “the average news feed story from a user profile reaches just 12 percent of their friends.” With this narrow reach of content towards friends, and most users having hundreds of “liked” businesses and organizations, it it hard for either type of user to reach a significant portion of their followers with their posts. Of course, the more you pay Facebook, the more reach you can have. But surely, if you want to ensure that every follower of your page sees your post, you are going to have to pay them a lot. Especially if you are a big company, like one represented by Mark Cuban.

Mark has recently recently criticized Facebook on Twitter and his blog for their extremely large costs of advertising to a wide audience. He doesn’t agree with the large amount of money a company has to pay to reach a significant portion of an audience. An article from Wired posts Cuban as saying, “Why would we invest in extending our Facebook audience size if we have to pay to reach them?” Cuban told ReadWrite. “That’s crazy.”

Ryan Tate from Wired goes on to say, “…the huge number of users Cuban wants to reach aren’t on Tumblr or MySpace, where posts are unfiltered; they’re on Facebook, where Cuban and his staff have to work harder – or pay more – to get in people’s faces. In his comments on Twitter and to ReadWrite, it doesn’t seem to occur to Cuban that Facebook users like that the social network quietly filters some Mavericks posts from their feeds. It’s not like unfiltered Mavericks promotional copy is particularly hard to find. If Cuban wants to get mad at someone for keeping his content obscure, he should blame the people who write it or the people who refuse to enthusiastically consume it – not Facebook for accurately labeling it as advertorial, and pricing its distribution accordingly.”

Mark doesn’t realize that people actually don’t care as much about clicking on sponsored posts as he thinks (orly?). The reason why people don’t want your posts, Mark, and why you have to pay to have them seen by your followers, is because they are mostly intrusive and unwanted (even if helpful. Think the light yellow sponsored posts at the top of a Google search result). If a company’s post was wanted to be seen by a user, then it would be, because that user has positively interacted with that company’s content in the past. The more they do, the more those posts will organically appear on a user’s newsfeed. Thanks Facebook algorithm.

“In response to this criticism (from Mark Cuban), Facebook explained–both in a post by one of its engineers and in comments to TechCrunch and Ars Technica–that the newsfeed filtering was designed to eliminate spam and noise and that it was constantly being tweaked to show users things they were actually interested in, not just things that brands wanted them to see. The message seemed pretty obvious: Don’t be spammy with your posts, and lots of your users will still see them for free. And if you want to spam them anyway, you will have to pay for sponsored posts to do that.” Good content is hard to develop. Edgerank gives the little guy a chance to be seen. As long as you have good content, not even money from the big guys can hide away your posts from your followers.

But not only does Mark have a problem with the way content is shown on Facebook, he is also critical of the content itself that is generated. He describes FB in his blog as “…a time waster. That’s not to say we don’t engage, we do. We click, share and comment because it’s mindless and easy.  But for some reason FB doesn’t seem to want to accept that it’s best purpose in life is as a huge time suck platform that we use to keep up with friends, interests and stuff.  I think that they are over thinking what their network is all about.”

The problem Mark, is not that Facebook doesn’t want to accept it’s role as “time waste central” of the internet, but it is that you, and the data you are sourcing, are trying to put them there as such. People spend all sorts of types of time on all sorts of types of content on Facebook. Some items on a person’s news feed may indeed be garble. But most importantly, the collective of information a user sees comes from their community in which is important to them regardless. Their content comes from people they have physically connected with, similar peers with similar friends, local, like-minded students, parents, siblings, local businesses. As Mark Cuban also says, “by default you are not going to use your newsfeed as a primary source of information. It’s more like the township newspaper .  You get the basic local stuff and updates , but it can’t be a comprehensive source.” Mark is right, Facebook is not a comprehensive news source. It is like a township newspaper, as he says.

Facebook is not meant to be a comprehensive source. It is not meant to be a go to stop to find out what great deal we can get from Coca Cola that day, or pressing issues of poverty in any given state or nation. We see those types of stories everywhere. From print ads, to radio, to tv and internet commercials. We get enough of that stuff from all types of different sources.

Facebook is about personal community and connection. So, if those large companies you represent, Mark, can’t afford to continue spamming every single user, every single day, who happened have liked one of those pages, boo hoo, get over it. Thanks again, Facebook Algorithm.

This is the beauty of Edgerank. No matter how a large a company is or many advertising dollars they have, they won’t be able to continue to reach followers who don’t like them. Mark also has a problem with this aspect of Edgerank because he believes that if a person really doesn’t want to see someone’s posts, they will simply hide them from their news feeds themselves. He says, “…Facebook is over complicating a simple issue.  A user can govern his/her newsfeed far better by hitting unlike than an algorithm like EdgeRank ever can.”

Yes, in theory, a person can decide better than an algorithm the type of content they want to see. However this simple “blocking” of a user is not as simple as he puts it. First of all, we don’t want to take the large amount of time that it does to  moderate every single person and business for good content.  Secondly, there is a deeper, unseen relationship between a Facebook user and their friends as he may realize. In a users township of friends, you may not always necessarily like everyone in it,  but you want and need them around because the content they share is an alternate, maybe sometimes extreme, but valuable, view of life that you think is important to consider once in a while in order to make effective and rational decisions in your own life. Some of what these people or businesses post is garble. But some is not. Some of it may be valuable to you. So naturally, you don’t want to see all of this person’s posts, but you want enough to be able to check in on them. And that is why Edgerank rocks. Person or business, only good content will be seen by those who want to see it most. And that is why the internet rocks and will continue to get better. Only good content will be seen by those who want to see it most

And that, my friends, is the point. Good content, that is relevant, personal, and authentic, will always win. And that’s awesome, because this is the type of content that is the best means for increasing the good of humanity, not profits. Sorry Mark.

Cocreation

I believe that in the future, everyone will be an entrepreneur. Very few people will stay working at one firm for their entire careers. People will instead be hired on a per project basis. Once their contract has ended, their availability will once again be available to be posted on a crowd sourced job hiring website such as InnoCentive.

All quotes from: http://markstaton.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/cocreation-journal-of-service-research.pdf

InnoCentive is one of the beginnings to the means of entrepreneurship. Instead of keep what’s ours a secret, we can open up and invite help from anyone anywhere to take part in our projects. Project contributors will be compensated and then released to move on to other work which pulls them.

The system that InnoCentive is facilitating is a form of New Product Development Cocreation in which people who are not employees of a given firm are asked to participate in the development of a new product before it comes to market. This system of cocreation has outstanding potential to further aid in the development of new products. However currently, there are drawbacks and legal issues that need to be considered and sorted out before the idea can flourish. The following are Stimulants and Impediments of the Consumer Cocreation process.

Stimulants of Consumer Cocreation	Impediments of Consumer Cocreation
Financial rewards – InnoCentive	Concerns about secrecy
Social benefits	Ownership of intellectual property
Technology (or product/service) knowledge	Information overload
Psychological reasons	Large amount of infeasable production ideas
Firm has proper tools and processes in place to stimulate cocreation process

Factors that Stimulate Consumer Cocreation

Financial Reward

“Some cocreation projects offer financial compensation, either directly in the form of money prizes or profit sharing from the firm that engages in cocreation with them, or indirectly, through the intellectual property that they might receive, or through the visibility that they might receive from engaging in (and especially winning) cocreation competitions.”

Cocreation activities are available all over the net. One website called InnoCentric provides a platform for companies to post questions or problems they are having to the site so that anyone on the web can offer a solution. For a large sum of money of course. Most rewards for solved problems come in at above $10,000.

Social Benefits

Many people participate in product cocreation because they receive recognition, feelings of self esteem, and “good citizenship” that they feel when participating. The recognition they gain can tie them to other important individuals.

Technological Knowledge

By participating in the cocreation process, contributors can gain valuable knowledge pertaining to the latest in technological development and theory. “For example, Blackberry, Lenovo Thinkpad, and many other brands have forums that attract consumers who participate in all stages of the cocreation process and gain technology knowledge themselves from exchanging ideas and inputs from others in the community.”

Psychological Reasons

Psychological reasons for participating in NPD cocreation are still poorly understood. It is most likely due to the generally positive feelings associated in interacting with others and creating things.

Firm Has Correct Tools to Stimulate Cocreation

Some firms are simply not structured to stimulate customer cocreation. Those that are by giving consumers the tools necessary to contribute will be able to cocreate. This must be the choice of the firm however to make the correct tools available to the public.

Factors that Impediate Consumer Co Creation

Concerns About Secrecy

For a firm to give consumers the necessary means for successful cocreation, they must share with them sensitive information that may have otherwise remained secret for a much longer time. By revealing proprietary information, it is possible that a consumer or competitor could take ideas from the company or other cocreators of the project and use them to profit for themselves.

Ownership of Intellectual Property

“Although some consumers might gladly hand over the fruits of their skills and labor to the cocreating firm without any acknowledgement, others might expect to retain full ownership over intellectual property…Firms that emphasize retaining ownership of intellectual propety rights for themselves are therefore less likely to engage in a high degree of cocreation.”3 Intellectual property policies are inconsistent and sometimes become entangled. The legal process of cocreation is uncertain.

Information Overload

Sometimes a company has millions of consumer generated ideas presented to them. It becomes difficult to identify the good ideas from the other mostly bad ones. Production time becomes an issue when companies want to be able to present the most relevant products to market.

Large Amount of Infeasible Product Ideas

While many consumer generated ideas are creative and interesting, most cannot be feasibly manufactured and sold in a way that will generate profit for the company.

So it seems that a company who is willing to share proprietary information while giving consumers the means to cocreate will achieve positive results. Cocreation will give a firms greater effectiveness and efficiency in NPD. By listening to and giving the customer what they want, a company can greatly reduce the chance of bringing a flop product to market.

It makes sense that when you develop a product for a consumer to buy, you would want feedback from that potential customer on whether they would even buy it at market in the first place.

Similarly, when developing a product, a company has access to an enormous pool of professionals with all types of skills in every niche market. This pool is called the internet, and surfing it is any type of employee or specialist a business could ask for. All they need to offer is the right level of compensation and visibility of the problem on the net for someone to take part. Cocreation has great potential. We just all need to find more effective ways to allow us humans to trust each other.

How Simple A,B Testing Will Convert More Customers

We all wish there was something we could do to get more people to interact with our site. And by this, I mean getting people to click on the all mighty,”submit your email address here!” button.

But how do we do that?

Could we maybe change the background color from green to blue to get people in a more serene and easy going mood? Would it help if we made our “sign up form” sequence shorter? Or maybe of we increased the font on our headings?

We could of course, make these changes, wait a couple of weeks and then see if we get more traffic and emails on our website because of it. But how do we know which change we made had the specific positive or negative effect? Or even more so, which changes had more positive effects than others? Just because we change something on our website and then happen to be getting more traffic a week down the road does not mean that we are getting those results because of our changes. There are a number of other factors that could have been the cause of the increased traffic such as: promo codes you have offered, increased marketing efforts, the change of seasons, etc.

So how can we go about testing changes on our website and figure out if they are actually working? The answer is a method called A/B testing.

With A/B testing, you will set up two web pages which are exactly similar except for the change you want to test. An embedded piece of java script to your page will automatically and randomly send a web browser to either your original or modified page. After enough data is recorded, (usually about 2 weeks) you can look at your data and see whether you have achieved a positive, negative, or neutral result. If you see a significantly positive change in web traffic, then make your test page your new one for all customers to see! Since you performed an A/B test, you can be confident that your changes will continue to generate positive results.

“An A/B test can have only three outcomes: no result, a negative
result or a positive result. The key to optimizing conversion rates is to do a ton of A/B
tests, so that all positive results add up to a huge boost to your sales and achieved
goals.”¹

Assuming you get good test results, you can be confident in their accuracy, but you should never be completely sure or convinced that it is the absolute best way to get people to interact with your website. The key is to keep testing. The more you test different elements of your page, the more data you will have about what works and what doesn’t. A significant amount of A/B testing on different aspects of your web page will be sure to generate an overall jump in traffic and positive interaction.

¹ Chopra, Paras: “The Ultimate Guide to A/B testing”. June 24th 2010. Smashing Magazine.

Everyone Should Be A Coder

I have always wanted to learn html and how to build a website, but the learning curve has appeared rather steep and timely. Until today, my future days of being a coder sat patiently on the back burner.

10 minutes into the Codecademy html and web page building tutorial I saw doors open that I had never before seriously considered. For some reason, everything clicked. Even this simple amount of language I had just learned had more meaning to me now than it ever had in the past.

Here’s a little somethin’ I was working on a couple of hours in.

It feels so exciting to know that my vision of having the “total package” as a marketer is closer than ever.

With extensive knowledge of coding, I will be able to have near complete control over the way I want to do marketing right at my fingertips. Web design, inbound, content, email, social…everything I could hope to want to be able to do well.

The idea of learning to code with html had always before seemed like a far off accomplishment, but for now, I feel more confident than ever that I can learn this stuff and make the use out of it I have always wanted to.

Check out this video of why everyone should be a coder. In the meantime, I’m gonna get back to Codecademy.

See ya! #lockedin

The Death of Paid Advertising

The problem with paid media.

It isn’t taken seriously. It is untrusted. It is forced upon us. In general, we do not like it. It is seen as an interruption rather than an invitation. It is seen as “not for me” instead of “just what I was looking for.” No one wants to be told what to do.

But give a person a reason and a will to join you, and you will then have more than just a customer, but a you will have a friend. A friend who won’t be afraid to be honest with you because he realizes that there are plenty of other good friends out there that he could go hang out with if you don’t treat him right. Honesty is the best policy. Good content, once seen, will not be ignored or forgotten. Every good bit you share helps. The better the content you produce and share, the more authority you will have, and the higher the likelihood you will have to fuel organic sharing of it.

People don’t see and hear about Redbull everyday because of their television and print advertisements. They hear about them because they put out kick ass videos, on the daily, that are informative, entertaining, and inspiring. The people in their videos aren’t drinking Red Bull, but Red Bull represents the lifestyle of the people. Being friends with Red Bull is like being a kid with the most awesome older brother who does the coolest things and one day you want to be able to do cool things like him and see the world a little more like he sees it so you go and drink a Red Bell every morning before you take on the world like your cool older bro does. People don’t buy what you make, they buy why you make it.

Check out what Red Bull has put out in anticipation for their 1 year anniversary of the Stratos project.

Paid media is like a fishing reel reaching out trying to sneakily lure in a sea of customers with some “too good to be true” bait, whereas your owned and earned media are like the happy light at the end of the tunnel that leads to endless possibilities.

Red Bull paid millions of dollars to allow Felix Baumgartner to step off that platform from the far reaches of the stratosphere. Every step of the way, Red Bull used social media as a main channel of communication to followers of the project. Doing so gave people awesome content so good that many of them will buy the documentary that has come out. And they have been drinking Red Bull up to and ever since. All of their advertising through social media was made available for free. You don’t need to pay to get someone to see your advertisement. You just need to make it good enough and visible enough for people to find it themselves. That is what gives your brand loyalty. That is what gives you real power.

Give and You Shall Receive: The Power of Authority and Free Content

Everyone wants to help the world. And everyone has their own vision of how they can best use what they know to do so. The reality is, we all have something to offer and we can all learn from one another.

In the competitive world of business, we all have equal opportunity and we all have the ability to “win” at success. Yet even though we all have passion and we will all work hard to reach those we can, making your organization visible and legitimate on the internet is no easy task.

The reason is that people don’t just want help from anyone. They’re not gonna take the time to listen to every nut on the internet who says that what they have to offer is more unique and effective than everyone else. The only way you can convince people to use your product is to allow them to trust you. To allow people to trust you, you need gain authority.

Authority gives you power and legitimacy in the eyes of consumers. It will be your key tool to converting a specific email audience to customers and clients that will financially support you.

From “The Business Case for Content Marketing” written by Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger Media, “The key to becoming an authority in any area is to learn all you can, and share all you can. Then you make money by selling something related to your authority, and even by re-packaging the content you’ve already created.”

The idea with authority is that you, similar to people like you, are seeking information on a certain subject that they are interested in. But the difference between you and most any other person seeking that information is that you have seeked and found so much quality content on your particular subject of interest that you have decided to share with others what you have found in a helpful way. To create a business out of the valuable information you have acquired, you can repackage it into your own program, service, or product and then convince others to buy it based on your authority.

Again from Brian Clark, “The key to becoming an authority in any area is to learn all you can, and share all you can. Then you make money by selling something related to your authority, and even by re-packaging the content you’ve already created.”

Your level of authority is all based on the quality and quantity of content you provide.

You can provide effective content in three ways:

1. Share on your site useful content that others have produced.

2. Produce your own content in the form of an informational blog post, photo, or video.

3. Make sure your content is up to date and relevant.

The more you share, the more reputable you will be and the more authority you will have. The more you help others, the more they will help you (assuming you share good content of course) because you are a good company with a good idea, and all good companies with good ideas can be successful with enough thought and enough ability to provide as many people as possible with enjoyable and insightful content.

In the world of the web, content rules.

Your job, is to simply do what you like doing.

Research, find good content (or generate it yourself), and then share it with others, FOR FREE. Once you gain enough authority that you become more legitimate than everyone else on the market, charge a fee for your most well detailed and self compiled information. For no one else can give what you give, and your product truly is, one of a kind.

How Great Companies Inspire Action Through Inbound Marketing

Some business do not believe or truly understand the power of inbound marketing.Those who don’t may say, “inbound marketing tactics are sound too expensive, it would be much cheaper for my business to keep sending out direct mail.” What these companies don’t realize is that inbound marketing strategies may be more expensive upfront, but will ultimately give you a much higher ROI in your tactics. “Twice as many marketers say inbound marketing delivers below average cost per leads versus outbound strategies. Our survey found that 34% of all the leads generated in 2013 come from inbound marketing sources. In fact, inbound delivers 54% more leads into the marketing funnel than traditional outbound leads.”1

“It’s about creating marketing people love: inbound marketing.”2 I really like this statement from Hubspot’s 2013 inbound marketing annual report. Connecting with your customers should not be an annoying experience for them. It should be one that is welcomed. A customer should want to approach what you have to offer because they see a part of themselves in what you create and provide.

        

Having the customer come to you through inbound marketing is ideally what the idea of marketing is all about. And that is to build real relationships with people. Relationships are of the utmost importance to a business because ones that are well kept will lead your followers to continue doing business with you. And they should want to do business with you not only because you provide something they need or want, but because the values you show and the content you put out personally resonates with them.

(The title of the email says: “‘Into the Mind’ wins Film of the Year; now available o iTunes and more”)

The content of this email from Freeskier magazine is a great example of inbound marketing. Freeskier magazine is a ski magazine very similar to other popular ones like “Powder”, “Ski”, and “Skiing”. Even though almost all of Freeskier’s revenue comes from magazine sales, this email they sent me is highlighting a new ski movie in which has come out recently, I would probably enjoy, and that they are unaffiliated with other than the fact that both parties are in the ski industry. So, while Freeskier will not gain any direct revenue by me being interested in this film, they know that by informing me of it, they will better be able to build a relationship with me through common interest. Since I am appreciative of Freeskier doing this for me, I will be much more likely in the future to support their magazine either by buying it in a store or subscribing to it from their website.

“What’s exciting to all of us at HubSpot is that marketers today understand that inbound is not just a set of tactics but an ideology and framework for how businesses will find customers in the next decade.” To me, this statement says, business’ should no longer attempt to trick or inconveniently trap customers in order to get business. We instead need to shift our marketing ideals so that we are the good guys people want to hang out with, not just the guys people go to because they need something in which after they get it, may or may not call upon you again. From the wise words of Simon Sinek, a author best known for popularizing the idea of the “Golden Circle”,  “People don’t buy what you make, they buy why you make it.”