Inbound Marketing. WTF does it mean?

Quite simply put:

Inbound Marketing is the concentrated effort a business puts into creating keyword-rich search engine friendly content to attract more website visitors, then converting those visitors into leads/customers with calls to actions & landing pages. Rinse and repeat.

Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

What are the key components?

1. Creating Search Engine Friendly Content
2. Setting up Conversion points with calls to actions and landing pages
3. Promotion via marketing channels

So what about Social media? Isn't tweezer going to get me more business?

You sad, sad, little man. No, it's not. (well not likely)

It's insane the amount of social media marketing hoopla on the web these days. It's literally impossible to filter out all the social media gurus telling you to make your Facebook fan page prettier.

I'm here to tell you that if you are just starting with inbound marketing. Forget social media. It's a waste of your time (starting out). Read on to find out why.

Focus on you

You are special and you need to "treat yo self".

Wasting your precious time posting Facebook updates to your 12 fans or a tweet to your 200 followers isn't going to do anything for your business.

Sorry, it's not.

You need to spend time on you. What I mean more specifically is you need to spend far more time on your website. Making it the prettiest sexiest site on the planet.

How many pages are on your site? 20? 30? 100? Not good enough.

You need to be creating more and more and more content on your site, starting now, and never stop.

Make sure each new page is optimized for a keyword phrase, sounds human, and is useful.

Tell Me What to Do

Instead of retweeting the post on how to get more retweets, I want you to do something for me:

Go through each and every page of your site and take a look at what that page is telling you to do.

If there is no call to action or next step for someone to take. You have failed and failure is not an option.

Make certain that each and every single page on your website has a clear, concise, contextually relevant call to action specifically telling the person what to do next.

When Can I Start Poking People on Facebook?

"So what you are saying is social media is bogus?"

No, not at all. Social media is still a powerful piece of the inbound marketing equation but it needs to come into play once your site is set up for conversions and for better organic search traffic.

Once your house is in order, Go nuts with social media. Poke, tweet, and plus one to your heart's content.

Just don't ever (and I mean EVER) stop creating content on your own site or stop optimizing your conversion paths.