As much as you would like to believe that your company is a special snow flake.

It's not. Sorry.

You think your potential customers act completely different than the other 99.9999% of the population?

Tell me another story, but this time try something true.

Here's what is true (and something I have seen time and time again) the core principles of Inbound Marketing work for every single individual, company, nonprofit, or school that internalizes inbound principles and puts in the work to succeed.

"But David, you mean to tell me something worth having takes work?!?! Say it ain't so"

It's a foreign concept to some people but yes, you do need to put forth the effort. Below I will describe the bare minimum to see results with inbound marketing and your company.

The Work Required to Succeed with Inbound Marketing

1. You Must Create Content

If you are not creating content and are never going to create search friendly content. Leave and leave now, you have already lost to your competitor who is (or will soon be usurped by them. Mark my words)

Create Keyword Rich Search Engine Friendly Content. There are tons of ways to do this but the tried and true method of consistent organic traffic growth is by Blogging.

Don't let the term "blogging" throw you off. It simply means creating a new page on your site that is optimized for a keyword your potential audience would likely be searching for and crafting some useful content around that keyword.

Confused? Don't be. You probably get asked 20 thousand questions over and over each day by your current customers, clients, and potential buyers. Write that stuff down, target a particular keyword phrase around that and go.

Does it work? Below is Inbound Now's Organic traffic month over month exclusively from blogging 3 times a week:

2. You Must have Capture Mechanisms for Non Buyers on your Site

You have probably surfed the web before... more times than you can possibly remember.

Let's examine your behavior on the web:

Do you typically buy something or contact the site owner every time you are browsing a new page?

The answer is no (if yes, your pants are on fire).

The cold hard reality of the web is that the vast majority of people coming into your site will never come back again.

Damn, that is not good! What is a marketer/business owner to do about this problem?

Create conversion points on your site and create a lot of them. It's something we like to refer to as lead generation.

Have relevant and useful content offers for folks to download on your site. By doing so you will be able to capture the contact information of the folks who are not yet ready to buy your product or service.

Here is the flow:

3. You Must Nurture Your "Leads" & Followup

Okay, so now you are creating content on a regular basis and you have capture mechanism to capture potential customers all over your site... Now what?

Well, the chances of that person who downloaded your content offer coming back into your site on their own accord is slim to none. The internet is a gigantic place full of distractions and cute cat videos and hoping that the person is going to come back into your site without a reminder is just plain insanity.

You need to set up a value add lead nurturing process to pull the initial converter back into the site at a later date.

This simply means create a sequence of followup emails to send to the converter with other relevant and useful information.

Does this relevant and useful information link back into pages and blog posts on your site?

You bet!

Do those pages/posts/resources you link to in the followup emails have other relevant calls to action to lead that person down the purchasing cycle?

Damn skippy! (Yes)

4. Know Your Business, Be Helpful & Seal the Deal

If you have a relatively low volume of incoming leads coming into your site, by all means, follow up with them individually.

Thank them for visiting your site and downloading your content and ask if they have any other questions.

This can kick off a deeper conversation that could ultimately result in a sale.

Conclusion/Epiphany

Inbound Marketing takes work (and time) but if you follow the four steps above I can 99.99% guarantee that you are going to see an increase in organic web traffic to your site and growth in lead flow.

After about 2-3 months of inbound marketing you should see results. If this is not the case, please let me know and we can reformulate your strategy.