<h2><strong> What Is Inbound Marketing?</strong></h2>
<p>If you&#8217;re more familiar with operating your small businesses than marketing, you might not fully understand inbound marketing.<br />
In its simplest forms, inbound marketing relies on social media, SEO, videos or podcasts and blogs to advertise via content.<br />
It gives you the opportunity to present yourself as en expert, which encourages consumers to trust you and use your business.<br />
The customers who focus on inbound marketing often already have a need, so it&#8217;s more focused than simply advertising your products or services to everyone out there.<br />
You&#8217;re simply allowing customers to make an informed decision by placing this information, or content, on the Web for them to see.<br />
This type of marketing is more than just attracting consumers through content marketing, however.<br />
It also provides the opportunity to increase leads via squeeze pages and funneling consumers into even more focuses groups to increase leads.<br />
If you&#8217;re thinking that this sounds like more work than traditional advertising, you&#8217;re right.<br />
It is impossible to effectively automate inbound marketing because the human touch is essential to its effectiveness.</p>
<h2><strong> Make Inbound Marketing Work for You</strong></h2>
<p>Before you delve into inbound marketing, realize that deployment and results both take time.<br />
It won&#8217;t work for you if you start a blog, a Twitter or a podcast and quickly give up without experimenting.<br />
Perhaps you&#8217;ll have to adjust keywords, the time of day when you release content or reply to social followers.<br />
Planning and research are important to inbound marketing because of this.<br />
For instance, you&#8217;ll want to research what&#8217;s making your target customers unhappy and learn how to manipulate their emotional triggers.<br />
Use these to create the call to action that will get you the most leads.<br />
Technical aspects of your websites and profiles are important, too. Your pages must load quickly, while content, headings and anchor text should incorporate keywords.<br />
Utilize title tags and meta data such as page descriptions. Don&#8217;t lie to the visitor but remember that titles and descriptions should be accurate and updated.<br />
The content you post to your blog, Facebook page, Pinterest boards or YouTube channel all help to build trust, so talk about the things you know best.<br />
High-quality, unique content in the form of videos, guides, tutorials, infographics and lists, among others, is also good for ranking on search engines,<br />
so you want to add new content frequently as part of your inbound marketing strategy. Engaging content encourages return visits, too.<br />
At the end of the day, consumers should be able to find your presence, learn from your content and trust you enough to hire you or purchase your products.<br />
You don&#8217;t have to take it from us that inbound marketing is a good thing, however.<br />
Just take a look at some of the numbers as revealed by the recent The 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report.<br />
If you decide to jump on the bandwagon, you&#8217;ll be in good company. Over 60% of companies will start inbound marketing this year.<br />
Almost half of the companies interested in inbound marketing will increase that budget,<br />
and it makes sense when you consider that inbound marketing produces 54% more leads than outbound marketing.<br />
Finally, just 1/5 of companies who don&#8217;t have a blog reported a positive ROI last year.<br />
Numbers don&#8217;t lie. Inbound marketing is an essential tool for your small business website.</p>
<h5>Featured images:</h5>
<p><span class="license">License: Creative Commons</span><br />
<span class="source">image source</span><br />
Ben Sawyer is an internet marketing consultant and online marketing manager.<br />
He created numoreous viral sharing online campaigns to help hos clients to achieve Google&#8217;s top 10. Currently, he is a content contributor for Paramold, eCommerce website.</p>

What Is Inbound Marketing And How Can It Help To Boost Your Small Business Website's Rankings?
