Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[music].
Greetings and salutations, everybody. We are back with another episode of Cliff Notes Tuesday.
We are doing chapter two of Inbound Marketing. So, this chapter is called, "Is Your Website
a Marketing Hub?" Just from the onset of the chapter, they compare the difference between
what they call a megaphone versus a hub. So, before the web 2.0 era, everybody made websites
that were essentially an online version of their brochures. In the book, they call it
brochure-ware. Essentially, those days are long gone. You need to make a site that is
more effectively a hub, where tons of things are linking back to it, and it's a place that
is a community for like minded people that are looking for information.
They also go into talk about how it's not what you say. It's what's said about you.
You want to be more like a New York City, rather than a Wellesley, Massachusetts. I
don't even know where that is, and I'm standing in New York City, so I agree with that. They
also tell you that you should focus 75% of your efforts for your site, or your business
rather, offline because that will cause more people to talk about you online and more sites
to link to you, and create this hub or ecosystem around your business. Then, they ask, "Does
your website have a pulse?" The way to give it a pulse is to enable RSS, so people can
subscribe to your website and get notices whenever you update that content. It's a way
to make sure that people keep coming back to your site.
Then, there's a pretty large section that's broken into two sections, essentially. That
talks about the idea of needing to redesign your site. They say that, essentially, people
that always want to do a redesign just have a really myopic view of their website. Really,
people aren't coming to your site for the design. They're coming for the content. Obviously,
design is a big consideration, but make sure that you're delivering content that people
want, so they keep coming back. Then, they also talk about tracking your progress. So,
before you do any of this, you want to see where you stand, see how many followers you
have, see how many subscribers, how many links, how much traffic. They talk about Website.grader.com
as a good tool to measure a lot of those different things.
Then, they go onto site 37 Signals as an example of a site that's using inbound correctly.
So, 37 Signals, they're the maker of Base Camp. They have a blog called "Signal Versus
Noise". They developed such great content that they really created such a huge community
around that site. They had about three million users come to Base Camp because of their blog.
Their blog is actually rated in the top .1% of blogs on the web. As such, they generate
tons of links, traffic, et cetera, et cetera. That's allowed them to convert those people
into users of Base Camp. One of the points they make is that the design hasn't changed
much during that whole process.
So, again, the book ends with things that you should do. You should calculate your reach.
Go to the Website.grader.com site and see where you stand. Stop obsessing over the look
and feel of the design of your site, and don't redesign. Instead of doing that, focus on
your blog. Bring in RSS and email subscriptions, and then also consider making your blog your
homepage. Again, they site Barack Obama's site. Check out 37signals.com and keep reading
the book. So, that wraps up chapter two. I'll see you next week for chapter three. Signing
off. [music].