1. Passive promotion: The notion here is that you can optimize your site using relevant keywords and over time you will passively attract more and more visitors to your blog.
2. Automated promotion: Thanks to RSS it is now easy to include the feed for your blog into various social media profiles. Above and beyond that the HubSpot software can automatically post tweets and status updates to various social media profiles. This is how technology have help with automated promotion.
3. Active promotion: This is the crux of blog promotion and we touch on how to interact with community and use social networking sites such as LinkedIn to answer questions and get your blog out there.
The mythical Tower of Babel represented an endeavor so great that it rivaled the heavens. According to the bible, a united humanity speaking a single language participated in the building of the tower. That’s the future of the world wide web envisioned by Dr. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet.
Dr. Berners-Lee in this impassioned TED talk on what he calls Linked Data describes an internet with open databases that can be linked with one another online to facilitate research and learning. Wikipedia is perhaps a simplistic example of such an entity but at a very minute scale.
Providing valuable information that is structured (or tagged) using meta data
The use of URIs to identify sources of information
Accessibility to the data by people and user agents via the HTTP protocol
The inclusion of links or URIs to additional, related sources of information to faciliate discovery
While it appears Dr. Lee’s vision is humanitarian in nature given he wants organizations to share their information extrinsically to the public at large this idea is valuable to corporations who implement this intrinsically. This is founded on the principles of Data Democracy which I wrote about on the HubSpot blog sometime back.
If you have any interest in the internet I highly recommend you should watch the video to get a glimpse of the future. It’s great content and really well delivered!
I recently reread Illusions: Adventures Of A Reluctant Messiah by Richard Bach for the first time in over 15 years. It is an amazing book and I think everyone should read it! But, the most inspiring part is the parable in the introduction.
The story starts with a messiah narrating the lives of creatures living along the bottom of a great river. All those creatures clung for dear life to the bottom of the river to avoid getting swept by the swift current.
One creature however feeling bored and directionless clinging the same old way decided it was time to let go and trust the river current. His companions warned him and laughed at him but he let go anyway and was instantly dashed against some hard rocks.
However he refused to cling to the bottom and soon the current of the river picked him up again and he started to move downstream. To all the creatures who lived downstream to who he was a stranger he appeared to be miracle creature and a messiah flying in the current like no other but of course knew better.
A sea of change is taking place in how internet marketing is being done today. Most companies are sticking to the same old ways of reaching their prospects by barraging them with emails, direct mailers and telemarketing calls, interrupting their daily routines. However these techniques are not effective and are often detrimental to the marketers.
The new marketing requires us to let go of the old ways (you can go back whenever you like) but you need to experience where the river is going and trust it. The river in question is 1) how the internet is transforming and becoming flat, allowing smaller and larger companies to compete on equal footing in search engines. 2) It’s how people are trusting each others’ recommendations in social media to discover new products and services. 3) It’s how companies are creating remarkable content that is being shared in social media and helping them to get found.
Sometimes we just have to trust that the river knows where it is going and let go. Fellow marketers clinging to the old ways may think you are a fringe case, may discount you as a radical or even choose to worship you as messiah but you know better that it really is all about trusting the river. It’s time to change our marketing and go with the flow.
How have you changed your marketing recently? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
I love ice cream and my friends know that. When someone asks my what ice cream they should buy my response is usually one of the following: 1) You should definitely get Häagen-Dazs ice cream. OR 2) OMG! Go get the Häagen-Dazs Belgian Chocolate Chocolate flavor. It’s to die for!
Now consider those two answers carefully. Which one allows you to make a decision easily if you find yourself knocking on the door of the Häagen-Dazs shop in the Burlington Mall at 6:45 am? If you like if chocolate ice cream (which I insist you should) the info in answer 2) would allow you to just walk up and say: “I’d like a medium cup of Belgian Chocolate Chocolate ice cream with jimmies on top”.
If however my reponse was 1) you’d have to window shop, look at the menu, perhaps leer at the others while they are devouring tasty ice cream till you can make up your mind. The same goes for your marketing.
Apart from knowing that your site visitors are trending up, how would you know what is driving that effect?
The reality is you get no actionable data from the graph above. You can’t see what is working and what is driving the growth of your site’s visitors. On the other hand the graph below provides some interesting insight:
By breaking down the number of visitors by each source or channel you can see that direct traffic in the graph above was cause for growth in March. At the same time there was a slight decrease in the Webinars channel because there was only one HubSpot marketing webinar in March instead of two.
The marketing takeaway is that you can spot trends by looking at graphs and stats at the high level. However the root cause of changes of trends in in the details. Go granular, dig deep and find out the root cause of your peaks or dips in your marketing reports. You will get a lot more actionable information from it.
LinkedIn is one of my favorite networking sites. I use FaceBook and Twitter as well but so far when it comes to professional networking, LinkedIn is the center of my Universe. There’s been a lot of angst with LinkedIn lately and LinkedIn vs. FaceBook comparisons (and I have some strong opinions about that) but I’m going to save that for another post.
Let’s face it. The future of the web pages is to make them more like note books. You need to be able to annotate pages, take notes, mark them up. That was the Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the web — to make it read/write. Most sites on the web are read only but blogs comments, product/merchandise reviews (such as on Amazon.com), social news aggregators such as Digg or Reddit are now read/write.
LinkedIn’s latest read /write feature (that I noticed!) is the ability to capture notes on the profile page for each contact in your network. Your online rollerdex just became more useful. No more switching back and forth between Word or Outlook or your hard copy notes. Live in LinkedIn, email, call, take notes and network away — beautiful!
Over time all these personal notes will behave like tags. LinkedIn’s search engine could use the information behind the scenes to make their search more semantic. If 50 of my contacts have the word marketing in their notes about me, that should help make LinkedIn’s search results for the keyword marketing more relevant. Read/write web helps make it a semantic web!
Now I’m not just happy with taking notes. At some point I’d like to capture all my touch points with my contacts one place. So that means I will need a private wall-to-wall feature like we have in FaceBook to capture online conversations I want to have with my contacts, or access to all the InMail emails passed between me and a particular contact over time.
It doesn’t stop there. Once the LinkedIn API opens up a little more I’d like to pull in conversations I’ve had with my contacts in other media such as FaceBook, Twitter, Gmail/Ymail. Might be useful to see if my contact has Digged or Stumbled my blog articles that I’m pulling into my LinkedIn profile. Some progress on LinkedIn’s part but they’ve still got a ways to go.
