It’s a task in itself to keep up with the various ways to build a brand and gain visibility through web marketing. Surely, some methods work a lot better than others, and some end up being a waste (that’s where analytics come in).
Businesses often tend to focus large amounts of attention on the obvious inbound marketing strategies, such as SEO blogging and search ads with links leading to sales landing pages. But there are inbound marketing strategies that do well in converting Internet users that many companies often forget about.
In order to push the limits of your reach to consumers via the Internet, it’s a good idea to look into incorporating the following three inbound marketing strategies into your mix.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is pretty much the same as blogging for your own domain, but it expands your audience if you submit guest posts to an influential blog with a large, engaged audience.
The key is to discern just how much involvement a blog gets by paying attention to the social media sharing buttons above, beside or below blog content.
If a blog in your niche has content that is heavily shared on one major social media outlet, like Twitter or Facebook, it’s fair game. Blogs with fewer shares on Twitter and Facebook but more shares spread out across other social media outlets, like Google+, StumbleUpon and LinkedIn, are great places to start as well.
This article tells you more about finding influencers in your niche.
Forum Participation
With blogs and social networking sites hogging the spotlight, many people forget about forums. They’ve been around for decades, and many still have highly active users.
It’s up to you to find the forums that are best for link building. Google Alerts is a great way to locate forums with discussions about your targeted keyphrases.
In order for forum participation to be effective, you must lend good insight or a valid point of view to the discussions. If there’s a discussion that relates to some of your blog content, feel free to leave a link – telling how the blog post connects to the discussion first, of course.
Another tip is to include links to your website, blog or social media accounts in your signature.
Forum participation requires you to create a profile for each forum you want to leave links on, but it’s worth the time investment to gain unique visitors to your website and blog.
Supersized Micro-blogging
By now every perceptive business professional should understand the advantages of social media for inbound marketing. Even so, many continue to use it on a small scale.
It’s time to supersize your social media involvement on the micro-blogging website Twitter. There are online tools to help with that.
TweetAdder adds followers that are related to your audience automatically and handles sending direct messages to each new follower. Customize the direct message text to include appreciation for following and a link to your website, blog or Facebook Page.
WeFollow is also a great resource. It offers focused lists of tweeters in your niche – along with their Klout score. By following these people, you are increasing your chance of reaching a much larger audience if you tweet interesting and relevant material that influencers retweet to their tens (or hundreds) of thousands of followers.
You can also add your Twitter account to WeFollow’s database, so followers that search for profiles in your niche can follow you.
There’s no need to jump on each strategy right away.
Choose the one that seems most profitable for your business model right now. Once you’ve gotten into the swing of it, start one of the other inbound marketing strategies.
With time and tweaking, you should begin to see more web traffic and more engaged site visitors – and ultimately, higher conversions.