Inbound Web Design

Some of our June Favorites from the Magnetic MarCom Weekly Web Roll Call…

• The Jedi Master Approach to Content Marketing that Converts
• The Most Successful Email I Ever Wrote
• 10 blog post ideas that are so quick and easy you could finish them on a bar napkin
• CTA – Calls to Adventure: How to Make Your Posts More Heroic
• Infographic: How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success.
• Nobody Cares about your Business…But that’s OK.
• How to NOT Talk Yourself Out of your Goals and Dreams

If you would like to grab even more Inbound Marketing and #HubSpot links that we find useful ourselves during our web travels, join @MagneticMarCom on Twitter.
 
June was an awesome month…  

A common thread found in comments from our fellow Inbound Marketers is “I know what tools I have at my disposal and how they are used…but, I just don’t have enough time in the day to do it all. What channels should I focus on?

Well, Twitter may be one of the greatest all-time innovations in content sharing, LinkedIn is a wonderful place for making B2B connections, and Facebook is the single place where everyone on the web naturally congregates…but I would suggest that the space you should be putting most of your time and effort into is “none of the above.”

Many times CTA’s are written a bit too much like a wedding invitation. As soon as your guests open the envelope and see the velum and calligraphed “You are cordially invited…” they know exactly what they are looking at, and are free to begin creating preconceived notions of what may be in store.

But what if instead, you had slipped a scrap of paper under their door, a ransom note, giving strict direction, a command, on what they must do? Something like:

This Week on the Magnetic MarCom Weekly Web Roll Call…

• How I Leveraged LinkedIn to Create a 7-Figure Income in 3-Years.
• Infographic: A brief history of content marketing.
• What the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can Teach us all About Marketing…Seriously.
• Getting Un-comfortable with your Content Marketing
• Nobody Cares about your Business…But that’s OK.
• How to NOT Talk Yourself Out of your Goals and Dreams
• How to Improve My Google Ranking? Use Google Authorship Program

If you would like to grab even more Inbound Marketing and #HubSpot links that we find useful ourselves during our web travels, join @MagneticMarCom on Twitter.

And so it begins…

This Week on the Magnetic MarCom Weekly Web Roll Call…

• 5 Ways the Ghostbusters can Improve your Online Marketing.
• CTA – Calls to Adventure: How to Make Your Posts More Heroic
• The One Tiny Difference Between a Mediocre and a Great Website.
• Automatic Appointment Requests on your HubSpot Site with TimeTrade
• Why the Future of Home Page Design is “Funnel Marketing”
• 5 Ways to Manage your Customer’s Expectations
• The Most Successful Email I Ever Wrote

If you would like to grab even more links that we find useful ourselves during our web travels, join @MagneticMarCom on Twitter.

Without further adieu…

The way people have interacted with brands has been (and will probably always be) in an ever-changing state of flux. The times, as they say, "are a changin'."

Marketing messages have been showcased via rock carvings and smoke-signals to iPads and iPhones. Not to mention the store aisle displays, newspaper and magazine ads, direct mail, radio, television, banner ads and spam that came somewhere in-between.

Of course, some of the marketing techniques used across these channels proved ineffective over time, and have (thankfully) fallen out of favor. But some “old-school” tactics have stood the test of time, and for good reason…they work. These techniques deserve a closer inspection, and possibly a spot within your inbound marketing efforts. 

How, by making social media buttons less prominent on your site, visitors are often more likely to respond to your offers.

We have never been huge fans of prominently displaying social media icons/links on every page of a website, especially the homepage. After all, the idea is to “pull” site visitors to your site through social media (because that is where they are already “hanging out” online), not to drive visitors that are already on your site away to your Facebook page, for instance.  

This is not to say that social media is any less useful as a content distribution platform.  We would simply recommend that you might take some time to first create a strategy for social media, one that uses an old-fashioned common sense approach to placing these social media buttons on your website.

“Thou shalt not annoy website visitors” is possibly one of the most important of the inbound marketing tenets.

Yet we all see the same mistakes happening time and again on countless sites, and at the cost of higher abandonment rates and lower conversions…yikes!

Below we have assembled a short list of the worst offenders we have recently seen during our point-and-click “travels.”