Inbound Web Design

C.O.P. C.A.R. Content Marketing is a little acronym that we have been tossing around the Magnetic MarCom office for awhile now.

It spells out (pun intended) a framework of steps that clients must wrap their heads around, and universally adopt throughout their respective organizations, in order for their newly devised inbound/content marketing plan to be given the necessary time and attention for it to begin showing results.

Let’s take a closer look into what exactly makes up the C.O.P. C.A.R. acronym and a solid starting point for any content marketing strategy…

This Week on the Magnetic MarCom Weekly Web Roll Call…

• Seth Godin’s How to Live Happily with a Great Designer
• Facebook Working on New Features for Huge Social Commerce Push
• The 7 Pillars of Personalized Marketing
• 7 Surprising Waysto use Pinterest to Grow your Business
• The Sin of Originality (and the Truth about Building a Popular Blog)
• Why Posting Every Day is a Silly Strategy (And What to Do Instead)
• How Even Boring Industries can Create Interesting Content

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.

Get tucked in…

Can social media activity impact organic search rankings? Popular wisdom says yes, but Michael David of Tasty Placement set out to prove it with a simple test, and compiled his findings into an easy-to-follow infographic.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where Google would not take advantage of their staggering search market share (more than 3 times its nearest competitor, Bing) to aid in injecting their fledgling social media arm, Google+, into more of our lives. 

Google+, afterall, holds a mere 0.58% of the social media market share as of April 2012. 

Suspicions are abound, that Google would "reward" those of us who are making a serious "go" at incorporating Google+ into our daily social media regimen. 

The following infographic, will at the very least, should encourage you to dedicate a bit more time into the investigation of how using different social media out-posts can affect your search rankings in a very real way.

It certainly raised an eyebrow here at Magnetic MarCom...

At each year’s mid-way point, we (at Magnetic MarCom) construct a simple one-page document that reminds the “troops” what we are working towards, and ratchets-up our goals and expectations for the following year…Sort of our yearly Declaration of Independence.

Don’t believe that you can plan your business for the next year using a single document? I would suggest that you take a moment and read the actual Declaration of Independence, a single-paged document that launched a powerful, free nation and inspired the world.

Most companies, usually by force of habit or procrastination, will begin forecasting and planning their “grand plans” for the following year somewhere between Thanksgiving and New Years Day. I, on the other hand, have become quite fond of making my grand business statements in line with when our forefathers did the same with the United States Declaration of Independence.

The simple fact is, on-page optimization doesn't necessarily rank first in the journey for top-10 rankings (#3 on our list). According to many SEO experts across the web, the process you may want to adopt for getting that coveted first position probably should look something more like:

#1. “Crawl-ability” – Super-optimized, carefully crafted, otherwise amazing content that the search engines can't see, cannot be indexed properly. The Google “Gods” have passed down the following (and fairly straight forward) tip for making sure your site’s pages are “crawl-able”:

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:

We have all been there: Staring at the blank screen, the blinking cursor…taunting us.

It can become a daunting task to continuously create timely, fresh, topical and useful blog content on a day-to-day or even week-to-week basis. Sometimes inspiration strikes and you effortlessly create a topical masterpiece, almost unconsciously. But on other occasions, frustration sets in as you struggle to even develop a topic…let alone a useful and sharable post.

Again, we’ve all been there.

The good news is, as inbound marketers and bloggers, we have at our disposal the greatest tool EVER created for collecting blog topics, researching ideas deeper, even connecting with other authors on a one-on-one basis…

Even in today's changing marketing landscape, we could stand to learn a thing or two from those who came before us.

Modern-day marketing...meet timeless design.

Many of you may already be familiar with the Mad Men television series and its protagonist, Donald Draper, the prototypical, charming (and troubled) 1960’s ad man.

If you haven’t yet seen the program, imagine back to the days where a hunch and a catchy tagline could shape the way America made its purchasing decisions for decades to come. Our preconceived opinions on virtually everything from vodka to Volkswagens were shaped during these “golden years” of advertising.

Ahh…the good old days.

While the traditional ad-shop will probably always have a place in how we conduct business, there is absolutely no denying that the divide between Madison Avenue and Main Street USA is atrophying with each day that we better understand the true power behind the internet. Namely, the web’s amazing knack for speeding up the process of creating meaningful relationships.

However, we can still learn from the traditional advertising greats...