by Dale Shumaker
4spirit@gmail.com
Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan is about getting found by using Google, social media and blogs. Halligan explains why inbound marketing is the most effective way of marketing today including strategies and tactics, how to do it.
Outbound marketing such as mass mailing, email blasts, telemarketing, direct mail, TV, print ads, and trade shows... are becoming less effective. People do not like to be interrupted as these forms of marketing do that.
Inbound marketing creates connections, builds followers, brings people to you. The Internet is the hub where people get to find you. People shop and find information from search, blogs, and social media (such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, You Tube and others).
Is your website a megaphone (where you are shouting out your message) or a living room with a library of minds sharing what they know, enjoy or think. Inbound marketing changes your sales message to a collaborate, living, breathing hub for your marketplace. It's not what you say but what others say about you. Make it a place to come, to learn, to interact, to get answers, to relate with like-minded people.
Rethink your website to be a hub for many to many, syndicated across the web. Focus on the rest of the Internet, with many links, fans, followers, and subscribers. So it's an interactive, constantly changing hub for your entire industry which happens to sell a project or service. Be remarkable to your niche that admires you. Create remarkable content. When you are remarkable you attract links from other websites (which is critical for Internet attraction). Remarkable content spreads quickly and easily on other social media. Create content you can produce rapidly and others can effectively spread online. You got to give to get.
A great way to create remarkable content is by starting a blog. A blog establishes you as a thought leader, changes your website to a living breathing hub for your marketplace, providing a place for customers to engage with you while improving search engine ratings. This gives other bloggers a chance to link to you.
Many platforms are available for blogging: Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress. Provide a place for comments. Write about things of interest to your industry or group. Add videos. Make them only two or three minutes long. Invite others to write.
It's best to write on your blog weekly, or at least monthly. Use key words so Google finds you. These are words that your industry or group would use in searching for someone like you. What are the popular phrases in your industry. Use these phrases in titles and subtitles. Follow comments on other blogs to start conversations. Follow comments on your blog and start a conversation. Don't oversell what you do or it drives people away. Stick to great, helpful content others want and find interesting.
Join in the conversation and comment on the blog. Be creative, use catchy phrases others will find appealing. Market your content through email, RSS, social media. Subscribe to blogs from your industry, your profession or special interest groups who like you and relate to you.
Help Google find you. People searching Google are looking for something. You can pay Google so they find you, or with quality content, Google will help them find you. To get people to find you requires search engine optimization.
How does Google work? Google does two things. It crawls the Internet looking for web pages. It processes searches to find the best matching pages. Getting a link on a page being crawled by Google gets you crawled as well. Getting a ranking on Google is a goal. Ranking is based on authority and relevance.
Relevance is based on its match to the term searched... the title page, page content, text of links to the page. Authority is the other thing Google considers. Authority is how important and authoritative the page is in Google's eyes. This authority becomes your page rank. You increase authority when others link you. Authority increases more when the site that linked you has a high authority ranking. To get authority, create as many links as possible. You do this by creating remarkable content others what to share for you from their sites. You become rank worthy when creating remarkable content others want to read.
Pick key words for search optimization. Words that are relevant, the words that the searcher is looking for, typing in the search box. The more times a word is keyed in for search the higher its search value. Use selective words your selective group likes to use and will likely type in for search. Use words in your content, titles and sub-titles that your searcher will think of using to find out what you have to say.
What influences Google is the tag line. When creating your tag line, put most meaningful words first, leave adjectives after them, for example, change "the best and biggest belt business" to "the belt business that is the best and biggest." Make title pages intriguing and accurate. Language too creative may not be found by Google. Use the language your groups use frequently. Word it though that it is something others will want to click on when they find you. Put your company name after your description. They are looking for remarkable content and then want to know who has it. Keep descriptions at one or two sentences, make them unique with key words included first.
Halligan goes into great detail on how to get found by Google.
He continues with getting found in social media including Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Digg, You Tube. Each of these are a discussion of their own, as Halligan gives you a play by play on how to make them work better for you. He includes specific guidelines for you to follow. The last section of Inbound Marketing is how to convert customers which includes tools and resources at the end of the book.
He has many of these tools and resources on his blog. Note his website and the blog; also check out the "marketing resources" he shares online.
http://www.hubspot.com/
Prayer Power by Andrew Murray shows us how to live with Spiritual Power... its origin is Prayer. In prayer, there is power. Without prayer, we lack Spiritual Power. We can conquer everything by prayer.
What are hindrances to prayer? By temptations to curtail or postpone prayer, allowing wandering thoughts to enter the mind, small distractions around us when we want to pray, or just having unbelief and a sense of no hope, a lax spirit.
How do we fight off inattention to payer? God wants a relationship with us. It is as important and regular communication as with a friend. In prayer we communicate with the One who loves us the most and wants to help us the most. It's also tuning to His will for our lives where we enlist His power which makes us the most effective in what we do we.
It's the intimate, spiritual, personal, uninterrupted relationship to the Lord Jesus that manifests itself powerfully in our lives.
Bring to mind these qualities of God, His Spirit, and the One we are connecting with.
1. God is omnipresent. He is everywhere we are and go.
2. He is omnipotent. His power is the supreme power of the universe.
3. God is a holy loving God. Through Jesus, all of His unimaginable love surrounds us constantly. Take time to think over the Word of the Lord. Go into His inner Chamber and enter into the relationship of Jesus in the Father, the Father in Jesus, and Jesus in you. Let Him unveil Himself to you, showing you how to live, and walk and abiding in fellowship with the unseen Lord constantly.
How is the blessing of victory brought through prayer?
1. Maintain an unbroken fellowship with God. We bear His image and we are fit for a life of communion with Him and are prepared to glorify Him.
2. He gives us His Power for the work He has set out for us, He has called us to do. Be diligent in doing His will and fulfilling His mission and purpose Hand Stamped for you. Then we can hold on to "I can do all things through Jesus who strengthens me, and I am more than a conqueror through the power of Jesus Christ who defeated death."
3. We share with God as intercessors to affect His great love for the entire world and the mission many are in motion to fulfill. We impact victory for others, and knowing that Jesus Christ lives in us, through us, we share in the victories for many to conquer the grip evil has on the world.
The great lesson in prayer and for every prayer is to see first of all that we commit ourselves to the leading of the Holy Spirit with an entire dependence on Him, constantly giving Him first place. It is so important that we stay in the right relationship with the Holy Spirit and His outstanding work.
1. Let us firmly believe, as a Divine reality, that the Spirit of God's Son, is the Holy Spirit and the propitious power of this Spirit is in us.
2. With His Great Powerful Spirit with us, and with unquestionable certainty know He dwells in us, we understand what He desires to accomplish through us.
3. We give over to the Spirit full possession of our lives for His Work. His dwelling place, our body and soul, is entirely under His control. We say as the Psalmist said, " I seek Him with all of my heart." We learn to forget ourselves and allow Him to make us a training ground for training as intercessors. So God can entrust us in carrying out His plans as day and night we cry out to Him to avenge the Adversary.
As you enter the inner chamber, going deep into God's presence, keep this in mind to make it a quality, life re-energizing experience.
1. Let your first work be to thank God for the unspeakable love that invites you to come to Him and to converse freely with Him. Reflect on God, Our Father in Heaven, and what that means.
2. Prepare yourself by reading the The Word of God, and prayerful Bible study. The Spirit of God comes through in the Scriptures and it opens the Spirit to be in a flow with God and your spirit.
3. When the confidence and Faith that is build up in you is established, enter into prayer. Let your prayers be something definite, arising out of the Word that you have read, or out of the real needs that you long to have satisfied.
4. Then as you finish, cement the bond of the inner chamber that you and God have established and the outer world. The inner chamber experience must remain in us all day long. As the obedience in faith rule, what you prayed in secret will overtake the challenges of the world. The inner chamber binds man to God and all supply from God is provided. You will see His potential manifested in your day and life.
Time is on your side, if you place time with God along your side. There is no communion with the Holy God, no fellowship between Heaven and earth, no power for salvation and needs to be met, if the day is not spent in time with God. The life of grace depends entirely on the time we are wiling to give to God's Spirit in prayer. This is where the Power is.
