One of my New Years resolutions is to read more for work. Not just blogs and tweets but actual books. I was able to get a jumpstart this year by reading Inbound Marketing, by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. In my opinion, this is one of the best books for tech startups. It has excellent information on how to best use and take advantage of Google search, social media and blogs. Reading the book there are some things that VA Partners is doing well with our inbound marketing efforts and other things we should improve upon.
Whenever I read a new book or go to a training session I ask myself two questions – what did I learn and what will I do differently. The areas for immediate focus based on the book are improvements with our blog.
What Did I Learn from Inbound Marketing
- Build better content into your blog to get found
- Keywords used in the Blog can help with SEO
- Don’t oversell your product or service
- Contribute to other blogs by adding comments
- Share information through social media channels
What Will I do Differently?
- Starting in the New Year we will increase the frequency of our blogs to four a month
- Split up the blog work between the team
- Spend more time working on the titles for the blog to make them infectious and help with SEO
- Keep the blogs to approximately one page and supplement them with more detailed white papers
- Spend more time providing comments to other blogs, not just retweets
- Use LinkedIn more to get blog message out, we already do a good job with Twitter
- Review other blogs
If you haven’t read Inbound Marketing yet and you are a technology or CleanTech startup, I would highly recommend it. They cover many topics succinctly with real life examples.
