Inbound Marketing and Technology Blog

Time once again for The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design, the weekly roundup for keeping you current with the latest news, trends and tips that affect us all.   In this this edition:

Here we are at the end of another week already. Yes, Virginia, there is a Friday, and here’s what we have for you this week on The Friday 5: Five Headlines from Social Media, Inbound Marketing, SEO, and Web Design, keeping you up to date with the latest news, trends and tips from the past week.  

Are white papers and ebooks among your content offerings for generating leads? If not, then they probably should be. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2013 Benchmarks for Content Marketing Report, 61% of B2B companies utilize white papers and 32% are using ebooks. Furthermore, in the B2B Content Marketing Trends study conducted by the B2B Technology Community, marketers indicated that white papers were one of their top offerings, 73% of whom claimed it to be an effective tactic.

I’ve already mentioned in Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 the importance of your company blog, and by now I hope I’ve convinced you of this. If not, here’s another statistic: Nearly 40% of marketers see blogs as the most valuable content for their company.

Missed Part 1 and Part 2? Click on the links to catch up. In Part 3 we pick up with tricks 11-15 on how to add value to your blog site. Blogging is not a waste of time. Effective blogs give their company’s website 434% more indexed pages—that’s a good thing. 

If you missed items 1 – 5 in Part 1, you can click here to catch up. As mentioned in the introduction of Part 1, your company’s blog is a necessary tool for a successful web marketing program. Companies with blogs get 97% more inbound links than others who don't. That’s huge if you want to be found in the vast expanse of the Internet.

Companies sometimes forget how valuable their blog is. With all that has to get done in a day, putting together another blog post ranks somewhere in between organizing that jam-packed file drawer and restocking your desk with paperclips. “What’s the point?” some may ask. “It’s not like our blog is getting us any leads. No one even reads the thing!” And if you’re writing purely for SEO purposes, it’s hard to get excited about bending sentences to include a few keywords that are supposed to help your page rank.

Are you desperate for a new website, but having trouble convincing internal team members to make a big change? We've put together some ways your poor website design is already affecting your company’s overall value and ability to grow with the changing marketplace.

Twitter has absolutely redefined how companies and organizations communicate with each other, and every individual has their own theory on best practices across this medium.

So, now that commerce is global and we have easy access to international web sites, how comfortable are consumers as a whole shopping abroad? I have found several health & beauty products on UK web sites but wondered if I needed a class in currency exchange or international business before I initiated a purchase. As it turns out, simple research is revealing that this is not the case. Many individual U.S. consumers ARE utilizing the internet’s reach, and businesses are taking advantage of bulk purchasing overseas due to cost savings. There are, however, a few points to consider when buying products online from other countries: