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Introduction
Inbound Marketing is the process of attracting your audience to your website through a structured and methodical system of publishing useful and interesting articles and stories to your website, promoting that content through various channels, building links to that content, and converting some visitors into leads.
However, THE core activity of Inbound Marketing in publishing.
This post is part of a series and here is the link to the main glossary page.
Your blog is the hub
Publishing articles and stories to a website is called blogging.
For that reason Inbound Marketing could be called Blogging for Business.
Marketing of course, involves conversion, and leads
But website visitors are not enough.
You need some of those visitors to buy, the first step of which is for them become a lead, which they do by providing contact information, usually by filling out a form in exchange for something (a download of some form, access to a video, etc.).
Once a website visitor becomes a lead, your marketing automation strategy and tool helps you turn these leads into customers.
The main focus of inbound marketing is creating quality content that attracts people in your business.
Methodology
Attract
To attract people to your website, publish compelling content that provides answers to their questions at frequent and regular intervals.
Consistency and regularity are key.
Social media and email promotion of content are part of your search engine optimization strategy, but understand they support the core activity of publishing.
Convert
With the help of landing pages that are properly optimized, forms, and compelling calls-to-action convert visitors into leads.
Nurture
Very few of us buy right away. We need time to make the decision. We make little mini decisions. Nudging people along is called Lead Nurturing.
It is done via Marketing Automation software that sends email messages to nudge them along.
Close
With the help of tools like lead scoring and lead nurturing (which are features of some marketing automation platforms), you work to transform qualified leads into new business.
Building topically relevant links is hard. We make it easy.