Inbound Marketing Tools of The Trade

I thought it would be helpful if I created a page that gets right down to the inbound marketing tools I use every day to attract customers with inbound marketing.

On this page I’m going to show you each inbound marketing tool I use categorized by why I use each one. Also if you want to learn more about a particular strategy there will be links to articles I have written on the topic for many of the tools I use. Simply click the link to read the article on the strategy you want to learn more about.

Please note: Some of the links shown below are affiliate links and I may earn a commission if you click on them (at no extra cost to you). With that said I use and trust each of the companies below and would recommend them to my best friend if they were trying to attract more customers for their business online.

Setting up an Inbound Marketing Business Blog

to attract customers from search engines and social media

This step is all about getting a business blog setup so you can start attracting customers that lead to sales for your business. In this phase you are going to need to learn how to setup your own blog in 3 minutes, make it look nice, start building your email list with a lead magnet, and optimize it to convert your visitors into sales.

• Bluehost  – I use bluehost for one reasons, you can have your own hosted business blog up setup in 3 minutes. With the 1 click wordpress installation button it has never been easier to create a proper wordpress blog hosted on your own domain name.
  ->Find out why I recommend you use a hosted wordpress blog.
• Woothemes – With Woo Themes You can Have a Beautiful Business Blog without Hiring a Designer.
• Response Magic – Your email list is the lifeblood of your blog it allows you to capture email addresses of your traffic so that you can influence them to give referrals or purchase your product or service..  Response magic is a great Free email marketing system that allows you to easily create a lead magnet to put on your website or blog so you can start building your email list fast.
  -> 6 Steps to Attract More Customers with an Email List

Keyword Research

so you know exactly what your ideal customer is already searching for

Keyword research is all about finding the right keywords that are going to produce traffic and sales, even before you build your website. This stage is a vital first step to starting any business and will save you time and money if you understand the market and the people in that market.

• Market Samurai – Before entering into any niche, market samurai helps me find the keywords that people are searching for online that have high search volume, low competition, high relevance and commercial intent. Finding the right keywords to base your business blog on and understanding how to optimize your website to be found in the search results are vital to the amount of targeted traffic your website gets and ultimately the number of sales you make.
• google keyword tool – Google keyword tool is a great free resource to find relevant keywords with traffic and its free. However understanding how much work it is going to take to rank on page #1 of google is vital to picking the keywords you target. This is why I prefer market samurai as it shows you exactly how much competition you have for each keyword.

Content Creation

To target the keywords you want to rank for in search engines and share in social media

Content is king!  Here is the bottom line. Content is like Internet real estate, the more content you have on the Internet the more ways there are for people to find you given that you get it listed at the top of the search results. You absolutely want good content before you can think about getting is listed at the top of the search results. Otherwise you could be hurting your brand rather than strengthening it. Here are some great tools I use to create content aside from writing blog posts with wordpress.

• Jing- This software should be in multiple categories because it is such and awesome tool and its FREE!. Jing is a little button that hovers at the top of your screen that allows you to either take a screenshot or shoot a screencast video of anything on your screen and record your voice  for up to 5 minutes. It then allows you to one-click publish it to screencast.com or youtube. It then automatically copies the link or embed code to your clipboard so you can just paste the the link to someone or paste the embed code of your video on a blog. I use this tool everyday to create content or just communicate a message to my team.
• Camtasia Studio – Screen Recording Software I use to create video presentations and record my screen to shoot training videos
• Microsoft Powerpoint – Slideshow Presentation Software I use in conjunction with camtasia studio to create video presentations that I can post online.
• Screenflow for Mac Screen Recording Softare I use on my mac.
• Keynote – Slide show Presentation Software for Mac

Outsourcing

so you can scale the growth of your inbound marketing strategy

I primarily use outsourcing only for repetitive tasks, not creative ones. I want the absolute best content possible to represent my brand. Not that you can’t outsource article writing I just choose not to. Here are the services I use to hire and manage my outsourced and internal staff.

• Odesk – Outsourcing Platform that I use to leverage my time by hiring outsourced contract workers to do my article spinning, manual article submissions and mass directory submissions to push up the rankings of my website and articles in the search results.
• Teamworkpm – Project Management software I could not live without. This is probably the most important piece of software in my toolbox. I can’t say enough about it. It allows me to get the ideas I have out of my head and into an organized to do list that is shared with contractors, full time employees and clients! It allows you to prioritize your actions so you can stay focused and on task. It allows you to collaborate with your contractors and unifies the communication and instructions all in one place so it is very easy to manage a group of people. A must have even if you are a one person operation as it will keep you focused on the objectives you define for your projects.