Business Growth Blog

One of the most critical elements that can impact the effectiveness of your ebook is its visual representation. If it's formatted poorly and looks unprofessionally prepared, it makes you look poor and unprofessional.

The old saying "you can't judge a book by it's cover" may be true, but the reality is that great covers and titles capture people's attention and makes them want to download your ebook.

Investing time and resources in creating in a good graphical representation of your content is critical.

Search engine optimization (SEO) and organic search refers to website visitors that come from doing Google searches (or Bing, Yahoo, etc) to find answers to their questions.

Once they are on the website, you have an opportunity to engage them with content offers they can download by filling out a form on special web pages called landing pages. Once web visitors do that, they become a lead that you can begin nurturing through the sales process.

Using SEO best practices, we were able to not only increase the amount of traffic from organic search for this client, but also quadruple the number of leads generated from this web traffic source in just 8 months.

I started blogging as my main business growth strategy in January of 2014. On average, I've spent approximately 40 hours per month writing articles, email marketing, and promoting on social media.

I know what most of you are thinking: "There's no way I could spend that amount of time doing that!" But here's the deal – it's a trade off.

How many hours have you spent cold calling, trying to get appointments, in meetings, and trying to convince people to buy from you?

I've spent 0 hours cold calling. I don't do any kind of paid advertisements, trade shows, direct mailings, or other types of "traditional" marketing. And yet, I've generated the exact right number of leads to achieve a steady increase in revenue.

Salespeople are on the front lines interacting with prospects and customers all day long. They should be driving what content marketing creates for lead generation. I recently did just that and generated about 70 sales leads in one month. Here's an example of how I did that:

Content Idea Generated Through Sales

One of my customers recently asked me if I had a blog template or some resources to help him start writing articles. I do have a solid process for that of course, but it wasn't a resource I made available online. I have a ton of articles on my website about blogging as well, but none of them are the actual "process".

Does SEO really matter that much? It sure does. Take a look at the results my clients have been able to achieve by engaging in consistent inbound marketing (blogging, landing pages, email marketing, social media, content creation, etc.).

This is the monthly marketing report for my 3rd month of consistent inbound marketing activities for Moon Marketing.

My biggest take away this month is that I need to focus more on some of my tracking methods.

For example, I tracked my prospecting and social media hours differently in March than I did in February, so now I can’t compare the numbers effectively. Oops!

Analyzing your results is a critical exercise for many reasons. Not only does it tell you how you’re progressing toward your goals, it develops critical thinking about your processes and how to improve.

Last summer I decided to take my business to the next level and do for myself what I do for my clients. I spent a lot of time creating my website, and by January 2014 was ready to start marketing.

I had a really good start in January (view the report), and February has seen even greater gains.

Read on to find out what kind of results I got from my efforts so far.

As an inbound marketer, I know that blogging is a critical part of creating a strong online presence and generating leads.

But you know the old saying: "You can tell a cobbler by his shoes." For too long I focused on my clients' inbound marketing strategies and let mine fall to the wayside.

I recently decided to take my business to the next level and make my inbound strategy as important as my clients.

Read on to learn what I did to start a blog and the results I achieved after the first month.

I was recently checking the results for a marketing campaign we did for a client, and when I saw the landing page conversion rate I was very happy! It was our highest conversion rate yet.

Here’s how we achieved a landing page conversion rate of 75%:

eBook Creation

My client had an ebook that needed updating. It had old branding colors and fonts, and the content itself needed a refresh. The ebook was getting played out - the conversion rate of people who downloaded it dropped 20 points in the last 12 months.

Here’s what we did:

Our client, Jill Konrath, author of two best-selling sales books, Selling to Big Companies and SNAP Selling, started a LinkedIn group called Fresh Sales Strategies back in August of 2008.

Her goal was to develop a community for salespeople to come together to share fresh ideas about what works in today’s selling environment.

When Moon Marketing joined forces with Jill to implement social media strategies in August of 2012, she had about 2500 group members. Not too bad! As part of our strategy development, we evaluated the return on investment in spending time developing an even stronger LinkedIn group. Here is what we discovered: