Generating Traffic – An Experiment with Inbound Marketing

After the best year of my life travelling around Central and South America, the dream finally came to an end and I found new employment at an exciting American start-up in Dublin.

The company’s vision is closely aligned with my own as well as with my career aspirations.

For anyone who has been reading my early posts and motivation for creating this blog, they will know that I am an aspiring writer and wanted to use this platform to create interesting, compelling content, fun anecdotes and travel stories. Ultimately though, I want to use it as a resource to promote my future e-books and novels in 2015 and to that effect I’m excited by the idea of inbound marketing.

This refers to marketing activities that draw relevant customers to your site or blog as opposed to the traditional outbound style where marketers go out and try to grab your attention (cold calling, telemarketing, TV Ads). There are several vendors in the marketplace that provide the tools to help make your blog/website more compelling by creating timely SEO compatible posts, offering a detailed analysis of who visits your site (what they click on and how to market to them), landing pages which allow whitepaper and e-book downloads and a plethora of other features.

As part of my induction training in the coming weeks, I have been tasked with creating a website built on Hubspot technology to better understand the principles of inbound marketing, and increase website traffic which in turn results in more ‘leads’ or sales of a specific product or service.

I’m not interested in selling a specific product just yet. At the moment, I am focused on the initial stage of the ‘sales cycle’ which is generating more traffic for my blog. Content will still be King.

Instead of reinventing the wheel and creating a brand new website, I’m going to use my own domain (aidanjreid) for this purpose which will hopefully benefit from a more strategic approach.

Hubspot is designed with small to medium sized businesses in mind. Examples could include local Beauticians without a web presence, Proofreading or Business Consulting, Recruitment Companies, Artists trying to get more eyes on their work – essentially any entity that wants more people to find their solution in what can be a crowded marketplace.

A shared trait among those customers are an entrepreneurial streak and interest in building their online brand through blogging and social media.

My ultimate goal is to increase visitors which has plateaued at around 40 visitors / 100 – 150 views daily. I haven’t posted in two weeks but still see a trickle of traffic coming in from the search engines. I probably could have increased this number tenfold by blogging on a daily basis but because it is a hobby and because I don’t think people would be terribly interested in my bowel movements or other inane dull topics people seem to churn out posts about, I’ve consciously focused only on topics which I feel are interesting and thoughtful.

I’m not interested in writing for the sake of it and aim for quality over quantity, usually spending between 2-3 hours on each entry before publishing.

I’d rather have a small band of followers who read my posts rather than thousands of silent bloggers who never contribute. I wrote a little about that here.

I’m going to be ramping up my blogging activity in the coming weeks and months, and have plenty more adventures and travel stories to share. I’m excited about seeing how Hubspot can capture more traffic in that respect and if others find this experiment interesting, I’ll be reporting back on the key metrics for anyone considering taking on an inbound marketing approach.