Hi, I'm Hari. I'm a proud inbound marketer.
Have you ever been spam emailed or cold-called by a marketer, trying to sell you his new company’s new product or sign you up for his company’s new service? Of course-- it’s a familiar experience for all of us (that’s why we have a junk email section and a “block caller” phone capability).
But that form of traditional "outbound" marketing is getting outdated. It’s not very effective, and it gets on the nerves of the customer. The new form of marketing is known as inbound marketing-- that is, getting the customers to come to you willingly rather than getting in their faces with your new product. Inbound marketers help customers rather than annoy them. (Yazamo works in the field of digital inbound marketing.)
The primary purpose of my work is to drive traffic to our website and help increase our sales. The product which Yazamo currently markets and sells is LeadQuizzes, a software which we recently launched to help small to mid-sized businesses efficiently generate leads and boost sales. Our clients can come in and build their own quizzes, which are then marketed to the public via social media advertisements. Here’s what the software looks like on the inside.
During the first week of my project I worked with my supervisor to outline general goals for myself, which we broke down into three major categories:
- Revamp the Yazamo/LeadQuizzes blog (SEO included)
- Work on PR to increase our exposure and drive traffic to our website
- Start guest blogging and promote our content
I started working with Yazamo about a year ago, so I already have an adequate understanding of how things work. In order to achieve a deeper understanding of each aspect of the company which helps us function day-to-day, however, I’m going through detailed training in a few core areas-- beginning with Facebook Ad Management.
I’ve started working toward all three of my goals in the past week, but the primary focus has been on the first two. We’ve been following Neil Patel’s blog challenge over the past few months, in which he aims to generate $100k in monthly revenue within the first year of starting a new blog from scratch. Neil’s challenge has been going for ten months now, and he’s very close to meeting his goal. Hopefully we’ll be able to see similar results with the Yazamo blog.
In order to generate blog traffic, two factors are key: consistency and optimization. This means posting as many times as possible, preferably 5-7 times per week. And this is no easy task when each article is targeted to be 1500+ words (that’s the optimal length for shareability and search rankings). If you don’t believe me, take a look at SerpIQ’s research-based chart below.
In order to stay on top of the consistency area, we may look to hire additional writers to help us out with the content creation process. I’m going to be the one managing, optimizing, promoting, and writing whenever possible for the blog. I’ll go into more detail on the SEO process in a later post.
On the PR side, I’m trying to get Yazamo and LeadQuizzes as much publicity as possible, and this role goes more into sales than marketing. I’ve started tracking down journalists and reporters, sending out emails pitching potential stories about our company. We’ll wait to see the results roll in, but I’m already learning a lot. For example, here’s a critical tip from Cameron Herald’s book Double Double: don’t contact editors. They’re usually the ones waiting to reject new stories each morning, whereas writers and producers are better targets.
I’m not going to start guest blogging for other business sites or promoting our content until I can fully launch the blog and get it rolling. In the meantime, I’ll continue with the PR work and start on the Facebook Ads course. The company blog will take some patience, however, as SEO and blogging usually only provide results in the long game.
Do you think I’ll be able to start bringing in traffic and generating sales for the company? What’s your impression of marketing as a whole? Let me know in the comment section below.
