In Inbound Marketing, Sharing is Caring!

In inbound marketing, I learn that you can’t have this “I want to share my content only – nobody else’s but me!” mentality.

I can tell you the above – because I was someone who is reluctant in sharing others’ resources. I’m thinking too much about losing my link juice, and thinking that linking out and sending my visitors to those external pages will lose me visitors. Yep, I know… it’s a low of online entrepreneurship.

Backscratching was always my preferential method of generating traffic and improving ranking. “I’ll do X if you do Y” was my strategy. Better yet “You do me X but I don’t guarantee I will do Y for you.” Well, that WAS me.

Today, as I learn that focusing on SEO only gave me a roller-coaster ride. When the rank improves, I shout “Yay!” When the rank decreases, I shout “Darn Google!”

I don’t know about you, but I’m fed up with the ups and downs of optimising for the search engines. I am now embracing the concept of Inbound Marketing. HubSpot’s recent guide on doing marketing that people actually love can give you some idea why Inbound Marketing is a trend this 2013.

Sharing is caring!

Inbound marketing, to me, is about sharing what matter for me and I think would also matter for my audience.

If I want to get my content to as many eyeballs as possible, I got to bring along quality resources with me, and present them side by side with my content for everyone can see.

For example, if I want to write about solopreneur I will write about what is being a solopreneur to me and I will share resources that I benefit and my readers would benefit – I will share a list of sites with outstanding solopreneurship resources; I will also share a video on someone who has been there and done that…

Bottom line, I will link out to QUALITY and RELEVANT resources at will. No matter how much link juices I will lose, if there’s 10 links worth sharing, I will do so. If people enjoy my content and appreciate the link, they will somehow get the words out about it – along with maybe a flock of new visitors or link or two. THAT is Inbound Marketing to me.

Takeaway

Today, getting as many inbound links (with your targeted keywords in them!) as possible and keeping outbound links minimal is obsolete. SEO is no longer that simple. Link quality, content quality, reputation, layout and so on – everything is taken into account in ranking your site.

Algorithm changes; Google Panda and Penguin turn SEO world upside down. It’s a curse to many but a blessing to some. To me, although my sites have been hit by either or both updates, algo updates are blessings. This way, I learn that although SEO is important, it’s not that dominant anymore.

I’ve seen sites – particularly blogs – which are getting tons of traffic and generating plenty of revenues with search engine traffic only account for a small portion of their total traffic. Penguin or no Penguin, those blogs thrive.

They share a lot – free ebooks, free tutorials, free guides, free training… cool contests… exclusive offers… authoritative content… tips after tips after tips… people love them and they visit their blogs and bring others along.

THOSE what make Inbound Marketing rocks!

Photo credit: ryancr via photopin cc