Top 5 Effective Inbound Marketing Techniques

More and more companies are realizing that inexpensive inbound marketing campaigns can be just as successful, if not more so, than more traditional million dollar ad campaigns. Thanks to Google, Facebook, Twitter and many other popular search engines and social networking sites, consumers that are already interested in your company, brand, product or service can easily find you, which can translate into tons of high quality leads.

Best of all, there are many different ways to take advantage of the power of inbound marketing, and (SEO) efforts. Here are the top 5 techniques:

1) Web content. Inbound marketing relies on high quality content that is interesting to your target audience. Whether it's an article, a blog post, video or other media, simply publishing this content online will help to draw your audience to your site once the search engines discover it.

2) Email newsletters. Email contacts are worth their weight in gold when properly utilized, because it gives your business a direct line of communication with your target audience, allowing you to deliver informative content, special deals and other information whenever you want. And contrary to popular belief, gaining subscribers isn't that difficult. If your company publishes a high quality, informative newsletters then you will attract subscribers thanks to word of mouth alone.

3) E-books and special reports. People love free stuff, which is why one of the most effective inbound marketing techniques is to distribute e-books and special reports that contain valuable information for your target audience. These can be given away in exchange for signing up for your email newsletter, or to further explain your products and services. Best of all, you can embed active links in these e-books and special reports, so that when your audience shares them, your website traffic increases without any effort on your part.

4) Video. Gone are the days when websites were static, bland and boring. Videos and video sharing sites like YouTube allow you to quickly grab a visitor's attention with exciting product or information videos. Best of all, if your video really strikes a chord with your audience, it can lead to an avalanche of free traffic.

5) Social networking. Just like email newsletters, social networks give your business a way to directly reach your audience and that means they should play a vital role in any Inbound Marketing campaign. This is more important than ever because consumers are increasingly demanding more transparency when it comes to the companies they choose to do business with. If your business endears itself to your audience by actively engaging with the community on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Digg, then new customers will naturally flock to your profile, leading to increased website traffic, leads and sales.