Today is the day that the book "Inbound Marketing - Get found using Google, Social Media and Blogs" hits bookstores for sale. 

I have been waiting for this book to become available since I first heard about it several weeks ago. I've already purchased my copy and am eagerly waiting for it to arrive.

According to the book's description on Amazon, "The rules of marketing have changed, and your business can benefit from this change. Inbound Marketing shows you how to get found by more prospects already looking for what you have to sell".

It's a book whose time has come. Indeed, as each day passes more businesses take to the internet to grow their businesses. The winners will be those who embrace Inbound Marketing.  

If you haven't already, I'd suggest you consider picking up your own copy of the book and start implementing the strategies of inbound marketing into your own online marketing plan. Your customers are looking for you.

Every business with an online presence faces the same problem -  How do I get my website found online by my prospects and customers? Simple. Create content. Lots and lots of content. Then, disperse that content to as many places as possible. Here are 7 ways to create content and help you get found online.

1.Create and maintain a Blog

"I'm not doing the SEO thing yet" was a comment from a small business owner on Twitter. He has a website, participates in social media, creates videos but he's not doing the "SEO thing" yet.

As a marketer, his comment baffled me. Isn't it common knowledge that any business online MUST be doing SEO? I guess not.

And this got me thinking: why isn't he doing the SEO thing yet? Is it because he doesn't have the time? Is it because he doesn't know he should? Is it because he thinks he needs an expensive SEO firm to help him?

I concluded it must be at least one of the three if not all of them.

Oh, if only he knew it doesn't have to be that way. If it's because he doesn't have the time to devote to SEO, well, he can hire me to implement the strategies for him. (shameless self-promotion, I know!)

If it's because he doesn't know he should then I understand that too. SEO is a mystery to many people, especially those who aren't marketers. But, here's the thing: if you're a small business owner with little to no employees then you are a marketer. You just don't know it. Or you don't want to admit it, in which case, that's a problem.

Small business owners like me need to do their own marketing because they don't have the budget to hire a marketing team to do it for them. (unless they hire me. More shameless self-promotion) Even then, they must at least know their own marketing strategy if they're going to outsource the implementation. Otherwise, they need an Inbound Marketing Consultant to help them figure it out.

But I digress. SEO is all about getting your website found by your prospects and customers. It's about keywords and links to your website. It's about creating content on your site that your customers want. Yes, it takes time. But, isn't the success of your business worth it? Isn't it about time you started doing the SEO thing? 

You don't need an expensive SEO firm to do it for you. (unless you're a huge fortune 500 conglomerate, which I'm sure you're not if you're reading my blog) You can do SEO all by yourself. It's not hard, but it is time consuming. There's no way around that.

Eventually, the end justifies the means. The hours spent on keyword research, optimizing page content, writing articles and blog posts, rinse and do it again, will result in lead generation and customer acquisition. (if you do it right)

In these early days of internet marketing few business owners really know what's involved. It's a great time to learn how to do it correctly because it will give you the competitive edge. If you don't do it, your competiton will. In fact, they already are. Where does that leave you and your business?

Photo by Danard Vincente 

As an internet marketing virtual assistant who specializes in assisting HubSpot customers I have created this tutorial to help my clients learn how to make simple changes to their HubSpot websites. This is the second in a planned series of "how to" videos.

Transcript:

This is Shari Sultana from Modern Marketing Support. Today we're going inside the HubSpot dashboard to learn how to change our website's color scheme using advanced options.

As an internet marketing virtual assistant who specializes in assisting HubSpot customers I thought it might be helpful to produce a series of video tutorials to help my clients learn how to make simple changes to their HubSpot websites. This is the first in a planned series of "how to" videos.

Transcript:

Hi everyone,

This is Shari Sultana from Modern Marketing Support. Today we're going inside the HubSpot dashboard to learn how to change our website's color scheme.

We've recently changed our logo header and the color scheme we currently have doesn't match our new look. So, we want to change that. 

HubSpot has a couple of different website templates available within their content management system. We're using the Brighton template.

As you can see, right now now our website has purple side panels and a green navigation bar. To make our website coordinate with our new header we need to go into the Settings tab. The Settings tab is over here in the right top corner. Click on that.

Inside the Settings tab you'll find the inner sanctum of your HubSpot website. It's divided into sections and we want the section called Content Management System. We're going to click on Template Configuration. You'll see it says "adjust the colors of your website". Let's click on it.

Inside here there are 2 areas. Once is basic and the other is for more advanced customization. Today we'll just look at the Basic customization and in a second tutorial we'll look at Advanced customization.

Now, there's also a logo/color wizard up at the top here but let's ignore that this time. We'll check that out in another tutorial.

You'll notice that we can adjust the Primary, Secondary and Background colors. Let's go ahead and adjust the background color first. When we do that we'll actually be changing the colors of the side panels. 

Click on color picker and you'll see this color palette appear. We can change our color one of 2 ways. If we don't know the exact color we want we can move this T around and you'll see the color changing in the box.

Or, if you know the hexadecimal number of the color you want then you can add it in this box here. I know the color I want is DAF1F7 so I'm going to enter it here in the box. You'll see it change to the color I want and then we'll click Save.

See how it says "changes saved. view website"? That's great. Let's go see how it looks. Wow. That looks much better. Now, let's go change the navigation bar.

If we want to change the navigation bar we click on Primary color. We'll add the hexadecimal number BFE5EE and click Save. Now, let's go view our changes and see how it looks.

Much better. Now if we wanted to we could also change the color of the font within the navigation bar and we can also change the hover color as well. But those are advanced options and I'll show you how to do that in the next tutorial.

We're so fortunate to have Miguel join us as our internet marketing Intern. Miguel is a marketing student at George Brown College in Toronto, Ontario. He'll graduate in December and then he's planning to eventually start his own marketing business for Professional Athletes.

Until then we're happy to have him assisting our team of inbound marketing virtual assistants. Miguel's first task was to set up the Facebook business page for Modern Marketing Support. He did a fantastic job. Check it out and, if you're so inclined, become a fan. Thanks Miguel!

Last month someone hacked into the account of a Twitter employee and mayhem ensued. For small business owners, it's a great reminder for all of us to periodically change our passwords, use a different password for every account, and use a variety of characters in our passwords. Strong passwords are a great defense.

I know many small business owners who use the same password for all of their online accounts. Even those who do use different passwords aren't using passwords that are easily hack proof. 

Excellent passwords contain at least 8 characters and use a combination of upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers and signs.

Now is the time to change your passwords and ensure they are strong and as hack proof as they can possibly be. It doesn't need to be difficult. You can download Roboform to help you. It's a password manager program that allows you to save up to ten passwords for free. 

As a virtual marketing assistant I have dozens of passwords to remember. I keep them written down and locked away offline and I keep them password protected in Roboform for online use. Roboform makes changing and remembering passwords easy and secure.

The question came up in the HubSpot customer forums today about choosing a blog topic. A fellow HubSpot customer wanted to know how to choose topics to write about. That's a struggle I know all too well.

The fabulous Erin Colbert suggested we look at our keywords in the HubSpot keyword grader and choose the low-hanging fruit to build a blog post around. Thanks for the great idea Erin! 

Here are 5 ways you can increase website traffic:

1. Focus your website content on keywords related to your target market. For better SEO make sure you place your keywords in the relevant places on your page.

2. Put a freebie on your site for visitors to download and give away to others if they wish. Write an ebook or have your virtual assistant help you prepare one if your time is limited.

3. Start a blog and be sure to add to it regularly. Stale blogs bring no traffic.

4. Comment on the blogs of people in your target market. If you leave an intelligent comment with a link to your website then people might follow it to find out more about you. Try to be one of the first commenters.

5.  Promote your website through your participation in social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and forums.  

Do you have a strategy method and tactics for attracting new leads? What is it?

Is it a mulit-faceted approach or singular like putting up a website and hoping the customers will find you?

Here's my strategy and these are my tactics:

Strategy: Inbound marketing methods

Tactics:

1. I have a monthly subscription to HubSpot. I use their software tool because it's the most comprehensive and all encompassing internet marketing tool available. Before HubSpot I spent a year using several SEO tools to patch together the information I get presented to me inside my HubSpot dashboard. The time and money I save NOT using those other tools is worth the cost of my HubSpot account.
2. Blogging on a consistent basis. Ideally everyday but currently once a week. This is one of the most important methods of promoting for a few reasons (albeit not always easy to do) Blogging, when done properly, creates more content for your website, more links for your website, more visitors to your website.
3. Properly structured website with lots of informative content, and optimized for SEO
4. Social networking on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Linked In. (those are my top 3 although there are many more)
5. Create compelling landing pages with killer calls to action. (In the next few weeks I will have a free download available on my site for interested prospects)

Since becoming a leading HubSpot Partner last fall my business has grown by leaps and bounds. In fact, my business has become so successful that it has morphed into a multi-VA business out of necessity.

Finding myself the owner/operator of a multi-VA business has been both rewarding and time consuming. Fortunately my business has been able to gradually evolve into its new self slowly and I have been able to adapt along with it.

When I first realized I needed a project management program I searched the virtual assistant forums for guidance. I tried ClientSpot but it didn't have the functionalities I needed. Eventually I settled on Basecamp and have not been disappointed. I have been using it since December 2008 and it does almost everything I need it to do.

Over the past several months my 2 subcontractors and I have been keeping track of our time separately. Each week they would email me their hours and I would manually input their time and tasks into my own timesheet for submitting to my clients along with the invoice. As my business grew busier this scenario was becoming less time efficient. I needed a collaborative time keeping method and , ideally, something I could integrate with Basecamp.

Hello Freshbooks! This handy tool lets your subcontractors record their time into your Freshbooks account. They must register for their own account but it lets them integrate their time into your Freshbooks account AND invoice you directly from their own Freshbooks account. From my Freshbooks account I can see at a glance how much time my subcontractors are using so that we don't go over budget.

From Freshbooks I can also invoice my clients directly and include the whole team timesheet inside the invoice. This has eliminated the need for me to send one invoice and one timesheet. I can also keep track of all my expenses right inside Freshbooks. Freshbooks fully integrates with Basecamp and there are various time tracking addons available. 

My last hurdle to overcome in my project management streamlining was how to handle the multitude of emails I get from my clients. Copying and pasting my tasks from my email into Basecamp was a lesson in futility. I spent more time than I felt was necessary but there was no other way I could do it. Or was there?

Enter MailManagr ! A google search led me to MailManagr. I found my salvation! I couldn't believe my luck. This program fully integrates with Basecamp and it solved my email dilemma. With MailManagr I can forward my emails, with attachments, directly into Basecamp and assign them and drop them directly into a To-Do, Milestone, or Message. I don't even need to login to Basecamp to do this. 

I would love to have ONE project management suite that lets me do all of the above. If anyone knows of such a thing PLEASE share the name of it. Certainly I would prefer that over having 3 separate tools. However, until I find such a thing I am delighted with my current procedures. I have saved myself time and I don't need to remember to remind my subs to submit their timesheets to me every week. It's all good. :)