Halligan Brian - Inbound marketing: get found using Google, social media, and blogs

Halligan and Shah are on the frontlines of discovering and systemizing marketing methods that will be the standard soon enough. Jump the line and learn about inbound marketing today. This book is the beginning.

Chris Brogan
Author of The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth

You don't need a degree from MIT to figure out inbound marketing. This book makes it simple and approachable.

Ed Roberts
Founder and Chair,
MIT Entrepreneurship Center

As Inbound Marketing so eloquently explains, there's no black magic to successfully attracting customers via the web. Read this book, apply its lessons. It works.

Rand Fishkin
Moz

If you've been looking for a trustworthy primer on getting found online, here's a great place to start. Buy one for your clueless colleague too.

Seth Godin
Author of Meatball Sundae

I wish I'd had a book like Inbound Marketing when I first started out online. This is the roadmap every small business needs for online marketing success today.

Anita Campbell
Editor in Chief, SmallBizTrends.com

If you have more money than brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing by reading this book.

Guy Kawasaki
Cofounder of Alltop, and author of Reality Check

Cover image: iStock.com/David Marchal/istockphoto

Cover design: Wiley

Copyright 2014 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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ISBN 978-1-118-89665-5 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-118-89659-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-89670-9 (ebk)

We're living a revolution!

We're living an ongoing revolution in the way people communicate. How did a relatively unknown, young, single-term black senator with funny ears and a funnier name get elected President of the United States, not once but twice? Simple: He and his team understood the revolution and harnessed the power of the web to communicate effectively with the masses. They built an online following of tens of millions and raised half a billion dollars, much of it from small donations on the web.

We're living a revolution in the way people find products and choose companies to do business with. These days, practically everyone turns to the web first when researching anythingfrom the best baby stroller to buy to which corporate accounting firm to hire for your business. We start at Google or another search engine and we tap our online network of friends, family members, and colleagues via online tools like e-mail, instant messaging, Skype, Facebook, and Twitter.

We're living a revolution where the companies that attract our attention are not the ones with big budgets and glitzy TV ads. Now we pay attention to the ones with great web content, like Quark Expeditions, a polar travel outfitter that uses content people find via search engine to fill expedition ships while the competition relies on expensive advertising and direct mail. When I wanted to travel to Antarctica, I found Quark Expeditions online and booked my journey.

Clearly, a great web presence is critical for any business. Inbound marketing is at the forefront of the revolution.

And with revolution comes liberation!

We're liberated from the tyranny of marketing effectiveness being determined by the size of our wallets. Today, anyone with a story to tell can command an audienceand customerson the web. Your potential customers are looking for products and services like yours right now, today, this minute.

We're liberated from the tyranny of having to interrupt people's daily lives to try to market to them. Rather than grasping for buyers' attention with expensive ad campaigns, now we can publish engaging and useful information on the web and deliver it exactly when people are interested. People land on our virtual doorstep. This is a dream come true!

We're liberated from the tyranny of always relying on mainstream media to get our information into the marketplace. Now we can tell our story directly. And the best part is that when you tell the story well, you'll get found by people who are eager to do business with you.

Inbound marketing is about getting found online, through search engines and on social networking sites that billions of people use to find answers each day.

We've come a long way since the first edition of Inbound Marketing was released in 2009. You'll read about updated strategies for success in these pages. The tools of inbound marketing are constantly evolving, and new ways to communicate have been launched such as Instagram, Foursquare, and Google+. Consider these remarkable stats: In 2009, Twitter had 18 million users, and now it has 241 million; Facebook has grown during the same time from 150 million mostly student users to 1.3 billion people around the world. Mobile has exploded in importance with 6.8 billion mobile phone subscriptions on a planet of 7 billion people! It's never been easier to reach buyers on the web.

While the strategies of inbound marketing are similar to those in the first edition of this book, Brian and Dharmesh have completely updated the tactics for our new environment.

Oh, and one more thing that's gotten better in the past five years: Marketing is more fun than ever! When was the last time you got excited about buying yet another contact list of people you could interrupt? Never, right? Creating content and engaging with buyers on social networks is empowering. Inbound marketing is fun, and with it comes a more rewarding way to live.