Running a marathon isn't easy, it's hard, very hard. It takes months of hard work, a decent diet and plenty of determination. But this is an inbound marketing blog so why am I even talking about running a marathon? Because the similarities are remarkable.

With the New Year looming, it is a very good time to take stock and start planning your work and your budget for the coming 12 months. Having a written marketing plan, which is picked up and used, and updated regularly, is vital if your business is spending money on any marketing activities. Without knowing where you are trying to go you won't know if you've got there!

The term inbound marketing is not yet widely used here in the UK. For that matter, neither is the term outbound marketing. However, the differences are not difficult to understand and this short post explains them in very simple language.

Hands up if you've ever referred to marketing as the "fluffy" stuff or the "airy fairy" part of business. Maybe once upon a time you might have been partially right, but not now, and especially not when it comes to inbound marketing.

Several times a week we get asked, "How much per month does SEO cost?". Despite providing lots of content (blogs, videos etc) educating people about SEO, it seems the message is not getting through. So, the time has come for some simple no-nonsense advice about what SEO costs.

In a fast-moving world, it's understandable that businesses who put some energy into improving their organic search results want to see dramatic improvements, quickly. The problem is, improvements are usually incremental and require hard work and persistence. Impatience leads to taking shortcuts and often brings poor results. You simply have to accept it's a long game and here's why.

Web based lead generation is a confusing subject for many, but in this plain English, bite-sized article, we'll pare it right down to THREE simple activities. If you follow these three steps, to the letter, you'll generate enquiries from your website, guaranteed.

We use and create lots of web based software solutions. Sometimes it's something as simple as our lead generation calculator, sometimes it's a lot more complex. We also work with our clients to develop web-based applications to help them achieve a business goal such as giving their customers access to data. If you're not sure what a web application is, think of your on-line banking, that's a web app. Right now we've got several web applications in development.

There are usually two choices when it comes to software development, custom or off the shelf, and this short article considers the merits and costs of each.

The enquiries we get on a daily basis thanks to our targeted lead generation activities fall into one of a few categories, the most common being denial, borderlining on anger. The anger is about the lack of search engine rankings and traffic being generated and it usually goes something like this.

It's that time of year again. The time when, instead of putting the kettle on to avoid the ads, we are actively searching for them, sharing them and talking about them. They stop being an interruption to the main event, and become the main event in themselves.

A recent enquiry we received via our website went something like this, "If you get me leads I'll be able to pay you to get me leads". In other words, they had a website that didn't do any effective lead generation, it didn't generate enquiries.

No rankings in Google™, no traffic, no enquiries, no leads. This, in turn, meant they had no money to invest in search engine optimisation (SEO) and Inbound Marketing, activity that brings customers to you instead of you going to them. If this sounds familiar, then you're almost certainly not ready to hire an agency to help you.

According to the HubSpot State of Inbound Report 2016, the top marketing challenge is generating traffic and leads, with 65% of companies putting this challenge well above other common issues like securing budget, managing websites and hiring talent.

Lots of blog posts, including ours, are quick to tell you what you're doing wrong with your website management and overall web strategy. But you know what, if you're getting any traffic from Google, no matter how little, and it's converting into customers, no matter how few,  you're doing a good job, well done. Getting this stuff right is bloody hard work!

In a previous blog we spoke about how to interrogate your competitors websites using SEM Rush. The video below develops that theme using Seed Keywords, SEM Rush and, of course, Google™.

While we all know that social media is a vital part of your content marketing tool kit, it can be easy to get carried away and rush off in the wrong direction, spending large amounts of time and effort doing the wrong things on the wrong platforms.