Apple Christmas Sales Infographic By Promotional Codes

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Not only was I excited that the book was coming out within my prime time as a web designer taking on more inbound marketing responsibilities, but I was one of the chosen people to receive a free copy in return for my ‘blogging review’! Thank you HubSpot!! And a super thank you goes to Rebecca Corliss! (Not only did she help hook me up with my free copy, but due to Amazon having technical difficulties with my email address and the hassle from it, she helped hook me up with 3 additional copies of the book. I passed those copies to my co-workers so we can all be on the same inbound wavelength.)

As I just mentioned this review is long over due, but there is a reason for that. My day job teammates and I have been super busy taking all of the wonderful knowledge found in the Inbound Marketing book and applying it to our company’s websites and soon to be social media portals.

Now with no more introduction needed, my review of the Inbound Marketing book:

Wow! Amazing! Wonderful! Holy Cow! Enlightening! (Insert any and all additional similar expressions.) Brian Halligan & Dharmesh Shah pulled a lot of can-be-intimidating information together and created an excellent resource for today’s marketing department. I was immediately drawn into the book and was able to plow through the book in a matter of a few days (in between all of the great ideas I was manifesting from the book).

Brian & Dharmesh guide you from how to unlearn what you might have learned in an offline MBA program to “break through the noise and connect” with your target audience.

By describing how to turn your website into a large dot on the map with many smaller sites connected to it (a.k.a. a hub) and give it a pulse (RSS distribution and/or social media site connections), Brian & Dharmesh make you analyze the value of the content you have to offer. They also teach you how to create your own remarkable strategy in ‘getting found’ along with suggestions of tracking your progress/reach.

The book is broken into four major sections:

Inbound Marketing: Overview of what this inbound marketing thing is all about.

Get Found by Prospects: Full of suggestions of how to create that remarkable content that your audience will find and wants. It’s done by moving away from fat wallets overpriced traditional marketing to never ending possibilities only you can dream up. There’s even a small section about “How Google’s Brain Works” which is very enlightening of how you may never make that #1 spot, and why that’s okay.

Converting Customer: The art and science of drawing in more visitors to your site and converting those very people into business prospects (leads). Brian and Dharmesh explains which marketing mistakes to avoid and how to nurture your leads through email or other communication channels. This section also teaches how to place a value on/grade a lead.

Make Better Decisions: Take away #1, Run! Don’t walk. Great educational tips of how to choose or become a team member who falls into the framework known as D(igital Citizen) + A(nalytical chops) + (web) R(each) + C(ontent creators).

It also includes “Tips from the Trenches for Startups” section at the back of the book.

Overall this book has the You Can Do It! attitude. After reading it you’ll be inspired to get outbound of your comfort zone and on top of the inbound marketing wave of the future. I know I was and still am inspired every time I skim back through the book.

I look forward to reading your own review of this book when you find that quiet moment within your exciting newly created inbound marketing plan.

Thank you for joining the arena of convenient latte, mocha and blended coffee drinks. When the drinks are made right, they are delicious and perfectly priced for today’s wallet.

When you entered this arena, I as a life-long customer noticed that you gave your milkshakes some new clothing, too. No longer contained in that white, red and yellow paper cup with a flat plastic lid and straw sticking out of it, you put the milkshakes in a clear plastic cup and put a dome lid on top. It’s because you wanted to help keep costs down, wasn’t it? Treat all of the milk-based products (blended coffees and milkshakes) as if they were one happy family. I appreciate those efforts. In the long run it keeps environmental waste minimized and your costs reasonable.

I appreciate how you as a business have kept up with all of the eating trends of this nation (and world), but I think you overlooked something, and/or need to make up your mind. Specifically in southeastern Wisconsin.

When I get a craving for a serious sugar rush, and my mouth waters for your shakes, I stop by one of your convenient locations and order one. As I go through the drive-thru, I am very happy you broke from the “Would you like fries with that?” tradition. However, you need to start a new tradition.

When you first came out the new line of coffees and updated the clothes line for your milkshakes, you started to fill that dome lid full of whip cream and a put cherry on top. I quickly learned to specifically ask for no whip or cherry whenever I ordered your milkshakes. Not only am I disgusted with an overload of whip cream on top of a milk based product, I’m allergic to those cherries!

Over time, some of the regional locations stopped putting these two additions on top of my milkshake. A huge thank you to whomever decided that! I no longer needed to ask for their removal, but I recently found out that not all locations share this decision. When I went through a drive-thru and ordered one chocolate milkshake for my passenger and one vanilla shake for myself, both my passenger and I were disappointed when received our milkshakes.

We could not enjoy your yummy, sugar packed shakes on the way home. We both would have to wait to get home so we could scoop out the whip cream & cherry and enjoy the little bit of milkshake left behind.

And, no I was not going to ask for the items to be removed. The team associate already walked away from the window. Convenience just turned into inconvenience.

This is where your new tradition comes into play:
When someone orders a milkshake, please have your associates ask, “Would you like whip cream and a cherry with that?”

This site’s article pages are a great example of web design. The logo is prominently located in the upper left corner. It’s colors are progressive and memorable. The menu navigation is conveniently at the top of the page. The main header’s font is at a balanced size and weight, and in a distinctive blue hue. The page itself is a large, centered, white column containing all of it’s information on a blue striped background. What I take away from this design helps me associate Search Engine Land’s branding as blue and white with a splash of progressive green.

This branding impression can be very important because there are visitors who browse the internet with multiple windows (or tabs) at open at once. I admit I am one of these types, and I observe others who do the same. When these multiple viewing panes are open and one of them accidentally gets closed, that branding impression can help the visitor remember what was just closed.

Case in point:
Last night, I was shutting down my computer for the night. I had multiple browser windows open with multiple tabs open in each. My browser is set to remember all of the tabs’ URLs of the last instance of the browser window open. I accidentally closed one browser window which had a webpage article I did not finish reading from earlier in the day. I looked in my task bar and realized I still had one more browser instance running.

Okay, quick. Think of which website had that article. I remember seeing white and blue. I believe it was Search Engine Land & the article was a recent post. I navigate to my RSS feeds and see if it was still listed. No it was not. It was obviously not that recent. So I just went to the homepage; maybe it’s listed there. It wasn’t; the morning posts were being outdated by the afternoon posts. Okay — let’s use the site’s search: flying solo SEO. Found it!

Now I could have used my browser’s web history tools to find it, but I didn’t want to launch those. I was leaving for the night. I want that immediate satisfaction, like many web users. It was because of the great aesthetic design of Search Engine Land & branding identity I was able retrace my steps in less than a few clicks.

Excellent work Search Engine Land!