In light of the recent exposure of inbound marketing, I thought that maybe it was time to sip the Kool-Aid. I have never thought deeply about inbound and outbound marketing. I understand the principles, but I have usually just processed them and moved forward with the understanding that there is good and bad marketing. I’d like to be a part of good marketing and apparently, I’m not alone.

As visualized below, inbound marketing is the term given to the process of diversifying from where your web traffic originates.

Hubspot recently attracted some attention because of a $32 million investment from Google Ventures, Salesforce.com and Sequioa. While the details and motivations behind the investment are very interesting, the fact it happened is the point on which I would like to focus. This method of marketing has been around, unmonitored for a long time. For years, SEO gun-slingers have been making claims of fast ranking pages, and techniques to “make you # 1.” Without a clear understanding of how these rankings can be achieved, many business owners not familiar with digital marketing have been skeptical of inbound tactics. In the diagram below, I’d relate this stage the “chasm.” Many who are skeptical have not been given proper information on how these techniques are measured. But now that Google has joined the game, essentially lending legitimacy to the process, things are going to change.

As this kind of marketing evolves to the masses, it is important to understand how all of these types of marketing integrate with one another to build inherent synergies. How influential that synergy will be is the next question.

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