Deepak Kanakaraju

Inbound marketing and inside sales are great ways to keep the cash register ringing even when you don’t have field sales people and a huge marketing budget. But what if you do not have a blog to start with? Where would you generate leads from? Starting a blog from scratch, publishing content and getting inbound traffic takes years to master.

If you have a sizable marketing budget, you can buy a well established website, portal or a blog that has your target audience as followers. You can redirect the traffic from the blog to your sales funnel, offer something of value and convert them into your customers.

If you are operating on a limited budget, the only way to get a serious audience into your list is to tap into the audience of existing blog and list owners. This can be done with solo ads on email lists or by promoting your product or service at a high affiliate commission. 

Read moreHow to do Inbound Marketing if You Don’t Have a Blog to Start With

Marketing in one perspective is just communication – Communicating the availability and features of a product or service to potential customers. We encounter marketing messages every day. When you think about it, you would realize that most of the marketing messages are pushed to you and not requested by you. This is also termed as interruption marketing. TV ads, Newspaper Ads, Out door advertising, spam mail and so on are interruption marketing messages trying to get our attention while we carry on with our day.

For many companies this model works just fine. They out-spend the competition with the ads, they generate more sales and revenues and the cycle goes on. In certain cases, promotion of a product or service is not possible with the above method. A start up company who have come up with a new product or service do not have the marketing budget to out-spend the competition. Also the conversion rate on such marketing messages is extremely low because they are un-targeted. The marketing messages reaches a whole bunch of people who are not interested in the product or service.

Read moreWhat is Permission Marketing and How to Execute it Effectively

As consumers spend more time using the internet and less time with other channels – advertisers are also forced to follow this trend. The ads have to be there where the eyeballs are. Unfortunately, digital marketing is not as simple and straight forward as traditional marketing.

Digital marketing is best done in-house and cannot be outsourced to a digital marketing agency for various practical reasons. This is the reason that digital marketing experts are sought after all over the world right now and the demand for such candidates will only go up in the future.

If you have a marketing background and want to become a digital marketing expert; you may be wondering which is the best way to go about it. There are several courses on digital marketing which are being offered as workshops, online courses and one-on-one coaching programs.

Read moreHow to Become a Self Made Digital Marketing Expert

It is a known fact that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. One of the main advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing is the power to measure and assign a numerical value on each step of the process…

This blessing is also a curse in disguise because we may end up measuring 50 different types of digital marketing metrics where most of them really don’t matter that much. (Example: Number of Facebook likes on a blog post!). Such metrics are aptly named as vanity metrics because the rise in numbers may be exciting but it may not lead to real growth in sales and revenue. As digital marketers we need to focus on metrics that matter.

With experience and maturity we can learn not to get excited about vanity metrics. For example, a YouTube video going viral and hitting a million views is also a vanity metric. We may feel like celebrating that the video has got a million views but in many cases viral videos have a history of having no impact on the short term or long term revenue.

Read moreTop 7 Digital Marketing Metrics Worth Losing Your Sleep Over