Key takeaways from “Inbound Marketing” |

In review today is “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs” by Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan.

I am pretty passionate about inbound marketing as a new age concept of marketing that is non-intrusive and relies on creativity. In my view inbound marketing is all about planting seeds.

Summary

As much as I was eager to read the book, I soon became very disappointed. The book seems to be geared towards beginners and if you are at all familiar with concept of blogs and SEO, you will not find anything new or worth reading.

However I think the book fails talking to newbies as well. It uses a mix of very simple language “Many web pages also include images.” (I kid you not, that is the actual sentence from the book) with recommendation of complex actions like when you are done writing your blog post share it on Twitter and Digg (to whom, your zero followers?).

Ultimately the book most feels like an early attempt to build more awareness about the concept, so the authors can profit from the expanding market (both commercially involved). Many references to their product throughout the book support this.

Key takeaway #1

Inbound marketing is the future of marketing. However you don’t need to read this book to understand it, this slideshare will probably explain it as effectively.

Key takeaway #2

There is a great quote mentioned in the book

“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.” – Benjamin Franklin

which could as well be its key takeaway.

This implies being exceptional at what you do, and in the world of inbound marketing it means thinking out of the box. Blogging and SEO are two things everybody does nowadays and it’s getting saturated. We as content consumers are building “numbered list post” (you know the “Top xx reasons you should do that” kind) blindness like we built banner blindness. Inbound marketing today is about creativity and the ability to think long-term by planting seeds across the Internet (and offline) that will eventually grow to be great fruitful trees.