Once upon a time there was a small business that started blogging in hopes to increase its website traffic. After spending many hours, months, and even years of consistent blogging, the business grew. The blog turned into a great marketing tool for the business. It became a marketing machine, generating leads, setting the small business apart as an industry leader.  

The following is a guest post from Jon Hainstock, the co-founder of ZoomShift, employee scheduling software made simple. Connect with Jon on Twitter @jonhainstock.

Is your website attracting visitors but not converting them into leads? Not sure where you’re going wrong? You may need to update your conversion process. And your website may need to be made more actionable to help guide your visitors through the buying cycle.

The Inbound Milwaukee User Group had another meet up with a ton of great marketing takeaways. This time, Jen Lopez, Director of Community at SEOmoz, joined us to walk through the steps to build a stronger inbound marketing strategy by adding an online community.

“Social media creates kinship between companies and customers, and kinship equals purchase intent. - Jay Baer 

Today HubSpot released it's fifth edition of the State of Inbound Marketing Report. This 2013 edition is 164 pages jammed with stats, key insights and takeaways on inbound tactics and strategy that any marketer or business should review. This report is the most comprehensive review of the inbound industry available, with data analysis from over 3,300 participants from 128 different countries, including CEOs, agencies, and marketers.

This is a guest post by Greg Elwell of B2B Inbound, a content marketing agency. Recently, Greg produced a podcast with Brody Dorland who co-founded DivvyHQ, the spreadsheet-free editorial calendar application. Here he shares some additional perspectives for using a tool like DivvyHQ.

Segmenting and managing your contacts is an essential part of email marketing. You wouldn’t want to send a potential customer an email about something unrelated to his or her industry or job function – doing so wouldn’t help you obtain leads or grow your contacts. Most likely, you would lose contacts because your audience won’t find value in your message and unsubscribe.

Do you have an overwhelmingly long list of all your email contacts? Do these contacts receive every single email you send out? You know you should go through the list and segment them into different buyer personas and categories, but don’t have the time. Managing your contacts is important for your business, and can even help bring in new leads and sales. Here are a few reasons why you must manage your contacts:

Your website is an essential marketing tool for your business. For this reason, your website performance should be continually measured, analyzed and updated.