December 15, 2009 by Maya Smart
Like many small business owners, I’ve had an online presence for years — featuring my products, services and biography on brochure sites. Visitors can read promotional copy and click through my portfolio. But with 2010 almost upon us, I decided that it was long past time for me to embrace the 21st century and make my sites more informative and interactive.
I knew I was missing an opportunity to reach a wider audience online and convert them into paying customers, but I balked at the amount of time and energy it would take to top search engine results pages, get linked to from blogs and create buzz on social networking sites. I couldn’t afford to spend hours a day marketing my business online or to pay someone else to do it. So I’m experimenting with HubSpot, an inbound marketing system, on one of my websites, WritingCoach.com.
HubSpot delivers the most value to search engine optimization beginners. Tech savvy readers will observe that one could cobble together a bunch of apps and programs to approximate most of HubSpot’s offerings for free or close to it. But the beauty of HubSpot for online marketing newbies is that it offers a system that puts it all together for you and makes implementation foolproof.
So far I’ve found that it takes the guesswork out of search engine optimization and makes it easy to start building a stronger online brand in just an hour a day. My investment so far includes $500 for HubSpot’s mandatory quick-start program, a $250 monthly fee and $10/page for migration from WordPress to HubSpot’s content management system.
HubSpot’s medium and large business products, which allow you to stay on your existing content management platform, cost $9,000 and $12,000 a year, respectively. And all of its programs are easy to cancel. There are no long-term contracts, and HubSpot even provides a video to show you how to migrate off of the system.
For the money, it gives small businesses a stable content management system, blog integration, search engine optimization tools and trackers, blog and social media tools, lead tracking, a social media dashboard, marketing analytics and more. It also provides loads of instructions, technical support, webinars and inbound marketing coaching so even technophobes can have the confidence to implement the strategies it advocates.
Its step-by-step, jargon-free advice for creating, optimizing and promoting site content; converting site visitors into customers; and analyzing site data to refine your strategy is worth the price of admission in my estimate. But the company goes further and gives you two things that will seal the deal for many business owners: HubFeed and an inbound marketing consultant.
HubFeed, the first page you see when you log into your account, offers up a customized list of tasks to tackle each day. My HubFeed suggests specific articles in the blogosphere and on social media sites that I should comment on to raise my profile among key audiences. It alerts me to new leads and inbound links to my site, tells me when my keyword, website and blog traffic rankings rise or fall, and recommends site pages that I should optimize to attract more visitors.
My HubSpot inbound marketing consultant gives the robust technology a human touch. In weekly, 30-minute sessions, she reviews the work I’ve done, offers suggestions for getting more out of the technology, critiques landing pages and blog posts and answers my questions. These consultations are offered as a part of HubSpot’s mandatory quick-start program. After the initial eight sessions, users may opt to purchase more for $50/hour.
Moreover, pretty much every related service you might need to implement your HubSpot strategy can be purchased through the site. HubSpot experts and partners can provide graphic design and video production and even market for you for a price.
Maya Smart is a Richmond-based freelance writer.
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