inbound-marketing

12Inbound Marketingcollaborative. Instead of broadcasting to their users witha megaphone, the top-ranked sites today have created communitieswhere like-minded people can connect with eachother. In order to take full advantage of this collaborativepower, you must rethink your web site. Instead of “megaphone,”think, “hub.”What we want you to do is to change the mode of yourweb site from a one-way sales message to a collaborative,living, breathing hub for your marketplace.It’s Not What You Say—It’s What Others SayAbout YouIf your company is like most others, you put all your Webenergy on your site. Seventy-five percent of your focusshould be on what is happening off your web site concerningyour brand, your industry, and your competitors.Your focus should include creating communities outside ofyour site for people to connect with you and your productsand others within the community. Ultimately, this “outside”focus will drive people back to your site. The model in Figure2.1 is of the Web—each dot is a web site. You want yourweb site to be a large dot that’s connected to many otherweb sites—in other words, a hub.In effect, you want your web site to be more like NewYork City than Wellesley, Massachusetts. NYC has severalmajor highways running through it, three major airports, ahuge bus depot, two major train stations, and so on. Wellesleyhas one highway passing through it, no airport, no busdepot, and no train station. The highways, trains, buses andairplanes to your site are the search engines, links from othersites, and thousands of mentions of your company in the