The popularity of inbound marketing has been increasing dramatically in recent years, but 2013 is poised to be its biggest year yet. By the time the year is over, it may well be considered the year of inbound marketing. If you haven't incorporated inbound marketing into your strategy at this point, you're already falling behind the competition. By understanding the benefits of this type of marketing, you'll get the motivation you need to put into practice.

If you've held off on adding a blog to your website because you're not convinced that it's worth your time, you need to think again. Maintaining a blog requires a minimal amount of effort, and the payoff can be huge. At first glance, the connection between publishing a blog and achieving online marketing success may not be obvious. However, maintaining an active blog can increase website traffic and positively impact your online endeavours in a number of surprising ways. Before delving into the best examples, a word of caution: You need to be persistent. These benefits aren't going to materialize overnight.

In case you haven't been around Facebook the past month, they switched all of their Pages over to the Timeline layout last week, same as you're used to with your personal profile. As of March 30, all of Facebook's 845 million users have had to climb on board with these new changes. Great news for you, Facebook has amped up their presentation with some pretty kick-ass features. What's this mean to you as a business owner or marketing professional?

The inbound marketing process is about attracting targeted prospects into your business. There are some big advantages to using inbound marketing in your business. First, inbound marketing is content driven. That means you need to be producing remarkable content that your target customer is looking for. Your content needs to educate, entertain and engage them. A by-product of content marketing is that you begin to establish yourself as a trusted authority in your market. Being the trusted authority helps you overcome many of the typical objections you're used to dealing with, such as price and trust issues.

Traditional Marketing Sucks The age-old marketing model isn't working anymore. Traditional marketing was all about how "reach" and "frequency" were the keys to success. This "outbound marketing" is interruption-based and largely focused on methods such as cold calls, print ads, direct mail, attending tradeshows, etc. The idea behind outbound techniques is to tell as many people as possible as many times as possible about your products and services and they would eventually buy from you; to get in front of cold leads and warm them up to the point where they would try your product or service.