Despite the many business benefits of blogging , it remains an underutilized tactic. 500 fastest-growing companies and just 35% of the Fortune 100 enterprises maintain blogs. While blog adoption is actually slightly higher among small to midsized businesses (SMBs), roughly half are still not taking advantage of this medium. Here are six compelling reasons for organizations of all sizes to make blogging the center of their social media and content marketing efforts. And presuming that blog is hosted on your company domain (e.g. Search engine optimization (SEO). MORE >>

'HubSpot last week released its 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report,  this year weighing in at a massive 175 pages. Given the report’s heft, no blog post (of any reasonable length) could it justice as a summary, but here are a sampling of the highlights. To get the full story, download the HubSpot report here. ” • 82% of marketers who blog see positive ROI for their inbound marketing. At HubSpot, we see the distinguishing factor as how people are using a specific channel more than the definition of the channel itself.” MORE >>

Editor’s Note (Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers was the featured guest on Hubspot TV some time ago. The B2B demand generation and global marketing firm Find New Customers wishes to congratulate Hubspot on this important new capability. Ifbyphone’s LeadResponder for HubSpot addresses the gap between web inquiries and sales follow-up, giving marketers the ability to instantly deliver inbound web leads to sales representatives as a phone call. As an add-on to the HubSpot Marketplace, Ifbyphone LeadResponder for Hubspot is integrated seamlessly into customer accounts. MORE >>

Back on September 20, I posted various tips from the Inbound Marketing Summit and HubSpot User Group. Naturally, the conference also included public and private discussions of HubSpot itself, but I thought those were best shared in a separate post. The conference yielded a clear picture of HubSpot’s business strategy for the coming year. HubSpot originally focused on “top of funnel” or “inbound” marketing, which boils down to helping marketers to attract Web traffic. HubSpot also plans to automate functions that are simply too hard for most marketers to do manually. MORE >>

Many of the same principles apply to optimizing a blog for search as for optimizing a business website : use keywords in the body copy, post titles, subheadings, permalink URL, image alt tags and meta tags. But a blog also presents additional opportunities for search optimization beyond those that apply to standard websites (which is why Google loves blogs ). Take advantage of these six techniques to help get your blog ranked highly in relevant searches, and increase your overall web presence. Syndication and blog directories. Fresh content. Social media. MORE >>