For years companies have attempted to "buy, beg or borrow" their way into peoples minds. They used paid advertisements, coupons and commissioned sales people to sell their products to consumers who might not even be interested. The internet has helped usher in the concept of inbound marketing. This style focuses on businesses getting found by the customers, by providing helpful content on their product or services and showing up on the search engines. You can not deny the advantages . Inbound marketing targets your key audience, is not interruption based and it has a viral opportunity.

Traditional marketing usually involves directing ads to a large amount of people and hoping that some are interested. This is where inbound marketing excels. Every customer that finds you through the search engines or one of your blog posts is someone interested in your product or service. They wouldn't be searching for the information if they weren't. So now instead of hoping your ads are reaching interested eyes, you focus on creating a hub of information that can easily be found online. The perfect example is companies using search engine optimization to get to the top of Google for certain keywords.

Inbound marketing holds another great advantage over traditional based marketing as well. It is not interruption based. On average people are hit with 2000 outbound marketing interruptions per day! With so many interruptions it is no wonder people have developed things like caller ID, spam filters, PVR's and satellite radio to try to cut down on these interruptions. Inbound marketing doesn't rely on these interruptions. People find your website when they want to. The benefit is two-fold. First, you avoid all the creative ways people have come up with to avoid these interruptions. Secondly, you don't risk losing potential leads due to interrupting people at a bad time.

Traditional marketers know the value of word of mouth advertising. Inbound marketing takes the idea of word of mouth to extreme levels. When you create some content for your website, such as a helpful tutorial related to your company, it has the chance of going viral. This is the ultimate form of word of mouth advertising. Information just flows so fast on the internet due to email, instant messaging, Twitter, Facebook and etc that hundred, thousands and yes even millions of people might see your content. You could have thousands of people talking about your product or services in minutes! Inbound marketing and the internet make that possible.

We don't suggest that you ignore traditional marketing opportunities. We do suggest that you embrace the online world and make sure inbound marketing is a part of your overall strategy. You get to reach interested leads without interrupting them, while at the same time you have a chance that your content goes viral and thousands of people are reading about your company. Take the time to learn about inbound marketing and how you can tap into this amazing strategy.