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At a recent speaking event, I posed a question to the audience. I asked, “who here watches TV on their own time, like on Hulu or Netflix, as opposed to watching live TV on cable.”

A few months ago, we embarked on a mission to better understand how users in central Virginia used the internet. To do this, we surveyed users throughout central Virginia, then broke down that information by age, gender, and income.

Executing an effective inbound marketing requires three things: 1) patience, 2) commitment, and 3) good decision making. It could take months, or even years, to see a significant payoff from inbound marketing. This is where patience and commitment come into play. Good decision making is less straightforward. It requires a level of expertise to do the right things the right way. It also requires good data to make educated, informed decisions about what to do next. Our Guide To Measuring Inbound Marketing showed you how to measure your inbound marketing efforts across a variety of platforms. Now it's time to go deeper. Most marketing automation platforms provide only a modest level of web analytics. This is adequate for a high-level view of what’s taking place, but it’s not enough for extensive analysis. Google Analytics is considered the gold-standard in free web analytics platforms, and it should be used in conjunction with any inbound marketing campaign. While Google Analytics provides hundreds of different reports and metrics, only a few are essential to the modern day inbound marketer.

Utilizing the right marketing mix can mean the difference between a healthy growing business, and going out of business entirely. Today, outbound marketing and inbound marketing are the two primary forms of marketing to potential customers. Understanding the proper mix between the two can be vital to the success of your business.

The following post originally appeared in WorkIt Richmond, an online resource for small business owners in central Virginia.

What Is Not Provided?

It’s been around for a little while now but yours truly just came across it and thought it deserved a mention. In this crazy world of social media it’s easy to forget that you are pumping a lot of information into your Online social tools and all in all, if your online data is important to you, Backupify is an easy way to get it back should anything go wrong. Backupify works with Twitter, Google Docs, Wordpress, Gmail, Facebook, Zoho, Delicious, Flickr, Basecamp, Photobucket, Blogger, FriendFeed and more. Obviously data you generate today is not stored on your computer. Granted, it is unlikely that an Online service will simply lose your data, just as it is unlikely that your hard drive will crash if you are good at up keep etc. however it can and does happen all the time. Hackers target these social mediums obviously and so it might be worth considering using something like Backupify. Backupify uses the Amazon cloud to backup your data and the nice thing about this is that should Backupify prove to be a flash in the pan (which seems unlikely) then your data has been stored on a titan of the Internet … and we’d have to hope they make their own backups .