If you contribute to a blog or any form of sales or marketing material containing imagery, you could easily face civil or criminal charges for copyright infringement. It only takes one “borrowed” image, and you’re playing Russian roulette with hefty fines and possible jail time.  

You absolutely cannot steal images from Google.

When a strategic inbound marketing plan is in place for your company, you should get more leads, get better leads, and improve your overall sales performance. I say 'should' in the previous sentence because there are many factors that play into a successful inbound marketing strategy - and many companies don't have these all in place reap the benefits of this investment. So what are the companies doing that are successfully implementing these strategies to drive more revenue and see great results?

I asked our team to share what is working for the companies who are utilizing inbound marketing to its fullest potential and tell what they are doing to drive success. Here's what they said. 

At LeadG2 and The Center for Sales Strategy, our tech stack not only serves to support our sales and marketing efforts, but it also enables our consultants and content teams to super-serve our clients and provide top-notch service and deliver quality results and help them achieve success. Are you utilizing tech to support your marketing, sales, or service efforts at your company? 

We asked our team what marketing and sales technology they use most frequently, and here's the top 10 tools from what was submitted. Yes, there's actually more!

One of the biggest resources that marketing teams have is access to their sales team. That's right! The sales team is a key resource for successful marketing campaigns. 

So, how is the sales team a resources for marketing? Here's how marketing and sales teams should collaborate throughout the marketing campaign process to drive better sales results.

Many people out there think they are blogging. Are they just blogging to blog? Or are they strategically blogging to get results and drive the efforts closer to success?

I hear a lot of people in marketing and business development that tell me that they "blog." But I want to know what they are doing with their blog... are they getting results from their blog or just wasting time to say they "blog" with no proof of success? Do they even know? Or... do they even want to know?

In the past, I've written about how a company's employees are one of the most valuable resources when it comes to the marketing efforts, and today I'm sharing a few ways that employees can supplement and support the marketing strategy to help drive better results.

Does blogging help with SEO? 

Hubspot explains that, "Blogging helps boost SEO quality by positioning your website as a relevant answer to your customers' questions. Blog posts that specifically use a variety of on-page SEO tactics can give you more opportunities to rank in search engines and get customers to visit your site."

What are the benefits of blogging?

• SEO
• Thought Leadership
• Education for Prospects and Customers
• Attract Qualified Leads
• Content for the Sales Process
• Lead Nurturing
• Lead Conversion
• And MORE!

So, how can you utilize this tool to benefit your business? The expert team at LeadG2 has put together a list to help you optimize your blog posts for search. Use this checklist with each post you publish to help you increase your search rankings and drive quality leads to your site before your publish and distribute your posts. 

As we kick off the new year, it's safe to say that content still reigns as king in the B2B world, and it seems that it's going to stay that way. With B2B marketers who use blogs saying that they get 67% more leads than those who don't, and companies who blog see 97% more links to their site than those who don't, it's clear that blogging should be a part of your B2B marketing strategy. 

So, do you really need to spend time to promote your blog? Isn’t the point of a blog to promote your website? Yes and yes. Your blog is, indeed, a big opportunity to drive traffic to your website and promote your business as well as your products and services, but it needs strategic guidance to be successful in driving traffic and converting leads. Many industry experts preach the 80/20 rule when it comes to content and promotion, saying that 20% of your time should be spent creating content, and 80% of your time should be spent promoting it. Think of your blog like a garden that's meant to feed your family. The whole purpose of the garden is to create food—but you need to feed it, water it, and tend to it to get the desired results. The same is true of your blog. 

When people ask us, "Where should I share my blog?" we suggest these eight free ways to distribute blog content. There are additional distribution channels that include paid promotion and advertising, but this list focuses on eight ways you can share you B2B blog content immediately that we've found successful for our clients and ourselves.

I'm starting today's blog post off with a few stats:

• 74% of B2B buyers choose a company that is first to help them with useful content
• 50% of B2B buyers use LinkedIn when making purchase decisions.
• 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.
• 7 out of 10 professionals describe LinkedIn as a trustworthy source of professional content.
• 1 out of 3 professionals on the planet are on LinkedIn.
• 200 conversions per minute are happening on LinkedIn.

Okay, great. Let's all give LinkedIn a big pat on the back. Those are some intense and super interesting stats to a person in the B2B marketing and sales industries... or they should be. If you aren't interested in capitalizing on these stats, you can stop reading. If you are interested in a 'hack' to help you capitalize and capture some of this focused attention from LinkedIn, keep reading.