You have no doubt heard that "your business needs to be unique." Being unique sets you apart from your competition and gives customers a reason to purchase from you, rather than your competitor. You hear that and you get it, but have you truly set about actually doing it? I don't mean just thinking up a tagline with a nice ring to it. I mean truly researching your market, your competitors, and your customers to find out what sets you apart now or what could, and then focusing your business on it.

Tommy Walker, editor at ConversionXL.com and host of Inside the Mind, shared some very cool tools for how to quickly finding and curate content that is relevant to your business. Finding good content to learn from and to share out can be difficult and overwhelming. There is a LOT to sift through. These tools should make the job a little easier to handle.

It is exciting to see businesses grow and improve, so I would like to share case studies when we publish a new site or significant optimization to give some press to them and some takeaways for you.

Here's a little primer on internet marketing. It is built around the idea of you generating inbound leads and customers by becoming an authority on solving a problem and sharing out information about it.

You want to be found on Google. Furthermore, you want to be targeting above-the-fold (the area you see on your screen before you scroll down) listings. How? Simply put, just (a) strategically pick the search phrase you want to rank for and (b) optimize your site to support that phrase. The rough news: there are about 200 factors to consider in your search engine optimization. The good news: SingleGrain and Backlink did some homework for us. Here are the factor groups and what they consider:

Sometimes you can learn just as much or more from things you do not like as from things you do like.

Learn the language of your customers and use them. Become the horse. This is the advice I received from The Man Who Listens To Horses. I recently picked Monty Roberts' book off the shelf for a change of pace from the usual. I just wanted something fun to read, but I got a marketing lesson anyway.

I just received this question from a client.

What can content do for you? At the very least, it will probably increase the length of time visitors hang around. Take a look at the chart below. This particular site was rebuilt on a content management system and published with a bunch of new content in late August/early September of 2012. The chart below shows the six months prior to launch and the six months after. Avg. Session Durationincreases from 01:01 (one minute, one second) before the rebuild to 12:02 (12 minutes, two seconds) after. That's a 12X increase.

"Does this whole process make sense?" I asked. "Yeah.." the attendees trailed off. We had just reiterated my version of the inbound marketing process during the conclusion of the second session of a recent Internet Marketing Workshop. I wanted to check and see how the attendees were taking the information in. That response was less than encouraging.