I'll start with the marketing takeaway: if you want people to sign up for something, offer them something they want.
Inbound marketing is a process, and all the steps are important, but if the worm on the end of your line isn't actually a big juicy steak, forget about it. Yes, you need a nice website and lots of good blogs to get peoples' attention. Yes, you need effective calls-to-action and landing pages to keep their attention and make them hungry for more. Yes, you need to promote your stuff in social media. But none of that does you any good if the prize isn't real and isn't valuable to your audience.
I'll give you some real evidence of this. Last night one of our clients asked us to build them a landing page for a special promotion. It was for a business education-related course on CD's. They were asking $1000 for the course, and it was being promoted in a webinar. I know what you're thinking, it must have been one hell of a course for $1000. And you'd be right. In one night they made over $50,000. Now that's ROI if you ask me. Obviously the folks loved the webinar and were ready to pony up a Gover Cleveland for the CD's. They used all the right Inbound Marketing tools to make sure nothing stood in the way between their hungry customers and their steak, but it was the steak that showed them the money.
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