I recently discovered what might be the best source for quality articles relevant to those in the digital community and probably my new favorite website! Inbound.org is a website designed for the passionate digital community. The purpose of the site is to provide the best and most current online content on all aspects of inbound marketing, including (but definitely not limited to):
|
|
|
Inbound.org was launched mid February and has been quickly growing in popularity with those passionate about all things digital. The brilliance behind this site came from its founders Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz and Dharmesh Shah of Hubspot. It is kind of like the Reddit or Digg of inbound marketing, but with a MUCH more attractive site design. The simplicity of the site design and structure is perfect for perusing articles. Similar to other social bookmarking websites, Inbound allows users to Upvote their favorite articles. The design of the site has made it very easy for new users to determine how to “Vote” for the articles that they like.
A very intriguing feature of Inbound.org is that registration requires users to have a Twitter account. I really like this feature because if you are truly passionate about social media, web development, SEO, analytics, etc., you should are already have a Twitter account and be active in the digital community.
The 3 Ways To Use Inbound
Hot Articles
The Hot Articles page lists the most popular articles on Inbound.org at that time. Below is a screen shot of what you might see while on the Hot Articles page. I understand that the articles listed are the most popular, however I don’t quite understand the ranking method. Articles are not listed by the number of Upvotes, though it appears that their may be an algorithm that determines the hottest articles based on time of article submission and number of Upvotes.
Incoming Articles
The Incoming Articles page is similar to the Hot Articles page, but it lists the newest submissions in chronological order. Think of it as a Twitter feed of newly submitted articles and you are actually interested in all of the posts!
Share Articles
All the articles listed on Inbound.org are submitted by users. The image to the right is the Share Article screen that users can use to submit articles to Inbound. For the Article Title option, you can either select your own title or a title will be created from the article URL. However, it is almost always best to write your own title because the number of characters displayed in the listings is limited. As a base, I recommend following the standard for SEO best practices and keep the title shorter than 70 characters (including spaces). Keep It Short And Sweet! Since the listings do not include a summary of the article submitted, it is extremely important that the title is intriguing and does not get cut off.
When submitting an interesting article, you are also required to select one of 23 categories that the article falls into. This feature is very helping when searching through the Hot Articles or Incoming Articles lists because the article category is included in the article listing. At this time you can search for a specific topic but it pulls articles from varying categories. The one feature that I hope to see as the site grows is the ability to sort submitted articles by category, and maybe even by hottest or newest articles in a single category.
Inbound.org does a great job bringing together bloggers, marketers, and those passionate about all things digital. It may even become your main news source for industry news. Why spend extra time searching for the newest blog posts and articles that interest you when you have a haven of the best and most interesting articles already available.
WARNING! You may become addicted to this site and spend all free time reading the great article submissions! (I already have!)
Have you been on Inbound.org? Do you think you would use it as a source for industry news?