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Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah have teamed up to write a new book on internet marketing entitled, Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs. Together they co-founded Hubspot, a leading internet marketing SaaS platform to help businesses manage all their marketing activities online. To me, this information isn't entirely new - it has been well covered on the Hubspot website and blog. What is new, I believe, is the appearance of the ideas, principles and tactics that Halligan and Shah espouse in one centralized, hard cover book. Just like when David Meerman Scott penned The New Rules of PR and Marketing and changed the online PR game, this book deserves to reach a wide audience of marketers looking to stretch their budget, gain brand awareness, establish thought leadership, future proof their internet marketing activities and ultimately, create the absolute best website in their respective niches. Halligan and Shah contend that in order to connect with customers online, customers need to be pulled in with remarkable content, decent SEO, regular and meaningful social media engagement, and clear calls to action - instead of relying on old style interruption based, big budget advertising techniques like direct mail, radio, television, trade shows and trade mags. So far, so good, right? Their thesis absolutely hangs on the idea that remarkable content must be created. If you can't write great content, you can't succeed. This content will drive brand awareness, fulfill searchers needs as they gather information about products and services and most importantly garner increasing visitors and backlinks to your website. According to Shah and Halligan, Google rewards sites with the best, highest quality links (i.e. endorsements to rank) pointing back to the site from other third party sites. This, of course, is not a revelation in the eyes of any SEO guru (nor did they intend it to be a revelation). However, what is important here. if you read between the lines, is that the authors are saying that artificial link building is a waste of time or at least an activity of secondary importance. Thus, if your site isn't generating links on it's own by - your site is just not remarkable enough in terms of content, value proposition and positioning to earn a backlink. This is an interesting idea for sure and one I've blogged about recently (Content Isn't King, It's the Crown Prince). Thus, without this dedication to content creation, link growth can't occur. Link growth is the foundational piece for most truly successful websites. This is 100% true. To attract links in 2009, 2010 and beyond - you'll need truly great tools, features and content on your website. Without links, your site can't possibly play in any competitive online neighborhood. Plus if you're building crappy links (or your SEO agency is) you won't be able to compete against an aggressive inbound marketing strategy pursued by a competitor as laid out by Halligan and Shah. Clearly, this inbound strategy is very future oriented and requires aggressive, dedicated marketers to properly implement. The book also, I believe, will help to put to bed the ideas that internet marketing is easy and that SEO is trickery. Successful internet marketing is tough, ongoing work that requires new skills, new rules and a dedication to creating the absolute best website in your niche and working tirelessly off=site to engage customers via social media. If you've the read the book, I'd love to hear what you thought, so please leave a comment below. Great comments will be given a "do follow" link.