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I have always believed that you’ll learn 10 times more about any subject through experience as opposed to a classroom, an article or a second-hand story. My time spent as an inbound marketing intern only reinforced that belief. There was almost too much to learn and I feel like I only scratched the surface, but here’s the big take-aways that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my career.

Traffic is something every internet marketer or blogger needs to survive online. It's not always kittens and rainbows, (although we'd like it to be) and sometimes you put a painstakingly enormous amount of time into a post only to find out nearly no one has viewed it. You have a stellar topic, an epic title and some solid content. So, where did it go wrong? The blogosphere is a big, busy world. With over 100 million blogs (and growing) it can be easy for your blog to go unnoticed.

Someone asked me the other day where I get my news from, and “Twitter” was my automatic response. While I still get the content from news-worthy sites like CNN or AP, it’s not like I’m combing their homepage anymore but rather clicking a quick link to exactly what I’m looking for. And I don’t have to search far for the public’s comments. Simply by exiting the article, I can see how my friends and even people I don’t know are responding to the story through Twitter as well. Since Twitter is acting as a “second screen” for me and many other consumers, brands should be aiming to become part of this social commentary and push out their messages to the millions of users using real-time marketing. And that’s exactly what Oreo is doing.

Email marketing has been around for a long time, making it prey to myths about how effective it really is. The truth is, there are many misconceptions about email marketing that are absolutely invalid. ImageWorks is here to help debunk these common email marketing myths for once and for all.

Last week Instagram and Facebook launched their new video service, Instagram video, in order to compete with Twitter’s Vine app. Instragram’s video offers the user 15 seconds to shoot a desired subject and is completely editable. So, while we’ve provided you with tips on how to use Instagram video for your marketing advantage, should you continue with Vine? Will users stay loyal to the infantile platform or switch over to Instagram, which was delivered to them in a simple app update?

By now you probably already know that Video on Instagram is the newest social media debut since the popular video Vine app was released. The new video feature allows Instagram's 130 million users to create and share up to 15 seconds of video. According to Mashable, within the first 24 hours of Instagram video availability on June 20, users uploaded more than 5 million videos.

This past week I was lucky enough to stumble across two real tickets to game 4 of the Stanley Cup between the Boston Ruins and the unstoppable Chicago Blackhawks. (Side note, this article might be slightly biased). Two hours and $400 later, I was sitting in the balcony watching the puck drop. While I expected the Hawks to win, I unexpectedly picked up on some parallels between the NHL’s sporting strategies and some always-important inbound marketing tactics.

Since its creation in 2006, Twitter has become one of the strongest and most powerful platforms that companies have at their disposal. As inbound marketers, you know how to use Twitter to push out content, drive traffic and create user engagement. And now Twitter is bringing out the big guns by making the site even more useful.

#HelloFacebook!

Whether you are an inbound marketer or not, chances are that you've seen that iconic #hashtag symbol a lot recently. The hashtag (formerly known as the pound sign to any non-social media dwellers) was originally used to follow specific topics of conversation on the social network, Twitter. Now the hashtag is common place all over social media platforms such as Pinterest, Instagram and Tumblr. While companies everywhere have capitalized on the hashtag to start conversations around their brand, Facebook has been awkwardly absent from this sharing capability.

The landing page on your website is the one of the most important elements in the lead generation process. Many inbound marketers forget just how important the landing page actually is, and focus only on the content offer behind that page. Don't be fooled --the landing page makes an incredible impact on conversions and cannot be ignored. The next time you sit down to write a landing page for your unique offer, ask yourself if your readers would feel truly compelled to read what you've written. As Hubspot would say, is your content remarkable enough?