ilya's blog

Eight reasons I love HubSpot

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So I finally decide to build this little site (ilyamirman.com), primarily to serve as a parking lot for my hobbies (photography, comedy, politics, marketing). To build it, I looked at a bunch of alternatives (Wordpress, Drupal, HubSpot, others) and in the end settled on HubSpot. One key requirement is that because this is a hobby site, during the week I can't spend more than few minutes on it, so it had to have a very low barrier to entry, and easy maintenance.

I've been a HubSpot fan (the product and company) for a few years now, and was once again reminded why:

1. FAST and EASY: I am no web programmer, and don't register domains or set up sites frequently.  But when I decided on a whim to finally do this, it was literally just a couple hours between grabbing the domain at GoDaddy and building the site in HubSpot on a Saturday morning.
2. CMS: The HubSpot content management system is actually fun to use.  It's a pretty effortless way to create pages, with lots of options for page layout and formatting controls.  And as powerful/flexible as they are, I've found the user interface more intuitive than my experiences with WordPress and Drupal.
3. Hosting: I like the fact that I don't need to worry about where the site lives, uploading updates, managing the server.
   
4. Blogging tools: It's super-easy to set up a blog (or several blogs), and insert related modules (recent posts, tags, etc.) throughout the site.  Furthermore the authoring tool includes automatic suggestions/notifications, such as "article body missing images" and "meta description missing keywords" to help optimize the blog for readers and search engines.  And, HubSpot takes care of all the "plumbing" - feedburner, social media sharing buttons, etc.
5. Analytics: I used to be a Google Analytics junkie, but find HubSpot's analytics both easier to work with, and more actionable and informative.  Whether it's looking at traffic sources and volume, page popularity or dynamics of keyword rankings, blog analytics or clickthrough rates on lead follow-up emails, they're all there, just a click away.
6. Forms:It is so easy to add all sorts of forms, without hooking up your own back end for the leads database.
7. Easily insert widgets: Whether it's adding Twitter feeds, photo galleries from my SmugMug photo site, SlideShare presentations, or a ton of other widgets - it's easy to pimp out your HubSpot-based site.
8. And the biggie: INTEGRATION!  All the tools are nicely connected, woven together and talk to each other.  For example:
   • Once you enter your social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), new blog posts trigger notifications on those accounts (rather than you having to post to Twitter etc. manually).
   • Once you enter the keywords relevant to your business (or pick them from the keyword tool), it will automatically notify you of conversations/posts/tweets/etc going on RIGHT NOW on those topics, so you can participate in the blogosphere.
   • The forms, leads database, email tools and lead nurturing are all integrated, eliminating the need to string together several plug-ins, databases, and workflows.
   • Content creation - whether on a web site page, a landing page, a blog post, lead nurturing emails, etc. - features a consistent UI.
   • HubSpot's analytics are monitoring all aspects of the site, everything from what drive traffic, to what your visitors are clicking on, what's generating leads, nurturing campaign clickthrough rates, etc.
   • Tools like Page Grader or Link Grader provide actionable intelligence on what to improve, and you're just a click away from going right to what needs fixing.
   • etc...

(And if I was a business, I'd also care about HubSpot's other features, such as integrated email and lead nurturing tools, integration with Salesforce.com and other CRM tools, landing pages, all sorts of analytics, etc...)

What to Improve

There's a couple things I'd like to see improved:

• CMS: In the CMS interface, sometimes there's weird behavior, like when you delete something from the middle of the content module, it pops you to the top of the module (forcing you to scroll down).  There's a couple quirks like that with bullets as well.
• CMS: Cutting/pasting from MS Word - it tends to paste in formatting that might screw up some browsers.  Though the CMS includes a "remove formatting" button, you need to remember to click it.  I think this used to be part of the cut/paste interface and gave you the option automatically.
• Trial: If you just grabbed a new URL (and it's therefore not a live site), HubSpot's trial software might not allow it, forcing you to temporarily choose a different name.   But, elements of that "temporary" choice persist, though hidden from your site visitors.  (For example, you'll get some site notifications from that original domain name.)  Better guidance on that, or eliminating that constraint, would be great.

Bottom Line

Sure, you can weave together half a dozen technologies – content management, analytics, hosting, SEO tools, campaign management, etc.– and with a bit of effort get it all to work.  But, you risk spending too much time connecting disparate systems, customizing, and inevitably running into limitations – and every second of that will take away from doing what you actually want to do.  And so the bottom line with HubSpot is that there's now no barrier between content creation and content publishing.