If you haven’t checked out Hubspot’s free marketing grader tool yet, you’re in for a treat! This online tool allows you to quickly view an assessment of your website and offers insights on how to improve your author marketing performance. It’s especially useful if you’re not sure why your website isn’t performing up to your expectations.

Hubspot is a robust inbound marketing software package for businesses, often frankly too robust (read expensive) for authors. But they are generous with information, free downloads and excellent tools that can apply to every small business, including all you authorpreneurs!

When you visit the marketing grader tool site (http://marketing.grader.com) you’ll be asked to enter your website URL, competing websites (optional) and your email address. From there you just wait (while being amused by a series of clever quips) for your free report to generate.

You’ll then be able to view insights on items such as:

• Blogging: Whether you have a blog, your most recent blog titles, insights into your blog titles, if your blog is reaching Facebook and Twitter followers, if your blog is RSS enabled, easy to find, and more.
• SEO: Your unique page descriptions, how many pages on your website are indexed by search engines, how many sites are linking to you, if your images have alt tags and so on.
• Mobile: Is your site optimized for mobile viewing?
• Social: Your social media interaction and Klout score.

Best of all, along the way the report gives you action items, suggested areas of improvement, resources to work on those improvements and fun videos and free downloads.

To use Hubspot’s tool to your best advantage, plan an hour or so to learn all you can from the report and set down a list of action items requiring your attention. Then, get into the habit of checking your grade once a month (it’s free whenever you want to access it). You can bask in the glow of good grades, and even keep up with any new trends in inbound marketing.

Give it a try and tell us how you scored!