I've been looking at a lot of data lately. 

Last week we dug into some social media marketing numbers, this week we'll go bigger and look at some of the major internet trends from Mary Meeker's latest report. 

Let's start with a bit of a perspective.

There are 3.4B global internet users. And there are about 7.5B people in the world. That's a penetration of 46%. 

Is your head spinning? It certainly will be after we go through some of the major learnings I've picked out for you. 

Let's get started. 

My start-up Smile Arty has now been live for about three months. 

Painful months. It was hard, really hard in the beginning. Things like getting the company registered, getting a bank account, setting up everything for accounting, revenue etc. were nerve-racking. 

The one thing that was easy was the website and all the content. 

I say easy because I have a PR background and I now work in inbound marketing so I didn't have to start learning any of this from scratch whereas the whole administrative thing for a new business was completely new to me.

I have to say, though, in less than three months, content started working. 

This is a guest poost by Aaron Wittersheim from Straight North.

Imagine you run a grocery store and one day you receive a box from a supplier containing 10 pieces of fruit — a mix of apples and oranges.

If a customer shows up and asks for five oranges, will you be able to fill that order? You should know because you probably opened the box to find out how many of each fruit you received from the supplier.

However, in the world of online marketing, not everyone is opening the box. Far too many companies assume that every conversion on their website is a potential sales lead — but the truth is, they’re not.

Although many online marketers might believe that the number of conversions on their websites has a direct correlation to the number of sales leads they receive, the reality is that only about half of those conversions end up being sales leads. The rest typically are made up of job applications, customer service requests, incomplete form submissions and other interactions that aren’t really sales leads.

By mixing the apples with the oranges, businesses waste time and resources chasing after oranges when what they really want are apples.

It's almost Halloween and pretty much everyone is talking or writing about it.

So I thought some newsjacking wouldn't be such a bad idea. (If you don't know what newsjacking is, take a look at this extensive piece.)

I also know that you love facts and infographics so I think you'll like today's post.

Now, Halloween is a scary time not just because of zombies but because we realise that the year is almost over. That's particularly worrying for marketers and agency people who are looking at both closing the year successfully with clients but also setting a thoughtful plan for the next year. 

Creating such a plan, though, requires research and informed decisions. 

The way we make informed decisions is by analysing the data, looking for trends and figuring out what the future of marketing might hold. 

That also includes not being scared to try new things and retire things that don't work. 

Every year HubSpot runs a pretty serious research into the state of inbound marketing. This year is no exception but we also added sales not just marketing as a research topic. 

The major finding in our 8th annual survey is not just that things are changing, they always do (and they better), but that things are changing at an insanely rapid pace. And most importantly we think that they are changing in the right direction. 

In five years only, marketing and the way we do business are going to be completely different. Why? Because the world is adopting inbound. It's becoming more authentic and less interruptive. 

As Brian Halligan says, 

Inbound means transforming how we do business to be more helpful, more human, more empathetic. It ... is about matching the way you market and sell with the way people actually want to shop and buy.

So it's not just about marketing, it's about everything we do as a business that needs to be is 100% customer-focused rather than marketer or seller-focused.