1:  What are your Blog Goals?

First, you cannot measure a blogging ROI unless you have clear blog goals and place a dollar value on the goals.  Then you have to track the leads or sales clearly to know how much revenue your blog is generating.  If you are using your blog for customer acquisition, what is the lifetime value of the customer?

2: What is your Blog cost in time and money?

Even a professional blog system like Employee Ambassador is reletively low cost on a month to month basis.  But you have to factor in your time as well.  What is the cost of your employees and you blogging?  If you are using the blog writing as something to do in down time, do not place the same rate on the time as you would on billable time.  That is only valid if you have the billable work to do.

Obviously, your blogging ROI depends on what you are selling and the time you are putting into it.  It is definitely worth monitoring and it nearly always gets better over time if you keep working at it.

However, it is your Blogging ROI – not your blog traffic, that is the real metric that matters.

Would you rather have an average 500 visitors per day that have a .05% change of buying from you or a targeted 50 visitors per day that have a 5% chance of buying from you?

And what if you work on your conversion and increase it?  It is far easier to improve your conversion if you know exactly what your visitors are there looking for.

This could be true.  Maybe they only read one or two websites and never do searches.  That is entirely possible.

But what many people do not understand is that the web and blogs are not two separate things.  When you do a search, many blogs come up in the results of the search.  Blogs are naturally optimized for search engine results.  And with some customization the blog can often capture the top spots in seach engines because Google loves fresh content.

Also, blogging is just a form of a CMS.  (Content Management System) People are often on blogs and do not even realize it.  If you landed on an individual post in this blog and read the article without looking around too hard, would you really be aware that you are reading a blog post?  What is the difference between a blog post and a web page anyway?

Certainly you can, but you will be more successful if your blog is set up having customer acquisition as the primary blog goal.  The purpose of blogging is not to create a blog.  It is to achieve your goals via the web.

Sure, the purpose of blogging for some people is to use it as a networking and social media.  However, there is not a rule someplace that says that is the only way to use it.

Take email for example.  Email was initially used to send people messages.  Then people started using email for marketing.  Now email is one of the most cost effective ways to do sales.

The biggest challenge to email is to build a hot list of emails of people that want to hear from you.  That is where the business blog comes in.  Customer Acquisition starts with someone opting into your email system if they do not directly buy from you or request a demo.

Your business blog just needs to be set up with purpose.  Is the purpose list building?  Lead Generation? Direct Web Sales?

That is why our system only adds essential internal links and clear calls to action.  It is simple and it is focused only on Customer Acquisition via great search engine optimization.

1. They write their blog too general.  The more specific your blog is, the better it performs in search engines.
2. They only talk about their product.
3. They never talk about their product.
4. They junk up the blog with all kinds of things in the side bar instead of focusing on customer acquisition.
5. New Business Blogs should have realistic expectations.  Write every day for two months and then look at the numbers.  Not after 3 days.
6. Get inbound links.
7. Don’t overdo outbound links.
8. Don’t spend too much time on a blog post.  Short frequent posts are better than spending a month perfecting one blog post.

A Brand Ambassador is someone that represents a Brand in a positive way and carries the brand message out to the public.

The Brand Ambassador position has become more common as an official job because of the many outlets where a brand ambassador can promote the brand and where many people can discuss the brand.

What is the difference between a PR Agency and a Brand Ambassador?

A PR Agency usually focuses on the news media, writing official communications and handling a crisis. But certainly many PR agencies have developed the ability to be good brand ambassadors as well.

A Good Brand Ambassador

To be a good brand ambassador, you really need to know the product, the industry and to have the motivation to help other people discover the brand. It is not something that can be done effectively a few hours per month.  A small business is best served by the owner being the brand ambassador.

The Employee Brand Ambassador

The employee brand ambassador is when there is a positive workplace and employees are motivated to create awareness.  This has become easier to do in the last few years with the rise of social media and employee blogs.

Employee blogging can significantly impact the visibility of the company.  We build the Employee Ambassador program to make it easy for employees blogs to be set up and monitored.  Each time and employee blogs, the blog post gets reviewed and then published to their own blog, as well as the proper conversion centers which are keyword specific blogs.

The development focus is simplicity.  A title and a couple of paragraphs is all you need to fill in to post your blog post.  And your corporate blog will rank higher in search with the blog search optimization that happens behind the scenes.

If you are interested in Employee Blogging, build a lead generation blog.  You can build a team of Brand Ambassadors that generate leads in no time.

1. Don’t think about what a blog should be.  Think about what you want your blog to achieve for your small business.
2. Blogs are just CMS websites (Content Management Systems) – don’t be intimidated.
3. There is no absolute right or wrong.  You can write a combination of short, long and medium blog posts.
4. Use images, but if you do not have time, just put up the text.
5. Post less more frequently, not a lot only occasionally.
6. Add Google Analytics right away so you can watch your progress.
7. Don’t clutter your business blog
8. Don’t drive people off of your business blog with too many external links
9. Don’t make people search all over your new business blog for your contact information.
10. Link to your business blog from outside resources to get it a better reputation.

For business blogging, we have simplified the entire thing.  You only have to write a title and a few paragraphs in your blog post, and the system does the rest.

So how powerful is the system?

We experiment constantly to tweak and optimize our process.  One niche product site we set up generated 3 sales worth approx $700 in the first three weeks.

While that may not seem big, it was something that will continue to get better and it was on a brand new domain name and for affiliate products.  Launching something new like that is not easy.

If it was on a sub-domain of your company and selling higher ticket items that you produce, the Blog ROI would be much greater.

I like to point this out because if you request a demo for our Corporate Blogging product and we get to the pricing issue, it really is not an issue.  The only thing you have to ask is if you are selling something that people want to buy.

If there is one thing I have learned over the years, it is that most business owners want less, not more.

Do business owners really want a list of 1,000 place you can go to set up accounts and maybe generate an occasional website visitor?

Or would a business owner want one strategy, such as our business blogging strategy, that is measurable, produces sales and leads and is easy to maintain because it shares the responsibility and optimizes automatically?

I think the choice is obvious.

Twitter, FaceBook, Free Blogs and Google are great.  But start with one focused strategy that has clear goals and grow from it.  Don’t start with a lot of stuff and then wonder why nothing big ever happens.

The question is:  Does your corporation want to set up a business blog that gets a strong business ROI?  Or do you just want to leave your employees out there blogging privately, not knowing what they can say or not say, and hope for the best.

Using Employee Ambassador is your top way to enter social media.  It gives your employees a home.  It gives their effort a clear business ROI by focusing the side bar on custom acquisition.  And it also lets you monitor what your employees are saying in the blog.

If you are thinking about starting a corporate blog, start a blog with people that have been doing it for years and have it down to a science that produces measurable results.  You can request a demo here.