Corporate Blogging

Corporate Blogging is not something you decide to do or not do.  Your corporation, assuming you have a larger staff,  is blogging right now.

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.

How to Start a Restaurant Blog

If you want to start a small business blog for your Restaurant, what kinds of things do you need to consider?

#1 Local Search

You are going to want to chose local search engine keywords that will be searched on by your target audience.  If you are in an area that tourists visit frequently, you may have to change the strategy a bit.  Also, consider things like downtown Chicago (as in Italian Restaurant Downtown Chicago)

#2 Converting Visitors

Your Restaurant blog must have a clear blog ROI which means putting people in chairs.  How you do this depends on the kind of restaurant you run.  Fine dining may ask people to call for reservations, while a diner may offer a sign up for online coupons.

#3 What to Write About?

The blogging search optimization strategy requires that you write regularly.  So what should you write about?

• Recipes
• Wine and Beer
• Local Events in the area
• Specials and cooking secrets
• Cultural aspect of food

Your restaurant blog can be really interesting.  It will depend on what your customers are looking for.

Social Media Marketing

How does a blog, especially a business blog like Employee Ambassador, help your Social Media Marketing?

1. Blogs are the home base that your social media marketing efforts point back to.  And a business blog set up as an Employee Brand Embassador blog is going to convert more of your effort into sales leads.
2. Blogs are where your thoughts begin.  You can automate twitter, automate facebook, automate tumblr and automate many other things when you have good content being produced in a blog that has an rss feed.
3. Search Engine Results – Blogs are far better at getting high search engine ranking and converting those organic visitors to prospects.
4. Your Business Blog is the focus of the links from other social media outlets.  This linking improves the blog ranking.
5. Your business blogging is where people that really want to get to know you beyond the social media profile can read about you and what you know about your industry.

Blogs are the hub of your social media marketing.

Old Media Marketing

It is popular to talk about social media, brand ambassadors and Web 2.0. But does that mean the traditional marketing has stopped working?

No.  Actually it means that there are more ways to reach people and you have more options that all may be less effective than in the past when there were less options  with more people condensed into fewer communication channels.

Here are some traditional marketing techniques that still work.

1. Press Release – When it used to be really read by the press, it was appropriate to call it a press release.  Now I would call it a news broadcast.  I do not believe a press release will usually find any major writers but I do think that you are going to get some good exposure and good back links to your business blog or website.  If you focus on a niche or use the more expensive press release services you may still hit some great media outlets.
2. Email Marketing – Way more attention seems to be given to social media than email marketing.  However, email marketing will still generate a lot more money for you when done right.  It is an essential part of your marketing and if you bought the whole Email is Dead line, you jumped in the wrong bandwagon.  I make most of my money from email and Search Engine Optimization from blogs.
3. SEO – Search Engine Optimization is not the new hot thing, but if there is one area that is actually using social media well, it is the people that get how SEO and Social Media are linked together.  The key with SEO is that if you are in a tight target niche with little competition, you can probably pay for a one time project and reap the rewards for a long time.  Blogs make it easy.  If you are in an even slightly competitive market, you need someone that goes to war on your behalf every month to increase ranking and get more pages indexed.  Or you can just use Employee Ambassador and your staff just does some light writing and the whole thing is automatically targeted to keyword conquest.
4. Old Websites – Do you have one of those old websites sitting around that looks like late 90’s and does date back to then?  Don’t touch it without talking to a web professional!  The age of your website is valuable and the page urls should not be changed unless you have someone that can look at your search ranking first.  I updated one of these old sites after some research and got fantastic results within 3 days – I am talking #1 rankings where a lot of other people were fighting for it.  These old sites have great credibility in the eyes of search engines and can be ignited by a good search engine specialist.
5. Directories – Things like directories seem out of date, but getting listed in a good directory still gives you a valuable back-link and can generate a steady (if not big) stream of website or blog traffic.  Some of my favorite are technorati and blogcatalog – but the older directories are still effective if you get into them too.
6. Link Exchanges – These things have a bad name, and anything that automates the process I would stay away from.  However, doing an occasional link exchange with someone else in your industry will help – not hurt – your website.  If link exchanges  hurt websites, most blogs with blog rolls would be thrown out of Google long ago since they often link to one other.  This is one of those things that still works, you just have to be smart about it.
7. Word of Mouth – The oldest of the traditional marketing is the new hot marketing.  Finding ways to get people to talk about you are the best way of cutting through the noise.  But it may just not work for you – you really have to be differentiated.

Most things will still work with good execution and message.  Just be realistic about how people’s attention has scattered.  You need to scatter your message where your niche market is to make sure they can find you.  Especially when they are looking in Google, which is where Employee Ambassador comes in.

Employee as Brand Ambassador

Your brand ambassador program must include at least some employees.  Employee Ambassador Programs create more brand ambassadors and have a lower cost.

While it is popular to think a Brand Ambassadors as flying around the country speaking and talking about the brand, it is certainly not the norm.  Being a good brand ambassador just takes a willingness on the part of the employee to support the brand and business.

That is why the Employee Ambassador program focuses on a very narrow goal.  By enpowering brand ambassadors to blog in a blog matrix that targets search engine results, you can get more from your existing workforce, produce more steady leads and sales and build a resource that will benefit you for the long term.

Here are some reasons you want an employee as brand ambassador:

1. The employee ambassador know what makes the company great.
2. The employee brand ambassador knows that it effects his or her job.
3. The business brand ambassador hears stories of how the company helps the customers and can repeat these.
4. The business can run contests for best brand ambassador, and they are not only getting better marketing results, but also boosting morale.
5. An Employee as a Brand Ambassador works for you.  So they do not say yes then forget about the business.  They are there every day and will stay more top of mind about it.
6. Using the Employee Ambassador system actually helps you build content that will be producing results for the business even after the employee brand ambassador has left the organization.

These are just some of the great business blogging outcomes if you integrate employees as brand ambassadors.

Blog Post Ideas

Blog post ideas come much quicker after you have been blogging for a while.  A blog usually has a certain feel to it on length and the business blogging goals.  Once you have gotten into the habit of blog writing, you will see a pattern emerge.

For example, here are some blog post ideas where you can just fill in the blanks.

1. The 7 best ____________ on the web.
2. How I did___________.
3. _________ Review
4. 8.5 Reasons to do _________.
5. Top Industry News
6. Did you know that ________________.
7. 100 websites where you can find out about ____________.
8. Top software to manage __________________.
9. Interview with ___________.

You get the idea.  As I mentioned, the more you do the more comfortable you will get with blog writing strategies.

Keep in mind, if you are blogging for SEO results more than for creating a regular audience, it does not matter if you write about the same topic (but complete rewrite of content) frequently.  For example, we frequently write on these blogs about business blogging, and I do not worry about someone reading the same articles twice because it is not set up to be read every day anyway.

Your Business Blog

The first thing people think of when they look at our Employee Ambassador blog is – where is all the blog stuff?

While a client’s blog can have as many things as they want in the side bar, a business blog should have only things that are focused on the outcome that you want.

That means navigation is secondary to signing up for a newsletter or requestion a demo.

This is not because you are tricking someone.  It is because from a business perspective, it is only worth doing if it makes you money.  And the busier your business blog is (covered in links and such) the less likely people will do what you want.

Also, Employee Ambassador blogs are a blog seo strategy, not a warm and fuzzy place to try to build an audience.  We certainly respect the warm and fuzzy blogs, but that is a different strategy, and works best when one person has one or more hours to write every day.

Affordable Business SEO

Blogging is one of the most Affordable Business SEO Strategies you can do.

It is not magical, but once launched a business blog will start producing some level of traffic within a few days.  And if you write to the business blog regularly, you are going to see an increase of SEO results and traffic over time.

Employee Ambassador is one of your most affordable business seo strategies you can pursue because we know SEO, and we help you leverage your existing team to build steady, optimized content that does not clutter up your main website.  Instead, the new business blog resides in a location where it can draw in potential customers from the web and encourage them to take action.  Combining clear business goals with blogging SEO makes Employee Ambassador the top option for customer acquisition.

Word of Mouth and Blogs

Word of Mouth Marketing is one of those really hot areas that has been growing like wildfire.

The growth of Word of Mouth seems to be considering with the growth of social media.

The reason is simple.  Social media gives marketers a way to estimate the word of mouth that is taking place about a topic, product or brand.  Blogging is a big part of how word of mouth is measured.

This makes sense because not only does a blog give the author a voice, but comments on blogs give the author’s audience a way to respond to the author’s blog posts.

Sure, there are a lot of other social media marketing tools that you can use too.  However, blogging is your home base.  It is the core of your online persona and it is the place you like back to from the other social media tools.  And if you have built a good business blog with clear business goals, it is where people buy from you, request more information or download your free white paper.

Blog as CMS

CMS means Content Management System.

This originally referred to ways to edit and organize websites.  But now it has morphed.  It still manages websites, but now the content has made the manager morph into a new media management system.

Video Blog?  Still a content management system.

Image Gallery?  Still managing content.

So when you are looking for the best content management system, it is not a question of which cms is best.  Instead, it is a question of which cms is best for your needs.

1. Do you need eCommerce?
2. Do you want to easily embed video?
3. Do you need to integrate with Amazon S3?
4. Do you want a small business blog or a five page website?
5. Who will be developing and supporting your cms?
6. Are there free plug-ins?
7. What other features may you need?  Threaded message boards?  Calendar with event registration?  Surveys?
8. Does it have RSS?
9. Is it search engine optimized automatically?
10. How does it manage users?  Does it allow for different user levels for advanced blogging and content management?
11. What language is it written in?  PHP or .Net?
12. How often does it get backed up?
13. Is it a hosted blog or cms – or do you need to host it on your own server?
14. Are there a lot of people that could customize it for you?
15. Are there free themes available?  Are they easy to modify to make them your own?

These are just some questions to get you started as you think about what CMS is the best option for you.