Increase Business in a Down Economy

Being is a slow economy is not fun.  Marketers quickly either have to be earning their keep or they are an expendable expense.  For this to happen, a marketer needs to show results – in the form of customer acquisition.  Or at the very least, in lead generation.

I feel very lucky to be working on the Employee Ambassador program now.  Consider these factors.

1. Employee Ambassador is designed to be 100% goal oriented – and the goal is customer acquisition.
2. Accountability – Reports clearly show if progress is being made or not.
3. Employee Ambassador blogs are a great way to do lead generation in down times (nights, weekends) to utilize your time best.
4. Employee Ambassador is cheap lead generation.  You are not paying per lead or per click.
5. People are looking for your product or service today.  If you are not one of the first results in Google for their search, then you are not being found.  Opportunities are lost every day.

We actually go through a live demo of how many opportunities you think you are failing to get every day.  It is fasinating to see how this changes the perspective of people about customer acquisition on the web.  Request a demo today.

What’s Your Blogging ROI?

Your Blogging ROI (Return on Investment) depends on several factors.

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.

Business Blog for Customer Acquisition

Can you use a business blog for customer acquisition?

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.

Blogging Mistakes

Here is a list of common business blogging mistakes people make.

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.

Content Management for Lead Generation

How does a Conent Management System effect your customer acquisition?

Simple.

A Content Management System, such as a blog, can should be able to be optimized for small business to produce daily leads.  Don’t confuse your normal webpage, which is probably more of an online brochure.  You can use a content management system to produce more content faster – and a good content management system will automatically optimize the content for search engine optimization and for lead generation.

In that way, a blogging system such as Employee Ambassador helps you with your client acquisition and sales.

When you are comparing content management systems, here are some things you want to make sure they have.

1. Automated Search Engine Optimization, including mod rewrite for friendly and optimized urls.
2. Super easy publishing.
3. Grids of data – we use a matrix of virtual blogs to create a grid of information.  Each node in the grid targets one particular keyword target.
4. Platform History – Is your system built on a platform that can expand with the times?  Any custom system has the danger of falling behind on the technical front.  That is why we choose to build our customized platform on the Wordpress Engine.  If a new technology comes out, we can quickly adapt.

Lead Generation with a Content Management System is all about targeting, the offer you make to visitors, fresh content and the focus of the site.  With only these few variables, you can quickly get an idea of how the effort is doing for you and make adjustments.

Click Fraud

A blogging strategy like Employee Ambassador is very valuable because it is a flat fee and creates organic search engine listings and traffic.

Is it easier to do Google Adwords or a similar strategy?  Sure.

But not if you want to do it right and within a reasonable budget.

See this article on Click Fraud.

I had one client report to me that his online advertising produced mostly job applicant (he was not hiring) and people with business opportunities.

Factor together Click Fraud and the difficulty of targeting your audience, and do you really want to pay per click?

The truth is, it can work but it takes a lot of work to research keywords, manage your adword campaign and build different landing pages for each keyword (that is what the experts recommend as maximizing your customer acquisition.)

Wow.  That makes a blogging strategy like Employee Ambassador, where you just have to post your thoughts a few times a month seem really much easier and cheaper.  Plus, organic search engine listings will get more clicks and have higher credibility.

MLM Marketing with Blogs

Blogging is a very effective way to do customer acquisition for an MLM.

The key is to write regularly and have as few of options as possible to click around on.

Instead, write regularly and have a free ebook on how to sell your MLM product – or how to grow your team, etc.

That generates leads, which then go into an auto responder series talking about the importance of joining the best team, your team.

And if you keep writing and you target the search engines with your best keywords, you will find that you are the authority on the product and people want to join a team that is obviously (according to Google) the best.

A new client pointed out to me also that a team could pool the cost of one Employee Ambassador blog and all contribute to it.  Each one could put their own links in their profile and in their articles, and as a group they would build an authority site that really gets great search results.

Good idea and makes perfect sense to me.

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.

Small Business Blog

The purpose of blogging, especially for a small business blog, is to create either sales or leads.

Customer Acquisition is possible with a small business blog, but you have to be building a tool for customer acquisition, not a fun blog.  That means you set up your blog to focus on the fundamentals.

1. Your Blog Generates Search Engine Traffic
2. Your Business Blog has a clear purpose and call to action.
3. Your blog is updated regularly so it ranks higher and generates more traffic.
4. Your business blogging purpose is focused on customer acquisition, not having a blog because you heard it is cool.

A successful small business blog is primarily about knowing why you are blogging before you start blogging.

Working with Employee Ambassador can help with this because we only focus on business blogs and employee blog writing to generate qualified leads that want what you have to sell.