Employee Ambassador and Buzzoodle

Employee Ambassador is designed to help groups of employees blog and then optimize that blog posts into lead conversion engines.

Within a short while of launching Employee Ambassador, it became obvious to us that the Employee Ambassador branding was focused on the wrong thing.  Online Lead Generation with Blogs is more important than the issue around who writes.

Now we have refocused our branding and product.  Buzzoodle has become the online lead generation with blogs solution that people are looking for.

We are still very passionate about working with clients that want to use employees as Brand Ambassadors, and this software is still excellent for achieving that.  We also intend to continue these blogs and topics, but if you buy our online lead generation product you will be working with Buzzoodle directly.

Why Employees Blog?

Your employees may be blogging right now.  Why do Employees Blog?

First, blogging is enjoyable to people once they get into the habit.  It gives them a voice to the world and is an outlet for their frustration, enthusiasm and opinions.  If your employees are blogging on their own, maybe even using a fake name so they do not get into any trouble, then you could have a real problem on your hands.

If you have Employee Blogging in  a controlled environment, then you are going to have employees that feel energized and listed to – and more appreciative of their job.  And you will have control over what is actually released to the public.

Of course, the Employee Ambassadors solution does not prevent an employee from setting up a free blog someplace, but it does help them feel better about the company they work for and makes them more skilled at producing beneficial content.

Employee Blogging

How an employer reacts to employee blogging can have a huge effect on future business.

For example, an employer could react in a negative way and discourage employee blogs.  This would hurt the long term visibility of the company.

Or an employer might simply not care about employee blogging.  This will make the company more visible, but has big risks to the employer because it is more difficult to monitor what employees are blogging about and the employer has no way to modify this content.

The third option is to use a group blogging tool like Employee Ambassador and encourage employee blogging in a controlled environment that has a clear business outcome.

20 Brand Ambassador Activities

Here is a list of 20 Brand Ambassador Activities you can ask your brand ambassadors to do to promote your brand.

1. Blog with an Employee Ambassador Blog
2. Build a Squidoo Lens
3. Public Speaking
4. Hubpages Hub
5. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter
6. Gather.com
7. Wordpress.com
8. Delicious.com
9. Stumbleupon.com
10. Digg.com
11. eZineArticles.com
12. Blogger.com
13. Tumblr.com
14. MyBlogLog.com
15. BlogCatalog.com
16. FiendFeed.com
17. FaceBook.com
18. LinkedIn.com
19. Furl.net
20. MyLinkVault.com

A brand ambassador that picks 2-3 things off of this list each week and does something with them will be very valuable at creating brand awareness and website traffic.

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.

Online Advertising Strategy

Is Employee Ambassador a blog or an online advertising strategy?

While it is a blog engine that drives the employee ambassador system, it is actually on online advertising strategy.

If you were to go to Google and pay for adwords, your ad would show up on the right and you could pay per click.

With Employee Ambassador, we help you target free search engine ranking on the left.  This has more credibility in the eyes of a searcher and gets more clicks.  Then when people click on your site, your ad offer appears on the right of your page.

Your offer could be a free white paper download, a product you are selling or any other type of conversion you want to design.  They key is that Employee Ambassador gets your targeted audience to the site in a highly credible way and then you are advertising in the side.

While traffic is not always high, it is targeted.  This means your visitors are far more likely to click on your offer because they are interested in what you have to say and what you are advertising.

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.

What is Brand Ambassador?

If you are asking yourself the question, “What is a Brand Ambassador” you are in the right place.

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, request a demo.  You can build a team of Brand Ambassadors in no time.

Free Blog List

Free blogs will not rock out the search results as well as employee ambassador blogs will, but they are still pretty good if you work at them for a while.  So here is a list of some of the best free blog sites.

Keep in mind that even if you are doing a paid search focused blog like Employee Ambassador, it is still a good idea to put up some free blogs and do quick posts to them once in a while, along with links to your main business blog.

Here is the list of Free Blogs

• www.wordpress.com
• www.Blogger.com
• www.livejournal.com
• www.tumblr.com
• edublogs.org
• www.blogr.com

They are free blogs, so why not set one up and post occasionally.  If nothing else, as they age they are better for helping you get inbound links to your real business blog.

Make Money Blogging

What Employee Ambassador does is very similar to what niche bloggers have been doing for years.  Targeted blogging with the intent to make money.

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.