Small Business Marketing & Business Acceleration | FrontlineMarketingSystems.com

Don’t Tell Me I’m Wasting My Time

Posted on 31. Oct, 2011 by Margie Clayman in Blog, Blogging and Content Creation, blogs, content creation, Guest Posts, margie clayman, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, thought leadership

Guest post by Marjorie Clayman, resident blogger at www.margieclayman.com. She works at Clayman Advertising, Inc., her family-owned full-service marketing firm.

I know that it is impossible to please everyone in any scenario, but most especially in the online world. Because of that, I most of the time let snide remarks roll off me like water off a duck’s back. However, there is one remark I’ve gotten a few times over the last few months that really frustrates me, not because I take it as a personal affront but rather because it shows a mark of selfishness that exists in the online world.

See, a lot of people have chided me for covering “the same ole stuff.” For covering the basics. For reviewing, again, some Twitter or blogging best practices. “We already know this!” they mutter. “You’re just creating an echo chamber of what has already been said,” others say.

With all due respect, these criticisms miss the mark entirely.

Not everyone is on your timetable

If you’ve been on Twitter since 2008, you are probably pretty proficient in the ups and downs of that world. If you’ve been blogging since 2007, you know how to do things like find your voice because you already have it. You’ve already been through that process.

However, not everyone is sharing your exact experience. Not everyone is on your timeline. I encounter people almost every day who are new to blogging, new to Facebook, new to Twitter, or new to the whole concept of social media in general. Do they not deserve the same kind of help you got when you were new? I think they deserve it more because there are so many obstacles in the way of their breaking through. Obstacles like people saying, “We don’t need this ‘how-to’ information anymore.”

You’re missing a chance to meet new people

I’m going to let you in on a little secret here. Something you may not have considered. If you write posts offering help in the online world, you are more likely to meet people who are brand new to the online space. It’s like reaching a hand out through the depths of the ocean to a person who is floating along.

Sure, you can keep writing about new and more complex things for your existing community, but how will that grow your community? If you approach content on occasion from the perspective of someone who is brand spanking new to this space, you will get to meet people and help people whom you may not have met in any other way.

What can be more valuable than that?

Not all of my posts will resonate with you

I appreciate all of the people who take the time to read my posts, but I certainly do not expect that every single one will resonate with every single person. Far from it. If you find the how-to information beneath you or boring, hey, don’t read it! But if you comment about how any idiot knows that stuff, or how I’m wasting my time writing up this information, you’re not really offending me. Instead, you’re blockading the people who may have wanted to ask questions but now feel dumb.

Also, this notion that blog visitors have “all read this stuff before” doesn’t hold mathematical water. Jay says that here on Convince & Convert, approximately 65% of the visitors fall into the “new” category per Google Analytics, and that’s after 500 blogs posts across more than 3 years.

Everybody is a teacher in social media. And everybody is a student. We were all brand-new once, so don’t make yourself an obstacle to those that are just starting to embrace it.

Early Bloggers

Posted on 20. Oct, 2011 by Sean D'Souza in Blog, blogs, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing

When did blogging begin? Earlier than you think!

Like it? Well don’t be shy: Tweet or Facebook it, or Google+ it
If you aren’t already on the ‘Friday cartoon list’ then here’s a link to make sure you don’t miss a fun cartoon

P.S. Also winners for the Bat Cartoon Contest. And the winner is: Justin + a consolation prize for KC Ramsay!

6 Steps to Successful Blogging

Posted on 22. Sep, 2011 by Joe Pulizzi in Blog, blogs, business blogging, content marketing, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media

I had the pleasure of presenting to over 100 HVAC contractors today at HVAC Comfortech 2011 on how they can position themselves as THE home comfort services expert in their region. The central theme of the presentation was blogging.

First off, blogging is just a tool...nothing more, nothing less.  But for businesses, especially smaller businesses, blogging can be a powerful way to share expertise and solve the pain points of customers.

I started off by sharing how Marcus Sheridan, CEO of River Pools and Spas, has become the leading expert in the fiberglass pool business by consistently blogging and sharing information that his competitors simply were not willing to share (hat tip to Jeff Molander and his excellent new book Off the Hook Marketing, which I would recommend to anyone interested in amazing social media case studies that have actually generated revenue).  How did Marcus do it?  Here is some insight from Content Marketing World.

In 2007, Marcus was struggling in a tough economy to grow his fiberglass pool business.  By 2010, Marcus and River Pools became the go-to place for fiberglass pools, selling more than any other retail location in North America.  At the same time, he decreased his traditional marketing spend by over 75%.  Not bad.

Just the Blog Stats Maam

Yes, blogging is just a tool, but here are some facts about blogs you may not know (courtesy of Hubspot).

• 90% of consumers read blogs.
• Over 70% of consumers read more than five blogs.
• 100% of businesses surveyed that blog more than once per day received customers directly from their blog.
• Businesses that blog are 4x more likely to be found on the web.
• Businesses with blogs get 55% more traffic on average.

Telling stories that help your customers with their problems is central to search engine optimization, social media and lead generation.  Without great stories, these three are nearly impossible.

Why Blogs Work

• Great blog content makes us sound interesting and positions us as experts.
• Search engines love blogs.
• Social media loves blogs.
• Your customers read blogs.
• Blogs are a great way to communicate with customers without directly selling.
• Blogs are a minimal investment compared to most outbound marketing options.

6 Steps to Blogging Success

There is no silver bullet to a successful blog.  A business can be successful blogging using different voices, different frequencies and different word counts. But if you haven’t started a blog yet, here’s a great start.

Set Up Listening Posts

The first step to blogging is to listen. A lot.

Be sure you set up listening posts using the following tools:

• Talk directly to customers.
• Open feedback channels with customer service and sales.
• Use customer surveys.
• Analyze keyword search terms using Google’s Keyword Tool.
• Find story ideas, shareable content and build your influencer hit list with Google Alerts.
• User Twitter Advanced Search.
• Develop your Twitter listening channel with a tool like Tweetdeck, or for multiple accounts and better analytics, use Hootsuite or Dlvr.it.

These activities will give you a solid pulse as to the pain points of your customers and where story opportunities may present themselves.

Log Your Customer Questions

Marcus recommends logging every question your customers have ever asked you.  By doing this, you are mapping out your story ideas and editorial calendar.

Remember, your customers don’t care about you, your products or your services.  They care about themselves.  So your focus should be about solving their challenges through valuable, relevant informational posts.

Create Your Publishing Hub

The content needs to be located somewhere.  WordPress, Hubspot or Compendium are three solid options.

Focus on Content Distribution

Now that you’ve developed your content hub, start to think about the different ways to distribute that content to customers.

• Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+.
• RSS and Blog-to-Email Feeds
• Email Newsletters
• Guest blogging
• Guest webinars
• News releases
• eBooks/White Papers

And don’t forget to activate your content in the community through blog commenting (remember those influencers you found through Google Alerts and Twitter?).

Develop Your Calls to Action

There are a number of secondary and user indicators that will help you show progress with the blog.  More than anything, we want to make a connection with the reader in some way through some behavior change.  These could be small or big, such as:

• Liking you on Facebook
• Following you on Twitter or LinkedIn
• Subscribing to your blog
• Subscribing to your enewsletter
• Downloading your eBook or white paper
• Trying a demo
• Making something available for sale

Since most of your blog visitors are first-time visitors, we want to try to give them a reason to come back.  Strong calls to action for subscription should be readily available.  Think like a publisher!

Keep the Editorial Calendar and Repurpose

If you don’t set a content schedule, the work won’t get done.  It’s as simple as that.

There is no silver bullet, but choose a content schedule that works for you.

Once that is complete, look for ways to repurpose your content into other avenues that would be valuable to customers, including:

• An eNewsletter
• eBook or White Paper
• A Print Book (Robert Rose and I just did this).
• A Print Newsletter or Magazine
• Submission of posts to other credible sites and media outlets

Lost?  Here are 42 different ways to package your content marketing.

____________

Whatever you decide, if you want to be the leading expert in your industry, you have to commit to it and work the channels.  Good luck.

Here is the presentation from today’s meeting.  Enjoy!

Calculate Your Blogging ROI in 9 Steps

Posted on 26. Jul, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Blogging and Content Creation, blogs, content creation, roi, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media metrics, social media ROI, Web Analytics

Blogging isn’t free. Creating and sustaining a good blog for yourself or your company is a highly labor-intensive proposition. The people (maybe you) working on the blog could be doing something else that helps the company make money, save money, or both. Thus, blogging presents a serious opportunity cost to the company. Smart organizations methodically calculate the impact of blogging on the bottom line, making it easier to justify (or not) the resources allocated to the task.

Here’s how you might start to figure it out:

Blogging Expense Calculation

A. How many staff hours does it take per month to write, edit, track, manage the blog?
Let’s assume it’s 36 per month (3 posts per week at an average of 3 hours per post).

B. What do those hours cost the company in salary?
Let’s assume Susan spends 10 hours per month managing the blog, and her salary is $50,000. Paul spends 8 hours per month writing blog posts at a salary of $75,000. Shashi also spends 8 hours at a salary of $95,000. Warren spends 5 hours at a salary of $150,000. Olivier spends 5 hours at a salary of $40,000.

Divide each salary by 2000 (hours worked per year based on a 40-hour work week and two week’s vacation) to get average hourly salary compensation. In our example, it’s $25, $37.50, $47.50, $75, and $20, respectively. Multiply the hourly compensation by the number of hours devoted to determine the monthly salary expense (10 X $25 + 8 X $37.50 + 8 X $47.50 + 5 X $75 + 5 X $20 = $1405)

C. What do those hours cost the company in overhead and benefits?
Take your monthly salary costs figure ($1405) and multiply it by your company’s standard overhead calculation. This includes benefits, rent on a per-person basis, etc. Your accountant or CFO will know this number if you do not, and it’s typically 40% – 50%. We’ll use 45%, so the overhead and benefits cost of the blog labor is $632 ($1405 X 45%).

The total labor cost for your blog per month is $2037 ($1405 + $632).

D. What does the blog cost in design and technology fees?
If you built the blog internally, use the method above to calculate the labor/benefits cost of the blog’s creation. Or, if you had a third party create the blog, find out how much you paid. Divide either internal or external costs (or a combination) by 24 to find a monthly expense. (This is a two year amortization schedule for blog creation. Given that blogging continues to evolve and redesigns are common, I’m not comfortable stretching beyond 24 months).

Let’s assume that you had a Web development firm create your blog for $7,500. You did a slight update three months later for $1,000, making your total costs $8,500, and your amortized monthly cost $354 ($8,500 divided by 24).

E. What does the blog cost in hosting, maintenance, and app fees?
Let’s assume your monthly blog hosting is $19, and you spend $19 per month on Inbound Writer to help with you blog’s SEO, and you spend $19 per month on Formstack to create and manage landing pages to convince people to download your white paper. (both Inbound Writer and Formstack are awesome, by the way)

Your hosting, maintenance, and app fees are thus $57 per month.

Your total blogging cost per month is ($1405 + $632 + $354 + $57 = $2,448)

Blogging Revenue Calculation

Is that $2448 per month worth it? Let’s find out.

A. What revenue-oriented behaviors does the blog create?
Unless you’re selling ads on your blog, your blog’s value will primarily be derived in its ability to cause behavior among readers that leads to revenue. That often takes the form of lead generation, especially in B2B circumstances. This part of the process can differ quite a bit depending upon what type of company you are, whether you sell online, etc.

But, let’s assume you are the aforementioned Formstack, a provider of drag-and-drop online forms and landing pages (and a Convince & Convert sponsor).

On their blog, I’ve highlighted in orange three actions that can potentially create instantaneous leads or sales (in orange), and three other actions that might create leads or sales (in red). We’ll only concern ourselves with the more immediate potential in this analysis.

B. How many revenue-oriented actions are created?
Let’s assume that after visiting the blog, 30 people per month either call Formstack and sign up, subscribe using the “sign up now” button, or subscribe after visiting the Contact Us page. (this is not a real number, I’m using it for illustration purposes only)

To ensure that the blog had more than a middling role in driving those behaviors, you could set your Web analytics software (Google Analytics, for example) to only count people who have been on the blog more than 3 times, or have spent more than 3 minutes on the blog before clicking “Sign up Now” or any other attribute that indicates the blog was persuasive. For telephone sales, you might need to verbally inquire about the blog’s role unless you use a special tracking phone number than only appears on the blog (which would be a best practice).

C. What is the value of each behavior?
In Formstack’s case, it’s easier because customers can sign up directly online. They just need to know what the average lifetime value of a customer is (although this may require some guesswork for newer companies with less history). Let’s assume (again, not real numbers) that the average new customer spends $25 per month with Formstack, and remains a customer for 12 months. That makes the average lifetime value of a new customer $300 ($25 X 12).

However, not all of that $25 per month is net revenue to the company. Formstack has costs to provide the services to their customers, including technology, hosting, support, and other expenses. Most companies know (or can calculate) their true revenue after these expenses have been deducted (make sure you’re not double counting blogging expenses). In this example, let’s assume the true revenue after expenses per customer, per month is $19. That makes the actual lifetime customer value $228.

D. What is the total value of the behaviors?
In this example, Formstack would be generating $6,840 from the blog each month (30 sales driven by the blog X $228 average value = $6,840)

Calculating Blogging ROI

There is no debate about this last part. ROI stands for “return on investment” and not “return on influence” or “return on ignominy” or “rabbit on interstate”. The formula for calculating ROI is always essentially the same (with a couple of variations for finance geeks). The formula is:

REVENUE MINUS INVESTMENT, DIVIDED BY INVESTMENT (expressed as a percentage)

In this case, the monthly revenue is $6,840, and the investment is $2448. ($6,840 – $2,448 = $4,392. $4,392 divided by $2,448 = 179%) The monthly ROI of this blogging program is 179%.

How can you use this type of equation in your company?