Acquire an FTE (Full Time Employee)

The question isn’t IF a good online marketing employee will help increase revenue.  If they are good they will.  But there is a question as to if the cost of this person will exceed the revenue they bring in.  For example:  $100,000/year salary and benefits for a good online marketer is a good deal.  If this employee helps you bring in an incremental $200,000/year in revenue this is a no brainer.  If the market will only let them bring you in $50,000/year there is probably a problem.

Acquire PTE (Part Time Employee)

A part time employee may also be considered and may cut the salary requirement in half.  You may also reduce the quality of the person you are seeking.  You are probably seeking (or at least hoping for) Organic Search, Paid Search, Display, E-mail, and Social Media marketing skills in one person.  Your chances of finding all these skills in one person are slim in the first place.  This effort is further hampered when you only have a part time position to offer.  Two reason for this: 1) you screen out the best people and 2) you limit the time they have to devote to doing a complete job each month.

Hire an Agency

Acquiring a GOOD agency will address the problem of expertise.  They will most likely have expertise in Organic, Paid, Display, E-mail, and Social Media.  Unlike your perfect employee they will most likely be multiple individuals who focus on their core competencies.   The problem with this scenario is you will probably go from $100,000/year salary and benefits for a full time employee to $200,000/year to engage a good agency.  You may also find you will not have an employer/employee type relationship.  As hard as they may try not to do so they will probably come across as a bunch of arrogant know-it-alls that will insist on doing everything their way with little input from you.  This may be justified in some cases but will be unacceptable in many situations.

Hire a Virtual Agency

This is the best of both worlds and more.  You have a)  at your disposal expertise in Organic, Paid, Display, E-mail, and Social Media, b) part time “virtual” employees while maintaining the quality and coverage of a Full Time Employee, and c) a cost that is closer to the cost of the part time employee.  The expertise gained by engaging  this virtual agency is further enhanced with years of contacts, available online marketing tools and techniques at their disposal, and economies of scales that simply can’t be enjoyed by companies that don’t have online marketing as their primary business.

What You Should Expect From A Virtual Agency

Most of us know something about how Twitter works.  We follow someone.  Hopefully they will follow us back.  We type in something interesting every once in a while. We read what others are typing in.  But what does it all mean?

As this is being written we are gathering responses in a Twitter poll from actual Twitterers.  This poll attempts to gauge what users of Twitter expect from their time and energy.  As of today the Twitter poll respondents believe Twitter should be used to:

1. Generally socialize and get connected 27%
2. Keep informed about a particular topic or interest 30%
3. Inform others about a particular topic or interest 19%
4. Promote a product or service I provide 24%

See poll results and add your two cents by clicking here.

From these responses we conclude that most people are not using Twitter to promote a product or service.   If you are a business person, and since you are reading this you probably are, you may at first view this as bad news.  But it is actually good news.  Since less than a forth of the Twitterers are promoting a product or service, we conclude the market place is probably more open to a few doing just that.

Let’s illustrate this with an example of businesses at a trade show.  If only the businesses at the trade show were the ones presenting, they would be focusing so much on promoting their own product or service that they may not be as interested in hearing about yours.

Of course you should Not come across as only being self promoting.  You need to build relationships, offer value, entertain your followers, then every tenth tweet or so they may not mind a little self serving promotion.

This brings me to the point of this blog posting.  How do you tell how effective you are on Twitter?  Yes, you can create tracking url-s that tells you when you got a visit, lead, or sale from Twitter and that is the ultimate indicator.  But how do you know how you rank with your followers as compared to other Twitterers?   How effective are your tweets compared to the best on Twitter?  A lack of knowledge here may make or break you.

One indicator of how you rank with your followers is your Retweet rank.  A Retweet Rank is a representation of the number of times a user has been retweeted by others recently on twitter.

If you enter my Twitter ID of @steventhompson, I have a Retweet rank of 8,406 and a 94.2 percentile.   This compares pretty good with Twitter ID @airductcleaner who has a retweet rank of 144,868 and a 0.0 percentile but not as well with Twitter ID @britneyspears who has a retweet rank of 1001 and a 99.31 percentile.  As you can see the lower the rank number and the higher the percentile number the better.

If you rank low and have a higher percentile this is probably an indication that you may get away with a few more self promoting tweets.  If you rank high with a lower percentile you may want to promote every 20 tweets or 30 tweets, of even more.

Go ahead and take the Twitter Poll.  Then find out your Retweet Rank.  You will then be positioned to do the optimal amount of self serving promotional Tweets.

Contact steve.thompson@siteedgeagency.com .

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Social Media, Online Marketing

Analytics, Blogs, Social Media | 1 Comment »

On today’s web - a static ‘brochure’ site doesn’t cut it anymore.  If you provide a service, sell a product, or want to generate traffic, you have to produce fresh content that engages your readers on a regular basis.  One of the best ways to do this? - Blogging.

What is a blog?  You can read the Wikipedia Entry for that.  What I want to do is give you 7 steps to making a blog work for your business.

What are the potential benefits to blogging about your business?  They are numerous: search engine traffic, blog search traffic, positioning yourself as an expert in your field, engaging your customers, creating a community, positive PR, RSS subscribers, easy content creation and archiving, and, most importantly - gaining new customers.

Just see what it did for one lawyer here. (requires a free signup - sorry!)

Step 1 - Do some research and planning.
Look at your business.  What sets you apart?  What are you an expert in?  What subjects do you feel comfortable writing about?  Go to Google and type in some keywords related to your business.  Are people blogging on the same subjects?  What are they talking about?  Can you add value to the conversation?  Answer all of the above questions, and find your niche.

Step 2 - Choose your platform.
There are a number of services out there, from free blog sites to very expensive systems.  Each has drawbacks and positives, so you have to decide what’s most important for you.  Ideally, you want a blog system that is easy to use, customize, and will allow you to have your own domain name pointed to it. If you can find one that offers web stats, even better!

Step 3 - Get started.
An empty blog can be intimidating, and the best way to get through it is to just get started.  As you post more, you can discover your voice, and it will get easier as you go along.  Remember, you don’t have to impress Harvard scholars here (unless they are your target audience) - blogs are supposed to sound like you wrote them.

Step 4 - Keep going.
Once you start, set out a schedule of posts that you try to keep to.  1-2 per day is best, but make sure to try to post at least a few times per week.  If you keep the content fresh, people will find you, and come back.

Step 5 - Interact.
The magic of blogging is that they create communities based around them.  Read other people’s blogs, and comment on their posts.  Allow readers to comment on yours.  Respond to those comments.  Provide links to others (and they will reciprocate).

Step 6 - Rinse, and Repeat.
Once you get rolling, keep the momentum going.  With a few months of effort, you can create a very valuable web property.

Step 7 - Get help.
As a business owner, you’re busy - and we get that.  Sometimes, it makes sense to get some help executing these steps.  If you hire a professional consultant, you can use their expertise in this area to kick-start the success of your blog, get ideas for content, change the look and feel of your blog, stay up to date with new plugins and technology, and have expert help in promoting your blog.

And, you’ll find that many consultants are reasonably priced.  Contact siteEDGE for more information on how we can help you build a successful blog to get you new customers.

Strategy, Blogs, Social Media | No Comments »