Boost Your Internet Marketing By Engaging Your Employees
March 16th, 2008 by hbond{{chris}} If you put a plan in place you can easily empower your employees to assist in your Internet marketing!
There are power in numbers – it’s a known fact. By leveraging this notion and empowering your employees you can have a power house working for your Internet marketing initiatives. While you still need an overall plan your staff can play a critical role in the overall strategy. Here are some ways you can get them participating.
- Blogs and Forums. Identify a set of informational blogs and forums in their discipline and incorporate them into their monthly research and education. Require them to engage in the conversations by commenting and be sure to have them use your domain name as the URL for their comments.Each time an employee leaves a comment they’ll be leaving a link back to your site. This boosts your overall link popularity which in turn boosts your rankings.
- Articles and Press Releases. Encourage your key staff in marketing and research & development to write about the work they’ve been doing on a regular basis. Both articles an press releases should be written up – optimized against specific keywords relevant to the subject matter and then published on line through press release sites and article submission services.
Once again each time an article or press release is published you’ll obtain value search engine optimized back links to your site.
- Social Media Sites. Encourage your employees to video and photograph corporate events. Provide them with simple tools to add titles and credits to the videos and encourage them to submit the videos to video sharing sites. TubeMogul.com is a perfect utility for uploading the video to multiple locations. For videos be sure to show and say the domain name of the company.
Do the same with photos using photosharing sites. In this case be sure to show the domain name in the description of the photo.
While this won’t produce direct links to your site it will improve overall awareness of your brand and will result in an increase in “direct” traffic to your site.
I’m sure we can think of even more ways that your staff can participate. By engaging them in just these three simple activities you’ll see a dramatic increase in your overall Internet marketing efforts.
If you have other suggestions on how to engage your staff please let us know. We’ll include your ideas and credit you with a link too.
Been reading for a while now. Just wanted to say good job.
Chris Tackett
Always interested in learning new ideas to increase internet exposure – thanks for the tips
Good tips.
What sites do you recommend for article & PR submissions? Which ones are best for back links?
Thank you for the info.
Good idea. Never thought about involving our employes. But it makes sense…
Hey Sterling,
Watch the RSS feed – we’ll post up a list of PR sites and Article directories too sometime in the next few days, OK!
I have actually thought about those things for a while. However, what kind of oversight would you do for staff commenting on blogs. Do you trust your staff enough to give them the liberty to speak their mind? I have always wondered about that.
Hey JACL!
You pose a good question. While I’ve only proposed the idea – what’s needed is the plan. To fulfill the plan you need staff – and not just any staff. I’d select those that are most loyal to the company and those most capable of participating. Setup the ground rules and means of measuring activity and results.
In a small compay it’s easy. if you have thousands of employees it’s a little harder! You just need the right level of leadership and coaching and it will work!
Your article was informative and those points you have mentioned were really helpful. Thanks for the idea..
@JACL – I think, if you don’t trust your employees enough to do something simple like that, then why would you hire them in the first place. Just a thought. I like all my employees to be able to show the face on behalf of everyone in the firm.
Well said! It’s a valid point. The larger your company gets there will be portion you don’t or should not trust but overall you should be aiming to trust them all!
What may be a good intention comment by one employee may be perceived as offensive by the receiving end. It happens every day by famous people who say things that unintentionally becomes offensive to a large group of people. Geraldine Ferraro who was a former Vice Presidential Candidate years ago said something to the effect that Obama would not be where he is now if he were white or a woman. That somehow became offensive to both women and minorities. That caused Hillary to distance her from those statements. These are people who are highly educated people. Just imagine the people assigned to post comments on blogs. It seems foreseeable that not all the comments may be appropriate.
Call it paranoia but bloggers are threated with lawsuits every day these days. And if you are a company with deep pockets, people will be motivated by $ to sue.
JACL raises some good points. While we can’t live in fear of what might happen – if we did that no one would start a business. However, it does underscore the need to setup a plan, carefully select those to get involved, coach them on boundaries and monitor their efforts.
great post, thanks
internet marketing can be very useful for your company if you use it the right way. you can reach out to a lot of your target audiences this way.
I don’t have employees I shall engage myself then.
There are power in numbers! Indeed. Thanks for the tip. Nice post.