I am a stickler for marketing and sales results. Everything we do should be measured, including our social media and social networking efforts. If what we do doesn't return ROI, we should stop doing it. Of course, to measure ROI, it must first be defined. I define ROI by asking the following questions...


Do our marketing efforts:

• Create great customer experiences as measured by the happiness levels of our customers?
• Result in loyal clients?
• Result in revenues and/or profits?
• Result in leads and referrals?
• Result in getting us noticed?

If marketing results in one or more of the above and is greater than our investment as measured in time and costs, we should keep the strategy and the tactics to achieve that strategy and work to do it better and more profitably. The purpose of this post is to focus on blogging ROI, and to do so please permit me to share my firm's personal story.
In the first two quarters this year, our blog has delivered ROI in each of the five metrics, specifically in the following ways:

• Two new clients found us through our blog.
• A referral from a fellow blogger led to a new client.
• Four speaking engagements directly linked to either bizsolutionsplus (our blog) or MarketingProfts Daily Fix.
• Loyal and happy readers as measured by their feedback and their frequency of visits.

One additional ROI from blogging that just happened an hour ago and led me to write this post: Today, I received a telephone call from the Publisher/Editor of Gardner Publishing, who was referred to me by her CEO. He read my last post here at the Fix, liked it so much that he shared it with his CMO, who shared it with his staff. With my permission, the article, How to Add 10 New Clients in the Next 12 Months, will be republished in one of Garner's four-color magazines, which are distributed to B2B manufacturers and suppliers within the auto industry.
Don't know about you, but my firm can't afford that kind of advertising. This is the fifth time a publication or another blog has asked for permission to republish one of my posts. (Thanks Ann. I owe you.)
None of the above is about me or my firm. Other blogs are experiencing similar results. I use my efforts to share my first-hand experiences. But this story offers little value if I also don't share with you how we deliver ROI from bizsolutionsplus and from guest blogging here at the Daily Fix.
Here are the marketing strategies behind our blog:

1. We didn't launch the blog until we identified the readers with whom we wanted to share and reach. In our case, we write for three types of readers--consultants, our clients and our potential ideal clients.
2. We remain consistent with our content, focusing on brand development, marketing, communications, public relations, advertising, social media and social networking. On some Fridays, we deviate by publishing something fun.
3. We write for our readers, not for ourselves.
We respond to every comment by e-mail and usually also with a comment.
4. We are always on the search for new directories the blog can be listed in.
5. We carefully choose our tags.
We comment on other blogs, forums and chats as often as we can,
6. We are faithful to some 50 blogs that we read regularly and, in addition to placing them in our blog roll, we give credit when they inspire us to write something and recognize them when they do good works.
7. We review our stats often to identify the most popular posts so we can better meet our reader's wants and needs.
8. We use Twitter to share our post links and to recommend other's posts.
9. And we guest post here because MarketingProfs does everything well and always with its readers and followers first in mind.

As I hope is obvious from the above, the real ROI of blogging comes in different forms and the "R" in ROI doesn't always have to mean revenue. Happy blogging.