Corporate blogging software

More marketers are practicing organic search optimization

Friday, November 6, 2009 by Stephanie West

A recent article by Advertising Age titled, Digital Marketing: The State of Search Marketing: 2009, has reported that search marketing is continuing to grow. In addition, about 9 out of 10 marketers are practicing organic search optimization. That's a large percentage of marketers that are going organic to get found in search!

http://2medschool.blogspot.com/2007/10/organic-chemistry-alkyl-halides-part-ii.html

The benefits of leveraging your online marketing strategy by organic search are limitless. Since many people are clicking on organic search results, they are attracting viewers to their blog, which can, in turn, draw potential customers into their website.

If you want to acquire new customers and then convert those customers - corporate blogging might be your answer because blogging humanizes your marketing strategy.

Compendium's corporate blogging software is designed to help leverage your blog in organic search - with a humanized approach. Nine out of 10 marketers are trying to position themselves in organic search - which mean YOU (as the customer) are likely to come into contact with one of these marketer's organic search strategies.

For more information on blogging for organic search and how it pertains to you - click here to speak with a blogging expert. They will explain the benefits of using Compendium's blog software to you!

Applying more SG to business blogging

Friday, November 6, 2009 by Brian Millis

Ok, so I try not to do double Seth Godin references but he seems to be so timely for what I'm doing. His most recent blog post begins with this quote:

"The problem with "everyone" is that in order to reach everyone or teach everyone or sell to everyone, you need to so water down what you've got you end up with almost nothing."

This is what I find so hilarious about most of the corporate blogs I read. Often time these busy business men and women spend time manually tagging or categorizing their freeware blog for things like: social media, agency, advice, technology, etc. etc.

These are such general topics for organization. Most of these people tell me that they spend time blogging for SEO and do this organization so they will be found in the search engine by qualified prospects. If you are a branding agency, why would someone search just "branding" or "agency"?! They wouldn't. They would search something like "branding agency in charlotte".

Seth's advice is great to heed when thinking about corporate blogging. If you try and make your blog about EVERYTHING or appealing to EVERYONE . . . . almost NO ONE will find you. Or you could look at it this way: A company that creates one blog and fills it with info ranging from industry news to product information simply waters down the blog, trying to make it about EVERYTHING. This means it will not be found by ANYONE or be a useful vehicle for getting found in search and driving traffic.

And this is why Compendium's structure is brilliant. Blog about EVERYTHING and let the software take care of the organization that actually makes it relevant to the searcher and the search engine.

Be smarter about how you market online

Thursday, November 5, 2009 by Brian Millis

Here is a great post from Seth Godin about online ad clicks. My favorite quote is:

"It's okay to make an ad that isn't easy to measure. If it works, that's enough."

Essentially, this is what every business blog post can be. What other form or online marketing allows you to tell your story from a very human level? As Seth says, the 84% of non-clickers online are looking to make a connection. So use the corporate blog as a way to build familiarity and attention.

This is why we have clients who enjoy over a 10% conversion rate on their Call to Action off of their blog page! People like to buy from people and a blog marketing strategy allows you to take advantage of this MAJORITY of searchers. The stats that Seth discusses in his post also point to why winning organic traffic is so much more valuable (in the majority of cases) than paid search.

Of course, we feel your blog SHOULD be optimized for clicks, but the human nature of a blog works much better for those 84% of non-clickers. Our corporate blogging software makes content creation easy and maximizes its visibility online. With Compendium, you can get in front of that majority of search and use good content to increase conversion.

How to use your Corporate Blog for inbound links

Thursday, November 5, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Corporate Blogging is all about credibility and search marketing. By organizing relevant content that is frequently updated you are essentially building targeted organic landing pages. Content drives this strategy, but don't forget ever that inbound links are really valuable too. Generally I fall into the camp that if your company bloggers create great content and that content targeting search, then you will dramatically increase the reach of your blogs and links will come naturally.

Sometimes however you might need to 'Prime the Pump' and engage in some strategies to legitimately go out and get some links.

This particular tactic is not my original idea but one I've been working on after a post by Rand Fishkin. The idea is sort of back to the Zig Ziglar quote that has been around forever:

"You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want."

There is really nothing new conceptually with Social Media. The ideas are the same as they were before brand corruption, now we just have the tools to actually execute.

Rand's idea is to target people you know and write a testimonial about them. The key is not to put this testimonial on your blog, but offer it up for them to put on their own blog.

Another spin on this is the offer to be a guest blogger. I use Google alerts to keep track of who's blogging in my industry, that gives me a steady stream of fellow advocates to reach out to.

Get Tracking - Measure Your Business Blog ROI

Thursday, November 5, 2009 by Jess Wehner

In order to make sure your investment with Compendium is worth the dollars you put into the program, it is important to track and measure the ROI of your business blog. While not all marketing teams have the resources to do this, ideally you should have an exact or specific way to measure how much revenue you can attribute back to the blog. This can be done by setting up unique landing pages for your CTAs or putting in tracking codes on all of your blog links.

One new customer that has done this from the beginning is Memolink. Memolink is an online rewards program that allows you to earn points for completing surveys and shopping online. Once you've earned enough points, you can redeem those points for gift cards, cash, or make a donation to a charitable organization.

Check out the Memolink Blog and you will see that every call to action and link on their site leads you to a page that has a unique URL. The Memolink team can then see how many members they are getting signed up directly from the blog, so they won't have to question at the end of the year if the blog was or was not a succesful investment. It will all be in the numbers.

If you'd like to set up a business blog program like Memolink, contact our business development team today and learn how to start generating leads and making sales from your corporate blog.

Exciting Product Release to Preview your Blog Post within Your Template

Wednesday, November 4, 2009 by Abby Brosmer

This morning, Compendium proudly released the ability to preview your blog post within your live blog template. Prior to today,when creating post as a user the options available were to save as a draft, submit my post to the administrator for moderation or preview the post in new window to ensure video worked properly.

Today, when a user selects preview post, they will now view their content as it would appear live on the web. A nice enhancement to our easy to use blogging software which allows users an extra reassurance that their content will represent the company well on the corporate blog.

As a member of the product support team, we are always working to request enhancements to the product that will enhance each users experience and provide the best blogging software to our clients.

If you have a suggestion, fill our the web form and we will add it to our product log for enhancements. Yes, these enhancements are prioritized by customer request, so every vote matters.

Happy Birthday to ME!

Tuesday, November 3, 2009 by Allison Bowen

Today I officially feel old. Okay, okay, I know 23 is not very old... But STIL

L! 23 is one of those ages that I've always considered to be "old." And now here it is, already! Wow does time fly by!

One thing I know for sure is that birthday wishes today are nothing like they used to be. When I was a kid, I might have a few friends at school tell me happy birthday if they happened to remember the right day. I might even get a birthday cake on our class calendar with my name on it.

But at age 23 I can officially say that I've received the most birthday wishes I have ever received. Is this because I now have so many more friends? Well, maybe in part. However, the more likely scenario is that there are now so many more social media avenues in which friends can offer me well wishes. Facebook provides everyone with my exact birth date; meaning it's just after 4pm and I've already received 56 wall posts. One friend Twitters "Happy Birthday @alliebb44" and all the sudden all my Twitter followers are retweeting the sentiments. Times have certainly changed!

Is your company up to date with this new world of social media? One great place to start is with a corporate blog. With Compendium's easy to use blog software you can quickly and easily write a post that relates to your clients and gives them an insight to your company, which can in turn lead to search engine optimization and sales.

So why not give it a try? Give us a call here at Compendium today!

Alerding Castor Hewitt receives results

Monday, November 2, 2009 by Stephanie West

This firm is a great example of why a business should blog. They dedicate about 2 hours a week to blogging. That's right: 2 HOURS PER WEEK. Wrap your head around that. In addition to their two hour per week blogging dedication, they have seen 500% blogging ROI... 500%!

Those numbers (alone) should convince you that corporate blogging has something great going for it. But if those numbers don't convince you, consider this additional information about Alerding Castor Hewitt.

This case study is an excellent reason of why you should blog for business. Compendium's blogging platform structures SEO tools that help maximize your search engine optimization results. Blogging for search, just as Alerding Castor Hewitt does, is a way for potential customers to find you on the internet. Online marketing is a means of reaching those potential customers that are searching for something on the internet. By blogging (for as little as 2 hours per week!), you are helping position your company to get found in search.

Click here to view this Alerding Castor Hewitt case study and read about their blogging success!

Don't Be Scared of Keywords

Monday, November 2, 2009 by Tyler Bender

I've been writing for years. I have a background in Journalism and was beat over the head with APA format writing in college. I have written websites, press releases, brochures, video scripts. I thought I'd seen the in's and out's of this "web 2.0" movement. The basic principles for writing for the web: keep it simple, put yourself in the shoes of your audience, tell them what you want them to do. Don't screw up gramatically, and don't have typos.

Got it.

Now, I've only been a part of Compendium's team for about three weeks as an internal content writer, and one of the things I have seen multiple times in some of our client keyword lists look something like this: (I'll use Compendium as my example)

Compendium Blogware
Compendium
Blogging Software
Corporate Blogs
Compendiums
Comppendium
Compendiam
Compendium Blog Ware

Notice something odd? The name of the company is misspelled. more than once.

And I'm expected to throw those keywords into my content like that? Whhhhattt? This concept takes some catching on. And for someone who has spent the greater part of his life trying to edit and perfect his writing so that it never has a typo, learning how to include typos into content on purpose is like telling Peyton Manning that it's ok to throw passes to the other team. At first, it was like nails on a chalkboard, only the nails were buckets of acid and the chalkboard was my eyes.

But it makes sense.

People don't check Webster's Dictionary or the phonebook before they visit search engines to search for your company's keywords. Sometimes they're going to misspell their searches and you want to win those searches - even if they're "wrong." Right?

When you're bloging for search, you should always account for the searches that aren't perfect. It's okay. Wouldn't you rather have someone find your blog even though they mistakenly typed in "Acmes Solution" instead of "Acme Solutions," than someone completely miss your content because you weren't comfortable including the misspelling in your content?

Part of the beauty of blogging is that it's not perfect. Actually, I think some imperfections in corporate blogs make the writers more "relatable" to their audience. If I saw a typo in a brochure, I'd think that the company was lazy, didn't care enough to edit their material and all-around not very professional. If I see a typo in a blog, it's easier to remind myself that an actual human being is on the other end of the blog, constantly updating their content, and it was probably a simple oversight.

So don't be scared of your keywords just because they're mispelled. They'll still work, and strategically, it makes sense to use them. The goal is to reach your audience - even if they're not sure how to spell your company name.

The Backbone to a Corporate Blogging Strategy

Saturday, October 31, 2009 by Kaila Woodside

If there is one thing that makes a powerful blogging software even more powerful its a great

blogging administrator. The main job of a blogging administrator is to approve and decline the blog content submitted by the company bloggers. But a great blogging administrator does much more. A great blogging administrator typically does the following as well:

1.) motivates the team of bloggers daily with new ideas
2.) develops incentive programs for the bloggers
3.) understands exactly how to track the success of the blog program back to a clear ROI
4.) is also a blogger and contributes daily to the blog
5.) is personally excited and motivated by the blog program
6.) understands blogging best practices and enforces those with the bloggers.

A great blogging administrator can be the difference between a good and a great blog for search engine optimization.

DEFINE: Click Through Rate

Friday, October 30, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

How can you measure the level of your corporate blog visitors engagement?

One of the best measurements of engagement is looking at the number of visitors who interact with your Calls To Action. But how can you measure engagement with your CTAs?

Click Through Rate: The number of visitors who click on your CTAs / Total Visitors to the site.

What is a good CTR? There is no ‘magic’ CTR, all industries and companies can have wide variance. We advice our clients to:

Understand the ROI of your program. In other words, for the effort you are putting in and the investment that you’ve made, are you getting the value out?

Watch the trend. Comparing CTR trends to see if they are increasing or decreasing when changes are made.

When blogging for search remember to continuously measure and test the CTAs that you use on your corporate blog. Need help with your CTA strategy - reach out to your Compendium Client Success Manager.

Blog Platform Updates

Friday, October 30, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

At Compendium we are consistently striving to make our corporate blogging software more efficient and user friendly as we can. Therefore making it easy to use blog software that allows any size company, in any vertical to incorporate into their online marketing strategy.

As part of this mission, our development team has on average a new release every week, with enhancements to our platform. This week's release is an enhancement to a a previous release we had that allowed admins on a blog network to manage their keywords and select which ones they wanted their users to focus on.

This feature in our platform allows the network as a whole to keep focused on keywords that are relative to their business and as they continue to generate content, will drive search traffic that will convert into new leads for their business.

Compendium is excited about this new feature and looks forward to the enhancements to come. If you have an idea, request, or enhancement that you'd like to submit - contact your Client Success Manager and we'll get it to our Dev Team!

5 Tricks for Fabulous Blog CTAs

Friday, October 30, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

In the spirit of the Halloween here are five fabulous tricks to help you get the treat (business blogging leads).

1. Use images of people. People respond to people and buy from people. Just make sure that the person in the image is looking at the action you want them to take not away from it.

2. Eye-catching colors are always good to use - in moderation of course. Get my attention but don't overpower me.

3. Say something that will really get them to think. Starting a CTA with a question is always a good start.

4. Make sure your offering a variety of Calls To Action. Your corporate blog will have visitors that are ready to purchase right now as well as visitors that are only ready to commit to a newsletter. Don’t miss out – cater to all of the groups.

5. Never give it away for free. Make sure you capture your visitors data.

While creating quality CTAs can be tricky don't worry we are here to help. Just reach out to your client success manager for strategy and guidance around improving your CTAs.

Blogging and Halloween

Friday, October 30, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

Part of the fun of having a corporate blog is that it allows the personality of the employees to shine, and allow potential and existing customers to engage with your staff.

So along that note, I wanted to share a bit of Compendium's personality during this festive weekend! Ladies and Gentleman....feast your eyes on one of our Business Development Managers - Brian Graham:

(Kudos to Brian for creating and sewing this Two-Face outfit together on his own - I'm sorry I missed the leopard print boot though...)

The best part about this picture is that Brian was on a demo with a client while allowing me to take advantage and publish his picture web-wide (Brian - any publicity deals you land from this, I get 15%).

Some might think this is a crazy office, but that's whats fantastic about working here. We are all passionate about what we do, and we have fun with it! That personality allows our customers to have fun too. The other thing that happens now, is that you probably feel a little closer to Brian, right? Feel like you might know him, would enjoy talking with him, etc - you've engaged with him!!

Obviously, a blog for search engine optimization is key, but don't forget to allow your human side to show too!

Here's hoping everyone has a safe and spooky Halloween!

Passion.

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Allison Bowen

While being a Client Success Specialist here at Compendium, I also have the role of being an Orr Fellow. This means that I am a part of the two-year Governor Bob Orr Entreprenurial Fellowship Program and have had many opportunities within Compendium and Indianapolis because of my position. As a part of the Orr Fellowship, I have recently travelled to many colleges throughout the state to recruit for our program.

Last night I went to a networking fair at Butler University and quickly discovered one thing about recruiting - it only works if you have passion for what you are doing! Isn't this the way it is with everything in life? As I stood at our Orr Fellowship table and looked around, it was easy to tell which employees were passionate about their companies. Students instantly gravitated towards those that seemed excited about what they were discussing.

The same goes for blogging. It's all about passion. If you're a client of Compendium's, you know you're using the best blogging software available. So, shouldn't you be passionate about it? How amazing is it that you can tell your story to the entire blogsphere every day? So c'mon! Write some posts! If you're passionate about what you're doing, your company's corporate blog is sure to succeed.

Increase Your Calls To Action Clicks

Thursday, October 29, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

What is the best technique for increasing your corporate blog Calls To Action (CTA) clicks?

Give a specific action don’t be passive!

It is your job to guide your corporate blog readers to take the next step with you. How will they know what to do if you don't tell them or encourage them to take action?

NOTHING

Be direct and make the offer appealing. Try using some of these methods:

Deadline - Act now to get X
Price save or price increase
Trial/Introductory period
Free gift
Only available through this offer
Upgrade
Free accessory

Have you tried using any of these methods with your blog CTAs? What method saw the best results? We love to hear business blogging CTA success stories so please share yours today.

You Don't Peak In High School

Monday, October 19, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Seth had a great post the other day talking about the goal of High School being basically to draw as much attention to yourself as possible.

The point being that most of the time this attention getting is short lived and without any real long term goal. As my wife says to our kids all the time: "You don't want to peak in High School!"

We see this a lot with the business people we talk to who are enamored with social networks without having any real goals. Like high school, the goal is to be popular with no other objective. This was perfectly manifested in the eMarketer story we talked about the other day. Their survey said that marketers had a goal of being Thought Leaders?

Seth's brilliance is that we have all seen this in our own lives. Popularity for the sake of popularity..."If I'm popular lots of good things will happen". Now some people are naturally going to be popular while most are going find themselves doing lots of compromising activity in a desperate attempt to be popular.....as you remember I'm sure, that popularity didn't last long and the memory is probably pretty bitter for all associated.

Then you have your ten or twenty year reunion and you find out who is really successful in life. Almost always, it's not the people who peaked in high school. The successful people are the ones who focused on the fundamentals and had a vision of the future.

How does this tie to Corporate Blogging? Widespread employee blogging is an investment in the future. The goal isn't popularity, followers or fans. The goal is to lay a foundation of stories about the problems you solve. That content will target search traffic. SEO is better for everyone...it's scalable, sustainable and puts you in front of people (prospects) who have problems you can solve. Corporate Blogging is real life, not high school.

Top 10 Google Analytics Resources for Corporate Bloggers

Tuesday, October 13, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

You can leverage your corporate blog analytics to gain insight into your blog including:

Where your business blog traffic is coming from
What visitors are most engaged with
The search keywords your traffic is finding you for
Guiding your visitors to take the next step

It is important that you listen to your analytics closely when your blogging for search. Don't worry everyone has questions about Google Analytics.

Here are the top ten resources I use to find answers to my Google Analytics questions.

Official Google Analytics Blog

Google Analytics Official YouTube Channel

Google Analytics Support Page

Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik

A Guide to Google Analytics and Useful Tools

50 Resources for Getting the Most Out of Google Analytics

AnalyticsSearch: Search dozens of Google Analytics support websites with 1 click

EpikOne: Analytics Talk

Follow & Tweet with @Google Analytics on Twitter

Software as a Service Compendium Blogware's Product Support Team

I hope that these resources help you with your analytics questions. Do you use a resource not listed here? Please just add it to my list via comments.

Communicating with Your Blog

Tuesday, September 15, 2009 by Stephanie West

Corporate blogging is a great way to update your clients (or perspective clients) on what is going on within your company.

Corporate blogging is a great search marketing tool. It also helps businesses get found in search. Blogging is also a great way to generate leads. And it humanizes your business.

But another great aspect of blogging is communication.

Simply communicating what is going on within your company is equally as important as getting found in search or generating leads.

So as the marketing intern, I'm here to tell you what's going on within the marketing department at Compendium.

This month, the Marketing department is hosting a blogging competition amongst the 5 departments at Compendium. Our Marketing Manager, Meghan, assigned each department weekly blogging goals to reach. The Client Success department won two weeks in a row. No one has caught them yet!
The Marketing department hosted a successful Webinar last week! Look for the replay on Compendium's website soon.
We're preparing for another Webinar and follow-up this Thursday, Sept. 17 from 2-3PM, Third Generation Business Blogging. Click on the link to sign up for this FREE webinar!

These are just a few of the fun things going on at Compendium - particularly within the Marketing department. From now on, look for more regular updates from me on what's going on at Compendium in the Marketing department!