Best Blog Software

Client Testimonial on Compendium

Thursday, March 18, 2010 by Sarah Sedberry

Of course every employee believes in their company and the product or service they carry, but it is always nice to get confirmation from clients and outside sources who love your company as much as you do.

Recently we had a client, Ray Rosewell of DaVinci Roofscapes, mention his success with his blogging program in an interview that was featured on Business Blog Writers. In the interview Ray mentions his goals and how Compendium is helping his company achieve them:

"From a business standpoint, what I am looking for is a way to make a blog effective as an information tool, but at the same time, use it as a tool that will allow search engines to find us so they can help people who are looking for information that relates to our products.. By using the Compendium blog platform to do the work on keyword selection we are able to accomplish both goals.”

For more on how Compendium's powerful blogging software can help your business achieve your online marketing goals, contact us to schedule a demo and get free Starbucks!

Measuring the Success of your Blogging Efforts

Wednesday, March 17, 2010 by Isaac Pellerin

There's no better way to measure success than having a tool designed to deliver up-to-date success metrics. I must congratulate our Engineering team that released an update to Compendium (a corporate blogging software built for search). The update integrates with Google analytics so that our clients can measure how much traffic is being generated through their blogging program.

Not only does this demonstrate the power of our software but it also builds a foundation where future updates will expand on our analytics capabilities.

"ROI, ROI, ROI" for Engineering!!!

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 by Maureen McNamara

Today is an exciting day here at Compendium for me. We meet with the Engineering Team who is responsible for making Compendium's powerful blogging software --- simple blogging software.

The Compendium Engineering Team, led by P.J. Hinton is responsible for the development, testing, deployment, and operation of Compendium Blogware. The group uses SCRUM (not an acronym - think rugby), an agile software development methodology to manage the planning, development and deployment life cycle. Emphasis is place on short development cycles and frequent releases. Progress on commitments are measured on a daily basis to ensure any obstacles are resolved asap.

I am a Business Development Manager. I sell the best blogging software on the planet and I am certainly not a techie --- but I love attending these meetings. The Engineering Team's vernacular includes exciting stuff like "sprint planning," "strategic sprint," "burndown chart," "agile,"disciplined transparency,"and of course the "scrum" and the powerful "scrum master".

Today, we learn how easy to use blogging software becomes even more robust when it comes to my favorite bottom line --- ROI analytics --- so I'll be sharing more in the days to come. Thanks engineering. Okay, okay, RAH, RAH, RAH!!!

Just Do it

Monday, March 15, 2010 by David Burks

Blog for Business- Just Do It

Social marketing is the evolved state of word-of-mouth marketing, using new, Internet-based social media. Social media includes a plethora of social sites people can use to spread the word about their business or Website. Social marketing offers the advantage of being inexpensive, but at the same time, it provides a highly targeted audience. In the correct and experienced hands, social marketing can multiply the profits of any business by increasing the number of customers.

Social marketing is best done through various social media channels such as blogs, social networking websites, picture and video sharing sites, and targeting social bookmarking sites.

Compendium specializes in blogging software, providing a hub for all social media efforts. To learn more about Compendium Blogware and our software, visit www.compendium.com.

Tracking Results

Monday, March 15, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

One of the aspects that makes blogging a winning online marketing strategy is that there are easy ways to track your return on investment. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track things like the percentage of 1st time visitors to your site. You can also track how many people click on links that lead to future orders. Those are just the basics of how you can track an investment in blogging.

One company that tracked their blogging efforts was one of our clients, Fairtytale Brownies. Within the first six months of blogging with Compendium's affordable blogging software, the company had 110 orders for their premium brownies. That was just a small percentage of the 10,000 plus visits the website received. Since Fairytale tracked their blogs, they can create more refined blog posts that can segment more customers and gain more business! For some fun reading, check out their case study here. Again, there are many more benefits of business blogging, but having the ability to track your ROI is very important!

Get your Questions Answered!

Monday, March 15, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

I received a project today to update records in our database of
people who attended a

webcast that our CEO and Co-Founder, Chris Baggott, spoke at recently. He covered many things about the importance of business blogging and strategies to help your business, like which platforms to use and how to optimize your companies performance in search.

One of things I had to update was what questions people asked and there was a common trend. People realized that blogging was the solution, but they did not know what type of software to use. The answer is easy, Compendium Blogware! Our affordable corporate blogging software can help businesses large and small. It also only takes roughly 10 business days to complete the Getting Started process so you can begin to maximize your web presence. If you would like to get some questions answered, view a demo today!

What is Return on Investment?

Friday, March 12, 2010 by David Burks

You need a Simple Blogging Software at your company that will give you a great ROI. What is ROI you ask?

ROI = Return On Investment

What Does Return On Investment (ROI) mean?
A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment or to compare the efficiency of a number of different investments. To calculate ROI, the benefit (return) of an investment is divided by the cost of the investment; the result is expressed as a percentage or a ratio.

Return on investment is a very popular metric because of its versatility and simplicity. That is, if an investment does not have a positive ROI, or if there are other opportunities with a higher ROI, then the investment should not be undertaken.

See you at my next blog.....

Brand integrity across all brands......

Friday, March 12, 2010 by Scott Bleczinski

Today while meeting with our sales team, we were discussing a blogging solution for global enterprise prospects and customers. Specifically, we were discussing how our blog software platform empowers all stake holders and customers to blog via our enterprise solution - it is a secure, easy to use blog software platform that can be rolled out quickly and easily. Many of our clients see our blog software as 'the answer' to corporate brand integrity across the globe. Each employee or customer receives a password protected log-in account, a quick tutorial via the UI.....and they are off and blogging. Brand attributes from the corporate web site or division can be easily incorporated to ensure consistency and integrity - key to our largest enterprise clients and prospects.

Only your corporate blogs let you control your own social media destiny

Friday, March 12, 2010 by Chris Baggott

Thanks a lot to Interactive Agency Fat Atom for sharing this great video. We talk often here about your Corporate Blogs being the hub of your social media strategy. There are lots of reasons for this, but one of the most compelling is control. With Blog software like Compendium, you own your blogging strategy and nobody can take it away from you. Who can say what happens with Facebook or Twitter in the future...but as a business you need to control your own social presence. This is not to say that you don't feed relevant blog content out to these social spokes, but you need to control the hub. Enjoy this great video :-)

SEO is a matter of opinion

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Julie Murphy

Who do you listen to when it comes to leveraging SEO tools? In today's world everyone is speaking about blogging for search. Blog for business with the most effective easy to use blog software that allows you to concentrate on a content management system built to populate landing pages that in turn create keyword rich pages.

Leverage the very words that searchers are using to find you, get found and get results. Everyone wins! You are served a top result and the searcher finds what they are looking for.

Blogs are fantastic SEO tools, just make certain you are using the best blogging solution!

A Growth in Social Media Marketing

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

One of the aspects that blogging offers companies is the ability to create content that is personalized. The content has the effect of making a potential customer feel as if the company is only focusing on them. The question is if your company has considered blogging yet? I hope you have because business blogging is one of the fastest growing trends for social media marketing. Check out Compendium Blogware's recent press release about the growing trends in social media by clicking here.

Social media marketing is a very large marketing concept with applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs but very few companies are embracing all aspects of social media to their advantage. People find Facebook and Twitter easy, but blogging can be easy too. For instance, Compendium Blogware offers affordable blogging software for business and there is no IT maintenance for you at all. So if you are lacking a blog, consider it by checking out this Whitepaper. It will provide you a lot of information on how you can drive demand to your business with business blogging!

Real time search

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Clayton Stobbs

As Google continues to roll out new search enhancements (personalization, real time search etc.) it is truly interesting to see how much value is created for the end user. For instance, Salesforce was creeping along this morning so I decided to search "is Salesforce down?". Naturally, salesforcewatch.com and downornot.com won the top two organic search results (Salesforce.com had the only PPC ad) but I found it very valuable to see that right below the main organic results, Google was pulling Twitter results directly applicable to the search.

In this instance, several results were also being pulled back from recent blog posts and this was quite valuable. If your company is using your blog as the hub of your social media strategy, you can truly begin to dominate a space simply because you're present in so many arenas. For instance, if someone searches "affordable blogging software", our corporate blog wins that search and in some cases, real time Twitter results have shown up related to the topic. Naturally then, it is important to first, win the organic results and give searchers what they want, but also to utilize other strategies capable of making the searcher happy through other social mediums.

For additional information, I would highly suggest watching the replay of our webinar with Jay Baer on blogging as the hub of your social media strategy.

Client Focus in Search Marketing

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Brian Graham

Last night we ate at the Capitol Grille. It was a great experience! Being a former restaurant owner I really appreciated their attention to detail and how in touch they were with our needs. This made the experience remarkable.

Social marketing allows you to do this with your potential clients and current clients. If you are opening up and being transparent they are going to relate. Using a business blog to give your business a personality is a great way to relate to clients. Testing and measuring what content to see what are people reacting to will give you insight into what matters to them.

Being able to organize your content around topics and keywords is a great strategy to employ so you can test and measure. Blogging software can help you manage this task. The organization of content is key so you can present a targeted message. Stay in touch with your marketing place. What is your business personality and how are leveraging it?

Content management that makes sense

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Julie Murphy

As a business, have you ever thought an SEO strategy could be made easier with an easy to use blog software? Simple blogging software allows your company to concentrate on marketing your business, not worrying about SEO tools and how you leverage to win search results.

Compendium is a powerful blogging software built with the primary purpose for winning SEO. Compendium is the only SaaS available today that provides a platform to win search results and significantly increase unique search traffic.

You tell the searcher about your business and let the software organize your content to keyword rich pages that are set to win search results.

Check out the website www.compendium.com

Misguided Opportunity

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Jason Harvoth

The Compendium Blogware team had a brain storming event last evening and the collaboration was fantastic. We bounced ideas off of one another, and built the camaraderie needed to become a world class sales team. When selecting the appropriate venue to host our event, we wanted something close to our office (which is located in downtown Indianapolis). We needed an area to meet/mingle; an area to eat our meal; and hopefully the facility would have something fun for us to do afterwards.

Compendium Blogware sales team goes bowling

Jillian's was our selection. We decided that some competitive bowling would bring out the competitive juices, and show some of our true colors. While the service and food were good, the bowling alley was far from decent. Pins wouldn't re-rack appropriately and this happened to each of our four lanes about every three frames. The pricing was too high for the value, but the space is superb for company functions. So, if you choose Jillian's then stick w/ the food and drink...no bowling.

Corporate blogging software companies are good dinner guests, but our platform for criticism too powerful.

Blogging Can Be Your Marketing Oscar

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

Hopefully everybody has noticed that the Oscars happened last Sunday with "The Hurt Locker" winning best picture because of its compelling acting and emotion. So I decided that I was going to go and see this movie since watching movies is one of my favorite things to do. The Academy had it right, the movie definitely is compelling and makes you feel a connection with the character.

So while pondering about what to write about for this post, it came to me. Movies and marketing campaigns are very similar because they are only successful if they are compelling enough for people to do something. Unfortunately, many companies are not getting an Oscar for their marketing campaigns.

Although, there are solutions for your company to improve its online marketing strategy. Compendium Blogware has powerful blogging software that can help your business right now with proven results. Sign up for a demonstration today!

Social Marketing is Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Kyle McGrath

The other day I had the opportunity to sit and listen to our co-founder Chris Baggott speak about his views on social media marketing and how blogging fit into the picture. After listening to him, there was a light bulb that went off in my head that clarified the power of what blogging can do for a company.

Prior to the days of million dollar Superbowl commercials and radio advertisements, companies relied on their value being spread by word-of-mouth from one customer to another. This form of advertising had the most value to a company, but as the target audience grew so did the methods used in order to reach them.

Think about how you look to experience something new today. What would you do in order to find a new restaurant to eat at? TV to buy? Or place to vacation? Research shows that 82% of people are using search engines like Google in order to look for answers to these questions. How does social marketing fit into this picture? It brings customers together from all over the world in order to share experiences through word-of-mouth advertising.

Blogging is the vehicle that gives your customers the best avenue to share their stories through words and pictures. Compendium's corporate blogging software allows customers to share their stories through web-to-post. This positive review of your company's service or product creates more value to an on-line searcher than any print ad ever would.

Blogging now empowers customers to re-initiate the value of word-of-mouth advertising on a global scale.

Return On Time Investment... priceless

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 by Maureen McNamara

At Compendium we drink the Kool-Aid. We're all busy but we all are tasked to blog. I am in sales and blogging is a lead gen tool for us. That is a great motivator for me and that is why I appreciate the best blogging software, the only corporate blogging software on the planet. The user interface is so simple, so fast and the compending feature is priceless --- to coin an overused campaign sound bite.

If you can't take my word for it, and why should you, check out this internal email sent last week from Heather in the Compendium Marketing Dept. to see what I mean...

"Just wanted to share some inspiring information about our internal blogging program:

Since the start of our blogging efforts (November 2007) to today, Compendium employees have created 3,226 blog posts.

With the compending process, those 3,226 posts were multiplied a little over 117 times generating 377,683 total posts in our keyword blogs.

So, the 2 years and 3 months time to generate 377,683 combined keyword blog posts would have taken 263 years to create without the compending process!!

Have a great weekend!"

WOW! I can't tell you how many leads we generated from those posts but let's just say we're all EXTREMELY busy and leave it at that.

Should your organization be blogging? If you don't think you have the time to make an impact on your SEO, customer acquistion and lead gen goals, check out the Compendium blogging solution and let it do all the heavy lifting for you. Trust me on this one... it works!

Blogging as Your #1 Marketing Tool

Tuesday, March 9, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

A fun fact for everybody: according to Marketing Sherpa, 80-90% of all Clicks happen in the organic section of a search engine page.

Wow! The problem is many companies are not competing for that portion of the search page. They are using sometimes overly priced ad words and at times are relying on usually unreliable SEO firms. Many companies are just unaware that starting a business blog could be your #1 Search Marketing tool.

Compendium Blogware has a webinar to show you how our corporate blogging software could be your solution! Marketing departments need to discover that they do not need to spend thousands of dollars on advertisements that they won't be able to measure their ROI. With the help of Compendium, creating and leveraging a blog can save your company lots of grief and money. Check out the webinar on how a blog can be your #1 search marketing tool.

Black Magic, Blogging, and SEO...

Monday, February 22, 2010 by Ali Sales Roach

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at my alma mater, DePauw, to a group of Management Fellows students. Most of my presentation focused on how to suck up to your boss, get a promotion, and not get fired (I'm kidding...well, sort of).

After the presentation, I went to lunch with a smaller group of students, and they all were prepared with great questions and all sorts of insightful opinions.

My favorite question came from a student named Mischa who said that he was pretty well versed with SEO and didn't understand why a company would use our blogging software instead of hiring a professional SEO firm.

Here's what I told Mischa: A good amount of negative attention has surrounded the professional services SEO space for a long time. That's because to most people it seems like wizardry and magic, a moving target of sorts that a lot of companies have paid a lot of money to try to master, only to turn up with lackluster results.

The great thing about blogging for search using software instead of human beings is that instead of hoping and praying that a wizard can help them unlock the potential of getting found online, the company itself gets to control what keywords they want to get found for and their content strategy to support these keywords.

Now, I want to make it clear that I'm not saying that all SEO firms rely on black magic and produce undesirable results, I'm saying that the space has unfortunately gotten very cluttered with irresponsible folks who are tainting the picture as a whole.

Take for example this quote from Entrepreneur: "The SEO business is 80 percent scam," says Peter Kent, an Internet marketing strategist and author of Search Engine Optimization for Dummies. "It's very, very difficult to find a good firm."

Aha! This is why companies large and small are turning to software like Compendium. Less guesswork, more control, and more insight into what makes a great search strategy.

So thanks to Mischa for the great question, and to Entrepreneur for backing me up....