Hi! I'm Jess Wehner, a Client Success Manager at Compendium Blogware. As a Client Success Manager, my priority is to consult, coach and lead my clients trough blogging best practices. The purpose of this blog is to inform readers about the importance of blogging frequently and provide updates on the results that will follow.
Personally, I am married and live on the northeast side of Indianapolis. I enjoy running, biking, doing just about anything outdoors and of course... blogging!
A few of our clients, coworkers, and friends were ranked last week as having some of Indianas top blogs! These blogs were voted in the top 50 based on content, comments, and visibility in Indiana and Indianapolis:
Many of our clients don't have tracking in place that will allow them to fully see exact dollars they can contribute back to their blog software. If this sounds like your company, there is some simple coding you can use to help your team track conversions deeper than just how many visitors came to the website from the business blog.
If your you use Google Analytics to track your website, you can set up a Goal to measure how well your site is fulfilling business objectives. A goal is achieved any time someone visits a page on your site that you wanted them to get to (i.e. a thank you page, a receipt, a confirmation, etc.). Once the goal is set up, you will be able to see the blog as a referring site listed in your analytics, and then be able to see how many of those referring visitors completed your goal. For example, the client I am helping set this up main business objective is to get people to view a demo. Our goal is set for the confirmation page once you have signed up to view a demo. Now, they will be able to tell how many people came from the blog and signed up for a demo - real ROI for their search marketing program.
If you take the tracking even further, you could even assign a value to that goal. For example if you know that 10% of people who view a demo will sign up for your services and your services on average go for $500, then the goal value would be $50. Then you could tangibly measure what the ROI is of the blog.
Here are step by step instructions for setting up a goal in Google Analytics (the simple way):
Step 1: Go to the goals page on Google Analytics, and click “set up goals and funnels”
Step 2: Click “Add goal”
Step 3: Fill in information for goal
Active Goal = On
Goal Position = Set 1, Goal 1
Goal Type = URL Destination
Match Type = Exact Match
Goal URL = Thank you page or registration complete page
Case Sensitive = check
Goal Value = can put a dollar amount of what this person is worth to you
Every couple months we like to provide general learning sessions for our clients. In addition to our dedicated account management team, we also want to provide opportunities for clients to take their knowledge to the next level with client-only webinars. This month's webinar will feature Chris Baggott, our CEO and Richard Cunningham, VP Marketing of Right On Interactive.
During this webinar you can expect to learn about:
How your business blog program and email marketing campaign can work together to acquire and nurture leads
How Compendium's marketing team is currently employing these tactics (our program has seen 97% growth in leads generated and 100% ROI, year to date)
How to integrate blogging into customer life cycle messaging.
I often recommend holding contests for your bloggers in order to motivate them to post. I'm not sure why, but many times I find our administrators don't use this tactic to increase blog posts on their network. Maybe they think it would take too much time? Maybe they think it wouldn't actually work?
Whatever the reason is, this posts is going to take away any excuse you could ever have! I want to encourage every admin to try a contest with their bloggers, at least once. If you're worried about time or not sure what type of contest to hold - just copy us! Here is an email from our marketing team for a contest we are running currently:
"Have you had a chance to enjoy one of the delicious holiday drinks from Starbucks yet?? They look so good, don’t they??!!
I want you to enjoy some tasty coffee – on the marketing department! So tomorrow at 5 pm I’ll be raffling off 3 Starbucks gift cards, just for blogging!!
Here are the details:
*Every post you submit will count as 1 entry into the drawing. If you submit a post, I will write your name on a piece of paper and enter you in the drawing. *The contest starts now and ends tomorrow at 5pm. Thursday at 5pm I will draw 3 winners out of the bucket. Each winner will receive a $10 Starbucks gift card!
There is no cap on how many posts you can submit, but remember, the more posts you submit, the more entries you will have in the drawing which will boost your chances of winning one of the gift cards.
The contest starts now – submit your posts!"
To hold this contest, Step 1: copy/paste the above, Step 2: email to bloggers, Step 3: buy Starbucks gift cards. See, that wasn't so hard, was it?
At our office, contest have been shown to increase content anywhere from 2-5 times as much! Try this Starbucks contest out on your bloggers today and let us know what the results are. We'd love to hear how you get your bloggers to motivated.
Struggling with content creation? We hear that all the time. I know, I know - you have a million other things to do and don't have time to blog, right? Well, here are a couple of time saver ideas to help your company come up with content for your blog program:
Outside content creation - we are offering content creation at really low prices, if you just don't have the resources within your organization, this may be the best option for you.
Employee contest - if it's difficult to get your employee's to blog, try asking them to submit stories to you (the administrator). One idea - send an email out asking for the top questions your sales team and customer service reps get from their customers and what answer they give. You can turn each of those Q&A's into a post. And you could reward the person who submits the most Q&A's.
Customer contest - have a contest for your customers - send out an email to customers and ask them to share their story of how they use your product. Then the best story could receive a prize and you could submit all of those stories as blog posts.
Content creation is key to the success of your business blog program. It's not enough just to buy our corporate blogging software, you must also write consistent, relevant content. For more information on how using compendium as your blogging solution, view a demo (and get some free Starbucks too!)
I recently received a great note from a client who just joined Compendium a month or so ago. Hendler Law is a law firm that focuses on mesothelioma lawsuits and other toxic exposure cases. They recently finished setting up their blog networks and attended our new live training with Allison Bowen. Here's what our contact had to say about the services so far:
"I did the training on Friday....thanks so much. Allison did a great job! Compendium's customer service is the BEST!"
I'm proud to say that not only does Compendium offer the best business blogging software on the market, we also have the best customer service reps (product support and client success alike) out there. Ok, maybe I'm biased - but if you don't believe me, just have our sales team set you up with a demo and you can hear even more success stories from satisfied Compendium clients.
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.
We have a webinar coming up this month that is sure to be interesting for clients and prospective clients alike.
If you are a current client, this will be a great time to learn about what some of Compendium's most successful customers are doing on their business blog, how they incorporate blogging best practices, and what success really means to them. Come see how you can make improvements to your current blog program.
If you are new to Compendium, come learn about how blogging for search can lead to an increase in traffic to your site, generate leads, and increase sales from people that have actually experienced these results.
As a snapshot, you'll hear from the following types of companies who blog for business:
eCommerce Gymnastics Apparel Company:
Over $100,000 closed business within a year, directly from blog traffic.
$10,000 in sales within the first two months of blogging with cheer uniform network.
SaaS Event Management and Web Survey Company:
500% increase in keyword reach, compared to the number of paid keywords targeted.
Many clients wonder how much content it will take to start receiving traffic on their keywords - and the answer we most often tell them is you can never write enough! But the truth is, depending on the keywords you are targeting - it could take writing content to each of those keyword phrases as much as one time a day. When you decide to go after words organically, it takes a bit more work than targeting them via a pay per click campaign.
Using Compendium as your business blog software is only the first step in a great SEO strategy. Writing frequent, relevant content is the next step. I found a great post that gives one person's opinion on how much content you can actually expect to write: SEO Copywriting Frequency. Ian Lurie says to look at the competitiveness of the term, and then gives this scale for how much content you should be producing based on the number of competing pages showing up when you search for that term in Google:
<10,000 competing pages: Write once a week.
10,001-100,000 competing pages: Write twice a week.
100,001-200,000 competing pages: Write three times a week.
200,001-2,000,000 competing pages: Write every day.
Keep in mind, these theory applies to each keyword - so if you are targeting 100 keywords, you need to write a lot of content! (You can see why we just tell people to write as much as possible).
Fortunately, Compendium gives each of your posts the biggest bang for your buck, pulling each post out to several different pages based on the number of keywords you use. So instead of having to write 100 posts a day for 100 keywords, our software will take 1 post and put it towards 2-5 keywords (or however many you target). For more information on exactly how our software works, view a demo with one of our business development managers.
One of my clients asked how to add a survey to their blog. We don't get this request a lot, because most of our client's business blogs are focused on lead generation or increasing sales. While a survey might not be a good fit for all blogs, a survey might be something you would be interested in adding to your blog if you are wanting to engage with your readers, get feedback on something, or just get your readers' thoughts on a subject. They may even give you content ideas to write a blog post!
If you would like to add a survey, there are a lot of free, easy to use sites out there - glowday.com, polldaddy.com, surveymonkey.com - just to name a few! For the most part, I found these sites are simple to use - set up an account, specify what you would like your survey to look like, then copy and paste the code into your blog.
Like any call to action you put on your blog though, make sure you have a reason for adding a survey and a tangible way to track and use the results.
Did you miss the Call To Action Webinar today? Don't worry, you can still catch a replay of the webinar.
I would strongly encourage every administrator to attend this webinar and really assess if your calls to action include these important elements:
A purpose
A benefit
A command
A place to click
Getting traffic to your business blog is only the first step, and what the Compendium platform can help with the most. Converting that traffic is your job as a marketer.
This webinar will help you understand what makes a good call to action, how to test and measure that call to action, and what makes a good landing page. You'll also get a look at some of our top performing client's calls to actions and see how they made improvements to increase their click through rate.
As we continue to grow, we are continually adjusting our processes to make them better for you - our client! One process that has been evolving over the past couple months is the getting started process. This is the initial period of getting a client up and running using the Compendium software and is important for starting to build a good relationship with our client. One change we made this past week was moving our training options from online videos to live sessions twice a week:
Tuesday: User – 2:00pm Admin – 2:30pm
Thursday: User – 10:00am Admin – 10:30am
Even though Compenium is an extremely simple blogging software to use, these trainings will help customers get familiar with our system, learn how to publish a post, and learn some best praciteces for business blogging. For more information on how to attend one of our training sessions, contact your client success manager today.
Not a Compendium customer, learn more about our system by viewing a demo today (and oh yeah, get some free Starbucks while you're at it).
One of our client's who just joined compendium is North American Bancard. North American Bancard is a payment solutions provider that has hit the ground running with blogging! They have been up for just a couple weeks now, and already have 30 plus posts on their blog! Many clients are constantly asking what else they can be doing to make their blog more successful, but the answer is simple - write more content and you will get more traffic. North American Bancard is proof of this, as they were indexed and started receiving search engine traffic within the first few weeks of writing content.
They are also doing a great job of incorporating blogging best practices by posting consistently, incorporating their keywords, and using white space to engage and entice readers. If you want to see an example of a client that does a good job writing frequent, relevant content, check out the North American Bancard Blog.
As I watched the below video, I couldn't help but think of all of my clients who can't seem to find the time to blog, or just can't remember to write a post. I couldn't help but wonder, if we made blogging fun, maybe it wouldn't be such a burden to do?
Do you believe in the Fun Theory? Test it out on your bloggers this week. Try "making it fun" for them to blog, and see what happens. You never know, you just might change their attitude towards blogging.
Doug has a post on adding your blog to facebook, but I realized it doesn't go in to detail on the step by step process, so I thought I'd create a post outlining the steps. Publishing your blog to your facebook page is an easy way to promote your business blog. While posting is important, it's also important to get inbound links to your blog and getting the word out about your new website is a great way to do this. By following the below steps, your facebook page will automatically be updated every time you write a new blog post.
Step 3: Verify you are the author of the blog - you can do this by supplying us HTML code to put on your blog, or by getting 9 friends to approve that you are the author of the blog.
Step 4: If you choose to use the widget to verify ownership, send Compendium the below HTML code, and once we have placed the widget in your sidebar, you can hit the "verify widget" button. The widget can be removed once you have verified your blog.
I feel like I post about this a lot, but the truth is, content creation is probably the top thing I spend time coaching customers on through out my day. I recently sent an email to a customer who is struggling to get content up on their blog - they don't have the resources to currently to create enough content themselves, nor do they have the budget to pay for a ghost writer to contribute content to their blog. Here are my suggestions for them (note - they are a b to c company):
Can you (or someone on your team) put every piece of marketing material that has already been created up on the blog? i.e. email marketing newsletters, mailers that are sent out, flyers, etc. As long as it is not on the web anywhere else, it can be put on the blog
Could we solicit stories from customers/potential customers (about their experience with your company) in exchange for a gift card of some sort (i.e. submit your story and be entered to win a $50 giftcard) – these stories could be turned directly into blog posts
Can we get sales reps or customer services reps to submit customer stories and provide a gift card to the person that submits the most stories?
Content creation is the most important thing for your business blog program, so if your team is not naturally producing enough content, make sure you think outside of the box for easy ways to find content. Most of the above ideas take little extra work and put the burden of content creation on the customer!
I always like to feature some of my clients on our blog to show all of the various industries that use Compendium to increase their search engine visibility. One client I just spoke with last week is KI Thought Bridge, a consultative company that assists other businesses with leadership development, change management, conflict resolution and negotiations.
One interesting thing they are doing on their blog is changing out their CTA on a monthly basis. Each month they have a new webinar, so each month we update the CTA on the blog with new details for that month's webinar. While updating the detail, we have also tried different wording and images to see what will encourage visitors to click through the most.
This is something we recommend all clients do and we are happy to help with. The easiest way to measure the ROI on your business blog is to measure the number of people who click through on your call to action. If that number is low, try changing out the CTA monthly, to see what works with your customer base and what doesn't.
Just got an email from a client looking for some content ideas and thought others might be interested in them as well. If your team is struggling with what to write about, try one of the below:
Customer conversations: every question you answer, every explanation you give to a customer can be a blog post. Take your emails and put them into blog posts (this takes no time at all!)
Customer stories: just get an email from a customer who was really happy, or maybe a phone call? Put that in to a blog post.
Current events: take news articles or other blogs and re-use parts of them on your blog, just make sure you include 2-3 sentences of your own thoughts on how the article relates back to your company (and only use a paragraph or two from the article – no need to copy/paste the whole thing in).
Start simple: talk about the basics – what’s your organization chart, how can people contact you, who are some of your clients, where are you guys located, what are you guys working on currently, etc. Each of these could be blog posts!
By the way - this was an email I had sent to the client that I just copy and pasted into a blog post (after putting it in notepad first of course). It took me 5 extra minutes to re-purpose this content! Now who doesn't have an extra 5 minutes in their day?
Got an email from a client wanting to optimize their blog marketing efforts today. They asked if we have any recommended strategies for ensuring content is efficiently and effectively created. Of course, having done this for over a year, I had lots to say!
Effective Content Creation: Every organization is different, and I’ve found the same strategy does not work across the board. Here are some various methods our clients have used:
Incentives/contests (this seems to work the best, but requires the admin to be creative and put the effort in): bloggers do not just blog on their own, they usually need an incentive (i.e. food, gift cards, vacation days, etc.) . We do tons of contests here – so if you ever want help brainstorming, let me know. You can also check out my other post on motivating your bloggers.
Scheduling: Set a goal for how many posts you want up per week (more is always better) and then divide and conquer. For example, if you want 5 posts up a week, and have 5 bloggers, schedule one to write Monday, one to write Tuesday, etc.
Send reminder/motivational emails: remember, while the blog may be on your mind all the time, it is not on your bloggers, send them an email every Monday with a reminder to blog, and what to blog about. It’s ok if every single person in your company wrote about the same thing because they are all giving their unique perspective, so share ideas.
Enforce it: Make it a part of someone’s job, i.e. they will be reviewed based on how many posts they are able to get up (this usually works if someone is in a communications/marketing dept and it fits with their job function)
In terms of making sure the content is efficient, here are some things you should try to do in your blog posts to make sure they are doing the most for your search traffic:
Use your exact keywords phrases as much as possible
Use keywords in your post titles
Use videos/pictures to engage visitors
If you copy and paste from another location, put it in Notepad first – this will strip the text of any outside formatting and make sure everything looks consistent
Use bolding and lists to organize your content in a way that is engaging to readers
Hope this helps! If you'd like more information, contact a client success manager to learn how to optimize your blog marketing efforts, or if you're new to Compendium contact our sales team by clicking on the view demo link in teh sidebar.
Hosted by Richard Cunningham, VP Marketing of Right On Interactive and Chris Baggott Co-founder, CEO of Compendium Blogware. Thursday, December 3rd 2009. Sign up here »
Hi! I'm Jess Wehner, a Client Success Manager at Compendium Blogware. As a Client Success Manager, my priority is to consult, coach and lead my clients trough blogging best practices. The purpose of this blog is to inform readers about the importance of blogging frequently and provide updates on the results that will follow. 
One of my clients asked how to add a survey to their blog. We don't get this request a lot, because most of our client's business blogs are focused on lead generation or increasing sales. While a survey might not be a good fit for all blogs, a survey might be something you would be interested in adding to your blog if you are wanting to engage with your readers, get feedback on something, or just get your readers' thoughts on a subject. They may even give you content ideas to write a blog post!
One of our client's who just joined compendium is North American Bancard. North American Bancard is a payment solutions provider that has hit the ground running with blogging! They have been up for just a couple weeks now, and already have 30 plus posts on their blog! Many clients are constantly asking what else they can be doing to make their blog more successful, but the answer is simple - write more content and you will get more traffic. North American Bancard is proof of this, as they were indexed and started receiving search engine traffic within the first few weeks of writing content. 
asked if we have any recommended strategies for ensuring content is efficiently and effectively created. Of course, having done this for over a year, I had lots to say!
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