Blog Content Management Systems

Universities should all be blogging

Tuesday, March 16, 2010 by Brian Millis

Below you will find a recent email I sent following a great conversation with a private university in New York. As a former Admissions Officer, I have a certain soft spot for helping schools realize the power of strategic blogging to better establish a school brand, culture, and communication with prospective students. Hopefully others will find this helpful as well.

Email:

Hi Current Prospect,

Thank you so much for your time yesterday as I certainly enjoyed the conversation. I wanted to provide you a few take-aways and example links for your internal conversations.

Here are a few examples of current higher education clients who are doing a great job!:

http://blog.granite.edu/blog/granite-state-college

http://blog.uindy.edu/blog/university-of-indianapolis

http://blogging.depauw.edu/blog/top-50-liberal-arts-colleges

Key Take-Aways Regarding Compendium:

Who we are: Compendium is an on demand, enterprise level search and social media platform. We provide a secure and scalable solution that leverages blogging for SEO, human engagement, and online customer acquisition.

Automation: We automate the organization of blog content to deliver the highest search engine ranking/traffic results possible.
Security: We use NO open source plug-ins developed by third parties, which require maintenance and update.
Scalable: Can have unlimited bloggers and can scale the number of strategically targeted online marketing search phrases.
Administration/Control: Admissions can easily manage the messages going out in blog posts and incoming comments from searchers.

Please let me know how I can continue to be a resource for you as you make decisions on the future of your blog program.

Best,

Brian Millis 317-777-6254

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!

How Does Advertising Affect Search?

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Jim Hyslop

I come form a background in traditional media, radio broadcast. My wife is a top notch sales executive for a large media company in television broadcast in the local Indianapolis market. As you have probably guessed we have a lot of conversations around the longevity of traditional media marketing in today's ever advancing world of on-line marketing. The truth of the matter is traditional media, especially television, isn't going anywhere although format is changing. Interestingly enough new media and traditional media can work in tandem as long as you understand the needs and processes of the consumer. What I am getting at here is traditional advertising will always be needed to create demand, but search will always intercept that demand. Let me explain....

Scenario:

It is Tuesday night and I am at home watching "Lost". A TV commercial for the new LED 55" Samsung comes on maybe as a bookend spot in a commercial break paid for by a large electronics retailer in the local market. I am currently in the market for a TV. I have been "reached" twice. Demand has been generated.

Immediately I reach over and grab my laptop as it sits beside me on the end table by my sofa and I do 6-10 different searches to find out more about the TV, the specs, the dimensions, the resolution, the type of wall mount I need.......and the best place to buy it at the best price. Demand has been intercepted. Unfortunately the company that paid my wife so much money to put that TV spot on her station has now driven my business on to the company on-line that did their job and simply showed up for me, the person who is looking to buy a new TV at the most affordable price. I find my discount coupon, I print it off, and I walk into the competing retailer to buy my new TV.

Get the gist!

The catch here is my 6-10 searches, are completely different than my wife's, which are completely different than her brother's. You must understand and manage content around the needs, intent, and language of the searcher. You have to think about all of the ways your customers want to be communicated to, and the way they look for information, and talk about that over and over again.

So how does a company manage all of those search derivatives and the large amount of content they need to generate to correlate their search marketing with their traditional marketing and show up for everybody they reach?

You need a content management system that will allow automated effective and efficient content organization on a mass scale with a built in level of control. You need an enterprise search platform.

What is that? Welcome to Compendium!!!!

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

The jury is in, blogging is the ideal tool

Friday, March 5, 2010 by Julie Murphy

Businesses are buzzing about SEO tools, social media, and blogging for search. Where are you going to focus your efforts?

Had a conversation with a prospective client today who is frustrated that they do not have more followers on Facebook. Why? What about facebook followers are going to drive you more busiiness?

When you peel back the layers, what do the search engines reward, relevant content! A content managment system is key in winning search. Blog for business and blog for search with simple blogging software.

No worries about tagging, catagorizing, or keywords. Learn more about compendium blogware: www.compendium.com

Blog content is meant to be shared.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 by Isaac Pellerin

The World Wide Web is a funny place. There are endless methods of communication available to us through this medium. One of the questions this leads me to ask is what the best way to leverage all of these methods so that it's central and easy to manage.

While we're being told so much about the benefits of social media and the power of social circles sharing information, I feel that it's easy to overlook the fact that somewhere along the line someone had to search for something.

This could be why blogging should the the hub of your social media strategy. Blogging for search allows you to be found by, what Malcom Gladwell calls, connectors (who will spread your message through their social circles).

Tomorrow Compendium is hosting a webinar with Jay Baer and Chris Baggott who will explore this topic in further detail. Sign up today!

Why Blogging Works for SEO: Part 6 - Relevance

Wednesday, February 24, 2010 by Heather Benfield

Welcome to Part 6 of a 6 series blog post about why blogging works for SEO.

To review, check out parts 1-5 on the main factors search engines focus on when looking at a webpage to determine its rank in organic search results:

1.    Titles
2.    Keywords
3.    Recency/Frequency
4.    Links
5.    Volume
6.    Relevance

Throughout this series I’ve talked about:

1.    How important it is to make sure you’re using relevant keywords in titles and content
2.    Posting often on tens, hundreds or even thousands of blogs
3.    Making sure your content is helpful and useful to your target market

But when it really comes down to it, the bottom line is…

If the searcher is happy, the search engine is happy.

In other words, relevance is the most important and measurable objective in a corporate blogging strategy. Blogs tend to double customer conversion rates compared to regular websites. Why? Because the searcher’s problem is more accurately solved with knowledgeable, focused blog content. Searcher satisfaction is the most important component of SEO. To turn readers into customers, you need to talk about what they’re interested in…and offer them a solution to their problem!

According to Vanessa Fox of Search Engine Land, “Relevance means keeping to a topic, helping the search engine understand what your site is about, and, ideally, about one thing in particular.” The best solution to ranking on a keyword term is to devote a specific page to that particular phrase. Blogging gives you the platform and the scale to be able to most effectively position your expertise for your customers’ benefit.

To start using Compendium’s enterprise blogging platform today, schedule an online demo with one of our business development managers (and get a $50 Starbucks giftcard after you're done).

Do you trust testimonials?

Tuesday, February 23, 2010 by Brian Millis

I read this interesting bit in e-marketer in response to some data that indicated that people are starting to lose trust in peer recommendations.

"The importance of peer influence is backed up by several studies that don’t seem to jibe with the Edelman data. Nielsen found last spring that almost everyone trusted people they knew. Moms overwhelmingly trust others like them more than experts, according to EXPO. And Lightspeed Research reported that family members and close friends were the most trusted source of information when making purchase decisions. The list could go on."

I'm a huge believer that corporate blogs convert at a higher rate than a web site or a paid advertisement because of the human nature of the content. One benefit to the blog as a communication vehicle is that it can be interactive through comments. However, the overwhelming value is the search marketing benefit that can come through strategic use of blog content.

So even if I am skeptical of a testimonial or an internal person in a company promoting a product or service, this transparency makes me far more likely to take a call to action. I'm glad that E-Marketer used the studies to back up my hunch that most people DO trust peers and companies that communicate at a human level with their target audience.

One cool way that Compendium clients are taking this to the next level is through our web-to-post functionality. Check it out here on GK Elite's blog. This is an easy and engaging way to solicit user generated blog content. It's easily controlled and administrated by a marketing employee at the company and helps drive high traffic and conversion rates.

When it comes to search marketing, "volume matters"

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by Stephanie West

Compendium's CEO/CoFounder, Chris Baggott coined this phrase in a recent company meeting. Honestly, it's one of the strongest points that I took away from the meeting.

Generating enough blog content is such an important aspect of maximizing your search engine optimization results. Your company could be utilizing Compendium's easy to use blog software, but your search engine optimization strategy is not very effective if you are not generating enough blog content to sustain your blog.

Companies that are looking for a corporate blogging software platform to maximize their search engine optimization results should consider Compendium's powerful blogging software.

Compendium's simple blogging software is an asset to any company's inbound marketing strategy. The blog content is automatically structured for search engine optimization. This feature makes Compendium unique from other blogging software. Although the content is automatically structured, that doesn't mean that it is automatically generated. Clients still need to generate an adequate amount of blog content. Once the content is generated, it will be automatically structured for maximum search engine optimization results.

So, ultimately, "volume matters"... You must generate blog content in order to reach maximum search engine optimization results.

Click here for more information on why content matters.

Increase Lead Generation On Your Business Blog

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by Jess Wehner

I am currently working with a client that has seen great traffic from the blog, but is struggling to get those visitors to take a next step. After a bit of digging I discovered that they are actually experiencing the same trouble on their website, which made me realize we are going to be starting from scratch to start showing leads/sales from the blog. Fortunately, we are here to help! And the client has a willingness to try our recommendations, so I look forward to seeing the results we can bring in and help conversions not only on his blog, but also his website. My recommendations to him:

Add a banner CTA to the top of the blog content (some clients who are currently doing this: Dyknow, Cvent, Fuseworks)
Continue testing - since your website doesn’t have a clear “winning” CTA/landing page, it is important that we keep trying different tactics to see what works with the online audience

I also recommended he work on his content creation and go back to the basics with blog best practices. Keep in mind that getting people to take the next step on your business blog starts with engaging them from their first place.

Content should be short and to the point - it’s ok to have lengthy posts every once in awhile, but for the most part keeping it short and simple is the way to go. Think of your post as baiting the client and then you will reel them in with the whitepaper/case study/demo/etc. You can check out our blog as an example, you will see most posts are pretty short. Keep in mind, when people are online they are scanning content to find something that stands out to them.

I'll update my blog once we've been able to turn things around for this program! Hopefully we'll have some good findings to share.

Why Blogging Works for SEO: Part 3 - Recency/Frequency

Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by Heather Benfield

In case you’re just joining in…I’m in the middle of a 6 series blog post about why blogging works for SEO.

To provide a quick re-cap, search engines focus on 6 main factors when looking at a webpage (or blog) to determine its rank in organic search results:

1.    Titles
2.    Keywords
3.    Recency/Frequency
4.    Links
5.    Volume
6.    Relevance

In this post, I’ll focus on recency and frequency.

A common misconception among corporate bloggers is that they’re writing for regular, repeat customers when—in all actuality—95% of corporate blog readers are first-time visitors.

I understand that if this is the case, then I probably shouldn’t be writing a series of 6 posts since 95% of readers are not following my blog and have found it in search today, for the first time. So, if you’d like to get caught up on titles and keywords, check out part 1 and part 2.

The good news about first time visitors is that bloggers don’t have to worry about writing too much or too frequently. Posting 10 blogs a day might seem excessive for the 5% of regular blog followers, but posting 10 blogs a day means you’re substantially increasing your odds of finding a first-time visitor looking for specific, relevant information via search.

The bottom line is that you can’t have too much blog content, and you can’t write too frequently. In fact, your post frequency should increase based on the number of people who are trying to win a particular keyword search. By examining Google keyword search results, you can determine the intensity of your competition and adjust your blogging efforts accordingly.

For example, check out Ian Lurie’s rule of thumb:

If you’re competing with less than 10,000 pages, you should write at least once a week. Twice a week for 10,001 – 100,000 competing pages, 3 times a week for 100,001 – 200,000 competing pages and every single day for 200,001 – 2,000,000 competing pages.

Corporate blogging should not be a top-down, thought-leader driven initiative. Instead, all employees should be encouraged to share their passion, knowledge and expertise through blogging. You found my blog post didn’t you? Now how would you have been able to do that if our CEO didn’t allow me to blog and share these ideas I gathered after reading one of our Whitepapers-in-progress?

To learn more about blogging for SEO with Compendium's corporate blog software, check out our free whitepaper downloads at http://www.compendium.com/resources.html

Marketing 101

Monday, February 15, 2010 by Kelly Simon

Marketing doesn't have to be complicated, just make sure your campaigns work with you, not against you. I spoke with a client, Next Door Garage Apartments, last week about this very issue and suggested they implement a linking strategy to assist in their marketing efforts.

Here are a couple of takeaways from our conversation:

Utilize tools like Hootsuite that will automatically push your blog content out to your social media networks.
Include a link to your blog or website in all of your social media efforts.
Do you use email every day (I'm guessing you do)? Make sure you have a link to your blog in your email signature.

You're your best marketing tool, make your campaigns work for you.

Marketing & Advertising Agencies, Please Stand Up.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010 by Jason Harvoth

If you or your agency is not offering your clients a better way to manage/distribute their blogging content, are you doing them a disservice? Developing a corporate blogging strategy for your clients is the first step in the right direction, but take it a step further with a content management system. As your clients build their blogs, a lack of optimized content management will contribute to lost leads or diminish the ROI you are trying to provide them.

Compendium's corporate blogging software can help you and your clients harness the true power of organic search. SEO tools are important, but without relevant, rich content searchers (possible clients) will not stay long.

Become a true value-added partner with your clients by presenting Compendium into their search marketing strategies.

Click HERE to find out more

3 Tips When Designing your Blog

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 by Megan Glover

Let's face it, there aren't a lot of resources available when designing your blog template for business. And, what resources do exist are hardly relevant to business objectives.

At Compendium, we know that over 65% of our client base chose our blogging software for: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and lead generation. In order to facilitate these goals, we help our clients design their blogs for maximum demand generation and return.

Here are 3 (simple) tips to consider when designing your template:

1. Get to know your audience. Do me a favor... look at your analytics, and I would be willing to bet that 75-100% of your visitors are BRAND NEW. When designing your template always, always keep your audience in the forefront of your offers.

2. Use referring keywords to develop Calls-to-Action. Now that you understand who is visiting your site, you must understand why. Looking at your referring keywords will allow you to understand what your visitors were searching when they found your blogs. For instance... at Compendium, corporate blogging software and blog content creation software continue to be leading keywords that drive our content and calls-to-action.

3. Get Analytics. If I lost you at Tip 1 because you have zero idea how to measure or track this info... then you should probably re-think your blogging strategy.

By default we install Google Analytics tracking on every single client template. That allows us to help and nurture our client's success to ensure we are delivering the measurement they sought our help for in the first place.

For more template tips, check out my colleague Mikey Mioduski's blog post about improving conversion.

Acquisition vs Amplification

Tuesday, February 9, 2010 by Brian Millis

Often times I find myself in conversations about the benefits of social media marketing versus the search marketing benefits of corporate blogging. I do my best to keep up with the opinions of social media experts who are far more knowledgeable than I am. And today, I thought it would be helpful to highlight the insights of Doug Karr.

My favorite part is the quote he makes at the end:

"I’ve said before that social media is an amplifier for businesses online. Facebook is a big amplifier!"

That is a much more eloquent way of echoing my beliefs about the benefits of a business blogging versus the benefits of social medias like Facebook and Twitter. The corporate blog can be the content platform where an organization pushes out information, insights, and invitation to do business. Therefore, this content becomes an acquisition tool by driving greater organic visibility on the search engine. As Doug mentions in his post, he uses search engines far more than social networks when he has an intent to buy. Humanizing an organization through corporate blogging and leveraging that content as a search acquisition method is the true value of corporate blogging.

However, that does not discount the statistics that Doug highlights and the power of social networking. Those spaces can dramatically amplify online business. I think it is especially powerful when a company connects their quality blog content to these social spaces. This method allows organizations to amplify the message they find to be most important. If and when that content gets re-tweeted or shared among networks, it has viral potential and can dramatically impact the overall online marketing.

My opinion is that corporate blogging is an acquisition tool, while social media marketing is amplification tool (thanks Doug!). Compendium can help businesses connect and exploit these two benefits with our easy to use blog software. Call me at 317-777-6254 if you'd like to see a demo of the platform in action.

Blogging Tip Guru Alert!

Monday, February 8, 2010 by Jason Harvoth

As I scour the web this weekend looking for a things to keep my children occupied or to find the latest line on the Colts v. Saints game, I noticed many websites that include corporate blogging. Many of these companies look to be blogging just to blog; without a true purpose. As a sales professional I'm always looking for ways to make companies money & I have a suggestion. Many companies need to incorporate a deep and wide strategy with their blogging strategy. The free software that is available only allows the content to go deep with their blog content. Compendium allows the content to be delivered deep and wide across the web; attracting more visitors (shoppers) to your site to be found.

Google's ad below shows you just how complex and logical a searcher's mind can be. Use Compendium to take advantage of these organic results today.

Chris Baggott and Stephan Spencer will conduct a webinar on February 9th, 2010. You do not want to miss the blogging tips and search marketing content covered in this session.

Be sure to sign up for the FREE webinar.

Blogging is for SEO, Not Old People

Saturday, February 6, 2010 by Frank Dale

I read an article today in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Blogging is for old people, Pew report finds.” The title references the author’s conclusion after looking at Pew’s study of the millennial generation’s internet usage patterns. If I ran a consumer-to-consumer blogging service, I might be concerned. If we are talking about B-to-B or B-to-C blogging, the Pew study data does not apply.

Blogging is still very much about communication. It is just not primarily focused on C-to-C communication anymore. Blogging is now in its third generation. We have moved past blogs dedicated to cats and into an era of blogging for customer acquisition.

Business blogging works, because it is an easy way to provide relevant content that search engines love. Search engine providers like Google and Microsoft need to provide relevant results to keep searchers happy and loyal. Blogs are particularly good at providing relevant content, because blog content is topical and easy to update. It’s a great match, because the incentives are aligned for the search engine provider and the blogger. Bloggers provide topical content that search engines use to keep searchers happy. Search engines provide bloggers with prospective customers already interested in the product or service the blogger provides. We know this because the searcher specifically entered keywords corresponding to the topic that interested them. You don’t type “business blogging software” into a search box for fun. At least I don’t. You search based on your interests or needs.

Millennials may not blog, but they will certainly read blogs. We trust search engines because they help us solve problems. When you use a search engine to solve a problem, you are looking for a relevant, credible answer. If the best solution to your problem is found on a blog, you are going to visit that blog not a random twitter page. At Compendium we know this is true, because we use our own corporate blogging software to acquire customers. If you would like to learn more about blogging for search engine optimization, you can download our free whitepaper on Third Generation Blogging.

Greater Exposure Through Strategic Blogging

Friday, February 5, 2010 by Jason Harvoth

Is your company looking to take its sales to the next level in 2010? Perhaps bring sales back to pre-recession levels? The budget that was put in place for customer acquisition in 2007 may not work in 2010. So, you'll spend the remainder of the year reactively trying to "Fix It."

Compendium's business blog software focuses your search marketing dollars on driving more relavent traffic to your drive. This traffic is then converted through your Calls to Action. Empower your employees to create blog content through Compendium's simple blogging software, and lower your cost of customer acquisition immediately.

Or, you can take Sammy Stevens' approach below and craft a catchy video? Good luck with that.

I wish I was Jake Greenbaum!

Wednesday, February 3, 2010 by Chris Baggott

So...what does this have to do with Blogging Best Practices? Well not a whole lot.

Let me take that back. A big part of using Compendium as a content management system is the idea of humanization. What makes blogging and other social media such great tools for business is the ability to act like human beings instead of faceless Brands or Institutions.

So here is the human Chris Baggott green with envy because young Jake Greenbaum gets to spend this winter in Chile paddling his a-- off and running amazing waterfalls!

So now you know something more about me :-) I am one jealous Corporate Blogger!