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How to Distinguish Your Posts

Posted Thursday, December 4, 2008 by Douglas Karr

Distinguish your business blog post with images

If you're going to start a business blog, you're going to have to move quickly to distinguish your blog from the millions of others out there. It doesn't take too much time to find free images online (just search for the term free images online). I took the above image and Photoshopp'd the text in and it only took a few minutes.

Distinguishing each post with an image is a great corporate blogging strategy and will garner each of your posts with attention. Make sure the image represents the story you're sharing.

Another benefit is that images will distinguish your feed from the host of others that your subscribers are reading.

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Internet Business Blog

Posted Thursday, December 4, 2008 by Jason Gergely

An internet business blog is a blog that is attached to the company website. Employees create their own personal company blog; writing about their job, the company, and the product or service that their company has to offer. All of which help the company increase its search engine optimization.

The reason that your internet blog should be part of your company website is because it is more effective in winning searches on Google. A company blogger writes about what his place of employment has to offer because when consumers are searching on Google, they are looking to solve a problem. When the employee writes something in a blog post about a similar situation that the consumer is looking to solve, it is more relevant to the search inquire, thus helping the company win the search.

When you are blogging for business, you not only just looking to increase your SEO, but you are also looking to humanize your marketing. By humanizing your marketing, the customers looking at your website and thinking about using your product feel a more human connection, rather than words on a website, explaining what the company does. Blogging makes consumers feel more connected with your company and as you know... people buy from people.

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It's about the blogging . . . . Baby!

Posted Thursday, December 4, 2008 by Brian Millis

I was demonstrating the power of the Compendium corporate blogging software today for a prospective client who wants to blog with a business purpose. The woman I spoke with knows how to blog, but can't seem to organize her content that will allow her to blog for SEO. As I we got into our discussion, I could hear her excitement build about our easy blog software that allows a company blogger to not worry about the marketing of each post. Let Compendium do that part for you! Just get on, and blog about what you know best . . . . your business.

Here is a comment I just read on one of our client's blogs:

"We have found that many parents-to-be visit our website as a direct result of Internet research of learning in the womb."
http://blog.babyplus.com/blog/infant-growth-assessment

In this post, BabyPlus asks their online customers to send them questions to be answered on the blog. What a great way to get your revenue stream engaged in your marketing effort! Nice work BabyPlus, nice work.

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Dumb it Down

Posted Thursday, December 4, 2008 by Douglas Karr

Somehow folks advising you to be 'dumber' with your posts sounds like you're insulting the average reader's intelligence. You're absolutely not - what you're doing is providing concise, simple terms that will be easily digested.

If you're going to start a business blog, writing great copy is key to a successful corporate blogging strategy.

Friend, fellow blogger and humorist Erik Deckers likes to remind his audience at regional events that most people read and comprehend at a sixth grade level.

More important is that the typical visitor to your blog arrived via search so they're scanning the page for a response, not a lot of fluff. Don't waste their time - provide the answer quickly and simply.

The juxtaposition of multi-syllable words in byzantine expressions only increases the likelihood that you'll persuade your prospect to hastily depart your Internet journal.

That was tough, wasn't it?

Great copywriting is key to a great corporate blogging strategy... writing simple, pithy, keyword-sprinkled and compelling content is what will keep new visitors coming back and convert visitors to customers.

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Blog Content Ideas

Posted Thursday, December 4, 2008 by Chris Baggott

outlook as a corporate blog content idea

I often tell people that your Sent Mail boxes are full of great blog content and ideas. Every day, people send you notes and more importantly almost anyone in a company that sends email is putting their thoughts about the business down in writing. From a corporate blogging strategy standpoint, email content makes perfect blog content. For example, here is a segment of an email I sent to a Compendium Blogware prospect today:

Trust that I’m going to hound you on this forever. It’s for your own good :-) Data driven search marketing is the perfect compliment to email. 90% of all marketing dollars are spent on acquisition marketing...a place that email has limited value. Search is the only acquisition strategy that is still growing in this environment and Compendium is the only software designed to legitimately target organic search on a scale comparable to PPC.

You will be thanking me :-)

Great thought starter for any Company Blogger? I'm wanting to help him start a business blog and so I'm giving him some compelling reasons to consider our multi user blog software....exactly the same kind of thing I should put into a post.

The same thing is true for you. When you are wondering what to post about today....check your 'sent mail'. It's a blogging best practice.

By the way, i was published yesterday in MultiChannel Merchant talking about Retail Blogging and the need to compete more.,

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Does Your Bounce Rate Suck?

Posted Wednesday, December 3, 2008 by Douglas Karr

We had a client contact us today that was extremely concerned about their bounce rate. I'm honestly not troubled too much by high bounce rates when it comes to your corporate blogging strategy – bounce rates will vary from industry to industry.

What I do pay attention to is the trending of the bounce rate. Is it increasing? Decreasing?
Where are they bouncing to? Are they bouncing via your calls to action? Hopefully so! Then it's not really a problem, is it?
Even if your bounce rate is increasing, it still may not be a huge factor if you're seeing a significant increase in search traffic. If your site ever makes the cover of Digg or Slashdot, you'll see a huge increase in traffic - and your bounce rate will approach 100%. That's okay - they may not be the visitors you're after and at least your business got some nice exposure.
If your search volume is consistent and your bounce rate is increasing, that points to more people leaving and it could be an issue with how relevant your content is to their search or how compelling your content is.
What's keeping your visitor there? Is there somewhere you're leading them to? Related content, a call to action, a contact form? All of these provide a path for visitors to stay and engage rather than leave.
Test different calls to action? Are you getting conversions through the blog? If you’re not sure how to measure those, look up how to setup goals with your analytics provider.

Marketing is a process and it takes time, especially with a corporate blogging strategy. It's all about consistency, momentum and quality of content. Observe your trends and overall patterns but don't get too worried about daily ups and downs.

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Your Business Blog

Posted Wednesday, December 3, 2008 by Jason Gergely

Ok, I know I have been telling you all about what I think is important to include in your business blog and how to organize it, but I just wanted to mention a few things that can make you blog post a little stronger, especially if you are blogging for your company.

I think the best thing you can do with you blog to make it more effective is to add that little bit of personality in there. I mentioned this before, but you don't have to have perfect grammar and syntax, nor do you need to have proper punctuation and paragraph breaks. Let some of your personality show through on your posts.

Another way to make your business blog more effective is don't just awkwardly include a keyword you are trying to use. My strategy is to integrate the word into the post somehow. Some keywords are harder to just slip in your blog post, while others are easier.

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Are you a creative blogger?

Posted Wednesday, December 3, 2008 by meghan peters

One of the many great things about starting a business blog is giving your employees the chance to show their creative side through blogging.

There are a lot of companies that are a little weary about allowing their employees to openly express company topics on the world wide web, but you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find. Allowing this outlet for employees often times let's the creative side out of people you would never expect. A lot of people already blog in their spare time, why not put that skill to good use!

At Compendium everyone is supplied with a blog and we can post to it regularly. This has given everyone a creative outlet and personally I think it helps spruce up our blogs! We have a few employees who do a great job of showing their creative side and their personality through their blog posts.

Check them out...

PJ Hinton
Brian McKay
Mikey Mioduski
Kaila Woodside

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A time for lead generation in a down economy.

Posted Wednesday, December 3, 2008 by Lindsey Young

With all of the media coverage lately about the current economic situation, more and more companies are hesitant about 2009 spending. Budget freezes, tighter purse strings, and more "red tape" is becoming a trend as I'm speaking with clients regarding first quarter planning. What companies need to realize is that the time for lead generation is NOW. With everyone's goal being more customers, more qualified leads and spending less to get those leads, where do I need to allot those precious marketing dollars?

A diversified marketing plan is key, however go with where the eyeballs are. Online. Print is dead, consumers are buying online, getting their news online, paying their mortgages online. You get the idea. As a marketer you need to intercept the eyeballs of your competition. An affordable SEO strategy is something pros are encouraging business owners to dig deep to invest in for 2009. Please see this article. A excerpt:

"High rankings are great, but what do they mean to a business? We talked to Doctor Bowler from Georgetown Surgical recently, and asked him, was he getting new business from the Internet? He was getting two to four new patients a week with his old website, and he's currently getting 50 to 70 new patients a week. That's a dramatic difference: he was nearly going bankrupt and was close to shutting up shop, and now he has to hire a new surgeon".

Utilizing blogs in your inbound marketing strategy makes sense. It's an extremely economical way to drastically boost your search engine rankings, while at the same time humanizing your company and giving your employees a chance to contribute. Blog content is most likely one of the most readily available resources you didn't even know you had. Whitepapers, newsletters, internal company emails. Using this existing content can do wonders for your traffic. More importantly, with the organized/topical system Compendium offers, it does wonders for qualified traffic. What's a qualified lead worth to you these days? Give me a call, I'd love to discuss it with you.

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Gartner Peers into Crystal Ball, Sees Bright Future for SaaS

Posted Wednesday, December 3, 2008 by PJ Hinton

A story appeared in yesterday's trade press wires about computer analyst firm Gartner releasing a survey, which predicts a strong market for Software as a Service (SaaS) in the year to come.

The analyst firm polled a number of enterprises across the world and found that 90 per cent are planning to maintain or increase their investments in SaaS. Respondents cited cost-effectiveness, and ease and speed of deployment as some of the key reasons for the decision.

One of the reasons clients adopt Compendium Blogware is that we are SaaS. We worry about the setup, the server up time, and the software upgrades. The only thing our customers have to worry about is creating content.

With unique features, like our Keyword Strength Meter and Content Ideas panel, the task of writing inspired and relevant posts becomes much simpler. With a frequent release schedule, customers get visible, added value through our multi-user blog software over the lifetime of their subscription.

If you're thinking about starting a business blog, take a look at our 60-Second Blogging Challenge to learn some of the other reasons we should be the cornerstone of your corporate blogging strategy.

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Blog Tip: Talk about your Clients

Posted Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by Compendium Client Marketing

Bottom line - it's all about your customers.

Make sure you talk about them.

Blogging Tip:
Talk about your clients. Celebrate your client's success with them. Have you had any clients in the news lately?

This should be a fairly easy blog post to write. Just open up your local paper or business journal I am sure you will find at least one client with something going on.

Here is a great example of a blog post that discuses a client and how the client uses our product.

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High Profile Athletes Connecting with Fans Via Blogs

Posted Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by PJ Hinton

Continuing on the theme of yesterday's post about how musicians are promoting themselves with blogs, we turn our attention to high profile athletes with a recent article that appeared on the San Diego Union-Tribune website that talks about the mixed rate of blogging adoption by the pros.

The article quotes Bob McKamey, a concept director for a web design company in Chicago that has created a lot of athlete websites:

“It's kind of black and white between those who get it and those who don't. And I'd have to say that there are more on the still-don't-get-it side.”

One designer who has been involved in creating sports websites is more passionate about the matter:

“Any of these guys, if they don't have a blog, I think they're missing out,” said San Elijo Hills resident Chris Bello, who designed the site for his friend, Perez, and runs two University of Miami sites, AllCanes.com and AllCanesblog.com. “This is the stuff that people are tuning in to. We're a reality TV society, and it's almost like this is a TV show: 'What are we in store for this week?' ”

Among blogging's biggest fans, according to the article, are Tiger Woods, Dale Earnhardt, Jr., Quentin Jammer, Danica Patrick, and Pat Perez. Their paths to starting a blog and their goals for blogging may vary, but they have a thing or two in common with corporate bloggers.

San Diego Chargers cornerback Quentin Jammer makes the case that we often make... blogs help you tell your story.

Jammer has had a site for three years specifically to get his own voice out there. He personally answers fans' questions on a weekly basis.

“Usually, people make assumptions about you,” Jammer said. “And if you don't want them to make assumptions, put up a Web site and let them know.”

The VP of marketing and brand development for Dale, Jr., expresses a similar sentiment:

Thayer Lavielle, Earnhardt's vice president of marketing and brand development, came to the team from a vastly different company, Loreal, where a cologne campaign using Earnhardt was “crazy successful.” Her approach to the racing Web site is decidedly sophisticated.

“We talk about buckets and themes,” Lavielle said. “Not only do you want to be the voice for the latest news, we also want to speak and sing the songs we want to sing, to tell the story we want to tell.”

The bottom line: blogs are becoming the way forward thinking athletes connect their fans, who are their customers in some sense. Triathlete Michellie Jones, says:

“Blogs have made it more personal,” Jones said. “People feel like they can connect with you. Some of my blogs are better than others, but if it makes somebody laugh, and if they can relate to you in some way, then you've reached the purpose the site was intended for.”

If you have a business but do not blog, ask yourself this question: "Are you connecting with your customers?"

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eMarketers and Retailers have Social Media...almost right

Posted Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by Chris Baggott

Blogging, Social Media, Business, Corporate, Retail

eMarketer reported another useful insight today in a report called: Learning to Work with Social Networks: A developing medium offers new targeting options.

I beg you to please remove the idea of Social Networks from your vocabulary and focus on the key phrase.....New Targeting Options.

There is, as of today, no successful and scalable retail marketing strategy that leverages social networks in the manner that most people think.

Social Tools?   Yeah...that's what we are talking about.   How can a Retail Marketer leverage Social Tools to drive their business objectives?

The number one most effective Social Tool is a Blogging Platform for Search Engine Optimization.   Substitute the term "Social" for "Human".   This entire phenomenon is telling marketers one thing:   Stop with the Branding and focus on human to human interaction. What we are suggesting is that you have a two phase blogging program.   Step one is to engage as wide a net of employees as possible to create content (blog) and phase two it to organize that great content around topics and keywords instead of individual "thought leadership".

If you have many blogs that are targeted to specific keywords, and you are feeding those blogs with relevant, human generated content frequently...well that turns a Social Tool like blogging into a New Targeting Option that is the holy grail for retail marketers.

And it's easy!

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Who's Your Company Blogger?

Posted Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by Douglas Karr

There's always debate on the net about who you should allow to blog and speak for your company. Mark Cuban is an extreme, but he does not allow anyone within his organizations to blog since he wishes to be the sole voice of the company. Personally, I think this probably hurts him more than helps him.

Other companies put their Marketing team on it, so the content is really regurgitated site content, whitepapers and case studies. The verbiage is refined with little personality. Blah... blah... blah... Zzzzzzz...

I think Chris Baggott nails it when he says that the best company bloggers you have are the people that are closest to your customers. They understand the relationship between your products and services and how it assists their business. They also understand the challenges and successes.

When you wonder about who will be a company blogger, you should ask yourself who you'll entrust your clients to? Who will be fulfilling your business relationship? Since blogs provide such a rich quantity of qualified leads through search engines, it's typical that the search engine user is asking the exact question that your employee can answer. Not your CEO, not your President, not your VP of Marketing... but the person who you've entrusted the relationship with.

That means that you can assume a pattern where your employee who handles the customer will write about topics important to the customer... which, in turn, will be topics important to a new visitor! As a result, customer-facing employees happen to make fantastic company bloggers.

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SEO Hot in This Economy

Posted Tuesday, December 2, 2008 by Kristen Raves

We hear about it everyday, markets plummeting, stocks crashing, jobs being lost. It is no surprise that we are not in the most stable economy. For that reason, blogging for search engine optimization is the best way to market your business. In a recent article by SEOmoz they discuss the various reasons why seo is the best marketing tactic out there.

The internet outperforms any other marketing channel out there. A majority of business for companies comes through the web. Additionally, the internet is one of the cheapest medians to use for marketing efforts and the ROI is like no other. Where as print media used to be the way to reach your customers, it is no longer the case because it is so expensive and unresponsive.
Web budgets are being reassessed. This means that as people pay more for Pay Per Click Campaigns you can acheive even better rankings through blogging. Utlimately saving you and your company money. In an earlier post of mine, I touched on the cost of PPC and how 95% of people click in the organic results. Since that is where you want to be found, blogging is the affordable solution.
You can measure your efforts through blogging. By using an analytic tool you can determine which posts/pages are keeping your customers on the page and taking action.

If it were up to me, I would tell every company to invest in blogging. It is a great solution for marketing during this time.

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Happy Blogging Holidays!

Posted Monday, December 1, 2008 by Sarah Sedberry

As it is the first of December and those in the Client Success Team here at Compendium Blogware are obsessed with the fist snow that happened this weekend, and all of the merriment to come this month, we wanted to send out our own little holiday spirit.

I admit that this idea came from our client The Sanders Group, and encourage you to post your own, as adding a little fun into your corporate blog allows readers to relate to you and see the personal side of your business.

Enjoy and extra points if you can name everyone in the video!

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

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Blogging Killed the Video Star?

Posted Monday, December 1, 2008 by PJ Hinton

Well, the record company's goin' out of business
They price the records too damn high
And the boys in the band could use some assistance
Get a daytime job just to get by

Well, the P.D.'s, they won't play the record
They're too worried about that book
And the D.J.'s, they all hate the song
But they're in love with the hook

-- John Mellencamp, "Cheap Shot", Nothin' Matters and What if it Did?, Riva

The lyrical excerpt above was taken from a song released back in 1980, in a time when radio stations were the primary gatekeepers to musical popularity, with the fate of a song's success determined by airplay. It would take another 20 years for the tide to turn.

NPR's Weekend Edition had an interesting story on Sunday about how the internet has changed the way musicians promote themselves. Focusing on Canadian musician Dallas Green, the story details how he has used the net to promote his solo efforts under the name City and Colour, and some of the lessons he has learned bear relevance to corporate blogging.

The record label knew that they couldn't count on getting on the airwaves, so Green started promoting through interviews and music giveaways.

The head of marketing at Green's label, Jeremy Maciak, testifies to the importance of the long tail:

"Any sort of blog we felt with even 100 readers or even less was worth our time," Maciak says. "As media is more and more fractionalized, you can't afford to not be any place."

Blogging for search falls into this same category. Getting your content out there on a regular basis helps to elevate your profile, even if your blog isn't considered a focal point for thought leadership. You're not gunning for reputaiton among peers. You're trying to be found by potential customers.

Reading further on down:

But this constant promotion and attention to fans is the new business model for music. A record's success is no longer judged by the first week's sales.
"It's about a slow build and having that intricate and honest conversation with our fans and potential audience," Maciak says. "Sometimes that takes months, years, to build."

By the same token, corporate blogging isn't just a short-term campaign, it requires a long term commitment because search engines ascribe authority to content age.

Finally, the article notes:

For fans there is an upside to the new model: Today's musicians must do more live performances, and record companies can no longer hide mediocre artists with lots of in-studio special effects.

Think of a corporate blog as a live performance by your company. A chance for your customer to get to know you in the real. Slick PR campaigns that attempt to hide away shoddy quality goods and services with a flashy image won't get very far because word-of-mouth has a rapid mechanism for coutering disinformation.

As I read the paragraph about this new model, I was reminded of another song from the same era as "Cheap Shot", namely the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star." It was the inaugural song for Mtv, a cable/satellite channel that at the time looked like a threat to radio's role as pop power broker.

While Mtv helped to usher in countless New Wave and Hair Band acts in the 80s, it took on a different focus in the 90s, phasing out video music and VJs in favor of reality and celebrity profile programming. That transition gave rise to the preference for flashy acts whose lack of real talent was compensated for by digtial postprocessing.

Blogging and other conversational forms of music promotion may well help to bring an end to an era that was so fixated on style over substance. I figured it would only be appropriate to herald the occasion by pulling out a live performance of "Video Killed the Radio Star", recorded in 2004 by the Buggles, including the original backup vocalists.

The performance is strikingly good, wouldn't you say?

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99% of Corporate Blogging Advice is Wrong

Posted Monday, December 1, 2008 by Douglas Karr

First, I'll throw out a disclaimer that my percentage is made up. I keep Google Alerts on corporate blogging and read each and every blog post out there. I'd actually estimate 99% is a low number because I have yet to find really great (or even half-decent) advice for corporate blogging out there.

The majority of advice out there is written, re-written, borrowed and stolen from other inaccurate articles out on the web. Misinformation spreads like a disease on the net.

Other advice is written by professional bloggers who are adept to putting out publications, but do not depend on their corporate blog to drive conversions on other products or services.

These blogging publications sell ads and some make quite a bit of money doing it. As such, their personal business doesn't depend on the accuracy of the information that they are sharing, only the quantity and popularity of the content.

Additionally, you'll find a world of social media experts out there - some know how to implement open source blogging engines, some are graphic artists selling themes, and others are search engine optimization experts who know how to properly structure and write a blog post. Very few of them are trying to run a business off of their blog utilizing it as a strategic marketing tool.

If you're going to read a post on corporate blogging advice, make sure the source actually has both experience AND their business depends on the accuracy of the advice. Compendium Blogware's success depends on how well the strategies and platform assist our clients' business. Not only do our customers succeed in their strategies, a majority of them actually upsell their engagements with us.

Watch where you get your advice from. Look for real-world examples rather than blanket lists of business blogging tips. Don't believe the hype!

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Entrenchment is Not a Sign of a Healthy Enterprise

Posted Friday, November 28, 2008 by PJ Hinton

CNet's Victoria Ho recently wrote an article about remarks from Gartner and IDC saying that Microsoft's Internet Explorer is too entrenched within large corporations for it to lose market share in that space.

Gartner's rationalizations for continued IE dominance are:

companies depend on too many applications that tie into Microsoft's HTML rendering engine
Microsoft provides tools for the centralized administration of IE, something that alternative browsers don't offer

IDC says that it's a self-reinforcing loop. Because IE is the dominant browser in corporate computing environments, application developers will expend the greatest amount of energy making sure their products work on IE.

I don't doubt that there is a mindset that perpetuates this pattern. Last week, I spoke with someone who works in QA for a large web application software development company that still has their computing environment standardized on IE 6, a browser that is broken with respect to standards compliance and way behind the times technologically (example: do you remeber what it was like to browse the web without tabs?)

The irony is that the centralized administration tools cited by the IT analysts empower dinosaur minded administrators to turn their computing environments into technological backwaters, elevating the risk of their systems being compromised by malicious software. As Windows XP support phases out, the updates to IE 6 will cease, making the security issue all the more prevalent.

Eight or so years ago, when Internet Explorer was the pretty much the only game in town with respect to dynamic HTML, one could make the business case that the added functionality in IE justified the lock-in.

Things have changed since then.

The alternative browsers have introduced DOM manipulation through JavaScript, CSS compliance with W3C specifications has improved dramatically, and the adoption of the XMLHttpRequest object made widespread AJAX development feasible. Several JavaScript libraries have been developed to abstract away browser-specific issues, like incompatible event models, that have hobbled developers from developting for other browsers. Microsoft's ActiveX technology has become so tarnished that security experts advocate disabling it.

In short, one can develop a modern web application that delivers rich functionality without the Microsoft lock-in and the security holes that they sometimes introduce.

One of the most painful lessons of the recent economic downturn is that the inability to adapt to the times portends a rough, if not fatal, passage for an organization. The plight of the big three auto makers is a prime example of the dire consequences the market metes out to companies that are too entrenched in their ways.

It's also worth noting that when it comes to the startups that are developing the next generation of technologies, Microsoft's .NET technologies aren't winding up on the development short lists. Microsoft's desperation has escalated to the point where it launched a program earlier this month to encourage adoption of .NET by startups by dangling free development tools.

The development ecosystem has progressed to the point where web user interface engineers can use third-party libraries to develop their pages using a browser like Firefox and expect it to work on most recent browsers. Some additonal tweaks are sometimes needed to get styling to appear correctly in IE 6, but developers have long agreed that IE 6 is a pain. Firefox has a large number of extensions that make a developer's life a lot easier. To get anything even close on IE, Microsoft requires you to use Visual Studio, which is a bloated approach to the problem.

IE may be the default browser in the enterprise for the near term, but as Microsoft prods customers to migrate away from Windows XP, the reasons that the analysts give for continued lock-in will wane.

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How Should I Name This Post?!?!

Posted Wednesday, November 26, 2008 by Jason Gergely

I feel like naming individual blog posts can be the most important part of actually posting the blog, especially if you are doing it for a corporate blog. Business blog names are vital because when people are doing searches, they don't want to see someone's blog title that doesn't sound like it has any credibility what-so-ever. You can't just name your blog post anything. Your title needs to be well thought out and directed to helping your company win searches online.

I recently read an article entitled, "Blog Marketing Tips #1; How to Optimize Blog Post Titles". After reading this article, I found how to better arrange words in my titles. Author Andy Beal says to keep your blog title "short and sweet". If you give to much information in the blog title, what is the point in reading your blog? Makes sense doesn't it?

Andy also suggests that you can also make your blog title better for your business blog if you include keywords in your titles. If you need any suggestions or ideas, you can look at what some of the employees at Compendium Blogware have done to help increase our SEO by selectively choosing how they name their posts.

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