Blog Hosting

First Compendium Baby On the Way!

Friday, March 12, 2010 by Jess Wehner

Just thought I'd do one last post on my blog before becoming a mom! Today is my last day in the Compendium Blogware office for a couple months, I'll be taking 3 months off to welcome and spend time with my first daughter.

Today is my official due day, but as anyone who has been pregnant can testify, the due date is merely a guideline for when the baby will come - only she will know the official timing! I've enjoyed spending the last 40 weeks of my pregnancy at the Compendium office. Everyone at our company has been extremely supportive and has helped me feel normal despite my growing stomach, ankles and feet.

I have also enjoyed sharing the news with all of my clients! I've gotten some great advise and even had the opportunity to use one of our client's products, the BabyPlus Prenatal Education System. Check out their Compendium blog to not only see a great business blog, but also if you're interested in learning more about the monitor they offer that pregnant women can use to help develop their baby in the womb.

I'll try to get a picture of our daughter up on the blog after she is born!

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 :-)

Study Shows 80% of Blog Traffic Comes from First-Time Visitors

Friday, March 12, 2010 by Heather Benfield

Since working at Compendium (a total of 2 months now), I'm beginning to see several common themes, questions, debates, misconceptions and conversations between the social media world and the seo world. One of the most common discussions I've heard between the two sides is the notion of "the repeat visitor".

What I mean by this is social media lovers often believe that the majority of business blog readers are loyal fans who keep coming back for more - a repeat visitor. However, here at Compendium Blogware we track metrics for over 400 client blogs and notice that the majority of traffic to a blog is from new, unique visitors.

In order to clear up the myth, Compendium partnered with a few social media and SEO gurus, Jason Falls, Debbie Weil and Jay Baer and conducted a survey with 266 companies addressing various questions about their social media usage and visitors.

The results?

Two-thirds of respondents reported over 80% of blog traffic comes from first-time visitors.

So what does this mean? Well, from a writer's perspective it definitely means that you can't assume your readers know who you are, what your business provides, or will understand any references you make from earlier posts or previous topics you've written about. You need to make sure you are writing your content in a way that would answer the questions a searcher was looking for when running across your blog in the search engine results. This also means you can re-use content! If you had a great post last year about the benefits of your product that you were able to see great traffic from, don't be afraid to re-use it since most of your readers will be seeing it for the first time.

This is a great best practice to use when writing a post. After a post is complete, ask yourself the following four questions:

1. Did I use relevant keywords or phrases that my target audience would type in a search querry if they had a question about my product or service
2. Did I establish who I am, what company I worked for or the product or solution I provide?
3. Based on the keywords I chose to focus on in my post, did I provide answers to the questions my reader was searching for?
4. Did I provide next steps for the reader to take action in order to learn more or even purchase the product or service I provide that solves their problems?

By asking these questions, you'll be able to cover your bases when making sure you are not assuming that the people reading your blog are long-time followers. You will in fact, be providing the needed information a new visitor would need in order to make a decision as to weather or not they would like to become a loyal customer.

Read the full Compendium Survey Results.

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!

Transparent data about blog visitors...

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Megan Glover

Exciting news at Compendium today. The results of our first Corporate Blogging and Social Media Trends survey are in.

With the help from our marketing advisory council, Debbie Weil, Jay Baer and Jason Falls - we set out to find answers to the question: What percentage of your blog traffic is brand new?

Why tackle this question? Well, up to this point, marketers have struggled to find a concrete way to measure business blogging. Repeat visitors, RSS subscriptions and "community" have all been words used synonymously with blogging success, but what's reality?

The reality is, when blogging for business - 80% or more of your traffic is going to come from brand new visitors. And, this is a great thing! By altering the way in which we've previously measured blogging success, we can take this new found knowledge and turn new visitors into potential clients. Thus, business blogging becomes another marketing tool in your suite of demand generation tactics.

Other great pieces of info are included in the study but it's really great to have data that helps marketers build the case for business blogging in a way that breeds tangible ROI.

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.

Large-Scale Long-Tail Organic Search Strategy

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Lee Jorgenson

This post is for all of the SEO gurus who are still dreaming of an SEO tool that is scalable and built for targeting thousands of long-tail keywords. Your day has come!

Compendium's search marketing tool (yes, it is a blog platform) allows businesses to target an unlimited number of keywords organically. How is this possible? What will my IT support need to look like? How long does it take to implement?

Check out a demo to see how the platform works. As for the answers to the next two questions: no IT support (they have enough to do already) and we typically have you up and running in about 10 business days.

Give us a call, and start dominating your long-tail keyword list!

Championship Blogging

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

One of the greatest days of the college basketball season is Selection Sunday which is when the NCAA picks 65 teams to play in the big tournament. This tournament is what we all fondly call March Madness or the Road to the Final Four. However, this tournament also creates inspiration for your company's blog! You can create your own blogging tournament like we have done at Compendium Blogware.

Heather, our blogging coordinator, has made a tournament with every department competing against each other. Then at the end of each week, a department is eliminated for their lack of blogging. Luckily, the Marketing department is leading in the 2nd week of the tournament but we still have to survive the last two weeks of the tournament. We, as the marketing department, pride ourselves on our blogging frequency and expertise so all the rest of the departments are trying to beat us.

I do not have any worry though that we will be victorious of our little tournament. Either way, blogging tournaments and incentives can really help your company's blog and add some fun to your corporate blogging strategy.

The New Wave of User Generated Content

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by jennifer buscher

This week, I've learned of several new and what I think are "game-changing" developments on the Compendium front. If you are in the online marketing world and have not lived in a hole over the last year, you've probably heard of something called "user generated content" and how important it is for SEO and online marketing now and in the future.

We all know that people like human, relevant content... People love reviews and testimonials, but your potential customer still have to find you first before they can get to your wonderful customer reviews. So, how do you use that human content for acquistion and to drive new visitors? This is exactly what Compendium is helping clients do through two features:

Web-to-Post: This is a feature that allows a visitor on your blog to share their story about your product or service, which then goes through an approval layer, and automatically distributed across your blog network to help you get found on the search engines. This content is often collected through a call to action which directs the visitor to a webform where they can share their story and even upload a picture. For example, Lydia's Uniforms collects customer stories through a webform that is accessed on their blog. With our business blogging platform, they are using this content to win search and engage new customers.
Email-to-Post: Similar to web-to-post, email-to-post allows companies to tap into their email database to solicit content. Let's stick with Lydia's Uniform's to paint a picture. Once my purchase is complete, I would receive a triggered email from them saying "Thank you for your purchase... we'd love to feature you on our blog.... click here (web form link attached) to tell us your nursing story." That story would also then be sent into an approval layer and once approved, automatically syndicated across the Lydia's blog network. That nurse who submitted her/his story would likely want to tell all their friends via facebook, twitter... you can see where this is going. People love user generated content and now there is actually a system that gives companies a seamless way to leverage that content to drive new business.

I firmly believe that these two features are going to change business blogs as we know them today. To learn more about web-to-post or email-to-post, please feel free to reach out to me directly at jbuscher@compendium.com or 317.777.6121.

Conversion rates and rank position for business blogs

Thursday, March 11, 2010 by Brian Millis

Lots of people I talk to think that you have to rank in the first few organic spots in order to see true success with their blog. Although I normally stick to those top rankings in my examples as a way to elicit the WOW factor, top ranking is not the only important position to think about with a corporate blog.

For Compendium clients, it is more about the aggregate traffic and conversion that happens across the entire network of key phrase blogs. Keep in mind what Rand Fishkin recently pointed out in his post about rank and conversion:

"Searches are almost always intended to discover information or take action. If there are too many pieces of information/actions you need to provide on a single page, your conversion will drop. Remember that a 10% conversion rate for position #10 is better than a 0.5% conversion rate for position #1 (assuming the avgs. from the leaked AOL data cited below)."

We have clients who are enjoying over 12% conversion rates on average across their targeted blogs. Our platform acts as a content management system for social content, which gives the ability to have many blogs ranking. They don't all have to rank in that very top spot as Rand points out. Imagine having 100 search terms where your blog ranks on the top page with an average conversion rate over 10%. That is a powerful search marketing strategy that will lead to increased traffic, conversion, and business.

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

Enhancement Requests

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Abby Warner

As a part of my release Wednesday series that I have been writing, I thought I would reach out to you the client and get your thoughts. If you are interested, feel free to complete the form below. We will add these enhancement requests to our list of enhancements and work to prioritize for development.

Thank you in advance for your feedback!


	Enhancement Request Please complete the form below detailing your idea. We encourage our clients to submit enhancement requests by emailing help@compendium.com . However, for the purpose of this blog post, I wanted to collect ideas through an alternate method.
	Your Name* First Name Last Name
	Company*
	Email*
	Phone
	Request Details*

FormSpring Online Forms

Compendium Classics

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

One of things I did today was upload old Compendium webinars to a site called slideshare.net. Compendium uses the website as a place for people to review some of the webinars Compendium offers. I uploaded around five to seven of our webinars that can provide insight into your corporate blogging strategy.

The old webinars cover topics such as:

   "5 Compelling Reasons for Small Business to Blog"
   "2009 Top Corporate Blogging Trends"
   "Why Blogs are Affordable, Dynamic, and Efficient Marketing Tools"

Those are just a few of the webinars that are uploaded. Most of these webinars are not offered directly off of Compendium's website so I would suggest checking out slideshare.net to view them! I am sure one of the webinars on the website can be useful for your business!

Blogging Can Change That

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Ford McAlexander

One of the greatest resources Compendium offers is the Whitepaper
"What Third Generation

Blogging Means to You". It is also one of the most frequently downloaded Whitepapers off of our website. The reason why it is such a popular Whitepaper is because it shares what is the true value of a corporate blogging strategy.

The only problem is that many business people are unaware of the positive influence blogs can have for a company. Businesses are losing credibility since many of their marketing campaigns do not seem personalized. Blogging can help change that. Businesses are not being found online because they have not created content that is compelling. Blogging can change that.

If you want blogging to change that, check out the Whitepaper today.

Social Media

Wednesday, March 10, 2010 by Isaac Pellerin

Social Media is here to stay! It represents a paradigm shift in the way we communicate.
While it can be overwhelming to process all of the information presented in the following video remember this: Social Media is the future of business.

My good friend, Marty Bennett, introduced me to this concept and has a very progressive perspective on how important Social Media is to students making college decisions. With all of these media available it's important to have a hub. Last week we had a great webinar with Jay Baer, he went into detail explaining why a blog makes the most sense to be this hub. My biggest take-away from his presentation was how important it is to use a blog within the context of your business. So being sure to have effective Calls to Action so that decisions are made.

When it comes to corporate blogging, it's important to have content that is ready to be re-purposed and shared.

With the current state of our media driven world we have more and more "connectors". The most effective social media marketing strategies are those that empower this army of connectors with targeted, meaningful information that spreads across their network with authority.

As it sinks in, I begin to feel overwhelmed by it's implications and excited by what the future holds.

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!

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....