Blog Software Comparison

Online Behavior --- Continues To Prove The Case For Business Blogging

Posted Thursday, August 21, 2008 by Jenni Edwards

This Forbes Article is great! I think one of the biggest takeaways is this line "...the Internet is still about searching for information. Indeed out of the top five sites most trafficked by U.S. visitors...four are portals (search engines) to other Web sites."

The Internet is about search. That's what people are doing. While email is still the most popular activity, the proof of the importance of search is in the rankings (make sure to check out the slides that compare the Top 20 Sites of 2005 to the Top 20 Sites of 2008 --- so amazing how quick we forget 'cool' destination sites, does anyone even remember Gorilla Nation Media from 2005?).

The one regret I have of the article is the fact that the author never did tie blogs into the search world or the idea to blog for SEO. And the mention of blogging is grouped into social networks and forums. While all of these do create the so called "interaction" the idea that businesses only can utilize blogs to monitor the chatter is an understatement --- what about taking the next step and implementing their own business blogging strategy?

Five Steps to Mastering Blogging and Online Marketing

Posted Sunday, August 17, 2008 by jeff lefevere

A Compendium customer, Lizan Brand, from Greenfield Liquors, was featured in the Saturday edition of the Indianapolis Star.

One of the things that Lizan is doing that is really interesting is mixing in video--highlighting drink recipes, talking about wine and the sorts of things that contextually engage a reader.

In my personal life, I’m well in tune with wine & spirits video blogging as a wine blogger (vlogger) is ascending to national attention. In fact, wine online darling Gary Vaynerchuk from WinelibraryTV continues to grab the wine world by its shirt lapels and give a good, healthy shake.

Gary continues to not only lead the charge in creating a brand online for himself and his business by proxy, but he also continues to give advice, good advice, to folks interested in growing their business, any business.

Vaynerchuk did an audio interview with an Internet-based business coach and he provided some additional insights that are not just applicable to technology marketing, but marketing in general. You can find the audio portion of the interview here.

Find the text transcript here.

A couple of the nuggets that I gleaned are:

* Vaynerchuk on putting content out on the web: “If you put out great content, you will be found.”

* Vaynerchuk on leveraging your expertise: “So, if you are the best guy in your law firm in contracts, instead of waiting eight to ten years to become a partner, start (using technology) about what you know. Give away that content for free. It will come back to you in spades 800 times over.”

* Vaynerchuk on tapping your passion: “So you may be good at three or four things, but please site down and analyze where you feel you’re most passionate about, even if that is the most competitive genre, do it because that is where you’re going to win when you really believe it, when it goes through your blood, you’re going to win every time because even if you’re not seeing the mythical success, your heart and soul is going to be happy. That is going to push through to the point when you will start seeing success."

* The Interviewer on setting lofty goals: “you have to have high ideals. You have to have something that you’re shooting for that’s absolutely spectacular. What you have to realize is that’s the ideal, that’s not the goal. When you achieve a certain level of success, the people that are super successful don’t compare where they get to--to their ideal. The ideal is just where they’re focused towards. To be happy and to be excited about what you’re accomplishing, you have to look backwards to where you were. As long as you make that leap and you look backwards to feel good about yourself then you can keep that excitement going. If you’re always comparing where you are to the perfect (ideal) then it’s very hard to stay excited …

The frenetic interview wraps up with Vaynerchuk’ “Five Steps to Mastering Social Media.” If you replace the “social media” with “blogging” the same values hold true. They are:

1) Make sure you want to engage/learn it.

2) Now that you know you want it, spend every living second that you possibly can on it.

3) Put your toe in the pool. Get involved.

4) Humble yourself. If you’re the best basketball player in the world, you’re playing hockey now. Put on your skates.

5) Know what you want to accomplish.

Good advice for all and something Lizan, a Compendium customer, is doing successfully and so can you. Business blogging is hardly hard, it just takes a little bit of the above five items.

Search Engine Optimization spending increases

Posted Friday, August 15, 2008 by Eric Romer

A new survey from the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) shows that both advertisers and agencies are ramping up their spending in Search Marketing, particularly organic SEO. This shouldn't be shocking news, as Search Marketing has steadily grown, and will continue to grow as less and less people use destination websites.

It's not rocket science. If I am looking for a particular brand of jeans, or a specific tea pot my mom was talking about, I search. I Google "cast iron asian tea pot", and start my research.

As the survey shows, advertisers are increasing their organic SEO by 28%, and agencies by 73% (the highest increase of all the categories!). So what does this mean? It means companies are trying to optimize a traditional website to be found on many different keywords. The only problem is a website will only be able to capture a handful of keywords. There are hundreds, thousands of different ways I can search for that tea pot. As a business who sells that product, I need to cast a wide net and be found on as many of those terms as possible.

Don't believe me? If you have 5 minutes, check out this Whitepaper that discusses how traditional SEO efforts pale in comparison to a corporate blogging solution when it comes to organic search.

Content for the Crown Announcement

Posted Friday, August 8, 2008 by Chantelle Flannery

A field of over 100 companies will be participating in this falls Blogging Tournament – Content for the Crown. The companies will face off in a single elimination bracket over the course of the next 7 weeks. At the end of each week the total number of posts for each company will be compared and the team with the most posts will advance to the next round. Tie breaks will be broken by comparing the previous weeks post totals - going back as far a necessary in order to break the tie.

To find out whom you have to compete with check out the tournament bracket.

The first round of the tournament begins on Monday August 11th and lasts through the 17th of August.

Spell Checking for your Web Browser

Posted Friday, July 18, 2008 by PJ Hinton

One edge that word processor programs traditionally have had over web browser based editors is spell checking. Many web-based content creation applications, including our own blog authoring software, now include a spell checking feature.

Built-in support for spell checking has been slow to make its way into browsers. Since version 2, Firefox has supported in-line spell checking (those squiggly red underlines you see under suspected misspellings). Internet Explorer 7 doesn't have this feature at all.

Still, that's no excuse to avoid using a browser based editor, because there are easy tweaks that you can employ on both browsers to give you an experience comparable to that of modern word processors. Over at CNet's website, Dennis O'Reilly has a recently published blog post that spills the details.

That's just one more reason to add to the list for not using a word processor as your blog posting software.

July 4th - Part III

Posted Tuesday, July 15, 2008 by Sarah Sedberry

The final installment on the historical 4th of July trip! (then to your dismay, you will have to listen to my ramblings regarding my obsession with the new iPhone.)

On the final day of our trip to Pennsylvania, we stopped by Gettysburg in order to wrap up all things concerned with our Nation's history that we could jam into a 3 day weekend.

Re-enactment Soldiers

Again, I was amazed at how much I learned about the battle of Gettysburg during my visit. (Mom, I swear I paid attention in History class) For example, I did not realize that we were actually visiting this historic area on it's anniversary. The battle of Gettysburg was fought on July 1st -3rd, of 1863. Also, unknown to me was that the battle took place on over 65 acres of land. That is some serious ground to cover in those days!

Despite the short time frame and massive distance between troops this battle was the deadliest with 51,000 casualties. This left a major problem for the towns people of Gettysburg. During our tour of the grounds we were able to compare pictures taken days after the battle and hold them against the same spots today - a very humbling experience.

A fun fact for those Hoosiers out there - the first brigade to enter into battle for the Union was the Iron Brigade, which was comprised of soldiers from Indiana and Michigan. These soldiers gained their famous nickname following their hard fighting at the Battle of South Mountain on September 14,1862.

To our clients out there - let us Hoosiers here at Compendium Blogware be your Iron Brigade. We will fight hard to make your company's corporate blog successful.

There's no such thing as a free... blog?

Posted Tuesday, June 10, 2008 by Lindsey Young

We've all heard that old adage, "there's no such thing as a free cat". Well the same can most definitely be said for blogging. You get what you pay for, plain and simple. And trust me, free isn’t always free. A lot of objections have come up lately here at Compendium. People interested in our software asking why they can't use a "free" platform and get the same results. I can sit here and list the differences between the other platforms and the numerous features our software offers in comparison, but I'd rather focus on our target audience at hand; marketers. In a recent post by our CEO Chris Baggott, he referenced a technology focused blog that stated:

"I complained to him that one of my annoyances in life is how complex Wordpress actually is. Why? Because you don’t just have to configure Wordpress to get anywhere. To get it to perform acceptably you can either throw powerful hardware at the problem (which is how Club Troppo has done it since our donation drive last year) or you can implement a whole rogue’s gallery of tweaks and adaptations."

While it might be the goal of the IT department to tinker in applications, it is not the goal of the marketing departments of the world. Marketing departments strive to drive in new leads, and progress forms of customer acquisition. Our blogs do that through engaging content, traffic through SEO, and increased search engine rankings. That is not the goal nor the outcome of free blogging platforms built for individuals. With Compendiums corporate blogging platform, blogging for a purpose is what our clients are doing. Marketers aren’t wasting valuable time managing the platform; they’re using our Software as a Service, and realizing their ROI. Let us do the heavy lifting; we are a solution for marketers, not another stray cat draining valuable time and resources.

9 Ways to Evaluate Your Online / Blog Traffic

Posted Monday, June 2, 2008 by Ali Sales

I started thinking about this a few days ago after an in-depth analysis of our website traffic versus our blog traffic.

I have several thoughts on this subject, but I'm afraid it might turn into a meandering essay if I'm not careful.

For that reason, I'm going with the top 9 things to watch for when viewing your online traffic. I'll include 1-3 here and finish up the list over the next few days.

9 Ways to Evaluate Your Online Traffic

1. Benchmark your website against your corporate blogs.
This is pretty self-explanatory, but so many organizations do not do this. Typically this responsibility falls on the marketing team -- maybe they even provide weekly/monthly metrics reports. The blogs should be included in these reports, and you should constantly keep an eye on how these results compare. You might find that your website isn't needed if your business blogs are consistently outperforming it.

2. Get into the weeds.
What I mean by that is that it isn't enough to say, "The website gets more traffic than the blogs." Or, "The website gets a ton of traffic, so it's doing well."

Where is that traffic coming from? Hopefully one of your largest traffic sources is through the search engines, like Google, and you're able to determine exactly what those keywords are, how many times they referred traffic to you, and what they did once they arrived.

It's worth it to pay attention and get your hands dirty. You'll find some of your best keywords to target and keywords that aren't worth your time. This will also give you some insight into traffic quality, which brings me to my next point.

3. Focus on traffic quality -- it will lead you to quantity.
Here's an example situation:

Let's say your website gets a million visits from various traffic sources each month. Let's say your business blogs get only a fraction of that - around 100,000.

At first glance, you might think: my corporate blogging program is a deadbeat!

But then you find that visitors who arrive at the blog stay twice as long as those who arrive at the website and convert at 15% opposed to 2% on the website. That's high quality traffic, and instead of increasing your spend to get more people to your websites, it would make sense to drive more people to your business blogs.

Even if the conversion % for the blogs stays the same, by now increasing the quantity, you will be even better off. In other words - it will lead you to do more of what's really working and making more than a superficial impact on your business.

Stay tuned for 4-9 in my next two posts. Also, here is a shameless commercial plug for a new webinar you may be interested in:

Free Webinar: How to Humanize Your Marketing
Learn more here.

WordPress is easy???

Posted Thursday, May 29, 2008 by Chris Baggott

There are a lot of parallels to compare Corporate Blogging today to where Email Marketing was 5 or 6 years ago.   Back then, Email Marketing was free. All you had to do was download a ListServ application, configure a server or two, find and manipulate some plug-in applications for registration or bounces or unsubscribes or de-duplication or throttling or opens & clickthrough tracking or analytics.....and the list goes on.

In the end, some geeks might have loved all this tinkering, but from a business or marketing standpoint it was a nightmare.   The solution was all encompassing SaaS tools from companies like ExactTarget, Constant Contact or Responsys...

Superior tools designed for marketers, not IT folks.   In the end, both parties were happier.

The same discussion happens in Corporate Blogging Software.   "WordPress is free...why pay you?"    For the most part we hear this when IT folks are involved.   Natuarally as they understand the Compendium Blogware offering they start to see the feature differences, but the don't really understand that Free isn't Free.

That is why I was so happy to see this post today from a big Technology focused Blog talking about how overly hard WordPress is:

"Recently I have started chatting to an engineer at Automattic, the mob which employs most of the lead programmers on Wordpress. They also run the Wordpress.com service, which is a big job — millions of blogs, tens of millions of monthly visits."

"I complained to him that one of my annoyances in life is how complex Wordpress actually is. Why? Because you don’t just have to configure Wordpress to get anywhere. To get it to perform acceptably you can either throw powerful hardware at the problem (which is how Club Troppo has done it since our donation drive last year) or you can implement a whole rogue’s gallery of tweaks and adaptations."

When you think about what your goals are with advanced business blogging the focus should be on engagement and traffic through SEO....not constantly tweaking software, messing with plug-ins or installing more powerful servers. Let the Vendor manage that stuff....

Organic + Paid Search = High Brand Recall

Posted Friday, May 2, 2008 by Megan Glover

I was sifting through blogging articles today, and ran across one of my favorites and immediately knew I had to share: Brandweek's Google: Organic Results, Plus Paid, Will Pay Off

“Online advertising should also support an overall online presence by working with organic search results,” Price said. “According to the study, advertisers with a presence in both the top organic search results and the top ad placements have the highest brand recall.”

This article is a great take away of the marriage between paid and organic search. What the article doesn't address; however, is how to achieve such top results. Engaging in a PPC campaign is pretty self-explanatory "pay per click" but how do you achieve top organic results?

That's where blogging enters the picture. Blogging, particularly blogging with a multi blog software such as Compendium allows you to cast a much larger net in search and target many, many more keywords organically as compared your website.

Take one of our Compendium clients, for instance. BabyPlus. They blogs yield traffic from nearly 1000 keyword phrases in a 30 Day period! And the great thing about organic search is those 1000 keywords are free... no pay per click needed here.

So, when thinking about the "how" in this equation, don't overlook blogging as an organic search tool. It quite possibly could be your most powerful weapon to achieving top organic results.

Blogs provide relavent content

Posted Tuesday, April 8, 2008 by Eric Romer

So, I saw a new feature for Facebook on a Wired blog this morning. Being an avid Facebook user, I was intrigued by this added element to the site. My first thought was, "Great, tack on another useless hour that I'm on Facebook." (which is exactly what they intended)

In the blog, Michael Calore writes:

"I like the idea of having instant, real time access to my Facebook friends, but I don't want to spend a lot of time on Facebook. Also, I may want to log into Facebook without having to deal with incoming chats -- or the threat of them -- at all. But it's not likely, since Facebook has been rather open about its intention to make the site the hub of our online social lives. The reason they launched chat is to keep people using Facebook for longer periods of time."

For me, this is the key. Most people, including myself, are already spending a LOT of time on Facebook. The last thing we want, is to spend more. From a business standpoint, Facebook wants users there longer, enriching their experience, making it more appealing for advertisers.

But at the end of the day, are people really engaging with advertiser messages on Facebook? I know I don't click on sponsored links, unless it is absolutely catered to a specific need/want that I have. Nine times out of ten, I'll see an ad on facebook that says "Travel in Switzerland? Click here for discounts", and I'll go to Google to compare travel sites.

I want to make my own decisions, not have someone tell me what is the best option. I have the tools to find out on my own. And when I go to Google, I'm going to trust the most relevant, topical and recent content I find.

If you want to enhance people's experience with your business or brand, you need to be standing there with relevant content when they come searching. Blogs will change your business.

Blogging for Freebies

Posted Monday, March 24, 2008 by Kristen Hanschu

Blogging pays off. Those 3 words can improve your business in ways that you never thought possible before. The blog software that we use at Compendium has helped me score a few freebies and show others what it can do for them along the way.

One of the blogs I use for training purposes focuses on Indianapolis restaurants. After going out to a new place, I blog about it and use that post to train others. Recently, I was able to score a few gift certificates from local Indianapolis restaurants.

Free Blogging Trends Report

Not only does this help that particular business, but it also serves as a benefit to my clients. I am able to take a real life situation in which I enjoy blogging about and apply it to my training classes. The students then feel engaged because they see a direct result of what blogging can do for their business. It also gives that certain restaurant more exposure and essentially free marketing.

This certain blog I am speaking of has only been up for 2 months and already it is seeing an astonishing number of new visitors to the site. In comparison to websites, blogs go above and beyond. Blogging is the best way to market you and/or your business.

What do you mean you can't track blogging?

Posted Friday, March 21, 2008 by Ali Sales

I'm a little bit fired up over this. I am tired of seeing articles such as this one (in the Financial Express) that essentially say, "Blogging could be a good activity for organizations. The problem is: the ROI can't be tracked."

That is just not the case. First of all, anything that happens online can be tracked. That is the beauty of the online world, as compared with the print world. Online, I can track clicks, navigation, time...you name it, I can track it. And guess what? Tracking doesn't have a high price tag. There are free, robust tools like Google Analytics available to anyone.

Tracking online is not something new to us when it comes to our website, our even email program. But for some reason, organizational blogging seems to present challenges that just shouldn't exist.

Of course at Compendium, we are able to use our own blogging software, and run a corporate blogging strategy ourselves. Not only can I tell you the average time on our blogs, the bounce rate, the most popular content, and the number of visits, I can tell you how many visitors take the next step. That's right, we offer a call-to-action on our blogs just like we do on our website.

From there, anyone who "converts" via the call-to-actions we provide is logged in our CRM system and is tracked through the prospect lifecyle until it results in a closed opportunity. And thus, we are able to track dollars and ROI.

Tracking isn't difficult to do, but the first step is acknowledging that it can and should be a part of every online activity, blogging included.

Using the Fine China

Posted Wednesday, March 19, 2008 by Mike Pecchia

I recently journeyed to the orient for two weeks to teach English, eat spicy food, and realize the potential of this fine country. This experience left me with something more than a new posse of 3rd grade friends and a stomach full of Tums; it gave me a first hand look at the rise of a superpower.

The city in discussion is Shanghai. Anyone from a professor to a contractor can highlight the technical points of how the urban development plan is going to unfold, but you will never truly understand it until you see the massive skyscrapers being built as if they were going out of style. The best way I can represent this to someone who has not traveled there is through this website: Shanghai Urban Development Exhibit. This caption from the exhibit is one of the most amazing city displays I have ever seen. The true nature of what is happening is outlined by this floor display. I could go on and rave for days about this exhibit, but I'll divert you to this site as a deeper reference. Professional TravelGuide.

How does this relate to blogging? Well, the exhibit itself has only indirect ties to blogging. The direct relationship is in the promise of the exhibit. Construction is already underway on achieving this dream, which is projected to account for almost 19 million inhabitants in the city; compare this to New York City's 8.25 million. Furthermore, the need for businesses to advertise to all 19 million inhabitants will certainly increase proportionally to the population size. How could a company in Shanghai or a company planning on being in Shanghai cope with this advertising need? Business owned blogs.

It is already too hard for individuals in countries such as China to maintain a personal blog due to the restrictions of the government. The only way a company could utilize such a blog tool would be through a monitored and code-conforming administrative layer. By meeting certain criteria for posts, a company can ensure that all content posted is pertinent and meets regulatory standards.

In a city such as Shanghai, it is important to establish a well known blog image and gain a significant market share before the initial boom. Doing so would put that blog name in the mouths of almost 19 million people. Ask any U.S citizen who uses the internet on a daily basis about which search engine they use and I guarantee that Google, Yahoo, or MSN are the top three choices. The reason being? These companies have been around since the early years of the internet and maintain a prestigious brand image. Model a business blog strategy off this example and that blog may become the front runner in the industry.

Some blogs that I found along the way in my research of China:

Shanghaiist
All Roads Lead to China
Technomic Asia

Check these sites out for more information on the developing nation. You may be surprised at how fast this nation is growing.

Deciding Online...Buying In Person

Posted Sunday, March 2, 2008 by Jenni Edwards

Daren shot this e-marketer article over to me the other day --- the basic point of the article is that people are doing a lot of consumer research online, while still making the purchases in the store. In more concrete words (from the article): "Looked at another way, for every $1 in online sales, the Internet influenced $3.45 of store sales."

Wow...that's pretty amazing --- so wait, you are telling me that my online presence pays off beyond online sales? Of course it does! What does this mean to you? Well --- first, if you are not an e-commerce company (i.e. - services industry, B2B) it tells you that having an online presence and being able to be FOUND through search is still vital to your business.

And if you are an e-commerce site that also has brick & mortar stores then it means that it isn't just your fancy shopping cart software that matters...you also need a presence for those online researchers that are comparing products/features and then going into a store to buy. How can you make sure they come to YOUR store? Well --- be there! Could you imagine closing a retail store on December 22nd when demand is at an enormous high? That is basically what you are doing in the online world when someone is searching (reflecting high demand..telling you they are interested in "organic cotton sheets") and one of your offerings is organic cotton sheets and you don't show up at the top of the search results.

So what do I think you should do? BLOG of course! Blog first for SEO, blog about your product and at the end of the day blog for the sake of your business.

We just hosted a webinar here at Compendium all about tracking and measuring the success of blogs, which is definitely a worthwhile topic; but the huge challenge of online marketing has always been how do you really measure what starts online and ends offline? Of course, there is the option of in-store surveys, etc.; but the accuracy of this type of measure is also hard to obtain. The e-marketer survey does prove online research leads to offline buisness and at a high rate...make sure you SHOW UP the next time your potential client is researching your product offering!

Blogging and Bounce Rates

Posted Friday, January 18, 2008 by Ali Sales

A search engine marketing firm, Slingshot SEO, got me thinking about bounce rates a few weeks ago. Sure, we've all heard that traffic, clicks, and conversion are all good ways to measure our marketing and corporate blogging efforts, but how many of us are paying attention to bounce rate? What sort of research are we doing in comparing bounce rates of our blogs vs. our landing pages vs. our website?

Slingshot believes that Google will one day (if they are not already doing so) take bounce rates into consideration when determining how to rank landing pages. It makes a lot of sense -- if 99% of the people who hit your page leave as quickly as they're able to, something isn't clicking. Getting those kinds of stats aren't difficult - it's making sense of them. "What" leads to bounce rate? The same things that apply to a website definitely apply to business blogs. The problem may be general design flaws, outdated content, irrelevant content, "boring" content, etc., etc. etc.

Now that I'm paying attention to the bounce rate on Compendium's own blogs, it's also interesting to see how various search terms impact bounce rate and read time. For example, "business blogging software" is one of our best terms, with people spending an average of 3 minutes on our blogs, and very few of them are bouncing off right away. The bounce rate for "business blogging software" on our website is higher, and the read time isn't as long.

What this tells me is that it would do Compendium a lot of good to be the #1 result in Google for this term. Clearly, it's attracting the right kind of attention, and higher search engine placement would likely mean more visibility. When it comes to your blogging program, as a first step, I recommend taking a look at your website stats, because then you'll have something to benchmark against. Thanks to Slingshot for getting me in the "bounce" frame of mind.

Even Wedding Vendors Blog

Posted Thursday, January 17, 2008 by Megan Glover

For those of you currently planning a wedding or who have recently been through it, you might agree that planning a wedding is wonderful… but awful. Fantastic… but exhausting. Joyous… but tedious. OK, it’s a downright emotional roller coaster (but 100% worth it in the end, of course). So how does this relate to organizational blogging?

Well, as I was researching vendors for my wedding, I was amazed by how many wedding vendors have blogs. Florists, Photographers, Caterers, Musicians… It was fantastic to see all these companies blogging!!

Let’s take the photographers’ blogs for example. With the easy-to-use and real time capabilities of blogging software, these businesses were able to shoot a wedding on Saturday and have pictures on their blog by Sunday. And, as ANY bride will attest to… wedding pictures cannot be posted soon enough!

Another wonderful perk to these blogs is that inherently, all of the businesses ended up with TONS of testimonials within the comments section of their blogs. Happy couples and families in wedded bliss visit the blogs, look at the pictures of their loved ones and leave great comments. What an awesome marketing tool!

I also found in my quest for the perfect wedding photographer, that wedding photographers aren’t the same. There are photojournalists, traditionalists, modernists, lots of "ists" in the mix. Each photograhper has their own style and to compare their work is nearly impossible. However, despite the uniqueness, they all used blogs to accomplish the same exact goals. First, as an online vehicle to display their product. Second, as a means to communicate with current clients. And, finally, to acquire new clients.

When we strip the pictures off the blogs it seems as though photographers might be blogging with the same purpose. As a consumer, I found this strategy to be darn effective and believe it's very applicable for all businesses looking for a way to effectively market their own uniqueness online.

My Morning Routine

Posted Thursday, January 10, 2008 by Megan Glover

Welcome to my first blog post!.Thanks for stopping by!

I don't know about you, but I've developed a pretty consistent morning routine over the years. When I get into the office I log onto my computer, get my cup of tea and the turn to the web to see what's going on in the world. Of course I'll hit the major news sources but I also turn to my trusty blogs as well. (I've set them up to come directly through RSS feeds on my iGoogle page.)

The first blog I visit is one hundred percent pop-culture. It's fun, entertaining and seems to satisfy my need for celebrity gossip, at least until tomorrow. After that, I visit more somber blogs such as ones related to my industry. I've found blogs to be an invaluable tool to keep up on the latest trends within my field. And, lately, I've added political blogs following the campaign trail to my morning routine.

The content of all these blogs might be like comparing apples to oranges but there is a strong commonality among them all. Each of these bloggers are blogging with a purpose. Whether that is to entertain, educate, win search, acquire new customers... the list is endless. However, that purpose and reason for blogging is the precise reason why I include them in my morning routine.

Alas, my tea is gone, I've got the scoop on Brittany and KFed's custody battle, and explored the latest in the world of search... I'm ready to get working. Until the lunch hour, when I will visit them all over again.

The Race For SEO

Posted Thursday, January 10, 2008 by Daniel Wale

I was recently in the market for a racing scanner. I think owning one brings me into compliance with an obscure zoning law within Indianapolis (where I live) requiring possession of such a gadget. While usually one to succumb to impulse purchases, I decided to be responsible and diligent in the form of conducting research and checking several websites during the course of reviewing price, different brands and quality factors.

Team Ethanol - Rahal-Letterman Racing / Indy Racing League

Having never purchased such an item previously, I wasn't immediately aware of the differences between individual units in terms of channel capabilities, headsets, sound dampening, reception, etc. Reading product description sheets was cumbersome, but websites that allowed for side-by-side feature comparisons certainly proved beneficial. Operating under the assumption that more is better -- more channels of reception and more decibel dampening -- I was able to narrow choices down to three units.

One site in particular employed a feature that directly influenced my buying decision -- the ability to read product reviews from actual customers who have purchased the same item. What a novel idea. Rather than read specification documents, I was able to enjoy, and relate to, field testing and feedback from people just like me within a similar situation.

This gets me thinking about blogging for customer acquisition. In my experience of buying a product based upon recommendations and the phenomenon of similar situation, the use of blogging as a sales and acquisition tool draws great parallels. In drawing upon niche knowledge and doing so in a manner that projects a personal connection with prospective customers in the form of blogging for business, we tap into the human condition of buying from a person, company or source that we like and feel connectivity with.

While the source I ultimately purchased from is certainly on the right path of facilitating similar situation by posting actual customer reviews, room for improvement exists. Imagine if their testimonials were in the form of blogs that position for search optimization. Imagine the power of combining testimonial blogs with blogs drawing upon knowledge within the organization regarding new models, sales, service and support.

Might have cut my research time in half by leveraging those blogs for SEO.

Interested in learning about easy to use organizational blogging software?
Reach Daniel Wale and Compendium directly at (317) 777-6110

Corporate Blogging in the Outdoor Indiustry

Posted Wednesday, December 26, 2007 by Chris Baggott

So they say that "what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas".   I've never heard that applied to Reno, so I thought I would share this video of one of the most enjoyable conferences I've had the pleasure to present to in a long time.

The event was America Outdoors and the attendees were made up of Whitewater Rafting and other adventure travel outfitters. It was interesting to see how this group responded to the idea of Corporate Blogging and Blogging for Search.   One might think that small business people who work in remote locations wouldn't be too jazzed about blogging benefits such as search engine optimization or other aspects of blog success.

To the contrary, these folks totally get the concepts of Marketing Democracy.   Outfitters compete every day for the vacation dollar against the giants of travel like Disney, Cruise Ships and all the other corporate travel giants.

What's great about affordable blogging software and solutions is that these outfitters actually have great content. They are not in the business to get rich...no one is doing this as just another corporate gig. No, these people are in the Outdoor Travel business because of the passion to share what they love with others.   That makes Business Blogging the perfect outlet. Disney might be able to outspend a couple who own a rafting business on the Youghaghaney River in almost every marketing tactic....but some middle level marketer is never going to beat these folks on passion. Easy to use blogging software makes the field much more competitive for businesses that are staffed by people who love the game.

How about you?   Where is your passion?   Watch the video...compare this to your last industry get together...

Next