Blog Software Comparison

$65 Billion to be spent on Corporate web sites....not on traditional media

Wednesday, July 1, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Here is a quote that should grab your attention:

"In 2009: $65 billion will be spent on enterprises’ own sites, dollars NOT spent on TV, magazines, newspapers, billboards, etc. To scale that, compare 2009 total U.S. TV ad revenue (cable + broadcast) at $66 billion, and total 2009 U.S. Newspaper ad revenue at $42 billion. So corporations spending marketing dollars on their own sites is equivalent to (a) wiping out all TV ad revenue or (b) wiping out one and one-half newspaper industries!"

Hello! Thanks to Outsell for this great new report, but what does it mean to advertising? Why is this happening?

Simple answer is that Advertising relies on middlemen to deliver a corporate message. With Online Marketing (Search Marketing), business can now leverage their own site, Corporate Blogging software and email marketing to control and develop a direct relationship with their prospects and customers.

Emarketer already told us that the three biggest growth areas in marketing are Search, Email and Social Media (Business Blogging covers both SEO and Social Media). What is transforming the marketing world it the capacity for organizations to have direct relationships with the people who drive their business. Marketing departments from organizations large and small are rethinking their investments and strategies and going direct...to the detrement of the old model that required a middleman to deliver your message.

Links for 2009-06-25

Friday, June 26, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-06-25

FREE Cron Jobs - Web Based Cron - Set Cron Job - Online interface for setting cron jobs.
Five questions you need to ask about load balancing and the cloud - Direct server return, health checking, persistence, quiescing connections, failover
California Startup Business Lawyers - Startup Law 101 - Mistakes Founders Make – Misunderstanding Capitalization - FAQ 010 - Grellas & Associates - An introduction to equity for founders and others at a startup.
Coding Horror: Scaling Up vs. Scaling Out: Hidden Costs - A cost comparison of scaling out vs scaling up. We at Compendium of course take the scaling out approach.
Extra Pair of Hands - Email Address Length FAQ - 6 characters is the shortest possible email, 254 characters (NOT 320) is the longest possible email. We still support 320 characters.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-06-25

Business Blogging and Twitter

Thursday, June 18, 2009 by Megan Glover

A year ago Twitter was mainly used by early adopters, politicians and Ashton Kutcher. Now, everyone and their grandmother seems to be Tweeting to the tune of 14 Million US visitors in March 2009 (Nielsen Online).

There's been a lot discussion about this micro-blogging tool and the impact it's going to have on online marketing and more specifically, blogging. Check out a recent Marketing Profs post by Joseph Jaffe: Blogging is Dying; Twitter to Blame.

The truth is, Twitter and business blogs can be friends and coincide to benefit one another to drive revenue to your organization. Here are a few ways we are using Twitter and our blogs to drive leads and traffic to Compendium:

1. Blog Content is the hub for all social networking. Using RSS feeds we are able to push consistent and relevant content to our Twitter and other social networking accounts. Thus keeping the accounts always updated and saving valuable time by re purposing content.

2. Twitter is a great referral source. Linking posts provides a steady stream of referral visitors to our blogs. In fact, it's one of our top 3 referral sources.

3. Twitter builds community - blogs convert it. Twitter is a speck compared to 1 billion to 6 billion visitors search engines receive each month.

People use search engines to find answers to their problems and they expect that search engine to deliver. There are little to zero delivery expectations of Twitter (other than to see what my followers were up to over the lunch hour). And, any info they provide beyond that is gravy.

These are just a few ways we are using Twitter to support our blogging efforts with the purpose of generating new business. Without this underlying goal in mind... it's hard to define what other purpose it might serve. Click here to follow Compendium Blogware on Twitter.

Email API's

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Here at Compendium we always look for opportunities to leverage functionality built by other SaaS providers. An area that we really didn't want to have to build on our own was basic transactional email support. Transactional emails are ones in response to user 'events', examples include:

New user signup
Password reset
Pending content moderation

Up until now we have supported transactional emails the way most companies do; an email queue. That is, when a new message needs to go out the software queues the message to be delivered then an asynchronous processor (cron, in this case) handles sending the email.

There are a few problems with this approach:

No open tracking
No click tracking
No user preferences
Having to maintain an email system and the appropriate software
No bounce handling

Obviously you can go and build all of this stuff but a number of companies have already tackled the problem so this was an obvious integration opportunity for us.

When evaluating providers we seriously looked at two services; MailChimp and ExactTarget. Both providers offer an API. Both providers support transactional emails (although ExactTarget supports them through what they called Triggered emails). Although I really preferred the RESTful MailChimp API to the ExactTarget Soap API, ultimately we selected ExactTarget for handling these emails.

In my next post, I'll provide an API comparison between the two providers.

Let your leads find you

Tuesday, June 9, 2009 by Brian Millis

Many prospects I work with are concerned about the time investment that a successful business blogging strategy requires. I often challenge this notion that blogging is a this huge time drain by asking what part of the blogging experience takes the most time. Here is the typical response:

1. I never know what to talk about.
2. I want my blog to be helpful and want to have something valuable to say. It's hard to consistently make it time relevant to my target audience
3. All the SEO techniques like categorizing, linking, tagging, etc. take so long to do it right

Very few of these complaints have to do with the content creation. Let's face it. Content is all around us. It's in every email, every conversation, each problem and solution, in print, in newsletters, press releases and on and on. . .

The challenge is making the blog experience simple. On Compendium's blogging platform, the important key phrases reload to give each post an easy SEO focus. Time relevant content ideas are fed right into the platform so bloggers always know what is happening in the targeted business vertical.

With these tools, it just comes down to making a blog post part of the routine. I compare it to working out. The hardest part is getting to the gym. I recently read a great analogy that describes how to think about a successful corporate blog:

"The more little things we did, small actions that when put together with other small actions in a strategic way, produced better and better leads. We call those actions Digital Termites. Everything looks normal until the building falls down." exerpt from Hunt or be Hunted

Links for 2009-06-02

Wednesday, June 3, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-06-02

How to implement COMET with PHP - Comet is a programming technique that enables web servers to send data to the client without having any need for the client to request it. This technique will produce more responsive applications than classic AJAX. In classic AJAX applications, web browser (client) cannot be notified in real time that the server data model has changed. The user must create a request (for example by clicking on a link) or a periodic AJAX request must happen in order to get new data fro the server. I will now explain how to implement Comet with PHP programming language. I will demonstrate it on two demos which uses two techniques: the first one is based on hidden ”<iframe>” and the second one is based on classic AJAX non-returning request. The first demo will simply show the server date in real time on the clients and the second demo will display a mini-chat.
Playing With Wire » Virtual Failure: YippieMove switches from VMware to FreeBSD Jails - A comparison of VMware and FreeBSD Jails for running isolated user supplied jobs.
How To Write Unmaintainable Code - In the interests of creating employment opportunities in the Java programming field, I am passing on these tips from the masters on how to write code that is so difficult to maintain, that the people who come after you will take years to make even the simplest changes. Further, if you follow all these rules religiously, you will even guarantee yourself a lifetime of employment, since no one but you has a hope in hell of maintaining the code. Then again, if you followed all these rules religiously, even you wouldn't be able to maintain the code!
Automate EC2 Instance Setup with user-data Scripts - Alestic.com - The Ubuntu and Debian EC2 images published on http://alestic.com allow you to send in a startup script using the EC2 user-data parameter when you run a new instance. This functionality is useful for automating the installation and configuration of software on EC2 instances.
HowTo update DNS hostnames automatically for your Amazon EC2 instances | MDLog:/sysadmin - A while ago one of the major problems people faced to use Amazon EC2 into production environments was the dynamic state of the instances IPs. Every time one instance was started it was getting a new, dynamic IP. This has been addressed with the introduction of Amazon Elastic IP Addresses, but even when using this, the private IPs are still dynamic and most of the time people will want to communicate between several instances on the private allocated IPs and not on the public ones. This article will show how you can easily automate the process to update DNS hostnames for your EC2 instances, by adding to the AMI’s the logic for this. I will use for this a master DNS server running bind9, but this can be adapted to any other DNS server.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-06-02

Your Marketing Campaign Budget, Blogging and ROI

Friday, May 29, 2009 by Douglas Karr

When we approach businesses with the thought that blogging isn't simply a means of gaining thought leadership, authority, trust, etc. in their space but present it as a viable means of growing your business and driving leads, it throws some folks off.

The businesses that understand it; however, see that by publishing content - and subsequently growing traffic through search, referral traffic, subscribers, etc. begin to then question the return on investment on a corporate blogging program. That's when we really get them to envision business blogging as a great marketing opportunity.

When you put numbers in front of a marketer like cost per lead, return on marketing investment, average deal size, customer value, etc... they begin to envision a blogging strategy as they do the rest of their marketing strategies or campaigns. They compare it to PPC, print, display, broadcast, etc.

Corporate blogging is unlike any of those marketing mediums. By creating an ongoing content strategy, you actually build momentum and continue to improve on your results instead of starting over with each campaign.

The typical marketing timeline with a number of typical marketing campaigns may look like this when generating leads:

Each time you start a new campaign, you start at zero, finish the campaign, and start over. Costs continue to climb and the Return on Marketing Investment bounces based on the expense and results of each campaign.

A corporate blogging strategy; however, builds momentum over time - increasing leads, decreasing the costs per lead and growing your Return on Marketing Investment. This is why Compendium engages customers on an annual basis! It takes time to see the results of blogging for business.

The great news is that as you continue to grow your readership and search results, the following year's return on investment is better than the first year. Third year is better than the second, and so on.

How is SEO is like a College House Party

Friday, May 22, 2009 by Brian McKay

Leveraging blogging as a tool for SEO can be compared to hosting a college house party. Come on, you remember these parties from your college days. The first time you set up your rented place for a BIG party, only 6 of your closest friends show up. The next 3 or 4 parties you attempt to host only draw a meager crowd. You and your roommates ask yourselves, "what are we doing wrong here?"

Then, miraculously, on the 5th attempt at hosting a world class house party, the doors are busting at the seams with people from Econ 101, the football team, and a lot of people that you never knew went to your school. You're party rocked the campus, and you are now on everyone's "must attend" list on Friday nights.

Now, how is this related to blogging best practices? Here we go. You start your business blog and begin putting up posts, and then you wait for traffic. Only a few business collegues and family show up. A few weeks past, a handful of posts are created, and still only a meager showing of friends and family. Alright, it's been a month, you've generated 30 posts, where is the traffic?

Again, miraculously, after the first month, with a business blog that has all of the content topically organized under a critical mass of targeted keywords, the traffic arrives. And, it doesn't stop coming.

Qualified prospects are now being funneled in by the case load from Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines. Congratulations, you have successfully executed a Blogging for SEO strategy. Now, keep the quality content coming to fuel the machine.

Now, when setting your Blogging goals you can think about how you earned your first successful house party in college. The second part of this equation is maybe more difficult. "What to do with all these people when they get here?"

5 Blogging Goals Every Marketer Should Consider

Wednesday, May 6, 2009 by Megan Glover

Before your first post, before your first RSS subscription it's important to establish clear, attainable and measurable blogging goals to sustain your strategy.

What you want to accomplish from your business blog may vary from company to company... but one thing must remain true, you must set benchmarks and goals to understand how your business blog is performing compared to other marketing investments. Below is a short list of blogging goals your company might use to measure the effectiveness of your blog strategy:

1. Increase organic search traffic.

2. Boost referral traffic to my website.

3. Generate more inbound leads.

4. Increase email and catalog subscriptions.

5. Sell more product.

For more information about blogging goals and and the importance of, check out our resources page for time saving tips and case studies.

What are your own blogging goals? Do they measure up to the above?Are there other metrics I might have missed?

How Do You Stand Out?

Friday, May 1, 2009 by Jenni Edwards

So recently, I have had a new motivation for networking as I have moved from an inside sales role to an outside sales role. I've always been the weird one that generally enjoyed business networking...especially over drinks.

Watching people network is always interesting - some are the shy, quiet types who may leave with only talking to one person at length; others have a plan in mind of who they want to talk to that day and some may try to work the entire room. Everyone wants to stand out...some do it by the way they dress, others by what they have to say and then there are the business cards. We've moved about everything else virtual, but even at conferences where badges can just as easily be scanned - business cards are still the rule. I've always more or less dismissed the importance of good design on business cards (although I think my cards from KA+A are awesome and of course, use green).

However, my mind was changed at last night's AMA event - I got a cute little half card from aglowmarketing and while Laura is still working on the website and this new venture; this card is sticking out on my desk. Maybe part of it is that I think there is a great business opportunity for us to work together - but a big piece is that since this card is different in size and look and feel it always ends up on top of my stack as I organize my desk.

I know that once again I am having a round about comparison back to my topic of business blogging, but when it comes to design; template and content - don't be afraid to stand out. A traditionalist may say that a bu-sines card needs to be 3.5"x2", your website needs to have a contact us page or your business blog needs to feed people right back to your site; but this is clearly not the case!

Browser Entrenchment Redux

Friday, May 1, 2009 by PJ Hinton

The ZDNet blog Between the Lines had a great post yesterday about businesses clinging overwhelmingly to Internet Explorer... and not just IE, but the aged and clunky version 6. The reason corporate IT departments resist upgrades, according to the post:

Companies are worried about custom apps that may fail on new browsers and security and compliance. In addition, companies limit the ability to upgrade. Seventy percent of companies restrict browser choice and Web content. Forrester notes that “IT control trumps technology populism.”

There were several comments from IT people that echoed this sentiment strongly.

I wrote about my feelings on this five months ago, and I feel just as strongly today. In my opinion, there is something culturally sclerotic about an organization that is so resistant to change. Increasingly, the ability to process and understand current information streams is becoming a competitive necessity.

The current crop, and future generations, of web applications enable the effective organization, analysis, and interpretation of information at an accelerated rate. If your organization uses these apps well, it stands to reason that your company will have a leg up on the competition.

Much of the complaints about browser upgrades and switches come down to the following whines:

The employees at my business will encounter too much difficulty in adapting to the interface changes.
The vendors who develop the web apps we use haven't updated their product to handle a browser later than IE 6.

At the risk of painting too broad of a brush, I think this is an indication of three potential problems with such companies:

Their human resources department has a poor recruiting process that doesn't demand a better grade of potential employee, one that is better suited to adaptation.
The IT department is awful about messaging product roll outs.
Their information technology selection process is defective, adopting product vendors whose improvement cycle is glacially slow. Think about it, IE 7 went live in October 2006, which is over two and a half years go.

The post's author, Larry Dignan, puts it rather well.

The problem: Information workers live in browsers all day. And companies are giving them the equivalent of a Yugo.

Being compared to 1980s state-of-the-art Serbo-Croatian engineering is a wake up call for sluggish business in difficult economic times.

Links for 2009-04-26

Monday, April 27, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-04-26

Performance comparison: key/value stores for language model counts - Brendan O'Connor's Blog

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-04-26

Links for 2009-04-16

Friday, April 17, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-04-16

How to Compare Hosted DNS Providers (with Data!) [Lesson] | LearnHub - We use Pingdom to monitor many functions of our servers, including DNS. What we saw was a resonable average resolution time of about 130ms, but frequent outliers higher than 500ms! The thought of a half-second penalty to the load time for first time visitors is not appealing. So we started to dig into the problem.
BPEL4People - The BPEL language specifies the behavior of business processes as long as the activities of the processes are Web services. Human interactions are not in its domain. Despite wide acceptance of Web services in distributed business applications, the absence of human interactions is a significant gap for many real-world business processes. To fill this gap, BPEL4People extends BPEL from orchestration of Web services alone to orchestration of role-based human activities as well.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-04-16

Benefits of Business Blogging

Friday, April 10, 2009 by Brett Fritz

Recently there was a great article published talking about several of the benefits of business blogging (click here for entire article). Here are the 7 benefits that the article lists:

Constant Communication with Industry Audience
Making regular posts on your blog and keeping it well updated allows you to keep in touch with your audience and customer base. Unlike your website, where the content is almost static, blogs allow you to make regular updates. You can post industry news, current affairs, trends of the industry, your personal thought and opinions about them and so on. Moreover, when you receive comments for your posts you can also answer questions and address their queries.

Attract New Customers
Blogs are read extensively by Internet users. If you write quality blog posts that contain great content, then you will attract lots of visitors. Moreover, regular posts to your blog will make search engines rank your blog well and this will attract new visitors to your blog. And if the new visitors like your blog they will further visit your website for your products and services. Thus you have an all new customer base.

Higher Rankings in Search Engines
Blogs and RSS feeds generally rank higher in search engines as compared to traditional websites. This is because the content changes and updates are more frequent in blogs and RSS feeds. As a result, search engine crawlers index them more often. If you design your blog properly, search engines will get notified about content update as and when they happen. In turn, the search engine crawlers will visit more frequently.

Build Online Reputation
Blogs can further help you to establish a sound online reputation. When you write about your industry, you are actually exhibiting your expertise over the subject and as your blog grow, you can further demonstrate your knowledge of the particular field.

Great Revenue Streams
Blogs can also act as great sources of revenue generation. You can add PPC advertisements, affiliate ads and sell ad space on your blog. If your blog is popular and manages to acquire a good enough page rank, then there will be advertisers queuing up for space.
Lead Generation

Blogs are a great medium to generate new leads for business. By posting good content on your blog and attracting visitor traffic, you can not only promote your good and services but also capture new leads for your business. The traffic to your blog will be highly targeted because people who'll be interested in the subject of the blog will also be interested in the products and services that you offer.

Strengthening your Web Presence
By creating a blog on the Internet, you can further strengthen your web presence and enhance your online reputation. Moreover, your audiences will know there is a live person behind your business and feel more at ease.

-- promotionworld.com

Links for 2009-04-07

Wednesday, April 8, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-04-07

CDN Latency Compared | Mudy's Blog - I compared some puplar commercial CDN’s global latency by using just-ping. The raw test result you can downloaded from here. Akamai, Patercdn, LimeLight, Mosso Cloud Files, Amazon Cloudfront
My Varnish VCL for WordPress | Mudy's Blog - On Varnish’s official website, there is a WordPress optimization guide For The Impatient: Preparing Varnish/Wordpress for a Slashdotting in 60 seconds or less…. The problem is that it removes cookie too aggressively. All non admin page will be virtually static. So I made my own vcl to remove cookies for only static files.
Disk IO: EC2 vs Mosso vs Linode | Mudy's Blog - Recently I read an interesting idea on amazon EC2 forum about Raid0 strip on EBS to improve disk access performance. So I am very curious to know whether this idea actually works. Technically it is also possible to setup a raid system on Linode(referral link) as well, but it will be backed by same hardware (so I didn’t test this idea).
Agile Testing: Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2 - At OpenX we recently completed a large-scale deployment of one of our server farms to Amazon EC2. Here are some lessons learned from that experience.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-04-07

Compendium Blogware to Host Agency Training

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Compendium Blogware is hosting our Agency partners in Indianapolis http://tinyurl.com/dxzgj7 Reach out if you want to come...

The idea is a day and a half with at least 20 Interactive agencies from around the country coming to compare notes, discuss corporate blogging strategy and learn our sales methodology from a messaging and positioning standpoint.

Should be a great event hosted at the historic Columbia Club.

Links for 2009-04-03

Saturday, April 4, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-04-03

PECL :: Package :: xhprof - XHProf is a function-level hierarchical profiler for PHP and has a simple HTML based user interface. The raw data collection component is implemented in C (as a PHP extension). The reporting/UI layer is all in PHP. It is capable of reporting function-level call counts and inclusive and exclusive wall time, CPU time and memory usage. Additionally, it supports ability to compare two runs (hierarchical DIFF reports), or aggregate results from multiple runs. Originally developed at Facebook, XHProf was open sourced in Mar, 2009.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-04-03

Starbucks is Back!

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 by meghan peters

If you haven't already, now is the time to participate in our Starbucks promotion before it's too late!

In case you weren't aware, we had decided to try a few different demo promotions over the past few months, but we've found that nothing compares to our Starbucks promotion.

So if your curious about business blogging with Compendium, here are a few questions to ask yourself:

1. Do you want to generate more leads?
2. Humanize your Marketing?
3. Would you like to acquire more customers?

If you answered YES to all of these questions, you're definitely ready to view a demo with one of our blogging experts here at Compendium.

And the best part is - you'll receive a $50 Starbucks Gift Card.

What are you waiting for? View a demo today!

Christine Craigs Blogging for New Business

Tuesday, March 24, 2009 by Christine Craig

ARAnet published a study stating Americans like advertising that tells a story... isn't that blogging?

Humanizing your marketing leads to customer aquisition.

Here is a direct quote from Scott Severson the President of ARANe"

"More than two-thirds of the respondents between 18 and 34 said they conduct Internet searches for products or services they read about in online articles either very frequently or somewhat frequently," Severson says. "That tells us that article-based advertising rates highest with these important and discerning consumer audiences. Our interpretation of the data is that, compared to banner ads or other options, people respond better when they can read an article, evaluate it, and then decide to click through for more information."

Entire article http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Survey-Says-Americans-Respond-prnews-14653621.html

Bobby Case gets business blogging...

Thursday, March 19, 2009 by Megan Glover

I had coffee this morning with a Compendium Blogware client, Bobby Case, who works for the Indianapolis Tennis Championships.

I wasn't really surprised to hear that they are the only Tennis Championship in the Country blogging. But, the thing is, their blog is working to generate interest and it's time other tournaments take notice.

The Tennis Championship decided to start a blog as a vehicle to talk to fans in a human- conversational tone, create buzz over the event, and to be found by sports fans who turn to the Internet for information. And, the success of their blogs show that over 60% of their traffic comes from search compared to direct or referral.

People are finding the Tennis blogs through search terms such as: professional tennis tournaments and how to become a pro tennis player.

These keyword terms are important because the more terms you rank for the bigger audience you have to purchase tickets, subscribe to newsletters, take some action that puts them in your marketing database... and in the last month they've had almost 1000 visits come to their blog via 600 keywords!

Bobby also mentioned they've seen a huge spike in Website traffic they can attribute as referral traffic from their blogs.

The Tennis Championships are July 18 - 26, 2009 in downtown Indianapolis and I highly encourage you to come out and enjoy the festivities. Tennis fan or not they put on a fantastic event and there's plenty of entertainment me for all.