Blog Software Comparison

March Madness

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 by Brett Fritz

This is my favorite time of the year! Its March Madness...college basketball at its finest! How does NCAA Basketball relate to a corporate blogging strategy? I will let you decide....

March Madness:

64 (65 if you count the play in game) college basketball teams compete to be crowned the best team of the year through a tournament bracket setting. The field of 64, round of 32, sweet 16, the elite 8, the final 4, championship game...one champion. The teams will each bring their "A-game" each night that they play because they understand that they only have one chance to continue moving forward in the competition.

Blogging for Business:

Implementing an affordable blogging software for your business needs to have goals put in front of it. Blogging needs to be done for a purpose: to humanize your marketing, increase organic search presence, create more leads/customers. When blogging for a purpose you need to use a software that is easy to use and will provide your business with the search engine optimization that you desire. Every time you write a blog post you want to know that you have done all you can to keep moving your business forward.

Maybe my basketball warped mind is stretching for this comparison... at least I got to talk about basketball.

Struggling with High Bounce Rates on Your Blog?

Tuesday, March 17, 2009 by Douglas Karr

Today I received an email from a client who was concerned about their bounce rates which ranged between 80% to 90%. No one wants to put in the effort on a blog and find that it's not sticky... so what's a blogger to do?

Before I even start to take action, one of the first things I compare is how the bounce rate is tracking from week to week - is it increasing, decreasing?

How is your bounce rate comparing to your search engine traffic? Typicallly, if you're reaching a larger percentage of search engine users, your bounce rate percentage will also increase. It's natural when you're casting a wider net, that many of the fish won't make the cut.

If bounce rates remain consistently high, I review the following:

Am I targeting keywords that are truly relevant to my business? At Compendium, for instance, we target a lot of blogging terms. Since we're a business blogging platform, it's natural that some of the audience isn't going to be relevant.
Am I writing relevant content? Bad content sucks and makes people jump fast. There's nothing worse than leaving a first impression with a bad blog post. Are you writing about your business? Your customers? That's why people are visiting you! Stay on target.
Do I write Post Titles that are truly relevant to the content within the post?
Am I writing content that gives back to my readers or wastes their time? If you want readers to engage and read more, you need to put some bait on the hook to get them to nibble. (Not that you guys are fish... I'm just using a simple metaphor).
Do I link to my other related posts within my content with informative anchor text?
Do I have previous posts from my blog listed in my sidebar?
Do I have engaging Calls To Action that make someone want to click through because the CTA is relevant to the content and leads the person to want additional information.

Lastly, of course... is the question no one likes to answer:

Do I suck at writing?

Some people really do suck. In that case, hand off the baton to someone else in the organization who keeps the readers engaged. You may be surprised by who the talented folks are within an organization when it comes to writing compelling content.

Don't give up if you're a young blogger, though. Sometimes it takes quite a bit of time to get into a rhythm and hit a few home runs.

I would not hesitate to contact ghost bloggers, as well. Great ghost bloggers can learn your business and write compelling content on behalf of your organization, or even better, interviewing and sharing stories about your customers.

Search Continues to Dominate Online Activity.

Monday, March 16, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Nielsen email vs. social networks, blogging, business, Corporate, blog

I've been reading a lot of breathless blog posts about the new Nielsen study that shows globally more people visit 'member communities' (social media & blogs) than engage with email. I had to see for myself and yes, it seems to be true according to this data.

The study doesn't break out U.S. specific metrics and is skewed towards a heavy shift in countries like Germany and Brazil but there can be no doubt that the trends are here. A lot of blog post I've seen on this study point to this as the death of email, but the data doesn't seem to support that.   Email is still growing.

But the big number here points to search.   As a busines focused on a customer acquisition strategy, search is still the big elephant. More importantly compared to other social media, search has the best ROI for marketers.   A big part of this study talks about the lack of an advertising model for what they call member communities.

This is why we are such strong advocates of blogging for search.   Blogging not only confirms your social side by humanizing your marketing, but it also takes advantage of the biggest opportunity in internet marketing....search.

Brilliant yet frustrating restaurant marketing

Wednesday, March 11, 2009 by Chris Baggott

restaurant marketing, seattle restaurant, business blogging, blog search

It may be hard to decern what exactly you are looking at in this picture. This is the hallway leading to the bathroom at the great Seattle restaurant 94stewart.

What they do so brilliantly is include fun little comment cards with every bill. They encourage you to write something and encourage everyone to got online to directories like citysearch and restaruants.com and post reviews.

This is a great strategy compared to what we see from typical local restaruants...but where do these cards wind up?   Wallpapering the path to the bathroom.   Striking, but probably not driving a lot of new business. (the restaurant was mostly empty the Tuesday we were there)

Imagine if this restaruant had a corporate blogging strategy. What better way for you to Humanize your marketing and leverage all this Content as a customer acquisition strategy?

Do some reasearch on search volume for Seattle Restaurants and you will find that there are about 50,000 monthly searches that 94stewart would benefit from over about 100 different terms.

What if they had an intern that did nothing but turn all these cards into blog posts?   The volume, enthusiasim and keyword density of all these cards would practially guarantee a dramatic increase in traffic for the restaurant, and assure that they would be overflowing every night.

Business blogging is often stymied by a lack of content.   In this hallway alone, there are over 5,000 posts (why do you think they call it Post-it notes)   Here's one example:

"Excellent! We had the crabby sandwich and it was wonderful. Great restaurant of a Holiday Meal!!! Tom & Teresa; Seattle"

Folks, that's a great restaurant blog post. uses the keywords: restaurant, seattle, holiday meal, wonderful, excellent.....

I have to guess that 94stewart gets about 50 of these cards a day. Great strategy, now leverage

Study Says Social Networking Surpasses Email

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 by Ellie Cummins

A recent study by Nielsen shows that time spent visiting social networking sites (predominantly facebook of course!) has outpaced the time spent emailing. View the article here.

It states that "Nielsen's global study of social networking, released this week, found that 67 percent of online users spend time on social networks, compared to 65 percent who use e-mail to communicate."

So although the pace is not by much it shows just how much time people are spending on social networking apps, the article goes on to discuss the large number of older generations (ie: 35+) that are using these sites. These older people are most likely those that are (hopefully still) employed and in a large part, professional individuals who, in my opinion, are currently using these sites not only to network but to find new tools for their business, their role, etc... Does your company have any type of presence here? If so do you know what it is and is it a positive one? A business blogging software that is easy to use and humanizes your companiese marketing would be a great strategy since that meshes so well with exactly what people using social networking sites want, People, Humans, What Do You Think About It!? Seriously, think about it...

Is it the media or the model?

Sunday, March 8, 2009 by Chris Baggott

I'm at my daughters swim meet today. It's not so bad getting up at 5:30am and sitting on indoor bleachers all day the first over 70 degree weekend of the spring...hmmm.

Well the good news is I get to catch up on my reading. I have a stack of papers and a couple of magazines saved up from the week, and churning through them generates some of my best ideas. (another reason to like air travel)

Old Media and corporate blog, business blogging

"But...that's Old Media isn't it Chris??"

Hey, I like old media.   So do a lot of other people. Paper is still a great packaging device for a Compendium of information. I love TV too. I use a DVR so I never see any commercials unless it's the eTrade baby, but I still watch just as many hours as I always have.   The problem with old media isn't the media after all, it's the business model.

The problem is with the entire concept of advertising.   It's not working, it's becoming ineffective, and that goes for new media too. Advertising ineffectivness is media agnostic.    Old or New there is less and less value in trying to interrupt people with "offers" or "brand impressions" because they are paying very little attention.

Golfing with my son yesterday we had a great time overusing "Skins Beatdown" and "Shakapotomus" but when I leave Merrill Lynch this month I'm heading to Charles Schwab not eTrade. (even though I find the Schwab commercials a little disturbing. Are those Avatars?)

Why am I picking Schwab?   Because with search I have all the information in the universe at my fingertips.   I'm going for security and convenience.   Shawb has a downtown Indianapolis office near my office...and their financial security is superior to eTrade's.

This is why companies of all sizes need to take business blogging seriously.   People are not ignorant to information any more. (I'm going to pick based on how entertaining you are??? Really?) Branding is seriously minimized when people can easily do their own research. My post a couple of days again talked about the growth of search volume. eMarketer forecasts that search Volume will grow by 21 Billion searches between now and 2010.

Search relevance drives your Customer Acquisition Strategy now, and blogging for search has become a requirement for businesses of all sizes to compete effectively. Relevance is about content. Telling your stories so that you can interact with every search query that may relate to your business.   I don't know how unique I am compared to others.

What I do know is that if you want to compete for me or hundreds of millions of other prospects every day, you are not going to do it in a magazine or on TV or with a on-line banner ad for that matter.

I love old media, and frankly I don't have an answer for them....probably the kindle or iPod somehow.   Meantime,"those of you who used to Advertise....start controlling your own destiny.   Start an effective blogging initiative.

Hey thanks to "will video for food" for the great image. More evidence of the power in blogging for search....after all who should be telling the story of "old media"?   This guy, or the actual old media companies who should be out there telling us their side of the story.

Step 1: Email needs Subscribers, Blogging needs Content

Friday, February 27, 2009 by Ali Sales Roach

The other day a customer mentioned that they couldn't believe they hadn't seen any SEO benefit from their blogging strategy.

We knew that this customer had not been creating content (they had about 3 posts to-date, which isn't nearly enough to get the meter to move for any corporate blogging program.

It got me thinking about email...would we ever expect an email program to generate any results if we didn't have a subscriber list to go with it?

Of course not! In order to have an audience that will take action from an email campaign, we need to have a subscriber list.

Well, it's the same thing with a business blogging program. You can't put the cart before the horse.

In order to see measurable results from your blogging strategy, you have to produce the content.

The difference between email and blogging is that with blogging, your audience comes from content production rather than from a list. And I repeat: results come only after your audience has been built to a certain degree.

If you're an email marketing guru and want to find out other ways the two mediums compare (and how they can work together), Chris Baggott has written an entire whitepaper about blogging and email and how they work together.

You can get the blogging and email whitepaper here. Enjoy!

My, How the Times Have Changed with the Browsers!

Thursday, February 26, 2009 by PJ Hinton

Anyone remember the Browser Wars of the mid-to-late 90s?

That was back in the day when Microsoft and Netscape were pretty much the only browsers worth considering. It's amusing to read some of the comparisons that appeared in the press back then. Consider a report about the release of Internet Explorer 3.0 in 1996. The big focus was on the speed at which pages loaded and displayed, the level of HTML eye candy support, the availabiilty of plug-ins, and the debate over Java versus ActiveX.

With Windows 98, Microsoft started wiring Internet Explorer into Windows so that people would be inclined to use it instead of downloading the multimegabyte bundle that Netscape was purveying. With lots of people getting the Internet via dialup, it was a shrewd strategy, working so well that by the dawn of the new milennium, Microsoft owned the browser market.

What's happened over the years? Broadband became pervasive, making downloads less of a hassle. HTML got standardized, and site designers started moving away from table-based hacks to CSS. The mortal remains of Netscape's source code got rewritten into Mozilla and then Firefox. Microsoft took its market share for granted let its browser development stagnate. Alternative browsers, like Apple Safari, Opera, and Google Chrome.

But a few other things happened...

JavaScript got standardized enough across browsers that writing portable code (aside from events) became a manageable task. Toolkits were developed to help close what gaps remained.
Computers began to have enough CPU horsepower that it became possible write substantially complicated JavaScript programs that were still responsive.
The XMLHttpRequest object, the wellspring from which AJAX flows, became available on more browsers than just Internet Explorer.

In short, somewhere around 2003 or so, JavaScript started to become a pivotal element in the development of webpages. How important? So much so that along with the rise of new browsers like Safari and Chrome, there has been the emergence of high performance JavaScript engines like Google's V8, Apple's Nitro, Opera's Carakan, and Mozilla's work-in-progress, TraceMonkey.

I was thinking about all of this as I read a report on some recent browser comparison tests that were published over at Lifehacker. A nontrivial amount of the article was devoted to discussing JavaScript performance. That's because most of the heavily used web apps, like Gmail, rely extensively on JavaScript to work their magic, and the continuous improvement of JavaScript performance enables future enhancements to those applications.

By the benchmark accounts, Internet Explorer is getting left behind, and that's not a good place to be with the rise of a new browser war.

Wait. And how are you not just like other platforms?

Monday, February 23, 2009 by Lindsey Bailey

Sigh. If I had a dime for everytime I've heard and addressed this question, I'd be in sunny Boca Raton FL enjoying my early retirement. But alas, I realize not everyone is as well versed about the differences in a thought leadership platform, and a professional SEO tool like Compendium. So, here's the shortlist:

Compendium: 10 Freeware Platforms: 0

If you're blogging for rankings, the clear choice is Compendium. If you're blogging for community or thought leadership then by all means choose something like a freeware as all of our features may not be an added value for you.

Compendium Blogware's architecture, functionality, and results do not even compare. Whew - and that's my Monday morning spiel!

Look and feel of a blog

Friday, February 20, 2009 by Brett Fritz

If you are anything like me, you want things to be in their place at the end of the day. I have two little girls and we make them help clean up their play room after a fun day of dress up and dolls. The point is that at the end of the day, the play room again looks like a part of our house (compared to during the day when it looks like a tornado swept through!).

The same should hold true for blog templates. A blog should have the same look and feel of your main website, if it doesn't, there is confusion jumping back and forth and back and forth. Am I on the company site or did I leave the company site? As a marketer there is nothing worst than having a confused customer!

My blogging advice is to make your blog fit your webpage to the same look and feel. Unfortunately, most blogging software does not give you this luxury... but.... Compendium Blogware does!

At Compendium, we understand that your blog is an extention of your company and brand that you are portraying, we make your Compendium blogs look identical to that of your webpage.

This is just another great reason why you should be partnered with Compendium. Contact me today and lets get you blog for a purpose to gain more customers!

Mckinsey report: Enterprise Web 2.0 success requires widespread employee participation

Thursday, February 19, 2009 by Chris Baggott

Wow, hat's off to McKinsey and authors, Michael Chui a consultant in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; Andy Miller an associate principal in the Silicon Valley office, and Roger Roberts a principal, on their great new report: Six ways to make Web 2.0 work.

Sincerely, these guys get it. They are preaching the Compendium Blogware gospel. Below I've pulled some key quotes from the report, but the main message is that Corporate Blogging must be a bottom up effort not top down. Top level executives can set a good example, but the key to real business blogging success lies in widespread participation.

In discussing the difference between Web 2.0 success vs. CRM/ERP (web 1.0) they say:

"What distinguishes them from previous technologies is the high degree of participation they require to be effective." "Unlike ERP and CRM, where most users either simply process information in the form of reports or use the technology to execute transactions (such as issuing payments or entering customer orders), Web 2.0 technologies are interactive and require users to generate new information and content or to edit the work of other participants."

As you know, I'm constantly preaching that your employess, at all levels, make your best bloggers:

"Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University, calls the underused human potential at companies an immense “cognitive surplus” and one that could be tapped by participatory tools."

Many companies ask us how to get more participation and more content from their employees. This quote talks to recognition. Bloggers work for applause. You hire smart people, they want to participate and feel valued...let them blog and recognize them for it. This quote compares the stick of mandates "you will give me two blog posts a week" vs the carrot of fame:

"A more effective approach plays to the Web’s ethos and the participants’ desire for recognition: bolstering the reputation of participants in relevant communities, rewarding enthusiasm, or acknowledging the quality and usefulness of contributions. ArcelorMittal, for instance, found that when prizes for contributions were handed out at prominent company meetings, employees submitted many more ideas for business improvements than they did when the awards were given in less-public forums."

And finally, the conclusion....let everyone blog. Good bloggers are not appointed, they are freed!

"With participatory technologies, it’s far from obvious which individuals will be the best participants."

Sincere thanks to Brandon Powell for passing this report my way.

Brandon Powell

Links for 2009-02-17

Wednesday, February 18, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-02-17

How To Think About Compression | The Changelog - A comparison of compression algorithms. I think a strong argument remains that gzip is most suitable for backups in the general case. lzma -1 makes a good contender when space is at more of a premium. bzip2 doesn’t seem to make a good contender at all now that we have lzma.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-02-17

Searching for a Paint Store

Friday, February 13, 2009 by Brian McKay

Below is the keyword search volume around paint related topics.

When you apply SEO Techniques to Blogging that search traffic becomes the playing field. The term, "Discount Paint" fetches over 5,400 searches on average per month. If you paid for these terms via PPC, you would be investing in 10% of click through traffic for the numbers listed above. For example, a term that has 4,400 monthly searches, you are only competing for 440 clicks.

Compare this to an organic strategy, by Blogging for SEO you will be competing in the space where 90% of click throughs happen. Organic search. For example, 4,400 monthly searches would equate to 3,960 searches that you would be competing for.

Give us a call at Compendium Blogware today for a free Blogging consultation, and evaluate how your current SEO strategies compare to the Compendium platform.

Measuring the Value of Blog Calls To Action

Friday, February 13, 2009 by Compendium Client Marketing

Now that we have covered the basics of how a call to action works and the keys to a good call to action... let's talk about proving your return on investment.

Here's the equation we will be working with:

Follow these steps to calculate your blog's CTA conversion Rate:

Log-in at Google Analytics. If you don't have access to your analytics contact our product support team at 317.777.6255.
Find the total number of visitors to your blog over the past 30 days (default setting)
Locate the number of clicks your calls to action received by going to top content and they typing outgoing in the search box
Divide the total number of outgoing clicks by the total number of visitors. This percentage equals your CTA conversion rate across all of your calls to action.

Now that you understand the basic equation behind determining the stressfulness of your calls to action over all break it down further. Consider looking at:

Comparing individual calls to action
Look at month over month data
Look at week over week data
Change out CTA images and compare
Change out CTA messaging and compare

Need help or have questions about your corporate blog? Contact us our client success team at clientsuccess@compendiumblogware.com for some expert advice.

30 Steps to Successful Business Blogging

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 by Douglas Karr

Setting up a new business blog? Here's my tips for getting started:

Register your blog with Google Webmasters and be sure to add your sitemap.
Do keyword research to identify what terms people are interested in getting to your blog from. It's not necessarily what you 'do' that's important, it's how you're found.
Set up Google Analytics or another comparable analytics application.
Add a filter to block your company and consultants traffic from showing up on your Analytics reports.
Ensure your post pages have multiple, excellent Calls-To-Action in the sidebar - whitepapers, case studies, newsletter sign-ups, contact forms, product purchases are all good CTA examples.
Use urgent and commanding wording in your CTAs (Download, Now, etc.)
Apply a graphic that's actionable - like a button with a mouse pointer.
Integrate your CTAs with your Analytics platform so you can measure how you're driving traffic to your business.
Test, reposition and rotate your CTAs often.
Use Whitespace effectively.
Use Images that are relevant.
Utilize bulleted lists.
Utilize ordered lists.
Use bold and subheadings to highlight key words and phrases.
Use a sticky post to introduce yourself.
Use various types of blog posts - video, explanatory, data, how-to, top 10 ways to...
Publish your RSS feed on your websites. Cross-link between your site and blog often.
Publish your RSS feed on your social networks.
Rotate employee bloggers that don't blog consistently and get ones that do.
Add a favicon to your blog.
Match your blog's design to your website.
Advertise your blog in your email signatures.
Publish your blog's feed to your email newsletter.
Set up Google Alerts for your company, products, employees, industry, etc. Respond through your blog and their sites.
Setup a Twitter account and publish your RSS feed to Twitter using Twitterfeed.
Register your company with Google Local Business.
Register with social bookmarking sites to promote great content.
Talk about your customers, not you.
Write pithy, relevant, simple content frequently and consistently with compelling titles.
Measure often to figure out what keywords and content are attracting business. Adjust your content and strategies accordingly.

I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you that Compendium Blogware accomplishes most of these, automates a few more, and consults with our clients on the additional external strategies.

Links for 2009-02-09

Tuesday, February 10, 2009 by Blake Matheny

Links for 2009-02-09

50 Useful JavaScript Tools - 50 excellent tools to help you achieve various tasks involved in authoring JavaScript code. You’ll find useful tools to speed up your coding processes, including debugging tools to hunt down places where your scripts break, unit testing and validation tools to test your scripts in various situations, security vulnerability scanners and code optimization tools to make sure your scripts are light as a feather.
Mosso: The Hosting Cloud » Blog Archive » A Quantitative Comparison of Rackspace and Amazon Cloud Storage Solutions - The cloud is advantageous for many reasons and both Rackspace/Mosso and Amazon offer cloud storage solutions. We are frequently asked to compare Cloud Files enabled with Limelight’s CDN with S3 and CloudFront. Many of the questions we are asked revolve around cost and performance (particularly CDN). These are very quantifiable metrics so I thought I’d share with you the results of some comparative analysis we’ve done.

This is a collection of links I have bookmarked on del.icio.us for the date 2009-02-09

Corproate Bloggining SaaS style vs. traditional blogging

Monday, February 9, 2009 by Julie Murphy

How does a web-based platform with Compendium compare to the typical blogging platform?

Compendium:

Keyword or phrase centric as primary purpose
No IT Worries:maintaining, updates, included Built for business, simple to use interface
Comprehensive search engine marketing analysis of key words on an on-going basis
Full administrative control, nothing gets posted without your approval
Tracking and reporting

Typical Blogging Platform:

Primary purpose is citizen journal;ism
IT worries, updates, installation
Constant tweaking for maximum benefit
No admin controls
No coaching

The differences are obvious, blogging with Compendium sets you up for true success. SEO through key word rich phrases bringing your business to the top fold of search, greeting visitors who want your business to solve their issues.

Blog Down!

Friday, February 6, 2009 by Sarah Sedberry

Compendium Blogware and Exact Target are caught in the midst of a heated battle - Blog Down on the Circle!!

Here's the deal - which ever company posts the most at the end of each moth for three months, the loser has to by the other a pizza party (it doesn't take much to motivate us ). In January, Compendium Blogware has taken the victory and currently has the lead for February.

So what does this mean to you? Many things!

1) Compendium is a fraction of the size as a company compared to Exact Target. Showing that no matter your size you can keep up with the big guys. Also, its all about content - the more bloggers you have actually writing content the better

2) This contest has allowed us the chance to use it as a case study for how content generation effects traffic. Before this contest, Exact Target on average posted 20 blog posts a month. In January they had 126 posts - causing their traffic to jump up by 5,000 - in just one month!

What better proof can you get that creating content directly effects the traffic your corporate blog will receive!!

Bottom line here is that content is what drives results, and we are excited for Exact Target and the results they are seeing from this contest. Think about what it would take to motivate your group of bloggers to create more content and ultimately drive more traffic to your blog.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Tuesday, February 3, 2009 by Ellie Cummins

I have been throwing this term "inbound marketing" around in my conversations with clients interested in blogging for SEO and lead generation. I have stopped myself a few times to make sure the person on the other end of the phone understands what that means and how powerful it is. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.

Inbound marketing is as simple as providing information about what that person (in the blogosphere "searcher") was looking for at exactly the moment they are looking for it. Search is really the primary and best way to accomplish this. Compare this strategy to traditional mediums of billboards, newspapers, radio, etc... as a marketer it is a challenge to truly know if those people who see or hear you ad are even remotely interested in or qualified to buy your product. With search and an inbound strategy your customers are online, searching for an answer to their problem and ta-da! there it is in the form of a zillion results on the topic they specifically asked for. Compendium's keyword focused blogging tool allows companies to not only be a part of those zillion search results but to capture the prime search real estate and actually "win" . Provide a web page all about their company and dedicated to exactly what the potential customer was looking for, then provide clear next steps for the person to engage with you company. Powerful stuff! Powerful, measurable, money making, stuff!

Publication versus Acquisition Blogging

Monday, January 26, 2009 by Douglas Karr

Too much of the content out on the Internet regarding blogging and business blogging best practices are focused on publication blogging rather than blogs used for acquisition. Publication blogs have far different objectives than business blogs that are put into place for acquisition:

Advertising
Sponsorship
Speaking Opportunities
Consulting Gigs
Book Deals

Although these may also be viable objectives for your business blog, blogs built for acquisition are constructed and optimized to find and acquire leads. It's important for publication blogs to watch key metrics like bounce rates, number comments, number of RSS subscribers - but these aren't as important in acquistion strategies.

Chris Baggott compares it to a database marketing strategy. In database marketing, you identify and segment your prospects, and market to them specifically - the right message at the right place at the right time.

Acquisition blogging has all of the components of database marketing:

The right message - what are the keywords that a search engine user is seeking your company, products or services through? If you can match your verbiage to the keywords or phrases sought, then you have a great opportunity to be found via search.
The right place - Search engines are the primary (and growing) medium for consumers and b2b buyers to find your product and service.
The right time - Rather than trying to predict when to market to your audience, blogging allows you to write frequent, relevant content. When the search engine user is looking - you'll be found!

In acquisition blogging, the focus is on:

Search engine result page placement for known keywords
Keywords that lead to conversions
Content that leads to conversions
Total conversions
Total organic search visitors

Your blog will still lead you to building authority, possible speaking and writing gigs... but at the end of the day you're judging your program's overall success on the number of prospects that walk through the door and the number of prospects you convert to customers!
An acquisition blog is constructed and optimized to lead search engine users in and convert them to customers.