Pictured: Eric Romer, about to catch a touchdown pass on a slant route in the end zone?  Suit him up, Dungy.... he looks ready.

So, I had the opportunity to tour Lucas Oil stadium last weekend, and it was a pretty amazing sight.  As a Colts fan, this is like Christmas.  The excitement in Indianapolis has been building ever since Lucas Oil broke ground.  Despite some disputes about funding of the project, this beautiful structure has a serious allure to it. 

One of the things I kept hearing during the public tour was people referring to the stadium as "The Luke".  I must admit, it was pretty catchy, and fans love putting their own nickname to personalize their city's new baby.  But as you would imagine, the sponsor is not so happy about the nickname.

I've always been curious how you measure the worth of a stadium sponsorship. Spending $122 million on naming rights for 20 years is no cheap purchase, even for a large manufacturer of oil products.  I hear about the ROI of advertising dollars all the time, but this I think stadium sponsorships in general fall into what Corporate Blogging expert Debbie Weil describes as "Return on Influence".  It's next to impossible to measure sales that directly result from Lucas Oil Stadium, especially when people refer to it as "The Luke".  Forest Lucas was quoted in an IBJ article saying:

"Calling the stadium 'The Luke' doesn’t sell a dime’s worth of products for us.  This will be a place we intend to show Lucas Oil to the world, so we’re eager to protect the integrity of the name.”

I get Mr. Lucas's frustration, but there's not a whole lot you can do when something catchy spreads with fans, especially as sports columnist Mark Rosentraub stated in the article, "exposure through the Internet can spread the nickname and entrench it in people’s minds even faster than traditional media." 

My suggestion?  You can't beat 'em, join 'em.  Find a a way to ride the "Luke" wave, and join the conversation.  Social media, affordable blogging software and other web-based tools allow you to be present, and help drive those internet trends.

Despite the nickname concern, the sponsorship "engagement" (2008's buzz word) that occurs inside the stadium, interacting with the Lucas Oil brand experience, the dragsters, race-car simulators, etc. is very creative and sets a new precedent in sports marketing.

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."

-- Mark Twain

I was reminded of this quote by Twain today as I read two articles, one at InfoWorld and the other at InformationWeek, about the Mozilla team's plan to give Firefox's JavaScript performance a jolt.  Code named "TraceMonkey", the project is introducing support for just-in-time code compilation into its JavaScript engine.  This new feature has been included with the alpha version of Firefox 3.1, but it is turned off by default because of it's work-in-progress status.

This project is interesting from our standpoint because an increasing amount of our application relies on client-side JavaScript to provide our customers with a smooth experience in editing and maintaining their blogs.  While the rise of AJAX has included many singing the praise of rich internet applications, JavaScript's status as an interpreted language has forced us to keep an eye on performance as our blog authoring software becomes increasingly feature rich.

As ambitious as the project may be, the Mozilla team are thinking wisely here.  The narrative being pitched by Adobe and Microsoft is that if you want to create rich web interfaces that have good performance, you need to lock into one of their proprietary technologies, the kind of technologies that require downloading and installing plug-ins.  As JavaScript pioneer Brendan Eich astutely points out in the InformationWeek article, "Not everyone wants to get a plug-in."

I was also struck by this passage from that same article:

If Mozilla is successful in its efforts, the rationale for developing rich Internet applications will become increasingly questionable. As Eich sees it, RIAs are already at risk. "Those platforms that are not a browser are an increasingly thin value-add to what the browser can do," he said.

In these remarks I hear an echoes of Marc Andreesen back in the mid-to-late 90s, when he boasted that one day Windows would be reduced to "an unimportant collection of slightly buggy device drivers" with a combination of Netscape's browser and Sun's Java technology.  It's even more amusing when you recall that part of this promise was tied to Sun's addition of support for just-in-time compilation for the Java virtual machine.

Will JavaScript succed where Java fell short.  It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Since it's Friday, I decided to take a moment while drinking my coffee to write a "Casual Friday" post...

Recently, I had a friend of mine throw an 80's themed party.  To my dismay I could not attend as I was out of town at the time.  Although, she was kind enough though to replay all of the fun throw backs and happenings that I missed out on.

While recalling this to my colleague Kristen, another Client Success Manager here at Compendium Blogware, during our morning trip to Starbucks - it started us on a rambling of our favorite 80's fads. (Everything from New Kids on the Block, our favorite cassettes, Connect 4 and Operation, to the wonderful fashion trends of neon, knot ties in your shirt, spandex, and air-pump sneakers)

Our conversation continued on into the elevator for the ride back to our offices.  In the elevator others jumped in on our conversation and soon we had good banter and had shared several smiles with our building mates.

Since we were having such a great time with this topic, I wanted to share with everyone else, and allow you to get in on the fun.     

What was your favorite trend or moment to come out of the 80's?

In Client Success, we often will have discussions with our clients regarding content development and how they struggle to come up with ideas to blog about.  Ideas can come from daily conversations, newsletters, frequently asked questions, industry news, other bloggers posts, and anything else that strikes your fancy.  For example....the 80's!  A corporate blog doesn't have to be dry.  Check out this company blog post from our client Circle City Tickets who had fun with her post.

I'm the only person in the history of our own blogging program to have to pull a post after it's gone live.  Could it have anything to do with the fact that I'm the only person in the Company that doesn't have his posts go through a review process?

I recently wrote a blog post about something I thought I overheard at a recent Indianapolis blog software conference.   Turns out that I heard inaccurately.  Ooops!

As you know, from a Business or Corporate blogging standpoint, we here advocate widespread employee blogging.   Employees generate the best content, telling real stories about real people, by real people.  Compendium clients see signifcantly higher SEO benefits from this sort of blogging and much higher searcher engagement.

But...as I've proven, it's not without risk.   This is why we have incorporated a workflow system so that all employee posts have to be reviewed by someone else.   It's not that your employees are malicious or that you are trying to squeeze the life out of them and their content.

It's just that blog authors tend to let passion get in the way of judgment & for a business it's just a blogging best practice to keep an eye on your content before it can do you any harm.

I'm not mean, but the most junior member of my team would have looked at this post and said: "Chris....are you sure this is what you are trying to say?"

There are a lot of blogging benefits, and only a couple of risks.  Once bad content goes live, you can't get it back...only ask for forgiveness.

Seth Godin has a great blog post today: Who's telling you the truth about your online personal marketing?

His post makes a great point about the the trend in marketing these days which I relate to transparency. He writes that, "people are judging you", and isn't that the truth.

Blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instant Message, etc... have all opened the door fainting the line between personal/professional life. So how does a marketer ensure the judgments of his or her employees don't hurt the reputation of the entire company?

Why not embrace and incorporate those mediums into your own marketing? You know your employees, particularly your Gen X'ers, are all tapped in and participating... why not embrace it and make your presence known too!

It's actually one of the reasons Compendium Blogware was founded. Chris (our CoFounder/CEO) noticed while at ExactTarget that many of his employees were blogging. And, blogging about the company - but Chris had was unable to leverage the blog content they were cracking out.

That's why Compendium is built for multiple bloggers and has an administrative layer which allows you manage the blogger's message as you see fit.  So, companies and organizations can give their employees platforms to blog on and yet reap the marketing benefits such as SEO. Not only that, but you're providing a real-life voice to speak out on behalf of your organization which ultimately... humanizes your marketing.

Compendium Blogware is happy to announce that our newest client, Eugene Chamber of Commerce, is blogging.  Not only are the blogging, but they are already seeing results!  In just one month of posting content they have seen all but one of their keywords ranking in Google. 

How have they accomplished this in such a short time?  The answer is, and will always be, content.  The way to get better rankings in the search engines is by adding updated and relevant content on a regular business.

Blogging for SEO is a growing business trend that companies are continuing to see the benefit of.  Our blogging platform is easy to use and makes blogging fun.  The Client Success Team at Compendium will help you get your blogs off the ground and provide you with continuing support for the life of your blog.  We are here for questions, consulting, and getting your company the results that you are trying to achieve.  What other blog software can say that? Well, none to be exact. 

If you would like to view Eugene Chamber's Blog click here.  Leave them a comment while you are at it!

A recent article in eMarketer, a leading source for Internet market trends, highlights retail shopping statistics that show consumers hit the web first... before talking to family & friends.

This is great data that really drives home the importance of a blogging solution for retailers. 

I'd be interested to see the breakdown of how many people start with a search engine in that 58% . It's probably a conservative estimate to say it's at least half, which would be about the same amount that visit local stores.  Think how much effort is dedicated to in-store displays and hiring smart, capable employees to service needs of shoppers.  Based on this data, why would a retail business not provide that same experience online??

Blog for your business.  Show consumers you are in tuned with your industry and the needs of your customers.  You will be found in search engines more often... on a wider range of keywords.  And, with a measurable blog strategy, you will convert those visitors into paying customers.

Over the past few years the concerns have been raised about how bloggers conduct themselves online. The most notable was Tim O'Reilly’s call for a bloggers code of conduct. Some of the more traditional bloggers gave a significant amount of push back to the situation while others embraced it. I think that it is important that all corporate blogging companies establish their own rules of conduct as it pertains to blogging.

Here are the main points that should be included in the code of conduct:

• As an individual and as a company taking responsibility for content fond on the blog
• Take a stance for/against use of images and videos you might not have the full rights to
• An explanation for your commenting policies – to you respond via email/post/comment and do you even approve comments when appropriate
• Policy for approving or declining posts – what content is acceptableHow success is measured and tracked on the blogs
• An explanation for how the content from the analytics on the blog are used and what they are

Another search engine?  Are we really in need?  Maybe if it is drastically better, maybe if it makes my life easier; but in general I am not sitting there wanting a new search engine, but I also have to assume that most marketers aren't sitting wanting for a corporate blogging tool --- it's my job to show them that they need one.  So has Cuil convinced me to switch from Google?  Not quite.  Although Cuil was founded by Google engineers and brags about the increased number of pages that are combed through and the ability to search the so called 'deep web'.  In addition, the search results look more like a magazine than a list, as traditional web searches do.  Not to mention the $33M in venture-capital money.

Interesting concept...but a bit confusing for my first try.  Also, was a bit surprised with the results of a few test searches.  Unfortunately, it looks like this evening that their servers were a bit overloaded and I wasn't able to get results for a few terms.  I like the innovation, pushing every search engine to be better and better.  However, this doesn't seem game changing for Compendium because at the end of the day --- a search engine's success will always be based on its ability to serve up the most relevant results based on the search terms in the quickest and most user friendly way.

What does this mean to our business?  Not much --- we measure some of our client's  success with Google and benchmark search standings there as well; but the topically driven corporate blogs that are created from the Compendium system are search engine neutral.

Late last week Google announced its quarterly earnings with disappointing results; only the fourth time they have ever missed Wall Street's expectations.  So what's behind this?  Well, first of all it's important to note that even though Google didn't meet Wall Street's expectations; they still rose from Net Income in Q2 of 2007 of $925B to Net Income of $1.25B this past quarter. 

What does this mean to the search community?  Internet and technology companies are historically volatile, but Google is the mother ship and rarely misses the mark.  So a couple of the reasons why Net Income and some revenue numbers were off the mark this past quarter:

• Acquisition of DoubleClick
• Increased costs associated with hedging foreign currencies (one of the most interesting things about corporate finance in a multinational company --- how much a currency fluctuation can change the bottom line)

Net-net, Google is still just as dominating as it was prior to this announcement in my eyes.  Google is who we, as a business blogging platform focused on winning organic search, will continue to benchmark against and use as a primary search engine of measuring clients success because with over 60% of the US market share it really is the elephant in the room when it comes to online acquisition --- so, being Google's friend and working in good faith to structure content in the best way for the user experience is exactly what we are focused in doing here at Compendium.

We received some really fun PR news this week. The BlogSquad is going to do a live interview with Chris next Thursday. Here are the details:

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.

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.

Article: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/19721.asp

This is a great article for those of you that know nothing about search as well as those of you that are pretty in tune with the industry. This is one of the most comprehensive documents that I have seen that walks you though the entire history of Search.

The article also discusses the future and finding the best ways to deliver the most relevant content to the readers. This sounds pretty familiar to what I say everyday to my Compendium clients...

“Google’s job is to help the user find the most relevant content. Compendium helps categorize your posts around a specific topic therefore all of the posts on the blog are relevant to that topic. When a search engine finds your blogs it says "Wow, look all of the content" and it‘s relevant to the searchers topic thus you start to gain recognition by the search engines and can continue to improve your rankings by continuing to add content.”

After you have a chance to review the article please let me know if you think anything is missing as well as what you think the future holds for the world of search.

Next stop on the 4th of July weekend tour was Philadelphia, PA, the heart of our country's foundation.  

For those who have never visited this city, it is a place I highly recommend you put on your list of places to go.  The history that is entrenched here is amazing, along with all of the beautiful architecture and interesting places to see.  

Some of the highlights of our two days in Philadelphia included a visit to the childhood home of Larry from the Three Stooges, the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall, the graveyard where Nicolas Cage was chased in National Treasure, Rocky Balboa's training route, the City Tavern - complete with costumed service staff and patrons, Betsy Ross's house, Benjamin Franklin's home, the first United States Post Office, and the list goes on and on and on...

The city of Philadelphia has such a rich history that goes hand-in-hand with that of our country.  The amazing thing to me is that it wasn't that long ago that all of this happened.  We're talking about 250 years here.  What a small blip of time in the world's history!  Even more mind-boggling is how successful our country has become in this short period of time.  Much like the results a company can obtain from maintaining a current blog, a blog can propel a website, due to search engine optimization, in a relatively short period of time, thus giving your company great success.

One of the great thing about blogs, is that they can pull off the equity of your already existing website - just how America pulled from the ideas and concepts of Britain.  Blogs give your company the chance to jump ahead of the curve in marketing.  

I cannot stress enough the importance of rich, current, and frequent content in company blogs.   Search engines thrive on these components and are what ultimately make a blog successful. 

Our country is rich in its history and continues to build on it going forward, making us a stronger nation each and every day.  Do the same with your corporate blog - build it richly and therefore ensure your success!

For this year's July 4th celebration, I traveled to our country's birthplace (Philadelphia, PA) in order to take in some history, as well as, enjoy a wonderful 3 day weekend.  During the trip the decision was made to make it the ultimate history/National Treasure re-enactment tour.  Over my next few blog posts I would like to share the information I learned along the way.


First stop was Valley Forge.

Now maybe it's my fault for not paying attention in history class growing up; however, upon my return I did a poll and realized I was not alone in my revelation.

Did you realize that there was never a battle fought at Valley Forge? 

I was surprised to find this out when visiting this now National Park.  It still holds great significance for our country though, as that is where George Washington's troops took refuge for the winter during the Revolutionary War.  It was during this encampment that Washington's troops were almost depleted due to poor conditions there, involving inadequate clothing, disease and famine that led to high death tolls.  With the relief of spring, that April a Frenchman, Baron von Steuben, came and applied a vigorous, systematic training program, that transformed the ragged troops into a confident 18th century military organization.  Ultimately forming what is now today, the United States Army.  The ideals, training and fighting styles were all established during the encampment at Valley Forge.  Thus making it the historical landmark that it is today.

After our visit to Valley Forge, my friend and I discussed how wild it is that neither of us knew the history behind this landmark.  To realize that there was never a battle fought, nor enemy attack blew our original thinking of what Valley Forge stood for.  It opened our eyes to the truth as well as gave us a greater appreciation for what our forefathers went through when establishing our country to make it what it has become today.

There can be parallels made to blogging for your company and the ultimate strength that it will give your business.  There are common misconceptions and confusion about blogging for business, but that is what we at Compendium are here for.  To help clear up that confusion and work with you in order to make your blog successful.  Much like Steuben helped America become an organized and elite fighting unit, as a Client Success Manager, I am here to help you... much like the Army motto.... "be all that you can be" (My apologies for the cheesy tag line).

I just finished reading a great article on The Semantic Web by John-Scott Dixon in the May 2008 issue of Website Magazine.  In this article John does a great job of outlining the current short falls of search engines and what the future may in fact look like.  I really liked the analogy of doing a search on Randy Johnson's ERA...Great Stuff! I am a major fan of baseball, so that one really caught my attention. 

Anyways, the long and short of it is that search engines are delivering far too many results today and will continue to do so for many more years, but as a marketer we are constantly challenged to increase our lead generation efforts through an audience which is passionate and engaged into what products or services we have to offer. 

How do you do that?  Our client success team will tell you that in order to maximize the benefits of blogging for seo, a blogging best practice is to focus on the mid and long tail approach in their keyword/Compendium blogs as the audience that is using three words or higher when conducting a search are more educated and engaged in what they are searching for and closer to making a purchasing decision. 

If you really want to target the audience to drive conversions and ROI, add a local qualifier to your keyword blogs!  For more information from Compendium on blogging trends, blogging tips, and blogging best practices, please visit our website frequently!

This year, local advertisers are expected to shift over $13 billion of their budgeted funds to the Internet, according to Borrell Associates. That number is up by 50% over the last year.

Why is this relevant to you? Because we can't ignore the huge role that local search is going to play for nearly every kind of business, even national chains and enterprises who are stretching themselves for ways to get back to the basics of relationship building. And guess what?

Business blogging will most certainly play a role in the migration of dollars from off-line to online and in the local search arena.

There are a few key things driving this shift:

1) People want to buy from people (i.e. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, like in Cheers)

2) People want to buy from people who *are like them* -- of course regional/local means common ground

3) Search is the #1 online activity these days, right behind email marketing

If you attended our Humanize Your Marketing with Blogging webinar this past week, you know that company blogging leverages all of these factors. If you were unable to attend, here is a link to the instant replay.

The numbers and actions of advertisers and all kinds of companies will continue to prove that local/personal marketing is the way of the future. Starting a business blog is one of the best things you can do to get headed in the right direction and jump on a trend that's going to become the norm.   

Yesterday, InfoWorld ran a story on the rise of scripting languages and an interview with Mozilla JavaScript architect Brendan Eich. Both are very worthwhile reads because they provide a nice mix of the state of the art and the historical context of scripting languages.

Prior to hiring with Compendium about six months ago, I had tinkered with scripting languages largely as side tasks.  The mainstay of my work lie in compiled languages like C, C++, and occasionally some Java. 

As I sought out new job opportunities both locally and nationally last year, I began to realize that openings for compiled languages were on the decline.  Indeed, a friend of a friend out in the Bay Area advised me last summer with these words:

In terms of technical skills, C++/Linux is a great foundation, however, there is a caveat. In the SF bay area overall, companies are more likely to use newer technologies for R&D/new development. There is still a lot of support work out there, but I would say the growing trend is to outsource support work, so those jobs are ever decreasing... Also, I would suggest making a larger investment on learning newer technologies, such as Java and other technologies on the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP, Python, or Perl) stack.

That turned out to be some very solid advice, even though I wound up staying in Indianapolis.  Here at Compendium, scripting languages like PHP, JavaScript, and Perl are the bread and butter of our day-to-day efforts to build user-friendly blog software.  The transition proved to be pretty smooth because PHP's syntax borrows so heavily from C and C++.  I was lucky in the sense that I was learning the language within a disciplined environment that made sure web apps were developed properly. 

One of the quotations from the article that jumped out at me was the remark by Andi Gutmans, co-CTO at Zend Technologies.

"It's very easy to pick up and then it will also scale with your needs," Gutmans explains. "I often call it the Visual Basic of the Web."

The ease with which the language is learned is a double-edge sword.  On one hand, it flattens the learning curve, but on the other, it gives mediocre programmers enough dynamite to be dangerous. 

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror noted as much about a month ago in his bluntly titled blog post "PHP Sucks, But it Doesn't Matter".  Atwood does a pretty good job of surveying the disdain as well as the widespread usage that PHP has managed to garner, but I don't think he quite closes the loop in his analysis.

Syntactically, PHP is a pretty elegant language.  It steals enough syntax from C++ to be familiar but escapes the hideousness of template meta-programming because a dynamic language doesn't have to worry about how to deal with generics.

From my own experience the bad reputation of PHP has two origins. 

The first lies in its original use as a way to embed server-side executable code within an HTML document.  Web programmers latched onto this in droves and abused it, creating websites that did not separate the business, presentation, and application logic cleanly.

The second sore spot is how PHP has managed to assimilate just about every third party library under the sun.  If you've ever had to install PHP or build it from scratch, you already have a deep appreciation, or at least a healthy fear, of how many optional elements can be integrated into the system.  A lot of times, these APIs are written to parallel the nomenclature of library APIs in C or C++, which makes for inconsistencies.

Ironically enough, both of these things are probably among the factors that helped speed the adoption of the language.

What has helped sustain PHP?  Two things come to mind, based on my limited experience.

For one thing, the PHP development community got Model/View/Controller religion.  Nowadays, there are tens of PHP frameworks designed to help developers employ the MVC design pattern, which helps separate the logics and avoid the ugly code for which PHP became notorious.  Granted, not all of them are of equal quality, and some have already gone dormant.  What's important is that enough developers realized that the old way of doing things was neither sustainable nor scalable.

The second thing was the under-the-hood change of basing PHP on the Zend engine, which has helped it to achieve performance levels that you might not expect from a dynamic language.

For all of the speed of development that one achieves with a dynamic language, there is one thing I could live without.  The incredible syntax flexibility of a scripting language like PHP can allow you to create code that is syntactically correct but semantically crazy.

For example, I recently wrote some code that was intended to build up a string that you could pass on to a logging facility.  It looked something like this:

$logger_string = 'problem with operation foo '  . 
 $print_r($some_variable, true) . ' some more text';

The bug in this code was that there should have been no dollar sign in front of print_r. It's a function name, not a variable.  PHP sees this as just fine and dandy, converting $print_r into  function name, provided that the variable name evaluates to a string.  This kind of thing will pass the PHP syntax checker but will cause a fatal error at runtime.  It's similar to the situation where a spell checker won't save you from using mistakenly using a homophone.

In spite of all of that, I'm happy to be coding with PHP.  Errors like those above are pretty rare.  Moreover, I don't miss having to worry about type declarations and memory management.  In spite of numerous sins of programmers past, I firmly believe that PHP is a great language to build a solid blogging platform. We're already doing that!

This past Friday, I traveled to Washington D.C. to take part in BlogPotomac, a casual conference (it took place at the State Theater, host to mostly concerts).

I took a lot of notes and had every intention of posting while at the conference, but here I am a few days later after a very messy day of travel home.

Some of the key topics of discussion included:

1. How do I motivate people in my organization to not only dip their toe into corporate blogging, but consistently fuel the business blogging machine with updated content?

2. What are the right means of social networking for my business? i.e. There's so much buzz about Second Life, FaceBook, blogging, etc....how do I move forward without trying to do too much, and doing the right things?

3. How can I track the impact of organizational blogging?

4. Do I have to have a corporate blogging policy...how can I control content?

5. If we participate in the blogosphere, what kind of engagement should we expect to see (i.e. comments) based on what others have seen in the past?

Excellent fodder for several blog posts (perhaps you're wondering about some of the same things), and I have some good quotes from the variety of speakers who took the stage.

Because I'm excited about these questions, I'm hereby declaring my "How to Evaluate Online Traffic" series over (this is one of the best parts of business blogging -- you have flexibility in what you do or do not want to talk about) because I found out that MidMarketer has a great whitepaper on the topic. Why recreate the wheel?

A link to the MidMarketer Web Analytics: What to Look at whitepaper is here - they have several other great resources on their site.

I'll spend my next few blog posts addressing the topics above.

I have been talking about this a lot in my recent New Client Trainings, but I want to briefly talk about some best practices in blogging and most specifically, the importance of constant relevant content on a blog. 

I recently sat through an SEO Training by SEOmoz, a leader in the SEO field, and then attended another event put on by a local Indianapolis Company, MediaSauce.  During both events the amount of focus on the importance of constant relevant content of our blogs. 

When we focus on optimizing our search value and blogging for business, the amount of content relevant to our keywords is directly related to the success of our blogs. 

We receive success stories from our Client Success team each week that focus on clients who are showing great results and 100% of these clients are leaders in content production.

Take 5 minutes and do a little research... stay on top of current information and topics relevant to your industry.  A couple of recommendations I have to help you write content:

1. Subscribe to RSS feeds from others in your industry
2. Subscribe to RSS feeds from others in related industries
3. Subscribe to RSS feeds from your competitors
4. Subscribe to eNewletters and email upates
5. Stay current on your trade publications.

All of these ideas will help you stay current with market trends, plus linking out to these will help you create some great "link juice"!