This guest post is by Jenny Dean of Business Blog Writers.
If you run a business that sells a product or a service, you need a strong online presence. If you’re considering blogging, or if you are blogging and it’s not doing what you want it to do, then you might look into a different blogging platform to help you achieve your online goals—Compendium.
Seeing that the distinction between blogs and websites has become blurred in recent years, many online visitors don’t even realize whether they have landed on a blog or a website. In fact, static websites are becoming less desirable, since a blog has a fluid ability to target specific visitors with the most up-to-date and relevant information.
Email and searches continue to dominate the online market, so you have to be equipped with the best ROI-producing tool available. Compendium’s blogging platform targets organic keywords in search engines, helps businesses acquire new customers, and serves as a hub for your social media strategy.
Compendium’s platform involves a SEO strategy approach that targets the organic side of the search engine results page (SERP), and is designed to win keyword searches.
If your business has these three qualities, then Compendium may be a great fit:
- a business domain with some age/authority
- an understanding of analytics and how you make money online
- an understanding of what types of key phrases blogs are best suited to win vs. PPC or traditional SEO tactics.
As of March 2011, Compendium’s pricing ranges from $3,500 to upwards of $50,000 a year, based on the needs of the client. Their packages are scalable based on keyword selection and services, as well as any upgrades that you might request.
Why would you want a blog as a business?
- To increase search engine traffic
- To create an online community of fans of your product or service
- To increase awareness of your product or service
- All of the above.
No matter what your company’s blogging goals are, Compendium’s platform is set up to make them happen. Of course, Compendium’s approach to Third Generation blogging has to do with more qualified search traffic and lead generation online. There are millions of searches around almost every business, topic, industry, etc. every day, week, and month. If your business has a product or service, then someone is out there searching for you.
In my business, we write content for a number of blogs, but our favorite platform to write on is Compendium and here’s why.
Please note: I mentioned in my ProBlogger post, How to Brand Your Blog’s YouTube Channel that I have another website called Floppycats.com, and I purchased the Compendium platform for that site. All the photos and examples below are taken from Floppycats.com’s Compendium blog).
Strategy
- Compendium has nearly 500 relationships with savvy marketers and business leaders all over the country. These leaders are just like you—they want to increase their ROI without a lot of effort. So when you have a platform through Compendium, you are set up with an Account Manager who can share tips and ideas among clients, allowing you to save time and money. It’s like having a marketing firm behind your blog that is also well-versed in SEO.
- Compendium helps you offer a conversion point or a call-to-action (CTA) to your blog These CTAs can include requesting more information, signing up for a free demo, downloading a document, or even a “buy now” option.
- Compendium helps to create a blog that has strong key SEO elements like informative page titles, consumer-focused keywords, recent and frequent updates, strong inbound links, and relevant content. Their platform allows your blog to target thousands of organic keywords in a search. It automatically organizes your blog’s keyword-rich content into lots of unique landing pages that are found in an organic search.
Monetization
- Many of Compendium’s clients are generating 400% marketing ROI with only minutes of effort each day.
- Compendium’s easy-to-use blogging and search engine optimization (SEO) tools help you achieve aggressive lead generation and revenue goals with less time and money than other marketing activities.
- Compendium llows you to make a true investment in your marketing dollars. The more content you create, the deeper and richer your search results become. In other words, the blog data never goes away; rather, it gets compounded and enhanced with new content. It’s not like PPC marketing that you pay for, where it’s up and then it’s gone forever. What’s more, 80-90% of all clicks happen in the organic section of a results page.
Optimization
- Compendium can be set up on any domain, even WordPress.
- You won’t find an easier or more efficient way to target a huge search market and get the highest return on their marketing efforts.
- Search engines look for the following when determining the rank of organic search results:
- titles
- keywords
- recency/frequency of content creation
- links
- volume
- relevance
- Compendium partnered with two industry-leading SEO companies (Distilled and SEOmoz) to make changes to their platform to enhance organic search benefits. You may have read a recent article about the Google Algorithm change that affected many blogs and many companies’ efforts to bring in search engine traffic. Search engine algorithms love Compendium’s system, and Compendium clients are unscathed by such search engine modifications.
Social Networking
- Compendium’s platform includes social media integration that allows you to push content to your company’s accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, all from within the platform.
- There are upgrades available with the system that allow for your blog to be built entirely on user-generated content. It’s one of the most incredible marketing strategies I have seen to date. To explain it would require a whole other blog post, so here’s a link to one I wrote a few months back explaining it.
Analytics
- Compendium’s platform allows you to log in at any time, track how the platform is driving traffic to your website, and see how your different calls to action are converting.
- The Account Manager who is set up for your account also integrates your blog with Google Analytics, so you will benefit from Compendium’s own internal tracking system, as well as an external tracking system.
Content report
Link activity report
Link activity chart
Ease of Use
- You do not have to be technically savvy to use Compendium. If you can login into an email account, you can login into Compendium and create a post.
- The Compendium gods were on our side when they delivered the Keyword Strength Meter! It’s one of my favorite things about Compendium (see image below). The Keyword Strength Meter is a bar that appears at the top of every post as you’re composing it, and goes from red to green, helping you know when you have used the optimal number of keywords for a specific post. In other words, you don’t have to worry about whether or not you have used the proper number of keywords, or guess what the search engines will like.
The keyword strength meter in action
- You can schedule your posts to release on the blog on different days and times. In other words, you could write five posts on Monday and schedule them to post on every day that week without having to sign into the system again (WordPress has this capability as well).
Protection
- Compendium is backed by SaaS security. There’s no IT or plug-ins necessary. Compendium is a fully hosted SaaS company, so Compendium hosts all of its clients’ blog pages. Compendium is built on an enterprise-level structure with all the security necessary to work with even the largest corporations.
- One of the clients that we write for mentioned to me that they chose Compendium because of the security measures involved—they knew their content would be protected on Compendium, whereas they couldn’t obtain a similar level of protection on other blogging platforms.
- Compendium is not an open-source platform (on an open-source program anyone can develop plug-ins or add-ons to the platform). Compendium is specifically built for enterprise and the security that they require. This includes features like SSL (for users signing in—think of a bank-like sign in), backups, redundancy, 24-hour monitoring, SLA (service level agreements), and more. All of these features, and the architecture on which Compendium is built, are far easier to control and monitor than freeware, giving an added level of security to this platform.
- Compendium allows for unlimited users that are all attached to an administrator. When a user submits a post it doesn’t go directly onto the company’s blog. Rather, the admin of the blog gets an email notification letting them know there is a new post ready to go. The administrator can then go in and read, edit, or decline the post, and offer feedback to the author without leaving the system. If your company has a PR department that would like to review the posts before they go live, then Compendium is a great option because it allows the user to input the posts and the PR department to edit and approve them as needed, without excessive back-and-forth comments with the writers.
Customization
The platform can look however you want it to—and you can have it easily match your website. I use my Compendium blog as a way to find potential subscribers for my main site, which is on WordPress. That may seem funky, but it has allowed more people to find me. It also allows me to post things with which I wouldn’t want to bug subscribers to my main site, but that I still think are worthwhile to have on my site in some manner. Below is a screen shot of the home page of my Floppycats.com website and a screen shot of my Compendium blog site.
The site on WordPress
The site on Compendium
Updates
Compendium is constantly improving the product, making enhancements every week to service the needs of clients.
The main reason I like Compendium is because with any business, it is important to get referrals as well as retain clients you already have. It has been my experience that when Business Blog Writers write on the Compendium platform, we are more likely to retain the client, because the content we provide on that platform actually works, delivering the results the client was looking for. Therefore they find the value in continuing their content creation agreement with us.
If you are interested in checking out Compendium, you can request a demo through the website. One of their fantastic sales representatives will schedule a time to show you a demo of their software.
Does your company use Compendium? How do you like it? What advantages have you seen from it?
Jenny Dean is a 31-year-old-business owner and entrepreneur from Kansas City. Jenny is currently working on Business Blog Writers, a company that supplies blog content specifically for company’s blogs, Floppycats.com, an informational website about Ragdoll cats and Antioxidant-fruits.com, an informational website about the antioxidant powers of fruit. Follow Business Blog Writers on Twitter or on Facebook.
Every single post here at ProBlogger gets me more and more excited about my blog! I truly cannot describe how much my blog has improved from staying updated here. Thank you!
Also, since blogging, it has been much easier to make sales and gain new subscribers than before, so I agree with the fact that businesses should definitely have a blog!
Thanks again,
-Gabriel Johansson
Not much more to add other than to echo the praise here, through the guest posts and Darren’s advice, everybody should see great improvements in all of their blogs!
Yes blog has its own importance and they usually attract more visitors then the static websites. They are important along with the websites.
This is something new to me. SEOMoz partnering with Compendium = Huge :) But the base price should be a bit lowered for new users to try.
$3,500 to upwards of $50,000 a year, You are joking right? What type of service are you offering that is so special. Only a total idiot with more money than sense. would pay those prices.
A complete detail on necessity of online presence of any product. Or else product may be lost in this big world if it is not that strong enough to fight with competitor. Or it will take time for that product or service to come into the picture for the outer world. Better to start making online presence.
I like that there is a built in keyword meter. I am always having to check with Google to see the best keywords to use on my blog posts.
I like that they figure out the keywords for you – you don’t have to do all of that. They also monitor all of them and adjust them according to what’s working, so you can focus on the bigger picture.
I agree, a good tool but not for the average blogger ( price wise )
I’ve join to compendium and download its whitepaper. But I haven’t feel satisfy with the explanation on its whitepaper. I can’t do anymore to my blog. Then, could you please tell me bout the new Google’s algorithm. How to increase traffic, coz around a week my traffic turn down.
It’s look like awesome tools… I want to try it
This is Problogger, right? After the recent guest post that canvassed some – in my opinion, somewhat dubious marketing approaches, incidentally garnering a riposte from Georgina that argued, inter alia, that the intention was to engender discussion – we now get a virtual advertorial for some extremely expensive blogging platform. I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt, but the laudatory quality of the review (and the fact that she herself uses their services) eventually gave me pause for thought. Maybe I’m getting out of touch with what Problogger is actually about, in which case I apologise to those better informed, but I really felt that Darren’s real strength was in his taking the higher ground when it came to the business of blogging, even to the extent that he was over-idealistic. Naive? Perhaps, but I still cling to my faith in him.
Absolutely agree. This is likely the worst post I’ve seen here. Pure advertorial spiked with marketing-speak snake oil. Not a hint of even an attempt at criticism. That’s actually true for virtually every article written on her own blogs, too.
It might also be worth noting that Jenny has a business relationship with Compendium on her own blog (not sure if it’s a sponsorship or an affiliate link).
We do write for a number of companies that use Compendium blogging platforms. My experience has been that when we write on a Compendium platform, our content goes way further than on a WordPress platform. Especially if that WordPress platform has not been set up correctly. In other words, my repeat business comes from customers that have a Compendium platform because the Compendium one is optimized to do what’s right with the content – allowing us, as a company, to do what we do – write content. So, yes, I definitely am going to promote it. Don’t knock it until you try it!
Hi darren
Solid post. I can’t wait using this tool.
Sorry, I find it very hard to believe the 400% RoI and the cost is just ludicrous for what you could put together on your own with various products that are already leaders in their field would be significantly less without further opening your wallet.
It would be nice to see Darren get back to actually posting full time on Problogger instead of all the craptastic guest posts that are either regurgitating old news or trying to sell something.
Talen, you know what it reminds me of…I could study and become a plumber and fix all my own toilets, but I don’t want to be a plumber, I’d rather just use my toilet! So I think of Compendium as paying for a plumber that already has the knowledge so that I can do things I want to focus on and spend my time wisely. Thanks for the comments, Jenny