Download our new whitepaper & then register now for Tuesday’s webinar.

eCommerce has accelerated the creation and exponential growth of the web as the  largest marketplace in history. The rewards of global e-commerce are nearly endless – and by now you must realize that a global view for your online store is absolutely critical.

A company that can successfully expand and embrace a global market – with tactics to address internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) – immediately gets access to seven billion potential buyers, from hundreds of cultures. These aspects, however, if they’re to be done right, are anything but small tasks.

To get a jump on the competition, or to check your current process against solid, winning results, download our most recent whitepaper,” Key Factors to Consider When Going Global with Your eCommerce Initiatives,” and then plan to join us for a free, live webinar on the subject.

Bridgeline teams up with UPS and FitForCommerce for this presentation, hosted by Direct Marketing News, to be held Tuesday, December 13, at 1:00 pm ET (10:00 am PT).

We’ll break down technology, cultural, and logistics issues that stand between you and those seven billion potential customers.

Attend the webcast and you will learn how to:

• Make it easy for customers to buy, no matter where they are
• Make sure they can pay you
• Build a framework on your site that can accommodate various cultures and habits
• Use merchandising wisely in international settings
• Adapt logistics to fit individual markets
• Maintain localized consistency at checkout

The webinar presenters include:

Bernadine Wu, Founder & CEO, FitForCommerce

Joey Rosenberg, US International Marketing Supervisor, UPS

Moderater: Juan Martinez, Senior Editor, DMNews.

So download the informative whitepaper, and then join us for this insightful and helpful webinar and panel discussion on Tuesday, December 13^th at 1:00 pm EST (10:00 am PST)

Location: Online

Cost: FREE

Register Now

We’re all familiar with the situation: your marketing directive needs some hands-on support – NOW – and your IT department can only make a couple of things top priority (maybe a few, if they’re superhuman), ESPECIALLY NOW. The scenario skirts around a “Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots” style conflagration – with both departments seemingly at risk of having a block knocked off.

But the situation doesn’t have to be like this. Much like David Carradine’s “Caine” (AKA “Grasshopper”), whose sole directive was to make peace and satisfy everyone (that was his sole purpose, wasn’t it?)  – calmly, effectively and, above all, with his own kung fu – these calamities can be handled, neutralized, even fruitful with the right tools and directions.

Register for this insightful webinar and join us as we pass on some collaborative kung fu – and show you how iAPPS can help enhance its effectiveness – to help you make sure your web technology fully supports your marketing strategy. Once adopted, these practices – and the right tools – will result in not only a much more smoothly run, effective and engaging website, but a few less bruises to boot.

Webinar Title: 10 Tips to Make Sure Your Web Technology Supports Your Marketing Strategy

Format: Free Webinar

Hosts: Bridgeline Digital

• Brett Zucker, Chief Technology Officer

• Becki Dilworth, Vice President of Digital Strategy

Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Time: 10:00 am – 11:00 am MST  (12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST)

Location: Online

Cost: FREE

Register Now

About Brett Zucker: Since 2006, Mr. Zucker has been Bridgeline Digital’s Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer. Brett is a frequent speaker and panelist at various industry events and has been quoted in many trade publications regarding the trends and future of web engagement management, content management, and web analytics. He’s a member of the Board of Directors of Content Management Professionals (CM Pros) and is the visionary of Bridgeline’s flagship product suite, iAPPS. Brett holds a BS degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

About Becki Dilworth: Becki Dilworth is Vice President of Digital Strategy for Bridgeline Digital Denver region. Prior to joining Bridgeline Digital, Becki was Vice President of Client Services at Indigio, an interactive agency based in Denver, where she oversaw the project management, search engine marketing and creative design teams. From 2003-2006 she was Director of Interactive Operations for the Denver Newspaper Agency. In her 3 years there, she more than doubled online revenue and was responsible for all marketing and product development initiatives. Becki graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor Degree in Internet Journalism and Graphic Design from Drake University in Iowa.

About iAPPS: Bridgeline Digital’s flagship application, the market-leading iAPPS Product Suite, is the only leading WEM platform available under either SaaS or perpetual licensing that unifies content management, eCommerce, eMarketing, and web analytics capabilities seamlessly – enabling users  to swiftly enhance and optimize the value of their web properties while maximizing their overall Web Experience Management goals. The iAPPS Product Suite was recently selected as a finalist for two 2011 CODiE Awards and iAPPS Content Manager is the 2010 CODiE Award Winner for Best Content Management Solution, globally.

Photo by BasicGov; Creative Commons share-alike license

The differences are far simpler, and way more important, than you probably think.

Sometimes the best laid marketing plans end up biting back, and in some truly surprising ways. While most cases of this sort of slip up – either positive or negative – can be chalked up to a failure to get the right message across, not many can be attributed to getting a message across a little too well.

Such is the case for the apparent confusion about the differences between “Cloud Computing” and “Software as a Service” (SaaS). As the digital marketing world is clamoring to get you to “move everything to the cloud” before the next guy, it’s become critical to offer clarification to help you make sure you know what you’re signing up for. Put simply, and in strictly logical terms, while all SaaS environments are by default denizens of the cloud, not all cloud environments are necessarily SaaS.

Cloud environments deliver the use of common applications that are served from the internet and are designed to deliver computing and interaction as a utility – Facebook, Salesforce.com and Google Docs are popular examples. SaaS, by comparison, uses specific software and customized architecture to provide services – primarily to enterprise customers (but certainly not exclusively) – based on specific needs. Bridgeline’s iAPPS Product Suite, for instance, is designed specifically to run as optimally in SaaS as it does in a dedicated server environment using a perpetual license.

The differences begin with support

Maybe a good place to draw distinctions would be to talk about what the two operating environments have in common. Since both operate on hardware that exists and is supported away from your business, and both interact with users through the internet from any location on the planet, each offers significant benefits to both enterprise and individual users. Some of these benefits include a more rapid setup, development and launch cycle than would typically be required, as well as greatly reduced overhead – since all that’s necessary is connectivity with the internet and a device with which to interact – from users in both enterprise and personal settings. Other benefits include massive data aggregation, mining and researching, on a scale never before seen, that can allow for insights into user behavior, trends and more.

But one place where a company running customized applications on a SaaS environment has a clear competitive advantage over one running in the cloud is in support. Because of their inherent structure, SaaS environments are much better suited for contiguous, comprehensive support than cloud-based environments – which can be shown in the differences in uptime. SaaS environments guarantee uptime, and compensate enterprise licensees for downtime after a certain amount (which in many cases can be just a few minutes). Downtime in the cloud is simply that – down and gone (look at the ubiquity of the Twitter “fail whale” for fitting proof), until it’s back up.

Updates, patches, version control – it’s all in the package

Another clear advantage of the SaaS environment is how the march of progress is constantly dealt with. Since all development is done off-site, any new versions, upgrades, patches and more are completely in the hands of your provider. No more hassles with receiving new software packages, installing, testing, re-testing, adjusting and finally launching a simple patch upgrade – all of that is done for your company with SaaS. Obviously this also presents major savings in both time and money – since your development group no longer has to dedicate either to the grunt work, and it’s all wrapped up in the regular fees.

A Content Management platform that offers a cloud-based deployment option that is not SaaS is essentially a perpetual license deployment in the cloud – updates and patches are not automatically handled nor deployed ubiquitously across the environment. They may still be your responsibility or need to be scheduled individually.

Saas CMS platforms, like iAPPS, are a little different. These platforms rely on support infrastructure that ensures maximum uptime, while all updates, upgrades, patches, etc. are taken care of as part of a monthly fee. iAPPS is an example of the most inclusive benefits of a SaaS vs. cloud environment: it allows you to focus on developing your business, web experience and your bottom line, rather than continuously keeping the software, hardware and general IT concerns on track.

It’s your site, build the engagement your way.

This type of support also offers advantages in customization that allow you to build a web experience that’s particular to your company. With cloud apps, the environment is largely “one size fits all,” though some customization at the user level – with minimal options available to the average user (more to those who pay the provider a premium) – is usually possible. For example, with the exception of the content you or your friends post, everyone’s Facebook interface looks basically the same. In a SaaS environment however, your experience is completely customized according to your business and design needs. The way your customers reach your site, what they see when they get there, how they interact and how they wrap up visits is entirely up to you. Clients using the same SaaS environment may not look anything like each other, collect and store data in the same ways, or offer users a similar engagement – and they usually don’t.

The differences are plain to see, but still the digital industry has trouble shedding light on them, and especially their fundamental importance – and, really, it’s the marketing of the cloud that’s to blame. As a result of the clamor to popularize and populate it, the term “cloud” has become a buzzword – complete with the obligatory ambiguity or (here it comes, get ready to cringe) “cloudiness” associated with this small piece of jargon. That single term is too easily substituted for both.

You owe it to yourself – and to your business – to know the difference before you move on up.

Content strategy is more important than a lot of people think, but that’s mainly because of the hype that surrounds SEO. Don’t get me wrong, SEO is super important for your entire site, but content is the oxygen that keeps your site alive.

Think about a piece of paper that is shredded into a thousand little pieces, these pieces represent each page on your site. To help those pieces be more understandable, we’ll have to pour on some glue to mend them back together – that’s our SEO. But sometimes things get messy and we realize that we don’t actually need or want all of those thousands of pieces, because people don’t really like the dull, ugly pieces. So, we cut out the ugly pieces and we’re left with a beautiful, bright and shiny collage that even a child would appreciate (this analogy has gone too far). The point is that, that beautiful, bright and shiny collage is your content strategy. Of course there’s a lot more to it, but the results typically pay off for you and your readers/customers.

How do we make a beautiful, bright and shiny collage, a.k.a. Content Strategy?

Content Inventory

Our Digital Strategy Group starts every content strategy with a full list of the existing content on a site. When this list is created it is then sorted, dissected and sectioned off into manageable tabs. I’ve done content inventory for sites with thousands, upon thousands of pages. Believe me, it’s easiest to sort content by error free content, content type and content with errors; e.g. 404 error pages and 301 redirects. Content inventory is really just the beginning of the content strategy process and shows what content currently exists on a site. Without content inventory, we couldn’t move on to the other necessary stages of content strategy.

Stakeholder Interviews

These interviews involve key people at a company, potential/existing clients, people that may refer business to the company or people that are invested in the company in some way or another. Basically, as a content strategist, we need to know how the company operates, how they would like to operate, what their clients think about the company, why people refer business to the company (or why they don’t) and how people view the company. What the company thinks about itself is typically very, very different from what the clients and investors think about it.

In a nut shell, we need to understand the company’s brand message and brand promise from their point of view and an outsider’s point of view.

Keyword Research & Analytics Review

Keyword research shows us common themes in things that people are searching for that surrounds a company and competing companies, and an analytics review can show us exactly how people interact with the current content on the site. Putting all of this information together begins to show us a pretty good roadmap of how the site should be laid out.

Scrumming it Up

That’s a big fancy word for an internal meet-and-greet. I’m sure there are content strategist out there that feel confident enough to take a stab at a content strategy without involving everyone on the web design team, but here at Bridgeline we like to scrum – that is, meet with the entire team that’s involved with the project so we can all look at the overall direction we think the site should go. This group meeting typically includes project managers, digital strategists, designers, developers, analysts… I know I’m forgetting someone here.

Content Analysis & Taxonomy

Content analysis is the process of organizing all of those little pieces of paper. It’s finding the focus of the site, discovering how content could be grouped, what content can be deleted or compiled and making suggestions on new content. I’ve seen websites with over 20,000 pages get consolidated down to 800 pages. That may sound crazy – I mean, who gets rid of content like that – but what ends up happening is a better user experience is created and conversion rates increase.

Taxonomy takes the content analysis one step further and makes suggestions on the navigation of the site. It helps show areas of the site that should remain and opportunities for new sections – this is where keyword research is used rather heavily.

Voice Definition

Now it’s time to understand what the company’s voice is – the brand voice. It should be consistent across the entire site and help the company discover how the content should come across to visitors of the site. We try to help the company think through all of the different personality styles that could represent their brand, but also speaks in a human voice that’s understandable to clients.

Editorial Calendar

It’s great to analyze existing content, and even better to define what it means in the future, but without a publishing process (or editorial calendar) content typically begins to go stale rather quickly. An editorial calendar can be as simple as who’s writing what and when, to as advanced as setting up monthly themes and promoting annual events.

Inbound Marketing & Social Media

Once the content is published it needs to do more than just sit on a site unnoticed. SEO really helps with promoting content in the search engines, but companies can get faster results by leveraging inbound marketing techniques (such as email marketing and guest posting) or social media. Our team typically ends the content strategy with teaching our clients techniques on inbound marketing and social media that can help promote the content that is being created. It’s time for syndication and aggregation.

Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day

Before hitting publish, give your content some time to breathe. When we write our own personal blog posts out there, we typically don’t have a team of people to bounce our ideas off of and to help us edit our content, but here at Bridgeline we have a slew of people to help edit content before it goes live on our site. I’m not just saying for grammar mistakes, but for consistency, voice, additions, deletions, etc. There are blog posts and whitepapers written that never make it to the blog, but that’s because they needed more work. Getting constructive criticism is never a bad thing. Pass the content around to a team of editors or experts in the company and get different opinions. Or sleep on it and read it the next day to make sure it still makes sense. There’s a big difference between content written for SEO sake, and quality content that brings in qualified leads.

Lastly, monitoring results is important. Between managing analytics internally, or from a group of experts like our Digital Strategy Group, content management should include website analytics, social media analytics and keyword analytics.

For more information on content strategy, which includes 10 Steps to a Successful Content Marketing Strategy, visit our Digital Strategy pages.

Keeping even your most fickle customers can be easy, if you provide the right experience.

Even the most savvy internet marketers among us usually agree: online sales are most often lost at the checkout. And why would we not believe that, when you consider the fact that 51% of all shopping carts end up abandoned? A commonly accepted reason for this are that onerous shipping charges prompt shoppers in this direction – if it’s not free, or at least damned cheap, they drop the cart altogether.

That belief, it turns out, is a little off the mark. In fact, it’s simply untrue, according to Bridgeline’s latest eBook, “Web Experience Management: Secrets to Closing the Sale Before the Customer Checks Out of Your Website.”

The truth is that sales are lost long before your customer reaches the checkout phase. According to the eBook, “Somewhere in the web experience, the customer lost faith in the product, the company or the website – maybe even all three.” It’s an overall lack of a satisfying shopping experience, says Bridgeline, that  ultimately kills sales – in the same way a badly written plot leaves a film with no definable aftertaste, and therefore makes it merely forgettable.

The object to completing more sales, and gaining longtime customers, higher conversion rates and, ultimately, more revenue, is to make sure your site is based in, and supporting, a rich, satisfying web experience. One that at least comes close to feeling as unique and encompassing as a visit into a real-life, brick and mortar version of the store.

Read on through the following excerpt from the new e-book and learn about five strategies you can use to stop even your most fickle customers from abandoning carts – both before and after the checkout process.

After you’ve sampled the excerpt, be sure and download a copy of the eBook to get the rest of the web experience management story, and learn to keep your website pulling in and converting more visitors to customers.

Enjoy, and happy etailing!

Brian Bolton
Senior VP of Marketing

Five Ways to Keep Even Your Most Fickle Customers

While we have covered the mechanics on how to use web experience management to power your marketing efforts and deliver increased sales in spite of a challenging economy, there are a number of savvy tips you can employ to turn up the amps. Here are five tips to ensure even your most fickle customers sign off as satisfied customers.

Creatively convert refunds into new sales.

“Now, this is where we’ve been able to turn around just under 25 percent of total refund requests to keep them on as customers and in many cases to actually increase the sale right then and there,” says Trevor Mauch, chief value creator at Automize, a task-scheduling and automation software company.

How did they do that? First they sent a series of three emails from their Customer Experience team. The first acknowledged the refund request and asked for feedback on the product so the good and trustworthy folks at Automize could improve the product. The second email offered the customer extra bonuses they’d be getting over the following seven days if the customer stayed on. The third email offered a free high-value bonus (usually another one of the company’s products sold on the site) for staying on. “All of this is in the aim of helping the customer reach that initial goal which caused them to buy our product in the first place,” says Mauch.

“If they decline the email offers, we’ve found that using the words ‘member in good standing’ are very effective. So, we offer to let the customer stay on as a ‘member in good standing’ and we combat the price objection by rebating a portion of their purchase that one time,” he explained. “We make notes in our CRM so we don’t offer the same customer a rebate on multiple products so they can’t game the system.”

The result: Just over 20 percent of customers requesting a refund take one of the offers.

Creatively convert cancellations into new sales.

Automize also has a monthly membership product that rebills monthly. As with any membership, some people will stay months and months, some well over a year, and others will stay only a few months.

“So, what we did was we came up with our average lifetime value of a monthly membership customer and now when members request to cancel their membership, we offer them a one-time ‘buy out’ option,” Mauch explains. “They can pay one lump sum fee today and have access to the membership program for life.”

In essence this means Automize is settling on a lump sum that equals 3.5 months of membership fees, which is the average membership lifespan. “We tested several prices and for this particular membership program that worked the best,” he said. “In the end, people join our membership programs because they know it’ll help them reach a specific goal. They want and need the product but some people just don’t like seeing that charge hit every month.”

Rather than letting people cancel without offering them a way to continue getting what they need, the company offers a “lifetime buy out” option. “Over 25 percent of cancellations are turned into the lifetime buyout, which is huge,” he says. “Most companies just don’t go out of their way to really find out what is driving people to abandon a purchase or why people are requesting refunds/cancellations for their products,” said Mauch.

“Once you really find the reasons behind these, you can turn a good hunk of those around into paying customers again.”

Aid and abet the window shopper and virtual layaways.

Not all cart abandonment amounts to lost sales. Sometimes shopping is interrupted for real-world reasons that have nothing to do with your website, such as waiting for payday to make the purchase. Make sure your cart or “Wish List” function will hold selections for at least 30 days but preferably up to 90 days to allow the shopper ample space and time to store their selections and easily make the purchase later. Think of it as a type of virtual layaway program.

Allow guest checkout and cart shares.

Not all customers want to register on your site. They may fear an onslaught of marketing emails in their inbox, or be stressed over keeping up with yet another password. Certainly you want to get the information if you can but don’t lose the sale over it. Also, allow “cart shares” which means simply allowing the customer to share their product picks with friends and family (without sharing any of their financial information) so they can get feedback prior to purchasing.

Cart shares can be done by email or on social media of the prospect’s choice. This can help close the sale and reduce refunds and buyer’s regret.

Develop a strong content strategy before you design the site.

“Not having a strong content strategy before you design can ruin a web experience when you find you have meaningful content and a bunch of space you need to fill to make the website look right,” warns Sprint’s Zalaznik.

The point of this exercise is to convert content into revenue. If you find yourself using space fillers, untested content, or less-than-credible content, you are already in trouble, as savvy customers will know it instantly and forever hold that against you. Hire credible writers and/or high-quality content generators if necessary but make sure that content is accurate, credible and always fresh. Watch the quality of product photos too. They need to be crisp, clean and inviting but not so big or so detailed that they slow the time it takes for the page to load—which means you shouldn’t enlarge photos to fill empty space either.

Download a Copy of the eBook

The search-engine goliath is constantly enacting changes, whether it is modifying algorithms, enhancing sitelinks, or merely altering the Google Doodle atop the page.  Sometime last week, however, Google made an extremely notable change to Google Analytics that has digital strategists around the world abuzz…and angry.

The keyword report is perhaps the most significant element of Google Analytics, especially for those of us in the SEO world.  Only a week ago, this report told you precisely what keywords searchers were using in order to find your site.  With this latest modification, Analytics no longer gives you specific keywords for searchers who are logged into Google.  Instead, any organic visitors that are logged in (whether it be via Gmail, Adwords, Analytics, etc.) are grouped together under the label “(not provided),” no matter what search term they use to find the site.

With this change, keyword reports will often appear like this:

Instead of seeing valuable keyword data that is incredibly helpful in building out a site’s SEO efforts, Google Analytics users are now stuck with a negative phrase surrounded by parentheses.

My colleague and SEO guru Kasy Allen has been researching how this change will affect search engine reports, and the numbers are staggering.  The following chart shows just how much keyword data digital strategists can expect to lose:

In the simplest terms, this graphs shows that on November 1 and November 2, 20.9% and 25% of our keyword data was lost to “(not provided),” respectively.  Prior to the change, there was not one day where more than 2.6% of keyword data was lost.  From both a branded and non-branded perspective, there is no denying that this is a major change that will undoubtedly affect the once healthy and direct relationship between keywords and on-page optimizations.

There has been much speculation as to why Google implemented such a noteworthy change to its Analytics.  The word out of Mountain View is that this modification offers added security to those who surf the web while logged into Google.  Those on the outside-looking-in hold the sentiment that this is a financial move for Google, as users will now be forced to rely heavily on Adwords for keyword data.

Rationales aside, Google is forcing the hand of internet marketing strategists to return to their roots of creating relevant, engaging content that is focused on the brand.  Rather than developing words based on what visitors are searching, web writers will now be forced to construct content that is in the best interest of the company and website on the whole.

Keywords have become the sun in the SEO solar system, and with one flex of its enormous muscle, Google has turned this faux-universe upside down.  Whether or not there is a silver-lining attached to this upheaval remains to be seen.

Your CMS should bring your content creation and editing processes into the 21st century. (Photo: Creative Commons License)

If your company is in the market to upgrade their CMS platform to a shiny, new model, or just beginning to research options, it’s important to compare all the bells and whistles you’ll need to keep  your web experience management (WEM) capabilities strong, relevant and fresh. There are many newer features out there you may not have even thought were available, and some that will quickly turn into favorites making you wonder how you ever survived without. Take some time here – and over the next few posts – to familiarize yourself with some of the coolest features built into the iAPPS Product Suite, and then imagine these capabilities as an intrinsic part of your content management process. Chances are that much of the intuitive basic functionality built into iAPPS holds what you’re looking for – whether you know it yet, or not.

To effectively research a solution, step away from the processes and environments you’ve become accustomed to and really look to identify the goals you’re trying to accomplish – on a daily, weekly and seasonal basis. Then, ask how your CMS can help you to achieve those goals. Too often, users take current processes – frequently and unnecessarily complex – completely for granted. This narrow view makes it hard to be fully aware of any potential new functionality that may be available that can actually make a difference. As you vet all the possibilities, be sure you’re not missing the chance to solve many of your problems with the right CMS by identifying all the options available to you.

Does it make content management easy?

A core notion behind content management is that it makes your job easier (otherwise what would be the point). Running contrary to that trend however is that many CMS platforms still present a user interface that is complex, abstract, and sometimes code-driven. As users, we’ve all been trained to believe that moderately complex – even clunky – interfaces for creating and managing content  are the norm. Often, these interfaces are so difficult to use, or even to understand, that users create “workarounds” to perform functions that their CMS should be doing for them. Technology has long since advanced that all of these interfaces should be easy to use (at a minimum!). Ideally, they should be intuitive, visually pleasing and multi-faceted.

At a truly basic level, your CMS should feature a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) interface. When users are creating or editing copy, this type of interface helps them to approximate – in real time– what the content is going to look like when they click on “submit.” iAPPS Content Manager, for instance, features an intuitive WYSIWYG interface that offers that benefit. Site managers for iAPPS-based properties find the interface extremely helpful, as do their attached designers and developers. The iAPPS interface has been developed with all the concerns of both sides of the site – developer and end user – in mind, and the result is a comprehensive tool with sensible options and processes for both.

“iAPPS’ in-line editing, or surf-to-edit capabilities are key features that make the CMS stand out,” says Matt Vegas, Senior Developer at Bridgeline Digital. “This is in comparison to many other CMS tools I’ve worked with – and there have been a few.” Vegas has had extensive experience over the years with many CMS platforms from both the end-user and developer sides of the screen. “No other CMS in my experience offers quite the same level of true, real-time interaction with content, with as much focus on both end-users and developers.” adds Vegas. “This is one of the reasons I joined Bridgeline – iAPPS is doing it right.”

Wouldn’t it make sense, for instance, when you’re creating and uploading content to your e-commerce site about a recent addition to your catalog, to have an interactive contextual dropdown menu that would allow you to automatically insert a link to more information from a manufacturer, or – even better – from another page on your site? This sensible kind of functionality is part of the iAPPS process, and is too often skipped in many other CMS platforms.

How about making it as easy as a click to add “Like” buttons, or other social sharing functionality? Quick and simple social marketing is one recipe to make your content contagious, to help increase its chances of becoming viral. Advanced, practical and user-friendly CMS platforms should take the inclusion of this type of functionality for granted – and iAPPS does.

Stay tuned for more solutions…

Be sure and check back here to catch more discussion of optimal CMS features,  and which of them are going to become your new, can’t-live-without favorites.

Next post: Data: Lost in Translation – Are you getting the whole package?

Make your content work for you over and over - re-imagine, don't just recycle. (Photo: apSos.de)

This past week, My good friend Ann Handley and I participated in a Webinar about re-imagining your content. The main takeaway:

Don’t just re-purpose your content. Look at it and figure out ways to present it to new audiences, in new formats and with differing end-goals. Re-imagine, don’t recycle.

In a nutshell:  Build out a plan – by quarter, by year, by season – with focus on each section on a single theme. Next, build one major piece around that theme that covers all you want visitors, customers and readers to take away from your business. You’re the expert, and here is where you prove it. It can be in the form of a seminar or presentation, a white paper or eBook, or some other weighty item – as long as it’s both focused on the current  theme, and complete enough that it covers many angles.

Next, use that larger piece to make smaller, bite-size, well-timed, targeted chunks that you can use to spread the word out over time, assert your industry expertise across a few different channels and keep interest in the theme high – all of which will consequently keep visitors coming to your site for more.

Sounds simple? In essence it is – but it’s hard work, as Ann and I discussed.

After the Webinar, we had a lively Q&A session – below are a few of the questions that were left unanswered

Do you feel a flip camera is a good tool to produce videos for my small business?

Definitely! Sometimes we marketers get caught up on the production quality of our content – it’s important to remember that our customers and users really care about the quality of our message and the value of our information. If you have something valuable to share or you can help solve a problem – and video is a good format in which to do that – then flip out that camera get started!

Will you discuss ideas about buy-in at the C-level?

This question references one of the data points we shared in our presentation – from a study jointly done by MarketingProfs and Junta42.

These are the biggest challenges in marketing content strategically and easily.

C-Level buy-in remains a top concern for content marketers. Why? Because it can be difficult to demonstrate direct ROI attached to content. However, we have found for our customers that data and demonstrable success is your best bet with the C-level group. Specifically, do some research within the search engine landscape to understand the best opportunities to gain additional traffic (i.e. eyeballs) to your site. It’s simple, yes, but being able to effectively demonstrate to the higher ups the missed opportunity that’s out there is a great stepping stone to discussing content marketing further.

What you are really talking about is integrated communications. In such a set up you do exactly what you are talking about. Correct?

To a certain extent, yes. Integarted Marketing Communications (IMC) is really marketing – it’s about finding your best marketing mix and making sure you integrate your strategy across those various channels. However, I think we would argue that Publishers as Marketers is a more approachable way to think of this (and possibly more challenging). Will the CMOs of the world become Editors in Chief down the line? Maybe, and we certainly want brands large and small to begin thinking of themselves as publishers, because they are.

Is it Kinexis or Kinaxis, both are companies.

Kinaxis – They’re worth a look too. They offer great strategies and really approachable content for a truly complex, trending topic.

What’s the difference between a webinar and an online seminar?

We would say it’s how you imagine it to be. Though fundamentally these are the same (the term webinar really formed out of the term web seminar) – we’ve seen people look at these slightly differently:

Online Seminar: Very focused on tactical education – almost a class.

Webinar:  Focused inspirational messaging combined with education, more an attempt to whet your appetite for more information – usually shorter.

Any advice on how to limit man hours when your client is a small business without a “publishing” team?

Hopefully the entire Webinar supplied a little direction on this. Some quick tips:

• Have a quarterly brainstorming session. Refer to calls from customers and general FAQs to understand what customers are interested in learning more about and what kinds of information you can best help them with.
• Identify 1-2 primary pieces of content here. They could be how-to articles or quick videos.
• Re-imagine. Those how-to articles and FAQs can be a few series of Twitter Quick Tips. Those quick videos can be segmented into  10 sound bytes.
• Wash, rinse and repeat!

Now, again, we understand – this is all easy to say and not always easy to implement. But – we’ve  experienced it ourselves – this re-imagine approach saves a significant amount of time in the up-front research and strategy. Your content effort becomes a series of tactics, rather than redeveloping strategy after strategy.

Do you have a list of what type of content to look for – within a white paper for example – that may be best re-used in a blog?

There are some clear, quick options here:

• If your whitepaper is formatted in a Top 10 type of format, you can easily divide that into 10 blog posts. Remember, it’s not a matter of copying and pasting from your Whitepaper – it’s about taking that information and re-working it to function with the target audience and format.
• If your whitepaper is focused around interviews from subject matter experts, take along an audio recorder when you complete those interviews. Turn them into a series of sound byte posts offering additional information that may not be flushed out in the whitepaper.
• If your whitepaper is heavy on data, see if there are ways to present this graphically and put out a series of graphs in your blog about key data points.

What tactics seem to be the most successful in gaining top audience interest?

This is a tough one to answer – as it entirely depends on your audience. Blogs tend to do well at attracting traffic, but may not be as effective at driving behavior. Conversely, Whitepapers and eBooks tend to attract a more targeted, better vetted audience and (often) include clear lead generation opportunities.

The best advice? Look at your competitors and aspirational peers. What are they doing? What seems to be working? And – test, test, test. Try a few different things to see what drives the most qualified business for you.

Do you have any recommendations on how frequently one should post to a corporate blog on a weekly basis?

Like all things, there’s no formula here. Blogs are strange – in that we tend to write them with the idea of a return audience. However, time and time again, statistics show that blogs tend to be “one-and-done” visits.

So – though we can’t tell you how frequently you should post, we certainly can say:

1. Make sure your blog isn’t an end point. Are you building momentum from that initial entry? Are your readers able to continue to interact with you in a meaningful way?
2. Make sure your blog is following SEO best practices and targeting terms that make sense for your products and audience.
3. Most importantly, make sure you’re being useful. Solve problems. Answer questions. As we like to say: “Show, don’t shill….”

Is there any formula for coming up with compelling topics?

As Ann said in the Webinar, good content is out there – it’s just about sniffing it out:

1. Talk to your customer service reps. What questions are they getting?
2. Talk to your sales reps. What are the most common objections? What pieces of information are prospects looking for?
3. Talk to your customers. What are their major pains related to your product/services? How can you solve them?

Would it be advisable to integrate freelance talent (writer/designers) into your strategy?

We generally recommend that the overall voice and strategy needs to be  yours, and owned internally – but external writers and designers can often bring efficiency and new perspectives.

What should be our number 1 takeaway from this webinar?

Marketers: Make your life easier. Look at your content and figure out ways to re-imagine it into different formats, for different audiences and to serve different purposes.

Cheers everyone – and thanks for joining us, both live and on the recording.

Good Marketing!

Becki Dilworth

Vice President of Digital Strategy

bdilworth@blinedigital.com

Identifying robots more effectively - even indirectly enlisting their help - will distill your results, and solidify your site's relevancy.

In a recent post, I spent some time exposing what we’ve since been calling the “bot quandary,” which, put simply, is the tendency for a sites’ analytics to become skewed – sometimes significantly – because indexing visits from bots and spiders are counted by search engines. In this post, I will spend some time on a few things that can be done to help reduce that skew in order to clarify your site’s actual relevancy.

Take aim and select your target, then execute

As I pointed out in my prior post, these spider visits affect site analytics, often significantly. In order to get a more accurate picture of your site’s true relevancy, it’s necessary to remove them from the count. But – and this is important – you don’t want to block the bots completely, or you’ll stop being indexed altogether. Of course, this can be a much worse fate than some fairly skewed numbers.

The most common practice is to filter the IP addresses from which each particular bot or spider is originating (which, of course, is something you’re already doing to protect your site from bots that scrape your content, right?). This strategy takes a strenuous, conscious effort, because you need to be sure you’re not inadvertently blocking the good bots along with the bad.

A common approach to keeping the filters accurate – and actually helpful rather than harmful – is to analyze time frames from within requests from specific IP addresses to see what the visitors’ behaviors look like. Compare your results, and see if they match these descriptions:

If you’ve been visited by a “bad bot,” or a scraper, you’ll see some of these traits:

• These bots request many pages in a short time span;
• They generally don’t request images or css files;
• They ignore your site’s Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP or robots.txt);

On the other hand, visits from “good bots” will show these tendencies:

• They request access to your site’s REP, and obey its directives;
• They make their identity known;
• They usually don’t request images.

Another way to identify bots-versus-human traffic is to research their “User-Agent,” which is a string of code bots use to define who they are. For instance, Google’s Search Engine has a user agent name of GoogleBot and the IP address is 66.249.93.104 (www.googlebot.com), which also lets you know that the search giant is sponsoring that robot. Expert Tip: Besides definitely identifying the bot as one not to be counted, this can actually give you an idea of how often your site is being legitimately indexed – an added benefit for sites with significant site content throughput.

Separate the good from the bad, and the ugly …

Once you’ve identified which IP addresses are which, the bad ones can be blacklisted, which means your analytics application will not include traffic from them in its reports. But keep in mind that these bots are smart, and getting more and more intelligent all the time. They’ll change their IP address often, and the filter then becomes out of date, so you’ll need to stay on top of them by refreshing your research and blacklistings often.

The technology behind this type of constant vigilance follows the standard virus protection tactics: you’ll need to periodically update your “bot-description” file in the same way you currently need to constantly update virus definitions for your protection. As you add well-defined IP addresses, new ones are added to the blacklistings, which keeps your numbers as current as possible.

Of course, once you start taking samples out of your site’s analytics after you’ve blocked some of the bots, your numbers are likely to dip slightly – possibly significantly. Be prepared for a little reaction, if you’re maintaining a site and need to explain the drop to a customer, or – worse – your CEO. Remember, you’re actually doing your site – and your company – a favor, by distilling analytics, and adding accuracy. You’re interest is in showing real, human traffic, not bot traffic, and so is theirs – but it may take some explaining (refer to the first post in this series to refresh your memory, if you need to).

iAPPS, for SaaS clients, is already there

Bridgeline’s WEM Platform, iAPPS, has already taken this type of traffic optimization – or “distillation” – seriously, and has added filters to our servers for known bots that do your sites no good. We take care of this for hundreds of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS or “hosted”) clients and have taken on the considerable task of keeping all SaaS clients perpetually updated, as part of the hosting license benefit. Currently, plans are in the works to support other clients running iAPPS under perpetual licenses as well.

Ultimately, the point is to monitor and act on true, accurate human statistics, so that the humans you reach are actually counted, and served in the way you intended them to be.

Separating the bot from the customer will refine your site's analytics - sometimes more than you'd think.

Two words you hear constantly in content discussions are relevance and traffic – testament that these concepts, maybe more than any others, drive the life of your site. Usually, but not always, the two form a symbiotic relationship: relevance definitely drives traffic – in many different ways – and usually our focus is on how to harness that power for good.

For this post, though, I want to focus on another, less obvious – and much less intuitive – relationship between content and traffic: the concept behind the relevance of traffic.

It’s not something web professionals have examined readily – or very heavily – as search has grown, but the concept is gaining steam around analytics and SEO discussions lately.

Here’s a pine-nut-sized explanation of the problem:

• All websites – and especially niche sites – depend heavily on search to survive, and publishers spend countless dollars and hours pouring over analytics and affecting optimization to be sure their SERPs stay up near the top;
• These numbers are constantly changing as search engine spiders – or robots (“bots” also works) – crawl across the ‘net and index pages to add to search databases;
• Bot and spider visits are counted in the overall site SEO picture, which skews final numbers – sometimes significantly.

Obviously, it’s necessary to allow the bots access to your site (at least those that are actually indexing, as opposed to “scraping”) – kind of like it’s necessary to answer the census taker at your front door. The question now, then, is about the relevancy of those numbers. The fact is, actual, human visitors are the only real numbers you – or search engines – should really be concerned with.

At the end of the day, bots are never going to turn into conversions, no matter what sort of freebie you’re offering to entice them to register.

How did we end up here?

Sometimes, working at web speed, we tend to lose sight of some of the internet’s basic nature. This is one of those cases. The nature of the web has developed so quickly – and from so many different aspects – over the last few years that we now find ourselves in a sort of quandary. How’d we end up developing something that works, some would say, just too damned well? Put simply, we made spiders just a tiny bit too fast and smart for our own good (Hmmm – does that sound a little apocalyptic? Didn’t mean it to).

Until recently, bots weren’t smart or fast enough to execute JavaScript, which is one of the staple ingredients of most analytics packages. Since they only visited to index, but didn’t have the power to “pull the trigger” of the count process, they weren’t processed as a visit. Now, they’re not only much faster, many are intelligent enough to process a complete click stream.

So, your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to reduce the skew from the bot visits as much as possible – without losing the benefit of indexing. That done, you’ll begin to present your analytics whizzes, and particularly your customers, with a more accurate, bona fide picture of your site’s overall relevancy.

Let the experts handle it for you

There are a number of ways to complete the mission. You can adjust your analytics package to filter out IP addresses from which these bots are coming, or you can use an identifying string to see who they are and where they’re from before deciding to block them or let them onboard (more on these processes in another upcoming post – stay tuned).

iAPPS, with the launch of Analyzer in version 4.6 – the newest version of our WEM suite – is approaching the bot quandary in a really innovative way for its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) customers. iAPPS developers are actually implementing rigorous methods to keep the wrong bots from being counted, behind the scenes, for all hosted customers. It’s a pretty gutsy move, especially considering that, so far, this whole “robot relevancy” idea isn’t very widely understood.

Case in point: once those visits stop being counted, customer traffic numbers are almost certainly going to decline – and might decline significantly. The move also means taking on a long-term level of support – in addition to the already comprehensive level the company offers its SaaS customers – with the need to constantly update options, IP addresses, etc.

“Not a problem,” says Anthony Wilson, Bridgeline’s Vice President of Delivery. “The quality and level of support we offer our SaaS customers is already top-notch, and we’re ready to take this on. After all, we’re the experts. This type of support is exactly what our customers deserve.”

Coming soon: Search and Destroy

Stay tuned for another post about the bot quandary, where I’ll discuss more options for reducing the skew in your analytics using Analyzer.