I have my own reservations about how one of the companies (I work for more than one under the same individual owner…dead giveaway on my identity now) is leveraging Compendium as a solution to increase sales. I can also say, being the single IT person for said entity(ies), that I believe that our type of business may be better served using WordPress, given the media capabilities that Compendium’s interface tends to lack in this stage of its development. Make no mistake, Compendium’s blog is a complete and very well-working solution. They will continue to make improvements and may very well come up with a better product that WordPress currently is (cliche: only time will tell…). It just takes time and effort. Please read on…

Some may have already written me off or head that I’ve said things that I really haven’t, but I actually think that Compendium has a great deal to offer businesses that WANT to get their name out there…but don’t know how, and may need a bit of handholding. Deny it all you want, but the sooner people admit when they need help, the greater the things are that they will achieve. There’s no shame in it, it’s called “learning”.

One year, in my opinion, is not a long enough time to determine whether or not a blog will help you. It takes a little while to move up in the page rankings. If you only try it for a year, then you didn’t give it enough time, period. Two years, minimum. After that period, if still nothing, then it’s decision time.

I can also say that they have made GREAT strides in the past two years regarding, especially, sharing through several different social media outlets. That was an issue I took up with them early into our initial contract period a couple years back. Quite possibly the most important aspect of having a blog: interlacing with other methods of communication to “get the word out” across several popular mediums to create a cohesive “meshed” environment of “buzz” on your product/service.

While I may not believe that it’s the best solution for MY company, I WILL respect the final decision of the individual who makes such a choice. And, in my (what?) free time, even write a blog every once in a while. I am not one of the main bloggers. We write at least once a day every week. Having a blog HAS increased visitors, there’s no denying that.

In many situations, a blog may increase site visits but not increase clients/customers/purchases for a business. This could also be because of general product interest or that business’ presentation…or lack thereof. You need to know your market, which is not Compendium’s responsibility. Compendium, as a company, DOES know their market, which is why they have who they do on their client list.

On the topic of using the compendiumblog.com name, most of what was said was untrue, as you can simply configure a CNAME record to forward to them and they take care of the rest. And, as Chris said, most of their client base uses this method, including those that I’ve spoken with. Without any issues, I might add.

As for the export…I’m not sure that it is their responsibility to provide a WordPress-compatible export of your blogs. The content that is “yours” is the blog’s intellectual content, the writing itself, not it’s ability to be transferred to another platform.

If you want to transfer to another blogging platform, that’s fine, but you need to be willing to do the legwork. That’s usually where people like myself come in….yay. We thank you for the, er….opportunity.

Some of the keywords (same as tags, for WP and other blog platform users) that are provided or suggested MAY seem to be relatively useless to some. (Queue Lee Corso: “Not so fast my friend!!!”) Fortunately, those keywords/tags that you don’t initially think will help COULD end up filling the gaps on searchers you may otherwise miss. Not every keyword is going to get the same number of searches. That would be, well, weird….

Just outright bashing someone’s profession/service isn’t the way to have an “open” discussion, You’ll get about as much done as our nation’s capitol does.

For anyone to think of suggesting “grey/black-hat”, purposeful manipulation is simply irresponsible and inaccurate ( I refrained from using other words that might sound more “lawyer-like”, and you also don’t clearly know what “black-hat” means…). While I may have reservations, I would certainly never make such public allegations about someone’s product.

Compendium’s blogs are only meant to use search engines in the manner that they were, honestly, meant to be used in the first place. If Google wants to change their algorithms, they have every right to do so, but it won’t kill someone’s blog/website overnight like you may be led to believe by other posters. Let’s stick to facts.

In most cases, even I can get extremely “passionate” about what I am saying, but I do, at the same time, realize reality. If I had only one thing to say, it would be: if this helps our business in the near future, then I am all for it, as long as the costs are justified.

From what I understand, the decision has been made for us to continue for another year, and I sincerely hope that it all works out, and look forward to the advantages that a hosted blog can add to our business.

I thought we did due diligence, but it wasn’t until we’d signed the contract that I saw that its success relies entirely on searches for unrealistically narrow and obscure search terms.

Can Compendium increase search rankings for those terms? You betcha. Does that turn into leads, site visits, or sales results by any other measure? Absolutely not.

Our own efforts of posting articles on free PR sites and other news outlets and our own social networking did much more to move us up in search rankings than any Compendium posts.

We have since moved to WordPress for a fraction of the cost.

The truly unfortunate part of this review, besides the lack of return on our original investment, is the fact that the sales person for Compendium told us that we could assume the URL and not have to do anything technically to switch to another platform if we choose to do so down the road. This was cerainly not true. In the end, Compendium Blogware exported our content into an XML file that was not WordPress compatible and we are spending a few hundred dollars and 2 weeks to convert it so that we can import our content to the new WordPress blog.

Our company is fairly technical and was able to find the solution and right the ship. Some other businesses may not be in the same position.

In conclusion, think twice before you pull the trigger on a blog platform, especially once that is a bit more expensive such as Compendium. You may be switching later and incurring more cost.

At the end of the day, everyone is engaged in a cat and mouse game with the search engines. We might speculate that potential customers will search for a variety of specific keywords. If we can maintain fresh versions of content that match those keywords, customers will find us. If our content grows stale or doesn’t match the words, we will slip down in the rankings.

The question is how much can you automate the process of building “fresh versions of content.” Certainly, if you try to generate all your content without any human editing, you are trying to game the system. If you only write articles by hand and use no automation, you’re probably never going to make it to the top.

Every blog is somewhere along this spectrum, from 100% human to 100% automated. Somewhere along this line, you cross into black hat territory. I don’t know where Compendium is, but their strategy seems to be based on knowing where the line is and standing closer than others. It will be exciting to see how they grow and where they go next.

…After reading that post that he linked to, I would still disagree.

“Anon” put: “For what they charge to get a blog with 25 keywords, you could have a WordPress blog with all of the tags and seo modules, set-up with one of thousands of themes, unlimited categories that you use keywords for AND a maintenance contract with your blog set-up provider to help you service it for the next year. You can even set-up WordPress so it has an administration layer for approvals.”

…From what I have seen, read and heard he is dead on. In the Compendium blog post that Doug links to, some of the main points are: “customization of theme, good hosting, tracking/reporting, installation, interface”.

Well Going back to what “anon” said for what they charge – you could easily get all of that and more with a smaller design firm. Compendium argues that all of there services will not take away time for your team, well you are paying Compendium to do all of that (And from what I heard it is a pretty penny). So regardless, you would be paying someone to do it. So why spend 10X what you could and not just get someone that has WordPress experience to do it.

I just still don’t see the benefits of Compendium verse just WordPress. I would defiantly like to read more somewhere, though.

I am continuing to pursue due diligence on Compendium, because…it’s really hard to commit to an annual contract for something you can’t even try out for yourself. Not even for a week or a month! And, to migrate from WordPress which is free to Compendium which charges a alot of money is a BIG step.

As for their results…Brownies in a B2C ecommerce environment is great, but what about the much harder task of demonstrating authority and explaining an intangible online? I would love it if any current Compendium users that work in a B2B service oriented company contacted me with their feedback. (Find it at my url: incitrio dot com)

google specifically states that blogs typically have duplicate content as many blogs are structured with overlapping categories. Specifically, blogs have archives so there are “categories” for each month. There is another one for recent. So most blogs would have july postings under recent and under july 2009 category.

Many blogs also list 20-30 static categories and many of their articles can fit under more than one category.

Additionally, many ecommerce sites can have multiple categories.

We sell appliances. Each dishwasher is available in multiple colors, so each one can have four nearly identical pages.

There is also a lot of duplication in all ecommerce sites, especially when you have thousands of items.

Ecommerce sites create numerous categories to appeal to different people. Many categories overlap or are identical.

Google has concerns when you auto generate thousands of “categories” in order to manipulate google. If compendium was to have 9000 categories, it would be of no use to the user and google would have an issue with it.

check out http://
shop.us-appliance.com/1/3/index1.html

7555 “categories” generated by software (baynote systems) and the “content’ for each category was added, content was also generated programatically to fool google.

I can answer your questions:
1. Not true – content always is created and owned by our clients. We have db replication, backups as well as off-site disaster recovery to ensure data is not lost. We also have an API, so content can be retrieved whenever a client wishes.

2. The list is too long, from service, support, enterprise functionality, cloudbursting, etc. Some of it is detailed in this post: http://is.gd/ltr4

3. We see more advantages to a subdomain than disadvantages. You don’t get penalized for having a subdomain but it does allow you to both ‘latch’ onto the reputation of your domain AND measure the impact of your blogging separately.

You should sign up for a demo to get fully informed!

1. Someone mentioned something to the effect of the clients content is owned by Compendium, so here’s question #1: If at a point in time, a Compendium client loses their budget for blogging, and they want to move to a Blogger or WordPress blog, is the content theirs or is it Compendium’s?

2. Why Compendium vs. WordPress vs. Blogger vs. Joomla?

3. Compendium blogs appear to be a separate component from the websites that they are displayed on. If the website that it is on has a search engine, is the blog content searchable from that search engine? If not, isn’t this a disadvantage?

Remember “A prophet is without honor only in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own home.” I think this is because your home town knows you best, is looking at your company more closely and is in a better position to give you honest feedback before others that aren’t as familiar with your company.

We both share the goal of Indianapolis being a midwest tech/web mecca. I think we also agree that in order to get there we need to hold each other to high standards.