Marketing Technology Blog

Most modern websites utilize a CMS (Content Management System) to allow the website administrators to make changes, post content, and manage the website. This is in contrast the old days of calling your design agency to get changes made, which could get very expensive and caused delays in updates. While website management was previously the realm only of highly skilled individuals (sometimes called “webmasters”), a CMS opens up control to non-technical members of an organization, such as the marketing director, administrative assistant, or even the CEO.

At SpinWeb, we create sites on the Accrisoft Freedom platform. Freedom is a CMS that is a bit unique and has some very nice benefits over some of the other players. Indianapolis seems to be a Wordpress town and I see a lot of companies using it as a website platform. There is nothing wrong with Wordpress and in fact my own personal blog and speaking site is built on Wordpress. However, Freedom has some distinct advantages when it comes to usability, depth of features, and support. I enjoy the fact that we are unique and utilize Freedom as our platform of choice, especially for larger organizations that demand more than the open-source platforms can typically provide.

A Content Management System with Support

One nice thing about Freedom is that it is fully supported and maintained by Accrisoft. There is a dedicated development team that is getting paid to create new features, extend existing modules. and turn customer feedback into a platform that empowers organizations to communicate online. Accrisoft is a great company and I have had many great conversations with CEO Jeff Kline about the future of the platform and about online business in general.

Freedom’s codebase is pushed out from a central server that ensures that every install is consistent. With many open source platforms, the typical model is to set up 50+ different websites that are all using different plug-ins, versions, and hacks which then becomes a nightmare to maintain as an agency. Freedom allows SpinWeb to support and maintain an indefinite number of websites without worrying about inconsistencies between them. Because all the software is hosted in the cloud, our clients have no need to worry about installing software on their computers. They can simply log in and go to work. Additionally, we can upgrade our clients’ websites in a matter of minutes when new versions of Freedom are released.

Outstanding User Interface

Freedom also has an excellent user interface. While some of the open source platforms can be confusing to end users, Freedom presents a clean, simple interface that makes it very easy for non-technical people to manage their websites.

Extensible Modules for Email, Forms, E-commerce and More

Freedom provides a number of powerful modules that integrate seamlessly into other parts of the website. For example, Freedom includes a built-in Email Marketing module, which gives website owners a complete private Email Marketing solution built right into the website. It includes templates, scheduling, subscriber management, and delivery statistics built right in. It also pulls data from other modules so that marketers can send campaigns to lists generated from other parts of the site, such as event registrations.

The Forms module in Freedom is extremely powerful and rivals many of the standalone form builders available today. With Freedom, non-technical website administrators can build complex (or simple) forms for applications, event registrations, donations, and lead capture all with a few clicks. That form data can then be processed and exported in a variety of ways or even integrated into the shopping cart for advanced e-commerce applications.

The built in shopping cart in Freedom also allows businesses to deploy an integrated e-commerce solution on their websites and sell products with minimal effort. This can also extend to event registrations, allowing organizations to sell registrations to events and accept credit card or e-check payments online.

Freedom has built-in modules for Blogs, Event Calendars, Press Releases, Podcasts, Forums, Directories, RSS, Affiliate Programs, Billing, and Polls, to name just a few of the other options in the system. Additionally, most modules can integrate with the leading social networks, which means that website updates can automatically get pushed directly to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Freedom is a very secure system. Not only is it a well-tested and hardened application, but it also has an excellent multi-user management feature, which allows multiple website managers to have different roles and levels of access. It also has a Workflow module, which allows editors to approve or reject changes before they go live.

Membership Organization Sites

I would be remiss if I did not also highlight Freedom’s excellent solution for member-based organizations, such as associations. Freedom’s Membership module allows member-based groups to manage a complete database of members and allow those members to maintain their accounts and make updates via the web. The module also allows member billing, CRM, marketing, and communication. Businesses can also use it as a customer database and in fact SpinWeb’s entire client database and billing system is managed via Freedom, complete with email invoicing, recurring billing, and online payments.

As you can see, one huge advantage to using Freedom is that everything is in one place. Before working with us, many of our clients were using different tools for email marketing, e-commerce, blogging, event registration, web content, and membership management. After switching to Freedom, they love the ease of use and efficiency (not to mention the cost savings) of having everything in one place.

Search Engine Optimized Content Management System

Freedom is also very search engine friendly. Freedom-based websites use “HURLs” (Human-readable URLs) which means that content can be indexed by search engines much more easily. HURLs help boost a website’s rankings in search engines and also look much better to humans than the typical database-driven URLs in many other systems. The HURLs in Freedom are completely customizable.

As an authorized Accrisoft Solution Provider, SpinWeb is able to deploy websites extremely quickly and with consistent quality every time due to our standardization on Freedom. Our clients love the ease of use, powerful integration, and level of control that they now have when managing their websites.

If you haven’t seen Freedom in action before, let me know and I would be happy to provide you with a demo.

What do the Washington Post, BBC News, and New York Times have in common? They’re enriching the content presentation for links on their websites, using a tool called Apture. Rather than a simple static text link, Apture links trigger a pop-up window on mouse over that can display a wide variety of contextually related content.

On the publishing side, Apture makes it very easy for authors to find, link to, and display related content in their blog posts. Simply highlight the text you want to link, and with one click, the Apture plugin – which is available on just about any popular online publishing platform – searches the internet for a variety of different forms of contextually related content, and turns your text into a slick, helpful rich media link.

One of the benefits to your readers is quick access to additional bits of information. Mousing over links will display a little pop-up window that shows content directly related to the term. This could be a YouTube video, a Wikipedia entry, or even real-time Twitter search results.

Ordinarily, these links might take users away from your post, even if they just wanted to find a quick bit of information. Instead of potentially sending your user to another site, Apture quickly and efficiently displays the content the user might be interested in exploring, and in effect, tries to address their interest or their inquiry within your post itself.

The idea behind Apture is to make your posts more sticky, and should, theoretically, increase time on site – a critical engagement metric for many brand marketers.

And for all the analytics junkies out there, you can track the links through Apture’s analytics service in the paid version. Note that while the publishing platform plugins for Apture generate links that Google sees as regular old links, the browser plugin does not produce links that are recognizable by search engines.

We are using the WordPress version of Apture on the current iteration of our blog, and as a company that just makes content – all day, every day – so far, we really like it.  All of our content producers have had positive things to say. It helps make for interesting and relevant posts, and helps out quite a bit with generating new content ideas – and making the ideas we already have more engaging to the user.

Try out a demo of Apture on their site – it makes making the content fun, and your blog more effective.

If you have an existing blog, chances are that you have search engine authority built to that domain or subdomain. Typically, companies simply start a new blog and abandon their old one. If your old content is lost, this could be a huge loss in momentum.

In order to keep search engine authority, here’s how to migrate to a new blogging platform:

1. Export your old blog content and Import them into your new blogging platform. Even if you do this manually, that’s better than starting with no content.
2. Write 301 redirects from the old blog post URLs to the new blog post URLs. Some platforms have redirection modules or plugins to make this easier.
3. Write a redirect from the old blog RSS feed to the new blog RSS feed. I would recommend using Feedburner so that you can update the feed without interruption in the future (Although I do wish someone would come out with an alternative to Feedburner! It’s terrible).
4. If you’re moving domains or subdomains, it’s still possible to redirect to the new blog address. UPDATED: I’ve noticed that clients lose some of their ranking when doing subdomains but they’re sometimes able to bounce back quickly. Changing domains altogether can have a drastic impact. I would try to avoid this at all costs. (Thanks to Jeremy at Slingshot SEO for pushing back on my original wording!)
5. Test many of your old blog URLs and ensure they forward properly.
6. Monitor Google Webmasters, Bing Webmasters and Yahoo! Site Explorer for pages that are not found and correct them. Don’t bother checking every day – it will take a week or two before you’ll see prob
7. Republish your Sitemap and resubmit each time you correct items.
8. If you’re changing your domain or subdomain, the biggest loss you’re going to take are on sites like Technorati, which require that you register your new blog address. They don’t have a means of updating your actual address.

Here’s a screenshot of Google Webmasters and how you can look for 404 Not Found references:

By ensuring your content is properly redirected, not only will you ensure that visitors can still make it to the content they were searching for, you’re also going to generate a lot less 404 Not Found pages. One note on this… give Webmasters a week or two to catch up! After you redirect those bad addresses, it won’t immediately fix them in Webmasters (I’m not sure why!).

On that note, I often find that external sites publish incorrect URLs – so I’ll even redirect those bad URLs properly!

There were times in my career and when I was going to college that I questioned my writing ability. Thankfully, blogging came around and (most) readers lowered their reading standards. Readers are thankfully scanning beyond errors with dangling participles, split infinitives, homonyms, transitive verbs, prepositions, relative pronouns, and just plain dumb spelling errors.

It wasn’t true in the past, but we’re all professional writers now. Not a day goes by that marketers have to write blog posts, press releases, whitepapers, case studies and email! You’re paid to write… are you making these common mistakes?

• Dangling Participles – happen when you write a sentence and a clause in the sentence is related to one that it wasn’t intended for.
• Homonyms – are words that are pronounced the same, spelled differently, and have different meanings. This is probably the most common writing error that I make.
• Split Infinitives – occur when an adverb is placed between the bare infinitive of a verb (ie. to boldly go.
• Transitive Verbs – a verb that requires a subject and an object.
• Prepositions – link nouns, pronouns and phrases to other words in a sentence.
• Relative Pronouns – Relative pronouns are that, who, whom, whose, which, where, when, and why. They are used to join clauses to make a complex sentence.
• Spelling – spellcheck, anyone?

I want to improve my writing each time I sit at the keyboard. I want to learn these nuances of English. I’m fairly certain that I make an error in every other post… perhaps even more. I’d appreciate it if you kept me honest and leave a comment so I don’t embarrass myself as often.

Without further ado, here are the top 50 writing errors (excluding punctuation) that I’ve been guilty of or have identified through other sites. 5 Grammatical Errors that Make You Look Dumb by Brian Clark continues to inspire me!

50 Common Writing Errors

1. Ad or add
2. Adverse or Averse
3. Advice or Advise
4. Affect or Effect
5. Alot or A lot
6. Amoral or Immoral
7. A part or Apart
8. Assure or Ensure or Insure
9. Allusion or Illusion
10. Awhile or A while
11. Centrifugal or Centripetal
12. Cite or Site or Sight
13. Collocated or Colocated
14. Complement or Compliment
15. Comprise or Compose
16. Conscience or Conscious
17. Council or Counsel
18. Definitely
19. Dependent or Dependant
20. Desert or Dessert
21. Disinterested or Uninterested
22. Elicit or Illicit
23. Emberass or Embarrass
24. Entomology or Etymology
25. Enquire or Inquire
26. Ensure or Insure
27. Every day or Everyday
28. Farther or Further
29. Flaunt or Flout
30. Hear vs Here
31. It’s or Its
32. Know or Now
33. Lay or Lie
34. Lets or Let’s
35. Loose or Lose
36. Loser or Looser
37. Militate or Mitigate
38. Payed or Paid
39. Practice or Practise
40. Principle or Principal
41. Regardless or Irrespective
42. Stationery or Stationary
43. Than or Then
44. They’re, Their or There
45. Would of, Should of, Could of or Would’ve, Should’ve, Could’ve
46. Where or Were or We’re
47. Which or That
48. Who or Whom
49. Your or You’re
50. You or I or me

If you’d like to read further, I discovered one of the most comprehensive lists of writing errors at Paul Brians’ website.

I may even pick up the daily calendar: 2010 Common Errors in English Usage Daily Boxed Calendar. This is now on my wishlist!

I’m looking forward to reading the comments. Did I make an error in this post, too?