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.

I wrote another post on how to track multiple authors in WordPress with Google Analytics once before, but got it wrong! Outside the WordPress Loop, you’re unable to capture the author names so the code did not work.

Sorry for the fail.

I’ve done some additional digging and found out how to do it smarter with multiple Google Analytics profiles. (Quite honestly – this is when you come to love professional analytics packages like Webtrends!)

Step 1: Add a Profile to an Existing Domain

The first step is to add an additional profile to your current domain. This is an option that most people aren’t familiar with but works perfectly for this type of scenario.

Step 2: Add an Include Filter to the New Author Profile

You’ll want to only measure page views tracked by authors in this profile, so add a filter for the subdirectory /author/. One note on this – I had to make “that contain” as the operator. Google’s instructions call for a ^ before the folder. In fact, you can’t write an ^ into the field!

Step 3: Add an Exclude Filter to your Primary Profile

You won’t want to actually track all the extra pageviews by author in your original Profile, so add a filter to your original profile to exclude the subdirectory /by-author/.

Step 4: Add a Loop in the Footer Script

Within your existing Google Analytics tracking and below your current trackPageView line, add the following loop in your footer theme file:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
var authorTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxxxx-x");
authorTracker._trackPageview("/by-author/<? echo the_author(); ?>");
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<?php endif; ?>

This will capture all of your tracking, by author, in a second profile for your domain. By excluding this tracking from your primary profile, you don’t add additional unnecessary pageviews. Keep in mind that if you have a home page with 6 posts, you’ll track 6 pageviews with this code – one for each post, tracked by author.

Here’s how the Author Tracking will look in that specific profile:

If you’ve accomplished this in a different way, I’m open to additional ways to track the author information! Since my Adsense revenue is associated with the profile, I can even see which authors are generating the most ad revenue .

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.

Sometimes you have to get back to basics when you’re providing some information to a company. I’m assisting a company with their online marketing and they need to store documents for their clients to download. WordPress has a fairly robust Media Library function so you can upload a file once, and then search and insert the link into other content areas.

Here’s how to upload a PDF and insert it into your page or post.

The caveat to this is that, if you’re going to provide information to your prospects or customers in the form of downloads, be sure to have them register for the information first. One simple solution for this is embedding a registration form into the pages that delivers an auto-response email with the valid download link.

This can be accomplished by installing a WordPress form Plugin or by embedding a form using Formspring.