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Σάββατο, 19 Δεκεμβρίου 2009 Integrating a blog into Classic ASP or legacy sites By goodedesign @ 8:56 πμ :: 5128 Views :: 0 Comments Integrating a blog into your site may be a great way to create usable, searchable content to help your search engine placement. By integrating a blog on your site, you will create a venue where you can repurpose emails, memos & other communications for site integration. How to use a blog to benefit your site: First, we recommend having a team of folks who are already writing emails, memos & other forms of communication. Blog posts can be edited content from internal memos or emails to clients & customers. Any communication where keywords are used or your specifically marketing your products & services with keyword-rich information should be considered for a blog post. Assign your team of folks to simply forward or archive a copy of content to be considered for a blog post. Utilizing a simple outlook folder can allow you to harvest a great pool from which a selection is made. Next, you will want to have one of more of your team or close out the end of their week by choosing one email per team member to be edited & included on your site's blog. Selections can be chosen for any number of reasons; the most important item to consider is the keyword content! Try to select content which has a variety of keywords which your company is targeting & may require less editing. The next step is to have someone edit the content to remove contact information, confidential information or anything that may limit the focus of the content. This posting is a great example! We spent a little time deleting & rewriting the content of a client email to create this Search Engine Friendly posting. Try to put the keywords into the title & first few lines of the posting as you will also want to have this information show up on other pages of your site by dynamically calling the title & first few lines of new postings to your home page or other pages. Finally, spell check & proof read your content. Nothing is worse than having blatant "speeling erorrs" in your text (LOL)! Now that you're finished and you've corrected the words to read: "spelling errors," it's time to post your content… You'll need a blog or article system on your site! WordPress WordPress is a great choice for a blog on PHP based websites. The WYSIWYG editor is user friendly & popular among web developers. DotNetNuke's Core Blog Module DotNetNuke (DNN) has a very full-featured blog module. There are also a broad selection of third-party blog modules for DNN as well as for other Content Management systems such as Joomla, Drupal & Plone (to mention a few). We recommend DotNetNuke & Joomla above most other CMS Systems. Finally, the best way to integrate a blog into your site is to have it be a small part of your online marketing picture! Utilize a broad range of online services such as external blogs, social media, forums & search engine marketing efforts to bring as much attention to your site and blog postings as possible. Social Media: The idea behind companies using social media is about buzz. There's a ton of people out there who will change purchasing decisions or product selection based on buzz. Though buzz is not the ONLY answer to help your site's reach, it's certainly one of the fastest growing ways to create web traffic and convert clicks to purchases. The smorgasbord of social media offers a great deal of free or inexpensive ways to generate buzz around your products, services or business as a whole. We've frequently told some people their first foray into the web should be with a blog, facebook & twitter. For ColorID, it's simply a logical step to begin integrating these tools into your current online presence. Your website & social media should be interlaced on various levels! Take your Re-Carding service as an example. I'm not sure what level of importance it has within the overall profit generation of ColorID. By simply posting a quick status update or writing a 2 paragraph note on Facebook and a small article on your future blog, you could give that service a touch larger footprint in your overall marketing of the CID site! The same thing goes with obvious revenue generators like ID Printers, Software & Service packages. By utilizing the text, communication & information you're ALREADY sending out on a daily basis in email & memos... you could simply re-post the same information in part or whole on one of these locations to create more buzz around that area of business. In fact... I will LIKELY reuse this edited email on my site as a buzz generation for my company and even post links from my post to YOUR site. How's that for putting your money where your mouth is!?!?! At this point with the economy turning up, this is the PERFECT time to begin utilizing lots of the free & inexpensive options for online marketing. I firmly believe that online marketing, search engine optimization & marketing are 80% work you're already doing. It just needs to be repurposed. Below are some ideas that you should / could consider to implement over time after the blog project is completed: Facebook FB is one of the fastest growing web communities. I believe it has outpaced MySpace and is probably now the largest online social media in the world... If current web stats are true on Wikipedia, it is a tie with MySpace or just edged ahead. Benefits of Facebook online TARGETED ad placement trackable, budget minded ad campaigns the ability to have a captive, or at least more targeted audience people receive updates as often as you dole them out the ability to have multiple folks admin the FB component of your biz Facebook has a vault of built in features: photos, notes/blog posts, video sharing/hosting, as well as a dev community building lots of new features all the time link sharing the ability to have an online conversation. open to the public ability to restrict access by various levels ability to create sub group and related FB pages and have all linked together Twitter: A great way to have an alternative "following," headlines that post to your site (fairly simple installation), and can post to your FB or myspace as well... plus, folks can subscribe to your twitter and receive your updates on their phones, mobile devices & feed readers as well... it's likely a small niche audience that may have some service needs! additionally, it is a way to send out quick post links and have it hit to your FB and other media as well as your site. Also a quick way to send short blasts (140 characters or less) to folks who need to know. (Utilize http://www.tinyurl.com with Twitter to become more powerful) TinyURL.com This will be beneficial as you begin using FB and Twitter like status updates to post links to articles, blogs or other online posts of interest. External blogs I still believe that the external blog can be and is an untapped behemoth of possibility. If 4 of your key folks were simply tasked to post 1 re-purposed email per week, you guys would have approximately 200 unique posts this year that could add buzz around your topic and site! To be sure, I know not everyone has loads of free time to post emails as articles... but they could easily have Goode Design or task a single person in the office with these emails and have THAT person post them. Youtube This could be useful in the future to post useful videos, commercial-like vids, how-to's, instructionals & tutorials for your clients. MySpace Not to be ignored, but it has been channeled toward a younger, teenage market. Wikipedia Your team could contribute various bits of information regarding your industry to information found in Wikipedia. Wikipedia frequently comes up as a top result with search. The tricky part is contributing and carefully placing information about your company so that it isn't SPAMMISH. The Future: In the not to distant future, these strides will likely lead us to building the next version of your site as a fully content-managed site in DotNetNuke or with ASPdotNetStoreFront. However, currently your classic ASP or legacy site could attract far more attention online with just a little bit of development, adding a new blog & tasking your team to contribute to your site's content.

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