Business Catalyst Blog

Last month, we introduced Australian BC Partners to the Google Engage program for agencies - a free training program that helps web designers, web developers and digital marketers just like you master AdWords and other Google products, so that you can help your clients and customers succeed online.

One of the great benefits of signing up for Engage is access to exclusive Engage Bootcamp training events. You can view the full schedule of upcoming events here.

As Business Catalyst Partners and Google Engage members, you'll receive a massive discount on the ticket price for Engage Bootcamp events.

Join today

It only takes 5 minutes, and it's free - www.google.com.au/ads/engage/

The regular approval process can take 3 - 5 days, however Adobe Business Catalyst customers (that’s you) will receive expedited processing of their application within 24 hours.

Once registered and approved, simply visit this page to view and register for upcoming Engage Bootcamp events, and you'll instantly receive your exclusive discount.

 

We recommend that all Australian Partners take advantage of this exciting program from Google. So make sure you register and book your spot at an Engage Bootcamp event today.

We're also working with the Google team worldwide to roll this partnership out across regions such as the US, so stay tuned!
The Adobe Business Catalyst Team

As part of our constant work to update and improve our systems, we are announcing two scheduled updates for Thursday, 24th of January and Friday, 26th of January.

The time for the updates is as follows:

• Maintenance Start time Thursday, 24-01-2013 20:00 AEDT (GMT +11)
• Maintenance End time Thursday, 24-01-2013 21:00 AEDT (GMT +11)
• Maintenance Start time Friday, 25-01-2013 20:00 AEDT (GMT +11)
• Maintenance End time Friday, 25-01-2013 21:00 AEDT (GMT +11)

Systems or features affected:
We are doing our best to ensure continuity of service, however during the maintenance window customers may experience intermittent degradation of 10-15 mins. for any service if their sites are hosted in our Sydney data center, as well as intermittent degradation of 10-15 mins. only for backend services if their sites are hosted in our New Jersey or Dublin data centers.
 
We sincerely apologize for any inconveniences generated by these service interruptions.

We’re excited to bring you all the details of our first system update for 2013, due go live next week. Our January update includes a bunch of great enhancements, including many of the exciting features you've seen over the past few months in beta, now being ready for everyday use by your clients.

Please take the time to read through the new features, enhancements and relevant documentation below, so you and your clients are prepared and able to take advantage of these new improvements. For a more technical and in-depth list of features/bugs being delivered, read the release notes post on the BC Forums.

New feature highlights

A new, persistent navigation ribbon

We’ve updated the Admin V3 navigation ribbon for ease-of-use and to make it easier for new users to understand. The new ribbon can persist even when you’re visiting the front-end of your website, and contain the following modes:

• Preview (a new mode, for previewing the front-end of your site)
• Manage (formerly “Site Manager”)
• Content (formerly “Site Editor”)
• Develop (formerly “File Manager”)

As part of this update, we’re also bringing the new “File Manager” out of alpha and renaming it “Develop” mode. In addition to editing your HTML/CSS/JS files via this mode, but you can now also set Page Properties for your site. To navigate to your Partner Portal, simply hover over your site name.

UPDATE: Due to some existing restrictions, in order to make the navigation ribbon persistent in front-end, you will need to activate this option from your Partner Portal/Settings tab. Please read more details on this issue in this article on our forum.

A range of Web App enhancements

Based on a lot of valuable feedback from the Partner community, we’ve added several enhancements to our Web Apps feature. As of this system update, you’ll be able to:

• Render a custom page when accessing the root URL of a Web App. For example, if you have a “blog” Web App, the items can be made accessible at /blog/my-blog-post, and you’ll have the ability to customize the /blog page 

• Render Web App items inside a sub-folder, such as /folder/subfolder/webapp-name. For example, you could have /blog/authors/bogdan (where Bogdan is the Web App item name)

• Instruct BC to not display or index the Web App items of a specific Web App. Today, all Web App item’s URLs can be indexed by search engines. For example, /states/california should throw a 4040 page

Stay tuned for more exciting Web App updates in the near future.  

Features moving out of beta

Email marketing list filtering

We’re bringing this great feature out of beta, while introducing a range of new list filters. For full details on this feature, see our previous release notes.

Inventory control for products

After extensive testing and integrating the great feedback from the Partner community, we’re finally bringing Product Inventory Control out of beta.

For full details on this feature, please refer to this forum article.

SEO Metadata for pages

With this upcoming system update, we’re also bringing our enhanced SEO Metadata tool out of beta. We'll automatically enable the new interface for all sites that don't require migration and newly created sites. If you don't see the new interface, you need to manually run the migration process by visiting Site Settings > Beta Features > SEO Page Interface, and clicking “Go to the migration page”. Read more about this feature here.

Other improvements/enhancements

Admin V3 default for all Partners and UI improvements

Beginning with this release, we’ll be making Admin V3 the default user interface for all Partners, with the ability to switch back to the older V2 interface from the User Details dropdown menu.

We’re giving you 3 months to train and make sure your clients are migrated over to using the new V3 Admin interface, before making it the default interface for all users starting with our April/early-May system update.

You'll notice the team have made a great deal of minor enhancements across the board inside Admin V3 - including tweaks to UI spacing, list views and persistence when switching between an item's detailed view and back to a list view. For example, if you switching back from editing a product to the Products list view, the Admin will now remember the page of products you were viewing.

Streamlined email marketing editing experience

In line with our on-going beta development of the email marketing editing experience, with this system update you’ll notice that we've introduced a new editor and also moved the “Subject” field to the “Content” step of the wizard, for easier reference and editing.

We've also integrated the fantastic Redactor editor in place of our existing WYSIWYG editor, for editing Email Campaign content. If you've enabled the "Visual, in-context editing" beta feature via Site Settings > Beta Features, you'll be able to see the new editor in action. We're planning to roll this change out across all sections of Business Catalyst in our coming updates.

SPAM and Security improvements

With this update, we're updating our SPAM management feature to not send comment workflow emails when a comment is marked as SPAM - keeping your inbox clean.

We're also turning on our Secure Redirect feature for all websites, to ensure a secure experience for your website and it's visitors. If you would like to redirect visitors to external websites from your site, you should add them under Site Settings > Secure Domain Redirection.

 

We hope that you and your clients love this month’s system update. Stay tuned for even more product news in the near future via the BC Blog.

BC Sandpile is a weekly online meeting run by Business Catalyst Partners for the purpose of sharing ideas, best practices, and networking.

Weekly Day/Time:

• San Francisco: Tuesdays, 5pm (all times adjusted in relation to this time)
• New York City: Tuesdays, 8pm
• London: Wednesdays, 1am
• Sydney: Wednesdays, 12pm

January 8th (9th in AUS):
Madonna C. Mendoza from Konsum Technologies will walk us through a cloud-based Hotel Management System integrated into Adobe Business Catalyst using API.
http://www.bcsandpile.com/_blog/Meeting_Chalkboard/post/api-case-study-madonna-c-mendoza/

January 15th (16th in AUS):
Scott Thomas and Kristen Lindsey from Apokrisis LLC will provide an overview of implementing a content-centric SEO marketing strategy for Business Catalyst clients.
http://www.bcsandpile.com/_blog/Meeting_Chalkboard/post/content-centric-seo-marketing-strategy/

January 22nd (23rd in AUS):
Paul Ridoutt from The Bowery will describe the planning and strategy behind one of their recently launched ecommerce projects.
http://www.bcsandpile.com/_blog/Meeting_Chalkboard/post/ecommerce-case-study-paul-ridoutt/

January 29th (30th in AUS):
Brett Stockley from Pretty Pollution joins the Sandpile again to talk about ways they use Business Catalyst to achieve great results for their clients.
http://www.bcsandpile.com/_blog/Meeting_Chalkboard/post/marketing-brett-stockley/

Full schedule: http://www.bcsandpile.com/_blog/Meeting_Chalkboard/

Our final episode for 2012. Get a recap of our recent end-of-year Partner events, learn about the new businesscatalyst.com site, and hear a handy business tip from Brendon O'Sullivan!

Listen to this month's podcast:

Simply click the play button below to stream the podcast via your browser.

player

Alternatively, you can download the podcast in .mp3 format for offline listening.

To subscribe and receive the BC Podcast each month, you can find us on the iTunes store here or by simply searching "BC Podcast" from iTunes.

In December's Episode :

• Check out the photos from our end-of-year Partner events
  
• Learn about the relaunched businesscatalyst.com website
• Hear some great advice from Partner Brendon O'Sullivan
  • Listen to the full interview on the BC Evangelist blog

See you in 2013!
Jackson.

We've just wrapped up series of great end-of-year BC Partner parties across the globe. A big thanks to everyone who was able to make it their nearest event, and to the Partners who helped in organizing these parties.

There were a total of 7 sponsored events, and you can view some fantastic photos from them by clicking the links below. If you took any photos yourself or held your own event, make sure you share a link in the comments section below.

Thanks, and happy holidays!
Jackson.

Chicago		Sydney (plus, a 2nd album)
New England		Melbourne
Denver		St Louis
Albuquerque

 

It's that time of year again and in order to give our Support team a well-deserved rest, we'll be taking a short break over the holiday season. Please find our team's availability during the holiday period outlined in the table below.

On those days marked as "emergencies/incidents only", we'll have an on-call team member available in the unlikely event of a service outage or emergency issue. From December 27-31 support will be available as per usual, however we'll have a smaller skeleton team online as we expect an overall lower volume of traffic.

December 25	Emergencies/incidents only
December 26	Emergencies/incidents only
December 27	Limited coverage
December 28	Limited coverage
December 29	Limited coverage
December 30	Limited coverage
December 31	Emergencies/incidents only
January 1	Emergencies/incidents only
January 2	Emergencies/incidents only

Up until December 24, and from January 3 onwards, Support will be fully operational and available via all channels. Thank you for all of your support during 2012, it's been an exciting year and we've achieved a lot as a Support organization.

Here's to an amazing 2013!
Vlad

Since launching the Zero To Hero program on October 16th, over 1,500 Partners have started their journey through this on-demand, free training resource.

This month, the folks at BC Gurus have added two great new courses to the Zero To Hero line-up - CRM and Reporting & Analytics.

There's also an exciting announcement and opportunity for all Partners to receive 3 months of free BC hosting upon graduating from the program.

For all the details, head on over to the BC Gurus blog

Here at Business Catalyst, we're always looking for new ways to help our Partners succeed. One fantastic way you can expand your business scope and generate on-going, recurring revenue is by offering clients additional services such as search engine optimization and online advertising.

With that in mind, we've been working with the folks at Google to bring their great Engage for Agencies program to BC Partners in Australia. If you're a web or digital agency looking to grow your business, we recommend that you sign up and take advantage of the program.

What is Google Engage?

Google Engage is a free agency training program that helps web designers, web developers and digital marketers just like you master AdWords and other Google products, so that you can help your clients and customers succeed online.

Join today

It only takes 5 minutes, and it's free - www.google.com.au/ads/engage/

The regular approval process can take 3 - 5 days, however Adobe Business Catalyst customers (that’s you) will receive expedited processing of their application within 24 hours.

Benefits of Engage

• Access to exclusive Engage master class and Engage Bootcamp training events
• Incentives for your new AdWords customers
• Dedicated AdWords campaign set-up phone support
• Online training, sales and marketing tips, and much more
• Check out the full list of benefits here

BC + Google Engage success story - Katherine Anderson, Sirocco Web Design

How long have you been an Adobe customer?
We started our Business and purchased our first Adobe Product, ‘Photoshop’ in 1997 to design Video graphics and VHS covers and this began our love affair with Adobe Products.

In 2010 we found Adobe Business Catalyst when researching integrated Content Management Systems for our clients. Once we saw the features of BC we became instantly hooked, bypassing the free trial and signing up to become a Certified Premium Partner. Since then BC has transformed our business by allowing us to offer a full suite of integrated online business solutions to our growing clientele.

Why did you join Engage? How long have you been a member?
We have always been intrigued with SEO and wanted our websites to be successful and rank well.  This lead us to Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Optimization as ways to further saturate the market and create brand awareness for our clients.

I had just become individually certified for Google Adwords in 2011 when we received an invitation from Lucinda Barlow, Head of Marketing at Google, to join the ‘Google Engage for Agencies’ program.  The program offered Adwords training, incentives, campaign setup services and marketing tools. We quickly joined and have attended every Sydney Engage event for the last 18 months.

Since then we have become Company Certified for Google Adwords and have become more dedicated and passionate about SEO, SEM and SMO.

What kind of agency do you have and what is your service offering?
Our Business has been running since 1997 and grown from a Video Production Agency to a full-service Graphic Design Studio, to now specializing in Online Business Design, Marketing and Consulting.

Having been in the industry for over 15 years we’ve experienced all aspects of offline marketing and are now focusing more online, with conversion optimizing, digital advertising strategies and evaluating ROI.

Adobe Business Catalyst is our CMS of choice and with Google as our online marketing partner we are able to offer our clients a complete online marketing solution.

What do you get out of being in Engage? What do you like most?
The Engage training events are like a ‘live resource library’ where we are able to have all our questions answered by actual Googlers and network with agency professionals. Getting the very latest, cutting edge information on product advancements, search tips and tricks, and learning how other agencies leverage online marketing has been invaluable.

Google Engage has trained us in all aspects of Adwords Search and Display, Analytics, Google+, Mobile and Video Advertising, Device Usage and Statistics, the Future of Digital Marketing and the full suite of Google products that we now use.

Being able to get advice from Google trainers like David Booth, Corey Koberg and Chris Skinner, who also run their own successful Online Agencies, has been inspirational.

The Engage Portal provides us with free certification for Adwords Courses, $100 promotional codes for our new Adwords customers, marketing tools and education material plus a fantastic pitch library to help sell Google products to our clients and create extra revenue for our business.

How has Engage helped your business change?
Google Engage has allowed us to further leverage SEO for our clients by adding SEM and SMO packages to saturate search results. We now work on providing return-on-investment statistics for marketing spend and use conversion tracking to measure and report on the success of online and offline campaigns.

Our Agency is also working on a white label solution to provide SEO services to other Business Catalyst Partners, providing on-page, off-page, local, SEM and SMO services to their customers. This allows us to offer our services as an SEO affiliate, working side-by-side with BC Partners to help their clients achieve their online marketing goals.

 

Get started with Google Engage by registering at www.google.com.au/ads/engage/

Already a member of Engage? Check out the new Pitch Deck Library for topic-specific, cusomisable, downloadable powerpoint templates that are perfect for client meetings.

We'll be continuing to work with the team at Google Engage in the coming months, so stay tuned!
The Adobe Business Catalyst Team