One of my pet peeves about blogs from creative interactive agencies is that they are often farmed out to prolific professional writers that produce lofty witty commentary on the industry’s latest superstars. Many go to the utmost lengths to attempt to convince you that they are innovative just because they say they are. Albeit impressive, this type of blog is hardly useful for you to quickly gain a sense of who the firm is, what are they working on and if you would actually like working with them. These blogs are also a huge waste of your time if you walk away with nothing new learned.
 

In June we launched an experimental approach to our Silverscape blog. We asked each of 15 relevant contributors to briefly answer the question (similar to twitter) what are you working on and why is it innovative or interesting. This approach, in concert with an automated Twitter announcement of each blog posting, has exponentially improved our qualified site traffic and organic search results.

Free suggestions on producing a blog that will be easy to keep up:

1. Find 15 – 30 valued members of your company to write 1-2 blog entries per month.
2. Suggest content contributors include external links of interest in the topic they are discussing to validate their theories and suggestions
3. Limit word counts to 525 and time spent on blog to 45 minutes
4. Tag blogs to make it easier for users to understand common topics your firm will speak about example webdesign
5. Remind content contributors to create keyword rich blog posts
6. Create a SMALL approval team, one or two people who are comfortable with the company voice, do not leave blogs to post in the queue
7. Send weekly Analytics reports to the whole company showing which blogs were the top performing blogs ie Phill’s blog got 45 reads but Joe’s only 22. Competition will encourage creativity. (Measurement AND fun)
8. Make frequent topic suggestions to your contributors. “Phill can you share the frequent client mistakes when creating an HTML email in a blog please?”
9. Topic titillation equals traffic success. Make if fun and gripping and people will read.
10. TEACH AND GIVE AWAY FREE GOOD ADVICE. If your blog has true value visitors will return.

Silverscape would be happy to add a blog to your site and coach you on how to roll out this program. Please contact us to learn more about the process.