Creating Content for Your Agency
Last January, Adster embarked on a blogging mission: each week, a staff member would write a unique piece of content for our blog. Sounds easy, right?
Sure!
Along with our team of great copywriters, we create content for our clients and tell them how important regular, relevant content is. In past years, Adster’s blog was updated, but without much rhyme or reason and certainly without consistency. So, off we went. Here is what we learned after a year!
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Write what you know
SEO, Adwords, link building, local SEO, technical news and more – Adster works in a lot of areas and thus has no shortage of topics to cover. Plus, our industry is always evolving so there’s always something to write about. Our team members specialize in different areas and you’ll notice that their blog topics often cover their favorite areas.
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Get team buy-in
Woof. This part may be tough! Some staff will straight up refuse to write blogs – that’s ok! Don’t try to include them in the process. It will be too frustrating.
Other staff may casually mention to you that blogging is having a negative impact on the organic traffic of your website. Don’t let this worry you, they are probably looking at Analytics incorrectly and may even just be looking for a reason why their blog is so so late. Organic traffic will most likely not suffer as a result of increasing your content (more on that below).
Others will always have topics, post their blogs on time and generally be fully on board. YAY FOR THEM!
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Be cool
This relates a lot to team buy-in but – some members of your team will have awesome ideas for blogs but will be off schedule with them. This was a big learning for me as I’m pretty organized and don’t like late things. This year we tried posting a blog every week and succeeded for the most part – cool, but it was more stressful than it needed to be. For 2017, we’re reducing blogs to one every two weeks.
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Make it easy for everyone
An easy to use CMS like WordPress will make everyone’s lives easier. We wouldn’t want one person to be in charge of posting every blog so having all staff empowered and able to do it themselves is a must-have.
In terms of making it easier, help your team brainstorm ideas if they’re having a hard time or offer to edit/review. Not everyone loves writing or is a confident writer and that’s ok.
You can further instill confidence by really promoting their content.
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Promote & share
We know that people probably aren’t anxiously waiting for the next Adster blog to come out – although feel free to prove me wrong in the comments below! – so we make an effort to promote each post through social media.
Regular blogging means regular Adster content for our social channels. We curate our social media to share industry news and in the past, I’ve struggled to bring people to our website in a natural, non-sales-y manner. A staff written blog post is a great way to do this – we’re sharing good info and bringing people into our site where they can (hopefully) learn more. YAY!
What were the results? Over the last 12 months, adding regular content to our blog increased organic entrances to the entire Adster site by 45% and to the blog pages by about 70%. Woo! It also gave us regular social content – double woo! We’ll keep at it for ‘17. TRIPLE WOO!
How do you motivate your team to create content? Let us know!