For the past year, we at Articulate have been constructing an efficient and repeatable process for producing and promoting remarkable content for our blogs and for our clients.

The key point here is "efficient and repeatable." Our blogs, Bad Language and Turbine, have been around for a long time, but we updated them only sporadically.

We found it easier to recommend marketing and copywriting techniques to clients than to do it for ourselves (we were, in a sense, like a doctor who smokes).

The following hard-won tips are derived from a lot of trial and error; basically, we've stumbled in the dark so you don't have to.

What's in a name?

First thing's first: you need a name. Giving a formal name to a project helps to crystallize your intentions and attitude toward the entire effort. Coming up with the right phrase shouldn't be easy; it's part of the process of starting to flesh out the skeleton of what you want to achieve with your blogging system. We went with "Articulate Blog Studio" for a few key reasons:

  • It's a project, not a task. Our original (and ongoing) aim was to develop a basic, repeatable methodology that we could test on ourselves, but which could then be scaled and applied to clients. So rather than refer to a specific blog, we made it a companywide project.
  • It's a creative process. Though elements such as content planning, delegation, editing and promotion can be standardized, the process of writing itself has to remain creative and flexible. We didn't want to sterilize the system to such an extent that our content became formulaic, hence the choice of "studio."
  • It's important to the business. The name helps us underscore that our house blogs are an important part of marketing ourselves. It supports the idea that we have to be our own first and best client.

Put someone in charge

There has to be one person leading the offensive—someone who has the authority to make decisions about content, editing, schedules, and assignments.

Collaboration is great, but if you want to get your blog to ever get going, there has to be someone that can push the button and start the experiment.

You can't do everything at once

Looking at large-scale, high-quality publishers such as MarketingProfs and Jezebel can be both awe inspiring and intimidating. They have reams of quality content coming out daily; their social media promotion is both clever and timely, and it elicits great response rates and interactions; they send out daily and weekly newsletters and snappy emails; and on and on.

But you cannot do everything overnight; and if you try, you'll fail at everything. So, sure, brainstorming is great: Go ahead and come up with all the goals, metrics, and processes you want to implement, and you should absolutely list them all. But, then, put them to one side. And, instead, focus on what you want to get right first.

We decided to start with two main objectives:

  1. Make sure that posts were regular and consistent—no more ad hoc posting.
  2. Increase the number of guest posts on relevant third-party blogs and measure the impact they made in traffic and conversions.

The questions are harder than the answers

The hardest part of building our blog studio was figuring out what exactly it was we had to figure out. It was a bit like trying to build a house without blueprints. So, we inverted the problem.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Matthew Stibbe

Matthew Stibbe is CEO at Articulate Marketing and TurbineHQ.com, and the author of the Bad Language blog. Reach him via matthew@articulatemarketing.com.

LinkedIn: Matthew Stibbe