Blogging Strategies for Advertising Agencies

This video is an interview with Michael Gass, author of http://www.fuelingnewbusiness.com (A blog about ad agency new business) at the offices of McDougall Interactive.

I have helped a number of ad agencies. I’ve been doing consulting work, fueling ad‑agency new business through social media for six years now. I’ve carried about 130 agencies through this process, and getting their blogs up and running quickly for inbound‑marketing purposes, and helping them to simplify how they create content. The first step is to create a good reading program. Reading fuels the writing. So I would advocate using something like Google Reader, to where you have all of these subscribed RSS feeds coming in to one location. It really does simplify the reading process, keeps you focused online, and it is very strategic, as it brings in content very relevant to the overall theme and purpose of your blog.

As you’re writing, especially initially, as you generate a base of content, I advocate doing 30 posts in 30 days, in a very short time frame. Therefore, you’re going to create a system for developing content. As you develop these posts, I would keep them around 350 to 450 words, on average. You’re actually better with a 450‑word post, and if you were to go over that, if you were to create those two separate posts, than to have this one long post. People tend to just scan content online. Their attention span is much less than it is for print. So it’s important to keep the posts relatively short, but long enough that you have some good meat, some good valued content, there.

I would write one original post for every four to five curated posts. A curated post, the resource‑type post, where maybe you’re giving the “Reader’s Digest” version of a particular piece of research. Or a long, lengthy article, you’re also providing the “Reader’s Digest” version or an executive summary.

I would encourage you to use keywords in every post title and that you be very consistent. That would tie the content to your particular audience, and as you repurpose content out through Twitter, what works for search‑engine optimization also works to identify that content to the audience that you’re trying to reach.

I also advocate writing in an inverted‑pyramid style, like a newspaper columnist. They write in a way where the most important content is at the top of the article. You actually lead with the conclusion. I would write a subtitle that is just a one‑sentence answer to this question, “What is my benefit as a reader if I commit to read your post?” And answer that in that single sentence. That tells the reader exactly what their takeaway’s going to be when they do read the post. And then I use bold and italics and numbered lists, bullet‑pointed lists, also, to make the posts scannable and pleasant to the eye, and that generates much more appeal.

I would encourage you, as you develop that base of content, you get those 30 posts, then a more realistic writing schedule might be one to two posts per week. And then spread the content consistently throughout your other social‑media platforms, as Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, and also, Google Plus generates a good amount of traffic, and also, it tends to have higher rankings in search as you propagate it through even some of the newer platforms such as that.

My blog site, I actually use Pinterest. I’ve got images in every post, and I connect those images to a Pinterest board and a little synopsis about each article, and that also ranks high in search and generates a significant amount of traffic to my blog site.

I hope these tips are of help to you. I have other tips on my site. You can go to MichaelGass.com, FuelingNewBusiness.com. You’ll find a number of resources to help you develop the right kind of content for your inbound‑marketing needs for your company.