Welcome to Post Number 250!

• July 11, 2008

By Francis Moran

Almost exactly 10 months after publishing our very first blog post on September 14 last year, here we are celebrating post number 250! It’s been a fascinating journey of learning and experimentation, and I’d like to share some of that with you today.

If 250 posts in 10 months means we’ve written about 25 posts per month, then we have slightly bested our target of averaging one post per business day. There have been a few thin weeks along the way as client requirements dominated our time, but in the main, we have achieved what we set out to do by way of posting frequency.

Our best-practices posts, which highlight a particular part of our media relations practice, often using a client case study as illustration, are among our most consistently read posts. Such posts were a key part of our editorial strategy for the blog.

We have been less successful achieving two other parts of the editorial strategy. We have written fewer pieces that comment on what’s going on in the wider world in which our clients live, and we have had many fewer guest posts than originally hoped for. Both these targets are a function of not having a dedicated blog editor spending the kind of hours necessary to find stuff for our writers to comment on and recruiting posts from our clients and others in our network.

Our readership, after growing quite rapidly over the first two months, has averaged about 650 visitors per month, on top of our roughly 100 RSS and email subscribers. (This latter number ebbs and flows a bit but continues to grow steadily by about 10 a month.)

Our internal objective was to have more than 1,000 visitors at the one-year mark. We hit 793 site visitors last month, and topped 800 at least once, so I think we are well on our way.

More to the point, though, is what our blog has done for our organic search engine rankings. Even by month three, we were seeing extraordinary improvements, going from could-not-be-found to top-50, top-20 and, in many important areas, even top-10 results for the kinds of searches we believe prospects run when looking for a PR company. We have yet to be able to link a new piece of business directly to such a search, but we know that many prospects have read our blog and are impressed by what they see there.

We could do a much better job of building out the links that would make us a more active part of the extensive community of bloggers who write about public relations and technology marketing. Again, having an editor with more time to devote to this would improve our effectiveness.

Now, the tough part. Has it been worth the investment?

Well, I said at the outset that I would hold off on hard ROI calculations until we had a full year under our belts. I can say that it is a very expensive proposition maintaining a blog with so much original content. We are timekeepers, so I know exactly how much this costs. I’ll keep that amount under wraps for now but will say that anyone who believes Web 2.0 tactics like blogging are free or low-cost either ain’t doing it right or ain’t counting up all the costs.

Speaking just for myself, I have thoroughly enjoyed once again having an outlet (pulpit? soapbox?) for my views on certain subjects. I know many others around here have equally enjoyed being able to share their views and opinions. From that perspective, it has been very worthwhile.

Bottom line: We see value here and we intend to continue. Thank you for joining us, and keep coming back.