By Jill Pyle
In preparation for the presentation that Francis and I will be giving at BarCamp on Saturday, November 17, I’ve decided to shed some light on what goes on behind the scenes at inmedialog.com. I won’t be getting into too much detail here; we’ll share more about editorial strategy, implementation and early results on Saturday. In the meantime, here’s a sneak peak. All feedback is welcome.
Design
We wanted our blog to have a professional design that stayed true to the inmedia brand and mirrored the look of our web site. To accomplish this, we worked closely with Blogging Squared to develop a custom WordPress template that incorporated our logo and colours. We’ve received nothing but positive comments on our blog’s design and found the WordPress platform very easy to use.
Editorial
Going into this, we knew we need an editorial strategy that would allow us to consistently offer up quality content. As the blog editor, I tortured my colleagues with a few different processes that didn’t quite work before we settled into our current routine. Though we are continuing to make tweaks, our current editorial schedule is quite simple. inmedia’s participating consultants are required to write one unique feature per week, as well as three or more “rewrite department” posts that direct readers to interesting technology stories. The third stream to our editorial content is guest contributions. So far, Linda Moran and Eliot Burdett have been featured as guest bloggers. If you have an idea for a piece, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Publishing
As the blog editor, I’m responsible for preparing blog posts for publishing. My colleagues can send me their content by email or save drafts in WordPress, whatever works best for them. I then proof the content, insert pictures, select appropriate categories, add Technorati tags, take care of any weird formatting issues and link appropriate publications, news items and blog posts. I also adjust headlines from time to time, making sure they include relevant keywords. We’ve found this process allows contributors to focus on developing quality content rather than worrying about technicalities with which they may not be familiar.
Outreach
We launched our blog in mid September. Other than sending emails to friends and family, we didn’t really promote the launch. We wanted to take a few weeks to get comfortable with the process and the platform. A few weeks ago, we started ramping up our outreach efforts. We began this process by featuring the blog in our company newsletter. We’ve since started to build out our tentacles by adding our blog to online directories, commenting on other blogs, creating accounts with services like MyBlogLog and submitting posts to social bookmarking web sites like digg, del.ici.ous and reddit. As a result, we’ve seen our traffic grow, with spikes here and there.
We’re taking this blog thing one day at a time, learning a lot along the way and adjusting our strategy as necessary. If you have any feedback for us, we’d love to hear it. Feel free to leave a comment, contact us directly or join us at BarCamp on Saturday, November 17.
