Media Shower

I have a confession to make. Media Shower has been in business for 17 years, and this is our first blog post.

How is it that a world-class content company can be in business this long, and never actually do any content on its own site? The shoemaker not only has no shoes, but he’s also walking around without pants, his genitals flopping in the breeze.

I’d like to say that we were so busy creating great content for our customers, growing our business, that we didn’t have time for a blog. And this is partly true.

But the other, more honest answer, is that we never made our blog a priority. Here we are, advising clients that their top SEO priority is developing awesome website content, but we weren’t doing it ourselves.

Irony is a cruel mistress, although she does work in an upscale B&D club.

Whether you have a full SEO team working on your site, or you’re a one-person show, developing a blog feels like exercise: you know you need to do it, but it’s always easy to find something else to do; your PPC campaign, sales follow-ups, short-term projects, emails, and lunch. And if you run your own business, add “everything else” to the list.Then there’s the cost: either you’ll have to pay for someone in the company to write your blog, or you’ll have to write it yourself. For many website owners, this is like asking if you want to jump off a bridge, or get hit by a truck.  Of course, you can hire someone else to write it, but where do you find someone you can trust with your company blog?

Here’s how we’re approaching it at Media Shower.

1) We’re not doing all the content. We are putting one editor in charge of the website: the great Sam Jordan. Sam will oversee the blog, but he won’t have to write every post: we’re using our Media Shower Content Engine for the bulk of the content. (Of course, this means we really are doing all the content, but you know what I mean.)

2) We’re treating it as a one-year test. Part of the reason blogs are so overwhelming is that they feel like forever. That’s why we’re thinking of this as a limited test. We’ll commit to one year, but we’ll really do it for one year. If it works, we keep it going. If not, we light our server on fire and roast marshmallows on it.

3) We’ll measure, learn, and tweak. From the beginning, we’re watching which posts do best for us (in terms of traffic, SEO ranking, and sales), and why. This lets us write more content that our customers want to read, and avoids the ongoing question of, “What are we getting out of this?”

I believe this approach will work for your business, too. It’s going to work for ours: just watch and see.

But if not, I hope you’ll join us for s’mores over our gently flaming server.