Process: Onboarding

Step 1. Let's Get Acquainted

Summary: We thoroughly review your site and your industry, collaborate with you to find the perfect "voice" of your blog articles, research competitors, determine our level of involvement (from semi-managed to fully managed), and choose a preferred method of communication.

After signing up, our immediate goal is to familiarize ourselves with your business, to match the voice of your brand, and to plan a content strategy that is 1.) relevant to your visitors, 2.) has the potential to attract visitors that will become customers, and 3.) meshes well with any existing content and information about your business.

To do this, we perform thorough research and learn about your audience, business model, and industry. Having managed many different types of content, some industries are more familiar than others to us, but if you are in a highly specialized industry, we may have additional questions and will require more information.

Next, we'll get a feel for your company's personality and style. For example, a health-related business focusing on fitness and gaining muscle might have more of a hip, personable, and even slightly humorous voice, whereas a company that fabricates industrial equipment will have more of a corporate and technical voice. We'll work with you to find a voice that will be most successful, and we will be consistent with that voice.

We'll also determine the level of involvement of our team. Some businesses have an in-house graphic designer and may prefer to use their team for all images in their blog posts. Others may have an in-house editor that they want to review blog posts prior to publication. By default, our campaigns are all-inclusive, but we can manage your blog entirely with our team, or work closely with your team, and anywhere in-between.

We'll also determine your ideal method of communication (we are reachable by phone, text, email, instant messenger, in person, mail, walkie-talkie, pager, paper airplane notes, you name it).

Step 2. Onboarding

Summary: We'll enroll you in our billing platform, request Google Webmasters, Analytics, and blog access, set up your blog in our rank tracking software, pitch you a few blog topics to start with, work out a weekly schedule, and take note of special requests for your posts.

Getting started with us is a fairly simple process. Once we've taken your payment information and spoken on the phone, we'll need access to your blog platform so we can familiarize ourselves with your blog, plugins, and modifications, and prepare to write and schedule content.

We'll also request access to your Google Analytics and Google Webmasters account so we can track your blog's performance. If these aren't set up yet, we can assist you with installing both. This step is optional but highly recommended. This will help us determine a handful of different things, such as your blog's overall performance over time and each article's performance over time. This information will help us during the ideation phase as well; if we see a certain type of post is doing very well, we may do a series of those posts covering different topics to capitalize on that search traffic. It will also help us identify blog posts that may need re-working or improvement - if an article's information becomes outdated over time, it may require updating to regain rankings.

Next, we'll set you up in our enterprise rank tracking account so we can track the performance of individual blog posts. We take performance and metrics very seriously, and every blog post is evaluated and tracked daily. These analytics help us hone in on high traffic topics with relatively low competition.

Lastly, we'll work out how our weekly schedule will look like, such as topic ideation and the protocol for reviewing new blog posts. Some businesses give us absolute autonomy over topics and blog articles, whereas others want to review all posts before they are published.

Step 3. Feeding Your Blog

Summary: We start writing content to fit your publishing schedule and requirements. How, what, where, and when we publish is completely customizable to fit your needs, if you have a preference. We can also accommodate custom requests like watermarks, interlinking, plugins, and more.

Publishing content to your blog is a constant on-going process. Depending on how many times per week you want content published to your site, we follow that strict publishing schedule and ensure blog posts are written, edited, and ready to publish on-time.

If you prefer to review topics and article drafts before anything is published to your site, we can send you a Word document or Google Drive document with your article so you can manually approve it before publishing. Many of our clients choose to do this in the first month or two until they get a feel for our process. After you're comfortable with our writing and formatting style, we can handle this entire process for you.

Blog posts are spaced out and published organically throughout the week. If you have any scheduling requirements for publishing at specific times or days of the week, we can adhere to those as well.

Beyond that, we can accommodate most custom requests, like custom watermarks on blog images, strategic interlinking to relevant posts, or utilization of custom plugins or integrations. In most cases, we don't charge extra for things like this.

Step 4. Improvements and Reporting

Summary: Everything from topic ideation to publication is approved by you before publication until we're ready to go hands-free. Every aspect of our process is fully customizable. We monitor performance to make sure we're picking up momentum. We're available all week via call, text, and email.

While we do a good bit of research on content topics for your business and the content on your website to write relevant content that matches your voice (whether it be casual, corporate, or a combination). We are always keeping notes on your company and making continuous improvements.

If you find we're not linking enough to relevant resources, we'll make a note to increase our external links to authority sites and sources. If we're sounding too professional and matter-of-fact, we can sprinkle more personality into our articles and make a note to do so on future posts. This helps us build a rock-solid profile on your content marketing strategy for a consistent voice.

We closely track the rankings of your blog posts. Every blog post we publish is entered into an enterprise rank tracking system across multiple keywords to track performance so we can closely track progress on your blog post indexing and rankings for high-value keywords. This gives us a lot of insight, like how long it takes for new blog posts to start ranking on the front page of Google, top performers, trends, and overall ranking trends of your blog over time. We'll also monitor trends in Google Analytics over time. If we notice an article drop in rankings over time, it may need an edit to improve its rankings if it dropped in relevancy.

We're available 7 days a week through text, email, and phone for reporting, improvements, updates, editing, and anything else you need for your blog. Most of our clients will text or call us - we're even available through instant messengers, FaceTime, you name it. We go above and beyond for our clients.

Our goal over time is for your blog to provide immense value for new readers, increase your website's SEO and rankings, attract natural links, and increase your organic search engine traffic and sales.