Why I Don’t Have A Brand New Lamborghini

£156,000 a year. That’s more than a quarter of a million dollars, easily enough to buy a new Lamborghini (with change), and yet that’s what we invest each year to keep our blog and Koozai TV running. So why do we spend such a crazy amount, and where exactly does the money go?

How the money is spent

We weren’t always such big spenders. In 2006-2009 we spent around £20,000 a year with only around five of the team writing for the blog on a regular basis.

This soon scaled in 2010. Around half of our team were allocated the time to write blog posts, with more time given to create better quality posts.

When we rebranded to Koozai in 2011, we upped the ante even further. During this period we had every member of our team writing for the blog. This was so well received that we increased the time people had to write each post from ½ a day to a full day, and supported internal research projects.

By 2012 we had launched a TV channel (Koozai TV), and started creating free whitepapers. When you factor in the time it takes to create content as well as manage this content, the cost is £156,000 a year.

Penguin Proof

Since the Google Penguin waddled onto the scene it seems that people have been paying a lot more attention to their online brand.

It’s not a case of just building a variety of links to your website, all with the same keyword loaded anchor text, anymore. Today’s SEOs need to market smarter and harder to achieve the highest rankings for the long term (although we all know its not all just about rankings).

I strongly believe that you can’t afford to have a short-term view when it comes to your organic rankings. You need to be planning for the future and practicing methods that are going to yield long-term results, without the risk of further algorithm updates, such as Penguin, negatively affecting you.

Ultimately, without good content your site is less likely to rank well, especially in really competitive environments.

It’s through our blog and Koozai TV that I believe we were able to avoid a Panda and Penguin penalty.

Almost all of the links we have to our site are from people reading our content and linking to us. We never really had to use excessive tactics that are now being penalised because clicking the “publish” button on the blog does a lot of the work.

The Benefits:

Aside from being a stable way to work through algorithm updates, what else do we get out of it? Well, we get a lot, including:

• Great content for our website
• A lot of content to push socially and build our social reach and profile
• A greater following and increased social connections
• An increased awareness of our brand
• Good examples for securing guest posts
• New contacts via free whitepapers
• Improved rankings for key terms in posts
• Raised awareness of the team which leads to speaking opportunities
• A team who feel they can express themselves
• Many unique voices for our company
• A public face / personality for our brand

Our blog is our main public face to the outside world. Whether this is to show potential prospects that we understand the market, gain opportunities for our team to speak or just build our brand, it’s through blogging we are able to grow the business.

It’s also been essential in helping us get noticed outside of the industry. With links from BBC, TIME, The Guardian, The Mail, ABC News and more only being possible because we blog so much.

Planning a Strategy

So it’s to the credit of the team, who keep things consistent every month. 20 blog posts, four videos and one whitepaper each and every month, and that’s just the basics. We trust them to create the content, and aside from a quick check by our Content Marketing team, posts and words are rarely changed.

We have had the odd blog post that didn’t make it because it was too risqué, but generally we encourage people to express their own personalities at every stage. Whether it’s a detailed industry guide or a passionate rant, we’ve covered a bit of everything, and hopefully that helps keep things fresh.

So, if you are thinking about blogging, be sure to involve as many of your team as you can. Anyone who can write should be encouraged to do so.

Conclusion

Ultimately, every single penny spent on the blog is an investment. Unlike the theoretical fleet of Lamborghinis which would have dropped in value by now, our blog is forever. So don’t buy cars, write blog posts.

Image Source

Yellow Lamborghini on exhibition parking via BigStock

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