When speaking with both prospective and existing clients, I often talk about the value of a good blog. I typically start by saying something like "Hear me out. I didn't used to be a believer until I saw first hand the power of consistently posting valuable content." I then discuss my great friends at New Media Campaigns and the incredible success they have had at driving traffic to their site (and even to our site) through their blog.A few years ago-and time flies, so it could have been several years now-we just finished designing our first interactive map highlighting the marine science industry in North Carolina. The guys at New Media Campaigns came up with an innovative way to power the map through jQuery, which not only allowed the map to be viewed on iPhones, it enabled our client to update all of the points of interest through the HiFi CMS, and it also meant that all of the content within the map was search engine friendly. We knew it was great, but we didn't know how great until we started seeing huge spikes in visits to the Liaison Design Group site. A closer look revealed that the traffic was coming from a post on New Media Campaigns site about the use of jQuery for this interactive map. People were flocking to the post, visiting New Media Campaigns site, then many would visit our site too. There were plenty of days when traffic to our site was 30 times higher than normal. And it was coming from a successful blog post.Now that my fairly long anecdote is out of the way, I want you to stop and think about it. This post about a project New Media Campaigns was paid to do resulted in massive publicity, which we now know has resulted in additional work. Even if the post took two or three hours to write (and it didn't), that's a phenomenal return on investment. I'm a believer, but now I have to execute. I have to think strategically about how I can create value for visitors to our site. Hopefully, in some small way, this post will help push a few people over the edge and decide to blog themselves. Not just for the sake of blogging, but to add value for visitors of their site. If they can do that (and if I can do it too), it will inevitably lead to more traffic and increased business opportunities.
