To do our blogs right–grow our monthly visitors, add to our daily subscribers, increase our rankings, and write quality articles that help great search marketers–requires a big investment. It’s one that we’ve made for the past few years, and one that we’re doubling down on starting this month!
(On a side note, please, please, please tell me you know the movie reference to the title of this post. :-))
This post is from me–the president and CEO of Hanapin Marketing–and it is the first visible sign of that extra investment. I’ll be writing at the beginning of every month, sort of like a “letter from the editor,” to communicate some of the great things we have planned.
This month, we’re starting a four-part blog series about hiring. At Hanapin, we have an outstanding group of Assistant Account Executives, Account Executives, and Account Supervisors–folks who act as a combination of client contact, data analyst, and search marketer all in one. Their jobs require a great deal of analytical thinking, clear communication, attention to detail, and grace under pressure, which is difficult to find in a single person. Over the past eight years, we’ve honed our recruitment process to find the very best candidates, whether or not they have SEM experience, and we’re detailing every step of the process and why we do what we do! This new series starts Monday, March 7th with an intro post, then we’ll alternate posts between SEO Boy and PPC Hero, since the overall series is about how to hire folks who are great at SEO and PPC!
The series is a great way to kick off the month of March, but that’s not all we have in store! The team had a really productive brainstorming session last week to come up with some great blog topics. Here’s a quick preview: On PPC Hero, we’ll be writing about helpful PPC people to follow on Twitter and their blogs, and we’ll also include some helpful exam studying tips for the AdCenter certification. On SEO Boy, we’ll provide tips on Google’s in-page analytics and, continuing our Bing theme, we’ll write about their Webmaster toolbox. Bing continues to increase their market share and drive more search traffic, and we’ll bring you even more tips on how to take advantage of it!
We’re also excited to announce that three new team members just started at Hanapin yesterday, so in the coming months keep an eye out for some new faces and new perspectives on our blogs. Also, there are two special days this month that we’d like to commemorate with custom illustrations. The first is PPC Hero will be turning four (four!!!) this month. The second is St. Patrick’s Day, and both PPC Hero and SEO Boy will be celebrating this one leprechaun style! We’re increasing the number of custom illustrations this year, not only because it’s just fun to come up with new holidays and poses for our cheeky, cartoony superheroes, but it’s also a great way for the team to take a break from the analytics and exercise the creative part of their brains. If you have an idea for a custom illustration, we’d love to hear it. Post it in the comments!
Last but not least, we’d like to get some input from you! Hanapin is making a big investment in our blogs this year, and we’re doing the same with our team members and our community. Starting in April, we’ve decided to devote a half-day of volunteerism each quarter to one of Bloomington’s 300+ non-profits. The team has narrowed it down to eight for April, and we want you to vote for your favorite one. The survey follows this post and contains descriptions of each non-profit.
Our blogs have been a great source of pride for our company, and they’ve generated quite a bit of business for us too. We feel that by committing even more time, effort, and resources to our blogs, we’ll see the return many times over, and we’ll continue to provide you, our readers, with informative, fresh, and engaging content. Thank you for being a loyal reader of our blogs, and we look to even bigger and better things for the rest of 2011!
