Anvil Media, Inc. (www.anvilmedia.com) as an SEM consultancy in late 2000. After a few full-time engagements and one email marketing startup, I elected to return full-time to SEM and hire employees at Anvil in January 2004. Anvil currently employs 13 SEM professionals servicing 40+ active clients for which we manage search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) and social media marketing (SMM) activities for mid-cap companies. Formic Media, Inc. (www.formicmedia.com), Anvil’s sister company,was launched in October 2008 and has over a dozen active clients and provides affordable SEM service packages designed specifically for small business.
Tell us a little about your blog?
Our first company blog (http://anvilmedia.blogspot.com) was created in June 2004 as an internal resource for sharing search engine marketing (SEM) news & resources with employees, partners and clients, but quickly expanded reach to the general public. After gaining momentum and visibility in 2005 and 2006, we dialed back our focus due to competition and lack of bandwidth. In summer 2007, we decided to steer our efforts towards creating a niche blog. We elected to focus on the growing discipline of online reputation
management (ORM) and launched Reputation Watch (http://www.reputation-watch.com) in late 2007. Unfortunately, the our team was so over-burdened with client work, that both blogs took a back seat for
a few months. Once the economy slowed down in fall 2008, the Anvil team had breathing room and we effectively redesigned & re-launched the Anvil SEM news blog and the team launched a blog, Anvil on Failing (http://www.anvilonfailing.com/) as a creative outlet and testing ground for client strategies. In the fall of 2008, I also launched a new SEM agency focusing on small business, Formic Media. We effectively launched the sister company via social media (creating Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn
profiles) as well as a blog (http://formicmedia.wordpress.com/) which focuses on SEM & online marketing for small business. Separately, but related, I started a personal blog on Lockergnome in February 2007 and have used it to share my personal experiences, as well as use it for a test bed for SEM and ORM strategies. While each blog has a distinctive purpose, focus and audience, they integrate and cross-pollinate as appropriate.

As alluded to earlier, Anvil started an SEM industry blog primarily to share links, articles, news and ideas with employees, clients, partners and peers. The Anvil SEM News Blog gained a following by industry luminaries early on, and has been recently re-invigorated. The Reputation Watch blog grew out of the desire to take ownership of a fledgling industry (ORM) by creating a blog focused exclusively on the reputation management niche. It too, has gained and maintained a core following over the years. Both blogs have been successful at generating awareness and credibility for Anvil as a thought leader. We feel the AnvilOnFailing blog will achieve similar success in branding Anvil as a fun place to work with a unique corporate culture, all while providing a critical creative outlet for the team.

As mentioned earlier, our first blog launched in 2004 (about the time we started providing blog strategy services to clients), followed by my personal blog (Kent Lewis Experience) in early 2007, Reputation Watch in late 2007 and Formic Media’s small business blog in late 2008.

Our blogs are measured on a variety of levels, but primary metrics include: site traffic/usage (Web analytics), registered readers, RSS feeds/syndication, comments/permalinks, inbound links and visibility in
search engines. Secondary value metrics include: peer feedback and resulting opportunities (speaking engagements, writing opportunities, new business prospects).

Personally, blogging has been a high value activity for me for a variety of reasons. First off, my Lockergnome blog has a high degree of credibility with Google, which means I can achieve top 10 visibility for target search phrases incorporated into my blog. This is powerful for marketing my companies and clients. Secondarily, I contribute to a variety of industry blogsOEN (http://community.oen.org/index.jspa), OMS(http://blog.onlinemarketingconnect.com/), PAF (http://www.portlandadfed.com/blog/) and SMS
(http://www.searchmarketingstandard.com/), which affords me a much greater degree of exposure, credibility and business opportunities.

We created our first blog on Google’s Blogger/Blogspot, but once Wordpress was determined to be a stronger platform for search engine optimization, we adopted it for every other blog. Wordpress also has extremely useful and powerful plug-ins that enable improved search visibility and greater
functionality (ecommerce, event registration, etc.).

We’ve implemented a variety of tools on our blog, including: site search, Recent Readers, Google AdSense, RSS feed & Twitter integration, Share and Enjoy (bookmarking), Sphinn, related posts and tag and category clouds.

If you can’t dedicate the proper resources to plan, implement, manage and market the blog, it’s best not to do it at all. That said, start by understanding the industry and developing unique niche, voice and content. Be transparent and open-minded in communications and lastly, read thesearticles on the topic:
http://www.anvilmediainc.com/corporate-blogging-tips-article.htm
http://www.anvilmediainc.com/popular-blogs-article.htm
http://www.anvilmediainc.com/blogging-monetization-article.htm

http://www.anvilmediainc.com/social-media-marketing-optimization-article.htm

While we haven’t modeled our blog after anyone else in particular, but here are a few we look up to most for their content and credibility:
http://www.semportland.com/
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/

Good question…who really knows? I started my publishing career as the editor of an ezine (http://www.anvil-media.com/) in 1996. By 2004, we started moving to a blog platform and in 2007, I moved to micro-blogging on Twitter. Based on my experience, I think blogs will weather the technology
revolution, as they offer the benefit of both timely and timeless information. I think the biggest change in blogging will be an expanded distribution model for what is now considered blog content: each blog post
will be syndicated across media sharing sites as appropriate (video, audio,images, text) and social profiles (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) and mobile platforms. While content will be increasingly decentralized (thanksto RSS) we will likely centralized the location of the original content to 1 blog (vs. 3). We’ll see how quickly that happens, but it’s almost comical totry to guess how blogs will evolve in 10 years, considering they’ve been around for less than 5 as of today.

I would guess the team spends 5 to 10 hours a week creating, optimizing, syndicating and promoting our blogs. This may increase or decrease based on bandwidth and technology. Our clients spend closer to 10 to 15 hours a week managing their blogs.

Of course! We integrate our blogs via FriendFeed with our other socialmedia profiles, including Twitter. The process is automated.

We use Twitter to promote our blogs, as well as for other marketing activities. We promote events at which we speak, sponsor or attend. We promote recent company news, coverage or awards and announce new clients or partners. You can see what we’ve been up to here:
http://twitter.com/anvilmedia
http://twitter.com/formicmedia
http://twitter.com/kentjlewis
http://twitter.com/pdxmindshare