Today Andy Beal from MarketingPilgrim.com answers my question about the thing he did in 2007 that improved his blog the most.

Without doubt, the best decision I made for MarketingPilgrim.com during 2007 was the addition of new contributors. We took on two paid staff writers and added almost a dozen other contributors.

Theses additions helped Marketing Pilgrim in a number of ways including:

• A deeper range of opinion. Our readers are now treated to broader insight and views–which I could not have provided on my own.
• More content for Google. With more writers, you produce more content for Google’s hungry spiders to digest.
• Expanded syndication. The addition of new writers helped position Marketing Pilgrim as a leading source of marketing news–which lead to our inclusion in Google News.
• More time for other projects. With the extra writing help, I was able to spend more time on research, development, and promotion for the site.
• Keeping me on my toes. There’s nothing like having fresh ideas and writing styles to help you evaluate and improve your own writing. I learned a lot from our new writers.

While having an audience of 8,000-10,000 daily readers helped us to attract great writers, that shouldn’t stop even the smallest blog from seeking contributions. A writing contest or a simply request for reader submissions is often all you need to bring additional content to your blog. You don’t even have to pay for new content either. Often an author byline and link back to their site, is enough of a reward for most contributors–just take this post as proof! :-)

Andy Beal is the editor of MarketingPilgrim.com and co-author of the upcoming book ” Radically Transparent.”

PS from Darren: If you want to know more about HOW to do some of what Andy talks about above – check out this more recent post from Collis on how to add new authors to your blog.

Happy New Year!

Here in Australia it’s 2008 already and later this morning V (my wife) and I will go out for our annual Goal Setting/Resolutions brunch and will sit down with our resolutions notebook and think about the year that is ahead of us. In setting goals we tend to break them down into different areas including:

• Physical (getting fit, diet etc)
• Travel (vacations etc)
• Friends (what people we want to invest more time into seeing)
• Family (things we’d like to achieve as a family)
• Spiritual (making time for connecting with this is important to us)

There are other areas – but you get the picture.

For each area we attempt to come up with some achievable goals as individuals and then share them with each other to see what similarities there are and what we can achieve together. The whole process is both fun and inspiring.

Later in the week I’ll sit down and go through a similar process with my blogs – setting some goals for the coming months. (here’s a series I wrote a couple of years on strategic blogging that has some tips on how to do this)

All this goal setting has me in the mood to hear what others are hoping to achieve in 2008. So I’d like to throw it open for some discussion (sometimes I think publicly stating some of your goals can be helpful in keeping you accountable to them):

• What do you want to achieve with your blog/s in 2008?
• What specific goals have you set for the year ahead in different areas of your blogging (design, content, community, traffic etc)

Today Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine answers my question of what one thing helped them improve their blog in 2007.

We’ve tried to improve the quality of our articles. In 2007 we’ve spent more time on research, we’ve refined our requirements and expectations from the sites we cover in our articles.

Also we’ve included more (many more) images in our posts. It helped us to improve the blog and drive more traffic to our site; and it was the main reason why our weblog crashed in the end of 2007.

However, after a couple of server issues we’re now finally back on track.

Note from Darren: Vitaly’s strategy has certainly paid off. If their Alexa ranking is anything to go by they’ve seen some real success with their ranking increasing from around 97,000 this time last year to a current ranking of 4790.