Our clients are busy folks and constantly on the go. Hey, we're New Yorkers, we understand the importance of time! So one thing we've been doing a lot lately is guiding clients to a better process of keeping their websites updated with fresh content. For some folks they need to keep a blog actively updated, for others its about getting press releases shown on time for new event announcements or product launches, but everybody, its definitely a matter of making their time the most useful when they have it to give.

1. Blog From Your Mobile Phone - Many clients we work with already have internet accounts on their mobile phones and didn't even know it. With this capability they can log in to their Wordpress, Blogger, or Typepad blog and write a new post from virtually anywhere. So this is a great time saver because finding an internet connection to post a press release is a thing of the past. But don't blame us for the pain it might put on your thumb and index finger when trying to write a 500 hundred word diatribe!


2. Hire a Blogger - Several companies in the past few years have gotten some heat for not being translucent with who is behind the writing of their blogs. Perhaps their marketing campaigns would have gone much smoother if they had hired a professional blogger to write for them for the campaign and spelled up front what the exact relationship was between the blogger and the company. Specifically, we're not condoning something like Ghost Writing, but we do think that having a blogger or net celebrity endorse you blog will make it easier to fight that content rot! Overall, getting someone to write on your behalf is fine, as long as the tone, the content, and the overall point of view remain intact to your brand's true nature.


3. Post to the Future - We're still amazed by this one, and we're not trying to make anyone feel bad, but most folks don't realize that every blogging application on the market can save posts to be published at a later date. Taking this into consideration, one of the best things you could do is to take one day a week to work on the posts for your blog and post date them to be published throughout the week. This way, all of your marketing needs are done in one day and you can enjoy the extra time during the week to sip on a tasty Mojito or whatever it is that they do in your parts.


4. Incite Public Participation - With the explosion of Wikis in the past few years, its only natural that maybe there could be some influence from them for online marketing as well. After all, these days when doing a search on Google you're usually bound to find something cited from the most famous wiki of them all, Wikipedia. A good example of a brand using a wiki to identify with customers is the Adobe Labs Wiki. Another good example is the brand spankin' new Television Without Pity Wiki from Bravo TV.


5. Make Impromptu Podcasts / Vidcasts - We're not even sure that Vidcast is a word, but we think you know what we're getting at. The short and tall of it is that if you make a regular podcast that is heartfelt and sincere, then your listeners will most likely appreciate it more than one that has been fine tuned and cleverly crafted in the confines of a production studio. Think about it this way, which would the average person want to see on TV, a reality show or a sitcom? They'd probably say a sitcom. Now, if we dropped in on their viewing habits, we're willing to bet that they will actually watch the reality show. We're human and we are voyueristic at heart, so why not use it to your advantage when it comes to marketing?


6. Use Visual Content - Humans are also extremely visual. Our brains react to the texture, color, shading, tone, and text used in an image. Couple this with the mobile phone capabilities we mentioned above and Voila! Now you've got yourself a marketing tool that can use imagery and be updated extremely quickly all by pressing the send button. Notcot, MSNBC Photoblog, and Boston.com do a great job at this.


7. Create an Advisory Team - In the sports world we'd classify an Advisory Team as the Athletes that endorse the clients product, but in the world of online marketing we can think of it as a team of industry professionals that want to share what they love. A very good ecample of this is Vitamin, a portal focusing on web design, run by the great folks over at Carsonified. Their advisors aren't only well known figures in the web world, but they also offer up articles, suggest contributing authors that Carsonified should tap, and generally set the tone of the website.


8. Make it Informal - We've already hinted at it above, but sometimes it lookslike the only thing getting in the way of many a companies online marketing initiative is their own need to craft and refine their message. Maybe if we took a more informal approach and got it out there in the first place, then we'd know what to refine to keep the message moving in the direction we want it to go. Without getting too far off topic, what we mean is that if you spent less time in the board room and more time on the web, then maybe fighting content rot wouldn't be so difficult. After all, the web is about content, and if you aren't creating then you're lurking.


9. Subscribe to Other RSS Feeds - What better way to give your websites viewers the content they want than showing them posts and news from other websites that they also probably enjoy. We haven't seen anyone with the cajones to try this on yet (let us know if you've found an example) but we're willing to bet that if you displayed relevant info from other sites in your industry as little callouts on your site, that you visitors would appreciate it. For instance, a financial advisor might want to include the top 5 most recent news items from the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and the New York Times business section in the footer of every page on their website. This would be very relevant to the financial advisors clientelle and also might even serve as a way to get folks coming back to theri website repeatedly. An even better idea would be to mimic something like Alltop but with your own company's branding. Update: Guy Kawasaki suggests checking out Onespot.com which can support your own branding.


10. Use Your Other Social Media Profiles - With a little bit of muscle from your companies web developer/designer, you can usually integrate the profiles you use for the company on other social networks into your own website. If you are using something like Drupal or Wordpress this is a relatively small task. For instance, on our blog we automagically bring in our del.icio.us feed to show links we're interested in sharing with our visitors (look to the column on the right) and on our homepage we also bring in our twitter feed to let folks know about small bits of news regarding our company.