Colleen Eakins Design (CED) is a design firm that specializes in print and digital marketing collateral & assets for small to medium size businesses. Capabilities include web design, logo design and branding, and printing for select collateral.

In 2002, Colleen started Colleen Eakins Design as a part-time business, when she was mid-way through her graphic design program in college. She started the business as a way to earn extra money and to build her portfolio with real-world pieces versus the class projects that typically fill new design graduates’ portfolios. She felt it would help set her apart from other job applicants when she finished with her degree program.

For years, Colleen used the business to freelance, earn extra income, and gain additional experience in other sectors and industries outside of what she did in her full-time designer role in Corporate America. While working as a contract designer for 3M, she decided to take a leap of faith when the contract ended and take her business full-time. In 2011, Colleen Eakins Design was fully instated.

The launch of the blog

The blog for Colleen Eakins Design was not introduced until January of 2012. This was around the time that WordPress was emerging as a popular content management system (CMS). At that time, Colleen redesigned the website for the WordPress platform and added the blog.

With adding a blog to the site, its intention and goal is to share content that other small businesses would find useful in the realm of marketing and design. This addition could also help the business for marketing purposes, search engine optimization (SEO), and to have the articles picked up by other business and marketing blog sites to encourage additional traffic to the Colleen Eakins Design website.

The strategy of the blog

Originally, the audience of the blog was small to medium businesses that were looking for resources, information, and help with their marketing efforts. Over the last few years, this has shifted to a broader topic base that still relates to small to medium sized businesses, but with general marketing practices intertwined within the articles.

The frequency of postings initially was on a daily basis and was experimented with as readership was established. This became difficult as Colleen was the sole author of the blog and owner of the business and the team needed to grow, which grew the postings to two written and two infographics posted monthly for readers. Currently, two written posts go out monthly for efficiency and to deter from reader burnout, as they are posted evenly throughout each period.

In regards to content, the team has been making content calendars for the last few years for organization, evaluate the needs for each topic and see at a glance what is on deck for our readers. Creating the content calendar has aided the team in being able to determine what has already been spoken about and order the topics in terms of priority and likeliness. Revisiting a topic can be beneficial, as the topic is still relevant for small businesses, but refreshing the content for updates to trends, software, etc. Other times we are able to look at current events and headlines that affect businesses to influence the article – one example is the COVID-19 pandemic and how it has affected small businesses.

Content can be a challenge for the articles, as the team works diligently to work in fresh topics or creative ways to update ‘old’ articles. Being in tune with the industry and through research of other articles, the team is able to help alleviate this difficulty, but still comes with hurdles we work to keep the articles as relevant and timely for our readers. Once the article is drafted, working through the review and editing process and creating imagery for postings can also be a challenge to keep in the step with design and content trends.

Rewards and Measuring Success

The content development process may take time for the team, but the end article is always a piece to be proud of.

Measuring success of each article is critical in elevating topics and overall strategy of the blog. Through promotion of social media, we can by the overall web traffic through our analytics that most website visitors land on the site through a blog post on another website and then either leave the post and visit another blog post, or root through the Colleen Eakins Design website and visit the ‘About’ and ‘Portfolio’ pages. After analysis, the team can attribute most of the website traffic, to the blog.

By using SEO we are able to measure the success of each article because new content is added to the website via the blog, search engines see the site as being maintained and updated regularly. This helps with search engine results for queries of keywords we are trying to rank for. Also, the postings are optimized for search engines. The biggest benefit of maintaining the blog has been the SEO benefits.

Looking Ahead

What Colleen Eakins Design gains from having a business blog on the website is acquiring leads for new business, by way of search engine optimization. Through new business inquiries, the business is found more often because of the boost the blog gives.

Where would the team like to see the blog in the next two years? Content wise, continuing to use the content calendar to plan the topics and ensure any external (social and worldwide) influences are taken in to account when drafting articles. For the design perspective, the team is evaluating refreshing the layout of the pages for enhancing readership.

The future is looking bright for Colleen Eakins Design and we invite you to come along for the ride.