As you’ve probably noticed, we’ve fully overhauled our website and switched our brand name to Upstate Synergy. Hopefully you like the new look and feel! It was truly a labor of love that we spent entirely too much time on. We’re still polishing up some final features here and there so “please excuse the mess” if you come across an old landing page or blog that isn’t formatted correctly.
Although “Web Synergy of the Upstate” served us well for over five years, the name was too long and our website no longer represented what we really did. Our first thought was to buy the domain web synergy dot com, but we spent two months trying to contact the domain owner overseas and finally gave up.
Our next thought was to rebrand to a different name completely since all of our larger clients don’t reside in the Upstate of South Carolina. Tons of potential names were thrown around as we redeveloped this site, but ultimately we decided to stick to our Upstate roots.
Living in the foothills of SC is a big part of who we are- it just didn’t feel right abandoning that. So the Upstate Synergy domain name ultimately stayed.
So what’s next for Upstate Synergy? With a new year and a new brand, we decided to change up our content strategies a little bit. Our founder Keith Koons has had thousands of followers for many years now in the content marketing niche, and you fine folks represent close to 40% of our total web traffic each month. It seemed a little silly for us to be giving advice to clients about catering to their visitors while not doing so ourselves.
This was a unique problem for us though since almost half of our traffic comes fron people that will never be our clients. But then again, they’re our people- writers and digital marketers just like us wo are always searching for new insights. So do we just chase the all-mighty dollar or focus on giving back?
Blogging for Clients & Our Fans
Ultimately, we decided that we have to really ramp up blogging efforts in 2017 with two different series- one that focuses on small businesses looking for web design or branding help, plus another blog catering to novice digital marketers and writers. Keith will also continue to share client success stories and his own insights as well, so we’re setting the bar pretty high to produce a tremendous amount of content moving forward.
Part of that strategy is going to be opening our blog to some great writers that we’ve worked with over the years, so you will start to see a little bit of guest posting moving forward. If you’d like to be a part of that, shoot an email over to Friends@UpstateSynergy.com with a story pitch and a brief outline.
Just know up front that our content standards are very high and we don’t publish fluff pieces. If you’re going to get a byline on our site, then it has to be something with actionable advice that directly helps our readers.
A New Video Blog Series
Additionally, we plan on starting a video series later this year with simple, straightforward advice on topics like creating a powerful digital brand, writing content that converts, building awesome websites and sales funnels, and all sorts of topics on learning about everyday customer engagement.
We are extremely excited about the video series and we hope that you are too!
Look for this series to start around March or April of 2017.
A Kick-Butt Community Forum
Finally, we are also debating whether or not we should add a community forum where our friends and clients can talk about digital marketing. We’ve always loved sites like Warrior Forum and Digital Point for sharing strategies and just getting to know our peers, but the problem with those places is that they become overrun with big egos. The solid advice tends to get lost in the cracks far too easily.
So if we did do a forum, we would want to keep it small…maybe even invite only. We would also have the community moderate to keep the trash talking to a minimum, and just make it a place where folks can share ideas, ask marketing questions or get some quick help. But to do that, we’d need people like you to share that same vision.
This is one topic where we’d really like to hear your input, so please share some feedback in the comments section below.
Also, what do you think of the new site? Did we nail it or not? We can’t wait to hear your opinion!