Today Compendium's marketing team (our blog program owners) put on our first ever Blog-a-Thon. As a company, we typically generate 60 or so posts per month for our corporate blogs. That means we collectively generate -- among nearly 30 contributors -- an average of 3 posts per business day.

The intent of our Blog-a-Thon was to crush this number. The marketing team notified us all by email last week the goals of the Blog-a-Thon and also let us know about a tasty breakfast that would be served to those who participated.

So, a key thing to point out here is that our blogging program owners gave us an incentive, and they work really well in motivating content contributors.

The next thing they did was block out 20 minutes on everyone's calendars around lunch time today. That's important because, let's face it, we're all busy people and sometimes blogging takes a backseat to other priorities if we don't have it scheduled.

And finally, they brought around a nice bucket of candy to everyone during the time that was slated as "Blog-a-Thon content generation" in order to give everyone some immediate satisfaction.

As of 4:45 today the Blog-a-Thon had generated an impressive 16 posts, with this post pushing the meter to 17 posts in one day.

For all of you math whizzes out there...the Blog-a-Thon gave us a 533% lift in content creation!

The immediate key takeaways here are that incentives, prizes, and scheduled time are all great blogging best practices.

The next step is for us to evaluate how all of that new content impacted our search results and traffic...more to come on that front, but all signs currently point to Blog-a-thon blogging success.