A lot of content marketing bloggers write for a broad audience, so they end up with posts like “Tips for Improving Your Blog” or “Top Blogging Myths” and “10 Minutes a Day to a Better Blog.” I find them useful, but I consume them the way I consume other content designed for mass appeal, which means scanning them quickly for one thing that will spark my imagination or at least reinforce what I already know.

That’s not what this blog is about. This blog is for an audience that already knows the difference between good and great content. It’s for people who already know how they would improve their blog—if they had the time, resources and support from their managers. It’s for people who know they need to make fundamental changes to their business processes and culture.

The challenge that a lot of my peers face is how to convince their bosses that spending the time and money on a content strategy will pay dividends in the future. Once that hurdle is accomplished, they face the practical challenge of implementing a content strategy. Anyone can set up a blog. Everyone should know that you need to post to your blog regularly. But it’s quite another thing to determine why projects languish and how to give them momentum.

At my day-job, there’s a lot of pressure on staff to constantly initiate new and highly visible projects, whether or not we ever complete them. The act of starting something new every quarter is meant to signal vitality, energy and momentum. It’s true that we’re constantly busy, but sadly, not much ever gets done. Our magazine stories too often rely on the first interviews we conduct instead of the best ones. This is not because individuals in my department don’t know what to do or want to do it that way. It’s because the overall business model and culture is based on a different set of priorities and values.

Who determines the culture? How do you change it? Can your department operate a sub-culture that operates effectively within a larger, contradictory culture? There are no single answers to these questions, but I plan to explore them all in this blog.

The stakes are high, by the way. In our organization, the tension between needing to do many things fast and wanting to do a few things right has become a staffing issue and a revenue issue. We’ve had nearly 100 percent turnover in two years as professionals who want to be proud of the work they do leave for better jobs. Only two people have been with this association more than three years, and some positions have turned over two or three times in the last three years. It’s difficult to measure, but our revenue has most certainly been affected by the loss of institutional knowledge on one hand and the inability to sustain high-quality, core products in favor of starting new products with minimal resources.