Five Best Blogging Service Providers in Indianapolis

It’s a great exercise in humility and a test of your ego to answer the question, “who are the five best blogging service providers,” and being told you can’t name yourself.

(Of course, anyone from Indiana would know better than to name themselves. Hoosiers are a humble people, after all.)

But who would I name as good content marketing/blogging service providers? After all, I should know this community and industry fairly well.

As I thought about the question, I thought back to my friendships that I’ve established over the years, and the people I’ve shared ideas, projects, and even clients with. And these are the five people and companies I would pick as five of the best blogging companies in central Indiana, in no particular order.

• Metonymy Media: President Ryan Brock has made it a mission to hire only creative writing graduates, which is good, since creative writing as a professional pursuit is difficult. But it also makes Metonymy great story tellers. If we do face an impending content shock, then the storytellers are going to be the ones who win. He’s also managed to grow Metonymy into a sizable agency with several professional writers, and taught the city of Indianapolis what “metonymy” actually means. Ryan is also the founder of Indy WordLab, a writers’ meetup I attend nearly every month.

Lindsay Manfredi. Seriously, you can’t help but be impressed by someone who has their own band.

• Lindsay Manfredi: She was one of the first bloggers I met when I started in this business, and I’ve learned a lot from watching her work. She was also willing to give advice when I needed it, and I’ve even referred a couple clients to her. Plus I love her energetic writing style — it matches her in person energy and the energy she brings to the stage when she’s playing live music around the city.
• Raidious: CEO Taulbee Jackson and I wrote The Owned Media Doctrine together last year, and I ended up learning a lot from him about content marketing on the enterprise level. They treat their content marketing efforts like a newsroom focusing on each day’s stories, being able to provide content to clients within hours, not days. Raidious also ran the Social Media Command Center for Super Bowl XLVI, a practice that every Super Bowl has adopted since then, and will continue to do so.
• Jackie Bledsoe: I first met Jackie during the Branding Yourself book launch in 2010, and have helped him as he learned about blogging and the professional copywriting life. He has parlayed his hard work into becoming one of the premier bloggers on fatherhood and family, writing for several family-related websites and publications, interviewing several celebrities, launching a podcast for couples, and is even working on an educational series that may turn into a book and speaking tour.
• Digital Relevance: I’ve known Jeremy Dearringer since Digital Relevance was Slingshot SEO, and the company was just three guys doing SEO work for corporate clients. They’ve suffered under Google’s different algorithm changes, but have managed to pivot and become a content company that does SEO. They’re still one of the biggest tech employers in the city, and I’ve known several people who have worked at Digital Relevance (and Slingshot) at one time or another. If anyone knows SEO better in the Midwest, I haven’t met them.

Those are the five people who I look to for my own inspiration and ideas of what I should be doing in running my own business. I try to learn from their creativity, their storytelling, work ethic, attention to technology, and energy. Hopefully I’ve been able to take something from the best of each of them and incorporate it into how I work.