Near San Fran­cisco in the town of Vallejo, there’s an old street that was part of the Naval ship­yard estab­lished in the 1800s called Mag­a­zine. In New Orleans, there’s a six-mile thor­ough­fare called Mag­a­zine Street. These are the ancient streets where mag­a­zines of sup­plies were kept, store­houses for emer­gen­cies. On war­ships, the mag­a­zine is the stor­age area for ammu­ni­tion. A mag­a­zine is where you can find every essen­tial you might need.

If you blog reglarly as a way of bring­ing fresh ideas to your con­stituency, whether they be clients, poten­tial cus­tomers, com­mu­nity, or just read­ers who like your voice, then you are prob­a­bly famil­iar with the feel­ing that blog­ging is fun­da­men­tally Sisy­phu­sian. You say some­thing worth­while on any given day, it goes up on your blog (which is hope­fully on the front page of your web­site) and it stays there for all to admire for­ever and ever.

Actu­ally, not really for­ever. It stays up there until you oblit­er­ate it with your next post. And then what­ever you’ve pre­vi­ously writ­ten, no mat­ter how bril­liant, gets pushed down far­ther and far­ther until it rests in a cold damp cel­lar reserved for ancient blog posts. As in any­thing writ­ten more than two weeks ago.

For­tu­nately, there’s a rev­o­lu­tion hap­pen­ing for art­ful blog­gers: the mag­a­zine. Magazine-style tem­plates for your blog have the poten­tial to trans­form your web­site from flat and old to active, com­plex, rich, daz­zling and involving.

We’ve been play­ing with a cou­ple of mag­a­zines on two of our web­sites over the last few weeks, and the impli­ca­tions are per­co­lat­ing through. You can take a look at endleofon.com and agencyforsocialmedia.com (this site) and see what the cur­rent result is.

Here are a few obser­va­tions: mag­a­zines are orga­nized by the cat­e­gory you assign your blog posts. In our cur­rent ver­sions we can have up to six cat­e­gories. Since the first cat­e­gory goes on top, we have named that cat­e­gory News, and every post we write will first carry that sin­gle cat­e­gory as its iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. Later, when News is full of posts and a post gets pushed out of News, we’ll rename it to one of our other five categories.

Maybe the most impor­tant dri­ver of the spirit of a mag­a­zine tem­plate is that it has a date­line, right across the front. That shows your com­mit­ment to vis­i­tors to keep your site always updated — so that every time some­one shows up you’ve got some­thing new for them. The great thing is that all your old posts that had some­thing impor­tant to say can now be found in one of the cat­e­gories on your front page, and listed there as promi­nently as you want it to be. If you’ve been in the habit of cre­at­ing lit­tle keynote graph­ics for each post, Bravo! You’re ahead of the game because your web­site will auto­mat­i­cally be lively with lots of great graph­ics. If not, then you really ought to spend a lit­tle time find­ing and cre­at­ing graph­ics to go with every post that you want to keep alive.

Don’t hes­i­tate to go back and freshen old posts. No one cares if what you said was slightly off six months ago. If it needs to be cor­rected, updated, revised or even thought through some more, go ahead and refine it.

Mag­a­zines are pow­er­ful, and not for every­one. If you are com­fort­able keep­ing your web­site up as a brochure, you don’t need to be a mag­a­zine. But if you’ve been cre­at­ing blog con­tent for awhile, a mag­a­zine might be the best pos­si­ble way to lever­age your investment.

And if you’re really com­mit­ted to build­ing an active com­mu­nity for the issues you care about, whether it be your busi­ness or sim­ply your pas­sion, you might find the poten­tial big gun of a mag­a­zine to be just what you’ve always wanted if you only knew it existed.

Next post we’ll talk about the oppor­tu­ni­ties mag­a­zines cre­ate for you to invite con­trib­u­tors to your site. Guest blog­gers used to come and go, dis­ap­pear­ing just like your own blog posts. But with a mag­a­zine, you can keep vastly more con­tent, your own and that of your guests, right up front.