While the buzz is currently on social media, your blog is still your best way to push out longer, developed ideas to your customers and/or site visitors. A great blog, however, can mean a lot of work. Luckily, you don't have to go it alone. The trend in blogging today is collaborative blogging, opening up blogs to a team of authors.

With collaborative blogging, authors can be assigned a day of the week they're expected to post. Detailed, media rich, and well researched posts are a snap given each author has up to a week to work on a single post.

A blog with daily or frequently updated content, rich in information, is a great way to bring repeat traffic. Consider a few popular collaborative blogs covering a variety of topics and approaches:

Basic: Science-Based Medicine - A collaborative blog about the intersection of science and medicine.

Developed: Social Media Today - A group blog covering social media topics like Twitter and Facebook.

Big Time: Gizmodo - A technology blog about consumer electronics.

Your basic collaborative blog, like the science-based medicine blog, is just a bunch of subject matter experts making regular contributions around a niche topic. The blog looks like a blog and has no advertising.

The Social Media Today blog is what I'd call "developed". They've extended the blog look, framed it with advertising, links to add on services, and links to their social media connections.

Big Time is, well, big time. This is the holy grail of group blogging. Your blog is bought out by a major media organization. It's a blog that no longer reports the trend but can make the trends. Gizmodo, Engadget, and Life Hacker are a few examples. They've actually stopped looking like blogs and have moved into a glossy magazine for the web feel.

Voloper vBlog

Creating a collaborative blog with Voloper's vBlog is a snap. Simply go to vBlog's back-end admin page and click the Authors link. Click the Add New Author button and complete the Author Detail page.

You can use vBlog's Post Details page to fine tune and schedule posting order. Authors can enter their posts ahead of time and set the status to "Draft". The blog "editor" can then make the posts active as appropriate and use the Post Date field to adjust the apparent posting time, creating an even flow of posts.