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In this episode, we share where we are relative to our doubling the agency goal. Then we talk through what's been working from a marketing perspective and some of the operational challenges that we're anticipating if we keep growing this quickly.
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In Episode 10, the episode about content strategies for new businesses, we shared that we were planning on doing a disruption story for one of our clients.
In this episode, we share who the client is (Mirascope.io), the article and talk through some decisions that were made when writing the story.
Then we share a couple of other examples of disruption stories that we've produced for clients.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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Can SEO content also be "thought leadership content?" Many people think these two kinds of content are completely different. More specifically, that you can't share thought leadership type ideas inside of SEO content and get articles to rank.
We share a different view. We think that SEO and thought leadership ideas do go together. In this video, we share multiple examples of thought leadership ideas being included inside of SEO focused articles and show how they're able to rank against articles that all share largely the same ideas.
We think that Google wants more differentiation in content and will start to reward differentiation more in the SERPS.
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March was a challenging month for us. We had our first churn of the year- which was not a great way to start the month- however it ended on a positive note.
We discuss the churn, some new clients, our lead numbers and then share some ideas for changes we're going to be making to our marketing.
Enjoy.
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LinkedIn influencer claims that: "Measuring the ROI of an individual piece of content (like this LinkedIn video, for instance) is not only a huge waste of time, it’s flat out not accurate.
When it comes to “ROI”, focus on measuring the ROI of the *channel* instead of each individual piece of content."
In this video, we break down why that argument is completely flawed.
We discuss how having the article level of granularity in conversion data is what led to the creation of Pain Point SEO and how this informs future content pieces that generate ROI.
Then we share a new process for tracking conversions using a combination of GA4 and BigQuery.
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In this episode, we discuss whether we should hire an editor to help scale writing operations. Devesh voices his frustration by spending so much time editing pieces -- most of his time in the agency is dedicated to editing and he feels like he doesn't have time to focus elsewhere.
We propose the options of hiring an outside agency to help with editing, whether we should focus on hiring someone internally, and also discuss other ideas and options.
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In this episode, we share why we took a client with a new business and domain rating of only 0.5 (didn't even know this was possible). Then we share the approach we're taking to grow their business from the ground up with content.
As part of the content strategy for this new business, we decided to create a disruption story for them. We talk about what the disruption story framework is, how we came up with the angle and idea for them and then talk through how the team outlined the piece.
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In this episode, we share our client stats for the month of February. We analyze the leads we've received, we share why we don't work with software development companies as clients and share some ideas on how we'd attack SEO if we were a software development company, and then we spend a lengthy time discussing if we should hire an editor.
The main challenge going forward is that we need to free up Devesh's time as most of it is spent editing new strategists and some of our current strategists. If we scale, we need to get him out of the day to day operations.
We talk through the pros and cons of hiring an editor, then finish the video talking through some other big picture challenges for the business.
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Seven months into one of our engagements, the CEO asked us "when will the volume of high-quality leads start to go up?" The typical answer from most marketers is to say "I don't know" or "it depends," but we wanted to provided a more data driven answer.
We knew that the client was likely 1-2 months away from seeing a big lift in the volume of leads due to where they were already ranking for high-intent keywords. Now, we had the challenge of presenting the argument and data to them.
In Episode 8, we share projections that we did to help make the case that we were on the cusp of achieving ROI and share our thoughts and analysis of where the client is at 7 months into the engagement.
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In Episode 7, we bring in a guest. David Klose, one of our content strategists, joins us to talk about his experience updating blog posts. More specifically, we discuss 2 client accounts that had declining results (both ranking and leads) and how there was a need to get rankings back up.
David shares the approach he took on two different accounts to bring the accounts back from a low in the engagement to new all-time-highs.
This episode shares a mix between the thought process that was going on behind the scenes internally as well as more of the tactical approach we took to recover rankings.
Hope you enjoy this episode!
Here's his article on his approach to reclaim rankings: https://www.growandconvert.com/seo/secondary-keywords/
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In Episode 6, we get recommended as an agency from a known entity in the startup space, but the prospect wants a service that we don't really offer. We debate whether we should create a new service offering to take on the new client.
Content brand post: https://www.growandconvert.com/content-marketing/content-brand/
Timestamps:
0:00 Episode Preview
0:42 Doubling Agency Intro
1:00 Prospect approaches us about a LinkedIn Service
4:20 Should we start a new service offering?
11:16 Our decision -
In Episode 5, we recap our first month since starting our challenge. We grew the highest amount in one month since starting our agency. We share our client count, where the mix of revenue is coming from and then analyze the 3 new clients that signed on for February.
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In Episode 4, one of our strategists is having trouble with an article interview and Devesh needs to jump in and take over the interview to steer it in the right direction.
We ask the question, is this a good use of Devesh's time? We haven't really built any processes around interviewing, do we now need to build more training or processes around interviewing or is this a one-off issue?
We talk through how to resolve this specific issue and then broaden out to talk more broadly about when it's a good time to build processes as you grow.
We hope you enjoy this episode.
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After doing some analysis on clients that dropped in 2023, we realized that we have an issue with our churn rate. On average, clients stick with us for 12 months, which in other words means: we turn over all of our clients every year.
In Episode 3, we talk through various ways to improve our churn rate: From changing pricing, to contract length, to various other ideas.
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We signed a new client on a year long contract, sent them the first article and they weren't happy with it. On top of that, the strategist and writer that was managing the account didn't feel like they were a good fit to keep running the account.
In Episode 2, we talk through what we did to resolve the situation. We weighed various options from: 1. Is it worth it to keep the client? 2. Do we need to bring in a new writer/strategist on this account? 3. Does Devesh need to take over writing to get this account in a better spot. We try to answer the question, when does it make sense to get back into the business vs. working on the business?
We hope you enjoy it.
Articles related to this episode:
Content brand -
We're starting a new series where we document our journey trying to double the size of our agency over the next couple of years. This is episode one of the series where we explain why we're ready to scale our business, what our goals are, and why were documenting the journey on Youtube. Then we do a deep dive into our business during 2023, share why clients churned and our plans for 2024.
We hope you enjoy it!
Read the full article here explaining the launch of the series: https://www.growandconvert.com/doubling-our-agency/public-challenge-doubling-agency/
0:00 Episode preview
0:32 Intro
0:49 Explaining the Doubling our Agency series
2:50 Moving from a lifestyle business to a business we’re scaling
5:00 Why we want to double our agency now
9:18 Our team and motivations behind growing
11:28 Why share everything on Youtube?
14:02 Why expand beyond just doing pain point SEO for ourselves?
25:08 Topics we’re going to talk about in future videos
26:58 Deep dive: Recapping 2023 (from our highest revenue ever to a ~40% revenue drop!)
38:21 Going through all of our 2023 one-by-one to determine the causes
47:44 Analysis of sources of churn
51:03 Our client count ending 2023
52:24 Looking forward into 2024 -
In our latest episode, we interview founder Ian Landsman about how he started the help desk software Helpspot back in the early 2000s and how he's lasted 15+ years against funded big name players like Zendesk, HelpScout, and more.
We get into the details about what he did in the early days to launch his company, why he never really had a focus on marketing until recently, and we share some of the rankings that we've been able to generate for their business in an extremely competitive category.
Sections:
0:00 Intro
1:13 The founding story of Helpspot
5:26 Funny story about software development
7:49 Laravel
8:48 How Helpspot was funded
9:35 Pre-SaaS
11:56 How Helpspot launched
12:56 Early SEO
15:39 Enter the competitors- Zendesk, etc.
18:27 Team size
20:29 Why Helpspot never invested in marketing
25:26 Difference between VC funded and bootstrapped help desk software
29:15 Did you ever think about selling your business?
31:43 Marketing and positioning
35:23 Why invest in SEO
40:37 Results from G&C
47:10 Attribution of leads to SEO/Content
53:52 Helpspot 2023 and beyond -
We're trying something new. Many of our clients have really interesting backgrounds and stories, so we decided to interview them.
In this podcast, we interview the Vocal Video team to learn where they got the idea for Vocal Video, learnings from their experience selling their past company TechValidate to SurveyMonkey, how their past experiences informed their marketing strategy, why they chose SEO/content marketing as a channel, how they launched their product and more...
Please let us know what you think of this format.
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There are many people that don't know how to calculate the ROI of SEO. In particular, they don't understand a key principle of SEO's ROI: it gets better as time passes. Why? Because unlike paid channels where you need to spend more for every extra click you get, in SEO you start accumulating or stacking pages ranking at the top of Google search results, while your spend doesn't increase.
So as you do SEO for longer, you get more traffic and more leads for the same monthly cost, yielding you better and better ROI.
In this podcast, we discuss this in depth, using examples and graphs (if you'd like to see them, find our video on Youtube).
We aren't making the argument that SEO is better than other channels, just that you need to think about it differently. With other channels, you may see a fast ROI, but leads get more expensive overtime and you need to continue to invest more into it, and with SEO, it takes longer to get an ROI but costs come down dramatically overtime.
SEO works well when you have an existing channel that is driving leads already and you can build this simultaneously over the long term.
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In the past couple of months, we've had an increasing number of people ask us our thoughts on ChatGPT and how it will affect the world of content marketing and content writing.We've seen people take extremes: People saying they are going to use ChatGPT instead of hiring writers or content marketers going forward. Then the opposite, people saying ChatGPT has no value in writing or content marketing.
In this podcast, we wanted to try to answer the question, "how can ChatGPT be used?" by sharing a number of different blog posts and writing prompts, and sharing our thoughts along the way about where ChatGPT excels, and where it falls short.
We hope you enjoy it!
A special thank you to Stacey Moore for helping educate us on the topic. Stacey has been using her own AI tool to assist producing content, you can check out her work at staceymoore.com
Sections:
0:00 Why we’re doing this episode on ChatGPT
5:27 The kind of writing we do at Grow and Convert
7:45 ChatGPT example 1: Produce a post on B2B Content Marketing Courses (Hard Example)
14:49 Some downsides of example 1 and why it falls short of good writing
17:19 Recapping what we’ve gone over so far
19:37 Have Chat GPT produce certain sections of the post on B2B Content Marketing Coursed
25:01 Contrasting ChatGPT to our post
29:39 ChatGPT Example 2: Daily Standup meetings post
34:14 Downsides of example 2: Contrasting it against what we wrote for the same subject
37:24 Using ChatGPT for B2C blogging and thoughts on selling to beginners
40:01 ChatGPT example 3: B2C - Produce a post on heat pumps
43:53 Downsides of example 3: How do you stand out when you’re producing the same thing as everyone?
47:25 Mistakes people make in hiring content marketers/ writers
49:06 How do you figure out search intent?
50:38 Chat GPT example 4: Running tips (easiest example)
54:59 Example 4 takeaways
57:21 Final takeawys on ChatGPT and AI writing - Visa fler