In this monthly update, we share our client count relative to our goal, our churn, how many leads we got in May and our general sentiment around leads. Then we share what marketing has and hasn't worked and how marketing differs for service businesses.

When you've identified a keyword or topic for a blog post, how do you get the arguments that go in your piece? We interview subject matter experts at Grow and Convert to accomplish this. In this video,  we share how we prep for interviews with subject matter experts, who to interview, and how to add differentiation in your articles when writing for SEO bottom of the funnel keywords.

Devesh and I debate whether we should focus more on how-to content on this channel because it seems to be what gets the most viewership and engagement. We reflect on the series so far, our overall goal of doubling the agency and discuss whether we continue the series as is, or we go down a slightly different path. If you've enjoyed certain episodes, please let us know which ones you've loved in the comments. Or, feel free to let us know topics you'd like us to create videos on going forward.

Your business is starting to grow and now you need more of a process around marketing... so you're thinking of hiring your first marketer. What is the right profile of the marketer you should hire?What should that marketer focus on in the first 90 days?How should they think about what marketing channels to focus on?What's a good budget to start with? We answer these questions and more in this episode. We share, from our experience, the mistakes that founders make when hiring their first...

In this episode, Devesh starts off by sharing the two goals of the content pieces we write for clients. Then he shares examples explaining the differences between how we write articles vs. how most blog writers write articles. We dissect the differences in how we write blog post introductions, body copy and share why we think it's important to have subject matter experts make the arguments that go inside of blog posts. This episode should help you learn how to write better copy inside of...

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.

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. 

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...

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.

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...

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. 

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.

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...

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...

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...

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 Service4:20 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.

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...

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. 

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...

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:...

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...

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...

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...