Groove Digital Marketing Agency: Key Activities and Results for Week of April 14th
Since writing a post about how I’m planning to grow my agency, Groove Digital Marketing, into my next 7 figure success story, the feedback I’ve received from readers has been very positive. Thank you to those of you who shared the post, commented on it, or emailed me directly. Your feedback was very encouraging.
In today’s post, as promised, I’m going to give you a look over my shoulder for the past week and share with you what I did, as well as the results we achieved.
If you missed last week’s post, you can find it here.
As always, my hope is that my transparency with you can be the fuel you need to achieve similar results in your own business. Sound good? Here we go!
Key Activities in the Week of April 14th, 2014
During the past week, here’s a summary of what happened:
- We published 3 blog posts
- We launched our Target100 direct mail campaign
- I published another content marketing video
- I created the plan for our next two TOFU campaigns
- I started to research the health care niche
- Added a new member to our team
- Website traffic and leads climbed steadily
Now that you’ve seen, at a high level, what the key activities were, let’s dive into some details.
3 New Blog Posts
Two of the following three posts were written by writers that we’ve hired to join our team. Within our wiki, we’ve created a very comprehensive set of instructions for how we want our posts written. The other post with the infographic didn’t really have much in the way of writing, so I did that one myself.
- WARNING: These 6 Mistakes Will Kill Your Blog
- 3 Reasons Why You Must Have a Mobile Friendly Website
- Winning with Content Marketing: 7 Key Ingredients
Mailed Letter #1 to the Target 100 List
On Friday, our first 100 letters were mailed. In next week’s report, I will share the results of this first mailing.
If you missed last week’s post, you will definitely want to read it so you can see the high level view of the 9 week long campaign.
New Video: Introduction to Inbound Marketing
After seeing a video by Andrew Dymski of Guavabox, I decided to create my own version of an Introduction to Inbound Marketing. This video will be sent to new Groove subscribers and the Target 100 list that download our lead magnet.
TOFU Campaign #2 & #3
Our next two inbound campaigns have already been planned in their entirety. Both lead ebooks are now in production. I’ve also selected all the titles for the blog posts and assigned them to our writing team.
Ideally, we’ll have all our content created at least 45 days prior to it being published. In addition to this pre-planned content, we’ll also be doing selective newsjacking like we did here (check out the volume of social shares we got).
Creating this post took one of our writers less than an hour, so it was time very well spent.
How to Plan Your Blog Posts
One of the things I think stumps a lot of people is coming up with ideas for what to write about.
Figuring it out it much easier than you might think.
Several months ago, Neil Patel wrote a post that (basically) said the following: study your competitors blogs and re-write (and improve) any posts that got a lot of comments and shares.
For some diehards, this is too simple of an approach. Luckily for me, I’m much more interested in getting results than in being a purist :)
I’m the first to admit virtually everything I’ve ever written about has already been covered 50 times (or more) elsewhere. Despite this, when I publish my own post on a topic I’ve seen elsewhere, I still get plenty of shares on social media – and new leads.
Let me put this another way. Do you really think the there is anything on Copyblogger that you can’t find on Hubspot’s blog? I doubt it. Yet, despite this, both blogs are insanely successful.
If that’s not enough, last week I recorded an interview with an agency owner whose blog, which is just two years old, gets 35,000 visits a month.
When I asked him if he follows Neil’s advice, his answer was, “hell ya.”
So, with that in mind, here’s my dirty little secret on how to quickly & easily plan your blog post titles:
- Create a spreadsheet to store them
- Every time you see a post that covers a topic that relates to a lead magnet you have planned, re-write the title and store it in your spreadsheet with a link to the original post
- Hire a writer to re-write (and look for ways to improve) the post
- Publish it on your blog and aggressively share on social media
Voila…huge volumes of epic content that is guaranteed to be popular.
NOTE: FOR THIS TO WORK, YOU MUST BE TARGETING THE SAME READER AS THE OTHER BLOG AND YOU MUST NOT COPY THEIR CONTENT WORD FOR WORD.
Health Care Niche Research
Another agency owner that I interviewed last week told me that he’s been having a lot of success in the health care niche. He told me that he can charge 4x the price for the same amount of work that he’d been doing for other niches.
4x? Really?
The reason for this is simple. The lifetime customer value (LTV) of the customers of his health care clients is extremely high, so his clients can (and expect) to pay a lot to acquire each customer.
At this point, I don’t know squat about the health care niche…and it’s a massive niche. To help me increase my knowledge, I’ve joined a number of LinkedIn groups and have started to extend invitations to CMO’s to be on my podcast.
In my experience, there is no better way to learn about a niche that to talk directly to the people in it.
Want to copy me but don’t have a podcast yet? Start one.
New Team Member
As I’m writing this very post, our newest team member, Juliana, is downstairs consuming our training material. Liz is only days away from giving birth to Kiana, so getting a replacement for Liz has been a huge priority.
Juliana has vast experience in writing and editing already, so I’m keen to see the contribution she makes to our growing team.
Case Study: Groove Digital Marketing Traffic and Conversion Stats
Since my decision just over a month ago to begin actively blogging on Groove, the results have come very quickly.
Below is a summary of our results thus far.
Additional Resources
Now What?
If you liked this post and want future updates on our progress with how to launch a marketing agency, just click the image below. If you’d like to get even more help and surround yourself with other agency owners, be sure and check out the Bright Ideas Mastermind Elite, which is my mastermind group for entrepreneurs running marketing agencies.
Have questions or comments? Please share them with us in the comments below.
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