Those who read this blog or listen to the GLS Content Marketing Podcast may know me as a content guy. A writer and a marketer who does a lot of website development and branding. But I have hobbies like any guy and so a few of my friends and I started a podcast in August […]
Podcast Hits 100 Subscribers in 1 Month with Zero Marketing Read More »
Many companies offer services that differ from each other, but are otherwise related in some way. For example, nail salons sometimes offer tanning services, psychologists offer life coaching services, and so on. Sometimes these services have a clear relation and connection, and sometimes they do not. With that in mind, there are times when it
About 5 months ago, I created a research post on pest control marketing, specifically looking at what it takes to complete in online marketing and branding for pest control. I chose the Staten Island area, because it’s a fairly large area without a large online branding presence. Five months seems to be a decent time
An Update on Staten Island Pest Control Marketing Read More »
After everything that goes into having a new website built for your business, the last thing on most lists is the content. The text on your site that conveys your branding message, convinces visitors to buy or signup for an email list, and that builds relationships with your audience. That stuff is precious gold and
What Does It Cost to Have a Website Written For You? Read More »
As a car service and limousine company, you understand how important it is to continuously generate new leads and grow your business. And today there is no faster and more effective way to do so than by building a website that generates a lot of visitors. Great Leap Studios has worked with car service and
Once you’ve developed a strong social media following, your next step is engagement. There are three ways that people can engage your social media account: They can “like” or “favorite” something. They can comment on a post or respond to you. They can share your post or retweet you for their own followers. That latter
Online branding strategies are not that different from offline strategies. Where businesses buy billboards and radio spots offline, they pay for Facebook Ads and podcast placements online. The difference, however, is that online we have so much more freedom of choice. We can pinpoint demographics, streamline our messages, and generate razor focused messaging that goes
These Five Common Branding Mistakes Cost Businesses Millions Every Year Read More »
I cringe every time I read an article about how SEO is essentially free marketing. Search engine optimization is not free – not by a long shot, and for years I’ve had to untangle a lot of the knots that our competitors put out there among potential clients. It’s why I don’t use that word
The Single Most Powerful Marketing Tool Online…is Free? Read More »
If you’ve followed the Great Leap Studios blog for awhile, which many of you have, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve increased the frequency of our posts dramatically – from one or two posts per week to 3 posts per day, every day, including weekends. We’re in the middle of our own content marketing experiment –
A few months ago, I was researching a book for a client about copywriting. I came across a passage about the Zeigarnik Effect – the psychological principle showing that human beings can’t help but want to know what happens next. It applies to just about everything. Cliffhanger endings. Soap opera style storytelling. Half finished photographs.
Keep Your Readers on the Edge of their Seat – Eager to Know More and Buy Read More »
Last month, Google released a completely revamped algorithm, replacing the existing one for the first time in more than 10 years. That’s a big deal. Even Panda and Penguin, which affected millions of sites, were revisions not complete overhauls. So this new release – dubbed Hummingbird by Google – is huge. But it’s not quite
What is Google Hummingbird and How Does it Affect You? Read More »
Facebook is something of a seesaw when it comes to marketing value. At first it was a pointless endeavor for businesses, then it was the next coming of the Internet. Then it was a cash-sink and then again, the source of the best ROI online. It’s hard to know exactly what you can get out
No More Endless Facebook Posts – Yet You Can Drive Twice the Traffic Read More »
Google’s algorithm is a secret, and while we know some of the marketing you can do to improve your search engine rank, not every factor is well understood. For example, we think we know that Google tends to value its own products and use them in rankings – for example, there is some evidence that
Can Google Adwords Affect SEO and Search Engine Placement? Read More »
We talk a lot about content marketing and online branding on this website, and we provide content marketing services to dozens of industries. But there is perhaps no industry better suited for online marketing than the tourism and travel industry. It’s amazing how many advantages tourism companies have for online marketing: Potential customers need to
Examples of Tourism and Travel Content and Blog Post Ideas Read More »
Search engines find and rank your website through your content. Your content tells them how valuable you are as an answer to potential search engine queries, what your website is about, whether you’re engaging to your visitors and more. That’s why it’s important to think about what you add to your site and make sure
Great Leap Studios is a New York branding company and content writing firm. Even though most of our clients come from other places in the world, we also work with local New York businesses to ensure that they’re able to compete in what has become an intensely competitive environment. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about
New York Branding: How Different Are the Boroughs? Read More »
There is one area where I have long slacked off – at least until relatively recently. I rarely, if ever asked clients for reviews. I’d do amazing work to be sure, but I never bothered asking anyone for a testimonial or a quick review on Google or LinkedIn. In fact, I would often be happy
The Secret to Getting Honest Positive Reviews for Your Business Online Read More »
Life coaching is a growing industry, and in the past we’ve worked with close a dozen life coaches developing life coach content. Life coaches are often dependent on the internet to attract clients, because the best way to make sure that you are seen as an expert is to create motivational, inspirational, interesting, and informative
Examples of Life Coach Content and Blog Post Ideas Read More »
Search engines regularly update their algorithms to answer search queries. Most of the time this helps legitimate businesses. Sometimes it doesn’t. There is a growing movement of marketers that believe Google is trying to make sure businesses need more content and more marketing to compete – more than they can afford – so that they
The Death of SEO: Introduction to Content Writing in a Post Search Engine World Read More »
Most marketing firms focus on things like lead generation, brand recognition and conversions. These are all very good numbers. If your branding or content marketing partner is boosting your numbers in any of these categories, they’re earning their fees. But one of area of the business that is frequently overlooked is retention. How do you
Advice to Business Owners Whose Clients Don’t Return – From a Business Owner Read More »
If you’ve ever listened to the Great Leap Studios podcast you know that we talk about pest control branding and marketing a lot, using it as our primary example of the value of content marketing services. The reason is that so few pest control companies use online marketing tactics, but those that do are almost
Examples of Pest Control Content and Blog Post Ideas Read More »
In July we took on two new accounts, both of which had Facebook Pages with less than 20 likes. One of our first tasks, I told both clients was that we needed to grow those numbers to at least 100 likes, largely because the full scope of tools provided by Facebook – from promoted posts
What’s the Fastest Way to Get 100 Likes on a Facebook Page? Read More »
I had a funny thought this morning. Do call centers advertise? I figure everyone advertises to some degree, right? But what about a company that essentially is an advertising firm? Do they pay for outside advertising or do they just rely on their own services to contact potential clients? I imagine it depends on the
This past week I have been privileged to spend a week in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. It has been an incredible experience. During my travels, I met someone that helped invent the internet (literally, in like the 1960s), a fire chief from New York during 9/11, and several other nice people while touring what is a
Offline QA: Puerto Vallarta Tourism and Online Marketing Read More »
For some reason, marketing firms, even ones with amazing blogs, tend to treat money and budgets as taboo. You don’t talk about it because it’s unprofessional or it pre-disposes potential clients towards or against your services. I don’t like that mindset because let’s face it, money is one of the first and only things on
So You Only Have $100 Per Month for Marketing – Now What? Read More »
One of the biggest challenges for us as a content marketing company is to develop a focused plan for B2C companies that provide big ticket products and services. The message needs to be hyper-targeted to a very specific mindset, both in terms of what will trigger a purchase and what will lead to a search
Quick question – how did you find this page? You probably searched for something like “window cleaner marketing” or “SEO services window cleaner” in Google. And this post showed up, if not first, near the top and you clicked on it, because it matched almost exactly what you were looking for, right? Content marketing and
Welcome to the second article in a series on content and blog post ideas for individual industries. Today we want to go over some topics for a growing industry – the Yoga industry. Yoga is growing in popularity, but yoga studios are popping up more often as well, which means that to profit you need
There is a mistake so grievous and yet so simple that it costs businesses of all sizes billions of dollars per year. In advertising budget. In lost sales. In lost customers. No one is immune to the problem – I’ve seen Fortune 500 corporations fall victim to this as often if not more so than
One Little Mistake that Costs Businesses Billions Every Year Read More »
Fall is just about here and that means a few things for homeowners. First, you can finally turn down the AC and start saving some money on your electric bill. Second, it’s time to go into maintenance mode and prepare for the upcoming winter. One of the most common fall tasks for homeowners is gutter
One of the most challenging issues for those that are interested in adding content to their website is coming up with ideas. We at Great Leap Studios have years of experience writing hundreds of articles for various clients, but even with all that experience, we know how challenging it can be sometimes to come up
Examples of Carpet Cleaning Content and Blog Post Ideas Read More »
What exactly does it take to trigger someone’s desire to contact you? This is one of the first questions I ask myself when we take on a new client. What one thing can I do that will convince a homeowner with a leaky faucet or a business owner in need of a new accountant to
Three Things Every Website Visitor NEEDS to See Before Contacting You Read More »
When it comes to promoting a business online, building a website, and generating traffic, there are quite literally hundreds of things you can do. But sometimes you find synergy between a handful of things and they work together perfectly. This week, on the GLS Content Marketing Podcast we talk about two such synergistic pairings –
Peanut butter and jelly. Shawn Spencer and Burton Guster. The Seattle Mariners and massive disappointment. There are some duos that make perfect sense – pairs that work extremely well together. In the online marketing world, there is one pair of tactics that also seems like a perfectly complementary duo – ad retargeting and content marketing.
Ad Retargeting and Content Writing – The Perfect Dual Strategy Read More »
Recently I was listening to a radio station on my way to San Francisco that advertised a small business branding workshop in Modesto. It was a bit surprising, because the radio station was kHOP, which is a pop music station that I wouldn’t normally associate with small businesses. Still, anyone can start a business these
A client of ours recently wrote asking for a press release to promote an eBook we developed about six months ago. The eBook was done, she had her ducks in a row and she was ready to push out a press release to get some coverage. But she wanted it overnight. Now we can accommodate
How to Avoid a Costly, $300 Mistake When Writing Your Online Press Releases Read More »
At Great Leap Studios, we often research keywords for our clients, and we tend to know how to find and develop content plans based on those keywords. In general, we’ve been very successful – most of the content we write works exactly as planned, and the keywords we target tend to be profitable. But every
Case Study Story: Keywords You May Not Have Considered Read More »
Becoming a successful content writer is not easy. As tempting as it is as a career (flexible schedule, good pay, fun work), it also requires a level of personal motivation and effort that most people cannot handle without someone looking over their shoulder. That’s why as soon as you start content writing, you should give
Content Writer Tip: The Short, Imaginary Deadline Read More »
Three months ago a close friend of mine asked me for a favor. He needed to get more traffic to his company’s website. They couldn’t afford to hire anyone so he was asking as a friend, just for a bit of friendly advice. “What one thing can we do that will have the biggest impact?”
How to Get a Guest Post on a Major Industry Site Read More »
Our industry is one that seems easy on the surface but is much harder in practice. Many, many people want to become content writers because of the freedom, fun, and simplicity of writing. The vast majority fail miserably, with many quitting within the first month. It’s not that writing is necessarily difficult – although it
