ABOUT
LEEP Calendar
LEEP Calendar
HOW TO USE THE LEEP
LEEP is an acronym for "Lewis' Event, Editorial & Promotional" Calendar.
The LEEP Calendar is an online database of events, holidays, religious observances, industry promotions, government days and event anniversaries often used by media and marketing people to promote products/services, call attention to causes, educate the public, commemorate an event or find a reason to celebrate.
Events listed in The LEEP Calendar come from a variety of sources including the US Congress, UK, Canadian and Australian Parliament, NGOs, Trade Associations, The United Nations, Government leaders, Commercial Institutions, Historical Dates, Current Events, Advocacy Groups, Non-profits, News Organizations, Religious Organizations, Custom, Patent Filings, Copyright Filings, Birth and Death Records, Popular Culture and hundreds of other sources.
Aside from satiating curiosity, The LEEP has many uses. Publishers of news media and blogs use it to assign timely stories to columnists. Marketing departments use it for product development, advertising and media planning. Retailers use the calendar outlining the most opportune time for product releases and sales promotions. SEO specialists use it to identify keywords that will be in demand in the coming weeks. Event planners use it to avoid double booking events that might compete with major religious holidays or cultural celebrations (like the Academy Awards). The international nature of the LEEP also provides insight into what other nations and companies are doing worldwide.
Ultimately, The LEEP Calendar is about ideas.
The LEEP deals with dynamic information and thousands of different sources and each date is therefore ‘subject to change without notice.' Approximately 5% of the dates in this calendar will change from their original dates due to a variety of factors: Strikes, weather events, television schedules, venue availability, current events, conflicting events or the date is not set for sure until a few weeks or days before the event occurs. The US Congress is notorious for renewing or declaring events after they've occurred Therefore many of the dates are estimated based upon their previous year's occurrence. Please see the LEEP Calendar Legend for an explanation of the various symbols used in this calendar.
The nature of programming requires that we not use certain common symbols in the names of the events. These include the Registered Trademark Symbol ®, some forms of punctuation and foreign letters like ã, í, and ñ. The events are not misspelled. We simply cannot include them in the widget and applications with these symbols and have them appear on your device. We've also had to replace the colon (:) with a hyphen (-) in some cases as well.
BIRTH OF THE LEEP
"As a former media sales person and a current writer, journalist and publisher, I've spent hours trying to find this information, praying it might dwell within a single credible location that was portable, easily accessible and affordable. During my years of media sales I used a crude version of this book, predominantly for vendor marketing, gaining access to new accounts or persuading agencies to pony up a few thousand dollars extra to coincide with a national promotion. When I became a publisher, I found that I needed to know when many of these events were occurring to draw traffic to our website CouplesCompany.com. How this works is key word searches for many of these events skyrocket during the promotions. Essentially, we needed content people would be looking for with the heightened awareness surrounding a given event.
We began updating this calendar again for 2012 in October based upon feedback from our fans, unaware of a pending change in Google. They had updated their algorithm in March/April 2011 and we saw a 50% drop in traffic overnight. That change penalized sites for outbound links. As we used over 1000 affiliate programs on Couples Company, we got hit hard. Fortunately, I had merged the company with two others in January 2011 and we were rebuilding the site and company on the backend and had decided to eliminate nearly all affiliate programs within the redesigned the site. We took the hit knowing when the new site launched in August we'd be able to regain what we lost with the new changes. We also figured that we were safe from another Google change as these usually came every 18-24 months. We were wrong to assume Google was done making big changes.
In November 2011, ten days before Thanksgiving, Google made changes again to their algorithm, giving priority to new content over existing articles on the internet. This proved very costly and a nasty surprise for us and tens of thousands of content websites with decades or more of information focusing on specialized fields without a need for breaking news. The change to Google's algorithm, whether intended or not, gives priority to the multi-national media conglomerates whilst penalizing the smaller boutique and specialized websites like ours. We saw a 30% dip in traffic, again overnight. Several of our exclusive articles and series suddenly stopped drawing. Our shopping mall, set up for the holidays fell from top positions. We were heading into the 4 most critical weeks of the year and Google changed the game plan... AGAIN!
One thing was clear. We needed a strategy and we needed it yesterday. Our little LEEP suddenly moved from useful to critical in generating a steady stream of new content that is timely to compete with the major media companies and re-establish our presence, most notably on Google.
In 2012 I focused my attention on LEEP Publishing. It took me three months to find the first 1100 dates for the 2011 calendar. Most professional people do not have that kind of time to devote to research. I decided a calendar was needed that provided that information quickly in a manner marketing and editorial people needed, that is, specific to subject and market. I also knew it needed to be affordable. Paid calendars are available on the market with a portion of the information you'll find in The LEEP and they retail for over $70. That's a lot of money for a blogger launching a new column or a small business owner just getting his or her company off the ground. I needed to be able to do this for a lot less, and still keep an editable database that could be kept current. This web-based application, the books and e-books are the result of that move.
Updating, researching, verifying dates, chasing down the origin of each event is a full-time job. For you to create the information in this application requires thousands of hours of research and verification each year. My hope is you will find The LEEP useful in your profession and allow us to continue to save you time, make you money and market smart for many years to come."
Laura Dawn Lewis
The LEEP Calendar is an online database of events, holidays, religious observances, industry promotions, government days and event anniversaries often used by media and marketing people to promote products/services, call attention to causes, educate the public, commemorate an event or find a reason to celebrate.
Events listed in The LEEP Calendar come from a variety of sources including the US Congress, UK, Canadian and Australian Parliament, NGOs, Trade Associations, The United Nations, Government leaders, Commercial Institutions, Historical Dates, Current Events, Advocacy Groups, Non-profits, News Organizations, Religious Organizations, Custom, Patent Filings, Copyright Filings, Birth and Death Records, Popular Culture and hundreds of other sources.
Aside from satiating curiosity, The LEEP has many uses. Publishers of news media and blogs use it to assign timely stories to columnists. Marketing departments use it for product development, advertising and media planning. Retailers use the calendar outlining the most opportune time for product releases and sales promotions. SEO specialists use it to identify keywords that will be in demand in the coming weeks. Event planners use it to avoid double booking events that might compete with major religious holidays or cultural celebrations (like the Academy Awards). The international nature of the LEEP also provides insight into what other nations and companies are doing worldwide.
Ultimately, The LEEP Calendar is about ideas.
The LEEP deals with dynamic information and thousands of different sources and each date is therefore ‘subject to change without notice.' Approximately 5% of the dates in this calendar will change from their original dates due to a variety of factors: Strikes, weather events, television schedules, venue availability, current events, conflicting events or the date is not set for sure until a few weeks or days before the event occurs. The US Congress is notorious for renewing or declaring events after they've occurred Therefore many of the dates are estimated based upon their previous year's occurrence. Please see the LEEP Calendar Legend for an explanation of the various symbols used in this calendar.
The nature of programming requires that we not use certain common symbols in the names of the events. These include the Registered Trademark Symbol ®, some forms of punctuation and foreign letters like ã, í, and ñ. The events are not misspelled. We simply cannot include them in the widget and applications with these symbols and have them appear on your device. We've also had to replace the colon (:) with a hyphen (-) in some cases as well.
BIRTH OF THE LEEP
"As a former media sales person and a current writer, journalist and publisher, I've spent hours trying to find this information, praying it might dwell within a single credible location that was portable, easily accessible and affordable. During my years of media sales I used a crude version of this book, predominantly for vendor marketing, gaining access to new accounts or persuading agencies to pony up a few thousand dollars extra to coincide with a national promotion. When I became a publisher, I found that I needed to know when many of these events were occurring to draw traffic to our website CouplesCompany.com. How this works is key word searches for many of these events skyrocket during the promotions. Essentially, we needed content people would be looking for with the heightened awareness surrounding a given event.
We began updating this calendar again for 2012 in October based upon feedback from our fans, unaware of a pending change in Google. They had updated their algorithm in March/April 2011 and we saw a 50% drop in traffic overnight. That change penalized sites for outbound links. As we used over 1000 affiliate programs on Couples Company, we got hit hard. Fortunately, I had merged the company with two others in January 2011 and we were rebuilding the site and company on the backend and had decided to eliminate nearly all affiliate programs within the redesigned the site. We took the hit knowing when the new site launched in August we'd be able to regain what we lost with the new changes. We also figured that we were safe from another Google change as these usually came every 18-24 months. We were wrong to assume Google was done making big changes.
In November 2011, ten days before Thanksgiving, Google made changes again to their algorithm, giving priority to new content over existing articles on the internet. This proved very costly and a nasty surprise for us and tens of thousands of content websites with decades or more of information focusing on specialized fields without a need for breaking news. The change to Google's algorithm, whether intended or not, gives priority to the multi-national media conglomerates whilst penalizing the smaller boutique and specialized websites like ours. We saw a 30% dip in traffic, again overnight. Several of our exclusive articles and series suddenly stopped drawing. Our shopping mall, set up for the holidays fell from top positions. We were heading into the 4 most critical weeks of the year and Google changed the game plan... AGAIN!
One thing was clear. We needed a strategy and we needed it yesterday. Our little LEEP suddenly moved from useful to critical in generating a steady stream of new content that is timely to compete with the major media companies and re-establish our presence, most notably on Google.
In 2012 I focused my attention on LEEP Publishing. It took me three months to find the first 1100 dates for the 2011 calendar. Most professional people do not have that kind of time to devote to research. I decided a calendar was needed that provided that information quickly in a manner marketing and editorial people needed, that is, specific to subject and market. I also knew it needed to be affordable. Paid calendars are available on the market with a portion of the information you'll find in The LEEP and they retail for over $70. That's a lot of money for a blogger launching a new column or a small business owner just getting his or her company off the ground. I needed to be able to do this for a lot less, and still keep an editable database that could be kept current. This web-based application, the books and e-books are the result of that move.
Updating, researching, verifying dates, chasing down the origin of each event is a full-time job. For you to create the information in this application requires thousands of hours of research and verification each year. My hope is you will find The LEEP useful in your profession and allow us to continue to save you time, make you money and market smart for many years to come."
Laura Dawn Lewis
