We’ve recently pushed a big upgrade to the system on the back of some pretty impressive results for clients and continued growth. New user subscriptions have been increasing organically as a result of our early SEO work. We knew it was time to make the on boarding much simpler.

Over the last 12 months, the client who had the original problem has been getting some amazing results. I’ve shared more about this in an article on Medium which goes into the solution that is getting them an email CTR 750% above industry average.

How to create the ultimate WordPress RSS-to-Email Newsletter. And why you should!

View story at Medium.com

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I’ve never been a person who has enjoyed too much structure before. I like the freedom to work on the tasks I choose at the time I choose. I’ve always found structure and planning to be a hinderance to creativity. Well that’s what I told myself anyway. Turns out that was BS.

As much as it pains me to admit defeat on this one, that was such an inefficient system. The truth of it looking back was that I was holding all the tasks and jobs in my head and wasn’t really choosing what to work on. I just worked on the next tasks when they were about to hit deadline and had become urgent. Looking back this is something I’ve always done and assumed it was my way of working –  at School and Uni I convinced myself that I worked better right up against deadlines and I’ve always crammed everything into the last couple of weeks for exams.

FINDING Productivity Tools & Systems

I’ve tried lots of different productivity tools, Workflowy, Todoist, Clear, Trello, Notion, Basecamp etc but always out with them fairly shortly after using them. The longest I stayed with a tool was Workflowy but I just used this as I used ever other tool – a giant list. Turns out lists are fine to a point. They get thoughts out of your head but they don’t help you structure, prioritise and plan your work without putting a bit more time into them.

So this year I started a new system in a notebook. I stuck with it and added additional bits to help me focus on the things I’m trying to improve.

Everyday I’d write down the 4 main tasks I had to get done that day and list out the same 7 things that I’m focused on improving. At the end of everyday I’d score myself against my 7 improvement areas (Drink less coffee, drink more water, exercise more, spend time with the family, get a good night sleep, eat less crappy food and complete my planned work for the day). I’d then average these out and get a percentage score for the day. I know some of these conflict with each other – spending time with the family is hard when working hard to get through tasks but it was a way of evaluating the things that matter to me and holding myself accountable.

The thing that I never seem to score highly on at the minute is exercise – seeing this every day really pushes home that I have to do something about this. I’m not sure quite how to fit this in at the minute. I don’t want it to cut into my time with the kids as that is too limited as it is but I need to find a way of fitting something in regularly – swimming or running would be good.

So this system worked fairly well but I was still having to hold tasks in my head and manually write my list and tasks out everyday.

The 90 Day Year

Shortly after I started this system I saw Dan Martell talking about the 90 Day Year. Now I’m not normally somebody who signs up to courses and workshops but this one came at the right time and claimed to help exactly with what I wanted to improve – productivity.

So I jumped in. It’s totally changed the way I work and made a huge difference to my productivity. I already have a clear defined system for tasks and projects on a daily/weekly basis and have a clear action plan to achieve what I need to over the next 90 days. It was at the point that early on I actually felt like I was cheating somehow. What used to feel like such a big job in my head was manageable to the point that it was no longer in my head. I have a clear focus for my 90 days which is broken down into smaller steps which are grouped into sprints. Once my plan is done I don’t have to think about it again.

I’ve adapted it slightly and I’m working on using the task prioritisation and time estimation elements better as this will help me take this all a step further. It turns out that the tools I was using before weren’t unsuited I just wasn’t using a good system. I’ve gone back to ToDoIst and that now basically runs my life. Everything goes in there. Every task no matter how big or small. I schedule it as soon as it goes in and label it by the project and type of work involved. This is where I’m also working on adding prioritisation and time estimates as well. Now I’m using it right I’ve got to admit, ToDoIst is awesome. It’s really simple but very powerful.

Using Productivity Tools as part of a System

ToDoIst has a 2 way sync with Google Calendar so this automatically updates my calendar – any changes I make there are also reflected in ToDoIst. And whilst I always thought that I’d hat to have my work mapped out and stacked up it’s actually far far better. I’m still in control – I can move tasks, group tasks, re-schedule tasks but it means I have cut a percentage of my day that was taken up with working out what I had to work on next. It also stops emails dropping in and taking priority just because they popped up in notifications. Everything gets scheduled.

It takes work to keep on top of the system and I do a daily round up at the end of every day, a weekly clear down on a Friday or a Sunday which includes getting everything in order for the week ahead but these are only short – a few minutes at most. The best thing I can say about running this system is I have a clear head at weekends – something I haven’t enjoyed for a long time. With a third little one on the way soon I had to find a way to sort myself out. I had to find a system that took my task lists out of my head and helped me be more strategic in what I was working towards. The by-product of this is it’s increased my productivity and given me a system that focuses on achieving long-term goals at the same time as fitting in daily tasks that pop up like through emails and social.

Whilst it is an investment I would certainly recommend the 90 Day Year – or finding your own system that works reliably. Having spent years trying to find a system or create one, for me this was the better option – a well structured system refined by Todd Herman over a number of years. I really wish this sort of thing was just part of our education system!

Version 2

So next for me is making sure I’m making time for swimming or running somewhere in my week. I also want to find a way of making the prioritisation and time estimates work within the system. I’ve adapted a couple of the sections of the 90 Day Year to fit in with how I work and tried to digitise some of the process so I just need to figure out how I integrate these other bits. I’m not wanting this to run my life in any way and that has not been the purpose of finding a way of managing my productivity. It is to give me time back and get on top of what I really should be working on. It’s helped me get a better understanding of juggling client work alongside Slidecraft and also helped me move forward with an idea we’ve been talking about for a long time to start planting trees.

Up to this point I’ve focused my 90 Day effort in terms of long-term planning around Slidecraft but in the next cycle I’ll integrate other aspect like the tree planting idea (I’ll talk more about this soon), FlipRSS which is getting some momentum, Little Walden and any client work. More work to do but it’s nice to have a clear head at the weekend and properly switch off and spend time with the family.

The post Facing Demons appeared first on James Qualtrough.

Having closed off yesterday with Lightening Demos of the sites and features we’ve seen and liked we moved into sketching mode. This was a really enjoyable but hard session. As we’re working on a feature that’s been in the system for some time it’s difficult to view it with fresh eyes – we’ve all been so heavily involved with it’s development to this point. However, that’s the value of sticking to the Sprint checklist and persevering, it did create some fresh perspectives on where we can take the feature and how we can develop the current iteration to allow for this.

We saved the Crazy 8’s for specific elements within the feature and this worked well for coming up with a number of ways of solving the problems quickly. With only three of us we ignored the parts about keeping things anonymous, this was less about getting group buy in and more about finding a process to help us work through ideas and rapidly plan a detailed spec for the feature.

Once we’d completed our Solution sketches we put them together and had an open critiquing session. We were pretty quick to rule out some ideas and agree on the direction for the feature but this was a really good point for us. It validated a lot of what we’d thought about the feature and most importantly after all of this we were all totally aligned on what to include and what to leave out.

The next phase for us was to move into the storyboarding. At the same time as Andrew and I storyboarding, Leo was mocking up some design prototypes in Sketch for us to review. I can’t undersell the value of the storyboarding. I think this one step alone has saved us days and days of development. It really makes you sweat the small stuff. It makes you think even more closely about every element of the feature and how the flow works for users.

It wasn’t the complicated things that threw the curve balls either, it was tiny little things like deleting elements and displaying toolbars. This triggered some great discussions and and we worked through issues as they arose to come up with a completed storyboard we were happy with. One final admission is that in the middle of the storyboarding we compared where we had got to with our existing solution and decided to revert a couple of elements back to what we already have. It really pays not to forget about what you’ve already got in the system and why it’s there, As it happens this was the perfect time to do this but that was more by chance than by design.

This is where we are ending the formal sprint. Leo will be mocking up our resultant solution in Sketch and we will be testing it but not within the sprint confines. We will be running some testing of the solutions too. We’ll test some of our earlier hypotheses and make sure the key tasks are all intuitive.

I’d love to sit in on a larger sprint with a full compliment as it would be interesting to see the dynamics of the decider and facilitator and how more people change the process.

We’ve scratched the surface of this but I can see Sprints being a really useful framework for us to use moving forward and developing as our team grows. Would certainly recommend this to anyone needing to get consensus or alignment on product direction or for generating ideas and refining processes. Really enjoyable, harder than expected in places but very satisfying in getting to a final outcome. It’s certainly not just the final outcome that is satisfying but the learning and thought that has gone in throughout. It’s filled in some gaps, it’s validated some of our thinking and it has challenged others. At the end, we all agreed it has left us far more confident and comfortable with the direction we’re going and how robust the solution is.

The post Product Sprint Day 2 appeared first on James Qualtrough.

We’re following the process as they recommend in the book but adapting it to suit our team and the project we’re working on. Leo recently read the book and introduced us to it and he’s created a stripped back version for us to follow. For a start we’ve condensed it to a three day sprint rather than the recommended 5 however, we won’t be prototyping at the end and constraints are always good. There’s also only three of us whereas there are usually teams of around 7 or 8. I can already see how valuable this process must be for diverse teams in big businesses.

We’re not working on a new feature so I expected some parts to be less relevant for us but so far (and we’re only 1 day in), I’d definitely say it’s been worth sticking to the process and we’ve gotten a lot out of it. As a designer, developer and marketer it’s funny how we often have the same thought but approach things from different angles. And although we had some very different perspectives when we started to create ‘How Might We…” statements, when it came to prioritising and picking the ones we needed to focus on we were all very much aligned. It’s given us a really solid focus for the next stage in the process.

As it’s been a really useful process I thought it might be good to outline what we covered today, as much for our own reference looking back as anything.

Product Sprint – Day 1

Items we found particularly useful:

• large roll of backing paper (we opted for this rather than a whiteboard – easy to roll up and store)
• marker pens
• post it notes
• timer
• Sprint Book (constant source of reference)
• Sprint checklist

We started off with setting our long term goal. This wasn’t too hard as this isn’t a new feature and we were all fairly clear why it is important and what it’s role in Slidecraft is.

Setting sprint questions is a little harder as you have to jump into a more pessimistic mind-set identifying ways this could fail. This was however really important and uncovered some things we hadn’t thought of before and gave us a set of clear questions we needed to answer through the process.

Mapping the key customers and their journey through this feature was straightforward enough but id uncover useful dynamics between the two. It also provided a clear visual tool for the work that followed.

Normally at this stage it’s ‘Ask the experts’ which is a kind of research phase however as the feature is not currently live and there is just the three of us in the team this was more of a discussion around the key areas of the process and the two key customer groups identified.

We moved on creating our ‘How Might we…” notes, scribbling down opportunities based on all the work we’d done to this point. We had a good number and we were able to pull these all together into some very logical groupings. Again, this was really useful as it created connections between ideas and groups we hadn’t seen until this point.

One of the hardest bits was picking which ones to focus on. we gave ourselves three votes each (the book recommends two but for a bigger team). This took a good bit of thought but the final result was that four opportunities stood out as things we collectively felt we needed to prioritise.

Moving these on to the map made everything fall in to place, just as the book says it should. It clearly showed on stage of the journey and one customer group that required most focus or priority focus.

Normally that would be the end of day 1 however we still had time so moved on to lightening demos. We all pooled examples of sites and apps that we’d seen or used that had solved the problems we were focussing on in some way. We quickly evaluated these and created a sketch sheet of the ideas that jumped out at us. There is definitely things on here we wouldn’t have had before and also a clear direction for some elements of the feature.

Tomorrow will be interesting as we get into the sketching. This will create a lot more detail and I think again will show some of the differences in how we approach the product. I’m sure it will uncover more problems we need to solve and solutions we haven’t thought of yet.

I still find it too easy to slip into what I think the outcome should be rather than viewing this for what the user is hiring the feature to do. I think that’s because this is an existing feature so I’m bringing pre-conceived ideas to what I’m doing. I think it would be useful to include a section on what users hire the product to do and so we may build this into our process for future sprints. The group discussions have been a great way of keeping things on track though and referring to the book throughout has helped make sure we’ve understood the task we’re undertaking fully.

So far pleased we’ve followed this and I feel it’s moved us further on in a far more structured way than if we’d just jumped into the feature and brain-dumped solutions.

The post Getting started with product sprints appeared first on James Qualtrough.

Although we’ll never be able to read everything that passes our way we can become more efficient at filtering and creating. Through adopting new social practices and using the wealth of tools out there we can start to find and make content that adds real value.

There are thousands of content marketing tools available but you just want the tools that really work, that are really going to make a difference to your days. For this reason I approached people who have made content a big part of their lives, people who are masters of filtering, creating and sharing to find out what is making a difference to them.

With their help I’ve compiled a condensed list of tools for content marketers. This is the content marketers short list if you like. I hope that this helps you choose tools that make life a little bit easier and your content marketing that much more effective.

I’m hugely grateful to the following people for their insights into their content marketing stack.

Neil Patel

Content Stack: Quick Sprout; Google Analytics; Buzzsumo

Neil is a Co-founder, entrepreneur and consultant who has helped companies like Amazon, HP and Viacom increase revenues. If you are looking for advice on growing your business he shares his knowledge at neilpatel.com and Quick Sprout.

Heidi Cohen

Content Stack: Pen; Paper; Evernote; Editorial Calendar

Heidi Cohen is President of Riverside Marketing Strategies and has spent her lifetime mastering content. She shares her knowledge and expertise at top conferences and on her website, Heidi Cohen’s actionable marketing guide.

Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré

Content Stack: WordPress; Buffer; Canva; GrowthHackers.com; Product Hunt; SaaS.Community; Nuzzel; SumoMe; Google Analytics; IFTTT; Pocket; Visage

Nichole is a SaaS consultant and moderator at Product Hunt and Growth Hackers. If you follow her on Twitter you’ll know she is a content ninja and at the top of her game. You can also follow her blog at http://nicholeelizabethdemere.com/

Daniel Kempe

Content Stack: Evernote; ContentMarketer.io; Quuu.co

Daniel is a photographer and co-founder of Quuu, a hand-picked content suggestions platform for social media. His passion for content and curation is evident in the quality of the product they’ve produced. You can follow Daniel on Twitter.

Matt Aunger

Content Stack: Blogo; Hemingway; Grammarly; Buffer; Google Analytics; Quuu; Mailchimp; Edgar (trial); Pocket; Evernote

Matt is a storyteller focused on helping brands, small businesses and startups tell their stories through valuable, actionable content and social media. He has written for Buffer and Quuu and many other clients. You can find Matt at http://www.mattmadecontent.com/

Ben Brausen

Content Stack: Sprinklr; Buffer; Hashtagify.me; Adobe Analytics; Google Analytics; Tailwind; Iconosquare; Hemingway; Yoast SEO; Radian6; BuzzSumo; Tracker; RivalIQ

Ben is a digital marketer with a strong focus on social media. He’s worked with small startups and Fortune 500s, helping them to master content and social engagement. Ben is a prolific blogger and regularly writes at http://benbrausen.com/

Jimmy Daly

Content Stack: Ghost; Open Site Explorer (MOZ); Google Spreadsheets

Jimmy is a writer, marketer and curator of the Swipe File Newsletter, a newsletter for writers, marketers and creatives. His content has been featured on top blogs and websites and he writes regularly on his own blog at http://www.jimmydaly.com/

James Qualtrough (Article Author)

Content Stack: Feedly; Pocket; Goodbits.io; Mailchimp; Buffer; Quuu; Start a fire; Google Analytics

James is co-founder of Slidecraft, online presentation software that adds context and conversation to presentations. His side projects include Little Walden, a weekly curated newsletter for creatives.

Content Marketing Analytics

Analytics is a critical part of content marketing. The name of the game is iteration and without good information you’re screwed. A 2014 report estimated that $135m would be spent in that year on new digital marketing collateral and this has only increased through 2015 (source). Heidi Cohen has also suggested that on average, companies spend 25% of total marketing budgets on content marketing (source). Here’s some tools that will help you get the most from your content investment.

Crazy Egg — Crazy Egg is heatmap analytics software that gives you the ability to see exactly where on your content your users are engaging with you. This is perfect for optimising content and learning about your audience’s behaviour.

Quick Sprout — Quick Sprout is a tool for improving your content. Learn from your analytics and compare to competitors to find opportunities.

Moz — I’ve been a user and a fan of Moz for years. It provides complete analytics for your online marketing with great tools for analyzing content. Optimise and analyse content for social and SEO mastery.

KISSmetrics — This is an advanced analytics tool starting at $200 per month. KissMetrics helps with understanding user journeys and optimising conversion funnels.

Sprout Social — Sprout social is a social analytics and reporting tool. The site has beautiful graphics and provides a great snapshot of your social profiles and performances including trends.

Mixpanel — An advanced mobile and web analytics platform with a free option for lower traffic sites.

Buzzsumo — Analyse and compare your content with competitors and find out what content is working for any topics. A great tool for identifying people active and influencing in your industry.

Google Analytics / Search Console — Google’s free analytics tool is a great starting point and provides basic information out of the box. It can also be configured for more detailed information. This is often used by other tools for more detailed or specific metric reporting. Search Console is the old Webmaster Tools and provides useful information on site performance, search performance and errors.

RivalIQ — An analytics tools that helps you increase your performance by monitoring and benchmarking competitor activity and performance.

Iconosquare — An analytics tool for Instagram — you can monitor, comment and get detailed reports amongst other features.

Audio for Content Marketing

When it comes to content discovery there‘s a never ending number of sites that curate or share amazing posts, images and videos. Instead I’ve highlighted some tools that help make the job easier along with some of my favourite resources. It’s not just content creation. A big part of any content marketing role is curation — finding great content to share. To give you an idea of how content marketers split their focus, on average, content marketers are dividing their content into three areas: (61%) created, (27%) curated, (12%) syndicated (source).

Feedly — Have all your feeds in one place to quickly and efficiently follow numerous blogs and websites. A great way to stay on top of other people’s content and find great content to share.

Pocket — Pocket is a great way to save articles to read later. It’s a great way to avoid the distraction that content can so often provide. Just save it for reading later.

Alltop — Find the top posts and news from around the word on any topic. A great resource for content discovery and finding industry influencers.

Reddit — User generated links and conversations around any topic imaginable. This community site can be a great source of content and if you get into the community a great place to share your content as well.

Hacker News — User generated news mainly from the tech world. Another hugely popular place to find and share content.

Growth Hacker — Growth Hacker is a growing community of growth hackers from around the world sharing and commenting on marketing and growth content from around the web.

Product Hunt — If you’re looking for the latest products and tech then Product Hunt is a good site to follow. Everyday new sites are listed and voted on by the community. It’s a great place to look for new and exciting tools and software.

SaaS.Community — A community for SaaS enthusiasts containing the latest marketing and growth news.

Nuzzle — Nuzzle is a social tool that helps you see the top news shared by your friends and network. Explore other people’s feeds to find content from your industry.

Curata — Curata is a content marketing platform providing an end-to-end solution from curation to sharing and analytics. This is great when you need to scale your content marketing to the next level.

Flipboard — Flipboard is a social magazine that you can create by following the feeds and content that matter to you most. You can also create publications for sharing content.

Hashtagify — An advanced hashtag search engine to find who is talking about the content that matters to you most. Find influencers and trending topics.

Issuu — Issuu is a digital publishing platform with a huge catalogue of content covering everything you can imagine. It’s a great source of inspiration and again a place for sharing your content in a different format.

Stumbleupon — Find and recommend content with this advanced bookmarking tool.

NewsCred — This is not for small business or individuals unless you have deep pockets. This is used by organisations serious about their investment in content marketing and starts from $3.5k per month. If you’re considering this you’re doing pretty well.

Content Marketing Conversion & Leads

If you’re producing content for a business or for your own brand then it is pretty likely you’ll have an end goal. This may be sign ups, it may be sales or it may be followers. Whatever your goals you’re going to need to understand where your successful conversions are coming from and how well your funnel is performing.

SumoMe — SumoMe is a suite of tools to help content marketers convert their website traffic more effectively. There is a free version to get started with as well.

Unbounce — Quickly build and test effective landing pages with Unbounce. Great for when you are trying to drive specific actions from your content marketing or sell content off the back of content.

ContentMarketer.io — ContentMarketer.io is an influencer outreach platform that helps you share content with key individuals through email and Twitter.

Optimizely — Similar to Unbounce, Optimizely helps you launch and test web and mobile experiences to get the best performance.

Image Creation and Editing for Content Marketing

Images can bring simple posts to life and make a huge difference to your engagement levels. For example, it is estimated that simply adding an image to a tweet can increase retweets by 35% (source). Here’s some tools to help you do this quickly and effectively.

Adobe Photoshop — Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard image editing software. It’s an advanced tool available as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud.

Pablo — Pablo is a free tool by Buffer that makes creating quick, engaging images a breeze.

Canva — Canva is an image and graphic design tool that can be used for creating all manner of digital content.

Visage — Visage is a design tool that makes on-brand content creation simple.

Newsletter Curation

Curation is extremely popular and a great way to save your audience time and make the most of the great content you spend time finding and reading. This is something I do as a side project with my Little Walden Newsletter. There are some great services out there that take much of the hassle away leaving you to focus on finding great content.

Goodbits — Goodbits allows you to quickly curate the content you find into a newsletter. This can be a great way to build and engage your audience. It can be standalone or integrate with your chosen mail platform like Mailchimp.

Revue — Revue is an alternative to Goodbits and provides a simple way to set up and manage a curated newsletter.

Email & Newsletters for Content Sharing

Even if you’re not curating content emails can pay a huge part in your content strategy. Building a solid database of opted in subscribers provides a great distribution channel for good quality content.

Mailchimp — Mailchimp is a perfect for pay-as-you-go newsletters. You can also set up RSS driven campaigns, automated campaigns and receive detailed analytics from your mailings.

Campaign Monitor —Another email marketing platform that helps you create effective newsletters to promote your content marketing.

Content Planning and Idea Generation

To give your strategy the best chance of success and to ensure the effort you are putting into producing and sharing content planning is an absolute must. From editorial calendars to individual content plans it will make all the difference and take the pressure off trying to come up with content ideas on the fly.

Notepad and Paper — Nothing beats pen and paper when it comes to sketching out ideas and planning your content. Picking the notepad and pen that works best for you is as important as choosing your pants and socks in the morning. You know when it feels right.

Post-it Notes — For more complex content you’ll need to take your planning to a new level and Post-it notes are a great way to scope out content, re-order and build a clear outline for the work at hand.

Content Automation

There are only so many hours in the day and whilst engaging with people directly is important, some tasks can and should be automated. Which tasks those are will be different depending on your strategy or business but the following tools will help you find solutions to speed up your workflow and save you hours everyday.

Buffer — Buffer takes the hassle out of scheduling your social posts. Set the most effective times to post and add content to your queue. Buffer does the rest.

Quuu — Quuu is a relatively new service that curates content to your Buffer queue. Links are all manually curated by the Quuu team and their army of Quuurators. You can also submit your content to the team. If it’s quuurated you’ll potentially see you content shared by hundreds of users.

IFTTT — If This Then That allows you to connect web services to create amazing time saving recipes. Browse existing recipes for inspiration.

Edgar — Recycle your social posts and get more mileage from your social posts. Automate your scheduling and choose what content gets shown at what times.

Content Marketing Paid Promotion

Just producing great content isn’t enough. Once you’ve shared it with you networks, where next? Well, paid channels is one option. It’s worth testing different channels and seeing what works for different content or for different industries. Below are just a few to get you started.

Outbrain — Outbrain is a way of getting your content in front of a much bigger audience through their content delivery network which includes sites like CNN, Sky News, The Daily Telegraph, Le Monde.

Facebook — Facebooks ads and targeting is a great way to extend the reach of your content. Drill down to devise your target audience and promote your content with the Facebook pay-per-click model.

Twitter — Twitter Ads allow you to reach out with interesting targeting options. You can target followers of particular users allowing you to build very targeted audience lists.

Stumbleupon — Reach a new audience through Stumbleupon — a platform for social content discovery.

Social Management & Sharing

Social management is all about making the most of your own time and resources. There are great tools out there that will make the life of a content marketer much easier. These are bread and butter tools.

Hootsuite — Hootsuite is a great way to manage all your social profiles from one place. Stay on top of your content sharing, retweets and mentions from all your accounts without having to log in and out.

Buffer — Buffer is a great tool for sharing your content across multiple platforms. You can schedule posts on a number of your profiles and see analytics all from one log in.

Bitly — a great tool for shortening links. Particularly useful when you are limited by characters. Although many systems have their own shortening service using Bitly means you can manage all your links from one platform.

Tailwind — A social management platform for Pinterest and Instagram. This is a great tool for anyone with images at the heart of their content strategy.

Radian6 — This is a complete social monitoring platform that allows you to monitor, track and respond across a wide range of platforms. Linked to Salesforce this is another enterprise level product.

Productivity and time management for Content Marketing

Staying on top of workflow and being disciplined is very important. Content creation, curation and consumption can quickly take over and hours can disappear. Don’t be a hero — get help from a tool that works for you. Try different ones and pick the one that slots into your way of working and keeps you on track. Sometimes it’s the simple things that work best.

Workflowy — Workflowy is a simple task list tool. It is a super clean interface that lets you make lists, take notes and stay organised.

Evernote — Evernote made a number of our content experts’ lists. Evernote has grown to become a massive product with a large number of features but describes itself as a place to collect ideas and write meaningful words.

Trello — A great way to keep track of everything and collaborate with others. Make lists, plan content and keep track of workflows.

Video for content marketing

Video is big business. Facebook and Twitter have both invested heavily in this area in 2015 with video ads, autoplay in feeds and a rising number of live video or streaming apps coming to market. It was also estimated that video accounts for 50% of all mobile traffic (source) so it is clearly an important area for content marketing.

Wistia — Wistia is video hosting for businesses. I see Wistia used more and more as an alternative to YouTube and Vimeo. It’s great if you want to get your website to rank rather than Youtube and provides detailed video analytics.

YouTube — Free to share videos and millions of page-views everyday. YouTube is a great place to share your content if you can build a community or audience for your channels.

Vimeo — High quality video sharing with paid and free plans for users. Has the benefit of no ads running in content if you’re looking for a clean user experience.

Camtasia — Screen recording software for recording and editing your webinars, screen-shares and more.

Webinars, Broadcasting and Live streaming for Content Marketing

Google Hangouts — Hangouts are a great way to broadcast yourself and your content to an audience. You can also record Hangouts making even more great content for you to share.

Periscope — One of the hot apps of 2015 was Periscope. Live streaming and broadcasting makes real-time content creation and sharing more accessible than ever and Periscope certainly grabbed a big share of this market. For a great example of somebody sharing content (Their knowledge and experience) check out Dan Martell.

Presentations for content marketing

Presentations are sometimes forgotten about in content marketing outside the business world but they can be a hugely engaging and effective channel. Forget the old PowerPoints you remember from school, presentations can be much more engaging and interactive when effectively created and shared online.

Slideshare — Slideshare is now owned by LinkedIn and provides a great place to upload your PowerPoint presentations. Slideshare has a massive number of monthly visitors (60m+ per month) and a huge archive of presentations.

Prezi — Prezi grabbed attention when it came out for it’s novel canvas approach to presentations rather than the traditional slides. When done well, Prezi can look extremely good and be a nice way to share content.

Slidecraft — Slidecraft is only at beta but provides a simple way to create presentations online with a big content twist. Add video, images and PDFs to your presentations by just dragging and dropping and add detailed context to every slide for your online audience. Sign up for beta access here.

(Disclaimer: I am co-founder of Slidecraft so I have an understandable bias  )

Haiku Deck — Haiku Deck started as an iPad app but has grown rapidly and is now a widely used tool for presentation creation and sharing.

Writing for content marketing

As one of our oldest arts, writing is often neglected or forgotten and put in the shadow of ‘sexier’ mediums like video and images. But it’s hugely important and perhaps more so now than ever before. This is a saturated marketplace, there are lots of high quality content being produced and it will be content that can inform, educate and entertain. It will be the content that can move people that will stand out above the crowd.

Medium — Your probably reading this on Medium — it’s great. Nice clean way to write and share content. Also a great place to look for inspiration.

Hemingway — Hemingway is new to me but was recommended by a number of people in researching this article. It helps you write better articles by offering suggestions and improvements as you type. I’ll certainly be trying this in future.

Grammarly — Similar to Hemingway, Grammarly finds and corrects up to 10x more errors than a standard word processor.

Tumblr — Not just a favourite resource for cat gifs but a great place for writers and content marketers to share writing, images, video and more.

WordPress — The webs most popular blog and CMS. This is a great way to get started with blogging and content marketing if you haven’t already. There are two options — hosted or self-hosted. Depending on your technical experience or requirements you can choose.

Ghost — Ghost is a blogging platform designed to focus on great content. No complicated CMS just clean beautiful online publications.

Blogo — Manage multiple blogs from a single platform. Currently integrates with WordPress but Tumblr and Ghost integrations are in development.

Surveys for Content Marketing

Surveys can be a great source of unique, original and timely content. Used correctly and with the right questions asked, they can provide content for numerous posts, whitepapers, images, videos and more.

Surveygizmo — Surveygizmo offers a comprehensive platform for online research projects and surveys. This would fit the requirements of anyone serious about running surveys online.

Survey Monkey — With a free plan, survey Monkey offers a quick and accessible tool for quick surveys online with advanced features if you need them.

Typeform — Typeform is a very versatile product that can be used for landing pages, surveys and more. It is easy to use, there is a free version and it looks great.

There are thousands of great tools out there so please share any great tips in the comments below. I will have missed off tools that will be a part of your content stack so please share them along with why they make your life easier as a content marketer.

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So I’d been sitting on the idea for Little Walden for some time. Little Walden is a newsletter curated especially for creatives. Five inspiring links sent on a Friday at 5pm each week — the Friday 5 at 5. A simple concept that stems from the love of my weekend morning ritual — waking early (ish), making a fresh pot of coffee and relaxing with stories and articles I know I’m going to enjoy. This is usually from a few carefully chosen newsletters I subscribe to and articles I’ve saved to read later in Pocket. (I have to admit that since we had twin girls 14 months ago these mornings are few and far between but they have become even more treasured.) I wanted to give this same experience to others.

Great examples of curated newsletters

I love condensed news and articles arriving in my inbox. I look forward to them arriving and they make a welcome break from the usual thoughtless mailshots that hit my gmail. The newsletters below actually get my main email address so I don’t miss them — sorry to all the services that get one of my ‘secondary’ emails.

Kindling from the Do Lectures
Delightful Times from Mel Carson
Brain Pickings by Maria Popova

For some other examples it’s well worth checking out Kevan Lee’s post on the Buffer Blog.

Finding the source of great content

Before even starting to look at how to set up the newsletter you need a good source of great content. I follow hundreds of blogs through my Feedly account. I categorise every new feed and I try and go through all new stories every week. I read short articles I’m interested in as I go and add these to my Buffer queue if they offer some value. Any longer articles I want to read later I save to Pocket. Often I’ll follow links in articles to other good sources which I’ll then add in to my Feedly account. One thing I don’t do enough of is removing feeds I rarely find interesting content in — this would certainly help me read through my Feedly account a little quicker.

This is an important part of the workflow and it’s what lead me to the final solution I decided on for our Little Walden newsletter.

Creating your own curated newsletter in less than a day

Although I’ve sat on the idea of Little Walden for a while, I just hadn’t made time to work out how it was actually going to work. Once I make my mind up to do something though I’m pretty good to hammer away until it’s done. So I set myself a challenge, get it set up and ready to launch in one afternoon. I had no idea if this was achievable but having a deadline really helps decisions flow quickly. The afternoon had a few interruptions and meetings so I picked it up again in the evening and by midnight I had a new newsletter. I had a workflow for my content, a new domain and hosting along with a new website for people to subscribe to Little Walden from. I didn’t have guides to work from so learnt as I went but thought this might be useful to others as some of the decisions, like which newsletter service to use, took a bit of researching.

Choosing a newsletter service

Before getting started my biggest worry was actually compiling the newsletter. I was hoping there was a solution to speed things up but I did think at one point I was going to have to code a newsletter every week, adding my carefully curated content, sourcing and resizing images. Luckily there are some great solutions out there that take the workload from you. I went with Goodbits after looking at what they offered. They not only offered a Chrome Extension for adding content but also linked up to my Buffer account. Anything I shared to my Buffer queue would automatically be available to me in Goodbits — awesome. But the clincher was the Mailchimp integration. I could use Mailchimp templates, which I’m more familiar with, and pull in my Mailchimp lists too. This meant I didn’t have to learn a new system or work out how to code or send through a new system and with a challenge like this that sort of time saving is critical.

The Goodbits set up is pretty straight forward so in no time I had content there I could drag and drop into my first issue, a connection to my Maillchimp list — all I needed was a newsletter template and a landing page.

Goodbits, meet Mailchimp

I already had a Mailchimp account for Slidecraft so I set up a new list for Little Walden. I borrowed the Slidecraft newsletter template that Leo had lovingly created and went to work in Photoshop and Coda. Another alternative if you’re not a developer is to buy a newsletter template from a marketplace like Themeforest.

At this point I need to point out I’m not a designer or a developer and if I shared my work with the team it would have been condemned. However, needs must, especially on a deadline like I’d set myself. I quickly pulled together a little logo for the newsletter and created some images to replace the Slidecraft ones on my template. I took to the code and replaced my images and added my new copy for the newsletter. I only had to include one line of code to pull in my content from Goodbits *|GOODBITS_CONTENT|* and that was it. There are other optional elements I could have brought into my template from Goodbits but I was happy to hardcode these into the template. Once done, I added the new code to my Mailchimp template and job done. A quick test in Goodbits showed the newsletter looking pretty much there.

Creating a Landing Page for newsletter subscriptions

The next step was to give people a place to sign up. I had a couple of ideas for this and had recently deployed a simple Typeform embed to a blank html page that worked a treat and looked OK. However, for Little Walden I wanted to have a little more control to add some additional information. I decided to go with a HTML template from Themeforest to save time. After a quick search I found Greened, which is actually a ‘coming soon’ template. I could see how I could adapt this and bought it — it was worth the gamble for $6.

The landing page shipped with a subscription form however it wrote all the subscribers to a txt file on the server. I wanted this to hook straight up to my mailing list on Mailchimp so I had to do some coding to get this to work. As I said, I’m no developer so this was messy and I needed to draft in some help on some of the responsive styles but worth the effort as it now all links in with Mailchimp.

Making this look like I wanted took a bit of time but only because I like to tweak and test things as I go. I drafted copy as I went through and tested it locally until I was happy.

Launching Little Walden

Earlier on I’d set up hosting for Little Walden — I have a reseller account so it’s really quick for me to deploy a new hosting space for projects. I registered the domain littlewalden.com and changed the nameservers to the new server. This allowed time for the changes to propagate on the web while I was setting up the newsletter. Using FileZilla I pushed the new website live and all worked fine — job done and completed at 14 minutes to midnight.

Finding & Growing a newsletter audience

So this is the next step. Little Walden exists — it will be going out every Friday at 5 — I just need to find my audience. I have a few things I’ll be doing to promote this so I’ll write a detailed post as a follow up once I’ve had a chance to get Little Walden out into the public.

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These are personal lessons, things that appeared important or applicable at the time and will hopefully be of use to others setting out as either a Dad, a Founder or both.

1. Jump in – Out of everything this is the advice I would give myself if I could travel back in time. Just jump in and get your hands dirty. Whether it’s taking an idea that’s been rattling round your head to the next step, killing off a product feature or changing a nappy – there is no better way to learn or find your limits than getting stuck in. You’ll suddenly find nappies are the easy bit.
2. You never know it all – No matter how licked you think you have something, life has a way of kicking you in the butt and reminding you that mastering things is a process. In this respect having kids and starting a business are very similar – they are iterative processes. No two days are ever the same and there is no end goal just moving targets. Ambitions, aspirations and milestones maybe but these are journeys that need to be your life’s work.
3. You’ll always question yourself – Am I good enough, will I do it right, what if I mess up, will I be as good as others? But what I’ve learned is other people we tend to benchmark against are probably thinking exactly the same. I’ve seen some of my biggest role models open up and share vulnerabilities that their profile would never allow you to assume. Worrying about this and comparing yourself to others only takes up time that you could be using to get on with being the person you want to be. It’s also one of the hardest lessons to learn, or it has been for me. Same goes for being a Dad, comparing yourself with what others appear to be doing and social media only makes this harder. Best advice I heard was don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.
4. When you love something you’ll always do your best – Let’s be honest, what more can you do than your best. The important thing is that when you look back you can say I gave it everything, I gave them everything, I did it because I believed it was right. And when you really love some one or something you do that. It’s nice to feel it, it’s nice to do things because you truly believe it is right or it is for the right reasons. Having kids has this amazing ability to put everything in your life in perspective – it can make things much clearer. It gives you a point of view – a focus.
5. Ignore advice – Books, blogs, podcasts, forums – it can all get a bit overwhelming. It’s only natural, you want to consume everything you can – you have millions of questions and the more you learn the more questions you have. But I’ve found the only way to truly learn is to get started. It’s back to the first point – jump in. The most frustrating time is waiting – the last few weeks before having kids is the hardest. As a non-technical founder the time between initial concept and working product is the hardest. It’s this phase for me when I have all my doubts – when I can’t shut my mind off for working through scenarios or tasks wondering what is going to happen, what else could I be doing. But do you know what, for everything I’ve read, no matter how good or insightful it’s been – it hasn’t beaten doing the job in hand. Not all advice is created equal and what works for one person, one startup, one family doesn’t always work for the next. The fun is in finding your own path. Easier said than done!
6. Commit, commit, commit. This was a big one for me – realising that doing is not the same as committing. Doing tasks is not the same as committing to a goal, being with your kids is not the same as committing your mind and your body to the moment of being with them. This has lead me to trying to improve at being in the moment which I find really hard. I have a mind that has always been prone to drift and to dream but there really isn’t any replacement for being in the moment.
7. Don’t give up. With taking ideas into the real world it’s all too easy to give up. In the early stages it’s only you that you are going to disappoint and you can always claim you had that idea before someone if it comes out in future. Having kids teaches you that it’s easier than you think to keep going. With kids you just don’t question it. It doesn’t matter what people might think, how much time it will take, how much money it will cost, you’re fully committed, you’re in and you wouldn’t have it any other way. And do you know what, it works out alright. You find solutions, you think on your feet, you smile and you get ready for the next challenge. It’s made me dust off some old side projects which I’m going to see through. They may not work as I expect, they may fall flat on their face,  but giving up no longer seems a reasonable outcome for an idea I still have belief in.
8. Routine saves the day – I wish I was better at putting this into practice in my work life. I’m certain that routines have helped made having twins the amazingly enjoyable experience it has been rather than a more stressful, anxious time. (I have my wife to thank for this one!) Between the four of us we know what is happening and when. The girls know when it’s time to eat and when it’s time for bed. From fairly early on we got a full nights sleep. Don’t get me wrong, we have days when this all goes out the window, we have moments where we don’t know our ass from our elbow but on the whole it works out pretty good. Maybe we have been lucky but I also know that Donna worked really hard to get them in the routine. I know she planned things meticulously and stuck by that plan regardless to get it to work. I know she taught me the routine to make sure I didn’t mess it up – and it worked. With all the jobs that require doing, or that we expect of ourselves, when starting a business this kind of focus can make a huge difference. I really, really need to keep working on this one!
9. Sleep is important. This is another weakness for me. I’m a night owl. It’s past midnight now and I definitely should be in bed. I was up until 2am yesterday as Erin had to go to the emergency doctors and had a pretty interrupted sleep after that. This morning I was all for going to bed early but get to the evening and I’ll cling on to every last bit of the day I can manage. I will be pay for this tomorrow. Mornings are mornings, the girls get up at 7 no matter what. Or 6.30 – it’s their choice The only option is go to bed early however, the evening is the only time I get to catch up on reading blogs, writing posts and finishing off any jobs I’d meant to get done in the day. It’s not easy but making time for sleep is important so every week we make sure that we both get at least one really good lie in. Having kids, starting a business is pretty demanding and the tired me struggles to stay positive, to have great ideas, to be productive. Weekends are fast becoming days of lower expectations. That sounds negative but actually it is really awesome. Some days we just do what we feel like. If it’s my lie-in I might get 10/11 hours sleep. I’ve been known to have the odd afternoon nap too (I have to own up – this is one sided as I still haven’t seen Donna take a nap yet.) Although I’m crap at going to bed and probably don’t get enough sleep during the week I know it’s important, I know I’m a better me when I do sleep I just have to keep tweaking this one to get a routine that works.
10. Teamwork makes things a shitload easier. Whether it is co-ordinating a weekend of activities with the girls around household jobs or getting your product to launch nothing beats a good team. I’ve lucked out on both and seem to have epitomised the saying of surround yourself with the best people you know. I’m inspired on a daily basis by Donna and what she does for me and the girls and by the Slidecraft team for making what was a crazy ambitious idea a reality. Anything can be overcome with the right team alongside.
11. Celebrate the little wins. It’s easy when you have a big end goal in mind to miss the little milestone but these are things that will keep you going and get you where you want to go. Celebrating milestones is not something that just happens, sometimes it takes effort but it is always worth it. It pays to lift your head up every now and then and look at the bigger picture, where you are, where you’ve come from and give yourself a pat on the back. It makes the next few steps a little easier.
12. Celebrate the fuckups. My mum told me this a few years ago, well perhaps a little more eloquently but the sentiment was the same. At that time I didn’t get it. I was out of school (OK this was more than a few years ago) and the education system had brain washed me into thinking there was a right and wrong but that’s not the case. There is just what is. If you’re going to be creative, if you’re going to push yourself, push other people or if you’re throwing yourself into something you’ve never done before, like having kids, you’re going to fuck up from time to time. Things aren’t always going to go amazingly, things aren’t always going to work. But they’re not supposed to and this isn’t wrong. When doing new things you’re learning as individuals, teammates or parents. There is no right or wrong it’s just experience, a series of experiments with learnings that we can celebrate and move on from, one little bit wiser.
13. Everyday is a school day. Every day is different and there are things to learn from each one. Some days you’ll be open to them, some you won’t. Some days I find I’m open to them but choose not to listen. Change is hard.
14. Coffee is your friend. I don’t notice the caffeine impact so much but I’ve come to enjoy my moment with a coffee. It’s 5 minutes to stop, put a brew on and let my head catch up. Don’t rush your coffee, savour the moment and make it a part of your day. (Unless your little monsters start screaming in which case, coffee break over!)
15. The job is never done. One milestone leads to another, one task ends another starts. It’s an iterative journey and one that I find easier when I can step back and see it for what it really is. Sometimes it’s too easy to get your head down and plough through ticking off jobs and getting focused on one thing. But these little tasks, this one big thing is just a small part of a much bigger thing, a job that is never complete until the fat lady sings as they say. Looking after yourself and living by your principles is as important as any of the above. It’s not selfish it’s just something that will help you be better at what you do. Not easy when time is in demand, but finding space and staying healthy is the only way to give your best to others. On that note I’m off to bed, nothing worse than a grumpy Dad at breakfast.

So, if I could travel back in time and summarise this for my younger self what would I pass on? Listen to none of it and just jump.

Whether you read productivity and lifehacks or not I’m sure everyone experiences at least some of the above and more likely many more I haven’t picked up on. The important lessons for me have been to try and keep my eyes and ears open, to listen to my instinct and to learn and apply what I can to every area of my life. There is no substitute for raw experience and we are all capable of much more than we’d ever give ourselves credit for. So here’s to the next 12 months and to jumping in more often.

Here’s a handy populated tweet if you’d like to share this post 15 lessons Entrepreneurs can learn from Dads #startups #dads

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None of my apps and profiles help me as much as scribbling and doodling my thoughts and ideas down in a pad.

Just the process of transferring ideas from my head to paper makes them become real and memorable rather than fleeting thoughts.

I have about four Moleskines on the go at any one time – one for things I need to remember, one for planning and ideas, another by the bed for those 3am brainwaves and one reserved just for doodles. I use three colours of Sharpie fineline pen to help make notes stand out and which make it easier for me to recall pages and notes in my head later on.

I’m certain they keep me sane and help organise my thoughts – I can confidently move on from thoughts once I’ve written them down knowing I can return at any point. Hemingway was recorded as saying, “Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it…” – for me I think it would be “…gives me one-third more chance to remember it.”

I’m not sure it will be the same for the next generation. Analog just doesn’t feature – they are confident taking notes and leaving messages purely in digital form. Maybe this isn’t a bad thing but I can’t help thinking that we about to witness the disappearance of generations of ideas and fringe reflections.

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Last couple of weeks I’ve been working on business projections for Slidecraft and have been building a model we can use to test some of our assumptions. Over this time I’ve come up with a few strategies to get me through the days when I start suffering with cell-blindness.

Coffee Breaks. Lots of them.

Make sure you have a killer playlist – keep it upbeat or you’ll be asleep.

Excel crashes. Save your work regularly – there’s nothing worse than having to start again. Nothing worse!

Build a template for regular reports.

Wear glasses. Even if you don’t need them.

Use a formula you’ve never used before. 

Select a random formula and use it in your spreadsheet.

Snacks – food breaks keep the energy levels high.

Move locations. Every now and then just sit somewhere else.

Work while standing up – if you don’t get more done at least you’ve stretched your legs.

Celebrate when complete.

Any more ideas add them in comments!

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