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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 1, 2016 10:12 AM
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I hate waking up. All my life I’ve been able to stay up late and sleep until noon -- no problem. It was a habit I fell in love with because working or studying until 3 a.m. made me feel productive.
Today, there are more goals keeping us up late than ever before, whether it’s work, relationships, or side projects. I see more friends tweeting at 2 a.m. than I do at 7 a.m.
However, I’m constantly reading about the success of early birds. There are hundreds of blogs referencing studies that scream getting up early is the right thing to do … but to me, working late and sleeping in is just, well, easier.
RHave you read those blog posts but still struggle to get up early like me? I’m here to tell you it’s time to commit to waking up early. Being an early bird is hard but studies show the benefits outweigh the struggle. Let me tell you why....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 1, 2016 9:51 AM
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Each year I write an annual Smashwords year in review and then preview what's coming for the new year. Welcome to the 2015/2016 edition!
The short version of this post is that amid a general slowdown in the ebook market, characterized by a glut of high-quality low-cost ebooks and flat or declining sales industry-wide, Smashwords is focused on the long term.
Although we've been in business for almost eight years, we still feel like we've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible. We're looking ten years ahead and laying the groundwork today to enable a better long term future for the constituencies we serve - authors, publishers, retailers, libraries, readers, and book culture. A quick introduction for thet thousands of authors and publishers who are new to Smashwords this year: I founded the company in 2008 to make it fast, free and easy for any writer, anywhere in the world, to self-publish an ebook. In 2009 we began distributing our books to major retailers starting with Barnes & Noble.
Today we've grown to become the world's largest distributor of self-published ebooks. Over the years we've opened up exciting new sales channels for indie authors and small indie publishers that were previously inaccessible or didn't exist....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 31, 2015 12:05 AM
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'Tis the season for annual reporting, planning, and reviews.
As you look back on last year's performance and look forward to what you need to accomplish next year, it's important to understand and adapt to industry trends. After all, missing a wave doesn't just mean that you didn't get ahead — it means that you got left behind.
Here are some great infographics that provide excellent at-a-glance learnings about the latest B2B marketing and sales trends. May the insight help you achieve 2016 success!
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 11:31 PM
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If you want to sell online, then having a perfectly optimized website with a creative design is essential for attracting more customers!
Whether you have a huge online shop or you’re just a small business trying to sell a couple of products, these 22 eCommerce websites will surely inspire you!
In this list you will find both large and small websites, from famous and less popular brands as well. Also, there are various niches presented here, from fashion, furniture and electronics, to accessories, beauty and health shops!
These eCommerce website templates use various types of platforms. Some of the eCommerce platforms used here are OpenCart and WooCommerce....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 4:06 PM
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Researcher Satu Vasantola published a paper with the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism recently about the type of content that gets shared online.
Using NewsWhip data and other methods, Satu looked at the content output and social performance of the BBC and Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.
We talked to Satu to find out what she learned about the type of content that is shared by both sites’ readers....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 10:12 AM
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Ev Williams made it easy for people to say what they want online. But the man who created Blogger, then Twitter and now Medium says the Web is on its way out, at least as a place to publish your thoughts.
In an interview with Peter Kafka on the latest episode of “Re/code Decode,”Medium CEO Ev Williams said the future of media lies in platforms like Twitter, Facebook and, naturally, Medium.“There’s going to be a convergence of distribution points for media,” Williams said. “And it’s going to make less and less sense to publish on the Web.”
So, what does that mean in real terms? To Williams it means that brands and people will continue to be valuable, but they will need to hop on a platform that can surround their work with other high-quality content and give it greater social reach....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 2:57 AM
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One of the most interesting studies I’ve read recently is Gartner’s Top Strategic Predictions for 2016 and Beyond: The Future Is a Digital Thing, a report published in October that delves into the evolving relationship between man and machine. The key takeaway? “Smart” and predictive technologies aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, and that applies to our business lives as much as it does to our personal ones.
- By 2018, 20% of all business content will be authored by machines. - By 2020, smart agents will facilitate 40% of mobile interactions, and the post-app era will begin to dominate. - By 2018, 6 billion connected things will be requesting support.
The implications of our increasingly smart world are both inspiring and frightening (as a copywriter, hearing that machines are making their way into the content realm is particularly scary!). As I started thinking about 2016 trends, it quickly became apparent that many of these same digital themes are making their way into the content marketing and social media spaces — and have been for some time.
Let’s take a look at some of the key trends we can expect to see over the next year. How will content and social — both already digital in so many ways — become increasingly digital in 2016?...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 1:34 AM
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Recycling existing content into a SlideShare is a great way to get more mileage from content you have already spent the time and effort to create. It is a wonderful medium for presenting information visually.
By the end of 2013, SlideShare averaged 60 million unique visitors a month…215 million page views” and was “among the top 120 most-visited websites in the world, according to its website. SlideShare is the perfect vehicle for extending the life of your content. Adapting existing content into a Slideshare allows you the perfect opportunity to present your information in an exciting, humorous or unexpected light. It provides a platform from which you can inform and educate your viewers about the subject matter.
Consider the following 5 tips as you repurpose your content into a SlideShare....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 1:09 AM
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Content marketers are up against a lot when it comes to driving engagement on Twitter. An estimated 20 million profiles on the platform are thought to be fake (iMediaConnection), and only 23% of brand posts generate any reply at all, let alone one that is memorable to consumers.
Still, the platform for all its challenges presents significant opportunities for brands with 302 million active users, 80% of whom are active on mobile. Need more convincing? 58% of the top brands have over 100k followers on the platform, according to Adweek, and 34% of marketers report successfully generating leads using Twittercontent marketing.
So, how can you rise to the top of the Twitter game and engage your audiences? The answer lies in the tweets themselves. Here are the best formulas for driving engagement on Twitter....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 28, 2015 11:53 PM
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At the end of each year I reflect on what I need to do more of or less of … what is working now and what will be working in the coming year.
A lot of this reflection is spent on the time I spend creating content. It’s significant. I thought I would share for you my strategic view of the strategy behind the content streams going into 2016. Here’s a summary of where things are headed...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 28, 2015 11:41 PM
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I want to show you what types of content you should be producing in order to generate strong sales from the rest of your content marketing efforts.
Some of these might overlap with the content you’re already producing to generate traffic, but some will be new.
If you’re starting to see a solid level of website traffic but aren’t sure how to turn those visitors into customers, this post should help you a lot....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 28, 2015 11:06 PM
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What will next year bring? I don’t know, but I do have some good guesses on some of the headlines we’ll see next. Here are my top seven...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 28, 2015 10:48 PM
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In just 12 months, we used Instagram to gain 400,000 followers for Foundr -- which translated to over 70,000 email subscribers. At the end of that period, we were averaging 30,000 call-to-action clicks per month from Instagram, and converting 30% of the users who landed on our website from our Instagram page into email subscribers.
We've seen it work ... now it's time for you to get in on the action. Here are four ways to use Instagram to build your business and brand....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 1, 2016 10:04 AM
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So these young men and women, who are highly savvy when it comes to new media, and how to spread news using it, had no idea that you can buy space for a personal announcement in a print product and its online equivalents.
I suspected that they'd see me as a media dinosaur for feeling it was important to mark such an important life event in print. But they didn't. In fact, they all thought it was really cool.
So Bea hung fire on the Facebook update until The Times announcement was published, and then did a screen grab from The Times iPad app that became her Facebook post. Then she bought five copies of the paper.
Of course, many more people saw that Facebook announcement than heard of the engagement from The Times.
But I learned that it really mattered to these new-media natives that the first announcement came in the paper-of-record environment of the Times....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 31, 2015 10:40 AM
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Publishers already know that Facebook video is a major source of engagement.
Video is a major part of Facebook’s future plans. The platform is testing an all-video news feed, and releasing a number of new video-focussed features, including the ability to save clips for watching later.
Although it’s still early days in figuring out what’s working on Facebook, it’s clear that there’s a lot of confusion out there about what works best in video. Some of the most successful publishers see the overwhelming bulk of their engagement on a handful of clips, while others might feature similar content, but wind up with a fraction of the engagements.
From analysing data at NewsWhip, we’ve come up with five factors that seem to hold true for most highly shared videos....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 11:58 PM
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Content marketing is an ever-evolving opportunity for marketers to reach new customers and gather data on their unique audience. But with the constant changes in the digital world, content creation needs to progress at an almost alarming rate.
Keeping up with the trends in the content marketing world is a full-time gig, but marketers can weather the storm by looking ahead. Create a strategy to cater to the coming 2016 year, and you’ll be set right out of the gate.
So what’s on the content strategy horizon? Here at ZenContent, we came up with a few predictions....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 11:15 PM
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Getting your blog post images right is crucially important.
Studies have found that 93% of the most engaging content shared on Facebook contains images, and that images have an 80% memory retention rate (compared with just 20% for text).
What’s more, recent eye-tracking studies have shown that internet users are less drawn to stock photos than they are to original visual content, meaning that the wrong type of image can greatly damage your blog’s engagement.
Thankfully, it’s easier than ever before to create custom blog images that’ll really stand out.
There are plenty of programs and resources available to the discerning blogger who wants to improve their blog imagery. Here are twenty tools that you can use to make sure your blog is as visually appealing as possible....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 2:17 PM
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HappyGrumpy is a new way of conducting polls. It is accurate, rapid and free. You can design and execute sophisticated polls in seconds, then start sampling and tracking public views.
If you need to poll or monitor public opinion, you should start using HappyGrumpy now.
You can monitor public reaction by the hour, day, week or month.
You simply enter your poll subjects, (e.g. person, topic, corporation, product, brand, issue, geography etc.), click go and your poll will execute, save and track statistics over time. You can even download the data or share using social media.
You can do this instantly, (Account Analyzer, Brand Analyzer) just enter your account, subject, issue or brand and see the results in seconds or set up a continuous poll (My Social Polls) which will track your poll day by day.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 9:48 AM
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One week it was corn bread, next came challah, then naan and Italian loaf. An unnamed young woman spent this autumn placing 20 such pieces of bread onto a table—one at a time—before smushing her face into the baked goods and posting Instagram videos of the bizarre activity.
And 22 weeks since launching the Instagram account called BreadFaceBlog, she has 29,300 followers, 8,000 of which she gained in the last two-and-a-half weeks. Only two of her posts have failed to get a combined 1,000 likes and comments—the rest have performed in the range of 3,000 to 10,000 likes and comments.
To put that into perspective, the longtime bakery King's Hawaiian has 7,000 Instagram followers after being on the platform for nearly three years, and the bread brand regularly gets only a few hundred likes and comments per post. The woman behind BreadFaceBlog actually put her face on three King's Hawaiian rolls as if her cheeks were rolling pins and garnered 1,269 likes and 3,469 comments....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 1:49 AM
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One of the major theses we employ in our social media strategy process is this: Companies should focus more on how to BE social, and less on how to DO social media.
With all the new tools and platforms constantly emerging, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking about social media through a tactical prism instead of a strategic one. The best social media strategic plans are tools-agnostic, and set forth objectives and metrics that supersede any particular social venue....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 30, 2015 1:25 AM
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Think about your social media strategy in the context of the seven Cs.
A lot of people and companies decide, after using social media for a while, that they need a strategy. Of course, that approach is like putting the cart before the horse.
To ensure success, you should think about your social media strategy in the context of the seven Cs....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 29, 2015 3:50 PM
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A life in public relations is unlike any other career you might imagine. For instance, did you know that PR pros need at least five cups of coffee just to maintain brain function? Or that while 100% of PR pros think that statistics are important, 101% believe that not all statistics are real.
Please take a look below at this light-hearted infographic by Upraise PR that takes a moment to have some fun with the world of public relations. Enjoy!...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 28, 2015 11:47 PM
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While many people agonize over their email copy and then slap a hastily written subject line on two seconds before hitting "send," sales reps know that the situation should actually be reversed.
After all, there's no point in crafting a beautiful message if buyers don't even open it. And what prompts the all-important open? The subject line.
But with only a tiny bit of real estate to work with, there's no room for mistakes. With this in mind, we took to Reddit's Sales channel to round up subject lines vouched for by real sales reps. Instead of reinventing the wheel with your messages, use these subject lines knowing that they've been tried, tested, and verified to work by reps around the world.
Interested to learn why these subject lines do the trick? We've also included the logic behind each for your knowledge....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 28, 2015 11:26 PM
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LinkedIn, that workhorse of social networks, lacks a lot of the excitement of its peers. It doesn't have Facebook's 1 billion daily active users, Twitter's real-time cachet or Snapchat's undying millennial devotion.
For professional utility, however, spending a few minutes a day on LinkedIn can bolster relationships, attract talent to your organization, and support both your employer's brand and your own.
Here are eight ways I've found to get value out of LinkedIn without eating up too much of your time...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
December 28, 2015 10:58 PM
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Here at Co.Design, we cover photography that transports you to other places and offers fresh perspectives on the built environment. We've talked to photographers who have spent years documenting their subjects, traveling the world or assimilating to a subculture so they could show it to us.
They've captured grown women who mother hyperrealistic dolls, mysterious "geoglyphs" discovered in Kazakhstan, and alleyways in Hong Kong that double as storage units. Their images prove that despite an onslaught of technological advances aimed at rethinking visual narratives, good old-fashioned photography remains one of the most powerful tools for telling stories. Here, we give you our favorite photo essays from 2015....
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Learn about the benefits of being an early riser and how your alarm clock can help take your career to the next level.