Belle Beth Cooper
A collection of posts by Belle Beth Cooper
A collection of 98 posts by Belle Beth Cooper - Page 4
One of the great things about our focus on transparency at Buffer is that we get to help other people learn from our experiences. We love learning from others as well, and since we got so much out of our round-up of counterintuitive advice, we wanted to find out even more about what other people have learned from experience. This time, we wanted to learn about the darkest moments of successful and famous entrepreneurs and what their lesson has been. Without any further ado and in their own wor
Stress is something I’ve been intimately acquainted with since I was a teenager. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to perform to a high standard, and often end up losing sleep due to stress. Since I’m working on decreasing stress in my life, I thought it would be interesting to look into how it actually affects our bodies and our brains. Here’s what I found out. Stress is normal, and sometimes even good for us Stress affects pretty much all of us at some point in our lives. The funny
Note from Leo: The below is an email Belle sent to the whole Buffer team on the 1st of September. It features our latest thoughts, ideas and questions about content and the Buffer blog. Since we default to transparency with our culture, we thought making this public could be useful for others too. Quick summary In August we published 18 posts on the blog, 6 of which were guest posts. After July’s 59% increase in traffic, August blew that away with a 118% increase. Our top post for the month hit
Update: We looked at 4.8 million tweets sent through Buffer to find the best time to tweet for clicks, retweets, favorites, and more. See the results for your specific time zone! This post was originally published in August 2013. We’ve updated it here with new research and visuals. We’re pretty keen on optimal timing for social media here at Buffer , and I figured it was high time I c
One thing that I noticed immediately when joining Buffer was our emphasis on cultivating positivity. If you take a quick look at our culture deck , you can see the high priority we place on this. Since I joined the team, positive thinking is something I’ve focused on a lot, and it’s been fun to see how spending time with positive thinkers rubs off on me. At the moment, some of us are experimenting with sharing one great moment we had at the
One of the big things over the next couple years will be getting the computer on enough desktops that we’ll actually communicate using what’s called electronic mail – Bill Gates It turns out that Bill Gates was more on target with this statement than he would have probably ever imagined. Today, we send so much email that we’re almost constantly looking for new ways to organize our inboxes and keep them under control. Email has grown into such a large area of our lives and our workdays that I w
Ever since my dad tried to convince me to meditate when I was about 12, I’ve been fairly skeptical of this practice. It always seemed to be so vague and hard to understand that I just decided it wasn’t for me. More recently, I’ve actually found how simple (not easy, but simple) meditation can be and what huge benefit it can have for my day to day happiness . As an adult, I first started my meditation practice
Since social media is changing so often. It can be really hard to keep up with stats and trends that affect how you use it. I quite often forget the facts that I’ve read, or I use Twitter based on stats that are outdated now. In fact, when I recently looked at some of the latest social media statistics , it hit me that the fastest growing demographic on Twitter is is the 55–64 year age brac
For a long time I had a certain idea about what makes an introvert or an extrovert. I had always thought that it works something like this: * Extroversion relates to how outgoing someone is * Introversion is the same as being shy. That was kind of my general perception. Doing just a little bit of reading made it clear very quickly – my thinking was way off! Recently I dug into some of the full-on research about introverts vs extroverts and I think I’m much closer to understanding what the t
I have a link to Facebook in my bookmarks bar, so I can visit it with just the click of button, but the link doesn’t go to facebook.com. It’s actually a link to one of my closest friends’ profiles. So my Facebook landing page is actually her profile page. It’s been this way for about a year now. Here’s why: I stopped spending a lot of time on my Facebook News Feed , because I found that the posts I was seeing weren’t too interesting, an
The below was originally an email that was sent out to the whole Buffer team So, powered by one of our 9 Buffer values – “Default to transparency”, we wanted to do the same here and be 100% transparent about our blog traffic in July Quick summary In July we published 16 posts on the blog, 4 of which were guest posts. Our blog traffic jumped by 59% from June, and our top post hit almost 30,000 unique views
Have you ever walked away from talking with someone that you’ve just met and thought to yourself “Wow, this was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had!” ? I’ve recently had one of those and at first I quite selfishly concluded “Wow, I’m a great communicator”. But then I realized, hang on a second, I think this other person was the reason I felt so good about this talk, how did he do that? I started to think about a few of the things this person did, that made me feel so comfortable and ope
Running a blog is so much more rewarding when you know people are reading, enjoying and sharing your work. If you’re managing a blog as part of your business, you probably want people to find and buy your products through your blog, as well. So increasing subscribers is an important task for bloggers. These are some fairly simple hacks that you can implement without too much fuss, which should boost your subscriber numbers. 1. Lower your bounce rate – here is how Cameron Chapman explained in
Happiness is so interesting, because we all have different ideas about what it is and how to get it. It’s also no surprise that it’s the Nr.1 value for Buffer’s culture, if you see our slidedeck about it. So naturally we are obsessed with it. I would love to be happier, as I’m sure most people would, so I thought it would be interesting to find some ways to become a happier person that are actually backed up by sci
Our biggest aim at Buffer is to help you share content on social media in better ways. I wanted to look at ways we can help you with this entire process, from finding the content to sharing it, to analyzing your social media posts. So I’ve uncovered some cool ways to do these things that you might not already know. Why find and share great content? Maybe you’re wondering why we focus so much on discovering and sharing awesome content here at Buffer. There are a few reason
Making decisions is something we do every day, so I wanted to find out more about how this process works and what affects the choices we make. It turns out, there are some really interesting ways our decisions are affected that I never would have guessed. Luckily, we can take action to improve most of these. What happens in your brain when you make decisions Obviously lots of things take place inside your brain as you make a decision. What I found really interesting were the various things that
I’ve heard blogging referred to a couple of times recently as a mixture between an art and a science. If this is true (and I think it is), there’s no ‘right way’ to approach blogging if you want to be successful. There are plenty of people who’ve done a great job of it though, and I thought it would be useful to learn from them. These 16 bloggers shared one important tip each for blogging beginners. No doubt, even if you’re not a beginner these tips will probably prove to be useful. 1. Get ide
I’m a big fan of afternoon naps. In fact, I was super excited when joining Buffer to hear about how the team is pro-napping. It’s not everyday you come across a company that’s open to letting employees take a snooze whenever they want one. Naps aren’t for everyone, though. I’ve heard lots of people say naps don’t make them feel better, so I wanted to explore how naps affect your brain and whether they really are good for you or not. How sleep affects us Better sleeping is known to provide lo
One of the things we focus on most at Buffer is the best time to post to Twitter and Facebook . This is because we want to help you get more engagement with your audience, which is beneficial for everyone. While the best time to post is definitely important, there are some other things to keep in mind. I had a look at what kind of updates work best for Facebook pages to increase interaction and found
We all love to take advice from people who’ve previously been through the same situations as us or who are further along a similar path to us. For entrepreneurs this is particularly useful, since it’s such a difficult, unknown path to tread sometimes. Funnily enough, some of the advice I’ve come across through reading interviews and articles from famous entrepreneurs is often counterintuitive to what I would expect them to say. I thought it would be interesting to gather some of this advice int
One thing that we’re obsessed with here at Buffer is obviously the best times to share on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It just so happens that with social networks, the timing of when your posts go out plays a vital role in your success. Since we’ve got our heads in this all day, every day, I wondered if timing plays a big role in other things we do every day. So I looked into how our body responds to timing and how we can utilize that knowledge. It turns out that we actually have a very so
Social Media is changing faster than ever, as if that wasn’t something everyone already knew! If you’re managing social media for your business, it might be useful to know about some of the most surprising social media statistics this year. Here are ten that might make you rethink the way you’re approaching social media. 1. The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55–64 year age bracket. * This demographic has grown 79% since 2012. * The 45–54 year age bracket is the fastest growi
I used to think sensory deprivation was just a crazy torture method that no one in their right mind would opt-in for, until I stumbled upon some information recently about sensory deprivation floatation tanks . These are water tanks big enough for one person, often set up at spas, where you can pay to float in salty water for hours, receiving almost no sensory information at all. Sure, it seems craz
Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. – Stephen King Even if you’re not a ‘writer’ per se, writing can be highly beneficial. It can be helpful for a number of things: * help you to work through feelings * stay positive * express your thoughts more clearly * market your product. Generally, there are two things that writers recommend to others who want to improve: more writing, and reading. More writi