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A collection of 2,599 blog posts
Have you ever discovered a life hack just when you needed to hear it? The timing and the solution perfect, and the next step so obvious that you acted immediately and have stuck with it ever since? When it comes to health, sweeping life changes are especially difficult to implement and even harder to sustain. But in my experience, it’s the small changes you adopt, maintain, and love that add up to a meaningful long-term difference. I’ve been collecting a list of these kinds of fitness, diet, h
Every single day, 4.75 billion posts go up on Facebook. To put that number in perspective, there have only been 129 million books published since the beginning of time, with an average word length of 64,000 words. That means we are publishing more content (by number of words) every single day on Facebook than is contained in every single book published since humans have existed! For us marketers, it’s our job to stand out in that absurdly large crowd of content. One way to do this is to have a
This may sound crazy, but here it goes… Building your email list isn’t as hard as you think. Really. In fact, when you know what to do and how to do it, list building is pretty darn simple. How do I know? I struggled with my blog’s conversion rate (1.4%) for over a year. That is, until I discovered the 5 secrets that I’m going to reveal to you in this post. After implementing these 5 simple techniques, my blog’s conversion rate skyrocketed by 134.85%. And today I’m going to show you exac
In February, my husband and I jumped head-first into urban farming — starting our summer garden from seeds. It then developed into an even larger endeavor when we added 13 chicks into our home. And then four ducks. And then three more chickens… The past several months have been a blur between brooding chicks, building coops, free-ranging, fixing fencing, gardening and finding eggs. As I look back upon these summer months, several distinct themes come to mind — and boy, do they ripple beyond ou
In August I think we really found our stride in a lot of ways, and hitting $4M is a huge milestone. At the same time, our MRR growth the last two months has been a lot lower than we’d like – 5% or 6% is not ideal for us. I’m confident with our hard work and new teams set up we can pull that up. (I also want to share some of July’s numbers—I went on vacation right at the start of the month and let the update slip by.) Traction update July * New users: 65,712 (Total: 1,663,761, from 1,598
My world at Blinkist revolves around books: self-help books, psychology books, books on business and marketing and persuasion. They’re full of colorful anecdotes and tried-and-true strategies for making just about anything in life easier or better. While having multiple options for mastering a skill is a nice luxury, too much of a good thing is still just that. At Blinkist, we condense nonfiction books into 15-minute summaries; even so, if you tried to read the entirety of the library, the onsl
I’ve got several go-to moves when I’m playing basketball. The crossover. The fadeaway. The tear drop. I’ve got several go-to moves when I’m writing social media updates, too. Title case. Text only. Signatures. I imagine you’ve got your own favorites, too. Combined, there are a litany of ways to compose, style, and organize a social media update, even in just the words we use in our updates. I’m always on the look out for new experiments to try with the way I write a social media update. My la
Jason Keath from Social Fresh Conference joined us this week to discuss all the social media tools needed for social publishing, blogging and more! Check out the highlights of the chat on Storify here! Here are some of the tools covered in the chat (though some might fit into multiple categories). Daily Social Publishing * Tweetdeck * Coschedule * ClicktoTweet * Buffer * WordPress * Photoshop * Mention * Hootsuite * SumAll * BuzzSumo * Twitter * YouTube * Facebook * Daily app
When I first set foot in Disneyland, I race to the most famous rides first—Splash Mountain, the Matterhorn, Indiana Jones, all the biggest and best. Little do I know there are just as many hidden gems and overlooked attractions that I’ve likely missed in my sprint for the headliners. Social networks are a little like Disneyland in this regard. There’s so much to see and so much to do that some of the fun stuff is bound to slip through the cracks. Which features of Facebook, Twitter, and the ot
Five or more hours of sedentary sitting, according to Dr. David Agus, is the health equivalent of smoking a pack and a quarter of cigarettes. Yikes. Yet, sitting around is something we get plenty of practice at. Reading and writing and creating on a computer makes for big chunks of sedentary time. If you’re reading this post right now, are you sitting down? How long have you been sitting? It’s a topic that I think of often. We’ve all kind of taken a shining to it on the Buffer team, being more
I’m so happy to announce that Mike San Román will be joining our team as our next web developer! Mike will be focusing on our Buffer for Business offering. In the short time Mike has been working with us, he’s accomplished quite a lot. Mike focused on understanding our Business customers through survey forms and running various experiments. He’s also implemented some key performance improvements including client side caching with IndexedDB. Since launching our Business offering last December,
Imagine that you arrived at your local movie theater this weekend to see a show and the options featured were “The Final Destination,” “Inglorious Basterds,” and “District 9.” If none of those movies sound familiar to you from recent buzz, that’s because they topped the box office charts in 2009—the year Brian Halligan and I released the first edition of Inbound Marketing: How To Get Found Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs. It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since the 1st
I feel incredibly lucky that I managed to jump on board the path of building a startup. Having hit upon a product that solved a key pain for many people, Buffer has grown rather fast. The team is now 25 people and we’ve just crossed $4M ARR. When I reflect on how quickly things happened and what it has required of me, the first thing that comes to mind is Paul Graham‘s essay entitled How to Make Wealth. In particular, this part resonates with me: You can think of a startup as a way to compress
Here’s a riddle: When is a tweet more than a tweet? We’re all pretty familiar with Twitter’s 140 characters—and of course, a photo is always an eye-catching addition. But what if your Twitter audience could sign up for your email list without ever leaving Twitter, or directly download your new app straight from a tweet? What if a photo and article summary could travel alongside every post of your content? And what if you could do all of this for free, right now? Twitter cards offer all this p
Content Crafter Kevan Lee joined us for #Bufferchat to talk about the unique nature of writing for the web. Check out the full Storify recap here, and continue reading for 32 web writing tips from Kevan and the community about how to write successful blogposts, tweets, status updates, and more. What makes writing for the web different than print? “We have less time to grab attention on the web. Web writing is quicker, more succinct, right to the point.” @Kevanlee * “ Writing for the
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the time I learned to tie my shoes. It came up because of a tweet from my friend Jeff. I thought of a study that I remembered from college; kids who were told that it’s hard to learn to tie shoes persisted longer than the ones who were told it was easy. Jeff’s point, of course, directly relates to customer service , which is where I spend a lot of
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter offer a unique opportunity to get close to people who are hundreds of miles away. You can share anything with anyone at any time. You can share. Does this mean that you should share? I’ve come up against this question many times, hovering over the Send button on a status update or considering what’s okay to share and what’s too private (or uninteresting). Where should the line be drawn? Should there even be a line? I’m happy to offer some of my th
Imagine you could go back in time and give your 20-year-old self a bit of advice on investing in the creative process, coming up with new ideas, and producing good, fun work. What would you say? I’ve thought a bit about this topic lately, as I reflect on how I’ve changed from the person I was in my twenties to the person I’ve become in my thirties. Creativity has become more and more important to me, both at work and at play. And the lessons I’ve learned along the way (and the ones I’m still l
You know the feeling. You’re sitting there, staring at your hands, at the keyboard, at the screen, at the ceiling. You’re supposed to post something on Twitter, but you have no idea what to post. I’ve been there before. I think we’ve all been there. Everything that comes to mind seems lame. Slogans, links, articles, quotes, pictures—you have no clue. So you sit there wasting your time. We’re all too busy to afford this wasted time. Social media shouldn’t be a time waster. It should be a money
I’m pleased to announce that Michael Erasmus has completed his 45-day Buffer Bootcamp and is now on board full time as our backend/full-stack developer focused on growth at Buffer! Michael has been such a pleasure to work with. His recent passion lies in data science, and he’s been leading the exploratory analysis that our growth team is doing at Buffer. He also built out what we call ’seamless’ experiments. Seamless is a way for us to conduct A/B tests measuring conversion funnels on
I’ve realized I am very much in a bubble. Everyone I know is building a company. Amongst my circle of friends, that is the norm. This, however, is mostly out of choice: I believe, in agreement with Seth Godin, that to be an outlier is an inefficient way to make progress: The easiest way to thrive as an outlier is to avoid being one. At least among your most treasured peers. Surround yourself with people in at least as much of a hurry, at least as inquisitive, at least as focused as you are. Wi
I know you don’t want to take a break right now. Why? Because you’re too busy. This post is probably one of more than a few tabs you have open on your browser or phone. Your to-do list is likely close by and packed with tasks. Sometimes we know there’s a better way to do things, but we’re just so busy we don’t even think we have the time to find it—so we keep going like we always have. That’s how I saw things, too. And then I discovered the power of taking breaks at work. They made me happier
When I started at Buffer, I was given permission to make mistakes, to ask forgiveness rather than permission, to always test everything. So I’d like to give you all some permission as well. You have permission to pick and choose your social networks. In fact, often times it may be best not to be on certain social networks, perhaps because of the time it takes to do social right or because your customer personas don’t fit with a particular network. When you’re choosing which social networks to
As our CTO Sunil has explained previously , we make all our product decisions based on metrics, meaning that we try to launch features early and measure how they impact all our metrics in order to decide which path to follow. We had the intuition that our current analysis tab in the Buffer for Business area could be tweaked a bit to make the user experience better. And last week Niel, one of our awe
