Blog - Page 96
A collection of 2,567 blog posts
I’m fascinated by the link between the way we live our daily lives and the health and happiness we enjoy. There are choices that you make every day, some of which seem completely unrelated to your health and happiness, that dramatically impact the way you feel mentally and physically. With that said, here are 10 common mistakes that can prevent you from being happy and healthy, and the science to back them up. When the Buffer team explored the science of happiness before on this blog, the int
I’ll confess up front: I have terrible posture. It’s been bad since I was in high school at least, and probably for even longer than that. It’s one of those things I keep in the back of my mind as something I know I should do, but never get around to, like eating more vegetables and sending more postcards. It’s really interesting to explore commonly-held assumptions for the Buffer blog, because I often find out surprising things. Researching how our posture affects us was no different. If you’r
Every month, the Buffer team shares some stats about our business, including how our blog posts did , what’s happening in Buffer for Business , and even our revenue . We also love to share what’s happening in the world of Buffer support. Here’s
We all have things that we want to achieve in our lives — getting into the better shape, building a successful business, raising a wonderful family, writing a best-selling book, winning a championship, and so on. And for most of us, the path to those things starts by setting a specific and actionable goal. At least, this is how I approached my life until recently. I would set goals for classes I took, for weights that I wanted to lift in the gym, and for clients I wanted in my business. What I
Below is the monthly update email I have just sent this morning to all our investors. I hope you enjoy taking a read about the full details of our work on Buffer in the last month. I’m excited to hear from you in the comments if you have any questions about what we’re up to! Growth/numbers: * New users: 77,000 (Total: 1,123,000, from 1,046,000: +7.4%) * Daily active users: 32,500 (from 30,000: +8.3%) * Revenue: $199,000 (Annual: $2,388,000 up from $2,088,000: +14.4%) * Business [http://buff
If you’ve been venturing a bit in the online marketing world like me, I’m sure you’ve heard the term “marketing funnel” before. To be frank, it was never something that appealed to me. It always seemed like just a way to optimise how many people are giving you money, which doesn’t seem very caring. So when I came across this post by MailChimp co-founder Ben Chestnut about why he hates funnels, I was excited to see that the traditional funnel isn’t the only way successful companies do marketing.
Quick Summary We didn’t publish any content for an entire week after we were hacked at the end of October. This affected our traffic numbers, which dropped 2% compared to September. On the upside, we got 55% more email subscribers than we did in September. How did the blog do overall? * Total uniques: 547,339 (-2% from Sep) * Total posts published: 15 (9 in-house, 6 guest posts) * Total posts republished: 4 (TheNextWeb, Lifehacker, Fast Company) * Top 3 referral sites: Facebook (84,374 uniq
In October, we’ve been trying to push hard on the Buffer for Business front. Since we want to try and be as public and transparent about the things we’re doing, here are the full numbers about how Buffer for Business performed in October. I’ve also emailed a new section to the team titled “Outlook and Thoughts” at the bottom, that I’ve included here. I (For reference, here is the September report [https://buffer.com/resources/how-much-revenue-did-buffer-for-busi
Seeing your name in the phone book used to be the ultimate, I remember it clearly. As a boy, I dreamed of the day when I would have the independence, stability, maturity, and home phone to be listed on page “L” alongside my fellow human adults. I’d crack open the new Yellow Pages, thumb through the Lees, and lo and behold, there I’d be. A celebrity. My Yellow Pages dream has vanished. Now it’s all about Google. I want my face on a Google search results page. The ticket to my desired Internet
Buffer was hacked on October 26th, resulting in several thousand spam posts appearing on Twitter and Facebook. Here is the impact on our numbers. Last Saturday I was sitting in my favorite coffee shop doing a few support tickets and writing a blog post when I opened Facebook and saw that the whole of my timeline was full of spam. The next thing I noticed was that all of the spam was “via Buffer”. I scrolled and scrolled and it was endless. We’ve written a lot about what actually happened [http
Ah, ideas. Who doesn’t want more great ideas ? I know I do. I usually think about ideas as being magical and hard to produce. I expect them to just show up without me cultivating them, and I often get frustrated when they don’t show up when I need them. The good news is that it turns out cultivating ideas is a process, and one that we can practice to produce more (and hopefully better) ideas. On
Update: This article was originally titled “Buffer has been hacked – here is what’s going on”. The hacking incident happened yesterday (Saturday) and below is a recap of everything that happened. Please ask us any questions you have in the comments below. If you’re reading this, the most important section for you is Update 7. We’ve discovered the source of the breach and closed the vulnerability. Keep reading for the full story. Update 9: We’ve discovered the exact details of how the Twitter
As the Buffer team grows we’ve been able to make some awesome adjustments to our mobile apps, including some great new features. In case you missed some of the recent additions, I’ve collected a run-down for you of how they work in our Android and iPhone apps. We’ve also included a few features that are easy to miss and might be a good bonus, which should make your Buffering much easier. Look f
In the northeastern hills outside Kyoto, Japan there is a mountain known as Mount Hiei. That mountain is littered with unmarked graves. Those graves mark the final resting place of the Tendai Buddhist monks who have failed to complete a quest known as the Kaihogyo. What is this quest that kills so many of the monks? And what can you and I learn from it? Keep reading and I’ll tell you. The Marathon Monks The Tendai monks believe that enlightenment can be achieved during your current life, but
Wow, it’s really not a small task these days to keep up with all the recent changes to Social Media. Only a few weeks ago, we talked about the biggest, new Facebook changes where especially the link posting iterations changed a lot of our behaviors. Looking at the biggest Social Media statistics [https://buffer.com/resources/10-surprising-social-media-statistics-that-will-make-you-rethink-your-strateg
Recently, I read a great book and promised to mail it to a friend overseas when I was done… about nine months ago. Today, I finally wandered down to the post office and mailed it, because the alternative was working on this blog post. This is classic procrastination at work. If you’ve noticed yourself doing this as well, you might have explored “cures” for procrastination , or tips to improve your productivity [ht
We all have goals and dreams, but it can be difficult to stick with them. Each week, I hear from people who say things like, “I start with good intentions, but I can’t seem to maintain my consistency for a long period of time.” Or, they will say, “I struggle with mental endurance. I get started but I can’t seem to follow through and stay focused for very long.” Don’t worry. I’m just as guilty of this as anyone else. For example, I’ll start one project, work on it for a little bit, then lose
Five years ago I was re-doing my last year of high school, managing a retail store full-time and performing in a play five nights a week. Suffice to say I burned out pretty quickly and in hindsight I can see why. Hindsight is a grand thing, but we don’t all go through the same experiences, so the hindsight of others can be beneficial to us as well. These 13 successful entrepreneurs and startupers have some great stories to tell, and I thought asking what they wish they knew five years ago would
While just a little over turning 3 years old, Instagram has made huge strides in social media. With over 150 million users on the platform, 16 billion photos shared, and 1 billion likes happening each day, the photo-sharing and editing platform is one of the most engaging channels on social media. Instagram has some pretty different functionalities in comparison to other social media sites and is fundamentally based on being able to simply upload and share beautiful images instantly. Except, lo
When I wrote a recent post for Buffer titled 10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier , I didn’t even consider the possibility that striving for happiness might not be in our best interests. Who wouldn’t want to be happier? Happiness isn’t necessarily bad for us, but I did find out recently that happiness alone isn’t enough for us to feel fulfilled. Sadly, chasing happiness is really common thes
When Joel started Buffer , its aim was to help you schedule Twitter updates for smarter sharing. It’s come a long way since then, and now we have lots of features to help you improve your social media presence across a whole bunch of networks. To help you get the most out of Buffer, we collected 10 of the most useful features together into this post. 1. Using Feedly and Buffer [https://buffer.com/resources/feedly
I’m super excited to share that Niel de la Rouviere has finished the 45 day Buffer Bootcamp* and recently accepted our invitation to join the Buffer team full-time! Niel is from South Africa and works on Buffer all the way from Taipei (we’re a distributed team ). Niel has lots of experience with various different JavaScript frameworks such as Backbone.js and AngularJS. It has
It doesn’t matter how you choose to live your life — whether you build a business or work a corporate job; have children or choose not to have children; travel the world or live in the same town all of your life; go to the gym 5 times a week or sit on the couch every night — whatever you do, someone will judge you for it. For one reason or another, someone will find a reason to project their insecurities, their negativity, and their fears onto you and your life, and you’ll have to deal with it.
At Buffer we recently spent the past 6 weeks focusing on one key metric – reducing churn rate. Comparing to the initial setting up of the growth effort with lots of experimentation and exploratory data analysis, it was a conscious shift to align the team’s focus on one key metric. Here are 6 ideas for those of you who run subscription-based businesses. Churn rate can be broadly defined as the prop