When we say ‘thank you’, it’s often at the end of a conversation.
In the marketing world, there’s no reason to see it that way. In fact, if you’re using your thank you page to signal the end of your customer’s path on your site, you’re doing it wrong.
First of all, let’s look at when to use thank you pages.
If images are the snacks of the internet, and articles are the main course, then infographics are somewhere in between. A light brunch, if you will. Packed with sustenance, but digestible enough to get down in a short period of time.
I’m not going to waste time talking about how important infographics are because that’s been done to death over the period of several years. Instead, I’m going to go through some common mistakes, basic design principles and processes that teach you how to make infographics that don’t look terrible.
The five business lessons learned while moving from an online poker company to building Cloudwards are simple: plan without becoming rigid, learn by doing, pay close attention to customer frustration, grow at a sustainable pace, and keep refining your niche.
I did not begin with a fixed plan to build a company focused on cloud storage and online services. I began with an entrepreneurial drive, then learned through content work, customer problems, and the practical demands of starting a company one decision at a time. These are the business lessons learned along the way.
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Thinking of starting a side project?
A month back, I realized I was getting to the point where I wasn’t bothering to take lunch breaks. I read as a big part of my job, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything heavier than reading articles. Frankly, I was bored during my lunch breaks and I got annoyed I wasn’t doing anything productive.
The solution?
After brainstorming several side project ideas, I started making a personal website.
This was the perfect amount of work because I had (very) basic HTML skills and needed to learn only CSS and how to deploy the code.
The copy on your SaaS startup’s landing page is one of the major factors that determines whether your product lives, or dies a horrible death.
Unbounce cites headlines as the single most important element of a landing page, and that’s for good reason.
Several decades back, advertising legend David Ogilvy said:
“When you have written your headline, you have already spent 80 cents of your dollar”
That means that for every 1,000 people who land on your page, 800 leave after reading only the headline. But that’s just an average. It’s possible to boost those numbers with great copy, and a small tweak at the top of the funnel, as we know, can really move the needle at the bottom of the funnel.
For this article, I analyzed 87 SaaS startup landing pages. This was taken from the top 100 in AngelList’s Trending section at the time, disregarding companies that had shut down.
I found hidden trends and best practices in two supposedly simple elements of the pages: the headline and the subheadline.
Just over a week ago (after about a year of lurking) I decided to give Medium a shot.
There are a lot of guides out there on how to use Medium, but personally, I need to try something myself to fully understand it.
Medium seemed like an obvious choice for a few reasons:
A lot of bloggers warn against setting up your home base on Medium, and they’re right.
You want your main site to be something you can manipulate, and Medium is not one of those places. It is, however, an additional promotion channel. See here for the results I got:
Yesterday I found out that the average person checks their emails 77 times per day.
Seriously? Is that what people do?
Back in the 90s, computers used to gleefully announce that ‘you’ve got mail’, but now clearing your inbox is cause for celebration.
It’s been said email is evil, a demon, a destructive force or whatever, but actually it’s just ancient.
Email can suck, but you just need a system to handle it and everything will be just fine.
We’ve all had conversations like this:
You: Hey, so I’m going to be writing 3 posts a week now, so I’m handing off newsletter writing to you.
Them: Ok, what do I do?
You: I dunno, go into MailChimp, make the newsletter, check it’s ok and send it to everyone.
Them: Right, I’ll let you know if I have any questions
[Later that week]
Them: [1,000,000 questions, a terrible newsletter and hundreds of complaints from subscribers about broken links]
The informality and laziness of shooting off a few instructions over Slack and ‘let me know if you have any questions’ can kill productivity faster than reddit.
Whether eye-catching, irritating, or actually useful, there’s no denying them. Gifs have never been more popular than they are right now.
Why’s this? It could be because mobile phones dropped Flash support. It might be because they’re so immediate and will automatically ‘play’ without the friction of a click. I think it’s both of these things, but most of all it’s because you can say more with a gif than you can with actual words. Gifs help us make connections with our audience, to explain, engage, entertain and tell stories. And, of course, boost reader engagement.
I’ve had something of a battle with to-do list apps recently which has shown me that it’s as much about the app as it is about the way you interact with it.
Your productivity really depends on the environment you manage your tasks in and the way your tasks are presented to you. With this in mind, I’m going to look at three options I’ve tested against each other over the past few months and report on what I’ve learned, both from the perspective of the features and from the perspective of the psychology of productivity. So, it’s Todoist vs. Wunderlist vs. Any.Do.
