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.

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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:

• Medium is a Twitter product. Any Twitter followers you have that use Medium count as Medium followers and are emailed when you publish.
• I have a lot of re-publishable content that already proved itself popular on TechCrunch and The Next Web.
• There’s a huge, excited audience for what I write about on Medium.
• Republishing and promoting takes very little time — 99% of the work is already done by the time you start.

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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Content marketing is built on beautiful principles.

Instead of interrupting people’s day to day lives with TV adverts, skyline-blocking billboards and glossy magazine ads, content marketers create useful resources for their customers and for each other. A strange mix of copywriting and journalism, content marketing has the moral edge over traditional marketing because the public don’t go out of their way to expose themselves to adverts, but they do voluntarily read content.

In case I’m interrupting your busy schedule, you can scroll down to the bottom of this post for the key takeaways.

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The following is a guest post by Linda Craig. Linda is a content specialist at Assignment Masters writing service. She is currently working on her PhD project and writing articles for pleasure. Feel free to reach her by Twitter.

When you take a look at the records for freelance writing hourly rates, you realize that some writers make over $60 for a single hour. If they work only 4 hours a day with that rate, they can easily make $6000 in a month without sacrificing their hobbies and social life.

You, on the other hand, might find yourself writing many hours a day to handle that content overload. Maybe you made some progress in terms of getting more money for your work, but you’re still not making anywhere near $60 per hour.

Many freelance writers find themselves in such situation. This is a very competitive industry. It’s open to writers from any country, and its flexibility is part of the problem. Beginners are willing to accept lower offers because otherwise they don’t stand a chance against all that competition. As a result, the average rates that clients are willing to pay are getting lower by the day, and you’re forced to accept huge volumes of work to make enough money to get you through the month.

Relax; the situation is not as hopeless as it seems. In the continuation, you’ll find tips that will help you handle the workload and become a more efficient content writer.

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When was the last time you forced your eyes onto a glaring screen at 4am, furiously typing after just waking up with the best idea ever?

Last night? Never? Well, neither answer is surprising. As I suspected (yet can now say with complete certainty) content writers are an odd mix between two types of people:

• Charles Bukowski hammering at his typewriter with classical music blaring through the radio
• A strait-laced data nerd, carefully analyzing keywords and writing content that has been proven to engage before it even hits Twitter.

While readers think of content in terms of ‘video’, ‘infographic’ and ‘blog post’, we writers think of it as that damn thing which keeps us up at night. So much so that Ed Fry, general manager at Inbound.org, has started writing short-form posts to get the idea out of his head and allow for a proper night’s sleep.

A recent thread at Inbound.org revealed excellent tips which both shared new ideas with me and reassured me that I’m not wrong in the head.

In the discussion, members of the Inbound community like Mention’s Brittany Berger and SplashOPM’s Derric Haynie share their blogging process – both step-by-step (for the more ‘together’ writers) and free-form rambling-style.

In this post, I’ve collated and curated the information to give you an overview of how successful and prolific content writers go from idea, to draft to finished piece.

I’ll also be taking careful note of the way I write this post, and give you a bullet-pointed rundown at the end.

Which text editors do bloggers use, exactly? Should you write to educate or provoke discussion? How far in advance should you plan your content? Let’s find out.

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The following is a guest post by Brent Schiffman, the marketing manager for ProjectManager.com.

Are you a developer, SCRUM Master, QA Engineer, Project Manager, or a manager of any sort?

You might have the problem I had before I found a solution to:

• Stop tracking the same information in multiple apps
• Stop transferring data manually between your apps
• Connect your favorite apps together to form… some kind of super app.

If you can’t manage your projects, to-do lists or general planning and productivity with any single app, I’m about to give you some great news.

And that great news is… the existence of Zapier.

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