In the last chapter, I showed you how to get tasks out of your head and into your notebook.
In this post I’m going to answer some questions you might be having about what to do next, and show you how to make a to-do list even when you’re short on time.
Read on to find out the answers.
The following is a guest post from Reuben Yonatan. Reuben is the founder of GetVoIP – an industry-leading business comparison guide that helps companies understand and choose a VoIP system for their specific needs. Follow him on Twitter, @ReubenYonatan.
We at GetVoIP have gone through a lot to get to the point we’re at today. For those of you who don’t know us, we highlight the top VoIP providers and offer shoppers an alternate way of learning more about each vendor.
However, it’s not that easy to be taken seriously in this hyper-competitive space.
There are plenty of websites people can visit to get advice on business software; they can even just go to a provider page to get reviews. But, many of those websites are too promotional to trust. We pride ourselves on being transparent with our customers and helping providers reach out to as many people as possible. This leaves many of our competitors wondering how we even make money, but that alone says enough about why we’re coming out ahead.
In order to be taken seriously by the providers we cover, we have to show them how committed we are to their products by constantly brainstorming and optimizing every level of our business model.
If we don’t have a solid process, our leads will go to someone else that does.
Here, we’re going to break down three internal changes we have made to our marketing workflow which helped us help providers spread their products and services to even bigger audiences.
Are you ever at a loss when it comes to planning your tasks? A good chunk of the time, I feel exactly like that.
That’s ok. Task management exists because planning and executing projects is hard.
Last night, I sat down with my wife and we wrote down everything we’ll need to do when we move house. It was two A4 sheets of paper before we even started breaking it down into subtasks. Two A4 sheets of paper.
The amount of items a human can hold in working memory is around 7, so when it comes to projects, of course you’re lost if you’re not planning them properly.
Don’t worry. There’s a simple way to do it, and once you’ve got that down, you’ve learnt it forever. And the start of it, just like I sat down to do last night, is writing everything down.
Here’s how to brain dump your tasks and make sense of them.
While writing a recent article for TechCrunch about empty states in app design, I came across Inbox by Gmail — the app which rewards you with a sunny sky when you hit inbox zero.
I’m probably a little late to the party, and as much as I love Gmail I feel that Inbox is a smarter and more intuitive way to process a bulging inbox.
Vinay covered why task snoozing is so powerful over on his Abstract Living blog, which made me want to try an app with the same mechanics.
If you’re anything like me and have these traits, you’re probably going to get a lot out of Inbox:
Delightful, right?! It looks even better on the iPhone because it animates slightly. After 20 minutes of looking for a way to record my iPhone’s screen and buying some junk app which doesn’t actually do it, I’ll leave that to your imagination.
If you want more content on Google products, see the posts Google Drive Tips and Dropbox vs Google Drive.
But first, getting back on track: here’s Inbox vs Gmail (The Showdown).
In 2015, The Fader reported huge news for Spotify. Out of its 75 million monthly users, 20 million are paying customers.
A 26.6% conversion rate is staggering on freemium products. As Jason Cohen says:
“A really good conversion rate for free-to-paid is 4%, like Dropbox. Awesome for them, but normal rates are more like 1%, and that’s if users are reasonably active.”
If 1% is average, and Dropbox‘s “really good conversion rate” is 4%, then 26.6% is absolutely bloody ridiculous.
We recently had a major overhaul of our pricing and landing page and wanted to get a good idea of what a high-converting pricing page looked like. We turned to the experts.
There are a lot of best practices for SaaS pricing pages out there, with giants like HubSpot, ConversionXL and SixteenVentures being the authorities.
I thought the best way would be to look at the pricing pages of the SaaS 250 — a list compiled by Montclare of the most successful SaaS products in the world.
To see this data in the form of an infographic, you can skip straight down to the bottom on this page.
Before jumping right in, it’s interesting to note that of these 250 companies, only 48 had pricing available. The rest had pricing available on request by contacting the sales people.
Jason Lemkin, CEO and Co-Founder of EchoSign, says that most companies have a very good reason for this. Writing on Quora, he outlined 5 key reasons you might be better off not showing pricing on your website.
So, 202 of the SaaS 250 have good reasons for not being transparent with their pricing. Let’s look at what I found when analyzing the SaaS pricing pages of the remaining 48.
Lots of text editors, like Word or Evernote, feel too ‘formal’ for proper note taking. They’re clunky and don’t work in harmony with my erratic train of thought at a meeting, lecture or presentation.
Lately, I’ve got instructions introducing me to new projects via video or voice recording, which I’d try to summarize in bullets, expand on and create to-do list items from the notes. When I was done writing and listening, I’d usually be left with a big mess of text that needs organizing, which would take more time still to go through and fix. With this method, I’d need to listen to the recording at least twice to get my notes.
Instead, now I use WorkFlowy to take and edit notes. Here’s how.
After publishing the Checklist Manifesto Review and following up with the Checklist Manifesto Summary, I thought it’d be fun to share the most memorable The Checklist Manifesto quotes by surgeon Atul Gawande. The book is packed full of useful knowledge, and not just from the author himself.
He interviews professionals from the man responsible for foolproof checklists given to pilots flying incredibly complex Boeing airplanes to a group of high-powered venture capitalists. All the people in the book have something in common – they want to reduce risk. And Gawande himself, like every human being with a will to survive, is no stranger to risk reduction. For him, however, it’s vitally important.
The Checklist Manifesto is the story of how this simple checklist was made.
The following is a guest post from graphic designer and copywriter Erik Fessler.
What do you think is worse: sitting for 100 days because you didn’t know what direction to travel in, or going for 100 days down the wrong path?
Here’s the good news:
This question doesn’t matter if you have a reliable and logical process to find the right direction.
Brainstorming is the key to finding that direction, and it’s something you can implement for your team in a logical, structured way. With that in place, you can use that process as a reliable way to generate ideas, iterate upon them, and harness the power of your team’s combined creative energy to make real business change. That is, if you can build and optimize your brainstorming process…
The following is guest post from Sawaram Suthar. Sawaram is head of marketing at Acquire, and also a founder of Jagat Media. A digital marketing consultant, he has experience in branding, promotions and page optimization, along with research and strategy. He has an MBA from the University of Pune.
Most brands optimize rational factors that affect customer behavior such as price points and product features. But today’s audience make purchase decisions based on their emotional experience as well.
Understanding customer emotion plays a key part in building customer engagement and brand loyalty, both of which can contribute to better sales, revenue and ROI.
There are plenty of studies to back me up on that. For example, research from 1997 at a large insurance company found sales agents with high emotional intelligence sold policies with an average premium of $114,000, which was almost double the figure for agents with low emotional intelligence.
