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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When you’re planning blog posts, it can be hard to keep coming up with good ideas, let alone a good title.

Sure, you have a couple in the pipeline, and some other topics you’re itching to write about. But looking at the calendar a couple months down the line, you’re coming up blank. How is it that some places churn out insightful and well-written content every Wednesday at noon?

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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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In 2013, Zenefits co-founder and CEO Parker Conrad made a bold statement at TechCrunch Disrupt: “If you’re an insurance broker, we’re going to drink your milkshake.”

For a while, it seemed he would make good on this promise. Zenefits, the YC-backed free 2-in-1 HR platform and insurance broker, is championed as one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies in history. Last May, the company raised $500 million in yet another funding round, bringing its total valuation up to an eye-boggling $4 billion.

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On November 18, 2014, Microsoft Azure went dark. Thousands of the cloud computing service’s customers experienced downtime on their sites for over 9 hours. When they flooded Microsoft customer support to ask what the hell had gone wrong, customers learned that it wasn’t some glitch, natural disaster, or devious hacking scheme.

It was pure human error.

Microsoft deployed an update without running through the standard operating guidelines specifically laid out for this scenario. Instead of rigorously checking that the update was good to go, engineers shipped it on the assumption it was bug-free. This wasn’t just this one-time incident—engineers at Azure regularly violated standard operating procedure because 99.9% of the time, it was a total waste of their resources.

And it’s not just Azure that does this—habitual violation of process leads to a ton of mistakes in all kinds of IT arenas.

When I was 16, I landed my first “real” job which so happened to be in IT. I had just passed my CCNA with the help of my dad (apparently the youngest person in Australia at the time) and was hungry to get my hands on some real technology.

But once I started, I found there was rigid process everywhere, and configuring a live Windows 2000 server was a totally different experience to tinkering with my fathers machines at home, with serious consequences for not following the process.
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[ Download our Free Ebook ] – Click here to download our free 111 page ebook on “How to automate the tasks you hate at work using Zapier“.

The Essential Secrets of Automation Software

Last week, we treated you to the first post in our Zapier series. “What is Zapier?“ covered the basics, but in this post we are going to go deeper into the advanced workings of the most useful automation software to have ever graced your computer screen.

If you still haven’t tried out Zapier yet, don’t sweat it! Considering how long it takes myself to come around to the idea of new technology (Windows 8 was a true shock to the system), you can’t be blamed for not going all-out straight away. So, to put any remaining doubts at rest, allow us to prove why Zapier truly is your dream automation software.

‘I wasn’t really sure what Zapier was for until I started digging around in the web application. Eventually I was able to come up with ideas to problems I didn’t even know I had.’ – Matthew W., Product Manager at SafetySync

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The following post is a guest contribution from Steve Klein the co-founder of StatusPage.io.

How long does engineer onboarding last at your company? 1 week? 2 weeks? A couple months? Regardless, it’s a process you think about in the short term, right when a new employee starts. Once it’s done, it’s done, and you can go on to thinking about the million other things that are going on in your company. Right?

Wrong.

The effects of employee onboarding last way beyond when a new person starts working and impact your whole company. If your onboarding isn’t effective, in just 1 or 2 generations of hiring you’re dealing with a team that’s shockingly less productive than it could be — and costing you a lot of money.

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When Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise wants something done, he points his finger and orders someone to “make it so.” This catchphrase is what the retail giant Amazon almost called itself: “MakeItSo.com.”

Doesn’t have the same ring to it, right?

While there’s no finger-pointing involved, this is basically how home delivery services work these days. We browse through a catalog of options, we pick one, we press a button, and poof—it becomes a reality. Whether it’s a box of paper towels, a new book, or a hoverboard, you can get it delivered pretty quickly.

And though this technology seems really like something straight out of Star Trek, the processes underlying it actually go back hundreds of years, for as long as humans have been trying to make home delivery services work.

But the systems and processes that Amazon has become synonymous with really rely on an appetite created by a name that was once a retail giant that cast a shadow as large as Amazon’s: Sears, Roebuck & Co. In fact, Amazon’s success can largely be credited to their ability to perfect processes that Sears innovated and honed throughout the 20th century.

And where Sears failed, Amazon is still succeeding…

…for now.

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