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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Customer Success isn’t something you do once or someone you hire to make magic happen. Unfortunately for those who are shy of putting in the effort, it’s a process.

A customer success process should include many of the functions we’ve talked about so far in this guide, such as customer support and NPS surveys, but also routine ‘check-ups’ on the health of your customer base.

There is, however, some good news about this. Since customer success is a process, it means a few things:

1. Part of it can be automated.
2. It can be rationalized and broken down into steps.
3. It’s easy to train a group of people to execute it.
4. It’s easily tracked and documented.

What does a customer success process look like, exactly?

In this final sprint of our guide, I’ll be telling you exactly that.

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At Process Street, we’re fascinated by the inner mechanics of all kinds of operations especially when it has to do with writing. Today, we’re taking a deep dive into a notoriously tricky process: journalism. It’s a hard field, one that demands quality, accuracy, and succinctness, all under a huge time crunch.

We recently interviewed ten reporters to peel back the lid on their processes, get some writing tips, and understand how they deliver quality under pressure. From news outlets like Bustle and National Geographic, we found that reporters are most successful when they adhere to a nuanced process—one they’ve tailored over the years to suit them.

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I’ve talked at length in the past about the user onboarding process, the difficulties of first-time use and how empty states can solve some of these problems.

While this is all well and good when you’re trying to tackle user drop-off after the first session, what about the later stages?

Assuming that everything else has clicked into place for your user and they’ve made it all the way up to the purchase, you must have made a good first impression! Unfortunately, it’ll be all for nothing if your app is hard to use, awkward, inflexible or disappointing over the long term, or if your premium plan’s onboarding isn’t tight.

Post-sale UX optimization isn’t something I’ve looked at before, or even heard about. But writing a guide about SaaS customer success is not a small task and UX is definitely a big deal, especially because good UX makes it easy for Customer Success to do their job.

In fact, a good SaaS user experience takes the weight off customer support, too. Overall, you don’t want to put a barrier between your users and your app and most importantly for revenue, you don’t want to put a barrier between your paying users and your app.

Here are some SaaS user experience optimization pointers to think about which will make the lives of your Customer Sucess team easier.
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You won’t find a harsher place for self-promotion than the ‘front page of the internet’.

As the 31st most highly trafficked website in the world, reddit has huge opportunities for awareness, leads and sales.

You could take advantage of that, if only you knew what you were doing.

Our content promotion team at Process Street sure didn’t. We all learned the hard way that redditors hate their platform being used for reddit marketing. They want value, great content and entertainment on site (so would rather not click through for it). While this seems like a dead-end, we can use it to our advantage.

In this post I’m going to tell you what worked, what didn’t, and exactly what I told the promotion team to turn things around.

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It’s one of the most painful moments in basketball. Your favorite player is fouled—they have an easy opportunity to make 2 points—but they miss the free throws.

In fact, it’s kind of astonishing that even professional players who make millions of dollars a year to perfect this craft still only make 75% of free throws. But a lot are actually much worse. Shaquille O’Neal’s was around 50%, a percentage so abysmal it resulted in the now infamous Hack-a-Shaq play.

And it’s not just Shaq. Some of the most dominant centers of this generation have the same problem. Both Andre Drummond and DeAndre Jordan are hovering around the 40% mark this season. Last year, Jordan made only 39 of the 84 free throws he took during the playoffs.

It’s gotten to the point where fans suggest that they shoot free throws underhand, granny-style—which no one has done for fear of getting mocked in the locker rooms post-game.

It’s clear that you can be a good basketball player and be terrible at free throws. But as it turns out, you can be a totally normal guy and be great at free throws. A lot of people are surprised to find out that the reigning champion for consecutive free throws is not an NBA player, in fact—it’s a dairy farmer. Free throw ability just all boils down to 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“.

Unless you’ve recently come back from a ten-year vacation in the wilderness, you probably have a computer, laptop, or smartphone that you use on a daily basis.

But even with all the modern technologies and products available to us in this 21st century, the daily struggles of organization and productivity remain.

Thankfully, there’s an app for that (quite a few, actually). At Modernize, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best and most efficient smartphone and tablet apps to help you organize your life. Take a look and get downloading!

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Successful business owners know the advantages of scaling through delegation and at the same time, preserving the quality of the service experience. Success is not something you achieve “all by yourself”.

Handing over some of the reigns is something most one-man businesses struggle with.

It makes me think of a good friend who launched her own public relations agency just over a year ago.

She told me about having just acquired two influential new clients, on top of how well some of her existing clients were doing, creating a lot more work for her in the process.

But instead of being happy and excited about her successful venture, she was complaining about the additional workload, and quite apprehensive about how it might increase even more in the future.

“How can I duplicate myself?” she asked nervously.

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Earlier in the month, I wrote about what churn is, and how to calculate it. Now, I’m going to cover how to beat it.

This is part 5 in an ongoing series on customer success for SaaS companies. Here are the previous 4 parts if you need a solid introduction to customer success:

1. What is customer success?
2. Why is customer success important?
3. What is churn?
4. How to calculate NPS

If you’re ready to beat churn, read on and we’ll get started.

The long road to churn, and why it’s so disappointing

It took months of preparation. Nick learned about your product through your content marketing, where you helped him with his problems and even provided a bit of lunch break entertainment.

He saw your product’s name over and over again thanks to your PPC ads, social media presence, and content promotion. Respected influencers are buzzing about your product on Twitter, and he heard the other marketing team in his company were getting on well with it.

After reading the copy on your landing page, he didn’t bounce. He stuck with it through the signup form, the activation email, and the onboarding tour. He even invited the rest of his team to try it out.

Over the course of the first week, Nick was engaging with the product less and less, and ignoring emails from your customer success team. Before the first month was over, he did something heartbreaking — canceled his subscription and churned out.

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