What happens if you make software too difficult to use? Probably the same thing that happens if you never made it at all — no one uses it.

It’s easy to get users to adapt to familiar concepts like drag-and-drop, but what if you made something totally new? You need a creative user onboarding process, like the one Microsoft used back in 1992 and the others I’m going to look at in this post.

The Software User Onboarding Process

I already talked about concierge onboarding, so this time I’m going to look at the total opposite — a style known as low-touch user onboarding. It’s not always possible to work with every customer, especially if you’re distributing software on a massive scale like Microsoft Windows, so writing onboarding into your product is a necessity.

James Hunt‘s excellent article on Mental Floss reveals the true purpose of Minesweeper, Microsoft Solitaire, FreeCell and Hearts: a gamified way to teach users concepts vital to success using Windows 3.1.

Let’s take a look at exactly how they did it.
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Have you ever been asked for your email address to see extra blog content? It looks something like this:

That’s a content upgrade. I’ve written pretty extensively about them in this blog post on lead generation, so if you need an in-depth look at the topic (plus the psychology of why it works), that’s the place to start.

They’re great tools for blogs connected to businesses because they capture the contact info of people who are likely to want your product or service. They get the valuable content, you get another email on your list of subscribers plus a free pass to market to them. The best part is that it’s not just any old email address, owned by someone who doesn’t care what you’re saying. It’s the email address of someone who is:

1. Interested enough in what you’ve got to say to give away their email address

2. The perfect fit for your product

It’s doubtful you’re the sort of person who turns down leads, so if you aren’t already using a way to capture emails with content upgrades (or you’re doing it in an awkward way), you’ll want to check out these four tools.

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Best Real Estate Apps to Close More Deals This Year

The real estate industry has come a long way since a long-dead entrepreneur decided to rent a part of their farm land to turn a profit. Down the line we’ve seen verbal agreements and contracts written in stone, all the way through to the mass of paper stored in unorganized filing cabinets we’re still unfortunately dealing with.

Even though computers have been widely used by agencies for over 20 years, paper documents are still around causing trouble. Maybe it was software industry’s fault for a long time, but now thanks to Android, iOS and the huge number of productivity tools at our disposal, there’s no excuse to be disorganized

Take a look at the 5 best real estate apps for simplifying your operations and closing more deals.

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What is The Checklist Manifesto?

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right is a 2009 non-fiction book by Atul Gawande. The book was released on Dec 2009 and was a New York Times Best Seller.

In the book, Atul (who is a surgeon by trade) talks about how many industries across the world use checklists to “get things done right”. He also breaks down his journey as the one of the key champions that brought checklists into hospitals around the world. This endeavor had incredible results. Below is a quote from a post in the New Yorker that talks about the rollout of checklists in just one state, Michigan.

In December, 2006, the Keystone Initiative published its findings in a landmark article in The New England Journal of Medicine. Within the first three months of the project, the infection rate in Michigan’s I.C.U.s decreased by sixty-six per cent. The typical I.C.U.—including the ones at Sinai-Grace Hospital—cut its quarterly infection rate to zero. Michigan’s infection rates fell so low that its average I.C.U. outperformed ninety per cent of I.C.U.s nationwide. In the Keystone Initiative’s first eighteen months, the hospitals saved an estimated $175,000,000 in costs and more than 1,500 lives. The successes have been sustained for almost four years—all because of a stupid little checklist.

The short of the matter is, checklists work. I have written about the power of checklists before when I told the story of how a checklist won World War II. But in today’s day and age, it seems silly to be relying on paper checklists, it only makes sense that as technology evolves we evolve with it.

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Ok, so, I am far from an epic content creator. I am, however, aspiring to become a better one and in that journey, I have come across some great resources on how to become a better writer and content creating extraordinaire.

I mentioned some of these in my post – Advanced Content Promotion Checklist (interactive checklist), but this is such a critical point that I thought they deserved their own post. Plus, this is kind of an exercise for me where I force myself to re-read them all. I hope they help you create epic content.

On a side note, if you’re interested in blogging we just released our tool Checklists for Bloggers – a simple way to create checklists that you can embed onto your blog and capture leads with. Check it out here.

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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“.

As a small business grows, and the number of employees increases, it is no longer possible for the person at the helm, the business owner, to attend to all problems as they arise. Without systems in place, you may find that you are dealing with issues in an ad hoc, time-consuming and often chaotic manner. It will mean that your employees are constantly bringing problems to you and that your business cannot run without you. This can be enormously stressful for you as a manager and frustrating for your staff. Systemisation of your business will be a key factor in helping you create a scalable, sustainable business that operates equally effectively whether you are present or not.

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I hate paper and I love Evernote. I use it to store everything. I automatically forward files from my email to my Evernote (including snail mail which is automatically scanned and emailed to me). I take photos of every document I sign and business card I’m given using their iPhone App and I even forward my Workflowy history to Evernote.

Some people may suggest using Dropbox or Google Drive, but Evernote has a specific benefit that makes it kick ass: Search.

Evernote is built around search. All documents, images and photos are scanned and made searchable. This means you can dump everything into one folder and Evernote will make it instantly searchable from any of your devices. No organizing, no tagging, just sweet, sweet search.

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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“.

Communication is a crucial element to success for any business. But for businesses that have an outsourcing operation or runs on virtual teams, communication is life or death. Virtual environments do not have the luxury of being in the same room or building as their co-workers, so the natural communication benefits from working in an office disappear.

Poor communication can lead to lower quality, productivity, and morale across the organization.

Here are 5 tools that can get you and your team back on track and chatting up a storm.

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External Hard Drives suck. They take up space, USB ports and are far from a secure place to keep your precious photos and videos.

I used to have three external hard drives, now I have none. In this post, I’ll explain how I got rid of them and how you can too.

A while back I switched from Dropbox to Google Drive since they are now offering 1TB of data for just $10 a month. But the change had a few unexpected benefits, one of which was allowing me to get rid of my external drives.

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Managing email is an important activity for all small businesses. We have written about alternatives to email a couple of times but the truth of the matter is, email is here and it’s here to stay. For many small businesses, email is still at the core and relied upon for day to day transactions plus we all use our email to login to our favorite apps and services.

In this article, we will talk about apps various clients and tools you can use to improve email productivity across your team. We will not talk about how to host your business email, something we already covered in the Google Apps vs Microsoft 365 post. The goal is for you and your team to get to Inbox Zero as Merlin Mann says in his famous 2007 talk.

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