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.

Before we get into the key findings, I want to offer you a free SaaS landing page headline generator. All you do is put in your software’s purpose, audience, and customer goal, and you get a list of 30 titles. These titles follow the formulas every SaaS headline I analyzed use. When you get the sheet, click ‘File’ and then ‘Make a copy’ to start editing in your own data.

Click here to get the title generator spreadsheet

And now, onto the key findings of the study.

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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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Two weeks ago I had a brainstorm with my team to think of how to improve productivity; the 4 ideas we came up with increased my output by 375% and ensured that I no longer resort to 70 hour work weeks. Obviously, this was just too good to keep to the Process Street team alone, so stick around if you want to find out how I did it!

‘Being more productive can have an awesome positive effect on the rest of your life as you start to feel generally more positive due to lower stress levels and more free time to do what you really love to do.’ – Dr Jones

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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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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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About a year ago, I was casually assigned a task to write one guest post per month in the name of the Process Street blog. “What on Earth?” I thought. Only the top writers get published on places like that. I don’t stand a chance. As it turns out, it’s not as bad as it might first seem. In fact, I’ve had a surprising amount of success.

Guest posting, like every other thing which requires relationship building, is a long process. While you can score slots on smaller blogs with a quick email, for bigger blogs or news outlets you need to be noticed first.

Just like how you’re not going to get very far by proposing on the first date… unless the person you’re pitching knows you’re worth their time (or at least know who you are) they’re not likely to bother with you.

Here’s a collection of the knowledge learned about guest posting over the last year which has since led to spots on TechCrunch, The Next Web, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Usability Geek and more.

Before you go any further, if you just want to skip ahead and grab a database of 189 guest posting opportunities click HERE. Done that? Good — now head down to ‘Ways to get on people’s radars’.

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This time last year, I was a pretty horrific writer. Just go look at my old blog posts.

…Actually, please don’t.

I was an avid reader of the tech press throughout my teen years and into adulthood, but it always seemed like a distant, snarky world guarded by unreachable journalists for whom inbox zero is an in-joke.

For a copywriter churning out product descriptions of model cars (my day job last year), it’s an even more distant prospect.

A few months back, I made my debut at TechCrunch, my holy grail, writing on user experience design – a topic I knew shamefully little about which would be read by those that lived and breathed it.

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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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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’d bet that a lot of you use Quora for personal reasons, or maybe even for a little content promotion, but how many of you use it to generate content ideas?

While writing a post about the keyword research process and using Quora to find hidden keywords, I realized what a gold mine the site is for finding out what your market cares about, how you can solve their problem, who the influencers are and loads of other data — at a glance, and totally free.

This is why Quora is your secret weapon for content ideas

For those of you that don’t use Quora, I’ll give you a quick explanation.

Quora is a question and answer site visited by around 80,000,000 people a month who are experts on every subject you can imagine.

The site is divided up into topics. To give you an idea of how niche the knowledge can get, there are entire topics dedicated to questions on Henry Ford, Birdwatching, Medieval Manuscripts and Elves (Tolkien’s Universe).

Not to mention topics for marketing, podcasting, content writing and other things you’re likely to have an actual interest in! It’s useful as a way for communities to start discussions and help each other out, but Quora is also a well-indexed database of the questions people really want to know.

Here are the 5 quick ways you can use Quora to generate content ideas, get a database of influencers and become an expert in your niche.

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