Successful Blog

Be More Productive By Doing Less

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By Robyn Tippins

If you are a small to medium sized business owner, I’m here to tell you today that your time is limited. I know this will come as an enormous surprise, but there are a finite number of your hours to go around.

You can’t do it all, and I’m guessing you probably don’t want to anyway…

time lost cannot be regained

Information Overload

Your company has to be on the cutting edge, so you must read often.

You spend at least 15% of every day (and probably more like 30%+) consuming information — Tweets, Facebook statuses, Pins, Medium posts and longform blog posts.

Your company has to be a thought leader, and that means churning out clever sayings and deep thoughts, and lots of them, including social updates, blog posts, white papers, videos and case studies.

You are well-read, from strategy to productivity, fascinating and much loved, and none of this is getting the work done.

Your company requires work to be done, the financials to be straight, payroll to be paid and sales to be made, so between administration, billable hours, garnering new business and information consumption/creation, you are doing too much.

Something has got to give.

Choose Whom You Will Serve

Choose a few hours, each day, to get work done.

I go radio silent every day from 2-4pm EST. During that time, I don’t check email, I don’t check Facebook and I don’t answer my phone. I don’t read HackerNews, TechMeme, Reddit or Cracked (my guilty secret). I just flat-out work. I get more done in those 2 hours, than I do in the entire rest of the day.

I’ve become so committed to this schedule that I have been able to cut out work, completely, on some Fridays, just by working ahead during those hyper-productive hours the rest of the week.

I have literally found an extra 8 hours per week, just hiding from my distractions.

Have you established any “heads-down” working hours?

Author’s Bio:Robyn Tippins is Co-Founder and CEO of Mariposa Interactive. She has been managing online communities for 17 years, and her book, Community 101, is a primer on online community management. You can follow Robyn on Twitter via @duzins.

Photo Credit: gothick_matt via Compfight cc

Image App Bonanza: 10 Apps to Spice Up Your Content

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According to ContentPlus UK, articles with images get 94% more views than those without. We have become scanners, racing through online posts and sifting for useful information.

Arresting images stop us in our tracks, and pull us into the surrounding text.

Beautiful butterfly image

This is a roundup of apps that I’ve personally road-tested for image manipulation. With the exception of PicMonkey, they are all installed on my iPhone right now.

Go forth and create fun, interesting photos. Just don’t let me catch you putting a “sunset” filter on your plate of salad. Don’t do that.

1. PicMonkey

Web app, Free with premium features
Handy, easy to use app that is great for banners, overlaying text, and resizing images. It covers much of the territory of Photoshop, without the long learning curve and big expense. My 8 year old kids started playing with PicMonkey and were cranking out great stuff immediately. Check out the “collage” feature.

2. KitCamera

Mobile app, Free with 99cent enhanced version
Successor to KitCam, which was acquired by Yahoo, and it’s the Swiss Army knife of mobile image editing apps. Great for live shooting as well as editing after the fact. This one is complex, but includes tons of pro photographer goodies, including filters, high speed shooting, and live editing. Check out the social sharing tools.

3. Vhoto

Mobile app, Free
Have you ever taken a great video, and wanted to pull a still image out for a thumbnail? Here’s your app. Vhoto will automatically find and suggest the best quality still images from a video clip. Use old videos or shoot a new one. Check out the Vhoto user community.

4. Flickr

Web and mobile app, Free with premium
Yes, I know you thought Flickr was gone. It’s not gone, but it’s been revamped, and looks better than ever. The mobile app is very easy to use, and will automatically sync up your photos if you like. Includes filters, pretty strong editing tools, and sharing. Did you know you can also upload videos?

5. Overgram

Mobile only, free
This app does one thing, but does it beautifully. Instantly add cool text to your Instagram photos. Choose font, size, text, and colors, and then save. Check out the beefier, paid Over app for even more editing tools.

6. Bubbsie

Mobile only, free
I had to include one completely fun one. Bubbsie makes it dead easy to create a “meme” image, by placing a thought or conversation bubble overlay on your images. Take a new photo, or overlay on an existing image from your gallery. Check out the picture frame feature.

7. Pixlromatic

Desktop, web, and mobile, free
The cool thing about this one (which I agree is unpronounceable), is that it’s so cross-platform. Use it almost anywhere. Take a photo with your webcam or device, or upload one from your library, and then enhance it with textures, backgrounds, and frames. Easy to use immediately. Check out the fun overlays (bubbles, fireworks).

8. Colorsplash

Web and mobile (special app for iPad), free
An App Store Hall of Famer, Colorsplash is the easiest way to colorize your photos. Turn your image black and white, and then selectively add color back to certain portions. Your colleagues will wonder how you did it. Check out the customizable brush sizes/shapes.

9. PhotoToaster

Mobile, paid app
Touch up, edit, crop, and highlight portions of your images in one app. Combines some of the best bits of ColorSplash and Pixlromatic, in an easy-to-use interface. Great for beginners, with lots of pre-sets. Check out PhotoMotion, from the same company, which lets you turn photos into videos.

10. PopAGraph

Mobile, free with premium upgrades available
Another cool tool for editing your photos, but it has some unique capabilities, including the ability to have separate filters on the background vs the foreground, multi-frames, and captions. Check out the video creator, with music. Share directly to Vine from within the app.

Have fun!

Note: I have zero affiliation with any of the above apps or companies, and no-one solicited these suggestions.

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

The Context of Content

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By Lisa D. Jenkins

It’s not the story, it’s the telling of the story.

Last week, I was in the wilds of Idaho, rafting the Main Salmon River of No Return. I left the online world and was completely disconnected from technology; no smartphone, no laptop. I did allow myself to bring a camera and Flip.

I took images and footage sparingly because a couple of years ago I realized I was losing memories because I was too busy trying to capture them digitally. But I do have a few incredible reminders that will help me remember all the amazing things I saw and experienced.

When The Husband picked me up from my trip, I couldn’t wait to get home and show and tell him everything.

The memories were easy for him to consume: the big bright trout I caught at the mouth of Sheep Creek, the massive bald eagle that flew just over my head,

Oddly, the images and video were more difficult. He looked through them and wasn’t nearly as exuberant as I thought he’d be. Take this image for instance, what do you see?

rushing river

You see a burned out forest. Wildland fire is not uncommon in Idaho and we often see sections of landscape marred like this. While mildly interesting, it’s not uniquely remarkable. Until you know that as we were rowing by, our guide Matt explained that he was rowing through this fire last year – at this very spot.

In the same way that story provides context that informs my image, you need to inform the content you share with context for your readers.

It’s not just the pieces of your story that make it remarkable, it’s how you thread those pieces together that tell a remarkable story.

What does this look like?

Do you have a new product? Outline the real-world problems your product solves to inform a simple demo video. This makes it easy for people to know who the product will help. If it’s not them, they might recognize the struggles of someone they know.

Are you adding a new service? Let your audience in on how you detected a gap in the services you provide, to inform the launch for your latest offering. This builds on established trust and gives your audience a behind the scenes view of how your company works to stay current with their needs.

Have you reached a goal? Use a timeline or infographic to inform a milestone your business is celebrating. This help others understand where you started and how exciting it is for you to mark the occasion. People who’ve been with you from the beginning will appreciate the walk down memory lane and newer readers will appreciate not feeling left out.

Telling your story.

As you execute your content strategy, include contextual elements that weave your disparate content into a cohesive story. Each point of reference you provide helps your readers feel included and invites them to go deeper into the story with you.

Author’s Bio: Lisa D. Jenkins is a Public Relations professional specializing in Social and Digital Communications for businesses. She has over a decade of experience and work most often with destination organizations or businesses in the travel and tourism industry in the Pacific Northwest. Connect with her on Google+

Four Content-Rich Blog Posts You Should Be Creating

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By Diana Gomez

These days, it’s not enough to post a picture of what your business has been up to this week.

Gone Viral

Sure, some customers may find interest in which food truck is parked at the office today, but that’s not the kind of thing that will go viral.

To move up the ranks in Google, you need as many eyes on your pages as possible. This means the content must be eye-catching! Think about creating headlines that leave the readers hanging; make them want to click to find out what’s coming next. Let their curiosity lead them further into your website.

As far as the content inside the post, here are a few ideas for you. These types of posts must be in your regular rotation if you want to keep up with the rest of the web in the second half of 2014.

Videos

Photo tutorials are superb, but audiences are really going nuts for comprehensive video tutorials.

Do you have something you can teach your customers? Whether you’re a retail clothing business with advice on sewing buttons or a hairstylist who can teach customers how to create a topknot, a how-to video is a terrific tool to draw some attention to your business.

Videos can also go viral simply from their entertainment value. As long as it’s funny or out-of-the-ordinary, it’s worth talking about. Be sure it’s high-quality and only one or two-minutes long.

It’s rare that a five or ten-minute video goes viral like a short-and-sweet video will. Also, be sure you place keywords into the title and description. Hosting it on YouTube will ensure that your video will be easy to share on social media, because going viral is all about making it easy for users to get to the content.

Top-Ten Lists

Ever hear of a little website called Buzzfeed? This site has blown up over the past year as audiences increasingly latch onto the short-and-sweet visual concept. Lists organize information in a way that makes it easier to absorb, and our brains seem to love clicking on headlines like “Five Foods that are Making You Fat.”

Our noggins naturally want to make sense of any information that’s presented to us, and so when some of the work has already been done, the decision to click is a ‘no-brainer.’ It’s such a phenomenon that the parody site The Onion has just created a new parody site having a laugh at Buzzfeed – cleverly titled Clickhole. One funny headline example is “16 Pictures of Beyoncé Where She’s Not Sinking in Quicksand.” There’s a reason why everyone (ahem, see title of this very blog post) is jumping on the list-making bandwagon, and you should, too.

Competitions

Everyone’s a sucker for free stuff, and that’s why you should be offering your readers incentives for clicking through to your site. Spend ten minutes on Facebook and you’ll likely encounter a slew of contests, all of which require some sort of interaction on social media to win. Examples: someone shares a musician’s Facebook status for a chance to win a record box set. An interior design firm blogs about an author and offers its readers a chance to win the author’s latest book if they “like” the author’s Facebook page and leave a comment below the firm’s blog post (which is a clever double-win for two parties).

By asking users to share and follow you, you’re making yourself visible to entirely new audiences/friends of people who already like you. And when there’s a free offer involved, your posts are all-the-more attractive. Asking a like-minded blog to offer its readers your product will almost always be accepted with open arms. The blog’s readers like it, therefore the blogger loves it, too. It’s a simple concept, but it works, and it’s fun.

High-Quality Images

The success of Instagram and Pinterest prove that what people want is a beautiful photo (or ten) to gaze upon. High-quality cameras can be found on most phones nowadays, which is super fortunate for us amateurs. Filters galore are available now that can turn an ‘OK’ image into something interesting that people will want to like and post elsewhere.

Do you cook? Post your creations to your blog, and make sure your posts have the Pinterest Pin option available. To make a pic extra Pinterest-friendly, post one collaged image that includes something like a four-step (and four-photo) recipe. Again, users are in search of the short-and-sweet and the quick-and-easy stuff.

Are you a mechanic? Post cool photos of vintage cars to your business’ Instagram account. Be sure a link to your blog is obvious on your profile so that users can see what other content you can offer them. Use appropriate hashtags that will help interested users find you, and while you’re at it, go ahead and tap the Twitter icon to simultaneously reach another social media medium. Every little bit helps, right?

What social-media medium works best with your business?

Author’s Bio: Diana Gomez is the Marketing Coordinator at Lyoness America, where she is instrumental in the implementation of marketing and social media strategies for USA and Canada. Lyoness is an international shopping community and loyalty rewards program, where businesses and consumers benefit with free membership and money back with every purchase. Check out Lyoness on Facebook.

Image licensed via Shutterstock

Leadership Lesson: Accepting Help Gratefully and Gracefully

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We’ve all met her.

She’s neck-deep in work commitments, taking care of a family, trying to stay in shape, and writing a novel in her spare time.

She looks like Wonder Woman from the outside, but if you look closer, the costume is frayed. If anyone says, “hey, let me take care of that project for you,” she grits her teeth and says, “no, I’ve got it.”

Wonder Woman lego

Pew! She responds within seconds to an email.
Pew! She figures out how to fix the dryer from a YouTube video.
Pew! She cranks out a presentation deck for a new customer.

Maybe she fears exposing that she’s not invulnerable. Maybe she is terrified of anyone finding out she doesn’t know everything.

Hey, guess what? Cat’s out of the bag.

You can’t do everything yourself.
You don’t know everything.
You haven’t experienced everything.

I just returned from a fantastic event, the GeniusShared retreat in Chicago, where a group of less than 30 smart, connected people gathered to help each other work on their dreams/businesses/passion projects.

The key to success for the retreat was the willingness of every person in the room to publicly share. All were willing to accept input, ideas, and perspectives from the others in the room.

Unless you’re willing to reveal your vulnerabilities to someone else, you will never be able to progress toward your goals. It’s the first step toward being a leader as well. Effective leaders always seek out those who are smarter, stronger, more experienced than they are.

Leaders accept help from others with grace and gratitude. They offer help to others freely.

When someone looks you in the eye and says, “how can I help you,” do you have a good answer ready? Can you accept with an open heart?

When was the last time you asked someone else, “how can I help you?”

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: levork via Compfight cc

7 Tips To Get Your Next Article Curated and Shared!

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By Dorien Morin-van Dam

I love it when my articles get read and shared, don’t you?

I closely watch to see where it gets shared, on what social media platform, and by whom. I absolutely get a kick out of it when my article gets a bit of extra life when an influencer in my industry shares it with their audience.

When I first started to blog, I often wondered what made someone curate an article and share it. After three years of blogging and following and watching those in the social media industry, I have a much better idea of what the ‘sweet spots’ are. Knowing what type of article gets shared, does not guarantee your article gets picked up, by any means. It will, however, have a much better shot of being curated.

7 tips to get your articles curated and shared
  1. Put a Date On It – Really! Go check and see if your articles have a date. If the content is evergreen, I do not mind sending out an article that is older, but if you write about social media platforms and features, I would like to know instantly what date you wrote it. It will tell me if it’s relevant and if I should share it with my audience, or pass it over for a more updated piece on the same subject.
  2. Add an Image – I can’t (I guess I could, but I won’t) curate an article to Pinterest and G+ without a picture. In fact, the only platform I will send it out on without a picture is Twitter, but only if it is really, really good. And my thought is, that if it is really, really good, (and you are a really, really good writer) you should have put in the extra effort to actually find (or create) and upload an image! Your image has to be pin-worthy to be considered for pinning. Therefore, if you want your articles curated to Pinterest, plan accordingly with your image(s).
  3. Craft a Catchy Title – Just like you want to catch my eye and have me curate and share your article, I want to catch the eye and interest of my audience as well when I share your article. Therefore, put a bit of thought into your titles. Make them catchy and irresistible, yet understandable! And please, do not misrepresent the article by using an obscene word or phrase. If you do, I will never share another one of your posts, no matter how great they might be!
  4. Format For Easy Scanning – What does this mean? It means outlining your article in such a way, that if I scan it and see the thought process behind your article, clearly defined by the use of paragraphs, bullet points and a conclusion, I am much more willing to share it than if it was one, long, rambling article.
  5. Mention or Quote an Influencer in your Article – If you can, reference an industry influencer by securing a quote from them. You could also reference a book or eBook they wrote by inserting a quote and linking back, of course. In doing this, it shows you are keeping up with industry greats and the latest research, which is exactly what I am looking to share with my audience as well! And yes, then I might curate and use your article.
  6. Provide a Link and/or Reference Research – Reference an industry influencer or researcher if relevant, by linking to an article they wrote. In doing this, it shows you are keeping up with industry influencers and the latest industry news and you know how to interpret and apply this information. That’s what my readers are looking for as well!
  7. Easy Comment & Sharing System – If I can’t leave a comment on your blog without much effort, I won’t share it. If I can’t share your article without much effort (meaning; I have to go look for the sharing buttons as they are not obvious!), I also will not curate and share your article. Make it simple to comment, simple to share and I will take a second look.

Question: Have you ever gotten a ‘major industry leader’ to curate and share an article you wrote? Thinking back, what article was it and what do you think triggered the share? If you can figure it out, I suggest you duplicate that type of post! And I have to admit I was giddy for a few hours after Mari Smith shared one of my articles on Twitter!

Happy writing,

Dorien.

Author’s Bio: Dorien Morin-van Dam is owner and social media marketer at More In Media, a social media consultancy in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Dorien provides social media consulting, management, training and education; she is passionate about teaching social media to small business owners. She services clients all over the USA and has worked in many different industries as well as with several NPO’s. In her spare time, Dorien manages four kids, three dogs and a husband. She runs marathons and loves to bake, travel and read.