 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Today is a little different. I'm actually not typing at all -- I'm writing this blog post by "talking it" on Evernote. And it only took me ten minutes.
I wanted to test this out because although being a Staff Writer here at HubSpot means I have lots of time to blog, I've also worked at places where I didn't have that luxury. When you're balancing 100 different tasks, it's hard to find time to actually sit down and write. (Or maybe writing just isn't your strongest suit.)Luckily, with a little creativity, it's actually still quite easy for you to blog. So in the spirit of being meta, I'm going to show you how to write a blog post without actually "writing" anything. In just 30 minutes (I added on an extra twenty minutes to give you buffer time for importing, formatting, and editing) you should have a polished draft ready to publish. So let's get to it!...
Animated videos can now be created easily using software. Check out these 5 tools and save a lot of money producing these videos.
The initial idea from this post on animated videos came from Nick from List.ly. I love when people share great ideas for posts!
So here goes, here are 5 animation video tools that we have reviewed.
Metta helps turning stories into short movies out of pictures, videos, text and sounds that are already published on the web. Polls and quizzes can also be embedded anywhere inside a video presentation to get controlled responses from viewers.
Via Baiba Svenca
Adobe’s Photoshop is the gold standard when it comes to photo-editing software – the preferred tool for many graphic designers and photographers. But many of the complex features that once only a Photoshop pro could do, can now be achieved using basic, free software that comes with your computer or downloaded from the Web. Think cropping, resizing, color adjustments, filters, red-eye removal, and automatic enhancements.
In fact, a lot of useful photo-editing features are built into online photo-sharing sites like Google+ and Flickr. However, what if you want to quickly apply one or two effects without having to become a Photoshop guru? We’ve found and tested a few online alternatives that won’t require you to fire up any photo-editing apps....
Curiyo lets online readers learn more about a word or phrase in a story without ever leaving the Web page. It's a valuable and easy-to-use addition to Web browsing, Walt Mossberg says.
Though the tasks have gotten significantly more complex and intellectual, today’s web tools fall into the same general categories, either enabling new tasks (creating infographics) or performing manual tasks faster and more easily (sharing information across multiple social networks and profiles).
Ever wish you could search for something by sketching it rather than using text? Send professionally formatted emails from your Gmail account? Easily develop optimized landing pages for marketing campaigns?
Find tools to accomplish those tasks and many more here in more than 20 of the best cool online marketing tools and reviews of the past year....
The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, analysing the data and, finally, reaching social media business intelligence; using all these insights to know your customers better and improve your marketing strategy. If you are a social media rookie, this list of the Top 10 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools might come in handy.
When looking for a tool, it’s a good idea to try a couple of them and choose the one that suits your needs best. However, bear in mind that these tools are not an alternative to Enterprise-level tools, such as Brandwatch, which brought social media monitoring to a new level, offering a much higher variety of services and in-depth analysis. It all depends on your needs. That being said, let’s take a look at some of the best free monitoring tools...
The company behind the .co domain has been working to associate .co websites with startups and innovation. Now its founders are trying to make it as easy as possible to start a business online with a new company called Pop.co.
thisBasically, Pop.co is a bundle of online services that should remove any barrier between coming up with a cool idea and building a web presence around that idea. This approach is particularly important in a future where entrepreneurs run “three or four micro-businesses at a time, easy come, easy go, and you don’t have to keep the domain forever,” said CTO Tom Lackner — he suggested you should even be able to set all this up from your smartphone.
Lackner and CEO Juan Diego Calle gave me a quick demo of Pop.co. You just pick the .co address that you’re interested in (assuming it’s available, and if it’s not, Pop.co will suggest alternatives), then the company automatically claims it for you, and you can either use Pop.co’s simple web page editor to create the page with just a little bit of typing, or use its simple DNS editor to point the website to a page you’ve created on another service like LaunchRock or Barley....
Are you looking for a social media analytics tool that can link social media marketing to sales conversions? Here is my review of Oktopost - which does that.
How do you prove the ROI of your social media efforts? For most people, social ROI is proved by measuring likes, follows, tweets, retweets and clicks because they don’t think they can link social media activity to sales. And truth be told, for most of the inexpensive social media management platform options available click/follow/tweet tracking is all that is offered. But that is changing.
Recently I began testing a new option, Oktopost. Oktopost is a cost effecient, social media management, tracking and reporting platform that tracks clicks, and more importantly conversions, down to the individual Facebook, LinkedIn or G+ post and tweet level. It is this ability to track conversion at the individual post level that I’ve found most helpful as it finally provides a tool to report true social media ROI....
Do you need better tools to help you manage yoursocial media marketing? Automating some of the more repetitive tasks related to social media can help you be more productive and efficient with the execution of your social media strategy.
To save you time and improve your marketing efforts, I’ll show you three social media tools that will deliver your content efficiently.
Adding an audio message to your classroom blog or website can be a good way to help deliver important messages to your students and their parents. Posting an audio message, even if it covers the same content as a written message, can increase the chances that a visitor to your blog will take notice of something important.
Adding an audio message to your blog or website is not difficult to do. Here are five free services that you can use to add an audio message to your blog or website....
Marketers need to follow other blogs to keep up with what’s happening in their industry and what people are talking about. And if you want to curate digests of useful links to share with your audience as part of your content marketing efforts, most of what you’re curating will be published on blogs.But do you still need an RSS reader to follow them?...Here are some great alternatives...
As an entrepreneur, I look to others to tell me about the latest apps, time-savers, hacks, and tricks. However, no female founders were interviewed. So I decided to do one with all women. Below is just a small sampling of the great female entrepreneurs and some of the apps--business and otherwise--that they can't live without.I culled a list of some kick-butt women entrepreneurs whom I look up to and a few I'm lucky enough to know. Clearly, I have a lot of downloading to do....
|
Three questions, three answers, and a mini case study on what is.
Everybody is hopping on the wearables bandwagon. Since the publication of my HBR article on wearables, I’ve been asked a number of follow-up questions from executives, tech analysts, and most especially from entrepreneurs.
Though the questions vary, they generally fall into three buckets.“Aren’t Head-up Displays (HUDs) like Google Glass where the market is going?”
No. Not necessarily. Pricey (and for now, socially awkward-looking) HUDs will likely be a sliver of the nearly half-billion units that will ship by 2018. By comparison, most other types of wearables will be relatively cheap, and as socially unobtrusive as a ring or wristband....
You probably thought your Uncle Henry was a little weird (and annoying) when he kept showing you how many more Nike FuelBand calories he needed to burn/earn to reach his preset daily goal. But what’s amazing is how that little wrist band with its tight feedback loop displaying points can actually motivate people to improve their lifestyle. Oh, it also makes a nice watch.
We’re at the dawn of a new industry loosely called "wearable technology" that may have reached $4.6 billion in sales around the world already this year.And Google Glass isn’t even for sale yet. Many geeks already are on board. The April Modis Geek Pride Survey of people aged 18 or over found that "61 percent of self-described geeks said they would buy and wear a smart watch," and "56 percent would do the same with smart glasses." Perhaps even more interesting, 37 percent of non-geeks were also interested in smart watches, and 35 percent were interested in smart glasses....But where is the trend going?
Do you write content that doesn’t appear on the first page of Google after you publish?
Do you spend too much time finding and sharing content and feel results could be better?
Do they know all the tools and technical aspects that are now important (Hint: Subscribe to this site!!)?
The role of the marketer is continuing to change and having some technology skills is a distinct advantage. Nobody expects you to have a computer science degree but there are technology skills that are useful!
Here are 7 signs you need to spend more time on the technical aspects to your job (assuming you don’t have someone else to do it for you!)...
Think 3-D printing and big data is a little overhyped? You're not alone. Gartner's annual Hype Cycle report reveals all the technologies that are at the "peak of inflated expectations"--and the technologies have already let us down....
Discover the tools social media pros are using today and get more out of your social media marketing.
Are you looking for social media tools to get more out of your marketing?Are you wondering what tools marketing pros are using successfully?
We asked fourteen well-known marketers to share the latest social media tools they’ve been using. Discover how you can use these tools to help you to get more out of your social media marketing....
You've got a wallet full of cards that'll get you things. They’ll pay the check, get you library books, and snag that tenth sandwich for free. But we found a card that will bring you power. Real power.It’s the ChargeCard, a USB charging cable for your iPod, iPhone or Android phone that fits in your wallet!...
Images tend to receive better engagement metrics than regular posts when shared on social networks, so what if you could add underlying content to images in order to further drive brand engagement? Thanks to PassionTag, you can do just that.
PassionTag is a mobile app (currently only for iOS) that essentially allows users to attach content to images via ‘SmartTag’ functionality. The images, along with their SmartTags, can then be shared on Twitter and Facebook, as well as through email and SMS messaging. By leveraging the app, users have the ability to turn static images into interactive photos that contain actionable tags that extend the story they want to tell....
With YouTube Chad Hurley and Steve Chen made publishing videos easy. Now they want to make it just as easy to create them.When Google wanted to boost the quality of YouTube’s content, it gave out $5 million in grants to select creators. YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who sold the service to Google in 2006, are now tackling the same problem, but with a different philosophy.
They hope that a new app they are launching on Thursday, called MixBit, will make shooting quality video scalable and accessible to everyone.“Unfortunately I think YouTube is going down the route of rewarding the select few around content creation, be it with partnerships or with ways of funding original content,” Hurley told Fast Company. “I can understand, it’s great to stimulate the community and make money available to them. But I feel that’s a more traditional approach to solving the problem. It’s basically replicating the studio model...I’m looking for something that doesn’t necessarily alienate any group of people, but gives them all equal access.
”That apparently includes people who never shoot any video. With MixBit, as with Instagram video and Vine, users touch their phones’ screens to take multiple video clips that the app combines into one video. But only MixBit allows other people to use those clips, if they’re public, in their own videos....
Somewhere between a PowerPoint presentation and a full-fledged video is the audio slideshow. Creating audio slideshows can be a good way to add meaning to slides that otherwise might not mean much without a presenter. Here are some ways that students can create audio slideshows....
Which accounting software to install? What HR system to buy? TrustRadius recently raised $5 million to expand its site...To solve to that problem, Bhagat recently founded a new company, TrustRadius, to do for business software what websites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Angie’s List have done for restaurants, travel, and home repair.
The idea is simple: Compile user reviews for 1,000 software products. The execution is a bit harder: Since the fate of a company—or at least, an employee’s career—might depend on choosing the right software, reviews have to inspire a lot of confidence.
To keep software salesmen from inflating their own products or bashing competitors, Austin-based TrustRadius requires reviewers to connect their accounts to a LinkedIn page and has a human read all reviews to gauge potential bias. Perhaps more important, it asks reviewers to answer a series of questions (sometimes as many as 40) that give context to their experience. That structured approach produces more nuanced reviews, Bhagat says....
If you're looking to up your mobile marketing strategy, check out these 5 vendors that can help....
|
Sounds like something worth trying.
Worth a try?
Haven’t you ever wished you could speed up your blog post writing?
Well, you’re not alone. 64% of marketers say producing enough content is their marketing challenge. Writing a variety of engaging work, getting buy in from management andmeasuring blog marketing metrics is definitely tough, too – but time is the real kicker. It’s clear the solution isn’t sacrificing quality for volume.
http://writtent.com/blog/10-shortcuts-writing-blog-post-record-time/ ;
The secret to whipping up a quick valuable blog post for those queue-is-empty days. Readers – meet the tried and true Top 10 List:
1. Make sure to identify the Top 10 List in the title of the post. Many readers are attracted to the convenience of skimming a list.
http://www.kunocreative.com/blog/bid/76819/10-Steps-for-Writing-a-Blog-Post-in-30-Minutes-or-Less ;
8 secrets to writing faster blog posts (infographic and tips)
http://www.j6design.com.au/ClientArea/Howtowritefaster-8secrets-infographic.aspx
Sometimes inspiration will strike you on your drive home or while you're getting ready in the morning -- with this process, you can just grab your phone and start talking into Evernote. Your ideas will be on paper without you actually typing a thing.
http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-i-wrote-1000-word-blog-post-in-10-minutes-ht