For author Ernest Hemingway, writing came naturally. "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know”, he once said.
Sounds pretty simple, right? The truth is we don't all have Hemingway's ease with words and putting thoughts together may not always be the simplest of tasks. But, whether we want to teach something, share an opinion or document part of our lives - we all have a story to tell and very innovative tools to help us share it with the world.
This week on #BizHeroes, blogger, author, journalist and owner of Social Media Slant, Cendrine Marrouat will be discussing "Blogging for a global audience". Join us for a enriching conversation about best blogging practices, inspiration and tips that can apply to everyone, from beginners all the way to advanced blogging gurus.
Q2: Is writing for a global audience different than a local audience?
Q3: Where do you find inspiration and ideas for your articles?
Q4: How do you deal with writer’s block?
Q5: How often should I blog?
Looking to get your blog in top shape and wonder how you can drive traffic to it? Well, if you haven't yet purchased Cendrine's ebook, The Little Big eBook on Blogging: 40 Traffic Generation Tips, I suggest you do. It is a truly fantastic deal and it has just been revised. It includes valuable information on generating traffic for your blog.
We live in the era of content overload where "getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant" as Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation once described.
How can we keep the valuable content and toss away the rest? What is the role of the curator and are they helping us tame the content jungle and navigate content shock?
This week at #BizHeroes, Content strategist Evren Kiefer will share his ideas, best practices and tips on the value content curation brings and why we need to be curating content before sharing it.
Our BizHero: Evren Kiefer, Content Curation Date: Tuesday, March 18th Time: 8pm Central European Time, 12pm PST, 3pm EST (day light savings! Check here for your time)
One of the greatest feelings as a business owner is quite possibly the day you can hire team members to help grow your dream.
But bringing a new dream team up to speed can add unforeseen stress and complexity. Subtle factors such as personality, cultural diversity and current work or life experience can all have a major impact on the success of your team...
So how can you ensure your team's a success? For starters, begin with solid team building.
"But there's only a few of us in my company!" you say... I hear you, but don't let the numbers fool you.
A team can be as small as just you and a partner or involve numerous people. Small business owners are putting an increasing emphasis on team building activities to improve productivity, increase motivation, foster problem solving and encourage creativity -- and with outstanding results.
Ready to get started?
This Tuesday trainer, coach, team builder and Small Business owner Noel Gray joins us on #BizHeroesto talk about what it takes to get a winning team off the ground and move past surviving to thriving!
Time: 8pm Central European Time, 12pm PST, 3pm EST (day light savings!)
Chat Topic: Small Business Team Building
Q1. Is there a process for team building, or does it happen on it's own?
Q2. What (or who!) can get in the way of team building?
Q3. What's the role of the team leader?
Q4. How can you offset conflict in your team?
Q5. How can we use social media to help team building?
Looking for some pre-chat reading? Here's a post highlighting the four phases teams go through before they can succeed: forming, storming, norming and performing. We'll definitely be talking about this on Tuesday!
Bring your curiosity, team building tips and team spirit and join @kNoeledge, @MagdaATQ and myself, @kdhungerford for #BizHeroes!
Today we are thrilled to announce the release of new version of Paper.li. This latest release is designed to bring publishers numerous benefits such as increased efficiency in curation, promotion and customization and deliver an optimized viewing experience for readers across tablets and mobile devices.
The new version of Paper.li sports an all-around cleaner, more streamlined and modern look and feel. We're really excited about these new features and think you will be too.
Publishers using the free service have been automatically switched to the new version and any papers created from here out will also boast the new look and feel.
All existing Pro publishers will have thirty days to manually switch their papers over to the newest version of Paper.li. You can read more about making the switch here.
New sidebar menu, increased productivity
The biggest boost in this release is the complete redesign of the publisher's dashboard with time saving forefront and center. Now publishers can add a source, edit content and customize a paper without ever leaving the front page of a Paper.li. If you've been publishing with us for any amount of time, you'll appreciate this improvement.
A simple to navigate right-hand side sidebar menu gives you access to all your paper's settings in once place and a left sidebar provides access to your account settings, favorites and papers.
This new logic not only provides better transparency over settings and options, but helps you publish content easier and faster, shaving minutes off your daily routine.
Mobile optimization, stickier reading experience
While most publishers use the Paper.li desktop app to curate and edit their papers, close to half of daily readers visit Paper.lis from mobile devices. We expect this figure to grow blow through the roof this year so we've begun the first of a series of improvements for mobile readers.
For phones we've redesigned the experience to draw readers to your strongest content, your headline articles. Topic section content easily accessible via expandable sections and video and image viewing has been vastly improved by displaying them to readers with a horizontal swipe instead of a vertical scroll.
On tablets our responsive design allows for optimal viewing across all sizes of screens and the new sidebar menu offers ultra simplified access to paper settings. Now you can curate and promote with ease on the go.
Fresh look and feel, cleaner design
With our last paper refresh taking place well over a year ago, it was time for a paper "pick me up". You told us that you'd be open to changes without changing the overall look and feel too much, so we made some subtle changes to give your paper a visual boost.
So what's new?
The overall layout of the paper has been updated to carry a softer, more modern look and feel.
One of the most noticeable enhancements is a new "sticky" topics bar that displays all papers sections for that edition. The topics bar remains in a fixed position as your readers scroll down your page, guiding your readers better through your content and lending to an overall better reading experience.
Share buttons have been relocated to the lefthand side of your paper, making it faster and easier for readers to share your paper.
We've also put more emphasis on the publisher profile and ad units have been readjusted to align better down the right hand side of the paper. Take a look and I'm sure you'll find some other nice enhancements as well.
Let us know what you think!
We're really excited about this new release and we're curious to hear what you and your readers think. Your feedback, ideas and opinions help shape the service so don't be shy! Leave us a note below or Tweet us @Smallrivers with your feedback or questions. We look forward to hearing from you!
Confucius once said "choose a job you love and you'll never work a day in your life." We know sometimes it isn't that easy though. It takes a lot of strength and determination to follow personal dreams and professional goals. Have you made your dream job happen yet?
With three Shorty Awards under her belt for The Younge Hollywood Blast and a thriving digital niche in the world of entertainment, Natasha Younge, a London-trained actress living in Los Angeles, comedian, entrepreneur (and Paper.li publisher) is doing just that.
At the next #BizHeroes Natasha will share her expertise with us how entrepreneurs can reach their dreams without losing sight of the end goal -- and how social media can help you get there.
Communities are awesome and essential for every business. But how do you get started building one?
This week on #BizHeroes Small Business owner and publisher Alice Krueser shares her tips on how she has built a thriving community for art enthusiasts, collectors and artists across multiple platforms.
Date: Tuesday, February 25 Time: 11am PST, 1pm CST, 20h CET
Q1. What comes first when starting a new business: community building or finding customers? Q2. What if a Small business owner doesn’t have a blog? Q3. What role can curated content play in growing a community? Q4. Does a “one type of content” approach across platforms work? Q5. What drives engagement on Facebook? Q6. Is word of mouth marketing as important for small businesses as it is for known brand
Join @MadgaATQ and @AliceKrueser and share your best practices, tips and advice on building community.
Have you ever heard the term 'buyer personas' and wondered what those are and why you should care about them?
Join us at the next #BizHeroes TweetChat and find out!
This week Jeremiah Wright and Jessika Phillips, from the internet marketing agency NOWMarketing Group will join us as guest hosts on #BizHeroes, Tuesday, February 18th to talk about why personas are essential for targeting the right people to purchase your service or product and how to get started creating them.
We were excited to learn that Paper.li is one of their favorite inbound marketing tactics. In fact, NOWMarketing publishes and manages more than 30 Paper.lis for their clients (tailored to buyer personas!) and dominate the curated topic of "Assisted Living Communities".
They've even created an ebook based on their experience with Paper.li. It's full of best practices, useful tips and good, all around helpful information. Definitely worth checking out.
Here are the details for the upcoming chat:
Date: Tuesday, Feb 18th, 20h CET, 2PM EST
Topic: How to Creating Buyer Personas for your Business
BizHeroes: Jessika Phillips and Jeremiah Wright, NOWMarketing Group
1. What are Buyer Personas & Why should you care about them?
2. How are Personas different than Target Markets?
3. What is an Inbound Marketing Funnel?
4. How do you get started creating Buyer Personas?
5. What value do they bring to your marketing efforts?
6. How can you use Paper.li to reach Personas?
Lastly, be sure to check out this video on buyer personas and if you aren't already following @JeremiahJWright, @JessikaPhillips and @NOWMG, it's time! See you Tuesday!
Our community is as diverse as the papers on the newsstand and home to some of the most knowledgeable and helpful people on the internet. And we'd like to introduce you to them!
Join us Tuesday night at 20:00 Central European Time (1pm CST) for our new #BizHeroes Chat and meet the publishers, and business heroes, across all niches of the Paper.li community.
The chat is an opportunity to learn new strategies, tactics and tips from a broad range of topic experts in the Paper.li community who are as knowledgeable and passionate about their interests as they are about lending their expertise to help others.
It's also a one more great opportunity for us to promote the people we love most: our publishers!
Next chat: February 11th, 20:00 CET, 1pm CST Bizhero: Mack Collier Topic: Fans vs. Influencers
The transcript for this chat can be found here! Topic questions:
1 -When should a brand work with their fans? What are the benefits?
2- When does it make sense to work with influencers?
3 - How do you choose if it's better to work with fans or influencers?
A word about Mack:
Mack is an author, #blogchat founder, publisher of the BlogChat Weekly and a selfless sharer of knowledge, wisdom and wit across social channels today.
Last year Mack introduced his book, Think Like a Rock Star to help people and companies build social and marketing strategies that will turn customers into fans. The book offers something to everybody regardless of company size or budget, and is even playing a role in shaping an ambassador program here at Paper.li.
You can find great pre-reading for tomorrow night's chat here on Mack's blog. If you don't have Mack on your radar yet, be sure to follow him at @MackCollier.
Both Magda and I look forward to meeting and greeting you tomorrow night at #BizHeroes. See you then!
Have you tried using the Publish-it bookmarklet to manually add content to your Paper.li recently?
This is a great feature and it has been around for awhile. In fact, we launched it back in 2011 and I was recently surprised to see it was one of the more frequently searched terms on our support forum the past couple of weeks.
So I thought it was time for a short "what, why and how" on using the Publish-it bookmarklet.
What is a bookmarklet? A bookmarklet is a javascript bookmark that you store on your favorites or bookmarks bar that allows you to easily save content to a service. In our case, the Publish-it bookmarklet helps you add a favorite article, image or video to your paper.
Why should you use it? We do our best to fetch and deliver the content you've asked us to daily, but it's possible that we miss a piece that you think is relevant to your community along the way.
The bookmarklet is a great way to fill in any content holes you find and is a convenient way to add content on the fly when you come across it.
Here are three ways the bookmarklet can help you:
Curate a paper from "just about" scratch. Perhaps you want a finely tuned paper with not a lot of content. You may add just one source to lightly populate your paper and use the bookmarklet to add in the rest. I speak to numerous consultants who use this approach. They add only their blog's RSS as a feed and curate in the other handful articles they want to share with their community.
Keep your weekly looking like a daily. Many publishers want the ease of a weekly with the "freshness" of a daily and with the smallest amount of time possible spent on grooming. The bookmarklet is perfect for this. It allows the addition of new content to a paper during the week without refetching the base content.
Collaboration. The bookmarklet is a time saver for teams, departments, event organizers or anyone working together on a Paper.li. Any collaborator on a paper can install the bookmark in their favorites and add content on the fly. Distributing workload frees up a little more time for everyone. Additionally group curation can lend to a nice (or eclectic!) blend of content on a paper. That's fun!
We just improved the bookmarklet with new functionality. Now it's possible to categorize the piece of content you've selected before you add it to a paper. This is exremeley helpful in reducing the time spent on editing and re-categorizing content if you don't like the topic we've assigned to it.
How to install it: here's a short 90 second video on how to get going with the bookmarklet. In truth the installation is done in about 5 seconds. We took 90 because we enjoy chatting.
Give it a try and leave a comment below. Let me know what you think and if you find it helpful.
Last month we sent out a short survey to find out more about what you like about Paper.li, how the service is working for you and where we can improve.
Your responses were great and we're still sifting through the 4000+ that came back -- thank you! And thanks for your patience while we get back to everyone who left an email address.
In short, the number one thing that users love about Paper.li is that the service helps you save a lot of time in monitoring blogs , RSS and alerts by bringing the content you are looking for to one place.
You also like that we deliver your content on your behalf via email to your subscribers, help you strengthen your ties with your community and, in general, help you do so much for so little money: free to $9 a month fits most budgets.
When it came to features though, there was one place that we weren't doing you any favors or saving you time: editing your content. You made it clear we that we were making it a lot more work than it needed to be and we weren't giving you enough control of the content on your papers. Ouch!
We listened and reworked what wasn't working for you! Today we launched a new and revamped editing process, making it quicker and easier for you to delete articles, photos and video, blacklist sites and sources and reposition your content. Here's what's new for you -
Drag and drop:
Now you can rearrange the content posts within the current topic section on the front page, or move them to an entirely different topic section by drag-and-drop. Photos and videos can easily be reorganized within their section as well.
This enhancement gives you complete control over content placement, ensuring that the content you determine key for your community is where you want it! and easy for your viewers to find.
Content reassignment:
If you prefer to edit and curate content specifically from Topic pages or the See All Articles page, you can do that too.
We've added a nifty drop down menu making it easy for you to reassign your content to a new topic section and automatically moving your favorite content to the front page.
The Publish-it bookmarklet will be adapted shortly to reflect Topic Sections, allowing you to curate the content directly to the Topic Section you specify.
One-click delete and blacklisting:
We've decreased the time you will spend on page editing by removing the drop down menu and implementing a lighting fast one-click delete and blacklisting functionality.
This enhancement, as slight as it is, is one of my favorites because it is a huge time saver. Anyone who grooms papers daily will probably agree that this small tweak alone is the biggest gift of all.
We've listed all of the specifics in this post. Leave a comment below and let us know how the improvements are working for you. Feel free to share what you feel is still missing and what can be improved further.
December is here and 2014 is just around the corner! That means a lot of shopping, socializing and planning to 'get things done' before the New Year arrives.
We know that sometimes getting things done is easier said than actually 'done'...so we've devised a plan to help!
Upgrade to Pro this December and we'll help you brand your paper!
Custom adverts, banners or custom CSS... it's up to you. Simply tell us what you need, and we'll lend you a branding elf to get the job done.
For standard Pro papers (on the Paper.li domain) we can
a. create a new banner image
b. create background and thumbnail cover
c. creating custom ad inserts (advertising your business, social platforms...)
For Pro papers on custom domains, we can help you by
a. create a custom banner, cover thumbnail and favicon
b. implementing custom social follow/share buttons
c. creating a custom header
d. creating a custom footer
This week I'm really excited to announce the launch of two great features to help you increase engagement and reach new audiences: customized Promo-Tweets and auto-posting to Facebook and Linkedin.
As the Twitter community grows, so does the competition. Over the past months you have told us that getting your message heard across Twitter is becoming more difficult by the day. You asked for control over your Promo-Tweet messaging as well as more options for promotion. Create custom messaging:
Now you can tailor your message to best fit your niche. You know best what makes your community tick, and click. Add a #tag, modify your mentions and customize your text. Read more about getting started with this new feature here.
Don't want to change a thing? No problem. The "daily is out" is set as the default tweet. Changing it is up to you!
Automatically promote on Linkedin and Facebook:
We've added auto-posting to Facebook and Linkedin. Create a custom post and share your paper url, or just the featured article, automatically, with each new edition.
Branding tip! Add a thumbnail cover image to represent your paper when shared.
Paper thumbnails increase clicks. When your paper is shared across social platforms you can share your branding along with it. Create graphic or upload your and replace the Paper.li standard "P" with each share.
If you choose to share an article from your paper, we'll post the article image instead of the cover image.
Leave us a comment below, or Tweet us @SmallRivers and let us know what you think once you've tried them out. We look forward to hearing from you.
The week has only just begun but I am already looking ahead...so, this this week's Tuesday tip is: join me and @Smallrivers for #blogchat Europe on Tuesday, October 8!
Whether your company has 2 or 2000 employees, blogging ranks as one of the most widely trusted and sure-fire way to build authority, grow relationships and generate new business leads. But how? Well, that's what #blogchat is all about!
Mack Collier's #blogchat is a Twitter power-house Tweetchat dedicated to helping YOU get the most out of blogging.
Whether you are a small business owner or a marketer working for a large mega-company, Mack and the #blogchat community provide great insight and help answer your blogging questions.
Because the North American version of #Blogchat is tough for us Europeans to make (it takes place at 3am, CET) Mack offers a European friendly version at 20h, every second Tuesday of the month.
Don't miss out! Pencil in the last three European #blogchats of 2013 into your calendar now:
Tuesday, October 8 - Blog Plug-ins that increase business networking and productivity Tuesday, November 12 - tba (aka: something really cool) Tuesday, December 10 - tba (aka: something really cool)
20h CET, 1pm Central.
Just because this chat is called '#Blogchat Europe' it doesn't mean it is for Europeans only. This just means it is held at a time that the European, North American, South American, African and Middle Eastern continents can manage. How cool is that? (Sorry Australasia, we'll have to work on that)
You'll find me there @kdhungford and don't worry about language barriers or making mistakes. We learn a lot and even more important -- we have fun! (And, we score cameo's in blog posts like this one from Tom Martin on Social Media Examiner!)
It's been an exciting couple of weeks here at Paper.li. Two weeks ago we announced fresh funding and since then we've been working fast to implement more of the features you've been asking for.
This week I have the pleasure of announcing that we have just rolled out a new Pro feature that you have been waiting for: Email Subscriber Export
We're starting off the week with a couple of new bells and whistles. Here's what's new for you!
Pro feature: "Private" papers
If you have a paper that you don't want anyone to see, you can now completely exclude it from being discovered on the newsstand or via search engines by taking it "Private" and making it stealth!
This is a great feature if you:
are in the process of branding and fine-tuning your Pro paper, but it isn't finished quite yet
use Paper.li for monitoring market trends and the competition, and would like to keep it under the radar
create content for a team and only want them to have access to it
have an event Paper.li and only want it visible before, during and after an event
This is a handy new source that allows you to add content gems that you come across during the day to your next edition without needing to modify your sources.
To get started go to your Content tab -> Accounts -> and click on your Twitter account. You'll see a favorites option appear.
Have a question? Leave a comment or Tweet us @smallrivers.
Our goal at Paper.li has always been to help people find, engage and build communities of like-minded individuals through content curation. Today, we are excited to announce that we have closed a new round of funding for $2 million and we are one step closer to achieving this goal.
This fresh capital pushes our total investment past $7 million to date, and opens up exciting new opportunities to innovate for our content curators at a more accelerated pace.
Thank you
Over the past three years, your curation efforts have helped shape the market. Today with over 3.7 million monthly users curating over 50 million articles in 7 languages daily, your curation efforts confirm our shared belief that future of content discovery and engagement is through the interest graph, not the social graph.
The speed at which Paper.li continues to grow is attributed to just one thing: you, the richly diverse community of curators across professions, industries and markets that continue to use, and love, the service. From solopreneurs to the largest of brands, there is only one thing to say: thank you. You never cease to inspire us.
What’s next
In 2012 we invested heavily in our technical architecture, engineering and implementing a state-of-the-art telecom grade platform to replace the original content curation we launched with in 2010. In doing so, we decreased system down times and vastly improved content processing, loading times and platform stability.
For 2013 our focus has been, and remains, on branding, collaboration and engagement features to help marketers and small business owners increase the net gain from their curation efforts. In doing so, our PRO user base has grown by more than 400% in the past three months, and we are forecasting to hit break-even in the coming three quarters.
Clearly, we have come a long way together since the first Twitter timeline paper rolled off the presses. Since then, you have paved the road for the potential of content curation and you have validated the value proposition.
We look forward to sharing some exciting next steps in the evolution of Paper.li and content curation in the coming weeks. Stay tuned… and thank you!
We are co-hosting #LeanImpact Chat on September 18th and would like you to join us!
Nonprofits and social enterprises fill a very important gap in our society, taking a very important matter into hands: social change. Social change requires massive amounts of effort and is very often spearheaded with small teams and limited budget.
As a start-up we understand the challenges of maximizing effort while working with limited resources, so when Meg Rulli asked us to co-host the upcoming #LeanImpact Tweetchat organized by the Lean Impact organization, we didn't have to think twice: Yes, Yes, Yes!
The topic for Sept 18th is Content Creation Success For Social Good Enterprises.
We can't do this alone though. We can only speak about our own start-up best practices so we would like to join in the conversation and share your knowledge and tips on achieving more with less within your start-up non-profit or social enterprise.
What is, or who is, Lean Impact?
Modeled after The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, the Lean Impact organization helps nonprofits and social enterprises leverage and apply Lean Startup principles to the non-profit and for-good organizations.
In a nutshell, Lean Impact means:
Figuring out what creates real impact and discarding what doesn’t
Shortening the time in the “create – measure – learn” cycle
Operating with fewer wasted resources
Leveraging forward-thinking technologies to achieve our goals
Gathering continual feedback from our community
This chat begins at 9am PST, 11am EST and 20h Central European Time. Follow @leanImpact now to learn more about their organization and feel free to contact me (@khdhungerford) or my colleague @MagdaATQ with any questions.
Have you ever wished you could add your own custom text to your newsletter?
Now you can!
Whether you are treating your subscribers to a full curated front page of content, or sending them a one article digest alert, now you can add up to 1000 characters of text to create your OWN call to action, and (drive traffic!)
promote your business
offer a deal
share a joke of the day...
The Email Newsletter Service tops the charts as our most popular PRO feature: more than eighty percent of PRO users make this the first feature they activate...so, you can be sure that there will be more enhancements rolling out around this feature and newsletter service.
Getting started is easy. Simply go to your Promotion & Emails tab -> Newsletter Service -> More options -- and start typing.
I had a lot of fun testing this feature this past week and I am really (really!) excited to hear how it works for you...so tweet me, or leave a comment below.
Welcome to my new 5 Things weekly post! This weekly post will highlight -- surprise! -- Five Things that I think are worth sharing every week.
From product updates to news from the community, upcoming events to cool new tools... content will be a surprise, but always helpful. Today I'm sharing a blend of all of the above. Here goes!
This is my second year attending #CMWorld and I can't wait! If you're planning on attending, please Tweet me and let's meet!
Rumor has it I'll be yodeling, but we'll see about that. I usually leave yodeling to my Swiss colleagues...
2. New! RSS for Topic Sections
Product enhancement! We just implemented RSS for Topic Sections so now you and your readers can subscribe either to the entire paper by RSS, or a particular Topic on it. Here's a quick how-to to get you started.
3. #Back2School with Paper.li in the Classroom
Well, summer's over (at least in the northern hemisphere) and school's back in. To get back in the swing of things my colleague Magda wrote this post on 5 Online Tools for Educators and Students. As a bonus, she includes a list of over 100 tools and apps for the classroom.
If you are using Paper.li in the classroom, please me know so I can add you to my List.ly.
4. We heart our community Did you know that we deliver almost 24 hour 'round the clock support to our community from Switzerland? That's right, that's where we're based and it's true. We make it our business to go out of our way to provide you with support when you need it.
We answer all of your questions, feedback, requests and even gripes the way we would would like to be answered; honestly, with empathy for the situation, with a helpful answer and as quickly as possible.
We just buffed up our team, so now when you send us an email or contact us at support, you'll meet Julia. And when you FB, Plus or Tweet us, you'll be greeted by Magda.
Twitter is our number one channel for proving quick tips and trouble shooting to get you going. Tweet us when you need us!
By the way, Julia is in the process of re-organizing our Support Forum and creating a series of how-to videos, like the one below, to better support you. Leave a comment and let her know which videos she should create next.
5. The #90DaystoEllen Campaign
Last, but not least, I want to share one of the best campaigns I have come across this year; the 90 Day to Ellen campaign. You may have noticed tweets of support coming from our Twitter account -- thanks to all of you joined us in supporting the campaign. We had a great time!
The team and I loved this campaign so much that on day 41 of the campaign, Julia and I wrangled some cows into making a video with us for the campaign. We're video number 20 on this list.
In short, the goal of the campaign was to prove that real relationships, i.e. a physical meet-up in the form of lunch with television talk host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres, could be fostered via social media by two guys, Bryan Kramer and DJ Waldow, while raising money for charity; Feeding America.
After 90 days and 66 million impressions (on Twitter alone!) the question is -- did Ellen say "Yes!"?
No, she didn't. In fact, she didn't say a peep. Not even a "No, thank you, I can't do that because (fill in the blank)...
But set aside the fact that Ellen didn't say yes or even participate in the campaign, the campaign itself was a clearly a success all the way around. Money was still raised for Feeding America, a stand-in for Ellen was selected to fill her shoes at the lunch table and a whole lot of good old fashioned networking and digital community building took place over 90 days.
What impressed me the most about this campaign was the outreach and recognition by the 90Days team to each and every person who tweeted, posted or created a piece of content to support the cause.
Grab your favorite drink and sit down for 10 minutes to check out the 90DaystoEllen.com site. If you are planning a campaign in the future this is a great place to begin for best practices. And don't be shy in reaching out to Bryan, DJ or their "90-Days-to-Ellen-Meme-Master", Courtney. They are all genuinely helpful, nice people that made us feel right at home participating.
That's it for today. Thanks for reading and have a great week!
Image: a big thank you to publisher Dorian Staten for creating the 5 Things image for this series.
Gmail recently launched their new Tabs feature to help users keep email more organized. If you haven't tried them out yet, or are still trying to make sense of them, here's a very short video from Michael Stelzner on how to ensure your favorite newsletters and important updates make it straight to your Primary tab.
But before you rush over and start making changes to move all of your newsletters and updates back over to the Primary tab (like I did) stop and think for a minute: isn't the purpose of Tabs to group your mails, help you de-clutter and be more focused? Hmm.
Newsletters
Speaking of email -- did you know that email, not social media, is the most reliable and preferred marketing channel by marketers today to build relationships and prospect clients? It's true, but one of the major stumbling block for many in getting started is idea generation and finding the time to source content.
Knowing this we launched our Email Newsletter Service a while back as a part of our Pro offering. The service allows you to easily get the most out of your content efforts by automatically turning your online newspaper into a beautiful newsletter, with no extra work. You can also export the html and use it in a third party email service.
Round about 245 billion emails are sent out daily worldwide and here at Paper.li we send out 20 million a month on behalf of Paper.li publishers.
So with all that email competition how do you get your emails noticed, and more importantly opened, in a busy email inbox?
With a strong subject line and personalizing the From/ Sender field!
I asked publisher Alice Krueser-Lowe from Art and Design Matters about the importance customizing her paper's subject line is playing in marketing her paper and she said this:
“The ability to personalize the subject line of our paper is a fantastic feature as it grasps the attention of our readers. It’s our way of being able to let them know that it’s worth their attention so that the email does not get in their lineup of deletions”
Here's a tip! Alice hooks me daily with her catchy headlines, which usually are based on the title of the featured article. It's a great way to give readers a sneak peek of what's in the edition and the variety of the headline truly keeps me on the alert for her mails. Needless to say, her content is fantastic and that's what keeps me clicking!
If you're looking for additional tips on creating "must click" subject lines, check out this Subject Line Study Report by Adestra. It contains the best performing subject line keywords along with a lot of other helpful information on creating stellar marketing emails.
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