Tun2U\’s fully responsive, parallax scrolling website has vivid colors, cool 3D visual effects, an impressive minimal style and auto rotating buttons.
The Product ecosystem growth journey of 2014-2015 has globally shifted its focus and direction. With the changing matrix and shrinking funds, priorities have changed for the ecosystem players.
The life of a writer (whether author or copywriter) is generally quite misunderstood. Friends assume that you’ve landed the dream job. You don’t have to leave your lounge room to get to work. No pesky boss breathing down your neck. And, free from the constraints of the corporate world, you can take a four-hour lunch break every day if it so pleases you.
While all these things apply some of the time, people tend to forget that the life of a writer is often characterised by hour upon hour of staring into a flickering laptop screen. Desperately trying to find the right word, the perfectly poised phrase, the exact tone. For writers, the ability to make ends meet is quite often reliant upon an intangible, un-controllable quality — inspiration. If writers are unable to transform an idea into words, they simply don’t make money.
So, on that rather depressing note, I thought it would be a gesture of solidarity amongst the online writing community to follow up on my article, The Best WordPress Plugins for Writers and Writing and provide details of a few more WordPress Plugins designed to make the life of the online writer just that smidgen easier.
This plugin automatically uploads your old blog posts onto your Twitter feed, saving you from the embarrassment of having to spruik your old copy just to keep it relevant. It also helps to optimize your Twitter feed and save it from dying a slow, painful death because you simply don’t have the time to update it (or got so wrapped up in drafting your novel that you forgot!). With over 80,000 active installs, and regular updates, this plugin could become a key tool in any writer’s social media arsenal.
Continue reading %Even More WordPress Plugins for Writers%
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More content than ever is being produced today as more businesses are understanding the need to operate as a media company.
And that’s fair. The results from content marketing cannot be denied:
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So the question is this: how do you create a self-sustaining content marketing engine? An engine that can operate efficiently with all the moving parts flowing as one?
I’ve gone through this exercise a few times (and failed in the process).
In this post, I’m going to give you a template to build your own content marketing engine. Every business is different, so take what makes the most sense and integrate it into your company.
If you’re going to create a content marketing engine, you’re going to need help. One person can’t do it all alone.
Here’s an example of how a team might be set up for a small company:
Let’s talk about these roles for a little bit:
The editor is responsible for making sure your content is up to par, gets scheduled, and follows your content process. In a sense, they can be seen as the executor of your content machine. For larger companies, you might have a Content Marketing Manager, Director of Content Strategy, VP of Content or Chief Content Officer.
Where to find good editors:
The designer helps make the imagery of your content look nice. Keep in mind that how your images and graphics look reflects upon your brand and that content with great imagery gets more engagement
Where to find good designers:
The social media specialist will listen to and engage with your audience. They’re also responsible for curating content that your audience might be interested in. If you’re wondering what your self promotion to outside content ratio should be, I suggest going with 1:4. This means that for every self promotional share, you should have four curated shares.
Individual outreach involves reaching out to:
It’s tedious work finding the right contact information and then e-mailing people, following up, and repeating this over and over. In an ideal world, this would be a role in itself. Probably somebody more junior.
If you are part of a smaller team, I suggest training this person in individual outreach and paid content promotion. Smaller team members need to wear lots of hats and these responsibilities fit this individual best.
Where to find great social media specialists:
The paid advertising specialist will help promote content on paid channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Gmail, LinkedIn and more. Promoting content through paid advertising is a growing trend and I think it’s the way of the future.
For example, right now we are paying for cold traffic to come to our blog posts and we’re collecting e-mails for $2.88 per e-mail. That’s a GREAT deal for us.
Where to find great paid advertising specialists:
For a more in-depth look at how a content marketing team should be organized, take a look at this post by Content Marketing Institute.
Here’s what their ideal workflow looks like:
Resources:
Draw up a mind map of your workflow in MindMeister.
The next step is coming up with fresh ideas for your audience.
Here are a few good ways to get started:
Swiped.co contains many marketing swipe files that you can use for inspiration. You can pull landing page/image inspiration for your own purposes.
I also regularly use Evernote to clip evergreen blog posts so that I can refer back to them.
Feedly is also a great place to keep an inventory of your favorite blogs. With Feedly, I can scroll through my feed really quickly and look for inspiration. Here’s an example:
One of my personal favorites is using Twitter lists to keep tabs on certain industries. For example, I made a list of venture capitalists that I like to follow and I always get value from checking up on it every day:
Making good use of your team is one of the most powerful ways to come up with great ideas.
Moz has a great set of tips for running a great brainstorming session right here:
Utilize tools like Google Trends and Google Display Planner to see what’s trending. Keyword Tool is another great way to see keyword volume not only on Google, but on YouTube as well.
I personally love using SEMrush to take a look at what competitors are doing in terms of PPC and SEO. BuzzSumo is great for looking at how content is performing socially.
Here’s an example use case for BuzzSumo:
Let’s say I’m interested in looking at top performing content for ’link building’. I’ll go to the ‘Content Research’ tab in BuzzSumo and enter “link building”:
Because we’re in the ideation phase right now, I’d like to:
Just thinking off the top of my head, maybe I can create an alternate version of the first result. How about ‘How to Use Pinterest for SEO: Link Building’? Might be worth a shot.
Continue reading %How to Build a Self-Sustaining Content Marketing Engine%
Pairing type is one of the toughest parts to get right in a web design project, and having tons of custom fonts at our fingertips doesn't make things any easier.
If you're just at the start of your journey to web typography mastery, it's likely that reading something along the lines of...
The Display and its Stencil are monolinear ... but they radiate great rhythm and warmth, with a touch of handwriting.
- Tremolo Typeface Review by Laura Meseguer
... will probably make as much sense to you as wine tasting does to a teetotaler.
Font selection is more an art than a science. Therefore, reading about typography, individual typefaces and foundries goes hand in hand with lots of practice. However — as Tim Brown says in his guide Combining Typefaces — "practice can take an unreasonable amount of time if you're not careful" (p.38). In the meantime, the website you are working on makes immediate demands on your budding typography skills. You need to come up with a great solution, and do it quickly.
In this article, you'll find plenty of online resources that will complement your learning about web typography and help you come up with beautiful type combinations.
You'll also learn how some of the services listed below let you test the browser rendering of your chosen fonts and offer hassle-free ways of including them in your project.
Browsing websites with good combinations of typefaces is a great way to develop an eye for how typefaces work together and in which contexts they're being used. Check out the resources below for some great examples.
Google Fonts is not just a service for picking custom fonts. It's also a place where you can learn more about your chosen typeface, including suggestions on a number of typefaces that work well with it.
When you select a typeface on Google Fonts, click on the small Pop out button to the bottom right of the font's container box.
Next, click on the Pairings tab and you'll see examples of how your selection is paired on the web with other typefaces.
Although I like this resource, in my view it doesn't say much about the context in which the suggested pairings are used. For instance, what kind of websites use Open Sans and Roboto together? Are they text-heavy websites like news sites and blogs? Are they image-focused websites like a photography portfolio site? Which page elements use Open Sans and which ones use Roboto?
This is super helpful information when it comes to selecting type combinations, and in order to find it we have to look elsewhere.
Beautiful Web Type showcases a selection of typefaces from Google Fonts.
The examples are a bit generic – they're not taken from real websites with specific goals and strategies. That said, the website shows off its typeface selections in beautifully designed sections. Notice how text hierarchy, font weights and styles, all play a part in making the text more readable and conveying the appropriate mood.
Another inspirational collection of typeface combinations from Google Fonts is on the Google Web Fonts Typography Project website.
The designs on this website are beautiful illustrations of type pairings and their uses on the web. As the project's README file on the GitHub repo says:
The primary goal is to communicate, not decorate.
Typ.io gives you tons of information on trendy typography designs and an up-to-date range of websites with well paired typefaces.
Not only will you see matching typefaces, but you will also get a sense of the role type plays in the design of real websites – which typeface is used for headings, which one for body copy, the font selection the designer has made for a certain kind of website, e.g., portfolio, blog, marketing, etc. In fact, you can search websites by industry, typeface, and font service.
Finally, click on the image with your favorite typeface combination, and you'll get the CSS code and the links to the services where you can purchase or download the font files.
Fonts in Use is another popular resource offering a wide collection of typefaces that work well together, taken from real websites.
Its impressive search functionality lets you browse the typography archive by:
To stress the point, showing how type works on websites from a variety of industries and contexts is crucial to developing an eye for good typesetting decisions.
The resources I'm going to list below will ask for your input in the search for the perfect type combination. Be it a way of testing typefaces or simply making a selection and waiting for a number of suitable matches, these tools are interactive and fun to use.
The beauty of Typespiration is that it lets you browse different designs showcasing beautiful free fonts and color palettes.
If you click on any of the designs, you'll have the option to:
Continue reading %20 Inspirational, Free Tools For Better Typeface Pairing%
