There’s a funny pattern of awakening that tends to happen when a technological advancement sneaks up on us. It starts with a mess of confusion.

We don’t understand the technology or its purpose: “I don’t get Twitter. Why would I want to know what you had for lunch?”

It then evolves into miscategorization: “The iPhone is actually a pretty crummy phone.”

We get so caught up in definitions, we almost miss the larger leap that’s occurring: “Why would people use messenger apps when you can just text?”

Then, finally, we get it: “The iPhone is not a phone at all. It’s an everything device. And Twitter is not about lunch. It’s about removing the barriers to real-time publishing.”

While we’re busy missing the big picture, a rapidly growing niche of early adopters is diving in. Early adopters don’t get distracted by the need to categorize or define the technology. They just use it. And in repeated agenda-less use, the bigger picture becomes clear.

This same pattern is happening today with Snapchat.

Hang with me. Don’t roll your eyes just yet. I’m going to pay it off. I’ve been a Snapchat doubter for a while now. Like many others, I relegated it to a fad or a niche service for a subset of a subset of the population. I’m beginning to realize I was wrong.

Snapchat is Shedding Its Skin

First, the basics. Snapchat is a one-to-one and group messaging app that has more than 100 million daily active users. Long classified as an app in which teenagers exchange goofy self-destructing videos, Snapchat is beginning to shed its skin and evolve into something new. Last week, Snapchat announced a 2.0 version with a slew of new features, some of which will reshape the purpose of the app altogether. First, let’s go through the features:

• Stories now auto-advance: To keep content flowing and viewer engagement up, Snapchat stories now auto-advance.
• 200 stickers added in private chat: While stickers may seem small, this addition brings Snapchat in parity with one of the more popular features on other messaging apps such as LINE and Facebook Messenger.
• Upload photos from your phone: Another crowd-pleaser, this moves Snapchat from solely an “in-the-moment app” to one that can be used to share and react to the past.
• 10-second looped video and audio notes: With video and audio notes, users can post genuine, human reactions as opposed to falling back on “LOL” or other anachronistic responses.
• Phone calls & video calls: This is where things start to get interesting. Users can place full phone or video calls right within Snapchat, so you can seamlessly move from sharing 10-second bursts and pictures to having a longer conversation.

On their own the features are interesting, but it’s the message behind the features that really caught my attention. Together, these features amount to a very clear benefit: The removal of limits to how you communicate with others remotely.

Think about it: Every other app or device we use for communication requires a certain category or format of that communication. Phones are great for long-form audio. SMS is great for text and sometimes images. Other messenger apps are great for short form messages and transactional conversations. But before this release, no single app or device optimized for all the ways humans communicate: long form, short form, audio, video, text, photo, and drawing.

Which means that Snapchat, for now, is actually pretty special.

Snapchat Wants to BE Your Phone

TechCrunch picked up on this immediately. In a review of the new Snapchat features, TechCrunch called the app social media bedrock, saying:

Photos that self destruct in 10 seconds aren’t even the point of Snapchat anymore. With today’s launch of Snapchat 2.0, Snapchat wants to BE your phone.”

But, I already have a phone. It’s the larger black box that contains Snapchat and the other apps I’ve downloaded. Sure, that’s true. But think for a moment about all the individual apps you’d need from within that phone to equate what Snapchat now enables you to do in one.

“It lets private conversations morph between mediums depending on what users want to show or tell,” explains TechCrunch editor-at-large Josh Constine. “Snapchat is positioning itself as the most vivid, human way to chat.”

And it’s doing so in a single, simple interface.

Last fall, Designer Tony Aube wrote a fascinating essay — “No UI is the New UI” — which  asserts that to date, much of remote human interaction has taken place through the filter of some sort of user interface. However, messaging apps are moving us toward a near-invisible UI. Aube went on to say:

What make [messaging apps] special is that they don’t use a traditional UI as a mean[s] of interaction. Instead, the entire app revolves around a single messaging screen.”

That screen, which can now nimbly move between image, face-to-face, audio, and other forms of communication, removes some of the technical congestion found in other apps — congestion which can cloud and limit the experience.

“We’ve learned a ton about how people talk, but our goal remains unchanged,” Snapchat explains in its launch post. “We want Chat to be the best way to communicate — second only to hanging out face-to-face.”

Do You Want a Side of Fries With That Hype?

It’s easy to read all of the excitement over the new Snapchat features and think we’ve all been blinded by a good PR team. But this actually isn’t about Snapchat at all. Rather, it’s an observation on how the systems we use to communicate are evolving.

One of the best explanations I’ve seen of how a single technology gains adoption and in turn advances society is the Gartner hype cycle. Here it is, as illustrated by, Luc Galoppin:

In the hype cycle, the slope of enlightenment comes after the first rush of early success stories give way to more patterned instances of how the technology can benefit society and business. In the slope of enlightenment, those benefits start to crystallize and become more widely understood.

I’d argue that with Snapchat — and other messaging apps — we’re just starting to emerge from the “through of disillusionment.” We’re just starting to see beyond individual messaging app features. We’re just beginning to piece together the larger shift that’s happening in the way we communicate. Likely, it’s a shift that other messaging apps and devices will pick up on and adopt.

Why Should Businesses Dive in Now?

I’m not going to sit here and tell you your audience is on Snapchat. In fact, they might not be … yet. But there is a benefit to wading into this emerging channel early.

Below is an illustration — by Luc Galoppin (and annotated by me) — of the standard adoption curve in which products and technologies go through on their path to ubiquity. Note: Snapchat is currently at the tail end of the early adopter stage.

Early adopters are both impressive and essential to technological advancement. Namely because early adopters don’t feel the compulsion to classify new technologies. They just want to get in and use them. Sometimes in doing so, they create new use cases that the app inventors didn’t even think about. In turn, early adopters shape second and third iterations of products, and have shaped this latest release from Snapchat. Behavior precedes strategy. And strategy that natively understands that behavior is all the more effective.

You won’t necessarily understand the potential of Snapchat by reading about it. You have to get in there, follow people, and use it. So even if your audience isn’t quite there yet, there’s a case for trying it out with the early majority … before the late majority arrives. That’s what we did.

Want a starting point? HubSpot just launched our own Snapchat account. You can start learning how companies use the app by opening Snapchat and searching for: HubSpotinc.

Ever feel like your business is too “niche” to benefit from blogging?

Then consider this: 16% to 20% of searches people ask in Google have never been searched for before. No matter how unique your niche is, it’s likely that people are searching for the content you’ll create. 

The great thing about an inbound marketing tactic like blogging is that it lets you attract the most qualified prospects to your business, wherever they may be. In fact, some of the most dramatic successes we’ve seen with blogging come from businesses in niche industries.

Take Conversant Bio, for example. They sell human tissue samples to researchers who use them for studies that advance modern medicine. Pretty niche, wouldn’t you say?

Well, when Conversant Bio started a blog with the help of HubSpot Partner SmartBug Media and started creating content around disease research, their blog visits went from about 5,000 visits in December 2014 to 34,000 visits per month ten months later in October 2015. Not only that, but they saw the number of quality leads increase by 700%.

As part of HubSpot’s 2015 Year in Review, we wanted to celebrate the success of our partners and the impact they’ve had on their clients businesses. So I caught up with SmartBug Media’s founder and CEO Ryan Malone to get the inside scoop on how they approached Conversant Bio’s blogging strategy and what they did to impact lead flow so dramatically.

The Strategy Shift

Conversant Bio’s target buyer isn’t your typical internet surfer. Their buyers are predominantly large pharma researchers who focus on really specific diseases, like lung cancer and leukemia. And it turns out these researchers conduct a lot of their research through search on the web — or at least start their research on the web.

What does that mean for Conversant Bio? That they had the opportunity to attract these researchers to their website via search engines — if only they could rank for those really specific, disease-related keywords.

To help Conversant Bio attract more qualified prospects to their website, the folks at SmartBug Media wanted to help turn them into industry thought leaders and sources of reliable news and educational content around specific disease research and techniques. To do that, though, Conversant Bio would have to shift the way they marketed themselves.

“We made the recommendation that they stop marketing as a tissue sample company, and start marketing as a subject-matter expert in each disease state,” Malone told me.

The biggest way they did this? By setting up a blog, and then being really strategic about the topics they wrote about.

“Rather than writing a blog post on ‘The 10 Benefits of a Tissue Sample for Research,’ we had them start writing about topics like what’s happening in blood oncology research or how certain types of cells have become important to blood oncology researchers,” said Malone. “Then, we folded in how the clinical and genetic profiling of these skills have helped researchers do better experiments.” That’s where Conversant Bio’s product — those tissue samples — could come in.

Step 1: Increasing Organic Search Through Keyword Research

Before focusing on lead conversion, the folks at SmartBug started with the goal of increasing organic traffic to Conversant Bio’s website through the blog. To increase organic traffic, they did keyword research to find actual search terms that people were entering into search engines around specific topics (in their case, specific disease states).

How did they conduct keyword research? By talking to subject-matter experts for each disease state, putting together lists of keyword ideas, and then using keyword research tools (like these) to build out long-tail keywords that they could then tie back to their product. They chose long-tail keywords to solve for lead quality in the long term, since website visitors searching long-tail terms will often be more qualified.

Although the talented writers at SmartBug Media have a fair amount of health care expertise, they spoke with those subject-matter experts to get a better understanding of the type of language their target buyers — those pharmaceutical researchers — were using. 

“It was a strategy that allowed us [at SmartBug Media] to move really quickly on those niches,” Malone explained. “By talking to those subject-matter experts, we leveraged their expertise to learn the language of the researchers [who made up Conversant Bio’s buyer personas], and then combined that with blog title strategy.”

Once they did that, they found it fairly easy to actually research and write optimized blog posts around those keywords. 

Step 2: Blogging Regularly Using Those Keywords

Once the folks at SmartBug Media had a solid list of long-tail keywords to work from, they began writing optimized blog posts — while continuing to do more keyword research to build a backlog for future posts.

“We would take terminology from subject-matter experts, use them to create a list of targeted blog post titles, give those titles to the writing team, and they would write the blog posts,” explained Malone.

For example, if they discovered that a lot of pharmaceutical researchers were searching for the term “breast cancer mutations,” they would create a list of blog post titles optimized for that keyword — like this one, titled “Methods to Detect Breast Cancer Mutations in FFPE Samples.”

They focused each blog post on one (sometimes two) long-tail keywords, and made sure those keywords showed up in the title of the post, in the body (especially the headers), in the URL, and in the meta description, as is best practice for optimizing blog posts for SEO.

SmartBug’s writers started at an entry-level retainer with Conversant Bio, which had them writing between four and six blog posts per month. Although that’s fewer monthly posts than we’d normally recommend, they found that these posts began to rank fairly quickly thanks to their industry and super-niche topics.

“Our keywords were so narrowly targeted in an industry where people haven’t really embraced inbound yet, so post ranking caught on really quickly,” said Malone.

In fact, take a look at Conversant Bio’s website traffic below, which Malone says is mostly blog traffic.

SmartBug Media started blogging for Conversant Bio in January 2015, which is when you see traffic begin to increase over time. Traffic growth significant over the next year, peaking in October 2015 at roughly 34,000 visits per month, before the annual holiday traffic dip.

More importantly, you’ll notice that organic traffic (represented by green in each bar) constitutes about 70% or more of their overall site traffic. Malone attributes this largely to keyword optimization on the blog.

Not long after Malone and his team began blogging for Conversant Bio, they started creating more sophisticated content around their best keywords in an effort to turn some of those increasing blog visitors into high quality leads. 

Step 3: Solving for Leads With Gated Content

Once they got the blog post machine going (with the help of HubSpot’s blog editorial planning template), it was time to create content like ebooks they could gate behind landing pages to collect leads.

You see, when SmartBug first started blogging for Conversant Bio, they were ending blog posts with call-to-action buttons leading directly to product pages to relevant tissue samples. For example, for blog posts about breast cancer mutations, they might end with a CTA like this one leading to their product page for the relevant tissue sample:

Image Credit: Conversant Bio

But after only a few months of blogging, they saw their efforts to bring in more traffic was working — and it was time to invest in writing long-form content.

Essentially, their strategy was to write ebooks about the same long-tail keywords they were blogging about so each blog post was paired with an ebook CTA that was highly relevant to what internet searchers were looking for.

“In addition to the traffic increase, the level of specificity in the targeting we did also increased our lead flow,” said Malone. 

And results were significant: Conversant Bio saw a 250% month-over-month increase in lead growth, with the proportion of marketing qualified leads increasing from 10% to 80% during the same time — an increase of 700%.

“The sales team at Conversant Bio used to get a lot of unqualified leads,” said Malone. “They’d get people who had been searching online for some human tissue-related topic that wasn’t specific to what they sold, or people who weren’t really a fit from a sales perspective.

“But in 2015, the percentage of their lead quality went up sevenfold. The percentage increase marketing qualified leads — from 10% to 80% — happened because those researchers were searching for a very specific, myopic thing.”

Step 4: Folding Content Into Well Rounded Campaigns

Paired with social media promotion, lead nurturing, and conversion paths, those optimized blog posts were successfully bringing prospects into Conversant Bio’s sales cycle.

Malone says many of the folks who would end up purchasing the product would come in to the blog through organic search, download the ebook, get nurtured via email, and then receive a follow-up from Conversant Bio’s sales team.

The result? The ROI for their campaigns was an astounding 3,558%.

None of this would have been possible without the realization that becoming an educational resource for their target buyers was the best way to bring in high quality traffic from search.

“Before the SmartBug-driven inbound marketing campaigns, the majority of our web leads were not well targeted,” Luke Doiron, Conversant Bio’s chief commercial officer, told SmartBug Media. “We’re experiencing significant ROI on our campaigns. Based on our historical customer purchase patterns, we expect the three-year return on this initial six-month investment to be above 14,500%. We’re thrilled!”

Want to see who else in the inbound community has seen success? Check out HubSpot’s 2015 Year in Review. 

For B2B tech marketers, it’s crucial to understand the real value of the technology you’re promoting – whether it’s a simple consumer product or a complicated enterprise service.

The real trick of technology marketing is learning a subject (one which may be completely foreign to you) quickly and efficiently. When that subject is a complex technology tool or service, you might feel lost trying to comprehend everything there is to know.

While I can’t give you a crash course in your client’s work—only they can do that successfully—I can offer 10 tips for every B2B tech marketer to help them optimize their approach.

1. Timing is Everything

As quickly as the technology industry evolves and grows, timing is everything. When researching any topic related to technology, or when sourcing a statistic or fact, it’s crucial to ensure you’re looking at the most current information available.

Always check the dates of studies and surveys. Even something published a year ago might not reflect the current reality of the industry. If a stat is pertinent to your whitepaper, blog, etc., and you can’t find the same stat for the most recent year, a good rule of thumb is to not go back more than two years or to qualify the data with a disclaimer.

2. Curate Content

Keeping tabs on the industry will help you curate the best content from thought leaders, customers and other important figures. Taking in a great deal of information from all of these sources can inspire your marketing efforts in other areas. Curating content will also provide a fuller picture of the technology industry and how it’s talked about in different channels.

First, you need to learn how to listen on social channels (primarily Twitter and LinkedIn), which content to pay attention to (influencers, competitors), and how to use it.

For example, once you’ve been promoting curated content for several months on social media, you can see which posts received the most clicks, and then develop blog posts on similar topics.

3. Create Buyer Personas

Personalization is seen as the key to unlocking prospects and creating conversions. Creating a buyer persona is the first step in targeting inbound marketing content for personalization purposes. Creating a persona involves getting to the root of who your customers are, how they behave, where they look for information and how they make purchasing decisions.

Technology might be a challenging area to create specific buyer personas for, but if you look at the types of customers who need your product or service, you’ll discover the little things that separate one persona from another.

4. Follow Big-Name Sources

As with any industry, it’s crucial to follow the news about what’s happening in technology. This provides fodder for content ideas, raises awareness of trends and informs you on competitor activity.

Just like journalists and news junkies follow The New York Times and the Associated Press for the beat of what’s happening in the world, technology marketers should follow certain publications for similar business reasons.

Beyond the online experts, such as TechCrunch, PC Magazine and CNET, you can also keep up with technology-focused sections of major publications like The Wall Street Journal, Wired and CIO. These outlets, among others, cover all aspects of technology from cloud solutions to cybersecurity to consumer goods.

5. Know the Influencers

As you invest time and energy promoting your clients across social channels, you’ll find thought leaders and influencers. Listen to what they have to say, participate in conversations they start and develop a mutual awareness. This builds trust and credibility with your customers. If all goes well, you can even invite these influencers to write a guest post, co-host a webinar, or become an advocate for your client.

6. Learn the Terms

There is nothing worse in technology marketing than not using the appropriate terminology. No one expects you to know these terms when you’re starting, but they will expect you to learn them, and how to use them as you become aware of the space and target audience.

The more exposure you have to the industry, the more naturally this terminology should come. It also helps to do your research and study the terms and so you can wrap your head around their meaning.

There might terminology specific to your client’s company, or just general terms used widely in the industry. Also, look out for acronyms or terms that may mean different things – and can be differentiated based on the industry context.

For example, a CMO in the business world (as you well know) is a Chief Marketing Officer, but in the healthcare industry it stands for Chief Medical Officer. Those involve very different qualifications and responsibilities; let’s face it – it would be embarrassing to get them mixed up. The same goes for tech terminology. Be vigilant of what you and your client are talking about.

7. Don’t Be Afraid to Ask Questions

The best way to catch up to speed on any topic is to ask questions. Ask as many as come to mind – and more. As topics get more complicated, the questions you ask your client may help them realize how a “layman” is viewing and comprehending their products and services.

Even if a question seems obvious, simple or stupid – you should still ask it. No one should fault you for trying to grasp concepts in your own way. No matter how confused you are or how well you think you get something, keep asking questions. It only leads to more insightful content down the line.

8. Understand the Competition

This is key to any marketing strategy, but in the tech sector, understanding the competition helps differentiate your client in your mind and to your customers. Seeing what other companies offer can make your client’s features and benefits more obvious. Creating and monitoring a Twitter List that includes your competitors, or even signing up for their newsletters, are two easy ways to start. 

9. Take Advantage of Existing Content

Unless a company is starting from scratch, repurposing existing content is an excellent tactic to first understanding the topics and voice of your technology client, and then replicating that with success.

Technology companies love webinars and presentations. Request access to these, get inspired and use them as a springboard to create more content. Moreover, these can often provide a more human side to the technology your client is selling, which only helps you when translating technical information to the average customer.

10. Know the Difference Value vs. Specifications

Technology depends on technical specifications in a customer’s purchasing decision. The smallest detail can be the deciding factor, so it’s vital to never underestimate the importance of this information. However, a great marketer practices the balance between using these specs and a company’s value proposition. Knowing your audience helps tailor your message with these approaches.

——-

Now that you have some tips and tricks for marketing technology, you can enter the game.

As a B2B tech marketer, promoting products and services isn’t much different than marketing other industries, but it’s essential to be vigilant of what technology customers, whether consumers or big enterprises, look for in their content and messaging.

You’ve probably heard of a “growth hacker” — someone who uses creativity, analytical thinking, and social metrics to help their products or services gain exposure. The methods behind growth hacking are a little bit scrappy, and they’re totally focused on end results.

So what’s a content growth hacker, then?

A content hacker, according to the folks at CoSchedule, combines their content marketing skills with the growth hacking mindset.

Content hacking is helpful if you want to increase your blog traffic, grow your subscriber base, see your posts get shared more on social media, and so on. To dig into what content hacking is in more depth, Check out the infographic below from CoSchedule to dig into what content hacking is, along with a few, helpful content hacks to get you started.

This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post. 

More and more companies and agencies are establishing remote working options for employees as flexibility in work schedule and location has become an important benefit for top talent. 

In addition, some agency owners have built their companies to be completely virtual such as SmartBug Media, which has a team of 25 remote team members.

This structure has allowed Founder Ryan Malone to recruit the best talent from anywhere, and it gives his staff more options when determining the lifestyle and location they find most inspiring and fulfilling. 

However, managing a team of remote team members comes with its own challenges. And one of these is running effective meetings. When people are in various different environments, time zones, and even countries, things can start to get confusing. You need a process and structure for making these meetings work.

To learn how to set up and run better meetings with remote employees, check out the SlideShare from Shoretel below.

This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.

Think the decisions you make every single day are guided by taking all the information that’s available to you into consideration?

Turns out that’s not always true. Thanks to the information overload we’ve all grown accustomed to, we’ve developed a need for shortcuts, or rules of thumb, to guide our decision-making. 

Check out the video below from influenceatwork to learn the six principles of persuasion, as identified by Dr. Robert Cialdini. (And read this blog post to learn about principles like these in more detail.) 

Every time I write, my goal is to write easy-to-read sentences.

I never want my audience to stumble or slow down or start a sentence over. That’s why, whenever possible, I use simple words instead of jargon, periods instead of semicolons, and active voice instead of passive voice. Most importantly, though, that’s why I strive to write concisely.

Framing your message concisely means saying everything you need to say in as few words as possible. It’s one of the most significant steps a writer can take towards clarity and comprehension — two crucial building blocks when it comes to reader engagement.

But executing succinct writing (much less recognizing when a sentence could be tighter in the first place) doesn’t come naturally to most people. Trimming the fat off your writing is a learned skill that requires effort.

The good news is you can start learning and honing that skill today by practicing the exercises below.

6 Exercises That’ll Train You to Write Concisely

By forcing you to either cut word count or stay within a word count, these exercises will help you do two things:

1. Hone your writing skills, helping you to keep your sentences tight and powerful.
2. Recognize when sentences are wordy in the first place, which is half the battle when it comes to writing concisely.

So come on. Let’s jump in …

1) Write a haiku a day.

A haiku is a Japanese poem. Traditional haikus must have seventeen syllables between three lines: five in the first line, seven in the second line, and five again in the third, like this one by Murakami Kijo:

First autumn morning:

the mirror I stare into

shows my father’s face.”

But the 5-7-5 structure is not a hard-and-fast rule. In fact, most modern haikus are written in varying syllabic patterns, like this one by Yosa Buson, written in 5-3-5:

Over-ripe sushi,

The Master

Is full of regret.”

Well-written haikus have an elegance to them — a rhythm. Each words holds weight — and each syllable is important — because that’s what the craft demands. And while it’s challenging to create an emotional image when you only have a dozen or so syllables to work with, doing so trains you to think deeply about your writing. It forces you to evaluate the opportunity cost of words.

Try writing a haiku every evening before going to bed. You can write about anything — your day, your dog, the untouched Scotch tape in your drawer at work — as long as you hold yourself to one of the predetermined syllabic structures above.

2) Tweet.

By restricting each tweet to 140 characters, Twitter forces you to relay an impactful or interesting or compelling or funny message quickly.

There. That last sentence was 140 characters, which came out to a mere 22 words with which to express why Twitter is an effective training tool for writers. Could I have composed more on the subject? Absolutely. But that’s not the point. The point is to get your point across in as few words as possible.

Tweeting often allows you to sharpen that skill.

3) Freewrite non-stop for 2 minutes, then halve the text.

When freewriting, you only have to follow one rule: don’t stop until the timer goes off.

Everything else is fair game: you can misspell words and forget commas and apostrophes. You can tell a story or give an opinion or paint a picture. As long as you don’t slow down, a freewrite is your opportunity to word vomit (which can actually be fun and cathartic). After two minutes of freewriting, you’ll likely have something verbose in front of you because you didn’t on-the-go edit. Do a quick CTRL-A (Mac users: Command-A) and check the word count. If you’re at 124 words, for instance, then your goal would be to relay the same message in only 62 words.

Run this exercise enough and you’ll start to recognize your negative writing tendencies. In other words, you’ll begin to see patterns in your writing, which will alert you to the bad habits you should watch out for when writing.

For example, are you using too many adverbs? Are your words too complex (“utilize” vs. “use”). Do you lean on the passive voice too much? All these habits will come to the surface when you force yourself to halve the text you just speedily wrote.

4) Simplify Wikipedia paragraphs. 

You might be thinking, but Wikipedia articles are already concise. And they are.

Wikipedia is definitely a no-fluff zone, which is why this exercise is so stellar. You see, by forcing yourself to summarize an already to-the-point paragraph into something even more succinct, you put your editing brain into overdrive.

It’s like sprinting the final 100 yards of a five-mile run, when your lungs are shot. Or pushing through one more squat at the gym, when your legs feel like Jell-O. That extra effort goes a long way in terms of developing you physically — and it will do wonders for your writing, too.

For example, let’s take this 175-word paragraph from the “Corporate history” section of HubSpot’s Wikipedia page:

HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2006. Shah invested $500,000, which was followed by angel investments from Edward B. Roberts, the chair of the Entrepreneurship Center at MIT and fellow MIT Sloan classmate and Entrepreneur Brian Shin. The company introduced the HubSpot software in beta in 2006 and officially launched it in December 2007. An additional $5 million in funding was raised in 2007, which was followed by $12 million in May 2008, and $16 million in late 2009. The company grew from $255,000 in revenues the first year the software was released to $15.6 million in 2010. Later that year HubSpot announced its acquisition of oneforty. Oneforty began as an app store for Twitter, but shifted into an online resource for social media marketing. The company also introduced new software for personalizing websites to each visitor. According to Forbes, HubSpot started out targeting companies of 1–10 employees, but “moved steadily upmarket to serve larger businesses of up to 1000 employees.”

Now let’s condense it into a 52-word bullet:

Founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah at MIT in 2006, HubSpot received a series of multimillion dollar capital injections that helped it grow more than 60X in its fourth year of business. That same year, HubSpot announced its acquisition of oneforty, introduced new website-personalization software, and began targeting much bigger businesses.”

The end-result is comparable to a CliffsNotes study guide. Or one of those recap snippets summarizing the last episode of your favorite show. In any case, it’s a snapshot — a concise rundown — and while it may be challenging to create, it’ll also make you a better writer.

5) Explain a foreign concept in 100 words or less.

Like most of these exercises, this one’s easy to grasp and hard to execute. It asks that you pick an unfamiliar concept or subject, and effectively explain it, in writing, in less than 100 words. That means you have to be concise without being vague. In other words, you should strive to break down the “what,” “why,” and “how” of the concept or subject.

For reference, check out HubSpot’s [In Under 100 Words] series, which makes quick work of some fairly complicated subjects, including Marketing Automation, SEO, and Smarketing.

And remember: by practicing this challenge, you’ll not only sharpen your writing, but you’ll also teach yourself something new. 

6) Read Hemingway, Bukowski, and Vonnegut.

In his memoir, On Writing, Stephen King wrote, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

You heard the master. Writers are readers, too. And if writers want to be concise, they must read other concise writers…

Like Ernest Hemingway, who is said to have written the world’s shortest novel. It’s six words long: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Like Charles Bukowski, who summed up the essence of his first novel, Post Office, in the book’s opening sentence, which reads, “It began as a mistake.”

Like Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote most of his novels, including his masterpiece, Cat’s Cradle, in a series of chapters that rarely exceeded two pages in length. This concise approach kept his storylines tight, punchy, and addicting. (Read this for more Vonnegut-inspired writing tips.)

The first five exercises in this article will help you to hone your sentences, to keep them succinct and ready to cut. But this last exercise will ensure that you’re reading some of the finest sentences ever written, a practice that will undoubtedly shape your understanding of the craft as a whole, giving you something to strive for and admire.

This is your inspiration. And now that you have it, let’s get to work. Let’s get better.

Which exercises are you most excited to try? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

While Amazon is busy trying to figure out how to get products to you as quickly as they can once you click the purchase button, the rest of the ecommerce world seems to be moving in the other direction. Some of the largest brick-and-mortar retail organizations have led the charge toward store pick-up options for online shoppers.

Macy’s, Best Buy, Target, and even Kroger now make it possible for customers to make purchases on an ecommerce site, complete the payment process, and then pick up the products in person at their nearest physical location. With ecommerce taking over the retail world, why would any company want to mix brick-and-mortar back in? Here are some pretty good reasons.

No Sticker Shock

We’ve covered abandoned carts several times. The number one reason for a customer abandoning their cart is the price of shipping. Once those buyers fill their carts and click through to finish the purchase, they see the final total with taxes and shipping, and they bail.

If you offer store pick-up as an option, that shipping cost goes away. Sure, you also take away the convenience of having the items delivered right to the buyer’s door, but some buyers won’t mind that. If they don’t have to wander the aisles in search of the items they need, they’ll still consider an online purchase with store pick-up a pretty great deal.

Quick Fix

When buyers can order items to pick up the store, they also have that added benefit of “right now.” Sure, they could check out Amazon’s Prime Now if they need something today, but those are some pretty slim pickings. For everything else they need, from groceries to a winter coat, they can find an ecommerce company that has a physical location, and buy to their hearts’ content.

Once the order is in stock, they can go pick it up right away. No waiting for UPS or the postal service to make the delivery. In most cases, buyers will get their purchases even sooner, and sooner is always better in the buying world.

Online Options 

Yet another reason a consumer may consider buying online and picking up at the store is the very good chance that online options are greater. A store can only stock so much, but the possibilities are endless on an ecommerce site. There’s room for everything!

If your brick-and-mortar store can only provide half of the options in your physical location, then you’re going to disappoint about half of your customers. Give them the option to buy online and pick up at your store, and you stand the chance of making 100% of your buyers happy. At the very least, your sales will increase.

If you’re still relying on shipping to get your products in to customers’ hands, then it might be time to consider some new options. Yes, there are some drawbacks to the click-and-collect model, but the benefits just might outweigh the negatives.

Some meetings are a total waste of time.

There’s nothing more frustrating than stopping your actual work to attend a meeting where everyone ends up staring at their laptops and nothing actually gets done.

It’s crazy how many hours we waste in meetings like these. In fact, the average employee spends 31 hours in unproductive meetings every single month. That’s 31 hours per month that each of us could’ve spent on work that gets us closer to hitting our goals, developing our skills, and making meaningful connections.

There are two ways to minimize that number. One way is to cancel meetings that don’t need to happen, or (politely) say “no” to meetings you don’t really, truly need to attend. The other is to make the meetings you do run and attend more effective.

To learn how to make your meetings more effective and collaborate more successfully, check out the infographic below from CT Business Travel. It covers how to set your agenda ahead of time, what the optimal number of people in a meeting is, how to make sure attendees are taking away the key points from the meeting, and more.

Here at HubSpot, there’s one thing we love above all else: Dogs.

A smush-faced pug? Instant heart warmer. Majestic golden retriever? More like new best friend. It’s no wonder our “bring your dog to work” policy at our Cambridge headquarters is an employee favorite.

Beyond being popular, this program also gets big results: Our research revealed a 278% uptick in employee satisfaction when HubSpotters were within a 10-foot radius of a dog. What’s more, data from a third-party, double-blind study showed that not only were these results true for dogs, but they also held true for all animals.

We’ve taken these insights and rolled them into our latest, groundbreaking employee perk: Productive Employee Things — better known as the P.E.T. Program.

We believe in healthy, productive, and happy employees. And we’re committed to this — even if that means anteaters roaming the halls, parrots nesting in the kitchen, or awkward turtles in our marketing meetings. In short, HubSpotters won’t need to leave behind the fuzzy, furry, or scaly companions that inspire them. We’ve decided to let HubSpotters around the globe bring their pets to work.

Let freedom ring … or squawk … or meow … or growl.

But that’s not all. With this announcement, we’ve put together a list of our top workplace pets. How would you rank these cuddly office companions? 

1. Chicken

   Two words that brighten up any employee’s morning: fresh omelettes.

2. Sheep

   Office temps give you an occasional case of the chills? Warm up alongside nature’s sweater.
   

3. Goat

   Your own personal, on-demand paper shredder (and facial hair consultant).

4. Kangaroo

   The utility vehicle of office pets. Carry around laptops, pens, and notebooks — all while keeping your lunch warm.
   

5. Anaconda

   Monday vibes give you the blues? Nothing a nice, strong hug can’t fix.

6. Octopus

   Manage all your daily tasks and more with a helping hand. Bonus: Fresh ink for the quill.

7. Alpaca

   Ever spill coffee during the morning hustle? Clean it up with a real alpaca-spit shine.

8. Elephant

   How long before the joke, “I want to address the elephant in the room,” gets old? Time to find out.
   

9. Pig

   Stay-the-course on any diet. This office pet will eat every tasty treat in sight before you can.