Welcome to My Blog

As the Content Director at an inbound marketing agency, I cringe when I visit our company’s blog and see that the most recent post was from more than a week ago. But sometimes, it just can’t be helped.

That’s because maintaining a regular blogging schedule can be extraordinarily difficult. Brainstorming topic ideas, writing, editing, proofreading, publishing, promoting — it’s a lot to ask from a handful of writers who have a plate full of client work to do.

When it comes to small businesses, who may have only a business owner trying to maintain all inbound efforts, blogging regularly becomes all but impossible. 

But none of that changes the fact that maintaining a regular blog is one of the best ways to keep leads coming into your site. Research has shown that 15 blogs a month can generate 1,200 new leads each month. That definitely seems worth the effort!

So how exactly are you supposed to blog 15 times a month when you can barely manage 1 a week? Short of making more hours in the day (and if I knew how to do that, I’d be swimming in my pool of money in a private colony on the moon), there’s only one way: get more writers. 

“But writers are expensive,” you say. “And freelancers don’t know my business!” 

This is true. But I’m not talking about hiring new writers or outsourcing your blog, I’m talking about making writers from the employees you already have.

Whether you know it or not, every person that works for you is a potential blogger. You just have to know how to convince them to contribute. 

Put Out the Call

If you’ve been handling your company’s blogging duties on your own, you may be surprised to see what happens when you actually ask your co-workers or employees to contribute. You might already have an aspiring writer in your midst. At your next staff meeting, or even in a casual email, see if anyone has something they would like to contribute to the company blog.

This is also a great opportunity to explain how important good writing skills can be to anyone’s professional development and future ambitions, no matter what their ultimate career goal. In fact, one recent survey found that corporate recruiters ranked “strong writing skills as one of the top 5 critical factors to consider when selecting candidates to interview. That’s pretty important. 

Of course, if your agency is growing and work is consistently rolling in, you might not get a huge response the first time around. Even people who want to write might be so swamped they don’t dare to take on a new project that will take up their precious time.

While it’s best not to badger anyone into writing for you, feel free to ask again, perhaps in a different way. If you made an announcement at a meeting, send a follow up email. Even better, if you know someone who you think would be a great asset to the blog, because of their experience, writing style, or energy reach out to them directly.  A personal invitiation is definitely a compliment and may have better results. 

Uncover Expertise

Since I started tracing block letters in kindergarten, I’ve never been afraid of writing. That’s probably a big reason that content creation (which includes a lot of writing) has become a part of my career.

But I also understand that my experience is not the same as everyone else’s. For some people, writing conjures images of high school essays covered in red marks and all nighters trying to make sense of “Chicago Style.” Is it a new show from Dick Wolf? We just don’t know.

In short, writing can be scary. It’s your job to help burgeoning writers overcome these fears, and one of the best ways to do this is by finding out what the writer is passionate about. From there, you can begin to brainstorm blog topics that let this knowledge shine.

Of course, your new blogger can’t write exclusively about mountain biking or pie crusts, but it’s your job to find a way to incorporate their expertise and frame it in a way that applies to your blogging goals.

For example, if someone is an expert in mountain bike repair, they could probably craft a pretty compelling blog about how biking down a mountain on busted shocks is a lot like trying to generate leads without a landing page (it’s possible but not very comfortable or efficient).

A passionate home baker knows a lot about the importance of following processes in the right order — not to mention measurement — which are both essential pieces of inbound marketing,  so why not help them craft a post that incorporates those elements? 

When people are writing about something they care about, those initial fears fall away much easier. And the more they write, the more confident they will become writing about a broader range of topics.

Be Flexible

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

– Douglas Adams

Another thing that can cause fear for new writers is deadlines. Come to think of it, deadlines scare me a little, too. But for writers who didn’t have blogging as part of their normal workload, it can be particularly daunting to add another looming date to their to do list.

A regular blogging schedule is great, but when you can be flexible with deadlines for new writers, they can feel a bit more comfortable and will ultimately produce something better.

The best way to do this is to make sure that you fit new writers’ posts into your editorial calendar in a way that gives them a ton of time. Be sure to build in a little extra time for a round or two of edits and some thorough proofreading and you will both be able to breathe a little easier. 

Provide Resources

The best blog posts are backed up by data along with personal experience. New writers might not know where to begin looking for the kind of data they need to support their posts, but you do.

When you’re assigning topics, be sure to provide plenty of resources — from blogs to trade industry publications and even social influencers — that your writers can pull from to help them find ideas and statistics. 

For first time bloggers, it could also be a good idea to offers some tips and resources on some of the blogging best practices that you may take for granted, like: 

• Proper linking/citation guidelines
• Internal linking practices
• How to include CTAs
• Grammar, spelling, and punctuation

As you recruit more writers for you blog, consider creating an internal document that goes through your company’s internal blogging guidelines. You can collect the resources you share  While you’re at it, this might be a great time to refresh your own knowledge of how to optimize your blog for lead generation. 

Give Great Feedback

You’ve been writing blogs for a while, so you know what you like and what works. But when you get your first blog post back from a brand new writer, don’t expect it to be perfect or to match exactly what you’ve been doing.

And don’t rush into editing, rearranging, and making the post presentable as you see it. Instead, sit down with your fledgling writer and go through your notes. Don’t be mean or dismissive (this should be a given as an editor anyhow). Give actionable notes and examples of great writing to encourage new writers to keep going.

It’s a real ‘teach a blogger to fish’ situation. If you go hog wild on editing and publish a post that’s unrecognizable to the writer, it’s going to be really difficult to convince that person to keep writing for you.

But if you can give constructive feedback (as well as praise where it’s deserved!) it will go a long way towards create a longterm contributor for your blog, and more lead generating content for your company.

Set Your Bloggers Free

When you give new writers the right tools to succeed, you are contributing to their professional development while also making an important impact on the future of your company.

The first few blog posts can definitely be challenging from both sides. After all, you have just as much on your plate as your employees and you might not feel as though you have the time to sit down with new writers, provide great feedback, and give them a space in your tightly controlled editorial calendar.

But just like a few minutes in the gym everyday can add years to your life, a few minutes with a new writer can add tons of content to your blog. That is, the upfront investment is well worth it for the payout.

If scheduling is really an issue, consider hosting office hours for new writers. Once a week, block off your schedule and plan to take questions, give notes, and work with new writers for an hour. Once they get off and running, you will have that time to work while still fielding questions as they come in. 

The best part of spending even a little bit of time working with your new team of writers is that you will be able to set them free from your editorial grasp a lot sooner than you think. And there is nothing quite so satisfying as being able to teach someone a new skill and then see it be utilized right away.

Building a company blog that’s driving leads to your site takes the help of the whole company, and not just because it’s a huge job. The fact is that your regularly updated blog can quickly become your company’s top source of traffic. That means it should be a good representation of your company, its values, and how you solve problems for your key buyer personas.

There is no better way to do that then to have people from throughout your company contribute. These writers add fresh voices and new perspectives while at the same time keeping your blog going and growing your business.

With these tips, you should be able to rally a team of writers that can help bring your blog to life.

Some habits, like brushing your teeth, you’ve done so many times that they feel automatic. In fact, it’s probably true that every time you brush your teeth, you do so in pretty much the exact same way every time.

Other habits, like exercising for even twenty minutes a day, can feel nearly impossible to pick up.

But why? Why are some habits so easy to fall into, while others are so darn hard? And why are those “bad habits” so difficult to break?

There’s a lot of scientific and behavioral research out there about habits — from creating new ones and breaking bad ones, to why some people find it harder than others to find motivation. And thanks to the TED Talk program, the leading researchers behind some of these cool studies have been able to share their ideas with the world in a format that’s easy to digest.

Ready to form better habits? Here are nine TED talks to give you the research, ideas, and tools to get started.

9 TED Talks on Forming Better Habits

1) Judson Brewer: “A Simple Way to Break a Habit”

Length: 9 min. 24 sec.

Why do we overeat, smoke, or give in to other cravings when we know they’re bad for us? Can we learn to break these bad habits by being more curious about them? Psychiatrist Judson Brewer researches mindfulness techniques for a living — specifically, techniques that help us quell our cravings. One of his studies, for instance, found that mindfulness training was twice as good as gold standard therapy at helping people quit smoking.

In this TED talk, Brewer teaches us what happens in our brains when we develop these bad habits, and how teaching yourself to be mindful can help you target the core mechanisms to help us step out of our unhealthy patterns and addictive behaviors.

2) Matt Cutts: “Try Something New For 30 Days”

Length: 3 min. 27 sec.

Serving as the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts tends to be best known for the work he and other engineers have done on Google’s search algorithm. But a few years ago, he felt like he was stuck in a “rut.” So he took the simple advice of the American philosopher Morgan Spurlock: Try something new for 30 days.

In this short, lighthearted TED talk, Cutts talks about what he learned from his 30-day challenge and encourages the rest of us to give it a shot.

3) Emily Balcetis: “Why Some People Find Exercise Harder Than Others”

Length: 14 min. 8 sec.

Why is it that some people struggle so much more than others to fit exercise into their routine? Through their research, social psychologist Emily Balcetis and her team found that our motivation levels and our goals can have profound affects on our vision — the way we literally see the world.

In this TED talk, Balcetis walks us through her research on health and fitness. She finds, for example, that people who are highly motivated to exercise literally see physical distance — say, the distance between them and a finish line — as shorter than people who aren’t motivated to exercise. Then, she talks about strategies for changing these perceptions of distance, which can ultimately make exercise and fitness goals appear easier and more attainable.

4) David Buettner: “How to Live to Be 100”

Length: 19 min. 39 sec.

Ever heard of “Blue Zones”? They’re communities around the world — from the island of Sardinia to the Okinawa archipelago, 800 miles south of Tokyo — in which the elders live to record-setting ages. David Buettner is a world explorer and writer for National Geographic, and he studies the world’s longest-lived peoples. His goal? To find the optimal lifestyle of longevity, so he and his team can uncover the universal formula for longevity.

In his TED talk, Buettner talks about his quest to find the lifestyle formula for long life and health. Then, he shares the nine common diet and lifestyle habits he uncovered from those “Blue Zones” that kept these communities’ elders spry past the age of 100.

5) Dean Ornish: “Your Genes Are Not Your Fate”

Length: 3 min. 12 sec.

Think the genes you’re born with determine your health and fate for life? Turns out, the lifestyle choices we make — from the food we eat to how stressed we are — can have powerful affects on how our genes “express” themselves, how we age, and even how large or small our brains are.

In this short but empowering TED talk, Ornish shares new research that shows just how profoundly adopting healthy lifestyle habits can affect us at a genetic level. In some cases, people have even reversed heart disease by adopting healthier habits.

6) Nir Eyal: “What Makes Some Technology So Habit-Forming?”

Length: 13 min. 20 sec.

We’ve all seen how the products we use change our daily behavior — from your cell phone to your email, Netflix, and Twitter. How do the folks behind these products do it? As Nir Eyal explains, it’s because they’re “masters of habit.” Turns out that about 40% of what you do, day in and day out, is done purely out of habit. Companies leverage this fact by using a design pattern to build habit-forming products.

In his TED talk, Eyal explains how technology companies design these habit-forming products by creating an experience that connects the user’s problem with the company’s product — with enough frequency to form a habit. He explains that it isn’t all negative manipulation, and that it can (and should) be used for good.

7) Guy Winch: “Why We All Need to Practice Emotional First Aid”

Length: 17 min. 24 sec.

Why don’t we take our emotional health as seriously as we take our physical health? Think about it: We teach our children all about physical health — like hygiene and exercise — but many of us don’t teach them anything about psychological health. It’s as if we tend to value our bodies much more than we value our minds.

In this talk, Psychologist Guy Winch explains that emotional pain — guilt, loss, failure, loneliness — can impact our lives in dramatic ways, especially if we ignore them or attempt to deal with them in isolation. He makes the case for taking care of our emotional health, along with the scientifically proven techniques we can use to heal our psychological pain.

8) Shlomo Benartzi: “Saving for Tomorrow, Tomorrow”

What can behavioral economics teach us how and why we plan well (or not-so-well) for our financial futures? “Behavioral finance” is a way of understanding the money mistakes that people make. And we make a lot of them — especially when it comes to saving for retirement. Why? Because, while it’s easy to conceptualize saving money in the future, it’s harder to actually do it right now.

In this TED talk, Shlomo Benartzi talks about saving money for retirement, which is one of the biggest financial obstacles people have. Using behavioral economics as a lens, he talks about how we can turn this behavioral challenge into a behavioral solution to develop new programs that encourage saving for retirement.

9) Sandra Aamodt: “Why Dieting Doesn’t Usually Work”

In a culture where dieting is the norm, it’s hard to imagine that it may not work. But according to neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt’s research, not only does dieting not work, it’s actually more likely to do harm than good. People who eat intuitively — as in, they eat when they’re hungry and stop when they’re full — are less likely to be overweight, while also spending less time thinking about food. Controlled eaters, on the other hand, are more vulnerable to overeating in response to different triggers.

In her talk, Aamodt explains the science behind the myth of dieting, and how getting into the habit of mindful eating — that is, learning to understand your body’s hunger and satiety signals instead of trying to control food and weight — can lead us to be healthier, happier, and probably thinner.

Which techniques for managing your habits did you find most helpful? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

It’s the beginning of the quarter. You just set your team’s new lead goals, and you’re starting to think about what steps you’re going to have to take to achieve them. 

While whipping up some compelling content and placing lead generation forms in all the right places sounds like a feasible strategy, rest assure that there’s more to be considered. 

Here’s the thing: Not all forms and pop-ups are created equal. In other words, factors like display type, trigger, timing, and device type can have a big impact on your ability to encourage your website visitors to sign up for anything.

To help shed some light on the current state of email list growth, our team at Privy took a look at six months worth of data, across 5,000 of our most active users. As a result, we were left with a ton of interesting email capture trends and takeaways. 

(Note: These results will certainly vary for different audiences, but the hope is that they provide you with a jumping off point for your own research.)

The Current State of Email List Growth: 5 Takeaways for Marketers

1) ‘Enter to Win’ campaigns offer the most incentive to join your email list.

Above all else, our data revealed that the type of content you employ carries the most significant impact on conversions. To better understand which types of content provide the most incentive for visitors to convert, we zoomed in on three different content categories:

• Sign-up campaigns: This is a simple “join our email list” form. In some cases, it may mention that the subscriber can expect great content, but it typically refrains from using a specific offer to incentivize conversion.
• Offer campaigns: Just like it sounds, an offer backed-campaign uses the promise of a specific piece of content or a promo code/coupon in exchange for conversion. Think: “Download this whitepaper.”
• ‘Enter to Win’ campaigns: This is more of a sweepstakes type giveaway, where at the end of the campaign schedule, a winner, or group of winners will randomly be selected.

According to our research, ‘enter to win’ forms offer the most incentive to join — converting at an average of 15%. While it’s likely that the success of this particular type of content can be tied back to our human desire to win something — anything — at a single stroke, there’s something larger that we can learn from this. If visitors are driven to “win,” that might mean that we could benefit from using language that positions our offer, whether it be a piece of content or a subscription, as something that will help people succeed — something that will help them get a leg up on the competition.

Remember: Depending on your brand and campaign intention, not all of these campaigns will make sense for you. Regardless, these are great benchmarks to use when comparing your own campaign results.

2) When it comes to display style, banners outperform bars and pop-ups.

Marketers love to A/B test campaign creative, yet for the most part the tests are restricted to a single display type. We looked across the three most popular form display types to examine which performs best. First let’s understand each display type:

• Pop-up: Also referred to as a lightbox, this display type often appears in the center of a website or “flies out” in the corner. 

• Bar: A full width bar that typically sits either on top of your site, or at the bottom.

• Banner: A more subtle interaction that sits at the top or bottom of a site, but starts in a “hidden” state until triggered, and then rolls into sight.

According to our results, the banner outperforms both the pop-up and email bar. While it’s easy for visitors to feel bombarded by a pop-up, or overlook an email bar, the banner display seems to strike a happy medium between the two. 

3) Tab CTAs delivered higher conversion rates than both time-based and exit-intent CTAs. 

There are a number of options to explore when determining how and when you want to present your visitors with a list growth CTA. To clarify, let’s take a look at a few different types of triggers:

• Timer: Time-based triggers allow you to specify when to display a list growth CTA, based on how long a visitor has been on your site. 
• Exit intent: This option tracks your visitor’s mouse movement to trigger a CTA when they appear to be leaving your website (moving their mouse towards the X). 
• Tabs: This trigger typically appears within your site’s layout — in the corner, along the bottom of the page, etc. — and prompts visitors to clickthrough to reveal a form. 

Based on our findings, tab triggers saw a 32.43% conversion rate, which was dramatically higher than the other types.

Why the noticeable difference? While time-based triggers and exit-intent campaigns have proved useful for many businesses, tab triggers require your visitors to proactively clickthrough to access a form. In other words, those who take action are typically more engaged — hence the higher conversion rate. 

(Note: Conversion rate is measured based on campaign views that resulted in signups by trigger type — not total site traffic.)

4) Device specific design and targeting can make a big difference.

For many businesses, the buyer’s journey starts on one device and ends on another. With this multi-device process in mind, it’s important that we’re planning our email list growth campaigns accordingly. 

As your might expect, our research revealed that desktop traffic converted better than mobile traffic. However, we also found that tablet users actually converted .10% better than desktop users. 

How can you use this information to inform your strategy? Above all else, make sure that your list growth campaign contains optimized conversion opportunities across all devices. While an image-heavy pop-up might perform well on desktop, it’s best to keep mobile interactions clean and simple. 

5) New visitors are more likely to convert than repeat visitors.

Like forms and pop-ups, not all traffic is created equal. In fact, we found that new visitors convert at 2.81%, compared to repeat visitors converting at 1.23%.

When crafting or tweaking your list growth campaigns, consider using audience attributes to determine whether or not they should see a particular campaign. For example, limit welcome offers to first time visitors, and target returning visitors with more advanced content.

By limiting the display based on how many times someone has visited your site, you’re ultimately creating a better, less frustrating user experience. 

Ready, Set, Grow

Like anything else in marketing, you need to start somewhere. Implement your first lead capture campaign, and start tracking conversion rates. You can always tweak your design, targeting, and content to turn up the dials later.

Remember: These findings reflect the behavior of our users. The best way to grow your email list is to use these findings to inform your own research and adjust your strategy accordingly. 

For even more on Privy’s findings, check out the comprehensive report here. 

A well-executed survey has the power to uncover insights that you can use to hone your strategy, shape your product, gauge customer satisfaction, and more. 

While it’s temping to share your findings right away, sometimes it’s better to pause and reflect. By taking time to find the story in your data, you might find a way to share your findings that is far more valuable than a bunch of jumbled stats and takeaways. 

One great way to present your data? By way of an infographic. Even if the data itself is complex and overwhelming, when you create an infographic, you’re forced to illustrate that information in a manageable, digestible visual that your audience can easily grasp. (Download our free infographic templates to get started.)

To walk you through the process, the folks at Venngage created the infographic below. They’ve outlined a ton of helpful design tips and tricks to keep you on the right track.

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