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In case you missed it, we now live in a mobile-dominant world. This year, Google reported that 52% of search traffic and almost half of shopping traffic comes from mobile devices, so a compatible web design is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. In April of 2015, “Mobilegeddon” transformed the marketing world as we know it, putting responsive and mobile websites at the forefront of a marketer’s mind.

And with Google’s mobile-friendly algorithm in place, you’d expect all sites to be compatible in this day and age. But that’s simply not the case. Nearly half of marketers don’t have their websites optimized for mobile, despite the increase in search traffic and the effect on rankings.

So what gives? Has the algorithm’s impact not been significant enough to warrant a redesign? Are businesses not getting customers from mobile?

Despite the upward trend in mobile usage, it’s important that we don’t discount desktop users. Time on site and number of pages viewed are three times greater on desktop than on mobile devices, and desktop is the preferred technology for reading news and watching videos.

These figures are certainly too significant to ignore, and it sheds an important light on mobile user behavior as well. Due to smaller screen sizes and often being on the go when using a mobile device, consumers are coming to a website with a clear plan of action. If the site they visit can’t give them the information they need quickly, they’ll go find one that can. This means that you have to provide them with what they’re looking for right off the bat; there’s no time to waste.

With that in mind, many designers are building websites with a mobile-first mentality, ensuring that pages aren’t bogged down with long load times, too many graphics, or content that requires a user to zoom in and out to read. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly yet, don’t panic. Redesigning a website to fit a responsive design, or creating a separate mobile site altogether, isn’t as complicated as you might think! There are plenty of builders out there that can do the job, likely the one your current site is built in.

Whether your business has fully adopted a mobile strategy or you’re still figuring out the best route to take, make sure you keep these principles of mobile web design in mind.

1) Make Menus Simple and Concise

On a mobile device or tablet, you can’t expect users to scroll through a large menu or click through to multiple sub-menus. There just isn’t enough space on the screen to process it all. It’s important that menus contain a high-level overview of the products and services you offer to allow visitors to narrow down what they’re looking for. From there, they can click to a specific category or utilize the search feature to filter their results further.

The ideal menu has no more than 5-6 items, giving users just enough information to guide their search. There should also be no more than two sub-menus within the main menu, if they are necessary at all. In terms of style, the “hamburger” menu () has been widely adopted, so you don’t need to say “Menu” for users to know where it’s located. Other companies have added their own twist to the traditional menu, like Carrabba’s.

On their mobile site, they have a simple dropdown below their logo, which unfolds five options. Since the restaurant menu and location finder are already located in the header, they don’t need a place in the list. They’ve effectively kept their menu simple and featured the most important elements of their website front and center.

When you’re coming to a restaurant’s website, you’re likely looking to do one of a few things: check out their menu, find a location, or order online. Carrabba’s site allows you to accomplish all of these things quickly and easily, without bogging you down in sub-menus full of appetizers, pasta dishes, and happy hour specials.

2) Keep Forms Short and Sweet

When it comes to completing contact forms on mobile, users are not interested in filling out field after field of information. For those situations, they’ll likely opt for a desktop or laptop. That’s why it’s even more important that you only ask for information that is absolutely necessary to accomplish the task.

If your contact form is to sign up for a newsletter, you shouldn’t ask the user for more than a name and email address. Even for payment forms, try to keep the number of form fields to a minimum. Consumers understand that more information is necessary to make a purchase, but it’s important that you’re sensitive of their time, especially if you receive a lot of mobile traffic.

In order to determine the ideal number of form fields, A/B test by changing or removing one field at a time to assess the impact on completion rates. For example, people are more likely to fill out a form if you don’t require their phone number, so try testing your form with and without that field or compare it as a required vs. optional field to see how it performs. Then compare these results to the actual ROI earned through each method to determine whether or not you should include it.

MasterCard is a great example of a company that utilizes contact forms while being thoughtful of a mobile user’s time. To reach their support team, the only required fields are first name, last name, email address, topic, and comments. This gives them just enough information to look up your account and direct your inquiry to the right department, without being too time-consuming or invasive.

They also give you the option to provide more information like phone number, type of card, and financial institution, so that if you do want to include any or all of these details, you can. But if not, you can still have your question or need addressed. Consumers are especially protective of financial information, so giving them this freedom not only caters to their mobile needs, but helps build trust.

3) Simplify Form Fields

In addition to form length, the types of questions you ask shouldn’t require too much input from users. It’s important that you utilize different field types in your form, such as dropdowns, checkboxes, and calendars. These are especially useful when typing in payment or shipping information, as well as booking travel.

You also want to provide as much clarity as possible in your form, making it obvious which pieces of information are required and which are optional. To make things easier for returning customers, utilize autofill to expedite the purchasing process, and offer guest checkout to new customers who don’t want to make an account.

It’s essential that companies in the travel industry take advantage of simple forms to aid potential customers in the search process. Expedia is a perfect example of this, featuring easy-to-see buttons and requiring very few fields to conduct a search.

When searching for a flight, if you click on the “From” or “To” buttons, they will suggest locations as you type a city or airport code so you don’t have to type in the whole thing. They also make the calendar feature much easier than some other sites, allowing you to see the calendar and click your departure and arrival dates on the same screen. 

4) Catch Your Visitor’s Eye with CTAs

Calls-to-action are an essential part of any web design, but they play an especially important role on mobile. Since, as opposed to their desktop counterparts, mobile users typically have more of an idea of what they’re looking for when they come to your site, make it as easy to find as possible with CTAs placed in the most valuablereal estate.

Ideally, they should be located above the fold, use contrasting colors or fonts to make them stand out (within reason, of course), and clearly state what the offer is for. The following steps should be laid out clearly so you don’t leave visitors wondering what they need to do next.

Papa John’s uses their homepage’s prime real estate to focus on a holiday promotion, which encourages visitors to pick up a gift for family or friends while they place an order online. The text is bold and stands out from the page, while still fitting with their color scheme and branding. And most importantly, you know what you’regetting if you click on the CTA. They don’t try to sugarcoat it with flowery language or fine print, so users can quickly get in, get out, and get their favorite pizza in a snap. 

5) Bring Users the Search Results They Want

Site search is especially important to mobile users that come with a specific plan of action in mind. They’re less likely to dabble with vague menus or scroll through page after page of products. That’s why it’s all the more important that your search results provide exactly what the visitor is looking for on the first page. Once a user completes a search, provide filter options so that they can sort the results as it best pertains to them (e.g. price, relevance, top sellers, etc.).

It’s also important to feature an image, price, and short description with each item so that the results pages aren’t bogged down with text and the user doesn’t have to click on several products to find the right one. The images should be clickable and expand within the same window to help visitors get a better view of the product without having to go all the way to its individual page. Then when they do find what they’re looking for, they can click on that particular item to learn more and purchase.

In a search for “Hoodies” on Under Armour’s website, you’re presented with several filtering options to narrow down the 371 results. You canselect by department, filter by price or size,or sort the options to see the highest rated or lowest priced products at the top.

This is an area where consumers prefer having more options so they can have a more direct search path and only spend time looking at items that are most relevant to them. The page provides you with ample information to help you proceed with your search, and is presented in a way that’s clean and not overwhelming to a mobile screen. 

6) Make It Easy to Contact You

With any ecommerce site, the ability to quickly contact a company is essential. If you have any questions or issues with an order, you want to make sure they can be answered or resolved in a timely manner. For mobile users, this means having a click-to-call feature prominently displayed on the website. This, along with a contact form or email address, will give visitors options so that they can contact you in the way that best fits their preferences and the urgency of their need.

It’s also helpful to have an FAQs page to give users the ability to seek answers to questions they have without requiring them to actually contact you. Most consumers would agree that if they can figure it out on their own, they would rather do so.

Another mobile-focused way to provide easy contact is by embedding a Google Map of your location onto your site. Allowing visitors to click on the map, zoom in and out, and search for directions from the Google Maps app will make sure that they have no trouble finding your brick-and-mortar location if you have one.

Online retailer Zappos understands the importance of being able to contact them quickly and easily to inquire about an order, returns, and promotions. That’s why they have a click-to-call customer service number displayed above the fold on the homepage. This way, customers that need immediate support can take one step to contact them directly without having to dig around the entire website to find the Contact Us page.

7) Design with Thumbs in Mind

By far the most common complaints users have about non mobile-friendly sites are that the buttons are too small to click on and text is hard to read. The foundation of responsive or mobile website design is that there is no need for zooming in and out to read content or click on a link. So when you’re designing your web pages, make sure that each button is large enough to be clicked on, and that they’re not spaced so close together that you might accidentally click on something you didn’t want to.

And don’t require visitors to pinch the screen to make text legible, just to have to zoom back out to click on another link or page. As a rule of thumb (no pun intended), the minimum tap area to accommodate a user’s thumbs should be 44px by 44px. It might be hard to adapt to every smartphone’s screen size, but it’s generally advised that you try to design your site with a few older models in mind, since older phones tend to have smaller screens. That way you can ensure that your content is easily visible across platforms.

The buttons on Southwest Airlines’ mobile site are easily clickable, and there’s no issue trying to read what the buttons have to say. Allowing them to take up (almost) the entire width of the screen makes it compatible to any user, and also provides them with a limited number of options to guide their search. You aren’t distracted by extra text or multiple CTAs so you can focus on why you came to the site in the first place: to search for a flight or manage current orders.

8) (Load) Time is Precious

As consumers, our patience is wearing thinner by the day. For mobile users, even more so. Since many are accessing your website on the go, it’s important that you don’t leave them waiting around for pages to load. Your site should be able to accommodate both WiFi and non-WiFi connections equally, ideally loading a page in less than four seconds.

Over half of mobile users expect a site to load in four seconds or less, and 80% are unhappy with the current browsing speed on smartphones. That’s a lot of potential customers bouncing from your website due to something that is almost entirely controllable (barring poor cell reception). Some goals to keep in mind for mobile web designers are to keep the entire site’s size under 1MB and use images and videos wisely. The more visual content you have, the slower your website will likely be.

For businesses in the news or publishing industries, they understand that consumers are looking to get the information they need quickly. The New York Times’ mobile site loads almost instantly, even without a WiFi connection. A lot of mobile users check their favorite news outlets when they only have a minute or two to spare, and just want to get caught up on the happenings of the day. The New York Times is able to deliver trending stories from a variety of categories, and they’re able to do so with a very swift load time.

9) Avoid Pop-Ups If You Can

In general, users aren’t huge fans of pop-up ads or surveys, let alone on a mobile device. Oftentimes, the box to close them out is so small that you have to zoom in to do so or you may accidentally click on an ad when you didn’t want to. Time is of the essence for mobile users, so using pop-ups simply gets in the way.

This is also an area where companies that feature publications or allow users to subscribe to content have to pay attention. It can be tempting to include a pop-up to encourage people to sign up for email alerts or a newsletter, but the reality is that most mobile users aren’t looking for that. If they want to sign up for something, they probably already know that they want to and will take the necessary steps on your website to find that form.

BuzzFeed’s site on both desktop and mobile features sponsored posts and ads, but they don’t use any pop-ups to try and get you to click through or sign up for one of their several newsletters (“Dog A Day” newsletter, anyone?).

In the screenshot below, you can see that their post “15 Tiny Ways to Take Yourself Less Seriously” is sponsored by Captain Morgan, but by clicking on the post you aren’t faced with an annoying pop-up. If you want to click on the hyperlink to Captain Morgan’s website, you can, but there’s no opting out necessary. BuzzFeed does the same with CTAs for its newsletters. They give users the ability to opt-in, but don’t force them to view content they don’t want to look at.

Does Your Web Design Fit the Mobile Mold?

With the prominence of mobile search and greater buyer intent on mobile devices, this is certainly a trend that you can’t afford to sit out on. Mobile’s influence on marketing and buyer behavior is on the rise, and there’s no sign of it slowing down. If you’ve decided to revamp your desktop site, you should prioritize compatibility across devices through responsive design or a separate mobile site. As marketers we must possess a mobile-first mentality, or risk having our business fall not only in search rankings, but in consumers’ minds.

In the world of marketing, there’s no shortage of new strategies designed to engage audiences and inspire purchases.

From scarcity marketing to viral marketing, there are a ton of different options for businesses to explore. But if there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that emotions rule our decision-making. 

Considering the relationship between our actions and emotions, it should come as no surprise that finding ways to incorporate joy into your marketing efforts can have a profound impact on the way people perceive your brand. It’s a concept called joy marketing, and it’s worked for a lot of big brands.

Want to learn more? Keep reading.

What’s Joy Marketing?

Joy marketing is a term used to describe campaigns that elicit a specific emotional response: joy. From sentimental adverts to inspiring quotes, this approach allows brands to connect with their audience on a deeper, more meaningful level. 

The concept of using joy marketing as a tool for boosting sales has quickly gained strength following the surfacing of research by psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky. Lyubomirsky’s research on behalf of ConAgra’s Reddi-wip found that 93% of Americans were on a quest to experience more joy in their lives.

What exactly does joy marketing look like? And how can you use it to boost business? We’ve got you covered with 7 noteworthy examples from brands like Coca-Cola and West Jet. 

7 Examples of Joy Marketing From Top Brands

1) McDonald’s: #Imlovinit24

Following their worst sales results in over a decade, McDonald’s re-launched their “I’m lovin’ it” campaign … with a twist. 

While the original campaign asked people to talk about their happiest moments in McDonald’s, the new campaign actually created memories. Taking shape over the course of one day, McDonald’s set out to bring “moments of joy” to 24 cities across the globe. 

As a result, people associated feelings of happiness with the McDonald’s brand, creating an emotional connection built on joy.

Joy marketing at its finest, perhaps? 

2) Johnnie Walker: Joy Will Take You Further 

Another high-profile brand to get in on the science of joy was the world’s top-selling Scotch whisky brand, Johnnie Walker. The brand called up psychologist Matt Killingsworth — who studies human happiness — to create a campaign that embraced the notion that the emotion of joy is key to progress.

Armed with a new tagline, “Joy Will Take You Further,” the brand has created a set of joy-centric adverts which will appear in over 50 countries and be seen by over 270 million people.

3) Coca-Cola: I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke

Although joy marketing is a relatively new term, the concept is long-standing. In fact, this feel-good, joyful sentiment can be seen as far back as 1971, when Coca-Cola released this iconic advert.

The man responsible for the campaign, advertising executive Bill Backer, was clear about what he was trying to achieve:

 “I began to see a bottle of Coca-Cola as more than a drink … [it was] a tiny bit of commonality between all peoples, a universally liked formula … I could see and hear a song that treated the whole world as if it were a person – a person the singer would like to help and get to know,” he explained.

Backer’s vision played out successfully and the ad went on to resonate with millions of people across the globe. Coca-Cola received over 100,000 letters praising the advert and thousands of requests for sheet music – spreading the joy certainly worked! 

4) Reddi-wip: Unleash the Joy

ConAgra’s award-winning “Unleash the Joy” campaign was the 2013 predecessor to 2015’s “Share the Joy.” Designed with joy in mind, the ads aim to position Reddi-wip as a brand that helps people create lasting moments. 

Launched in an effort to increase sales, the campaign not only resulted in higher monthly sales, but it ultimately helped the company exceed their goal by boosting sales by 3.1%.

5) West Jet: Christmas Miracle Campaign

One look at WestJet’s 2013 “Christmas Miracle” campaign – which sees the airline hand out personalized Christmas gifts to unsuspecting flyers – proves the worth of joy marketing instantly.

According to shortyawards.com, this ad was Canada’s most shared viral ad of 2013 and in the top five globally – the relatively unknown Canadian airline gained in excess of 40 million YouTube views of their advert and increased sales by 86% on the previous year. A very merry Christmas indeed.

To keep up with the tradition, West Jet released a 2015 variation of the campaign — “12,000 Mini Miracles” — in which they set out to perform 12,000 random acts of kindness in a 24-hour period.

6) John Lewis: Man on the Moon

John Lewis recently launched its eagerly anticipated Christmas ad for 2015 … and it’s pretty joyful.

After spotting an old, lonely man on the moon through her telescope, a young girl tries and fails to make contact with him. Eventually she manages to deliver him a present, just in time for Christmas, by attaching it to some helium balloons. When he receives the gift, the old man sheds a tear of (you guessed it) joy.

Within an hour of its launch the ad had generated over 16,000 mentions on Twitter and was well on track to smash the record set by the previous year’s #MontyThePenguin ad (97,257 mentions over the first 24 hours). Compare this with the 2013 #BearandHare campaign (just 6,826 mentions in the first 24 hours), and it’s easy to see just how beneficial adopting this marketing tactic has been for John Lewis.

7) Beringer: Better Beckons

The “Better Beckons” campaign by Beringer Vineyards was inspired by, and features, Russian Instagram sensations Murad and Nataly Osmann. The couple gained an Instagram following of over 3 million with carefully framed hand-holding shots of their world travels using the hashtag #FollowMeTo.

Beringer was quick to bottle their joy-inducing power by commissioning a photo series of their very own.

The result? Six simple images that scream love, joy, and adventure. One look at Beringer’s Instagram page and it’s clear to see the positive impact of the campaign on increasing interaction — on average, a typical post featuring the joyful couple generated significantly more likes than those without.

 

#followmeto Napa Valley with @NatalyOsmann for an afternoon picnic @beringervyds. #BetterBeckons

A photo posted by Murad Osmann (@muradosmann) on Oct 30, 2015 at 10:34am PDT

How to Create Your Own Joy Marketing Campaign

Want to give joy marketing a shot? Follow these four simple steps to creating your own winning campaign:

• Identify the joy. Identify the ways that joy is linked to your brand. Is your company ethos underpinned by a desire to create joy for both customers and staff? Does your product or service bring joy? Use this to underpin your entire campaign.
• Locate your audience. How can they be reached and communicated with? Some brands will exclusively use social media as a platform for their campaign while others branch out to television advertising, email marketing, or print media. Identify the right route for your business before creating your content.
• Plan and create your content. Would a documentary-style video best convey your message of joy? Will you opt for imagery? Animation? Look to the examples above when planning your content to stay inspired. 
• Monitor your campaign’s success. Use analytics, social media listening tools, and surveys to gauge responses to your joy marketing efforts, learning as you go. Remember to focus on your ultimate goal and set KPIs.

What examples of joy marketing have you seen? Share them with us in the comments section below.

When I first started editing pieces for HubSpot’s Marketing blog, I was really, really scared. 

I had spent the previous months as a full-time writer, soaking up as much feedback as I could to write the best pieces possible. Then, the tables were turned. Suddenly, I had to be the expert on what we should be publishing, how to fix incoming pieces, and how to give feedback to people who had decades more experience than I in marketing. 

I was terrified. 

Two years later, I realize that I was right to be scared. Editing is one of the hardest parts of creating quality content and scaling that across your organization. You’re in charge of establishing and maintaining The Quality Bar — an oft-lauded but squishy, intangible concept that no one can actually define for you. And you better do that while growing your audience, training new writers to meet The Quality Bar, and getting buy-in for your content across your organization. 

The good news is your fear goes away after a while. After editing hundreds of pieces, training two full-time writers, and making plenty of mistakes, I’ve uncovered a few tips that I’d recommend to any editor looking to up their game. And I want to share some of these hard-learned lessons with you, too. 

How to Be a Better Editor: 11 Tips From the Trenches

1) Question every fact, stat, name, and example.

As The Defender of The Quality Bar, your job is to be the ultimate devil’s advocate. You need to wonder whether Oscar Wilde really said that quote … or it’s just another platitude someone stamped his name on. You need to see whether that stat you’re using to back up the crux of your piece really means what the writer said it means … or whether the original study said something different entirely. You need to second-guess whether your main source’s name is spelled properly … or you need an extra ‘n’ at the end. 

The only way you’re going to uncover these mistakes is to question everything. So make it a habit.

2) Zoom in and zoom out to uncover adjacent ideas. 

Even the best editors get stuck when thinking of new ideas. You block off time to fill out your editorial calendar for the next month, and then … nothing. 

I’ve picked up a really handy trick that’ll help unlock lots of new ideas — I call it The Zoom In, Zoom Out Method. Here’s how it works: 

1. Think of one idea. Yes, just one. It doesn’t have to be good — it just has to be something concrete. I’ll use this as my idea for this example: “10 Tips for Writing Blog Posts Faster.”
2. Then, zoom in on your idea. Are there sub-sections of your idea that you could turn into a whole post? Can you narrow your topic to make it more appealing to certain audiences? If I want to zoom in on “10 Tips for Writing Blog Posts Faster,” I can uncover lots of other topics, such as “10 Tips for Writing Titles Faster” or “10 Tips for Writing List Posts Faster.” In each of those titles, I’m just taking my first topic … and making my world a little smaller. 
3. Then you go the opposite way — zoom out from your topic. In this step, you’re increasing the scope of your post and focusing less on the very small details. For example, when I zoom out on “10 Tips for Writing Blog Posts Faster,” I could uncover “10 Tips for Writing and Designing Content Faster,” or “The Science of Being More Efficient.” Both of these latter titles are related to the initial idea, but they’re broader in scope. 
4. You can continue this process over and over and over until you build out a huge backlog of ideas. 

So next time you think you can’t think of any new ideas, think again. Little tweaks can uncover a plethora of successful ideas.  

3) Recognize your own boredom. 

This advice is something I recently learned from an episode of the podcast Startup — but it’s probably one of the most important lessons I’ve learned in the past two years. In this episode, Alex Blumberg shares their entire process for creating some of the most compelling podcasts on the market today. 

His biggest tip when working with producers to edit episodes? Recognize when you’re getting bored — it’s your brain telling you that some serious editing needs to happen.

So when you’re assessing a piece, keep part of your mind on the task at hand and part of your mind on your own emotions. If you find yourself pulling up your Facebook feed for the tenth time to escape from reading the piece, stop.

Look inward. Why are you bored? Is it the topic? Is the way the argument is presented? Is it the way the piece is designed?

Then, think about ways to solve those problems. Add formatting? Rewrite the intro? Design a supporting visual? Rework the thesis? Abandon the piece altogether? 

Being more attuned to your emotions — especially once you’ve had a few months of editing under your belt — will help you better assess pieces and give feedback. 

4) If you’re not sure what’s wrong with a piece, zoom into the details, and then zoom out to uncover larger themes.

I know what you’re thinking. What if you’re bored and you can’t figure out what the heck is wrong with the piece? I’ve got a solution for you, my friends. 

When this happens to me, I like to dive into the details of the feedback. I’ll write up an email with suggestions like, “In this paragraph, add a sentence about XYZ to strengthen your point,” or “Can you add an image here?” But before I hit send, I take a second to zoom out of my feedback: Can I pull out any patterns within the specifics to speak to higher-level problems? 

This reflection process allows me to get to the crux of the piece’s problem, even when there are lots of competing issues. 

5) Know when your feedback should be super detailed — and when it shouldn’t. 

It can be tempting to send writers feedback that includes line-by-line changes. In fact, it’s absolutely needed when a writer is brand new to your team and is learning the ropes about your brand’s voice, style, and Quality Bar. 

But once they’ve progressed beyond the point where you need to tell them that yes, your style guide dictates “real-time” when used as an adjective and “real time” when it’s a noun, you need to change strategies. You want the writer to be able to uncover weak parts of their pieces without you having to spoon-feed them every time. 

In that stage, your feedback should become less detailed. It should still be specific — i.e. “You tend to use passive voice,” not “Your writing sounds weak.” — but you shouldn’t be pointing out line-by-line changes. When you’re too specific with your feedback after your writers have achieved a certain level of expertise, they’ll by psyched that you spent time pointing out mistakes … but may not generalize those mistakes to other situations. 

So don’t shy away from detailed feedback, but realize that specific, less-detailed feedback can also be useful when training writers. 

6) Decide which mistakes are non-negotiable — and never make them.  

When you’re the one upholding The Quality Bar, it can be easy to obsess over every. single. detail. to make sure you’re not making any mistakes. 

The truth is, that obsession can be unhealthy. It can make you reread a post over and over and over, hoping and praying you haven’t missed anything. It can wake you up at 5:45 in the morning wondering if you actually misspelled the title of your morning’s blog post. It can paralyze you, make you afraid to hit publish.

And even when you’ve done everything you can possibly do, you’ll still have a commenter point out that you misspelled something in your introduction. 

Your goal shouldn’t be to avoid making any mistake ever — it should be to never make mistakes that matter. 

So that its/it’s mix-up in your sixth section? That’s an easily fixable mistake that doesn’t really have an impact on your overall piece’s success. 

The typo in your title, however? That’s a non-negotiable mistake. 

Figure out what mistakes you absolutely can’t make, and make sure every piece you edit and approve doesn’t make any of them. This will save you from many sleepless nights while also preserving your Quality Bar.  

7) Keep a list of mistakes you make, and then “Find and Replace” them before publishing a piece.

Confession: One of my recent pet peeves when editing is using plural pronouns when referencing groups or companies … but it’s also one of the things I’m most guilty of when writing. 

Knowing that, I make sure to do a “Find and Replace” before I publish a piece to make sure I have all of my pronouns straight. 

Identify what writing and editing weaknesses you have, and then search for them in each post before you schedule it. It’s as simple as hitting Control + F on a PC or Command + F on a Mac, typing in your problem word or phrase, letting your browser take you to the word or phrase in your piece, and then swapping it out with the right thing. 

This simple tip will help you polish pieces in just a few minutes. 

8) “Find and Replace” HTML snippets to quickly clean up a post’s formatting. 

This same tip works when you’re trying to clean up a post’s formatting. Instead of opening up your source code and manually stripping out problem areas, you can simply Find the problem code and leave the Replace box blank. Once you hit “All,” the problem code snippets will disappear completely. You can use this trick to swap out tags, too. 

This tip really is about using technology to find shortcuts to time-consuming problems. It’ll free up your time to focus on more important matters. 

9) Lean on Google and Word to prevent spelling and grammatical errors.  

Even if you’re the most knowledgeable editor, it can be easy to forget if you need a comma in that sentence or if that word should be capitalized or not. When in doubt, don’t brush past your concerns — Google them. You will find an answer from folks who are way more experienced with writing and editing than you are (and learn more in the process). 

I also recommend using Word to help you do a final spell and grammar check. While Word won’t catch all of your mistakes, it can help you catch any last glaring errors. 

So before you schedule a post, make sure to copy all of your text and paste it in a Word document. And give the document a few extra seconds to process your piece once you’ve pasted it in there — Word takes a little longer to “read” your piece and uncover any mistakes. You’ll know it’s done when you see a little red X at the bottom of your document window:

10) Realize each piece shouldn’t sound like you wrote it. 

There is such a thing as overediting. 

If every piece you edit ends up sounding like you wrote it, you’ve overedited it. 

Your job, as an editor, is to preserve the voice of your writer while making sure they are meeting your Quality Bar. So if they crack a joke that’s not funny, you have a right to take it out. But if the joke is cute and you’re just reworking it to sound like something you’d say, you’re taking it too far. 

After you edit each section of a piece, make sure you look back and ask yourself the toughest questions of all: Did I really make that section better? Am I just saying what they said, but in my own voice? If so, you should go back and work their voice back in. Re-integrate some phrases they use. Keep that pun. Let one of their interesting word choices stand. 

11) Make peace with not knowing everything. 

Editing is filled with gray areas — gray areas you are not always going to know how to deal with.

Is that title really that much better than this title? Is that metaphor really the best way to explain a complex issue? Is this section really going to offend someone?

Even though you are The Defender of The Quality Bar, you don’t, can’t, and won’t know everything. Question everything — including yourself — and ask people for help when you need it.

Challenging your own knowledge and assumptions doesn’t mean you’re bad at your job. It just means you’re experienced enough to know you don’t know everything.

And when you get to this point, I promise you one thing: You won’t be scared of editing anymore. 

What are your favorite editing tips? Share them in the comments section below.

If you’ve ever taken a Lyft, you know the ride’s been a little different than those with other ride-sharing apps.

Your car is adorned with a bright pink mustache. You sit right up front next to the driver. You may even give them a fist bump.

These quirks help differentiate Lyft as the friendly, human option in an uber-competitive industry … and it seems to be working.

The startup is one of the fastest-growing ride-sharing apps on the market.

Want to hear how Lyft’s been able to grow so fast?

Listen to this week’s episode of The Growth Show to hear from Lyft CMO Kira Wampler about surviving (and thriving) in an insanely competitive industry. Some episode highlights include:

• How Lyft thinks about the balance of innovation and competition 
• Why Wampler loves to hire player-coaches
• How Lyft has scaled non-scalable parts of its culture
• How Wampler explains marketing to her kids

Click the play button below to listen to this episode in your browser, or subscribe on iTunes to download episodes directly to your phone:

Check out the latest recaps of The Growth Show episodes by clicking here.