Welcome to My Blog

All bloggers have a number of websites that they visit every single day. Aside from the obvious ones (like email and Twitter), your favorites might be anything from your blog’s publishing calendar, to your online to-do list, to all your favorite social media button generators.

Wouldn’t it be great if all of those helpful resources were just a click away?

That’s exactly what bookmarks are for. In your web browser, bookmarks are links to specific websites that show up as buttons at the top of your web browser — making it easy to visit your favorite websites.

How to bookmark websites will depend on the browser you’re using. But trust me, it’s easy. Here are links to instructions for how to add a bookmark for four popular web browsers:

• Chrome
• Safari
• Firefox
• Internet Explorer

Now, let’s get bookmarking. What are some of the best websites that all bloggers should add to their bookmark bar? Check out 30 of the HubSpot blogging team’s favorites below. (And be sure to share your own favorites in the comment section.)

30 Websites Every Blogger Should Bookmark

For Keeping Organized

1) Publishing Calendar

Figuring out when you should publish which blog posts is time-consuming enough, right? Bookmark your publishing calendar so it’s only a click away at any given time. You can use it to keep your topics and authors organized, track keyword and call-to-action usage, and make sure all your blog posts are written on time.

• If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can bookmark your HubSpot Calendar App.
• If you’re not a HubSpot customer, then you can create a publishing calendar using Google Calendar and bookmark that.

(Are you also responsible for running your company’s social media accounts? Then you might want to bookmark social media publishing calendar tools as well.)

2) Trello

Trello is a really simple collaboration platform you can use to brainstorm and organize your blog post and project ideas. Bookmark it so you can easily add new blog post ideas as you think of them, manage your own post-writing to-do list, and see what the rest of your team is working on. You can also use it to build an editorial and social media publishing calendar, prioritize different tasks, and organize notes.

3) Evernote

While you can install Evernote as an app on your computer and any device, you may also want to make the website a bookmark on your web browser. Even more specifically, you can make notes within your Evernote into separate bookmarks: one for your to-do list, one where you store useful snippets of HTML, one where you store inspiring articles or ebooks, and so on.

4) Waterfall Graphs

We use waterfall graphs to keep track of daily progress on our traffic and leads goals on the blog. If you’re a HubSpot customer, your marketing software has a built-in waterfall chart template that will generate these graphs for you — so you might want to bookmark that page in HubSpot. If you’re not a HubSpot customer, you can create a waterfall graph yourself in Google Spreadsheets and bookmark that.

For Data Analysis

5) Percent Change Calculator

I can’t even begin to tell you how useful this little calculator is when looking for and analyzing data. Ever want to know the percentage change of two values without having to remember the formula? Simply enter the two values into this calculator, and it’ll spit out the percentage change.

6) Atlas (by Quartz)

Atlas is Quartz’s slickly-designed command center for all its charts. There are all kinds of cool, useful data in there — everything from Prada’s share price over time to the highest CEO-to-worker pay ratios in the U.S. You can download, embed, or grab the data. It’s open source so you can create your own versions, too. One of the best ways to build credibility on your blog is to back up your claims with data and evidence, so bookmark resources like Atlas so you can easily search for and grab the data and charts you’re looking for.

7) Comprehensive List of Marketing Statistics

Whether you’re a blogger who writes about about marketing, or you just need statistics to back up your strategy in a team presentation, it’s tricky to find the original source of data within the rabbit hole of the internet. We’ve put together a massive list of marketing statistics that are up-to-date and categorized for easy reference.

For Blog Ideation

8) Quora

Quora’s question-and-answer platform features questions from real people in your audience — and what better way to appeal to your readers than by answering their questions? Quora also offers an upvoting feature that lets you see how many other users are interested in the answer to a question, which can help you prioritize your response blog posts.

9) Portent’s Content Idea Generator

When you drop a topic into this neat little tool’s search bar, it proposes eye-catching, humorous title and topic ideas for you to test out. It also provides reasoning for the proposed titles, and you can make it spit out a new title idea if you’re unsatisfied. It might not produce the perfect title for your blog post, but it will get your creative juices flowing if you’re wondering what format or style in which to write.

10) HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator

Our handy free tool produces a week’s worth of blog post title ideas when you submit three nouns or keywords you’re trying to write about. The tool is particularly helpful because you can generate ideas about specific angles by entering several search terms at once. I submitted “blogging,” “tools,” and “marketing,” and I got back these five interesting title proposals:

For Writing

11) Style Guide

When you’re blogging, posting on social media, and creating other types of marketing content regularly, it’s important to have a written style guide to ensure your writing style is consistent across different marketing channels. But it can take a long time to learn all the nuances of your brand’s style guide, so have it bookmarked for easy reference while you’re writing and editing. (And if you don’t have a style guide yet, learn how to create one here.)

12) Keyword Tools

Keyword research comes in handy when you’re brainstorming, writing, editing, and creating headlines for your blog posts. That said, keep your favorite keyword tool bookmarked. Here are a few of our favorites:

• HubSpot’s Keyword Tool (30-day trial)
• Google AdWords’ Keyword Planner
• Google Trends

Want to learn more about how to do keyword research for SEO? Check out this blog post.

13) WordCounter

Although there’s no “right answer” for how long a blog post should be, sometimes word count can come in handy. Bookmark WordCounter so you can quickly paste in your content to see how many words you’ve written.

14) Dictation.io

Let’s face it — if you’re a full-time blogger, you might get exhausted by writing sometimes. Don’t worry though, it happens to us too. When you need to take a break, try Dictation.io, a dictation tool that translates talk to text. This is a great way to keep the tone of your blog post conversational and to switch things up if you’re getting writer’s block.

For Editing

15) Pre-Publish Checklist

It can be pretty hard to remember every little thing you should check on a blog post before hitting “Publish.” That’s why we bookmarked this pre-publish checklist, which is a complete list of everything you should do when editing and proofreading your blog content. It covers everything from ensuring all your sources are properly attributed to double checking all your links work.

16) Hemingway App

Have you ever been in the middle of writing a blog post and realized your writing felt a little … convoluted? Bookmark the free Hemingway App for moments like these. All you have to do is paste your content into it, and it’ll assess your writing and identify opportunities to make it simpler. For example, it’ll point out instances of passive voice and hard-to-read sentences.

17) Tone Analyzer

In the same vein as analyzing readability, what about analyzing tone? Sometimes, you might be reading over a blog post and feel like it comes off as a little too negative or a little too excited. Tone Analyzer is a free tool that uses linguistic analysis to detect the tone of a piece — and then offers helpful tips on how to improve and strengthen the tone.

18) HTML Elements

If you edit a lot of blog posts, chances are you’ll be working with HTML on a regular basis. I like to keep this list of HTML elements handy so I can easily make changes to HTML when needed. From there, I can use CTRL + F to jump right to the HTML element I’m looking for.

19) HTML Score

Speaking of HTML, here’s another great HTML resource to bookmark. It’s a long list of special characters that HTML 4.0 processors should support, like the copyright symbol ©, currency symbols € ¥ ¢, and so on.

Image Credit: HTML Score

20) HTML Cleaner

Source codes can sometimes seem to take on a personality of their own and pull in crazy HTML snippets — especially if you’re copying and pasting from an external file, like Google Docs. If you find yourself having that problem regularly, bookmark a tool like HTML Cleaner so you can quickly remove any superfluous code from your content.

21) & 22) Grammarly & Correctica

Before you can officially say you’re done editing a blog post, you should run it through an editing tool like Grammarly or Correctica to triple-check there are no grammatical errors. (Bonus: Grammarly even checks for plagiarism.)

23) Headline Analyzer

You’ve written and edited your blog post. At this point, the only thing standing between your cursor and the “Publish” button is an eye-catching headline. Once you have a few ideas in mind, head to your bookmark bar and open up the Headline Analyzer, a free tool that scores your headline quality and rates its ability to drive social shares, traffic, and SEO value. It also shows you how it will appear in search results.

24) StockSnap.io

Once you’ve written your blog post, a great header image captures reader attention on social media. There are numerous stock photo websites featuring free photo downloads that you’re free to distribute, and we like StockSnap.io’s trending feature that shows you popular photo downloads — so you can steer clear of them to make your blog posts more unique than other web content.

25) Compressor.io

A photo compressor can help speed up the time it takes to load your web page and make your photos smaller for easy social media sharing. Drop your stock photo of choice into Compressor.io, and it will generate a new, compressed image for you to download and use in your blog post.

For Social Media

26) ClickToTweet

Creating a tweetable link is a lot easier than learning custom code. Bookmark ClickToTweet so you can create basic tweetable links to accompany cool quotes in your blog posts at a moment’s notice. (Learn how it works here.)

27) Pinterest’s “Pin It” Button Generator

Ever seen those “Pin it” buttons that let you pin an image to your Pinterest board? We use Pinterest’s “Pin it” button widget builder all the time to create those buttons for images we post on our blog. Bookmark that page so you can create and place these buttons next to images, infographics, and other visual content on your blog. (And scroll to the bottom of this blog post for instructions on how to build your own.)

28) Social Media Button Cheat Sheet

While we recommend bookmarking some of your favorite social media button widget builders (like the “Pin it” button builder above), you may want to go ahead and bookmark this cheat sheet as a handy reference. It has links to all the widget builders for share and follow buttons for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+. It also includes step-by-step instructions for how to create them and implement them on your website and blog.

29) BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo shares analytics about how many social media shares a URL has received, so when you’re getting ready to publish blog posts on social media, drop links into BuzzSumo to see which types of content perform the best. You can also glean insights about posts from your competitors or previous posts from your blog to see which are most shareable and clickable. Here’s an analysis of one of our blog posts about Facebook ads:

30) Embed Code Generator

Do you create original pieces of visual content (like infographics) and post them on your blog or website? Then you’ll want to provide embed codes alongside them so it’s easy for your readers to share them on their own blogs. (Plus, it’ll help you generate some inbound links because the embedded image will automatically link back to your website.) Bookmark the embed code generator so you can easily create these HTML snippets. (And read this post for instructions on how to use it.)

Here’s an example of what an embed code looks like (taken from this blog post):

Share This Image on Your Site

<p><strong>Please include attribution to Blog.HubSpot.com with this graphic.</strong><br /><br /><a href=’http://ift.tt/1CnPcwG’><img src=’http://ift.tt/1fsQP7g’ alt=’the productivity diet’ width=’540px’ border=’0′ /></a></p>

What are your favorite websites to bookmark that help you be a more efficient blogger? Share them with us in the comments.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

It is much more cost effective to keep a customer than it is to find a new one. In fact, according to a report by Adobe, returning customers account for up to 40% of a company’s revenue.

Trouble is, a 2016 small business survey revealed that while 72% of small businesses plan to allocate the majority of their marketing budget to customer acquisition, only 28% plan to allocate the majority to customer retention.

To help marketers refocus their retention plans — especially those in the ecommerce industry — I’ve put together six creative ways to keep your loyal customers coming back. Check them out below.

6 Little Ways to Reward Your Customers This Holiday Season

1) Offer a compelling discount.

By a compelling discount, I don’t simply mean “20% off your next order.” Instead, try a discount that will inspire your customer to continue shopping with you.

What does that look like? It depends. And there are a couple things to consider:

• Focus on the value your product or service provides customers, not just the price you discount it by. In other words, position yourself in a way where buying your product is a complete no-brainer.
• Choose your words carefully. According to research from Psychology Today, a “Get $ Off” promotion emphasizes achieving a gain, while the “Save $” wording emphasizes avoiding a loss — and customers recognize that difference.

For example, check out how T-Mobile positioned this holiday deal on the Samsung Gear S2:

2) Get personal.

Great customer service is about more than just solving your customer’s issue. Try going above and beyond by creating something awesome to remind your customers why they love your business.

For example, you might send out a personalized holiday card or thank you note to their home address. Even though we’re in a digital word, it means a lot to receive something handwritten, and capitalizing on the holiday spirit in this way can build a positive brand association.

Not only do the folks at Buffer engage their audience on social, but they also go out of their way to send handwritten cards, stickers, and t-shirts to their clients:

Wearing my @buffer t-shirt with pride. #bufferlove http://pic.twitter.com/bWpjalt2nW

— Jason Thompson (@nosaj_jason)
January 25, 2016

Their strategy works well because with every exchange, they are encouraging customers to become brand ambassadors.

3) Tap into referrals that reward.

Referrals are a great way to get customers to sell your products for you. It’s a simple evolution of word-of-mouth marketing, as customers usually refer friends or colleagues.

For example, when shopping with The Clymb, you are gently reminded to refer a friend in the website header:

Notice how it provides a clear call-to-action along with an incentive — $10 for your loyal customer and $10 for a future one — encouraging visitors to take action even before they start shopping.

4) Use premium packaging.

Anyone that’s spent any amount of time wresting with a roll of wrapping paper and tape dispenser knows the value of a pretty package. In fact, according to a 2015 Dotcom Distribution packaging study, 49% of online shoppers said that branded packaging made them more excited about receiving or opening an item, while 44% admitted that packaging reinforces that a product is worth its cost.

The lesson? First impressions make a huge difference in our fast-paced lives, so by using premium packaging you allow your product to stand out against others. Take Pad & Quill, for example. This tech accessories company packages its iPhone and iPad cases in paper with friendly messages printed on it. It even uses an authentic-looking Roman seal to give a more hand-wrapped feel.

5) Turn the small print into a feature.

Refund and exchange policies are often part of the small print on your website. During the holiday season, you have an opportunity to make them a feature. After all, these policies are in place to increase trust and promote sales, right? Make them known.

When buying gifts, customers prefer a return policy that ensures that if the recipient doesn’t like it, they can easily return it. If you can offer this, you have a better shot at increasing sales, while keeping your customers happy.

Nordstrom does a great job of displaying all of its holiday shopping, shipping, and return perks right on the homepage, giving potential and existing customers peace of mind during one of the more stressful times of the year:

6) Create a holiday-inspired video.

Why does everyone love and anticipate the John Lewis holiday advertisements year after year? Because they tell a story that evokes emotion.

Fortunately, you don’t need a million-dollar TV advertising budget to do this, just an idea for a great story. As video is becoming more and more popular, it’s key that you apply it to all areas of your marketing strategy.

Back in 2014, the Lowell Police Department went viral due to its “Christmas Surprise Traffic Stop” video. In the video, police officers asked the folks they pulled over for traffic violations questions about what they wanted for the holidays. Meanwhile, their behind-the-scenes crew quickly purchased the items and drove them to the scene. Watch the magic unfold below — trust us, it’s worth the four minutes:

The holiday season is a time of giving, so be creative with how you can implement goodwill into your marketing campaign.

Wrapping Up

Offering compelling discounts with creative call-to-actions will inspire your customers to buy, but great customer service is why they return.

Remember to focus on the value that you are bringing your customer, not just how low you can get your prices.

How are you creating the holiday cheer with your marketing this year? Share your ideas with us in the comments below.

Hiring the wrong person costs your agency more than you might think.

According to Jörgen Sundberg, founder of Undercover Recruiter, a bad hire can end up costing your business around $840,000. That’s not a number to take lightly.

Sundberg’s team based their calculations on the cost of a second-level manager who makes $62,000 a year and is terminated after two and a half years. They considered the cost of hiring, onboarding, and retaining the employee, as well as the overall revenue loss associated with mistakes, failures, and missed business opportunities caused during the employee’s doomed tenure.

If you work at a small agency, losing that amount of money over a single bad hire can cause unthinkable damage to your bottom line. There’s simply no room for hiring mistakes.

To ensure your next hiring decision isn’t a major pitfall for your business, we’ve compiled a list of common reasons behind poor hiring choices. Avoid these at all costs to make sure your next new hire succeeds. 

4 Common Mistakes That Lead to Bad Hires

1) You fall victim to “The halo effect.”

Imagine you’re a hiring manager conducting interviews for an account manager position. After a long day of mediocre and disappointing candidates, your next interviewee turns out to be eloquent, positive, and friendly — a welcome combination of traits that impress you immediately. On top of his enjoyable presence, he has a pretty solid resume. You hire him right away.

A few months after he’s been onboarded, you hear word from his manager that his performance has been disappointing so far, and he shows no signs of improvement. So what went wrong? How could the candidate who impressed you so much in the interview turn out to be a total dud?

This is a perfect example of the halo effect: a type of cognitive bias that occurs when we overlook obvious faults when someone impresses us in one particular area. In this case, you were impressed by the candidate’s sociable demeanor, and assumed he’d be equally impressive in other areas. His resume might not have been stellar, but since you were already sold on his sociability, you didn’t even notice you were overlooking potential issues.

Beating the halo effect starts with being aware of its impact, and developing a straightforward hiring system to offset its effect. Melvin Sorcher and James Brant — partners with Sorcher Associates, a management consulting firm — recommend putting an evaluation process in place which requires candidates to be assessed by a group of people from different levels and areas of the company.

“The process enables the group to probe a wide range of leadership criteria and obtain balanced and complete information,” Sorcher and Brant wrote in Harvard Business Review. When a candidate is reviewed by a wide range of people, it exposes them to varying sets of opinions and biases, minimizing the potential impact the halo effect can have on the hiring decision.

2) You don’t know what the position really requires.

Most job requirements come in list format: a neat index of basic skills, recommended experience, and personal traits that somehow combine to describe the ideal person for the job.

Unfortunately, succeeding in most roles requires more than a laundry list of vague qualities — particularly in the fast-paced, ever-evolving agency landscape. Hiring managers seeking candidates for a new position should set aside time before the interviews to dig a little deeper and discover “the pivot” — the elusive set of qualities that tips the scale towards one candidate over another.

“The pivot” is a term coined by Ram Charan, a business advisor and author of Boards That Lead. As Charan describes it, the pivot is “a strand of two or three capabilities that are tightly interwoven and required for the new leader to succeed.” In other words, the pivot is what separates someone who will be an average performer in the role from someone who will truly flourish and exceed your biggest expectations.

For example, when hiring a new business development manager, the pivot might be a background in economics, an adaptive nature, and a unique ability to remain calm and collected in stressful situations.

“Directors who choose the right CEOs do a lot of work before arriving at the pivot,” Charan writes. “They take the time to fully understand the company’s current challenges and how the external context is changing. They read analyst reports, talk to insiders, and consult outside experts to expand their thinking.”

Although Charan uses “the pivot” as a way to help companies hire CEOs and other major leadership positions, it’s useful for all hiring managers to think about what specific abilities really put a candidate over the edge.

3) You focus too heavily on technical skills and not enough on intangibles.

Technical skills are important — don’t get me wrong — but they hardly ever make up for larger issues with an employee’s disposition, attitude, and work ethic. Hiring an employee primarily on the merit of their technical skills could cause you to overlook other major red flags — and might lead to a wasted investment in an unfit employee.

According to a study conducted by Leadership IQ — a leadership training and development company — new employees rarely fail due to issues with their job competence or technical skills. In fact, of the new hires that were terminated within 18 months of being hired, only 11% failed due to technical shortcomings.

So what were the top reasons new hires didn’t succeed in their new roles? Issues taking feedback, inadequate emotional intelligence, and a lack of motivation caused more employees to fail than gaps in technical job competency.

Check out the full breakdown of the survey below:

Image Credit: Leadership IQ

“The typical job interview process fixates on ensuring that new hires are technically competent,” explained Mark Murphy, CEO of Leadership IQ, on their company blog. “But coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation and temperament are much more predictive of a new hire’s success or failure. Do technical skills really matter if the employee isn’t open to improving, alienates their coworkers, lacks emotional intelligence and has the wrong personality for the job?”

It’s easy to get blinded by an employee’s impressive technical skill set, but hiring managers need to look beyond the resume and make sure candidates have the right attitude, disposition, and mindset for the role as well.

4) You treat every open position like an emergency hire.

Sometimes it’s necessary to get someone hired and onboarded as quickly as possible for the overall stability of the agency — but most of the time, you can afford to take enough time with the hiring process to find someone who will bring the right energy to the role.

In periods of rapid growth, agencies often feel the need to acquire talent expeditiously, without much thought to the hiring framework or time line. With this attitude, it’s easy for unfit hires to slip through the cracks when they wouldn’t have otherwise been considered.

Linda Brenner, a coauthor of Talent Valuation and the CEO of Talent Growth Advisors, emphasizes the importance of prioritizing hiring for open roles according to long-term business needs.

“Start by identifying which roles are most essential to delivering on future growth commitments — not just to continuing your operations right now,” Brenner writes in Fast Company. “Finding and hiring top talent in those areas is most essential.”

Once you’ve identified which roles to prioritize, develop a hiring time line that allows your team adequate time to select ideal candidates. If you start hiring now for roles that will be essential in the coming months or years, you’ll be able to conduct a more thorough process that yields better candidates.

How does you agency approach hiring top talent? Let us know in the comments.