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Showing posts from October, 2019

Media training 101 for small businesses

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Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr...
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Robots Won't Take Your Job, But They've Probably Already Changed It

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One of my favorite short films of all time wasn't actually written by a human. It was written by a neural network named Benjamin, which was fed a lot of science fiction movies and then asked to write its own. Impressive, right? The thing is: the movie is terrible. The dialogue makes sense, if you read each line on its own. But together? Together it's just nonsensical—in the most entertaining way. That's great news for me, as a writer. Though outlets like the Washington Post have had some success with bot-driven sports journalism, I probably won't be automated out of a job any time soon. For other workers, though, it's a fair question: "Will robots take my job?" What counts as a robot? When we talk about robots taking people's jobs, what we're actually talking about is automation more broadly. Only in some cases (like a car assembly line) does this involve literal, physical robots. This type of automation is called mechanical automation, and ...
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Be Efficient, Not Productive

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I'm not here to make a semantic argument, really. But there's a difference between being productive and being efficient , and efficiency wins every time. Productivity measures how much you do or produce within a given timeframe. Efficiency, on the other hand, is about being productive with less effort . So if you answered 50 more customer support tickets this week because you worked through them as fast as possible, you were more productive. But if you answered 50 more tickets because you used a text expansion app to respond to commonly-asked questions, you were more productive and more efficient. So to be more productive in a way that won't burn you out in the long run, you have to figure out how to be more efficient. My Own Journey Toward Greater Efficiency Several months ago, I wrote a Twitter post complaining about the studies that are released every so often saying things like "bloggers spend an average of three hours writing a blog post." As someone w...
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How One Woman Launched Her Business On the Back of Automation

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"Because I don't have to do everything manually, I'm better able to serve more customers since the process is a lot quicker." Veronica Lieberman, Founder, Make It Hapin Knowing what you want isn't the same as achieving it. While working for a fashion subscription box, Veronica Lieberman saw how generic that model was—because these boxes have a fixed inventory, there isn't much room for individual styles to break through. At the same time in her personal life, Veronica tried bringing outfits she found on sites like Instagram and Pinterest to life. Shopping with intention and creating an aesthetic from scratch was no small feat, but it clicked. She created Make It Hapin to solve these problems, and in the process discovered a way of working that is as individual as the service her team provides for customers. Her market: Everyone who knew what they liked when it came to fashion, but didn't know how (or have the time) to recreate it themselves. Make It ...
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5 Creative Ways to Stand Out When Applying for a Job

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Recently, Basecamp posted five new job openings. For those five openings, they received more than 4,000 applications . Notably, more than 1,400 people applied for their Head of Marketing role, and more than 2,000 applied for two open Customer Support Representative positions. I followed Basecamp's hiring process with interest via Twitter updates from the company's founders, blog posts on Signal V. Noise , and podcast episodes on Rework . I was curious: what does a person have to do to get their resume noticed when it's one sheet of paper in a stack of thousands? Following Basecamp's story gave me some information, but I wanted more. So I did what writers love to do after asking themselves a question they can't answer: conducted some research, spoke with a few people, and compiled what I learned into this guide on how to stand out when applying for a job. 5 Creative Ways to Stand Out When Applying for a Job I've written before about the importance of using ke...
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Why Your Gmail Inbox Should Be Your To-Do List

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I've read so many articles listing the reasons why you shouldn't use your inbox as a to-do list . So when I pitched the topic for this post to my editor at Zapier—who inspired the idea with her post Why Google Sheets Should Be Your To-Do List —I expected her to turn it down. What she told me instead was encouraging: Zapier's CEO, Wade Foster, also uses his inbox as a to-do list. So it's not just a method that works for freelancers like me who get maybe 10 emails a day (on a busy email day). It also works for people like Wade, who I can only imagine receive exponentially more emails than I do. I've tested lots of to-do apps over the years, but nothing has outperformed my inbox. Here's how I make it work. Editor's note : When I reached out to Wade on Slack to hear more about how he uses Gmail as his to-do list, a bunch of other people chimed in saying that they do the same thing. Turns out it's more popular than you'd think. (I still think Google S...
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