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How to Use Medium: A Beginner’s Guide to Writing, Publishing & Promoting on the Platform

Off-Site Content
August 8, 2021/by
How to Use Medium: A Beginner's Guide to Writing, Publishing & Promoting on the Platform What do the White House, Sports Illustrated, and my cousin Jimmy all have in common? They all publish content on Medium. For the White House, that content includes State of the Union addresses and policy announcements. Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, manages a sports news publication called The Cauldron. My cousin Jimmy? He publishes an ongoing series on advanced cat grooming techniques. And that, my friends, is Medium in microcosm. What is Medium? Medium is a social publishing platform that is open to all and home to a diverse array of stories, ideas, and perspectives. Anyone can be an individual contributor, and popular topics on Medium range from mental health to social media, and from world affairs and trending news to productivity hacks.  As Medium founder (and Blogger creator/Twitter co-founder) Ev Williams wrote when he first launched the platform in 2012: "Medium is not about who you are or whom you know, but about what you have to say." To help emphasize the importance of what it is you're saying, the overall design of Medium is minimalistic, featuring lots of white space and limited formatting options. Want to change the header typeface to Comic Sans? You can't. Medium won't allow for such atrocities of design. But that's just one of many little nuances that come with the territory for Medium users. In fact, if you're just getting started on the platform, there's a...
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25 Stunning Instagram Themes (& How to Borrow Them for Your Own Feed)

Instagram Marketing
August 8, 2021/by
25 Stunning Instagram Themes (& How to Borrow Them for Your Own Feed) Nowadays, Instagram is often someone's initial contact with a brand, and nearly half of its users shop on the platform each week. If it's the entryway for half of your potential sales, don't you want your profile to look clean and inviting? Taking the time to create an engaging Instagram feed aesthetic is one of the most effective ways to persuade someone to follow your business's Instagram account or peruse your posts. You only have one chance to make a good first impression — so it's critical that you put effort into your Instagram feed. Finding the perfect place to start is tough — where do you find inspiration? What color scheme should you use? How do you organize your posts so they look like a unit? We know you enjoy learning by example, so we've compiled the answers to all of these questions in a list of stunning Instagram themes. We hope these inspire your own feed's transformation. But beware, these feeds are so desirable, you'll have a hard time choosing just one. Tools to Create Your Own Instagram Theme Creating a theme on your own requires a keen eye for detail. When you’re editing several posts a week that follow the same theme, you’ll want to have a design tool handy to make that workflow easier. Pre-set filters, color palettes, and graphic elements are just a few of the features these tools use,...
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The 9 Best Free Portfolio Websites for Creating an Impressive Digital Portfolio

Design Tools
August 5, 2021/by
The 9 Best Free Portfolio Websites for Creating an Impressive Digital Portfolio Whether you're a UX designer, freelance writer, or photographer, an impressive online portfolio is critical for impressing potential clients, and landing future jobs. But crafting a good digital portfolio can feel like a daunting task, especially when you aren't even sure which website you should use to create one. Here, we've created a list of the nine best portfolio websites for designers, freelancers, and photographers, to ensure you're able to showcase your best work in any industry. What is an online portfolio? An online portfolio is a collection of your work that showcases your skills and abilities. A portfolio should include your past work experiences, qualifications and skills, degrees or certifications you’ve completed, any awards or accolades you’ve earned, as well as some examples of your work. Examples of your work might be photographs, writing samples, case studies, spreadsheets, or lesson plans, depending on your field. Best Free Portfolio Websites for Freelance Writers 1. Journo Portfolio Image Source On Journo Portfolio you can create a sleek, modern digital portfolio easily. The site offers nine distinct themes, and adding an article is as easy as pasting a URL and clicking add — the site takes care of incorporating the title, publication, date, content, and image. Features include the ability to integrate with Google Analytics or use Journo's built-in analytics tools to measure visitors. Additionally, your site is automatically mobile-ready. You can also blog straight from the...
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10 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs

Content Creation Resources
August 3, 2021/by
10 Content Curation Tools Every Marketer Needs "Curation" is one of those words that's always conveyed coolness to me. Take, for example, curating an art gallery, or curating music for a soundtrack. Cool, right? Content curation can be just as cool – and just as important. Where do you get started on content curation? In this blog post, you'll find an explanation of what it is, how it can serve your brand and a series of tools you can use at every experience level. What is content curation? Content curation consists of finding material relevant to your audience from a variety of sources and sharing it strategically through your communication channels. Say you’re a marketing agency. You could write a blog post with a roundup of top product demos and add some context on why you picked them. That list of demos would be curated by you based on what you believe your audience will find most valuable. So, now that we’ve answered, “What is curated content? ” Let’s get into the benefits of this approach. Benefits of Content Curation One of the biggest benefits of content curation is that it adds value to your audience. There’s so much information out there today and most consumers don’t have the time (or the desire) to sift through hours of content. That’s where you come in. You can figure out what matters most to them, find the content they care the most about and present it to them in a...
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Blog SEO: How to Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Content

Blog Optimization
July 31, 2021/by
Blog SEO: How to Search Engine Optimize Your Blog Content Search engine optimization, or SEO, is incredibly important for marketers. When you optimize your web pages — including your blog posts — you're making your website more visible to people who are using search engines (like Google) to find your product or service.But does your blog content really help your business organically rank on search engines? In this article, you’ll find the answer to this question and more. Get ready for an in-depth exploration into the world of blog SEO, the factors that affect it, and tips to start optimizing your blog site for the search engines. Although it's clear blog content does contribute to your SEO, Google's many algorithm updates can make publishing the right kind of blog content tricky if you don’t know where to start. Some blog ranking factors have stood the test of time while others are considered "old-school." Here are a few of the top-ranking factors that can, directly and indirectly, affect blog SEO. Pro tip: As a rule of thumb, take time to understand what each of these factors does, but don’t try to implement them all at once. They each serve a specific purpose and should be used to meet a specific SEO goal for your blog. Listen to HubSpot's Matt Barby and Victor Pan take on this topic in this podcast episode. Factors That Affect Blog SEO 1. Dwell Time Although dwell time is an indirect...
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Marketing Effectiveness: How to Measure It & Present to External Stakeholders

Marketing Strategy
July 31, 2021/by
Marketing Effectiveness: How to Measure It & Present to External Stakeholders You can apply marketing strategies all day, but if they aren't effective, those efforts don't matter in the long-term. Measuring marketing effectiveness is crucial to improving your go-to strategies over time. Are your methods hitting KPIs? Are they helping your clients reach short- and long-term milestones? Use each campaign to learn and grow. By measuring marketing effectiveness, you can better ensure high ROI or return on marketing investment, ROMI. Measuring Marketing Effectiveness How do you measure marketing effectiveness? Sure, you can look at traffic or sales metrics, but it goes further than that. Ultimately, the KPIs you choose to measure can vary by company and strategy. But there are some metrics to pay attention to when measuring marketing effectiveness. First, when you consider revenue, look into how much of the revenue is a direct result of the marketing efforts. This can help provide clear, high-level insight into how successful the marketing efforts are for the company. Next, consider pipeline ROI or pipeline growth. Do you continue to generate more and more new leads via your marketing efforts? If not, your marketing effectiveness might be falling flat. Conversion rates are also a strong KPI to review. Keep in mind that impressions, views and even clicks don't necessarily translate to a successful marketing strategy. If users are clicking but not following through with a purchase, why aren't they converting? Conversion rates can offer a better look at the success of...
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What Is an Enterprise Data Model? [+ Examples]

RevOps
July 31, 2021/by
What Is an Enterprise Data Model? Enterprise data modeling is nothing new. This tactic has been around for years, but it is still relevant to modern businesses today. It can feel like an abstract, complex concept at times, but it is an important part of data governance, which helps manage and secure a company's data assets. In today's world, data security is important, as is boosting productivity and efficiency with up-to-date applications and digital processes. Enterprise data modeling can help ensure company apps and data are standardized, secure and in-line with the business mission. What is an Enterprise Data Model? Simply put, an enterprise data model is a visual representation, or graph, of an enterprise business' data. It focuses on high-level, more abstract components as it tries to define and standardize an entire enterprise business' data. That means enterprise data modeling can be a massive task, but it will be important to help reduce duplicates, inaccuracies, and errors in a business' data. Why Do You Need an Enterprise Data Model? There are numerous reasons why you might need an enterprise data model. Let's dive into four, now.  1. Improve Data Quality Even small companies handle a lot of data on a daily basis. Over time, this data can quickly become irrelevant. Errors can slip in unnoticed, as can redundancies. The more issues in the data, the less accurate it becomes. When companies revisit data to inform decisions, data riddled with errors and redundancies can impact company sales and...
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