Said with a little more panache, “Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.” Most people mistakenly think creativity rests solely on eureka moments, but professionals know systems are what help you consistently bring abstract ideas into the tangible world.

Principles for thinking creatively

We’re better off starting with a set of principles for creative thinking before getting into habits and tactics. These aren’t strict rules, but instead recurring patterns in the creative process that are worth noticing.

Why? Because whenever you’re stuck, applying one of your principles is like wearing a lens: it helps you see the problem in a specific and familiar way, which can help speed up the path to insight.

1. Explore before you refine

Traditionally this is described as divergent and convergent thinking, but I prefer Bill Buxton’s labels of exploring and refining; the two distinct phases necessary to first deeply understand the problem space, and then iterate on your best solutions.

The exploration phase is about width, or giving yourself permission to generate lots of rough ideas. To do this successfully, you have to inhibit precision to a degree. Time spent trying to generate high-fidelity ideas, or complete, polished thoughts, is counterproductive because you’re attempting to raise a skyscraper on a foundation of assumptions.

The refinement phase is emotionally easier to handle. We’re more confident there because the anxious feeling of working on the wrong thing has subsided, at least a little. But exploring is ultimately what keeps our batting average where it needs to be. If you want to consistently produce valuable work, don’t assume your first idea is your best one.

And when your inner perfectionist is calling, remember the 10-90 rule: the last 10% of the work usually results in 90% of the polish. There’s time to do things right—but only after you’ve confirmed you’re doing the right things.

2. Make your work repeatable, but not repetitive

Building consistent into your work doesn’t require bland, repetitive output. Do yourself a favor and stop creating from scratch every time.

There’s a saying in the music industry that’s always resonated with me: “You have a lifetime to write your first album and a year to write your second.”

The idea being that if all your wildest dreams come true and you’re launched into the limelight, you now have to follow up the debut without the option to toil away in obscurity. Momentum is everything, and once you have it you don’t want to lose it.

Related to this, many otherwise impressive projects fizzle out due to the pressures of success. When something gets traction, you feel an obligation to deliver—the freedom of low expectations and feelings of play are diminished, if not gone entirely. Many people aren’t prepared for that, and they often try to up the ante with everything they release without a sustainable way to do so. You know what’s next: burnout.

This is a hard problem without a “cure-all” solution. But, most people would do well to remember that careers, side projects, and business ventures built on creativity need ways to ensure their output stays repeatable, but never becomes repetitive. Consistent habits put you where good ideas can find you.

3. Focus your creativity on unsolved problems

Figuring out how to do things in a fundamentally new way is one of the most rewarding feelings in any field. But, not everything is worth doing differently.

As Marty Neumeier writes in The Brand Gap, creative people “describe how [the world] could be. Their thinking is often so fresh that they zag even when they should zig.” That’s a nice self-congratulatory pat on the back, but the message rings true. Some work is simply the cost of entry; the undifferentiated heavy lifting. With these tasks, quality execution is required to even compete, but there’s a lot less room to stand out or find a competitive edge. (As an example, think of something that would be absurd to see as a selling point on the back of the box.)

We’d be better off admitting how beneficial it is to stand on the shoulders of giants and should, as Paul Graham writes, “Travel widely, in both time and space.” Comparison can unearth time-tested solutions that solve age-old problems; it can even lead to old solutions solving new problems. Old books can teach new tricks.

The point isn’t to limit yourself or to default to borrowed ideas, the point is you should conserve your time, energy, attention, and creativity for opportunities with high upsides and room to differentiate. The pursuit of originality where it isn’t needed is one of the leading causes of wasted effort.

4. Create alone, move forward together

Collaboration comes with administrative overhead and a bias toward ideas that the entire group agrees with. Be careful: creativity is about courage, not consensus.

Collaboration comes with administrative overhead and a bias toward ideas that the entire group agrees with. Be careful: creativity is about courage, not consensus.

Great work is rarely produced by committee. No interpretation has crystallized this idea for me quite like this quote from Gilbert K. Chesterton:

I’ve searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees.

Creative people often learn the hard way that tools like in-person brainstorms and meetings are useful for outlining what can be done, but they’re awful for putting paint on the canvas. While groups can surface ideas the individual may have missed, they frequently favor a blend of what’s already been suggested—otherwise known as consensus.

If a large group converges on the same idea, how can it possibly be daring, or even original? People overwhelmingly prefer the familiar; we all come bundled with that bias. And when working together, it’s easier to defend the well-established over championing the new and unproven. As Isaac Asimov wrote, “For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.” You need time alone to be foolish.

That’s not to say group feedback isn’t valuable, however. As we’ll explore in the next section, feedback matters. Groups are often far more competent at piecing things together than they are at creating the individual pieces. So use group settings to chart the course, get visceral reactions along the way, and push past the finish line. Create alone, then decide and move forward together.

5. Get honest feedback early and often

One of my college professors, who was also a non-fiction author, had a hilarious way of describing his book writing process: “Start with boundless optimism, followed by unceasing paranoia.”

The lesson within the humor is that a blank slate makes anything possible, so new and nascent ideas must be safeguarded so they aren’t squashed too early. But in the later stages of any project, feedback and critique are crucial as you look for what is wrong, or could eventually go wrong. The problem, of course, is feedback can be hard to receive. When work hasn’t seen the light of day, you can fantasize however you like about its quality. Feedback brings you back to reality.

Receiving feedback is like any other skill, though, and there are ways to get better at it. The first step is reframing what it is entirely: “Feedback is a gift” is a phrase we often use in my business, and it rings true.

There are exceptions, of course. Trolling and brutish criticism aren’t constructive and deserve to be ignored. Feedback is also a two-way street: a culture of trust and assumed positive intent are essential for maintaining the high standards and healthy tension needed for collaboration. That’s exactly where you want to be; a little friction is the only way to make sparks fly.

Receiving feedback gracefully is still a hard thing to do, and its importance is somewhat of a truism. But, that doesn’t make the idea any less important—great creative work is contingent on a willingness to be judged.

6. Follow fixed deadlines with a flexible scope

Work expands to fill the time allotted. Fight back by prioritizing your time and following fixed deadlines.

Disappointment is always a matter of expectations. The wider the gap between “what I expected” and “what I received,” the more disappointment we feel.

If the output you’re most known for—let’s call it your signature work—is high-effort, high-impact, following a schedule that dictates “one of these every week” could lead to the wrong kind of compromise. That’s why I prefer Jason Fried’s approach of setting a fixed deadline with a flexible scope. Deadlines that remain firm create a forcing function where the scope has to adjust instead.

What I always like to add is that an end user’s expectations can be adjusted based on how you package things. Audiences find satisfaction in different ways for different formats, and quality comes in many shapes and sizes. The level of polish you apply is a strategic choice and should fit the scope of the product.

There’s a reason why everyone claims to love documentaries but spends most of their TV time rewatching Seinfeld. And so well-made editorial products deploy shorter—but still high-quality—columns and formats to break up the monotony and add variety. The crossword puzzle helps sell the newspaper, too.

As obvious as this idea may seem, I know too many talented people who have created unnecessary stress for themselves by tying their identity to the single format or style they initially became known for. If your signature work demands a certain amount of time, find another outlet with a smaller scope and let your audience know that it is indeed different. That way, you can commit to the most important part of the creative process: shipping things consistently.

The post Creative Thinking: 6 Ways to Discover New Ideas (That Don’t Rely on Eureka Moments) appeared first on Sparring Mind.

The growth in the number of YouTube channels with over 1M subscribers.

There are approximately 41,900 YouTube channels with over 1 million subscribers. This estimate is based on publicly available data.

Thanks to Jacob Bates who first shared this approach on his blog.

The post How Many YouTube Channels Have Over 1 Million Subscribers? Data Reveals the Answer. appeared first on Sparring Mind.

That may seem strange to say: do big faceless corporations actually run blogs? They definitely do now. However, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any room left for new players.

In fact, my own journey as an amateur blogger reveals a lot about why blogging is still valuable today. There are many reasons to blog, and many paths to success. If you’re interested in starting your blogging journey, keep reading.

My blogging journey started from zero

I wrote my first blog post in July 2008. It was hosted on some random WordPress website and I don’t even remember the topic, but I do remember it being pretty bad.

Blogging felt like it was reaching peak frenzy back then. According to Google Trends, I caught the wave right as it really started rising in 2010 and 2011. Mashable was cutting edge and landing on Digg could make or break your blog—what a time to be alive.

Google Trends data for “how to start a blog” shows that interest in writing for one’s own blog started to peak in early 2010.

Teasing, of course, but there was a nice communal feel to blogging back in that era. And it was thanks to that community that I decided to stick with it, learn more, and start taking my blog seriously.

My first self-hosted blog went live in 2010. It also, unfortunately, went kaput, but this site you’re reading now, gregoryciotti.com, became my permanent home in 2011. And I’ve been blogging here ever since.

The writing I published on my blog has helped me in a number of ways. First, it introduced me to the founder of a startup that would eventually hire me to lead content and organic growth. Then, it introduced me to my future manager at Shopify, where I’d spend five years learning from the best growth practitioners in the world. And finally, we’re here over a decade in the future, and I’m a self-employed entrepreneur who earns a living through my blogs/websites and my real estate investments.

I’ve started probably 30 blogs over the years with only 4 having any kind of shelf-life. But the blogs that were successful were really successful: one of them even earns more in a year than my annual salary at Shopify. I’ve tested all sorts of niches and ideas but ultimately found that I enjoy blogging the most when I’m helping a professional audience solve problems in their career. So all of my current blogs focus on manager-level readers in disciplines like support, HR, etc.

You can check out one such blog at SupportZest.com, that’s the blog I use for many of my public case studies. The others I don’t share publicly since it could invite excess competition—and if you read my site, hopefully, you are or eventually become a successful blogger! But can you please compete with someone else?

But that’s more than enough about me. Let’s talk about starting your journey with amateur blogging, and how you might even go pro.

Beginners step-by-step guide to amateur blogging

The nice thing about starting a blog today is that technology has come a very long way. Unlike when I got started, you shouldn’t have to touch a single line of code. Instead, you can be up and running in a few minutes and manage your blog almost entirely from your WordPress dashboard.

WordPress proper, which is found at WordPress.org, is open-source software that’s free to use, so the cost will be what it takes to buy a domain ($10 per year) and host your blog ($3-12 per year). With all that in mind, let’s explore the simple steps it takes to set up your new blog.

1. Buy a domain name

The easiest and best place to buy a domain name is Namecheap. I buy all of my domains from their service; they have great prices for unregistered domains and even a few premium domain name options.

Your domain name should either be your brand, or your name. Branded domains are a much better option if you plan on growing a blogging business, whereas a personal domain only really fits if you plan on writing about a certain subject forever.

A good brand name doesn’t need to be complicated: it’s simple, easy to remember, and speaks to what you blog about. “Unemployable” is a great name for an entrepreneurship blog and “Ballpoint” is great for a writing blog because those are two recognizable words that hint at the topic they cover. And sure, “GregsTennisBlog.com” could grow pretty big, too, but I’m sure you’re more creative than that.

Data on domain names shows that .com, .co, and .org—also known as the top-level domains—were the easiest to recall and seen as the most trustworthy. Personally, I encourage bloggers to focus on getting a .com and just adding words before or after their main brand. For example, if your brand name is “Dolo” and your blog is about marketing, it would be better to buy DoloMarketing.com than Dolo.Marketing, or some other unusual extension. Dot com is the gold standard.

2. Choose a WordPress host

The right WordPress host for most bloggers is Bluehost, an official partner with WordPress. Bluehost shared hosting plans start as low as $3 per month and usually climb to about $10 per month after your first year. They also offer fast WordPress setup in just a few clicks.

If you have a little more budget to spend, WP Engine is one of the fastest managed WordPress hosts on the market—that’s what I use to host this blog. You will pay quite a bit more for the speed and support, though, and plans start at about $20 per month.

3. Install WordPress on your host

If you choose Bluehost as your hosting provider, they have helpful instructions for installing WordPress. Just follow each step on that page with your Bluehost account open and you’ll be finished in just a few minutes.

If you choose another hosting provider, you can search for “[host name] WordPress install” and they will almost certainly have a help center article with instructions. WP Engine’s setup guide, for example, can be found here.

4. Select a blog design

Since WordPress is free, open-source software, many developers create free themes and templates that you can use with WordPress. It’s best not to overthink your design until you’ve started attracting readers to your blog—so select a theme that’s clean, simple, and easy to read for now.

WordPress.org is a great place to find free themes to download; these are all reviewed and approved beforehand, so every theme is safe to download and install. Once WordPress is set up on your host, you can also browse themes inside the WordPress dashboard by clicking on Appearance → Themes → Add New. You’ll find many free themes to install from that screen.

Here’s a view inside of my WordPress site hosted with WP Engine. Your dashboard should look almost exactly the same regardless of which host you choose.

5. Publish your first post

Don’t worry about plugins, keyword research, or tweaking your theme right now. The hardest muscle to build as an amateur blogger is the publishing muscle, so you want to create that habit as quickly as possible before getting distracted with bells and whistles.

No need to think about SEO, traffic, or anything else—just write about something interesting you think your future readers will care about. Because nobody will read your first post anyway, it’s best to think of it like a pre-game stretch and get it out of the way! Once you’ve pressed published and have shaken the publishing jitters, then you can worry about planning your next move as a blogger.

The most common amateur blogging mistakes

Thanks to my work in growth marketing and SEO, I’ve seen hundreds of blogs flourish and fizzle. But it’s my nearly 15 years as a blogger that’s given me the experience to know what the most common mistakes are for newbies. Learn from my scar tissue—I’ve made these errors, too. Here are the top mistakes to avoid as an amateur blogger:

1. Blogging without a goal (for too long)

Blogging can help with or directly lead to a number of successful results:

1. Blogging can help you get noticed and hired by a premiere company (which happened to me with Shopify!).
2. Blogging can turn into a full-time business by way of affiliate referrals, advertising, and your own products (which happened to me in 2022!).
3. Blogging can help you kickstart your freelance or consulting career.
4. Blogging can help you deeply explore your interests and creativity, which can then lead to many unknown—but hopefully positive—outcomes.

Of course, you might end up experiencing a few of these benefits if you’re successful, but it’s helpful to start with or quickly form a point of view on what you’re trying to accomplish. The way you should run a blog as a business is far different than running a blog meant to land you a great job, or a large consulting client.

I’ve seen a lot of people make the mistake of not matching what’s published on their blog to their desired outcome. You won’t land your first data science job with an affiliate-focused “best data science tools” round-up. So think about what your first outcome or milestone with your blog should be, and let that guide your decisions and editorial strategy.

2. Blogging on someone else’s land

I’ve changed my tune on social media in recent years. The algorithm on nearly every platform rewards native content and punishes links to other websites. If you want to drive traffic and awareness from social media, you have to publish for the platform.

But that doesn’t mean you should publish only for these platforms. Not having a website, domain, and blogging platform that you control means you’re at the whims of whoever’s land you’re renting—whether that be Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, or anywhere else.

“What would happen if they shut my account down today?” That’s a fair question to ask yourself. Even less certain and more likely is that a shift in a platform’s algorithm could affect the reach of your new and existing content—just ask the many animators who were hurt by YouTube’s radical shift to focusing on total watch time.

Where traditional bloggers have a leg up here is that they see their blog, their self-hosted website, as the nexus for their activity online. Yes, they might build up a LinkedIn presence, or start growing their reach with YouTube videos. But all of that funnels back to a blog they control with a newsletter/email list they can take with them.

Don’t be shy about taking your blogging efforts directly to social media. But also don’t build your entire online presence or business on somebody else’s website.

3. Choosing a blogging niche that’s too small

If you’ve explored blogging as a business, you’ve probably heard of “Niche to Win.” This is the idea that it’s much easier for a blog to gain initial traction if it’s focused on either (a) an underserved niche, or (b) it serves an established niche in an entirely new way.

To be honest with you, I’m a much bigger fan of option (b), and it’s for a simple reason: big markets offer more opportunities. The riches are, in fact, in the niches, but only in niches within a large market with lots of demand. If you niche down too much, you ultimately end up with a very small number of people to reach, who may not even spend money on the topic/hobby/skill that you’re blogging about.

You also want to consider what happens if you’re successful in your niche: will there be anywhere to go from here? Once you’re at the top of the hill, is that the end, or is there another mountain to climb? Sub-niches within a larger topic or market don’t have this problem, because you can easily expand to cover more things once you’ve exhausted your first initial niche.

So yes, niche down. But be wary of trying to conquer a tiny or obscure market, and watch how you brand or position yourself in any market. Just like actors who get typecast, you don’t want to be stuck as the “Underwater Basket Weaving” guy or gal after you discover that’s not a profitable thing to blog about.

Instead, niche down by way of solving a precise problem, for a precise reader/customer, in a memorable and creative way. Tens of millions of professionals use Excel, but there’s only one Miss Excel.

4. Letting planning turn into procrastination

Taking action is a form of learning; probably the best form of all. So while there are a number of things you need to “get right” as a successful amateur blogger, they can be figured out in time. Most decisions you make about your blog are not irreversible. Here are a few I know bloggers get stuck on:

• Choosing domain—pick something snappy and redirect it later if you need to.
• Choosing a niche—pick something profitable and narrow or expand your focus later if you need to.
• Choosing a design/theme—pick something clean and readable and tweak it later if you need to.

The only decisions that become one-way doors are when you’ve built up a larger audience on a specific topic. At that point, it can be tough to make a 180-degree turn. The readers you attracted around disc golf probably don’t care about financial planning & analysis.

But that requires a lot of time; all decisions calcify over time. In the early days, you’re not stuck with almost any early decision you make, and you should see most of your choices as “ongoing experiments” rather than some sort of arbitrary commitment.

So don’t let anything written here or elsewhere stop you from making the ultimate mistake: not trying at all. Rolled sleeves and dirty hands can be found in every success story, but sophisticated planning is only found in a few. Take action now and pivot based on what you see.

5. Underestimating the importance of backlinks

Not all blogs have to revolve solely around traffic from organic search (SEO), but all successful blogs will ultimately drive most of their traffic from this channel. I’ve seen hundreds of dashboards for big blogs and this is universally true.

What most bloggers underestimate in the beginning is the importance of links in ranking their content. And not just links to their homepage, but to individual posts and pages on their site. Links are so important that a blogger who focuses solely on content and links will probably go farther than most. In fact, Shopify’s Chief Growth Officer used to say “links are the currency for SEO.” Outside of the content itself, they are what decide whether or not you rank.

The best way to build links is to start with the content itself: by writing things that are linkable. But what does that mean? Simply put, it means publishing something that a fellow blogger or journalist would feature in their own article.

Data is the king of link-building content. When I say that to new bloggers, they assume that data stories are this impossibly technical type of content that an amateur like them could never publish. Then they learn that “surveys” are also sources of data. Then they learn that tools like SurveyMonkey can source respondents for your survey. Then they learn that many free data visualization tools exist to create charts and visuals.

You can make a data story as an amateur blogger; the real missing ingredient will be your creativity. What sort of things/questions can you observe or survey people about that others in your topic or niche would find interesting? As one example, I asked myself this question recently and published an observational study that examined 500+ job postings for content marketing leadership roles. And no surprise, a lot of my peers linked to this post!

6. Being too afraid to delegate work

If you are looking to run a blog as a business, here’s some obvious advice that still needs to be said: run it like an actual business.

Most entrepreneurs struggle with delegation during their first rodeo; after all, your perfectionism or inventiveness or way of doing things is usually what makes you successful in the first place. But with a blogging business, you have to eventually step off of the content treadmill—even if that just means getting some help with the administrative stuff, like creating graphics or uploading to the CMS.

In the earliest days, yes, you may need to do literally everything yourself until you have the funds to hire an assistant, editor, or whoever. But if you’re truly running things like a business, then you won’t be waiting long to monetize: you may launch your product within your first year. And somewhat ironically, it’s usually content creation that first needs to be outsourced in some way. You can do this by hiring someone for time-intensive administrative tasks, or even begin to step back from the actual research and writing by training a contractor on your approach and writing style.

I know a number of popular bloggers who thought they would never hire a writer, but quickly learned how teaching someone to translate your ideas into crisp copy is far from an impossible task—in fact, it can be quite rewarding to do so, because now you’re able to explore, teach, and “write” at a much faster pace.

Don’t let your hands-on perfectionism put a ceiling on your blog’s growth. Once you start getting traction, have the courage to reinvest your revenue and “fire yourself” from less important activities.

7. Blogging in the dreaded “milquetoast middle”

One advanced tip I’ll share for amateur bloggers is to stay at the far ends of the content spectrum, and avoid the boring middle. What does that mean exactly? Well, let’s first define the two ends of the spectrum:

• Educational: Information-driven content that helps your readers solve a problem or make a decision. Traffic for this content will come from search because it’s built from the ground up with searchers in mind.
• Spectacle: Story-driven content that reveals something thrilling or unexpected. Traffic for this content will come from social and dark social (Slack, email, etc.) because it’s written to attract attention and stir conversation.

The mistake I see bloggers making is not picking one of those lanes or trying to blend them together. Story-driven articles don’t work well for search, because Google has determined that most people are using search as a command line for answers—they want the solution, and quickly. Social, meanwhile, is a place for surprises and even controversy; you go there to find the unexpected.

Your blog as a whole can contain both types of these articles. In fact, they work quite well together: spectacle articles attract links and shares that help your educational, search-focused content perform even better. But you should rarely mix the two together; like pineapple and pizza, they’re better alone. See, even I’m up for a little controversy.

Blogging is easy to learn, but hard to master

Getting a blog set up is quick and painless, and writing your first post is a lot of fun. But I want to be candid: building a profitable blog, or making money online from your blog, is pretty hard work.

You will likely toil away for months, at least, to create high-quality content and build backlinks. And even once the traffic starts arriving in droves, you’ll need to find sustainable ways to monetize, which often happens through affiliate marketing or advertising to promote other people’s products—or by building your own. Pro bloggers see pretty high margins from these activities, but they take work, and blogs are often very susceptible to algorithm shifts updates to various search engines.

So all in all, I’m very fortunate and happy to be a blogger. But just like you, I started as an amateur. The thing that made the most difference wasn’t a tool or some special marketing hack. It was consistency: showing up and growing my blog every day, even when I was tired, even when I didn’t want to. And the rewards were well worth the effort.

The post Amateur Blogging: A Beginner’s Guide to Starting from Scratch appeared first on Sparring Mind.

After so much time spent practicing and studying the discipline of entrepreneurship, you end up noticing some patterns—especially around the habits of successful entrepreneurs and what they seem to do that other people don’t.

The truth is that what I saw was way different than what most lists try to prescribe as advice. I just read a list of supposed entrepreneurial habits that said listening to uplifting music was something all entrepreneurs had in common. It’s a mess out there!

Entrepreneurship is, by its very nature, inclusive. Many different types of people can make it as entrepreneurs, so their personal preferences (e.g., whether they’re a morning person or not) rarely play a role in their success. What ends up mattering is the way they approach their work and problem-solving.

Here are the habits I’ve observed in entrepreneurs that do the distance.

The 7 most common habits of successful entrepreneurs

1. They focus on their signature strengths

A signature strength is a skill or talent that is a key reason why you’re impactful in a given context. It’s what you bring to the table, in a sense.

Entrepreneurs may flirt with the I-must-do-everything mentality at first (covered more in #6), but they quickly become consumed with leaning into their signature strength. They develop the habit of asking, “What can I do that no one else can do? Where am I most valuable to the business right now? In which areas do I get the most fulfillment?” The answers are far from self-serving: by knowing where they’re strong and where they’re weak (or unfulfilled), a founder gains clarity on where they may need to hire or outsource, or who they could give more opportunity and responsibility.

And all entrepreneurs eventually learn that there are a ton of talented people in the world, and one of the best leverage points they have for their business is to put the right talent in the right place. Once they ask that question of themselves, where and how to apply their signature strength becomes more obvious.

2. They care about time to impact

The most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met are impatient in action and patient with results. There’s this trope that the busiest founders and executives often respond to email the fastest, and I think their “secret” is that they simply don’t wait a long time to do small tasks, but know how to steadily chip away at long-term projects.

And in that sense, the best entrepreneurs are extremely impatient. The reason is that they know there is no substitute for something living in the world and getting feedback; feedback is oxygen for ideas, and no idea for your business is ever truly validated until customers start swiping their credit cards. These entrepreneurs are always pushing to get things into a place where they can get this feedback, but without compromising their reputation for quality.

Unknowingly, I think a lot of entrepreneurs agree with Brandon Schauer’s cupcake principle. That is, sometimes the best thing you can ship (or introduce to the market) is the cupcake version of the thing you ultimately want to build. Why a cupcake? Because it uses the same frosting and cake mix as the bigger cake but it takes less time to produce—while still being good tasting. And now that your cupcake is out in the world, you can get real feedback from customers on how it tastes before investing in something bigger.

Speed is king for small businesses, and it’s often the one decisive advantage you have over large incumbent corporations: while they’re debating minutiae in meetings full of people, you can ship fast, learn quickly, and adjust as you go.

3. They’re driven by goals

Not all entrepreneurs are great planners, but every successful entrepreneur I know has a lifelong habit of setting goals—whether they’re detailed and meticulous or informal scribble on an abandoned whiteboard.

What this habit really reveals is one of the most common motivators for entrepreneurs: personal growth. One founder of a highly-successful consumer brand told me that they always thought about this theoretical scenario that was shared on social media: What if, at the end of your life, the person you meet is the person you could have become? For many entrepreneurs, closing that gap is one of their life’s greatest motivations, and they use their business as a vehicle to achieve that end.

Of course, you’ll see this habit appear in more practical situations, too. I found it extremely common to hear entrepreneurs talk about their rolling sets of goals for the business. Weekly goals for themself laddered up to quarterly goals for their team which laddered up into annual goals for the business. It may have taken them some time, but successful entrepreneurs always develop a clear sense of where they want to go—and they use goals to communicate that in great detail.

In my own experience, I find the process of setting goals more important than the goals themselves. Setting a goal paints a clear picture of what needs to happen, and it drives up my excitement of imagining what could be once we arrive. If you set stretch goals that feel ambitious but possible, you’ll usually end up with more clarity around what needs to be done; something that’s far more important than hitting an arbitrary number that you yourself set.

In one of our podcast episodes, a founder told me this about the audacious goal she had set herself:

4. They’re customer-obsessed

Don’t get me wrong here: entrepreneurs’ relationships with their customers are not always rosy. If you know, you know—we’ve all had long days where the support inbox is just overflowing and customers are getting on our last nerve. It’s a business relationship and not a friendship, after all.

But, every successful entrepreneur I know does deeply care about how customers experience their product and brand. And the best ones know the customers are the real boss. That actually ends up being a pretty fitting metaphor for the relationship: you’re not friends with your boss, they have an outsized impact on your growth, and you can ultimately come to like a good boss—even if there’s some tension from time to time.

Businesses do not exist without customers, so great entrepreneurs habitually act like the customer is there at the table when they’re making a decision. They can even obsess over customers so much that friction can build with employees, who the founder may come to expect too much from (especially since employees don’t share the same potential upside).

But more often than not, the relationship stays healthy and this habit becomes the backbone of why their company is successful where others have failed. This habit often shows up with the founder always viewing product or pricing changes through the lens of the customer, advocating for the customer (even when their team disagrees!), and grounding their company’s mission and culture around delivering value to customers.

5. They’re persistent

In my opinion, the single habit that increases the chances of success as an entrepreneur the most is persistence. Or, as investor Paul Graham would call it, being “relentlessly resourceful.”

If a good business model or product idea is a seed placed in good soil, conviction is the water—it’s what makes an idea grow, in the end. And more than that straight line scenario, it’s also the habit that drives you to plant another seed should the first one fail to flourish.

I can count on one hand the number of entrepreneurs we’ve spoken to at Shopify that would say starting their business was easy. And of that select group, what came easy was really a stroke of luck at the beginning that helped them get immediate traction—all of them later had an experience of feeling stressed and overwhelmed with the growth they experienced, or some other hurdle that cropped up. Luck may have given them their start, but persistence made them successful.

Then there’s the 99% of entrepreneurs who never get such a lucky break; the ones who have to grind for every single inch of progress their business makes and who may have to someday watch their progress get torched by a random unlucky break or macro trend that didn’t go in their favor.

This willingness to chip away at a goal day after day, without evidence it’s working, without support (let alone praise and attention), and sometimes, without confidence in yourself is one of the most defining habits of entrepreneurs. When others would stop, they just kept going.

6. They know polish is a strategic choice

The personality trait most associated with entrepreneurs that felt the most mixed in my experience was “perfectionism.” It’s really all over the place.

I know some entrepreneurs who are scrappy opportunists and absolutely not perfectionists, and I’ve known founders who can only be described as obsessive—the kind of people who believe that quality is fractal and who, in their heart of hearts, want to paint the back of the fence every time, even if no one will ever see it.

But the habit that all great entrepreneurs eventually pick up is a much healthier view on polish, or getting the details exactly right. And that’s that polish is a strategic choice you make based on something’s importance. As much as perfectionists want to believe otherwise, not every task is worth doing at an A+ level if it takes your time and attention away from more important to-do’s. In entrepreneurship, this is often described as things being on fire and the need to choose which fire to tend to.

I’ve worked with CEOs of major companies who, despite all the things rolling up to them, went through periods where they were so focused on the company’s biggest problem that that’s all they would talk to you about. As the founder, you’ll begin to learn when something truly matters for the health of your business, and that’s exactly when you shouldn’t hesitate to obsess.

7. They harness their stress

The only type of “entrepreneur” that’s living stress-free is the fake kind selling courses on YouTube. Real entrepreneurs are often stressed about their business and frequently anxious they’re not doing enough.

When I used to work with Harley Finkelstein, Shopify’s President, he told me that he views his anxiety as something to harness rather than something to dread—it doesn’t need to take over your life and you’re not weird for feeling anxious as an entrepreneur. And, there’s no shame in getting help if you need it.

If you’ve ever run your own business, you know how true this is. Managing your own psychology is often the hardest part of being an entrepreneur, even harder than the objective or technical things that you need to do. When it’s all falling apart, or at least feels like it is, you can feel alone and isolated. There’s no one to deflect blame to and nowhere to run. It’s stressful, and channeling this stress is essential to having a healthy relationship with it.

The post The 7 Most Important Habits of Successful Entrepreneurs (Learned from Experience) appeared first on Sparring Mind.

Why does that matter? Because all great content marketing is rooted in storytelling, and data is a collection of as-of-yet unfiltered stories; it records trends in behavior that, in aggregate, reveal how things work. It’s no wonder that data stories tend to be some of the most shared, linked, and discussed stories on the internet. Data visualization should be a cardinal companion in your approach to content creation.

The best data visualization tools allow non-designers (and non-data scientists) to capture and represent data in accurate and compelling ways, all without having to know heavyweight design tools and principles. Here are my favorite data visualization tools for beginners.

The best simple data visualization tools

1. Chartblocks

Price: Free

Chartblocks is a useful free data visualization tool that lets you either import your data from a spreadsheet or dataset or input data manually into a table. The design options are limited but robust enough to let you customize charts and graphs to match your brand. And, there aren’t any major restrictions (that I’ve found) to using the tool or downloading your final visual. It’s a free tool without many—if any—exceptions or fine print.

I especially liked how easy it was to import and adjust the simple datasets I was using in the tool. It’s one of the most user-friendly tools on this list, with an intuitive interface for data input and editing and a straightforward visual editor to make your charts look clean and polished. For most people who need simple data visualizations for existing data, this is the right tool to try first.

2. RapidTables

Price: Free

RabidTables is a free web-based data visualization tool that lets you create line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, scatter plots, and table charts. The best part is that you don’t need to create an account in order to use RapidTables, making it the perfect option if you just need a simple, clean visual to represent your data.

The tool works through manual data input, so you won’t be able to import spreadsheets or other datasets, but that’s to be expected with a free, no-registration tool like this one. There are a few design options available for each chart type, including helpful ones like a full-spectrum color picker, but these options are limited.

One final limitation of RapidTables is that the default size of each chart is pretty small, so it’s best used for things like blog posts or internal presentations where you don’t need to take up an entire slide.

3. Visme

Price: Free, but access to the full list of templates starts at $12.25/month

Visme is a full-suite visual design tool that’s also useful for visualizing your date. Data for any chart you create can be added and edited through an in-app table that looks like a simple spreadsheet, and you can import existing data (even on the Free plan) through Excel, Sheets, SurveyMonkey, and even Google Analytics.

The design and template options are also pretty impressive on the free plan, but you’d likely want to upgrade if you plan on using this tool to its fullest extent or to scale out the creation of data visuals. There are some questionable templates in the mix—no one should ever use a 3D bar chart for anything—but most of the starting options are clean and simple and give you enough of a canvas to represent your brand in the template through the use of fonts and custom colors.

Once you’ve created a design, you quickly find that the “catch” with Visme is that you need a Pro plan in order to download the images. However, you can simply set your charts into Presentation Mode within the tool and grab a screenshot, as there aren’t any watermarks to speak of. Once you’re ready to make full use of the tool, you can then upgrade to Pro.

4. Adobe Express

Price: Free, premium plans start at $9.99/month

Adobe Express is Adobe’s lightweight alternative to its professional suite of design software. Built to compete directly with more user-friendly tools like Canva, Adobe Express is free (with premium plans) and allows you to create custom charts and graphics with a wide variety of templates, palettes, and effects options.

When it comes to data visualization, Adobe Express is best used to clean up charts you need to look great in presentations. I found the tools’ ability to import and manipulate data to be lacking, but that’s not too surprising since it covers a wide variety of graphics needs and isn’t focused solely on data visualization. Many people will probably appreciate that Express probably has the best design options available but at the expense of being able to work with your data directly in the tool.

5. Infogram

Price: Free, but the full range of design options becomes available on the Pro plan for $19/month

Infogram is a powerful data visualization editor that can take some time to get used to, but once you’re familiar with all of the options, it becomes a very versatile tool for showcasing your data. I was super impressed to see how easy Infogram made it to create an animated charter racer—those charts that show you how the data changes over time.

The range of chart options is impressive and made better by the fact that Infogram has some Canva-like capabilities to add visual flair like photography and other visuals. The free tier won’t block you off from too many features, though Infogram also tries to restrict downloads to paid plans—again, a screenshot is a simple workaround if you’re just trialing the tool. As I started using Infogram more, I found the team options well worth the price to upgrade, since it made it really simple to create and collaborate with other people.

6. Line Graph Maker

Price: Free

The deceptively named LineGraphMaker.co is actually a set of simple tools that lets you create line charts (of course), bar charts, pie charts, scatter plot charts, radar charts, and doughnut charts—all for free and with no account registration.

As you’d expect, the design and customization options are limited as a tradeoff for being a free tool, but it’s the perfect solution for anyone who needs to quickly visualize relatively simple data. You won’t be able to customize the final design much at all, but then again, that’s probably not your biggest concern when using a simple but efficient data visualization tool like this one.

7. Tableau

Price: Free

Tableau Public is a platform offered by Tableau, an analytics company, that lets anyone build and share data visualizations online. You’re likely not familiar with Tableau unless you use it for work, but Tableau Public is a much more accessible option open to anyone with a free account.

Tableau Public does require that you upload an existing set of data from a spreadsheet or allow the product to import data from a location like Google Drive or OData. As someone who’s used Tableau for work before, I’m familiar with the interface and find it relatively easy to navigate—but from having introduced people to the product, I know there’s a bit of a learning curve involved, and that applies to Tableau public, too.

If you’re planning on creating a number of data visualizations and need to import larger datasets to do so, it’s worth learning Tableau. If you rarely create data visualizations and just need something simple, the time investment with Tableau may be a bit high for your needs.

8. Datawrapper

Price: Free

Datawrapped is another excellent tool if you already have a spreadsheet or data set available. The tool allows you to import a .csv from a number of locations, such as a self-hosted file on your website, Github, or direct from Google Sheets.

The design options for Datawrapper are solid, but as a free tool, there aren’t many built-in templates or palettes to choose from. Still, there’s a huge array of charts to choose from and enough customization options that you can get the final designs to fit your brand. Datawrapper also has a few small but important quality of life tools; I really appreciated the color blindness checker that’s built right into the tool, for example.

The free plan does require attribution should you want to embed the chart directly on your site. If you don’t you’ll have to upgrade to a premium plan which is a steep $499/month. Fortunately, most users can get plenty of value from the free plan and won’t need to upgrade unless they must remove attribution and need access to the extensive collaboration options that the premium plan unlocks.

The post Let the Data Talk: 8 Data Visualization Tools for Created Custom Charts and Graphics appeared first on Sparring Mind.

I previously led content marketing at Shopify, so my perspective on the best content creation tools is guided by one thing: growth. I’m always searching for tools that drive more impact or save my team valuable time, so we can get back to impactful work.

That’s what will guide this list, too. I’ll share the best free content creation tools (along with paid options) for content creators and map them across the full content creation process, from ideation to production.

Research and planning tools

1. Answer the Public

Answer the Public is a tool that crowdsources questions on a topic by collecting current search data. Once you plug a word or two into Answer the Public, it will return a list of questions, prepositions, comparisons, and alphabeticals (terms grouped in alphabetical order).

The paid version of the tool also lets you set listening alerts for the brand terms you specify, so you’ll receive a weekly email that details what new terms have appeared for your term (e.g., your brand name) and how search trends have evolved over time. This is helpful for tracking sentiment as it appears in search queries, like if more searchers are asking about case studies or reviews for your products.

Pros

• Fast and simple tool for getting an exhaustive list of ideas to cover around a topic. Great for mind mapping or brainstorming when you’re stuck.
• Pro features are helpful for tracking brand sentiment as it appears in search and to see how the conversation is evolving around your brand (or products) through Google searches.

Cons

• Unlike more robust SEO tools like Ahrefs, Answer the Public doesn’t let you go as deep on the specifics for each term, like the difficulty or what the current search engine results page (SERP) looks like for the term.

Alternatives

Topic Research by SEMRush is probably the best alternative tool that’s available, though it does require you to create a SEMRush account.

2. Google Trends (and trendspotting tools)

Google Trends, Pinterest Trends, and Exploding Topics are all tools that let you see what topics are trending based on user behavior. The behavior most of these tools are tracking are search terms since these terms offer a consistent language to identify a trend in the first place—e.g., noticing an increase in the number of people searching for “sleep masks.”

You can get ideas by visiting the homepage or curated lists that these tools offer, or you can go hunting by plugging in terms and seeing how their popularity has risen or decreased over time. Google Trends also allows you to compare multiple terms together and will overlay the data so you can see how two topics are growing or shrinking in relation to each other.

Pros

• Trend tools help you validate when something is truly hot or if a topic has steadily been rising in popularity. You want to go where the attention is, and these tools help you confirm that.
• The long-term trend of a topic is often important to check before you make a larger investment, e.g., such as starting a blog or content series about the topic.

Cons

• These tools work best when you’re investigating a hunch you already have, since the
• Everyone has access to this data, so any trends highlighted by the tools themselves—such as a front-page selection—will be noticed by other people, too.

Alternatives

There aren’t a lot of direct alternatives to these tools. Two related resources: SimilarWeb can help you spot website trends, and SocialBlade can help you uncover growth and trends across social profiles.

3. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content research and analysis tool that lets you identify trending and high-performance content on other websites.

BuzzSumo can surface data around social shares and search trends, but can also be used to notify you of key terms and phrases appearing on other websites—great for tracking mentions and awareness of your campaigns, along with providing a level of brand safety so you can respond or keep tabs on any less-than-ideal mentions.

Pros

• Offers probably the best dataset for tracking social shares, making it one of the few content creation tools that allows you to uncover ideas for social-friendly content from competitors.
• The mentions feature is a great addition for following up on your PR and newsworthy content campaigns, many of which you’ll create with input from BuzzSumo’s data.

Cons

• Requires a significant amount of filtering to really make the most of the available data. You have to watch out for outliers and learn to recognize what “outsized performance” looks like based on the competitor site you’re analyzing.

Alternatives

Ahrefs and Content Studio are two broader marketing suites that have comparable features to BuzzSumo. However, I find that BuzzSumo’s data set is the most expansive and complete, at least for content research.

4. Also Asked

Also Asked is a keyword research tool that specifically focuses on the “People Also Asked” section displayed by Google for many terms. Also Asked provides quick access to this data—instead of running one search at a time and unfurling the section—so you can get a sense of what you might need to feature on your page, or on other pages, in order to fully cover the topic and rank.

What’s unique about Also Asked is that it surfaces live People Also Asked data and connects the topics together for a cohesive keyword map for the People Also Asked section. This is helpful for evaluating what the next step in the search journey might be or what needs to appear within content in order for searchers (and Google) to consider the coverage complete.

Pros

• Saves time by pulling in People Also Asked data in a way that’s easy to parse and understand.
• Helps make connections between topics and ideas with the visual graph it provides.

Cons

• This is a single-purpose tool and so it’s pretty limited in what it can do. It does its job well, but don’t expect to rely on it beyond its specific purpose.

Alternatives

Since this is a specialty tool, there aren’t any direct alternatives that I’ve come across. Although obviously, there are broader SEO platforms like Ahrefs that

5. Help a B2B Writer

Help a B2B Writer is a business-focused alternative to services like Help a Reporter Out (HARO). This service allows writers to pose questions to experts in exchange to be featured in a story the writer is producing.

Writers and content marketers benefit by getting direct access to valuable sources for their stories, and sources get a feed of stories to contribute to in exchange for exposure. It’s a smart idea and the caliber of stories I’ve seen thus far is far better than HARO, though obviously it’s limited to B2B coverage.

Pros

• Much more focused group of askers and respondents, which means higher-quality prompts and responses that never stray from B2B topics.

Cons

• This is a relatively new service, so there aren’t daily requests like there are in HARO.

Alternatives

Help a Reporter Out, which this service is inspired by, is a good alternative but will need to be filtered to source and find requests specific to B2B.

Content optimization tools

6. Clearscope

Clearscope is an on-page content and SEO tool that provides feedback on whether your content matches the search intent of your target keyword. Clearscope takes a target keyword that you’ve identified and uses natural-language processing to summarize how the top results in Google cover the topic. Based on these top pages, Clearscope makes suggestions on sections and topics that you can include in your content to make it more comprehensive and complete for searchers.

Content creation tools like Clearscope are very powerful and my data and experience show they do help you rank faster, especially for lower-competition keywords. But, they don’t guarantee the content you create is actually good. And every tool in this category encourages you to mimic content that already exists, so use Clearscope and related tools to inform your content—not to dictate what you write.

Pros

• Clearscope’s recommendations feel the most natural and considered, whereas some competing tools often feel like they’re actively recommending that you keyword stuff your article.
• Clean and simple user interface that even a total novice can learn quickly. This is helpful since you’ll often be sending new writers into Clearscope if you manage a team.
• Google Docs and WordPress integrations make it easy to incorporate a Clearscope report right into your text editor or CMS, should you use either of those tools.

Cons

• Clearscope is one of the priciest tools on the market once you get past their basic plan. If you need to run more than 20 content reports per month, you’ll be paying upwards of $1,200 per month.
• Like most content optimization tools, Clearscope places too much emphasis on exact phrases and isn’t smart enough to count similar phrases or synonyms in its scoring.

Alternatives

Surfer and Frase are very solid alternatives for optimizing your content. Dashword also offers a similar feature set, and the pricing is a little more beginner-friendly.

7. Headline Studio

Headline Studio is a headline recommendation tool that’s part of the CoSchedule content marketing platform. After you paste in your headline, Headline Studio will give it a score based on its use of power words, common words, clarity, reading grade level, and “skimmability,” which they describe as the headline’s ability to be noticed and scanned on social media.

The tool pulls both direct data in the form of click-through rates through headlines, but also includes more qualitative feedback like the use of words the tool labels as “emotional.”

Pros

• The main value of this tool is that it gets you to dissect and closely analyze your own headlines. Even if you don’t implement all of the suggestions, Headline Studio does prompt you to second-guess weak word choices or excess jargon.
• The scores also include context as to why you received the score in the first place. This feedback is typically more valuable than the numerical score.

Cons

• Whether or not something is a strong hook is totally dependent on your audience. The tool also biases toward flashy language that, frankly, might not actually describe your article.

Alternatives

Content Row and Sumo offer basic headline generator tools that compile recommendations based on the prompt you provide, usually through one or two focus words.

8. Hemingway

Hemingway is a writing assistant that grades your prose on clarity. The tool primarily looks at passive voice, adverbs, and reading level to make recommendations. Color-coded highlights indicate when a word, sentence, or paragraph is too complicated and what’s causing Hemingway to flag that section.

There’s an online version available for free on their website, while the premium desktop version works offline and allows you to import finished text to tools like WordPress, Medium, Microsoft Word, or directly to your site via HTML.

Pros

• Offers a really helpful gut check for your prose, quickly highlighting long-winded sentences and complicated words that may confuse readers.
• The free tool is perfectly serviceable and you may never need to upgrade. Clean web interface for the online version, and there’s a more robust desktop app.

Cons

• As revealed in the name, the tool tries to emulate Hemingway’s simple, terse style. That may not be the right tone or level of sophistication for your audience.

Alternatives

Writefull and Expresso are two helpful alternatives, though I still prefer Hemingway’s desktop app and user interface overall.

9. Grammarly

Grammarly is an editing app that provides feedback on grammar, sentence structure, and the clarity of your prose. The free version is a great spot check for grammar and will help you catch obvious mistakes and even places in your writing where the reader may become confused.

You’ll need to upgrade to the premium version if you want full-sentence rewrite suggestions or flags around consistency, formatting, and tone. The advanced plans also allow for multi-user accounts and advanced tools like a plagiarism checker, which is great if you’re running a content program with multiple freelance writers.

Pros

• Fast and reasonably accurate grammar checker that serves as a stand-in for a copyeditor. Flags obvious mistakes that even human editors may miss.
• Advanced plans also provide feedback on clarity and consistency, offering rewrites for clunky sentences and odd word choices.

Cons

• The feedback could use some fine-tuning; fortunately, the tool does give you the option to flag when feedback is incorrect. Some suggestions are also technically correct but strip the flair and flourish of a sentence or paragraph.

Alternatives

ProWritingAid and Ginger are two commonly-used tools for checking grammar and getting feedback on word choice and sentence structure.

10. Squoosh

Squoosh is an image compression and optimization tool built by Google developers. Squoosh will compress any image file that you upload to a new, web-friendly file type that will be far smaller. The most commonly used file types are .mozJPEG and .webp, which are designed to display crisp images without the bloat of an ultra high-fidelity file type like .png.

Every page on every website benefits from using compressed images—you should never upload or embed an image without compressing it. This is especially important if you’re not using a static site generator or if your content features a lot of images. Blogging platforms like WordPress are unfortunately a little sluggish by default, but compressed images can help you keep page load speeds high. (For more tips, read our guide on making WordPress faster.)

Pros

• Fast and easy to use, image optimizations take seconds and you can download them immediately.
• No account creation is required and the tool is forever free.

Cons

• No integrations with CMS or website builder tools mean you have to download and upload images individually. But hey, it’s free.

Alternatives

There are a ton of these tools, but I recommend you stick with Squoosh for single images. Optimizilla and Kraken are two other popular options.

Visual and design tools

11. Burst

Burst is a highly-underrated free stock photography website that’s operated by Shopify. All of the photography on Burst is completely free to use, and there are a number of different photography collections to choose from—everything from landscaping to work-from-home backdrops.

The value of any stock photography website for content marketing is the archive of pictures, and Burst offers some of the best photos for blog posts outside of more premium options like Stocksy.

Pros

• Royalty-free stock photography with a wide selection and no login required.
• Easy to browse photos with a reliable search and easy to download photos without an account or login.

Cons

• Some of the photos on Burst have gotten popular and made the rounds, so you can sometimes select a photo that’s seen everywhere.

Alternatives

Unsplash and Pixabay are my two favorite free alternatives. And there are obviously many, many paid services for marketers who need stock photography.

12. Canva

Canva is a graphic design tool that allows anyone to create infographics, charts, presentations, video content, and more in a user-friendly interface. Canva is popular because you can get a lot done with just the free version, though the premium version unlocks a near-infinite graphics library, pre-built brand kits, 1TB of storage, additional tools like Canva’s background remover, and more.

There’s a reason that Canva has made waves in the design space. The template library is unmatched and most of what the average person wants to do can be accomplished with the free plan. For those who rely on Canva for most of their visual content, the pro/premium plans are a good value at around $13/month.

Pros

• The free plan is very generous and will let most people accomplish most basic visual design tasks.
• Includes a drag-and-drop editor that’s easy to pick up and use without extensive onboarding or training.
• Unmatched graphics and template library for pretty much every visual type you’d use in marketing content.

Cons

• In the free plan, you’ll occasionally run into odd restrictions like graphics or fonts you can’t use that look like they were available to you.
• Not great for data visualization. If you’re in need of that, I’ve curated a separate list of data visualization tools.

Alternatives

Adobe Express and Piktochart are both great tools for creating and sharing social media posts that feature graphics, custom inline visuals, data visualizations, and more.

13. Visme

Visme is another graphic design tool that lets you create and customize a number of different visual templates. Visme is comparable to Canva and the reason you’d choose one over the other mostly comes down to the templates and available design options.

Visme does some styles better than Canva—I think their presentation styles are better, for example—however, Canva has a larger archive of graphics and more is available to you for free.

Pros

• The visual editor offers more robust options and definitely feels the most similar to powerful tools like Photoshop, except in a lightweight web interface.
• Features design options that don’t appear or aren’t well represented in other visual design tools, like 3D graphics and avatars.

Cons

• The Visme logo appears on anything you create on the free plan. I think this was a mistake and may limit the appeal of the tool for some people.

Alternatives

Venngage and Vista Create are two decent alternatives to Visme, depending on what you’re trying to create. I find that Visme has better data visualization templates, for example.

14. Lunacy

Lunacy is a visual design tool available in a free desktop app. Lunacy includes some really helpful features like one-click image upscaling and background removal, along with an impressive library of illustrations, 3D graphics, avatars, UI kits, and more.

Lunacy is essentially a free version of Figma with a native app and built-in graphics. Figma is still a great tool, but for more detailed design creation and editing, Lunacy is worth trying as a comparison. Lunacy makes money from free users by charging to license some of its available premium graphics.

Pros

• Offers a lightweight design tool that’s comparable to bigger players in the market but comes with a built-in library of visuals.
• Free, monetized through pay-as-you-use access to certain graphics.

Cons

• Only available as a desktop app.
• Lacks the collaboration features of tools like Figma; it’s generally a less powerful editor than Figma.

Alternatives

Figma and Sketch are the two main alternative options to Lunacy and tend to be widely used by teams.

Social media creation tools

15. Buffer

Buffer is a social media creation, scheduling, and analytics tool. Buffer’s main suite of products allows you to schedule posts across every social channel, analyze the reach and engagement of posts, and reply to comments and messages in a shared inbox.

What I like about Buffer is that you can grow with the tool, since the pricing is very accessible to solopreneurs or small teams, but more of the advanced features can be unlocked with the premium plans, which mostly focus on team collaboration and reporting.

Pros

• Accessible pricing for a fully-featured social media management platform.
• One of the most intuitive calendars for building a cross-platform schedule for social media.
• Offers a number of other free tools with every account, like a single-page website builder that you can link to from social profiles.

Cons

• The built-in creation tools for Buffer, like Pablo, are inferior to most other options.

Alternatives

Later and SproutSocial are the most popular alternatives to Buffer, with SpoutSocial having a focus on larger teams.

16. Giphy

Giphy is a very popular database and search tool for finding animated .gifs. Giphy organizes its massive archive of .gifs by trending topics, categories, hashtags, and more. Giphy also lets you create new .gifs with photographs, stickers, and backdrops—once created, Giphy also hosts the image for you to share.

Pros

• Free .gifs that are smartly curated for timely events and evergreen topics.
• Most of Giphy’s value can be had without paying or creating an account.

Cons

• If you do decide to create an account on Giphy, I don’t find the account interface to be all that intuitive.

Alternatives

Tenor and Imgur are the most frequently used alternatives to Giphy, but both interfaces feel inferior to Giphy’s.

17. InVideo

InVideo is a web-based video editor that adds creation-oriented features like templates and graphics. The main benefit of tools like InVideo versus a more established (and fully-featured) software like Adobe Premiere is that InVideo is simpler to use with a less intimidating interface, and its pre-built create can help you produce simple videos faster.

Pros

• Good balance of being easy to use and not too overwhelming with a feature-rich set of options for editing your videos.
• Lots of ready-made templates to help you create, especially for the price.

Cons

• I’ve had some issues when exporting video, and it’s happened more than once.

Alternatives

Animoto and WeVideo are two comparable options for in-browser video editing, though of course there are powerful desktop apps available like Adobe Premiere.

Podcast creation tools

18. Buzzsprout

Buzzsprout is podcast software that hosts files, publishes to every platform, collects download and unique listener data, and offers unique features like Magic Mastering that auto-edit your audio files.

Buzzsprout is one of the best tools I’ve used for resource-strapped showrunners who still want to grow and compete with bigger shows. The auto-editing and optimization are huge timesavers, the in-product transcription tools are great for repurposing audio, and Buzzsprout even comes with turnkey “Visual Soundbites,” as they call it, which let you clip portions of your show for social media platforms.

Pros

• One of the most feature-rich podcast hosting tools with friendly pricing for up-and-coming podcasters.
• The pricing is very fair and can grow with you as your show picks up traction.

Cons

• The analytics aren’t all that robust. Podcasts struggle with this generally, but the data available in Buzzsprout is pretty minimal.

Alternatives

Simplecast and Anchor are both excellent alternatives—I’ve used them both across very large podcasts, I just find Buzzsprout hits the sweet spot between advanced functionality and ease of use. If you’re just looking for something free and basic, go with Anchor.

19. Adobe Audition

Audition is the audio editing software that’s part of Adobe’s broader creative suite. It’s probably the most advanced audio editing software available with tons of edition options and presets.

Whatever you want to do with your audio, and whatever you need to fix, Adobe Audition can do it. I don’t think I’ve ever run into an audio issue that couldn’t be fixed in a few clicks with Audition—in that dimension, it beats every other audio editing tool.

Pros

• Near endless amount of editing options for audio files—this is a tool for professionals or for people who want high-quality audio.
• Best-in-class compression, noise reduction, and plugins for everything that tool doesn’t do out of the box.

Cons

• Heavyweight software that I’ve found is prone to slowdowns and crashes, especially on older computers.

Alternatives

Audacity and Garageband are two very popular alternatives. And, if you’re not already subscribed to the Adobe Suite, they may better fit your budget (Audacity, for example, is free).

20. Descript

Descript is an audio and video editing tool that allows you to edit a file just like a document. For example, if you upload a podcast episode to Descript, the software can create an automated transcript and let you edit the audio you hear by editing the text on screen.

It’s absurdly useful for quick edits and removing rambling sections from a podcast. I’ve yet to use it for video, but this is clearly Descript’s flagship feature and I’ve used it for every podcast I’ve produced or reviewed. It’s great.

Pros

• The ability to edit audio via the text on screen is like magic, and Descript’s product leads the way here.
• Delivers what are probably the best automated transcripts you can get from any editing tool.

Cons

• The desktop app can be a bit glitchy and sometimes causes my laptop to lag.

Alternatives

Piktostory and Veed.io both offer comparable automation solutions. Or, if you just need a transcript, Rev offers both automated transcripts and transcripts written by hand.

21. Audiogram

Audiogram is a podcast clip tool that lets you pull out audio excerpts to share on social media. Once you’ve uploaded your audio, Audiogram transcribes your audio to text, lets you pick a design and customize it, and then allows you to export files to publish on social media.

Pros

• Features a solid automated transcription tool that really speeds up the process of creating a new audiogram.
• Great pre-built templates that you can customize to match your brand.

Cons

• The app can sometimes be quite slow when loading an audio file.

Alternatives

Headliner is a useful alternative to Audiogram with a similar feature set and comparable pricing—it’s actually a bit cheaper for its basic plan, so review these options and choose the one with the features you need.

Video creation tools

22. Wistia

Wistia is a video hosting platform for small businesses that offers a video editor, embeddable player, marketing feature set, and analytics. What makes Wistia so good for on-site video is that its product is built with marketing in mind—the video embeds are the most SEO-friendly I’ve seen, there are a bunch of built call-to-action options, and the player itself can be heavily customized to match your brand.

Wistia also features creation tools like Soapbox, which is a simple tool for creating videos directly from your computer’s webcam. Soapbox is perfect for low-fidelity videos or internal videos you’re creating for your team.

Pros

• Arguably the best embeddable video player for marketers and small businesses.
• Feature-rich and smartly designed analytics tools for measuring engagement and video performance.
• Advanced tools like A/B testing sections or entire videos are not available on many other platforms.

Cons

• Wistia’s pricing includes the number of videos you upload, so if you upload dozens of videos but don’t often use the premium features, you may still be bumped up into higher-tier plans.

Alternatives

Vidyard and Vimeo are probably your best alternative options. But, I think Wistia’s analytics and robust feature set for its embedded player make it well worth the price. And if you just need to upload a video, everyone knows about YouTube!

23. Final Cut Pro

Final Cut Pro is Apple’s ubiquitous video editing software for Macs, and it’s still a great solution. Final Cut Pro earns its cost through a near endless feature set and best-in-class tools for object tracking, color correction, and motion graphics.

Pros

• The industry-standard tool with a truly complete feature set for editing high-fidelity video. You are unlikely to ever outgrow Final Cut Pro.
• Offers the best ecosystem of any video editing tool, with a plugin for literally everything.

Cons

• Costs nearly $400 to purchase, so it isn’t cheap. For simpler videos, you should try other options and see if they fit your needs.

Alternatives

Adobe Premiere Pro and Camtasia are the most popular alternatives to Final Cut Pro, and both also work on Windows 11.

24. CloudApp

CloudApp is screen-recording and .gif creation software that lets you easily make simple demos and tutorial videos. Creating a video takes as little as one click and the extensions mean you can create videos from anywhere, even in your browser. The feature set offers a great way to add polish to an otherwise simple video style with annotations, overlaid web recordings, and more.

Pros

• Simple and fast screen recording software that helps you create instructional videos with no video production experience.
• Very fair pricing—you can go a long way with the free and individual plans.

Cons

• Uploading videos can be a little glitchy, and there’s the occasional performance hiccup when using the app.

Alternatives

Loom and Hippo are both solid alternatives, but their features and pricing are a little more biased toward teams and internal communication. CloudApp remains great for personal use.

25. Frame.io

Frame is a video collaboration platform for teams—simply put, it’s a way for you to upload media to the cloud and let your team leave feedback on drafts and rough cuts directly on the video, similar to how Google Docs allows collaborators to share feedback on single words and sentences.

Pros

• Simply the best collaboration tool for producing videos with multiple stakeholders.

Cons

• The per-user pricing means it can get somewhat expensive if you have a number of reviewers for your projects.

Alternatives

MarkUp is the only other tool I’ve tried in this space, and it’s definitely comparable to Frame.io. I like Frame.io’s interface a bit better, but that may be because I’m more familiar with it from my time working on multimedia content at Shopify.

The post The 25 Best Content Creation Tools for Running High-Impact Content Marketing Programs appeared first on Sparring Mind.

The truth is that it’s easy to get stuck chasing the latest and greatest content marketing tools at the expense of executing on the fundamentals—the stuff that really matters. However, there are a few tools out there that will genuinely save you time and give you an edge in competitive markets.

We’ve previously covered the best content creation tools and content optimization tools, so let’s now look at platforms that handle broader aspects of managing a content marketing program. Here are the content marketing tools I’ve used most frequently over the years to build strategies for blogs, startups, and public companies.

The best content marketing tools for driving impact

1. WordPress

Pricing: Forever free, but requires separate hosting and may require premium plugins.

WordPress is an open source content management system used by 43.2% of all websites on the internet. The magic of WordPress is that its widespread use and availability means there is an unmatched community of developers building solutions for the platform—you can get WordPress to do (almost) anything you want, and often without touching a line of code.

The value for content marketing teams and startups is that WordPress is familiar to nearly every non-technical role, especially writers, and it’s simple to set up on your website. Your company should be building and selling product, not fussing around with your CMS.

WordPress also plays nice with nearly everything, so if you find you need a certain tool to help you scale, WordPress likely integrates with it and that means you won’t have to switch platforms or change up your content workflow.

Pros

• The widespread use of WordPress means its ecosystem is unmatched. It’s a platform that requires some maintenance, unlike a platform for absolute beginners like Wix, but you’re a professional and probably looking for a balance between ease and flexibility, and that’s where WordPress shines.
• WordPress is one of the easier tools to work with in regards to SEO, which is especially helpful if your somewhat-technical content marketing team is the one mostly touching the blog. WordPress gives craftspeople like this what they need to handle SEO without much time spent in code.
• The price of “free” is technically correct! But note that WordPress is a self-hosted platform and the price of various premium widgets and add-ons can add up.

Cons

• Out of the box, WordPress isn’t the fastest CMS around and the plug-and-play nature means fresh installs can quickly get bloated. There are a number of ways to make WordPress faster, but it’s more time spent on the tool rather than the content.
• WordPress is designed for a wide range of websites and as such, it’s not as opinionated in its design as dedicated content marketing platforms and won’t include some features—like in-app analytics—without a plugin or integration.

Alternatives

There are many! HubSpot offers a more complete digital marketing and CRM platform that you can also build your blog on. But there are also simpler CMS tools like Jekyll (what we used to build Help Scout), Ghost, and even Wix. WordPress is free and countless plugins and integrations mean you can probably get it to do what you want, so it remains my default recommendation.

2. Buffer

Pricing: Free, paid plans start at $5/month per social media channel.

Buffer is a social media management tool that lets you schedule, publish, and analyze as well as respond to users on social. I’ve been using Buffer for years for just-enough marketing automation across social platforms, from big moments like launch campaigns (after embargo, of course) to small details like first comments.

The tool has grown over the years and the biggest improvements have been in reporting and engagement, otherwise known as managing replies on social media in an inbox-like interface. Overall, Buffer has greatly improved as a tool for teams and still features the social content calendar that made it famous.

Pros

• The porridge is just right for some teams—Buffer’s platform offers all of the necessary features and scales nicely with collaboration and enterprise features on larger plans. It doesn’t offer every single thing under the sun, but the product’s focus is nice and helps keep the price reasonable.
• Buffer’s product has made great strides with reporting. The ready-made reporting templates are great and will save you a lot of time sharing numbers back with leadership.
• The engagement tools are smartly designed and actually use machine learning to stack rank the replies you receive, meaning the Buffer will flag if it suspects a reply is particularly negative, or if people are piling on.

Cons

• Lacks a few quality of life features that competing tools have, e.g., reporting should reveal when social media posts perform best over time, and some of the tagging features are a little inconsistent.
• There are small tools/add-ons around for content creation, like Pablo and its tool for building landing pages, that aren’t as good as the rest of the product.

Alternatives

SproutSocial and Agorapulse are two popular options for social media marketing. Buffer has caught up with both of these tools over the years, but I still think that SproutSocial has better reporting and Agorapulse’s ROI calculator is really useful, especially for this channel. Buffer is still a very solid tool and has my favorite calendar and scheduling workflow by far.

3. BuzzSumo

Pricing: Free, paid plans start at $99/month.

BuzzSumo is a content research platform that indexes billions of pages and reveals their social shares, backlinks, and trends across formats. You can also use BuzzSumo to find trending content ideas, though the real value is in the content research data.

BuzzSumo needs to be used with a specific lens: you’re looking to find over-performers relative to the sites you’re investigating, not just “popular articles” overall. BuzzSumo can help you surface that information, but you’ll likely have to pull the shares and engagement data into a spreadsheet and figure out what qualifies as an over-performing or viral post for the site you’re investigating. More on that here.

Pros

• The best data set I’ve used in a tool built for content research.
• Can enable both quantitative and qualitative research for content creation outside of keywords.
• The influencer features can also help you build a list for outreach after you produce your story, making BuzzSumo a fairly complete option for campaign-style content.

Cons

• A single outlier can often skew your research and BuzzSumo does not flag this to you. E.g., a post that received thousands of pins, or where the social shares are clearly spam of some kind. This is somewhat on the user, but it’d be nice if BuzzSumo could guide you away from making false assumptions.

Alternatives

The two most comparable tools are probably SEMRush, particularly their topic and content research features, and Social Animal. As time has gone on, I’d also add Ahrefs and their Content Explorer as a viable alternative, especially if you’re already using Ahrefs for its other features. I personally feel BuzzSumo has the biggest and best data set and returns more finely-tuned results, so that’s why I use it.

4. Surfer SEO

Pricing: Free, paid plans start at $49/month.

Surfer is a content planning and optimization tool that uses machine learning and natural language processing to make recommendations on how well your content matches the search intent for a particular term. That’s a lot of fancy, official language to say something simple: Surfer looks at the top results for a target keyword and tells you how comprehensive your page is in comparison.

My data and experience show that SEO-driven content creation tools like Surfer won’t make bad content rank, nor are they magic a potion for success. These tools do, however, help content rank faster and inform writers where their article may need additional context, detail, or information. Surfer is currently tied as my favorite tool for content optimization alongside Clearscope. The reason I recommend the Surfer over Clearscope is purely because of the pricing—it’s the most cost-effective solution on the market, for now.

Pros

• Reasonable pricing that doesn’t spike past a certain number of reports.
• Great integrations (like with Google Docs) to bake Surfer right into your content production process.
• One of the leading products in the relatively new space of content optimization. Feedback from Surfer will highlight potential coverage gaps in your own content and give you a better sense of what you have to cover to rank.

Cons

• The app can feel a little over-designed and sluggish at times versus competitors.
• Lots of bloat in the product (for me at least) with AI writing features and other things I don’t personally use.

Alternatives

Clearscope, Frase, and MarketMuse are popular options for content optimization. Clearscope in particular is an excellent tool and one I happily pay for, and I think it’s one of the best options in terms of the recommendations it makes and how well its integrations work. But, the pricing jumps drastically if you’re using it for more than 20 articles per month, so I recommend it with that single caveat.

5. Ahrefs

Pricing: Starts at $99/month.

Ahrefs is an SEO suite that offers tools to analyze backlinks, find content opportunities, explore competitor traffic, track rankings, and conduct keyword research. It does a lot of essential tasks for a search-driven content marketing strategy, and it’s one of the tools I use the most each day. You’ll need Ahrefs or a tool that’s similar to what it offers to stay competitive.

The interface can feel overwhelming at first but it’s smartly designed and easy to pick up for newbies, and the help center and video tutorials are a step above competitors (tools and training are better than tools alone). The site and content explorers are what make Ahrefs a stand-out tool, as most of its other functionality can be found in SEMRush, its main competitor. Keep that in mind when choosing between these two solutions.

Pros

• Industry-leading features for competitor research and content analysis.
• User-friendly interface and some of the best training of any SEO tool.
• Full suite of tools that solve for everything the average content marketing manager needs for SEO.

Cons

• The new per-user pricing is not good and rightfully caused a lot of pushback. There is essentially one “power user” who gets access to everything, but additional users now tack on an extra $30 to $50/month, depending on their access. It’s needlessly confusing.

Alternatives

There are a lot of task-specific SEO tools out there, so it really comes down to whether or not the alternative is a full platform that does all (or most) of what Ahrefs does. SEMRush is far and away the leading competitor here, and many people prefer it to Ahrefs. Another tool that’s been making waves is SE Ranking, which is a bit newer, lacks Ahrefs data set, but does offer comparable features. Older tools I haven’t used in a while include Moz and Majestic.

6. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is a marketing suite for planning, scheduling, and distributing your content. CoSchedule’s main draw and central product is its marketing calendar that organizes all outgoing marketing content into one place, like project management and publishing in a single tool.

CoSchedule’s other features work nicely with its central calendar, and altogether, it becomes easy to store creative assets, create publishing workflows and checklists, and sort inbound requests—all from a single interface. You can get started with a basic version of the marketing calendar for free and then see if this more expansive set of tools fits your needs.

Pros

• Fair pricing that lets users get value out of the free plan.
• CoSchedule can act as a source of truth for managing marketing projects and calendars should it be adopted across your team.
• A suite of other tools, like their Headline Studio, also become available with a free account.

Cons

• Despite recent improvements, I continue to find the CoSchedule interface to be over-designed and sometimes laggy. Speed is critical for marketing tools you spend a lot of time in and I wish they’d focus more effort on making the product faster.
• The per-user pricing can seem steep if you’re coming from a tool like Trello, or just used to using Sheets for everything.

Alternatives

Trello and Asana are popular options for managing content calendars. Trello is a simpler tool that only works in a Kanban style, while Asana is more feature rich but can be a little hard to onboard for new users. Both are great options, but I’ve found that CoSchedule meets in the middle of those ends and also feels purpose-built for marketing, which is nice.

7. Coda

Pricing: Free, paid plans start at $10/month per “Doc Maker,” which is a user who can create documents in your workspace.

Coda positions itself as a tool that turns docs into apps, and what that means practically is that Coda brings together databases, spreadsheets, docs, and even presentations into a single connected tool. Imagine relational tables inside of a rich editor like Google Docs, but woven together like a knowledge base. It’s a powerful tool for managing projects and internal operations.

The automations are definitely where power users get the most out of Coda. It can take time to get up to speed on all that’s possible through automation, but it’s easy enough to start with a few simple if-then statements inside one of your tables or project trackers.

Pros

• A powerful suite of tools combines planning, organizing, and project management all from one shared location. With all of the available features, docs inside Coda really do start to feel like dashboards or even apps.
• Can replace multiple tools with a single instance if you’re able to adopt Coda across teams and functions. For solopreneurs, this might be the only internal hub you ever need.
• User-friendly pricing that lets you add users who aren’t editing docs for free.

Cons

• Coda requires a bit of a learning curve not just for an individual user, but also for teams onboarding into the product who are used to using single-purpose tools.
• Some larger documents can get pretty sluggish, but smaller documents are comparatively quick and snappy to load.

Alternatives

Notion and the Google Workspace suite of tools (Docs, Sheets, etc.) are common alternatives to Coda. Google’s software is ubiquitous and Notion is extremely powerful once you invest time into learning how it works, so I could honestly recommend either of them. Personally, Coda integrates everything I use on a daily basis in a way that just clicks with me—it’s more of a personal preference than an objective advantage.

8. Canva

Pricing: Free, paid plans start at $13/month.

Canva is a web-based graphic design tool for creating visual content and infographics for websites and social media. The main appeal of Canva is that it’s lightweight and far simpler to use over fully-featured photo editing tools like Photoshop, but doesn’t compromise too much in terms of functionality.

Canva is also popular with non-designers for the seemingly endless supply of pre-built templates available across design styles. When it comes time to edit the details, Canva also shows up strong with a huge range of options, e.g., picking a font gives you access to hundreds of available fonts and font effects, even on the free plan.

Pros

• Most users will get a lot of value just from Canva’s free plan, and they open up enough of the product that you’ll be able to tell if Canva is the right solution for your needs. Generally, Canva is very user-considerate and even free users get a solid product.
• The template library is hard to beat. It’s grown over the years and now features a vast array of turnkey designs across every format.
• The editing interface is quick and snappy, and it feels more intuitive than many other web-based graphics editors. Most users will be able to grasp how the tool works after their first session with it.

Cons

• Sometimes you’ll end up accidentally running into premium walls in Canva at random. This is because Canva doesn’t filter the available templates into free or premium; they’re all grouped together in the same list.
• Canva is a fine tool for your typical infographic, but more advanced data visualization is not the tool’s strength. If you’re searching for a way to create charts, I curated a list of my favorite data visualization tools in an earlier blog post.

Alternatives

Adobe Express and Visme are two popular options for graphic design. Both offer comparable features, but I don’t think anyone comes close to Canva’s template archive at the moment. See which design library you prefer and use that to inform your decision.

9. Grammarly

Pricing: Free, paid plans start at $12/month.

Grammarly is an editing and grammar-checking app that provides recommendations and fixes for your copy. The free plan offers a solid spelling and grammar check to find and fix common errors, while the paid plans unlock additional feedback around word choice (simplicity, variety), tone, and plagiarism, along with making full-sentence rewrite suggestions.

No tool, in my opinion, can replace a great copyeditor, but Grammarly offers a helpful sanity check for your copy if you’re turning it around quickly or just want a second robo set of eyes on your prose. As you use the highest-tier plans, more options become available that are positioned toward businesses, like feedback based on your supplied style guide.

Pros

• Fast and generally effective grammar tool that will catch small, subtle errors. The free plan gets you a valuable product out of the box.
• All plans allow you to set goals for your prose and Grammarly will adjust its feedback based on this goal. For example, you can set how knowledgeable your audience is, the formality, your intent (storytelling vs. facts), and more, and Grammarly will adjust its feedback according.

Cons

• Like most of these tools, Grammarly will still make mistakes based on context or even just dramatic effect. It’s a nice gut check, but don’t rely on its suggestions too heavily.
• The editor can get a little laggy in a large document with many edits.

Alternatives

Wordtune and ProWritingAid are commonly used alternatives to Grammarly. Both tools focus on their more expansive feature set, but that can work against them if all you’re looking for is a straightforward grammar checker and rewriting tool. For that purpose, Grammarly feels more focused and is probably a better fit.

10. Simplecast

Pricing: Paid plans start at $15/month.

Simplecast is a podcast hosting platform for professional and business podcasts. At Shopify, my team produced and managed the Masters podcast, one of the world’s top shows on small business and entrepreneurship with over 8 million downloads and Simplecast is what we used to host our show.

I’ve already covered how to grow a podcast, and the one universal tool you’ll need is a solid hosting platform that’s reliable with robust analytics—and Simplecast is my favorite solution. The player is best-in-class and the analytics are great at the mid-range pricing plan. Generally, the pricing is feature-based with some features unlocking at certain tiers, though there’s also a “soft” monthly download limit for each plan, meaning you won’t be charged for going over but will be nudged by Simplecast to upgrade.

Pros

• Unlimited hosting on all paid plans so you pay for additional features, not file space.
• One of the best available players and likely the best analytics platform for podcasting.
• Reliable tool, I haven’t had any issues after using it for nearly 5 years.

Cons

• I wish more of the analytics were available on the lower price points, but I suppose they’re gated to help further justify the higher tiers.

Alternatives

Anchor, a Spotify company, and Buzzsprout are both great alternatives to try. I think Simplecast has the best reporting features and it’s my favorite audio player, but Anchor is a comparable solution at everyone’s favorite price (free) and Buzzsprout comes with helpful features like their automatic audio cleanup tool.

11. Google Search Console

Pricing: Free.

Search Console is a website and analytics platform from Google that lets you uncover and fix site issues, as well as see detailed performance data on how your website is performing in Google’s search engine. Search Console can get especially powerful once you start pairing search data with your own business intelligence—we built internal tools at Shopify to figure out which search terms were driving customers in addition to clicks.

Search Console is undoubtedly one of the most important tools in a search-driven content marketing strategy. It will frequently offer the best available data you can get on how a page is performing in search, what’s driving impressions and clicks, and how performance is trending over time. Get it set up immediately if you plan on using content marketing for SEO outcomes.

Pros

• Offers the best available data on the performance of your pages in search, bar none. Easy to install and almost instantly valuable once you have data flowing into the tool.
• Free, and Google doesn’t seem hard-pressed to monetize.

Cons

• The search performance reports are easy enough for most people to pick up, but there may be some training required to get the most out of the tool. Google offers some free training on their YouTube channel.

Alternatives

None, really, since no tool will give you the same set of data as Google’s own solution. If you’re going to be running a search-driven content marketing program, Search Console needs to be a part of your toolkit.

12. Tableau

Tableau is a visual analytics and data science platform that includes SQL, Python/R notebooks, interactive visualizations, and live reporting tools. I’ve mentioned before that the most important content marketing metrics at Shopify were Gross Adds and Retained Active Merchants, and Tableau was how we empowered non-data scientists to pull this data and create reports across properties and campaigns.

Pros

• Powerful platform for marketing analytics that’s probably as user-friendly as you can get for what it does.
• Essential tool for reporting on the business impact of content and cutting data from multiple properties and projects.

Cons

• Still fairly complicated when compared to simpler analytics tools that many content marketers are familiar with.
• Almost certainly requires a data engineer to set up properly. And despite Tableau’s visualization tools, your marketing team will benefit from being familiar with SQL to make the most of this tool.

Alternatives

Google Analytics and Mode Analytics are other solutions we used at Shopify, though Mode is geared for larger companies. I don’t have much experience using similar tools beyond Tableau and Mode.

The post The 12 Best Content Marketing Tools for High-Impact Teams (No Fluff) appeared first on Sparring Mind.

At the time of this writing, the first search result for content marketing metrics lists social shares as the number one metrics teams should track. If that doesn’t tell you that content marketing has a measurement problem, I’m not sure what will!

At Shopify, I ran a content marketing program that drove millions of monthly sessions and tens of millions in revenue. We had exceptional support from our data science team and were able to go deep on measuring our performance. Below are some of my favorite content marketing metrics to use when gauging the health of a large-scale content program for a self-serve funnel (e.g., no sales team).

The content marketing metrics that matter

1. Retained Active Customers

Retained Active Customers (RACs) measure how well any page on your website converts and keeps active customers based on retention time frames that matter to you.

We used this measurement framework at Shopify, and I believe it’s one of the best content marketing metrics for any company with a self-serve funnel. RACs both expand the range of insight you can gather from your data and shortens the time to discover new insight; the hallmark of any good metric.

The best time to implement the RACs framework is after you’ve clearly defined important milestones in your funnel and when they’re reached. You likely have something in place unless you’re getting a new content or marketing program off the ground, but this is an example of what I mean:

• Pre-Lead: Any email captured by any means other than a trial signup.
• Lead: A trial signup that hasn’t yet made their first payment.
• Gross Add: A signup that’s made at least one payment to any plan.
• RAC(x): A paying customer on any plan who you’ve retained for at least X days.

You’ll have to define your own metrics here, and once you’ve collected enough data, it can be helpful to set a site-wide benchmark for conversion across each stage of the funnel, just so teams across the company are broadly aware of how well, e.g., a lead converts to a paying customer.

As noted, RACs also require time frames for customer activity; ideally, you’d choose time frames quantitatively based on your understanding of signup and success for your product (e.g., tracking RAC60 because customers are twice as likely to upgrade past Day 60), but you can start by picking best-guess time frames and updating them later based on what you learn.

For example, you could define sub-metrics like RAC30, RAC90, and RAC180 to denote a customer who signed up for your product, converted to a paying customer, and remained a paying customer for 30, 90, or 180 days.

Remember that the longer the time frame, the more lag there will be until you can confirm the data, so while it’s useful for many companies to track long-term retention like RAC365, it’s helpful to also include shorter time frames so you can make faster decisions.

2. Gross Adds

Gross Adds are customers added to your product before you factor in retention and reactivation. As we mentioned above, Gross Adds can be a helpful metric to get more immediate feedback on a campaign, tactic, or strategy without having to wait for retention timelines.

Although we also tracked leads and pre-leads at Shopify, we also tracked customer adds directly because our funnel was self-serve and because our data showed that pre-leads had a relatively small window to convert.

Gross Adds are a relatively straightforward metric, so the one other point I’ll add is that we typically did opportunity sizing with Gross Adds. The reason is because Gross Adds were an easy metric to calculate and because they offered a fast enough feedback cycle to tell us if a new tactic, topic cluster, etc. was working or if we needed to pivot.

3. Incremental Gross Ads by cycle

One of the most frequent measurement mistakes I see content marketing teams make is assuming they had a successful 6-week cycle, quarter, or half because their numbers are up—without confirming what’s driving the results.

The magical thing about content marketing is that it compounds: evergreen content with the right distribution can drive results long after it’s produced and published. But that also means that in order to successfully measure content marketing, you need to understand whether the net-new content shipped within the last cycle is performing to your expectations or if legacy content is masking a cycle where you underperformed.

So, what do you measure? The simplest measurement for a self-serve content marketing funnel is to track incremental Gross Adds for each cycle—both net-new content and results from content republishing. The latter, content refreshes, are why you need to track the incremental results rather than just the overall performance of pages you modified during a cycle. You’ll laugh, but I’ve seen people make that mistake.

The final product is going to look like a cohort analysis chart that shows how much each cycle is contributing over time. I’ll be honest: building this is no small feat for a non-data scientist, and it’s especially hard for content republishes. So, I’d start with net-new content and the best metric you can measure—even if that’s just getting a cohort view into leads added per month from each cycle.

4. Session-to-customer rate

The past few years have unmistakably shown marketers the kind of performance swings that are possible as a result of large macro events. I know many companies whose conversion rates thrashed wildly with the times, reset, or changed trajectory entirely.

That’s why it’s crucial to keep some sort of health check that scores how well your top-of-funnel traffic is turning into actual customers. The simplest measure is session-to-customer rate, tracked across properties and topics.

Session-to-customer rate is also helpful for tracking how newer, large-scale content initiatives are influencing your ability to convert customers. At the start of a content program, you might take a bottom-up approach and address all of the bottom-of-funnel opportunities, such as building a competitor conquesting campaign and pursuing “alternative” keywords.

Over time, however, you’re likely to move up the funnel and into broader topics that are only tangentially related to the problem your product solves.

As you push into these new areas, site-wide or property-wide conversion rates are bound to fall, but you need to be sure that’s why happening and to what degree—are you dropping across many topics, or is it just the new stuff? Are we sure the root cause is the top-of-funnel nature of the topic or is something else driving the decrease? And let’s not forget, you need to explain increases in conversion rates, too! Session-to-customer rate can reveal that answer, and that’s why it matters.

5. Lead to customer rate

One thing that session-to-customer rate can’t reveal by itself is whether you have problems deeper in the funnel. One example we experienced at Shopify was that our mobile onboarding was underperforming, and as content marketing began driving more mobile sessions, our customer adds weren’t going up at the rate we expected.

Lead to customer rate revealed that we had been adding customers at a reasonable rate, but they were dropping off at a worse rate than before because of our mobile onboarding experience. This not only revealed an opportunity for growth but also provided some air cover for content marketing—we had an explanation for the issue, and we were able to rule out problems that any reasonable person might expect, like maybe that we had been chasing pageviews at the expense of conversions.

Many content teams won’t track a conversion rate this deep into the funnel because content has very little leverage to affect this number directly. But I recommend tracking it across content properties to be able to conduct a deeper investigation when you see noticeable swings in conversion rates.

The post The 5 Content Marketing Metrics I Recommend to Track Performance appeared first on Sparring Mind.

Our producer ran the show, sourced all of the guests, organized our production workflows, and ran all of our experiments—she’s the real star of the show! In that time, we learned a lot about what actually grows an audience and what doesn’t. The best lessons come through mistakes, failed experiments, and a little bit of scar tissue.

If you’re looking to learn how to grow your podcast, this post reveals never-before-shared lessons from my time working on one of the world’s most popular podcasts for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Here are the top lessons we learned.

1. Define what your show brings to the table

One of the easiest ways to derail a successful show is to lose your sense of why people (should) listen in the first place.

Our most challenging decisions around growth came from the fact that, early on, we hadn’t sat down and laid out in plain language what made our show unique and special—and why people tuned in every single week. We just took that information for granted, and when it came time to develop new styles, experiments, and series, there was a lot of arm-chair debate on what felt “on brand” or not.

We could have saved ourselves a ton of headache—and you can do the same—by getting specific about what our show was, what value we wanted readers to get, and, just as important, what we were going to avoid.

“What we are” and “what we aren’t,” with specific examples, is a great place to begin. This is sort of like the unique selling proposition for your show; the reason why someone would subscribe and give you hours of their time over another show covering the same topic.

Once you’re able to express this in clear language—and source feedback from listeners who validate what you’re saying is true—the steps you can take to grow your show become much more obvious. Are people tuning in to get tactical advice, personal narratives, or deep investigations? You won’t know how to invest in or improve your show if you can’t answer that question.

2. Source the most interesting guests you can

Guests and their stories are the X-factor for every podcast. This seems obvious to say, but I’ve seen plenty of showrunners get caught up in the many other tactics for growing their show to the detriment of their guest quality.

We have tried so, so many non-content experiments to grow the podcast, and none of them mattered as much as experimenting with various guests, interview prep, or story angles from certain guest segments. In podcasting, it really is all about the content. Someday, I’ll tell you about the time we spent thousands of dollars on Spotify ads just to drive 50 clicks to our show.

But I hear you, “get interesting guests” is about as novel as “eat your vegetables.” The thing is, it’s just as true—both things are the foundation for success, even if they’re obvious. That said, there are a number of approaches to sourcing guests that I would consider for almost any show. Here are a few that worked for us:

A. Big names: Yes, they really do work (sometimes)

Influential guests and celebrity names can drive a lot of downloads, but honestly, it’s no guarantee. One mistake we made was banking too much on someone’s current platform and exposure versus whether they were a perfect fit for our audience or had a story that fit our podcast’s style and subject matter. Yes, this approach works, but don’t compromise your show for a big name—that won’t work and jeopardizes your show’s reputation.

B. ‘Just like me’: The power of a role model

One episode style that surprised us was no-name business owners driving more downloads than famous entrepreneurs. It seemed like the common factor was that the best-performing “Average Jane/Joe” episodes featured stories that really spoke to the motivation of our own listeners. For us, that meant interviews that dealt with failure, personal motivations for starting a business, entrepreneurship as a form of personal freedom, and people who overcame significant challenges. In short, people who felt like role models, whose accomplishments felt relevant to our listeners and personally meaningful. Who is the equivalent role model for your audience?

C. Hidden secrets: Is it the angle, or the story?

For our show, we had to get really deliberate about whether the main draw of a guest was a specific hook or bit of experience they could share or whether their story and personality was enough to carry the show.

For the former, we soon learned that somewhat uncharismatic guests could drive a lot of downloads if it felt like they had a “secret” to share. Put another way, anyone with hard-won experience and a strong hook could overcome the lack of a compelling personal story. But it essentially had to be one of the other: secret information, or a sensational story.

It’s worth considering what spectrum your podcast operates on. Usually, the worst of both worlds is to land somewhere in the middle of your spectrum—wherever that is. It’s better to know which distinct angles work best on your show and to nudge guests in that direction based on what you know about them rather than to let the conversation cover too much ground and dilute the episode.

3. Reinvest profit to improve your processes

The best way to invest any profit you make from your show is into the production process. There are, I’m sad to say, marginal returns to get from improving production quality for most shows, but there’s a much higher ceiling for improving the process that guides how your show gets produced.

Once our show started getting traction, we hired a number of key contract positions to take non-critical work, the “undifferentiated heavy lifting,” off our plates so we could focus on guiding and growing the show. Here are some areas where hiring gave us a positive return:

• Editing. We listened to every episode before sending things over to our editor, but I’m sure once you’ve built rapport and worked with the same editor over time, you could even outsource this step. We used tools like Descript and Frame to add feedback and comments on episodes while also giving our editor room to make editorial decisions.
• Mixing and engineering. This is probably the first area where you should look to outsource work unless you enjoy doing this yourself. Hiring a professional audio engineer unlocked both a noticeable step up in quality while also saving us plenty of time fixing audio issues.
• Transcripts and descriptions. We published what we called Transcripts+ to our company blog along with the episode itself—these were short and concise summaries of the episodes formatted like a typical blog post. We also had the same person handle writing descriptions for the various podcast platforms where the show was hosted.
• Branding and graphics. Creating and updating our tile, along with the visuals we used for our companion written pieces, required graphic design work that we didn’t have time for. So we sourced a designer to create custom images for each episode.

You can also get help in sourcing and preparing research for guests before they appear on the show. However, since we had already saved so much time with the work above—and since guests are such a critical component of a successful show—we kept a lot of this work in-house. We were able to deeply prepare for guests and spend time on the story because so much of the production process had been streamlined.

4. Produce a series for a step change growth

Producing a series is not a guaranteed way to drive downloads and listeners—no individual tactic is, honestly. But our most successful experiment for changing the trajectory of our month-over-month growth in downloads was investing in producing our first running series.

The series interviewed the co-founder of Bushbalm on how he ran his business and his experience throughout multiple stages of the journey: everything from initial product development to growing the team. The first episode over-performed, and we saw strong retention with people coming back to download future episodes.

The value of a good series is that it provides a hook and a form of consistency that makes it more compelling to come back and revisit a show. “If I like one, I’ll probably like the others” is a really powerful internal monologue to build with your listeners, and it’s why consistency has its place in a format like podcasting.

But a series does bring its own risk: it’s a higher level of investment compared to any individual episode, so if the series doesn’t land with your audience, you may end up spending a lot of time and resources on a dud. One way to circumvent this is to litmus test a series with a single initial episode and not make too many promises—if the first episode flops, you can leave it be and get back to your normal schedule. But if it lands, you can head right into development.

The post How to Grow a Podcast: Lessons from Over 8 Million Downloads appeared first on Sparring Mind.

Run a quick search for blogging tools and you’ll see most people are strangely recommending tools and apps that mattered a decade ago. (People still use Evernote?) Or, they do not clearly describe why the tool is valuable and how to incorporate it into your blogging or content marketing strategy.

This list is different: it’s my hand-picked round-up of blogging tools that made my work easier, helped improve my team’s workflows, and, ultimately, helped us drive more impact for the blogs we were responsible for. Let’s jump into the list.

1. Free blog post template

What’s the tool?

The first tool is the free template I built to run my content-driven businesses and what we used for articles at Shopify.

The one important thing that’s missing from this template is the formatting in the final section: otherwise known as the outline or content brief. I removed that because each brief is specific to both the article you’re writing and the type of business you run; most of the people reading don’t need to fill out a brief as extensive as the one we use at Shopify.

Beyond that, this free template is designed to be plug-and-play, so you can add your preferred details to fill out for every brief or cut the sections you don’t use regularly.

Why is it valuable?

I often joke that all good templates are usually built through scar tissue—that is, helpful templates can only be made once you’ve already made the mistakes. I’ve wasted a lot of time chasing down the details that are now baked right into this template; it’s wild how long we operated without a simple review column!

As you add or subtract elements from the template, keep that in mind: you don’t want to over-engineer any template because that just results in people filling out meaningless details or filling in data throughout multiple tools. Use this and any template to reduce low-value questions and speed up production time.

Are there alternatives?

Certainly! In fact, I imagine you and many other readers will create alternatives by taking my template and making the changes you need to fit your own workflow.

2. Surfer SEO

What’s the tool?

Surfer SEO is a content planning and optimization tool that uses natural language processing to give feedback on your written content.

Surfer looks at the current top search results for the keyword you designate and “scores” your content based on how it compares, providing recommendations for what you could include to provide better, more comprehensive information for searchers.

Pros: Why is it valuable?

My data and experience show that content optimization tools like Surfer aren’t some magical tonic for SEO, but they do work—especially in industries with lower competition. For highly competitive topics, every marketer is using these tools already.

Surfer currently offers the best value on the market for what the software provides. The best way to use Surfer for search-driven content is to create a report for the keyword you’re targeting and use the input Surfer provides to ensure your content brief is comprehensive and covers the topic in a way that matches what the searcher is trying to solve.

I would not use any of Surfer’s pre-generated briefs, but this first step will provide a gut check to ensure your own brief covers everything it needs to. Then, I’d add your final draft into Surfer once it’s ready to get a content score. Don’t compromise the draft or focus obsessively on getting a perfect score—instead, use it as a way to flag if the final draft feels incomplete or doesn’t quite answer the questions Google thinks are important for the query.

Cons: What could be better?

Most of the content outlines that these tools provide are really, really bad, and Surfer is no exception. The technology just isn’t there yet, and I can’t imagine a high-performance team seriously using any outline that these tools spit out. I also find Surfer feels more sluggish when compared to competing tools, and the UX is overdesigned and clunky.

Are there alternatives?

Yes, but most of them are pretty expensive. I have experience trialing all of these tools, and I’ve used both Clearscope and MarketMuse for extended periods of time on larger projects. The enterprise features of MarketMuse can make it valuable for large teams, and Clearscope definitely has my favorite user experience—but for most bloggers and small content teams, Surfer SEO offers the best value.

3. Bear

What’s the tool?

Bear is a beautiful note-taking app that allows you to write and sync notes in markdown across all devices. I’m sorry for the Evernote potshot at the beginning of this article, but if you’re looking for a modern alternative, this is the one.

Pros: Why is it valuable?

No matter how streamlined and optimized your blogging workflow gets, you need a place to jot down serendipitous ideas. And more than that, you need note-taking software that’s a delight to live in and that makes organization easy and not a chore. Even if you don’t use Bear, I honestly believe this is true for all bloggers.

What Bear really brings to the table is the best design and UX of all the note-taking apps I’ve used, along with the easiest-to-use apps across devices. Many note apps are fine on desktop but a complete chore on mobile, which defeats a big reason why I use them at all. Bear is great on both mobile and tablet though it’s on iOS only, unfortunately.

Cons: What could be better?

It’s Bear-bones. This negative really depends on what you’re looking for, but Bear won’t serve as a team knowledge base replacement or anything similar. It’s an app that competes on design and simplicity with a “just right” feature set, which means there are likely some odds and ends, or specific integrations, that it’s lacking.

Are there alternatives?

Yes, but none that I particularly love. Notion is too heavyweight (for me) just to take notes. I do find that NoteJoy, Simplenote, and OneNote work pretty well, but I prefer Bear over all three—and Bear Pro is cheaper than all of these options.

4. Jasper AI

What’s the tool?

Jasper AI is an AI-powered writing assistant that uses GPT-3 to generate copy based on the prompts you provide. Jasper can be used to generate AI-written prompts, outlines, headlines, and even full articles with minimal human input.

Pros: Why is it valuable?

The increased access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 has given rise to a bevy of new AI writing tools that promise to make content creation quicker and easier. You’d be wise to not dismiss the recent progress this technology has made: it’s far better than it was even a few years ago and definitely capable of writing sentences, paragraphs, and full articles that sound like a human being.

Google has said that purely AI-created content is against their guidelines, so there’s bound to be some tension with these tools in the future. But I wouldn’t be too worried because what makes tools like Jasper actually valuable is how they help equip human writers with better prompts and faster ideation.

What that means is Jasper is very helpful for either creating the foundation for a short piece of written content or in helping with ideation. Jasper is better used as a writing partner or a junior writer for short, descriptive copy. If you try to use Jasper, or any other current tool, for writing long-form essays or thought leadership, you’ll end up disappointed.

Cons: What could be better?

Jasper’s pricing can be frustrating for some users because it’s quite high, and it’s based on a credit system like a lot of AI-powered tools. That means if Jasper produces copy that’s unusable or that you don’t like, you can get refunded a percentage. However, the tool does make mistakes and will duplicate ideas and paragraphs from time to time, so the human element—being able to provide clear, articulate prompts—is actually a factor in the overall pricing, which isn’t what most people are used to.

Are there alternatives?

I’ve trialed most of the main Jasper alternatives, and although none of them quite met my needs, I can see many bloggers and marketers getting value from WriteSonic and Copy AI. The bottom line is that I just don’t feel the copy ideas they generate are as good as Jasper’s, but because of the opaque way these tools work, it could have been the way I wrote and described my prompts. I plan on trying Writer, a relatively new tool, in the future.

5. Coda

What’s the tool?

Coda is an online word processor that lets you create documents that feel like apps. What that means is that Coda docs can include interactive tables, databases, charts, automation, and more.

Pros: Why is it valuable?

The main value of Coda is that it allows you to build a document with a bevy of interconnected blocks, rather than just write in a document. Have you ever come across an old Word or Google Doc at your company that contained outdated data? In Coda, you can pull the data that appears in charts and graphs directly from a database or a spreadsheet within Coda.

In this way, Coda offers the flexibility of docs and sheets but feels much more akin to an internal knowledge base in that it’s designed around having your docs live and work together. So as you use Coda to store notes, docs, data, and more, your other Coda docs actually get more powerful, as they have more information to pull in. This is in stark contrast to other word processors where a doc or spreadsheet feels like it lives in isolation.

Once you have Coda embedded in your workflow, you can use it to replace all of the following tools: document editors, (many) spreadsheets, project management tools, internal knowledge base software, and internal email tools. It’s that powerful.

Cons: What could be better?

Coda solves an interconnected set of problems—disparate internal tools that don’t work together—and so it’s not exactly a simple product. If you sit down and stare at a blank Coda workspace, it can feel a little overwhelming, and there’s definitely a learning curve involved. That’s my main caution with the product right now: the individual learning curve will take you some time, and adoption within teams may require some training.

Are there alternatives?

Coda is a bit of a strange tool in that it fits so many workflows and outcomes. I suppose you could say everything from Google Docs to Notion to even Fellow are potential competitors to Coda, but in my opinion, Coda’s value is in stitching together the right set of features from each tool. For example, Notion may offer a more powerful way to create and sync databases within docs, but Coda is a more useful product for creating docs for every purpose.

6. Airtable

What’s the tool?

Airtable is a low-code solution that allows users to build simple apps that function similarly to rich, interactive spreadsheets. Although Airtable has moved away from positioning itself as a spreadsheet, I think most people will end up using Airtable in the same way that most bloggers use a WYSIWYG editor in lieu of writing in plain HTML—it’s like a rich spreadsheet with a better interface and project management features built in.

Pros: Why is it valuable?

Airtable is the kind of app that you can build the entire backend of your business around. Right now, if there is any data flowing through my business, I try to get it inside of Airtable. You can create workflows, automation, project trackers, databases, calendars—nearly everything—from a single piece of software.

Airtable currently acts as both our content calendar and our dashboard for many content properties, and I can’t think of a single tool with that range. The more you invest in getting data and information inside of Airtable, the more powerful it becomes.

Cons: What could be better?

Airtable is far and away the most complicated product on this list. I imagine the Airtable team has had a hard time positioning the product because it can be used to do so much. If you’re already a spreadsheet wiz, you’ll probably find your footing in Airtable pretty quickly, but if you’re just looking for a more robust tool to organize things, you may end up with two learning curves: how to use a spreadsheet, and then how to augment your spreadsheets within Airtable. Once you’ve gotten a handle on how Airtable works, though, the sky’s the limit.

Are there alternatives?

Honestly, no. There are lots of alternatives for individual aspects of Airtable, like project management tools that also have e.g., a Kanban view, but there’s no product I’ve found that does everything Airtable does in a single product. It’s fantastic for content operations and running a growing blog, so I highly encourage you to try it.

The post 6 Non-Obvious Blogging Tools I Use to Run Multi-Million Dollar Blogs appeared first on Sparring Mind.