The Yours to Make initiative includes an installation at London’s Saatchi Gallery created by digital artist and curator Zaiba Jabbar using Reels
Instagram’s “Yours to Make” initiative aims to attract young people to the platform Instagram
In a column about art and Instagram, it’s easy to ignore the other apps scrambling for social media dominance. But the fight for attention is relentless, and while Instagram may be the art world’s social platform of choice, such favouritism tends to be generational. In the mid-2010s, reports started to show that fewer young people were using Facebook while the number of over-55s signing up was growing. It was soon coined “Boomerbook”. Meanwhile, Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 initially to neutralise the threat of competition, but soon the app began to mop up the pool of young people abandoning Facebook.
Now we are facing “Millennialgram”. According to a recent survey
undertaken by the financial services firm Piper Sandler, 35% of US teenagers say Snapchat is their favourite social media platform and 30% prefer TikTok, while Instagram comes in third at 22%. A report from the New York Times
last month revealed internal documents from 2018 in which the company had named the loss of teenage users to other social media platforms as an “existential threat” and a further document from October last year that read: “If we lose the teen foothold in the US we lose the pipeline.”
The latter leaked document laid out Instagram’s marketing plan for this year, and now we are beginning to see it unfold. The platform openly announced what it calls “the next chapter in Instagram’s brand story” on its website in September. Called “Yours to Make”
it aims to “showcase how you can explore who you are with Instagram”. The announcement was accompanied by a video that shows young creatives using the various features and products on the Instagram app, including the hip-hop artist Topaz Jones, the Native American make-up artist Madrona Redhawk and the digital creator Justin Yi—“real creators and everyday users who are using our platform to push the boundaries of creativity and experimentation”, Instagram says.
The New York Times says Instagram has allocated a marketing budget of $390m this year, mostly aimed at wooing teens. In the UK, the Yours to Make film is accompanied by a social-first content series created with Channel 4’s 4Studio, a brand partnership with the culture publication Dazed, targeted digital and video adverts, and “experiential activity” such as an installation at London’s Saatchi Gallery (4-9 November).
The work at Saatchi will consist of a free-to-access, interactive “motion art installation” in the galleries—a “digital portrait of British youth culture” with Instagram Reels video content from 50 handpicked Gen Z creatives. It has been assembled by the digital artist and curator Zaiba Jabbar, who says she has been inspired by “the breadth of creativity” in the Reels. The platform is also inviting users to submit Reels about their own journeys of self-discovery—tagged #YoursToMake—for the chance to be included in the work. Time will tell if Instagram can Reel the kids back in.
Insta’ gratification is a monthly blog by Aimee Dawson, our Associate Digital Editor. Looking at how the art world and Instagram collide, each article tackles a topic around the innovations and challenges that spring up when art enters the digital world.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has announced new plans for creators to bypass 30 per cent App Store fees that Apple charges on transactions, as it prepares to build Metaverse.
In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that as we build for the metaverse, we’re focused on unlocking opportunities for creators to make money from their work.
“The 30 per cent fees that Apple takes on transactions make it harder to do that, so we’re updating our Subscriptions product so now creators can earn more,” he posted.
Zuckerberg said that the company is launching a promotional link for creators for their Subscriptions offering. A
“When people subscribe using this link, creators will keep all the money they earn (minus taxes). Creators will have more ownership of their audience — we’re giving the ability for them to download the email addresses of all of their new subscribers,” he explained.
An investigation by The Financial Times has found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube lost around $9.85 billion in revenue after Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency (ATT) policy last year.
Advertisement technology company Lotame estimated that the four tech platforms lost 12 per cent of revenue in the third and fourth quarters, which roughly translates into $9.85 billion.
Zuckerberg said that Meta is also launching a bonus programme that pays creators for each new subscriber they get “as part of our $1 billion creator investment announced this summer”.
The new iOS App Store policy requires apps to ask permission to track users’ data. The policy went into effect in April, barring apps from tracking users if they opt out.
Facebook lost the most money “in absolute terms” when compared to other social platforms due to its huge size.
“Facebook has the most to lose because the cost of running advertisements on its platform has been increasing for years,” the Financial Times report said.
Since the introduction of the Apple iOS policy, most users have opted out, leaving advertisers in the dark about how to target them.
Zuckerberg has slammed Apple for its App Store policies in the past, saying the iOS privacy changes are negatively affecting its business.
“Apple’s changes are not only negatively affecting our business, but millions of small businesses, and what is already a difficult time for them and the economy,” he said last month.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, said that the biggest impact to them has come from iOS 14 changes which advantaged Apple’s own advertising business.
It’s one of the great ironies of branding that, while we tend to care passionately about the precision and quality of the words that brands use to communicate, the language we use ourselves is hopelessly vague. Often, we use identical terms to describe different ideas and concepts. At other times, we use different words to describe identical ideas and concepts.
One of the most glaring examples of this is the confusion that often exists between ‘brand positioning’ and ‘brand strategy’. Positioning is often described as “the space in people’s minds that a brand wants to occupy”. The term was popularized in the 1970s by advertising executives Al Ries and Jack Trout, who argued that brands wishing to cut through in a noisy, over-communicated society, needed to develop an oversimplified message capable of reaching an oversimplified mind:
Avis: we try harder. Seven-Up: the uncola.
In the words of Ries and Trout:
“Along Madison Avenue, these are called positioning slogans. And the advertising people who write them spend their time and research money looking for positions, or holes, in the marketplace.”
And here’s where the confusion begins: Ries and Trout flip-flop between two different definitions of positioning:
1. Positioning a brand in a marketplace;
2. Positioning a brand in people’s minds.
These are related, but different activities. What happens in someone’s mind is not the same as what happens in a marketplace. ‘We try harder’ and ‘uncola’ are not parts of a market, they are ideas that brand owners want to establish in our heads.
Philip Kotler is pretty firm in his point of view on which of these two activities is best described as ‘brand positioning’. As he explains in his 2017 book, Marketing 4.0:
“Since the 1980s, brand positioning has been recognized as the battle for the customer’s mind… Brand positioning is essentially a compelling promise that marketers convey to win the customers’ minds and hearts.”
That’s good enough for me. There are as many definitions of positioning as there are brand consultancies, but I’m happy to go along with the intention expressed here. It’s about hearts as much as minds.
It’s about belief.
The precise form of this belief can vary significantly. Over twenty years ago, I was told that a brand positioning is best expressed as a vision, mission, and set of values. Years later, it became popular to distil these into an ‘essence’ or a ‘brand DNA’. Subsequently, ‘brand purpose’ reinterpreted brand positioning for a generation in search of a deeper form of meaning. In reality, these are all variations on the same theme.
They are all about establishing a belief about a brand in people’s minds.
None of these describes strategy, although I’ve noticed that ‘brand positioning’ and ‘brand strategy’ are frequently used interchangeably. I find it helpful to think of them as distinct.
Here’s why:
Strategy suggests an analytical, insight-rich, data-informed, logical process. In broad terms, it’s about deciding where to play and how to win. Brand strategy comes in many forms, but I’ve always found it helpful to think in terms of the 5Ws:
WHO: Which groups of people do we want to prioritize? WHY: What are the most powerful motivations and attitudes we can appeal to? WHERE: Where are the best places for us to reach them? WHEN: What are the most important moments and occasions to focus on? WHAT: What competing offers exist, and how can we improve upon them?
If you don’t have a clear idea of who you want your brand to resonate with, why they should care about it, where and when you need to be available to them, and what competing offers you’re up against, then you don’t have much of a strategy. When someone talks about ‘positioning a brand in a marketplace’, then I tend to think of brand strategy, not brand positioning. It’s the part of my work when I expect to be wading through data, facts, and insights. It’s when I expect to be spending my time scrolling through Excel spreadsheets. The result should be a laser-sharp definition of what a brand wants to achieve and how it intends to get there. This is the realm of KCQs, KPIs, and BHAGs.
Brand strategy is a dispassionate, rational process.
Brand positioning is the opposite.
A solid brand strategy is necessary, but not sufficient if you want to create a great brand.
It’s not enough simply to set out which parts of a market you want to compete in, or who you want to appeal to, or which of their unmet needs you intend to fulfill. This gets you to something like Marty Neumeier’s ‘onlyness’ statement for Harley-Davidson:
WHAT: motorcycle manufacturer;
HOW: that makes big, loud motorcycles;
WHO: for macho guys (and macho wannabes);
WHERE: mostly in the United States;
WHY: who want to join a gang of cowboys;
WHEN: in an era of decreasing personal freedom.
It doesn’t exactly grab you. When I look at it, I wonder, ‘what’s the point?’ This is more compellingly articulated in Harley-Davidson’s mission statement:
“More than building machines, we stand for the timeless pursuit of adventure. Freedom for the soul.”
That’s a statement of belief. Although the two are clearly related, it’s more than a simple summary of the brand strategy, because it involves a creative leap. Without this, it would be as dry and uninspiring as a brand onion.
Great brand positioning is an antidote to indifference.
In contrast to brand strategy, positioning a brand is a creative act. It’s based on imagination, not insight; inspiration, not analysis. This is the part of my job where I spend time listening to people: What motivates them? What makes them proud? What inspires them? What are their hopes for the future? What does sustainability mean to them? How do they define success in its broadest possible sense? This part of the job is about understanding the future people want to create and the role they would like their brand to play in creating that future.
Brand positioning and brand strategy play complementary roles. Without a brand strategy to back it up, brand positioning risks being a hollow statement of ambition. Without a brand positioning to make it sing, brand strategy can descend into dull, lifeless drudgery. I’ve seen examples of both. There are organizations that love the fun part of coming up with a beautiful, bold promise, but shy away from the dirty, difficult task of working out how exactly that’s going to be delivered, to whom, and how. There are also organizations that create intricate brand onions, wheels, bridges, or platforms, but are utterly bereft of a creative expression that people can actually care about and believe in.
Trying to pin precise definitions on vague marketing concepts is generally a fool’s errand, but I’ve found the distinction between brand strategy and positioning is a helpful way to make sure when I’m speaking to a client that I’m fixing the right problem. Sometimes the issue is a lack of creativity. Sometimes it’s a lack of rigor. Often, it’s both. I’ve also found the distinction is a helpful way to critique my own work: Is the positioning ‘idea’ compelling enough? Is the strategy sharp? Is there an appropriate balance of rigor and creativity?
One final thing worth mentioning is that the relationship between brand strategy and positioning is similar to the relationship between a chicken and an egg: It’s not obvious which comes first. I’ve noticed that B2B brands tend to lead with positioning, while B2C brands lead with strategy.
“Brand positioning and brand strategy play complementary roles. Without a brand strategy to back it up, brand positioning risks being a hollow statement of ambition.”
For example, when Google says it wants to ‘organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’, it’s not describing a strategy. It’s making a promise with the expectation that this statement will establish a firm belief in the minds of its employees, its investors, its customers, and the rest of the world. The role of brand strategy is to translate the positioning into a concrete activity that stretches the brand into specific areas and specific audiences: maps, news, academia, communication, hardware, and beyond.
On the other hand, when Guinness shifted its brand strategy to focus on occasional drinkers, the brand team realized that the positioning would also need to change: The brand’s emphasis on ‘waiting’ was seen as a barrier to consumption for this group. The result was a shift of positioning and comms that moved away from ‘good things come to those who wait’ and instead repositioned the brand to celebrate people with the character and confidence to stand out from the crowd.
Honestly, I don’t think it matters which comes first. What matters most is that a brand’s strategy and positioning are mutually supportive: A clear strategic direction, married with a compelling positioning that’s capable of inspiring strong creative execution. Great brand strategists seamlessly bring together the analytical and the imaginative. This is how they do it.
I’m a brand strategist with over 20 years of experience. I began my career at Interbrand, where I led their brand valuation offer, and have subsequently developed and spearheaded the consultancy teams at M&C Saatchi Clear, Dragon Rouge, and The Clearing. I’m a member of the Superbrands Council in the UK, as well as a regular conference speaker, contributor to marketing publications, and author of two books on business, branding, and sustainability.
As the founder of a bootstrapped start-up, people often ask me how I decided on which funding route I’d take when there are so many options for founders to consider.
While I don’t have a short answer to this, there’s one thing I can say: your choice of funding needs to be based on the nature of your business and the product you are dealing with.
he exact type of your business can be determined in a number of ways, but I find ‘Red Ocean’ and ‘Blue Ocean’ can be quite helpful. Coined by acclaimed business theorists, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne to classify all market strategies, Red Ocean refers to when there are a lot of competitors and you need a substantial amount of money to survive in it. Whereas Blue Ocean refers to a very niche market wherein you might see a lower growth rate but survive with considerably low investment.
While being helpful, there is of course no hard and fast rule to this theory — it’s often purely situational.
Our first product, BizTalk360 falls within Blue Ocean (no competitors, focused segment, and low customer acquisition cost) while our latest product, Document360, falls under the Red Ocean strategy. With that product, we’re competing against companies like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Confluence, Notion, and so on, so we end up spending a lot on customer acquisitions for this product.
Now that I’ve given you a bit of the background on where I’m coming from, let’s dive into what made me ultimately decide on going the bootstrapping route.
The decision to bootstrap
The initial product idea for BizTalk360 was seeded at the Microsoft Global MVP Summit in Seattle in February 2010. The first version of the product was very well received by MVPs in 2011, which led to me to officially launch the start-up the same year. Within a year, we onboarded 65 customers.
As we started to launch new products, we sort of banked on the success of our previous products and reinvested the revenues into the company to fund them. All our products have their own engineering, marketing, and sales teams working on improving the products and acquiring customers.
Today, our parent company kovai.co has 1500+ customers. We have not had to seek external funding since all our products are generating revenues.
Great products will sell
When we launched BizTalk360, we knew that we still had a long road ahead. Building the product was not much of a challenge since I have the required technical know-how. Selling the product was the tricky part as I didn’t have much experience doing that.
I started blogging very early in my career. My blog used to be very technical in nature as I specialized in a particular domain which is the BizTalk server and gradually I was able to build an audience of 15,000 followers.
When I developed BizTalk360, the blogs helped me get my first customer (a casino) all the way from Hong Kong, which was completely unknown to me until that point. While my blogging activities might’ve landed us the first customers, it was the value of the product itself that kept customers loyal.
So no matter how good your acquisition is, the retention will always come down to quality.
Scale at the right time
In my opinion, most start-ups fail due to premature scaling. That’s why knowing when to scale your start-up is one of the most crucial decisions you’ll face as a founder.
Most entrepreneurs just assume that once their product has been successfully launched, it’s time to scale up. But that’s not how it works. The product has to be periodically monitored and improved to make sure that it is not being overtaken by competitors. Your product needs to scale up along with your business.
Since our flagship product, BizTalk360, is a niche segment, we were able to be the market leaders right from the beginning and still continue to do so. The product matured completely in about fives years and the goal was all about maintaining the product, taking care of existing customers, and adding new ones. We then decided to diversify and move to new products, we simply replicated what had worked for us in similar situations.
Another thing you should do is structure your work model and business process. You should have systems in place to effectively monitor the stakeholders and processes in the organization.
But once you actually pinpoint problems through that monitoring, you need to react to them the right way. Many start-up founders think that just hiring a person can magically solve all their problems, but let me be clear: it doesn’t work.
For example, hiring a Sales Manager when your product isn’t working properly is a rookie mistake. You need to be extremely patient and persistent in the process. Ensure that your product is a market-fit product before you consider scaling your start-up.
Scaling your start-up might seem tempting sometimes, but nothing is better than the slow, steady, and organic growth of your start-up.
Check your finances — cash flow, sales, expense, and revenue — before deciding whether you want to scale up. It’s easy to overlook certain aspects when you are trying to manage multiple things at the same time. Even then, you should have an elaborate financial plan with forecasts for the future.
The bottom line is: take time to lay the groundwork before taking your start-up to the next level.
Founder & CEO, Document360 Saravana is a Microsoft BizTalk server MVP since 2007, blogger, international speaker, and active community member in the BizTalk area. Before founding Document360, he founded two other enterprise software companies: Biztalk360 and Serverless360.
“Clearly, for too many companies, the hype about data-driven decision-making is not being matched by reality.”
Those are the words from Sovan Bin, the CEO and founder of enterprise data platform Odaseva. He had more to say in this press release:
“More than three-quarters of large enterprises admit that they’re lacking fundamentals in data management, and this is preventing them from unlocking the full value of their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) data. And yet, most enterprises – 64 percent – expect that the number one benefit of CRM data is an improved customer experience. There’s a clear disconnect here – and it must be addressed by rethinking data strategies, so CRM data becomes useful and actionable.”
What prompted his statement?
It was this study that his company commissioned from research firm Forrester. It found that 78 percent of enterprises report gaps in their data management that prevent them taking full advantage of their data and 64 percent said they find it challenging to actually move CRM data to platforms where it could be valuably used. Half of large enterprises worldwide (47 percent) feel they cannot rely on their CRM data to provide a single source of truth regarding customer data.
For the past few years CRM platforms have been stressing data, data, data. They’re using AI (Artificial Intelligence) as a marketing tool to lure companies into the enticing world of being able to predict what customers and prospects will do in the future based on their prior behaviour. But the reality is not living up to the hype. Why?
Odaseva’s Bin believes it’s for two big reasons. The first is that the majority of enterprises lack the basic foundations of data management. The other is that security concerns are limiting companies’ ability to truly leverage their data. Forrester’s research recommends that business invest in more skills training, improve their “data continuity” and step up their security.
I’ve learned to take these “commissioned” studies in stride because there’s always an agenda behind the findings. Odaseva is a data platform, so obviously a narrative where data is the problem and needs to be improved serves the company’s best interests.
But the findings do match what I see. Most of my clients complain about the integrity of their CRM information and I can’t think of one that would rely on their CRM system’s data for analysis of customer behaviour, let alone sending a simple email campaign, without some human oversight. The AI tech is just not there yet. And it’s going to take some time – and bigger strides – to achieve even those goals.
CRM systems are merely cloud-based databases. It’s as simple as that. At the very least, any organization that wants to get a satisfactory amount of ROI from their CRM system needs to invest in both people and tools to ensure that the data in the system is accurate, complete and can be relied on by sales, marketing and service teams. Security is also of prime concern. And then it’s about the questions: what behaviour do we want to predict? What data do we need to predict this behaviour? What’s our confidence in these predictions? How can we leverage these analytics to grow our sales?
Figuring out the answers to this question will be of primary concern to successful companies using good CRM systems in the future. But it will time and investment. Not making that investment merely creates a mess of data that is unusable…and will certainly hurt a company’s longer term value.
Feature Image Credit: Stephen Chernin/Getty Images
I was a former senior manager at KPMG and since 1994 the owner of the Marks Group PC, a 10-person customer relationship management consulting firm based outside Philadelphia. I’ve written six small-business management books, most recently “The Manufacturer’s Book of Lists” and “In God We Trust, Everyone Else Pays Cash: Simple Lessons From Smart Business People.” Besides Forbes, I formerly wrote for The Washington Post and the New York Times and now write regularly for The Guardian, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Inc., Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine and Fox Business. I make no compensation from the number of people who read what I write.
What are we going to call this? The Great Rebundling? The Atlantic is rolling out subscriber-only newsletters, editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldbergannounced Tuesday, bringing the work of nine writers under the magazine’s single paywall.
The nine writers are Jordan Calhoun, Nicole Chung, David French, Xochitl Gonzalez, Molly Jong-Fast, Tom Nichols, Imani Perry, Yair Rosenberg, and Charlie Warzel. The Atlantic is giving a free year-long digital subscription to anyone who subscribes to any of the writers’ existing newsletters — whether that subscription was paid or not, confirmed executive editor Adrienne LaFrance.
LaFrance was less forthcoming about compensation structures (no word on whether writers who bring in more subscriptions will earn more) and whether the writers will have the same editorial freedom they’ve had as independent writers (“The Atlantic is a writer’s collective, and a place where all writers are encouraged to pursue their preoccupations and curiosities. That’s true for our staff writers and it’s true for this group of contributing writers.”) Nick Catucci, a senior editor at The Atlantic who oversees newsletters, will be the writers’ “key creative partner” and each post will get copyediting help, too.
Charlie Warzel, who left The New York Times to launch his newsletter Galaxy Brain, threw back the curtain on his decision to leave Substack in an illuminating last post.
Over seven months on Substack (I did not take a deal with the company) I made considerably less than I did working at the Times (this will be the line people quote, I guarantee, if they quote anything from this post). I grew this puppy from 0 subscribers to over 16,000. On the paid side, I got over 1,400 of you to shell out. Due to monthly subs and some generous founding members, I did manage to crack the six-figure annualized revenue number ever-so-slightly (of course I didn’t do this for a full year). Not bad! But also far from the kinds of first six month numbers of the TOP TIER ‘STACKERS.
He lays out a few reasons for why things didn’t work out as well as he’d hoped on Substack. (One is that he failed to do enough “grievance blogging.”) A couple more that caught our eye:
I’m not a trade publication and not niche enough. Many of the best, most profitable newsletters are based off a very legible beat of some kind. They’re obsessive on one thing or act as a new style of trade publication. Their value is very clear to subscribers and, if you pick a niche where people can expense you for their jobs…giddy up!
I reached my Twitter promotion ceiling. This varies by the Substackers I’ve talked to but my experience is somewhat similar to what Casey Newton wrote recently. A lot of my paid subscriber growth came after getting Twitter shares. If there’s one thing that I don’t love about my personal Substack experience, it was that it still seemed to be anchored to Twitter, a platform that I owe so much to and have just the grimmest feelings about. Alas.
A subscriber’s open rate, Warzel found, didn’t line up with their willingness to pay.
A lot of the people who opened my emails the most did not pay for the newsletter … A lot of the people who paid for the very expensive ‘Founding Member’ subscription tier hardly ever opened the emails. One billionaire signed up for Galaxy Brain early on and then…like…a day later disabled their email. Curious!
Warzel, who reported “modest” growth every single month and a subscription churn around 3%, also wondered if he’s not pulling the plug a little too early. “There’s an argument to be made that if I was very patient for a few years, I could be sitting atop a one person (or multiple person) newsletter empire, making more than my market value at any publication,” he noted. “I think this is possible!”
Since leaving Uber a year ago, in October 2020, I’ve been making a living from writing – one with comparable income to when I was employed.
None of this would have happened if I did not start to write this blog several years ago. Writing which helped hone my writing skills, and build the credibility to start publishing books, and to start my weekly newsletter.
How do you find the inspiration and motivation to write? This is a question I frequently get – especially that regular blogging has led to making a living off writing. Here are the 12 approaches and steps that worked for me – some of which might be useful if you’d like to write more regularly.
1. Own Your Content
Start a blog or a place where you can start share your longform writing.
I am personally a fan for paying out of pocket for the writing platform I use. By doing so, I own my content. I took this advice from software engineer and blogger Scott Hanselman after reading his post Your words are wasted where he writes:
And still you tweet giving all your life’s precious remaining keystrokes to a company and a service that doesn’t love or care about you – to a service that can’t even find a tweet you wrote a month ago.
I pay a monthly fee of around $30 to use Ghost as a hosted service. Paying every month reminds me that I should write something to not waste all this money. It’s a small thing, but this guilt is what helped me get more articles out in the early days.
Getting started on free places where you keep your copyright like Hashnode or Dev.to can also be an option. The nice thing about them is you might get better reach, and more feedback or comments.
The downside with free-to-write platforms is that you don’t really own your content: those companies make a business directly or indirectly monetizing your writing and the traffic it generates. For example, see what happened with Medium: much of the content hosted there is paywalled.
2. Start Writing – Regularly
Few people know, but I have been blogging on another blog for years. Those posts were irregular braindumps on whatever was on my mind. It was a mix of personal updates, debugging stories and sharing when I released a new version of my app.
In 2015, I decided I want to write about software engineering – a field I had been working in for years. I took my inspiration from the once-very-successful Coding Horror blog by Stack Overflow cofounder Jeff Atwood. In the post How to achieve ultimate blog success in one easy step, Jeff wrote:
When people ask me for advice on blogging, I always respond with yet another form of the same advice: pick a schedule you can live with, and stick to it. Until you do that, none of the other advice I could give you will matter. I don’t care if you suck at writing. I don’t care if nobody reads your blog. I don’t care if you have nothing interesting to say. If you can demonstrate a willingness to write, and a desire to keep continually improving your writing, you will eventually be successful.
I read, re-read, and re-read this post. I then decided this is exactly what I need to do.
I picked a schedule and stuck with it for months. I decided to write an article every two weeks for the next couple of months. And this is what I did, shipping the first few articles on this blog:
If I started writing today, I’d join a community like Blogging For Devs, where you have a community that can feel it keeps you accountable, and a group that gives feedback on your early drafts. I’m a paying member here and drop in when I have the time.
Ship 30 for 30 is another great way to start. This is a program where you ship 30 writing assignments in 30 days as part of a cohort that keeps you accountable, which kicstarts this process and helps form this habit. The course is priced around $300: paying this amount and working in a cohort I’d expect will help you stick with writing through the 30 days.
3. Write For Yourself
When I (re)started my blog, I was wondering who would be reading my articles. In the end, I decided I don’t care: I’ll just write them for myself, as a reflection of the ideas and observations I have come across.
Approaching writing with this approach, it has been surprisingly therapeutic and a tool that helps me reflect. Writing my ideas down, in a form that makes sense requires a surprisingly large amount of thinking.
Writing is a forced way to think more clearly – and I’m not the only one to make this realization. Early Facebook employee Andrew “Boz” Bosworth shares a similar observation in the article Writing is thinking:
Even when I write for my own benefit, it is undoubtedly a bonus that at the end I have a document which I can easily share to invite critiques or enlist support. I know of no more scalable way to engage a large audience than the written word.
I’m glad I started out writing for myself: it helped my thinking, and it helped polish my writing as well. The early articles are noticeably shorter and, less pleasant to read, though they often took more time to write than later ones. They gave me early practice in forming and writing down my thoughts around various engineering topics though.
4. Copy Writing Styles You Like
Most of my favourite writers and bloggers have a distinct style. When I started writing, this made me think: what would be my style? What writing setup should I chose?
When starting out, I copied the writing style and approach of well-known bloggers. Most of my early posts were inspired by the quotation style that Jeff Atwood uses in many of his articles. He takes a 1-3 quotes from various articles on the same topic, then adds his own cents.
As I browsed blogs, this approach struck me as one that can help me get started easier. Commenting on someone else’s writing is a lot easier than writing from scratch. So this is what I did with my first few articles. If you look closely, the resemblance in style for these articles should be clear – but only if you know where to look for the inspiration:
Many early Pragmatic Engineer articles were inspired by the writing style of Coding Horror. Can you see the similarities?
As you start to write more, your writing style will evolve and you won’t feel the need to “copy” another style. This is what happened in my case. Current articles don’t lean on any one style: they’re a mix of what I have found pleasant and useful, over the years.
If you like this style – you’re more than welcome to copy the approach. I do, however, recommend the quoting approach for an easy start: it’s much easier for words to flow when there’s already a few thoughts from someone else that you can reflect on.
5. Capture Ideas As They Appear
Once I started writing, the biggest barrier I faced was the lack of ideas. After finishing an article, I’d be unsure what to write about next.
Capturing ideas as they popped into my head has been very helpful for my writing I almost always did this with a note taking app on my phone or my laptop – as ideas would often come when debating with a colleague, or having a conversation over lunch. I now use Craft Docs to capture these – both because of the slick UI, as well because my brother is behind the company – but any system works.
Once I started to capture these ideas as they hit me, I no longer had a shortage of topics. After a while, I had the opposite: too much to choose from. Here’s a screenshot of my “blog ideas” note in Craft Docs, and a fraction of my idea backlog:
6. Freewrite
Once you have the idea, it’s easy to get stuck on an empty page. One of the tricks that helps me break this block is to do twenty minutes of free writing. Here’s how I do it:
I set a timer for 20 minutes on my phone, and place it next to me.
I proceed to do free writing, typing out everything that is in my head. I don’t stop to correct grammatical errors, or to go back and fix anything.
I don’t stop to criticize my thoughts – this gets easier once you’ve done this a few times.
If I cannot think of anything to write, I write “I cannot think anything to write… okay, now I thought of this new idea on…”
The interesting thing is how it works, every time. After a few minutes I’m pushing out ideas, and I’m usually frantically typing when the timer goes off.
7. Draft
Following free writing, I have a good chunk of ideas. I then proceed to write a draft piece.
My approach is this:
I write out key ideas I want to explore as bullets
I write out each of those bullet ideas: either by copying from my free writing, or by adding a few paragraphs to each
I personally like to bold out the key ideas I’m exploring. It helps me focus on what I’m trying to say.
I often do research during the draft stage, reading up on topics I’m writing about, then quoting or linking to relevant resources.
My draft is complete when I wrote about all the parts I wanted to.
8. Edit
Once a draft is ready is when a very different staging of writing comes: editing. This one is something I often leave for the next day. Even when I start doing it after the draft, I take a break to get into “editing mode”.
Editing is about making this piece digestible for the reader. I do a few things:
1. Add a closing section. What is the takeaway of the piece? What is the one, or two things I should leave the reader with? For example, in the article Data structures & algorithms I used working at tech companies, I added this summary section:
Data structures and algorithms are a tool that you should use with confidence when building software. Know these tools, and you’ll be familiar with navigating codebases that use them. You’ll also be far more confident in how to implement solutions to hard problems. You’ll know the theoretical limits, the optimizations you can make, and you’ll come up with solutions that are as good as they get – all tradeoffs considered.
2. Make the opening count. The first few paragraphs need to grab the attention of the reader, make it clear why the topic is relevant, and what they’ll get out of it. I often set the context in the beginning as well.
Do you actually use data structures and algorithms on your day to day job? I’ve noticed a growing trend of people assuming algorithms are pointless questions that are asked by tech companies purely as an arbitrary measure. I hear more people complain about how all of this is a purely academic exercise. (…)
This article is a set of real-world examples where data structures like trees, graphs, and various algorithms were used in production. I hope to illustrate that a generic data structures and algorithms knowledge is not “just for the interview” – but something that you’d likely find yourself reaching for when working at fast-growing, innovative tech companies.
3. Tighten up the text. Once the opening and the closing are clear, I go through the article to tighten up the text, make sentences shorter, and fix any grammatical issues.
In the past, I used Hemingway Editor to spot overly complex sentences. I would then proceed to make them shorter and easier to read. Over time, I learned to write more clear sentences myself:
Making text easier to read with Hemingway Editor: before and after
I also use Grammarly to catch spelling, and grammar issues, and sometimes take suggestions the tool gives – though I just as frequently reject them.
An editor not only makes your writing more clear, but it’s a fantastic way to learn on how you can improve it. I would not recommend an editor for every blog post: but hire one if you’re serious about wanting to write better. My editor is Dominic Grover and I could not be happier with how he helps me write better:
9. Publish
Pressing the button to make my writing live is one I like to delay. However, I’ve always found that done is better than perfect. Most of my blog posts go out after light edits, and I set it live.
10. Feedback
For most of my early posts, I got no feedback, and probably very few readers. However, as soon as I start to get feedback, I often go back and tweak my writing based on what people say.
The most frequent feedback I used to get was on typos. I sometimes do get corrections, and additional ideas, mostly as emails or messages – both are more common since more people read what I have written.
11. Audience
Writing and people reading your writing is a chicken-and-egg problem. When you start out, there’s no one to read. When there’s no one to read, there’s little point in writing.
As uncomfortable as it is, you do need to share your writing to where interested people could be. This can be social media like Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook. It can be groups like subreddits, Hacker News and other tech forums. It can be chat groups on Discord or Slack.
Self-promotion is something you’ll need to be wary of on forums: if you only join these communities for the sake of sending a link to your article, you will – rightfully – not be welcome at these places.
This is where it’s helpful when you start to write for yourself: you have less of a pressure to want to get people you don’t know read your writing.
12. Again. And again. And again.
The hard thing about writing is not on publishing an article: anyone can do this. The hard part is doing the writing on a consistent basis.
I found that setting up dedicated time – an hour each week, on a weekday – helped me get into the habit of writing. This is how I wrote most of the posts on this blog.
Over time, some posts resonated with people, while others saw very little interest. Still, every piece helped one person: me. Every time I published, I had the satisfaction that I’ve understood or explained something for myself – and maybe, for others as well.
And this satisfaction is what gave me the motivation to do it again. And again. And again.
‘Hey, Siri, grow my business’: The founder of First Page wants you to hop on the voice search train and watch your business skyrocket
It’s no wonder, really. After months of lockdown and social distancing, we had to talk to someone. In 2020 and throughout 2021, Alexa and Siri became a little less robot and a little more gal pal. Siri supported our online shopping habit without judgment, and Alexa gave us step-by-step instructions on how to make the perfect quarantine sourdough.
Voice search will change the way your brand does SEO. And if you want to grow organic traffic in 2022, you’ll need to get on board. So we’ve put together some of the top tips to help you craft an SEO strategy that really speaks to your target audience…literally.
Improve Domain Authority
Want your results to be on the tip of the tongue for voice-enabled devices? Focus on increasing your site’s domain and link authority by implementing a link-building strategy and boosting your backlink profile. High domain sites are the most likely to rank well in voice search.
Developing an effective link-building strategy means looking at your brand’s strengths. What do you have to offer that people would find interesting enough to share on their websites, social-media accounts, or in news articles or editorials?
In addition to data stories, using expert insights from your customers or influencers can help create unique, insightful content that resonates with people and often prompts them to share. Use a service like Cision’s HARO (Help a Reporter Out) to source industry thought leaders or respond to queries as a thought leader in your industry.
You also can build a lot of links just by being aware that links are important — lots of companies are already doing things in the community or with partners, or they’re doing things that are newsworthy. Ask for a link when it makes sense.
Keep It Simple
Most voice search results come in at a 9th grade reading level. Keep your content casual and conversational, and don’t forget to include those long-tail keywords that answer questions like “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how.” Do a quick Google search for your primary keywords, and pay close attention to the “People also ask” section below the sponsored and top results. This is an SEO gold mine. Incorporate those questions into your content to increase your chances of ranking on voice search.
Snag Those Featured Snippets
More than 40 percent of all voice search results come from Google’s featured snippets. Featured snippets are typically in the top position on search engine results pages (SERPs), otherwise known as “position zero.” While landing a zero-position result is still shrouded in mystery, you can improve your chances by optimizing your content around long-tail keywords that answer specific questions.
The “People also ask” questions mentioned above will help you narrow down keywords that are relevant to your brand and write crisp, concise answers to them.
Other ways to increase your chances of getting your content in a featured snippet is to carefully consider formatting choices. Use bulleted or numbered lists, tables, and heading tags. Above all, structure your content to make it easy for Google to understand and pull answers to the questions people are searching.
Don’t Ignore Local
No matter how big your brand, it pays to have a local presence. Voice searches on mobile devices are three times more likely to be locally based than text searches. Be sure to include your location within your long-tail keywords when appropriate, whether it’s your brand headquarters, regional offices, or the communities where your employees or leadership are located and in which they’re involved. If your brand is local, you’ll need to own that market if you want to rank well in voice search. Make sure directions to brick-and-mortar locations are correct and simple to understand, and optimize for “near me” searches.
Make sure your Google My Business and local directory listings (like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and specific industry directories) are complete and up-to-date, including all locations and map listings. Engage in local partnerships and community initiatives where it makes sense for your brand. Doing this can help with link building as well as with your authority and credibility within specific regions.
Create Content With Context
SEO without killer content to back it up won’t get you too far. Make sure your content gives your SEO strategy a lift by building your content around your ideal personas, and answer key questions like:
Who are they?
What keeps them up at night?
Why do they need what my brand provides?
Then, reflect those answers in your content. Keep it concise, conversational, and relevant. Consider adding FAQs with more specific questions, and reinforce this with schema mark-up, whether it’s FAQ schema, reviews schema, or video schema. This helps give more structure to your content and ensures Google can easily understand it.
Make sure the content you’re creating fills a need or solves a pain point. Create valuable tools and downloads that provide something useful and fulfil search intent. Be sure you’re also using multimedia, like infographics and video, to make your content engaging and shareable.
Also, if there are specific issues, problems, or trends that are impacting your customers, cover them in your content. For example, if most of your customers are in California and feeling the effect of wildfires there, be sure to mention it. Bottom line: If they’re talking about it, you should be, too.
Find a Professional SEO Consultant
The way we search is changing. We want clear, concise answers, and we want them yesterday. Flowery, long-form content might be great for your existing desktop audience, but if you want to capture new visitors through voice search, you need to optimize and adapt your SEO strategy. A professional SEO consultant can help you implement all the tips above and a lot more, like technical and on-page SEO.
You want to grow in 2022, right? Who doesn’t? But if you haven’t jumped on the voice search bandwagon yet, you’re putting your brand at a disadvantage. If you want to be the brand everyone (or at least, Alexa and Siri) is talking about, make sure voice search optimization is part of your 2022 SEO strategy.
The digital marketing industry has seen an influx of growth over the past few years. More businesses than ever are adapting to the digital arena brought on by the global pandemic. This change of pace has spurred new digital marketing trends that have replaced previous outdated strategies.
Below, 10 members of Young Entrepreneur Council explain which recent digital marketing trends they’re most excited about and why. Here’s what they believe the future of marketing will look like, and how these trends have already impacted their own efforts.
1. AI Writing Assistants
I’ve been getting excited about AI writing assistants which are mainly tools that can produce ghostwritten content. There’s Narrative Science, Wordsmith and Automaton, for example. All these AI assistants work by combing databases and finding patterns in order to make educated guesses on what the content is about. Advantages: an illusion of higher quality and less personal bias in articles, they’ll likely churn out more articles than there would be human writers, will lower prices for clients, less stress on writers. Disadvantages: potential loss of author voice (depending on how much control is given to the software), possible breach of integrity when personal biases become part of the production. Regardless, AI writing assistants should be an interesting trend to watch in digital spaces. – Brett Farmiloe, Markitors
2. Video Marketing
Our firm has invested in video marketing, to revel in the potential. Watching a video for a product or a service not only improves brand recall for the consumer but also gives them a chance to immerse themselves in the experience. They receive a few minutes of either entertainment or information and are incentivized to share it within their networks. You can also use the elements of storytelling to weave an unforgettable narrative. For example, one UPS commercial, inspired by a YouTube channel that rescues dogs from the street, showed a driver taking in a stray dog. The transformation associates UPS with positivity and care. A small business doesn’t need as high a budget to reach the same emotional connection. You simply need a good script and actors. – Duran Inci, Optimum7
3. Giveaways
I love the idea of using contests and giveaways to drive traffic to your website and boost conversions. They’re fun and generate excitement with your target audience, encouraging them to take action and interact with your brand. The great thing about contests is you can set rules to boost engagement, such as requiring social shares or comments to get entries. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
4. Audio Social Apps
I have never seen the ability to create momentum behind a product or service like you can with audio social apps such as Clubhouse, Greenroom or the new social app Fireside. Even market research can be done with the press of a button and you can hear from your potential clients in real-time about what they want or don’t want. Even finding out what problem to solve and add on to your current portfolio. Plus being able to speak directly to your customers builds a strong bond and rapport where no other social platform can. We have created services and even businesses based on the demand and what people want. – Daniel Robbins, IBH Media, Bintana Sa Paraiso, His skincare
5. Accessible QR Codes
I’ve been getting excited about QR codes as an access point to products. During Covid, the rise of restaurants using QR codes to display their menus on people’s phones means almost everyone knows how to open a cellphone camera and scan a QR code. This is a rising trend that is going to become more and more popular. Companies like Apple are adopting this with app clips. You can scan a QR code on something like a scooter and it will pop open a segment of an app so you can interact with that product without downloading the entire app. I think many more things will soon be able to be accessed with a QR code, and that will be a big shift in how people get their products into the hands of customers more easily. – Cody Candee, Bounce
6. Social Media Shares
Social media content that spotlights our clients, stakeholders, partners and collaborators is an amazing way to get at least one share of your content. We have changed the way we measure success in a post from just reviewing likes and comments to how many shares we are getting. This approach is a game changer and really builds relationships. We focus on talking about their achievements, stories and congratulating them. It is simple and works. – Saana Azzam, MENA Speakers
7. The Rise Of Audio Content
There has been a shift in media consumption. Written rules the world and the internet but something has changed for some time now. Writing isn’t the only major option for media consumption. We’ve moved to audio and video. And the trends can be seen in books being preferred in audio form and blogs becoming podcasts. You might get into trouble reading a book or watching a video on company time but an engaging podcast can get you through your shift. It has informed my decision to create content on audio and video platforms instead of writing articles alone. The dividends have started paying off already. My YouTube show “Coffee With Closers” has been a platform to interact with entrepreneurs whom I admire and am friends with while creating content that’s valuable to business prospects and people in general. – Samuel Thimothy, OneIMS – Integrated Marketing Solutions
8. Leveraging SEO
SEO PR is very exciting and is allowing for proven ROI from building high-value PR links on major news outlets. This concept can drive more organic users and obtain highly sought-after publication backlinks. It’s certainly worth the time to learn more about it and implement it into your marketing strategy. You can work to learn this yourself or reach out to professionals to help implement it. – Tyler Quiel, Giggster
9. Social Media Stories
Stories on social media such as Instagram have taken over as a fast strategy for growth. Benefits of using stories include building the know, like and trust factor which helps with sales. Stories are a quick, low-pressure way to communicate without worrying about editing or design. When people show their face on stories they can upload daily and speak directly to their target audience. This trend is so powerful that it serves as a tool to conduct market research and sell directly to clients. The results are so effective that I ask my audience to use the hashtag #showyourface and tag my account @dietitianboss on Instagram for accountability. Every day my audience tags me and I re-feature them in my stories. The act of showing up gets both my clients and company recurring business. – Libby Rothschild, Libby Rothschild
10. Optimized Podcasting Platforms
A digital marketing trend that I’ve recently been getting truly excited about is the increase in podcasting platforms working to increase the integration of podcasts with content marketing channels like blogs, social media posts and email lists. Podcasts have transformed into one of the best ways for brands to target their ideal client avatars with pinpoint accuracy, enjoying tremendous boosts in credibility and brand exposure to key audiences. Even better, niche podcasts can be very affordable to market through. When combining podcast marketing with other methods of content marketing, the entire marketing campaign is more effective, with far better integration of promo codes and links for fine-detail tracking and better insight into cost per acquisition of each channel. – Richard Fong, ProcessingCard.com Check out my website.
YEC is an invitation-only, fee-based organization comprised of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs 45 and younger.
When photographers take that initial leap into photography as a profession (or a more serious side hustle), blogging should rank high on their list of to-do’s. Blogs have long proven to be one of the most effective tools photographers can use to build a presence online. Honestly, though, they can be a pain to maintain. A well-designed and consistently updated blog may help photographers gain credibility, use targeted SEO to grow a following, and make clients and vendors happy with easily shareable posts, but they also typically require a significant investment of time and effort, both for learning to use the software and posting regularly. For this reason, a good number of photographers don’t dedicate adequate time to blogging. That is where Storytailor from StompSoftware (the makers of BlogStomp) comes in.
Since 2009, StompSoftware has provided affordable, easy-to-use software for both Mac and Windows users. With their latest blogging app, Storytailor, the StompSoftware team has released what might arguably qualify as the ultimate blogging tool. This holds especially true for photographers. Storytailor’s intuitive design and powerful tools help lighten the load for running an effective photography blog with minimal time and effort, and it works well with Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, and others. In the following review, we’ll weigh in on Storytailor’s features and consider how they might help improve your blogging workflow.
When you open Storytailor, the first thing you’ll notice is the app’s simple, straightforward design. You can easily navigate the clutter-free interface and locate the features you need to craft your post at every stage of your workflow. Storytailor maintains this elegant design aesthetic throughout, whether you’re populating the blog with content or putting together a collage to share on Pinterest. It may sound cliche to say there’s truth in the idea that “less is more,” but this app supports such claims with concrete evidence.
Don’t mistake the minimalist approach to the app’s interface for a lack of power, however, as you’ll learn below.
Design Features
Part of what makes this app so easy to use is the amount of automation going on behind the scenes. The app’s auto-arrange blog post builder has been designed to do the majority of the work for you in terms of setting up and laying out the blog. All you have to do is load your photos, fine-tune the design (using margin sliders, image cropping, inserting logos/watermarks, etc.), add your copy, and publish.
Let’s take a closer look at the process to further explore each feature.
Adding and Organizing Photos & GIFs
A view of the Collage Module in Storytailor
Photographers will appreciate Storytailor’s emphasis on leading with imagery to build a blog post. Right from the start, after you select the “Blog” or “Collage” option, you’ll notice a conspicuous drag & drop area that makes it easy to import your photos and begin the blog-building process. Storytailor gives you three other ways to add photos to your post, but you really need look no further than the drag & drop option on the opening screen.
After adding your images, the “auto arrange” function automatically begins organizing the images (pairing portrait-orient photos side-by-side, for example). Once your images have finished loading, you can rearrange them in the Image Browser or the main blog column. Simply drag and drop the photos to where you want them. In addition, you can right click on the images in the Image Browser to sort them by file name, capture date, or creation date. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, you can use the margin slider in the upper righthand corner to control the size of the margins between the photos. Sometimes, it’s the finer details like this that make all the difference.
Another cool feature that Storytailor recently added gives you the ability to include GIFs in your blog post. This provides a great opportunity to highlight a sequence of images that can add to the overall storytelling, such as a twirl on the dance floor, a bouquet toss, or perhaps a candid interaction between newlyweds.
Adding Copy
Storytailor makes it easy to add custom web fonts and insert text copy to your blog post as well. To start, simply click on the text icons throughout the post to set up your intro at the top, insert blurbs between photos, and then link to venues and other vendors, if applicable (linking out to other sites is one of the ways to boost your SEO score). You can then use Storytailor’s selection of fonts or add any hosted font from services like Google or Adobe to finalize the look of your post.
The overall design automation and quick select options for organizing the images and other features helps provide a stress free experience.
SEO
Optimizing SEO for your blog is one of the most important things you can do to get your blog seen. Between keywords, file names, title and image tags, and so on, there’s a lot to keep track of. You can purchase separate plug-ins to help do this, but Storytailor packs plenty of SEO tools right into the app.
SEO Tools and Grading Structure
Using Storytailor’s SEO tools, you can easily add keywords and customize file names, title tags, and alt tags for images. You can also load preselected keywords that will automatically be added to all of the photos in your post. From there, you have the option to add additional keywords to individual images.
The Grading Structure allows you to check the effectiveness of your SEO efforts in real time with a graded score (think A through F) for things like the title, word count, and other items like those listed above. If you’ve ever used the Yoast plug-in, you’ll already be familiar with the concept. Squarespace or Wix users who don’t have access to the Yoast SEO WordPress plug-in will find that much more value in these tools. Even if you use WordPress, you won’t need to worry about getting the Yoast plug-in. The Grading Structure in Storytailor takes the guesswork out of knowing whether or not you’re hitting the major SEO metrics.
If you’re newer to SEO or you just want to ensure you’re doing everything you can to maximize SEO for your post, check out this helpful article, “Our SEO Philosophy,” on Storytailor’s website.
Publishing Features
Publishing your blog post with Storytailor takes no time at all and it really couldn’t be easier. To illustrate, here’s a quick overview of the steps involved:
Finalize the written content and photo layout
Click “Publish” in the lower right corner
Select your blog platform (Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, Other)
The app will publish the post on your site as a draft (you’ll need to provide log-in details for your platform) or provide an html code you can paste into the backend of your blog site.
Storytailor adopts CSS style from the blog, which allows font type and color matching to happen automatically for most users. After you publish the post, the next phase of Storytailor’s effectiveness kicks in when the SEO you’ve set up works to bring more traffic to your page.
Website/Blog Format vs. Publishing
Websites and blogs come in a wide variety of formats and hosting plans. As a result, there are occasions in which users might experience publishing issues due to obscure/conflicting code in their websites, or because of stringent hosting restrictions. A handful of users from Storytailor’s beta test group of 2500 reported experiencing some issues when publishing for these reasons. I have not experienced any such issues, but it’s worth mentioning. I imagine that outside of any unconventional website setup you may be running, the features in Storytailor should work as expected.
Sharing Features
In addition to all the amazing features in the Blog tab, Storytailor has also included a Collage Builder and a Batch Exporter for jpeg exports, producing web-ready files for targeted sharing. You’ll recognize this feature if you’ve used BlogStomp in the past, and you’ll appreciate it more than you know if you’re new to this entire process.
Collage Builder and Batch Exporter
For photography-based bloggers, these features alone are more than worth the price of admission. Seriously. If you only ever used the Collage Builder and integrated it into your current blogging workflow (or to share images on Pinterest), you’d still be amazed at how much more efficient your blogging workflow would become.
Example of one section of a collage layout made with Storytailor’s Collage module for linandjirsa.com
The Collage Builder has greatly simplified the whole process of creating and adding custom layouts to our blog posts for Lin & Jirsa Photography. Since we discovered its effectiveness, we’ve used it constantly. The Collage Builder works similarly to how you arrange and customize the photo layouts with the automated Blog Builder, but here you can also export your collage as a web-ready file, which is great for Pinterest. Simply add a web url to images so that when they’re shared on Pinterest, potential clients can more easily find your contact info.
Security Software Limitations
Although I have not personally experienced this issue with the app, it’s worth noting that Storytailor has reported a few instances of users running into certain security software limitations in the Collage and Batch Exporter modules when creating new jpeg files on their computer. When this happens, you just need to “allow” or “whitelist” Storytailor in your security software. Once this task is complete, you will be able to export your jpeg files. Chances are, however, that Storytailor will work as intended without any such hassle.
Support
For both Mac and Windows users looking to get the most out of the app, Storytailor has put together a collection of helpful blog posts and videos that outline each of the app’s features in more detail. If you have questions about the app not answered in the FAQs or blog posts, contact their team via email. I can say from experience that they’re quick to respond.
Pricing
Storytailor offers a very simple pricing structure with two basic payment options. Find the rates below:
$7/mth (paid annually)
$10/mth (paid monthly)
Both options include unlimited blog posts
Additionally, you can get a free 14-day trial to test-drive the software before you commit to making a purchase.
Conclusion
I hope that you found this review of the Storytailor app helpful. After having used other means of building blogs, it’s easy to appreciate Storytailor’s user-friendly interface, automations, and tools. Together, they help simplify the blogging process and actually make it fun to do. For years, the StompSoftware team has continued to innovate and develop better tools for bloggers, and Storytailor reflects that continued commitment. Issues with the software are few and far between, and ongoing updates will only continue to make a great tool even greater. At the end of the day, worthwhile blogging tools should allow you to spend more time shooting and less time blogging. That’s what Storytailor does, and well.
After adding your images, the “auto arrange” function automatically begins organizing the images (pairing portrait-orient photos side-by-side, for example). Once your images have finished loading, you can rearrange them in the Image Browser or the main blog column. Simply drag and drop the photos to where you want them. In addition, you can right click on the images in the Image Browser to sort them by file name, capture date, or creation date. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, you can use the margin slider in the upper righthand corner to control the size of the margins between the photos. Sometimes, it’s the finer details like this that make all the difference.
