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7 things you should do before bed to have a productive morning

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By Dara Pollak

We all know there are things we can do to be productive when we wake up (i.e. coffee), but what about before we go to sleep? These are just a few things you can do to ensure you set yourself up for a good night ’s sleep to wake up feeling refreshed and ready to take on the day. Even if the day is sitting at home and taking a bunch of zoom calls.

Create a peaceful place for sleep

Your bedroom should be used only for sleeping, and a lot of people admit that they browse online in their beds, stay on their phones in bed, and watch TV to fall asleep. Try to stay away from electronics 30 minutes – 1 hour before bed. If you must have your devices on in bed, turn on “nightshift” on your iPhone (and other devices now have similar features), which cancels out blue light. Why is this helpful? Blue light is proven to disrupt our sleep cycles by “convincing” our eyes that it’s still daytime.

Ambient noise can be helpful if you find the right kinds

As mentioned above, the TV is not a good source of this, but white noise or pink noise can promote better sleep. Pink noise is classified as lower intensity and more soothing than white noise. Pink noise can be found in nature – think rustling leaves and light rain, or a cat purring. According to this small study, pink noise has been said to reduce brain wave complexity, so you can wake up ready to work! You can stream pink noise sounds on YouTube.

Don’t drink caffeine past 3 pm

It may seem like a long time before bed, but caffeine stays in your system for 5-6 hours after you drink it. In older adults, it can take even longer to process the caffeine out of the system. If you must have a beverage at night time, try some caffeine-free hot tea.

Pillow sprays

Lots of companies make pillow sprays now with essential oils and calming scents like lavender, which is proven to help slow activity in the central nervous system and aid in falling asleep faster. A popular one to try is ThisWorks Deep Sleep Pillow Spray – spray in the air around your bed or directly mist onto your pillow. You can also try an essential oils diffuser to keep a steady mist of lavender or sandalwood, both great sleep scents.

Keep your bedroom at a cool temperature

No one likes sleeping in a hot, stuffy room. Optimal sleep temperature is around low-mid 60’s. If you get really hot when you sleep, you can look into cooling systems like the ChiliPad, which is a mattress pad that cools, helping you stay at optimal sleep temperature all night long. They can be pricey, but worth the investment if you have temperature issues.

Create a before-bed routine to help calm your mind

Journal, meditate, read, or try coloring! There are tons of coloring books for adults now, and this practice has been proven to reduce stress and anxiety by calming the activity in the amygdala, which creates a similar state in the brain as meditating. If neither of these options appeals to you, try some simple breathing exercises 30 minutes before bed. There are plenty of apps now that offer guided meditations and exercises for free.

Don’t drink too much water before bed

Avoid liquids at least an hour before you go to bed, and always use the restroom before you actually go to bed. Waking up in the middle of the night to do this can bring on a slow morning!

Feature Image Credit: SHUTTERSTOCK

By Dara Pollak

Sourced from LADDERS

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Content Ideation: The Methods and Tools Necessary for Content Marketing Success

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As companies continue to produce more and more content, it’s becoming harder to stand out. Most alarming to marketers, Ahrefs found that over 90% of content gets zero organic traffic from Google. That means coming up with unique and relevant content ideas that rank well and garner click-throughs is a crucial task for digital marketers now more than ever.

With this in mind, we’ve asked content marketers which methods work best for generating content ideas, whether there are any tools they recommend, and who they think should be involved in the process.

Which Methods Work Best?

Maryna Burushkina, Head of SaaS at Hamburg, Germany-based Neuro Flash starts every content journey with topic discovery. “First, we need to identify what topics we want to write about, which at the same time, reflect upon our brand values and meet our marketing goals,” Burushkina explained. She evaluates 25-50 topic ideas based on search volume, keyword competition, consumer sentiment, brand consistency, and a variety of other factors. “After topic discovery,” she added, “we dive deeper into long-tail keyword research.”

“Our industries are highly competitive with limited brand loyalty,” revealed Adam Lumb, EN Site Manager at Malta-based Cashcow, “so we need to produce articles that users are specifically searching for.” That’s why his content ideation process is based heavily around keyword research and competitor analysis for each region and market they’re involved in. “This process is particularly effective,” Lumb explained, “as we can immediately gauge the potential ROI based on the search volume of a keyword, how valuable it is, how likely it will lead to a conversion.”

“Our content ideation process consists of researching and staying on top of the news trends and stories that pertain to our client base,” stated Anne Szustek Talbot, VP of Content at New York, N.Y.-based BX3. Once they have a running tally of story ideas, they agree on which topics best fit the brand’s voice. “Importantly, we try to cite external sources when developing content,” Talbot added, “so that our posts read more like news articles than paid ads.” Keeping a journalistic approach to content can lead to better stories and projects more authority for the brand. For Talbot, their content marketing success lies in employing “a journalistic approach in researching and executing story ideas so that we present the most professional voice on behalf of the brands we represent.”

The Tools That Marketers Use

“We use a variety of tools for different reasons,” Burushkina said. In particular, she uses Google Analytics and the brand’s own website data to find content opportunities related to things they’re already ranking for. “We then conduct further long-tail keyword research using Google Keyword Planner, and research competition in SEM Rush,” she said. When determining the scope of the content, Burushkina and her team checks Buzzsumo to see what other related content has been performing well.

“We use Google Analytics, Google News, and Meltwater to keep on top of trending news stories,” Talbot said. These tools work best for their journalistic-based approach to content creation because they feature the latest news and can be filtered for the brand’s target audience. “Regularly keeping up with and reading content from top-tier news services is key to ensuring we are telling the right stories for our target audiences,” she added.

“The main service we use to do keyword research and competitor analysis is Ahrefs,” revealed Lumb. Ahrefs is a comprehensive tool that offers insight into backlinks, content shares, keyword traffic, and other SEO information. Using the tool, Lumb is able to start with very generic keywords and drill down into a few target keywords that were recently discovered, have low competition, or their competitors aren’t ranking for at all. “However, we supplement keyword research with a few other tools too,” he said.  For example, Google Trends is useful for determining if keywords that are more popular during certain times of the year and AnswerThePublic provides autocomplete data from search engines that reveals how users construct their search terms.

Who’s Involved in Generating Ideas?

“Everyone in the team is involved in generating content ideas, from [the] Machine Learning expert to [the] Marketing Manager and [the] CEO,” Burushkina said. That way, the brand’s content strategy includes a variety of perspectives and ensures ideas are vetted by all areas of the business.

It’s great to get everyone involved in generating ideas, but ultimately it’s up to marketing leaders to determine which content will resonate with their audience. “While contributing thoughts to the idea box is a team activity,” continued Burushkina, “the Marketing Manager will be the one taking it a step further and actually conducting a thorough analysis, and finally crafting the content.”

Feature Image Credit: SHUTTERSTOCK

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Sourced from CMS WiRE

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Why Trump’s Tweets Indicate he Could be the Best Thing That Happened to Both Business and Politics

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Love him or hate him, he seems to have a personality perfectly suited to the White House.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Researchers have analysed the tweets of Donald J. Trump. They compared his personality traits with other influential business leaders.

The Twitter messages of Donald J. Trump, the entrepreneurial businessman turned US president, show that he is creative, competitive and a rule-breaker. But no one is perfect (especially not Trump!). He also has neurotic tendencies. (But who doesn’t?)

Since joining the social media platform Twitter in 2009 to May 2017, Trump has issued more than 35,000 messages. This amounts to about twelve tweets a day. With 30 million followers, he is the second-most followed politician on Twitter after his predecessor, Barack Obama, who on average tweeted about four times a day.

The researchers, Martin Obschonka from QUT in Australia, and Christian Fisch from Trier University in Germany analysed how aspects of Trump’s personality are revealed in the language he used in 3200 tweets issued by October 2016 (before he became president). They used established software for assessment of language and text for psychological purposes.

Trump’s language use and online personality were also compared with that of 105 other influential and famous business managers (including Google’s Eric Schmidt, HP’s Meg Whitman, and Apple’s Tim Cook) and entrepreneurs (including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Dell’s Michael Dell, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos) who are not on the political stage.

Their results indicate that Trump is indeed a distinct type of person who shows strong features of a so-called Schumpeterian personality that is said to be typical of successful entrepreneurs. This personality was described by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s as being very creative, change-orientated, competitive and rule-breaking. The analysis further indicates that Trump has neurotic tendencies, and experiences underlying low well-being.

“These traits are rather untypical for entrepreneurs,” explains Obschonka. But he adds that neuroticism isn’t necessarily all bad, for it can also stimulate competitiveness.

“Maybe this high neuroticism is a major motivator to succeed in Trump’s entrepreneurial projects in his business life, but also in his role as political leader,” speculates Fisch.

“If social distinction is a core principle of the entrepreneurial personality, then we clearly see this principle reflected in his unusual personality profile,” says Fisch. “Many experts agree that really successful entrepreneurs not only dare to be different – they are different.”

The researchers speculate that having entrepreneurial personality traits could be advantageous in leading and governing an entrepreneurial society as a top-down process. But they stress that leading a company is very different from leading a country and it is unclear whether political leaders with an extremely entrepreneurial personality can indeed act strictly entrepreneurially in their highly responsible role.

Time will tell if an entrepreneurial person can indeed make a country’s overall success more likely. And if so, everyone, everywhere in the world, needs to think about who we will vote for in the future.

 

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