Category Archives: business

Reading is Candy for the Mind

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To inspire and to be inspired, to surprise and to be surprised, to broaden one’s mind and to gain that sparkling new energy.

Based on the most photographed slide of my keynotes: the inspirational booklist, frequently asked and even more often shared. Alternating between business and inspirational motivational titles.

Books appear in random order. Read more

  • ‘Start with Why’ by Simon Sinek
  • ‘Get Your Sh*t Together’ by Sarah Knight
  • ‘How not to Plan: 66 ways to screw it up’ by Les Binet and Sarah Carter
  • ‘Copywriting Secrets’ by Alan Sharpe
  • ‘Eat your Greens’ by Wiemer Snijders
  • ‘Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day’ by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky
  • “The ONE Thing” by Gary Kelly and Jay Papasan
  • ‘Let my people go surfing’ by Yvon Chouinard
  • ‘Chasing Excellence: A Story About Building the World’s Fittest Athletes’ by Ben Bergeron
  • ‘Life Scale’ by Brian Solis
  • ‘Thrive’ by Arianna Huffington
  • ‘TED Talks Storytelling: 23 Storytelling Techniques from the Best TED Talks’ by Akash Karia 
  • ‘Good Strategy, bad strategy’ by Richard P. Rumelt
  • ‘Everybody writes’ by Ann Handley
  • ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie
  • ‘Epic Content Marketing’ by Joe Pulizzi
  • ‘If I Could Tell You Just One Thing…: Encounters with Remarkable People and Their Most Valuable Advice’ by Richard Reed
  • ‘Daily Reflections for Highly Effective People: Living the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Every Day’ by Stephen R. Covey
  • ‘Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff’ by Richard Carlson
  • ‘The Ideal Team Player: How to Recognize and Cultivate The Three Essential Virtues’ by Patrick M. Lencioni 
  • ‘Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs’ by John Doerr
  • ‘The Infinite Game’ by Simon Sinek
  • ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear

Why you should read these books

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Brand building by Les Binet

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How to keep your CFO on board for brand building.

“The first thing is to start talking the language of finance. We don’t help our case when we talk about brand-building in terms of awareness, image and ‘touchy-feely’ terms. Brand building is about selling. It’s about revenues and cash flow, but it’s about durable revenues and cash flow, over longer time periods. We have to help CFOs to understand that some marketing activity gives you an immediate short-term delivery of sales,” gotta love Les Binet

Les Binet on why long-term marketing matters in the age of short-termism | WARC
In this exclusive interview for WARC’s annual Marketer’s Toolkit, Les Binet – Group Head of Effectiveness at adamandeveDDB and a leading researcher on marketing effectiveness – speaks to WARC’s Anna Hamill about the practicalities of long-term brand building, how to convince the CFO, and smart ways…
Les-Binet-on-why-long-term-marketing-matters-in-the-age-of-short-termism-_-WARCDownload

Increase Productivity

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Love this! Why your first 3h of work matter and how to easily increase your productivity. “The Myth of the 8 Hour Workday: the traditional 9–5 is poorly structured for high productivity. ” 

The obvious link between work and fitness: “To get the best results in your fitness, research has found that shorter but more intensive exercise is more effective than longer drawn-out exercise. The concept is simple: Intensive activity followed by high-quality rest and recovery.”

“The most productive countries in the world do not work 8 hours per day. Actually, the most productive countries have the shortest workdays.”

This Morning Routine will Save You 20+ Hours Per Week
The traditional 9–5 workday is poorly structured for high productivity. Perhaps when most work was physical labor, but not in the knowledge working world we now live in. Although this may be obvious…

Master your mind

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L.O.V.E. “Our thoughts become our words, our words become our actions, our actions dictate our destiny” Master your mind. 

Focus and kill the inner critic.  You are responsible for your own happiness. “Never whine, never complain, no negativity”.

Ben Bergeron on Instagram: “Super cool visual of my @ted Talk from @fromdusttilldrawn #weaponizeyourmind”
3,487 Likes, 37 Comments – Ben Bergeron (@benbergeron) on Instagram: “Super cool visual of my @ted Talk from @fromdusttilldrawn #weaponizeyourmind”

Facebook Posts – stats

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Source: https://www.newswhip.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Facebook-Publishing-Q3-2019.pdf

Key takeaways
 • The top publishers on Facebook remained mainstream publishers, with Fox, NBC, and CNN in the top three for the quarter.
• Overall engagement to web content was up compared to Q3 of 2018, but down compared to Q2 of this year.
• The very top stories were often viral in nature, even though the overall trend among top publishers was towards political news.
• LADible was the top native publisher on Facebook again this quarter, though with significantly fewer engagements than in Q2.
• Photo made a comeback this quarter, with nearly as many of the top 10,000 Facebook posts from Pages being photos as native videos.
• The top Page and posts by reaction varied widely, and it was rare to see a Page or post be the top performer in more than one category.

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SEO writing tips

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How to rank on the first SEO page of google with great writing tips
A recap from the article https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/11/rank-blog-top-google/

  • Pick the keyword you want to rank on, in line with the core of your content piece.
  • Look at the organic top 5 first page rankings, pick the H1 and H2 headers from those pages (excel).
  • Make an analysis, break the H1 and H2 collection down in common topics (categories).
  • Make sure the keyword is in the 70 character count and check on the MOZ title tag tool. develop a user-intent-focused title, explain ‘what’s in it for me’ for the reader. https://moz.com/learn/seo/title-tag
  • Set up your keyword-rich H2 and body copy.
  • Implement keyword in the meta description, capped at 155 characters, in first 120 the key plus call to action to read for mobile readers. Keep it short and simple. 
  • Image titles between three and five words with keyword-rich sentences for the alt text on the images.
  • Mix internal and external links in the blog posts. Use the visual title and alt text visuals to give more context on the piece. 
What This Agency Did to Rank Its Blog at the Top of Google (Case Study)
Learn how a Content Marketing Agency of the Year figured out how to rank on the first page of Google – Content Marketing Institute
Title Tag | 2019 SEO Best Practices
A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and…

Publishing on Medium

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Great tips to publish on Medium, easy steps to get noticed, from writing to visuals, to using whitespaces to how to publish and share.

How to Write and Publish Articles That Get Noticed
I get a lot of views here on Medium. Close to 100,000 every 30 days. I’ve been writing for four months and only write three to five articles each month. Everyone wants to know how they can get their…

Minimalism

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Get back to basics and embrace minimalism, also for big brands in 2020 “… resonating with customer-facing businesses, which focuses on being straightforward and essential. Minimalism is essentially a bare-bones, pared-down approach that applies clean colors, simple graphics, and easy-to-understand processes and interfaces.”

medium.com/@darpan_21468/5-startup-branding-trends-to-watch-for-in-2019-d25611b9a99d

Confirmation bias and data

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About confirmation bias and data. Nice and long listen on how the Gamechangers Netflix documentary is an example by the book of highlighting and cherrypicking research, putting it out of context to showcase just one bright side of the vegan lifestyle. 

Don’t get me wrong… I am absolutely not against vegan or vega. Joe Rogan shares his open and honest mind, inquisitive for the bigger picture. Gotta love this guy for his podcast to broaden your own horizons. 

‎The Joe Rogan Experience: #1389 – Chris Kresser Debunks
Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac is a globally recognized leader in the fields of ancestral health, Paleo nutrition, and functional and integrative medicine. Link to notes from this podcast by Chris Kresser: http://kresser.co/gamechangers