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Improve Web Productivity: Keyboard Shortcuts for Marketers

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I’m a pretty fast typist. I’ve always loved games, and when in 5th or 6th grade my class started regularly visiting the computer lab for “Mario Teaches Typing,” I blazed through every level.

Now, being able to type as quickly as I can think or hear, more or less, is an incredible advantage — I don’t know where I would be professionally if I had to think about where my fingers sit on the keys or hunt and peck for that next letter.

In the field of content marketing, typing out words at a nice clip has advantages, but I could probably be just as effective if I typed at 60 WPM rather than 100.

But there is a field where there are so many characters to hammer onto the screen that a faster operating rhythm is a material advantage: programming.

Programmers as Typists

Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Exchange and author of the programming blog Coding Horror) wrote a now-famous post titled “We Are Typists First, Programmers Second” about the importance of typing competency — efficiency, really — in order to keep a train of thought alive while coding. In it’s FAQ, the programmer’s typing tutor typing.io argues “every typo interrupts the thought process not unlike a slow compiler or UI lag.”

It’s a controversial topic (just read the comments on Jeff’s post, for a small taste of the differences in opinion), but there is something to be said for the momentary distraction of shifting from keyboard to mouse when trying to get things done.

How do programmers become more efficient typists? Once you’ve practiced your way to 100 WPM, the best way to speed up further is to use shortcuts.

Efficiency in Digital Marketing

As digital marketers, we all have long to-do lists every day, much of which involves being in a browser and multiple open applications at once. I’ve found being able to dance around with keyboard shortcuts helps me get more done, faster, and break my train of thought less frequently.

I’m assuming we’re all already using basic shortcuts — copy, cut, paste, bold, italics etc. What I want to share with you are my “next level” shortcuts — things you might normally do with your mouse but are so much more efficiently done with the keyboard.

These are all Mac shortcuts because that’s what I use, but they should all have fairly similar analogs in the PC world. Here’s what Microsoft has to say about it.

Next-Level Keyboard Shortcuts

keyboard shortcutsfor efficient marketers (1)

TIL: Collect Aggregate Social Sharing Info With BuzzSumo

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I spent much of today wading through reports.

Google Analytics; Marketo; SnapApp; BuzzSumo — there are a lot of different analytics machines in my life, and I love all of them. They don’t always play nicely, but they hold fascinating insights into “what’s working,” as vague a notion as that might be.

Reporting on my content marketing program means dipping into all of these analytics platforms and pulling out the nuggets I need to learn, make adjustments, and explain my logic to the rest of my team.

One of the things I like to look at is our overall brand reach. Big question, no? My approach to tackling big questions is to make them just a little bit smaller. Chunk them out into manageable, bite-sized morsels and get a truer truth than the guesswork involved in trying to paint the broad brushstrokes of the Big Question.

When it came to the smallification of the brand reach question, I decided to look at social shares on our external content placement. That means content we’ve had syndicated through sites like Business2Community as well as guest posts we’ve placed with folks like Marketo or Content Marketing Institute.

These sites almost always offer “social proof” share figures on each post — encouraging visitors to share based on how many of their peers did — and my first plan was to go post by post jotting down these share figures. Not super scientific, but I wasn’t sure I had an alternative to brute force.

Then I remembered: BuzzSumo.

I’ve been making great use of BuzzSumo lately to see how our posts are performing relative to our mindshare and market-share competitors, but I’d only ever used it to search by keyword or domain name so far. Turns out, you can plug an entire URL into the BuzzSumo search bar and get share figures across the 5 big social networks in the blink of an eye.

That’s a post we got up on the CMI blog in September, blowing my mind with 2.6k total social shares.

I repeated this process with all our other syndicated and guest-posted content and ended up with a happily notable quantity of shares to report up the organization. Pretty cool stuff!

Have you used BuzzSumo before? Had you come across this use case before? Share your BuzzSumo love in the comments!  

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How much coffee should I use?

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Before I became a barista, this is a question I would ask myself every time I tried to make coffee. Most coffee machines or even manual brew methods give you a rough guideline like “3 TBSPs per cup” — but the definition of “cup” varied by preparation, and how should I know if it should be a level TSBP or heaping? Knowing how much raw coffee material to use to get that perfect cup was a constant challenge.

Then, I went to coffee school. As it turns out, coffee is a little bit more science than art. In our classes, we learned the coffee industry has standards for brewed coffee based on research into the preferences of real people – study participants were served coffee brewed to different specifications and recorded their tastes, ending up with a range of acceptable brews that guide the industry to this day.

Key to this brew range is the ratio of coffee to water. Use too much water, and you could end up with a weak and, ahem, watery cup; too little and you’ll get closer to coffee sludge. While the extremes are fairly obvious, it’s in the nuanced close-to-perfect range that brewing gets a little trickier. In our classes, we learned the range for most peoples’ taste lies in the ratio of 1 oz water to 1.5-1.75 grams of coffee. That means if you use 8 ounces of water in your brew method, you should plan to grind between 12 and 14 grams of coffee. Some people like their coffee a little stronger or weaker and will vary on either side of the range, but this is a helpful starting point.

Using this range as a reference, the next (possibly obvious) piece is weighing and measuring your ingredients. Use a regular kitchen scale to weigh out your coffee before brewing, then break it out again when you add the water to make sure you hit your ratio. Keeping variables like this constant allows you to play around with grind size and brew time to find the cup that suits your tastes. In my recipe for French press, I use 1.75 grams of coffee per ounce of water – for my 18oz press, that’s 31 grams of coffee (freshly ground on a coarse setting). For Aeropress, I go a little lighter, using 13.6 grams of coffee for 8oz water.

And in case this is all sounding like a little too much work for your everyday cup of joe (or you don’t have access to a scale), keep in mind that you could always set your ratio once – measuring how many scoops equals 31 grams – and leave the scale on the shelf next time. For reference, I just weighed out a level tablespoon of my beans at 8 grams – if that helps!

Finding the ratio that works for you, combined with the right grind size and brew time, will ensure you get a great cup every time.

What’s your recipe for a perfect cup?