6 Simple Ways to Tap Into the Power of Influencer Marketing

July 31, 2015 at 06:00PM

Did you know that just 3% of people generate 90% of the impact online? 

Considering this alarming statistic, it should come as no surprise that leveraging the power of this select group of influencers serves as a highly valuable strategy for businesses looking to expand their reach. 

To help you get familiar with the concept of influencer marketing, HubSpot teamed up with with influencer marketing platform, Traackr, to create The Content Marketer's Guide to Influencer Marketing. This free guide has everything you need to help you identify the right influencers, perform outreach, and leverage these relationships to grow your business.

But why stop there?

Below you'll find six must-try ways to get influencers to share your content so you can get more impact from each asset you create.

6 Ways to Get Influencers Sharing Your Content

1) @Mention them.

If your content is helpful, inspiring, and relevant to the influencer's audience, mentioning their Twitter handle in your social post is often enough to grab their attention and potentially earn yourself a retweet. If the content is about them, your chances are even higher. 

In an effort to capture the attention of content marketing guru Ann Handley, Shareaholic simply mentioned her book, Content Rules, in their tweet. In return, she retweeted it to her 221,000+ followers, creating an opportunity for Shareaholic to reach a much larger audience than they would have without her support. 

Knowing what influential experts in your field are interested in, engage with, and regularly share on their social profiles can help you both curate and produce content that will appeal to them.

To make this process easier, you'll need to start by doing some research. Working your way through their social profiles will help you gain a better understanding of their interests and sharing habits.

Then simply choose some of the topics they’ve been sharing, create awesome content around them, and drop the expert a quick message to let them know about it. 

2) Include them in a curated list.

A good way to create content that’s likely to get shared by thought leaders is to curate a list and include them in it. There's no denying that people have egos, and if you play to them, you’re likely to benefit.

A great example of how to approach this comes from Wordsteam founder Larry Kim. Back in March, Kim wrote an article for Inc.com on marketing experts to follow on Twitter. Check it out:

Not only is an article like Kim's easy to put together, but there's no denying the value of the potential sharing opportunities it aims to create.

To find out who the top players are in your industry you can look for lists such as the one mentioned above, or use an influencer management tool like Traackr, which provides users with a simplified way to keep tabs on their influencer engagements. 

Once you’ve created your curated list post, be sure to send the mentioned influencer(s) a tweet to let them know. Not only is this is a good way to get their attention initially, but it also opens the door for continued conversation.

3) Ask them to contribute to your blog.

There are many benefits that accompany getting an influencer to contribute a guest post on your blog.

Above all, you're getting great content for your blog that your audience is sure to love (and you don't have to write it). Not to mention, this type of contribution helps to build your blog's credibility --  if you can get a thought leader to post for you, you must be doing something right. But perhaps one of the most valuable benefits of influencer guest blogging is the fact that they are likely to share that post with their networks, which means a chance for you to reach to a whole new audience. 

To increase the likelihood that an influencer will agree to contribute to your blog, it's a good idea to focus on limiting the amount of work they actually have to do. Interviewing experts is a great way to create great content without the expert having to actually write it.

Zazzle Media, a marketing agency in the UK, publishes a monthly ‘Big Interview’ on their blog where they talk to thought leaders in the digital space. To attract the attention of a wider audience and increase their credibility, they asked Ann Handley for an interview, and she agreed. 

 4) Include their commentary or quotes.

Adding expert commentary or quotes to your long-form content serves as an effective strategy for adding credibility and inspiration to your content. Doing so allows the reader to feel like they're benefiting from the opinions and advice of top experts in that field, and as a result, they recognize the content as more valuable. 

A great example of using expert commentary to make a data report more interesting is this content marketing report HubSpot completed with Smart Insights. We included 12 experts’ opinions on what the data meant and in turn, each expert shared the report with their audience.

Below is an example of one of the comments we included from Head of SMB at Twitter, Brian Lavery:

 

You should try to weave their comments into the main body to ensure the content and story flows well. However, we recommend that you place them on a contrasting background to help them stand out. 

For a similar effect, but for less commitment from the influencer, you can collect quotes from existing pieces of their content. Anytime you find a great line from an expert in an article or on Twitter, simply add them to a spreadsheet for future use. (Here are 101 awesome marketing quotes we put into a SlideShare to get you started.)

When leveraging this approach, just be sure to link back to the original source and give the influencer a heads-up to let them know you've used it. 

Pro tip: If you feature experts in your gated content, e.g. ebooks and reports, make sure to sell the value of their input on your landing page. Ask your influencers for their headshots and call them out under the main copy. They’ll appreciate the additional link back to their site or Twitter profile and it will help to persuade visitors to download the content. 

5) Host an AMA (Ask Me Anything).

By getting an influencer to dedicate 30 minutes of their time to answer questions on Twitter, you can significantly grow your audience and brand awareness. All it takes is a good hashtag, a great influencer, and a solid promotion plan.

Here’s an example of a Twitter chat from Truebridge Capital who partnered up with Forbes to give advice on what it takes to be a venture capitalist -- a topic that was relevant and interesting to both of their audiences.

(Looking for some inspiration? Check out some of the awesome AMAs featured on Inbound.org.)

6. Get a testimonial.

By sharing an early version of your content with influencers before your main promotion, it gives you an opportunity to get a testimonial from them on how great the content is.

This testimonial can then be added to your landing page and promo assets, making your content even more compelling to download. Simply give them the content and ask for their feedback on the content or give them a "lazy tweet" they can share with their network (and you can include on your landing page). 

By monitoring keywords related to your offer on social, you can identify when influencers discover and share your content organically. For HubSpot customers, you can easily keep an eye out for these instances by creating custom streams using the Social Monitoring tool.

I found this Tweet from Jeff Bullas, one of the world's leading content marketers, which recommended a SlideShare I created. I made sure to capture his tweet so that I could use his testimonial to further promote the content. 

Getting Started With Influencer Outreach

Just remember, we often trust friends, colleagues and experts more than marketing and advertising.

Marketers who get this, devote time and resources to creating authentic relationships with the people who matter to their business. These people are the ones who influence your customers and shape your industry.

Your job is to find the most important people for your brand, whether they’re among your prospects, current customers, industry experts or passionate individuals.

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8 Creative Ways to Enhance Your Content Marketing With Visuals

July 31, 2015 at 02:00PM

On the web, there are few things more discouraging than a big block of text. That's because humans are visual creatures -- we tend to gravitate toward content that is pleasing to the eye, and we're especially drawn to visuals that capture (and keep) our attention. 

It's no wonder that 70% of marketers planned to increase their use of visuals in their content marketing this year. Sometimes visuals are just a more effective and creative way to present information, data, or difficult-to-understand concepts. After all, they don't say "a picture is worth a thousand words" for nothing. 

Adding visuals is not only a smart way to enhance the quality of your content -- but it's also proven to make your content marketing more effective.

In fact, tweets with images receive 18% more clicks and 150% more retweets, photo posts on Facebook brand pages account for 87% of total interactions, and in a recent study by Demand Gen Report, 86% of buyers expressed some level of desire to access interactive/visual content on demand. If you need even more convincing to incorporate visuals into your content marketing strategy, there are even more stats where those came from.

Download our free guide to learn more about how to use visuals in your content marketing.

So are you ready to enhance your content with visuals? Here are some great ways to start incorporating visuals into your content marketing.

Visual Content Marketing: 8 Ways to Visually Present Information & Data

1) Include high-quality photos and images to attract attention to your content.

What's the first thing that you noticed when you clicked through to this blog post? Probably the photo at the very top, right? And if you came across this post through social media or a subscriber email, that photo probably caught your eye in those channels, too.

If you incorporate no other visuals into a piece of blog or website content, make sure it at least has an attractive featured image. That way, you know your piece of content will be accompanied by an eye-catching visual when it gets shared on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. And considering what we just told you about how much better visual content performs in social networks, I'm sure you can understand why. 

(Tip: To make sure Facebook features your image prominently in the News Feed when users share links to your content, make sure the featured image you upload to your content is at least 600 x 315 pixels.)

When selecting a featured image for a piece of content, make sure you choose one that's relevant, high quality, and attractive (find more tips for choosing images for your content here). But most importantly, make sure you have the rights to use it. There are a lot of free stock photos out there that you can use; or you can purchase a stock photo subscription from a site like Thinkstock or iStockphoto.

In addition to including a featured image, add photos and images throughout the body of your content to offer readers visual examples that support your copy. Just be that if you're using an image of an example you found on another site, you attribute it properly.

2) Use infographics to visualize a collection of data or information in an easily digestible way.

Infographics continue to be a highly shareable, traffic-driving content type. In fact, in a recent content quality vs. quantity experiment we did on the HubSpot Blog, infographic posts were one of our blog's best traffic-drivers. And according to Demand Gen Report’s 2014 Content Preferences Survey, 39% of B2B buyers said they share infographics in social media frequently.

If the thought of creating your own infographic seems daunting, it doesn't have to be. We have a free guide to creating beautiful infographics, plus 10 free infographic templates you can download and use in PowerPoint. I've even used one to create a full infographic in under an hour -- check it out.

But here's another secret -- the infographics you publish on your blog don't have to just be the ones you create yourself. In fact, the majority of the infographics we publish on this very blog aren't ours -- they're just high-quality infographics with content that is relevant to our audience. Just keep in mind that if you source an infographic from another website, you make sure you properly attribute the original creator.

3) Use data visualization to present data, information, or concepts in a more compelling way.

While infographics are a great visual content format for portraying a collection of data, sometimes you just want to visualize a data point or two. Maybe it's a statistic you're using to support an argument you're making in a blog post, or perhaps it's a data point you want to visualize for a slide in a presentation.

Charts, graphs, diagrams, scatter plots, heat maps (and so many more) -- these are all great visualization tools to help you tell a more compelling story with your data, or put your data into perspective.

Here's an example of the latter. In a blog post I recently wrote about historical optimization, I wrote about how, prior to our historical optimization efforts, 46% of the monthly leads we generated from our blog came from just 30 individual blog posts. But in my opinion, the written stat alone didn't really do make as strong a statement I wanted it to. It needed more perspective.

So I visualized the data using two pie charts. The pie chart on the left shows the distribution of monthly leads we were generating, and the pie chart on the right shows the distribution of the number of total posts we had on our blog:

Much more impactful, right? 

Data visualizations can be as simple as this, or they can be a little bit more creative or complex. The following example is a more complex interactive data visualization from Column Five. Using Forbes’ "Top 50 Most Valuable Sports Franchises 2014" list, the interactive visualization enables users to see the number of years each team has competed in addition to the number of championships they've won, offering a more complete look at the each team’s history and success as a franchise. (Check out the interactive version here.)

Visualizations can also be used to explain certain concepts that may be difficult to understand from a text description alone. In the following example, Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic XKCD explains the concept of gravity wells via this straightforward illustration (click to enlarge): 

To learn more about how to use data visualization in your content marketing -- and how to choose the right type of visualization for your data, download our free guide here.

4) Experiment with animated GIFs to delight and inform your audience.

All controversy about proper pronunciation aside, animated GIFs can be a delightful (and in certain cases, very useful) visual content tool. GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format, and if you're not familiar, the format can used to display animated images.

But don't take my word for it -- here's an example of a GIF we created to promote our ebook How to Get 100,000 Blog Readers:

Delightful, right? But like I said, animated GIFs can serve more of a purpose than just sheer delight. They can be really functional, too. 

Here's a great example of how a data visualization can be made even more valuable when displayed as an animated GIF. This GIF, from Pew Research Center, uses animation to show how age demographics are shifting over time. It keeps the graphic more compact while still showing the changes in population over the years. What's more, this GIF is perfect to use in blog, email, and social media promotion of Pew Research Center's larger study. 

Another great use for GIFs is to provide a preview of your downloadable content offers -- like ebooks, templates, or other downloads. The following is a GIF used to promote our free business-themed stock photos download. The GIF scrolls through a sampling of images to give potential downloaders a sense of what they'll get with the download.

The animated GIF can then be used on the landing page for the stock photos download, in blog posts promoting the offer, and in email and social media promotion for the offer, too.

Want to learn how to create an animated GIF of your own? Check out this blog post.

5) Be smart about formatting to make your content more reader-friendly. 

You have to admit that those big, discouraging chunks of text you often come across online would be much more palatable if they were broken up by some strategically placed headers and other types of formatting like bullets, bolded text, etc. 

Want to make your content easier on the eyes? A little formatting can go a long way to make your content more reader-friendly. As much as you might not want to believe it, people rarely read blog posts, articles, and other types of online content in their entirety. Instead, they skim and scan and read only the parts that interest them. 

Make it easier for readers to do just that by breaking up your copy with clear, concise headers that help them discover the bits and pieces they really want to read. Check out how we did it on this very post as an example.

If your content is on the longer side, you can also leverage the use of anchor links that enable readers to jump to different sections of a blog post or a longer form piece of content such as an ebook without having to scroll. Check out how we did it in this post, which includes a table of contents in the post's intro that allows readers to jump to different parts of the article:

Learn how to create anchor links here.

6) Create graphics to use as social media content.

Remember those stats I mentioned in the beginning of this post? Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks and 150% more retweets.

Is it really any wonder why? Which of the following tweets draws your attention? 

Case in point.

And images don't just take the cake on Twitter. Photo posts account for 87% of total interactions for Facebook brand pages, too. Seems like you might want to use visuals in your social media updates if you aren't already.

Consider creating custom graphics to accompany the links and status updates you share on social networks. Here are a couple examples of images we created to promote our survey for the 2015 State of Inbound Report and our upcoming INBOUND event.

If design isn't exactly your forte, we have 60 free templates and tips you can use to easily create visual social media content right in PowerPoint. Download them here.

7) Bring your content to life with video.

When most people think of visual content, video tends to be the first thing that comes to mind. And rightfully so -- because video is such an engaging form of content, it's only increasing in popularity, especially in social media.

In fact, Facebook reports that on average, more than 50% of people who come back to Facebook every day in the U.S. watch at least one video daily -- which could explain why the amount of video from people and brands in the News Feed has increased 3.6X year-over-year, globally.

While video seems to be the golden ticket on social networks, it can also be used to supplement your website and blog content, too. Take the following video for example, which was used to within our blog post about how to create an infographic in under an hour (yup -- the one we mentioned earlier!). The video supports the existing content in the post by offering another form of media for people who prefer video to text.

This video was then also repurposed and promoted on Twitter and Facebook. Talk about killing two birds with one stone!

Here are just a few ideas for how you can use video in your content marketing:

• Create brief how-to videos to supplement blog content and share in social media.
• Conduct video interviews to enhance customer case studies.
• Create teasers for your downloadable content offers, as we did in this example.
• Use video to promote registration for upcoming events.

Because video production can be daunting if you're just starting out we recently released a new interactive guide that will teach you how to create high-quality videos for social media. Check it out here.

8) Create SlideShare presentations to tell visual stories.

Did you know that SlideShare -- a popular website for sharing slideshows and presentation slides -- has more than 70 million professional users? It also happens to be one of the top 100 most-visited websites in the world. That's no small potatoes.

Slideshows and PowerPoint presentations are another great form of visual content that can make great fodder for blog posts, landing pages, and social media content. You can use them in a variety of ways -- to promote your offers (example), provide quick, helpful tips (example), or to stand alone as a really shareable piece of content that tells a story (example).

Here's another example of a really awesome SlideShare presentation from Velocity Partners, which has generated over 1.2 million views on SlideShare to date (and here are several more presentation to get your creative juices flowing).

Crap. The Content Marketing Deluge. from Velocity Partners

Want to create SlideShare presentations of your own, but aren't sure where to start? Here are some resources that can help:

• Templates: 5 Free Templates for Creating SlideShare Presentations in PowerPoint
• Blog Post Tutorial: How to Easily Create a SlideShare Presentation
• Ebook: The Step-by-Step Guide to SlideShare Marketing

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in November 2011 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

 

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Tips For Re-training Your Media Sales Team

July 31, 2015 at 01:00PM

One of the biggest challenges facing media companies who adopt the inbound marketing methodology is re-training their sales team to sell inbound campaigns to advertisers.

Because Inbound marketing is fundamentally different from many other traditional advertising options—like PPC or event sponsorships—it's often pretty far out of your sales team's  comfort zone. Even so, it's worth investing the time and effort into training your sales team on inbound, as the results will likely be much more valuable, long-lasting relationships with your advertisers.

Here are several ways you can make sure your sales team has everything they need to make the transition and grow your inbound marketing program.

Update Your Team's Skill Sets

Just as any sales person would get up to speed with a new product line, so should your media sales team when they shift to selling inbound sponsored content-based campaigns. Make sure they not only understand how this type of advertising differs from what advertisers are more familiar with or are currently using, but also can demonstrate how it's more beneficial.

Being able to convey concepts like using ads to provide educational value to readers, and the fact that inbound leads are much more qualified than click-throughs that come from traditional ad campaigns, will be vital to their ability to sell. Your advertisers may not technically be marketers, but they need to think like one. 

Practice What You Preach

If your sales team is still using an outbound sales model to pitch inbound campaigns to advertisers, there’s going to be a big disconnect. 

Hold your company's feet to the fire. If you want your sales team convince advertisers that inbound works, they should be able to prove that they can get at least some of their own MQLs through the techniques they're selling. Additionally, by getting them involved in that process, they’ll understand it better and gain first-hand experience to use in conversation with leads.

Imagine if someone said to you “I actually got your contact information through this exact process, let me tell you how it works.” That can be very compelling. One way to do this as a publisher would be to place a CTA on your own site, leading potential advertisers to a landing page with more information on inbound and sponsored content.

Create Compelling Sales Materials

Once your sales team is fully knowledgeable on inbound campaigns as they relate to advertisers, equip them with plenty of materials to close the deal.

Consider creating a template that can be customized for each client, highlighting the stages of a sponsored content campaign launch. Once you have a little experience under your belt, case studies can be a great tool for highlighting top-line stats as well as more qualitative procedures. Also, a short guide or one-pager on Inbound Marketing can be a great piece of material for leads to bring back to their internal teams and decision makers.

Don't forget, your website and audience are one of your most valuable assets. Compile data provided to you from self-identified forms, and create user profiles that demonstrate who your audience is, what products they're interested, and where they are in the buyer's journey. 

Allow Your Sales Team to Incentivize Advertisers

Especially when your sales team is new to selling inbound campaigns, it may be helpful to allow them the opportunity to offer potential advertisers an incentive. 

For instance, MQLs are what most advertisers want out of a campaign, and preferably with the highest ROI possible on their spend. What if your sales team were to offer a 30-day free trial or discount on their first sponsored content campaign to prove both quality of leads and cost per lead? This could be particularly helpful if the sales team is converting an existing PPC advertising relationship to a sponsored content-based one.

Redefine and Report on Success

Instead of focusing your sales pitch on clicks, impressions, or placement, shift the conversation by defining the value-add concepts that make those variables attractive in the first place. Instead, sell the things marketers and advertisers really care about—MQLs, sales pipeline, and revenue generated. By making the connection between your sponsored content, the type of leads it will generate, and the actions those leads take, you’re closer to answering the advertiser’s question of “how does this affect my bottom line”.

Back these theoretical offerings with numbers from real past campaigns. Passing along these stats not only demonstrates how you measure success, but also the the transparency of your media company in delivering campaign results. 

Re-training your sales team is a necessary step when adopting an inbound marketing approach. While it’s not an easy task by any means, these suggestions will get your team a lot closer to closing new (and more valuable) deals for your publication.

 

 

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4 Genius Tactics for Increasing Ecommerce Sales

July 31, 2015 at 01:00PM

Nothing about running an ecommerce website is straightforward and easy. The goal is, of course, to present a product, entice buyers to purchase, and then process the payment. This is how even the most basic ecommerce site should run. For those that really want to increase sales through the use of psychology and maybe even a little wheedling, there are some other tactics you can adopt.

A/B Testing

Absolutely every aspect of your site could be tested for improvement, including images, headlines, product descriptions, and even the overall design. Even if you think you’re already doing well with your current website collateral, there’s always room for improvement.

Before you start changing everything on your website to see what sticks, stop and create a battle plan. If you change everything at once, you won’t know what’s effective and what’s not. Plan two weeks for each change so you can gather enough data to make a decision. Then start with one component at a time. You could test something every two weeks and still find room for improvement years down the road.

Social Media

Speaking of social media, are you sure you’re using it to the best of your ability? What if you could keep an eye on what people are saying about your company and your products on all your social media outlets? With social inbox, you can. You’ll receive a notice any time you’re mentioned, which then gives you the opportunity to follow up.

Use this feature to provide stellar customer service when buyers have a complaint or just answer questions when visitors ask. If you really want to have some fun, respond to even the most ridiculous of mentions with your own special brand of humor. Your customers will love you.

Heat Mapping

What if you could track the parts of your website where buyers hung out for a while? Would that help you provide better information for the next time they stopped by? With heat mapping, you can keep an eye on the pieces of your website that visitors really love. Scrolling and clicking information come together to give you a full picture of what your buyers really want to see.

You can also track where your visitors come from and how long they hang around. In other words, if you use your social media for marketing, you can discover how many clicked on your offer and how long they stayed. This helps you determine which social media outlets you should focus on.

Exit Lightboxes for Lead Generation

The truth is that 99% of first-time visitors to your ecommerce site have no intention of making a purchase. You can accept this statistic and hope to get them the next time they stop by, or you can do something about it.

An exit lightbox with one last offer can be added to your site for last-minute lead generation. Some sites generate a pop-up the moment a customer enters the site. The exit lightbox instead pops up just before customers bounce. By providing the possibility of later savings, you might just convince those visitors to give you contact information so they can stay on top of things. If they’re interested enough to stop by the first time, potential discounts could bring them back and finish the job. 

As you can see, these tools go a lot further than just offering products and accepting payments. If you’re ready to step things up a bit, consider any of the tools listed above. If you already use some version of these tactics, let us know how they work for you. We’d love to know if you see more sales as a result.

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The 20 Best Sites for Wasting Time on the Internet

July 31, 2015 at 12:00PM

There's a lot of content out there about productivity -- everything from hacks to shortcuts to tips and tricks for how to get more done in less time. It's all about the sprint, the checking things off the lists as quickly as possible, and the downloading of software that'll block out any and all distractions.

But what about those times when you just want to surf the internet aimlessly? Hey, no one can be totally productive all the time. In fact, studies have shown that taking deliberate breaks after periods of work is better for productivity.

The question is, how do you spend those breaks? You could check your email, but that still counts as working. You could check Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, but there's something so mundane about haphazardly scrolling through your peripheral friends' photos.

We have a few better ideas. Here's a shortlist of the most wonderfully entertaining places to waste time on the internet outside of email and social media. Get ready to bookmark your favorites.

20 of the Best Sites For Wasting Time on the Internet

1) WaitButWhy

WaitButWhy is one of my favorite places to spend time on the internet. Every week or so, a guy named Tim Urban churns out one, really long, really awesome article. (Seriously, they're canonical. You can kill a lot of time reading just one of them.)

His articles are always fascinating, in-depth, and really well written. His writing style is the perfect mix of informative and humorous -- making topics like the Fermi Paradox (the what?) approachable for someone like me who'd never heard of it before in my entire life. He writes about relationships, religion, outer space ... pretty much everything.

My favorite posts of his include "Everything You Don't Know About Tipping," "The Great Perils of Social Interaction,"  and "Your Life in Week" (which has some awesome graphics in it, by the way). He even wrote a great post on why procrastinators procrastinate, which anyone reading this article might want to check out.

2) Sense-Lang's Balloon Typing Game

 

Image Credit: Mashable

Hey, it's not a total waste of time if you're practicing your typing skills, right? I've spent way too much time playing online typing games and trying to beat my words-per-minute records. There are a lot of typing games out there, but Sense-Lang's Balloon Typing Game is one of the simplest. Balloons with letters on them float down your screen, and your job is to burst them by hitting the right key before they reach the bottom. If you're looking for more of a challenge, check out their car racing game.

3) Mental Floss

Mental Floss is a super addicting online magazine with articles covering a really wide range of topics. Their articles are really well written, really well researched, and usually on topics that don't get a lot of airtime.

For example, in their "Big Questions" section, they tackle weirdly intriguing questions like why shells sound like the ocean and why yawns are contagious. Readers can even submit their own big questions.

Not to mention, I love the way they describe themselves -- it's quite fitting:

mental_floss magazine is an intelligent read, but not too intelligent. We're the sort of intelligent that you hang out with for a while, enjoy our company, laugh a little, smile a lot and then we part ways. Great times. And you only realize how much you learned from us after a little while.

Like a couple days later when you're impressing your friends with all these intriguing facts and things you picked up from us, and they ask you how you know so much, and you think back on that great afternoon you spent with us and you smile.

And then you lie and say you read a lot.

4) xkcd

If you're into nerdy humor even the littlest, tiniest bit, there's a lot to love about xkcd. Each post features a short, stick-figure comic strip on humor about technology, science, mathematics, and relationships. The guy behind it is Randall Munroe, who worked on robots at NASA's Langley Research Center in Virginia before starting this blog.

Here's an example of one of the comic strips. (He always includes a joke in the comic strip image's alt text, so be sure to hover your mouse over the image to catch that joke.)

 

Image Credit: xkcd

5) The Oatmeal

The Oatmeal is another one of my absolute favorite places to spend time online. It's a huge library of awesome content -- some comprised entirely of graphics. Even if you've read everything already, it's the kind of stuff you can read over and over again.

Some of my favorite posts include "Why Working From Home is Both Awesome and Horrible," "How the Male Angler Fish Got Completely Screwed" (I think I legitimately cried laughing when I first read that one), and a whole manner of grammar-related posts like "Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling" and "How and Why to Use 'Whom' in a Sentence."

6) Supercook

If you want to surf the internet in a semi-productive way -- but not so productive that you actually have to leave the house -- then check out Supercook.

Here's how it works: You tell it which ingredients you have in stock in your home, and it'll give you a big list of recipes you can make using just those ingredients. It's a fun way to stay thrifty, clean out the fridge, and make sure food doesn't go to waste.

7) BuzzFeed "Comments" Sections

You already know BuzzFeed is a great place to waste time on the internet, but we're looking beyond the actual article here.

Scroll down to the comments section of any article for a wildly entertaining showcase of the crazy stuff people are saying. It's especially entertaining to read the comments under seemingly benign topics that shouldn't make people irate, but do anyway.

8) The Toast

If you're into great (and hilarious) fiction writing, then you'll definitely want to bookmark this site. Every day, writers Nicole Cliffe and Mallory Ortberg publish a post on "everything from literary characters that never were to female pickpockets of Gold Rush-era San Francisco."

To get an idea of whether it's up your alley, then read their post "A Day in the Life of Seth MacFarlane, Human Male (Definitely Not a Swarm of Hyper-Alert Bees and a Metal Jaw.)" (It's just so good.)

9) Baby Animal Cams

Puppies. Kittens. Chicks. Sea otters. I have this website bookmarked for whenever I need a pick-me-up. You can search for the species you want to watch, and then check out a stream from houses, shelters, and aquariums in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. I've spent some quality time fawning over these golden retriever puppies.

10) Zillow

It's fun to check out real estate in areas you might want to live -- and it's just as fun to check it out in places you'll probably never live (but would love to in a dream world). Go ahead and explore what's out there. You can set up saved searches -- some more realistic than others -- to relive your discoveries later.

11) Google Maps Street View

In the same vein as Zillow, it's wildly entertaining to go to Google Maps and zoom in on the street view in random places around the world. It's so strange and thrilling to see what life was like at a random moment in time, on a random street somewhere you may never visit in your lifetime.

I recommend the Palace of Versailles in France, Mount Everest Base Camp in Nepal, the Swiss Alps, and the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia (yes, they have underwater cameras.)

12) HowStuffWorks

This website is dedicated entirely to -- you guessed it -- how things work. And by "things," they mean everything -- from airbags to regenerative medicine to velocipede carousels. They've covered so much on this website, it'll be hard to run out of things to read about. 

Plus, they have a whole bunch of really cool podcasts that have branched off the main site over the years and are worth checking out, like "Stuff You Should Know," "BrainStuff," and "Stuff Mom Never Told You."

13) The Onion

If you haven't spent some quality time reading the online satirical newspaper The Onion, then you're seriously missing out on a good laugh. (And you've kind of been living under a rock.) But seriously, I sometimes forget how consistently hysterical the articles are.

The publication started in 1988 and they've managed to successfully maintain a high standard for humor and writing ever since. Their headlines are laugh-out-loud funny in and of themselves -- from "Free-Thinking Cat Sh**s Outside the Box" to "Archaeological Dig Uncovers Ancient Race of Skeleton People" to "Find the Thing You're Most Passionate About, Then Do It On Nights and Weekends For the Rest of Your Life."

Of course, their headlines being hilarious makes sense, seeing as the headline is where each story begins. This awesome episode of NPR's This American Life gives you a really cool peek into The Onion's editorial process. 

(Bonus: ClickHole, their sister website that makes fun of Upworthy-style viral content on the internet, is another great place to waste some time.)

14) Wikipedia

You didn't think I'd write a post on where to waste time on the internet without including Wikipedia, did you? Of course not. You've gotta love spiraling into the proverbial Wikipedia black hole: Look up one thing, and then check out something that's interlinked to it. Before you know it, you'll have charted the entire Russian Revolution. (An actual glimpse into my colleague Corey's Sunday morning.)

If you want to get more involved while wasting time online, remember Wikipedia is based on a model of openly editable content -- as in, anyone can edit any unprotected page. So if you're into editing and updating content in your free time, it's yours to edit. (As long as you follow their guidelines.)

15) OCEARCH Shark Tracker

Tracking sharks as they swim around the ocean may not be the most conventional way to waste time on the internet ... but it might be the coolest.

The Track Sharker tool by Marine Research Group OCEARCH lets you track tagged sharks -- who all have names, by the way -- as they travel all over the world. You can even zoom in to a specific location to see which sharks are hanging out there and where they've been swimming and traveling for the past year. Go, Leviticus, go!

16) Giphy

When you need to find the perfect GIF, you can't just stop at the first result you get for "dancing" or "awkward" or "animals being jerks." I could spend (... and have spent) hours on Giphy looking for juuust the right GIF. How long do you think it took my colleague Niti to come up with all ten of the ones in this post? WORTH IT.

17) Way Back Machine

Feeling nostalgic? Check out what websites have looked like over the years via Internet Archive's famous Way Back Machine. It lets you pick a date and see exactly what the website looked like at that time. 

(If you want to take just a quick look, here's a roundup of what 9 famous websites used to look like. The images were all taken from the Way Back Machine.)

18) Apartment Therapy

If you're even a little bit of a fan of home decor or DIY projects, this is a website you might find yourself spending hours and hours on. There's a ton of awesome visual and written content on here. My favorites include their "before and after" series, their "small spaces" series, and the tours of people's actual apartments and homes.

Plus, they have a ton of helpful articles giving tips on everything from how to redo your stairs to ideas for using that awkward space above your fridge. There's no shortage of useful and fun information on here, making it prime for endless browsing.

19) Lifehacker

Lifehacker is a hub of productivity tips, tricks, and downloads. It's basically an archive of all the information it would be incredibly useful to know, but nobody every really teaches you. Aside from productivity, they also cover topics such as money-saving tips, clever uses for household items, and so on.

For example, did you know you can buy alcoholic beverages at Costco without a membership? Or that you can peel a mango in under 10 seconds? Or that there are four lengths of naps that'll benefit you in different, very specific ways? Along with the fun articles, they have some pretty awesome, in-depth articles, like this one on how to plant ideas in someone's mind, as well as helpful listicles like the top ten obscure Google Search tricks.

There's so much content on there that it can be hard to find posts on specific topics. Use the Lifehacker Index for an introduction to their top-performing posts and tips on how to find posts on any topic on the website.

20) The Oregon Trail

Here's a little gift for those of you who made it to the end of this post: Internet Archive -- yes, the same one responsible for the Way Back Machine -- made it possible for people to PLAY THE COMPUTER GAME "OREGON TRAIL" AGAIN. I can practically hear all the Gen X'ers out there screaming with joy.

If "Oregon Trail" isn't your cup of tea, the other games made available by Internet Archive include "Duke Nukem," "Street Fighter," "Burger Blaster," "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," "The Lion King," and "Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer." Check out the full library here.

What are your favorite websites for wasting time on the internet? Share with us in the comments.

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