How to Choose the Perfect Fonts for Every Project: A Detailed Guide [Infographic]

When it comes to delighting people with design, details matter -- a lot. The fonts you choose every time you lay out an email, an ebook, or an image for social media end up giving your marketing a polish that makes a big difference.

Trouble is, with so many options to choose from, finding the right one isn't always as obvious as we'd like it to be. Thankfully, there are a few guiding principles out there to simplify the selection process.

For example, headlines should be bold and engaging, while body text needs to be clear and easily readable. If you're creating content for the web, you'll want to use the fonts that have been adapted specifically for use online -- meaning they’ll display the same on all modern browsers.

So, which are the best header fonts? The best body copy fonts? Which fonts do popular websites use, and what personalities do each of them reflect?

Check out the infographic below from Creative Bloq to learn everything from the best fonts for headers, body copy, and print, to the future of fonts in an increasingly mobile world. (And read this blog post to learn tips for choosing and using fonts.)

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How to Publish on LinkedIn Pulse: A Beginner's Guide

Try as I may, I'll never be able to recreate my mother's tomato sauce recipe. It's a science; a tried-and-tested formula that took her years to master. (Time well spent, if you ask me.)

But the great thing about formulas is that they provide us with a starting point -- a list of the elements we need to produce an intended outcome. From there, it's up to us to put them together. 

When LinkedIn announced that they'd be opening up their publishing platform, Pulse, to the public in February 2014, the professional network suddenly turned into a more interesting destination for marketers to explore. 

What does my mom's tomato sauce have to do with this? 

Well, while many were quick to see results from the new platform, others felt hesitant about whether or not they should give it a go. And without a clear formula for how to approach the unfamiliar territory, many continue to remain sidelined today.

Download our ultimate guide to using LinkedIn here for even more LinkedIn tips.

Unwilling to leave good marketers behind, we've put together a roundup of everything you need to know before you hit publish on LinkedIn Pulse. From topics, to structure, to timing, this post will have you up to speed in no time.

How to Navigate to LinkedIn Pulse

To start, let's get you there. There are two ways to access the publishing platform. 

One way is to select "Pulse" from the "Interests" dropdown in the main navigation:

This will take you to the Pulse homepage, where you'll then click "Publish a post" in the upper right-hand corner: 

The other way is to click "Publish a post" directly on your LinkedIn homepage:

The Anatomy of the LinkedIn Pulse Editor

To help familiarize yourself with the editor, let's take a look at some of the most important features:

In the top left-hand corner, you'll see a tab labeled "Writing ideas." This feature pulls in timely potential topics to help people who are experiencing a bit of writer's block. To execute on one of the ideas, simply click "Write about this" below the text.

The large gray area above the editor is where you upload a featured image. All you have to do is click on the box to upload an option from your computer. Note: Images that are at least 700 x 400 pixels look best. 

Underneath that, you'll find a place to insert your headline. We'll get into some helpful tips for choosing the perfect headline below. 

When you're ready to write, the actual editor is pretty intuitive. The navigation displays different formatting options to help you easily insert headers, add quotes, bold your text, adjust the alignment, add bullet points, etc. If you're looking to add links, images, video, or other rich media assets to your post, look to the icons on the far right. 

One of the most important features of the editor can be found at the very bottom. The tagging feature allows you to label your post using categories such as "marketing strategy" or "project management." These categorical tags will make it easier for people to find your post.

Once you're satisfied with your piece, you can publish it -- or save it for later -- by clicking on the respective button in the top right-hand corner. 

Feeling good about this? Let's move on to some tips that will help you prepare for actually publishing something. 

How to Post on LinkedIn Pulse

1) Explore the platform first.

Before you dive into a post, it's important to note that LinkedIn's publishing platform is a little different than your company blog. The audience, the tone, and the overall lay of the land are unique to LinkedIn.

What does the lay of the land look like, then? In a SlideShare announcing the publishing platform's launch, LinkedIn described themselves as "the working world in one place." They wrote, "LinkedIn has millions of executives, entrepreneurs, entry-level, workers, and people about to retire." While this sounds like a valuable audience to tap into, you'll want to be sure that it aligns with your company's buyer persona -- otherwise, it's not worth publishing there. 

Once you figure out if you should be publishing on LinkedIn, it's time to learn how to post on LinkedIn Pulse successfully. Here are a few, according to LinkedIn:

• Write about areas in which you have an expertise.
• Keep your writing focused. Avoid covering too many topics in the same post.
• Keep your voice authentic.
• Don't shy away from expressing your opinion. However, keep your long-form posts appropriate for the LinkedIn audience. Don't post anything obscene, shocking, hateful, intimidating, or otherwise unprofessional.
• Publish whenever you have something valuable to share with LinkedIn members. In general, the more long-form posts you publish, the more credibility you will build, and the stronger your professional profile will become.
• There are no limits on word count, but the long-form posts that are best received are more than three paragraphs.
• Upload pictures, videos, presentations, and documents to add to your content. It helps bring your insights to life and is a good way to showcase concrete examples of your experience.
• Use the share box on your homepage to share short-form thoughts, questions, and other media such as articles and images. (Learn more about sharing on LinkedIn here.)
• Have colleagues, friends, or family members review and edit your long-form posts.

Want to learn more great tips for publishing on LinkedIn? Check out this post by LinkedIn Executive Editor Daniel Roth on how to crush it as a LinkedIn writer.

2) Hone in on a specific topic.

A LinkedIn post shouldn't take readers here, there, and everywhere. And in terms of cutting through content saturation, your best bet is to cover one topic -- and cover it better than anyone else. 

To shed some light on the power of specificity, let's turn to a series of tests that Marketing Experiments conducted for an online dental company to determine if minor changes could significantly impact response rates. In these tests, they explored six headlines representing non-specific, semi-specific, and super specific topics:

1. (The Control)
2. "Dental Plans for $8.33 a Month. Acceptance Guaranteed."
3. "Over 55,000 Dental Care Providers. Acceptance Guaranteed."
4. "Dental Care Coverage. Best Price Guaranteed."
5. "Low Cost Dental Care for the Uninsured"
6. "Best Price Dental Care - Without Insurance."

The results?

Landing Page Headline: Impact on Conversion Rate
Headline	Impact on Overall Conversion
Headline 1	-5.68%
Headline 2	72.76%
Headline 3	26.41%
Headline 4	-68.43%
Headline 5	-20.44%
Headline 6	-5.11%

Interestingly enough, the only two headlines that contributed to a positive impact on overall conversions were the ones that included specific numbers: "Dental Plans for $8.33 a Month. Acceptance Guaranteed." and "Over 55,000 Dental Care Providers. Acceptance Guaranteed."

The takeaway? People like specificity.

While it's clear that specificity contributes to the attractiveness of a headline, getting comfortable with this concept of "zooming in" on ultra-specific topics can take some getting used to. To help you get started, take a look at how this initial idea was transformed into something specific enough to stand out in a sea of sameness:

• Start here: The Top 10 Business Blogging Best Practices
• Take it to here: How to Write Blog Titles That Actually Get Clicked
• Then try this: How Using Verbs in Blog Titles Helped Us Generate X% More Clicks

Sure, it's not the easiest route to take, but after seeing the results of the Marketing Experiments study, it's clear that the potential payoff is much greater.

3) Choose your title wisely.

Aside from specificity, the structure of your title has a lot to due with the success of your post. 

The beauty of LinkedIn publishing is that every time you publish a post, your connections receive a notification in real time. This notification contains the title of your post, and the title of your post only. In other words, if the title you employ doesn't dazzle them, the notification will go unnoticed. 

To fully maximize the potential of this notification, we dug into some data from Noah Kagan and Search Wilderness. The data, based on an analysis of over 3,00 of the most successful blog posts on the platform, was conducted in an effort to generate some insights regarding what makes a post successful. 

In terms of titles, here's what Kagan found:

Titles That Work Best on LinkedIn Pulse

1) How-To Posts

How-to posts perform best for post views, likes, comments, and shares than any other post type. On average, these posts had 22,368 LinkedIn views.

Example: "How to Establish Your Brand Message"

2) Listicles

List posts perform well, getting slightly more post views, likes, comments, and shares than non-list posts. On average, these posts had 16,364 LinkedIn views.

Example: "8 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Benefit Your Brand"

(To learn how to write how-to posts and listicles, check out this blog post for helpful formulas.)

Titles That Don't Work As Well on LinkedIn Pulse

1) Question Posts

Posts where the headline poses a question (like "Why Publish on LinkedIn?") perform poorly across the board in terms of LinkedIn publishing metrics. On average, these posts had 13,832 LinkedIn views.

4) Add visuals.

Just because LinkedIn is a professional network doesn't mean everything has to be buttoned up and text-only. People like pictures and visual examples. Including them your posts will not only help you to reinforce your points, but it'll also help to break up long blocks of text.

But before you go sprinkling visuals through out your posts, it's important to be mindful of how you're using them. 

According to Kagan, you should aim to have at least one image in your post -- but if you can include eight images in your post, even better. Kagan found that including eight images in one blog post is associated with a greater number of LinkedIn shares, likes, comments, and views.

What about multimedia assets like SlideShares and videos? Kagan's data revealed that the inclusion of multimedia assets is actually associated with fewer post views. If you're going to include them anyway, be selective. While posts with one multimedia embedded generated just under 15K views, posts with three multimedia embeds dropped down to just under 8K views. 

5) Pay attention to when you publish.

Being aware that LinkedIn is geared towards business professionals, you want to be sure that your schedule aligns with business professionals' LinkedIn usage patterns.

Take a moment to put yourself in the shoes of these business professionals -- your potential readers. You probably wouldn't want to publish a post on Monday morning, as many of them are just making their way back into the office to catch up on emails and work from the weekend. You also probably wouldn't want to publish a post on Friday afternoon, as people are busy winding down on projects and prepping for the weekend. 

The takeaway here? To increase the visibility of your posts, you'll need to identify the times in which people are most active on the platform. According to Kagan's data, posts published on Thursdays saw the highest average total views (19,164), followed by Sundays (18,219).

While you'll want to experiment with different publish times and days to gauge the way your audience responds, this data should serve as a baseline to get you started.

Ready to Get Started?

If you're looking for a little inspiration before you start whipping up your first LinkedIn Pulse post, we'd recommend checking out the "Top Posts" section of Pulse. To get there, click on "Top Posts" from the main Pulse menu in the upper left-hand corner:

The posts featured in the section have managed to rack up a lot of engagement, so there's something to be learned from each and every one of them. Here are a few to get you started:

• Troubling Habits of Chronically Unhappy People
• Watch Out For These 5 Pieces of Wrong Advice
• 7 Career Regrets To Let Go Of In 2016
• Why You Shouldn’t Postpone Performance Reviews

Looking for even more inspiration? Check out this roundup of impressive LinkedIn Pulse posts here. 

What other tips do you have for LinkedIn publishing? Share them with us in the comments.

Editor's Note: This post was originally published in May 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

 

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Personalize the Online Experience for Prospective Students

How frustrated do you get when you can't find the information you’re looking for on a website? Contrast that with time spent on a website where content you're most interested in "magically" appears just where and when you want. We’ll bet you find the latter a more pleasing and powerful experience that you'll remember long after you left the site. 

Your prospective students and their parents are no different.

What can an education marketer do to create a personal experience that keeps visitors glued to your school's website? A lot. You can personalize a visitor's online experience, from the moment they land on your page, to the one when they open their tenth email from you. 

Instead of using the same "Request Information" call-to-action (CTA) on your website form for every visitor, your copy could change based on that visitor's behavior. Someone who came to your site from a search for "paralegal programs" could see CTAs customized for your school's paralegal program. While a return visitor who's already in your database, and expressed an interest in graphic design, could enjoy a completely different user experience.

When you personalize content, a visitor feels satisfied because their needs are being met and thus feels a stronger connection to your institution. The result is a higher degree of engagement with your content, which leads to more school inquiries, applications, and enrollments.

Ways to Personalize Within Your Online Community

You have lots of criteria you can use to deliver the most relevant content to each individual prospective student. Think about all the kinds of people coming to your website. You have prospective students looking to make applications for the following year, for a variety of different programs, and other reasons. How about their parents? If you've created your personas, you've already highlighted what concerns, values, and interests matter most to different people.

Download this template if you want to learn more about creating your student personas.

In addition to the different personas, consider where a visitor is in their personal enrollment cycle. What about those extra-eager students who've started their research while still a year away from applying? Or prospective students who've already spent a lot of time on your site and downloaded a good deal of content? What about students looking for early decisions? Regardless of persona, they’re probably ready for information about the admission interview process and will likely respond to a CTA to set up their own appointment. On the other hand, pushing out an interview CTA to a first-time visitor who hasn’t had time to get to know your school wouldn't make sense and most likely wouldn't convert.

Even if you don't know anything about that first-time visitor, you can still personalize their experience. Does their IP address show they're outside the country? Share content specific to foreign applicants, or even in their language if you've localized your website. Is the visitor on a mobile device? Have a mobile-optimized version of your content so it's easy to read. 

When you think about ways to personalize your content, start by identifying:

• The persona your visitors fit
• Where they are in the enrollment cycle
• Their online behavior

Data gleaned from your database—including demographic data, referral sources, and revealed areas of focus, such as specific fields of study and non-academic activities 

How to Personalize the Experience For Prospective Students

The more you know about a visitor, the better you can tailor their online experience. To capture the most information, you want a visitor to fill out a form on your site. Most prospective students won't be ready to download an application or contact admissions early in their enrollment cycle, so you'll need to think of other ways to get them to convert.

Gathering Information With Forms

Your goal at this stage is to create an emotional connection with them. You want each student to feel excited about all you have to offer—and to them in particular. The smart way to glean this information is by offering informative content to download, such as sample syllabi or a guide to campus organizations, on a form-gated landing page. Find the balance of content they want, yet won't require a major commitment, or too private a disclosure, from them. 

Once they're a contact in your database, it gets easier to collect or capture additional information about them. It's been proven that too many required fields on a form decreases conversion rates—especially in the early cycle stages. With smart forms, you avoid that. You progressively ask for different information each time a contact downloads more content. 

For example, the first smart form may ask only for their name, email, and program of interest. Simple. Non-threatening. On their next visit, because the website recognizes who they are, the smart form asks only one new question, such as expected enrollment date. Now the visitor only has to fill out one field. Voilà! You've got new intelligence that your admissions team will love. They got information they wanted without feeling obligated. Win-win.

Building Lists Based Off of Forms, Website, and Email Actions

Behind the scenes, you'll use all this data to create lists to customize content, including offsite content such as emails and PPC ads. When using a "smart list," any contact meeting the list's criteria will automatically get added to it. So as a contact provides more information via your smart forms, they'll get added to more relevant lists, further improving the relevancy of the content they get.

List criteria are built off any data element captured through smart forms, as well as their online behavior. Let's say you've created a smart list of contacts intending to graduate in 2020, who want to major in international economics, and said they want to study abroad in London.

Did members of that list open your email about an event on studying abroad being held in their area, but didn't register to attend? Send a second round of emails with messages specifically targeted at future economics majors wanting to study abroad in London encouraging them to go. If they registered and went, you can make sure they don't get future offers for the same event.

Here's another example: Say a visitor first downloaded some program information three months ago. Today she's returned to your website. Over the next week, she downloads content about campus activities and financial assistance. She's also started her FAFSA. Having already created a smart list of visitors who meet these criteria, you know that sending a campus tour invitation always gets a high response rate. So this visitor, as soon as she started to fill out that FAFSA, immediately was sent an email inviting her to tour the campus. 

Smart lists are the engine of all personalization efforts. More specific than your personas, smart lists can be based on different study programs, expected enrollment semesters, geographic location – any combination of data you capture in your contact database. Armed with these smart lists, you can personalize web and landing pages, forms, content offers, CTAs, images shown, and emails.

Personalizing Your School's Content

We've been focusing on personalizing CTAs, but you can also customize almost any element of your content on a landing page, webpage, or email. Here are some examples:

Headlines

Headlines have the greatest impact on whether a website visitor will explore a page closely. You never need display a generic headline again. A headline can include the offer you want this prospective student to act on—e.g. a reminder of a relevant application deadline. For a prospective student who's at an earlier stage in their enrollment cycle, a headline may tout an exciting campus life or a suggestion to apply for financial aid ASAP.

Images

If a prospective student has visited pages on your school's athletics program, you can deliver an image of a student athlete or team on your homepage the next time this student goes to that page. Give them the vision of campus life they have in their head.

Articles

Say your research shows parents are primarily interested in financial assistance issues. The blog posts they see can skew heavily to those with a financial assistance tag.

Formatting

Visitors who come to your website from an Instagram link can see pages with a higher image-to-text ratio. Those who spend a lot of time on each page with a slow scroll can get more text. The idea is always to deliver the content in the format most likely to engage that specific visitor. 

You do want to watch out for the "creepy factor" so no one feels like they're being stalked or spied on. Still, prospective students and their parents are eager for relevant content. And the easier you make it for them to find it, the better. Personalization, starting with smart forms and lists, is the engine that drives a compelling and memorable user experience your visitors will share with their friends and networks.

Personalization is Powerful Marketing

Personalization is the most effective way to draw prospective students deeper into your website so they consume still more content—sparking a cycle of more granular personalization. As your analytics and smart forms feed into the database what they learn about each visitor, you serve up increasingly more relevant content. And at the same time, you're gently pulling each prospective student closer to applying, and each candidate closer to enrolling.

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Omnichannel: A Fancy Word for Increasing Product Discoverability

With the Fed recently raising interest rates, it is clear that consumer confidence is up. Shoppers have more money in their pockets and are willing to spend it. So, trying to persuade them to purchase won’t be as much of a need in 2016 as compared to years past during the economic downturn.

No, this year, attracting and converting customers will be the biggest challenge, especially for brands who have not embraced the omnichannel trend. Why? Easy—studies suggest that the rise of technology and the plethora of options it affords us has lowered human attention span to less than that of a goldfish. For retailers, this means that a potential new customer wanting to purchase, say, a dress, has a lot of distractions in her way before she lands on your site.

The Rise of Omnichannel

Let’s take a step back though. Omnichannel is an industry buzzword, and perhaps an overused one at that. But, its implications pack a meaningful punch.

Omnichannel simply means that your brand is capable of selling absolutely anywhere the consumer is willing to buy. In an omnichannel world, there is no distinction between retail stores or ecommerce or mobile commerce or social commerce. It is all merely commerce, and the need to manage business operations from a centralized hub, pulling in sales and inventory data from physical stores, ecommerce sites and various marketplaces, is key to a successful strategy.

Recent data supports this, as well. An Adlucent study found that 47% of shoppers plan to start researching products on a search engine like Google or Bing, followed by Amazon with 31%, and 13% in stores. Bloomberg data released earlier this year reported similar findings: 44% of consumers start their product search on Amazon, with 34% doing so on search engines.

Yet, no matter where consumers start their search, 90% of retail sales still occur in store, and 95% of all retail sales go to stores which have brick-and-mortar locations. In fact, it seems very much as though mobile commerce and physical commerce are converging: 75% of shoppers use their mobile device in store, promoting the use of beacons to push in-store notifications bringing that short consumer attention span back to the brand at hand.

These numbers are likely the impetus behind Amazon’s recent opening of a brick-and-mortar bookstore, or the ever-growing physical locations of once only-online stores including ModCloth, Nasty Gal, Birchbox, Warby Parker and more. Indeed, in a recent USA Today article, Warby Parker CEO Neil Blumenthal said the company sees itself as medium agnostic.

“In five years, I’m not sure what other channels will exist,” he says. “The key is to stay flexible and follow the customers.”

Of course, the reverse is true as well. Many once offline-only sellers are opening up digital storefronts, with mobile-friendly templates to get the most out of Google’s recent mobile-local search algorithm play, among other online benefits. Luxury retail is one of the fastest growing online segments due to the previous reluctance of brands like Chanel, Dior and more to open online shops. Exclusivity is no longer the name of the game, folks, at least not when it comes to discoverability.

So, what is a scaling brand to do to compete with ever-eroding boundaries between the various commerce preferences of consumers? Well, here are a few ideas.

Open a Popup Shop, Even to Just Test It Out

Have you heard of Storefront? This startup works similarly to an Airbnb for your business. You enter your location and they will find a space for you to rent. This is a smart strategy for scaling brands. Invest in a few pop up shops in your area and perform a bit of an A/B test on location.

Plus, Sucharita Mulpuru, a senior analyst with Forrester Research, says that an offline store could be well worth its costs, drawing on analysis of foot traffic and customer conversation. “It costs $10,000 to pull a focus group together,” she said. “If you look at how much it would cost you to do market research, and the amount of market research you gain just by observing people, it’s the equivalent of 100 focus groups.” 

Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

This goes well beyond SEO. Yes, be sure that your SEO is rock-solid and remember that SEO is not a “set it and forget it” thing. You must be consistently updating. Make sure all product pages have proper meta-data and page titles. Write your own, compelling and keyword rich product descriptions. Launch a blog to add personality to your brand, and to earn growing ranking authority on search engines.

Got all of that? Great—now to the technical side. Make absolutely sure your site is mobile-friendly. Responsive templates are one of the best ways to do this. Add SSL protections to your site. Your whole site. Google has yet to completely verify that this is used in how they rank sites, but multiple executives have mentioned the importance of this. Take note.

Make Marketplaces Your Friend

This is a hard one for a lot of growing online businesses. Many of you started on an Etsy or Amazon, and decided to move away from those marketplaces to increase your total cost of ownership and begin to build serious brand awareness. That’s great, and that was a smart move.

Now that your site is up and running, though, marketplaces can increase your product discoverability and bring even more people to your site as well as your brick-and-mortar. Amazon product listings often instill brand trust and credibility for consumers. Plus, almost half of all online product search begin on Amazon. If your products aren’t there, you aren’t even in the running to win those customers.

Marketplace product listing is a strategy all its own. You don’t need to put every single one of your SKUs on marketplaces. In fact, it might be better that you don’t. Instead, slightly alter the SKUs you sell on Amazon, Etsy, eBay and the like, and then price them accordingly. On Amazon, for instance, you’ll be competing for the lowest price—so be sure you place products there with high enough margins that you can be competitive.

This can play well into a full omnichannel strategy as well. For instance, stores like Best Buy place products on Amazon, but offer in-store price matching, enabling them to sell additional products to savvy customers in-store, and let those who prefer marketplaces check out there.

Conclusion

In all, retailers of all sizes need to be utilizing all available product discoverability touchpoints. Customers are increasingly blurring the lines between commerce points of sale, whether that be offline, on your website or via a marketplace. If your products don’t appear when and where a customer searches for them, you won’t be closing any sales. Instead, you’ll likely be losing those sales to a quicker competitor—one who is constantly watching the industry and prepping their ecommerce backend to better serve as a hub, rather than a stand-alone.

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How to Be a More Curious Person: 7 Tips for Becoming a Lifelong Learner

The other day, I was in the grocery store. I overheard a cart-bound little kid asking his mom question after question. "Mom, why do they put so many apples out at once?" he asked as they browsed the produce section. "Mom, what's Ocean Spray?" he speculated from one aisle over.

His enthusiasm and investigative demeanor got me thinking about my own level of curiosity.After all, in today's fast-paced, innovation-heavy world, what we know today might not be valuable to us in a few weeks, months, or years. And if we want to remain agile, we need to continue to seek out and explore new information, new mediums, and new opportunities.

We need to be more curious.

While it may seem like an innate desire, there's actually a lot you can do to nurture and increase your own curiosity. From asking more questions to embracing the unexpected, the following tips are designed to help you become more curious.

How to Be a More Curious Person: 7 Tips for Becoming a Lifelong Learner

1) Ask every question.

Try as we might, it's impossible to have all the answers, all the time. And while it's easy to default to assumptions when faced with a challenging unknown, it's better to work through knowledge gaps by asking questions. 

When we ask questions, we're creating an opportunity to discover new, useful information that can be used to challenge our existing approach, expand our vision, and spark fresh ideas. Questioning allows us to become more insightful.

"People who get insights see something that's a little bit off, and instead of ignoring it, they're curious about it. Curiosity keeps our mind engaged to work out the implications," explains cognitive psychologist Gary Klein.

Don't know what questions to ask? The folks at HopeLab, a research and development organization, created a series of questions for curious leaders. Designed to help people remain both present and open, these prompts promote the importance of curiosity when assessing a situation. 

2) Consume content that's outside of your comfort zone.

I never realized how much there was to learn about coffee pots until mine stopped working one morning. It's funny the way that works, isn't it? When we don't have any initial knowledge about something, we're not really curious about it ... that is, until we have to be. 

Back in 1994, George Loewenstein, a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, suggested that curiosity does, in fact, require some initial knowledge. In other words, the more we know, the more we want to know. 

So if you're looking to become a bit more curious, you may want to try tapping into some subject matter you don't know much about. Whether you focus on productivity habits, Egyptian pyramids, beer brewing or something entirely different is up to you. The important part is that the content is unfamiliar -- basic research will spur you to want to know more.

3) Listen without judgment.

"Curious people are often considered good listeners and conversationalists," explains Ben Dean, Ph.D. in a newsletter for the University of Pennsylvania. 

By suspending judgment, you're ultimately allowing yourself to be more receptive to what someone is saying. You're focusing less on what you're going to say next, and more on the words and information they're choosing to tell you -- or not tell you.

So next time you're having a conversation with someone, just listen. When you take the time to truly absorb what they are saying, it'll be easier for you to formulate questions, warm up to new perspectives, and learn something new that you may have missed otherwise. 

4) Embrace the unexpected. 

Many people find themselves plagued by their own doubts, which causes them to miss out on new places, flavors, people, and experiences. But often times, doing something unexpected can trigger a chain of reactions -- both positive and negative -- that you can learn from and formulate questions based on. 

When you're busy worrying about the "what ifs," you're shutting yourself off from these types of unexpected opportunities. So go ahead, book that plane ticket. Go on that blind date. Say yes to the "chef's special" at a restaurant -- even if you're not quite sure how to pronounce it. 

Research reveals that surprise can actually drive our motivation to learn, so embrace the unexpected and celebrate whatever the outcome. 

5) Try not to dwell on the past. 

When you spend all your time worrying about the past, you don't give yourself a chance to be curious about the future. So rather than worrying about what you could have, would have, or should have changed about your last assignment, try to focus on strategies for blowing your next project out of the water. 

"The problem for many adults is that we stop being curious about new experiences and are instead focused on understanding what we've already been through," explains David Klow, founder of Skylight Counseling Center.

What new opportunities are out there for you to explore? Is there anyone in your network who can help you get better at XYZ? What conferences can you attend to expand your understanding of the industry you work in? Focus on what's to come, not what's already happened. 

6) Gamify learning.  

If you tend to view learning as dull or tedious, you'll probably find that training yourself to be more curious isn't easy. As you would imagine, this is a problem that many teachers are forced to overcome when dealing with unmotivated students. 

To inspire curiosity and excitement, many teachers have turned to gamification in the classroom. By gamifying lessons, they're able to regain the attention and interest of their students. 

Why does this approach work? Games make us "more curious, more determined, and more optimistic," explains game designer and author Jane McGonigal. According to her research, games allow us to try -- and try again -- without having to worry about failure, which helps to motivate us to keep going.

If you're having trouble staying curious about a subject, try turning your research into a game. Check out Quizlet's game mode to brush up on subjects by completing challenges such speed tests and drag-and-drop matching games. 

7) Change your perspective on a situation.

Rather than rest on your laurels when it comes to making decisions or planning projects, allow yourself to view the situation from the perspective of a stranger -- or better yet, your buyer persona. 

What would they suggest? What concerns would they have? What challenges do they face? Then, look at the situation through the eyes of your competitor, your boss, an industry outsider, etc. and continue the exercise.

"When we are curious about others and talk to people outside our usual social circle, we become better able to understand those with lives, experiences, and worldviews different than our own," explains Emily Campbell, research assistant at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. More curiosity and empathy is a good thing -- it can go a long way to making you a better marketer (and human). 

What are your favorite tips for thinking more curiously? Share them with us in the comments section below.

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4 Free Tools to Analyze Your Social Media Competitors

Do you want to improve your social media marketing? Have you looked at how your competitors are using social? There are tools to help you determine what’s working for you and your competitors, what isn’t working and why. In this article you’ll discover four free tools to compare your social media presence with your competitor’s. #1: Do [...]

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

January 07, 2016 at 12:00PM http://bit.ly/1Pgym8k
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How to Disrupt the Fashion Industry: Inside Everlane’s Branding & Growth Strategy [Podcast]

Everlane isn't like many other contemporary fashion brands.

While others' pricing and supply chain information is shrouded in mystery, Everlane's is completely transparent. On their website, you can see exactly how much money it takes to produce each of their products -- and how much money they're profiting. The fashion startup even devotes a whole section of the website to showcase detailed information and photos of their factories. 

Everlane also embraces cutting-edge marketing tactics to reach their customers. For example, they're experimenting with Facebook Messenger to communicate order details for customers and Snapchat Stories to engage it's already vibrant community.

How'd the company build such a different brand -- and how is their brand fueling their growth?

In this episode of The Growth Show, our host, Kipp Bodnar, gets behind the scenes with Everlane's Founder, Michael Preysman.

To listen to this episode in your browser, click the play button below, or click here to listen in your iTunes app.

Check out the latest recaps of The Growth Show episodes by clicking here.

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