Use HubSpot Better

Hi, I’m Craig Bailey and this is my personal blog where I write about technology, business systems, HubSpot, marketing strategy and general life experiences. You can read my posts here.

I’m involved with two agencies in Sydney:

  • The first is XEN Systems. We help government departments and mid-large B2B technology companies with their sales and marketing strategy, including implementation and training in HubSpot 
  • The second is XEN Create. We provide premium graphic design services to companies, with a focus on using the latest AI tools, including Midjourney

I also co-host HubShots, the podcast and YouTube show focussed on getting the most out of HubSpot. We are the creators of the HubShots Framework.

Latest stories

LinkedIn versus Facebook. Again

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“Oh, we’re B2B,” someone said. “We don’t think anyone’s looking for our content on Facebook. We only want to use LinkedIn.” Good post from Contently debunking this approach – that somehow continues to persist. And they back it up with data: The incredible amount of time that people spend on Facebook (50 minutes per day) means that Facebook has a supply of attention that no...

Apple results

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Interesting to read all the analysis of Apple’s latest results eg things like this. There’s all kinds of opinions about whether it’s a good result or not, and what the future holds. But ever so occasionally something with real relevance pops up. Like this, from Jeff Johnson: Apple stated that Q1 FY2017 was an all-time record for quarterly revenue. The media dutifully and mostly...

Snap hosting bills

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TechCrunch notes from Snap’s filing that Snap are committing to spend $2B with Google over the next 5 years on Cloud Infrastructure. $400M per year isn’t big compared to Google’s other revenues (from ads), but it shows the growth coming. Similar to how Apple’s watch business is tiny compared to the iPhone sales, but is huge compare to other global companies eg Rolex (Apple...

Medium launching subscription plan this quarter

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Good news. I think. Via TechCrunch:
Medium CEO Ev Williams announced today at Upfront Summit that his company will launch a consumer subscription product, with the first version coming this quarter.
Ev called the product “an upgrade to your Medium experience”
I can pretty much guarantee I’ll be subscribing.
I love Medium and spend time in there every single day.

BloomBerry

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Potentially useful tool for analysing the types of questions people are asking about a topic:
BloomBerry is an ever expanding database containing millions of real questions from across the web.
Questions are then intelligently grouped into topics for easy analysis.
But heavily weighted with Quora posts it seems – for example.

Salesforce is doomed. Apparently

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This, kids, is why you need to take most opinion pieces on tech blogs – even the respected ones – with a grain of salt. The title – Why Salesforce is the new Blackberry – is a clever title. It certainly got me interested. But then *sigh*, as the post attempted to position Salesforce as being in danger of sudden death – but never clear what causes that death (ie the...

Just say Thank You

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Useful reminder from James Clear with 7 times you should just say Thank You. #1 on his list is where I usually stuff up – responding to compliments. As James notes: We often ruin compliments by devaluing the statement or acting overly humble. Internally, you might think this prevents you from appearing arrogant or smug. The problem is that by deflecting the praise of a genuine compliment...

Google Featured Snippets

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A good post from Moz covering some featured snippet testing they conducted. Featured snippets are predominantly paragraph snippets, although other formats (list and tables) are increasing. Here’s a quick takeaway for you: Key findings: Featured snippet paragraph lengths The optimal length of a featured snippet paragraph is roughly 40 to 50 words, or around 300 characters. Lots more to learn...

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