Welcome to Fresh van Root newsletter #68.
Finally, spring arrived here in Vienna, right before the Easter weekend. While putting together this newsletter issue, news broke that Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter. But I can assure you that you won’t find any story about that in this newsletter. We focus on sharing content that has a longer half-life. Enjoy our selection of reading tips and recommended apps in this newsletter. As always, stay fresh. Rolf
For all new subscribers, here’s what this newsletter is about: We are exploring content and apps at the intersection of marketing, productivity, content creation, and social media. This bi-weekly newsletter is a summary of that exploration.
🧠 Hand-Picked Content
The Capabilities Of AI-powered Image Creation (Blog, 10min)
Describe an image with natural language, then press return. Seconds later, you get the picture you want. That is the promise of AI service Dall E 2. This blog post explores the possibilities of the AI-powered image creation tool. And in general, the results are impressive. It could also have a significant impact on content creators and marketers. Creating custom-branded images by cultivating your company’s own AI system is a possible future ahead of us. More
On Metrics: Trust Your Gut (Blog, 10min)
Tracking and predicting customer engagement along the marketing funnel is a big priority for marketers. But in many cases, it doesn’t make sense. Especially in B2B, the buyer journey is too complex to attribute to your tracking/marketing framework fully. Rand Fishkin is making a case for trusting your gut more often than investing in more and more resources to track everything. More
Creating Good Old Websites (Blog, 6 min)
A single person created Wordle, and it was a simple website for a good idea that grew to worldwide fame. It required no login/account, and it had no ads. Is there a larger trend behind this? Anil Dash is saying yes because there is mistrust in big tech companies. He calls this “A Web Renaissance.” More
Give More People Access To Your Content (Blog, 3min)
Alt-tags describe an image on a web page and are essential for anyone consuming the website without pictures. Images are often added last minute before a blog post or web page goes live. And alt-tags are left out. This blog post reminds us why it is essential to add alt-text to your images. More
Is The NFT Hype Officially Over? (Article, 1min)
The first tweet posted by Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey was sold as an NFT for $2.9mio last year. Now it was re-sold for $280. Tweet | More
🛠️ Tools & Apps & Services
AI Copywriting & SEO Feedback
AI-powered copywriting and content creation tools promise to change the content creation game. While we think these tools can help beat writers’ block and be used for inspiration, they are not suitable for creating ready2publish content. Mark Copy is coming with templates to make headlines, blog outlines, social media post ideas, etc. But it also brings an SEO angle to the game. You can add entire blog posts to it and run some SEO analysis on the content.
We expect a massive consolidation of these tools in the market; we have already discovered about 20 tools like this one in the last two years. They are just not that different. Screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2 | More
Online Video Editor That Stands Out
Automatic transcription of (live) audio is being built into more and more products. If you need this often, you can check out Tactiq. It’s a Chrome extension that connects to Google Meet and other online meeting tools. It creates a transcript (5 different languages supported) of your meeting when enabled. The transcript is created in real-time. You can then edit, add screenshots during the meeting, and more.
It’s cool to record interviews that you later want to work on or publish as a blog post. Screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2 | More
How To Get “Add To Calendar” Links?
A client asked us how to get “add to calendar” links for a mailing or a web page. The service we recommend is AddEvent, and it does exactly that and much more. Screenshot | More
Customer Feedback Survey
Survicate is a survey solution for product and marketing surveys. You can brand your surveys and connect them to your existing campaigns with its integrations (lots of them). More
Share Screenshots With Branded Short URL
Droplr is the screenshot tool (that also records videos) we rely on when sharing screenshots with clients and the public. It can replace both Loom and your screenshot tool at once. Example | Review | More
📣 Fresh van Root
Interested In A Figma Course?
We are thinking about creating a new course: Figma Hacks for Creators & Marketers. There is a huge amount of people out there who do not work in design roles but still use the tool daily. Are you part of that group?
🏞️ Your Next Wallpaper?
🔗 One More Link
Remember That Old Nokia Ring Tone?
The Museum of Endangered Sounds brings back memories. If you were born before 2000. More