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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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10 Tips to Transform an Elusive Goal into a Doable Project

When you work with clients, their projects become your projects.

And when you’re consumed with helping others achieve their big goals, you don’t have much time and energy to accomplish your own.

Of course, it’s natural for your paid work to take priority. After all, there is rent to pay and mouths to feed.

But often when we put off the things we really want to accomplish (and accomplish well), the lack of progress toward our goals leaves us feeling sad and disappointed. Like we’re wasting time by not doing something we really want to do.

Basically, it sucks when you don’t feel like you’re progressing how you planned.

But rather than let another year go by — where your important goals and personal projects get pushed aside — let’s take a look at 10 tried-and-tested techniques for making significant progress.

1. Give yourself permission to start before you feel ready

Prioritizing our own projects can be challenging.

There’s always something else we could be doing. Or “one more thing” we might need before we start. Not to mention the fear that we’ll make the wrong moves and end up failing.

But, predictably, these perfectionist tendencies can only be conquered with one thing: action.

So deliberate, consistent practice (and the permission to be imperfect) is what will produce real progress toward your goals.

Allow yourself to start before you feel ready — making sure you stay flexible and willing to adjust your action plan as needed.

2. Shift your perspective: “Have to” vs. “Get to”

“You can build a work life around deadlines. You can procrastinate, pay the late fines and push through the last minute emergencies because you need all of that in order to get to ‘have to’ mode.

“Or, you can follow the path of the most productive and happy people you know. By redefining the work you’ve chosen to do as something you get to do.” – Seth Godin

If you’ve been struggling to start a new project (or make a decision about what to do next), consider reframing it as something you “get to do” rather than “have to do.”

This mindset shift can transform the way you see your work and propel you from a state of procrastination into one of focused action.

3. Use a simple system to move past the “idea phase”

The overwhelm involved with starting a new project can be paralyzing — and it’s often a result of the endless stream of other “amazing” ideas that bombard our thoughts when we’re trying to decide what to do next.

This is where a system for capturing your ideas becomes invaluable.

Simple systems improve the way you work and are essential for making consistent progress toward your goals.

If you’re getting stuck with idea overload, Sonia has some fantastic practical advice for capturing your creative ideas (and clearing your head in the process).

4. Embrace smaller (more effective) steps

“When making plans, think big. When making progress, think small.” – James Clear

Ever stalled on a new project because it felt too big to achieve? I have (many times).

Usually it’s because I’m so focused on how long something will take or how much more there’s still to do, and I give up before I even begin.

Big projects need to be broken into small parts in order to feel doable.

I’m now in the habit of “drilling down” into each task I set for myself. My goal is to make it as small as possible so it becomes remarkably easier to start and finish.

I also avoid giving myself large chunks of time to “focus” on my project, because I’ve found that restriction — not freedom — with my time frames works better for me.

Shorter time frames + smaller tasks = faster progress.

Try it!

5. Don’t start with “why” … start with “why not”

“We have more ability than willpower, and it is often an excuse to ourselves that we imagine that things are impossible.” – François de La Rochefoucauld

When it comes to self-management, a little self-awareness goes a long way.

So before I begin a new project, I like to list out all of the things I might use as excuses for not getting started (or being able to finish). By identifying and acknowledging them, they lose a little bit of their power.

Diving deeper into your excuses can reveal the real reasons you aren’t making your project a priority or achieving the progress you want.

Plus, once your excuses are exposed, you can work out how to eliminate them.

Arming yourself against these potentially crippling roadblocks will ensure an easier time pushing past them when they do inevitably pop up throughout your project.

6. Visualize your finished project

A well-designed project has an effective action plan. Something that can provide clear direction and prompt your next steps.

One of the easiest ways to create a project plan is to work backwards from your end goal.

You have to know what you want to accomplish before you can figure out how you’re going to accomplish it.

Having this visible end goal doesn’t mean your strategy or approach can’t change along the way. But it does mean you will always have a destination to aim for.

7. Focus on the first step, first

I’m a sucker for the planning stage of any project. I love thinking through all of the things that need to get done and putting them in their correct order of operations.

For me, that’s the easy part.

But sometimes, once I have my big, fancy plan, I get to the “taking action” part and I freeze. All I can think about is how much there is to do and how I’m not quite ready to tackle that last task on the list.

This kind of mental overload is why it’s so important to only focus on what the next step is.

Your project plan is important to have because it keeps you on track and provides your course of action. But if you allow yourself to get lost in the enormity of your to-do list, procrastination is bound to set in.

When you want to make progress, focus on the first step, first. Ignore the rest.

8. Answer these four questions to pinpoint your priority

“You are either consciously saying no to the things that don’t matter or you are unconsciously saying no to the things that do.” – Rory Vaden

If you can’t decide what to do first, consider running your tasks through a “focus funnel.”

I learned this technique from Rory Vaden, author of the book Procrastinate on Purpose.

A focus funnel is a tool to help ensure that — as much as possible — you’re always spending time on your next most significant thing.

Pick a task on your project list (perhaps one you’ve been putting off) and work your way through these four questions:

Is this task something I can live without? This stage of the funnel is about elimination and giving yourself permission to ignore certain tasks.

Can I systematize this task? This stage is about automation and giving yourself permission to invest in a system that can help get this done more efficiently.

Can someone else perform this task? Here is where you can consider delegation and giving yourself permission to be imperfect.

Can this wait until later? This is the stage where you can choose (yes, choose) to procrastinate and give yourself permission to put something off — until you’re actually ready to do it.

If you’ve gotten to the end of the funnel and answered “no” to all of the questions, then you have established a priority. It is the next most significant thing on your list.

Concentrate completely on that task until you accomplish it. Treat everything else as a distraction.

9. Practice “just in time” learning

I don’t know about you, but the projects I truly want to work on are usually ones that require a new skill set or some additional knowledge.

And while I used to try to learn everything all at once (a wonderful way to dive head first into procrastination), I have since started matching what I learn to the task at hand.

It’s called “just in time” learning. In a nutshell, you align your knowledge and skill development with your next most significant task, so you can use what you learn immediately in your work.

The goal is to give priority to the thing you need to learn now, not something that might be helpful a month or even a week later.

10. Hold yourself accountable

Building in some accountability is a super effective way to start and stay on track with a new project.

But it’s important to note that the type of accountability you choose can make all of the difference.

Do you thrive off of peer-to-peer accountability? Is it easier for you to connect and problem-solve with someone who is in the trenches with you?

Do you respond better to paid accountability? Is it more effective for you to have some skin in the game and hire a coach?

Do you crave specific guidance from someone who’s already done what you want to do? Can you find a mentor who can help shed some light and evaluate your ideas?

Do you need to use your family members to hold you to your word? Will tying it to your personal life make it more meaningful?

I know I need a “higher line” for accountability to really work, so finding a mentor or coach has always yielded the best results for me. But you could be different.

Think about what’s worked for you in the past (and more importantly, what hasn’t). Then consider what style of accountability will benefit you the most as you work through your next project.

It’s time for your first step

When starting (and finishing) projects, you’ve probably noticed that we struggle with a lot of mental barriers like indecision, procrastination, and a failure to prioritize.

But as I discussed today, some well-designed self-management systems and some simple self-awareness can usually help you push past those not-so-obvious obstacles.

If you’ve been struggling to figure out your next move or unable to muster the motivation to start something new, try a few of the tips from this list.

Have you got a project you’ve been putting off? Is it something you’d like to get done this year?

I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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Why I Decided To Retire Entrepreneurs-Journey.com And Rebrand As Yaro.blog

One of the most repeated questions during my coaching calls over the years is this:

Should I use my name for my domain name?

The alternative is to use a unique word or phrase as a brand, separate from your own personal brand.

Given how important choosing a domain name is for your new web business, this question deserves consideration.

It also ties into a big change I recently made, dropping the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com domain name, which I had used for 13 years, and replacing it with Yaro.blog — a personal brand domain that doesn’t even use the .com address!

My First Domain Names

The first domain name I ever purchased was MagicAustralia.com (later changing it to MTGParadise.com), for my Magic: The Gathering card game website.

At that time in history, the late 1990s, I could have scooped up a lot of amazing one-word domain names and become rich reselling them a decade later. Sadly, I didn’t have the foresight as a teenager to see this opportunity, I was too busy playing cards.

The next domain name I bought for a business was BetterEdit.com. I was proud of this choice as it had great alliteration and also explained what the business did.

I also purchased other domain names for side projects that went nowhere, including MP3Now.com for my music site, YoungActivist.com for my change the world site, and Yaz.com.au for my Australian focused online trading community (you can learn all about these failed projects here).

In 2004, after I discovered blogging and made the decision to start a hobby blog about entrepreneurship, I made possibly the worst domain name choice I had up to that point. I registered Entrepreneurs-Journey.com.

I wanted to write about my entrepreneurial journey of the previous seven years and track my ongoing business projects into the then future. The domain was a reasonably accurate description of this ethos.

However, as I would quickly realize, the word Entrepreneur is hard to spell, you should avoid hyphens in your domain and ideally the fewer letters you use the better.

Despite all of these handicaps, my blog did very well and as you probably know, became the basis for a teaching and coaching business that is still going today, almost fifteen years later, having generated over two million in sales.

The Emergence Of The Yaro Brand

Although I was happy with my blogging results, as the years went by I became more and more unhappy about my domain name.

On podcast interviews rather than say my website address I would tell people to just Google for ‘Yaro’ instead. This would bring up my blog as one of the first search results, due mostly because my blog ranked so well and my name is rare.

Although it wasn’t my intent initially, once I headed down the path of teaching through blog posts and hosting my own podcast, I found myself becoming a personal brand.

Around the same time I started blogging, people like Steve Pavlina (stevepavlina.com), Darren Rowse (problogger.net), Brian Clark (copyblogger.com) and John Chow (johnchow.com) were all becoming what today we would call an ‘influencer’ — essentially a personal brand.

As you can see from their domain names, using your name or a brand name for your domain didn’t seem to impact the end result significantly. If you produced content read by thousands, you’d become a known entity.

As time went by it became clear that ‘Yaro’ was by far my strongest brand, not Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. Yet I stuck with my domain and even branched out with the EJInsider brand for my paid programs and first version of my membership site (later relaunched as the LaptopLifestyleAcademy.com).

In more recent years I reached the point where not only did I not like my domain, I became embarrassed by it. I felt that my somewhat amateurish domain name reflected poorly on my overall expertise, especially as a first impression point.

Although I can’t verify this, I also think my long hyphenated domain name may have negatively impacted my search results as time went on and search algorithms became more sophisticated.

Meanwhile, as the web matured, all kinds of new personalities surfaced in my industry, including Lewis Howes (lewishowes.com), Pat Flynn (smartpassiveincome.com), Amy Porterfield (amyporterfield.com), John Lee Dumas (entrepreneuronfire.com) and Marie Forleo (marieforleo.com)

As you can see again with these examples, whether you use your personal name as your domain or a unique word or phrase, didn’t seem to matter. John even succeeded using the hard-to-spell word ‘Entrepreneur’.

New Companies, New Projects, New Domains

No matter what rationale you want to apply to choosing a domain, the most important thing is your own relationship with it.

Emotionally I had no desire to shout to the world the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com brand. Instead, my energy was turning towards a domain name I had bought years earlier in preparation for a new project I hoped to focus on one day in the future.

That domain is ChangeManifesto.com, once again returning to my previous interest in ‘changing the world’ topics, and not just business.

In 2017 I decided to finally begin the Change Manifesto project, starting with the book and blog. The blog was setup, I wrote some articles for it, and began writing the book as I traveled Europe.

During the same year, in partnership with my team member Claire, we completed a behind-the-scenes test of a new business. For this project I did some brainstorming and was happy to discover I could register the domain InboxDone.com (my first choice, InboxZero.com was taken). I was excited that such a short and descriptive domain was still available even in 2017.

After finishing the first draft of the Change Manifesto book by the end of 2017, I faced a bit of a crossroads.

I wanted a break from the book, and the idea of jumping in and editing the first draft, which required a significant rewrite, was not motivating. The Change Manifesto blog on the other hand, I enjoyed writing to roughly once a month. Some of my best written content was going there.

Meanwhile Entrepreneurs-Journey.com was finally heading towards the release a of new design, which had been delayed by years because of an unreliable web designer I had to part ways with.

The entrepreneur in me was very excited about the potential of InboxDone.com. I wanted to make sure whatever energy this business needed from me to grow was available. The only way to get customers was to do some form of marketing, and that was definitely high on my priority list. Yet this business was still very new, so there was no guarantee it was going to work.

There were different directions available to me, and I knew there was no way I could go all-in on all of them at the same time.

The Emergence Of Yaro.blog

I’m not sure when he made the change, but at some point Tim Ferriss, who you probably know as an author, podcaster and hacker of life, converted his main personal brand domain to www.tim.blog.

This was probably the first time I’d see someone very successful use the still relatively new .blog domain name extension.

I usually stay clear of any domain name extensions that are not .com. There are countless examples of companies and people doing really well despite not using .com, but still, I hadn’t seriously considered something as different as a .blog domain until I saw Tim do so.

Each month new clients signed up for InboxDone.com. This was awesome and exciting, and also helpful because it gave me a clear focus. I like making decisions based on where momentum is going. In this case we had an obvious winner, so in my mind InboxDone.com was becoming my number one growth focus.

I still love coaching and creating content, so I wasn’t about to give up that part of my life. However, it did mean I needed to simplify this area so I didn’t have too many competing goals.

All of these thoughts were running in my head, yet I still hadn’t made a decision to change anything. It wasn’t until one day after a call with my project manager Laura that I made a big choice.

Laura said to me what I was already thinking. All of these projects in some way connect to the Yaro brand. Whether it’s a book and blog posts about change, my coaching business, and even my new business InboxDone.com, they all link to me, my story and my expertise.

Laura knew very well I didn’t like the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com domain, so she said to me, why don’t you change everything to sit under the ‘Yaro’ personal brand, which you are known for anyway.

I agreed, and with that I decided to make some fairly significant changes.

1. Entrepreneurs-Journey.com would become Yaro.blog. Tim Ferriss had given me ‘permission’ to see the .blog extension as a viable option. In case you are wondering, I did contact the owner of Yaro.com — he said he wanted a million dollars simply because I wanted the domain — sigh.

2. The new blog design and logo would have to be modified to remove the Entrepreneurs Journey parts and replace them with my name. Thankfully the designers could easily make that change, meaning we could launch the new domain and the new design at the same time (well almost, we had to carefully roll out one change after the other to manage SEO considerations – see below).

3. ChangeManifesto.com the blog, would merge into Yaro.blog. The ChangeManifesto.com website and domain would focus on the one-day-to-be-released book (whenever I felt like going back to rewrite the first draft). The blog component of the site would close down, and all the blog posts I’d written there would be migrated into Yaro.blog

4. All my blog posts and podcasts would be branded under the Yaro personal brand and released on the one Yaro.blog going forward.

5. InboxDone.com continued to be promoted within my Yaro.blog content. We have podcast ads running on my own podcast and I’ve written several blog posts related to email management that recommend InboxDone.com. This has worked surprisingly well, as our number one source of new customers outside of people who know me already has come from one blog post that ranks well in Google search.

This left me with a wonderfully simple structure. Claire my cofounder and I would focus on keeping InboxDone.com growing slowly and carefully. When not doing that I could spend my time creating content for Yaro.blog, a domain name and brand I was happy to promote as a blog and podcast.

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com had a great run, and ChangeManifesto.com I hope will still one day see the release of my book, but for now having one growth company and a personal brand gives me a clear direction.

The SEO Implications Of Changing Your Domain Name

Once I made the decision to switch to Yaro.blog, the big concern I worried about was how we could manage the change without damaging my search engine rankings and killing my organic traffic.

When you change your domain name, you are changing the web address of every single piece of content you have published on that website. You can do things to inform Google that you are changing domains, but I was still worried about the potential impact.

The tech team led by an old online friend and previous student, Ovi, who I brought on board to finish up the new blog design, could also do the domain change. Given my blog was almost fifteen years old at the time we made the transition, this was not something I was going to do myself!

We talked about it, and decided that first we’d make the domain name change without switching the design, make sure we did everything we could to mitigate any damage to search engine rankings, and then proceed to roll out the new look.

I won’t go into the technical details of how to do a domain name change, since I frankly don’t know enough about it and plenty of other people have written great how-to guides to manage the transition.

Ovi rolled out the new domain name, which switched entrepreneurs-journey.com for yaro.blog. We had redirects setup so the old domain would still work. All our tests showed links were redirecting as they should, now we just had to wait and see what happened to the search engine rankings.

Within two days, Google was showing yaro.blog in search results and entrepreneurs-journey.com was basically gone. This was good, but traffic-wise, things were not looking great — my organic traffic was half of what it used to be.

Over the next few weeks things started to improve slowly, but my traffic never returned to what it was since before the domain name change.

I was hoping the redesign rollout might improve things, since the website should load quicker and have cleaner code. I was also expecting variables like ‘time on site’ will increase (people staying longer on my posts), which also factors into search engine rankings.

Rolling out the new design was a much bigger job than making the domain name switch. Ovi and his team made the new theme live and we all began exploring the site to find bugs. Within a month the site was 95% of what I wanted it to be, which was a satisfying feeling. It was a significant change to the previous design and felt like moving into a new house.

As you will probably know if you own a website, making changes is a never ending job. I’m still working with Ovi now to tweak certain pages, add features, and optimize elements.

In terms of traffic, although there was a move upwards after the design was rolled out, my traffic hasn’t returned to what it was before the changes. This is frustrating, but it has forced me to focus on optimization again.

If you have yet to check out the new design, head over to www.yaro.blog and click some links to look around. I recommend you do this with a laptop or desktop for the larger screen.

It probably won’t surprise you to see a lot of my face all over the new design. The switch to focus 100% on Yaro as my brand has meant, much like so many other personal brands, influencers, consultants and experts, we put forward our image in everything. I feel a little uncomfortable about this as my site seems like a shrine to me, but I understand it’s an effective method for making sure people remember you.

What Should You Do?

To end this article I’m going to answer the question that I started with —

What should you do with your domain name, and consequently, your brand?

Over the years my answer to this question hasn’t really changed. At the end of the day what matters is if you are excited about your domain.

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com carried me far, despite being not a great domain name. As a brand, I could have continued with it and still did well, but emotionally I didn’t like it.

There are other factors to consider too, for example:

A personal brand is a lot harder to sell, so if you are building a company and the idea of selling it one day appeals, don’t use your name.

What your actual name is matters. If it’s really hard to spell and remember, you’re not helping your cause if you use it for your domain name.

Choosing a brand name is generally more difficult because all the best .com domains are gone. Of course you don’t have to use .com, but it’s almost always preferable.

If you’re NOT looking to personally be a brand, possibly speaking at events, doing interviews online, or at the very least, showing photos of yourself, then don’t use your personal name.

I also cover some other very important elements when choosing a domain in a handout you can download for free from here:

If you’re choosing your domain name and brand for the first time, I strongly recommend you download this handout as I cover the most important elements that makes it easier for people to remember you and your domain.

That in the end is the most important thing – will people think of you when they have need for what you offer?

As I go all-in on my personal brand, at least for my coaching business, I do so knowing that so much of my success has come from people trusting me as a person.

My companies with independent domain names like InboxDone.com are not meant to be an extension of the Yaro personal brand, BUT so many of our customers choose to work with us because of the relationship they have with me.

It’s hard to beat the power of building trust online using your personal brand. The ‘Influencer economy’ is alive and well, with individuals enjoying access to massive audiences who trust them, and thus can influence purchasing decisions.

Whether this is your path is very much up to you.

Good luck!

Yaro

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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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I Wrote a New Book, and It’s Publishing Soon!

Pat Flynn has written a new book, and it’s publishing in August 2019! It’s called Superfans, and it’s all about creating superfans for your business.

Pat Flynn April 22, 2019

I’m incredibly excited about this post, because it’s the first public announcement about a really big milestone coming up this summer!

(No, not FlynnCon, although I am definitely excited about that!)

Team Flynn, please mark your calendars for August 13, because that’s the day my next book launches.

I’m so amped to share more with you, so read on to learn about the process that’s gone into writing and creating the book—and of course, stay tuned for the big reveal: what the book is called and what it’s going to be about.

Why I Chose to Self-Publish (Again)

This book has been in the works for a while—about five years, in fact.

And like my previous books, I’ll be self-publishing it.

When I was working on my 2016 book, Will It Fly?: How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money, I was grappling with the decision to publish it myself or go with a traditional publisher. I’ve even had agents and publishers reaching out, ready to work with me on my next book.

I chose the self-publishing route.

Although there are a lot of pros that come with working with a traditional publisher (like a monetary advance and distribution in physical bookstores), as I was writing Will It Fly?, I learned that traditional publishing would likely mean giving up control over things like creative direction and content. Since most people end up doing most of their own marketing anyway, I made the choice to self-publish.

I may end up going traditional in the future, though, primarily because I’m very curious about experiencing the process first hand, but also I know distribution and mainstream media can be much wider. But I’ll save that for another book idea I have in mind (hehe!).

My most recent book before this one was the second edition of my memoir, Let Go, which I also self-published and funded through Kickstarter in 2018. It was the first full-color print book with a gorgeous graphic treatment that I’ve worked on with Team SPI, and I’m in awe of how it came out.

With my next book, I’m shifting from memoir and getting back to business—literally. I’ll reveal the title and topic in a moment, but this book is going to be one aimed at entrepreneurs and business owners everywhere.

Visually, it’s going to be pretty great too. While it won’t have all of the custom illustrations we did for the second edition of Let Go, it’s going to look pretty awesome on the shelf and in your hands. (Okay, the written parts should be decent too.)

So why did I choose to self-publish again?

I chose this path because even though things went pretty well for Let Go and Will It Fly?, I wanted to have one more crack at it and see if we could improve on the process. The self-publishing landscape has been rapidly changing, and while there are new challenges, we also felt like we had enough experience under our belt to make the most of the opportunity.

In particular, through our previous experiences, we developed a good idea of what our team could take on ourselves and where we could use some outside help.

On that note, I have to give huge credit and thanks to Ryan Sprenger of New Type Publishing, who is helping us out with a lot of the logistics of self-publishing this book. We didn’t have access to Ryan’s awesome expertise with my previous self-published books, so we were figuring out a lot of things as we went along, and not taking advantage of all the opportunities available to us. Ryan has helped us navigate the pitfalls of self-publishing and make sure the book reaches as many people as possible. We also had some initial guidance from another friend in the business, Kary Oberbrunner, who had some great insight about how to get the book available for pre-orders, which is not the easiest thing to do when you’re self publishing!

I’m also super thankful for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) challenge, which gave me the motivation I needed to finish the first draft of the book. I wrote over a thousand words a day in November 2018, and finished my draft by the end of the year. NaNoWriMo gave me a ton of motivation to get the draft written, but I was also inspired by the knowledge that I was writing about something that could truly help people.

View this post on Instagram

I wrote over 30,000 words in November, with one more day to go! ? And I’m close to being done with my new book ?? I’m feeling REALLY good about what I’ve written, and although we’ve got a long way to go (more drafts, copy editing, etc), it’s been great to see this much progress in such a short period of time, especially relative to Will It Fly which took over 1.5 years. ? Thank you all for the encouragement this month, it wouldn’t have happened without you, especially after being sick for two weeks of the month. Thanks to those of you who played along with my word count guessing game, and congrats to all the winners! Team Flynnstagram, you have one more day to guess and win a copy of my book, Let Go! What’s your guess?

A post shared by Pat Flynn (@patflynn) on Nov 30, 2018 at 9:40pm PST

Okay. I may have intentionally front-loaded this blog post just so I could stall and create some anticipation. So what is this book already, Pat?

Drumroll, please . . .

My next book is called Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business, and it’s about how to connect with people in a way that makes them want to stick with you and your brand for life.

The Origin Story of Superfans

The concept for Superfans was born as a topic developed for a 2014 presentation at New Media Expo, which is sadly no longer around. But this presentation helped put me on the map and land the keynote at the 2015 New Media Expo in Las Vegas, (which you might remember as the one where I came out in a DeLorean). Since then, I’ve been invited to several other conferences to speak on the same topic. In fact, after Social Media Day in San Diego 2017, Jay Baer, someone who’s a big inspiration to me, met with me and said (in more or less these words), “Pat, that was an amazing presentation. That’s the kind of content that should be in a book.”

Ever since that day, I’ve been inspired to see Jay’s suggestion through to fruition.

One of my motivations behind writing Superfans was to create a how-to guide of sorts for Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans” concept. If you’re not familiar, “1000 True Fans” is an essay Kelly wrote way back in 2008. His idea was this: If you can inspire just one thousand people to become true fans (which he defines as “a fan that will buy anything you produce”) and each of those true fans provided $100 profit per year on your art, your craft, your work . . . well, there’s a six-figure business right there!

But more than just supporting you financially, your true fans—your superfans—are there for you in other, non-monetary ways that will help your brand last.

It’s a masterpiece, and it’s still just as useful today as it was back then. “1000 True Fans” was vital in helping me understand how achievable real, life-changing success actually was.

Superfans is a book for anyone interested in building a brand that will last by cultivating an audience of raving fans—of true fans—who will follow them anywhere. This book is for the solo YouTuber, the blogger, the small team, the midsize startup, and even the large corporation. I wrote it to help people running brands of all sizes and types understand how to create magnificent experiences and magical moments for their people.

Building superfans is what I believe business owners should be focused on doing today, with technology changing, jobs being outsourced, and uncertainty everywhere.

Creating a core group of dedicated superfans is the best way to succeed in business and build a brand that will stand the test of time. This concept is something people are slowly coming around to, but there’s still a lot of “old school” thinking going on about what it takes to make a brand and business succeed. A lot of people out there are still really focused solely on driving traffic and conversions. And while those metrics are important in building a business and creating a revenue stream, they can’t give your brand a real foundation for longevity.

The most important thing is to build a set of superfans who can support your business and your life—and you don’t need a lot of them in order to make a big impact.

In March 2016, I wrote in a blog post about Will It Fly? that “I wanted to write a great, timeless book that would help as many people as possible. If I happened to make a bestseller list doing that, then great.”

That book happened to make the Wall Street Journal bestseller list. And if Superfans does the same, that’ll be awesome. But it’ll also be just fine if it doesn’t, as long as it does what I hope it will do for the people who read it: help them build a successful business and a lasting brand by cultivating their own legion of superfans.

Team SPI has also really enjoyed getting into the book in the editing and design process, and I’m super thrilled to get it into people’s hands.

So, you might be wondering:

Can I preorder Superfans yet?

Not yet! However, you can . . . get a sneak peek at what the book might look like!

Here are a couple low-fidelity initial cover ideas we’ve played around with—the final cover probably won’t look exactly like any of these, and the subtitle is still a work in progress too. But this gives you a good sense of what we’re going for.

So stay tuned for the big announcement when pre-orders are available. It’s going to be an exciting summer!

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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results

“20 of the most important SEO blogs online”

“complete with handy guides explaining how you, too, can get in on the gold”

In the Academy Award-nominated film Food Inc, filmmaker Robert Kenner reveals how the varied choice of items we see on the shelves of supermarkets is actually a false presumption.

Instead, that seemingly endless variety is actually controlled by just a handful of companies.

Today I’m going to reveal how the huge diversity we perceive in Google search results is once again a few large corporations controlling what we assume to be choice. More specifically I’ll reveal how just 16 core companies are dominating the most popular industries online and how that situation is going to get a whole lot worse. To begin our journey down the rabbit hole together, I want to take you through a series of events which uncovered something I had never considered before about the industry in which I operate: Are the Google rankings I aim to get for myself and my clients actually controlled by just three hands full of companies?

Around two weeks ago I came across a post on Reddit about Hearst Media. I was unfamiliar with Hearst Media but very familiar with the brands they own such as Esquire, Elle and Cosmopolitan.

The Reddit outing, which was shared on a new account, claimed that Hearst were using their powerful brands to “game Google” and rank a new website of theirs very quickly, using slightly shady practices.

Being an inquisitive marketer I had to check it out for myself. The quick summary is that Hearst clearly were (and still are) using their authoritative brands to point links to their latest venture, BestProducts.com.

While I expected BestProducts.com to be receiving a lot of traffic from the brands linking to them – which also include Marie Claire and Woman’s Day – I didn’t expect Google to have taken such a huge liking to them. Especially when the site in question had zero reason prior to be ranking so well (it was owned previously then the domain dropped a few years ago).

To give an overview of what was happening for those who are skimming this article, the situation looks like this.

The arrows in this picture represent links.

There are far more brands involved in this network, but we’ll get to those in a second.

As I stated earlier, I was far more surprised by how Google reacted to this.

Launched in October, They Now Receive More than 600,000 Visitors from Google Per Month

Here’s the graph that kick started the countless days of research I did for this blog post.

As we can see, the estimated traffic to BestProducts has shot up dramatically in the last few months. SEMRush is showing similar numbers, as we’ll get to in a second. With 62% of their traffic estimated to be coming from Google, that’s at least 600,000 organic (free) website visitors for the month of April.

I expect the data for May will be significantly higher, but I have to wait until June 10th to see (that’s when SimilarWeb confirm they’ll update their reporting).

So Why Am I Surprised?

Tons of authoritative sites linking to you is obviously great for SEO.

But as anyone who has been involved in search engine optimisation for a period of time might wonder, surely getting so many sitewide links in a short timeframe should raise a bit of a red flag?

Even if the links in question are from some of the biggest media brands in the world.

Here’s a few examples.

Esquire.com (Product Reviews)

Elle.com (Beauty Reviews)

Cosmopolitan.com (Beauty Reviews)

MarieClaire.com (Reviews)

PopularMechanics.com (Product Reviews)

Now, I will say that 90% of me thinks there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, you’ll see the majority of this post is focused on why I’m surprised Google give the resulting website so much traffic.

Quite simply if I owned a lot of websites, I would be fine linking them together. If for nothing more than from a usability standpoint.

That being said, 10% of me is a little surprised that these link texts and locations are constantly changing. I think it’s a bit risky on their part.

As of publishing this post, Cosmopolitan use ‘Beauty Reviews’ as the anchor text of their footer to the site. Previously it was in a different placement and used the anchor text ‘Style Reviews’.

These are not static footer links that have been left alone (and not just on one site). They’re changing to different pages – and using different words – on a fairly frequent basis.

To me this takes the situation away from “they’re just linking to their own site” to “they’re doing a lot of tweaking to see which results in higher rankings.” You could argue they’re testing it for usability reasons, but you’ll see in a moment why I think they know a thing or two about SEO.

Before I get into that, I wanted to see if I could figure out when these links were added to their network.

Were they all thrown up at once and it took a while for them to have an impact, or was there some clear plan behind the links from Hearst Media’s various brands?

Here’s some of the data I managed to uncover on when each site first linked to BestProducts (I bolded those that linked on the same day).

PopularMechanics.com – November 5th

Esquire.com – November 5th

Cosmopolitan.com – January 1st

Seventeen.com – January 12th

RedbookMag.com – February 23rd

Elle.com – March 15th

CountryLiving.com – March 18th

WomansDay.com – April 5th

MarieClaire.com – April 5th

RoadandTrack.com – April 13th

For my own curiosity, I was glad I took the time to trawl through every screenshot on Archive.org to find these answers. It’s now obvious that the people working for Woman’s Day, Marie Claire, Popular Mechanics and Esquire had some conversion that went along the lines of, “Don’t forget, today’s the day we have to put those links to Best Products in the footer.”

As I said earlier, I don’t really care too much about what Hearst media are doing with their “link network” of magazine brands. I don’t see anything wrong with it and don’t think Google should either.

That being said, because I’ve done more research for this blog post than any other, I do want to add that they purchased the most successful SEO agency on the planet just a few years ago.

If you can’t read that because of my small post width (I’m working on a redesign), they paid $325 million for an agency that generated more than 60% of their revenues from SEO clients.

At the time of acquisition iCrossing were also the biggest search agency in the world based on revenue numbers. In other words, the staff at Hearst Media comprises of a large number of people who know a lot about SEO.

To me this explains the slow buildup of network links and the semi-frequent changing of URL’s and link text in their website footer.

I Have No Problem With What Hearst Are Doing. Google’s Reaction Is What Really Interests Me…

I’ve said it a few times but I’ll say it once more for anyone skimming the post: This is by no means an attack on Hearst Media. They own the websites so they’re welcome to do with them as they please. They also made BestProducts a rather attractive looking website.

Then again, I’m surprised at how well their strategy is working. I’m not naive – I know that authoritative links equal a good chance of increased search rankings – but I didn’t expect they would be outranking some of the biggest brands on the internet for search terms that can make them a lot of money.

From Zero to $583,000 in Free Search Traffic

We’ve already looked at the data from SimilarWeb, but the stats from SEMRush are interesting as well.

SEMRush pips BestProducts at ranking for over half a million dollar’s worth of search queries (if you were to buy them via Google Adwords) in a very short space of time.

Their Top Keywords According to SEMRush

Some of those incredible rankings they’ve achieved include:

hairstyles: 11th (450,0000 searches per month)

short hairstyles: 7th (301,000 searches per month)

best wireless earbuds: 1st (22,200 searches per month)

short haircuts: 9th (301,000 searches per month)

best running shoes for women: 1st (18,100 searches per month)

bluetooth speakers: 11th (165,000 searches per month)

lighted makeup mirror: 1st (14,800 searches per month)

best makeup brushes: 1st (14,800 searches per month)

haircuts: 7th (165,000 searches per month)

short haircuts for women: 6th (110,000 searches per month)

They’re still ranking for these terms, which is why I predict the SimilarWeb traffic graph will increase a lot when they update their data for May.

Their Top Keywords According to SimilarWeb

It’s interesting to see how different the data from SimilarWeb and SEMRush seems to be, but they’re at least right that BestProducts are ranking for what they state they’re ranking for.

best dishwasher 2016

best smartwatch 2016

best gaming headset 2016

best action camera 2016

best bluetooth speaker 2016

Hey, I did tell you all just before new year that you should be writing 2016 everywhere on your site.

I could make this page infinitely scrollable if I show all of their rankings, so I’ll just share a couple to show they really do rank.

While they aren’t a top result for this one it does show that they’re likely still getting hundreds of clicks per day for just one search term.

It’s certainly not just with BestProducts that Hearst are having a lot of SEO success though. Just look at how their brand is doing as a whole…

Hearst Alone Absolutely Dominate Certain Sectors of Google Search Results

Worried about ranking top three? Why not just take all of the spots.

Sadly, Google Search Results Will Never Look Diverse Again

At least not to me.

You may think Hearst are some kind of exception and partly, you would be right. However, they’re certainly not alone.

Purch also own some of the biggest sites online.

They all already link to each other in the footer of every site, but it’s my understanding that they were all fairly big ‘brands’ on their own before being purchased. Just look at the traffic numbers for some of those sites:

Toms Hardware – 51 million visitors per month

Top Ten Reviews – 17.5 million visitors per month

Live Science – 20.6 million visitors per month

I don’t have to go into their domain stats; you already know they have authority.

Purch and Hearst compete in many of the same industries and one of Purch’s sites – TopTenReviews – also ranks in my screenshot above for the dishwashers search query.

There’s no doubt they are watching the success of one of their bigger rivals and if they see that they can spin off new web properties into valuable entities, it must be very tempting to follow the same path.

Sadly, the more research I did for this post, the less and less varied Google search results appeared to be. Time after time I was able to trace back the top ranking websites to some of the biggest media companies in the world.

There are of course some I’m missing (especially outside of the English language) but these are the companies I found most often in search results across the board.

Click here to view a slightly larger image.

To show you I’m not being dramatic, let’s take a look at some actual search results I believe that these networks are dominating. They’re not just limited to one sector.

They’ve Taken Over Software

That’s a little bit of a long-tail example, so let’s look at something far more popular.

They’ve Taken Over Food

Image results were manually removed from this screenshot for clarity

And another…

For this screenshot I removed some Google images so I could fit in the search results

They’ve Taken Over Technology

I’m starting to feel like I was one of the only people who didn’t know about these brands.

They’ve definitely got a big hold on the technology industry.

They’ve Taken Over Gaming

Note: One Youtube result was removed from this graphic so I could fit in the screenshot

They’ve Taken Over Health

They’ve Taken Over Automotive

They’ve Taken Over Beauty

They Buy Out the Competition

They (More than Likely) Share Keyword Data Across Their Network

I can’t blame them for doing this, but it’s certainly interesting to see.

It’s not only the big broad keywords that send a lot of traffic they can share either. If you have similar brands, you should definitely be taking advantage of the long tail.

Why have one top search result when you can have two (or many more)?

These Companies Get $20,000 in Links Just for Buying a Domain Name

When Google search results are so reliant on one thing then we’re all a little bit at the mercy of whoever has the most money to throw at the problem.

Whenever these big brands start a new website the tech and news blogs share it with the world, and that means link acquisition.

Hearst’s Best Product Got Incredible Links On the Day of Launch

Here is Racked.com, ironically owned by another of the sixteen, talking about their new brand.

As Did Time’s New Breakfast Site

Even if you’re just writing about the first meal of the day, it’s notable to those in the tech space.

As Did IAC’s New Health Site

There are few better links to get about a new brand than a mention from TechCrunch.

It’s Clear That Domain Authority is More Important Than Ever

If you didn’t “catch” on to this after seeing how well BestProducts are ranking then let me make it clear: There are almost no backlinks from other sites pointing to the top ranking pages of BestProducts.com.

They do have some internal links – mostly from the footer of PopularMechanics articles – but very few. However, they have a ton of strong links pointing to their homepage and category pages, which is spreading the ‘link juice’ around their entire website.

This is inline with what Brian Dean reported when he analysed 1,000,000 Google search results:

As he says, “In other words, the domain that your page lives on is more important than the page itself.”

Overall, it makes sense that domain authority plays a big role in overall site rankings (it’s not easy to get internal links) but I’m surprised to see it being so important.

How IAC’s About.com Used Their Authority to Catapult a New Site to the Top of Google

When TechCrunch covered the launch of About.com’s new standalone health website, Very Well, they had this to say regarding their SEO,

One of the greater challenges for About.com will be SEO. The company current has pretty good juice when it comes to Google searches, and launching on a new domain with a new brand could prove difficult to migrate.

The other interesting thing they quoted, which a lot of other news sites picked up on, was that,

Verywell will launch with more than 50,000 pieces of content ranging from common medical conditions like diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis to simple health tips like how to get more sleep or advice on fitness.

That’s a lot of content for a brand new site.

50,000 Pages of Content Did Nothing for Their SEO.

From what I can tell, Very Well seemed to come online around February of this year. The first mentions or evidence of the site didn’t appear until April, but some of their older content has February 2016 as the publish date.

Now the day they launched the site – whatever that really means – was April 26th, 2016. That means they added 50,000 pieces of content to a dropped domain in the space of two months.

During these two months not a single website analytics tool (such as SimilarWeb, Alexa or Compete) detected any traffic going to VeryWell.com

Luckily, About.com Has Some SEO Authority to Throw Around

As TechCrunch noted, About.com are one of the most SEO-authoritative brands in the world. It seems like no matter what you search for, they’ll be there ranking on the first page of Google.

It’s interesting then that About.com decided to risk that authority by pointing their health-related sub-domains straight to Verywell.com, as shown below.

This is just a sample of those I found. There are many more.

To be clear, these sub-domains used to have sites on them. They’re not just randomly redirecting. They were previously used by About.com.

WIth a wave of links from About.com and the media web talking about IAC’s new web brand, VeryWell started to get noticed on website analysis tools. Most notably by Ahrefs.

That’s a lot of links in a short period of time. Surely it must be setting off a few red flags like they did for Best Products.com? Heh.

“How’s That New Site Ranking, IAC?” Very Well!

If you want to know how this new brand is doing in Google, take a look for yourself.

That’s a recording of 3.6 million visitors to the site with 56% of that reportedly from free search engine traffic.

IAC must be pleased with that. So much so in fact that I think this situation is only the tip of the iceberg.

This Domination of Google Results Is Going to Get Much Worse

Over the last two weeks of dedicating day and night to this topic I found a lot of similarities in these mega brands.

Many started offline in publishing and brought those titles online while many purchased their own competitors and ran different brands like they were separate entities. For instance, IAC purchased About.com while AOL (now owned by Verizon) purchased Patch, TechCrunch and The Huffington Post.

However, the most common thing I’ve found in my research is that they all plan to spread the authority of their online presence.

IAC’s About.com Will Disperse into Many More Verticals

Speaking with TechCrunch, their CEO Neil Vogel states, “What we learned in rebuilding what we were is that we don’t want to be that anymore. About was built during a different time in the internet, where scale translated to trust. But the internet has changed. No one wants advice on their 401k from the same people that give advice on how to bake a pie.”

As TechCrunch also note;

Learning that, About has shifted its focus to building out verticals around its troves of topic-specific content, with Verywell being the first.

After seeing the quick SEO success of Very Well, I’m sure they’ll be bringing that plan forward.

Time Have Already Spun-Off into Two Verticals

Back in September of 2015, Time Inc’s ‘The Foundry’ (sort of like their internal incubator) launched a car news website called The Drive. Time recently revealed the site is now receiving more than 2 million unique visitors per month.

More recently, Time launched a website called Extra Crispy. Oddly enough it’s a website dedicated to breakfast, but if you saw the screenshots above then you’ll know they’ve received a TON of links back to this site, simply because it was created by Time.

Two of the 16 Are Teaming Up

Just last month, two of the sixteen brands I’ve highlighted today actually acquired a new company together named Complex Media.

The video-focused company claim to reach more than 50 million unique visitors per month.

With Verizon purchasing AOL last year for $4.4B, I wouldn’t be overly surprised to see them make a few more content-focused acquisitions. *Cough* Verizon will buy Hearst *cough*

Hearst Built BestProducts.com in Just Six Weeks

I’m not even talking about how long it took to get the content on the website. I’m talking about sitting in a meeting one day and having the idea for the site to actually having it online and getting links from some of the most powerful domains in the world.

Digiday reports that Hearst can move fast. “We’re now at place where we can spin up properties incredibly quickly,” Young said. “This went from idea to launch in six weeks.”

Young also commented that, “We have a strong new platform. Now we can start applying that to new opportunities.”

Which to me can only mean that more BestProducts-like websites are on their way.

A Depressing Summary, but Not a Negative One

Though this post may seem like a bit of a “it’s us against them” fight, that really wasn’t my aim.

The more research I did for this article and the more I realised certain brands were owned by the same company, the more I felt like I was watching Food Inc, the documentary that revealed the thousands of brands you see on supermarket shelves are really owned by just a handful of companies.

Side note: If anyone has the skills to make a similar graphic with the brands I covered here I would include it

It’s not too dissimilar from what I’ve shared today. Thanks to Jason and Mary for putting this graphic together.

Click here to view larger

As I’ve always said, I write articles that I personally think would be interesting to read. In 11 years of immersing myself in the online marketing industry I’ve never seen anyone talk about the huge dominance that certain players have on search results. So, as the research was interesting to me, I decided to share it.

Let’s take an ideal worldview for a second. If Google’s ideals are to be believed, results from queries in their search engine should produce results that searchers want to find.

For that reason, I’m sure teenage American girls searching for advice on colours of eye-liner aren’t thinking “Ugh, really Google? Beauty tips from Vogue again?”

Similarly, when I’m searching for tech product reviews, I’m actually happy results from The Verge appear over some site I don’t have much faith in. I trust The Verge, and I’m more likely to click on their results than from anyone else.

From an objective standpoint, the Google results are good, if not great. They provide what the searcher, and I, are looking for.

But I’m a marketer. If you’re still reading this article, I can assume with 99% certainty that you’re one too.

As a marketer I learned how little Google care if a new site gets hundreds of thousands of links very quickly.

I came away with even more belief in the importance of having a strong domain (read: a domain that has a lot of backlinks) if you want internal pages to rank.

I also became a little fearful that these brands are going to spread into even more verticals, taking their already huge financial war chests and filling in all of the blank Google results they don’t yet own.

If we want to debate whether it’s fair or not or whether Google should make changes, a court of law in the US has twice protected their search results under the First Amendment. Meaning it is totally up to them to list and rank websites wherever they wish.

The first time they won a battle on their rankings, a company called CoastNews were suing them for $5M because they ranked at the top of Yahoo and Bing but were nowhere to be found on Google.

At the end of the day, Google is a business that aims to make their shareholders money and if we as webmasters are looking to rank higher in Google, it’s usually because we want to make more money as well. I can’t feel it’s unfair and want to profit from it at the same time. After all, I do have several niche agencies which profit from ranking other people highly in Google.

I can complain – it’s a shame Google can’t detect some of what is going on here – but it’s not going to change anything about how I run my business.

All in all, I simply hope you found my findings as interesting in one go as I did while discovering them on the way.

You Can Still Fight Back

Next week I’ll be going live with a report on the state of link building in 2016 so if you want strategies on how to get links to make your sites rank, make sure you enter your email in the box below (or in the right sidebar) to make sure you don’t miss it.

Thank you so much for reading.

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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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The latest Update of WhatsApp assists you to use read Siri messages

3.8 (75%) 4 votes

The apple iPhone has a new update called as Siri and therefore talking to the Siri computer program is a simpler and faster way to get the things easy. Its forever with you on your apple iPhone, iPod, Mac and the Apple Watch, therefore, it is ready to assist all over your day. Ask the Siri to set an alarm or Play a song or a voicemail. Send a call or a love note to anyone. And the more you use the Siri, the good it knows what you want at any moment of the life. Just say it to the Siri and Siri does it for you.

Here Siri is the name of personal digital assistant for the apple company. Its normal voice manage that the talks back to you, that know about the relationships and the context, and with traits straight out of the Pixar. Ask the Siri queries, or just ask the Siri to do belongings for you, just like you would ask an actual assistant, and the Siri will assist to keep you connected, conversant, in the correct place, and on the time. You can even use to build in dictation specification of the Siri to get in the text around everywhere by easily using your voice.

How to set up, safe, and begin using the Siri:

While in most of the cases you can begin by using the Siri right out of the box, in some of the cases you may have to authorize it first. There are also few settings that you can configure in your phone which including the ways to build the Siri safer. Since the Siri can, if you pick, ignore your PIN lock and bring to your phone contacts and the another data, you should verify out all your choices and make sure you select whatever combine of the convenience and the protection which makes the most sense to you and to the phone. You can also modify the language of the Siri which can control when you listen to the Siri and even adapted absolute settings on your iPhone and the iPad, all with the sound of your own voice.

How to check with Siri and how it helps for the people:

Not only can you command texts, emails, and more to the Siri, you can also have Siri carry you up to date on arriving notifications on your iPhone or an iPad. If you are driving and receive a normal message, alternatively of taking your hands off the wheel and by just have the Siri to read the text message for you. The same things which are hold you to the right for the emails and more supportive options.

A new WhatsApp application which updates on the iOS is now granting the Apple users to ask the Siri to learn out their new update of WhatsApp messages.

The nearby new specifications which came into view on Whatsapp update version 2.17.20. The update of the WhatsApp is 88.8MB in size and is ready on the App store or play store.

WhatsApp application had already granted the Apple users to bring under control or to send WhatsApp text message via calling out Siri.

The important thing of the WhatsApp application update is the latest feature that lets you call for Siri to read the messages of yours. If your mobile phone is on the table, and you are feeling too inactive to pick it up, you can easily say Hey Siri and ask by Reading my last WhatsApp text message. Therefore the Siri narrate you who to sent the last text message, and reads it to you. Siri also asks you if you need to answer to the text message, and you can command your reply.

WhatsApp application on the last day of the week launched the latest update for the iPhone user, which carry some nifty small visual advancement along with the capability to have the Siri read out your new text messages. The new WhatsApp update version v2.17.2 is now ready through the App Store.

The new version of the WhatsApp application, which is around 89MB in size, focus the four key updates and you can demand the Siri to read out your new text messages; visual advancements to the Calls tab, Contact info of yours, and the Group info of the screens; capability to choose the various statuses at once in the My Updates screen of the phone which you can onward and remove the data; and hold up for the Persian language.

New Updating:

By talking about the Siri accompanying update, WhatsApp application before lets you belong to and therefore sends the WhatsApp text messages via Siri. The latest update knows allow Siri to read out your new messages to your hands-free moment, which will come in easy to use when you are in driving, for instance.

The range of capabilities only works if you have few unread text messages. Say something like Hey Siri, read my last WhatsApp text message and therefore the Siri will read out the latest text messages which arrived on your phone to you and will then responsive you to belong to a reply. You can then select to reply to the text message by composing it to the Siri. We tried the latest feature and it looking to work as promised. You should also observe that once Siri has read your new messages, it would not to be able to read it repeat the next time. Furthermore, this specification will only work for the users who are having the version iOS 10.3 plus.

The WhatsApp application new update also carries few visual modifications to the Calls tab, Contact info of yours, and Group info screens on your phones. On beginning any sole of the screens, you will notice that the screen display pictures add to as you scroll down, and the different options below have colorful icons after that to them for few added flavor to what was in another way a fairly dull blend.

The update of the WhatsApp also lets you choose the various statuses in the My Update section of the app which you can ahead or remove the data from that, a modernized just by two-step verification on your interface which cause it simpler to set up and the camera function of your phone and therefore now keep in mind the lens you used in last of front or back. As by specified by earlier, WhatsApp application has also additional support for the Persian language on your phone with the new update to its iPhone application.

As for concluding that the important point of the application update is the latest feature and how it helps the user by that lets you demand the Siri read your text messages in your WhatsApp application. If your mobile phone is on the table, and you are feeling not good to pick it up or reply, you can just by saying Hey Siri and ask, Read my last WhatsApp text message. At the same time, the Siri inform you who sent the last message to you and reads it what the matter to you. Siri also demands you if you need to reply to the text message, and you can command your reply. Thus, therefore, this will help the user in many ways.

About the Author:

Anand Rajendran is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dectar a well known Software products development and Mobile App Development Company based in Chennai, India. He has extensive experience in building and leading innovative and collaborative software development teams to deliver major software applications like Scimbo – Whatsapp Clone Script. He loves exploring new things and sharing his knowledge with others.

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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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26 Mobile and Desktop Tools for Marketers : Social Media Examiner

Social Media Marketing

Industry Report

In our 10th annual social media study (44 pages, 70+ charts) of 5700+ marketers, you’ll discover which social networks marketers most plan on using, organic social activities, paid social media plans, and much more! Get this free report and never miss another great article from Social Media Examiner.

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We Analyzed 12 Million Outreach Emails. Here’s What We Learned

We analyzed 12 million outreach emails to answer the question:

What’s working in the world of email outreach right now?

We looked at subject lines. We looked at personalization. We even looked at follow-up sequences.

Along with our data partner for this study, Pitchbox, we uncovered a number of interesting findings.

Here is a Summary of Our Key Findings:

1. The vast majority of outreach messages are ignored. Only 8.5% of outreach emails receive a response.

2. Outreach emails with long subject lines have a 24.6% higher average response rate compared to those with short subject lines.

3. Follow-ups appear to significantly improve response rates. Emailing the same contact multiple times leads to 2x more responses.

4. Reaching out to multiple contacts can also lead to more success. The response rate of messages sent to several contacts is 93% higher than messages sent to a single person.

5. Personalized subject lines boost response rate by 30.5%. Therefore, personalizing subject lines appears to have a large impact on outreach campaign results.

6. Personalizing outreach email body content also seems to be an effective way to increase response rates. Emails with personalized message bodies have a 32.7% better response rate than those that don’t personalize their messages.

7. Wednesday is the “best” day to send outreach emails. Saturday is the worst. However, we didn’t find an especially large difference in response rates between different days that messages were sent.

8. Linking to social profiles in email signatures may result in better response rates. Twitter was correlated with an 8.2% increase, LinkedIn an 11.5% increase, and Instagram a 23.4% increase.

9. The most successful outreach campaigns reach out to multiple contacts multiple times. Email sequences with multiple attempts and multiple contacts boost response rates by 160%.

10. Certain types of outreach get higher response rates than others. Outreach messages related to guest posting, roundups and links have an especially high response rate.

We have details and additional data from our study below.

Most Outreach Emails Are Ignored or Deleted

You may have heard that it’s challenging to get people to reply to cold outreach emails. According to our data, poor response rates do appear to be the norm.

In fact, we found that only 8.5% of all outreach emails receive a response.

This response rate is similar to what several cases studies, like this one from the Moz blog, have previously found.

The fact that 91.5% of cold outreach messages are ignored may not come as a surprise. After all, generic outreach emails like this are extremely common:

Fortunately, our research found several factors that helped certain outreach emails outperform the average. We will cover these findings later in this post.

But for now, it’s important to note that very few outreach emails receive a response.

Key Takeaway: 91.5% of outreach emails are ignored.

The Ideal Outreach Email Subject Line Length Is 36-50 Characters

Our study found that long subject lines get a significantly higher response rate than shorter subject lines.

Specifically, subject lines between 36-50 characters get the best response rate.

To compare subject line response rates, we placed them into 5 buckets: short, medium, long, very long and extremely long.

And we found that long subject lines outperformed short subject lines by 32.7%.

Why do long subject lines do best?

It’s likely because longer subject lines give you an opportunity to fully describe the content of your message.

For example, imagine a super short subject line like: “Quick Question”.

At 13 characters, it’s impossible for your recipient to know what your email is about. It could be a question about their sales process. Or their lunch plans.

Plus, because it doesn’t note anything specific, it makes your outreach email seem generic before they’ve even opened it.

Contrast that with a subject line like: “Quick Question About Your Latest Blog Post”

This subject line is much more specific. That way, if the recipient decides to open your email, they know what to expect.

However, it’s possible for your subject line to be too long.

For example, “Quick Question About Your Latest Blog Post About The Top 10 Paleo Diet Myths” is an extremely descriptive subject line. But it’s likely to get cut off by most inboxes (like Gmail):

Key Takeaway: Long subject lines get 32.7% more responses than short subject lines.

Sending Follow-up Messages Significantly Improves Response Rates

Should you send follow-up messages to people that don’t reply to your initial outreach?

According to our findings, yes. We found that multiple outreach messages work better than a single message:

While sending 3 or more messages results in the best overall response rate, sending just one additional follow-up can boost replies by 65.8%.

Why do follow-ups work so well?

Simply put: people receive lots of emails in their inbox every day. In fact, The Radicati Group found that the average office worker receives 121 emails per day.

With 100+ emails to sift through per day, the chances of your single outreach email getting seen, opened and replied to is pretty slim.

But when you send more than one message, you have yet another chance to stand out and push through the noise in someone’s inbox.

Of course, there’s a right and wrong way to send follow-up messages.

Annoying follow-ups like these can damage relationships, lead to spam complaints, and overall, do more harm than good.

However, gentle follow-ups that provide additional context can improve conversions without burning bridges.

Key Takeaway: Follow-ups can significantly improve outreach conversion rates. In fact, a single additional follow-up message can lead to 65.8% more replies.

Reaching Out to Several Contacts Increases the Odds of a Response

We looked at the effect that reaching out to several contacts at the same organization had on outreach conversions.

And we found that, compared to a single contact, sending emails to more than one contact improves response rates by 93%.

We also looked at how outreach success rate correlated with number of contacts. We found a clear pattern that more contacts leads to more responses.

However, we did find a point of diminishing returns at 5+ contacts.

If you’re reaching out to a single-author blog, you probably don’t need to worry about sending messages to several different contacts.

However, multiple contacts becomes important when reaching out to large websites with dozens of employees. That’s because it can be hard to tell who exactly is responsible for which task (even with the help of an org chart and “About Us” page).

For example, let’s say that you’re sending an outreach message to a large publisher as part of a link building campaign. Should you email the author of the article? Or the editor of the blog? Or maybe the best person is the head of content.

It’s almost impossible to know without an intimate understanding of the organization’s inner workings. That’s why it usually makes sense to reach out to a single person. Then, if you don’t hear back, try again with another contact. That way, over time, your message should get in front of the person that is most likely to add your link to the post.

Key Takeaway: Having multiple contacts to reach out to increases your chances of getting through. In fact, outreach emails sent to multiple contacts can boost response rates by 93%.

Personalized Subject Lines Lead to More Replies

Personalizing emails is considered an outreach best practice. However, to our knowledge, there hasn’t been any research done to support this strategy.

That’s why we decided to investigate the effect of personalization on outreach email replies. Specifically, we compared the response rates between messages that did and didn’t use personalized subject lines.

Our data showed that personalized subject lines got nearly 1/3rd more replies than those without personalization.

Why do personalized subject lines lead to more responses?

Although it’s difficult to fully answer this question from our data alone, my theory is that personalized subject lines help you stand out in someone’s crowded inbox.

For example, take a non-personalized subject line like: “More Leads”. For someone that’s hurriedly scanning incoming emails from their iPhone, “More Leads” doesn’t compel them to see or open the message.

On the other hand, adding a bit of personalization makes your subject line much more compelling to the person on the receiving end of your message.

Key Takeaway: Emails with personalized subject lines boost response rate by 30.5%.

Personalizing Email Body Copy Can Significantly Improve Response Rates

As we just outlined, personalized subject lines are correlated with higher response rates (likely due to a higher email open rate).

However, we wanted to see if the benefits of personalization extended to the outreach email body itself.

Our data showed that personalizing the body of outreach emails also improved conversion rates. Specifically, personalized messages received 32.7% more replies than those that weren’t personalized.

Generic outreach messages are easy to spot. For example, here’s one that I received a few days ago:

The telltale “Hi,” or “Hello,” is usually enough to let you know that this exact same email has been sent to hundreds of other people.

On the other hand, even a relatively small gesture, like using the person’s first name, can go a long way.

And for those that are interested in getting the highest reply rate possible, writing outreach emails from scratch (or working from a template with lots of room for personalization), seems to work best. Here’s an example of one such outreach email someone recently sent me:

According to our research, personalizing subject lines and body copy is correlated with above-average response rates. Yes, personalizing takes more time and effort. But the data suggests that this extra work pays off.

Key Takeaway: Emails with personalized bodies boost response rate by 32.7%.

Wednesday Is the Best Day To Send Outreach Messages

Several industry studies have set out to answer the “best day to send emails” question. However, most of these studies (like this one from GetResponse) are specific to newsletter messages. They also tend to focus on open rates, not reply rates.

Which is why we decided to look at how response rates differed based on the day of the week that messages were sent out.

Our data showed that Wednesday had a slight edge over the other 6 days of the week. Also, Saturday appears to have the worst response rate.

However, I should note that the differences in response rates were somewhat small.

For example, when we looked at the response rate for the “best” day (Wednesday) to the “worst” day (Saturday), we found that messages sent on Wednesday had a 1.99% higher overall response rate.

In other words, according to this data, sending outreach emails on Wednesday vs. Saturday could theoretically boost your response rate from 6% to 7.99%. If you’re only sending a few dozen outreach messages per month, this may only lead to an additional reply or two.

However, this finding is more significant if you’re doing outreach at scale. That’s because, while 1.99% may not mean much in absolute terms, it amounts to a 33.1% higher relative response rate. Which is significant for those that send out a large amount of outreach emails every month.

We also compared response rates for messages sent during the week vs. those sent on the weekend.

And we found that outreach emails sent Monday through Friday had a 23.3% better conversion rate than emails sent on Saturday or Sunday.

Key Takeaway: Outreach emails sent on Wednesday get more responses than any other day of the week. However, most small-scale outreach campaigns don’t need to organize their sequences based on the day of the week.

Linking to Social Profiles May Slightly Improve Outreach Response Rates

Do social profile links in the email signature affect response rates?

According to our study, they do. Messages that contained links to social profile links in the sender’s signature had an 9.8% higher average response rate compared to messages without them.

We also broke down the impact of social signature links by social network. We found that linking to Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram profiles positively affect response rates. However, linking to Facebook profiles didn’t seem to make a dent.

Why would social profile links lead to more responses?

I have two theories:

First, links to social profiles make you seem like a living, breathing person.

I doubt that many recipients actually click on these social signature links. However, their mere presence may suggest: “I’m not an outreach robot. I’m a person that’s reaching out to you”.

Second, it’s possible that social profile links may not have any direct impact on responses at all. It could be a case of correlation, not causation.

For example, people that tend to be transparent may also spend more time personalizing their messages, which is the true underlying cause of the improved response rates.

While it’s impossible to glean the exact effect of social profile links on outreach response rates, they don’t appear to hurt conversions. Which makes them something worth testing.

Key Takeaway: Outreach emails that contain links to social profiles have a 9.8% higher response rate than those without social profile links. Links to Instagram and LinkedIn appear to be most effective.

Email Sequences That Involve Multiple Contacts and Multiple Messages Perform Best Overall

As I covered earlier in this write-up, follow-up messages and sending multiple contacts are correlated with higher outreach reply rates.

We also decided to investigate the combined effect that these two strategies had on conversion rates. Specifically, we compared reply rates between a single email to a single contact with a 3-part email campaign to several different contacts.

Our data showed that more contacts combined with sequencing yield a 160% higher response rate than sending a single message to a single contact.

Key Takeaway: Taken as a whole, campaigns that involve sequences that go out to several contacts perform significantly better than one-off emails to a single person.

Outreach Emails About “Links”, “Guest Posting” and “Roundups” Have Especially High Response Rates

We investigated reply rates between eight common email outreach topics.

Specifically, we looked at the reply rate for outreach emails related to:

Link building

Guest posting

Sponsorships

Infographics

Resources

Reviews

Mentions

Roundups

And we found that outreach emails about guest posting, roundups and link building all had an above-average response rate.

This is an especially interesting finding considering that many content marketing and SEO experts consider guest posting and roundups “dead”.

However, at least according to our study, site owners are still largely receptive to pitches for guest posts and expert roundup invitations.

Emails related to sponsorships also tended to get a fair share of replies. I found this noteworthy as Influencer Marketing, which relies heavily on paid product placement and promotion, is growing. It appears that influencers are still happy to receive pitches from brands that want to sponsor their website, YouTube channel or Instagram profile.

Our data also showed that messages about infographics receive relatively few replies.

This may be due to the fact that infographics have lost the novelty they once had. Or that the most infographic-focused outreach is untargeted.

For example, I got this infographic pitch in my inbox a few months ago:

My site has never written about or even touched on holiday promotions. This was clearly someone that created a mediocre infographic with the hope that mass outreach would help get the word out.

Key Takeaway: Emails about guest posts, roundups, links and sponsorships tend to get the best response rates.

Conclusion

I’d like to thank Michael Geneles from Pitchbox for providing the data that made this study possible. I also want to give a shout out to Alex Gopshtein for digging deep into the data and making it easy to understand and digest.

And for those that are interested, here’s a link to our study methods.

Now I’d like to hear from you:

What’s your #1 takeaway from today’s study?

Let me know by leaving a comment below right now.

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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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How to Perform a Content Audit to Grow Site Traffic

I had just pitched my crazy-sounding plan to a potential client during a sales call…

After 15 seconds of silence, he finally said: “You’re kidding me, right…? So you’re telling me if I delete 80% of my content, I’ll actually get more organic traffic? Are you insane?”

That wasn’t the first time I’d gotten that kind of response.

Having been in the search engine optimization (SEO) world for 6+ years now, I’ve been called just about every synonym for “crazy” you can find in the thesaurus. Most people don’t like hearing that their non-SEO-focused content is actually hurting them from an organic-traffic standpoint.

But here’s what they don’t realize: It has been proven—time and again—that you can generate more organic traffic every month with just a handful of SEO-focused posts than you can with tons of nonoptimized posts.

(Here’s a great case study from Ahrefs that shows this is true.)

An example: after removing and redirecting 195 blog posts (more on how to do this in a minute), my friends at ReputationManagement.com generated close to a 100% increase in organic traffic in just five months.

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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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6 SMART Goal Examples That’ll Make You a Better Marketer

When I was 14, my dream was to play college baseball. But I had one small problem: I only weighed 100 pounds. And even though I still had four years to bulk up and improve my skills, I knew I had a long way to go. Fortunately, my coach always knew how to give me opportunities to shoot for that kept my drive alive.

I think of SMART goals like my former baseball coach.

After a grueling practice or workout, he would harp on how the long term is just a series of short terms. And to hammer that mentality into our heads, he would make us write down our off-season training goals every year. But he didn’t just accept the first draft of your goal sheet. He never did. He would make you edit it until you knew exactly what your goals were and how you were going to achieve them.

Setting a goal like “improve upper body strength” and planning to lift weights three times a week wasn’t enough. You had to write down how much you would improve your bench press by and how many times you would work out your upper body per week.

Every year, I set concrete off-season training goals, and since I had a plan and clear direction, I always achieved them. By the time I was a senior in high school, I had gained 70 pounds of muscle and earned a baseball scholarship.

When I first learned about SMART goals, I had an epiphany. I realized the reason why I could keep improving my athleticism in high school was because my coach made me set SMART goals. And the reason why successful marketing teams always hit their numbers is because they also set SMART goals.

The thing I love about sports is the life lessons you learn playing them directly apply to your career. Setting SMART goals not only helps you get better at baseball, but it also makes you a better marketer.

Read on to learn exactly what a SMART goal is and how you can set one today.

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What are SMART goals?

SMART goals are concrete targets that you strive to achieve over a certain period of time. These goals should be carefully drafted by a manager and his/her direct report to set them up for success. “SMART” is an acronym that describes the most important characteristics of each goal.

How to Write Smart Goals

The “SMART” acronym stands for “specific,” “measurable,” “attainable,” “relevant,” and “time-bound.” Each SMART goal you create should have these five characteristics to ensure the goal can be reached and benefits the employee. Find out what each characteristic means below, and how to write a SMART goal that exemplifies them.

Specific

SMART goals are “specific” in that there’s a hard and fast destination the employee is trying to reach. “Get better at my job,” isn’t a SMART goal because it isn’t specific. Instead, ask yourself: What are you getting better at? How much better do you want to get?

If you’re a marketing professional, for example, your job probably revolves around key performance indicators, or KPIs. Therefore, you might choose a particular KPI or metric you want to improve on — like visitors, leads, or customers. You should also identify the team members working toward this goal, the resources they have, and their plan of action.

In practice, a specific SMART goal might say, “Clifford and Braden will increase the blog’s traffic from email …” You know exactly who’s involved and what you’re trying to improve on.

Measurable

SMART goals should be “measurable” in that you can track and quantify the goal’s progress. “Increase the blog’s traffic from email,” by itself, isn’t a SMART goal because you can’t measure the increase. Instead, ask yourself: How much email marketing traffic should you strive for?

If you want to gauge your team’s progress, you need to quantify your goals, like achieving an X-percentage increase in visitors, leads, or customers.

Let’s build on the SMART goal we started three paragraphs above. Now, our measurable SMART goal might say, “Clifford and Braden will increase the blog’s traffic from email by 25% more sessions per month … ” You know what you’re increasing, and by how much.

Attainable

An “attainable” SMART goal considers the employee’s ability to achieve it. Make sure that X-percentage increase is rooted in reality. If your blog traffic increased by 5% last month, for example, try to increase it by 8-10% this month, rather than a lofty 25%.

It’s crucial to base your goals off of your own analytics, not industry benchmarks, or else you might bite off more than you can chew. So, let’s add some “attainability” to the SMART goal we created earlier in this blog post: “Clifford and Braden will increase the blog’s traffic from email by 8-10% more sessions per month … ” This way, you’re not setting yourself up to fail.

Relevant

SMART goals that are “relevant” relate to your company’s overall business goals and account for current trends in your industry. For instance, will growing your traffic from email lead to more revenue? And is it actually possible for you to significantly boost your blog’s email traffic given your current email marketing campaigns?

If you’re aware of these factors, you’ll be more likely to set goals that benefit your company — not just you or your department.

So, what does that do to our SMART goal? It might encourage you to adjust the metric you’re using to track the goal’s progress. For example, maybe your business has historically relies on organic traffic for generating leads and revenue, and research suggests you can generate more qualified leads this way. Our SMART goal might instead say, “Clifford and Braden will increase the blog’s organic traffic by 8-10% more sessions per month.” This way, your traffic increase is aligned with the business’s revenue stream.

Time-bound

A “time-bound” SMART goal keeps you on schedule. Improving on a goal is great, but not if it takes too long. Attaching deadlines to your goals puts a healthy dose of pressure on your team to accomplish them. This helps you make consistent and significant progress in the long term.

For example, which would you prefer: increasing organic traffic by 5% every month, leading to a 30-35% increase in half a year? Or trying to increase traffic by 15% with no deadline and achieving that goal in the same time frame? If you picked the former, you’re right.

So, what does our SMART goal look like once we bound it to a timeframe? “Over the next three months, Clifford and Braden will work to increase the blog’s organic traffic by 8-10%, reaching a total of 50,000 organic sessions by the end of August.

If you want a more concrete understanding of SMART goals, check out the examples below. You can always revisit this blog post and reference them when it’s time to set your goals.

6 SMART Goal Examples That’ll Make You a Better Marketer

1. Blog Traffic Goal

Specific: I want to boost our blog’s traffic by increasing our weekly publishing frequency from 5 to 8 times a week. Our two bloggers will increase their workload from writing 2 posts a week to 3 posts a week, and our editor will increase her workload from writing 1 post a week to 2 posts a week.

Measureable: An 8% increase is our goal.

Attainable: Our blog traffic increased by 5% last month when we increased our weekly publishing frequency from 3 to 5 times a week.

Relevant: By increasing blog traffic, we’ll boost brand awareness and generate more leads, giving sales more opportunities to close.

Time-Bound: End of this month

SMART Goal: At the end of this month, our blog will see an 8% lift in traffic by increasing our weekly publishing frequency from 5 posts per week to 8 post per week.

2. Facebook Video Views Goal

Specific: I want to boost our average views per native video by cutting our video content mix from 8 topics to our 5 most popular topics.

Measurable: A 25% increase is our goal.

Attainable: When we cut down our video content mix on Facebook from 10 topics to our 8 most popular topics six months ago, our average views per native video increased by 20%.

Relevant: By increasing average views per native video on Facebook, we’ll boost our social media following and brand awareness, reaching more potential customers with our video content.

Time-Bound: In 6 months.

SMART Goal: In 6 months, we’ll see a 25% increase in average video views per native video on Facebook by cutting our video content mix from 8 topics to our 5 most popular topics.

3. Email Subscription Goal

Specific: I want to boost the number of our email blog subscribers by increasing our Facebook advertising budget on blog posts that historically acquire the most email subscribers.

Measurable: A 50% increase is our goal.

Attainable: Since we started using this tactic three months ago, our email blog subscriptions have increased by 40%.

Relevant: By increasing the number of our email blog subscribers, our blog will drive more traffic, boost brand awareness, and drive more leads to our sales team.

Time-Bound: In 3 months.

SMART Goal: In 3 months, we’ll see a 50% increase in the number of our email blog subscribers by increasing our Facebook advertising budget on posts that historically acquire the most blog subscribers.

4. Webinar Sign-up Goal

Specific: I want to increase the number of sign-ups for our Facebook Messenger webinar by promoting it through social, email, our blog, and Facebook Messenger.

Measurable: A 15% increase is our goal.

Attainable: Our last Facebook messenger webinar saw a 10% increase in sign-ups when we only promoted it through social, email, and our blog.

Relevant: When our webinars generate more leads, sales has more opportunities to close.

Time-Bound: By April 10, the day of the webinar.

SMART Goal: By April 10, the day of our webinar, we’ll see a 15% increase in sign-ups by promoting it through social, email, our blog, and Facebook messenger.

5. Landing Page Performance Goal

Specific: I want our landing pages to generate more leads by switching from a one column form to a two column form.

Measurable: A 30% increase is our goal.

Attainable: When we A/B tested our traditional one column form vs. a two column form on our highest traffic landing pages, we discovered that two column forms convert 27% better than our traditional one column forms, at a 99% significance level.

Relevant: If we generate more content leads, sales can close more customers.

Time-Bound: One year from now.

SMART Goal: One year from now, our landing pages will generate 30% more leads by switching their forms from one-column to two columns.

6. Link-Building Strategy Goal

Specific: I want to increase our website’s organic traffic by developing a link-building strategy that gets other publishers to link to our website. This increases our ranking in search engine results, allowing us to generate more organic traffic.

Measurable: 40 backlinks to our company homepage is our goal.

Attainable: According to our SEO analysis tool, there are currently 500 low-quality links directing to our homepage from elsewhere on the internet. Given the number of partnerships we currently have with other businesses, and that we generate 10 new inbound links per month without any outreach on our part, an additional 40 inbound links from a single link-building campaign is a significant but feasible target.

Relevant: Organic traffic is our top source of new leads, and backlinks is one of the biggest ranking factors on search engines like Google. If we build links from high-quality publications, our organic ranking increases, boosting our traffic and leads as a result.

Time-Bound: 4 months from now.

SMART Goal: Over the next four months, I will build 40 additional backlinks that direct to www.ourcompany.com. To do so, I will collaborate with Ellie and Andrew from our PR department to connect with publishers and develop an effective outreach strategy.

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onlinemarketingcourses · 5 years

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A Modern Approach to Marketing

In this guide, I’ll go into detail about how artificial intelligence is impacting marketing right now and how it will continue to impact it in the future.

At the end of this post, you’ll be excited about the possibilities of AI and probably a little nervous about the implications!

And it’s alright to be nervous because the role of marketers in organizations will change but….

…you’ll still have an important role to play.

Table of Contents

Download a PDF of this Guide

Would you prefer to read this later? If so, download a PDF version of the AI Guide.

C H A P T E R – 1

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence in Marketing is real and now is the time to sit up and take notice.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating marketing toward a more intelligently automated future in which smarter (i.e. AI-powered) solutions enable marketers to solve problems and achieve goals more efficiently. You have a choice. You can sit back and wait for the marketing world to get smarter and change around you, or you can embrace AI now and be proactive in creating a competitive advantage for yourself and your company.

Paul Roetzer, Founder of Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute

However, not all software companies really have AI that say they do.

There’s just so much hype surrounding AI Tech companies want to capitalize on it by saying their software is powered by AI and investors will give higher valuations to them because of the AI in their software.

But there are many great software companies building true AI applications and this is set to grow massively over the next few years.

MRFR research predicted the AI market to be worth 25 billion by 2025.

If you’re a marketer, it’s time to get up to speed and understand the potential impact that AI will have on marketing. I’m pretty sure that this guide will help.

So, what is artificial intelligence?

We all know what human intelligence is…I hope so anyway!

Artificial intelligence is when a machine demonstrates some human-like intelligence.

For example:

A machine processes data and learns from it so it can make smarter decisions about the data it will process in the future.

Instead of just repeating the same instructions, the machine automatically learns new instructions based on experience.

Alpha Zero, the game playing AI developed by Deepmind, learned Chess in 4 hours and then was able to beat the best computer program available for playing chess.

Learning a new game is mimicking human intelligence, but the AI can learn in 4 hours what a human may take months doing.

Computer science describes the study of AI as the development of intelligent agents.

Look:

This is really about smart programming.

Our intelligence helps create artificial intelligence.

As some tasks become very routine they may not be considered artificial intelligence anymore.

Here’s an example:

Optical character recognition is often excluded because it’s a routine task expected from computers.

What is the difference between narrow and strong AI?

Narrow AI (also called weak AI) is artificial intelligence focused on one task.

Strong AI is everything else!

Strong AI has the ability to apply intelligence to any problem rather than a specific task.

For example:

A spam filtering tool performs one task well. A self-driving car is also described as narrow AI but I think this is a bit of a stretch!

Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Marketers?

Yes…. some!!!

Marketing is a time-intensive process with a lot of repetitive tasks which machines can help with…

…but there are certain tasks that machines will never be able to perform at the same level as human marketers.

I can imagine, in the future, sitting across from a robot discussing a business proposition but I can’t imagine I’d build the same relationship with a robot as with a real human. It’s relatively easy to build software to beat someone at Chess and…

…the software gets better at beating people.

But…

Building relationships is the most important part of marketing and computers suck at it.

Also, who is going to build a strategy for a company?

An AI enabled machine can provide inputs into this strategy but strategists will still survive.

I watched a movie called ‘Her’ recently where the actor builds a relationship with an operating system.

Such a ridiculous movie!

Currently, though, there is a serious problem with implementing AI within organizations because of the lack of knowledge amongst marketers.

In a report done with CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) by Deloitte in 2018, the major factor that could slow down the organic growth in marketing is lack of talent.

And because AI is more technical than most other areas of marketing, this is going to be a major issue.

I wrote this guide because there is so much technical information on AI online that it’s quite difficult to understand. I’m hoping this guide will help marketers understand what AI is really about.

Once you understand AI, then you can work out how to replace the systems you use internally with AI software. And if you decide it’s smart to replace the existing software solutions, you need to figure out what functionality will be gone and what new functionality will be added.

You’ll then need to educate your team about AI and train them on the new software.

Plus, the marketplace for AI solutions is growing so fast that, without understanding AI, you’ll have a hard time finding the right vendor.

C H A P T E R – 2

The elements of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is a complex field that includes various elements.

It is focused on the following:

Learning – Acquiring information and rules for using that information.

Reasoning – Thinking about something in a logical and sensible way.

Doing – What’s the point in learning and thinking if you don’t do?

Self-correction – Understanding mistakes and correcting them.

Here’s a breakdown of the main areas that AI has been implemented in.

Note: There are some overlaps in each of the areas. For example, a self-driving car uses a combination of machine learning, image recognition, and deep learning.

Neural Networks

A brain takes an input (external or internal), processes it and then produces a result.

A neuron is the basic unit of computation in the brain and it’s responsible for processing those inputs to produce the outputs.

Chemical signals are passed from neurons to neurons.

There are over 100 billion neurons, on average, in a human body and it’s an extremely complex web of interconnections between neurons. Some neurons can be connected to up 10,000 other neurons.

Imagine if someone was putting their hand near a hot stove. This is an input. The neurons would process this causing the hand to move from the stove.

Here’s how this would look internally:

The sensory neuron feels the heat, passing the information onto other internal neurons and eventually to a motor neuron which causes the reaction of moving away from the heat.

A single neuron doesn’t do much on its own, but using a complex web of neurons gives you amazing capabilities.

The neuron consists of input, output, and weight. Weight is really an indicator of importance in the overall scheme of things for this particular piece of information.

For example, you want a machine to work out how valuable a car is.

You take in a range of inputs e.g. year, make, model, condition, mileage, etc. and these are passed through neurons. Each input is weighted.

The make and the model are weighted higher than the mileage or the year.

And then:

Through a series of complex calculations, the machine comes up with a result.

Here’s a simple example of a neural network.

The initial inputs are weighted (e.g. characteristics based on importance), they are then sent to the hidden layer for processing, and the result is the output.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is a branch of AI which enables computers to become progressively better at performing existing tasks or become able to do new tasks without any need for human intervention.

The computers are continuously analyzing data so they can produce better results in the future. Simply put, they’re becoming smarter.

Machine learning is typically broken down into 3 parts:

Deep learning

Earlier we talked about neural networks. Deep learning uses more advanced neural networks.

So instead of an input, hidden, and output layer, you may have many hidden layers.

Meaning there is a lot more processing done than with a basic neural network. The same system of weights is passed between the neurons.

Deep learning is typically categorized in the following way:

Supervised

Supervised learning is where you provide the computer with input data and then the output data (i.e. the results you’d expect). You then build an algorithm around this so you can start providing new input data and the computer will automatically create the output data.

For example, imagine if you had a spam filter. Instead of giving the computer a set of rules to determine whether an email is spam or not, you provide it with a set of emails and then tell it which of those emails is spam and why. The algorithm would then be used to work out a new set of emails.

Unsupervised

With unsupervised machine learning, you provide the input data but you don’t provide the output data. The input could be a batch of test data at first.

So, the computer doesn’t have any example data to help it generate the answers. It needs to do a bit more work.

Semi-supervised

This is a happy medium. It’s not completely unsupervised but the output data is not enough to accurately predict all results.

So, the computer processes the data and uses the output data as a guideline that it improves over time as it processes more data.

You may want to use semi-supervised ML in cases when you have to manually classify the data but there’s so much to classify that you just classify a piece of it and leave the rest to the computer to deal with.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

This is what natural language processing is about…

Alexa is an Amazon device.

You ask questions in a conversational way and Alexa is able to process them and give a response.

Well, it usually is…..

Natural language processing (NLP) systems have become more advanced over the last few years but there are still many challenges.

For example, it wouldn’t be unusual to say the following:

Alexa – Who are Man U playing?

Manchester United supporters often abbreviate Manchester United to Man U or the Red Devils or just saying United. There’s a slim chance that Alexa would understand these abbreviations.

Here’s another challenging example for NLP:

“I was at a pub the other night with my mates and it was deadly.”

When we use the word ‘deadly’ in this context in Ireland we mean that it was great fun. NLP systems are still not good at detecting the sentiment of text or spoken word.

So NLP will continue to evolve but it will never be perfect because of:

Accents

So many languages, variations of languages and slang used

The tone of voice and body language

Evolutionary Computation

This is the definition of evolutionary computation from Wikipedia:

“In computer science, evolutionary computation is a family of algorithms for global optimization inspired by biological evolution, and the sub-field of artificial intelligence and soft computing studying these algorithms.”

But what does this actually mean…

It was called evolutionary because it’s a continuous process of optimization of results which ‘evolves’ better solutions over time.

It was also called evolutionary from Darwin’s theory of evolution.

For example, one of Darwin’s theories was about survival of the fittest. The weakest members of a species will die over time.

With evolutionary computing, you come up with many potential solutions to a problem. Some may be good and some may be completely random.

With testing, over time, the best solutions evolve.

With deep learning, we are focusing on models we know already. Evolutionary computing is coming up with solutions to problems where we don’t have any sample results we could use to help.

Vision

We’re talking about the ability of computers/machines or robots to see, process, and act automatically based on images.

AI for vision it’s generally split into:

Computer vision – A computer extracting information from an image to make sense of it.

Machine vision – Machines using visual methods to improve things in areas such as a production environment. They could be visually identifying faults, reviewing food labels, and/or detecting flaws in a product.

Robot vision – This is where vision is used to identify something to be worked on and the robotic capabilities perform the necessary action.

Robotics

Robots are physical machines.

Robotics is the field of study of robots.

Sometimes you’ll hear people talking about robots automatically creating content for marketers but these are not actually robots. There’s no physical robot involved.

Most robots do not have AI but this is changing.

For example, I used to own a robotic lawnmower called ‘Robomow’. The tagline was ‘It mows you don’t’. I actually used to sell them but that’s a whole different story.

Robomow sits on a charging unit and every few days it would come out and cut the grass. There was an electrical cable around the edge of the garden and the mower would go back and forth at different angles to the edges. It recorded where it had been so it knew when everywhere was cut.

It even had rain sensors so if it was raining it wouldn’t come out to cut the grass.

But it didn’t have artificial intelligence.

For example, it could have learned about obstacles in the garden and built different routes based on those obstacles.

Unfortunately, mine just kept getting stuck underneath the trampoline…

…every time…

Look:

I’m not saying these devices are not useful.

But…they could be a lot smarter.

Expert Systems

An expert system is a computer program that emulates the human ability to make decisions.

i.e. it replaces the need for or supports an existing expert.

It typically contains a knowledge base with a set of rules for applying the knowledge to each particular situation.

With machine learning capabilities, it’s building its knowledge base over time and adapting or creating new decisions based on its working knowledge.

Speech Interpretation

In the not too distant future, it will be unusual for someone not to have a device such as an Amazon Echo in their home so they can voice questions and instructions to this device and get immediate answers.

Voice interpretation is getting better all the time and some of these devices are leveraging artificial intelligence to learn over time and produce better responses.

Imagine if a speech recognition system was able to predict if a sale was going to be generated from a call center and then make suggestions to agents to improve the conversion rate?

And they did this by analyzing the conversation and the acoustics in this conversation.

A company called OTO systems studied 4,000 hours of inbound sales conversations with 50% conversion rates.

They trained their deep learning models to capture the ‘acoustic signature’ of a successful sale.

They managed to predict 94% of the call outcomes.

They then implemented this system in a call center and seen a 20% increase in engagement with a 5% increase in sales.

AI Planning

According to Wikipedia, these are strategies or sequences of actions automatically created for intelligent agents, robots or unmanned vehicles.

So, its all about analyzing a problem and producing a plan of action.

AI planning is taking into account things like:

Dependencies – does one task require another task to be completed

Milestones – specific dates that have to be met

Constraints – for example, if you only have 10 people available you can’t throw 20 people at the problem.

When the plan and the schedule are created, it is automatically adjusted based on results and changes to inputs.

For example, if a resource is not available any more then the plan has to be adjusted.

C H A P T E R – 3

AI Applications in Marketing

There are so many potential uses of AI in marketing that would make it more efficient and help deliver better results.

We have talked about 1 to 1 marketing for many years and, even with advanced marketing automation systems, this is still not a reality.

But…with artificial intelligence, we have a much better chance of delivering what feels more like a one-on-one customer communication.

Let’s take a look at some examples of how marketing can improve with AI.

AI and Content Marketing

To survive on the web we need to produce content.

Content attracts visitors, engages our audience, and gives them an incentive to come back.

Content comes in many forms:

Blog post

Testimonials

Factual data e.g. reports

Video content

Tweets