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onlinemarketinghelp · 5 years

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10 Business Skills All Entrepreneurs Need to Develop in 2020 https://ift.tt/2PruH1s

There are a lot of business skills new entrepreneurs require to succeed in business. In the startup stage, entrepreneurs wear multiple hats. You need to know a little bit about a lot when starting your first business. In the beginning, you’ll either be doing everything yourself or overseeing the work of those doing the work for you. So, let’s break down what some of the business skills you’ll need to develop are.

What Are Business Skills?

Business skills are your ability to complete business tasks. For example, running Facebook Ads is one example of a skill in marketing you may need to develop to attain customers for your business.

How to Develop Business Skills

There are a few ways you can learn how to develop business skills. Here are the top three:

1. Trial And Error

The most effective way to develop business skills is through action. You’ll learn more by signing up for TikTok and creating video content than you would if you were to watch someone else do it. That’s why the number one way to develop a business skill is to practice it yourself. It can be extremely intimidating to do something for the first time. You may worry about the mistakes you’ll make or how you’ll be perceived. However, pushing through that fear and anxiety is what’ll help you learn new business skills efficiently.

2. Learn From Others

Another great way to develop business skills is to sign-up for an online course. If you’re looking to learn how to start a dropshipping business, you could consider signing up for Oberlo 101. If you want to learn from a range of successful entrepreneurs, you can subscribe to the Start Yours podcast. There you’ll learn some of the most up-to-date tactics entrepreneurs practice today.

3. Look for Patterns

A third way to develop business skills is by studying what other people do. Aim to find the patterns of success by studying how others do it. If you’re looking to learn search engine optimization (SEO), you can spend time studying the highest listed articles for various keywords. If you’re looking to create viral social media posts, you can spend time looking at the most popular posts for multiple hashtags. Or, if you simply want to develop leadership skills, you can study the leaders you admire and note what they do differently.

10 Business Skills All Entrepreneurs Need to Develop

1. Marketing

One of the business skills you’ll need to develop is marketing. Marketing allows you to gain new customers, grow your social media followers, write compelling website descriptions, plan promotions, and more. Fortunately, there’s plenty of information available online to develop this business skill. Whether you need to learn how to optimize your business or master TikTok before your competitors do, most entrepreneurs can develop marketing skills through trial and error.

Marketing skills are one of the most valuable business skills for entrepreneurs. Many of the top-performing businesses on Oberlo have entrepreneurs with strong marketing backgrounds running them. In 2020, you’ll want to have strong skills in TikTok, Instagram, advertising, content marketing, and email, just to name a few.

2. Sales

Most entrepreneurs can confirm that sales skills are essential. If you sell physical products, you’ll need to know how to sell them to retailers. Or you may need to develop partnerships with companies to sell your product to their employees.

Billionaire Sara Blakely once said, “Everything about my journey to get Spanx off the ground entailed me having to be a salesperson – from going to the hosiery mills to get a prototype made to calling Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. I had to position myself to get five minutes in the door with buyers.”

Even the owner of an ecommerce business is still required to be a salesperson. If a customer is unsure about whether or not a specific product is right for them, you’ll need to be able to persuade them to buy the product.

You also need to be able to differentiate between soft and hard business skills when it comes to sales. Most customers think of a hard sell when they think of sales. For example, the car salesman who follows you around pitching that you need to buy this car right now before it’s too late. A soft sell would be giving away a free sample-sized version of the lip gloss or a guide on picking the right lip gloss for your skin tone for your beauty brand. It’s important to know when and where to use soft and hard sells for your business.

In 2020, you’ll need to have a clear unique value proposition to help differentiate yourself from other competitors. Everyone is fighting for the attention of customers, buyers, and other businesses. So in sales, a business skill you’ll need to know is how to stand out in a crowded marketplace.

3. Customer Service

As a business owner, you’re responsible for managing the business skill of customer service. You’ll be required to process refunds, respond to customer inquiries, and manage feedback. Having customer service skills will allow you to keep customers even if they’re unhappy with their first purchase. That’s because you’ll know how to resolve the issue without burning the bridge. Also, it’ll let you understand your customer’s needs because you’ll be in regular contact with them. You’ll also use your customer service skills while communicating with customers before, during, and after their purchase.

In ecommerce, business skills such as customer service are essential. Customer service allows you to build relationships with your customers. The stronger your customer relations, the easier it is to serve customers products they love. If customers are always complaining about the quality of a specific product, you could easily change the supplier and offer a product of higher quality. This keeps your customers coming back. It also lets your customers know that you’re committed to keeping them happy and listening to their needs.

In 2020, focus on mindful listening. Often, entrepreneurs listen to respond. However, listening to respond often leads to missing out on some key details. By practicing mindful listening, you’ll better understand what the customer expects of your business and its products. In customer service, one of the business skills to develop is reading between the lines.

4. Accounting

Financial acumen is one of the most critical business skills you’ll ever need. When you’re starting your first business, you might take a while to develop this skill. However, as your business grows, you’ll need to master your ability to budget, invest, and forecast. You’ll be required to pay your government’s taxes. Also, you’ll need to know what type of things you can write off. You’ll also need to make sure that you’re still making a profit after paying off all your expenses.

Understanding accounting and finance will allow you to take your business to new heights. You’ll be better equipped to determine how much money you should spend on marketing, employees, and more. Also, you’ll know how to save your business some money when sales are generally lower. You’ll even know how to grow your profits through reinvestment.

In 2020, costs are rising more than ever. Thus, the business skill you’ll need to focus on developing is a better understanding of what your business’ tax write-offs are so you can save more money.

5. Adaptability

Now let’s go into some soft business skills you’ll need to develop. Most entrepreneurs need to be adaptable. Even if you choose to start a dropshipping business, you’ll make use of this skill. For example, recently, Coronavirus and Chinese New Year caused many dropshipping companies to pause sales. Packages were not being shipped out to customers due to a temporary block by China itself. This can add a lot of stress to a business. By being adaptable, you may temporarily switch to another supplier based in the United States during that time.

Being adaptable is a business skill you need because it keeps your business alive during tough times. When technology changes, some businesses choose not to change their business model. However, this can eventually kill the business. For example, BlockBuster, a video rental company, decided not to change its business model to include online video streaming. They had an opportunity to buy Netflix but decided against it. In the end, BlockBuster closed its doors, and Netflix’s model survived.

6. Time Management

Business skills centered around time management are a must. Many entrepreneurs start their businesses part-time while still holding full-time jobs. Balancing the workload of a small business in the few hours after work can be difficult. After a long workday, it’s normal to feel exhausted. However, you still need to work on your business to make it a success.

In ecommerce, you’ll use time management skills to ensure that orders are processed the same day your customers order. Since products are being shipped from China to countries as far as Canada and the United States, you mustn’t delay order processing.

One of the great things about mastering your time management business skill is that you learn to maximize your time with the same number of hours. Billionaires and other successful entrepreneurs are allotted the same 24 hours each day. However, how they manage those hours is what sets them up for long-term success.

7. Determination

One of the business skills you need is determination. Og Mandino once said, “Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.” Determination will help you overcome adversity. It’s what keeps entrepreneurs motivated even if they have several failed business ventures under their belt. It’s what helps them ignore the words of their haters and skeptics. If you have a big goal that you’re trying to accomplish, you can develop your determination as it helps drive you.

The best thing about being a determined entrepreneur is that it makes adversity bearable. Most determined business people don’t even realize they’re experiencing challenges because they’re so committed to achieving their goal. No negative thought or obstacle can stand in the way of their success. They’re ready to work around every obstacle and do whatever it takes to make their dreams come true.

8. Resourcefulness

Business skills like resourcefulness are game-changers. Resourceful entrepreneurs always find a way of figuring things out. They know who to contact if they’re having a problem they can’t solve. They know how to use search engines to learn how to do something. They know when to ask for help and when to solve a problem on their own.

Being resourceful means you know how, where, and when to get the information you need. By being resourceful, you become an independent entrepreneur. It allows you to find information on your own without continually needing to rely on others for help. Whatever you need to figure out, you’ll always find a way.

Sometimes, the answers you need can’t be searched for online. In those cases, a resourceful person would take the lead and run an experiment to find out the answer on his or her own.

9. Creativity

Creativity is one of the many business skills you need to start a business. You’ll be utilizing creativity when writing copy for your website, coming up with ideas to make your website stand out, and marketing your business. Problem-solving also requires some creativity. Sometimes to solve complicated problems, you have to think outside the box for a solution.

Creativity is a great business skill to have because it allows you to differentiate your brand from competitors. It also allows you to find other paths to your goals when obstacles present themselves. Also, it will enable you to come up with solutions to complicated problems.

In 2020, creativity can be found all over social media. Spend some time watching videos on TikTok or Instagram to see how entrepreneurs channel their creativity to promote their businesses – and themselves.

10. Strategy

As a business owner, you’ll also be utilizing your strategy skills. Creating a strategy for long-term growth will keep your business alive for more than just a few months. Those who are able to strategize can see a future for their business and have a plan of attack for it. They don’t merely create a company to make money right now. Instead, they create a business to make money for life.

One of the key benefits of being able to strategize is that you can consider the long-term consequences of short-term decisions. You’ll be able to foresee potential problems and come up with a plan to minimize risk. You’ll also know which risks are worth taking and which can be disastrous. In addition, you’ll know where you plan on being in five, ten or even twenty years. And it’s that kind of long-term plan that sets you up for future success.

Conclusion

The business skills you develop can help you succeed as an entrepreneur. You’ll need to establish a balance of hard business skills like marketing and soft business skills like creativity. Taking the time to become a master of these skills and more can allow you to build a successful brand. You’ll also be able to provide adequate training to employees and virtual assistants. Which of these business skills have you already mastered? Leave a comment below to let us know.

Which business skills have you already mastered? Are there any other business skills you think should be on this list? Leave a comment below to let us know.

Want to learn more?

10 Online Stores to Use as Inspiration for Your First Store

How I launched my eCommerce store in less than 30 minutes (with products)

20 Amazing Startup Business Ideas That’ll Make You Money

Free Logo Maker

Is there anything else you’d like to know more about and wish was included in this article? Let us know in the comments below!

The post 10 Business Skills All Entrepreneurs Need to Develop in 2020 appeared first on Oberlo.

from Oberlo

What Are Business Skills?

Business skills are your ability to complete business tasks. For example, running Facebook Ads is one example of a skill in marketing you may need to develop to attain customers for your business.

How to Develop Business Skills

There are a few ways you can learn how to develop business skills. Here are the top three:

1. Trial And Error

2. Learn From Others

3. Look for Patterns

10 Business Skills All Entrepreneurs Need to Develop

1. Marketing

2. Sales

3. Customer Service

4. Accounting

5. Adaptability

6. Time Management

7. Determination

8. Resourcefulness

Sometimes, the answers you need can’t be searched for online. In those cases, a resourceful person would take the lead and run an experiment to find out the answer on his or her own.

9. Creativity

10. Strategy

Conclusion

Which business skills have you already mastered? Are there any other business skills you think should be on this list? Leave a comment below to let us know.

Want to learn more?

10 Online Stores to Use as Inspiration for Your First Store

How I launched my eCommerce store in less than 30 minutes (with products)

20 Amazing Startup Business Ideas That’ll Make You Money

Free Logo Maker

Is there anything else you’d like to know more about and wish was included in this article? Let us know in the comments below!

The post 10 Business Skills All Entrepreneurs Need to Develop in 2020 appeared first on Oberlo.

https://ift.tt/2viOUQq February 26, 2020 at 04:44PM https://ift.tt/2To9RSa

0 notes

krestmarketinggroup-blog · 7 years

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Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner “You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem.”

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say “efficiency” is a more accurate term than “efficacy,” but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there’s a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

At RDI, we specialize in marketing services for mid to large enterprise clients with annual revenues of our ideal client ranging from $50M/year to $20B/year. The size of clients that we work with have 50+ person marketing departments, and some with more than 1,000. Implementing profitable and evolving SEO programs is much more difficult for non-agile companies and those with marketing that predates the internet. Despite having more resources and built-in topical authority, enterprise SEO can be much harder than SMB SEO — not only because the SEO challenges are greater, but because it introduces another layer of organizational challenges.

What is enterprise SEO? This same question was on a slide at a recent SEO meetup lead by Ratish Naroor , Director of SEO at Overstock.com. Ratish’s opinion of what constitutes enterprise SEO differed from mine in a few areas. Ratish’s main qualification was that the site in question had one million organic landing pages. At RDI, we work with companies that drive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue through organic search. Often these sites have less than 5,000 pages, yet their digital marketing departments are twice the size of many marketing teams at e-commerce-first companies. In my opinion, there’s more to consider than just the number of pages. I like to focus on the organization itself and not the size of its site; organizations whose website is its product take SEO more seriously. E-commerce retailers like Overstock, real estate sites like Zillow, and travel sites like Trip Advisor or Expedia all invest heavily in SEO programs. Many times, “old companies” that have been around 40+ years will have “old management” stakeholders who are a little late to the digital marketing party and more resistant to change. Does this late adoption of SEO and digital marketing make the organization itself any less enterprise? I don’t believe so.

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Corporate team structure, budgeting, and approval process. There’s no hard number here, but typically 20 or more people are involved in taking web pages from an idea to a 200 status code. Some companies are so lean it will blow you away, so think more than just the total head count.

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

Unique and difficult SEO challenges. This may include large page counts where scaling on-page changes and crawl control is important, competitive industries where search terms have high paid CPAs, or international SEO operating in multiple languages and countries.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO? When working with an enterprise organization, there are three major areas to address in order to minimize internal SEO challenges and to see real follow-through in implementing high-value SEO ideas, strategies, and tactics. 1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility SEO can’t succeed in a silo. To get your strategies implemented, you will need full participation and cooperation with content producers, developers, legal, and department heads. It’s important to remember that companies of this size will have an established culture. Sometimes this culture is dysfunctional, and overcoming it will be an uphill battle. Tom Critchlow recently described this culture as a “grain.” The direction and depth of this “grain” is going dictate how much time you spend on this step, and the best way to get people involved is to keep your work visible to the decision makers:

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

VPs and directors: High-level performance reports like M/M and Y/Y traffic and conversions give them a bird’s eye view of the site and the effects of your SEO efforts. Tying this data to a dollar figure will help make your case. This can include simple analytics data from Google Analytics, or more advanced tools such as our favorite BI tool, DOMO , or its competitor Tableau .

Product owners/business units: Keyword-level data and traffic to a specific site section that a team works on. An enterprise SEO tool like BrightEdge or Conductor can make these reports easy to manage.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Many marketers still think SEO is something you sprinkle on at the end of a content project, or “something our IT team handles.” It’s up to you to break down those assumptions and educate their team on the idea that that SEO is symbiotic with every marketing channel and department. These trainings can vary quite a bit, so find what works for the company you are working in/with. We have seen success with the following formats: lunch and learns, video recordings for SEO suites mentioned above, team-specific trainings focused on the area the team controls such as development or content research. While I’d love to say that we turned all the marketers into great SEOs, that’s rarely the case. What we typically see — and are thrilled when it happens — is an email from a product manager that says, “Hey, we are launching a new product next quarter and you mentioned it’s good to do keyword research for new pages; can you help?”

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the “SEO Brainshare.” Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

As an agency, we have to be clear with our main point of contact: “You can’t change your SEO results without changing your site. We need you to be the driver of change at your organization. RDI will arm you with the ideas, rationale, and detailed instructions, but you have to get the people in your organization to act.”

While my experience is very agency-focused, in-house SEOs will have to explain a similar scenario to their managers, and the managers of the content, creative, and development teams. The best way to enable yourself for success is make sure you have access to all the players needed for SEO greatness, and they each know what’s at stake and have a certain degree of ownership from their managers. If the product owner doesn’t have a KPI tied to organic traffic or conversions on their pages, it’s highly unlikely they will prioritize and take ownership of organic traffic to those pages.

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?” and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn’t been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn’t their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return This is undoubtedly the hardest to nail. SEO results by nature are highly ambiguous. There is a constant flux of right vs wrong, causation vs correlation, and my least favorite, the best choice between two “good” options. I recently listened to a podcast where Bill Hunt (an OG of SEO, BTW) said, “If you can’t put a dollar number on it, you won’t get a dollar for it.” The hardest thing for me to do as I grew my SEO strategies from local businesses to enterprises was to eliminate SEO busy work. I needed to move away from tasks like updating ALT tags because a crawl tool flagged them as “errors,” and start focusing on projects that would have a monetary impact — like creating new site sections, reworking high-ranking titles for CTR, and consolidating competing content.

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

Now you need to see how many non-brand conversions you would get if you achieved the rank you feel is plausible (this is more of an art than science; I like to use the rank of the top competitor as “achievable”): (Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,’Rank CTR’!A:B,2,0)),0)

For this you’ll need to have a CTR curve table in a table labeled “Rank CTR.” We used the CTR table from AWR for unbranded search , but feel free to use any CTR curve you feel is most accurate for your industry. You can even build upon your own data in Google Search Console.

You will need to do this once for current estimated traffic and again after you have set your target rank numbers, then run a delta to get percent change. (The above formula and CTR curve can be found in the Content Gap Analysis template on our site.)

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis . Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the Content Gap Analysis we look at what competitors are doing, then measure the estimated traffic for a topic area. This kind of analysis looks for gaps on our client’s site where competitors have content and we do not. We can examine the likelihood of us being successful in our next content endeavor and to put a number on the estimated traffic a competitor’s site section or page is getting. Once you find opportunities with a forecastable impact, prioritize them in content or site projects and try not to juggle too many balls at once — at least until some content projects have shipped. Don’t forget to quickly communicate the success of a project to accelerate the two factors mentioned above, even if it’s just a quick email with a screenshot from Google/Adobe Analytics.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly Enterprise SEO is great because it allows you the opportunity to work on sites with serious impact and serious challenges. Sometimes you must take the good with the bad, and in enterprise SEO the bad is typically the bureaucracy that comes with large companies. Focus on what matters, don’t piss anyone off, and don’t relent on the need for progress. Happy optimizing! Please share how you have conquered organization challenges in your work in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://bit.ly/2woAp9d

#articlewriting #digitalmarketing #blogpower #linkbuilding #socialmediamarketing #lagunabeachseo #bestlocalseo #contentwriting #seo #huntingtonbeachseo

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wickedbananas · 7 years

Text

Overcoming Corporate Roadblocks for Enterprise SEO Efficacy

Posted by jaredgardner

"You don’t have an SEO strategy problem. You have an organizational efficacy problem."

That is typically what I tell our new clients at Red Door Interactive (RDI). Poor organizational efficacy can be caused by several things, most commonly a lack of labor, a lack of knowledge, or a lack of senior executive buy-in and direction. Many people would say "efficiency" is a more accurate term than "efficacy," but I like to remind people that you can do ineffective SEO in a very efficient manner. If the work doesn’t move the needle, then there's a fatal flaw in your SEO program.

What is enterprise SEO?

This same question was on a slide at a recent SEO meetup lead by Ratish Naroor, Director of SEO at Overstock.com. Ratish’s opinion of what constitutes enterprise SEO differed from mine in a few areas. Ratish’s main qualification was that the site in question had one million organic landing pages. At RDI, we work with companies that drive hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue through organic search. Often these sites have less than 5,000 pages, yet their digital marketing departments are twice the size of many marketing teams at e-commerce-first companies. In my opinion, there's more to consider than just the number of pages. I like to focus on the organization itself and not the size of its site; organizations whose website is its product take SEO more seriously. E-commerce retailers like Overstock, real estate sites like Zillow, and travel sites like Trip Advisor or Expedia all invest heavily in SEO programs. Many times, “old companies” that have been around 40+ years will have “old management” stakeholders who are a little late to the digital marketing party and more resistant to change. Does this late adoption of SEO and digital marketing make the organization itself any less enterprise? I don’t believe so.

If it’s not just page count that matters, where do you draw the line for “enterprise SEO”? Here’s how I classify it:

Corporate team structure, budgeting, and approval process. There's no hard number here, but typically 20 or more people are involved in taking web pages from an idea to a 200 status code. Some companies are so lean it will blow you away, so think more than just the total head count.

Organic search as a channel can drive realistic business. SEO isn’t for every company, so it’s crucial that the company can drive top-line revenue growth through organic search.

How do you succeed at enterprise SEO?

When working with an enterprise organization, there are three major areas to address in order to minimize internal SEO challenges and to see real follow-through in implementing high-value SEO ideas, strategies, and tactics.

1. Create a culture of SEO through visibility

SEO can’t succeed in a silo. To get your strategies implemented, you will need full participation and cooperation with content producers, developers, legal, and department heads. It’s important to remember that companies of this size will have an established culture. Sometimes this culture is dysfunctional, and overcoming it will be an uphill battle. Tom Critchlow recently described this culture as a “grain.” The direction and depth of this "grain" is going dictate how much time you spend on this step, and the best way to get people involved is to keep your work visible to the decision makers:

Automated reporting: Focus on showing each team/person metrics they can control

Dev teams: Technical crawl reports with issues such as internal redirects or 404 reports are relevant things that they can control. We like DeepCrawl for crawl reporting.

Pro tip: Include the email of the SEO lead on these reports and encourage questions.

Trainings

Many marketers still think SEO is something you sprinkle on at the end of a content project, or "something our IT team handles." It’s up to you to break down those assumptions and educate their team on the idea that that SEO is symbiotic with every marketing channel and department. These trainings can vary quite a bit, so find what works for the company you are working in/with. We have seen success with the following formats: lunch and learns, video recordings for SEO suites mentioned above, team-specific trainings focused on the area the team controls such as development or content research. While I’d love to say that we turned all the marketers into great SEOs, that’s rarely the case. What we typically see — and are thrilled when it happens — is an email from a product manager that says, “Hey, we are launching a new product next quarter and you mentioned it’s good to do keyword research for new pages; can you help?”

Open brainstorms

Share your knowledge and promote contributions to the program. When I started at RDI 2.5 years ago, our SEO program was good, but it was siloed. We had 3 people working on their own projects for clients and not really collaborating with each other. To share ideas between the (much larger) SEO team and other teams, we started hosting weekly meetings called the "SEO Brainshare." Each week, one team member picks a topic or challenge and we workshop it with whoever wants to participate. We typically see 5–10 people from other teams at RDI join the meeting, which increases SEO knowledge and keeps our department top of mind. After a year of hosting these meetings religiously, we have seen a large influx in SEO work being incorporated into new and existing client programs, as well as a more multi-channel approach to everything we do at RDI.

2. Teamwork and navigating a political environment

For a real-world example, I’ve presented challenges and opportunities to Senior VPs and CMOs at Fortune 100 companies where executives have said, “Wow this is a huge opportunity. Why haven’t we done this yet?" and our main client contact responds, “Because XX department hasn't been tasked with supporting us from their management, so this isn't their problem.” That’s where the politics really start to come in. You typically need to go high enough up the marketing department ladder to convince someone with power to back your initiative and direct people outside of your department to support you, holding those other people accountable for the results of the team.

3. Don’t get lost in the noise — focus on return

This is undoubtedly the hardest to nail. SEO results by nature are highly ambiguous. There is a constant flux of right vs wrong, causation vs correlation, and my least favorite, the best choice between two “good” options. I recently listened to a podcast where Bill Hunt (an OG of SEO, BTW) said, "If you can't put a dollar number on it, you won't get a dollar for it.” The hardest thing for me to do as I grew my SEO strategies from local businesses to enterprises was to eliminate SEO busy work. I needed to move away from tasks like updating ALT tags because a crawl tool flagged them as “errors,” and start focusing on projects that would have a monetary impact — like creating new site sections, reworking high-ranking titles for CTR, and consolidating competing content.

There are a few ways to estimate the impact of a fix. Most involve some form of search volume X expected CTR X conversion rate. Here’s the formula in theory:

(Expected click-through rate at current position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Current non-brand conversions for a keyword

(Expected click-through rate at target position X search volume for that term) X (conversion rate of site section) = Target non-brand conversions for a keyword

Then run a percent change for delta for those two numbers and you have the amount of new conversions for your project.

Ideally you want to do this at scale, since you want to look at more than a single search term for a site change. Here is the excel formula for that:

=IFERROR(B3*(VLOOKUP(G3,'Rank CTR'!A:B,2,0)),0)

For this you'll need to have a CTR curve table in a table labeled “Rank CTR.” We used the CTR table from AWR for unbranded search, but feel free to use any CTR curve you feel is most accurate for your industry. You can even build upon your own data in Google Search Console.

Working in the agency world, the pressure for our recommendations to have a return is extremely high because those recommendations are measured against the cost of the retainer, even when the project might be something that tends to have a negative impact, like a domain migration. At RDI, the closest thing we have to a secret sauce for this is our Content Gap Analysis. Here’s a sample of how we present findings to clients:

You can grab the Excel template from our site linked above.

Focus on the needle-movers and communicate the value of your ideas clearly

Enterprise SEO is great because it allows you the opportunity to work on sites with serious impact and serious challenges. Sometimes you must take the good with the bad, and in enterprise SEO the bad is typically the bureaucracy that comes with large companies. Focus on what matters, don’t piss anyone off, and don’t relent on the need for progress. Happy optimizing! Please share how you have conquered organization challenges in your work in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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animlcrisscross · 8 years

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Dear World,

On June 10th, 2016 a big part of my heart was taken from me. I couldn’t believe the words. Christina? Shot? For sure she was gonna be okay. I was messaging her, sure, but my heart wasn’t believing that she could be taken away. I was just telling her, “Please be okay. I love you.” And things of the sort. I already had imagined her posting a selfie from her hospital bed, saying “I’m okay!” And telling us she loved us. Then around 2am, I found out Christina took her last breath. I couldn’t believe it, beforehand I was pacing around my room, and rocking back and forth and saying please god not Christina, not my Christinzio please. I remember seeing my friends go offline for a while and just coming back to say one word or a couple sentences. I remember how it felt to be in Team Grimmie at that time. It was such a sense of togetherness. We were just a big family even more so. A family that lost someone they loved so deeply.

When I made the shirts, people were DMing me, I was completely overwhelmed with people telling me how great I was for making these. Occasionally, I would get the “I’m so sorry for your loss” messages and people asking me to tell her family they’re sorry. I didn’t know how to respond. I was never close to Christina in the sense that we got to know each other personally. We exchanged a message or two and a couple tweets but that was the extent of our relationship. I never told them that I wasn’t as close to her as they thought, I figured they needed something to let their feelings out to. I always longed for a personal relationship between me and Christina, I mean who didn’t? She was close to a lot of my friends and it’s so crazy to think that me and Christina had mutual friends. I was so close to the situation, I was part of the world that sat anxiously waiting for a tweet that could make us sigh with relief or break us completely. I saw the trending tweets and it was so weird seeing her trending. I remember when TG could never get her in to the trending topics no matter how hard we tried. But that day within seconds she was trending. A whole bunch of people suddenly knew about the girl who was our little secret. For a while people on my Facebook would post about her, and how sad they were of the situation. Some of them didn’t know who she was but they were sad anyways. Almost everyone who knew me, knew I loved Christina. I had pictures of her in my binder and people would ask if she was my sister. I remember people would say I looked like her as well, haha. (It was the hair)

One time I even fully convinced someone that Christina was my girlfriend. (She called me sexy on twitter once lol)

That summer was all about Christina. I hadn’t been following her as I used to for a while. TBH, I got kind of mad at her for a while. She never talked to me anymore, but she would always talk to my friends. I realized now that it was kind of impossible to find little ol’ me in the sea of millions of followers she had. Compared to back then, Christina had gained so many fans. Although the I know in my heart that if I would’ve had the opportunity to meet her, she would’ve developed a friendship with me like all my friends.

Almost half of my life was dedicated to loving Christina. I’ve been with her since her first single, her first major award, her first tour and music video. Gosh, I remember crying of happiness when she was on the voice, running around my house and silently screaming “CHRISTINA IS GONNA BE ON TV!!” I can assure you Christinzio that the rest of my life is going to be dedicated to you.

Since June, probably the whole world has heard about her. People that just knew her for her passing and people like me. People are commenting how sad they were that they didn’t know about her sooner. She was such a humble and goofy girl. I was blessed to grow along side her. I even got my worst habit from her. (Fixing my bangs 24/7)

If you don’t know anything about Christina I just want you to know she had such a kind soul. She radiated so much love and everyone loved her. She would come on twitter and be like “how you doing team grimmie” and she would have conversations with us and just be so amazing. She didn’t have to do that, she didn’t have to tweet us and follow us. I was part of the few who she followed back in 2013, which was 4 years ago if you can believe. She loved video games like Zelda and Earthbound and league of legends. She loved Christina Aguilera and fun and Skrillex as much as we loved her. She loved anime like death note and free. She loved things with all her might. She was so dedicated to everything.

Ever since she passed, the world has seemed to sweep her under the rug or even selfishly use her for views. The teen choice awards used TG to help them gain viewers and didn’t even mention her or the award she won. YouTube themselves didn’t even mention her in YouTube rewind, like they have for past deaths. She has been in no award show memorials, for example the Grammys today.

Christina died doing what she loved and greeted the man that planned to kill her for weeks with open arms. No one has honored her the way she deserves.

Although, Christina does not need stupid award shows and other things to remember her, that’s what Team freaking Grimmie is for. We will never let her be forgotten. As a person who has been in team Grimmie for 7 years or more, I can tell you Christina has grown so much but has remained the same humble, God loving dork she was back then.

I’m not officially part of her street team (I screwed up and sent it to the wrong email lol whoops) that doesn’t matter to me. I was OG Team Grimmie. I was there for the birth of “frands” and “rawwk fingers” and when find me was released. I was there when she first told us she was on the voice. When she was first touring with Selena Gomez. I will never ever let her be forgotten.

On Valentine’s Day, her family and friends are gonna release a new single called Invisible. I already know it’s gonna be so great. So you should really really check it out and show this dumb world that she doesn’t need recognition from stuffy award shows. Show the world that Team Grimmie is still here and we will never let our little Christina be forgotten. Get her single on the charts and get #CGforever trending.

My friend Cassie just tweeted an hour ago "out of the 13 billion+ years the universe existed, i am so lucky to have lived at the same time as christina victoria grimmie and know her." I'm so grateful that I had these years to grow up and look up to Christina. I will live everyday like you did, full of love. Please don't forget about her world. Love you Christinzio.

#Christina Grimmie #the Grammys #teen choice awards #team Grimmie #cgforever #invisible #Christina Grimmie death #Christina Grimmie Grammys

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jessicakmatt · 5 years

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SubmitHub Founder Jason Grishkoff Talks Blogs, DIY Promotion and Artist Discovery

SubmitHub Founder Jason Grishkoff Talks Blogs, DIY Promotion and Artist Discovery: via LANDR Blog

Promoting your music effectively on a DIY basis is tricky.

Watching big artists pour thousands into massive campaigns can make the limitations of a low budget seem hopeless.

But there are some tried and true techniques that all artists can take advantage without breaking the bank.

One of the most effective is submitting your music to playlists and blogs to share with their audience.

Reaching out to them properly used to be a big job in its own right. That’s why Indie Shuffle founder Jason Grishkoff created SubmitHub to streamline the process.

We sat down with Jason to talk to about the blogosphere, DIY music promotion and the future of artist discovery.f

Q: Hi Jason. Like many musicians, I have vivid memories of sending hundreds of cold emails to music blogs hoping for a post or review. It was difficult, tedious and I barely ever got a response.

SubmitHub seems to have eliminated all that while simultaneously rescuing curators from the endless pileup of pitches in their inbox.

When did you realize the blog submissions model was broken?

I started my music blog Indie Shuffle back in 2008-2009.

At the beginning I was just finding songs I liked on BitTorrent websites and I really had no idea there was a blog culture.

But I quickly found myself on Elbo.ws, which was kind of the precursor to Hypem.

There was a really nice community of other blogs there and we’d exchange tips on how to generate more traffic and get more awareness.

When Hypem took off and Indie Shuffle got added I started to get emails from musicians, managers, publicists and record labels.

And I thought, “hey this is cool, they’re just sending me music to put up on my website.”

But a couple years later it got out of hand. I was receiving hundreds of emails a day.

And so I set up a fake submissions address and just said I can’t deal with it anymore. It’s all rubbish, nothing’s personalized and everything was getting lost in the BCC lists.

It was clear that people didn’t want to build a relationship. They just wanted to use me to get on Indie Shuffle. And I wasn’t even really making any money as a blogger. Not enough to do it full time.

That was 2013. 2015 was when I started SubmitHub. I think the idea was spurred by the fact that Indie

Shuffle was no longer a viable business for me to be employed by and I had to come up with a different idea.

I was playing around with all kinds of different business ideas that weren’t very inspiring and I was still faced with this problem of a completely overflowing inbox.

So I decided to try to tackle that with a smooth blog submission system.

Q: One reason blogs became as influential as they did is the success of aggregators like Hype Machine. How do you view the legacy of Hype Machine in formalizing the blog system?

Don’t get me wrong, Hype Machine was great for blogs. I don’t think Indie Shuffle would be where it was without it.

And it was incredibly influential for a time. I definitely heard stories of record labels where every Friday they would sit around to discuss the popular chart on Hype machine.

But in my mind a lot of of its success was due to the fact that you could game it. If you were a publicist you got pretty good at figuring out the formulas and how to get ahead on it.

And since the blogs had stopped paying attention to their submissions, they just started watching what other bloggers were posting on Hypem.

And from there it just became a rehash of the same music. Even when I wanted to find new music, I would go to Hype Machine. As a blogger on Hype Machine! It’s kind of ironic.

A couple of my writers were still responding to publicists, but in general small independent acts rarely got a chance to get any sort of coverage.

When I enabled SubmitHub and starting paying attention to submissions again I thought, “wow this is back to the origins of why I was music blogging in the first place.”

With SubmitHub you finally have the bloggers actually listening to everyone’s music. It doesn’t matter if you are represented by a massive major label or if this is your first ever single.

Your song has just as good a shot as anyone else’s. What that means is that the bloggers aren’t paying attention to what any other blogs are posting nor are they paying attention to what hype machine’s posting.

They’re all just focused on the fact that they’re all getting 20-50 submissions per day in their feed, and that’s what they’re paying attention to.

Q: SubmitHub does an amazing job of balancing the needs of both curators AND artists. Did the ideas behind the platform come more from the perspective of one side or the other?

It was a natural progression for sure. It’s been about three and a half years since I kicked off SubmitHub and what’s cool is that I’m the only developer.

It’s been about three and a half years since I kicked off SubmitHub and what’s cool is that I’m the only developer.

Our team is still really small. As the guy who does all the customer support and all the development I can see exactly where people’s pain points are what the users’ issues are.

For example, a very common complaint that would come up is that the genres didn’t match well.

People would say, “I sent this person a hip-hop track but they’ve never posted hip-hop, why are you telling me to send to them?”

And I would say well, I’m not telling you to send to them—they said they like hip-hop and it’s your decision ultimately.

Ok so that’s a bit of a problem, People are obviously frustrated so I’ll try to solve it.

So I’d go in and ask well how much do they like hip-hop? Sometimes even if these blogs have hip-hop enabled you probably shouldn’t send them that, but here’s a blog who totally loves hip-hop based on their history.

Taking this kind of information and trying to solve the pain points for the artists was definitely part of that progression.

Q: Music promotion platforms that rely on paid transactions from artists are sometimes viewed with suspicion. How do you balance bloggers’ and artists’ expectations with a sustainable business model?

As they should be! [laughs] This actually gets to something about SubmitHub that I feel like has been taken out of context in the past.

People have asked me why bloggers like SubmitHub and I say besides the fact that it makes their lives a lot easier, they use it because of the money!

People jump on that but it’s part of the reason that I rolled out the monetization component.

If SubmitHub existed without any sort of premium and I was a blogger on there getting 50 submissions a day, I would have almost no incentive to actually check them.

My only incentive would be that there’s potentially good music here that I could share with my audience. But for 99% of these curators, that audience isn’t generating them any money.

So premium credits are really a way of keeping bloggers engaged, active and feeling like it’s actually worth their time to spend 2 hours everyday going through these submissions.

The money is a small amount. It’s anywhere between $0.50 and $1.50 USD for each submission.

SubmitHub keeps what’s left and at the end of the day if you’re going to argue that $0.50 is payola well…[laughs]…it’s hard for me to counter that if you’re really stuck on the idea that it is.

But that’s the basic rule of the platform. Anyone on SubmitHub absolutely cannot have any form of payola. They get kicked off if we catch them and we’re always running sting operations.

Q: SubmitHub offers connections to everything from traditional music blogs to Twitch streamers. What are your insights on which channels will become the most important for DIY promotion?

Well everyone is still talking about independent playlists.

I still get Indie Shuffle emails and they’ll email me asking to be on my Spotify playlist. And I’m like, “hey I’m an OG blog! And you want to be on my Spotify playlist?”

But I think it’s becoming increasingly hard for them to stay relevant because of how many fake playlisters are out there.

For myself I still really see the value in a Hype machine campaign. I would filter SubmitHub to hit every single Hypem blog I could and start out with a premiere request.

Even if your goal is to get on Spotify playlists the blogs still matter because the Spotify editors pay a lot of attention to them, especially Hypem blogs.

In the end though there’s no one clear path to success. To reference Chris Hillard’s recent quote from a piece on Pigeons and Planes, there still isn’t a formula that can find an artist before the formula does.

If you’re doing a promo campaign today SubmitHub can help but you still need to tell your friends, your family and hit it from as many angles as you can.

All I can say is that if someone offers you placement for money, turn the other way. No matter what, even if it looks good.

There’s a reason that’s illegal in the radio industry!

Q: Any other advice for artists promoting their own music aside from using SubmitHub?

Not being an artist myself, you’ll have to take this with a grain of salt, but today’s state of music allows listeners to dive into their specific niche.

Your strategy should be to find a niche of listeners people who care about your music and are focused on that, rather than looking for some runaway success.

What is my music? Is it ambient drone? Is it christian soundtrack music? Whatever. You can get in on that and really focus on that.

Q: What’s next for SubmitHub?

We’re working on multi-language support which is incredibly exciting. I’ve got a translation system I’m working on that will help me get the whole entire site into 10 or 20 different languages, which could open things up a lot.

There’s also the Hot or Not section. It’s a feature for artists to rate other artists. I coded it just for fun over christmas and it’s totally taken off.

We’re up to 3000-4000 ratings a day, so I’ll be giving that a bit more attention to see it where it goes.

It’s like a whole different product within SubmitHub, but people really like it!

The post SubmitHub Founder Jason Grishkoff Talks Blogs, DIY Promotion and Artist Discovery appeared first on LANDR Blog.

from LANDR Blog https://blog.landr.com/submithub-interview-jason-grishkoff/ via https://www.youtube.com/user/corporatethief/playlists from Steve Hart https://stevehartcom.tumblr.com/post/186053321819

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cryptswahili · 6 years

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Living on Bitcoin Day 6: An Artist, a Dev and a Moon Boy Walk Into a Bar…

This is the fifth instalment of reporter Colin Harper's "Living on Bitcoin" experience in San Francisco. Find out what happened to him earlier on Day 1 , on Day 2 , on Day 3 , onDay 4 and on Day 5.

On day six I woke with a renewed sense of energy. My last two days in San Francisco were booked up with plenty to do, and yesterday’s purchase had reinvigorated the experiment’s sense of purpose.

That morning I wrote, paid Kashmir back for the breakfast (she got into her Coinbase account) and set out for two days of Bay Area shenanigans that would include meeting a local crypto artist, getting tipsy with bitcoin and sleeping (and sailing) in the East Bay on a boat that threatened to capsize.

Around 1:00 p.m. I caught an Uber into the Financial District to meet up with Dustin, a multi-talented developer who had responded to a Reddit thread I made leading up to my week here. He invited me sailing, but the weather was sketchy — it had been raining for the better part of my time in San Francisco and there were winds and storms in the forecast — so we decided to meet at Digital Garage, a coworking space on Market Street that accommodates many cryptocurrency projects.

I was loitering in the lobby when he passed me, and we registered who the other was immediately. Big, tall, bearded with long, blonde hair, a tremendous smile and goofy disposition, he crossed from the other end of the lobby to greet me.

He’s got the hair, the beard, the “No worries, dude” vibe. We’re going to get along great.

We did.

As we entered the working space, I was pleased to see a cryptograffiti original on prominent display, which added an air of authenticity to both his presence in the space and to the San Francisco crypto community for supporting a local, industry-specific artist.

Posting up at a table in the working space, we hit it off and began jumping from one crypto topic to the next. Turns out, he’s a lone-wolf dev who’s building a hardware wallet with bluetooth-enabled mobile controls — not unlike Ledger’s own Nano X, I suggested. He hadn’t heard of it before.

“Well, they might have the bluetooth, but I doubt it’s trustless and multi-sig,” he tells me, going on to say that he knows of no other trustless hardware wallet. Interest piqued, I surveyed his app and the hardware wallet prototype, which he’s also building himself.

“You’re just a one-man band, aren’t ya?” I remarked, impressed, after learning that he was building everything himself.

He’s a bit of a crypto OG, it seems. He’s been in the space since 2011 and hangs around the Bitcoin Core internet relay chat (IRC), where he says he’s been humbled on a few occasions. I asked for his veteran perspective to help explain why I couldn’t find any more stores in the area that accept bitcoin. He suggests that it’s intertwined in the same trend that has made Silicon Valley so banal to him.

“Bitcoin has really exacerbated the aspects of Silicon Valley I don’t like,” he admits. “It has an appreciation for altcoins or stablecoins, but not really for bitcoin, hard money. I think there’s this culture in San Francisco that just idolizes what investors like, what’s new. I heard someone say Silicon Valley is about new things — bitcoin isn’t new anymore.”

Everyone’s just looking for “the next big thing” or “the next Bitcoin.” They’re not going to find it, was more or less his view, and he believes that the focus shouldn’t be creating something new but improving what we already have.

“I’ve heard it said that the East Coast owns things while the West Coast makes things,” he theorized, “and if that stereotype were true I could see more people taking bitcoin.

“I think the challenge is that the majority of people don’t understand security stuff. The people who buy these don’t understand half of it. The challenge is teaching them,” he said, broaching the evergreen topic on the “how-tos” of adoption.

Our conversation was kinetic and animated as we touched on a wide range of crypto-related topics. I’m not surrounded by developers much in Nashville (especially not crypto/blockchain ones), so the opportunity to talk to one who knew the ins-and-outs (and knew them real well) left my curiosity welling with streams of new, if half-hatched, bitcoin applications and infrastructural ideas.

We talked crypto assets insurance (a concept which we both had previously hatched complementary business models for), his conceptualization that the network serves users and not miners (he believes that “hashing wars” are irrelevant, since, ultimately, the users will decide which chain they buy in to) and his surprising penchant for interacting with some of the space’s most prodigious and controversial celebrities without knowing who they are.

At one point, he had left his laptop at the Crypto Castle only to retrieve it, unmolested, from the same couch he left it on a month later, though he didn’t really know who Jeremy was. I brought up Brock Pierce and his benevolent-or-parasitic (depends on who you ask) ventures in Puerto Rico. When Dustin was still involved in the Valley’s tech party scene, he was acquainted with him before either even knew about bitcoin.

“Ohhh, that’s Brock Pierce. I know him — I just didn’t know his name. We used to party a lot 10 years ago. That’s hilarious.”

Everyone knows everyone in this industry, and the degrees of separation between connections is often slim. It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon but with Bitcoin.

He would reaffirm this observation throughout our talks. For instance, he had applied for Coinbase back in 2013, a job he didn’t end up getting — though Armstrong’s consolation prize was pretty nice.

“He gave me a bitcoin,” he said, smiling and holding up his hands like he was holding something ethereal. “It was like 34 bucks then.”

The literal token of gratitude for being one of Coinbase’s first applicants.

That would have been sometime in 2013, maybe even right before Hill’s article. Funny, he was probably up for the position of Coinbase’s third employee.

I ordered some pad thai for lunch on Uber Eats, tried to manage some work but was ultimately distracted by my on-going, engaging conversations with Dustin. He’d agreed to go with me to the Bitcoin meetup at Stookey’s that night. To kill time until then, we decided we would give BitPay an office visit. I wanted to ask them about the decreasing presence of bitcoin-accepting merchants in the bay area, and see if the trend was national and global.

I called the office but only succeeded in leaving a voicemail, so we decided that running the errand on foot would give us our best shot. BitPay has two offices listed on Google. One was, no doubt, a mailing address but we had no way of figuring out which one.

The rain-soaked walk was made easier thanks to our umbrellas (Hans had graciously loaned me his, a feeble but functional black pocket umbrella). On our way, we took a detour so that I could try out a bitcoin ATM.

The experience wasn’t as gratifying as I had hoped, mainly because it didn’t feel like actually buying bitcoin — it was more like buying credit or a coupon for bitcoin, the opposite of what I had been doing all week: using bitcoin to buy credit and coupons in the form of gift cards.

The Coinme ATM was located in something of a mall a block over from the Moscone Center. I decided to use cash, but upon using the machine, any chance of anonymity was promptly thwarted.

First, it asks you to insert your ID, followed by a request to take a picture to verify that identity (that I would have to basically do know-your-customer (KYC) verifications twice to buy bitcoin with cash was anathema to me). After this it asked me for my phone number and email address, which I found ironically less intrusive after having to be photo identified. When all this was done, it printed a slip of paper with a username and password, along with a URL at which I could access the $10 worth of bitcoin I had bought.

Cool, I can’t even access it yet and don’t even hold the keys. Certainly different from when Hill used a makeshift, trustless prototype at Internet Archives in 2013 before the first crypto ATMs had been produced. Back then, it was just a computer and a cash box, which any employee could use to withdraw or deposit bitcoin for cash. Same concept, but more anonymous, easy and endearingly janky (you had to trust people not to steal cash from it, though).

The disheartening and borderline frustrating experience (it felt a bit cheap, a normal monetary transaction service masquerading as a crypto one) was aggravated when a Ramen vending machine 20 yards away teased cryptocurrency as a purchasing option, only to qualify the payment as “Coming soon!” at checkout.

We went on with our search for BitPay, but it was ultimately fruitless. At the first location, our call on the building’s outside directory went unanswered. At the second, we were told that BitPay no longer occupied space in the building, so we decided to pack it in.

Fighting the wind that had whipped up in our mile or so walk, we took refuge in an Chinese food joint that Dustin was fond of. We split a helping of kung pao chicken, which I repaid in bitcoin. Dustin had become an IRL intermediary through which I could enjoy those elusive dining-in-with-bitcoin experiences.

Dinner finished, we found our way to Stookey’s, an intimate, cooly lit bar that could comfortably seat maybe 30 people. We were fashionably late and took a seat at the rightmost end of the bar. I was unpleasantly unsurprised to discover that no one else had shown up for the meetup yet. For the first 30 minutes, we were the only ones, it seemed, a disappointing situation that was becoming par for the course in a week of almosts.

But it was also a win. I got to spend my bitcoin again, this time on a delicious pisco sour (a Peruvian, egg-white cocktail with a pisco base, bitters and limes) and enough beer and other cocktails to get a buzz on and cringe at the thought that the prices were not too far off from Nashville’s own.

Striking up a conversation with a wispy black-haired guy who “is kinda a tech geek,” Dustin asked him if he was there for the meetup. He said no, admitting that he was a bit skeptical of the whole thing. He rehashed an old misperception that I’ve heard from numerous naysayers, and the fact that I’m forgetting it now is either a testament to the cocktails’ potency or to the fact that most arguments against bitcoin (especially from the underinformed) have all been packaged into a nebulous hodgepodge of complaints that, in their ubiquity, have begun to resemble each other).

Dustin and I hit it off with one of the bartenders, who showed a greater-than-average understanding of crypto — so much so that he had educated opinions on forks, proof of work vs. proof of stake, and Ethereum’s Constantinople upgrade. He’s been invested for two-and-a-half years, though he had been tuned into the market and started conducting due diligence two years before that.

I asked if any of the crypto-focused co-owners were around so I could grill them. One of them, a close friend of his, was sojourning in Mexico, as one does when crypto rich. Our bartender was a more-than-adequate stand-in for my questions, seeing as he’d been at the bar for two years, so I asked him if he’d noticed a drop-off in Bitcoin meetup interest.

“They go up and down. We’re in between,” he said, conceding that they had been considering scaling the meetups down from weekly to quarterly.

He also shared his personal experience of the hassles that come with accepting bitcoin, particularly in times of network bloat. “Fees were getting ridiculous on BitPay,” he told me. “A $14 cocktail becomes a $24 cocktail and people don’t want to pay.”

“How many people pay in bitcoin, would you say?” I asked him.

“A few, mostly during the meetups obviously. Every now and then, someone will be a few drinks in, realize we take it and then want to pay that way.”

After about an hour, I turned to my left to observe a room whose patronage had thinned out in tandem with the vanishing contents of our glasses. With the room cleared, I could make out two dudes having an enlivened conversation two seats down from us: one, tall and thin-ish; the other, shorter and bulky, with blond hair.

“I think that’s Dan Held,” I told Dustin, referring to the blond character. True to form, Dustin didn’t seem to know who Dan was, showing the willful introversion of a man who is more preoccupied with the code of the industry over its personalities.

I went over and introduced myself, thanking Dan for an op-ed he had recently submitted to Bitcoin Magazine and telling him a bit about my experiment. I related it back to Kashmir Hill’s own, where he was featured in the final day of her 2014 excursion.

Dan invited me to get coffee the next day, but I said it would be tricky given my schedule. I would be busy in the morning and evening, and I had plans to meet up with cryptograffiti, a San Francisco-based crypto artist, in the afternoon.

He gave a half-cocked smile and nodded to the man he had been talking with.

“No way, seriously?” I said, shocked at the serendipity.

“Yeah, that’s me,” the tall man responded with a grin.

With introductions made, we talked a bit, and I learned (not to any surprise) that the artist was a maximalist of sorts.

“Bitcoin is my baby,” he said with the simultaneous seriousness and self-aware waggishness of a true believer.

Like Dustin, cryptograffiti was an OG. Always jumping at the chance to glean another point of view, I relayed the frustrations that had obstructed my week on bitcoin, and I asked why there were so few people at the meetup.

“People stopped going to meetups because the focus had changed. It was too financial. People started shutting you down if you knew what you were saying,” he said.

It’s all wrapped up in the paradigm shift the crypto community has experienced since 2013, he believes. Like Dustin, he thinks the altcoin boom exposed how mercurial community attention can be and diverted much of the excitement for bitcoin toward the industry’s new and shiny offspring.

“It’s cool to be contrarian. Everyone is looking for the next thing.”

Dustin joined the conversation, along with another meetup latecomer: a short, spiky-haired Ethereum “moon boy” with wide, distant eyes whom I had met at the conference and who claimed he had conceptualized a “decentralized, global supercomputer” in high school before Ethereum had even existed.

Sure thing, bud.

The meetup, while small, felt profound. It was small, but it was also quality and included a diverse sample of the industry’s many players. It was eclectic and intimate, much like the “Bitcoin at $100” meetup that Hill was a part of. Only ours was smaller, something I would not have anticipated when I started this.

But there was probably a greater diversity of professional specializations in the industry at this meetup: a one-man developer team who seemed to personify Bitcoin’s open-source nature, a Texas boy who had become one of the crypto space’s most recognized entrepreneurs, a San Francisco-based DJ-turned-artist whose crypto-themed artwork sells for five figures (yes, really), a Nashville-based journalist who didn’t know squat about Bitcoin until 2017 and was thrilled just to worm his way into this milieu, and the Ethereum moon boy who did brand relations for an Ethereum-built project.

Bitcoin and crypto had all given us the opportunity to pursue passions and careers within the industry.

Even if its use as an IRL payment has regressed, the impact of the network has been far reaching — the industry is more active than ever. This thought enlivened me.

Dustin had offered me a bed on his boat for the night, something I wasn’t about to pass up, especially with a few drinks in me. It was across the way in Berkeley, so we took the BART. I paid Dustin for a ticket and then a 15-minute drive from Oakland put us at the harbor.

The boat’s exterior gave the impression of a modest and relatively well-maintained sailboat. Below deck, the haphazard displacement of various sundries and provisions presented the habitat of a man who probably had the madness to create things few people could.

The night winding down, we decided to watch/play Black Mirror’s Bandersnatch on Netflix. The choose-your-own-adventure movie’s interactive nature gives a new dimension to Black Mirror’s typical rabbit-hole examination of technology and human frailty. We had both watched it before and wanted to see what different endings we could get.

Even if tenuous, the connection between the protagonist's struggle to create a choose-your-own-adventure game (it’s also glaringly meta, like a lot of Black Mirror’s concepts) in the seminal days of the video game industry and my own struggle to spend bitcoin became apparent.

What alternative endings, universes, paths had I not confronted, found or gone down in the course of my own adventure? Maybe I’d missed some opportunities where I could’ve used my bitcoin. Or maybe this was the most optimal path: I had met Held and cryptograffiti at a meetup and was about to sleep on a boat, owned by a developer whose myriad and disparate interests and lifestyle were like something out of a book.

What other endings are out there? I thought to myself, the boat gently rocking to the bay’s swaying tide.

It was an easy and comfortable sleep.

As Kashmir Hill did in her original journey, Colin is accepting BTC tips to help him along the way.

Tip jar: 3CnLhqitCjUN4HPYf6Qa2MmvCpSoBiFfBN

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

[Telegram Channel | Original Article ]

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ellahmacdermott · 6 years