#and that lets you analyse things without converting them to numbers first.

[xwingace]

All of the above, and....

School is preparing you for the rest of your life, but it's also preparing all of your classmates. _You_ (or I) might not need math, or english, or biology, or history, or physics or drama or spanish etc etc etc a lot in the rest of your life, but the kid sitting next you might. And maybe when being exposed to some of these things in school, you'll discover a passion for it that could influence the rest of your life in a way you don't know yet. Even if you already have a passion, as the person I reblogged from says, you'll never know _when_ you might need whatever you learn, and having been exposed to the basics in school, you'll at least have a direction to start looking in.

It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.

There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!

[theknowledgereview]

How to Select Your CAT Online Coaching?

CAT (Common Admission Test) is India’s Largest Management Gateway Test through which one can target about 20 IIMs and 1,200 other B schools all over India. It is a highly competitive exam, with over 3 Lakh aspirants appearing this year (the highest number compared to previous years).

MBA is a dream for so many aspirants; however, to target your dream college, it is important to ace the entrance first, for which you would need excellent CAT online coaching. In this article, we will discuss how iQuanta helps you to ace your CAT and convert your dream B-School.

CAT Exam Pattern

CAT is a 2-hour test with an individual sectional time limit of 40 minutes each. The three sections in CAT are:

Quantitative Aptitude

Logical reasoning and data interpretation

Verbal ability and reading comprehension.

Some of the key details of the CAT Exam:

Mode of Test CBT Mode

Total Duration 120 minutes (40 minutes for each section)

Total Questions 66 Questions

Quants: 22 Ques.

LRDI: 20 Ques.

VARC: 24 Ques.

Total Marks 198 Marks

Quants: 66

LRDI: 60

VARC: 72

Type of Questions Objective type

CAT Online Coaching

Targeting a top B-School with your desired percentile requires consistent practice and rigorous preparation. Hence, acing CAT from the best CAT Online Coaching is the first step towards your preparation.

Let us analyse what factors you should be looking for when selecting a CAT Online Coaching and Why it is important.

What to look for in CAT Online Coaching?

When you plan to take the help of online coaching for your CAT Preparation, there are certain things to keep in mind before choosing the best one:

Content Relevancy

Before you choose a coaching for your preparation, you need to make sure that every material and concept they provide, is updated with the current year and should be CAT-relevant. You may practice hundreds of questions and still, you won’t make it in CAT because of the outdated questions that you practiced.

Importance: Practicing a definite number of Exact CAT Level Questions on a regular basis would yield much greater results than practising tons of questions from an outdated source just for the sake of practice.

Doubt Solving

It is important to analyse how often the faculties or the team of a certain Coaching is there for you to resolve your doubts and queries. Everyone can provide you with regular classes and assignments for your practice, but not all of them are present to clarify your doubts.

Importance: Your preparation goes on smoothly without taking a pause for long to solve a doubt. And you also gain clarity towards the right approach to attempt the question.

Class Taking Methodology

Different Coaching Institutes use different ways and techniques to conduct their classes. It is important to take some demo sessions first and check the faculty’s way of teaching and other yardsticks, like different methodologies and patterns they would use to cover your syllabus.

Importance: Different students have specific kinds of needs when it comes to their preparation and hence, analysing the methods used by online CAT Coaching almost clears all the confusion. You gain better clarity once you go through their teaching patterns and methods used by them.

Now that you have a fair idea of what to look for in CAT Coaching.

Let us see what are the key important factors that iQuanta provides to the students that make it different and stand out in the market.

What Makes iQuanta Different?

24*7 Doubt Solving Support

It is very obvious while you prepare for the CAT Exam, you will face numerous doubts and confusions. It’s a relief when those doubts get catered on time, and you get a detailed solution for the same. iQuanta, with its rigorous practice and concept learning, makes sure every doubt gets solved with a detailed solution and various approaches to a solution.

Peer-to-Peer Learning

With constant practice and classes, we believe that students should engage within themselves to enhance their preparation and competition. The peer-to-peer learning at iQuanta engages competitiveness among students, which is important for them to experience in order to grow in an MBA environment in future.

iQuanta’s Interactive Classes

iQuanta indulges students in their unique style of teaching where you get Live Interactive Streaming Classes as well as Live Application-Based Classes. With regular concept learning classes, we also rely on an ample number of question practices that are CAT-relevant.

iQuanta’s Magnificent Legacy

iQuanta has been proven efficient for its students with respect to consistent preparation and mentoring of students. With over 10,000+ IIM Calls, iQuanta has a record of students converting the top B-Schools all over India. Here are some of them:

The only thing that is going to yield you better results in your CAT Preparation is Consistency. You need to stay focused and motivated throughout your preparation and ace your CAT with full determination.

READ MORE: https://theknowledgereview.in/how-to-select-your-cat-online-coaching

SOURCE: https://theknowledgereview.in

Educational Magazine in India

Education Leaders in India

Best Educational Magazine in India

Top Education Magazine

[ami-incants]

Sleep Charm Pouch

Pictured: Store-bought blue pouch, angelite, black tourmaline, lapis lazuli, rose quartz, charoite, amethyst, malachite, lavender, ‘My sleep is peaceful’ sigil.

This pouch was requested by @femsiriuslyobsessed​. My pouches are usually to be carried on your person, but this one belongs under your pillow. See under the cut for general information about using charm pouches and their components.

Pouch Colour: Blue - Calming, peace White - Protection, peace Green - Healing, freedom Brown - Wards off bad omens, grounding

Crystals: Charoite - Promotes deep sleep, soothes nerves, calming to those with ADHD and autism, releases fear and negativity, puts things into perspective, reduces resistance to change. Amethyst - Aids sleep, eases depression and anxiety. Promotes calm, motivation, self-belief, control. Enhances calm, strength, physical and emotional healing. Lessens conflict. Protective stone. Black obsidian - Dispels nightmares by absorbing negative energies and shedding light on past traumas that allows the emotional trauma to be resolved. Aids falling asleep by reducing self-destructive thoughts. Fosters self-belief and motivation for positive change. Protective stone. Labradorite - Aids falling asleep by calming the mind and clearing worries and fears. Can help you to understand and move past nightmares. Eases depression and anxiety. Enhances strength. Protective stone. Rose quartz - Aids sleep, eases depression and anxiety. Promotes calm, self-belief and self-care. Supports all kinds of relationships. Protective stone. Angelite - Healing and protection for environment or body, converts fear, anger and anxiety into faith and tranquillity. Black tourmaline - Grounding, cleanses negative thoughts and anxieties, good for relinquishing chronic worries. Green aventurine - Calms and balances emotions, halts over-analysing, soothes emotional wounds and encourages recognition of root issues. Selenite wand - Not for in the pouch, but to cleanse the room  (see below for suggested accompanying spell, or simply focus on your intention while spreading the smoke around the room. Pay particular attention to doors, windows and vents).

As this pouch is going under your pillow, be aware of the size and shape of your crystals when choosing them. A pointy crystal in the ear is likely to have an adverse effect!

Herbs/Spices: Lavender/Chamomile - Calming/soothing. Calming/Soothing incense - I use Lily of the Valley. Do not leave candles or incense burning when you fall asleep. Sage - Cleanse your bedroom with sage smoke (see below for suggested accompanying spell, or simply focus on your intention while spreading the smoke around the room. Pay particular attention to doors, windows and vents).

Charms: Broom - Brush away negative influences Hammer - Drive away malevolent energies Personal charms - Any which bring you comfort and calm feelings, would recommend a stuffie.

Sigils: Choose either/both if they suit your situation. My dreams are pleasant

My sleep is peaceful

Spell: Choose any that suit your situation. Sleep Pouch Charging Spell - Hold the pouch in your hands while reciting this spell aloud or in your head. This spell unfortunately won’t suit everyone’s belief system, I wrote it to charge a pouch for a family member. You can use one of the other spells below to charge the pouch, but I have found these need recharging daily whereas this spell works for a week. Remember, it’s possible to charge a pouch by simply sitting with it and concentrating on its purpose. This spell can also be used with candle magic and a sigil can be carved into the candle before it is lit. The candle must burn out/down as much as possible. Preferably bury the candle nub in the earth once cool. Recharge weekly.

When this beneath a pillow lies, Let those who rest their head Be visited by Hypnos to Sleep soundly in their bed. And if his sons must send to them Dreams through either door, Let them not be troublesome. Disturb their sleep no more.

Re-energising Spell - When you feel that special brand of drained that sleep isn’t aiding, cast this in bed for a productive following day. You can use one motivating or event-relevant crystal for the whole spell, or use the following recommended crystals. While reciting the first line, hold amethyst to the centre of your forehead. For the second line, run malachite down both arms, or across a problematic area. Take amazonite for the third line and hold it over your heart. For the last line, place each stone, in the same order, under your pillow (or into a pouch to be placed there) as you say each statement. Recast nightly.

Heal, heal, the worries in my mind Heal, heal, this tired flesh of mine Heal, heal, this weary, wary soul Let me sleep, help me heal, make me whole.

Nightmare Warding Spell - If relevant, use nightly as required. To ward off nightmares. Can be recited aloud or in your head while holding your pouch, a relevant crystal or a personal charm (such as a stuffie). Recast nightly.

Let me sleep without my tears Make me not relive my fears Dreams be happy, else be none Peaceful be ‘til morning come

Nightmare Banishing Spell - I wrote this with the intent for it to be used after a nightmare, but support it being used however you see fit. I would recommend using a cleansing item (a crystal such as selenite would probably be best, or a little moon water) or holding a black stone (for grounding and absorbing negativity) while reciting this out loud or in your head. Recast as required.

Take these demons from my dreams For they serve me no more I am safe. I am strong. I have closed that door.

Self-Cleansing Spell - Use as required. I use this while combing my aura with my selenite wand. You could use your favourite method of cleansing, whether it’s with smoke, water, moonwater, crystal-infused water or music. I use this before spiritual work but also anytime I’m feeling a little woolly or run down. The purpose of including it here is to rid yourself of any negativities that may be clinging to you and getting in the way of a peaceful sleep. The words ‘keep’ and ‘leave’ can be swapped or substituted with ‘make’ if it feels appropriate. Recast as required.

Cleanse my mind, Cleanse my soul, Keep me kind, Leave me whole.

Area Cleansing Spell - Use as required. As above, I use this spell to cleanse an area before spiritual work, and I have included it here to rid the bedroom of any negative energies that may be lurking and interrupting your sleep. Use your preferred method of cleansing while reciting this spell. Repeat the spell if necessary to cover the entire area that you want to cleanse. Pay special attention to doors, windows and vents. Recast as required.

Let negativity dwell no more. Banish evil, close the door. Let this area peaceful be. Protect this space and protect me.

Ask box is open for suggestions!

Below the cut for more information on how pouches and each element of them work. 

About Pouches

Pouches can be made of any material, but natural is better. I prefer to use natural cloth as it is easy to carry around, easy to access and I can feel the energies from the crystals through the material, and smell the herbs. Pouches do not need to be professionally made, you can use a simple drawstring bag that you have made yourself, or even use a handkerchief/cloth square secured with a ribbon. If you cannot source a suitable pouch in the desired colour, the protecting energies of white or the grounding energies of black work well for most situations. It is up to you whether you cleanse your pouch and its contents as a whole or as individual components. Due to the multiple ways I use my crystals, I cleanse and charge them regularly so do not feel the need for a full ritual when putting together a pouch. It is not necessary to use an item from each of the suggested categories, go with what feels right to you.

About Crystals

Chose the number of crystals that feels right for you, and is practical for you to carry around. My magic tends to work in odd numbers, particularly 3, 5 and 7. Black stones tend to need cleansing more frequently as they can get clogged up with the negative energies they have absorbed. Smoke and moonlight are easy and safe ways to cleanse. Sunlight can be used but may discolour some crystals. It’s common advice to cleanse crystals in water/moonwater but this can be risky as many crystals may dissolve, rust, discolour or release toxins. (Crystals that end in ‘-ite’ are particularly likely to react poorly with water.) I cleanse all of my crystals under the full moon each month, and with sage smoke if needed in the interim.

About Herbs/Spices

Follow your nose and use herbs that you enjoy the smell of. Whole fresh herbs are highly preferable where available. They will be much more potent and can be added to the pouch as they are. If using dried herbs, you may want a smaller pouch/vial to contain them within your charm pouch, to avoid the mess. Some herbs are better ingested, and many are available in tea bag form so could be carried within the pouch that way for their scent and for a cup of tea to pick you up if the occasion arises in a location where herbal teas are unlikely to be available. Ginger can be used to give added potency to any spell.

About Charms

Certain objects have particular meanings, but sometimes the most powerful charms are ones personal to us. I have two items of jewellery that I always wear to connect me to three important people in my life, and a third I wear in times of particular need. A personal charm could remind you of a person, place or time. As long as the memory it evokes matches the energy you want in the pouch, it should complement the magic of the other items. Not all charms need to be inside the pouch, you can wear them as you would normally, but if you want to give them a boost you could put them inside the pouch while you cleanse/charge it. If the suggested item seems too large for a pouch, assume I mean a toy/miniature version e.g. broom, hammer.

About Sigils

The sigil can be drawn (preferably in the pouch colour) onto paper, stone, wood etc to be placed inside the pouch, or can be marked onto the pouch itself. When drawing the sigil, think about the affirmation and visualise it already achieved. If using candle magic to charge your pouch, the sigil can be carved onto the candle.

About Spells

Spells do not have to be written down and kept within the pouch. They can be used to charge the pouch, or recited from memory at times of need. If writing it down to serve as a reminder, it is beneficial to write it in the optimum colour for that pouch.

[jqxsol726238226-blog]

Changing AIFF To MP3 In ITunes On El Capitain

AIFF MP3 Converter konvertuje soubory AIFF do MP3 a MP3 do AIFF. Splitting the output information based on chapters stored in the source recordsdata. Something that has bothered me for online aiff to mp3 converter mac a really very long time is my incapacity to play FLAC audio files on my Mac. (FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec and doesn't play in iTunes.) Effectively, I've lastly gotten it figured out. Just observe these easy steps. There are various workarounds. First the mp3 format is depreciated. Secondly for podcasting - and some other mp3 related workflow, software like Monkeytools Sound Grinder is a approach better answer than iTunes. It let's you embed far more metadata, including a number of graphics to the mp3, which generally is a good thing for podcasting. Technique 1: Drag and drop the AIFF files or AIFF folder to the primary window of the AIFF Converter. Select the files you need to convert. They will now be added to the record in the Converter" view. Instead, you possibly can at all times drag and drop recordsdata to the view. This script appears to correctly handles filenames that have blank areas in them. I just used it to convert a number of Apple's iLife sound effects information, and virtually all of these have areas in the filenames, so again, this script deals with that as nicely. That is true virtually the entire time. The only time it might make sense is in case you have a decrease bitrate audio file in a high quality format like WAV. For example, it might make sense to convert a 96 kbps WAV file to MP3, however only if you select a bitrate of 192 kbps or higher. The upper bitrate on the MP3 file will permit it to maintain the identical quality as the WAV file, despite the fact that it is a decrease bitrate.

AIFF, quick for Audio Interchange File Format , is an audio format initially created by Apple Laptop for storing and transmitting high-quality sampled audio knowledge. It supports a wide range of bit resolutions, pattern rates, and channels of audio. This format is sort of fashionable upon Apple platforms. However AIFF information are uncompressed, making the information fairly large in comparison with the ever-present MP3 format. The MP3 format is a lossy format. That signifies that an MP3 file doesn't contain 100% of the unique audio data. Instead, MP3 recordsdata use perceptual coding. In different words, that means it removes the information that your ear doesn't discover thereby making the file smaller. The explanation that we need to convert AIFF file to MP3 file is as a result of uncompressed AIFF recordsdata are too giant to travel over the internet at any great speed, so it is arduous for us to download AIFF information or share AIFF information with our buddies on the Internet. All2MP3 converts music information directly into MP3 audio format using AppleScript. After beginning the program, you merely drag and drop files onto this system window and choose the standard of target information. All you have to do is click on the All2MP3 button and the conversion process starts. This system converts MPC, APE, WV, FLAC, OGG, WMA, AIFF and WAV. Convert online aiff to mp3 converter mac movies from 1,000 in style websites to MP3 with ease. Step 2: Choose MP3 because the output format. Of course, there are greater than 200 formats supported which implies you may convert you file to some other format you want simply. MP3 Media Converter is Android APK to converter audio and video codecs to MP3 or MP4 information. When you have got some audio files on Android cellphone or tablets, you can convert them instantly on smartphone. Finally, we get to the center of web audio - the various file formats. This part offers an introduction to some of the commonest codecs for net audio. DropCUE file in 'To Audio Converter' to precisely cut up musical albums and DJ's sets into single tracks. You may convert any audio file supported to Audacity to three files sorts: MP3, WAV, and Ogg Vorbis.Select the AIFF, AIFC information in iTunes library, click on File >> Convert >> Create AAC Model, Create MP3 Version or Create WAV Model. After that a new copy of the AIFF, AIFC recordsdata might be saved to iTunes library as.M4A,MP3 orWAV recordsdata. re analyse that crate and you must find all everything again to regular with out having to recreate a brand new crate and find all of the music information for that crate.Use a command line mode to transform or compress a lot of audio files straight. Whilst you subsequent need to convert an audio file (no Ogg, FLAC, or House home windows Media data allowed) just drop it on prime of this workflow. Having said that, using a pc as a music supply continues to be not the best choice, compared to a devoted player.However image codecs such asAI andEPS, or sound formats such asMID andMUS, do not include precise image or sound info, however moderately the instructions needed to generate them. AnEPS of a sketch of the Mona Lisa would have the actual curves of the sketch in a format that the pc understands and can show to the consumer. The pc can manipulate every curve independently, even the place it overlaps other curves, without disturbing them. Likewise, a MIDI file of the Fifth Symphony has tracks or channels for every of the instruments, and the notes and velocities and other commands for each of those in a means the computer understands and might manipulate. You may change the individual notes of a person instrument with out affecting the opposite sounds that occur during the identical time. You'll be able to't do that with aWAV orMP3.

[talkagency]

TOP GOOGLE ADS MISTAKES YOU SHOULD AVOID

Have you put your heart and soul into SEO but still struggle to rank high with Google?

Chances are you’ve done something wrong.

The reality is that good SEO will only get you so far.

Sooner or later, you’ll have to invest in paid advertising as well.

Cost-per-click (CPC) or Pay-to-click (PPC) marketing is a great way to promote your product or service.

But that’s not too simple either.

Sure, setting up a Google Ads account and running your first campaign looks easy enough, but are you doing it right?

Keep reading to find out what you mistakes to avoid when setting up a new Google Ads campaign.

Generic Keywords

With SEO, you can afford to try many different keywords, analyse traffic data and figure out what works best.

When you run an ad campaign on Google Ads, you should be a bit more careful.

Investing in the wrong keywords could cost your company thousands of dollars.

So what do you do?

Well, you first need to perform keyword research to find keywords that rank high on Google’s search engine.

Once you identify a few keywords that you think may work well, take a step back and think about your marketing campaign as a whole.

Investing in generic keywords that rank higher may seem like a good idea at first…

… but such practices usually only work for brands that are already well-established in their respective industries.

Paying more for highly-competitive keywords will not necessarily increase traffic and sales (despite what Google says).

Just like keyword research in SEO, you need to find keywords that are less competitive but still generate good amounts of traffic.

Focus on keywords that are more likely to lead people to your product.

Don’t just pick the most competitive and expensive keywords thinking you’ll gain more in return.

Keep your ad groups nice and tidy.

If you have different irrelevant keywords in the same ad group, consider splitting those keywords into more ad groups.  

Stick to keywords that describe your product as accurately as possible:

Even if they don’t rank as high as other more generic keywords.

Wrong Keyword Match Type

What’s up with all those different match types anyway:

broad match, phrase match, exact match…

… Google offers many different keyword match types and doesn’t offer any in-depth information on how they all function.

Broad match types show your ads in more searches, while exact match types will only show ads when users search for the keywords you’ve specified.

The truth is that Google wants you to use broad match…

which is exactly why broad match is set as the default match type when you create a new ad group.

Broad match modifier is a bit better than regular broad match as it only shows your ads on search terms that you designate with the + sign.

It’s still dangerous if the keywords you’ve used are still very broad.

Keyword order matters, which is where phrase match comes into play.

Phrase match is great for when you want to run a targeted campaign that’s focused on smaller audiences and select keyword groups.

Some marketers don’t ever use phrase match in their campaigns, but it does have its uses.

Exact match is the go-to match type for most campaigns, and marketers love it.

Exact match works only if you spend a significant amount of time researching the best keywords for your product.

It’s the most cost-effective match type when utilised correctly as it allows you to reach audiences that you know will be interested in your product or service.

Also, keep in mind that exact match is not true to its name.

Exact match may trigger ads for searches that match the ‘intent of the keyword’.

Your ad may trigger for a search that doesn’t match your keyword word-for-word but is, according to Google, somehow semantically related.

This includes misspellings, plurals, as well as implied words and paraphrased words.

Utilise negative keywords to exclude Google’s engine from showing your ad when a specific, unwanted term is searched for.

Too Few Ads or Ineffective Ad Copy

For Google to properly prioritise ads that will do better, you need to have more than one ad in each group (Google recommends at least three).

When you add more ads, you give Google’s machine learning technology the chance to focus on those ads that are expected to perform better.

You may trust Google to display your ads, but Google can’t really write the ad for you.

Your ad copy needs to be short, clear and compelling.

Make sure you include a CTA and that you know your audience well.

You don’t have too much space to work with.

Make an impact by using emotional triggers and by emphasising why users should choose your brand over others.

If you’re not sure what your ads are supposed to look like, you can always do a few quick Google searches to see what your competitors are doing.

What are they offering and what language are they using?

If something’s working well for them, don’t be afraid to adjust your ad copy accordingly.

Not Taking Advantage of Extensions

You may have created your ads, but you’re certainly not done!

Google offers many extensions that make your ads stand out:

  Callouts: Additional descriptive text that can help your brand highlight important features or benefits. Free shipping? Fast Service? Include it here!

Sitelinks: These are links that lead to other relevant pages on your website (e.g. contact page or pricing information). Getting people to click on your main link and end up on your landing page should be your number one priority, but sitelinks provide people with much-needed relevant information.

Call: This one’s great if you want people to call your business and works really well on mobile (people can click on the link and call your right away).

Location: Connect Google ads with My Business to include your location in your ads. Users will have access to your address, phone number and opening hours. They can also click on your location to view it on Google Maps.

Price: This is a controversial and much-discussed topic. However, if price offers your brand a competitive advantage, you may want to include it and make it visible right away.

Promotion: Highlight any offer or promotion by letting users know what’s on sale and for how long.

App: A really useful extension that’s unfortunately not used often enough. If you have an app make sure you use this extension to let users know they can click on the link to download it from the play store.

    Setting up your ad extensions shouldn’t take long:

But make sure you review and test different functions and extensions to find out what works best for you!

Google Ads Bonus Tips

  Google will keep the ‘Include Google Display Network’ checked when you set up a campaign. That’s good for them; not so good for you. If you include display with search you’ll be sacrificing control. You’ll also only be showing text ads on the network (image ads perform much better).

Don’t just set your campaigns target location and leave it at that. Always remember to click on ‘Location options’ to gain access to an important feature that can save you money. If you don’t want people outside your targeted locations to be seeing your ads (which is most likely), click on the ‘People in your targeted locations’ option under ‘Target’.

Don’t forget your landing page. It doesn’t matter how good your ad is, if your landing page is not easy to read or is cluttered with useless information, no one will convert and your ROI will be low. Focus on an easy-flowing design that keeps things simple and accessible. Your CTA should be effective and the page itself must load fast and be mobile-friendly.

Track your conversions and do it correctly. Don’t track page views and other actions that don’t make you any money as conversions. Without conversion tracking, you can’t know which keywords work and which ones don’t, which means you won’t be able to optimise your campaigns.

Be wary of ‘recommended’ settings. Just because Google says it’s the best choice, it doesn’t mean it is! Do some research and test out different options yourself.

  And that’s it!

If you’re just starting out with Google Ads or have not used Google’s ad platform (formerly known as Adwords) in a long time, you’ll definitely want to check out our Ultimate Google Ads Guide!

Article first published here: TOP GOOGLE ADS MISTAKES YOU SHOULD AVOID

[cse6441-blog]

Week 2 Lecture (Evening)

Confidentiality Continued

To start, we drew back again to covering different types of ciphers and encryption. More specifically, Richard touched on the following:

Vigenere Cipher (Caesar + password)

Enigma

OTP (One Time Pad)

Keys

Vigenere Cipher This cipher is a method of encrypting alphabetic text. Using a password, it does multiple substitutions on the plain-text following a encoder matrix (pictured above). Essentially for each letter, there’s a “new” Caesar cipher applied.

For example, take a password like swordfish. This can be converted to a numerical value which indicates how much to rotate the letter. This pattern is repeated throughout the plaintext, encrypting the message with the password.

For swordfish, the numerical set would be 18, 22, 14, 17, 3, 5, 8, 18, 7. Thereby encoding a message such as “HELLO WORLD” with this password yields: ZAZCR BWJSV (which is simply adding the password on top of the plaintext)

Back in 1999, Microsoft used "susageP”, which is Pegasus backwards to encrypt the passwords they stored (https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-defends-wince-nt-password-flaw/). Good stuff haha.

The strength of Vigenere Cipher is that it is not susceptible to a frequency analysis. However, the weakness of the cipher lies in that the password is echoed and repeated throughout the ciphertext. Thereby, we can spot repeated sequences which reflect common words in the English alphabet. Furthermore, by analysing the gaps between these common patterns, we can narrow down the length of the password. Typically, they are a common factor of the gap, so the longer the message, the easier it is to identify the password.

Bits of Security

In security, there is a useful measurement we can use to measure the amount of work an attacker needs to do in order to crack your cipher.

We call this, Bits of Security - which are useful in estimating how strong your ciphers are, and how capable attackers are.

Lessons from Exponential Growth

Exponential growth can be dangerous. It’s easy for someone to underestimate, but with its name, it starts off slow, and catches up QUICK. In the lecture, Richard illustrates this point by telling us a story about Marco Polo. In a seemingly innocent request for one grain of rice on a chessboard, and doubling that each time, you can see that it quickly goes exponentially out of control. (source: http://www.singularitysymposium.com/exponential-growth.html)

One Time Pad (OTP)

Another brilliant encryption method is the one-time pad. It’s proven to be virtually “uncrackable” as long as you keep your messages short and foolproof. In fact, mathematically they’re unbreakable.

However, they do have a limitation, in that there are only a finite number of pads that you can use! Re-using a pad will leave a trace which allows you to compare two ciphertexts and decipher the pad used.

Data Destruction

Where is the physical internet?

These things that we talk about in the software world such as The Cloud, have a physical entity in real life. They don’t ‘live up there in the sky’, but are just a housing of servers in a secret building somewhere. In the same way, all the data that you keep on your machines or online are stored somewhere on hard-drives in memory.

Thereby lies the issue, once we are done with these devices, how do we get rid of this sensitive information? In reality, we can’t just “delete things physically”. They exist in space and if not discarded properly, the information inside them can be recovered. Also, people tend not to ‘delete things’ as it is quite a lengthy process for the average person. In order to clean a machine, you may have to overwrite it many times. Especially with SSDs coming into fashion, data is automatically managed and spread across the drive, so there are always traces of your information still there. So naturally, people are lazy and tend to just throw their old things out.

Type 1 & Type 2 Errors

The main takeaway from this segment is that there are always two common errors that occur. Type 1 and Type 2 (False positive/negative). The distinction isn’t too important, but we should be aware that they exist and their effects on events that occur.

In practice, there is usually a trade-off between these two. In minimising one, you are increasing the other. It’s generally hard to minimise both and extremely costly - so it’s on you to prioritise what you think is important.

Another thing to consider is the perspective of other people. Depending on who you ask, they will have a different opinion on what THEY think is more important to minimise.

In the lecture, Richard recounts a story of an Indian lady and her boy coming in from Sydney airport. They both go towards the airport security gates - but by practice can only go through one at a time. The lady proceeds first, and passes without any issues. However, her child upon entering the gate, is aggressively beeped at by the machine. The security officer on standby sees this, acknowledges what has happened and lets the boy through anyway. No pulling him away, no further questions, nothing. He simply lets him pass and go on with his day.

Now why exactly is this the case? Why was the boy not interrogated further and checked thoroughly. Well, considering the circumstances: a) The boy was a very young child, and likely meant no harm b) The mother would have been distraught if they took her boy away c) It would have disrupted the processing of others and took a fair bit of time and effort, enough to be discouraged by

Therefore, from the perspective of someone who works there in that position, they would be more inclined to let these small affairs go with a good degree of confidence that things will be okay. They have to go through hundreds of thousands of incoming crowds every day - so it is within their interest to reduce false positives, and conversely increase false negatives.

To someone from the outside they might argue that false positives should be improved, and that security should be checking all these cases out because of that threat. But that would require them to stop each person every time and go through all that trouble for the slim chance that they actually pose a threat.

The Anatomy of An Attack

In this segment, Richard amuses us with a story of how a smart UNSW alumni hacked his way into a company.

To summarise, this famous hacker was challenged to penetrate a company. Eventually he achieved this by doing tons of research about the company and attacking a weak link and social engineering to gain access to the CEO’s computer.

Breaking this down into steps, we can see the anatomy of an attack:

Someone is targeted

Then made to do something dumb (Spear fishing)

Privilege Escalation

Using an exploit

Telegraph Poles

Let’s look at telegraph poles. Logically to be safe, they should be straight right?

Well in reality, sometimes there are poles which are wonky. This is because there is a wire pulling it one way, and not a counter-wire pulling it from the opposite direction. As such, overtime, the pole eventually drifts into the direction of the sole wire, making it crooked. Similarly, for a system to be successful, we should invest on making people work in their self interest. In this way, a system is able to thrive if you have people counteracting each other by working for their beliefs.

[musingsofanewbienurse]

Transitioning to Veganism

In January 2019 I decided to take part in veganuary with the intention of being fully vegan afterward (bar what was already in my cupboard and needed eating up). It wasn’t a sudden decision, in fact, it had been a gradual choice that I had been considering for months at this point. I had been vegetarian since July 2017 and had been gradually decreasing my intake of animal products so that by the end of 2018 my diet was 80-90% plant based already. I had been avoiding dairy for the most part anyway as it causes my skin to break out badly and cheese was an expensive luxury on a furgal university budget. The only thing that really let me down in that aspect was when I ate out or by not checking labels.

Like most people I had watched the world-famous Netflix document ‘What the Health’ in the spring of 2017 and that was probably one of the first major catalyst that lead to me analysing and changing my diet. I had grown up on a small, rural island off the mainland of England, one of its main agricultures being farming. Every-day I would see cows and sheep grazing in fields both outside my bedroom window and on the way to school, I saw these animals had a good quality of life (in a way that they do not always in larger areas of Britain and the US), and like many people, never really questioned the connection between that and my dinner plate.

I was also notoriously fussy, and although I liked most varieties of meat, the same could not be said of vegetables. In fact I hated every single one until I was 16 and then I could just about stomach carrots. A healthy diet I did not have, despite how much my parents tried to push otherwise. Going vegetarian was simply not a viable option for me back then; but on joining university I started to cook for myself and my taste matured, leading me to today, where I now love 99% of veg (broccoli is legitimately my favourite food) and it makes up the bulk of my diet.

It meant, that when I watched the documentary I was able to genuinely consider becoming vegetarian, and started to slowly phase meat out of my diet. Even then, I knew that ultimately I did want to become vegan, after seeing the impact the meat and dairy industry has on our health*, the environment and on the animals who are subjected to it. But I wanted to do it the right way and for the long-term. If I cut out everything at once I knew after a week or two I would revert back to my usual diet, my body craving things that had always been present. I also wanted to be educated about things I substituted meat for; I go to the gym regularly and I wanted to know that what I was eating would have a good variety of nutrients. And most importantly, I didn’t want my mental health to suffer.

Like most young women growing up in this century I have had issues with food and my body. Although I have never received any formal help or diagnosis I definitely had an unhealthy relationship with food, especially in my mid-teens, though even now some days are harder than others. For the most part I am a lot better, but I was wary that if I suddenly cut out a lot of different foods and placed a lot of restrictive rules on my diet that I would be taking a huge step backwards, that I would go back to obsessing over every little thing that I eat. I didn’t want to sacrifice my health and knew that if I was to do this safely, then gradually converting my diet was the only answer.

And that is what I did. First it was dairy milk, an easy swap as there are so many alternatives on the market. I mainly go for soya at home because it’s the cheapest and I really don’t need anything fancy in my bowl of porridge, but oat is by far my favourite and go-to when I’ve gone out for a coffee.

Eggs was one of the biggest changes. In my second year of uni I had eggs for breakfast nearly everyday that I wasn’t on placement, and I genuinely didn’t see myself as able to give them up. But in third year I found a love of porridge and overnight oats, or tofu scramble if I fancied something closer to what I usually had eaten. And eventually I was only having eggs when eating out, there is nothing nicer than an eggs benedict (and if anyone can link me to a good vegan recipe for it, I will love them forever).

Like I previously mentioned, cheese wasn’t a large part of my diet, because as a university student it just wasn’t worth budgeting for. I’ve never had a problem with any of the vegan alternatives I’ve tried, though this may be because I ate cheese so rarely that I couldn’t really directly compare the two.

Chocolate, the crux for many people, was a big one. “But how do you live without chocolate?” I’m normally asked by my horrified coworkers, and the answer is that I don’t. In fact, I probably have it in some form everyday, it just took a bit of getting used to looking for the vegan friendly alternatives in tescos. But there are plenty, and even some of the major brands are accidently vegan (looking at you bourbons).

Eventually it just left occasions where I was eating out (laziness would sometimes lead to me choosing the vegetarian option, and other times it was simply because that was what I wanted to eat), and items where I had not checked the label for hidden ingredients. Milk powder is in bloody everything, and if it’s not that, it’s normally eggs. Quorn in particular is well-known for this, though their vegan range is steadily growing.

By December 2018 I felt ready to take on Veganuary. I no longer felt like my diet, or lifestyle would be negatively impacted by it and I saw it as a great chance to draw a line under the sand. When speaking to my dad on the phone two weeks in he asked if I was struggling yet. And honestly? I hadn’t even noticed, as there had been so few occasions where I would have chosen the non-vegan option anyway. To me it just made sense that after January I continued to eat plant based, and now, at the end of February I haven’t regretted it once. I am a giant advocator of eating a vegan diet. I feel so much healthier than when I ate meat, am more active than ever and can’t remember the last time I fell ill. I do understand it’s not possible for everyone, people who have had or have eating disorders may definitely struggle, and placing a load of rules on what they can and can’t eat wouldn’t be beneficial to their mental health in the slightest (just as it wouldn’t have been for me once upon a time).

I also understand that if you’re not educated about nutrition and the aspects of a healthy diet, then becoming vegetarian/vegan doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be any healthier, especially with the wide range of plant based foods and meals now out in supermarkets (I’m not berating any of these releases in the slightest, it’s amazing to see so many options and makes it a lot more accessible than it once was, it just means navigating for a healthy option isn’t always the easiest thing). Being vegan is still a privilege, I only have to support myself on my wage and it leaves plenty of room to opt for the more expensive meat alternatives and keep my diet balanced. A single parent with two kids however doesn’t have this option, and places like Lidl and Aldi are brilliant for selling a large quantity of meat for a relatively low price.  

But reducing your meat and animal product intake is good for the planet, and I do think that every little thing, whether that be partaking in Meatless Monday or swapping dairy milk for soya helps. No-one has to be perfect or commit to the most severe of changes, especially if they feel it is what they should do because Instagram told them to, but making a substitution here and there helps massively.

*I am not saying that meat and dairy cannot make up a healthy diet, though like anything in large quantities it isn’t beneficial. There is also plenty of evidence against cows milk and how we digest it. In early 2019 the Eat-Lancet commission (linked below) was published, outlining global targets for the world population to achieve a healthy, nutritionally balanced diet whilst keeping food production sustainable. The diet consists mainly of fruit, vegetables, grains and legumes, with a small amount of meat and fish. It is fairly similar to the Mediterranean diet, and emphasises that you don’t need to cut all animal products out, but reducing them would be highly beneficial on a number of levels!

Walter, W., Rockstrom, J., Loken, B. et al (2019) Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT-Lancet Commission on Healthy Diets from Sustainable Food Products. The Lancet. [online] Available at: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31788-4/fulltext#seccestitle10

[povlsen29bird-blog]

How To Lose Weight

Some people feel better supplementing the already active T3 (sometimes prepared from pig thyroid glands), as it can give a stronger effect than the T4 hormone, but its effect is often harder to control.

Healthy Weight LossThere are a lot of fad diets out there that promise to help you drop weight fast—but do they work, and more importantly, are they healthy? The 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans provide suggested daily calorie intakes based on gender, age, and physical activity level. When you know your calorie budget, then you can plan on how many servings of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, dairy, and other protein sources to include every day. There's a lot here. So, to demystify what sustainable weight loss looks like, we not only dug into the research, we also reached out to experts who help people lose weight, exercise, and explore their relationships to food, to ask them what actually works. Here's what they told us about losing weight in a healthy, effective, and sustainable way. The authors wanted to compare low-fat vs. low-carb diets, but they also wanted to study genetic and physical makeups that purportedly (their word) could influence how effective each type of diet will be for people. Previous studies had suggested that a difference in a particular genetic sequence could mean that certain people will do better with a low-fat diet. Other studies had suggested that insulin sensitivity may mean that certain people will do better with a low-carb diet.

If you don't have diabetes they will show you how to lose or maintain your weight and eat more nutritiously. If you are at risk for diabetes, or have pre-diabetes, ( Stage 1 Type 2 diabetes ), the book's "Food Do's" can help you prevent full-blown (Stage 2) Type 2 diabetes. Weight management is about long-term success. People who lose weight quickly by crash dieting or other extreme measures usually gain back all (and often more) of the pounds they lost because they haven't changed their habits in a healthy way that they can stick with. To mix things up, I'll add variants to those meals. One week I might do seared tuna on my salad (a little more money), or do a spinach omelet instead of just scrambled eggs with spinach on the site. I even switch up my first meal with bacon, sausage, or no meat, just to keep things interesting and new. The 5:2 diet. Eat as much as you need to feel satisfied 5 days of the week and then eat calorie-restricted on two days (500 calories per day for women, 600 calories for men). I don't recommend this as it requires calorie counting and more planning, but some people still find they enjoy it. Dark chocolate. You can enjoy dark chocolate in moderation. It contains healthy fats called MUFAs that help your metabolism burn more calories and fat, and it can also slow down your digestion so you can feel full and indulge less. In this case, seek professional help Trying to lose weight without first combating food addiction is next to impossible. Kolors Healthcare sparked its inception on 6th of October 2004 with 11 email protected Srinagar Colony, Hyderabad. Today we stand as World's first ISO 9001:2008, certified company in Inch - loss Program. Kolors is recognized for providing best solutions into Slimming, Skin and Hair care, and has reached the highest standards in terms of client satisfaction in a span of 14 plus have extended our Healthcare services across Telangana, AP, Tamilnadu,and Karnataka. We did all analyses according to intention to treat and using Stata v11.0 and SPSS v17.0. We preferred objectively measured weight, but we used self reported weights when they were the only measures available. We assumed participants for whom weight at follow-up was not available to have their baseline weight for the primary analyses. We also did a sensitivity analysis using the last recorded weight as the follow-up weight. Shape A Unisex Slimming & Health Care Centre in Karnal reveals an avant-garde gymnasium, well-equipped and tastefully decorated. The establishment is visited by people of all age-groups with multiple requirements, all of which are addressed to with attention and care. Whether the need is losing or gaining weight, increasing flexibility, toning muscles or improving cardiovascular health, this establishment offers proper guidance and help. The fitness centre owes its overwhelming success to its provision of the finest equipments. There are on-site personal lockers for the customers ensuring safety of their belongings. The facility remains functional between 05:00-16:00 - 13:00-21:00. Customers can pay their fees via multiple payment modes like Cash, Visa Card, Cheques, Credit Card, Debit Cards, Master Card, American Express Card, depending upon their individual convenience. As a beer home brewer, I know that taking barley or wheat and letting it sit in hot water for an hour converts the starches into sugar. Beer is sugar water with alcohol. So I always imagine my body as a mash tun (the vessel used to heat up grains to convert them to wort, which is beer before it has alcohol). Located within the famous 5-star Akra Hotel, The LifeCo Akra Antalya Center offers its guests Europe's best result oriented options of healthy nutrition and detox programs. At The LifeCo Akra Antalya, you will feel renewed by a comprehensive set of therapies, a healthy nutrition plan and the ultimate soothing environment while your loved ones enjoy the city of Antalya. Ideal for business trips and family holidays, The LifeCo Akra Antalya could be your next stop for a refreshing and pleasant holiday with spectacular views of the Mediterranean Sea. Whether or not you're specifically aiming to cut carbs, most of us consume unhealthy amounts of sugar and refined carbohydrates such as white bread, pizza dough, pasta, pastries, white flour, white rice, and sweetened breakfast cereals. Replacing refined carbs with their whole-grain counterparts and eliminating candy and desserts is only part of the solution, though. Sugar is hidden in foods as diverse as canned soups and vegetables, pasta sauce, margarine, and many reduced fat foods. Since your body gets all it needs from sugar naturally occurring in food, all this added sugar amounts to nothing but a lot of empty calories and unhealthy spikes in your blood glucose.

After four weeks, the group eating the least number of calories lost four pounds of fat and little to no muscle, whereas the group that maintained the smaller calorie deficit lost only a little fat.

Even if you don't drink soda, there are dozens of simple, everyday habits you can follow to lose weight. In fact, Andy Yurechko, MS, RD, of Augusta University Medical Center in Georgia, believes the most successful dieters avoid fads and focus on long-term sustainable practices. Compare and contrast brands. Some yogurts, for example, boast that they're low in fat, but they're higher in carbs and added sugars than others, Stewart says. Foods like gravy, mayonnaise, sauces and salad dressings often contain high amounts of fat and lots of calories.

Women who regularly read food labels are, on average, nine pounds lighter than those who don't do this, research from the U.S. National Health Interview Study found.

Motivation, for instance: One person may be mentally ready to diet, while another might make only a halfhearted effort, surrendering to temptation after a short time on the assigned diet.

It's common to lose 2-6 pounds (1-3 kg) within the first week on a strict low-carb diet, and then on average about one pound (0.5 kg) per week as long as you have a lot of weight remaining to lose. This translates into about 50 pounds (23 kilos) per year. Go to the Library. To learn about living well with diabetes, make the VHL go-to-guide your go-to resource. And remember that the VHL has lots of great information to help you get healthy by eating better and exercising more. Keep a food log. Recording what you eat every day helps to keep you accountable and motivated. Guests at the Pritikin Longevity Center are encouraged to eat. Hunger is NEVER an issue. In fact, many of our guests say they're eating more than they ever have, and they're losing weight. Shape A Unisex Slimming & Health Care Centre in Karnal. Aerobic Classes with Address, Contact Number, Photos, Maps. View Shape A Unisex Slimming & Health Care Centre, Karnal on Justdial. Kim says, Whilst this does depend on the individual, for the average person who isn't following an intensive exercise programme, eating three meals per day, five hours apart is ideal. For example, you might have breakfast at 9am, lunch at 2pm and dinner at 7pm. It's also always a good idea to avoid eating late in the evening. Unsurprisingly, the results showed that nothing had happened to the weight of the women receiving calcium or the placebo. However, the group which took the multivitamin lost more weight - about 3 kg more - and improved their health markers. Among other things, their basal metabolic rate (the rate at which the body burns calories when at rest) increased. While there are probably plenty of pre-made bean and veggie soup options that just need a few minutes to heat through on the stovetop, making your own soup is really easy—and a great idea for your health. Homemade soups are much lower in sodium - about 100 milligrams or less per 2-cup serving. By contrast, 2 cups of many canned soups contain a blood-pressure-busting 1,200 milligrams or more, a worrisome amount considering that health experts recommend consuming no more than 1,500 milligrams of sodium for the entire day. This is also a great way to use up all those leftover vegetables in your crisper—pretty much anything works in this soup. Slowing down your meal helps you counter this outcome by allowing you to plug into your body's satiety cues , giving it time to figure out that it's had enough food. In practice, this means setting aside 15 to 20 minutes to have your meal. Enjoy how your food smells and tastes, savor each mouthful by chewing mindfully, put your fork down between bites, breathe and give yourself room to feel nourished and filled up. Yohimbine is a natural substance that increases fat loss , and is particularly helpful with losing stubborn” fat in the belly, hip, and thigh regions. Bottom line, you can lose a large amount of weight fast, but you need to do it safely and under a doctor's care. However, the safest weight loss method is to eat less and exercise more, with a plan and goal of losing one to two pounds per week. Changing the way you go about eating can make it easier to eat less without feeling deprived. It takes 15 or more minutes for your brain to get the message that you've been fed. Eating slowly will help you feel satisfied. Eating lots of vegetables and fruits can make you feel fuller. Another trick is to use smaller plates so that moderate portions do not appear too small. Changing your eating schedule, or setting one, can be helpful, especially if you tend to skip, or delay, meals and overeat later. Fermented foods: These enhance the function of good bacteria while inhibiting the growth of bad bacteria. Sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, yogurt, tempeh, and miso all contain good amounts of probiotics, which help to increase good bacteria. Time have studied kimchi widely, and study results suggest that it has anti-obesity effects. Similarly, studies have shown that kefir may help to promote weight loss in overweight women. Statistics show that most Americans try to diet or lose weight at one point or another. However, focusing on long-term health and fitness is a superior approach. Try to make a habit of exercising and eating right - not just to lose weight, but also to feel better and live longer. It can be hard at first. In fact, it took years for me to do it in my own life. But now proper nutrition and exercise are always on my mind and part of my routine. Just keep at it, and if you fall off the wagon, pick yourself up and get back on. Slimming Pill Hailed 'Holy Grail' In Tackling Obesity 's well worth the effort.

How well medical nutrition therapy works depends on how much effort you put into it. Your dietitian can give you information and suggestions, but you must change your habits.

[longlivefeedback]

Start with a bang, end with a whimper: the problem with fandom studies

Imagine you start talking about a new fic idea, and it’s a hit! People are excited, they’re weighing in, they’re even signal boosting. This is going to be awesome, you think, and you start writing. A thousand words, five thousand words, ten thousand words - the first chapter is a big one, but it has to be perfect. After all, so many people are interested, and you’re using a lot of ideas they gave you, so you want it to be as good as possible. 

Finally, you’re ready to publish. One last round of editing, then you hit post. Look!, you want to yell. I did the thing you wanted me to do! 

And... tumbleweeds. 

There are a handful of kudos. Those are nice, but what do they really mean? Was it great? Was it adequate? Are they going to stay on for the next chapter? A few comments follow. Some are polite “thank you for writing this” notes - those make you smile. About half of them point out perceived plot holes or typos and nothing else. 

Where are the people who thought it was cool, who sent you ideas, who talked about wanting to see what you’d come up with? Are they there, lurking; or did they just not see the notification; or did they decide it wasn’t interesting enough to bother with? 

Was it worth all those hours you spent writing it? 

As authors, a lot of us have been there. As readers, we can sympathize with authors who have poured time and effort into something, only to receive very little response. 

And thus comes the problem with fandom studies. 

During the data collection phase, everyone is very interested - on the whole, actually getting the information to analyze isn’t difficult, because users are great about signal boosting, answering surveys, and giving their own predictions about the eventual results. 

Then it gets to the cursory overview. Demographics, “this many people said this,” a lot of basic factoids that are cool but not very important or relevant. A lot of time might have gone into taking the raw data and converting it to an easily digestible form, but it’s not what we’re here for. It’s just the foundation. 

This gets some attention. Quite a few people will reblog it and ask questions, and some will mention wanting to see the actual answers to the questions that the study wants to answer. It’s nowhere near the level of engagement reached in the data collection phase, but that’s to be expected - not everyone who was willing to take a few minutes and answer survey questions or signal boost is really interested in the results, but they were being supportive and helping out! 

We finally, finally get to the analysis, the hardcore number crunching, the hours of fighting with excel and desperately reviewing statistics textbooks and sending panicked messages to your old math teachers because wait am I actually doing this right or- 

By this point, most of the engagement has dropped off. There are a fair number of likes and a handful of reblogs, but almost all of the written feedback centers around pointing out perceived errors or problems and nothing else. 

This is, admittedly, to be expected. Truly math- and stats-intensive analyses are much less accessible, less fun to read, and generally harder to understand even if you’re comfortable with the methods being used. However, it also leaves the study authors feeling like they’ve put a lot of work into something that people simply aren’t interested in, despite the fact that it was the stated goal of the project since the very beginning. 

As such, I’d like to make a few suggestions as to how to support fandom studies. 

1. It’s okay to say “thanks!” and leave. 

You don’t have to write an essay or go over every bit of math. If you’re interested, let the author know that you appreciate their work, even if you don’t say anything more than “this is cool” or “oh nice!”

2. The rules of concrit still (mostly) apply. 

When it comes to data, there’s no opting out of concrit. These are facts. If there’s a mistake, it should be pointed out and addressed. However, if this comes in the form of “this should have been considered instead” and nothing else, it’s like getting a comment that only says “your protagonist was OOC.” This is especially frustrating when the author has no good way to respond to the criticism. 

3. If you leave criticism or a correction, make sure the author can talk to you about it. 

First of all, the author may not have enough details to make use of your crit. If you simply say “I’m not sure this was the right statistical test,” but they’re not able to reach out to you for further details, the author will proceed to tear their hair out. Therefore, this isn’t the time for anon asks, which must be answered publicly, or replies, which may not be able to tag you and group blog moderators must respond from their main blog. Furthermore, criticism is best offered in private - frankly, it’s highly embarrassing to have a mistake pointed out in front of everyone, and it’s much more polite and respectful to give them a chance to make any corrections without having to do so in front of an audience.  And finally, the criticism or correction offered may not, in fact, be correct. Everyone occasionally misreads, misunderstands, or gets mixed up. If this is brought up privately, it’s easy to clear up. If it’s public, and the author has no way to respond, and there’s no “thanks for your work,” they will be screaming into the void.

4. Studies are made to be shared. 

The questions a study is trying to address are generally applicable in some wider sense, and the work that goes into this is meant to spread answers as far as possible to people can find them. Therefore, if sharing and signal boosting ends at the data collection stage, the study has failed. 

Reblogging is tricky, especially if it’s not to a fandom blog, but sharing it is still important. Send it to your friends, tag people who might be interested in the replies, link to it if you see related posts that could use some data support (or contradiction), and cite it if you talk about the issue. If you’re a stats-minded person, write a more accessible version of it or use it in some of your own discussions. Post (cited and sourced, tagging the author) excerpts. Use it in your fandom metas. 

Creators thrive on feedback, and this includes those who conduct fandom studies. Please remember that behind every nifty little chart is a person (or several people) who have put a whole lot of effort into their work, and not number crunching machines who happily churn away and assimilate every bit of impersonal criticism. 

Data analysis can be as rewarding as writing a great fic, but when it comes to practicalities, there’s no such thing as information for the sake of information.

Support fandom studies. It’s easy to get discouraged when audience interest goes from overwhelming to tepid to tumbleweeds, especially when the majority of written feedback is neutral or negative. Answering fandom questions isn’t going to help cure cancer - that’s my day job - but it will, hopefully, make fandom better. 

Besides, they’re doing math so you don’t have to, which is always a good thing. 

So to end this post, we want to give a shout out and thanks to @toastystats for their extensive work and analysis of ao3 tags; @ao3commentoftheday for hosting discussions about commenting culture and looking at the meaning of kudos; @dawnfelagund who has written for us and helps keep the tolkien fandom going, including studies like her look at gender in the tolkienfic community; @cfiesler for looking at fan platform use over time.

We are surely missing more, so readers, can you help us out? Link to a cool fandom study you’d like to share and/or tag someone who writes them! 

[digidartspost]

A Guide To Conversion Rate Optimization

In today’s digital world, online traffic is tremendously inconsistent. If you’re unable to drive visitors to your conversion funnel, then it might be difficult for your business to stand out from the rest. The best way to approach visitors online and boost conversions of your business website is to run efficient conversion rate optimization campaigns.

A successful conversion rate optimization campaign not only saves you time, money, and effort but also allows you to explore new growth opportunities and strategies. It also helps you in understanding your website by providing customer behaviour insights and improves UX (User Experience) to accomplish your goals. So, let’s understand more about conversion rate optimization and its elements in detail. Keep on reading.

What is a Conversion?

When a visitor to your website completes a targeted goal, like filling out a form or making a purchase, this is known as conversion. It includes activities such as email signups, creating an account, service subscription, form completions, leads, and online sales (purchasing a product or service).

What is the Conversion Rate?

The conversion rate is the percentage of the visitors to your website who fulfil the targeted goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors. This process of converting a visitor into a customer is known as conversion rate.

Conversion Rate = Number of conversions ÷ Total number of visitors x 100

For instance, if you had 60 conversions from 1,200 interactions, your conversion rate would be 5% since 60 ÷ 1200 x 100 = 5%.

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

The process of optimizing your website or landing page experience and maximizing the percentage of visitors who perform the desired action on a website such as purchasing a product, signing up, filling out a form, clicking on a link, click on ‘’add to cart’’, are the examples of CRO.

Elements of Conversion Rate Optimization

An effective conversion optimization campaign analyses data thoroughly, runs multiple tests, modifies content to make it more relevant to the visitors, and draws the appropriate conclusions. So, look at these five major elements that can be optimized to run an effective conversion rate for the website.

Landing Page Design and Format

Landing page optimization is the first and foremost thing to captivate any visitor to a website. A well-designed and formatted landing page grabs more eyes and represents the usability and success of a website. For instance- When a visitor visits the website for the first time, they might look for the products and services on the webpage. And if an option such as “Add to Cart'' has been given on the web page without scrolling much, it can increase the conversion rate of the webpage automatically.

Website Content

A well-designed and aesthetically beautiful website can increase traffic to your site. It can linguistically grab people and turn them into potential leads. Content is the queen of the website after the design. Make sure to write compelling content that emphasizes the product's persuasiveness. A catchy headline with captivating content that answers all the relevant questions makes the webpage look appealing and accomplishes the goal of attracting clients online.

Call-To-Action

A call-to-action (CTA) is exactly what it sounds like: a request or call for customers to take any desired action on the webpage. This action could be anything from signing up for a newsletter to scheduling a webinar, making a purchase, or using a service. The more specific and crispier the CTA, the more leads it generates.

Site Structure and Easy Navigation

The structure of your website should be focused on creating an easy-to-navigate experience. At its most basic level, site structure is a graph describing how different pages on your site interact with one another. However, every site has different pages and navigation structures.

For instance, when you usually visit a website, you first visit the homepage and explore way down through the categories and subcategories until you find what you're looking for. Your users will have no trouble browsing through your site if this entire procedure is seamless. However, if it is unstructured, people will become disoriented and depart your site. So, ensure to build an easy navigation structure so that users can easily locate anything they need to fulfil their goals with the fewest number of clicks feasible on the webpage. An easy-to-navigate website is key to generating conversions and improving a brand’s reputation.

Page Speed

Page speed, also known as page load time, has a significant impact on your site's overall performance. In fact, it has a direct impact on the user's experience, the site's conversion rate, and its search engine ranking. A page loading time delay can even reduce the conversion rate up to 7%. So, make sure that your site should load faster to avoid conversion rate loss.

Conversion rate optimization has become a mainstream activity, with everything from mapping the importance of website optimization to strategizing the means and techniques to improve site performance. It not only allows businesses to better understand how customers think, use, and perceive their brand but also provides access to a wealth of data that can be used to create future company initiatives. CRO isn't just another tool for improving your brand's online performance; it's the only way to stand out! So, if you need to hire the best digital marketing agency that can assist you to fulfil your company’s desires. DigiDarts is here to assist you! Being the leading digital marketing company in Delhi, DigiDarts provides 360 digital strategies solutions to clients to succeed in the market at affordable packages. So, what are you waiting for? Consult DigiDarts today, and start building a successful CRO for your business.

[wdmsolutionsuk]

How To Create Your Ideal Client Avatar

Attract Your Perfect Clients With a Specific and detailed Client Avatar.

As you’ve found this page, you probably have some idea of what client avatars are, but let’s dig a little deeper and look at how to use them in the right way to access your ideal clients.

What is a client avatar?

Simply put, it’s a fictional persona of your ideal client. Note that this is not the same as your target market. If you’ve been running a business for any length of time, then you no doubt have a very good idea of who your target market is. But a client avatar takes this a step further. Rather than trying to appeal to an audience, you’re trying to appeal to a specific person.

Having a client avatar will allow you to identify not just whom you’re talking with, but to actually understand them on a deeper level. When you can do this, you’ll be able to address them directly in all of your content and marketing materials.

Whether you’re creating copy for your website, your email newsletter, paid advertisements or even YouTube videos, you can target it specifically to your client avatar as though you had them opposite the desk in front of you. By imagining you’re having a conversation with your ideal client, you’ll naturally be writing (or creating) specifically for them.

Doing this will enable you to create a real connection rather than just appealing to a group of people (your target market). This is the big difference between your avatar and your market. Of course, you can (and probably should) have more than one client avatar. You probably serve more than one type of person in your business, especially if you offer different services and/or products.

If you have staff, get them involved. Brainstorm! Everyone has different ideas and I have no doubt that they will think of things that didn’t even occur to you.

Client Avatar Stages

There’s no right or wrong way of making up your client avatar, but there are some best practices and ways to make sure you cover all that you need to. I like to split it into three stages:

Details and Demographics

Goals and Motivation

Challenges and Obstacles

Details and Demographics

This section is all about basic data and is the section that’s most closely linked with your target market as it contains very similar details. There is one huge difference however. The best way to demonstrate this is to show you an example of an Avatar used here at WDM.

This is Paul Sutton

Paul is 45 years old. He’s male, lives in Bury St Edmunds (in Suffolk), and he’s a health club owner. He’s also married with two children.

You may wonder how having children could possibly be relevant and perhaps it’s not, but by giving details like this, it helps to give your avatar character and make them a little more real. This way you can better target them when creating content for you business. Paul earns £70k a year. He went to college, but not university.

So far, most of this sounds fairly standard and exactly the type of facts you’d be looking at when determining your target market. But here’s where that big difference comes in that I mentioned earlier.

Backstory...

When I’m writing content or creating a video I want to see Paul, My Avatar, as a real person, not just a bunch of statistics. If I want to connect with Paul at this level, then I need to know more about him, not just facts and figures. That’s why I’ve created him a backstory. It doesn’t contain his entire life history but it does tell me a little about him and what makes him who he is.

Paul has an established health club with a great reputation. He’s looking to take it to the next level and bring in an operations manager so he can focus on the bigger picture and take more time out without his business being affected. Although Paul has to use computers for his work, he’s not tech-savvy and doesn’t like dealing with technical issues. He’s open to new ideas when it comes to marketing and managing his online growth. His website’s okay, but it’s a little dated and not really much more than an online brochure.

You’ll see how these details further come into play very soon.

Goals and Motivation

What are Paul’s goals and his values? What motivates him?

As we know, Paul would really like to hire an operations manager. This will allow him to focus on the bigger picture, but also to take a little time out of the business. To facilitate this role, Paul knows that he needs to increase membership sign-ups by 30 percent (preferable in the next 12 months).

Why? What’s Pauls motivation?

Well, he may be a businessman but for him (and most people) it’s not just success in business that we strive for. We’d like to also improve other areas of our lives.

I mentioned taking time out of the business. Paul would like to spend more time with his family and he’d like to get back into some of his old hobbies. He’s spent most of the last few years running his business, and now he’d like to devote a bit more time to leisure activities. He also feels that he never travelled as much as he’d have liked so he’s keen to make up for lost time.

Values

What are Pauls values? Well, he worked long and hard to build his business. It’s important to him that it stands the test of time and maintains a great reputation.

So he values outstanding customer service.

He wants his Health club to be welcoming, comfortable and unintimidating. Remember, this is a health club, not a muscle gym. He wants people to feel warm and invited. He also, of course, genuinely wants to help his members achieve their health, fitness, and relaxation goals.

He values his staff highly and would like to help them with professional development where he can. He believes in promoting within where possible.

Challenges and Obstacles

What challenges and obstacles does Paul face?

What’s stopping him from achieving his goals?

Well, he has a website, but it isn’t converting well. it’s really just an online brochure. It does generate phone calls but there’s no real system in place for dealing with these. He’s not really doing anything with his website or measuring conversions. He doesn’t have any analytics to know what’s working and what isn’t. You’ll probably see it written or hear me say it many times but if we don’t measure, we can’t improve.

Paul has low client retention after year 1 ends. This isn’t because of poor service or anything negative. Its simply the standard in his industry. People will often join a gym or health club and not renew the following year because well, let’s face it, most of us have done this at some point (I know I have). But, if there were something he could do to improve retention, that would make a big difference to his business. It’s usually far easier to retain a client than gain a new one.

Paul is also concerned about losing business to larger competitors with better marketing strategies and perhaps bigger budgets, such as Bannatyne’s, which is of course a well-known brand and also local to him. He needs to find a way to make his club stand out against this competition.

Paul is very busy. His role as owner is demanding and he doesn’t have enough time to complete his tasks (or he certainly feels that way). He’s not sure how to scale the business from where it is now and he feels a bit trapped in a cycle because he can’t see how to free up more time so he can move things forward (focus on the bigger picture).

I’ve learned a lot about Paul but how will this help me in my business?

So What?

I’ve learned a lot about Paul but how will this help me in my business.

I’ve identified that Paul is my ideal client. But how does this information help me?

Knowing what Paul would like to achieve, what motivates him, and why he does what he does allows me to tailor the services I offer specifically to meet those needs.

I can see now that Paul will benefit from a website redesign that engages visitors and encourages them to take action. This might be to book an appointment, become a member, or order a spa-package.

I know that automation will help reduce his admin time, his costs and increase sign-ups. It needs to be easy to use and non-techie because he’s obviously not interested in that stuff. He doesn’t do technical. He has enough on his plate and doesn’t want to deal with hosting, website maintenance, back-ups, and security. With this knowledge, I know create a website care-plan that will be perfect for Paul.

I can install analytics on his website and display them in a way that’s simple but allows him to see analyse website visitor behaviour and also measure conversions. His care plan can include making improvements based on the data from his analytics.

Paul will probably be interested in some kind of lead generation system too, that to entices and draws in new members. This would include landing pages and full email automation that ensures everyone gets the right email at the right time with no manual work required by him or his team. Once it’s in place, it will run itself 24/7. As long as his subscribers are being sent the right e-mails at the right time, they can then be given an offer that’s specific to them.  They can also join or pay online depending on what the service is. This is far more likely to bring in new business than the simple phone number he currently has.

Paul would also benefit from ongoing newsletter that offers advice, help and perhaps incentives to stay a member after their year 1 contract ends. As long as the emails are well-timed, especially coming up to that 10-12 month period, he’s far more likely to be able to retain more clients after that first year.

To further increase traffic to his website (or business in general), a local marketing campaign would be extremely beneficial.

I can offer him an audit/review that includes Google Maps, and his ‘Google my business’ page. Perhaps offer some optimisation to help him rank higher for relevant terms to his health club.

The same applies with SEO. Paul would really benefit from a local SEO campaign to make sure that he is showing in Google when (the right) people are searching for those kinds of services. I could also look at targeted pay-per-click campaigns specifically to his area.

It might be a good idea to suggest that Paul creates a refer-a-friend incentive for any of his members so they can bring in people and perhaps get either a discount, a free month’s membership, a free massage or something similar if a friend becomes a member.

Because I have a detailed Ideal client Avatar, I now have an array of specific services that I can offer Paul. And, because they’re tailored to his needs, I know that not only is he likely to agree to them, but also (and perhaps more importantly), they’re actually going to help him achieve his goals.

Paul will be an extremely happy and long-term client. In turn, I’ll feel great for being able to help him achieve what he’s set out to do.

So now I’ve built up a specific image of my ideal client. I can speak directly to them in all my marketing efforts.

This includes my website, my services, my email newsletter segmentation (an email autoresponder that segments subscribers based on their actions and ensure they only receive emails that they are interested in), and my video content.

When your content is designed for your ideal client, you are far more likely to attract…

Wait for it….

YOUR IDEAL CLIENT!

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Originally published here: https://webdesignandmarketing.co.uk/marketing/how-to-create-your-ideal-client-avatar/

[wesleybates]

How to execute a successful B2B Email outreach campaign?

Maybe it was your first B2B email outreach campaign, or you tried one and quit halfway through. Or you did everything right but didn’t see the results you were looking for. Whatever your reason is, wanting to execute a successful B2B email outreach will be a reality as you have come to the perfect place. A successful B2B email outreach campaign follows the best practices, and leave plenty of room for experimenting, tweaking, analysing so that you can incrementally build up perfect campaigns with better outcomes every time.

Start your campaign by investing in the best email marketing tools, and follow the tips below to get maximum return on investment (ROI) with your B2B email outreach campaign.

Email Marketing statistics.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, around 93% of B2B marketers use email to distribute content. As per Statista, active email accounts are expected to hit 5.6 billion by 2019. About 83 per cent of B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program, with 40% of them saying newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success. The startling thing is that nearly 16% of all the emails never make it into the inbox.

Best Email marketing tools.

Here’s the list of some best B2B Email Marketing Tools:

Zoho Campaigns

Agile CRM

Messenger

Zoho Mail

HubSpot Sales Hub

Bouncelesss

Docsify

Constant Contact

Squarespace

Mailchimp

Pardot

Tips to Get Maximum ROI from your email marketing campaigns

If you are ready to get more out of your B2B email marketing campaigns, follow these seven tips to get maximum ROI from your email marketing campaigns:

Personalise your emails

Personalising your emails make them more relevant to the individual subscribers. A personalised email is sent by companies using their subscribers’ data to offer them with more relevant offers and ensure a positive communication experience. Personalised email marketing enables you to send relevant emails based on personal information such as greeting them using their first names. Also, they can be used mass mailing with personalised subject lines to behaviour-based trigger emails, including reactivation, birthday emails, etc.

Use Interactive graphics.

Make sure to use interactive graphics including, videos, GIFs, photos in your emails. Incorporating interactive graphics in your B2B email marketing campaigns has a tremendous visual impact on the user. Moreover, it will encourage the user engagement, which in turn will trigger the user to click the call-to-action button on your mail.

Hook with your subject.

Use engaging subject lines for a successful B2B email outreach campaign as it will let people open your emails to learn more about your company and ultimately become customers. So, to hook with your subject, create short, personal subject lines using active verbs that give your email readers an accurate idea of what they can expect to find inside your email. You can also generate subject lines conveying a sense of urgency. After all, your subject line is the first and possibly your impression on your customers.

As per Amy Porterfield, Online Marketing Expert, “Don’t underestimate the power of this one simple sentence because email marketing is the most effective means of online marketing.” So, keep the subject line simple, short, fun and relevant to the content in your email by using action words that evoke emotion, interest and curiosity to encourage opens.

Keep the message short and concise.

Once your subscribers open an email or click through to your landing page, you have mere seconds to capture their attention. So, it is recommended to avoid using complicated words such as technical jargons. Instead, write your email as if you were talking to a friend. Similarly, keep your content compelling and to the point such as it will grab the attention of your readers and keep them interested in reading it.

Mobile-friendly emails.

Smartphone usage is sky-rocketing, and with it, the number of people reading email on their mobile device is also increasing. As per Litmus, about 53% of email is now opened on a mobile device. This number is up by 500% from 2010, and so it is safe to bet that it is going to continue growing. Now, this means that you should mobile-friendly emails that display optimally between a desktop/laptop and a mobile device to ensure that it will look great regardless of where your customers and prospects will open and read it. So, be concise as possible in both content and design by using simple words and layouts, respectively. Use a single, clear call to action inside the mails instead of including multiple calls to action that could often make things a little complicated on mobile.

Avoid using tiny fonts; instead, use text that can be read easily. It is recommended to use a strong contrast of colours such as dark text on a light background because most people turn down the brightness level on their mobile device to conserve battery. Moreover, they are often reading on the go in the sunlight. So, the strong contrast of colours is easier to read. Also, use only one to three images which are essential to your email.

Combine paid ads with emails.

Smarter marketers, take the relative success of both email marketing and paid ads as a signal to look for ways to combine them for successful campaigns. The success of an email marketing campaign is tied to the number of leads subscribed to your list and to generate leads. The typical approach is driving traffic to your landing page that paid ads excel at.

Use dedicated landing pages.

Email marketing enables you to access a direct line of communication to your audience, which means you don’t have to rely on the ever-changing social media algorithms or third-party platforms to get your message across the audience. You own your email list, and you get to choose when and how often you want to talk to your audience. As 91% of people check their email daily, it is essential to show up in their inbox consistently to stay at top-of-their-minds.

With personalised email marketing, you can automate your content in such a manner that it saves your time without sacrificing customer relationships. If your email marketing strategy is working, then look at your conversion rates to perform optimisation which is one big and fun experiment to perform.

When your email reader is primed and ready to take action, send them your landing page which is dedicated to one Call-To-Action (CTA) that eliminates all other distractions. Usually, it is easier to convert a visitor into a lead with a landing page as it is focused on one core offer. 

The purpose of your email landing page is to move prospects down your sales funnel. The stronger your email landing page is, the more confident you’ll be in sending new subscribers through your sales funnel. As the audience moves through the funnel, your email landing page is a unique opportunity to make a great first impression and start a relationship on a foundation of trust.

Every successful and dedicated landing page will welcome new traffic, convert into more email sign-ups, increase your conversion goals month to month and collect early bird interest in events and latest offers. To sweeten the deal, create email landing pages with freebies and other incentives as they will help to bring in new and quality leads.

Conclusion

Emails are an effective marketing tactic. It is essential to incorporate some aspects into these messages for increasing interactivity by letting your customers respond to polls, surveys and reviews. Please don’t underestimate the value of interactive graphics and visual impact of an email as they create a unique experience to your customers. Instead of offering a discount, spark the curiosity of your audience by making them slide, scratch or pull within the message to reveal a promotional offer. 

Use personalisation techniques to increase your click-through rates. Contact Web Designing Edwards, CO to get successful B2B email outreach campaigns with email marketing services at Apex Info Tech for increasing your click-through rates.

[cliftonsteen]

Coffee Roasting Probes And Tips on Using Them

The readings from different probes and roasters will always vary. However, learning the variables which affect individual roaster probe readings and how to control these can help you with consistency in roasting, data, and quality.

Join us as we look at how to better understand roaster probe data, how different probes work, and how to help ensure your readings are consistent.

You may also like: A Guide to Bean Temperature & The Coffee Roasting Curve

Roaster Probe Position And How to Understand Their Data

A probe is a small electric device that is placed inside a coffee roaster to measure temperatures. The information is then transformed into data and graphs which help roasters to track and document their roasts.

Coffee roasters can have a number of different probes fitted to record different temperatures.

First, you may find a probe that monitors the environmental temperature, which is the air temperature inside the drum. This probe is usually located in the front and centre, on the face of the drum. A lot of the heat transfer in roasting is through the air in the drum, so, following environmental temperature is key to controlling a roast. 

Another important probe measures the bean temperature. Although roasters cannot know the exact temperature of each individual bean, placing a probe that is immersed in the bean mass will help provide the most accurate data. The probe should be placed lower down in the roaster, either on the bottom right or left depending on which direction your drum spins. 

Bean temperature is used to record and analyse Rate of Rise (RoR), which measures the speed at which the temperature of beans is changing over time. Roasters need to find the right ROR to ensure that they get their desired flavour profile without letting the bean heat up or cool down at the wrong point. 

A third probe can be used to measure the exhaust temperature, the temperature of the air as it leaves the drum. This probe is placed at the point in which air is streamed out of the roasting machine. Fay Kamanis, director of the coffee roastery Padre Coffee in Australia, tells me that reading this data along with the input of air “can determine how much heat/air you choose to apply or take away.” 

Probes help with reading data as you roast as well as providing roasters with means to replicate roasts that have worked well. Data analysis has become a tool in replicating great quality coffee.

The left probe will read the environment temperature, whilst the right will give us the bean temperature. Credit: Chris Nance of Coffee Tech.

Which Probes Should You Use?

You can choose a number of different types of probes which can help provide different readings. 

The Resistance Temperature Detector (RTD) probe measures electrical resistance and uses that to determine the temperature. The higher the temperature, the higher the resistance of the flow of electricity, which is then measured on a sensor and converted into a temperature reading. 

RTDs are considered a great option for recording bean temperatures as they’re generally responsive and accurate. They operate well between 0°C/32°F–250°C/482°F, so may not be a good option for recording exhaust temperature.

Another popular probe is the thermocouple. Thermocouples are made up of two different metals within the probe. They work by measuring how the two different metals respond when the temperature changes. These create a temperature-dependent voltage as a result of heating – this voltage is then interpreted to measure temperature. 

Type J or K thermocouples are considered popular among roasters and are also recommended by Scott Rao. Type K thermocouples can work well at higher temperatures and can, therefore, be used as a probe throughout the entire roaster.

Fay explains that their best results are using J Type 3mm thermocouples: “They are extremely durable and give fast and accurate readings. There’s no right or wrong though – it all depends on your machine, roasting style, and personal preferences.”

There are different considerations to make when choosing a probe for your machine, such as the diameter which affects its response time; how well it records at different temperatures, and the cost of the probe, too. Each probe will work differently and will suit different roasters and methods. So, research into probes is a valuable consideration for roasters.

Top Tips For Using Roaster Probes

You may find that roaster probes seem inconsistent or aren’t measuring expected temperatures. Here are some top tips for using and reading temperatures from roaster probes.

Understanding The Roaster & Probe

Consistency is critical in roasting to achieve the desired roast profile and ensure batches of coffee are not wasted. However, varying readings from similar machines will always happen.

Fay, who has roasted on a number of different machines including Has Garanti, RoastMax, Pertroncini, Probat, and Loring, tells me, “No two roasting machines are the same. The important thing to know is that you have consistency in temperature readings with the machine you’re using as opposed to what you previously roasted on and expect that they will most likely be different.” 

When using a new machine, a roaster should use their senses as well as temperature probes to help guide the roast and adjust the curve. Sometimes roasts will follow data perfectly and not turn out as expected, so always trust your own instincts.

Fay says, “Taste is ultimately the best way to assess your roast. The profile will act as your first quality indicator, then confirming via taste is our protocol – especially when you make adjustments to an existing profile.” 

Different probes types and diameters will also result in different readings. Ram Evgi, the founder of roaster manufacturer Coffee-Tech Engineering, based in Israel, tells me, “Every change in the diameter of the measuring probe will affect the reading and the speed of response, a smaller diameter probe will read higher and react faster.” 

Scott Rao points this out on his blog. Using the example of a 1.5mm probe placed next to a 3mm probe during the same roast, Scott Rao explains how bean probe diameter and responsiveness affect the time and temperature data of a roast. As a roaster, you should pick the most appropriate probe for your machine, and use this consistently.

Installing Your Probe

Where your probe is positioned, and how far into the roaster it’s placed, will also affect the reading. 

Ram says, “Every change to how deep the measuring probe is inserted will tremendously affect the reading result. The deeper the probe goes, the higher the temperature it will read at that given moment.”

This can also explain why the same machine may have different results using the same probe. Ram tells me, “Every installation, even with similar machines, will behave slightly differently.”

Maintenance of Roast Probes

Measures in cleaning and maintenance are integral to ensure every part of a roaster is in good working order. 

Fay tells me, “Longevity and accuracy of your probes will rely on regular maintenance – how often will depend on how much volume you roast. You will see ‘roast’ build-up. Cleaning with a cloth or gentle scourer and some warm water will usually do the job.”

Replacing probes is also an option. If you’re after the same consistency, opt for the same type of probe with the same diameters. Remember to install the probe with the same immersion inside the roaster to ensure consistency.

Older roasters that were originally designed without the function of using probes do not have to go without either. Ram tells me that the process of adding roasting probes retroactively is relatively easy. 

You may also like: How And When to Clean Your Coffee Roaster

Ram Evgi calibrating one of the probes installed on a Ghibli roast machine. Credit: Chris Nance

Roaster probes provide valuable information that is represented in roast data. However, each probe will read temperatures in different ways and at different speeds depending on its design or how it’s placed in the roaster.

So, familiarise yourself with the machine, probe, and potential variables to ensure consistency in temperature readings and data. But don’t forget, trust your instincts too, and use your senses alongside data to roast batch after batch of high-quality coffee.

Enjoyed this? Check out A Guide to Achieving Consistency in Coffee Roasting

Photo credit: Chris Nance, Georgia Folker, Padre Coffee Roasters.

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Coffee Roasting Probes And Tips on Using Them published first on https://espressoexpertweb.weebly.com/

[mydigisalon]

55+ Salon Marketing Ideas To Attract New Clients

Online and digital marketing has opened a portal so huge that there are endless things we can do to reach our goals. But we often get distracted by things like “ Viral video concept” and other shiny things that we forget to build a solid base for a brand and dive right into accomplishing bigger goals. While experimenting and trying new tricks is a must in marketing, it’s never too late to perfect the basics.

With fundamental basics, you can never go wrong while building the foundations of your salon. These basics are the tried and tested salon marketing ideas that can be tweaked and improved according to our needs. These basics will help you out at any and all stages of your business to reach out to potential clients and build your brand image. There are 5 things you need to work on for a strong base for salon marketing ideas. Let’s dive into it without further discussion.

Salon Marketing Basic #1: Visual Branding

Visuals always speak louder than words. The visual appeal of a salon should be consistent everywhere from their social media, website, email right to their offline pamphlets. Make sure the color scheme goes with your brand aesthetics and expresses your brand perfectly. To get all this right you need to make sure that everything is just perfect. Focus on key pointers like what your salon personality should be like. Some of the brand themes which you can try are artistic, edgy, indie, wacky or calm, you can even go for abstract. Make sure whatever salon marketing ideas you choose is in sync with what you want your brand to express.

Second thing is that you should keep your target audience in mind at all times while implementing your salon marketing ideas. Think of all the demographic and characteristic traits they might have. Apart from the age group, consider their business interests, shopping behaviors, likes and dislikes etc. Only after all this is sorted, go for your brand logo and color palette. E.g. yellow and teal can be used if you are going for an edgy punk rock look and rose gold or peach if you want to get a more classy and feminine vibe. To sum it up, your brand image should be consistent, meaningful and attract the right audience.

Salon Marketing Basic #2: Website and App

Salon owners don’t give websites and salon booking app much thought and this is where they go wrong. The first thing that potential clients look for when they think about researching a business is to check the website. To help you get the importance of the website we have listed down 4 points:

It helps to connect with your clientele and tell your story in your own words along with pictures of your work. You can tell them about the time where you started, what you believe in and what your vision is.

It gives your salon a sense of legitimacy because the users will have a place to get in touch with you even if they are within your vicinity.

It will help in SEO and SEM optimization. The easiest way to get on top in google search is through SEO optimization and you need to have a website in order to do so. You can even link your social media accounts on your website to reach a broader set of audience.

You can put valid and updated information on your website. Things such as services available at your salon, prices, timings, your best workers and specialists etc.

Salon marketing apps are also important because they give a more personalized feel to the user. Clients can look up for their previous and upcoming appointments along with the pricing for other services all at one place. But keep in mind that all these things should be branded and follow a color palette or theme that represents your brand to your clients in a way that they get a sense of familiarity. They should be able to associate the colors or theme with your brand and recognize you. Website is the best way for clients to book an appointment instead of calling the salon to schedule it. Give your clients as many options as you can.

Salon Marketing Basic #3: Social Media

Social Media has to be on the list of salon marketing ideas, a lot of salon owners are already on it. However, you have to know how to make it work and get potential leads through it.

There are a lot of social media platforms available out there, you can get the best salon ideas via social media. However, not every platform is good for everything. E.g. your brand page on LinkedIn might not be the best option. Facebook and Instagram are better suited for interactive brands. Instagram is perfect for creating a visually appealing vibe with filters, colors etc. It works more like a portfolio for your work. Facebook, on the other hand, is text and videos. The algorithm these days demands more videos like Live podcasts to get more likes and engagement.

Salon Marketing Basic #4: Facebook Ads

Social media marketing or SMM is to reach out to potential clients that you can convert into customers with a little push. Regular social media updates will help in getting people more acquainted with your salon. But Facebook and Instagram ads are important beauty salon advertising ideas to get real-time customers for your salon. Facebook ads with proper targeting and budget will give amazing results. There are 5 things you need to keep in mind about getting everything right.

Friendly and personalised language.

Try to go for short video clips instead of pictures

Keep time-sensitive promotions with a call to action button.

Use Facebook ads manager to keep a track of the metrics and analyse the numbers as frequently as you can.

Change the text copy and creatives timely. It will help to optimize your ad campaign and get more clients.

Salon Marketing Basic #5: Email & Social Reviews

Apart from a website and social media marketing, the marketing suite for salon should also include email marketing and social reviews; two things you can not afford to miss at any cost. To connect more often with your customers you need email marketing because there is no guarantee that they will check your content on your social platform. To make sure that they do not miss out on important deals and other offers, send them a personalized email. It will help them re-book more often. However, make sure they are not sale mails, they’ll go directly to spam or get deleted. Fill your email with personalized content like staff image, stories etc It will help your clients feel more connected with you. It is vital to add emails to your beauty salon marketing plan.

The last point is social reviews, always ask your users to rate and review you on Google, Facebook, Yelp etc. This helps your clients to become your brand advocates by publicly vouching for your work. New customers always go for genuine reviews, they check different platforms for reviews and ratings before spending their money.

It doesn’t matter how good your services are, if the clients are not aware of your brand then your business is as good as closed. You need to make sure that your brand is visible and stands out to get more clients.

Looking for marketing and advertising ideas to grow your salon business?

Let’s take a look at these easy, tried-tested and effective salon marketing ideas to help you secure more clients.

Still thinking how to market your beauty salon? To help you secure more clients, you can definitely on these salon marketing tricks for an easy win. They are easy, tried-tested and fun.

1. Get Your Spa or Salon Listed On Online Directories

Users have a habit of searching online before spending money on services or products. This is the reason why your brand should pop up in search results like google my business, yelp( this is really important, make sure you have an account on Yelp with good ratings), and other social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram etc. with a business profile.

2. Form Partnerships with Other Local Businesses

In order to get new clients and enhance your beauty salon marketing strategies, form new alliances with local businesses with similar offerings. Eg. buy dinner, get a haircut free or movie free etc. These are some of the best hair salon advertising examples that can work for your salon. Offers and deals are really important when it comes to new user acquisition.

3. Offer Referral Discounts

Referral discounts and offerings are a great way to retain old customers and at the same time acquire new ones. You can even work with local businesses for referral schemes. E.g. refer 1 get 20% off, these offers are really lucrative and will surely get you good on foot traffic in your salon.

4. Loyalty Programs or Punch Cards

For your loyal and recurring clients make sure that you have an ongoing loyalty card or offer at all times. It will help you build a good rapport with them and they will keep visiting. E.g. hair spa free after 4 transactions.

5. Salon Promotions that Works

Customers love offers and discounts. Offers like first time visit, last-minute specials or monthly on house discounts or yearly visits etc. You can give clients offers when they first visit or during any time slot when the traffic is low etc. It will pique the customer’s curiosity and they might end up booking an appointment because of these offers. All in all, the ultimate goal is to build salon promotions that work.

6. Share Your Promotions on Social Media

If you have a running promotion or offer, do not forget to list out on Facebook and Instagram. Even if you put a story and your reach is organic, make sure you do it. It will give the vibe that it is an exclusive offer for your social media followers.

7. Make Use of Facebook & Google Ads

Facebook and google ads help in bringing legitimate leads for the business. When users look at an ad they tend to go for it 40% of the time. The success of these ads will depend on your targeted audience and other creatives. When a customer visits your website you can use these ads to re-target them by showing banner ads and redirect them back to your page.

8. Run a Contest in Your Salon

Social media contests are a great way to acquire clients. Run a referral campaign e.g. the user with the most number of referrals will get a day of free services or a hair makeover etc. It is one of the best hair salon Facebook post ideas to increase your salon’s engagement. Think of it as more like a small gift if they get you an adequate number of new clients.

9. Create An Email Newsletter

When your clients book an appointment with you or are paying for the services used, you can ask for their email addresses. When you have enough email IDs in your database to work on, you can blast monthly emails to keep them updated about your salon promotion ideas and offerings. You can even personalize this experience by sending individual reminders addressing them with their names along with the promotions that they can avail.

10. Holidays, Special Events and Gift Certificates

Holidays are a great way to catch potential clients. E.g. Mother’s Day, Black Friday sale, New Year, Christmas etc you can give small discounts like 20% off for all mother’s hair spa on mother’s day. You can even include your client’s anniversary and birthdays to make them feel special and cherished.

Offers like a free manicure with haircut will get more traffic before valentines and proms etc. will get more teenage traffic to your store. And offers like blowdry free with facial will get more mid 20s woman.

Apart from these offers, Gift certificates can also help you attract new clients around the holidays. Campaigns like free $10 gift cards with every $150 gift certificate purchase. So when a client comes to use the gift card and gets another 10$ service gift card there is a high probability that they will end up using your services again.

11. Create a Profitable Front Desk

Your front desk staff is the face of your brand when a customer enters your salon. Apart from that it is one of the main rebooking sale interactions. You should make sure that your staff is well trained to upsell or cross sell to the clients before and after your services.

12. Set up a Selfie Station with your Salon’s Hashtag

Selfie trend is not going to go away anytime soon. You can benefit from it by creating your own mini photo booth within your salon. Just make sure the lighting is great and your clients will post the pics on their social media channels for sure. You can add props like a hashtag cutout or image in the background to make it more authentic. Ask your clients to use the same hashtag while posting and all the posts will come under it.

13. Create a Memorable Client Experience

The main motive of visiting a salon is not just to get a haircut, people expect luxury and pampering with it. Make sure that you create a memorable experience for your clients right from the moment they enter your salon and it should continue till the moment they step out.

14. Carry Exclusive Products

Exclusivity is a factor that can help build brand value. If you keep high quality products that are available only at your salon, it will differentiate you from the competition. Try to upsell these products, if the clients end up liking them then they will keep coming back for more.

15. Cultivate High-Quality Relationships

If you have recurring customers you should work on developing a long term relationship with the. It will only help you get loyal customer connection but they can also help to recommend your services to potential clients. Ask them to rate your salon on social media platforms and refer offline to their friends.

16. Simplify your Pricing

Pricing is the first thing that customers check when they ask for services. Too many options can confuse the customers, you should work on simplifying your pricing structure and menu. Let your services speak for themselves, keep in mind that customers spend more if they understand everything in one go.

17. Branding at its Best

Just the salon space is not your brand, your employees are representing your brand at all times. Make sure that apart from your salon theme their clothes, hairstyles, makeup skin and behavior are always on point.

18. Offer Add-on Services

If you have any add on services, like free blow dry with hair spa etc, then make sure that you coach your staff properly. They should be able to naturally up-sell add-ons or retail while serving the customers.

19. Hold a Super Sale

Running discounted services or offers is a great way to acquire new customers. Running an end of season sale once or twice a year is a good strategy. During this period you can offer all your products and services at 25% off to stimulate retail sales.

20. Referrals to the Rescue

Another way of acquiring new customers or generating potential leads is Referrals. If you have your salon app, you can run an offer for referrals, like refer 2 people get 25% off on your next salon visit.

21. Online Reviews

Online reviews are really important. More than 70% people look for the salon/business online before availing services. You should request your clients to leave an online review when they visit your salon.

22. Offer Express Services

On the go services are a lifesaver for clients. You can offer express or mini services as add-ons to the original service or as a quick service session in between. E.g. basic manicure while getting their hair coloured.

23. Social Stylists

Make your stylists a social media expert. Teach them about the techniques to capture good pictures and end results after the services. Their profiles should speak for themselves, it will help draw new clients while boosting their and your brand image simultaneously.

24. Manage your Reputation

Positive and negative reviews are a part and parcel of online presence. You should engage with both of them in order to provide better customer experience. Listen to their queries, and try to resolve their issues. Make sure you are always polite and professional while interacting with your customers, even when they are rude.

25. Search Engine Optimization

When clients search for salons in your area, make sure that your ranking is good and you appear on top of the search results. Top result + good reviews = New clients. Hence, your beauty salon digital marketing is quite helpful.

26. Google Ads

You can run search and display ad campaigns on Google ads in order to appear on top. Organic search results are great but paid results will get you reliable clients at a much faster rate.

27. Facebook Ads

Everyone is on social media, so clearly it makes sense to advertise on it. Reaching out to clients via facebook ads can help you target them based on their interests and demographics. You can be as picky and as broad in selecting your audience.

28. Update your Website

Website i really important, if you do not have one get it made. My digi salon can help you with that. You need to get a simple and easy to follow website that conveys your message and brand language clearly.

29. Publish your Salon’s Own Blog

Original content and timely updates on your blogs not only helps clients, it also helps maintain your brand image. You can post blogs related to the current market trends or your offerings and their benefits. If you still do not know where to start then download our app and know about the trendy hair salon marketing ideas.

30. Contribute to Guest and Top Salon Blogs

Guests posts and blogs are important to maintain digital presence amongst popular salon publications. IF you content is accepted by the guest sites, you can get free coverage and traffic while reaching out to a new set of users.

31. Polls, Quizzes and Feedbacks

Social media can be used for a two way communication for businesses instead of just posting content. You can run a weekly series of stories with polls, quizzes and feedback on your social media channels with incentives for participation. It will help boost your online presence and engage with customers who normally wouldn’t.

32. Update your Third-Party Pages

Third party websites like Google and Yelp can help you grab potential opportunities. Make sure your profile on all these partner websites is up to date at all times. If you receive any review or feedback, reply and engage with customers. It will give an impression that you are listening and boost customer experince.

33. Promote Visually Engaging Content

One of the most popular yet trendy salon marketing ideas is promoting visual content on Instagram. Instagram is all about visual content. Anything and everything that grabs their attention within the time span of first 2 seconds will help increase engagement. You should use beautiful pictures in your blogs, posts and website with clear communication. You can try My Digi Salon’s inventory for getting beautiful and appropriate content that you can post on your social media channels.

34. Create an Explainer Video

Small videos are really helpful for increasing reach on socila media. Engaging videos or mini shoots during services like boomerangs etc. can help you connect with a wider set of audience.

35. Try Tik-Tok

Try Tik tok videos for hair colours showing before after, they are in trend and people love watching them for hors. Create engaging videos that tell your brand’s story, or shoot mini videos during and after your services to show off new styling and color techniques.

36. Define your Brand

You should be clear about your brand personality and theme. It will totally depend on your clientele e.g. macho for men only salon and quirky for edgy looks etc. Make sure that it is reflected in all your online and offline communications.

37. Tag your Clients

When you click your client’s before and after pictures, make sure you ask for their social handles. You can tag them in your posts and stories and they can repost them. Clients love getting featured on salon pages, it’s sort of a social validation checklist.

38. Sell Beauty Products Online

Offline upselling is great but to reach out to a new and untouched audience you should try selling your products and services online. You can either add a shop here section on your website with product listings or host an egift section.

39. Build Joint Ventures

Partnering with local business by co hosting events is a great way cross promote your services. Offers like “Visit us, get 10% at Henry’s” etc. will get more customers in you salon as well as your local business.

40. Get involved in National Events

Third party and national events are a great way to unlock potential clients. By participating in national educational events or trade shows can be a great networking exercise. You can learn how to improve your business,get new B2B working opportunities and at the same time improve your brand image.

41. Create Professional Business Cards

One of the traditional yet effective salon marketing ideas is creating a business card. All your staff members should have professional business cards that they can handle to clients and partners. It should ideally have their name, number, email address and contact information. You can even add social media handles to make it more trendy.

42. QR codes for Social Media Handle Links

Instead of typing the handle names on cards and pamphlets, you can get QR codes printed. These QR codes can be scanned by your clients and will redirect to your social media handles. It saves time for the clients who might not make the effort to look you up online.

43. Team Up with Local Schools

Tie-ups with local schools, universities and institutions, especially fashion and hair styling, can help you get quality interns for your salons at a cheaper price.

44. Birthday Offers to Clients

You can offer small rewards or discounts to your loyal customers on special occasions like birthdays. Send it on the day or a day before to remind them that you care and their pampering session is due.

45. Bridge the Gap Between Customers

If you can not give discounts, then try to send out gift cards or text wishes on important dates. These little efforts can help you bridge the gap between you and your customers to help make life long relationships.

46. Networking Events

Stay connected with other top players and professionals in the business. It will help you stay on top in the market with the latest trends. Trying registering and attending events taking place in your vicinity. They are a great way to improve networking.

47. Become an Educator

You are a professional, share some tips and ideas with your followers. You can post and share educational content on your social media channels for your clients. Moreover, you can even host live sessions on Instagram where you can go for Q&A and share educational content or host classes that clients can attend to show them how to maintain their services at home.

48. Apply to be a Talk Guest

Instead of just hosting these classes on your social media channels you can expand your reach by getting on talks as guest speakers. E.g. During virtual events for hair and beauty, you can participate as a guest speaker and share your experience with the attendees.

49. Host a Client Appreciation Event

Thank you loyal clients by hosting an appreciation event once a year. Send an invite to all your VIP clients for a full day or multi day event. You can go out of station or just party all night in a 5 star setting. Client appreciation is the first step in establishing strong relationships.

50. Retarget clients who have Left

If you note that your loyal customers have stopped coming to your salon, e.g. zero visits in the last 4 months. You can drop an email or sms with some discounts for a new appointment. Communication matters so make sure that you convey your message clearly.

A Must Read : How to Generate Leads for your Salon Business

51. Learn from the Best

Make sure that you are upto date with fellow successful and professional leaders. In order to procure their skills and accomplishments, try to follow in their leads. See what they are doing and how they maintain online presence.

52. Give Away Freebies

Everyone loves freebies, instead of offering discounts you can go for merchandising. Give small gifts like shirts, pen, and other items with salon branding as a token of appreciation.

53. Re-Do your Retail

If you feel that your growth has gone stagnant or is dropping, you need to re-evaluate your retail strategy. Take help from us, My digi salon is a complete marketing suite for salons to establish the most effective sales strategy.

54. Offer Discounts to Senior Citizens

Senior citizens tend to be more loyal towards brands and businesses. To make it easier for them to opt for your services instead of your clients, offer senior discounts to your regular and loyal custimers.

55. Send Appointment Confirmations

As mentioned above communication is the key. How you communicate with your customers will directly affect your brand image. To improve it, you can start by sending appointment confirmation texts and emails to your client as a reminder. It will help avoid unnecessary hassles and misunderstandings. Moreover, it is one of the most effective salon marketing ideas.

56. Automated Scheduling Reminders and User Journeys

Automation is the future and you can take advantage of the features available now. You can work on client or user journeys. E.g. welcome email, first appointment, referral emails etc. apart from that you can automate reminder emails like an email 5 weeks after a hair color appointment. You can even send them a ‘we miss you’ email with incentives.

57. Get a Beauty Salon Marketing App

Instead of running here and there for all the things we mentioned above, you should invest in a beauty salon marketing app. Get a customized salon app by My Digi Salon with all the features that you believe are required for your salon e.g. side menu navigation, banners on the homepage for new offers etc. You can get in touch with your customers directly via in-app pop-ups, push notifications etc.

Conclusion

We are sure that the above mentioned salon marketing ideas will help you in your salon management. They will definitely help you in retaining your customers and at the same time acquiring the new ones. You just need to make sure your brand language and visualization is consistent and resonates with your goal.

Originally published link here: https://www.mydigisalon.com/blog/salon-marketing-ideas/

[septembersung]

Looking at the posts I’ve accumulated so far for #500 reasons and counting, I realized I need to frame the various subjects I’m tackling. I’d rather post more quotes than original posts, but the trouble with a complicated history like the Reformation (and the internet in general) is taking things out of context causes problems. To do this right, we need a clear conceptual framework in which to lay those quotes (and my inevitable commentary on them). So while in my first post I talked about where I’m coming from personally, in this post, call it intro 2.0, let’s lay out some history and approach parameters.

Let’s get the approach parameters out of the way first: 

A) I’m trained in theology, not history, and I’m blogging about this as someone learning, not an expert. B) please charitably correct me (with sources!) if I get something wrong, but C) we should go into this realizing there’s a lot of room for disagreement (as you’ll see if you finish reading this post). D) I always try to represent the source I’m summarizing/working from accurately. That means: D-1) if you disagree with something I say, let’s first go back to the source and make sure I’m conveying it as they said it, and D-2) A good debater should understand the opposing POV so well that they can word their opponent’s argument to the satisfaction of their opponent. If I misrepresent an argument, it is not intentional. Please bring it to my attention and we’ll work it out. 

That said, now we can talk about bias. If we’re going to talk about the Reformation, its causes and effects, how it influenced our civilization and still affects people today - even, yes, all those pesky theological “details” many would say no one cares about and don’t matter anymore! - then we need to ask some pointed questions: Just what do we mean by the Reformation? Whose version of the Reformation and its legacy is correct? What exactly is it, septembersung, that you’re taking issue with and arguing against?

Well, if you ask three historians “what happened,” you’ll get thirty answers...

To a large extent, Catholics, Protestants, and secular historians tell the story of medieval Christianity (i.e., Catholicism) and the Reformation differently. Extremely differently. (There is a lot of overlap in some areas between Protestant and secular approaches, however.) You might think that “facts are facts,” but history isn’t primarily facts; history the story we tell ourselves about facts as we know them. Sometimes an assumption, or a “fact” that’s actually false, or a matter of opinion, or disputed, gets enshrined as truth, embedded in how the subject is approached and handed down, and then everything from that is skewed. (This is an exceptionally important point we will come back to frequently.) 

Everyone has a bias; this is unavoidable. In this context, bias means “where you stand to see the rest of the world.” Everyone has to stand somewhere. What’s important is to be able to identify your bias and see how it affects the story as you’ve received it and as you tell it. And, equally importantly, to differentiate bias, a fact of being an individual human person, from prejudice, which in this context means unfair and probably incorrect negation of a point of view you don’t share. An illustration of the difference: A secular, that is, non-believing, historian writes a history of the Reformation. Their bias is that they are not Christian, neither Catholic or Protestant. Their prejudice is shown in privileging the Protestant side of the story. To pick just three examples of how that prejudice could play out: using slurs against Catholics, the Church, and Catholic beliefs; accepting Protestant claims about Catholicism and Christian history a priori, as factual premise, without investigation or explanation; taking it for granted, as an accepted truth that does not need proving, that the Reformation did the world a favor. Here’s the kicker: this is not an invented example, but a summary of a large swath of writings on the Reformation.

As you know, I’m Catholic; that’s my bias. You should ask yourself: what’s yours? Do you know how it affects what you’ve been taught and the way you perceive history and the world around you? What prejudice might you be participating in that you don’t even realize is a prejudice?

(Sidebar: In addition (and related to) to the bias issue: intense specialization and the ways history as a whole is conceived and taught has led to such an overabundance of “facts” and narratives, particularly about this stretch of history, that there is little cohesion, and simply so much that trying to get a handle on the big picture can be completely overwhelming. You can drown in data and never learn a thing. (I always picture a cartoon child opening a stuffed closet and being buried in toys.) There’s a super good, though technical, layout of this problem in the introduction to Brad S. Gregory’s book The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. I’m going to talk about that book a lot.)

The takeaway so far should be: the story of history that we receive varies by which community we’re in and which community delivered the story to us. I am not arguing that no objective truth about the matter exists. Quite the opposite: the first step to finding the truth is recognizing that what has been uncritically accepted as fact is an interpretation based on unreliable ideas. What I would most like to show my readers through this project, especially my Protestant readers, is that the reality and significance of the Reformation has been greatly misunderstood across the majority of communities. It’s pretty unlikely you’ll read my posts and come away deciding to convert to Catholicism. What is possible, and I hope it will happen, that you’ll walk away with a different understanding of Catholicism itself and Protestantism’s role the last 500 years of Christian history.

(Important sidebar: “Protestants” and “Protestantism” can only ever be a generalization. Not only do the vast number of denominations disagree with each other about Christian doctrine, on points big and small, but they have different biases, different understandings of history, different views of Catholicism - you get the idea. Whenever we use the term “Protesant/ism”, we should be aware that is a generalization.)

With all that said: here is a simplified summary of the story of the Reformation as popularly understood. What does that mean? It means this summary doesn’t cover everything, but it does encompass the broad spectrum of “not-Catholic” opinion, including both Protestant and secular views, which vary from each other and among themselves. And, of course, scholars and academia tend to acknowledge more nuance and complexity in the events of history than non-specialists. I spell this out to avoid tiresome arguments that I’m setting up a straw man or objections like “but I don’t believe that/all of that/that in that way,” etc. So as I said: the broad gist of the Reformation story as popularly understood by much of the world today:

The Catholic Church was pure institutionalized corruption. The hierarchy and religious lived immoral lives and oppressed the lay people. The Church was unChristian in deep and significant ways that were harming people. When Luther (et al) realized this, and that what the Church taught as religious truth was just a means of perpetuating its control and corruption, they got up and pushed, and the whole rotten structure came tumbling down. Suddenly the common people had access to the Bible, Jesus, real catechesis, spiritual and political freedom, genuine community, and (to use the modern terms) freedom and agency. There was some resistance, but the populace more or less welcomed the Reformation and joined in enthusiastically. The Reformation was a movement who’s time had come. With the suppression of “priestcraft,” superstitious practices and beliefs, and man-made ritual, the accumulated debris of centuries of ”Romish inventions” was swept aside and Christianity was given a clean slate. With this demolition of the Church, thus (believers would say) true, original Christianity triumphed; all the excess (at best) and demonic distractions (at worst) that led people away/separated people from Jesus was gone. With the demolition of the Church, thus (some believers and the vast majority of secular analyses would say) the road to modern society was paved: separation of church and state, the triumph of the thinking mind/rationality/logic over and against the deadening religious/organized religion influence, the growth of the sciences, freedom, tolerance, pluralism, etc.; the goods and wonders of the modern world exist because the iron grip of the Church was broken. Shedding the past launched us into the future. We’re lucky it’s over and done with and not relevant to us, in our secular society, anymore.

There’s just one problem with this narrative: it’s almost entirely wrong. 

That’s a large chunk of what I’m taking issue with and arguing against.

I can’t guarantee this tag is going to be particularly organized or exhaustive - I decided to do this just a few days ago and, despite being a fast reader, can only cram in so much - but I’m going to examine these kinds of claims (in their originals, please note, not from my general gist summary) through my own writing and through sharing the content of scholars and writers more qualified than myself, to argue for a contrary thesis: Not only is that understanding of Catholicism and Christian history factually incorrect, but the Reformation was not an organic, welcomed event/process but rather a violent uprooting of a strong, loved religious tradition and past that cut Christians off from their heritage, fragmented and splintered society, blew the foundation out of Christendom (society as Christian society,) putting Western civilization on the road to society’s secularization, the marginalization and oppression of religion in the public life, and opened the door to the moral, rational, and political chaos we know today. I will absolutely address issues like “but wasn’t the Church corrupt?” but to a certain extent I don’t think that’s actually helpful until some of the fundamental falsehoods in what is generally assumed about the Reformation have been examined. In addition, as we follow the ramifications of the Reformation down the centuries, we’ll get to talk about politics, American exceptionalism, Dracula and turn-of-the-20th-century English culture (it’s amazingly relevant), and - my personal favorite - iconoclasm and incarnation.

I highly recommend reading Karl Keating’s short article “Not a reformation but a revolution.” (Quotes are coming.) He says it better than I do.

The queue starts tomorrow, Sunday October 1st!

[explosionmarketing-blog]

Nyrie Roos- In 2020 Where Business Strategy Flows, Business Grows

“Having a business without a strategy in 2020, is like throwing mud at a wall and hoping something sticks… Are you riding this rollercoaster!” 

Actually, the real question is, do you have a strategy that delivers automated, targeted and relevant traffic that converts into sales for you? That’s the whole point of your business and market presence… right? To make some sales in the background while you’re doing what you do best and were trained to do. Be that running a Pharmacy, a Financial Planning business, a Dental Practice, a Physio Practice…whatever it is.

First things first…you need to start with a unique strategy that is individualized for your goals and your business. Once you have this, then you can move forward with the next steps in this article.

Right now, the cheapest traffic you can send to your business is gained by talking to people and hoping they remember to come back and visit your website and online presence. I figure you can reach about 8 people a day in person, maybe you can cold call more from the yellow pages, maybe you can do talks to a group of people every now and then. It takes time and a lot of effort but it is free and thus the cheapest. Assuming your time’s worth nothing of course and after all…you don’t even know that they are your customers or that they are “qualified” customers.

Where Targeted Traffic Flows, Business Grows

What if I said, there are business owners out there reaching 100’s of thousands of people and sending them to their site for around 8cents a visitor? I’m talking about something that is the same as to you standing in the middle of the biggest stadium that exists, right in the middle and everyone seeing and hearing your message, with their phones in their hands and, you only pay if they visit your website.

But not just anyone…these are all one of you target market avatar.

Imagine if your staff were standing at the entry, analysing everyone who approached and only let people into the stadium if they’re exactly the same as your customers, so the whole place is filled with people who are most likely to buy from you. They are pretty well “qualified” leads.

Imagine even further, that you can tag everyone who does visit and continue communicating with them without needing their email address.

They just have to set foot on your website. Sound too good to be real?

This Is Real and It’s called Social Media Pay per Click (PPC).

Have you heard of it? Do you stand firm in your belief that you dislike it? Well that doesn’t matter, because a lot of your target market has it, they love it, and that’s where they’re hanging out to the tune of 1 Billion daily active users. So even if you don’t use it, your prospective customers do, and you really need to have a presence there. Period.

But who has the time or energy to think of 3 things to post every day to add to the noise? Not me and not you, I’d hazard a guess. Even if you did, Facebook changed the rules a long time ago to say that they won’t show your posts to just anyone, unless you pay for it.

But before you lose your cool about it being a cost of doing business now, remember emails aren’t free either. You have to pay for a system to send them each month. Not that anyone reads emails anymore either, even if they do get through the filters. Let’s face it, most people’s inboxes are like a bad nightmare.

What you might not know is that Facebook is still in the golden age when it comes to cost. Remember when Google clicks were 5c each? Now they’re like $7 or often, even more. Done right, Facebook ad campaigns are still very cheap. Ridiculously cheap. You can attract and nurture a person twice for less than the cost of a postage stamp.

"So for promoting your website and what you offer, social media PPC can be the cheapest and best way to say you’re open for business without being chained to your computer. Don't discount Google Adwords though, it's all about planning and strategy...identifying the mix that will give you the greatest ROI AND not applying a "cookie-cutter" approach to your business."  

The Problem

There is a catch (of course). Learning social media PPC takes time and effort and when you finally get it, it changes drastically. It’s a full-time job. Plus if you’re not efficient at it, you can blow through your cash really easily and still be no closer to your objective.

“I’ll just boost some posts,” “I’ll set up an ad on LinkedIn,” “I’ll get started getting leads on Instagram,” and so it goes on... You can, but unless you have the plan and strategy covered first, and you know what you're doing, that’s the shortcut to suck you dry. Would you jump in a plane and just start flying expecting to take off and land it safely?

What you really need to do is to outsource the grunt work to someone else who knows what they’re doing for less than the cost of doing it yourself, if you’re smart. Does it really make sense to burn up your cash and time?

The Solution

Find a team, like us, of trained advertising experts whose job it is to send quality traffic to you, but that’s not where it ends. They need to have the ability to:

Attract relevant prospects who want to share your message with their friends

Collect everyone who visits your whole website and specific pages

Increase your page fans with people likely to buy from you (not just for the numbers)

Nurture people who are interested in you

Train your social media PPC campaigns into targeting your perfect leads so the longer it runs for the better it gets

Analyse your current clients and find people who look like them to within close or 1% similarity

Create a list of people without needing their email addresses

Convert people into sales, leads, bums on seats, whatever your objective is

How It Works

You need to build a series of “recipes” that can be followed.

You can choose from:

Generating leads

Sell an event (anything that people turn up to, eg live, webinars, seminars)

Sell a product

Sell a service

Each recipe has a list of marketing assets or “ingredients” that you’re going to need. For example:

Blog post urls

Landing pages

Thank you pages

Social media accounts

Social media pages

Images

Videos

Ecommerce pages

Anywhere you want us to deliver people

You then make a social media post out of the ingredients and deliver it to your target market. Then, keep an eye on it too and make sure it’s being monitored.

If you want to add anything extra to the recipe or need to fill in the gaps, just let us know.

About Nyrie Roos

As an ex-Corporate Health Leader who was born in Australia, has a background in successful business startups, has a Masters in Business Administration.

Nyrie has a strong reputation for being Australia’s leading expert on contemporary sales and marketing strategies for business, and mentors and coaches clients in developing profit and growth generating business strategies. He has presented to thousands of business owners and marketers both nationally and internationally on the power of getting the foundations right in their business first and then growing their business as an asset for their future.

Nyrie Roos is the founder of Success Stream and Explosion Marketing, a mother, wife, health-conscious, speaker, presenter and Christian. Nyrie is passionate about sharing her firsthand knowledge of how to harness the true potential of business growth via events, masterclasses and workshops. She doesn’t just talk the talk, she walks the walk – daily. She actively reviews Client campaigns every day and her clients constantly generate 3 to 10 times return on investment developing, implementing and scaling strategies.