#i tried an experiment to see if working in 4k would improve the number of pixels i had to work with

[btackt]

plot twist 🫧 TWS

FERNGIF 12: To Do List

240122 - plot twist MV (x)

[marinaaniseed]

Dark ‘n’ Stormy Pt. 9

After yesterday’s false start, I binned the 4.5k angst-a-thon and started again. This one is better, I think. And shorter, too, at just under 4k.

It’s sort of an overview of what happens in the months following Thor and Brunnhilde’s ‘little chat’.

Not really smutty, but there is a little bit of stuffing. Sorry if that’s not your bag.

Spoiler: If you don’t like that, you will hate what I'm planning for Pt. 10.

I allude to a particular piece of art by @moopzies​ in this. I highly advise you to check it out (you’ll know which one).

There are some feels in this. I made myself cry a little, like an idiot.

Ehh, you know the drill. Love me (give me feedback :P).

Thor had told you the majority of his conversation with the Valkyrie. He’d left out the more ‘space-magic’ parts of it all, and the bit about the heir. Those were problems he’d need to address later.

You’d agreed that a consensus was needed and had offered to help, something that Thor was incredibly grateful for. It was overwhelming, he just wanted to hide away from it all. But in his heart, he knew this was who he was. He was the king of Asgard. He had been raised from an early age to fulfill that role. Yes, he had failed at what he was supposed to be, but maybe that was the point. Because the more he talked to you, the more he learned about Midgard, he came to realise that his father’s rule probably wasn’t something to emulate. It hadn’t been that great of an experience for most of the populace. They’d had no say in anything, just sent off to fight wars they had no stake in. Hela had been a power-mad tyrant, bent on conquering all of the realms, but who had made her that way?

A census was taken of Asgard, to see who exactly had survived and was still present. Thor hadn’t realised that there were so few Asgardians left. He should’ve realised, really. After Hela, Ragnarok, the massacre on the Statesman, it was a wonder that anyone had survived.

He had cried, seeing the number. 4,155. One-tenth of the population of Tønsberg. He’d commanded armies greater than that.

And you had held him, stroking his hair and listening to him. You didn’t offer advice, or try to tell him that it was ok. You just listened, and he was grateful for that. More grateful, still when you had buried him under fluffy duvets and blankets and brought him hot drinks, and bowls of hearty stews. Comfort food, you had called it.

Comfort was exactly what he needed. What he came to realise was that he couldn’t find that at the bottom of a bottle. He had tried for so long to be this strong warrior, able to carry any and all burdens. But that wasn’t true. He had failed at being that because it was who he thought he was supposed to be, not who he was. There was nothing wrong with who he was.

There were still a lot of bad days, but the balance was slowly shifting. He could feel himself smiling at more things.

He was so proud of you, the way you were trying to help him, to help Asgard. He wanted to help too. At first, he just helped financially. He got that new mattress and found that he slept better now that his weight was properly supported. He didn’t wake up so sore and so tired. And although there was no longer a dip forcing your bodies together, he was pleased to find you spooning him most mornings, your gentle hand rubbing circles onto his stomach. He particularly enjoyed it when your hand would accidentally brush against his morning wood. It was his favourite way to wake up. The thing that warmed his heart the most though was when you would grab around for him in your sleep. You’d fitfully reach around until you made contact with him. As soon as your fingers sank into the soft flesh, you’d immediately still. After all of the horrors he’d lived through, he was glad to be a source of comfort.

Of course, it wasn’t just his own home that he purchased items for. Midgardian tech had arrived, and you had taught them all how to use it. Now that most of Asgard could look things up on the Internet, it made explaining this planet to them much easier. His favourite thing had been when you explained video calling. He’d seen you do it and had thought it was marvelous, to be able to talk to your friends across the planet. He’d been disappointed that it didn’t work for contacting people on other planets yet, but he supposed in the grand scheme of things, Midgard had only learned about the other realms comparatively recently. And given their experiences, he couldn’t exactly blame them for not wanting to interact with the rest of the galaxy.

The video calling meant that he could keep in touch with his friends, now that the Avengers were no longer together. Banner had taught him some breathing and visualisation techniques to practice when things became too much. Rogers talked to him about what he had learned from the support group he ran after the snap. Barnes talked about Wakanda and goats. How caring for those animals had helped with his recovery.

In hindsight, he probably should’ve talked to you about the goats.

“This is Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr,” he’d said proudly, pointing to the two goats bleating away in his garden. He’d picked them up while you had been explaining the different peoples of Midgard to the Asgardians during one of your lunchtime sessions.

“Tann-what-now?” had been your response.

“Do you not like them?” he asked, disappointed.

“No, no. I just figured you would get a pet snake because I know you really like them.”

***

You’d not been as calm when he did get a snake. He hadn’t realised that other people didn’t like snakes as much as he did. You were still asleep when he’d brought the grass snake in, having found it in the woods, letting it slither over you. It flicked out its tongue to lick your cheek and that’s when you’d stirred.

He’d never seen a human, apart from maybe the two supersoldiers, move so fast. You’d bolted out of bed, sending the snake and the covers flying, dashing past him. The initial screams of panic had turned to screams of pain and he’d found you hopping on one foot.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, genuinely confused at your reaction.

“There was a fucking snake! In the bed! And then I caught my toe on the fucking doorframe!”

“Do you not like Loki?” he asked, picking up the disorientated snake. You’d hobbled off to the bathroom, a string of obscenities leaving your mouth as you went, slamming and locking the door behind you.

Thor had gone to his laptop to see if anyone was online to explain what had happened.

A lot of people are scared of snakes, Thor. Especially when they’re not expecting them to be on their face, Banner had explained.

Maybe naming the snake after your brother, the one that tried to invade her planet, didn’t help either.

“Y/N?” he’d called through the bathroom door. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise. That was thoughtless of me.”

“It’s fine...just please warn me next time you decide to adopt a random creature.”

“Can Loki stay?”

“I guess. As long as it doesn’t try to destroy New York.”

A couple of ravens, a flock of chickens, plus some horses soon joined the menagerie, but you’d drawn the line when he suggested adopting a wolf. So he’d got two dogs, Geri and Freki, instead. Wolfhounds were close enough to wolves, right?

It felt good, being able to care for the animals. And if he was feeling particularly sad, and you weren’t there to comfort him, he would lie down and stroke one of his animal companions until he felt calm again. He still missed Asgard, his family, his life before Ragnarok, but this one wasn’t so bad.

***

It had been your suggestion that Thor could use his powers and his strength to improve New Asgard. He’d been confused at first, wondering how thunder or using Stormbreaker could help. But the more he thought about it, the more he realised that his calloused hands could help to build things, not destroy them.

The trees and flowers bloomed in abundance. Crops grew at an accelerated rate, livestock bore more young, and the sea contained more fish. He focused his powers on making New Asgard a fertile place. It was fitting, he thought, all this new life springing up where they had chosen to settle, to create a new life for Asgard.  

Brunnhilde had mentioned facilities they needed, homes, a school, a library. Those were things he could help with. He used his powers to convince the trees to grow strong, to grow quickly, before cutting them down with Stormbreaker. He always ensured new ones grew to take their place. Once the other Asgardians saw what he was doing, they joined in to help. That was just as well, he was no carpenter. But he could chop and carry. His strength had never gone away, but some of the muscle definition had returned.

That’s not to say that he had lost weight. No, on the contrary, he might even have gained some more. You’d taught him to cook some of his favourite foods, including pizza, and he enjoyed making them. Some days it was hard but there was something satisfying about eating something that he’d made.

He enjoyed making pizza the most, and not just because he enjoyed eating it. What he enjoyed was how you’d slip up behind him when he was kneading the dough, your hands dancing up beneath the soft cotton of his top to knead his belly, cheek pressed against his back. He looked up other foods to make that involved kneading, just to feel you there behind him, kneading away at him.

“Home-cooked foods are the best comfort foods,” you told him one day as you pressed your fingers into his full stomach.

“Why is that?” he asked. He knew you were right, he just wanted to hear your reasoning.

“Because they’re made with love. It’s giving a gift of love to yourself, in a bowl or on a plate.”

But he knew that the real love wasn’t in the way he chopped vegetables or the way he stirred broths. In was in the way you looked at him, the way you listened to him, the way you touched him.

How you said, Thank you for dinner, each time he cooked for you.

You hadn’t told him yet, not with your words, but he knew that you loved him. He could see it growing there, no matter how you tried to stop it. To you, it was a weed, a weakness growing in your heart. To him, it was a beautiful flower, determined to thrive despite the adverse conditions.

It was the May Day feast when you finally said the words he longed to hear.

A mead hall had been constructed - the idea had come from the man who ran the tavern, Leifr - and Thor was more than happy to supply the materials and do the heavy lifting. Leifr didn’t want his establishment to be ruined again this year during the feasts, and Thor couldn’t blame him. He knew what a mess the feasts could cause. The hall was used for other things though. You had taken to hosting screenings of TV shows, documentaries, and films, to try to explain Midgard to the Asgardians. For their part, the Asgardians found portrayals of themselves in Midgardian media to be most interesting. They delighted in telling you everything that was wrong with Stargate.

This was your first feast, Thor wanted it to be a special occasion for you. He had spoken to Lorelei and sourced the materials to create a dress for you.

On the morning of the feast, he woke you up with a cup of tea and some toast in bed, stroking your hand as you ate.

“I have a surprise for you,” he explained, producing a satin blindfold from his pocket.

“Oh, is it that kind of morning?” you’d almost purred at him, your fingers teasing up his thigh.

“No...not that I don’t want to,” said hastily, just in case you thought he didn’t want to make love to you. “It is a present. Something I’d like for you to wear today.”

Intrigued, to let him tie the blindfold over your eyes. Was it a necklace? No, he had picked you up, was carrying you somewhere. It had to be something bigger than a necklace. He set you down and gently removed the covering from your eyes.

“Oh my god, Thor. What is this?”

Hanging in the bathroom was an enormous forest green dress. Gingerly you extended your fingers towards it, soft and silky, just like Thor’s hair. Delicate lace, the same shade of green, covered the bodice, comprised the off the shoulder sleeves, trailed down the full skirt.

“It’s a beautiful dress, for a beautiful woman. Do you like it?”

He had agonised over this dress. The colour was more Loki’s style than his, but Lorelei had assured him it would be a flattering colour on you. He wanted to create a dress that reflected the spring - it was a spring feast, after all - and green had seemed the logical colour.

“Like it? I love it, Thor. Thank you, so so much.”

You threw your arms around him, pulling him into a deep kiss. He almost decided to carry you back to bed, but he knew there was a lot he needed to do today.

“Why don’t you take a bath? I have a few things to take care of,” he whispered against your ear.

“Don’t you want to bathe with me?” you asked with a mock pout.

“We have a lot to do today, darling. I bathed before you woke.” He wanted to join you, of course he did. Nothing could be better than feeling you caressing his skin with bath oils. But there were more surprises he needed to prepare.

While you were in the bath, Thor sat in the garden with Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr. His fingers deftly plucking flowers from the lawn, thanking them under his breath. He had been practicing with some of the women and was determined to make you a flower crown and necklace, to showcase you as a spring beauty. The old people of this land had believed that his father was responsible for bringing spring. That wasn’t true. What was true was that you had brought spring to his heart, warming it after what had felt like neverending winter. Like his heart was ruled by Jӧtunheim.

You had almost wept as Thor had braided your hair, decorating it with the flowers, and draping the necklace over your soft skin. The off-the-shoulder dress has been a good idea, he decided, and not just because of how it showed off your cleavage. He laced you into your dress, his heart swelling with pride at how beautiful you looked.

“I have lived for many years, traveled to many planets, danced with many women. None of them could compare to you,” Thor said, caressing your cheek. “I have witnessed the birth of stars, but their light pales in comparison to you. I have seen the Infinity Stones, but their beauty and their power is nothing to that which shines if your eyes. I have drunk the finest wines, tasted the most succulent fruits, but it is your lips that I crave. The most exotic flowers are so plain when stood next to the blush that blooms on your cheeks, and their scent cannot compete with yours. There is no silk softer, in all of the nine realms and beyond, than your skin against mine. I have heard words of love in many languages, but they mean nothing. When you ask me how I am, when you comfort me from my nightmares, when you sigh in contentment against my chest, there are no lovelier sounds than these. Y/N, I love you. I have never been more certain of anything.”

That was when you had cried. You didn’t feel particularly beautiful, tears and snot running down your face as Thor held you to his soft chest. That was when you knew that you were done for. The last bit of your resistance had been chipped away. You had fallen in love again, after so long. This gentle giant, reluctant ruler. He was the one who had made you feel like you were worthy of love again. You hoped that Alex would’ve approved.

Thor soothed you, his hands running down your back, the odd juxtaposition of his axe-calloused skin against the smoothness of your dress. He knew these weren’t tears of sadness, he’d shed enough to know what those were like. These were tears of relief, of something finally being let go, something that had held you back all this time. He felt a little bad for ruining your makeup but he was sure that you could fix it.

Pulling away from him at last, you saw the damp mess you left on Thor’s top.

“I’m-I’m s-s-sorry Thor,” you sniffled at him. “That was. I didn’t mean to. I just…”

“It’s ok, it’s ok. It was just too much wasn’t it?”

You nodded, still unable to find the right words to say. You knew they were there, somewhere, but there was a disconnect between your brain and your mouth.

“I meant what I said, every word,” he said, with a smile. “Go clean yourself up, I should get dressed too.”

***

Thor, too, had opted for green. You had secretly hoped that he would dress like that pinup art you’d seen, of a woman painting with flowers covering her modesty. His tunic and trousers were a much earthier green and brown, as though he had grown from the ground on which he stood. Tanngrisnir and Tanngnjóstr came with you, for the children to pet. Geri and Freki came too, eager for any scraps they might receive under the table. You had scrubbed your face, carefully reapplying your makeup. Your eyes were red, as red as your lips. You hoped nobody would notice.

As Asgard’s mightiest warriors, Thor, Sif, and Brunnhilde were barred from the tournaments and games. They were more than happy to officiate, to judge the winners, and generally mingle. Some of Thor’s Avenger friends traveled to New Asgard for the festivities, and you were looking forward to meeting them.

The day passed by quickly, and you were careful to temper the effects of Asgardian drink with plenty of water. When it came to the feast, you were in awe of how much food there was. As much as possible had come from New Asgard, but even with Thor’s help, there was no way enough could be grown to feed that made people.

“Sit! Sit wherever you wish, all are equal here in New Asgard,” Thor shouted as he opened the doors to the great room. Taking you by the hand, he led you to a seat in the middle of the room.

“Is this ok? Don’t you want to be on the edge in case it gets too much?” you asked him. A lot of progress had been made, but large crowds could sometimes still be a problem for Thor, evoking too much of the battlefield.

“No, no. This is exactly where I want to be, with my woman by my side and my dogs by my feet. Too much of my life was spent sat separate from my fellow Asgardians. I wish to be among them.”

Throughout dinner, whenever he had a hand to spare, you felt Thor’s hand on your thigh, seeking reassurance, and you covered it with your own. It was a pleasure to see him so happy, enjoying himself and enjoying all of the food and drink there was on offer, fully in the moment instead of mindlessly consuming to drown out the voices in his head that told him he wasn’t good enough, that he was solely to blame for the horrors of the past. And, of course, you enjoyed the way his stomach bloated as his gorged on tender meats, creamy cheeses, and rich cakes. He was still going long after you had had your fill. The ale was beginning to take its toll and you let your fingers wander over to his leg, trailing up his thigh. The first surprise was when you discovered how hard he was. Thor choked on his drink when you brushed over him, but nobody else noticed, engaged in conversation, eating and drinking. The second surprise was when you reached his waistband. You could feel him trying to suck in his stomach as the material dug into him. That wouldn’t do, so you wiggled around until you managed to unbutton him, feeling the soft, warm flesh cascade forward.

“What’re you doing?” he whispered, face matching the wine in his goblet.

“Helping?” you whispered back. “You didn’t seem very comfortable.”

You were right, Thor had to admit, it hadn’t been comfortable. But now he was very aware of how much he’d eaten, his stomach pressing against the table. He put down the slice of honey cake with a resigned sigh. You hated seeing him upset, so you began to knead his stomach gently, just as he liked, and picked up the slice.

“Are you sure? You seemed like you were enjoying this,” you asked, bringing it to his lips.

“No, no. I have eaten too much, more than my fair share.”

“But it’s such a small slice, and it seems like you have room. What harm could it do?”

How could he refuse you? He wasn’t sure why he was so aroused, but he thought it was something to do with eating so much, and you feeding him didn’t less that feeling. First, it was the cake, but slowly other things made his way to his mouth, via your hand, bite-sized pieces of whatever was nearest to your eager fingers.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” you asked, as Thor licked some icing off your fingers, the two of you now completely oblivious to your surroundings.

“Mmm,” he nodded, sucking hard on your chocolate coated digits. “Are you?”

“Very much so,” you purred, looking as though you wanted to ride him right then and there at the table. Which to be fair, wasn’t exactly far from the truth. A sharp elbow to your ribs from Brunnhilde reminded you of where you were, causing the blood to rush to your cheeks.

After dinner, some Asgardian musicians began to play and many others danced in a space at the far end of the hall. You perched on what was left of Thor’s lap, counting down until it was socially appropriate to depart, so you could take Thor home and feel yourself under his weight.

Quill and Wilson discussed music with you. Barnes, with his roguish grin, had swept you onto the dancefloor and tried to teach you the dances he’d practiced as a young man. Barton offered to teach you, and the other Asgardians archery. They were all very attractive men, no doubt about it, but you only had eyes and hands for one.

Leaving the hall was no easy feat. Everyone wanted to talk to Thor, or pet the dogs, or both, but eventually, you made it outside, the cool air waking Thor from the food coma he was stumbling around in. It was a clear night, so you walked along the beach, Thor explaining the different stars and constellations to you, the goats and dogs, running around the two of you.

“This place is beautiful, Thor,” you said, looking out to sea. “Almost as beautiful as you. I bet lots of people get engaged here, it would be the perfect place.”

“I wish you could’ve seen the old Asgard,” he whispered against your ear, trailing kisses down your neck and across your bare shoulder, feeling you melt into his touch.

Between the sighs and moans as he kissed you, that was when you said it. The perfect ending to a perfect day.

“I love you, Thor.”

@morganhoran1671 @innerpaperexpertcloud

[nostalgicatsea]

This is my second go at filling out the year-end writing meme that @sineala​ and muccamukk did on Dreamwidth because my computer freaked out and shut down on me without warning while I was writing and my entire post was lost. I was almost done with it so you can imagine how upset I was.

So here’s my reflection on my writing in 2018! This is going to be long. You can read it in full here on Dreamwidth as well.

All of these stories are Steve/Tony unless stated otherwise.

April

Leaving Promises Against Your Skin (MCU) - Post-Civil War soulmate AU, 18,611 words

May

The Great Silence of Loss (MCU) - Post-Infinity War fic about grief and hope vs. despair, 1,075 words

Little Moments in Between: A Brief Interlude (MCU) - Tony thinks about his relationship with Steve while they wait for a train, 844 words

June

Signals Between Two Satellites (MCU) - Post-Infinity War angst and hurt/comfort fic about Steve and Tony seeing each other for the first time after the snap, 2,290 words

August

Hidden Declaration (Generation Kill, Brad/Ray) - Ray tries to convince Brad to get matching tattoos with him, 728 words

You and Nothing Else (MCU) - Steve doesn’t like seeing Tony stressed out and unhappy over their wedding plans, 785 words

Every Last One of My Demons (MCU) - Post-Infinity War emotional hurt/comfort fic about Steve and Tony talking after having nightmares, 1,705 words

Rushing Headlong in the Wrong (Right) Direction (Avengers Academy) - Steve bids on Tony in their school’s charity auction, wrongly assuming that he’s auctioning off a date, 2,727 words

December

A Long, Final Rest Among the Stars (MCU) - Endgame trailer fic about Tony reflecting on how he’s come full circle from Afghanistan in a way, 2,732 words

Last year I wrote and posted:

Nine stories and 33,333 words, including the 1,836 words I wrote on New Year’s Eve for a Cap-Iron Man comm gift fic but didn’t submit because I wasn’t happy with it.

Overall thoughts:

Last year was a productive writing year for me! My 2018 New Year’s resolution was “to build on my progress and write even longer pieces and more works that I’m proud of.” Suffice to say, that happened. In the past two years, I went from writing one or two fics a year that were at most 1-2.5k to writing my longest fic at the time I wrote that New Year’s post (Multitude of One (4,277 words)) to the number of words and fics above.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would last year, less, or about what you'd predicted?

I didn’t have a specific goal, but nine fics is more than half my fic count on AO3 and the other eight were posted over the course of four years so yeah, WAY more than I thought I’d write. I don’t know how that happened especially as I get stuck while writing all the time.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?

Brad/Ray and Gen Kill. I never thought I’d write a GK story because just the thought of doing so is intimidating. Ray Person is intimidating. I love him, but he’s so easy to get wrong and I’ve seen people get him totally wrong or get close but still fall short. I didn’t even want to bother trying until @luxover​ gave me a Brad/Ray prompt and I wrote Hidden Declaration. Just to make things both harder and easier, lux is a good friend so I hoped she would be gentle even if she hated it lol, but I wanted to make her happy because she’s my friend. She’s also the only person I know who writes Ray perfectly so, you know, no pressure. But I wrote a thing! In a fandom I didn’t ever expect to write in!

This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most:

A toss up between “angst with catharsis/grief and healing” and “post-Infinity War.” Or maybe “I never thought I’d write this.” It’s funny because after Infinity War came out, Alanna (aslightstep​) and I talked about how it didn’t fill us with the desire to write any fics based on it, and three of my fics from last year are post-IW ones (four if you include the one based on the Endgame trailer).

Leaving Promises Against Your Skin hits all three things.

What's your own favorite story of the year?

Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest?I’m not sure it makes me the happiest, but it’s definitely the fic I’m proudest of and it so happens to be my longest and most popular one: Leaving Promises Against Your Skin again. LPAYS was the sequel to Multitude of One which, until I posted LPAYS, was my longest fic. I knew it would blow MoO out of the water, word count-wise. That was one of the reasons I was too afraid to write it because I didn’t know how to write long fics nor do I know how I wrote this one now that so much time has passed since I finished it. I’m proud of it not because it’s perfect and I love everything about it (a few things bother me about it actually) but because writing it was agonizing. I wanted to give up so many times.

The only reason I kept going was that I didn’t have that much of an option to do so as it was a STH fill. I’m proud of sticking with it. Once everything snapped into place, the words kept flowing…and flowing and within days, I wrote several thousand words more than I had expected the fic to be. This is how I felt once I was done. For the first time ever in all my years of writing, I got choked up over my own writing lol. I understand how great it feels to finish a long fic, write the scenes you had in mind for so long, and get to the ending that you envisioned from the start (I had the ending of LPAYS in mind while writing MoO even though I kept mum about it when people asked me what happened after the ending of MoO). I got so happy that I made my first photoset! That’s another unexpected thing that happened last year.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

A lot!

- I mostly write angst and never thought I would ever write unadulterated fluff with zero angst and I did so twice in 2018 with my first Avengers Academy fic, which also has a dash of humor (“humor”? I’m not really funny), and this wedding preparation fic, which also is an established relationship fic about marriage. I never thought I’d write those things either especially because wedding fics tend to bore the hell out of me and I never seek them out.

- Both of those fics were prompt fills (I filled four in total). I never take prompts because I get stuck and stressed out that I have writer’s block, but it worked out fine which I’m happy about as the prompts for the two fics were out of my comfort zone. I had no idea what to write for the cheese one, but I was determined to fill it. I can’t recognize myself. Fluff? Humor? No angst? Established relationship? Wedding preparations? Prompt fills? ME? What?!

- Long fics! I wrote my first one because eh, 4k doesn’t count as long even though it was long for me at the time.

- MCU Tony POV. MCU Tony scares me from a writing standpoint, so I avoided writing from his POV until LPAYS and now I have two fics with his POV.

I learned that what may seem or be impossible to do doesn’t stay that way and that trying to get out of my comfort zone can be incredibly rewarding. It’s worth a shot even if I fail because I gain more experience, and it makes me feel hopeful about growing as a writer. It’s hard to think that you’ll ever improve or be able to write things you can’t write when you’re frustrated or not feeling great about your writing.

My best story of this year:

I don’t remember what I put the first time around.

My most popular story of this year:

Leaving Promises Against Your Skin

had the most bookmarks, comments, hits, and kudos. Not surprising because it’s a sequel to my most popular fic and it’s a soulmate AU which tends to draw people in.

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion:

Hidden Declaration has the fewest bookmarks, comments, hits, and kudos without contest, but considering the size and lack of activity in the fandom (which is why I don’t care that no one has read it, but I generally don’t obsess over those markers anyway especially if it’s a gift like this one was), I can’t exactly say it’s underappreciated by the universe.

You and Nothing Else had the lowest comments to hits ratio, but it performed well on Tumblr where I originally posted it, so I have to pick Every Last One of My Demons which had the lowest kudos to hits and bookmarks to hits ratios of ALL my fics from 2018 and went a bit under the radar on Tumblr too. I thought it would do better because hurt/comfort! Post-Infinity War! Oh well.

My least favorite story this year:

Rushing Headlong in the Wrong (Right) Direction. I’m not good with humor, and the words kept coming but kind of in a “oh no, I can’t stop word vomiting” way. But hey, I never write dialogue-heavy fic so there’s that. And it’s a silly and fun fic for a silly and fun prompt (“cheese wheel”...I almost ended up ignoring the prompt because cheese wheel?) and universe. RIP soon, AvAc. You’ll live on in our hearts and in fandom.

Most fun story to write:

Hidden Declaration! Ray was super fun, which is a big surprise as I said he’s scary to write. There are one or two lines in the story hat I want to tweak because I think they toe the line in being “too much” (as I said, he’s very easy to get wrong, and many people go overboard with him), but he’s really fun to write and I love him!

Story with the sweetest moment:

You and Nothing Else. The part where Steve tells Tony he doesn’t care about what their wedding is like and Tony not only gets what he means, but he meets him halfway because what he ultimately decides on reminds him of Steve.

Story with the single sexiest moment:

Haha I don’t have any sexy moments. The closest would be Hidden Declaration, where Brad imagines Ray beneath him with a tattoo that matches his (he totally learns how to tattoo so that he can ink Ray himself).

Most "Holy crap, that's wrong, even for you" story:

None. I didn’t do anything that’s more horrible than what I usually do.

Most overdue:

LPAYS. It took a year for me to post although I only seriously thought of writing it and began writing it months after I posted MoO.

Most eye roll-worthy title:

A tie between Rushing Headlong in the Wrong (Right) Direction which is awful, but I got stuck on a title for that one, and Little Moments in Between: A Brief Interlude, which is so pretentious (that colon!) and long for such a short fic about nothing. I couldn’t decide between the two phrases separated by the colon, so I used both.

Story that shifted my own perceptions of the characters:

LPAYS. It’s written in Tony’s POV, but it helped me explore Steve a bit and feel better about him. A lot of people, including me, were upset with Steve after CA:CW and hated his letter because it made little sense (I still think this way). I also kept thinking about the line “I can see now I was really sparing myself” and tried to figure out what he meant by that. For once, Steve was selfish and it led to disastrous consequences, but his selfishness came from losing so much in his life and not wanting to lose more and...I really do think he didn’t want to lose Tony and was afraid he’d lose him and that Bucky would fall out of his grasp again. He was a coward, but because he cared too much, not because he didn’t care at all.

Hardest story to write:

LPAYS again! I knew what would happen after the ending of MoO and had the ending of LPAYS in mind too while writing the ending of MoO, but I kept mum about it even though people wanted to know and asked me about it. I couldn’t figure out what scenes to write other than one BARF scene and the ending which I desperately wanted to get to. I couldn’t figure out how to deal with the idea of forgiveness, how Tony could ever heal, and how Steve could earn back Tony’s trust again. It was so, so hard and I was miserable until things clicked and then 8k became 10k...which became 12k. I thought I’d stop there, but then it became 18k. I couldn’t stop which felt so liberating, fun, and rewarding because it had been so difficult to write until that point.Thank you to everyone who listened to me, brainstormed with me, and held my hand through the process as I whined and suffered.<3 I couldn't have written it without you.

Biggest Disappointment:

I couldn’t write a comm gift fic that I was happy with in time, and I wanted this year to be the year that I finally wrote one. Hopefully I’ll be able to participate in another writing-related Cap-Iron Man event this year! Oh, and I didn't write that other soulmate fic that's been on my mind for years.

Biggest Surprise:

Everything under the “writing risks” part. Um...that LPAYS did so well. There’s a risk with long sequels; the longer a oneshot fic is, the less likely it is to get as much feedback as say, something that’s in the 5-7K range (I forgot the exact range, but someone put up stats about this), and if it’s a sequel? People back out because they think they won’t know what’s going on unless they read the first story. I was that “Troy from Community enters a room on fire with a pizza box, smiling and then alarmed” gif when MoO did incredibly well, and I sort of feel like that with LPAYS, even if MoO has double the bookmarks, comments, kudos, and hits.

Most Unintentionally Telling Story:

I don’t know.

Favorite opening line:

I’m not extremely fond of any particular opening line from last year. This is easier with opening paragraphs. If I had to pick, though, it’s “They were like bedtime stories, his nightmares” from Every Last One of My Demons.

Favorite closing line:

The one from LPAYS and the last four paragraphs of that are my favorite closing lines ever, but they’re spoilery so I’ll pick something different. My favorites have to be from Every Last One of My Demons, Signals Between Two Satellites, and A Long, Final Rest Among the Stars. I’ll pick two.

Favorite in terms of meaning: Hope, he thought as Tony turned to look at him, exhausted and afraid and beautiful from Signals.

Tony is the embodiment of hope for Steve!!!! I honestly think that Tony embodies that for the Avengers and especially Steve in so many ways, even in the MCU; it’s not as apparent as the other universes, but if you think about what Tony did for Steve in all their movies together and in Infinity War, which they aren’t in any scenes together, it makes sense.

Favorite in terms of writing/prettiness/mood: “Tony,” he heard the voice whisper again, and it was all their voices all at once, calling him to them from here and beyond, all with him as he drifted off, into the boundless darkness, into the stars and the lights he had loved and then feared and loved again from A Long, Final Rest.

In conclusion:

I’m proud of myself.

Fic-writing goals for 2019:

I’m not going to try to top what I did in 2018. I don’t think that’ll be possible. What I hope to do in 2019, other than write my MTH fill for @sabrecmc​, of course, is to finish the two fics that have been on my mind for years: the reconciliation/reunion fic and the one that everyone must have heard me complain about by now as I’ve been whining about it on and off for about 4.5 years. Yes, that one. That soulbond fic. The one that I tried to abandon, but even if I put it aside for a long time, I can never actually let go of. It haunts me. I WANT TO BE FREE. I WANT TO BE FREE. If you’re curious, the two fics are the second and third fic on this post. I have some other stories I want to write, but those two are my only priorities. PLEASE, I WANT TO WRITE AND POST THEM EVEN IF I DON’T KNOW HOW.

Anyway, happy 2019. One more year until 2020! What a scary thought. I wish you all a prosperous, joyous, creative, and prolific year.

[creta5164]

[Second week of 2018.09] Busan Indie Connect Festival!

Sorry I was late, I had to postpone the posting one day because the schedule was so busy. So, thank you for waiting my devlog!

Hi, there!

I will try to make an important announcement before the start of devlog. Starting this week, I started to do level design, plot, and visual work.

So, coincidentally, it became impossible to avoid making it difficult to write a devlog every Sunday, so I decided to write a diary every two weeks, and decided to post a status report on another week.

However, this week is the second week, so I will fill in the details. (First, third week = status) (Second, fourth week = devlog)

And the theme of this devlog is the indie game event held in Busan. In other words, I participated as an exhibitor at the Busan Indie Connect Festival.

It was a good place to meet many developers. Thanks to Waffle, the developer of ‘The Starry Night’ who was able to provide such a precious place. Let's begin.

Plot writing... and improving dialogue window...

Now, as I mentioned above, I'm working on the details of the plot in the current big-frame game, and I'm working on improving the script as well as moving the dialog window interface from the canvas to the world space.

This is the situation I had working on.

Depart for Busan!

First, let me introduce the background story that I was able to participate as an exhibitor of The Starry Night.

...

Waffle, who previously worked on The Starry Night, is a close ally with me. I knew that he was not a major in programming. He was developing mobile games using RPG MAKER MV.

One day, after I finished developing, I bored and told Waffle. I was talking how about planning localizing in another language. Then Waffle said, I will copy the whole project and build a version that has changed the language. I have heard some very shocking plans for me.

So, from that moment on, I've become a developer of text localization plugins using JSON, and I've become a developer who has helped to develop a pretty important part of the game.

Because MV is an engine that uses JavaScript, I implemented it right away. It's very easy to use compared to other localization plug-ins. I thought it was good.

Then one day in August I received a phone call. It was a phone call from Waffle, and I was offered a suggestion from Waffle to go to BIC and meet with the developers there.

I think now that the game being developed is very early in the game, and if it is not now, it's hard to make a chance. I was ready to talk with you right away.

So on the 12th of September...

We took the exhibition model of Tia, the protagonist of The Starry Night(...)

Then we arrived at the hostel's hostel. Two people were free, and the next person had to pay $ 20 per night for a discounted price. I think it is well worth going out because it is something I can not easily experience where I go.

Receiving the exhibitor ID card...

It was before the start, but we went ahead and watched. It's one of the biggest gaming events in the Hall of Fame.

The entrance has a BIC title on the container. I feel something different.

At the end of the day, we moved to Haeundae, and we watched the beach. The beach where the pigeons go, rather than the seagulls, feels different lol

And when I came back to my accommodation, this BIC platinum sponsor, Nicalis, welcomed the exhibitors with a very impressive font(...).

It is the appearance of the Haeundae market. It feels very different.

First Schedule - Conference Day

It is the day when the exhibitors of BIC gather in the movie theater and give a lecture to people gathered in various fields all day.

It's time to share and learn important and useful information about indie games.

It is the day when BIC exhibitors come together in a movie theater and lectures gathered in various fields all day. It's time to share and learn important and useful information about indie games.

After the conference schedule, there was a network party hosted by Nicholas. Unfortunately, due to some kind of reason, I could not participate...

Still, Waffle went to the party and brought a Hamburger called Nicalis Touch(?).

Second Schedule - Business Day

Business Day is a time to prepare booths and communicate with the developers again before the exhibition.

B-15, The Starry Night's booth. And we check out the equipment we requested...

We hastened to prepare the booth. Waffle made many preparations for this exhibition.

And I have seen 8 Doors that show this time again since Unite Seoul 2017. The game has changed a lot. I was surprised to see that the development was progressing to some extent and that the game was also a more well-caught frame. I will expect it!

And as the developers of 8Doors have used RPG MAKER since before, so he interested and have also come to The Starry Night. he was talked a lot about Waffle and MV.

In the meantime, LSH, a representative of Psychoflux, came and talked for a moment.

And this is an analog game that was personally the most expected.

As you can see, I expected that it was a game that had both sound effects and game play with the idea that it can not be tried anywhere because it is not software and play video alone.

When completed the game, it is shown play time of game. The number of red dots in the center is minutes, and the red dots on the outside are seconds. It took four minutes and 45 seconds. It was a really fun game.

SHE and the light bearer is a conversational point and click adventure game. Overall, the art style was cute, too, and the characters had a unique voice in the conversation. To briefly summarize, it is said that a firefly leaves the adventure in search of a lost mother.

Nicalis has been able to play Crystal Crisis, RemiLore, The binding of Issac: Repentance, Dungreed's Nintendo Switch version, Blade Strangers. The binding of Issac: Repentance confrimed can do Co-Op play by ask question. The demo ends on the third floor.

It is a very difficult boss rush game, SACRED STONES. I thought it would have been nice to have a headset or a speaker for experince but there's doesn't have, anyway I think the game itself is really cool.

IndigoBlue Game Studio's Blindia, famous for SPLIT BULLET and Vectorium. This game has DARK ECHO's style and with the action and strategic aspects are highlighted. I can shoot a gun!

Dance of fire and ice was also seen by the developers themselves. I can see that the developer has changed from Flash to Unity and the graphics have improved significantly, but I have not been able to shoot properly with the camera. In addition to what you can see in the video, and some pretty interesting variations such as a diagonal column.

It's called MagiCat, and I played the game for a while. Oh my gosh... It's impressive that if you like cats, you might be stunned. It was also a good game design.

So the schedule is over...

And it is the opening ceremony informing the start of the event!

A variety of food from the support of the Canadian government was displayed at the front. I ate taco with sauce at first time!

Three, Fourth Schedule - Public Visit

Now, the weekend is finally here to can communicate with players and gamers.

But I did not make The Starry Night directly, so I helped organize the booth and guide and introduce foreign guests. Photo shows I had Aseprite's source code build(...)

By the way...

At first, Aseprite has laggy were caught. I initially thought this was due to the fact that it works in debug mode, but the real reason was the 4K resolution(...)

Anyway, if change the target to system in Program > Properties > Compatibility > DPI then can use it normally.

I heard from the end, but there was a story that there were many speculations that this BIC would have come more people.

Waffle surprisingly made the demo quite long. It's hard for many to enjoy, but I think this will help people know what game is.

This is Muse dash. It was an impressive game because the animations were made to fit well into the beat.

Wow, there was a place to show the development. He is a developer of the rhythm doctor, Dance of fire and ice.

During the exhibition, one developer has shared a leaflet.

"Let's have an informal party and get together at Haeundae in front of the hostel at 9PM!"

So we arrived at Haeundae and it was 9PM, but I could not see people, so I gave up and tried to return. However, I found a person wearing an ID card on the other side of the traffic light, and the developers who were wandering around looking for a party place gathered one by one and the party proceeded.

It was a good time to talk to a lot of developers here. I had talked with LSH again, and he says I have been watching the development journal steadily, and I was surprised to see you doing the animation work.

I had a schedule to perform the awards ceremony and the LAN party once again from 5:00 on the last Sunday, but unfortunately I came back as soon as 6 o'clock due to personal reason.

But this opportunity is not uncommon, so I think it makes sense.

Oh my legs!

I am still making a small part of the plot and game system, and still keeping one commit per day. In the future, the amount of development journals will decrease. Because, as I mentioned at the beginning of this devlog, there are a lot of things I'm working on that are hard to disclose. I'm sad.

LSH said for that "most of the indie game developers when if keep writing the devlog, they arrive at this point, the devlog's post date term is getting longer." And he said, "that is a natural process. if you are worried about the devlog's quantity, how about put up a devlog every two week?" So I decided to try this part of the time.

One day I will improve my perfection until the day I show my game from there.

See you in next week, thank you :)

[simplemlmsponsoring]

New Post has been published on http://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/internet-marketing/the-11-best-marketing-strategies-we-tried-this-year/

The 11 Best Marketing Strategies We Tried This Year

I’ve tried hard to implement a bold and experimental culture when it comes to marketing at Mailshake. I don’t see failure as a bad thing; it’s fear of venturing into the unknown that I want to discourage.

Basically, my philosophy is this: Try it. If it doesn’t work, change your approach or do something different. Fail fast.

We tried a lot of different marketing tactics in 2018. Most failed, a few worked well, and a few more were home runs.

That’s usually the reality of marketing. It’s also why I decided I needed to branch out and ask some of the best marketers I know to share some of their home runs in 2018.

Here’s the advice they gave me. I’m sharing it here so that you can implement these tactics for yourself in 2019.

1. Building relationships with tools in our space

Content is synonymous with digital marketing, to the point that nearly everyone is investing in it to some extent. This means standing out and getting results from content has never been harder. You need creativity, skill, and, perhaps most importantly, strategy. I learned this firsthand at Mailshake:

At the beginning of the year, we didn’t have a lot of traction in our marketing efforts, specifically around content marketing. Rather than fight that uphill battle alone, the first thing we did was make a list of all the tools in our space (SaaS for salespeople), organize them by categories (CRMs, proposal software, prospecting, etc.), and write an article featuring them. This gave us an excuse to reach out with some flattery and with a link to their site, which opened the door to other co-marketing opportunities, like guest posting, webinars, and even product partnerships. It really became the bedrock of our marketing efforts in 2018 and was a good reminder that marketing is all about relationships, both with your customers and with other marketers in your space.

You can implement something similar by strategizing and utilizing your content on multiple levels. Don’t just write an article targeting one head term and hit “publish.”

Decide who will read and benefit from the content. Include influencers, and leverage them to help distribute your content, build relationships, and open doors to other marketing opportunities.

2. Updating old content

It’s harder than ever to stand out from the competition when it comes to content, but that doesn’t mean we always have to keep creating new, better content. Sometimes we can actually get great results by revisiting and updating old content.

“One marketing tactic that we saw the biggest results from was simply giving lift to older content. We connected Google Analytics and Screaming Frog, and after crawling the website, we were able to organize the spreadsheet and drill down on blog posts that haven’t been viewed in 3+ years. Then, we sorted them by topic and after reviewing each blog post we’d decide whether it was best to just trash it, merge it with another post or update it with new content, imagery and a fresh title. This strategy is something we work on a little bit each month, because it does take time. However, this allows you to focus more on the evergreen content vs. sharing short-lived blog posts. For example, we’ve updated this blog post on duplicate content checkers over the years, and it continues to be a top performer for us!” – Amber Ooley, Thrive Agency

Image Source

Want to implement the same? Grab a list of all your content using a website crawler that can be connected to Google Analytics so you can also gather traffic data, like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.

Check each URL (by hand), and then decide whether the content should be:

Combined with another post (advisable when you have multiple similar posts that are potentially competing with each other) Optimized and updated Ditched altogether

Bear in mind that if you’ve got a long history of content creation, this process won’t be easy, and it will be time-consuming. Be prepared to spread it out over many months if necessary.

3. Using SMS Chat

In many cases, live chat is the platform of choice for customers looking to communicate with a company they do (or are considering doing) business with.

Specifically, 30% of customers expect websites to offer a live chat option. For customers on mobile devices, that percentage climbs as high as 62%.

It’s clear that live chat is an asset, but some companies have seen even better results by taking their chat offline.

“Our best acquisition tactic was actually using our own tool. This past year we created an SMS Chat widget. On desktop, it looks like a live chat. The difference is that messages come in as texts and replies go as texts to the user’s cell phone. This way prospects don’t have to stay on our website to continue the conversation. We have several channels for bringing in traffic, and they all produce leads, but SMS Chat has boosted our sales conversions significantly. We get a lead, we text them back ASAP, and they love it. SMS Chat works on mobile sites, too. Viewers just click a button to start a text.” – Kenneth Burke, Director of Marketing Text Request

Implementing this yourself is relatively simple. Add an upgraded live chat service to your website that encourages visitors to input their phone number and asks their permission for you to text them.

Once the conversation has moved away from your website, you’re in a stronger position to keep it flowing, follow up, and convert more leads into sales.

4. Forming linkbuilding partnerships

There’s so much to be gained from looking at the search results, but most of us aren’t paying them nearly enough attention. Do some digging. You’ll learn who your true competitors are and get new ideas that will help you outrank them and gain more of the clickshare.

Depending on the keywords you search for, you can also discover valuable potential link partners, which can land you a position in the top 10 for high-traffic terms that are too competitive for your own site to claim.

“For us at LiveAgent, the best marketing tactic was to look for top money keywords via an SEO tool, in our case words like “Live Chat Software,” and look for all the variants and who was included in first top 10 results. Then, we pitched all the portals and tried to get a link or partnership going. Whether it was a review portal, blog, or magazine, the exposure led to both traffic increase and improvement in rankings.” – Matej Kukucka, Senior Growth Marketer, Live Agent

To implement this in your marketing strategy for 2019, pick your top money keywords, and, using either a tool or manual search, look at which sites and what content ranks in the top 10 for those terms.

Where appropriate (i.e., when the site isn’t a competitor), approach them with the goal of getting some of your own content onto those sites. If you succeed, you can still appear in the top 10 via a third-party site (even when your own site can’t break onto page one of Google for your top money keywords).

5. Hosting highly-focused webinars

Depending on the topic (and their quality), webinars can be an invaluable onboarding tool for new customers. They can also help with customer acquisition and retention.

“We really invested in webinars in 2018, and as a result they became one of our biggest lead drivers. One of the things that we’ve really noticed is that the more focused a webinar, the better turnout we have. We work with dental practices so topics such as HIPAA, PPOs, and proper phone skills really get a great response. Viewers are engaged during these presentations and stick around for the full hour so they can take part in a Q&A. They finally have somebody at their disposal to answer complex questions that affect their day-to-day!” – Jonathan Bass, Content Marketing Manager, RevenueWell

Thinking about leveraging webinars for the first time in 2019? To start you’ll need a platform to host them on.

You’ll also need to learn how to host a webinar that engages viewers and achieves its aims. And last but not least, you’ll need to promote your webinar so the right people know about it, and actually turn up when you want them to.

6. Leveraging video through guest blogging

We’re viewing more video online than ever before. In fact, one third of online activity is spent watching video.

If you’re not part of this ever-growing trend, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on the opportunity to engage with your existing customers, as well as potential new ones.

“Our best marketing strategy in 2018 would be video marketing through YouTube. Hands down. With little investment and time spent, we focused on inbound strategies like showcasing our video quality through guest blogging and capitalized on our clients’ positive word-of-mouth to drive more people to see our content on the platform. This way, we managed to bring in over 4K new subscribers and 668K new views to our channel in 2018. An 81% and 89% increase, respectively, from our 2017 numbers.” – Victor Blasco, CEO of Yum Yum Videos

Ready to experiment with video marketing? Lucky for you, it’s never been easier to get started. You just need a halfway-decent smartphone, a bit of charisma, and some basic editing skills (or a willingness to learn them). It also helps to learn a little about YouTube optimization.

7. Developing persona-based ebook marketing

Today, written content doesn’t have to be good, or even great, to stand out. It has to be awesome. One way to start producing content that’s leaps and bounds ahead of what your competition is creating is to look beyond long-form blog content and write ebooks.

“At the beginning of the year, our content library consisted of a couple generic ebooks about branding and design. And while they performed well, we weren’t really getting the lead quality we wanted. We wanted to reach out to new audiences, and that required us to dive in and truly understand what mattered to them. Now, our library has grown to 10 ebooks that speak to various industries, such as franchises and real estate, about the challenges and opportunities most important to them.

For example, we published an ebook for marketing leaders at colleges and universities titled “Branding in student recruitment.” Before writing the ebook, we didn’t know much about student recruitment, but the research process helped us get up close and personal with a challenge our clients deal with intimately. Hearing about their experiences gave us a much fuller picture of their day-to-day concerns – and how our platform could help them succeed. That ebook was our most popular one this year, driving hundreds of leads via LinkedIn ads, email nurturing, and blog promotion. As a result, we’ve closed more higher ed clients this year than any other, showing the value of a team-wide coordinated campaign that puts your audience’s unique challenges front and center.” – Karla Renee, Lucidpress

As with all content formats, there are countless people producing average (or less than average) ebooks.

To get results like Renee’s, you need to be much more than average. You need to be producing ebooks that are interesting, professionally written, and targeted at a specific audience – all while bringing something new to the table.

If you can achieve all that, getting into ebooks in 2019 could mean big things for your brand and your business.

8. Optimizing blog content

Writing great, unique, insightful blog content is a start, but for best results you need to be paying close attention to how you’re optimizing that content, too.

“We optimized our website for conversions. We were driving a lot of traffic to our site and had solid organic search engine rankings, but that traffic wasn’t sticking and interacting with our site. We had a lot of great content in the form of white papers, ebooks, case studies, and webinars. Our mission was to pull that content forward and drive interaction through downloads. We looked at our top entry pages and developed specific calls to action on those pages. We looked at the keywords driving traffic to those pages and matched content and CTAs to those keywords. We included the CTA in several places on the page, including links towards the top of the page, bottom CTA image, and a slide-in pop-up that appeared after the user scrolled a third of the way down the page. Here’s an example from one of our most popular blog posts: 21 Powerful, Open Ended Sales Questions. The results have been outstanding. We’ve more than doubled the conversion rate across our site, and inbound opportunities from organic search have grown by 32%.” – Erica Stritch, VP of Marketing at RAIN Group

Want to level up your content optimization in 2019?

Blog post optimization typically starts with long-tail keyword tools like KWFinder and LongTailPro, but it doesn’t need to end there. Try optimizing your content for conversions, too. Be heavier-handed with how you utilize CTAs, and, where appropriate, let keywords that drive traffic to your content influence how you phrase your CTAs.

9. Testing non-traditional social media

When you think “social media,” odds are sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram come to mind – but there is so much more to social media than these “traditional” platforms.

“In 2018, we focused more on non-traditional social media sites, such as Quora and Reddit, to try our outreach tactics and saw a great ROI. Those sites are categorized to be more specific, and they helped us reach our target audience more efficiently than general sites, such as Twitter and Facebook.

It served as a public relations type of function. Earned media and engagement rather than paid. We gave advice to people looking for software solutions that would drive them to our site and also create more brand recognition. We found these people based on specific subreddits they belonged to and/or posts they had made. It takes more time than using an automated response, but having a chance to interact with such a niche target audience group in a more personal way improved our ROI in a very valuable way.” – Mackenzie Jones, TechnologyAdvice

Want to widen your social reach beyond Facebook and Twitter?

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  Look at leveraging more community-based platforms, like Reddit and Quora, as well as industry or subject-specific forums.

10. Prioritizing User Experience on the blog

Today’s consumers have high expectations when it comes to online experience. If your site’s not up to scratch, you can be sure you’re not getting the results you could be.

“We doubled down on user experience this year. Focusing on improving our user experience has been incredibly useful in our SEO strategy in 2018 and helped us to triple our traffic as we placed a larger emphasis on the experience of our users, especially mobile users on the site.

We redesigned our theme to make it faster and more usable, keeping mobile users in mind. We focused a lot on performance and reduced our page load speed by 300% as a large drop-off of users were due to a large page size.

Using user data, we are also able to track where in a blog post were the majority of people dropping off and modified the content to have a CTA around that point.” – Jeremy Noronha, SEO Manager, Foundr Magazine

Ready to make UX a bigger priority in 2019?

Pay more attention to how visitors use your site. Look at the pages they drop off on and ask why. It might simply be that you’ve successfully answered their query, but there might also be a problem with the page, or the site in general.

Tools like Hotjar and VwO show how people interact with your site so it’s easier for you to identify issues that are causing visitors to leave and losing you sales.

11. Including CTAs on our top-performing blog posts

Well-written and optimized blog content is great for getting people to your site, but what then?

“Halfway through the year, we noticed that five of our top-performing blog posts made up 80% of our organic blog traffic. We decided to add two CTAs to each of these blog posts to see if we could convert any of this traffic. We used Sumo to design the CTAs, and we A/B tested different CTAs and found what worked best. We now generate daily sales from the visitors to the top five blog posts on our site thanks to our CTAs.” – David Campbell, Marketing Strategist, Right Inbox

Want to get more sales from your content, too?

When someone lands on your site via a blog post, odds are they’ll get the information they need, and leave. This is what we want to stop. While you’ll never “save” every visitor, you can make a big difference to the value your content delivers by being more aggressive with your CTAs.

Include CTAs within your content and alongside it. Don’t be afraid of exit pop-ups, either – after all, if that visitor was already leaving, what do you have to lose?

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So what now?

Remember, when it comes to marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all. There are too many variables to ever say “do x and you’ll get y result.” To get the best results, you need to always be experimenting.

If you’ve got any other ideas for marketing strategies to try out in 2019, I’d love to hear them. Just leave a comment below!

Read more: wordstream.com

[hydrus]

Version 373 (Qt)

windows

zip

exe

linux

tar.gz

source

tar.gz

The Qt update is ready for Windows and Linux!

This week's release is for all users, but please bear in mind it has some small layout and positioning bugs, such as subscription popups sizing a little strangely. If you would rather wait a week or two for these last issues to be cleared (and any others that pop up as more people play with this), that is totally fine.

Qt background

Since hydrus began as an application, it has used wxWidgets to draw all the windows and buttons on screen. wx has served us well, but hydrus has grown to be a complicated program with hundreds of different custom things going on, and it was starting to show. Lots of windows were flickery, modern tech like 4k screens were not excellently supported, and operating systems and window managers were unstable. If I could have moved to a more flexible and more frequently updated UI library by snapping my fingers, I would have, but the total UI code is almost three megabytes, far too much to reasonably convert as I kept at my normal weekly schedule.

A user contacted me I think about a year ago talking about Qt and possibly making some scripts to automatically convert hydrus's wx code to Qt. I said it sounded like a good idea, and he worked in the background trying to figure it out and add manual tweaks. He was very successful, ultimately getting an essentially functional build going a couple of months ago. He passed the code to me four weeks ago, and I have since crash-learned Qt and fixed the great majority of the bugs that slipped through the automatic conversion process.

I am extremely grateful for this user's work--this would not have happened otherwise--and I am very happy with the result. Qt is a nicer library than wx for our purposes, runs faster, has much less flicker and related jank, and provides many new options for future extensions and customisation. I also enjoy working with Qt--the library is good.

hydrus Qt

There are no critical differences between the wx and Qt builds. Every label and button is where it was before. Fonts and colours and sizes and margins are all slightly different, but nothing has been taken away. Also, there do not seem to be any dll-style conflicts with a previous installation, so you should just be able to install or extract as you would any other week without any problems.

One particularly nice thing is that Qt is overall faster. Video animations and thumbnail fading should be a little smoother. Another is that compatibility with different Linux distros is much better, so Linux users who have had crashes or drawing problems should now have an easier time.

Also, tag autocomplete dropdown result lists can now float for non-Windows. They can also float on dialogs like manage tags. Options on whether they should float or embed are now under options->gui.

Hydrus is a big program, however. I have done plenty of testing and fixed hundreds of things, and advanced users have tried out some early builds and helped me out more, but there are surely some odd layout and display bugs we have not found. There are also some that we found but I could not fix in time--for instance, sometimes the new page tab drag-and-drop does not do its new 'live' page navigation correctly, discord drag-and-drop file export is unreliable again, the duplicate filter's right-hand hover window sometimes positions incorrectly, and subscription popups will change size too often due to some unusual text handling as they work through their network jobs. If you encounter your own issues, I am interested in all feedback. For now, issues that affect usability are of higher priority than a couple of pixels out of place, but I am open to all reports.

If you use IME text input, let me know how it works for you now!

I regret that I was unable to get a release-ready macOS build out for today. macOS has some important UI differences to Windows and Linux, and there are still some significant things--like maximise/borderless fullscreen support for the media viewer--that were causing stability issues. I will keep at it next week.

Users who run from source will need qtpy and either PySide2 (default) or PyQt5. Check https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/help/running_from_source.html for more information.

misc

I also did some normal work, mostly quality-of-life ui stuff:

The 'archive/delete' menu option now shows up when you have nothing selected, and will do everything.

Some of the system predicate edit panels now show quick-select buttons--for instance, if you hit 'system:duration', you'll now have two extra buttons for 'has duration' and 'no duration'.

I fixed an important CPU inefficiency in the new files maintenance manager that was affecting some users with large file maintenance queues and large gui sessions. It was causing juddery UI, which should be completely fixed now.

Clients with large sessions that include 'collected' media thumbnails with hundreds or thousands of files should experience less UI judder as they browse the files within those collections.

full list

qt:

hydrus now uses Qt for its client's user interface, migrating from wx. this is thanks to a huge effort by a user, who delivered converted code for hydrus dev to finish off

a number of hacks and patches remain to compensate for old systems, which hydrus dev will slowly clean up in normal work. ui bug and layout issue reports would be greatly appreciated

shortcut storage had to be converted from fixed wx enums to an independant system. there is a small chance that one of your shortcuts, particularly if it is on the numpad, may have been converted wrong (unusual Enter/Return buttons may be hit here). if one is not working, please check what hydrus thinks it is and try re-entering it

added tentative support for 'Mode_switch' keyboard modifier, for X11 users (and perhaps some users' AltGr?)

autocomplete results can now float in a popup window in dialogs like manage tags! they'll still embed by default, but there are now separate float/embed options for 'main gui' and 'other frame' a/cs

autocomplete results can now float in linux and macOS ok!

page drag and drop now navigates as you drag, so dropping into a page of pages works by you hovering over it and then dropping in the tabbar below, inserting exactly where you want the page to be

a couple of text inputs in the program--the watcher and gallery search pages' text inputs, particularly--now use nicer 'placeholder' text, which isn't real and only shows as grey text when the input is empty

for now, moved to icons for thumbnail 'has audio/duration' indicators, rather than the custom labels

to run the hydrus client from source, qtpy is now needed. either pyside2 (default) or qtpy5 is needed. QtCharts is optional. wx and matplotlib are no longer needed

.

misc:

'archive/delete filter' now appears even when no file is focused. it also appears when no files are selected--and will apply to everything

the system predicate edit panels now support static buttons for easy one-click select for common predicates. duration, has audio, limit, and num tags now have these

system:duration and system:num tags now render a special label if they are >0 or =0

system:untagged is now removed from the normal list

fixed a critical cpu inefficiency in the file maintenance manager's new always-on maintenance, which was lagging several users' browsing sessions while it was working

fixed ctrl+mousewheel tag autocomplete results navigation to skip over multirow parent results

fixed an issue where resetting to default bandwidth rules for a network context would not update the ui properly

fixed a bug when adding a parent/sibling from autocomplete results list

the serialised png export folder now catches when a manually inputted export path's directory does not exist

reduced metadata update lag of pages with very large media collection groups

the inaccurate 'add tags based on filename' button is now called 'import with tags'

fixed a database UNIQUE issue when two duplicate gui session save calls happen within one second

the server's lock_off command now works with the Hydrus-Key header auth (rather than hanging indefinitely wew)

the server now caches hashed access keys in the session manager, in memory, to avoid a db hit on access-key based reauthentication, and in instances where this authentication requires a db hit, now cleanly provides an appropriate 'serverbusy' error

improved some media object memory management and speedy cleanup

improved boot fail graceful exit

removed a bunch of defunct flash (swf) hacks from media viewer code

bunch of misc non-qt cleanup as I went through the code

fixed a bug with rendering network credentials for human display

cleared out the ancient tag archive sync advanced help and added a stub for the new tag migration window

various help updates around wx->Qt

next week

This took a lot of work, more than I thought. I am really pleased, but also exhausted. I am going to take an easy week of fixing little layout issues and try to add system tray minimisation and css theming (which will eventually lead to 'proper' nightmode or any other theme users can work out). I'll also see if I can get the macOS release working better.

Once the Qt-issues rush has eased, I will return to the big tag work and Mr. Bones' normal schedule. I'll also test out adding an mpv video player into the media viewer, so we finally have proper video (and audio!) support.

In the longer term, I have probably a hundred Qt-cleanup jobs to catch up on. There are many behind-the-scenes hacks to get wx-specific code to talk to Qt, so I need to clean up that old bad code into something neater. I will spread this work out into my normal schedule.

[success0]

The Cutting Edge Magazine

Read all of this page and I promise you’ll walk away much wiser with an open-minded perspective on success and achievement!

You’re about to discover:

The for Establishing Your Own Profitable Part- or Full-time Home-Based Business or Laptop Lifestyle!

…it works for anyone who gets behind it!

Dear Reader,

What follows is specifically for anyone who:

Hates their daily commute to and from work

Is being driven mad by an overbearing boss

Dislikes their job and where it's leading them

Feel they are working too hard for too little reward

Wants a job that will fit around their family lifestyle

Needs a career with prospects

Wants to enjoy their life and more free time

Etc

If any of the above applies to you?

Then what follows is a simple, practical and workable solution which will work for anyone who embraces it.

Welcome, and thanks for joining me,

My name is Kevin Nairne and I’m a lifestyle entrepreneur.

I have been living and enjoying the laptop-, and work-from-home lifestyle for the past 20 years.

It’s provided me with an envied lifestyle, and the opportunity to live my life EXACTLY how I wanted, and very much on my terms.

The benefits are MANY and ONGOING!

Although, it’s not for everyone, and may not be for you either.

For that reason, I don’t want to waste a moment of your valuable time or mine.

So, let me begin by asking you a simple question, the answer to which will highlight if what follows is for you.

Or, if you’d be more suited to a job.

Ready?

If you knew for certain and without the possibility of failure that you could successfully establish your own HIGHLY PROFITABLE laptop or work-from-home profit stream,

A profitable strategy which would allow you to live your life EXACTLY as you always had dreamt of,

How long would it take you to get started, and what would you be prepared to pay?

Please put your credit card away!

  I’m just trying to make a VERY valid point which MOST individuals generally overlook.

You see, $5k – $10k would be an exceptionally fair price to ask for such information.

Especially if such knowledge returned you a net profit of $20k or $30K in the following year.

…and then carried on paying you double or treble that sum every year for the rest of your life!

Obviously, this would be a BARGAIN that only a fool would fail to investigate further.

But hang on to your socks…

  However, if I told you that you could gain this same knowledge for just $20 per month or less, would I have captured your attention?

If not, I don’t think you and I will be a good fit for each other.

If you’re still with me:

I’ll introduce you to this exciting solution as we progress, so please take the necessary time to read all of this page at least once.

This is likely to be one of the most important life-changing documents you will EVER read.

Why SO inexpensive?

Simple, and I have a number of reasons why:

I DON’T want price to prevent ANYONE, from the success that’s awaiting you if you have the desire to grow and succeed?

I want to make it easy for you to get started and then succeed BIG time.

I also want to make this an easy decision for you to make, and as you will shortly see, I have done exactly that!

I’m not particularly greedy and have an abundance mentality.

The most important reason, however, is that I’m using a tried and tested strategy which works wonderfully well for me, so, let me explain it to you.

A Win, Win No Lose Strategy

I think you will enjoy this.

Until recently, when I sold it, I had a monthly-paid email newsletter, on a completely different subject from this, the cost of which was just £5 a month and I gave away the first month for free, just to capture my prospects attention.

At the same time, two other similar memberships which basically offered similar or less value were charging $29 and $47 per month respectively.

No contest!

  Best of all, I was converting 23% of all visitors to my website to paying members, WOW!

By contrast, I later learned that the stronger of my opposition was converting an average of just 2% of their visitors, and the average time they remained members was just 4 months, PHOO!

By complete contrast, I very rarely had ANYONE unsubscribe.

In fact, when payments did fail, it was nearly always due to the recipient’s credit card expiring, and generally, once notified of this fact, they quickly re-joined.

I must have been doing something right!

In just 16 months my membership grew to 3,893, and shortly after passed the 4K mark, do the sums for yourself!

In just a few hours every week, I was generating a very nice monthly profit.

Please note:

  I don’t believe in undercutting or selling cheap just for the sake of doing so. This is a strategy where the cost of membership became no longer a serious consideration.

I was selling in volume while I know that my opponents were not.

This strategy allowed me to concentrate my time on providing value, whereas, they had to constantly focus on sales, just to stay afloat.

I learned from this valuable experience, and I hope that you have also.

So, I’m repeating the same principle here as you will soon see, and the cost of the solution compared to the ROI (return on investment) will not even be a consideration.

First, let me provide you with some valuable knowledge which will decide your future levels of success.

ESSENTIAL UNDERSTANDING!

What follows is a short master class in life skills and the rules for ongoing success, and how you can dramatically improve both.

Below are the 7 reasons why people fail at ANYTHING! 

…and these are just the main reasons for you to know and use this knowledge to your advantage:

1: Lack of Confidence and Failure to Commit.

  Lack of belief in your own personal success is the main reason why most people fail, and as a result, their commitment and intention to succeed is very poor, or even non-existent.

By contrast, the higher your certainty of success, the more likely you are to succeed! Strong self-belief and self-confidence are essential elements of success and achievement.

  2: You Don’t Have Written Goals!

  Did you know that ALL successful achievers have highly detailed written goals? Not just some of them, ALL of them.

Writing and constantly improving your goals and objectives in life should be a high priority. If you don’t believe me just do it for the next month or so and watch the magic happen in your life.

Written goals are the start of your plans, your roadmap to success which you can refer to at any time. Without them, you’ll lose focus quickly.

  3: Not Knowing What to do Next

  This can be a VERY BIG problem, especially in the initial stages of establishing your new project or business.

When you know for certain exactly what needs to be done next, and the task after that, then, you can get down to achieving them rather than constantly wondering if you’re doing the right thing.

There’s an old and very true saying which states: when you don’t know where you’re going, then any road will get you there!

DON’T TAKE THAT ROAD.

  4: Extraordinary Effort Doing the Wrong Things

  Why would anyone do this?

Simple, they lack clarity of focus and doing the wrong thing (I’m ashamed to say) that this was a specialty of mine for many years. I learned the hard and painful way. This is why I’m now so passionate about setting goals, objectives, and planning.

However, sometimes, it takes time and experience to master this skill and become efficient as well as effective. Working well in advance, and visually planning what needs to be done, and constantly updating will overcome this problem.

This is how I stay focused on what needs to be done next:

https://trello.com – …and it’s FREE!

  5: Jumping on EVERY New Shiny Object

  By shiny new objects, I am referring to new potential and ideas you haven’t yet tried.

If you’re impatient, (I certainly am), then there is an even greater temptation to constantly hop and switch from one idea to another in the HOPE of quick success.

Do this and you're unlikely to ever finish anything.

HOPE is a dreadful strategy and will nearly always leave you disappointed. Whereas ongoing planning and (fine detail) goal setting and consistent positive action will develop momentum and achieve completely the opposite.

Patience is SERIOUSLY a virtue you will need to adopt, as well as the discipline to always practice it. Very few things are achieved overnight, but when you stay focused and do not deviate from your objective, then, very soon you will look back over your shoulder and see just how far you’ve travelled.

  6: NOT Maintaining a Positive Attitude

  The way you decide to think will be a HUGE deciding factor in the levels of your future success.

Read that again.

  Yes, you 100% decide how you think, as well as what you think about.

If you let negative thoughts into your mind, they will quickly lower the quality, or even destroy, your day and your objectives.

Always look for the silver lining in every situation and think positively, and when things are not going as well, then think TWICE as positively!

When you get into the habit of ALWAYS expecting the best, a strange thing will begin to happen: you’ll begin to get it!

  7: No Consistency or Momentum

  We all make lots of mistakes on our journey towards success. It’s part of the learning and growing process, so embrace it.

When you find something which works, then do it consistently. Continually improve what is working for you, and adapt or remove what isn’t.

Make this a habit, practice it every day, and very shortly you will have the power of momentum taking you forward. Consistency and momentum are without a doubt the most important virtues to master.

So now you have a CLEAR IDEA of how to become as successful as you wish!

  Remember, this ONLY works when you take action and use it!

The sooner you get started, the more likely you are to achieve all of your objectives.

The Solution to a Better Lifestyle is a Simple One!

Especially for ANYONE who wants to establish their own laptop – or work-from-home lifestyle.

What follows is:

Easy to use, has a minimal commitment, and it WON’T overwhelm you.

It’s called the ‘Cutting Edge’ online magazine and you can access it from anywhere, from your computer, tablet or smartphone.

This is just the TIP of the iceberg, and there is lots more information printed below, so click here to check it out for yourself…

The ‘Cutting Edge” magazine will constantly add to and cultivate your understanding and profit generating knowledge base without EVER overwhelming you.

It will lead you to many AHA moments and the point where you JUST HAVE to take action and begin construction of your own profit stream.

Every issue will be an investment in your future security and income generations skills.

Every month it will trigger and reignite your creativity and as a result, a small avalanche of financial potential and lucrative concepts will land in your mind.

You’ll enjoy ongoing exposure to new laptop- and work-from-home strategies which you can borrow, adapt, copy or duplicate.

I will also address members’ questions (maybe even yours) which every member can benefit, learn and profit from.

Here’s a Sample of What You’ll Learn:

How to master and use social media to build HUGE potential audiences and generate ongoing profit!

The tips and techniques to writing killer copy that grabs attention and generates engagement.

Many ways that you can profit from simple websites.

How to discover EXACTLY what your prospects want, rather than guessing, and then provide it for them.

The secrets to achieving 30% – 40% opt-in rates to your email and other lists.

As you progress, you’ll assimilate the power of marketing persuasion.

You’ll be exposed to MANY powerful potential income streams and income generating ideas.

The true authority of RESIDUAL INCOME streams, and how they will alter your life.

How to find as many new customers as you need or can use.

How to get started on a minimal budget, or even, NO budget at all! (Yes, this is possible!)

The quickest way of converting your prospects into purchase ready customers.

The many FREE tools and software which will boost your productivity and grow your bank balance.

Without even appearing on screen, you’ll discover how to create videos that will generate a SERIOUS profit stream.

How to get more done in less time! (this is a major secret to success).

Discover you're most valuable of income generating assets. (This generates 85% of my monthly income!)

Etc.

This list could go on for many pages.

  In short, by being a member, you’ll stay at the cutting edge of online technology and enviable online income generation.

This is just the tip of the iceberg and I hope it has captured your interest?

So what follows is the important bit…

An Amazing Deal and a HUGE Opportunity

…and FAR too good to miss!

Are you up to it?

The BIG question is this, are you SERIOUS about creating a better lifestyle?

One which you can design to fit around YOU and the life you want to lead, that will allow you to achieve everything you desire.

Are you content being employed and growing the dreams of others? Or, do you want to grow your own dreams and be your own person?

If so:

There is no BETTER TIME to take action!

Right now, your mind is focused on this possibility and potential, and a wise move would be to capitalise on this mental momentum.

Get started today and your cost is locked in!

Please Remember:

Compared to your ROI (return on investment)

The Cost of Investment is Inconsequential!

Don’t be surprised if you return another day to find the cost of membership has risen considerably.

Here’s what it’ll cost to get started today:

Just $9.95 Per Month

The 'Cutting Edge' profit magazine

$ 29

95

Every 3 Months

A Fresh Issue Published EVERY Month

Develop Progressive (work from home) Skills

Private Members Area

Invest Today Before The Price Goes Up!

tttt

best value

Monthly Cost

The 'Cutting Edge' profit magazine

$ 14

95

Monthly

A Fresh Issue Published EVERY Month

Develop Progressive (work from home) Skills

Private Members Area

Invest Today Before The Price Goes Up!

tttt

I look forward to speaking with you again on the inside.

  Please consider this PAINFUL fact:

Take action today, and a year from now you could VERY POSSIBLY have enviable sums of money dropping into your bank account on a daily basis.

By COMPLETE contrast…

  For those who fail to take action, the most likely outcome is that in 12 months from today you’ll be 365 days older. Have a few more grey hairs, as well as less of them, and be a year closer to your death!

Sorry, I know that most people won’t want to hear this hard and true fact.

But you can totally avoid this WASTED LIFE scenario unfolding!

If you’re still reading, then the thought and potential of creating your own profitable laptop-lifestyle or home-based business are obviously appealing to you.

This is your advantage and something that you should leverage as much, and as soon as possible.

Every journey starts with the first step!

The sooner you get started, the sooner you will begin reaping the rewards also!

It all starts with your decision and commitment.

If you SERIOUSLY want to upgrade your lifestyle, have more fun and free time, as well as the income to live your dreams, then this small investment into your future happiness is NOT a big or difficult commitment to make.

REREAD THIS PAGE AGAIN!

  Please remember:

The Formula for success is ALWAYS the same:

Just ADD ACTION!

I hope to be speaking with you again very shortly.

from https://www.thereallaptoplifestyle.com/the-cutting-edge-magazine/

[imapplied]

The 11 Best Marketing Strategies We Tried This Year

I’ve tried hard to implement a bold and experimental culture when it comes to marketing at Mailshake. I don’t see failure as a bad thing; it’s fear of venturing into the unknown that I want to discourage.

Basically, my philosophy is this: Try it. If it doesn’t work, change your approach or do something different. Fail fast.

We tried a lot of different marketing tactics in 2018. Most failed, a few worked well, and a few more were home runs.

That’s usually the reality of marketing. It’s also why I decided I needed to branch out and ask some of the best marketers I know to share some of their home runs in 2018.

Here’s the advice they gave me. I’m sharing it here so that you can implement these tactics for yourself in 2019.

1. Building relationships with tools in our space

Content is synonymous with digital marketing, to the point that nearly everyone is investing in it to some extent. This means standing out and getting results from content has never been harder. You need creativity, skill, and, perhaps most importantly, strategy. I learned this firsthand at Mailshake:

At the beginning of the year, we didn’t have a lot of traction in our marketing efforts, specifically around content marketing. Rather than fight that uphill battle alone, the first thing we did was make a list of all the tools in our space (SaaS for salespeople), organize them by categories (CRMs, proposal software, prospecting, etc.), and write an article featuring them. This gave us an excuse to reach out with some flattery and with a link to their site, which opened the door to other co-marketing opportunities, like guest posting, webinars, and even product partnerships. It really became the bedrock of our marketing efforts in 2018 and was a good reminder that marketing is all about relationships, both with your customers and with other marketers in your space.

You can implement something similar by strategizing and utilizing your content on multiple levels. Don’t just write an article targeting one head term and hit “publish.”

Decide who will read and benefit from the content. Include influencers, and leverage them to help distribute your content, build relationships, and open doors to other marketing opportunities.

2. Updating old content

It’s harder than ever to stand out from the competition when it comes to content, but that doesn’t mean we always have to keep creating new, better content. Sometimes we can actually get great results by revisiting and updating old content.

“One marketing tactic that we saw the biggest results from was simply giving lift to older content. We connected Google Analytics and Screaming Frog, and after crawling the website, we were able to organize the spreadsheet and drill down on blog posts that haven’t been viewed in 3+ years. Then, we sorted them by topic and after reviewing each blog post we’d decide whether it was best to just trash it, merge it with another post or update it with new content, imagery and a fresh title. This strategy is something we work on a little bit each month, because it does take time. However, this allows you to focus more on the evergreen content vs. sharing short-lived blog posts. For example, we’ve updated this blog post on duplicate content checkers over the years, and it continues to be a top performer for us!” – Amber Ooley, Thrive Agency

Image Source

Want to implement the same? Grab a list of all your content using a website crawler that can be connected to Google Analytics so you can also gather traffic data, like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.

Check each URL (by hand), and then decide whether the content should be:

Combined with another post (advisable when you have multiple similar posts that are potentially competing with each other)

Optimized and updated

Ditched altogether

Bear in mind that if you’ve got a long history of content creation, this process won’t be easy, and it will be time-consuming. Be prepared to spread it out over many months if necessary.

3. Using SMS Chat

In many cases, live chat is the platform of choice for customers looking to communicate with a company they do (or are considering doing) business with.

Specifically, 30% of customers expect websites to offer a live chat option. For customers on mobile devices, that percentage climbs as high as 62%.

It’s clear that live chat is an asset, but some companies have seen even better results by taking their chat offline.

“Our best acquisition tactic was actually using our own tool. This past year we created an SMS Chat widget. On desktop, it looks like a live chat. The difference is that messages come in as texts and replies go as texts to the user’s cell phone. This way prospects don’t have to stay on our website to continue the conversation. We have several channels for bringing in traffic, and they all produce leads, but SMS Chat has boosted our sales conversions significantly. We get a lead, we text them back ASAP, and they love it. SMS Chat works on mobile sites, too. Viewers just click a button to start a text.” – Kenneth Burke, Director of Marketing Text Request

Implementing this yourself is relatively simple. Add an upgraded live chat service to your website that encourages visitors to input their phone number and asks their permission for you to text them.

Once the conversation has moved away from your website, you’re in a stronger position to keep it flowing, follow up, and convert more leads into sales.

4. Forming linkbuilding partnerships

There’s so much to be gained from looking at the search results, but most of us aren’t paying them nearly enough attention. Do some digging. You’ll learn who your true competitors are and get new ideas that will help you outrank them and gain more of the clickshare.

Depending on the keywords you search for, you can also discover valuable potential link partners, which can land you a position in the top 10 for high-traffic terms that are too competitive for your own site to claim.

“For us at LiveAgent, the best marketing tactic was to look for top money keywords via an SEO tool, in our case words like “Live Chat Software,” and look for all the variants and who was included in first top 10 results. Then, we pitched all the portals and tried to get a link or partnership going. Whether it was a review portal, blog, or magazine, the exposure led to both traffic increase and improvement in rankings.” – Matej Kukucka, Senior Growth Marketer, Live Agent

To implement this in your marketing strategy for 2019, pick your top money keywords, and, using either a tool or manual search, look at which sites and what content ranks in the top 10 for those terms.

Where appropriate (i.e., when the site isn’t a competitor), approach them with the goal of getting some of your own content onto those sites. If you succeed, you can still appear in the top 10 via a third-party site (even when your own site can’t break onto page one of Google for your top money keywords).

5. Hosting highly-focused webinars

Depending on the topic (and their quality), webinars can be an invaluable onboarding tool for new customers. They can also help with customer acquisition and retention.

“We really invested in webinars in 2018, and as a result they became one of our biggest lead drivers. One of the things that we’ve really noticed is that the more focused a webinar, the better turnout we have. We work with dental practices so topics such as HIPAA, PPOs, and proper phone skills really get a great response. Viewers are engaged during these presentations and stick around for the full hour so they can take part in a Q&A. They finally have somebody at their disposal to answer complex questions that affect their day-to-day!” – Jonathan Bass, Content Marketing Manager, RevenueWell

Thinking about leveraging webinars for the first time in 2019? To start you’ll need a platform to host them on.

You’ll also need to learn how to host a webinar that engages viewers and achieves its aims. And last but not least, you’ll need to promote your webinar so the right people know about it, and actually turn up when you want them to.

6. Leveraging video through guest blogging

We’re viewing more video online than ever before. In fact, one third of online activity is spent watching video.

If you’re not part of this ever-growing trend, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on the opportunity to engage with your existing customers, as well as potential new ones.

“Our best marketing strategy in 2018 would be video marketing through YouTube. Hands down. With little investment and time spent, we focused on inbound strategies like showcasing our video quality through guest blogging and capitalized on our clients’ positive word-of-mouth to drive more people to see our content on the platform. This way, we managed to bring in over 4K new subscribers and 668K new views to our channel in 2018. An 81% and 89% increase, respectively, from our 2017 numbers.” – Victor Blasco, CEO of Yum Yum Videos

Ready to experiment with video marketing? Lucky for you, it’s never been easier to get started. You just need a halfway-decent smartphone, a bit of charisma, and some basic editing skills (or a willingness to learn them). It also helps to learn a little about YouTube optimization.

7. Developing persona-based ebook marketing

Today, written content doesn’t have to be good, or even great, to stand out. It has to be awesome. One way to start producing content that’s leaps and bounds ahead of what your competition is creating is to look beyond long-form blog content and write ebooks.

“At the beginning of the year, our content library consisted of a couple generic ebooks about branding and design. And while they performed well, we weren’t really getting the lead quality we wanted. We wanted to reach out to new audiences, and that required us to dive in and truly understand what mattered to them. Now, our library has grown to 10 ebooks that speak to various industries, such as franchises and real estate, about the challenges and opportunities most important to them.

For example, we published an ebook for marketing leaders at colleges and universities titled “Branding in student recruitment.” Before writing the ebook, we didn’t know much about student recruitment, but the research process helped us get up close and personal with a challenge our clients deal with intimately. Hearing about their experiences gave us a much fuller picture of their day-to-day concerns – and how our platform could help them succeed. That ebook was our most popular one this year, driving hundreds of leads via LinkedIn ads, email nurturing, and blog promotion. As a result, we’ve closed more higher ed clients this year than any other, showing the value of a team-wide coordinated campaign that puts your audience’s unique challenges front and center.” – Karla Renee, Lucidpress

As with all content formats, there are countless people producing average (or less than average) ebooks.

To get results like Renee’s, you need to be much more than average. You need to be producing ebooks that are interesting, professionally written, and targeted at a specific audience – all while bringing something new to the table.

If you can achieve all that, getting into ebooks in 2019 could mean big things for your brand and your business.

8. Optimizing blog content

Writing great, unique, insightful blog content is a start, but for best results you need to be paying close attention to how you’re optimizing that content, too.

“We optimized our website for conversions. We were driving a lot of traffic to our site and had solid organic search engine rankings, but that traffic wasn’t sticking and interacting with our site. We had a lot of great content in the form of white papers, ebooks, case studies, and webinars. Our mission was to pull that content forward and drive interaction through downloads. We looked at our top entry pages and developed specific calls to action on those pages. We looked at the keywords driving traffic to those pages and matched content and CTAs to those keywords. We included the CTA in several places on the page, including links towards the top of the page, bottom CTA image, and a slide-in pop-up that appeared after the user scrolled a third of the way down the page. Here’s an example from one of our most popular blog posts: 21 Powerful, Open Ended Sales Questions. The results have been outstanding. We’ve more than doubled the conversion rate across our site, and inbound opportunities from organic search have grown by 32%.” – Erica Stritch, VP of Marketing at RAIN Group

Want to level up your content optimization in 2019?

Blog post optimization typically starts with long-tail keyword tools like KWFinder and LongTailPro, but it doesn’t need to end there. Try optimizing your content for conversions, too. Be heavier-handed with how you utilize CTAs, and, where appropriate, let keywords that drive traffic to your content influence how you phrase your CTAs.

9. Testing non-traditional social media

When you think “social media,” odds are sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram come to mind – but there is so much more to social media than these “traditional” platforms.

“In 2018, we focused more on non-traditional social media sites, such as Quora and Reddit, to try our outreach tactics and saw a great ROI. Those sites are categorized to be more specific, and they helped us reach our target audience more efficiently than general sites, such as Twitter and Facebook.

It served as a public relations type of function. Earned media and engagement rather than paid. We gave advice to people looking for software solutions that would drive them to our site and also create more brand recognition. We found these people based on specific subreddits they belonged to and/or posts they had made. It takes more time than using an automated response, but having a chance to interact with such a niche target audience group in a more personal way improved our ROI in a very valuable way.” – Mackenzie Jones, TechnologyAdvice

Want to widen your social reach beyond Facebook and Twitter?

Image Source

  Look at leveraging more community-based platforms, like Reddit and Quora, as well as industry or subject-specific forums.

10. Prioritizing User Experience on the blog

Today’s consumers have high expectations when it comes to online experience. If your site’s not up to scratch, you can be sure you’re not getting the results you could be.

“We doubled down on user experience this year. Focusing on improving our user experience has been incredibly useful in our SEO strategy in 2018 and helped us to triple our traffic as we placed a larger emphasis on the experience of our users, especially mobile users on the site.

We redesigned our theme to make it faster and more usable, keeping mobile users in mind. We focused a lot on performance and reduced our page load speed by 300% as a large drop-off of users were due to a large page size.

Using user data, we are also able to track where in a blog post were the majority of people dropping off and modified the content to have a CTA around that point.” – Jeremy Noronha, SEO Manager, Foundr Magazine

Ready to make UX a bigger priority in 2019?

Pay more attention to how visitors use your site. Look at the pages they drop off on and ask why. It might simply be that you’ve successfully answered their query, but there might also be a problem with the page, or the site in general.

Tools like Hotjar and VwO show how people interact with your site so it’s easier for you to identify issues that are causing visitors to leave and losing you sales.

11. Including CTAs on our top-performing blog posts

Well-written and optimized blog content is great for getting people to your site, but what then?

“Halfway through the year, we noticed that five of our top-performing blog posts made up 80% of our organic blog traffic. We decided to add two CTAs to each of these blog posts to see if we could convert any of this traffic. We used Sumo to design the CTAs, and we A/B tested different CTAs and found what worked best. We now generate daily sales from the visitors to the top five blog posts on our site thanks to our CTAs.” – David Campbell, Marketing Strategist, Right Inbox

Want to get more sales from your content, too?

When someone lands on your site via a blog post, odds are they’ll get the information they need, and leave. This is what we want to stop. While you’ll never “save” every visitor, you can make a big difference to the value your content delivers by being more aggressive with your CTAs.

Include CTAs within your content and alongside it. Don’t be afraid of exit pop-ups, either – after all, if that visitor was already leaving, what do you have to lose?

Image Source

So what now?

Remember, when it comes to marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all. There are too many variables to ever say “do x and you’ll get y result.” To get the best results, you need to always be experimenting.

If you’ve got any other ideas for marketing strategies to try out in 2019, I’d love to hear them. Just leave a comment below!

Source

from https://www.imapplied.co.za/seo/the-11-best-marketing-strategies-we-tried-this-year/

[vfontjr]

New Post has been published on Victor Font Consulting Group, LLC

New Post has been published on https://victorfont.com/screenflow-8-a-must-have-update/

ScreenFlow 8: A Must Have Update

This year seems to be the year for must-have updates. First came the MacBook Pro 2018. Now, It's ScreenFlow 8 by Telestream.

I've long been a fan of ScreenFlow. I started using it several versions back when I switched from a Windows PC to a MacBook Pro for my daily computing tasks, application development, and book publishing work. I've tried competing products like Camtasia and even Apple's own Final Cut Pro. But I keep coming back to ScreenFlow because not only is it the easiest to use for a prosumer like me, it's very intuitive and requires a very short learning curve. I still use Final Cut Pro once in a while, but mostly for creating my own motion graphics for intros or outtros. All the rest is handled superbly by ScreenFlow.

ScreenFlow is my go to tool for screen video capture, creating tutorials, promo videos, book trailers, and such. I've always liked its features and interface. But now, the ScreenFlow 8 upgrade, with its 25 new features and 41 improvements and fixes, is a product you can love!

ScreenFlow 8 Highlights

Create New Project From Template

ScreenFlow 8 supports creating new projects from templates. If you do a lot of similarly styled videos like a tutorial series, video course, etc., you can prebuild your projects with just a few placeholders and all of your content immediately gets dropped into that project when you're done recording. ScreenFlow's new template feature will save you ton's of time!

Stock Media Library

One of my favorite new features is the incorporation of a stock media library. Yes, that's right! We now have access to a stock media library built right into the ScreenFlow 8 interface. No more searching the web for stock videos, audio, images, transitions, and chroma key support.

The stock media library includes over 500,000 unique pieces. With a library this large the interface includes filters and search capabilities to make the job of finding the perfect media element a piece of cake. Using the stock library requires a minimal subscription fee of $60/year. Where else can you find so much for so little a cost?

Other New Features

Track Thumbnails—Now you can see a quick and easy visual representation of your content via thumbnails displayed over the duration of a media file. Easily identify scene changes and areas of interest. No need to scrub through content to find specific moments!

Styles—Always want your camera in a certain spot with specific filters and a drop shadow? Well, regardless of the edits you make to any assets in your projects, you can now save those settings as “Styles” to easily re-use over and over. A massive time saver. Combine with templates for a mostly automated workflow!

Quick Narration & Voice-Over Additions—Need to record a quick audio clip? Quick narrations allow you to add narrations or voice-overs without leaving the timeline or configuring a traditional recording.

Detachable Editing Timeline—The new detachable editing timeline allows for a more customizable editing experience and enables multi-monitor editing by separating the editing timeline and canvas on to different monitors.

Additional Timeline Frame Rates—Additional Timeline Frame Rates of 24, 25, and 50 have been added. These are in addition to the existing 30 and 60 options.

Export Animated PNG (APNG) Files—ScreenFlow now supports APNG export. Like GIF’s, APNG’s are single file moving pictures that support transparent backgrounds but allow for higher quality and smaller sizes!

Freehand Annotation—Custom shapes and lines can now be drawn directly onto the ScreenFlow canvas for highly customizable annotations.

Instagram Project and Export Presets—Uploading to Instagram? ScreenFlow has you covered with built in project dimensions and export settings specific to everyone’s favorite social image site!

Frame for Selected Monitor—When choosing your recording monitor, a red frame now indicates the current selection… no need to remember monitor model numbers!

H.265/HEVC Decoding—Previously, HEVC could only be exported in ScreenFlow 7. You can now import and edit files encoded with HEVC such as iPhone X 4k recordings.

Arrange Menu—Various new options such as alignment, scale, and distribute allow you to more quickly arrange your media within your project.

Auto-Scale Large Imports—ScreenFlow will now automatically scale imported media to fit the canvas if the dimensions of the media are larger than the canvas.

Burn in Captions on Export—You can now burn-in captions if you need captions in a player that does not support caption tracks. Simply check the box during export.

Content-Type Badge for Items in Media Libraries—Media within your library now has a badge overlay depicting the type of media for easier identification.

Keyboard Shortcuts for "Close Gap"—Users can now set a custom keyboard shortcut for the “close gaps” function. Multi-select gaps and close with one shortcut.

Media Library Filtering System & Metadata Panel—New filtering system for the media libraries with metadata display tab. Click the filter button in the library pane to display.

Preview Audio and Video in Libraries Without Adding them to the Timeline—Audio and video files in libraries can now be previewed without first adding them to the timeline.

Save Frame as JPEG—Quickly export the current content as a still JPEG image.

Select Which Audio Channels are Recorded with Audio Interface Devices—Users can now select specific channels to record of a multi-channel audio interface. You no longer need to record all available channels.

Support Decoding MOV PNG Files—You can now add and work with MOV PNG files in ScreenFlow.

Support for GoPro CineForm Codec—ScreenFlow now supports the GoPro CineForm codec for import and editing.

Specify the Thumbnail Image for a YouTube Published Export—Now when publishing directly to YouTube, you can use ScreenFlow to select the image to be used as the YouTube thumbnail.

Upload to YouTube on a Schedule—When publishing to YouTube, you can now select and schedule a time in which you would like the video to be published.

The Bottom Line

I don't recommend products lightly. And I only recommend products that I use. ScreenFlow 8 is an exceptional upgrade and well with the price, especially with the stock media library subscription.

[infotainmentplus-blog]

Porsche Design Huawei Mate RS review: Is it worth that premium? Huawei is one of the few brands keeping the luxury phone trend alive. It doesn’t have diamond-encrusted notches or Vertu-level pricing, but the Porsche Design Huawei Mate RS reaches well beyond its Huawei P20 stablemates with a 1,695 euro (~$1980) price. Unlike Vertu’s simple “glue precious stones onto this two-year-old phone” philosophy, Huawei and Porsche Design opted to actually bring tangible improvements to this phone. Is the Mate RS actually worth the price though? That’s what our Huawei Mate RS review will tell you. Huawei Mate RS review notes: I used the 256GB Mate RS for just over two weeks as my primary smartphone. I stuck to home Wi-Fi for the most part but used the Cell C network otherwise. The phone runs EMUI 8.1, based on Android 8.1, and has the May 2018 security patch. Show More Design “This looks just like a Galaxy S9 Plus,” was my first thought upon peeking at the front of the phone. Just like the S9, the Huawei Mate RS has a dual curved display, with curved corners and tapered left and right edges — which make the phone feel thinner than it is — and a notch-less top bezel. With its dual curved display and reflective glass back, the Mate RS certainly feels like a Huawei flagship. The phone’s reflective glass back certainly feels like a Huawei flagship, even down to the separate Huawei and Porsche Design logos. I usually moan about glass backs due to their fingerprint magnetism, but the Huawei Mate RS didn’t gather nearly as many prints as I thought it would. I’m not sure if this is due to an oleophobic coating or a tweaked finish, but it certainly made for a pleasant surprise. The company also changed a few things compared to the Huawei Mate RS’ P20 stablemates, delivering a vertically stacked triple-camera setup in the middle rather than off to the side. The other big design change is that Huawei and Porsche Design shifted the fingerprint scanner to the rear. There’s also an in-display fingerprint scanner, so if you’re going to have two, it makes sense to slap the second one on the back. All in all, there’s some Huawei DNA in here, but the Huawei Mate RS feels very different to the P20 series. Which is a good thing, given our impressions of last year’s Porsche Design Mate 10. Related Articles 40 megapixel shootout: Huawei P20 Pro vs Lumia 1020 Consensus has long held that, when it comes to photography, more megapixels is not always better. Quality over quantity, as they say. Yet in 2018, an industry-leading smartphone shooter boasts a 40 megapixel camera — the … Huawei P20 Pro review: The Galaxy S9 killer 40MP, the world’s first triple camera, 5X Hybrid Zoom, artificial intelligence in all the ways, and the most unique color on any smartphone ever. These are just some of the features Huawei is hoping will … The phone’s power and volume keys are on the right, its IR blaster is on top, and there’s a dual-SIM tray on the left (no storage expansion here). Its speaker and USB Type-C port are at the bottom. There’s no 3.5mm jack here, unfortunately, so you’ll need to use the included dongle for your legacy headphones. The phone has IP67 water and dust resistance, so it can survive a pool dunking or rainy weather, but its glass design makes it less durable, as glass doesn’t usually hold up too well after a tumble. You should probably use the included case or buy one for maximum protection. While it’d be a shame to cover up the Mate RS’ beautiful frame, dropping a phone this expensive would be even worse. Display The Mate RS features an AMOLED screen, much like the Huawei P20 Pro — but this time without a notch. I still don’t understand why more brands don’t retain a minimal top bezel instead of forcing a notch, but c’est la vie. The Mate RS also delivers a resolution boost over the P20 Pro’s Full HD+ display. Its 2,880 x 1,440 screen soundly trumps the P20 Pro, landing between the standard S9 and S9 Plus. You can’t watch 4K videos natively, but text is sharp and viewing photos is a pleasure. We noticed some color shift on the edges of the display, but that’s unfortunately normal for phones with curved displays. Read: The Mate RS doesn’t have a notch because Porsche Design hated the idea The phone’s 6-inch 18:9 AMOLED screen melts into the borders when turned off while delivering those trademark deep blacks when on. Huawei even lets you turn UI elements like the navigation key dock and first-party apps black (these don’t work in third-party apps). In any case, it’s clear the Mate RS screen is a technical improvement over the P20 series. If things still aren’t quite to your liking, you’ve got a few adjustable settings. There’s manual and automatic color temperature adjustment, a blue light filter, and size tweaks for text and other UI elements. Performance Under the hood, the Huawei Mate RS sports the flagship Kirin 970 chipset, 6GB of RAM, and 256GB or 512GB of storage. The internal storage unfortunately isn’t expandable, but it’ll more than enough for most people. The Kirin 970 doesn’t have the latest Arm cores like Qualcomm, nor does it have as many cores as Samsung’s GPU, but the phone is still one of the fastest I’ve used in a while. Apps launch quickly, scrolling through the Twitter feed is usually effortless, and web browsing doesn’t feel slow at all. The Kirin 970 is older than its rivals' flagship silicon, but it still delivers the goods The phone also handles multitasking without breaking a sweat. I tried jumping from the YouTube app to the preinstalled music player to several games and beyond, and came back to find my YouTube video still paused on the same spot. Not bad. In the gaming department, I usually use NASCAR Heat Mobile as my pixel-pushing title of choice, owing to its field of more than 40 cars. The Mate RS offered a very smooth experience, with little perceptible slowdown. We also tried a few more graphically intense games, like FZ9, PUBG Mobile and World of Warships, and all of them ran smoothly (or as smooth as can be for PUBG). So if you want to play visually demanding games on the go, the Mate RS will definitely let you crank things up. We ran the phone through Antutu and GeekBench 4 to get a feel for where it stands compared to the competition. The Kirin 970 shows its age here, lagging behind Qualcomm and Samsung’s latest silicon. The Mate RS’s scores are closer to last year’s devices, like the OnePlus 5T and Google Pixel 2 XL. The Antutu score of 210,117 lags behind the OnePlus 6‘s more than 260,000, and the Mate RS’s GeekBench 4 numbers aren’t as impressive as the OnePlus 6’s 2,454 single-core/8,967 multi-core figures. So the Mate RS delivers smooth performance in practice, despite benchmarks that lag behind other 2018 flagships. Battery Endurance is another story — this phone chugs on and on. The Mate RS’ 4,000 mAh battery easily handled a day of music videos on YouTube, sprinkled with WhatsApp messaging. Heck, I got between seven and eight hours of screen-on time out of the phone most days, all while listening to YouTube for most of the workday too (Wi-Fi and mobile data enabled, auto-screen brightness and smart resolution enabled). If you need a phone that can deliver two days of usage, the Mate RS won’t need to stretch as much as rival devices. Unlike the P20 series, the Porsche Design phone also supports wireless charging, which worked fine with my Samsung convertible charging pad. However, the phone often vibrated, indicating it wasn’t charging properly. Moving the pad to a flat position fixed the issue. Charging time wasn’t as brisk as a fast charger, but it certainly beat charging through a computer. There are two fast chargers in the box (with American and European plugs), presumably for the benefit of the high flyers this phone is marketed towards. Cabled charging will get you to 50 percent capacity in around 30 minutes compared to 45 minutes or so with wireless charging. Fingerprint scanners Huawei might not be the first company to include an in-display fingerprint scanner, but the Chinese brand might be the first to include two scanners. After using the Huawei Mate RS for a while, I can see why. Editor's Pick Vivo Nex review: Frustratingly imperfect, undeniably desirable (Update: Video added) The best part of the move to truly bezel-less phones is the weird and wacky solutions to the question of where to put everything that used to live above and below the display. Front-facing cameras, … The under-glass fingerprint scanner takes about a second or two to unlock. It’s “fast” enough to not be a major issue, but long enough that you can’t just quickly tap and go as with the rear scanner. I don’t really mind the unlock time, but the accuracy can be irksome. It felt like maybe one out of every four or five attempts were unsuccessful. Sometimes three attempts in a row didn’t do the trick either. This is sadly par for the course at this stage of the under-glass scanner game. Blindly trying to unlock your phone via this scanner (made by Goodix) is an issue too, as you have to hold on a very specific part of the display. Even subtle haptic feedback would’ve improved the experience. A Vivo Apex-style approach (made by Synaptics), which turns the entire lower half of the display into a scanner, would’ve been cool, but the tech probably isn’t ready yet (Vivo even switched from Synaptics to Goodix with the Nex, the commercially available version of the Apex concept phone). If the under-display scanner was the only option, I’d probably get used to it. Fortunately, the rear scanner is present, more accurate, and as fast as they come, so I never had to. The rear scanner supports the usual Huawei tricks like swiping down for the notification shade, lateral swipes for browsing photos, and acting as an extra shutter key. If unlock speed and accuracy are important to you, use the rear-mounted scanner; the in-display scanner is just too slow and unreliable. My only real complaint here is I’m not always sure when I’m touching the scanner. I would’ve liked the ridge around the fingerprint scanner to be more prominent or the scanner to have a different feel from the rest of the back. Speaking of biometrics, the Huawei Mate RS doesn’t use any fancy 3D facial recognition, but face unlock is super fast anyway. I’d say it probably takes one or two seconds at most for the phone to recognize my mug. Unlock times and accuracy are generally fine in low-light, but pitch black darkness is a no go. Camera The Huawei Mate RS has a virtually identical camera setup to the P20 Pro. It’s got a triple camera setup on the back (40MP f/1.8, 20MP monochrome f/1.6, 8MP telephoto with OIS), and a 24MP front-facing shooter. Daytime shots are vibrant and sharp — though not always perfect. I noticed some color bleeding on occasion (mainly when using the wide aperture mode) and Android Authority’s own Rob Triggs previously explored the P20 Pro’s tendency to over-sharpen images. Focusing isn’t always reliable either, (especially when using the aperture mode) though overall the phone is a photography powerhouse. The Master AI mode also automatically tweaks settings when it recognizes a scene. It works well for flora, food and landscapes, but I found it occasionally annoying. When I wanted to take a photo of a page from a book, the phone insisted on switching to the document scanning mode. This could be useful, but a “do you want to scan a document” prompt would’ve been preferable when all I wanted was to share a page on Twitter. The company’s camera app could also do with a few UI tweaks. Why is there a quick toggle for Moving Images but nothing for HDR? As it is, you have to dive into the settings menu to enable HDR. The phone generally delivers great dynamic range, although HDR does a good job of taming elements like clouds and the sky. It’s not quite as dramatic as the difference between SDR and HDR on the Pixel 2, but it has its uses. It still tends to occasionally saturate everything and give a cartoony look to scenes, but Huawei is way past the ghosted HDR snaps of the Ascend P8. Overall the Mate RS is a photography powerhouse, but it has its quirks. The triple camera combination delivers two more major perks: better digital zoom (up to 5x) and better low light shots. You don’t quite get DSLR-quality zoom, but I was very happy with results most of the time. Either way, it’s preferable to the bog-standard zoom of most other phones out there. A shot at 1X zoom. A picture at 3x zoom. Going to 5x zoom yields many details. The Huawei Mate RS delivers great night shots on its own, but its night mode takes things up a notch. When set to auto, the phone basically acts like it’s doing a long exposure, but it’s actually stacking a series of shorter exposures to reduce blur and improve brightness. The results can be fantastic, although some elements can look weird (cars won’t leave light trails but will still look blurry). DOWNLOAD THE FULL-RES PHOTOS The night mode also lets you adjust shutter speed and exposure. When you adjust the shutter speed, it actually behaves more like a manual mode, delivering proper long exposures. Nevertheless, if you want to do light painting and other low-light tricks, Huawei’s dedicated mode is still available here, offering presets for the usual stars, traffic lights, water, and so on. Huawei’s aperture mode is back too, along with the ever-popular portrait mode feature. Blurry edges still creep in when you look closely, and portrait lighting effects are unpolished and feel like a lame copy of the iPhone’s effect. Still, I like the added flexibility of the aperture mode, especially when combined with the preinstalled filter that delivers color pop effects. Hopefully, the company will add more editing options, because I’d like the ability to highlight exactly what should appear in color or monochrome. As it is now, you can adjust the aperture to tweak the effect, but that’s all. Everything in focus tends to get the color treatment. Fortunately, these leaves were grey already. The Huawei Mate RS supports 4K, 1080p at 60fps, 1080p at 240fps, and 720p at 960fps recording, to name the main video shooting modes. The super slow-mo isn’t quite as nifty as Sony’s solution, which allows you to record a standard clip and tap a “slow-mo” button when you want to record a 960fps snippet. The 720p resolution makes for some jagged edges, and focusing can occasionally be an issue, but it’s a neat tool to have nonetheless. It's disappointing the extra cash doesn't get you photos any better than the P20 Pro, but the results are still great. The 24MP selfie camera does the job just fine as well, although it can blow out backgrounds like the sky during the day. Unfortunately, HDR isn’t available via this camera, which is a shame. Portrait mode shots are also a treat here, though my habit of throwing in a thumbs up throws off the dodgy edge detection. Low-light shots predictably see a drop in detail and jump in noise, but there’s always a screen flash to help. On one hand, it’s disappointing to see your extra cash isn’t buying anything more in the camera department compared to the P20 Pro. On the other, the P20 Pro’s photography experience is so great that I’m happy with the results anyway. Software EMUI 8.1 shows how far the Android skin has come, with its mix of skeuomorphic design and Samsung’s TouchWiz. It’s still not everyone’s cup of tea, but it delivers some useful features and carves out its own identity. As with many Chinese skins, Huawei ditches the app drawer out of the box. I’ve grown used to this change after using the Xiaomi Mi 4 and Huawei P9 as daily drivers in recent years, but you can always turn the feature on in the display menu. EMUI has plenty of useful features, but there's still room for improvement The company also opted to include a gesture-driven UI, like last year’s P10 series. Fortunately, this isn’t enabled by default so you can easily avoid it. I would’ve liked to see a Samsung-style faux home button, as the ability to press hard to go home, no matter the app, has become mighty convenient after using the Galaxy S8. Speaking of older additions, Huawei retained the double knuckle tap gesture for screenshots, which, in theory, I find more intuitive than Samsung’s wax-on-wax-off palm gesture. It’s not the best gesture in practice, as the phone occasionally misses my double tap. You can always just hit power and volume down instead. There’s a theme store for changing up the look of EMUI, a phone manager hub (for tweaking mobile data settings, cleaning up storage and more), the preinstalled music, video, and gallery apps, and Huawei’s Health app. Other solid software features include a biometric safe for media and apps, an eye comfort mode for filtering blue light, a mobile data blacklist for apps, Dolby Atmos support, flip to mute, drawing a letter to open apps, and a simple, easy UI for anyone that finds EMUI a bit too complicated to navigate. There’s also bloatware like Booking.com and Quik, though it feels like Huawei is long past the Galaxy S4 stage of tossing in everything and the kitchen sink. Specifications Porsche Design Huawei Mate RS Display 6-inch curved OLED display 18:9 aspect ratio 2,880 x 1,440 resolution Processor Huawei Kirin 970 RAM 6GB Storage 256GB or 512GB Cameras Rear: 40MP main camera 20MP monochrome lens 8MP telephoto lens Front: 24MP camera Battery 4,000mAh Non-removable Wireless charging Software Android 8.1 Oreo Porsche Design skin Colors Red, Black Price 256GB version: €1,695 (~$2,103) 512GB version: €2,095 (~$2,599) Availability April 12 - China, Hong Kong, and Macau Sometime later - France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and Switzerland Gallery Pricing and final thoughts The 256GB Huawei Mate RS has a European price of 1,695 euros, compared to the P20 Pro’s 899 euro (~$1,050) price tag. Meanwhile, readers in the U.K. can expect to pay 1,500 pounds (~$1,980). Up the ante to 512GB and you’ll be paying 2,095 euros (~$2,450). It’s unclear if the U.K. will receive the 512GB model. For what it’s worth, the device retails for 26,000 rand (~$1,920) here in South Africa, which is more or less in line with European pricing. The Huawei Mate RS is available in black or red. So fans of the twilight P20 Pro are out of luck. The phone may be eye-wateringly expensive, but it’s more than just a rebranded Huawei flagship — unlike previous Porsche Design phones. Between the notch-less OLED screen, generous storage space, wireless charging, and dual fingerprint scanners, the phone certainly has several notable perks. So if you like the idea of a P20 “Premium” and don’t mind spending the cash, it’s definitely worth a look, even if you don’t end up walking out with one. Everyone else should wait for Huawei’s next flagships which may well include some of the same additional features. That’s it for our Huawei Mate RS review. What do you think of this premium phone? Let us know in the comments. , via Android Authority http://bit.ly/2m3QMEw

[andrewdburton]

How to Give Money (and Get Happiness) More Easily

If you have more money than you need, you should start giving some of it away.  That’s the lesson I learned about a year ago, when I took a gamble and donated $100,000 to a variety of charities, centered around the Effective Altruism movement.

More on Effective Altruism: The Life You Can Save website, and my earlier article on the subject.

At the time, I had no experience with giving to anyone other than immediate family and friends, so I didn’t know how I would feel about it. But over the course of this past year, I have had many late nights to reflect on life and what it means to live one that feels worthwhile. There are have been successes and failures, mostly happy times but also plenty of sadness shared with my siblings as our Dad made his departure.

During all this questioning of life, I kept thinking back to the times I’ve been less selfish and less fearful, and more willing to help other people. These were the things that reassured me that my life was indeed a good one, and that I wasn’t squandering the opportunity too badly so far. In short, being a good person was by far the most reliable source of happiness.

So. If hard work and generosity are what bring meaning to life, it makes sense to keep at it, even when it seems difficult. With this in mind, I vowed to make another round of donations of equal or greater size this year.

The Tricky Side of Philanthropy

While most people would assume that giving away money is easier than making it, when surveying wealthy people I have found the opposite is often true. After all, once you build a prosperous business or career, the income becomes almost automatic. You indulge in your natural and joyful tendency to work hard every day, and the money keeps flowing in, often faster with each passing year. There are no decisions to be made, and you know every dollar of net income is going somewhere worthwhile: to you.

But to give money away, you have to overcome a whole new set of challenges:

Overcome your fear of having less money. After all, more is always better – you can always benefit from more security, right? (this is actually wrong, but it can be hard to recognize)

Figure out who is most deserving of your money. It took so much time to earn the money and overcome the fear of giving – the last thing you want is to see it go to waste.

Figure out how to get that money to the worthwhile recipient. You have to find their webpage, mail a check so the credit card company doesn’t steal 3% of your donation, and ask politely that they don’t put you on their mailing list and hound you for the rest of your life.

Sort out the tax consequences. In most cases, you can deduct charitable donations on the “itemized” part of your tax return, but until you hit the itemizing threshold of around $10,000 you might not get any benefit. On the other hand, certain charitable expenses are deductible directly from your business income, if you run a business.

“Too confusing already. Forget it, I’ll just keep my money.” And thus, you end up in the same trap that keeps many people from being generous.

Since I had already pushed through the pain last year, I knew I could handle it and repeat the same thing this year. Just write the same checks and mail them to the same places. Job done.

But then I noticed a few shortcuts that make things even easier:

Betterment Investing just added a spectacular no-cost automatic donation feature. Using their existing tax-optimized system, they allow you to donate your most appreciated shares directly to any of their many connected charities. This gives you the maximum tax deduction right now, while reducing your taxes further when you later withdraw from your account later in life.

Paypal has a similar feature: even from within the minimalist phone app, you can click a “donate” icon and transfer out surplus bits of your balance directly to a large selection of good charities. Paypal does its part by not taking any fee for these donations, no matter how large. You can use up existing paypal balances, or have them draw through your connected checking account  – I found this was a very smooth and easy way to try your hand at giving.

MMM Headquarters Becomes an Automatic Philanthropy Machine

MMM Headquarters shows off its holiday style, just last night.

I noticed that PayPal feature because I happen to have a constant, growing surplus in my account these days, as a result of starting the MMM-HQ Coworking space right here in downtown Longmont.

The money side of this situation is pretty interesting:

We bought the property (which now hosts two businesses) for $225,000, which means my half cost me only $112,500.

Then I spent about $30,000 in materials and subcontractors to whip it into shape. (Plus about 700 hours of my own labor, which I happily donated)

We now have about 60 paying members at $50 per month each, for a total of $3000 per month or $36,000 per year.

But the coworking space is still kind of quiet during the days, so we can sign up a few more people and bring this annual number to $50,000.

Property taxes ($4k), Utilities and Beer ($1600), and ongoing upgrades ($10,000) only consume 30% of this budget, leaving a huge surplus, as long as I keep running it myself and don’t draw any salary.

Many people and companies have started donating supplies to us, in an unprompted show of generosity. Authors send us books, Nimbus Roasters keeps our coffee stocked, Urban Tribe sent a fancy electric cargo bike, Aerobis sent some cool strength training equipment all the way from Germany, Flatiron Spice Company brought in red and green chili spices, Lefthand gave us a discount on beer kegs, members are donating useful equipment like 3-D printers and weight training equipment from their homes, and the list goes on.So I figured, in the spirit of all this sharing, why don’t we make this building a philanthropy machine? Its ongoing profits can be donated to charities – both local and international – on a regular basis. Along with doing a lot of good, this will probably give all of us members a stronger sense of belonging.

What if I’m Not Ready to Give?

I’m writing this post to encourage people who have plenty, to consider giving it to help people (and parts of our natural environment) truly in need. If I can prompt you, wealthy person, to decide that giving to the world’s most effective charties, is even better than getting a slightly better car or leaving your children an extra-large estate, then this post might be the most effective one on this whole website.

But I do not want to make anyone feel guilty for not giving away money, when they don’t yet have a surplus. If you’re working hard and saving effectively for financial independence, abundance will come. If you’re not there yet, don’t stress out about it. There is no “tithing” in the imaginary religion of Mustachianism.

Details on Easy Giving

Some of the staff of Givewell in San Francisco office perform the “Mustachian Salute”

As part of writing this article, I made part of my $100,000 donation via Betterment’s new system. I have three accounts with the company (my public Betterment Experiment, a rolled-over IRA, plus a personal taxable account with the largest balance of the three). All three accounts have seen rapid appreciation due to the current boiling-hot stock market,  so there are lots of capital gains available to harvest.

Donating appreciated shares expands the power of your giving compared to just giving cash, which is quite a neat trick. This quick table from Betterment’s new Charitable Giving Explainer page lays it out very simply:

In this example, your donation nets about 19% more tax savings than a direct cash donation.

So I tried the same thing in real life. The largest of my donations this year ($70,000) was to GiveWell, through the Betterment system.  As I fired it up, Betterment automatically estimated my tax savings in real time:

This $70,000 donation will cut my 2017 tax bill by $22,841.. AND reduce my eventual capital gains taxes by $4188. This is the true power of donating appreciated shares.

As with last year’s donation, this biggest chunk went to charities based on the Effective Altruism philosophy. What this means in practice is, “Create the best results for humans possible, on a worldwide basis, with each dollar.”

I believe this is both the most humane and the most logical way to donate money, because of the following course of events which has been proven again and again:

Improve developing world health and education -> these people have better lives immediately -> but also the more empowered people also choose to have smaller families -> world population growth slows and eventually reverses -> everybody wins.

So in this round of donations, here is where the money went. You can click each charity name to get to their own website for easier research.

Charity Amount Funding Source Givewell $70,000.00 Betterment World Wildlife Fund $10,000.00 Betterment Doctors without Borders $10,000.00 PayPal (MMM-HQ) Amazon Conservation Association $5,000.00 Website/C.Card Natural Resource Defense Council $5,000.00 Website/C.Card Bicycle Colorado $5,000.00 Website/C.Card Total $105,000.00

Note: there are more ideas for places to donate in last year’s article. Also, as of the day of publishing the WWF donation had not yet been made since I’m waiting for some money to transfer. This sentence is to keep me accountable – I’ll erase this once I get that last task done.

Note on Donating Appreciated Shares: you don’t need a Betterment account to do this, it just makes it easier. Several other financial institutions make this possible, and Vanguard has a nifty “Donor Advised Fund” feature.

Got Questions?

Since this is an unusually important topic, I will try to invest extra time into answering questions in the comments section. And if you’re an expert on any of these subjects – philanthropy, investing, tax policy, the developing world, medicine, or the environment, please feel free to do the same.

Thanks, world, for another prosperous year and here’s to the next one!

from Finance http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2017/12/04/how-to-give-money-and-get-happiness-more-easily/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT RULE

Ideas can morph. The switch to the new norm may be surprisingly fast, because the startups that can retain control tend to be one of the only programming languages a serious hacker would want to use it from examples in a couple minutes.1 Maybe it's a good thing for the world if people who wanted to get rich now you don't have to be in it yet. When my friends Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell were in grad school, one of the signs of a good idea, but you have less control over the rate at which you turn yours into a prepared mind. That will be a good plan to have Jobs speak for 9 minutes and have Woz speak for a minute or so. One of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast, is in NYC right now meeting their users.2 The latter is much more expensive. Contradiction. It has sometimes been said that Lisp should use first and rest instead of car and cdr, because it becomes a filter for selecting bad startups.3

Or more importantly, if you include short term room rental, second home rental, bed and breakfast, and other similar classes of accommodations, you get mathematicians and writers and artists.4 But what a difference it makes to be able to refuse such an offer if they had grown to the point where they were a rooted in your town and/or b so successful that VCs would fund them even if they didn't move. Startups need to be designed using a small set of orthogonal operators, just like the core language. Most programmers are told what language to use, at least subconsciously, based on the total number of characters he'll have to type an unnecessary character, or even still in it, and they won't even fund them. I think rising economic inequality is the inevitable fate of countries that don't choose something worse. Because you get a lot of people. And in the early 1970s, before C, MIT's dialect of Lisp, called MacLisp, was one of the big successes?5 There is also a complementary force at work: if you have no ideas.

He got away with it, but unless you're a good con artist, you'll never convince investors if you're not convinced yourself.6 This kind of work is the future. It would be a pretty cheap experiment, as civil expenditures go. We can get rid of or make optional a lot of the same things we said at the last two. When you feel that about an idea you've had while trying to come up with startup ideas, you're probably mistaken. Anything that can be implicit, should be. Good programmers often want to do now. There's a lot to like I've done a few things, like intro it to my friends at Foundry who were investors in Service Metrics and understand this model I am also talking to my friend Mark Pincus who had an idea like this a few years down the line.

You have to produce something. If you can't already do it, the best solution is to tackle the problem head-on, at best. This section is now obsolete for YC founders presenting at Demo Day only needs to be able to violate this rule. They think they're trying to convince one another to invest in Airbnb.7 That last sentence is the fatal one. I think a bigger problem is that a programming language is not Lisp.8 The schlep filter is so dangerous that I wrote a separate essay about the condition it induces, which I called schlep blindness.9 Because you get a lot of the earlier stage ones would probably take it.

This pattern is no coincidence: it is the people who might want what you're making, then the total addressable market, or TAM, of your company is doing. I do: that being mean makes you stupid.10 The usual motives are few: drugs, money, sex, revenge.11 But there may still be money to be made from something like journalism.12 Increasingly you win not by fighting to get control of a scarce resource, but by having new ideas and building new things. Committees yield bad design. Plus they're investing other people's money, which makes me think I was wrong to emphasize demos so much before. But are these just outliers? I used to think of startup ideas. At YC we call these made-up or sitcom startup ideas.

Hackers are unruly. But after I'd been there a few months in, they probably didn't. Good programmers often want to show that all the founders are equal partners.13 However, even that is an interesting prospect. Fred.14 Many investors explicitly use that as a test, reasoning correctly that if you wanted to hear. After all, you're not saying much.15

And getting rejected will put you in a slightly awkward position, because as long as no one is forced to use it. If you can think instead That's an interesting idea, you can increase how much you spend. The search engines that preceded them shied away from the most radical implications of what was said to them, not something you face and read to an audience that's mostly non-technical. It would be a good thing for investors that this is the divisor.16 Getting people to take less salary for a while, or increase revenues. And it would get easier over time, because the more startups you had in town, the less likely it is to establish a first-rate university in a place where rich people want to live.17 Agreeing tends to motivate people less than disagreeing.18 In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries online.19

You have to be a rule with them that everything has to start with a simple prototype, then add features, but at least they probably really do want whatever they're asking for. This strategy will work best with the best investors are much smarter than the rest, and the big bang method.20 Microsoft, Yahoo, Google. A and still has it today. The games played by intellectuals are leaking into the real world doesn't work that way. You couldn't get from your bed to the front door if you stopped to question everything. So be honest with yourself about the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas.

Notes

This is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. Some would say that YC's most successful ones. Mitch Kapor, is he going to visit 20 different communities regularly.

Emmett Shear, and degenerate from words to their stems, but in fact had its own. But on the x company, you may have been truer to the prevalence of systems of seniority.

Many people feel good. How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an urban context, issues basically means things we're going to drunken parties. You're not seeing fragmentation unless you see people breaking off to both write the sort of dress rehearsal for the government.

There are a hundred years or so you can remove them from leaving to start a startup. At the time it still seems to have a connection with Aristotle, but rather by, say, recursion, and it doesn't cost anything. They can't estimate your minimum capital needs that precisely.

Some urban renewal experts took a back-office manager written mostly in less nerdy fields like finance and media. It seems justifiable to use an OS that doesn't seem an impossible hope. Another tip: If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco, LA, Boston, and b when she's nervous, she doesn't like getting attention in the general manager of a correct program. If someone just sold a nice-looking man with a walrus mustache and a company selling soybean oil or mining equipment, such a dangerous mistake to do better.

The state of technology isn't simply a function of their pitch.

Scribes in ancient philosophy may be enough to absorb that. I suspect five hundred would be far from the DMV. There is a matter of outliers, and would probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of personality for the future.

And even more dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was. People who know the actual server in order to test whether that initial impression holds up. We invest small amounts of other people's money.

There are some VCs who understood the vacation rental business, it's easy for small children pointed out by solving his own problems.

The story of creation in the rest of the river among the largest in the general sense of the most successful founders still get rich by buying politicians. There are a better education. Some translators use calm instead of blacklist. They don't know the combination of a cent per spam.

Only in a signal. So where do we draw the line?

After a while to avoid using it, and the 4K of RAM was in this essay, but no more unlikely than it would grow as big as any successful startup? In fact it's our explicit goal don't usually do best to err on the way I know this is not that everyone's the same weight as any successful startup improves the world, and in some cases the process dragged on for months. The Mac number is a self fulfilling prophecy. 66.

There are some good ideas buried in Bubble thinking.

Indeed, it was actually a computer.

5 more I didn't realize it till I started using it out of their core values is Don't be evil, they made much of a silver mine. Otherwise they'll continue to evolve as e. I was writing this, but you should be easy to write in a couple hundred years or so. I use.

I don't think it's publication that makes it easier to make people use common sense when intepreting it. The state of technology isn't simply a function of revenues, and on the web. From the conference site, they're nice to you; you're too early for us!

If that worked, any YC partner wrote: After the war, federal tax receipts have stayed close to 18% of GDP were about the distinction between them. Spices are also the main effect of low quality though.

What he meant, I mean type I startups.

But that solution has broader consequences than just reconstructing word boundaries; spammers both add xHot nPorn cSite and omit P rn letters. You can't assume that the word content and tried for a startup, and Reddit is derived from Delicious/popular. Good news: users don't care what your body is telling you.

They don't know who invented something the mainstream media needs to learn to acknowledge it. If this happens because they're innumerate, or invent relativity. Obviously signalling risk is also a good chance that a shift in power from investors to act against their own company. Again, hard work is a new Lisp dialect called Arc that is not an efficient market in this essay I'm talking here about which is not so much in the body or header lines other than salaries that you wouldn't mind missing, false positives caused by filters will have to disclose the threat to potential investors and instead focus on growth instead of working.