#might be well served to put a little more focus on curating what content YOU experience if you find yourself uncomfortable with particular

[bigskydreaming]

TFW you realize you relate more to a fave character than you ever actually consciously realized, lmao. 

So I was just having a remote therapy session, and we were focusing on just some mental pain management techniques since my stupid metabolism makes most pain meds largely useless and my head has been waging all out warfare on me for the past week and a half, lololol. And we were delving into one of my personal fave rants, which is the fact that so many people - including vaunted medical professionals - just fundamentally don’t seem to get that having a high pain tolerance does not mean you don’t like, FEEL pain unless its really a lot or intense. Its just that you’re hard-wired/trained/geared via stuff like an abusive childhood, lol, to not SHOW or DISPLAY any visible or audible pain cues unless the pain reaches a certain high threshold where its impossible to hold them back.

But particularly over the past four or five years, with my ongoing medical shit, its super obnoxious trying to get your doctors to display a sense of urgency about your condition because they’re just fundamentally not grasping the degree of chronic pain you’re dealing with every day, since, y’know....I can literally be sitting there in the doctor’s chair and conversationally talking about the fact that no, I definitely am currently feeling like, an eight or nine out of ten on the pain scale, please don’t be confused by the fact that I’m literally LOLing as I describe this to you rather than gasping and moaning in a more obvious indication of it. 

Its like, I’m not TRYING to undersell it or anything, its just, when you grow up since the time you’re like five or six years old, knowing damn well that the only appropriate response to someone asking ‘oh am I hurting you’ that won’t earn you MORE pain is a completely casual or cavalier sounding ‘nope, I’m fine, all good here, no problems.’......like, at a certain point in your development, that becomes pretty hard-wired in, like, you can’t shake it just because you consciously WANT to. (Though it is one of the things I’m trying to unlearn and ‘rewire’ in therapy now, via EMDR techniques aimed at like, literally reprogramming my nervous system and how I react to various stimuli. Its.....slow progress, lmao, but I mean there is some progress so its all good).

But point being, when you’re a physically abused kid and your physical abuser doesn’t want to believe or accept that they’re hurting you, and so they tended to just get angrier and MORE dangerous if they thought you were indicating or even just ‘implying’ that they were in fact hurting you.....you get pretty damn good at not showing even the slightest hint of pain or distress unless its literally a level you’ve never experienced before and thus have no practical experience in hiding or distracting yourself from.

But that doesn’t mean you don’t FEEL every bit of it. It doesn’t mean you’ve found a magical off-switch that means you can just mind-over-body yourself from acknowledging or being aware that you are in fact in a shit ton of pain. You just.....have learned the importance of masking it, and found ways to do that by necessity.

Except, even much later in life when you are in a safe place or more control of your situations or surroundings, there’s no easy way to just....stop putting that mask on by default, the second you’re experiencing any type of pain. And so even when dealing with medical professionals, too many of them just don’t GET that their vaunted ‘tell me how much pain you’re in from one to ten’ scale isn’t really the be-all and end-all of pain measurement, because its subjective and arbitrary as HELLLLLLLLL.....and one of the defining parameters for what that pain scale looks like and feels like for YOU, is....your personal history with pain and how you’re ‘comfortable’ displaying evidence of it. (And I know there’s a ton of people and even groups of people who can relate to this for entirely different reasons, I just can only speak to my own of course). 

But its definitely frustrating and invalidating as hell to be in more pain than many people ever experience in their lives, and TRYING to convey that as openly and honestly as you can.....and literally being able to SEE the doubt and dismissal in doctors’ eyes, because all they’re seeing is the visual cues you’re putting out there and which they equate to ‘can’t possibly be in THAT much pain, not if he’s acting this casual about it’.....

And so the frustrating irony is that you end up dismissed as like, a pain ‘lightweight’ who is complaining about an apparent degree of pain that’s barely anything in their ‘professional’ estimation. And thus they’re disinclined to take your requests for heavier or more effective pain medication seriously, or not impressed by your attempts to imbue a greater sense of urgency in their approach to your treatment plan or procedures, etc......when in reality, the only reason you’re showing those cues of not being in that much pain is because you’re MORE used to and familiar with even extremely high degrees of pain than anything a lot of them are accustomed to.

Its invalidating as hell, being treated as though you have no idea what you’re talking about when you say “I am actually in a shit ton of active, ongoing pain, hey thanks, can we maybe do something about this,” when actually, the disconnect comes from you having MORE experience with MORE pain than some of them can even fathom. You just....also have more experience with reasons not to SHOW that pain, if its at all avoidable to any degree whatsoever.

THAT’S what high pain tolerance actually means, and the sheer volume of medical professionals who just flat out don’t get this, or worse, just don’t care or are too proud to reassess their viewpoints on this matter if that carries the implication they don’t actually know as much as they think they do......god, it grates.

(Once, when I was around twenty-three or twenty-four I think, I got caught up in the periphery of a bar fight that resulted in me getting a shard of glass embedded in the back of my forearm. Still have a pretty sizable scar from it. And it absolutely hurt like fuck, but I was conscious as paramedics arrived on scene and when going to the hospital to have it removed and stitched up, and like......kinda cracking jokes about it the whole time because I was uncomfortable as hell and didn’t really know what else to do or how to react, y’know? I mean, I had a few inches of glasses jutting out from the top of my forearm, lol, what the hell are you supposed to do or say about that? There’s not really a protocol, lmao. Problem was, they took one look at me sitting there with this spear of glass sticking out of my arm and making dumb jokes about it like it was no big deal......and they decided this meant I was in shock and kept trying to treat me accordingly. And it was just like.....useless, because lol no I wasn’t in shock, I had none of the physical symptoms of being in shock and benefited from none of their assumptions that I was.....I was just a dude with a shard of glass in his arm that hurt like fuck and I really wanted it out as soon as possible, and I was in full awareness of what had happened and everything I was feeling, I just didn’t know how to convey this in a way that they would believe, because I couldn’t come up with anything to say or do other than laugh about how fucking surreal the whole situation was.)

Anyway, so circling back to the point, or as much of one as I ever have, so today I was just learning and practicing various mental pain management/coping techniques with my therapist and discussing my issues with doctors and the High Pain Tolerance Quandary. Basically like, I would really truly like to know or learn how to display the ‘expected’ physical and visual/audio cues for being a person who is experiencing a ‘4′ on the pain scale, versus a person who is experiencing a ‘7′ or a ‘10′.....so they can stop fucking treating me like I’m only at a 4 when I’m actually at an 8 or 9, just because I look and sound like a person who really is only at a 4 no matter what they actually CLAIM to be feeling.

Course, easier said than done.

But yeah, so as she was coaching me through various techniques and surveying what I was doing with my body and facial expressions and cues, etc, she pointed out something that I had literally never noticed about myself before, even though once she DID point it out I could recognize that its something I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, well back before I was ten and no doubt stemming from smack dab in the midst of the worst of my childhood abuse.

So, y’know on Teen Wolf, how Scott and Liam and various others are at times shown digging their claws into their palms and drawing blood to ground themselves with the pain? (And ironically, how I was just talking the other week about photo doubling for a similar such scene with gashes in the character’s palms, lmfao). Well, obviously I don’t have claws, and part of why I’d never really paid much attention to when I was doing it is because even my therapist wasn’t comfortable classifying it as a kind of self-harm or anywhere near punitive enough to carry that kind of weight or associations.....

But like, I’ve always kept my fingernails fairly trimmed but not completely. Like, just enough of an edge to them that at times, particularly when I’m in physical pain or distress already, I’ll just like....dig my fingernails into the pad of other fingertips, and use that little familiar spike of pain to not ground myself but rather distract myself from whatever else I was feeling. Like, she wasn’t comfortable calling it a self-punitive technique because as we got into it, it was clear I was never doing it to CAUSE myself pain....rather, its something I only do when I’m already in pain, usually far more pain than anything that brings up.....but by deliberately doing that and creating a focal awareness around it, even just a largely subconscious one......I’ve apparently long been using that to hook my attention up to a very specific, very manageable sensation/focal point of pain that lets me and my ADHD brain relegate whatever other pain I’m feeling (even if its much much worse) to the back of my mind for at least a little while, as I distract myself by focusing on this more obvious and consciously directed bit of lesser pain. 

And a big part of why I probably never noticed I was doing this, we eventually concluded, is because as a kid I probably came up with it as a kind of survival technique specifically BECAUSE it was something I could do to distract myself/manage my pain covertly, without drawing my abuser’s attention to what I was doing either. And by extension, without the fact that I was doing it at all 'betraying’ that I was in pain or trying to manage or cope with painful sensations in the first place. A lot of other pain management techniques, like even just deep, deliberate breaths, tend to be a lot more obvious and noticeable, and thus would have been counter-productive for my specific purposes. No matter how much they helped me manage whatever physical pain I was feeling, they would have at the same time inevitably drawn attention to the fact that I was trying to do that at all in the first place....and thus only invite more pain. 

Merely digging my fingernails into my fingertip pads, not enough to draw blood or make me cry out or anything like that, but rather just to distract myself and deliberately focus me on a source of pain I could deal with and more easily handle, as well as being ‘low in intensity’ enough that focusing on it didn’t bring any other obvious visual or audio pain cues to the forefront.....that I could do without anyone noticing. And thus this is likely why it came to be my go-to move whenever I was in any kind of pain at all, as just a quick and easy way to wrap my head around my physical sensations and shift focus to something more easily dealt with or managed (even if it didn’t actually dismiss or get rid of whatever other pain I’m feeling entirely). And just the low-key nature of it in general likely being a big part of why it became such an unconscious instinct for me until now, something that barely even registered in my conscious mind as I built up/hard-wired instinctive responses that incorporated it without me having to consciously direct myself to do that.

I mean, its still obviously not an ideal response, especially when I’m long past being stuck in any kind of external situations or need to fall back on that and the covert nature of it. So now its another of those things to just be aware of and work on rewiring on an instinctive level, making it a priority for me to focus on consciously using more helpful and positive methods of pain management.

But it was just interesting to me to have it pointed out as something I’ve been doing all this time, let alone being as unaware of doing it as I’ve apparently been. And its not hard to draw obvious parallels to when characters in media I consume do similar things even if for not quite the same reasons or in quite the same ways. So now I’m just kinda contemplating that and wondering how much even just some degree of unconscious awareness that I do that might have made me more alert to when characters or other people do similar things. Made me more attuned to noticing or even fixating on moments when they do things like that, that I related to even on an entirely subconscious level.

*Shrugs* Anyway, that’s all, like, literally not going anywhere with this, was just unwinding and felt like mapping my way through that all contemplatively, because oh no, inexplicable strangeness, therapy puts me in particularly contemplative headspaces, whodathunkit, lmfao. *Shrugs* Just struck me as particularly interesting, so felt like sharing for anyone else who can relate/see similar parallels themselves.

Or just chalk it up to random anecdotal wtf-ery from your friendly (err, mostly. okay sometimes. FINE ideally, let’s go with that) neighborhood over-sharer. 

[polarishq]

Meet EMMETT STEPHENSON. They are ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY TWO years old and hail from MANHATTAN, NY. Emmett embodies the star, CAPELLA, and is sponsored by the moon AOEDE. They use he/him pronouns. Their faceclaim is JORDAN FISHER.

Capella reminds me of the scratch of bow strings across a cello, a living Alexa, very carefully curated Spotify playlists, jazz music, manners and gentleness, the crippling fear that you’re not good enough, eventually destroying everyone you love, libertango.

BIOGRAPHY

[trigger warnings for: blink and you miss it 9/11 mention, depression, anxiety, panic attacks, attempted suicide]

New York City was once touted as the center of the universe. While the universe is far more vast than we could ever imagine, Manhattan’s been a good place for someone like Emmett. It’s dirty, it’s noisy, and while it has its moments of peace and tranquility, it’s the perfect city for someone with crippling anxiety, because there are so many places to hide. True, the city posed its own problems in terms of being overcrowded (those tenement houses? Forget it), as well as having its share of insanity (Prohibition? The first Stonewall riots? 9/11?) but it’s his home and he wouldn’t have it any other way. Emmett absolutely believes that there are mole people in the subway, BTW.

Emmett Stephenson was two and a half years old when he managed to climb up onto the family’s untouched Steinway piano bench (the piano was mostly a display of wealth and a show, nobody else played it) and plunked out the melody to a Christmas carol after he’d heard it playing on the radio. Emmett was thirteen years old when he was given his first oboe, a tiny, gleaming little instrument that didn’t show the usual signs of wear and tear or broken reeds from a novice player. Emmett was ten years old when he sat, cello poised between his knees and brought an entire audience to their feet with his skills and abilities. But, Emmett was twenty seven years old when he realized that he was far more powerful than he could have ever expected.

To a family of dark witches, especially a family as ruthless as the Stephensons, a son with healing abilities was considered to be useless. A defensive inclination, if anything, and he was mostly used to help heal his siblings after their own duels. Emmett didn’t mind, as he never thought he could go out into a duel and physically harm another, but he was always the go-to for healing cuts and scrapes. However, Emmett spent his childhood life cooped up in their penthouse apartment. He was never a fan of going outside, even though he knew he could always fix whatever injury he had. Little did he know that this sort of issue would manifest itself into a major case of anxiety and social anxiety later on in his life. His siblings were the only people that Emmett ever truly felt comfortable around. As children, they would tease him for being the weakling of the bunch, but when they got older, they would sit and talk to him for hours upon hours, venting and unloading all of their problems onto him. Emmett was like a strainer, he could let everything else wash through him and cling onto the things that were truly important. Despite how uncomfortable he felt around people, he enjoyed helping them with their problems. It made him feel as if he were doing something right.

Even though he generally had a good, protected relationship with his siblings, he found that talking to strangers made him feel hopelessly awkward. He had spent his entire life sitting in a practice room, playing as many different instruments as he could get his greedy little hands on, and spent none of that time trying to make friends. By the time he was twenty, Emmett had mastered every instrument in Western existence, and was starting to work on those instruments of the world. His parents threw around the word “prodigy” like they knew what it meant, but Emmett honestly never felt as if he had to work at practicing. It always came so natural to him. Emmett’s IQ was off the charts, and he asked his father if he could go to regular public school, simply because he had a thirst for knowledge. His father looked him over with disdain, but figured that since he was the useless Stephenson anyway, it might do him some good. Emmett managed to skip a grade while playing in the school’s orchestra, and he really did well in private school before he was shipped off to Cypress Music Academy for the summers. Meanwhile, his healing grew more and more stagnant, and Emmett felt the panic sink in at the thought of being totally worthless to his parents.

It wasn’t until Emmett received his Capella mark that he realized his powers were not at all what he had initially thought they were. He was shipped off to Polaris, and only there did he learn that his healing abilities could be channeled through his spellcasting of sound. The true key to access his healing magic were by combining his sound magic with his innate healing abilities.  As he got older, he moved onto healing major injuries, and he even began to help heal the most fragile of all injuries: psychosis. Emmett learned a whole bunch of other tricks at Polaris, but none of those tricks were how to get people to enjoy his company. The slight stutter he’d had as a child never went away, and despite how his presence calmed almost anyone who spent longer than six seconds in his presence, Emmett realized very quickly that he would never be able to heal his own mind. His healing abilities grew more powerful through his own training, and while his professors would send him injured duelers to practice on, he never seemed to be able to keep a conversation going after the pleasantries they’d exchange to fill the silence.

It was at Polaris that Emmett truly longed for people who understood him, someone other than a blood relative who wanted to be around him of their own accord, not because they were forced to. During his free time, he would throw himself into the one, lone music room and saw away at a cello to his heart’s content until he poured all of his heart and soul into his playing. When he finally graduated from Polaris, he truly became a disgrace to his family as he asked to attend college at Juilliard, a human mortal school, hoping to find people who loved music as much as he did. While in theory, this had been a great idea, Emmett’s isolation grew even worse when put alongside mortals. Those students at Juilliard needed to practice day in and day out to achieve the level of artistry that Emmett had when he was eleven years old. His awkward, anti-social personality made him come off as an arrogant show-off, even though the truth of the matter was that he had no idea how to relate to them. His major was in piano, and he had the obnoxious skill of being spectacular at both classical and jazz music. If the orchestra needed another tuba player, Emmett was at the ready. He ended up majoring in piano, french horn, and cello.

His life changed significantly for the worse when he discovered he could accidentally cast spells through his playing. After a particularly nasty fight with his father, Emmett was in a complete state of disarray right before his first jury at Juilliard. His playing was charged with the level of emotion that he normally would not let himself feel, and he was so absorbed in his own playing of the tango that he didn’t realized he’d knocked all three of his jurors unconscious. Once he’d finished, he finally looked up from his trance and realized what was happening. Panic-stricken, Emmett quickly rushed to heal them, but it was too late. Knowing that he was now a murderer, and exactly the kind of person his father had always wanted him to be, Emmett sunk into a deep depression afterwards. He dropped out of school and hasn’t touched his instruments since, knowing that the one thing he could do properly was something that could kill someone else. Without an outlet for his anxious and depressive nature, Emmett quickly sunk into the lowest place he’d ever been in his life. Despite how his parents insisted that there was nothing wrong with him, they were most ashamed of the fact that he let any dueling prowess he had fall by the wayside. Emmett made an attempt on his life six months after he left Juilliard, and it was then that he was found by the Ursas again.

This time at Polaris, Emmett is learning to keep his emotions and anxiety under control. He’s spent so much time developing his skills as a musician that he’d let his self-control fall completely by the wayside. In his defense, he didn’t even know he had aggressive powers until they suddenly burst out of him. Emmett wants to be a PA for Lucia Alberti, and specifically for the Art of Dueling, and he’s completely disgusted with himself. He wants to be able to control his magic, but he’s terrified to hurt someone again. So, he serves Jupiter and only hopes that someday he might be able to control himself. Still, Emmett prefers to focus on his healing, as his prerogative is to help people rather than hurt them. Or at least, try to.

CONNECTIONS

Capella is known for sonic magic, and their innate ability to create magic with all forms of sound. Whether it’s the rhythm of thudding footsteps on the street to the gentle call of the birds, Capella is very in tune with a certain kind of magic beyond all that is taught and done at Polaris. Capella is a natural healer and typically chooses an extremely kind and gentle soul. Capella’s failings lie in their inability to believe in themself, and their skewed sense of self-worth.

CONNECTIONS

Filling the role of Charlotte Giordano’s The Emotional Leech.

Filling the role of Agatha Cartwell’s Beauty in the Beast.

Filling the role of Esther Hughes’ Makeshift Therapy Group.

Jam Session: Another instrumentalist who greatly enjoys music and someone who wouldn’t mind if Emmett listens to them practice. Above all things, I’d love for this person to be someone who can teach Emmett how to safely play music again, as well as be a friend for him.

Out of My League: It’s your classic total nerd/popular brat trope. Emmett’s probably very good friends with this person (canonically he’s mostly into women with some male exceptions agljdagkj) and they’re everything he’s not! Likeable, charming, popular, wonderful, extremely charismatic and someone Emmett wishes he could be like. He’s also got a gigantic crush on them so like, good luck with that.

Siblings [0/2]: Okay, Emmett has two older siblings who are extremely powerful offensive witches, he loves them and would do anything for them! They should be prepared for Emmett to cling to them like a koala. Please use half-black, half-white fcs for these! :)

Penned by Leigh ★ 

[ren-black-fmp]

Zine research 2

Going Homo - Issues #2-#4

This has probably been my favourite zine to look at so far. the narrative style from the main author makes it feel like a conversation between him and the reader. This really allows the tone to be flexible, skirting from serious topics and obituaries to more jokey interactions poking fun at themselves and the reader. 

What this zine is extremely effective in is it’s collaboration. The zine itself is often 70% collaboration with the main author being used as a linking devices between the different sections. This builds such a strong sense of community and becomes especially valuable as you learn more about how underground the gay scene was in Arizona universities in the 1990′s.

Top surgery Recovery in Community - August 2020

This was quite an odd mix of emotive and informative. The structure of the zine had heavy medical influences especially in describing procedures and recovery. The work was very individually centres with insights into the authors own lived experiences. This might be a detriment to the core message of the zine as it wants a more community driven feel. I think this could be helped with collaborative voices once their personal experience was discussed, this would balance out the voices and make the claims about community feel more substantiated.

New hearts New Bones - December 2010

Found this magazine interesting as a continuation of the style of earlier zines. The entire work is constructed using magazine clippings and images with a few handwritten elements and purposefully printed images. This creates a strong colour story and visual language but it does little to promote the actual messages they are trying to convey. I know from descriptions of the zine that it is meant to be anti-capitalist, this helped me understand certain spreads in the zine and connected a few of the dots but the first 5 or so pages feel a bit random compared to the message.

It’s not the end of the world (But it sure feels that way) - Cameron Tepper - April 2020

Extremely well constructed and provides an intimate slice of life look into early quarantine for the author. The suggestion of music seems key to the piece, he talks about Connie Converse repeatedly, so much so that as soon as I had connie converse playing in the background I felt more connected to the zine and the feelings he was trying to convey.

Really like the visual style of the zine. Combines the collage aesthetics of the 1970s-90s with more modern techniques to create a more polished effect that feels curated and controlled. 

Enjoyed the changes in formats and different sections as it allowed my focus to be shifted and reinvigorated my interest with each page.

Mental Healthy - Jenny Eden

Not completely my cup of tea but I appreciate the use of colours to create a warm and welcoming atmosphere to match the contents of the zine. Also a very clear narrative style and effective use of illustration to build on whats written.

Itchy Legs - Sara Gore - 2019

A more story-book like narrative with more adult themes to do with medical conditions and anxiety. I felt a great empathy for the main character/author and the illustrations served to add humanity to the story being told.

The lack of structure to the design of the pages and the use of handwriting instead of type, make the zine feel more intimate and like a stream of consciousness . This helps put you int he shoes of the author and approaches something you might perceive differently without this insight.

“Straight Ally” is an Oxymoron - March 2020

I’m not so sure how much i agree with the sentiment of this zine.Its vibe is quite hostile and seems off putting for the audience it perhaps is angled towards. As part of the LGBT community, the information was not as relevant for me as it is already known but it would be a useful introduction to ideas around relationships and gender in the queer community.

The title and accusatory the might make some non-lgbtq people turned off of the zine as it feels like they are going to be attacked for something they were unaware of.

Attitude Adjustment

This takes the form of a more traditional comic book layout which suits the dialogue based narrative being showed. It also allows the mind to be more open to ridiculous cartoony images and discussions. This allows the author t escape realism and begin to explore their high stakes emotions in a more free and somewhat overly-literal way.

I really enjoyed reading this zine, I felt like it was familiar in the sense that it brought nostalgia for 1990′s cartoons such as “Daria” and has the same flippant attitude to the main character. They aren’t afraid of making her dramatic or the extreme of one point of view. This allows the viewer to project ideas that they would usually ignore due to their extremity of dramatics.

Felt very seen as an over thinker. Felt very reminiscent of real conversations I have had with professionals who just really don’t understand. Inadvertently fosters a community of people behind the zine with shared experiences.

Let us rejoice for it is spring*

*At this latitude and warmer than usual because of global warming. - Das Ende

This zine is really unique to me. the entire thing is hand drawn in a style that looks like a traditional quill with a digital edges. The more traditional/religious connotations of the text style and narrative voice is interestingly coupled with references to modern urban experiences. The two serve to make the writing seem trustworthy and significant while acknowledging its roots in the authors won life experiences. Love the illustration style, it feels immediate and lively with a lack of control that suggests that it was done in the moment the author thought of the words.

[thestartupdubai]

Top 5 Business Ideas for Start Business in Dubai UAE

We're going to go over 15 new business ideas that you can start during this crisis that might allow you to create something brand new that you never thought possible in just 15 minutes, that's right, one business idea per minute, but first, let's go over some background information.

Discuss what is going on right now. Recent data has shown that unemployment is at an all-time high, with one out of every five Americans unemployed, which is insane, and it reminds me of my storey from 2008, when I was laid off during the recession for various reasons, and it A tell you a little bit about the niche and why I think there's opportunity there, and a lot of these are a resurgence of the recession.

Business Ideas Under 10 Lakhs in Dubai

I think that demonstrates where I'm coming from, so fuck you. What I want you to realise is that yes, you can take advantage of the resources you have here to serve a community of people, but you must come from a certain background.

Kids are home all day right now, which they've never seen before, and if you're like me, you want your kids on the iPad for nine hours a day, right? But we also need to get them to learn, so there's that distant learning that's going on right now, but we as parents still have to get stuff done.

What Small Business Can You Start at Home

Right now is a good time to concentrate business ideas on that and assist them, because if you can find parents and appreciate their pains and concerns, that's where you'll find some good opportunities right now. Number two, I want you to consider content creators right now.

Guess what, they're going to need some help, so companies that start to help those new creators who are focused on their efforts edit their things, repurpose their material, there are massive opportunities right now and there's going to be a huge boom in services that help content creators.

7 Innovative Business Ideas in Response to Coronavirus

Number three, let's talk about speakers. This is a fantastic opportunity for you to zero in on a particular niche in the creator room. Speakers have been hit particularly hard during this time, with events being cancelled left and right by people who used to fly. What do these speakers have to say?

Build their own virtual events, from which they can then create their own online mini-events - and many of them, with a lot of experience talking about these subjects over and over, are best suited to guess what to write books now, so maybe you can step up and assist speakers.

What Is a Good Business to Start With 10k?

Starving musicians, guess what, they were already starving, and now they could business ideas be starving even more, and they're going to need some support. There are a lot of people right now who are stepping up to teach art, creativity, and their work, whether it's guitar, piano, or whatever it is, there's a massive demand.

Business Ideas You Can Start With No Money

I think we all know that hobbies have been really good, from piano to guitar to art to all sorts of stuff, and now is the time to lean into that and support those who really need that extra income right now, and it could be a fantastic situation with a win-win situation for everybody.

Business Ideas With Low Investment and High Profit

Cation, and I believe there will be a big opportunity connecting students who are at home now learning out while at home to communicate with companies tech companies and other companies who might need some support that are now looking at a lot of remote work solutions, so a student just coming out of college will have a lot of opportunities.

Business Ideas Related to Information Technology

Very well, and you can get paid for it. For example, I know a lot of people who used Craigslist to find students right before the crisis, so why not be the middleman who can help link great students with great talent with companies that need that talent? Let's take a look at some entertainers.

Business Ideas That Can Make You a Millionaire

They've been spending a lot of time in person going from audition to audition and working on their work outside of the house, but guess what? They're in the house now, and you may be able to help them consult, bring them ideas, and even help them develop their personal brand online.

Business Ideas During Lockdown in Dubai

Developing their online brand is number seven. The health and fitness niche is obviously big, and what I believe there are opportunities in terms of specialty fitness solutions for people in this current crisis and what the new normal will be, and I'm reminded of a man named Joe who has a channel on YouTube about this.

What Are Some Good Ideas for a Small Business?

That niche, or even virtual training like I get from my friend Jeff at total body construction com, there are massive opportunities in fitness right now because people are at home eating junk food and need support, and you can help them - so that's fitness. That's what I'm talking about when it comes to diet.

What Are the Most Successful Business Ideas?

This is another way to tackle companies now here's what I would business ideas suggest figuring out what a business type is because businesses are concentrating on new things that they've never had to concentrate on before and there may be software-based solutions that can support them so instead of going in and helping them in, I would recommend finding out what a business type is because businesses are focusing on new things that they've never had to focus on before and there may be solutions that are software-based that can help them.

Create tools to assist them in managing their inventory and a variety of other tasks. I did an episode with a man named Dane knacks Dane Maxx, which was episode 46 in my podcast, where we actually called companies and asked them what they needed help with and what was inconvenient that they wished they could fix.

Memberships are a massive opportunity right now, and one of my good friends, Steve Mc Claren, has just spoken about how his students in his tribes network, who are all membership-based website owners, are booming right now because guess what people are missing right now? They're craving community and interaction, and when you can provide that, it's a win-win situation.

Connect with the group and share your business ideas on the website. It's not even about the content you put in there; it's about the link; it's about the guidance; it's about that sort of yearning for connection, community, and networking that people are sorely lacking right now, so if you can build a membership platform right now, that would be fantastic.

During these times, I know a lot of people who are starting gardens in their homes and even trying to grow their own food, which is incredible. I also know that the gardening niche is exploding right now, as shown by some of the numbers on Amazon with a lot of the items that are being sold.

You just need a small group of people who could use your guidance and advice, and you know expert curation whether it's selling your own goods or affiliate marketing as an opportunity, you could become the go-to person to help people start their own garden at home, and check in and share your progress with them every day.

Sports are also going on. There are several opportunities in eSports electronic gaming sports. For example, there are opportunities to create competitions for various types of games. There are also opportunities to create guides, YouTube channels, business plans, and twitch streams for various games.

We're moving into a new normal where people are engaging and seeking community. There are also opportunities in both VR and gaming, as well as AR. What are your plans to take the next step?

Many of those people don't know how to do that; they frequently have people who help them behind the scenes, and guess what? You can step up and support them as well by identifying college and professional athletes in a variety of sports and being their go-to person for assistance.

Should something else happen and they are unable to return to their line of work, it is worth a lot to me, and you should step up and support someone in that space as well number thirteen. I'd like you to consider brick-and-mortar companies.

I always say that the riches are in the niches, and your niche may be something like, "I'm going to help brick-and-mortar businesses stay alive by selling more goods online, starting a Shopify website, or being able to deliver more products and help them fulfil their things," or something similar.

Focus on learning the language of the audience and knowing what their buyers need, as well as learning how to ship those products and get refunds if they don't suit and other stuff like that. There are so many possibilities if they only focus on that niche and then have discussions to understand what they would need help with.

Meditation in virtual reality, I believe, would be a thing. Traveling through VR, I hope, would become a thing, and there are massive opportunities there have always been opportunities to do that in VR, and I believe now is a great time for a lot of those spaces inside VR to emerge.

Especially in relation, and while the gaming aspect is important, I believe the VR community will see a massive boom as a result of what's going on even outside of the game. Okay, number 15, and this is a big one for me. There will be a new educational norm in the future.

focus your energies and resources on a particular community, whether it's parents, teachers, schools, or whatever, and seeing if you may be able to build something is it an opportunity for you there in number 16 yes, I said there are only 15, but we're doing 16 because I always want to do more.

I'll take you to a fast and simple tutorial on how to get started with live streaming and the best apps to do so, but consider this: there are people who are used to watching regular television shows or late-night shows at home, and I'm one of them.

Opportunity for you to provide value to others, and I believe you will become the person who can help others go live as well, so if you want to learn more about how it works and maybe even get paid to help others do that, just click on the connection that's up there in the icon.

Conclusion

Perhaps you know someone who has recently lost their job, and there are new opportunities coming out every day. I believe it was Sir Richard Branson who said that business ideas are like buses, and if you miss one, you just have to wait for the next one, and guess what, there are a whole load of business idea buses that ribe hit those Bell notification icons so that I can send you more videos as they come out.

Business setup Dubai is not easy, just like anywhere else. Do your research. Talk to other business owners and possible co-tenants. Consult experts on how to set up a company in Dubai and make sure to utilize available resources to help in your efforts.

If you need assistance for a Dubai business setup , KGRN is at your service. With years of experience in the industry, they are able to have you and your team legally ready to work within the day.

Ref: https://kgrnaudit.com/business-setup-in-dubai/

[wineanddinosaur]

How NYC Bartenders Are Building Pandemic-Proof Businesses

The days of sidling up to a bar in New York may feel like distant memories. But bartenders and business owners are fighting to bring them back by building imaginative solutions for the beverages, and the hospitality, that have been in such deficit over the past 11 months.

Some of these intrepid ideas involve new ventures and virtual bar experiences, while others pivot from traditional bar service entirely. One upstart is resurrecting an ancient technique to sell shelf-stable libations to-go. Another sees safety — in the form of rapid tests for Covid-19 at the venue entrance — as the new luxury.

In every story told here, there is resilience and a reimagined future. Here’s how a handful of NYC’s bar owners, workers, and newly minted entrepreneurs are attempting to survive and succeed in this pandemic.

Speakeasies Out on the Street

When Raines Law Room opened in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, it was the perfect example of the speakeasy style that many cocktail bars were emulating in 2009 — unmarked, hard-to-find door, tin ceiling, the works. With no standing room allowed, it was not easy to get in, which was the icing on the exclusive, hidden bar cake. These are not the sorts of places that thrive with indoor seating restrictions.

“Something that’s unique to all these frontline industries — and I hate to put us in the same category as health care, but we’re also some of the most affected — it’s like, ‘Come up with genius ideas while you’re kind of broke and uninsured!’” Meaghan Dorman, bar director of both Raines Law Room and Dear Irving, says. But bar people are immensely resilient, so Dorman opened up the bar’s intimate backyard and worked to obtain a bike lane permit in order to seat even more guests out front, in plain sight.

Though Dorman never thought she’d see a concept like Raines Law Room with a patio, it’s an increasingly common phenomenon in the streets of NYC. Even Attaboy, another infamous and elusive bar of New York, is now serving cocktails right out in the open on Eldridge Street.

“We’ve just really had to rethink how we can translate our philosophy into the only business we’re allowed to do right now,” Dorman says. For all of her bars, this entails not only in-person service, but a focus on to-go cocktails and virtual class offerings as well.

Paying for Safety is the New Luxury

In order to enter City Winery’s flagship location at Pier 57 in Hudson River Park on the West Side of Manhattan, both guests and employees alike are required to take a rapid Covid-19 test.* On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, patrons are responsible for the cost of a $50 test — a fee whose full amount goes directly to the testing company — and can spend their 15-minute wait for the results sipping on complimentary bubbles. Those who test positive for Covid-19 are sent home after being offered a follow-up PCR test with 24-hour turnaround, but they are not permitted inside. A negative result is rewarded with entrance to the restaurant, where all other safety protocols, such as social distancing and mask-wearing, are still enforced.

Michael Dorf, founder and CEO of City Winery, believes that offering tests at the door is “not just a scientific and social responsibility to keep people safe,” but an example of an expanding definition of hospitality. By ensuring that everybody inside what he refers to as “the bubble” has acquired a negative test result, City Winery is able to add another layer of comfort to the hospitality his restaurant venue provides. “And at some point in the not-too-distant future, we’re going to start to see [the need] to check people’s certificate of vaccination,” he says imaginatively.

Dorf believes there are “a lot of psychological considerations” to take into account to make guests feel as safe as possible, “and that’s our job,” he says. “Just like providing good bathrooms, we need to provide a good, comfortable situation for consumption. If people don’t feel safe, then they’re not going to come.”

Since City Winery is usually also a live-music venue, Dorf foresees thorough safety measures carried over for concerts when gathering restrictions are lessened. Until City Winery can host shows with an all-inclusive, test-and-ticket price for revelers, it is offering virtual concerts through its CWTV exclusive streaming series. Dorf says he is open to using it as an incremental offering for audiences who are unable to attend live because of logistics, “but we don’t see that at all in any way as a substitute.” As with its virtual wine tastings, he sees this more as a temporary bridge to connect people in a very solitary time, but also feels pushback on virtual gathering “because there’s so much of it,” he says. “And what we do really well, which doesn’t work in a Covid world … is bring people together.”

The Rise of the Salon

“My apartment, a brownstone with a large parlor, fireplace, and view of the Chrysler Building was my metropolitan dream. I was gutted at the thought of having to leave it,” recalls Georgette Moger-Petraske, a freelance food and drinks travel writer who lost her work last March. When her roommate moved out around the same time, keeping the apartment didn’t seem likely. Then she stumbled upon an 1860s perfume counter from Louisiana in an antique store during a day trip upstate. “I fell hard at first sight,” Moger-Petraske says of the beautiful bar-like structure. “Taking into consideration how much everyone was really missing bars and restaurants and attempting being home bartenders, I hatched a plan.”

The plan was to teach the fundamentals of classic cocktails like the simple yet elegant ones served at the storied speakeasy Milk & Honey, which was arguably the first of its kind in New York City to gain rabid popularity in the early aughts. Late owner Sasha Petraske and Moger-Petraske’s book, “Regarding Cocktails,” is filled with recipes for the at-home bartender and a fitting touchstone for any class. And so, with a little help from a PPP loan and a friend on the North Fork of Long Island with the Yennecott oyster farm, “Regarding Oysters” was born.

Moger-Petraske’s unique salon brings small groups into a Covid-safe learning space. During a two-hour session, guests are welcomed into her Murray Hill apartment with hand sanitizer and temperature checks before being treated to a class in cocktail-making and oyster-shucking at the little antique bar that had caught her eye so many months ago. “The salons are very intimate and there’s always a celebratory feeling in the air,” Moger-Petraske says of her small, reservations-only classes that will gather in honor of birthdays, engagements, and date nights.

Between the roaring fire, crystal clear Hundredweight ice cubes, and vintage barware that she has collected over the years, Moger-Petraske is able to present the feel of a curated bar to her students. The essence of hospitality is palpable. “Our favorite NYC dining rooms and bars put just as much consideration and passion into their establishments,” she says. “From the fold of a napkin to the charm of a miniature salt boat, the clarity of the cube chilling your Penicillin, to the delicate Depression-era coupe your Water Lily is served in. It’s my hope that in the absence of our beloved bars that my guests feel inspired to create some of this magic in their own homes.”

Your Friendly Neighborhood Grocer

St. John Frizell, owner of Fort Defiance in Red Hook, Brooklyn, tried to make his restaurant function as a delivery and takeout business for a short while back when nobody knew how long the shutdowns would last. Since sending out quality meals in to-go boxes is no simple feat and can require menu changes and more, “it was a question of how much investment,” says Frizell.

“Is this the best way to invest the money that I have left? And I decided it was not, so we closed the restaurant in late March,” Frizell explains. Not long after, he reached out to family-owned organic farm co-op Lancaster Farm Fresh to see about obtaining some of its CSA boxes. He found that enough people in town were interested in claiming one of their own to set up an online store on Fort Defiance’s website. Getting a box of beautiful vegetables through contactless pickup outside the closed restaurant was a popular notion in a time when nobody knew how Covid was transmitted and the supermarket was to be avoided. Business grew and soon people began asking for other items. “And I wanted other things too, like, cheese and milk, and eggs, and bread, and just started to build from there,” Frizell says.

It was decided then that the change for Fort Defiance was going to have to be permanent, not just a temporary closure until things got back to normal for restaurants. “That was an important decision because you can’t really ride two horses at the same time,” says Frizell. “You have to make a decision and just go for it with your whole heart.” The new iteration of Fort Defiance as a general store has since gotten into the mail-order and holiday catering business as he and his steadfast team roll with the punches of what their neighbors in Red Hook might need.

“I don’t want this to come off as corny, but [what] we went through, you have to ask, ‘How can I help?’ Like, ‘How can I be of service here?’” Much like when Hurricane Sandy flooded Fort Defiance and most of the neighborhood in 2012, “we were all kind of in the same boat as we are now. We all had problems, but we were all very ready to help each other at the same time,” Frizell recalls of his community.

As another way to reach out, he started a newsletter called The Fort Defiance Gazette with announcements of new items in the store, promotions, and more. “It’s also filled with the same kind of bullshit I would talk to people about across the bar. They’re still getting the content from me, whether they like it or not,” Frizell laughs. “But it’s another way to connect, and then people email me back all the time. So there’s this dialogue happening, it’s just happening in a different space.”

Room-Temp and Ready To-Go

“Our business really came about as we were watching our industry fall apart around us and feeling really sad and helpless about that,” says Blake Walker, co-founder of drinks delivery service Day and Night Cocktails. He and fellow Amor y Amargo alum Sean Johnson mitigated grief with conversations about possibilities for projects, contemplating styles of cocktail to best suit a pandemic hellscape. They settled on the “Scaffa” — a room-temperature and undiluted mixture of spirits found in Jerry Thomas’s 1860s “The Bartender’s Guide.” Recently appearing on menus at bars like Amor y Amargo and the late Pegu Club, the Scaffa also boasts the at-home allure of being shelf-stable, so it won’t take up space in the refrigerator.

Unlike many to-go models that can arrive alongside complicated instructions, Day and Night’s drinks are poured from their bottles without fuss. “What you get is exactly the way we would serve it to you if you were sitting across the bar from us,” Walker explains. Each menu features a fresh, bright “Day” cocktail alongside a deeper, richer “Night” mixture. For those not sold on the warm drink concept, think of cold as a flavor inhibitor and know that the professionals have layered some very indulgent ones in there.

Refreshingly, Day and Night isn’t only about the drinks — like bartending, it’s about taking care of people. “We decided right off the bat that we’d do a donation for each sale to an organization called Bushwick Ayuda Mutua, which is a mutual aid organization in Bushwick that I was volunteering for,” says Walker. After the murder of George Floyd, all profits for the month of June went to the Movement for Black Lives. Because of the smaller scale of the venture, Walker is also able to have an encounter with every customer. “I don’t take that for granted at all,” he says. “Having that personal interaction [is] the closest that I can get to the across-the-bar experience that I’ve missed so much about my job as it was a year ago.”

By the time Walker and Johnson’s workplace reopened to tackle outdoor dining, they already had their own regulars at what was becoming more than just a side hustle. “It made us turn towards Day and Night as a potential alternative because, at least for us, the experience of going back to work was not pleasant.” Less money for more effort with the added bonus risk of catching a deadly virus is a hard sell.

Instead, Walker started working full time on Day and Night Cocktails in December, quickly finding a way to make it a fully legal enterprise. He can now pursue an LLC and, with that, the potential of permanence. “We also are open to the possibility that this is meant to be a to-go concept,” Walker says. “It’s impossible to know exactly what drinking culture is going to look like on the other end of this, and I think that there may be some kind of a liminal time where both the to-go and physical bar spaces coexist.”

The Future

Are all of these innovations and modifications to the classic bar experience worth it if they don’t somehow improve the way hospitality workers are treated or protected?

For Day and Night Cocktails, the commitment to supporting good causes extends to its own hurting community. “Something that remains incredibly important to us is that whatever our participation is with this industry, on the other side of Covid, we just want to make sure that we’re working towards an industry that takes care of its own better,” Walker says. “We want to be a part of that rebuilding process.”

The real pain of newly vacant real estate where beloved bars once were is hard to ignore and important to acknowledge. There will be more empty storefronts as time trundles on, with plenty of talent waiting in the wings to fill them with new concepts. “It’s going to be a really opportunistic time,” Walker observes. Hopefully, the entrepreneurs jumping at these opportunities will have more than just profit in mind.

“Our guests need to understand that we’re not expendable and disposable, and our government needs to know that, too,” says Walker. “We need to remind each other all the time that our work is important and valuable and we shouldn’t be [a] disposable commodity that’s part of this gajillion-dollar industry. We have to do a little bit better [of a] job taking care of each other.”

As creative as bartenders are getting with side gigs and business-wide pivots, many want to get back to the bar as much as patrons do. “It’s all just so antithetical to what we love to do that I just can’t wait to serve someone at the bar again,” Dorman says longingly.

Despite everything, I do detect enthusiasm when speaking with these hospitality professionals about what the future holds for bars. I want to believe that fantastic transformations lie ahead, because perhaps it’s not a return to “normal” that we should crave, but a hope for an evolution. Dorman gets it right when she says, “It feels like the music has definitely changed at our party or something.” Here’s hoping for a better playlist on the horizon.

*At the time of publishing, City Winery is temporarily closed.

The article How NYC Bartenders Are Building Pandemic-Proof Businesses appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/post-covid-bars-nyc/

[perfectirishgifts]

Building A Leading ESports Organization. An Exclusive Interview With Adrian Montgomery, CEO Of Enthusiast Gaming

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/building-a-leading-esports-organization-an-exclusive-interview-with-adrian-montgomery-ceo-of-enthusiast-gaming/

Building A Leading ESports Organization. An Exclusive Interview With Adrian Montgomery, CEO Of Enthusiast Gaming

I recently had the privilege to sit down (well share a Zoom call!) with Adrian Montgomery, Chief Executive Officer of Enthusiast Gaming. It is not often as a writer you get direct, unfiltered access to the CEO of one – if not the – leading company in its space, let alone for it to be in my favorite sector – eSports!

For those still unfamiliar with Enthusiast Gaming (as I realize not all of you are quite there on eSports yet! Time to get on-board now though, huh?), the company’s aim is to “build the world’s largest platform of communities for gamers and eSports fans”.

It is already the largest gaming network in North America and the UK with 100 gaming related websites, 1,000 YouTube channels, 7 professional eSports teams and over 30 virtual and in-person gaming events globally such as EGLX, (eglx.com) and the largest mobile gaming event in Europe, Pocket Gamer Connects. The platform reaches over 300 million gamers each month, generating an average of 4 billion views of content each month.

Enthusiast Gaming EGLX

Enthusiast Gaming also has approximately 500 gaming influencers, reaching over 500 million subscribers on Twitch and YouTube. Enthusiast Gaming’s eSports division, Luminosity Gaming, has over 70 million loyal fans and followers, and is a leading global eSports franchise that consists of 7 professional eSports team, including the Vancouver Titans Overwatch team and the Seattle-based Call of Duty team. Yes, wow.

Enthusiast Gaming Vancouver Titans

Before joining Enthusiast Gaming, Adrian was a senior officer and director of several companies in media, sports and entertainment, finance and industrial services — most recently serving as president and CEO of Aquilini Sports and Entertainment, one of Canada’s premier sports and entertainment organizations.  Adrian’s personal passion for eSports clearly jumped off the screen as we got talking about how he became involved in eSports one fateful day when he had a very different type of rental inquiry for their 20,000 seat arena.

“I had just read an article about eSports, and one of my guys phoned me and said “You know how you were interested in eSports? Well, these guys are coming in – do you want to come on the site tour?”. Well, it turned out we had this opportunity to host the biggest eSports event in the world – the DOTA 2 International run by Valve – that was coming out of Seattle for the first time.  I came down and met these three guys, who were acting as if they were in charge of FIFA or the SuperBowl or something! “Take that down, move that, block that off, our crew needs this…”. I was getting a little frustrated and keen to try to put them in their place, saying ‘Hey, so what exactly is the prize purse for this little rinky-dink tournament right? “$33 million dollars (USD)”. Oh my god! So, I went back at the end of the site tour and said, alright, there is clearly something here!”

Despite several doubters among traditional hirers of the venue and concerns on the complexity of the set-up and all its incredible visual effects, the event went ahead. The entire building sold out in one hour for six straight days, the city of Vancouver became overrun with cosplay wearing, DOTA 2 fans and Adrian’s team could not get into their offices as fans lined up were around the block to get in.  So how did the DOTA 2 team achieve this? A complex, multi-layered, omni channel marketing campaign?

“It is almost impossible to sell out a 20,000 seat arena for six days. So I asked the organizers, “I’ve got to know – what is the marketing plan here? They said, “look dude, we’ve got it covered,” to which I replied with, “look, I might be fired tomorrow so you’ve got to give me something.” To my surprise, they said “Ok, you want to know the plan, ok, here is the plan. First we are going to send out a Tweet…” and I said “Ok.. and?” and they responded with – “That’s it, that’s our marketing plan.”

This moment saw the company’s 87-year-old multi-billionaire owner task Adrian with getting into this brave new world of eSports.

“What did you do? And whatever you did, we need to get all of the way into this industry.” A month later they bought an Overwatch team, then Luminosity Gaming and the rest is history”

Enthusiast Gaming Event

Fast forward to today, in asking what now sets Enthusiast Gaming apart, without hesitation Adrian cites the company’s singular focus on its fans.

“We feel no-one is as obsessively focused on the fan experience as we are. The thing that makes us so different to anyone else in the space is that we are not trying to dominate a vertical; we are not trying to just be an eSports organization, a collection of websites, or a tournament organizer – we want to build value right across the fan experience. If you are a super-keen EPIC Games’ Fortnite player who has logged-off, the beauty of this gaming phenomenon is that you are not then ‘done’ – you go to Twitch where – obviously! – we want you watching our Fortnite streamers Muselk and Fresh, when you go to YouTube, we want you to go to the biggest Fortnite YouTube channel in the world – our channel, BCC Gaming, if you want to see what EPIC Gaming is up to next, we want you to then come to one of our events and see their booth up-close. It is all highly integrated – and hopefully a lot of fun also!”

While it is clear Enthusiast Gaming connects with its fans in a very genuine way and has built meaningful relationships, you would be forgiven for thinking there is a significant marketing machine behind this growth – and a bit like how Adrian was surprised about the DOTA 2 event, you may also be surprised to learn they’ve done it in a purely organic, authentic way.

“The thing that blows people away – and is routed in our content and approach – is when I tell them we don’t spend a single cent in acquiring or keeping that traffic coming back. They won’t believe it. Building a world-class business routed in user-generated content is definitely a very hard thing to do – and when you succeed it is a very hard thing to explain! There is a lot of art as to how it’s curated, how its presented, but when you can do it well, the sky is the limit for you in terms of possibilities.”

For all of its growth, gamers can still be seen to be misunderstood as a community. Of the 300 million active base the company has, many falls into the cliched ‘hard to reach’ segments – of Millennials, GenZ & Gen-A, and that are so attractive to brands.

Enthusiast Gaming Event

“They are the world’s most lucrative demographic because they have a lot of purchasing power. They don’t have their money sucked away by these things called children and mortgages. If you are a company, you are no doubt trying to get them into your world at a very early point in their buying lifecycle. What people don’t really understand is that with any traditional sports would kill for the demographics of an eSports fan – they are a little bit older than you think – typically being in their 20’s; they have more disposable income than other traditional sports fan but then, they are elusive – they just don’t consume content the way I did in 20 years ago!”

Enthusiast Gaming is already partnering with the likes of Gillette, Proctor and Gamble, GoDaddy, and Pizza Hut. However, Adrian was clear that other brands need to realize that gaming is not a hobby for many millions – billions of people.

“eSports is more than a hobby for gamers – it’s a way of life. It’s their identity, it’s their social network, and it’s their method of expression. eSports and gaming is going to continue to skyrocket, and people are realizing how pervasive it is in people’s lives. What I’ve seen change this year – and I can tell you which is one of the most exciting things for our industry today – is that most marketing directors now know if you need to communicate with young people, you simply must have a video game strategy. eSports has made quantum leaps during the recent pandemic.”

With the likes of GenZ’s being highly influenced by the people they follow on social media, it just so happens that their heroes– and some the biggest stars on social media – are gamers. Enthusiast Gaming sponsors some the biggest athletes, recently signing one of the biggest content creators on Twitch – xQc – who has a community of 100,000 concurrent viewers every night. The company is also focused on developing the next generation of talent. Recently creating the “Rising Stars” competition, Enthusiast Gaming sought to leverage its incredible platform to create a “star-making factory” and find and develop the next gaming superstars of tomorrow.

“We are trying to create ‘The Voice’, we’re trying to create ‘American Idol’ for gamers. We recently had a five-week competition with all entries judged by stars on our roster like xQc, Muselk, Anomaly, and Fresh sit on as judges. We recently concluded the competition at the 2020 Enthusiast Gaming Live Experience (ELGX), where BabyCappah took the title and a $100,000 USD sponsorship with Luminosity Gaming. We are creating something of a Simon Cowell fuelled concept here…and I think we are going to be very successful with it!”  

BabyCappah will actually become a fully-fledged member of the Luminosity Gaming roster. In true entrepreneurial style the company had originally beta-tested the concept with a smaller version called ‘So You Think You Can Stream’.

“The incredible gamer who won is actually quadriplegic – RockyNoHands – we made the decision instantly to sign him to Luminosity Gaming.  We are so proud to be associated with him. He is an incredible example of how we can hopefully convince people with disabilities to engage more with eSports with him as a leading ambassador – it is very exciting to see the impact eSports can have.”

We all hear the eye-popping statistics about how big the gaming industry is. From Activision, to Tencent, to EA to biggest companies on the planet – Amazon, Facebook and Google – vying to be THE broadcast platform for the content is clear that there is still so much growth in eSports. This is true for Enthusiast Gaming which has also recently completed others acquisitions, and with the company planning to list on NASDAQ, and launching a free Ad-Supported Streaming TV Channel – BCC Gaming – with Samsung TV Plus. So – what’s next?

“What is next is for us to sell our content – using elements such as subscription. We believe we can take a userbase and turn it into a marketplace. Why can’t we have an App Store? Can we connect these communities and people together and make a social media network of our own even – that is all ahead of us. I always tell my team, while we are building a company called Enthusiast Gaming, we are also helping to build an industry – and the rules are being written as we speak. The plane is getting configured in flight and there are people like us, like FaZe Clan, and all of the other publishers collectively building something incredible. To have people like you helping get the word out and for taking us seriously really means a lot and it is very exciting times ahead.”

It is clear from talking to Adrian that there is an incredible opportunity for brands to engage through eSports provided they are happy to mirror Enthusiast Gaming’s authentic approach. As a CEO, Adrian is a leader driving everyone forward in an open, honest and authentic way and clearly runs a very collegiate, interactive and respectful organization that every company can learn from. It is clear Enthusiast Gaming will be a major part of eSports’ continued growth and I’ll be watching with great interest.

From Media in Perfectirishgifts

[onlinemarketinghelp]

How to Sell Online: Online Selling Ideas for 2020 https://ift.tt/2wapSUa

How to sell online – that’s the question. And whatever you’ve heard about starting an online business, it’s probably true. It’s a competitive playground that challenges even the savviest entrepreneurs, yet the overwhelming consensus is that setting up an online store is a life-changing experience. 

One of the best facts is that you can sell online way beyond the borders of your city or your country, or even continent without ever leaving your work desk! Once you get started, virtually anyone from anywhere in the world can become your customer.

But where do you start?

There are simple ways to figure out how to sell online, and they all stem from the answers to three basic questions – why, what, and how?

But here’s a neat summary of everything you need to know about how to sell online. It couldn’t get any easier.

Why Knowing How to Sell Online is a Good Way to Do Business 

Can you imagine your life without the Internet? No emails, no late-night last-minute shopping, no cat videos… It’s like the banishment from Heaven all over again!

And that’s precisely why the eCommerce industry is living its golden age. Everyone is connected and cozily nestled in their little online bubbles with no intention of going back to the old ways. Plugging into this trend is beginning to look like the smartest way to start an online business.

Here’s more on why.

1. Your business goes where you go

Let’s get this one out of the way first — forget about *real* vacations without a laptop, at least for the first year or so.

When you learn how to sell online, any place in the world can become your office, and more often than not, you’ll end up working weekends, nights, and holidays. The only difference is that you’ll do it with a smile on your face.

Work from the beach or your grandma’s garden — wherever you go, you’re just a tap (and a wifi connection) away from accessing your business. Everything you do must propel you towards success.

2. Cash-strapped? Start a business with a small investment!

The beauty of the online world is that you can get the business off the ground with very little initial investment. It depends, of course, on what kind of business you’re planning to start, but for the sake of this article, I’m assuming you have your mind set on running an online store. And when it comes to selling online, dropshipping seems to be the go-to strategy.

With minimum overheads, such as paying for the hosting of your website and running some online ads, you can sell online and build a profitable business in just a few months. And it’s not some kind of fantasy. There are real success stories to prove it.

3. Making money 24/7

Whereas physical shops are restricted to opening and closing times, online stores run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. All the time. It doesn’t take a genius to see the potential in this business model. If you have a constant stream of traffic coming to your store and you optimize your conversions to a good standard, you can essentially make money in your sleep. 

This touches on another substantial benefit of selling online – if done right, it can be a sweet source of passive income. It is less time-intensive than, say, running a brick-and-mortar boutique because you don’t need to be present at all times. With automated inventory management and a robust online marketing plan, you can sell online with very little extra input from your side.

4. A lot of room to grow

Entrepreneurs often have to bend over backward to keep increasing their sales. While you may have the hottest products in stock, it can be hard to find new customers and keep them loyal to your business. Taking up the option to sell online can fix this problem almost instantly. According to the latest eCommerce statistics, the number of online buyers is expected to reach 2.05 billion in 2020. That’s a lot of potential customers! What’s more, online shoppers are rapidly growing and are expected to hit a mammoth 2.14 billion in 2021.

The takeaway? Entrepreneurs who are still on the fence about online selling should take action before they’re left in the dust. Plus, with so many strategies for selling online, it couldn’t be more simple to capitalize on the growing eCommerce trend.  

Now, that sounds like a dream come true.

Until you hit the next cornerstone of this process, what will I sell online?

Online Selling Ideas: Sourcing Products When You’re Stuck

Let’s leave the question of how to sell online for a moment and focus on WHAT to sell instead. Finding a profitable idea is not an easy task. But sometimes, the answer might be hiding in plain sight. So if you know where to look, inspiration is available in high doses.

1. Piggybacking on trends  

Who doesn’t want to be a trendsetter? A pioneering genius with a ground-breaking idea? It’s a blazing dream of many entrepreneurs. Yet, the eCommerce world isn’t always kind to unique online selling ideas. To get the sales engine running, an online store needs to serve a high demand in a market and tap into a growing niche or trend that will define its profits.  

When you’re on the hunt for a money-making idea, it pays off to put your ear to the ground and listen to what the customers want. Yes, I’m talking about the best-selling lists, trend reports, and product curation lists.

Start your initial research by casting a wide net. First, review the new and upcoming trends on online retail giants, such as eBay, Amazon, or Etsy. What are the month’s top picks, most favorite products, or best-selling items? Can you spot any particular trends like colors, shapes, fabrics, or patterns?  

When you have a rough idea of what you want to sell online, it’s time to find a way to source these products for your online store. And one of the best places to look for dropshipping products is Oberlo. Give its ‘Product Statistics’ a thorough look, and you’re almost guaranteed to find something that meets your needs. For example, products with over 500 orders in the past 30 days are likely to sell well. Jump on these products quickly so you can get ahead of the competition. 

Your next logical step is to choose high-margin products.

2. Aim for healthy margins

What matters at the end of the day is how much money you get to keep. Healthy margins will determine the future of your eCommerce business, so you should do everything you can to invest your time and effort into products that will yield the best results. The average eCommerce gross margin is approximately 40%. However, every market and every product is different, so you should spend time analyzing the competition and the going rate.

Some of the easiest tactics you can use to maximize the profits include ensuring prominent website presence for your high-margin winners, putting them at the front of your marketing initiatives and cross-selling campaigns, and adding variations of the bestselling items (think different colors, sizes, and shapes).

Oberlo has a handy tool called profit margin calculator that will give you a better idea of your options.

3. Follow in the footsteps of eCommerce winners

Again, sometimes the best ideas hide in plain sight. Why try to reinvent the wheel? Capitalizing on useful resources, such as Oberlo’s 100+ Best Products to Sell in 2020 ebook and ‘What to Sell’ section, is the ultimate shortcut to kicking off a successful online store. Don’t be discouraged from investing in a particular idea just because someone else is doing too – the online world is big enough for all hustlers.  

How To Sell Online: Forging Your Way To Success

Finally, we get to the actionable part of this article! Here are a few strategies for selling online without as much as breaking a sweat.

1. Using existing sales gateways

You can sell online through marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy, but the strategy has its pros and cons. First of all, there’s an established, large community of returning customers that you can access. And for someone who’s just learning how to sell online, it’s a big deal to be able to tap into a vast pool of online shoppers that already trust the platform. Another big plus for eCommerce beginners is the opportunity to test the demand for the products they offer. Once you establish a good sense of what’s popular, it’s time to start building an online store.

Why shift the strategy when it starts returning a profit? Many reasons. The big marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy will charge you a commission for every sale. And it’s a painful experience to give your hard-earned money just like that! Second, selling through a third-party will prevent you from building a personal relationship with your customers. In essence, you won’t be able to capture their email addresses, provide useful content, or run your own campaigns to generate more sales. What’s more, marketplaces can shut your store at any time, which is a costly and damaging process to go through.

2. Selling via social media platforms 

Along with marketplaces, social media channels like Facebook and Instagram allow you to get your products in front of prospective customers. For instance, you can set up a Facebook shop to showcase your inventory to Facebook users. Those interested can then add your items to their cart and check out on the platform directly. But if you’d rather create an independent eCommerce website, Facebook still offers several ways to sell online; you can use your Facebook Business Page, run ads, and sell products in Facebook groups.

Social media allows you to work with influencers. You can give samples of your items to influencers in return for shoutouts. Identify some influencers in your niche by searching for relevant hashtags, then partner with them to promote your products through stories, videos, posts, and more. Bonus read: The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Influencer Marketing

3. Creating your own dropshipping website

Thanks to platforms like Shopify, setting up your website is easier than ever. You can take advantage of free trials and endless online resources to get it off the ground in just a few days. 

Also, you can install a dropshipping app to eliminate the hassle of buying and storing inventory. It’s a great way to sell online due to its many advantages, but the most profound are, of course, minimum setup costs – since you don’t need to buy the inventory or manage a warehouse. The ability to offer an extensive selection of products, which helps to scale quickly, and the incredible flexibility that comes with the fact that you can run your business from anywhere in the world. It’s the perfect combo of potential and freedom that’s attracting the digital nomads and hustlers.

However, it’s not entirely hassle-free. With so many success stories fueling the interest in this market, the competition to sell online is high and growing, so it’s crucial you do your homework before jumping on board.

Some of the other most commonly cited problems, such as finding the right suppliers, can be solved by integrating with existing eCommerce tools. With 2000+ 5-star reviews and a free starter plan, Oberlo is one of the most popular choices when it comes to importing products to your online store and managing inventory.

How To Sell Online – Final Thoughts 

Let’s look at it this way – an online store is almost free to set up, no initial investment means there are very few risks involved, and the factors determining your business’s success are entirely in your control. If you have the time and resources for going at it alone, then remember – sooner is better than later.  

Want to Learn More?

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

What Is Dropshipping? It’s the Easiest Way to Start an Online Business!

[VIDEO] What to Sell Online: How to Choose Products

10 Online Stores to Use as Inspiration for Your First Store

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

The post How to Sell Online: Online Selling Ideas for 2020 appeared first on Oberlo.

from Oberlo

How to sell online – that’s the question. And whatever you’ve heard about starting an online business, it’s probably true. It’s a competitive playground that challenges even the savviest entrepreneurs, yet the overwhelming consensus is that setting up an online store is a life-changing experience. 

One of the best facts is that you can sell online way beyond the borders of your city or your country, or even continent without ever leaving your work desk! Once you get started, virtually anyone from anywhere in the world can become your customer.

But where do you start?

There are simple ways to figure out how to sell online, and they all stem from the answers to three basic questions – why, what, and how?

But here’s a neat summary of everything you need to know about how to sell online. It couldn’t get any easier.

Why Knowing How to Sell Online is a Good Way to Do Business 

Can you imagine your life without the Internet? No emails, no late-night last-minute shopping, no cat videos… It’s like the banishment from Heaven all over again!

And that’s precisely why the eCommerce industry is living its golden age. Everyone is connected and cozily nestled in their little online bubbles with no intention of going back to the old ways. Plugging into this trend is beginning to look like the smartest way to start an online business.

Here’s more on why.

1. Your business goes where you go

Let’s get this one out of the way first — forget about *real* vacations without a laptop, at least for the first year or so.

When you learn how to sell online, any place in the world can become your office, and more often than not, you’ll end up working weekends, nights, and holidays. The only difference is that you’ll do it with a smile on your face.

Work from the beach or your grandma’s garden — wherever you go, you’re just a tap (and a wifi connection) away from accessing your business. Everything you do must propel you towards success.

2. Cash-strapped? Start a business with a small investment!

The beauty of the online world is that you can get the business off the ground with very little initial investment. It depends, of course, on what kind of business you’re planning to start, but for the sake of this article, I’m assuming you have your mind set on running an online store. And when it comes to selling online, dropshipping seems to be the go-to strategy.

With minimum overheads, such as paying for the hosting of your website and running some online ads, you can sell online and build a profitable business in just a few months. And it’s not some kind of fantasy. There are real success stories to prove it.

3. Making money 24/7

Whereas physical shops are restricted to opening and closing times, online stores run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. All the time. It doesn’t take a genius to see the potential in this business model. If you have a constant stream of traffic coming to your store and you optimize your conversions to a good standard, you can essentially make money in your sleep. 

This touches on another substantial benefit of selling online – if done right, it can be a sweet source of passive income. It is less time-intensive than, say, running a brick-and-mortar boutique because you don’t need to be present at all times. With automated inventory management and a robust online marketing plan, you can sell online with very little extra input from your side.

4. A lot of room to grow

Entrepreneurs often have to bend over backward to keep increasing their sales. While you may have the hottest products in stock, it can be hard to find new customers and keep them loyal to your business. Taking up the option to sell online can fix this problem almost instantly. According to the latest eCommerce statistics, the number of online buyers is expected to reach 2.05 billion in 2020. That’s a lot of potential customers! What’s more, online shoppers are rapidly growing and are expected to hit a mammoth 2.14 billion in 2021.

The takeaway? Entrepreneurs who are still on the fence about online selling should take action before they’re left in the dust. Plus, with so many strategies for selling online, it couldn’t be more simple to capitalize on the growing eCommerce trend.  

Now, that sounds like a dream come true.

Until you hit the next cornerstone of this process, what will I sell online?

Online Selling Ideas: Sourcing Products When You’re Stuck

Let’s leave the question of how to sell online for a moment and focus on WHAT to sell instead. Finding a profitable idea is not an easy task. But sometimes, the answer might be hiding in plain sight. So if you know where to look, inspiration is available in high doses.

1. Piggybacking on trends  

Who doesn’t want to be a trendsetter? A pioneering genius with a ground-breaking idea? It’s a blazing dream of many entrepreneurs. Yet, the eCommerce world isn’t always kind to unique online selling ideas. To get the sales engine running, an online store needs to serve a high demand in a market and tap into a growing niche or trend that will define its profits.  

When you’re on the hunt for a money-making idea, it pays off to put your ear to the ground and listen to what the customers want. Yes, I’m talking about the best-selling lists, trend reports, and product curation lists.

Start your initial research by casting a wide net. First, review the new and upcoming trends on online retail giants, such as eBay, Amazon, or Etsy. What are the month’s top picks, most favorite products, or best-selling items? Can you spot any particular trends like colors, shapes, fabrics, or patterns?  

When you have a rough idea of what you want to sell online, it’s time to find a way to source these products for your online store. And one of the best places to look for dropshipping products is Oberlo. Give its ‘Product Statistics’ a thorough look, and you’re almost guaranteed to find something that meets your needs. For example, products with over 500 orders in the past 30 days are likely to sell well. Jump on these products quickly so you can get ahead of the competition. 

Your next logical step is to choose high-margin products.

2. Aim for healthy margins

What matters at the end of the day is how much money you get to keep. Healthy margins will determine the future of your eCommerce business, so you should do everything you can to invest your time and effort into products that will yield the best results. The average eCommerce gross margin is approximately 40%. However, every market and every product is different, so you should spend time analyzing the competition and the going rate.

Some of the easiest tactics you can use to maximize the profits include ensuring prominent website presence for your high-margin winners, putting them at the front of your marketing initiatives and cross-selling campaigns, and adding variations of the bestselling items (think different colors, sizes, and shapes).

Oberlo has a handy tool called profit margin calculator that will give you a better idea of your options.

3. Follow in the footsteps of eCommerce winners

Again, sometimes the best ideas hide in plain sight. Why try to reinvent the wheel? Capitalizing on useful resources, such as Oberlo’s 100+ Best Products to Sell in 2020 ebook and ‘What to Sell’ section, is the ultimate shortcut to kicking off a successful online store. Don’t be discouraged from investing in a particular idea just because someone else is doing too – the online world is big enough for all hustlers.  

How To Sell Online: Forging Your Way To Success

Finally, we get to the actionable part of this article! Here are a few strategies for selling online without as much as breaking a sweat.

1. Using existing sales gateways

You can sell online through marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy, but the strategy has its pros and cons. First of all, there’s an established, large community of returning customers that you can access. And for someone who’s just learning how to sell online, it’s a big deal to be able to tap into a vast pool of online shoppers that already trust the platform. Another big plus for eCommerce beginners is the opportunity to test the demand for the products they offer. Once you establish a good sense of what’s popular, it’s time to start building an online store.

Why shift the strategy when it starts returning a profit? Many reasons. The big marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, or Etsy will charge you a commission for every sale. And it’s a painful experience to give your hard-earned money just like that! Second, selling through a third-party will prevent you from building a personal relationship with your customers. In essence, you won’t be able to capture their email addresses, provide useful content, or run your own campaigns to generate more sales. What’s more, marketplaces can shut your store at any time, which is a costly and damaging process to go through.

2. Selling via social media platforms 

Along with marketplaces, social media channels like Facebook and Instagram allow you to get your products in front of prospective customers. For instance, you can set up a Facebook shop to showcase your inventory to Facebook users. Those interested can then add your items to their cart and check out on the platform directly. But if you’d rather create an independent eCommerce website, Facebook still offers several ways to sell online; you can use your Facebook Business Page, run ads, and sell products in Facebook groups.

Social media allows you to work with influencers. You can give samples of your items to influencers in return for shoutouts. Identify some influencers in your niche by searching for relevant hashtags, then partner with them to promote your products through stories, videos, posts, and more. Bonus read: The Complete Guide to Getting Started With Influencer Marketing

3. Creating your own dropshipping website

Thanks to platforms like Shopify, setting up your website is easier than ever. You can take advantage of free trials and endless online resources to get it off the ground in just a few days. 

Also, you can install a dropshipping app to eliminate the hassle of buying and storing inventory. It’s a great way to sell online due to its many advantages, but the most profound are, of course, minimum setup costs – since you don’t need to buy the inventory or manage a warehouse. The ability to offer an extensive selection of products, which helps to scale quickly, and the incredible flexibility that comes with the fact that you can run your business from anywhere in the world. It’s the perfect combo of potential and freedom that’s attracting the digital nomads and hustlers.

However, it’s not entirely hassle-free. With so many success stories fueling the interest in this market, the competition to sell online is high and growing, so it’s crucial you do your homework before jumping on board.

Some of the other most commonly cited problems, such as finding the right suppliers, can be solved by integrating with existing eCommerce tools. With 2000+ 5-star reviews and a free starter plan, Oberlo is one of the most popular choices when it comes to importing products to your online store and managing inventory.

How To Sell Online – Final Thoughts 

Let’s look at it this way – an online store is almost free to set up, no initial investment means there are very few risks involved, and the factors determining your business’s success are entirely in your control. If you have the time and resources for going at it alone, then remember – sooner is better than later.  

Want to Learn More?

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

What Is Dropshipping? It’s the Easiest Way to Start an Online Business!

[VIDEO] What to Sell Online: How to Choose Products

10 Online Stores to Use as Inspiration for Your First Store

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

The post How to Sell Online: Online Selling Ideas for 2020 appeared first on Oberlo.

https://ift.tt/2x6dB3b March 18, 2020 at 03:34PM https://ift.tt/3d9gSPv

[davewakeman]

Empty Seats Aren't About Price...

I wrote this in 2017. As I was thinking about the ongoing baseball cheating situation, I wanted to post this again…it will also be interesting to see how this plays out as the coronavirus continues to disrupt things. 

I came across an article on CNBC this morning about teams using “dynamic pricing” to help bring fans back into the stadiums.

The idea behind dynamic pricing is awesome.

It is the idea that a ticket isn’t some static thing and that some games or events have more perceived value to their buyers than others.

The thing is that this is true.

But where the article loses me is that it feels like the newest form of conventional wisdom that is going to weigh down sports is that variable pricing is going to solve all of our ills.

Simply put, “People only buy on price.”

Which if you are versed in any bit of marketing, you know that is simply not true.

Price is an easy excuse when you aren’t offering giving your customers enough value.

Jesse Lawrence from TicketIQ mentions that tickets are a “commodity.”

This is actually true, especially in the way that tickets and events are often sold in today’s market.

When you visit the website of any organization and the emphasis is placed on things like:

Free Parking

Spacious Seating

First-Class Catering

Then, yeah, you have a commodity on your hands.

Compare that to organizations that are selling based upon the value of the experience and the emphasis is on many different things. Instead of features, you’ll get the vivid language that focuses on things like:

Imagination

Creativity

Excitement

There’s a whole different world of expression that isn’t being used by the modern sports and entertainment marketer to maximize attendance and revenue and price alone isn’t going to fix it.

Why?

Because price is often a convenient excuse when the buyer doesn’t see the value in what you are offering.

If price isn’t the solution, what is?

First, price alone isn’t the solution. That’s correct. But that doesn’t mean that pricing isn’t a problem.

For the past several years, we’ve seen teams and leagues work to undercut the secondary by trying to price in a manner that captures all of the perceived revenue that the secondary market is making from the inventory that they sell.

It is very short-sighted for a number of reasons like:

The prices listed on the Internet are almost never the real selling prices and I don’t care what kind of data you think you have, the only people that really know what something sold for are the people doing the buying and selling.

From a psychological standpoint, it is harmful to the team’s brand. There’s an unfair psychological barrier that exists between the primary and secondary. This means that a fan is willing to spend a lot more for a ticket to a hot event on the secondary than they are from the primary in a lot of cases. If you charge $500 on the primary side, a lot of consumers are going to think you are gouging them. If you are on the secondary side, the same price and situation make the buyer feel like a winner! Unfair, but that’s psychology. People are just wired that way and the thing is, they don’t even know it.

By cutting out channels that have incentives to maximize pricing and revenue, this often leads to a downward spiral of having to find partners and channels that have an incentive to create the best “bargains” or “deals” for their consumers, causing a cycling downward of ticket pricing and perceived value of the ticket.

In doing research for an upcoming report on challenges and opportunities in the ticket market in 2018, I found that pricing is one of the top concerns of everyone involved in the ticket industry because they feel like even when tickets are selling well that the pricing mechanisms in place aren’t working well for everyone involved in the industry. Specifically, because the people I have surveyed recognize that an empty seat has a negative multiplying impact on everything about a fan’s experience which can lead to lower attendance and less revenue going forward.

The solution for pricing isn’t simple, but it is a necessity.

First, we need to stop the fighting between the primary and the secondary market.

Right now, the consumer doesn’t care where the ticket comes from. They just want to know that when they buy a ticket that it is valid.

In many instances, consumers go to sites like StubHub or Vivid Seats from the jump. They may not even know that your team has a website.

And, more than likely, they don’t care.

This means that the back and forth over who is right to sell tickets or who is wrong to sell tickets is inside baseball. No one cares.

While the industry is arguing about something that doesn’t seem meaningful to consumers, consumers are being harmed by less than faithful actors like people that are creating tickets to sell multiple times, scams to sell tickets that don’t exist, etc. Or, even worse, this wasted energy misses an opportunity to drive demand for games, concerts, and other events.

The best way forward is for the primary and secondary to work together to just sell tickets. There are billions of dollars in the live entertainment industry and that’s without people maximizing their marketing and selling efforts.

Trust me there is more money to be made by growing the industry further than trying to hoard all the current pennies for yourself.

A rising tide, or something.

Which is why I have been active in industry efforts to bridge the gap between primary and secondary market to create an opportunity to achieve higher attendance and higher revenues.

Instead of fighting like toddlers, we would be better served to work together on some smarter pricing policies.

Those might require that the primary and secondary share revenues or profits on ticket sales.

It might mean that the way sales teams are structured changes.

It likely means that change is going to have to happen.

Guess what?

Change is already happening anyway.

You can’t stop it, but you can embrace it to make it work for you.

That will mean that you can’t just offer up one-size-fits-none pricing and that you likely won’t be able to “set it and forget it.”

You’re going to have to work to constantly update and adjust your pricing to fit your market.

That’s just a fact.

Second, emphasize customer experience.

You’d think that after a new building boom in the States that the customer experience problem would be solved.

And, if you look at the experience as only being driven by rooms, facilities, and offerings…maybe you would have a point.

But the thing is that experience is everything.

In digital marketing, they use the term customer path or customer journey to talk about the steps and moments in a person’s buying experience with your brand.

In sports and entertainment, the path never really ends.

If you are a New York Mets fan, you likely are going to be a fan or customer for life. That means that your journey never ends.

With the advent of social media, it should be easier than ever to have an ongoing, long-term conversation with your fans and customers.

That isn’t the case.

In most instances, social media is a hit and run endeavor. Content is created and dropped onto a social media platform like Twitter, Facebook, or whatever.

If you see it, great!

If you don’t, great!

The thing is that just posting stuff on the Internet on social channels isn’t a great tool to ensure that your customer is always connected to your brand.

What happens if Twitter changes something in their timeline?

Or, Facebook changes their algorithm?

Screwed.

While I just talked about the experience of the digital customer experience extremely briefly, the same eye needs to be applied to every aspect of the customer relationship.

How is the ticket buying process?

Is it convoluted?

Is it smooth?

How is the in-game experience?

Are there huge lines at the gates?

Bottlenecks at certain stands?

Are your ushers and customer service reps strong on the service?

In today’s world, where reviews are only a few taps away, the need to generate a better experience and a more compassionate and considerate experience is more important than ever before.

Because we’ve all seen the scenario play out where one bad review or one bad experience sours a relationship for good.

Don’t do that.

Get everyone’s head into the practice of asking:

“How can we add value to…?”

Then have them answer the question and try to come up with actionable items that will enhance the experience of buying a ticket, being a fan, and being a customer.

Finally, after pricing and experience are looked at, spend a little bit of time on visiting what’s next.

In too many ways, the industry of sports and entertainment can often feel stuck because we get complacent and think that things are always going to be the way that they are today.

Even worse, not just thinking that things are going to stay the way that they are today is thinking that things haven’t really changed at all.

You see this in the reluctance of teams to change the way that they sell to the business community.

You see this in examples that I have heard of inside sales managers telling salespeople that using a personally curated email list to sell last-minute tickets “isn’t really selling.”

These are just two examples of a larger need for the industry to always ask themselves the famous Peter Drucker question, “What is the future that has already occurred?”

Then answering that question so that they can take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

This is likely to help you get in front of customers’ changing wants and needs.

If when you ask this question you don’t allow your focus to stay only in sports and entertainment, it also allows you to capitalize on new technologies and new ideas that are already gaining traction in other industries.

The fact is that it is very easy to get stuck in what works today and to end up surprised when the entire theory of your business changes around you. The aim for any business, not just a sports business, should be to disrupt yourself by always asking what is working, what isn’t working, and what is coming or has already arrived that I am not paying attention to.

This introspection will lead to much wiser decision making and likely put you in a better position to not have to fall back on the idea that the only thing that matters is the price.

Please follow and like us:

Empty Seats Aren’t About Price… was originally published on Wakeman Consulting Group

[coopdigitalnewsletter]

11 Feb 2020: Why political software sucks. Writing for death. Remote working.

Hello, this is the Co-op Digital newsletter - it looks at what's happening in the internet/digital world and how it's relevant to the Co-op, to retail businesses, and most importantly to people, communities and society. Thank you for reading - send ideas and feedback to @rod on Twitter. Please tell a friend about it!

OK, this one’s a bit of a linkorama.

Sustainability, data and AI in retail

Pandora, Zalando, IKEA, Amazon ramp up sustainability focus - how long until retail businesses must have a clear, strong sustainability position if they’re to avoid losing customers and revenue? - not long, believes this newsletter.

UK consumers warming to AI, with 54% happy to resolve queries with bots.

IKEA are promising new data controls for customers - that link might be behind a paywall so it’s explained here.

“In the future, all but the most convenience-based retailers will begin to use their stores as media to acquire customers and their media platforms as stores to transact sales. Put another way, media is now a cost of sales and rent is now a cost of customer acquisition.” - a retail opinion.

“Amazon Choice” labels look like an editorially curated quality filter but are just a popularity algorithm.

The impact of coronavirus on China-centered supply chains - now that China is responsible for around 15% of global manufacturing, the concerns for supply chains are real.

Why political software sucks

In the US, the Democratic party’s Iowa caucus votes were delayed by flaky software (and here’s how caucuses work). Some interesting commentaries on the underlying causes of unreliable software:

“The space is dominated by decision makers who are stuck on a very short term decision making cycle. Structurally there is no space for long term investment, despite everybody stating that this would be good [...] In normal tech circles we’d have a bunch of free software libraries and tools we build on together, but the campaign tech space doesn’t have this because decision makers fear our tools will be taken and used by the other side.”

“no one should have been solving the problem of making the caucuses more innovative. transparency & speed was what it sounds like the actual needs were, & those are often best served by rock-solid last-gen technology, optimized & tested to heck.”

“well-intentioned but underfunded and lacked comprehensive organizational buy-in [...] the product testing cycle and margins are nonexistent [...] a hard market where everyone hates you and no one has money to pay you”

Software is always harder than it first looks, even to fellow developers commenting online! The comments above recall Conway’s law (“organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”). But here you might extend that slightly: the software you get reflects the organisations’ communications structures, but also the values and the incentives that commissioned it.

Writing for death, care promises

Designing content for people dealing with a death: “There’s no room for doubt or misunderstanding. That means the words we use must get straight to the point. By trying to be kind, we often use more words when we should be helping people to understand what they need to do as quickly and simply as possible.”

Scotland’s independent care review has published its comprehensive report on the care system, encompassing “legislation, practices, culture and ethos” - it’s ambitious and essential reading for those working in digital gov, but also those who care about humans.

Remote working

18F’s best practices for making distributed teams work (18F is a digital services agency within the US government). Perhaps there are some lessons here for organisations with many locations: tear down any head office vs shopfront barriers by going “remote first”.

There are now startups explicitly working on making remote staff work easier.

Help agriculture

Digitalfolk, could you help next-gen agriculture get more sustainable and more human-centred? Add your name here: Agriculture is a game-changer! Community of Practice.

Digital in organisations

Six digital strategy plays to drive value in established corporations - some of these plays are common sense (like cutting cost/time/process/error), but this is an interesting read, and it’s good to see some failures discussed as well.

How to scale agile product development and delivery - spoiler: not by imposing some framework.

Co-op Digital news and events

“‘We don’t want to just give people a refund when there’s a problem; we want to give them a genuine response and a personalised experience that they will remember.’ [says Claire Carroll, Head of Sales and Service at the Co-op.] The Co-op’s trailblazing approach has been a great success: customers actually buy more in its stores after making a complaint. ‘The basket spend is 6% higher’”

That’s from a shiny Salesforce customer success story - Co-op customer service advisors run 3m requests yearly through it. If customers are sending more after a complaint, that means Co-op is handling complaints - fixing the problem - in such a way that’s builds increased loyalty and confidence in the business. The industry term for this is “service recovery” (and that link is an interesting thread of how to win at ecommerce), but you might equally call it putting customers first. As exciting as the Salesforce bit is, this story is really about a Rescue Lasagne.

Public events, most of them at Federation House:

Carbon Co-op’s Beginner’s Guide To Retrofit (a monthly event about retrofitting your house for energy efficiency) - Wed 12 Feb 6pm at URBED, 10 Little Lever Street, Manchester, M1 1HR.

Manchester Law Tech Meetup - Thu 13 Feb 6.00pm.

Open Data Night - February 2020 - Tue 18 Feb 6.30pm.

Conscious Entrepreneurs - Wed 19 Feb 12pm.

Open Data Manchester: Black software (explores racial injustice & the professionals & hobbyists of color who helped build the internet) - Wed 18 Mar 6.30pm.

Returners/Re-trainers (about successful initiatives to create better routes for women returners/re-trainers) - Thu 26 Mar 11.30am

Internal events:

Digital all-hands - Wed 12 Feb 1pm at Fed Defiant.

Co-operate show & tell - Wed 12 Feb 3pm at Fed 6 co-operate space.

Data management show & tell - Thu 13 Feb 2.30pm at Angel Sq 13th floor breakout.

Membership show & tell - Fri 14 Feb 3pm at Fed 6 kitchen.

Food ecommerce show & tell - Mon 17 Feb 10.15am at Fed 5.

Delivery community of practice - Mon 17 Feb 1.30pm.

Health team show & tell - Tue 18 Feb 2.30pm at Fed 5 kitchen.

More events at Federation House - and you can contact the events team at  federation.events@coopdigital.co.uk. And TechNW has a useful calendar of events happening in the North West.

Thank you for reading

Thank you, beloved readers and contributors. Please continue to send ideas, questions, corrections, improvements, etc to the newsletterbot’s typing entity @rod on Twitter. If you have enjoyed reading, please tell a friend!

If you want to find out more about Co-op Digital, follow us @CoopDigital on Twitter and read the Co-op Digital Blog. Previous newsletters.

[buttonholedlife]

Gays Hate Techno speak non-commercial techno culture, along with a great collection to match

Their festivity has no wristbands. Their schedules may not be blowing up on socials. When Gays Hate Techno throws a party or does a compilation-- like the one that only lost-- what you obtain is actually nothing at all yet musical feeling.

It is actually only the type of riotous perspective that has instilled the most effective digital popular music. Given that we can not all create the event, Gays Hate Techno collections can bring you some of that sensation straight through the songs. The have quickly become must-hear occasions, and also model 4.0 is no various.

I spoke to GHT owner Matt Fisher as well as compilation developer Benjamin B. Orphanhood Eksouzian to acquire knowledge into how it all comes with each other. They deliver a confident notification for any person who seems like they're certainly not discovering community in electronic music-- as well as a template for just how to function all together to get that groove back.

Oh yeah, as well as-- due to the fact that this is actually a collection, we've obtained one thing to queue up for listening. (Do not miss the corker of a track by friend-of-the-site David Abravanel, whose popular music possesses the best wit for the task.) There's a complete megamix of the popular music (which you can easily additionally manage signing up for their podcast):

Images good behavior GHT, coming from their gathering.

Peter: I recognize this is an one-of-a-kind sort of group; can you describe just how you envision this team as well as exactly how it functions?

Matt: Gays Hate Techno isn't an industrial promoter in the standard feeling. Our company do not possess a set roster, resident DJs, or even a particular program. Our company manage around performing projects like the party and collections that assist the online area, not vice versa. During that way, the compilation and also the event possess the same objective-- they're means our company can easily ensure and also celebrate partnerships that or else exist merely or mainly online.

Peter: The individuals I recognize who have actually been to your celebrations state it is actually a definitely unique odds to follow all together. How performs the celebration event for the group?

Matt: The layout for the celebration is actually imitated revolutionary faerie parties and also Burning Man-style encampments, so it possesses goals that are actually various from, point out, an industrial music festivity. We're a reasonable slumber event created around songs, but a community-building activity. What I mean by that is that our company depend on involvement, volunteering, and impulsiveness much more than perhaps an event would. Our experts likewise try to become as cheap as feasible, as well as we keep a traveling fund that defrays costs for our females, trans, nonbinary performers and also artists of different colors.

. Peter: So just how carries out the neighborhood job-- just how perform folks take part?

Matt: Anybody may and also must get involved. Our construct is actually created around helping with individual communications as high as it is actually generating a popular music sequence. Our experts have an available require artists, and also our experts leave behind room around our curated plan time for an available course for casual sets as well as tasks.

Folks volunteer to prepare dishes, aid park cars and trucks as well as assist set up phases. Our team talk to every person to give away 2 hrs of their opportunity. They additionally take fine art, perform injury decrease training, serve as our clinical staff, give massages, do yoga exercise and also reflection. Undoubtedly a celebration our dimension does not especially require 400 volunteers. The objective of the volunteering is so much more about trembling people away from viewer setting as well as providing them an excuse to create brand-new good friends while becoming part of the activity, not just portion of the target market.

I assume that the social focus triggers better functionalities, incidentally. We put together an atmosphere that produces unwinded, enthusiastic listening, and people that've permit their protectors down a little bit, and also motivate the DJs and entertainers to seek a lot more individual, farther-out tips than perhaps they normally reach check out. There's a wonderful responses loophole there. Our experts're all there as songs supporters, and as an encouraging system.

Benjamin: In conditions of the compilation process, as Matt specified above, our team see these compilations as an innovative item of the participants of Gays Hate Techno. Our intention is actually to advertise our participants' art and also to display their original work as shared through the music genre of techno.

To that side, every year (cycle) our team introduce a contact us to engage to the present members of the facebook team, e-mail calls from previous compilations, along with a Discord team for individuals who have actually determined to leave Facebook, but would like to keep hooked up to the celebration and neighborhood. Participants create each of the material-- songs, album artwork, promo video job, push launch copy, as well as in most years the audio mastering of tracks.

Our team urge volunteer work and involvement to create a compilation that shows our community. Our team require the performer to announce the work as their personal and also to confirm that it does not include samples that might offer a licensing concern. Outside of that, our company do not reject jobs from a visual critique standpoint. This year, as an example, our company had more artwork articles for the album art work than our experts can use and also made a decision to let the Facebook group vote to determine the last piece to represent Gays Hate Techno IV.

Peter: At the threat of making you discuss a joke, I must inquire-- what is actually the account along with the label?

Matt: Gays Hate Techno is actually a prank title that emerged of a conversation I had along with buddies in New York City back in 2010 or even 2011. They were managing a gathering at the Stonewall Lodge that featured techno, tech-house, as well as very little even more than what back then was regular gay male nightclub music. It was the answer to the inquiry: why's it thus hard to receive folks to follow bent on pay attention to better music?

Each of the 3 terms was indicated sarcastically, of course, along with a kind of Kathy Griffin-type odd dismissiveness. A pair of times later, I produce the Facebook team as a method for us to just debate and upload paths we liked. Individuals invited close friends, and also it quite, extremely quickly ended up being an international team. People would comment that they failed to know some other queer individuals who liked the songs folks were posting. There was a wish to link with various other folks this method.

. CDM: Due to this whole workers-- I am actually attracted to call this team "Misanthropes"? Perform support the collection and this excellent area and offer it a pay attention-- as well as purchase it if you like it.

GAYS HATE TECHNO IV through Gays Hate Techno portions

a number of the background with our company regarding their track-- and also it's a necessary and also effective tale:

"i am actually recognized to become included in the 4th edition of the Gays Hate Techno compilation! my keep track of, "what they derived from me i will never come back", is actually an action in the direction of recovery. a sonic portrayal of my mindset post-trauma, and the tension it has actually placed on my interpersonal connections because of the brought upon concern as well as pain. i am an heir, yet the memory is there along with me daily i awaken, till the minutes stocking bedroom prior to i design to sleep.

because my abuse happened back house in michigan, it is vital for me to render to the queer & & trans folks certainly there without clinical support or access. detroit, and michigan typically, have actually restricted sources for LGBTQIA+ household, as well as there is no location solely for queer and also trans heirs of sex-related abuse as well as rape, which is a significant aspect when you are actually browsing this form of damage. i have actually determined that i will certainly match the sales of this record till december 18th of this year, and will certainly be donating that atop my personal addition to the Compunction Ellis Facility, an institution in detroit that supplies secure residing for homeless queer and also trans young people, help solutions, a come by health and wellness facility for wayne area homeowners that are actually medicaid eligible at no expense, and transition information for trans youth, only among others. therapy is actually type the recuperation method, as well as providing queer young people accessibility to that is critical.

i chance y' all delight in the compilation. thanks for the continuing assistance! ..."-- Jarvi Guðmundsdóttir aka Acid Father (excerpt coming from FB blog post)

Regarding the event

The post Gays Hate Techno speak non-commercial techno culture, along with a fantastic compilation to match appeared initially on CDM Create Digital Songs.

This content was originally published here.

[seotipsandtricks-me]

The world of online fashion is continually evolving to meet the demands of savvy consumers and how you communicate, perceive trust and provide a service is more important than ever… but that’s far easier said than done. With ever-growing competition, there are plenty of challenges but likewise, from initial search through to the final stages of a purchase, there are many opportunities for marketers to implement new strategies and produce a positive impact for sales conversions – and customers. Remember, this is about you working with your audience, standing out in the overcrowded digital landscape and giving shoppers the answers, opportunities, and confidence to easily buy from you. Conversion rate optimisation (or CRO) isn’t about just optimising technical performance – it’s about creating a user-centric site with an intuitive design that guides your core audience towards a purchase. So – to make it happen, there are 5 essential steps to follow in order to understand, engage, serve and sell to your ideal shoppers – Define your brand and your audience Do your research – products, competitors, brand and customer journey Present a lifestyle – not just a soulless product Give new and existing customers alike objectively great service Simplify search, avoid option paralysis and guide the customer Let’s get started! Define your brand and your audience To craft an engaging shopper journey that converts well, it’s important to match up who you are as a brand and the type of products and services you offer, with specific audiences who you can be confident, will have a strong reason to buy from you. Let’s start off simple. Ask yourself, who are you? What image and service do you want to provide? How do you achieve this? Do John and Jane Smith care about that fancy homepage animation? Is your copy providing the right message or is it just a distraction?   On average, we judge a site in 0.05 seconds and if you can’t convince them in that time that you are a safe, sensible option for purchaser then…well…you’re saying goodbye to the visitor before you’ve really had a chance to say hello. Brands have to both differentiate themselves from the competition, while also delivering an image (and site functionality) that is familiar enough for audiences to feel comfortable, at-home and engaged enough to explore further. The first step in almost any meaningful conversion rate optimisation strategy is to ensure that you’re not actively pushing customers away – so those initial moments (when visitors are assessing your brand, product and site functionality ) really do count. Digital strategy and some quite traditional marketing principles around brand-building, design and the market-fit of products intersect here but central to everything is an understanding of the multiple audiences you can realistically sell to. The more equipped you are to use data insights around their age ranges, sex, location, lifestyle and a myriad of other demographic traits, the more insight you have to provide experiences that captivate users and provide a positive experience. While you can make very good use of heavy-duty market surveys, focus groups and so on, the fact is many of your competitors won’t have even made a start on truly getting to know their audiences. Nathan Fulwood of CreateFuture emphasises that going down a highly complex route of testing isn’t necessary to give rich, actionable insights; “So many teams tie themselves in knots with complicated A/B or multivariate scenarios and experiments. Avoid this. Pick one hypothesis, run it and learn. Then two, then four…” Putting ego and assumptions to one side and using tactical surveys, straightforward A/B testing and just simply talking to your audience will open up new sources of insight and allow you to develop better experiences. Knowing who you are as a brand (and the value of your products) isn’t just about the aesthetic elements of design or using grand language to talk about how desirable your products are. Demonstrating quality and building interest by building your customer journey and website experience around the motivations, needs, goals, and preferences of potential shoppers – in terms of what they want from your products, and from a site selling those products – will bring them closer to a purchase. In short – show, don’t tell. Do your research – products, competitors, brand and customer journey In eCommerce operations there can be some big trust barriers.   Unlike a retail store, you can’t try on, touch and investigate the products you might be interested in buying. In this sense, known brands certainly have an advantage over independents when it comes to online retail. One way to build confidence in the desirability and quality of your products – and your ability to deliver them in a hassle-free fashion – is through reviews, testimonials and ratings.   Before you can anticipate great reviews, you first have to have a promise that you want to deliver to customers – a solid value proposition that shoppers can frame their experience against. This isn’t just a slogan – this is the main reason or reasons why you are a logical shopping choice and why you should be chosen in this ever-expanding world of eCommerce options. Doing the research to develop a robust and objective understanding of where you fit within your chosen market – as a premium offering or accessible, budget option – will help to inform your value proposition, meet shopper expectations and optimise conversion rates. The goal is to provide an elegant, seamless customer journey and map up what you know about your audience and their expectations of your products into a straightforward experience. CEO of User Vision Chris Rourke emphasises that a comparatively small amount of usability testing can produce a game-changing amount of actionable data to align your brand and on-site experience with customer expectations; “If you want to understand the user behavior, another powerful method is usability testing.   Even with a few representative users performing realistic tasks, you can learn loads of things from their behavior and opinions that can be applied as part of an iterative continuous improvement programme.” The more research you can do about your potential customers (and how competitors position themselves, their products and craft their own customer journeys) the more equipped you will be to provide an online experience that converts well – but a little can go a long way. Present a lifestyle – not just a soulless product Imagine this: a potential customer is looking for a new pair of shoes – something casual, modern-looking and a purchase that is more of a treat than a necessity – an indulgence to get excited about.   They find their way to an online shop, find the shoes they want but the images and supporting content are, let’s say, lacking. The (clearly stock) images are relatively small in size, very compressed and coupled with a generic description. In this case, the price point remains high but the presentation is poor – enough to make someone reconsider an indulgent purchase…or perhaps even prompt a visit to a retailer that looks more legitimate. Nathan Fulwood emphasises the importance of having a brand that goes beyond the baselines of static imagery and genuinely communicates passion and prompts new possibilities – “Once you have the basics down, does your brand give a licence to do something interesting – in your imagery, your product descriptions, your testimonials and reviews – that’s going to build a stronger connection and more memorable experience to your shoppers? ASOS are great at this – from featuring a trolled shopper as a model, or men modeling women’s clothing during Pride“. Particularly for an indulgent or aspirational purchase, it’s important to develop on-site messaging in line with a lifestyle – not just flat product content that presents a treat as just another commoditised product. Retailers have scope to communicate passion for their own products, and go beyond flat descriptions – shoppers don’t just buy products for their use value – they buy because of how the products make them feel – about themselves, the lifestyle they aspire towards and wider themes. Be to the point and specific; again, no jargon or industry terms – just plain language that will nonetheless communicate enthusiasm for the brand. To maximise engagement, providing better quality, non-stock images or even videos of actual lifestyle shots showing off the item with other items you sell, with plenty of examples to showcase the product in different environments and lighting will accomplish several things.   Not only do such steps help answer immediate questions a buyer may have about how the product will look, but they also need remove uncertainty and communicate enthusiasm. Rather than offering an experience of commoditised products, distinct from one another, you can improve cross- and upsell opportunities while advancing your brand by offering suitable related items via “what other customers also bought” suggestions or curated content with complementary styles and products. Product pages represent an opportunity to tell a story, provide social proof through reviews and commentary and communicate passion for products while answering any lingering questions that might be preventing a purchase. Give new and existing customers alike an objectively great service I feel this is an obvious point, but still today some retailers forget about either type of customer when in fact both are as important as each other. As well as giving a reason for a new customer to make their first purchase, usability is key to earning repeat business from existing and former customers. One thing that fresh potential customers and existing customers appreciate is a clear user experience with no ambiguity about how to find and purchase the items they’re interested in. For new customers, communicating the enthusiasm about your brand and products as discussed earlier is important, but it’s just as important to be transparent about your returns policy, sizing, pricing, delivery costs and more – the practical matters. Beyond your products and pricing, companies can also put up barriers by demanding too much from first-time shoppers. These demands might be something a visitor can put up with for a single purchase, but they’ll implicitly or explicitly make a mental note not to come back. So – make sure every on-page element the visitor sees has a purpose or meaning, remove any surprises from the customer journey and be transparent about costs. Removing barriers in the checkout process and shortening signup/checkout forms by only asking for the information you truly need will build trust, and speed up the path to a purchase. If you do want to ask for data, give shoppers a compelling reason to sign up for an account with deals, personalised products, finance and/or a VIP experience. Making it easy for the customer to navigate and find what they want is key to transforming a new, one-off customer to a repeat visitor. Chris Rourke emphasises that accessibility best practice to support visitors with disabilities should be built into the fundamentals of your design and user journey; “An important part of a companies UX /CX/business strategy (for commercial and legal compliance reasons) is to ensure that the site or app enables people with disabilities to achieve their goals. Ensure that your site developers and designers are complying with best practice (such as the WCAG 2.1 technical guidelines) so that  the site can be accessed by the widest possible audience.” By adhering to these standards, brands will very likely be improving the customer experience more generally by prioritising clarity of design and removing unnecessary barriers to conversion. When thinking about the wider customer journey, simplifying product search, top-level navigation the path from click-throughs from email or 3rd party marketing campaigns is key – with testing of different approaches to apply real customer data to make decisions. More than this – if the visitor still doesn’t convert, use other channels to bring them back. A case study by Sales Cycle states that of all abandoned-cart emails, 50% are opened and over a third then go on to make a purchase. The lesson here is to think about conversion rate optimisation as a discipline that starts before a shopper visits your site, and doesn’t end even after they’ve left it and moved on. Simplify search, avoid option paralysis and guide the customer Unfortunately, lots of eCommerce companies fall for this and offer too many options for potential shoppers. Bombarding visitors with competing offers and options can actually have a dramatic and negative effect on conversation rate. The problem here is that with more choice, the greater the demands are on the user to evaluate products. They may then choose the simplest option – the option to leave your site. A powerful tool to tackle this is to add a robust approach to product searches on-site. WebLinc states, that on-site searchers are 216% more likely to convert than regular users and even spend more. So: make things simple and relevant; don’t offer too much in terms of functionality or choice on a single page, and give visitors highly useful opportunities to find their own. Dan Fielding, Business Analyst at St Gobain has the following advice – “Don’t just “set and forget” your on-site product search” One of the easiest ways to increase conversion rate and spend on your eCommerce site is to optimise your on-site product search. Modern eCommerce platforms are equipped with a range of features for managing synonyms, redirecting common searches to custom page, or personalising search results based on customer segmentation. Giving users the tools to navigate effectively is key – and the more of the work you can do for them by applying customer insight and segmentation, the better.” Of course, while there are challenges to having too many products, offering too little can be just as bad. As with many aspects of conversion rate optimisation, it’s a balancing act to attract, engage, sell to and service shoppers in highly competitive markets. One familiar method to guide visitors towards a purchase is the sensitive use of an exit-intent overlay. An exit-intent overlay is essentially a pop-up which, deployed correctly, can offer a subtle incentive to stick around, sign up or make a purchase if users look like they’re going to navigate away from your site. Another aspect is to work on is visual hierarchy. We, humans, tend to organise everything we see and base/judge it all on size, colour, position etc. So – something that is bigger, brighter and at the top of a page will have more importance than something small, dull and at the bottom. Use this to lead users through your pages and choices and grab their attention using headlines and calls-to-action with larger and contrasting elements and also descriptions and features that are smaller. This then allows the user to scan quickly and not be overwhelmed while finding their own way to the products they desire. Ultimately, these are all just methods to give help site visitors to help themselves. Coming back to search functionality, Dan Fielding recommends developing a complete understanding of the tools you have available, but retaining a customer-first mindset with empathy for how they search; “Get to know the tools at your disposal, then regularly review your most commonly searched terms. Repeat the searches as a customer and try to find ways to make the results more effective. Tweaking the on-site search configuration can get you a lot of quick wins, but the real value comes when you bring in others from across your organisation to help solve the problems you find. An effective on-site product search isn’t just a content problem to solve, or a UX or technical one. It’s an area that benefits from collaboration across teams, but get it right and it will pay dividends for a long time.” There are many tools and techniques available to guide visitors, but they have to be intelligently actioned in order to avoid annoyance. At Blueclaw we have a proven toolkit and methodology to keep visitors engaged to maximise conversion rate – get in touch if you’d like to experience this for your brand. Summing up Conversion rate optimisation discussions can often be too focused on software technology and data insights, rather than a blended approach based on rich testing insight, along with more qualitative understanding of brand, audiences and building brand value to deliver results. From defining your brand and audiences through to crafting on-page experiences that match up with their interests intent, through to how you sell to and serve shoppers – there’s a lot that goes into eCommerce conversion rate optimisation. However, that just means that the rewards for the companies who get it right are all the greater. Interested in taking your CRO, SEO and digital experience strategy further? Talk to the Blueclaw team for straightforward tips, industry insight and support today. The post 5 Steps to Maximise Fashion eCommerce Sales – Using CRO, Audience Insight and Competitor Analysis to Boost Conversions appeared first on Blueclaw.

[blogwritetheworld]

The Write Place: Starting an Online Literary Magazine

Photo by Tamarcus Brown on Unsplash

Looking for the right advice on pursuing the writer’s life? You’ve come to the write place!

Perhaps the best way to support writers is to publish their work. This month, we will focus on some of the best practices for starting your own online literary magazine. As our world becomes more and more digital, online magazines serve to bring great writing to the masses. From blogs that feature work, to full-blown magazines, these online literary spaces help engage readers from all corners of the internet by bringing them the latest and greatest works of our time.

AN OCTOPUS HAS MANY ARMS

Being the editor-in-chief of a magazine is no easy task. Like an octopus, the leader of a magazine must have many arms to complete many tasks. Most chiefly, the editor-in-chief must lead their readers and editors through a process of collecting and curating written pieces by different people into one, coherent magazine. Like an octopus, the editor-in-chief must collect and arrange what it most loves.

Think about the works you most love. What do they have in common? Are they all short? Are they all the same genre? Do they have similar themes? Are they written by similar kinds of writers? Do they share similar imagery? The same sense of humor? Why not get a few friends together and start thinking about your answers to these questions… it just may be the beginning of the magazine of your dreams!

MISSION AND MASTHEAD

The next steps to starting an online magazine are to gather a team and come up with your mission.

Maybe you want to have a literary magazine with many genres. You might consider bringing a team together to handle the submissions, reading, editing, etc. These members of the editorial board are known as the magazine’s masthead. Most literary mastheads look something like this:

MAIN EDITORS

Founding Editor(s)

Editor-in-Chief (or editors-in-chief)

Managing Editor

GENRE EDITORS

Senior Poetry Editor

Senior Fiction Editor

Senior Interviews Editor

Senior Essays Editor

Book Reviews Editor

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Associate Editor, [Genre]

READERS

Prose Readers

Poetry Readers

ART EDITORS

Senior Art Editor

Associate Art Editor

WEB TEAM

Web Designers

Web Editors

CONTRIBUTORS/CORRESPONDENTS

Blog Correspondents

Regular Contributors

MANAGERIAL TEAM

Business Development Associate

Copy Writer

Editorial Assistant

Graphics

Layout Design

Marketing Assistant

Social Media Manager

As you can see, you can build a well-rounded team of people to bring your magazine to life and keep the publication process running smoothly.

Many literary magazines also include an Advisory Board on their masthead or in the credits. Let’s say you start your online magazine through your school. You might use this space to name the teachers who sponsor your efforts. Maybe you meet at your local library to put the magazine together. You might thank the library or the librarians for hosting your efforts. It’s important to give credit where credit is due, and to give thanks to those who help make your magazine a reality!

Your team might not ever be as big as the example masthead above—many small literary magazines run successfully with just a few people at the helm, but this list is a good way to start thinking about how you might start to gather some editors together. Maybe you belong to a slam poetry group at your school?. Likely, some of your friends also have a passion for reading poetry. They may want to join your team of poetry readers or editors. Perhaps you belong to a book club dedicated to mystery reading? Maybe one of your book club members would love to host a monthly blog on great mysteries in literature on your site? All of the readers and writers you know are available to you for these opportunities. If you’re short-staffed, you might reach out to teachers at your school about the project and see if they have any students in mind for your open positions. You can also post on your school’s bulletin boards or take an ad out in your school’s paper.

Once your team has been built, it is time to brainstorm. What is the mission of the magazine? With so many literary magazines out there, what is it your project seeks to bring to readers? What makes it unique? Will you only publish flash fiction? Will you only publish pieces that contain mountains? Is your magazine political? Artistic? Let readers and submitters know what it is you’re looking for.

The last commitment to make in this stage is the model of the magazine’s distribution. Will your magazine come out annually? Bi-annually? Quarterly? Monthly? Weekly? Daily? If you choose quarterly or longer between publications, what other things might you be able to do in between issues? Some things might be related to social-media. You might also have editors contribute little twitter reviews of their favorite pieces each month or week. Anything goes!

With a team intact, a name chosen, a commitment to a timeline, and a mission in hand, you’re ready for the real work of running a magazine to begin!

NAMING YOUR ONLINE LITERARY MAGAZINE

The first commitment to make as an editor-in-chief is giving your magazine a name. A name, like a title, is a promise made to a reader. It offers a sense of tone. It might also indicate the magazine’s content. When a reader hears or sees National Geographic, for example, they know to think of exploration of the world. A reader seeking to learn about science, nature, or anthropology, knows to go to these pages.

Literary magazines tend to have much more coded names—this is unsurprising and writers and readers of literature tend to love good metaphors, double-meanings, sly puns, and the like. A quick study of the “About” sections of online journals can give us a sense of such pretensions. One of my favorite online journals is Canvas. Canvas is an online literary journal for and by teens. According to the about section, the name canvas has many meanings to the editorial staff, ranging from a canvas tent as a place of solace and connection (as the editors hope you will also find a place of solace and connection within their pages) to a canvas backdrop or setting (the editors hope the poems and stories will also help define/set the stage of the world we live in). As we can see, the thought-process in even naming a magazine takes a lot of time and care. Landing on a name for your magazine sets the tone for the works contained therein.

CHOOSING A PLATFORM

Online magazines need online pages. There are many softwares and platforms that are free to the public where you can build out your magazine’s look, format and organization:

wix.com

weebly.com

wordpress.com

doodlekit.com

squarespace.com

As you and your team experiment with these sites, think about the look and organization of your online literary magazine. You might look to other online journals and see how they organize their buttons and headers in relation to issues of their zine. When you land on the site’s homepage, what do you want to see? The cover? The names of the contributors? Do you want it organized in columns? Or lists? These kinds of decisions can be inspired by the various platforms for web design. Just remember that these sites are not affiliated with Write the World so remember to ask a parent or teacher before signing up.

SUBMISSIONS AND SOLICITATIONS

A key part of magazine operations is publishing the works of writers. In order to do that, you must seek out excellent work. This can be done with open submissions as well as direct solicitations. A solicitation means that you directly ask a writer to submit work to your project. Let’s say you’re starting a magazine for LGBTQIA teen writers and you heard someone read a great slam poem aloud at school that fits your magazine’s mission. You might reach out directly to that writer and ask if they’d be interested in having that poem published or if they have any other work that they’d like to submit to your magazine.

Submissions, on the other hand, give all writers an opportunity to make it through the ever-infamous slush pile. You and your team will decide on the dates for an open reading period. Then you’ll have to come up with guidelines. Your submissions guidelines might look something like this:

[INSERT MAG NAME] is open for submissions for our reading period from September 15th through November 15th. Submissions should be accompanied by a brief cover letter introducing us to your work. Poets should submit 3-5 poems. Fiction writers should submit works of no more than 12 double spaced pages. Artists can submit up to 8 pieces.

You might also include information related to formatting (do you wish to receive things in PDF format, or .doc format), or any other information you hope to receive from writers. As submissions come in, your readers will have to give each piece a fair read and pass the most promising works on to their more senior editors.As you start reading, you’ll also need to develop rejection and acceptance letters.

Be sure to be encouraging. As writers, we understand the impulse to take rejection personally. But luck often plays a big role in these decisions—a reader at a magazine may have read 100 pieces before landing on this one. That alone might make a reader less likely to hear music in a given submission. I always feel best when a form rejection wishes me well in placing the work elsewhere and/or to keep submitting.

For acceptances, you’ll want to follow-up with writer by offering a release form. A teacher can help you draft this, making sure that there is parent and writer consent to publish works. This is also a good opportunity to request updated information like a writer biography, the most recent draft of the piece you’d like to publish, and any other writer materials you may desire for your magazine.

GATHERING THE PARTS

Now that your many arms are performing their tasks and works are being selected, it’s time to put your first issue together. Host a meeting with your managing and/or genre editors. Bring snacks, as people tend to compromise more kindly on a full stomach. As a team, you’ll need to select which pieces will be featured together and why. Come up with a protocol for sharing air time and choosing pieces. Will you all vote? Will each editor get a final say? You’ll have to come up with the rules for selection as a team.

There’s still more to do once you’ve selected works for publication. You’ll also need to think about the order in which the pieces appear. Maybe you’ll organize the pieces alphabetically? Maybe the pieces will be grouped by theme? Or maybe genre? It’s all up to you.

Next, you and your editors will need to reach out to writers. You’ll want to make sure that the piece or pieces you want are still available. Depending on your format, you might need to follow-up with the writer for a short bio, photo, or any other contributor information you might include with the publication. As for the writers whose work you did not select, you’ll want to write a form rejection letter that is kind and encourages them to continue writing and submitting work.

FINISHING TOUCHES

As you accept work to your magazine and gather information from each contributor, it’s finally time to put it all together! You and your team can delegate different parts of the magazine for publication. You’ll need to transfer the writing into your chosen website space. Each editor will have to make sure there are no mistakes on the pieces. And then it’s time to press PUBLISH.

Once this happens, it’s up to you and your team to get the magazine out into the cyber world! Post links to your contributors’ works on twitter, IG, facebook, your school website, and the like. We at Write the World look forward to reading your literary magazines!

[contentmarketingallstars]

Content Marketing All-Stars Q&A: Forrest Dylan Bryant of Evernote

Is it possible for a brand to succeed at scale with new content marketing tactics?

Absolutely.

For proof, just check out what Evernote is doing.

The organizational/productivity platform has built large audiences across a wide range of fresh channels, including on Medium (100,000+ followers) and with its "Taking Note" podcast (a top five tech news show on iTunes).

On top of that, the company excels in developing traditional content such as beautiful infographics and engaging guides.

So, what's the secret to Evernote's success? How does the firm approach content creation and content strategy?

To find out, we recently chatted with Forrest Dylan Bryant, the company's Director of Marketing Content.

Check out the full Q&A below:

Q: What is your background and what is Evernote?

A: Evernote is a place where you can capture, organize, and share your thoughts and ideas. You can keep all of your notes and docs in one place, so you never have to worry about where they are. Your thoughts are always with you, always accessible, and always in sync, via desktop, mobile, and the web. We have more than 200 million users around the world, so our content reaches a pretty broad audience.

I lead a team of writers, and I’m first and foremost a writer myself. But I’ve worked a lot of different sides of the content landscape over the years, from marketing to strategy to CMS management, for big corporations and startups and nonprofits. I also have a background in book publishing, I’ve written novels, been a music journalist, and I’ve spent nearly two decades in community radio. So I guess I take a big-picture view of content.

Q: What role does digital content play for Evernote? Why are you creating it?

A: I’m so glad you asked me that question, because that’s the question all content marketing should begin with: Why are we doing this? Who is it for? And what is it supposed to do, for us and for the consumer? Some organizations never ask those questions, but they're essential if you want your content to be meaningful and get results.

Here at Evernote, we’re trying to help people manage information — to collect it, organize it, and find it whenever and wherever they need it — so they can focus on the things that matter to them. This company’s mission is helping people do their work more effectively. So our content has to have the same mission. It’s not just about selling the product, because Evernote isn’t just a product. It’s a means to an end.

When you look at it that way, our content becomes an extension of the product. It’s about inspiring people to think better, organize better, and use Evernote better so they can find that freedom to focus. We want all of our content to deliver real value.

Q: What sorts of pieces are you creating? What is effective for helping you achieve your goals?

A: Our content marketing breaks down into a few big buckets, which align with the kinds of pieces our audience responds to the most:

First, there’s educational content that helps people discover Evernote, learn why it might be right for them, and get the most value from it. With that kind of content, our goal is to get people to think about new ways to use the app so they use it more often to do more things. This takes the form of use cases, feature walkthroughs, demo videos, and tips. That’s not completely self-serving. We’ve found that the more notes someone creates, and the more they put into those notes, the more value they get out of Evernote.

Next, there’s guidance and inspiration for becoming more organized and productive. You could call that thought leadership, but it takes a lot of different forms, like interviews with productivity experts and teachers, explainers for popular productivity methods, or looking at the great thinkers of history and how they approached their work.

Third is all the corporate and funnel content that explains new features, tells our story, and builds awareness and gets people to try the product.

In terms of channels, we focus heavily on our blog and social media, but as we branch out we’re seeing the most growth in newer channels. We just hit 100,000 followers on Medium. Our “Taking Note” podcast has repeatedly reached the top 5 for tech news on iTunes, and our series of Facebook Live webinars is getting more viewers and more engagement with each installment.

Q: What do you think is the key to your success with Medium and podcasting? Are there any audience development tactics that have worked especially well for you?

A: I think in both of those cases -- with Medium and the podcast -- one of the main reasons we have been successful is that we have been focused on giving people useful and relevant content. We are really focused in both of these channels on giving people in-depth content that is of use to them, and that they can take and apply to their own methods of working.

With Medium we are very careful about which pieces we post and which we don’t. We take the audience on that platform into account and focus on things that they are going to be able to get something out of, and interact with, rather than just put up content for content's sake.

We also focus a lot on quality. We have freelancers but we don’t farm out our content creation. We keep the pool small. We are very careful about editing. We always want to make sure that we present our content in the best possible light. That includes the way that we edit our podcast; quality is hugely important.

In terms of building an audience, we find strategic use of our email newsletter very helpful. We always try to fit in the right pieces of content which we think are going to resonate with the most people. It’s not just everything we have published; it’s highly curated.

Also, we do a lot of cross-channel promotion. If we've got something interesting on Medium, we make sure we highlight it on other social channels. That helps a lot.

Q: How do you measure the success of your content marketing efforts? Which metrics do you pay close attention to?

A: We look at the fundamentals like clickthroughs and shares, time on page, and that sort of thing, but we’re also trying to dig deeper. Like for an article, there’s a big difference between unique views, average time on the page, and how many people actually reached the end of the article. Those are three totally different metrics, and all basic stuff, but you need to put them together if you want to have a truly useful picture of your content’s performance. And what did the reader do next? Click a link to learn more? Share it? Or just walk away? Reach matters, but engagement matters more.

We always look at comments, not just the number but the sentiment. That’s huge. Only a certain subset of your audience is made up of the sort of people who make comments — the enthusiasts, the passionate, and the cranks — but those are also often the people who care the most, who are most likely to amplify your good content and let you know when you’re not living up to your own standards.

You can also learn a lot from the metrics gathered across your organization, from registrations to customer support tickets to PR share of voice. I want to know how all of it’s doing and why because that tells me where our content is helping and where it isn’t.

Q: Any favorite pieces of Evernote content? What are some good examples of what you guys do?

For the company’s anniversary this summer, we put the spotlight on Stepan Pachikov, the original founder of Evernote. He’s a true visionary and an under-appreciated hero of Silicon Valley, but he also has a fascinating personal story. So one of our writers wrote a long profile that was really a piece of journalism. We wrote it as if it would be published in a prestige magazine like Vanity Fair or the New Yorker. It went deep and didn’t flinch. That piece went onto our Medium channel and became an Editor’s Pick. I was really proud of it.

On a more practical level, we discovered that our customers love being able to save time by using quality, pre-made note templates for specialized tasks, like goal setting or class projects, or even planning a novel. So we assembled an in-depth primer on how to use those templates and provided a whole set of templates that you can add to Evernote with a click. That blog post gathered hundreds of thousands of views in a very short time and people wrote in to thank us for making their days easier. That’s content as an extension of the product.

We also had a crew at the Confab content strategy conference this spring, where we were the official note-takers. Three writers covered every session at the conference, and a notebook full of all of those notes was made freely available to the public afterwards. You can view it even if you don’t use Evernote, but if you do use it, you can save the whole thing with one click and have those notes forever. We did the same thing at SXSW. Again, content as an extension of the product.

But some of my favorite content is when we’re just scrappy. Like when we ran a bunch of Twitter polls and then compiled the results into a fun little infographic summarizing a day in the life of our fans. That’s content as conversation, and it’s a beautiful thing.

Q: Finally, which content marketing trends are you keeping a close eye on? Which formats, tactics, or platforms do you think will have a major impact over the next few years?

A: I find the resurgence of podcasting over the past two years to be a remarkable phenomenon. I’m a radio DJ in my spare time, so maybe I’m just biased towards audio, but what I find most interesting about podcasting is that it allows the delivery of deep content through passive means.

Here’s what I mean by that: reading text or watching a video requires your full attention. It requires an active investment by the audience, not just of time but of focus, and that’s why so many great articles are languishing unread in people's Evernote, Feedly, and Pocket queues.

But a podcast is audio. It’s still a time investment, but it’s passive. You can listen while you drive, or cook, or do yard work. And it’s perfect for the kind of deep thought leadership content that actually changes minds or inspires people to think in a new way. That’s powerful AND convenient. So I’m a big fan of podcasting.

Over the next few years, I’m also very interested in seeing how native social media content evolves. You’re always going to stand a better chance of gaining attention if you go to where the audience already is. And an even better chance if you’re not “going” there at all, if it’s a natural environment for you. So we choose our social platforms carefully and try to suit the content to the people who are there and the ways they like to interact in those spaces. As artificial intelligence and other innovations come to those platforms, they may enable entirely new ways of personalizing interactions, and that could increase the value of social content exponentially. We’re already seeing that a video session on Facebook Live can be far more engaging than a traditional webinar. Just imagine when your content can be chopped up and reassembled to fit an individual’s interests and needs.

And while it isn’t content per se, I think real-world experiences are going to be increasingly important to brands. The more time we spend online, the harder it is for online content to stand out. It becomes background noise. Real, physical experiences like pop-up stores and fun events bring novelty and immersion. You can touch them, take a selfie in them, have real conversations with real people. When it’s well done, an experience like that has an impact far beyond the few people who are actually there. It touches their whole networks in a unique and authentic way.

[adrianodiprato]

+ “If engagement is the ceiling - the highest bar - then we may be missing the point. Think about it: Would you rather hear about changing the world, or do you want the opportunity to do so? A story about a world changer might engage us but becoming world-changers changes us. So, the question for you as a professional educator is: If you had to choose between compliant, engaged, or empowered, which word would you choose to define your students?” ~ George Couros

From Engagement to Empowerment

When reading George Couros’ book Innovator’s Mindset I was reminded of how we, as educators, can have an influence on student motivation and the profoundness that is born from purposeful learning.

If we as a collective group of educators already know what works to motivate students, then why are so many students still unmotivated? Have we become too focused on short-term results and forgotten long-term impact?

We know that many things can impact on a student’s motivation levels – personal circumstance, self-worth, technology “distractions”, the age of entitlement or parents that don’t want their child to take responsibility, fear of failure and the list goes on.

Also think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (below) is a motivational theory in psychology comprising an eight-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. The first four levels are often referred to as deficiency needs, and the top four levels are known as growth or being needs. Maslow believes that motivation decreases when the bottom four needs are met. Conversely, he believes that intrinsic motivation increases as the top four needs are either satisfied or met.

So, let us now shift the focus on our own practice and our responsibility in motivating our students. When we set aside all the outside factors and influences on student motivation and basic human “needs” and just focus in on our time with the young people in our care, how are we really doing?

Having been in this game for some twenty-six years now this is what I have come to know about what motivates all learners to move from engagement to empowerment:

1. Relatedness

“To inspire meaningful change, you must make a connection to the heart, before you make a connection with the mind.” ~ George Couros

Students are more motivated to achieve when they have formed the belief that their teacher deeply cares about them as a person and their learning growth. Building this level of trust involves sharing who you are and learning whom your students are.

Begin by building an inclusive community in your room, where the dignity of each person is valued and accepted.

By incorporating a bit of humor, storytelling, positivity and passion in your classes can make all the difference in establishing a positive learning environment. A quality teacher-student relationship provides students with a sense of stability, safety and belonging, which sets the stage for more academic risk-taking in a respectful climate. Provide quality one-on-one formative feedback, encourage open and active participation and always see the good as well as the challenging in your students.

2. Autonomy

“How happy is the little stone

That rambles in the road alone,

And doesn't care about careers,

And exigencies never fears;

Whose coat of elemental brown

A passing universe put on;

And independent as the sun,

Associates or glows alone,

Fulfilling absolute decree

In casual simplicity.” ~ Emily Dickinson

Many parents, teachers and students read “test scores” or ATAR results and conflate this with ultimate achievement. Doing well on a test or getting a high ATAR score shouldn’t be THE only goal. When we shift the focus on to learning and on the individual learner, by connecting to their interests, their needs, and personal goals, we can create experiences that ignite curiosity, develop passion, and potentially unleash genius.

In the excellent book Drive, Daniel Pink declares, “People don’t engage by being managed. They don’t engage by being controlled. The way that people engage is if they get there under their own steam, and that requires sometimes enormous amounts of autonomy over people’s time (when they do what they do), over their technique (how they do it), over their team (who they do it with) and over their task.”

Students are more motivated when they have control and independence over their learning and have choice in how they curate and demonstrate their knowledge, attributes and skills acquisition. This type of learner agency comes from the power to act and requires all students to have the ability to make decisions and take ownership of their own behaviours throughout the entire learning process.

When we control the task too much it generally will lead to compliance. How much real choice do your students actually have with each and within learning tasks? I accept that providing choice can be messy, with students completing different tasks at different rates, making it hard to be consistent with grading. However, once you give students more ownership for their learning you will support them becoming more self-directed and more empowered.

3. Competence

“Education is not the filling of the pail, but the lighting of a fire.” ~ William Butler Yates

Does your language in the classroom contribute to a fixed or growth mindset? Students are more motivated to persist at a challenging task when they honestly believe they can grow and emerge better than they were before. This requires them (and us!) to cultivate a growth mindset, a belief that their intelligence and abilities can evolve through deliberate practice and sustained effort.

Harnessing the power of intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic remuneration can be thoroughly satisfying and infinitely more rewarding. Creating an environment where all learners are encouraged to take risks in pursuit of learning and growth rather than perfection is absolutely foundational to shifting to an intrinsic motivation and empowerment mindset.

Begin the task from where the learner is at. The task needs to be within their learning zone and allow for a natural productive struggle that stretches and challenges for growth to emerge and ultimately for the individual to thrive.

Remember that growth needs do not stem from a lack of something, but rather from a desire to simply grow as a person. Once individual growth needs have been reasonably satisfied, one may be able to reach one of the highest levels of Maslow’s theory – self-actualization.

4. Relevance

“What worked well in the past may not be relevant or appropriate in the present.” ~ Steven Redhead

What are you doing to make content knowledge and skills relevant to the lives of today’s learner? Students are more motivated to undertake complex tasks that require creativity, adaptability and perseverance, not via extrinsic rewards but through the inherent value of learning that is made relevant to their lives. In my experience I have always found that when students believe they are doing something authentic, something that will improve their real lives or have some kind of impact, they are naturally motivated.

If we only focus on short-term, extrinsic rewards to coax kids through low-level tasks and provide technology as games or rewards to motivate learners instead of designing authentic and personal learning experiences, that draw on each learner’s natural curiosity, passion, and interests, we will not truly connect and empower learners. Learning experiences, where each learner gets to solve a challenge that is meaningful and relevant to their context, can empower all learners to act and do something that matters to them and for the other.

Our often-obsessive focus on testing, scores and league tables has narrowed our curriculum perspective and, as an unintended consequence, pitted schools and educators against one another to look good instead of working together to create the schools and experiences that are great at evolving to meeting the needs of all learners and communities they serve. If students aren’t empowered, they won’t invest in the required content knowledge and skills, attain mastery, and ultimately apply what they are learning.

Once they get motivated to achieve, they will eventually exert their full effort, time, and energy. As we return to the classroom in the next week make a small adjustment to your normal practice and see what happens.

This blog entry is grounded by my extensive professional practice and by Self Determination Theory (SDT), initially developed by Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan.

[laurelkrugerr]

How to Make Your Brand More Cohesive

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Nikki Arensman is a brand designer and strategist who works with female entrepreneurs, particularly those building digital businesses. She spoke with Jessica Abo via Zoom about how entrepreneurs can navigate the early stages of growing their businesses and beyond. 

What do you think is the biggest mistake that most entrepreneurs make in year one of their business?

Arensman: Ultimately, in year one, you’re really just wanting to prove to yourself that your business is not only viable but that it can also impact your industry and earn you an income. You’re wanting to make money. We’re building a business. The mistake that I see all the time is not building a foundation from day one that supports building trust between you and your dream audience. 

Our most favorite brands, they’re the ones that we can count on for X, Y, Z. Whatever they’re doing good at. We know that if we go over to their Instagram, if we open up their emails, if we listen to their podcast, if we read their blog, we know what we’re going to expect from them in terms of the way that they look, their language, the way that they talk and the way they communicate. And, subconsciously, what that does for us is it starts to build reliability and build trust. And we know that ‘Okay, I can always expect this from them.’ Then when we need something, we immediately think of them.

What this does is it really makes us, the consumer, want to be a part of their story and want to be a part of their success and have a piece of their brand. I always think of the formula consistency equals reliability, reliability equals trust, and trust brings in more sales.

For those entrepreneurs who just finished year one, and they’re entering year two and they just feel like they’re all over the place, what are your pieces of advice on what they should do first and what they should focus on long-term?

Arensman: First things first for me. When I’m either wrapping up year one with a client or even back to when I was exiting year one and moving on, it’s figuring out what worked and what didn’t work. Strategically, what worked in your business, what brought in income, but also what felt really good and in alignment and what was a struggle and just was like pulling teeth, trying to get you to show up and do it. And then, what did your audience and your clients just absolutely love? Whether that was a service, an offer, a webinar you did, a live training, something that it just hit it out of the park.

From there, I decide how this person should move forward. Either they can do one of three things or a combination of three things. They can either scale an offer with an audience that was a total win. Something like a webinar that did really well and piece together whether it was the audience or was it the actual topic of discussion? 

Number two is continuing to explore new offers and figuring out where I really shine the brightest. 

Number three is really bringing your branding and your messaging up to speed with where you’re at at that point, which is typically such a different place from day one when you first got started.

For those who identify with one of those or all of those, break down each one for us a little bit more.

Arensman: Let’s take number one, which is scaling an offer. Was there an offer or service that was a total win for you and the client? If so, then it might be worth turning this into an offer that you can scale. For example, if that’s a one-on-one offer, you can think about it like breaking down each piece of content that you worked on in that one-on-one setting and turning those into lessons or modules for a digital course that then removes you from the equation. The plus side of doing that is that you can still have your one-on-one offer. Except now you can raise the pricing on that and bump it up because they’re going to get access to you and your time. You can still have the course that could be sold to a wider audience. That’s an example of that. 

Or maybe it was a group program that you launched live and you had a set of four or five calls where they did get access to you. You can now break that course down into smaller training sessions at lower cost. Say you’re taking module one and turning it into its own little offer at a lower ticket than somebody needing to buy into the giant group program. This introduces your audience into what we like to call “the binge and buy” mentality — it supports them in coming back for more. It eliminates people just being one-and-done with a service. Instead, they’re saying, “Oh, I want this,” and, “Oh, I can see they offer this.” 

There are some programs that do offer that. One of my favorites is MemberVault. These let you have easy access to a marketplace. These options are a great place to begin. Getting comfortable with paid advertising through Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest ads that will basically lead traffic into these scalable offers that you could have.

If someone is not ready to scale, but they feel more comfortable continuing new offers, what does that look like?

Arensman: This is a great route if you are still figuring out who your people are or you haven’t totally clicked with a certain ideal client or niche. If you didn’t really feel yourself get in a flow in year one at any time, then it’s worth taking a step back and looking at what felt out of alignment and find the gap between what you offered and your messaging and what your audience is wanting.

Related: How Your Company Can Have a Positive Social Impact

One of the ways of doing this is having past clients answer a set of questions about their time working with you. What was it like, where did they feel most supported and how did the work that they did with you and the time that they spent with you really impact their business? That’ll give you a really good insider look from the client themselves, what felt good and what didn’t feel good. That scares people because they might get some answers that they’re not ready to hear, but it’s so powerful to look at that and analyze and then say, ‘Here’s where I really excelled, straight from the client.’ Sometimes you don’t even have the awareness of that as the provider.

Also, just trying some new things. Don’t be afraid to pivot and put something new out there and see if it sticks. You don’t always need a fully built-out sales page, the perfect email sequence or the perfect funnel in order to get some sales and gauge, what works and what doesn’t. And sometimes the thing that you just get from a blip of inspiration and you throw out there —whether it’s on social media, on your story or in your feed or you email out your list — sometimes that’s the thing that sticks. And it turns into that killer program that does really well or that new one-on-one service that you can then go back and scale in the coming months.

You also say that it’s okay to give yourself time to catch up to your business. What do you mean by that?

Arensman: Sometimes, when you have an offer or service that isn’t converting the way that you hoped, it’s not always the offer’s fault. Sometimes it’s the messaging or not really reaching the right client. This really comes back to having a beyond basic understanding of who you’re serving and ultimately what their problem is. This requires taking a look at your brand as a whole and, like you said, really just taking a second to let everything catch up.

In addition to knowing relevant information about your ideal client, it’s equally important for you as a brand to have a solid foundation in both visuals and content. The two of those being able to work in tandem together. If one gets left at the starting line — let’s just say you DIY’d your logo over a year ago, and you are avoiding using it on client documents or in your email footer or things like that because you’re embarrassed of it or it makes you want to cringe. That is an energetic block there between the presentation of you out there. It’s time to upgrade and bring it up to speed with where you’re at as an entrepreneur. Ultimately, it’s elevating the experience that a client can expect to have from working with you.

That’s one way, through your logo and visuals like that. Maybe up until now, you’ve been getting by using stock photography, but this is now the year that you’re going to invest in a brand photoshoot and really put some time and energy into curating the visuals that are important to you. It’s really about the experience that your client gets, that they want to be a part of that and can make a visual connection where they want to be to what your photos look like.

And lastly, if in general you just feel like you don’t know what to talk about on social media or you’re getting stuck every time you go to write an email campaign — I hear it all the time, “I feel all over the place.” And whether that is on your feed or in a live session, then I would get clear on three-to-five things that are relevant to your ideal client and their needs and also important to you and your brand.

You want to think of these, they’re three-to-five main topics that are important to you, and they make sense for your client and the problem that you’re solving for them. And then within those three-to-five topics, you’ve got a whole bunch of content that you could talk about and ways that you could maintain within those topics every time that you show up. You’re no longer just fishing and trying to figure out things to talk about and ways to connect. It’s like, “These are my three-to-five things, and I’m going to give these three-to-six months of just maintaining this lane and see how that starts to convert within messaging, within offers and in general,” — just the way that you are communicating with your audience.

Related: How WW International Is Trying to ‘Be Better and Do Better’ Right Now

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source http://www.scpie.org/how-to-make-your-brand-more-cohesive/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/07/how-to-make-your-brand-more-cohesive.html

[goodra-king]

Transcript of Make Pinterest Your Marketing Secret Weapon

Transcript of Make Pinterest Your Marketing Secret Weapon written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ManyChat.com. 1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger every day, ManyChat is how you reach them.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Alisa Meredith. She is a social media consultant, also the content marketing manager at Tailwind, an Instagram and Pinterest scheduling tool. We are going to talk about social media in general, but we’re going to focus on one of the platforms in particular, Pinterest. So Alisa, thanks for joining me.

Alisa Meredith: Thank you, John. Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch: We’ve been doing this social media thing really over a decade now, and how would you describe kind of the state of where we are in social media? Consider I got on Twitter in 2006 and Facebook opened up in 2008. What’s the last decade for social media been like, good, bad, and ugly?

Alisa Meredith: Wow, how long do we have? I think it’s gone from … I remember the days when everything on Facebook was free, and you could assume that when you posted something on your business page, all of your followers would see it. That seems like it doesn’t even seem possible right now, does it?

John Jantsch: I get like 5% reach, maybe, and I have a client that’s a remodeling contractor that everybody just loves these people, and they get like 50% reach. It’s amazing.

Alisa Meredith: That’s wonderful.

John Jantsch: So it can be done, I guess.

Alisa Meredith: It can, but it’s pretty rare. I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing on most social is that ads are becoming more important, and that makes sense. They have to make money too.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I mean I know when we’re recommending social for a lot of small businesses, we are talking about the organic aspect of it, but a lot of times increasingly we’re just lumping paid right into part of that plan.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah.

John Jantsch: So kind of maybe set the landscape for small business owners. Where does social fit in? And obviously different businesses, different uses, but generally where does social fit in today you’d think in somebody’s marketing plan as a small business?

Alisa Meredith: I think it really depends on which network you’re talking about. They all kind of have their own place. Facebook is the place you go because people expect you to be there. If you’re not there, I think there’s some suspicion. Like, “What do they have to hide? Why are they not on Facebook?” Instagram is where people get to know you personally, which is a wonderful thing, and it can be really good for sales. Pinterest, which I do not classify as social, but I understand that it does get kind of lumped in there, is more of a search engine. There’s a place for most people on most networks, it just depends on what you’re trying to get out of them.

John Jantsch: That’s a great distinction. I don’t think I’ve heard anybody talk about it as a search engine, necessarily. I mean, I think a lot of people lump YouTube into the social networks, and I wouldn’t necessarily call YouTube a social network, but it kind of gets lumped in that same way.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah, I agree, and I think that they both have some social elements, but primarily the way people use them is for their own information. So I think of Pinterest as more like the introvert’s network. It’s about me, it’s about where I go to plan. It’s not where I am going to present myself in a certain way like you might on LinkedIn, or Facebook, or Instagram. It’s a very different intent, and the way that people use it is different too. So something like 90% of all activity on Pinterest happens in search, which is definitely not the case on other networks.

John Jantsch: Yeah, in fact there’s a lot of content in say LinkedIn and Facebook that you would never turn up organically searching, say on like Google or something, but that’s not the case. I would guess 50-75% of the traffic to Pinterest comes through organic search outside of Pinterest. Would that be true?

Alisa Meredith: I think it’s probably lower than that now. It used to be that Google showed a lot more Pinterest results in their search results, but I think eventually they got wise to the fact that, “Hey, we’re basically sending their traffic to another search engine,” so there are fewer results from Pinterest on Google right now than there used to be. There certainly still are some, but Pinterest itself is very much a search and discover engine. In fact, there are about 2 billion searches performed every month on Pinterest.

John Jantsch: So let’s talk about the social networks, then. You’ve mentioned Facebook, and I think you mentioned LinkedIn already, and Instagram, and Twitter I guess, still out there as a social network.

Alisa Meredith: Yes, it sure is. It’s had a little bit of a resurgence lately.

John Jantsch: Well in fact, that’s what’s kind of interesting. I think LinkedIn has had a huge resurgence in terms of its-

Alisa Meredith: Oh, yeah.

John Jantsch: … usefulness, and in fact I hear more and more people talking about LinkedIn as a search engine. So in other words, not just participating groups and comment on things but actually go there to find articles. Because so much great content is now getting put on LinkedIn.

John Jantsch: If you were advising small businesses, and again I know the consultant answer is going to be, “It depends,” but generically do we need to be on all four of those that I just mentioned?

Alisa Meredith: I think for the most part, yes there’s a use. I think on Pinterest specifically, it can be difficult to get a lot of traction if you are strictly a local based business. If you’re a brick and mortar in let’s say Ontario, Canada, and that’s the only place that anyone can go to buy from you, it’s going to be really hard to get qualified traffic from Pinterest. You’ll probably get a ton of traffic, depending on what you’re selling, but it may not be the place to spend most of your time. Instagram will probably be better for you in that case.

John Jantsch: I had a client a few years ago that was just getting massive amounts of traffic, and we were like, “What?” I mean, they were a local lawn service, and we’re like, “What is going on?” And apparently they had written some blog post that Google decided was like the number one to talk about grass or certain seeds or something, and so like 90% of their traffic was coming from outside of their community, but it was still kind of fun to see.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah, well they should probably start selling grass seed or something nationally.

John Jantsch: I know, I know.

Alisa Meredith: Make something of that traffic.

John Jantsch: Something to do something with it. Okay, so a lot of people look at Instagram and Pinterest, or maybe not a lot in your world but a lot in my world, and kind of see them as the same. They’re both very visual, they’re all about pictures. How would you tell somebody how they differ?

Alisa Meredith: Oh, so so different, practically opposite. Instagram really is like a curated view of a person’s life or a business, really, and it’s like showing the best of yourself, showing an intimate portrayal of yourself so people really get to know, like, and trust you which is great, it’s wonderful. That’s kind of external. When a person is on Instagram, they want to know about you. They want to know about your unboxing. They want to know about your company party because that helps them feel more comfortable to buy from you and feel like they know you.

Alisa Meredith: When a person is on Pinterest, they do not care about that. They really do not. So to have a Pinterest board with all of your company photos, it’s not going to go anywhere. What people care about on Pinterest is, “How can you help me make my life better? How can I become a better mom, teacher, marketer? How can I make my house the way I want it, my body the way I want it, my diet?” It really is the introvert’s network. People don’t go on there to share generally. They go on there to collect and then to get inspired to do.

John Jantsch: I’m going to pretend that my listeners don’t really know much about Pinterest other than what you’ve just shared. So break down, if I’m a business owner, how would I start looking at Pinterest? Maybe not just like how do I do it, maybe just how do I start thinking about it in the context of marketing my business?

Alisa Meredith: I think the best way is to get an account and use it. You might have zero interest in Pinterest, you think, but everything that you’re interested in is on there. Trust me. I would choose something that really gets you excited and just create one board and look around. Search for ideas that get you excited, and see what is it about a particular article, or topic, or what is it that made you click this pin over that pin? How are you behaving on Pinterest? Just get inside of the mind of a Pinner because marketers, we always look at things a little differently. Sometimes you just need to be a consumer for a while.

John Jantsch: So in a lot of networks that people might be used to, and again you’ve already pointed out that that’s not what Pinterest necessarily is. The point is to build a following, but that’s not really the behavior on Pinterest, is it?

Alisa Meredith: No, it’s not at all because like we talked about, most of the activity is happening in search, about 90%, and so your content is potentially going to reach way more people than ever will follow you. Followers are important in the sense that Pinterest serves up your new pins to your followers first because those people should be the ones who would be most engaged with your content.

Alisa Meredith: So then they watch like how your followers engage with that content as it comes out, and that has an impact on how far it will be distributed, or how often it will show up in search, or how high up it will be in search or related pins. So that’s where they’re important which is why it’s even more important on Pinterest than maybe anywhere else to make sure you’re attracting the right followers rather than going for numbers.

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John Jantsch: So if I’m building some boards, and I’m posting some things, and maybe Pinterest is showing them for certain types of searches. How do I make business objectives there? I mean, ultimately we want customers, so how does Pinterest allow me to do that or help me do that?

Alisa Meredith: Pinterest is all about the traffic. It’s the one place that I know of that is very happy to send you off of their platform to yours. It can be a huge traffic driver, and sometimes I’ve had people call my agency and say, “Hey, I wasn’t doing anything on Pinterest, and I just happened to notice that I’m getting a ton of traffic from Pinterest so I feel like maybe if I put some effort into it, I would get more,” and yes usually that is the case. It is already the number two driver of social traffic, right behind Facebook. If people put more energy into it, it could be a lot more.

Alisa Meredith: But among content marketers, anyway, only about 28%, 27% of content marketers are using Pinterest which is kind of amazing to me when what we want really kind of all starts with traffic, and that is where Pinterest is incredibly powerful.

John Jantsch: Would I be incorrect in assuming, though, that you’ve got to show up with some visual chops there, that that’s what people are looking for, or can you have a checklist of things as long as it meets something I’m looking for?

Alisa Meredith: Well you know, I have seen some ugly pins do really, really well. I have one from an old agency of mine that I still get emails about it being my most popular pin, and it is ugly. It has like Lego characters on it. It’s bad. So sometimes that happens, but in general you do want high quality, professional images with some compelling text on the image, which partially works to help people know what the image is and to click through. It also helps with search. So Pinterest actually reads the text on your image, Pinterest can actually tell what the items in your image are, and they assign keywords based on those items.

Alisa Meredith: You do need to give some thought to your images, but you don’t have to … There are apps out there that will help you. There’s Easel, there’s Canva, there are all kinds of things. You don’t even have to know Photoshop to make a beautiful pin.

John Jantsch: So I’ve written a book recently called The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur, and every day it has a new page and new entry, and I anchor all of those daily pages with quotes from some mid-19th century literature. Just using myself as an example, this is my way to get free consulting by the way.

Alisa Meredith: It’s brilliant [inaudible 00:13:49].

John Jantsch: But would quotes taken from some of those pages be a good Pinterest?

Alisa Meredith: Yeah, quotes on Pinterest are unbelievably popular. I was just looking this morning at audience insights and looking at what the general Pinterest user is into. Quotes, let’s see, 26% of the general audience on Pinterest is interested in quotes. So we have 322 million monthly active users. 26% of those people are engaging with quote pins.

Alisa Meredith: So yes, I would do that. However, I would also say that infographics can be very popular on Pinterest, but they don’t always get clicks. I’m suspecting the same thing might be true of a quote pin. So what I would say is, “Yes, absolutely you should try this,” but also put some kind of call to action on your image itself. So like, “see how to use this in your business,” or just like whatever, you know. I don’t know what the quotes are exactly, but.

John Jantsch: Well, so it’s like Thoreau, and Emerson, and some of that kind of writing that people would be familiar with, but what you’re saying is don’t just leave them as eye candy, make them something more useful to the user, or at least [inaudible 00:15:07].

Alisa Meredith: Yeah, like how to use this in your everyday life, yeah.

John Jantsch: All right, so are there some tips and tricks for getting organic traffic then? So in other words, just like there are tips for Google. Are there tips for showing up higher in Pinterest searches?

Alisa Meredith: Yes, absolutely. Something that has changed fairly recently, and people are noticing it, is that it used to work that you could pin the same image to the same blog post over, and over, and over again to the same boards, and that worked to increase your traffic, but Pinterest doesn’t want that. They want every time you or I go back to Pinterest, they want us to see something new and exciting so that we want to keep coming back. Makes sense.

Alisa Meredith: So with that in mind, that’s not working anymore, to pin the same thing over and over again. So what a lot of people are doing is making multiple images for the same blog post. Right? So more opportunity to show up. I asked around to some of my friends, “Have you done this? What are the results?” and a friend of mine who has a Teachers Pay Teachers store where they sell writing checklists for third grader teachers, for example, she had a pin, it was a couple years old, and she was still getting almost 2,000 link clicks a month from it, which I’ll take that from one image on Pinterest.

Alisa Meredith: But she thought, “Let me make a new image, just freshen it up.” It’s a very simple image with just some text overlay on it, probably took five minutes to make. In the same month where she got 2,000 from the old pin, she got over 10,000 link clicks from the brand new pin.

John Jantsch: Hm, wow.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah. Yeah, so this is working.

John Jantsch: Does video work in Pinterest?

Alisa Meredith: Yeah.

John Jantsch: That sounds like a really basic question, but.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah, native video is fairly new to Pinterest. It seems to be most effective for awareness and engagement as opposed to traffic. There are ways to get it to work for traffic, but kind of the intention is that people will watch it on Pinterest and learn more about your business. So especially if you’re looking at ads on Pinterest that are video, a lot of them are the bigger brands. So they’re paying for that awareness, but yeah they’re very prominent in search on Pinterest right now because they’re new, and Pinterest wants people to use them. So they’ll be right at the top of your search results. Of course they’re very eye catching as you’re scrolling through on mobile. Like one of the videos in the frame will be moving, which is pretty great.

John Jantsch: Yeah. All right, so let’s move to the inevitable: paid Pinterest or promoted pins, I think is the term for that one.

Alisa Meredith: Promoted pins, yes.

John Jantsch: How does that work?

Alisa Meredith: The coolest thing, to me, about promoted pins is that when you advertise a pin on Pinterest, even after that promotion is done, that pin lives on, and then people because your distribution has been so much greater because you paid for it, people will have been saving it all this time, right, so now it’s on their boards, and their people are seeing it, it’s showing up in other searches. People keep clicking on these secondary pins that came from your promoted pin, and you’re not paying for that. You stopped your ad, but you’re still getting more traffic because you promoted the pin. It’s pretty cool.

John Jantsch: Yeah, absolutely. How does the function of purchase, how does the targeting work, how does the bidding work? Again, I guess I’m really saying, “How does it work?”

Alisa Meredith: How does it work? Well, it’s somewhat like Facebook Ads, although the targeting options are not as extensive. It’s a smaller platform, it’s a newer platform, but they are pretty cool. You can do things like you can instead of a lookalike audience, you can do an act alike audience which is similar, but instead of having similar demographics it would have similar behavior patterns. Like Pinterest would look at say your paying customers and say, “All right, these people tend to be interested in this sort of thing, they tend to pin this sort of thing, they have boards about these sorts of things,” and then they can target those people.

John Jantsch: So going back to my quoters, people that typically pin quotes could be an act alike.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

Alisa Meredith: Well I mean, an act alike would be more like you have an audience.

John Jantsch: Oh, I see. I see.

Alisa Meredith: Like your website visitors.

John Jantsch: So you provide that, you provide that. Got you, okay.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah, or your email list. But you can do also what I think is pretty cool is an engagement audience where if I pin something, and then you pin it. Like you pin something that goes to my website, and someone else clicks on your pin that goes to my website, I can then target that person because they have engaged with content to my site even if they don’t know me at all, but I know that they’re interested in my content.

John Jantsch: Are there industries or types of businesses that this is just a no brainer for, that do really well in Pinterest? What would those be?

Alisa Meredith: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, so travel does really well. We have a lot of recipe bloggers that get a ton of traffic from Pinterest. Fashion and beauty, bloggers, even finance does really well. I think it all comes down to if you can frame your product or service the right way, like the Pinterest way, just about anybody can make it work. Because like with finance, I use this example like on Facebook it might be something like, “10 Things That Will Get You Audited This Year,” right? That works on Facebook, but on Pinterest you want it to be aspirational. So it’s going to be like, “10 Ways You’re Going To 10x Your Business This Year.” It’s different content. Sometimes you can reframe existing content to have it work on Pinterest, but it’s just a very different feel.

John Jantsch: So Alisa, I’m going to give you the advertising moment for the show today.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah.

John Jantsch: How would I use a tool like Tailwind to make this job of … I know Tailwind also does Instagram, but specifically for Pinterest how would I use a scheduling tool like Tailwind to make that job smoother?

Alisa Meredith: Pinterest really wants us to be consistently adding new content. If you are creating multiple pins to your content, and we should be if we want to get the most out of the traffic we can get from Pinterest, it’s great for scheduling. We have what we call Smart Schedule which looks at when your followers are most likely to be engaged on the platform, and we’ll send your pins out at that time, just to increase the changes that they’re going to see and engage with your pins.

Alisa Meredith: Life happens, right? We could go a while without pinning anything, but Pinterest really wants to see those consistent signals that you are a reliable content creator, and they will boost your distribution in the search and in the feed.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and while I think we want to stay in the moment and do things that are interesting that happen in the moment, I do think if we have a plan for our editorial, we should schedule things out. I remember when social started, people were like, “Oh, that’s robotic. You’re not being truly social,” but I think if we’re looking at social media and we’re looking at search engines and platforms like this as just a part of our overall marketing plan which is what we should be looking at them as, I think then scheduling just makes sense because it’s basically our editorial plan. So we stay focused, and we stay on track.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah, and really, I don’t know how you do business without batching anymore. If I created five pins, and I had to try to remember, “Oh, I want to add a new one every week so that Pinterest knows that I’m creating great, consistent content,” I’m not going to remember. What, did I pin that? I don’t know.

John Jantsch: Well, you do like a lot of small businesses and you go find a Gen Z person to-

Alisa Meredith: Oh, is that what we do?

John Jantsch: … tell them to do that.

Alisa Meredith: I guess you could have a Gen Z person or you could have Tailwind. Whichever you prefer.

John Jantsch: So where can people find out more about Tailwind? And I’m pretty darn sure there’s a free trial, even.

Alisa Meredith: Oh, there is a free trial. It’s tailwindapp.com or the blog is blog.tailwindapp.com where you can learn a whole lot more about Pinterest and Instagram marketing. Yes, and there is a free trial. If you sign up, you get 100 free pins to use as you would like, and you can try all the cool features of Tailwind.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well Alisa, thanks for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Hopefully we’ll run into you again out there on the road. I know we spoke at the same conference in Maine a few months ago, and maybe we can do that again.

Alisa Meredith: Yeah, I’d love that. Thanks for having me, John.

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