#well hello there new long form content video i’m about to watch 100 times to the point i’m casually quoting it on every watch lmao | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

uwua3 · 4 years

Note

Hello! Sunflowers hold a really special meaning for me so when i read the "sunflower dreams" My heart was so happy!! I havent felt this happy in a long time since quarantine started so thank you for taking the time to write it! It really made my day. If i could request a kazunari x reader where they're both artists that would be amazing. Maybe the reader can be a famous anonymous art influencer? Its up to you! Again thank you so much for writing "sunflower dreams" 💜

i’m so happy i could make you smile ‧⁺◟( ᵒ̴̶̷̥́ ·̫ ᵒ̴̶̷̣̥̀ ) it’s messages like these that absolutely make my day! thank you so much for taking your time to even read it, i’m glad to know it touched your heart ♡ i hope you have a good rest of your day—please know all of a3! love you vvv much!!! ｀･ω･)9 i hope this makes your heart happy just like before! thank you, anon, for everything

summary: every time you fell in love, you made a new art piece

author’s note: please smile from this absolutely soft and endearing kazunari fluff! in times like these where negativity is all around us, it’s good to take a break and purposely give yourself happiness. i hope this is a light in your day and makes you experience all the goodness of love! ♡ — concept based on “to all the boys i’ve loved before”

word count: 3,389

music: i like me better – lauv

to everyone i’ve loved before.

🌻🎨 miyoshi kazunari

you created art every time you had a crush so intense, you didn’t know what else to do

no matter how big or small it was, or how long or short it lasted, love is love. even if it was a random stranger you’d never see again or someone you knew for a lifetime, love is love

therefore, there was no exact total. because even if you didn’t remember every single person you’ve made art for, you clearly remembered what it was like experiencing the euphoria of love. the phenomenon of your heart selflessly beating for someone else. the attack of getting hit by cupid’s arrow out of no where. the rush of emotions unlike any other

love was everywhere and you made sure to create something that was a memory of it. that was when you decided to practice art after being unable to recall a person’s face a moment too long

it was your form of a love letter. a picture spoke a thousand words you couldn’t write, and art was the perfect way to convey that. online for everyone to see were your love letters in art form: portraits of everyone you’ve loved

you fell in love again and again, a new art piece posted soon over the years of your life. under the username, to-everyone-ive-loved, a lifelong project was in the works for all of social media to see

unknown to the rest of the world, you were the artist behind the blog “to-everyone-ive-loved” who created portraits from memory

but, you didn’t mean to fall in love with another artist as well

all it took was one comment and you were theirs

it was one of your most recent posts, a finished piece on a stranger you saw. you found yourself in veludo way, the ideal street to find people you’d never forget. after witnessing a sudden street act, only one actor caught your eye that day

you didn’t know his name, but you didn’t need to. you were in love

you immediately rushed home without a second thought, the inspiration and creativity infectious after watching him perform. something about his energy was wildly entertaining and bizarre, like a modern pop song as a person. he was effortlessly trendy, popular, and charismatic just from the few minutes you saw him

the moment he stood up on that street corner like it was a stage, all eyes were on him and he knew it. as you sketched into the day, you remembered the small details clearly. dirty blonde hair with no dark roots in sight, glittering green eyes, wide welcoming smile. he had the face of an actor, that’s for sure

when you posted it right after finishing, you didn’t expect any major attention. on average, your posts got 100 likes or so. while it was an impressive feat, nothing could’ve prepared you for that one comment

kaz-PIKO: i’m in love with your art ♡

as your popularity and fame grew before your very eyes, you clicked on his profile and realized it was him. the actor you had seen earlier at veludo way

you didn’t know what happened, but all you knew was you couldn’t forget this one person, miyoshi kazunari, no matter how hard you tried

no matter where you went, you couldn’t draw anyone else except that boy named kazunari. after scrolling through his entire instablam account, you found out he was an actor for mankai company’s summer troupe. he was a star in his own right, with a stage presence like the spotlight was constantly on him and a heart of gold

this was the first time you ever got so caught up on someone that they didn’t leave your mind. hours became days, and days began becoming a week before you let yourself follow him back

everyone you had ever drawn had never recognized themselves before. it was all because a follower connected the visual similarities between your art and kazunari’s unique traits that kazunari knew you had seen him before

if only he wasn’t a social media influencer with followers reaching the hundreds of thousands. at least, his popularity attracted attention to your profile...

this was a problem, however. because if you couldn’t draw anyone else, what could you do? once again, you stalked kazunari’s blog once again like it was a habit

it was never really a rule to make one love letter per person, but you never had wanted to make another for the same person. until, now

video after video. picture after picture. story after story. you could see kazunari’s face even when you closed your eyes. what about him made you daydream about him constantly? was it his charming voice that could make anyone stop and stare? his intricate piercings that were different every day? his ability to make you feel at home? whatever it was (or maybe it was an accumulation of everything and more), you had to draw kazunari again

when you posted it, you typically didn’t add more to the caption than the date and time. except this time, you felt like all your rules were being broken over someone who had no idea who you were

to-everyone-ive-loved-before: XX/XX/20 (3:33 A.M.) — social butterfly

you watched it upload. it was a piece you had never done before. glowing butterflies of all colors surrounded the center of the masterpiece, a smiling kazunari

hopefully, this would solve whatever feelings you were having and the world would go back to normal. you’d move on, fall in love with someone else, and repeat

it didn’t work, because some time later, you woke up to a comment that made you feel the butterflies in your stomach

kaz-PIKO: like a butterfly, i’ll fly to you, wherever you are~ ☆

and for some reason, you wanted kazunari to find you

you had never felt so motivated to draw before. however, your muse was the same. a beautiful boy named miyoshi kazunari who was slowly capturing your heart without even knowing it. you watched the pages in your sketchbook lessen and lessen. the corners of assignments and napkins and anything in between was covered in doodles. if there was a writing instrument in your hand, something related to kazunari would come out of it

it was a fascination. a fixiation, even. you had only seen one performance before falling in love. was it because kazunari responded that it made you feel like you had a chance?

you wouldn’t admit it, but it was becoming embarrassing with how much you were staring at the few unread messages from kazunari in your dm box. they came in right after you had followed him back, and more arrived when you posted the “social butterfly” piece

what was stopping you from talking to your muse? you knew the answer without thinking: what if these feelings were real?

obsessions and crushes come and go, but... love, love stayed. there wasn’t any possibility you could love someone from afar without knowing anything about them, right?

but, then again... you did know some things about kazunari. you knew kazunari was the best actor of all time, with expressions and gestures the equivalent of art. kazunari was art—in every single way possible. everything about him made you want to draw and draw and draw

you only drew kazunari for a certain time, no matter which stranger crossed your path. people you knew you would’ve sketched simply became passer-bys, and it was all because of kazunari’s sunny smile that you were in love. or, what you thought was love

the more you thought about kazunari’s unread dms, the more you wondered what this was. why did kazunari make you so happy? was this truly the first time you were experiencing... a crush?!

for the first time since that street act, you found yourself in veludo way. while half of you was hoping you’d randomly bump into summer troupe’s moodmaker, the other half was petrified about how kazunari was a real person. a very much popular, recognizable person

it was the weekend, and the burden of university projects was telling you to go back and focus. yet, with a sketchbook in one hand and a pencil tucked behind your ear, you were very much prepared to draw to your heart’s content

as you tried to flip to a clean page, you heard something that made your heart flutter. despite the noise and busy atmosphere of veludo, a distinct laugh was audible above the crowd. when you looked up, your eyes barely registered a deep blue jacket before walking straight into the person

you nearly tumbled to the ground before two hands steadied you, a surprised “whoa!” leaving their mouth before being followed by a gentle laugh. the usual embarrassment didn’t set in until you went to go thank the person, only to stop

oh my god. you had just bumped into miyoshi kazunari, your muse for the past month or so

kazunari grinned, even though it faltered slightly at your wide-eyed expression and awkward silence. he didn’t seem to mind as he adjusted his black top hat, pocketing his phone and confidently meeting your gaze

“i’m so sorry~! i hope you’re okay, i’m kazunari!” kazunari introduced and you realized he didn’t know you were behind to-everyone-ive-loved-before. you quickly adjusted yourself, pretending as if this wasn’t the highlight of your entire week

when you introduced yourself, kazunari’s eyes sparkled with interest as he easily led you into conversation. despite being a bit of a socially awkward artist who preferred being alone over anything else, kazunari was... comfortable. you didn’t feel self-conscious of how you acted, because he readily accepted how you were with a smile

was he like this was everyone or... did he find you to be a work of art, too?

standing off to the side, you finally noticed several members of mankai were advertising their latest play. bright, aesthetically pleasing flyers were being handed out to everyone walking by, and you seemed to look a moment too long before kazunari followed your gaze and suddenly snapped his fingers

“oh! are you interested in theatre?” you really weren’t, but you nodded anyways just to see kazunari’s excitement. he pardoned himself for a moment just to snatch a flyer, returning to show it off with a proud smile

“please come to mankai company’s summer performance!” kazunari’s smile sparkled and before he looked around to see if anyone was watching, he winked. kazunari covered the side of his face that was facing his troupe members, pretending as if you two were sharing some big secret

“plus, i’ll be there. if you come, i’ll make sure to do my very best~” kazunari bargained, even though you already knew he was already planning on wowing the audience with his charisma. you took in his genuine want to impress you and the butterflies came back

“i’ll come.” you agreed without even checking the date or reading anything. now all of you just wanted more & more opportunities as the person kazunari was surprisingly interested in, not as the artist who was basically in love with him

agreeing right away was worth it when kazunari shot you a grateful, blinding smile in return. you stumbled over your words with how taken back you were, but asked anyways, “do you like flowers?”

kazunari’s eyes softened for a moment, his usual energy suddenly gone before returning. he seemed genuinely moved by your question, and you wondered how many flowers it’d take to see him smile again like that

“i do, especially if they’re from you.”

“what kind?”

someone called kazunari’s name, insisting they were going to be late for practice. kazunari shouted back an agreement by telling them to go ahead first, before putting all his attention on you once again

“hibiscus.” meaning delicate beauty

before kazunari could ask for your socials, with his hand already reaching for his phone, you cut him off, hoping your voice wasn’t off

“next week. 7 P.M., mankai theatre. i’ll be there, front row.” you promised and took off, rushing off with a wave as kazunari stared after you for a second before waving back enthusiastically

as you left, kazunari was about to leave before he noticed something on the ground. it was a plain sketchbook, unassuming at first but it was nearly bursting at the binding with how many pages there were

when kazunari picked it up, he was about to flip to the first page before mankai called his name again, impatient this time. kazunari held onto the book and sent one last glance towards your direction before disappearing, hurrying to make sure the director wouldn’t penalize him for being the reason everyone was late

when you arrived home, you instinctually reached for the pencil behind your ear. at the same time, you put your hand in your bag, attempting to feel the familiar edges of your sketchbook

then, after turning your bag inside out and finding nothing, you collapsed onto your desk chair with shock and disbelief

you lost your sketchbook in veludo way the moment you met kazunari. what if he had it?

you drew another piece and stared at your screen, wondering if you should post it. it was kazunari once again with a yellow hibiscus flower behind his ear, the same gentle smile you couldn’t perfectly capture gracing his lips

you typed the caption and backspaced before settling on something that only you and him would know

to-everyone-ive-loved-before: XX/XX/20 (8:01 P.M.) — delicate beauty

you hesitated before deleting the post a second after. maybe, you’d keep some artwork to yourself

kazunari had the sketchbook open next to his bedside, his phone in his hands and your profile open. he could recognize your art style a mile away, and the moment he saw the first sketch after practice, he couldn’t believe it

did this explain why he felt such a natural attraction to you? when you bumped into him, kazunari swore he could see the sparks flying. you made him feel like he was falling in love and you only proved him right when you two talked earlier. he wanted to know everything about you, he wanted to see you again

was this what love at first sight felt like? kazunari giddily typed a message over and over again, the unread messages of his filling his screen

kaz-PIKO: heya!! ★>d(,,･ε´-,,)⌒☆ just wanted to say i LOVE your art fr!!! we should totes collab, you know???

kaz-PIKO: thanks for drawing me btw :0 does this mean you live near veludo? let’s meet up!!!

kaz-PIKO: ,,, i don’t usually say this but, that social butterfly piece was breathtaking. you must really like me, huh? (･ω<)☆ jk haha

kaz-PIKO: no but really, it’s beautiful. thank you, honestly. it made my day, you make me happy ♡

kaz-PIKO: you must be really beautiful, too. i would want to draw you as well. lmk if ur up for that haha

kazunari read back his previous messages, all of them delivered but unopened. he realized how... how open he already was with the anonymous faceless artist, despite never interacting with them

now that he knew what you looked like, it only reassured his intuition that he was rightfully head over heels for you

kazunari typed something before deleting it, closing out of instablam and throwing his phone somewhere on his bed

kaz-PIKO: i was right, you are beautiful. i may have fallen in love, too

some things were better left unsaid. after all, you two had until next week to figure everything out

for the rest of the week, all you and kazunari did were think about the other person. a small part of you was afraid kazunari wasn’t the dream boy you imagined, but he was much more. you noticed he started posting more often and turned his notifications, wanting to be one of the first to see his practice videos and university selfies

you didn’t post any of the art you made of kazunari, making it the longest you hadn’t posted ever. kazunari couldn’t help but refresh your account every now and then, hoping he’d see his face again, as selfish as it was. kazunari wouldn’t know how’d he feel if he saw someone else had your heart

the longer time went on, the more you were certain. every fascination you had with someone was temporary, and you remembered the feeling rather than the person. but, with kazunari, you liked him for who he was. everything kazunari made you feel was new and exciting, but even when that went away, you still liked him

kazunari was your first crush, for real

kazunari liked making people like him. so, your online confession through art wasn’t exactly a surprise. but, yours was different. it was earnest, honest, and everything he didn’t know he was needing

kazunari looked through your sketchbook again and again, tracing over the notes you wrote in the margins and admiring your skill

kazunari liked you, and he was certain he would’ve still liked you even if you weren’t to-everyone-ive-loved-before

when showtime arrived, kazunari was oddly nervous. peeking from behind the red curtain, kazunari could already see you were one of the first sitting front row, just like you said. he had practiced his lines a thousand times and summer was fully prepared, why was he nervous?

before he went on, kazunari ignored the urgency of the mankai staff and quickly texted a message to your profile, hoping you’d at least see the notification this time

kaz-PIKO: i like you, too

(when you felt your phone buzz, you quickly silenced it)

the show moved you to a standing ovation, just like everyone else in the audience. as summer walked out to bow and express their gratitude, you watched kazunari’s eyes search for yours as he tilted his head towards backstage. you nodded, knowing you’d do anything to see this kazunari. actor kazunari, who was on cloud 9 with his performance and glowing from praise

you wanted to see, to experience, to draw, all versions of kazunari

after the applause, you looked around backstage before feeling a hand on your arm, the feeling reminiscent of the first time you bumped into kazunari

“you came.” kazunari breathlessly stated, as if he was surprised. before he could say anything else, you presented him with a bouquet of hibiscus flowers. the same shade of yellow you drew him with

“of course, i wanted to see you again.” you honestly admitted, knowing it made you flustered. kazunari carefully took the flowers before grinning, gently placing then beneath his chin. he looked like a vision, you wish you could’ve asked him to stand still so you could capture this moment forever

“i wanted to see you, too.” kazunari softly said, all the energy of being on stage gone. it was tranquil and peaceful, like you two were the only people in the entire theatre

kazunari took a moment to admire you before realizing something, taking something from behind him and presenting it to you. it was your sketchbook on the bottom, but a smaller version was on top of it, signed in silver sharpie. kazunari’s signature was glittering like his eyes as you took it

“next time, let’s draw together.”

kazunari’s sketchbook was filled with you. anything from small doodles to encouraging messages was found inside, with tens of post-it notes of just thoughts about you. kazunari’s art was colorful and extremely out of the box compared to his usual traditional style. it made you smile

kazunari watched you flip through it, already knowing this was the greatest act of love he could’ve declared this early on. he anticipated for you to reach the end

when you landed on the last page, you saw a note

do you want go on a date with me?

“next time, respond to my dms! that way i don’t have to write everything~!” kazunari teased and you two shared a laugh, knowing everything was going to be okay

“yes.”

“yes...?”

“yes, i’ll respond to your dms. and yes, i’ll go on a date with you.”

eventually, you ended up closing your blog for good. your last post was a picture of you and kazunari, with one caption

to-everyone-ive-loved-before: XX/XX/20 (3:33 P.M.) — to the one boy i love now, i love you

kaz-PIKO: i love you, too ♡

#miyoshi kazunari #kazunari miyoshi #a3! act! addict! actors!#a3!#act! addict! actors!#a3! actor training game #a3! headcanons #act! addict! actors! headcanons #mankai a3!#mankai company #a3! x reader #a3 x reader #kazunari x reader #a3! kazunari #a3 kazunari

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x-exo · 3 years

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*slides into your asks with a rose in my mouth* why hello, tis me!

Apologies for the long wait but your favorite long asks anon is here and OOF so much has happened. Let us break it down one by one lol

Monsta x our beans, welp we can officially say we are army wives for them because shownu is now at the military and just welp this feels weird lol. I lowkey forgot he was meant to enlist so when the news came out I went through so many emotions. Its why the latest comeback feels a bit bittersweet to me. It is their BEST for sure and for this year, I agree so to not see him perform right before he left is a bit sad. I don't blame him of course (if anyone does i am fish slapping you) but just a shame. I'm happy we do get content with him still? Seems pre-planned so that is nice!

Onto legends exo, fantastic comeback. I cannot stop listening to the album, its just bops full of bops to me. They broke so many records and I'm over here sipping my tea because fudge yes. It isn't a full member comeback, 2 of the members featured in the comeback are off playing call of duty and they still did THAT. While having lay properly in the comeback!? (Or at least some form, better than tempo era!) Kyungsoo my beloved, the man that can swoon you off your feet, his proper solo album. Omg I am just in love? The album feels like a Playlist that you hear while taking a walk or on a raodtrip? I love it, I just love everything about this with how much thought was given. It makes me feel warm and I'm so proud of him (I think he even got a first win) but sadly xiumin got the it shall not be named virus D: I feel so bad and I can only hope he gets better! It makes me worried because I keep seeing more and more idols getting sick and I can't help but wonder why don't the kpop entertainment just put a pause with stuff? Of course that is VERY unrealistic, I am aware that is naive for me to think but its just so idk how to word it properly (my English brain is not working I am sorry) I cannot help the feeling of while I get people are being safe and yes we need to still live like normal beings, is it worth risking idols health just for some entertainment? Idk how to explain my thoughts properly but maybe I hope I made sense!!

Onto svt! That is perfectly fine to not vibe with a comeback! I will admit, I didn't fully vibe with this comeback and it shocked me because every comeback was a hit to me. Even fear, left and right or homerun where I know many fans were split on, I liked but RTL was a grower. For me, listening to it without watching the mv, helped it alot and it is a song I like. Is it their best? No I don't think so but it is alright to say "hey I didn't bop to this, not my cup of tea" (imo I blame the mv? The mv REALLY didn't do the song justice at all, I am sorry if I sound like a fake fan but this mv Just is bad in all aspects. Sure we have some pretty shots but like it just doesn't fit at all?) So if anything listening to the song or wishing the live performances does it better. Seeing the choreography amps the song up more, cannot go wrong with their dancing. As for the rest of the songs, I admit game boy is my top favorite? Idk if it is because I am a gaming nerd and found all the production of the song so creative but yeah. We can wait for the next comeback! Svt always have something up their sleeves, plus we do have their music projects to look forward too (I wonder when we will get one? Seeing as RTL promotions stopped) some positive news with the boys is they resigned like a year before their contract ends and I'm a bit emotional :') I'm excited to see the boys future projects. We did have caratland recently! Did you watch it if I may ask? We did get in the soop confirmation so I'm excited to watch that, the boys deserve that nice break (even if it was filmed for a show fjsbsns)

Ok I think that is it for kpop updates? XD I do hope life has been treating you kindly! Life has been a bit all over the place sadly so I hope it wasn't like that for you as well! Until next time my bean!

hii!!!! omg sorry for the late reply i've been pretty busy these days 🙈

indeed so much has happened! and much more since you sent this ask omg!!

our shownu is at war *looks into the distance* *wipes away tear* *sighs* by now I got used to enlistment news (see what happens when you stan 2nd and 3rd gen groups) but STILL [[IT HURT]] when they uploaded the monchannel videos of his goodbye day like ????? what kind of twisted mind diuhdfuihdifuhs but the boys were all so cute and soft but they seemed so sad they didn't want to let go of their super leader :(( I hope he's learning lots and making new friends (and also we've got our international super spy yoo kihyun giving us small updates on him every now and then so everything's fine!). Yeah I totally get you it felt empty without him this comeback and at first it didn't really clicked with me but when the enlistment news came out i understood he had to take care of his health and thoroughly check on his eye sight in order to be 100% ready for the military so it made sense he had to be absent :( everything was so close (the comeback and enlistment) that I'm sure there was no other way for doing it I'm pretty sure he couldn't maybe postpone the enlistment day any further

onto exo! my ksoo my soft boi my romantic boi 🥺 his album is so him SO HIM i can't explain it bur it's just HIM you know it's the type of album you'd play on loop on a summer afternoon when you've taken your papers and paints outside in the garden to paint a bit with the warm soft breeze moving the trees lightly 🤧 and he signs in English and SPANISH (he did it for me) my multilingual king he's a native. Also I've been watching Honeymoon Tavern with Jongin these days and OMG i could d word for him really (if you haven's watched it go do it when you have time) he's SO SOFT and SO CUTE and he works as a waiter and a wedding planner and helps with the room preparations and is also a tour guide and he's just so cute so happy al the time the way he interacts with everyone is so 🥺🤧😭 onto more serious stuff now: yeah i was so worried about minseok catching covid omg but i'm glad he went through it with our any major complication and the rest of the boys are safe too! I guess the industry doesn't stop bc that would mean a huge loss of thousands and thousands of dollars/won/etc so as long as the gov doesn't prohibit going out or gathering like at the beginning of the pandemic, they'll keep on going with the idols' schedules otherwise the industry would just shut down having no way of earning money to sustain all the companies and idols.

as for seventeen! yeah i like the songs too! the mv sure ruined rtl and listening to it without watching it has really helped it grow on me more but still it feels kind of meh to me idk i really like anyone i think it's my favourite from the album. AND NOW WE'VE GOT A COMEBACK IN OCTOBER!!!! yayyyyy i can't wait they seem to be preparing very diligently (i hope they release a sexy bop) it's a shame junhao aren't gonna be present for this comeback but i'm soooooo happy they have the opportunity to visit their families again omg they have spent 2 whole years without seeing them in the flesh they must be so happy to get back to them again!!! it's so funny seeing them be bored at the quarantine hotel and doing lives every day duhdfiudhfiuh i hope it passes quickly and they can see their loved ones finally! and I did watch Caratland!! omg the unit switch song was the best thing ever hhu doing lilili yabbay and not being able to stop laughing idfuhdifuhs perf team doing chocolate and owning it????? hello??? performance team more like main vocal team wow! and the vocal team being a complete mess during check in lmaooo i loved it! In The Soop has finally started!!! I love these kind of "normal life" concepts I love seeing the boys being themselves cooking and relaxing I've watched the first and second eps as of today and also few clips from the third and omg mingyu and jeonghan drowning in the pond dfuhidfhidfs lmao they're so dumb i love them 🤣 i'm glad they could go away for a few days and spend time together away from their hectic schedules!

I hope you're well now and if not hang in there it'll all pass soon enough! 🥰💕 bye bye!!

p.s.: I got your request for the svt this or that gifset and i promise i’ll do it one day i just don’t feel like giffing these days dhbduusi i’m out of energy

#ask #my super nice lovely anon

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mtg-thrill-of-possibility · 4 years

Text

A Reflection on Magic, the Pandemic, and the Dark Side of Arena

Hello to all the readers who may stumble upon this in the search for new Magic content. I wrote this mostly to fill a void in my life that has opened up over the last year and more of a mental health thing than some form of Magic related advice but since it is about that, I thought they’d go hand in hand. I love Magic. Or at least I have loved Magic? It’s hard to tell. Like nearly everyone on this planet, I’ve been shut off from in-person Magic and it had/has me left down. I normally volunteer at my LGS and help them organize their tournaments and judge the events and generally whatever else they ask me to do because I really love Magic. I love playing with my locals who don’t spend hundreds of dollars and craft GP/MF level decks. I love watching a group of people playing draft chaff and off beat home brews and where adults and teenagers can compete with one another on that level. I enjoy sitting off to the corner on the store’s EDH night and listening to games and drawing tokens for games in my own corner while I wait for my own games or sometimes my ow turns. I also love traveling with my wife to cities and go compete in GP/MFs where we usually both scrub out of the main event by round 3 or 4 and then hit the vendors and side events as well as explore the cities for new restaurants. I miss Welcome Days where adults bring in kids and I show them the ropes. I love meeting adults who poke their noses in and ask me “Magic is still a thing? I played that in high school” and show them the changes. I can still remember the Theros Beyond Death prerelease last year and thought how much fun it was to not work the event for once and just play. And looking back, boy am I glad I entered the THB prerelease.

February was the start of the downturn. Our EDH night was slightly less full but I just figured it was due to the weather since the winter usually has a downturn in the attendance for every event. But then the rotating cast of 10-15 FNM players was 6; Pioneer on Saturday had 3. The next week, the EDH crowd was down to from the usual 6-8 pods to 2. FNM and Pioneer failed to fire. The news that COVID-19 was starting to creep into the Midwest prompted me to ask the store what precautions we wanted to take and when we were going to stop in general.

I work in chemical research and I have a background in pharmaceuticals and once (or twice) studied the MCATs and considered going to med school. I was definitely concerned but in February it hadn’t reached my state (yet) and I wanted the store to be ready for the imminent shutdown and continued downtick in participation (my LGS and I had been strategizing how to move up in events and the store ranking on the WPN). But it’s a red state. Science denial must be a recessive trait that the Midwest incorporated into its identity for a long time and I was told that I had some freedom but to not go crazy. I thought I’m a volunteer. I’m not spending what little money I have on stuff for you guys. So, I did the best thing I could think of for free, I started a Discord server. I was really excited at the prospect. I had just bought a webcam in case my workplace started working from home and thought how cool it would be to be able to organize events in Arena and talk through Discord when the store wasn’t available. I asked if we could hang up a flyer and tell all the Magic customers that they continue with tournaments and Magic if they joined the Discord I set up in the store’s name.

My LGS asked how much this was going to cost them and I said exactly as much as it costs them now if not a little less since we don’t need the store’s utilities or a cashier behind the counter in the after hours to work the tournament. They were happy and I got the greenlight. Things worked okay at first. Those with Arena accounts showed for a few weeks. Others I knew were interested were convinced that we were overly sensitive to the virus and FNMs continued to limp along with 4-6 people until everything ground down to a halt.

Come mid-March, COVID had finally reached the state and the city. Cases were light, a few hundred people tested each day, single digit cases detected but I again was worried. My workplace had already begun educating everyone on how to wash their hands properly and disinfect every surface and everyone was issued a bleach spray bottle with their name and a serial number on it. While the mayor and governor hadn’t ordered a shutdown yet, I advised strongly that the store go ahead and if they wanted to continue that I wouldn’t be there to assist until the curve was sufficiently flattened.

I’m not sure why but they trusted me and listened. I was glad and I pushed again for people to join the Discord server. Players were reluctant but I assured them that this may be the future for some time and if they get on now, they can still get the Ravnica intro quests and start building up their Arena collections. I got more on my side, we had 8-10 and got them all to try and hook anyone else they knew to join us. However, by the end of March, my workplace had moved to 100% virtual and with my extra time, I had begun to unwittingly shift the power dynamic in the store by accident. You see, I really love Magic. I was now working from home for a job that required me to have direct physical access to hundreds of thousands of dollars or sensitive equipment that need recertification when they get moved 12 inches down a work bench and dangerous chemicals I don’t want near me unless I know there’s an inspected chemical shower nearby. When the campus shut down, I got very bored. I did what research I could from my home portal, attended virtual conferences and webinars every day, but I had tons of down time. That meant watching my wife play Animal Crossing, playing with my dogs, marathon sessions of Civilization but most crucially, I also began grinding Arena.

My local meta had been defined by the understanding that none of us were really Arena players. I had played when the Kaladesh and Amonkhet closed betas were happening, but I was turned off by the fact that all my playing of those formats amounted to nothing when it launched with Ixalan and I would start from square one. Everyone in the group typically shied away from tier 1 tournament decks because to all of us, it was more fun to goof around with RG auras and Tilonalli’s Summoner decks than it was to grind Esper Hero or the new Uro decks. And the limitation that everyone didn’t have all the shocklands meant we were all playing on roughly the same card pools with some variation due to our play styles. So when I suggested we all start playing Arena to replace the tournaments, it worked because it meant we all played the same dumb decks we’d play in person with a few exceptions of having less than perfect mana bases.

But I would find myself grinding Arena everyday where my friends and locals were not. Even though I jumped into Arena at mid-March, I finished the Theros Beyond Death mastery at level 78 when Ikoria began to creep around the corner. I had just begun to get back into Magic when Fate Reforged hit and didn’t realize how much I love wedge color alignments over shards but boy did I love Abzan in Khans standard and now I was in love with Abzan again in Ikoria standard. Grinding the way I did meant I drafted most afternoons for the first month of Ikoria (and forced Temur every time) and started climbing the ranked ladder in the evenings. Ikoria would also mark the first time I spent money on Arena. I’m notoriously spend-thrift in video games and anything you can free-to-play I do religiously because you shouldn’t make a game grindable over the course of years if you give me that option. But drafting took gems and I really love drafting but most people at my LGS are too concerned about rares than learning to do it properly and a lot of younger players feel lost when I draft a zero rare deck and go 4-0 and collect my prizes. By the end of April, I would reach Platinum in constructed and Gold in limited. But now my LGS was far less inclined to play with me. I didn’t brag about any of my rankings but the skill disparity had begun to creep in as well as the difference in our collections. Having played so much Arena, I could see the tells the software gives away that paper Magic doesn’t. I learned to read when the game would hang up on the beginning of combat and end steps because they’re holding potential responses. I began to do the full control shortcut to bluff counter spells and removal. In paper Magic, if my opponent would sequence things wrong or tap their mana wrong, we’d make jokes and rewind it because it’s one of those human errors that we all make and redo it the right way.

But Arena was different; some learned the hard way to not trust the auto-tapper, some didn’t realize that the way they normally stack triggers in paper is backwards and too late to fix after a spell or ability resolved. And I couldn’t help them. And I let them make their mistakes because I can’t change Arena. If they use the auto-tapper and they realize that Arena doesn’t tap the Castle Vantress even though they couldn’t activate it anyway and they lose a dual source, I couldn’t help them. If they have the lethal Explosion in hand but forgot to hit Control in their second main so they can stack the Wilderness Reclamation triggers in their end step, I don’t concede out of pity.

In May, I try and keep the Magic going by suggesting that we shift the format to a draft limited but they’re unconvinced of the website that allows you to simulate an 8-person draft and then import the drafted card lists to Arena. Why? Because they don’t have the cards already and I’ve changed the dynamic. They know I’m much more skilled at Arena and Ikoria drafting. The news has also been reporting that the curve was flattening, and our state was lifting restrictions on gatherings. They want to play EDH and paper Magic, not this digital intangible game. I reluctantly agree but keep grinding on Arena anyway. My friends didn’t want to play Magic on Arena and I couldn’t understand why. I was getting burned out on drafting at this point and the drafts were harder to fire off a month and a half later, work was returning on a limited schedule where I was onsite 75% and virtual 25%, it really did seem like things were returning to normal.

In June I finish the Ikoria mastery and at this point my wife had begun to show more interest in playing on Arena and trying to get her account a little more stocked since our normal paper system is I aggregate everything we typically need and I make her desired deck and hand it off to her to wreck people on FNM but since I didn’t have to judge, I got to play and we couldn’t both play from my account at the same time. I casually start hers and I get the wild hair that maybe I should make a loaner account in the store’s name and if anyone says they don’t have the cards, they can borrow the store’s account for the tournament. I make the account but put the pipe dream on hold when Wizards announces that in-store play can resume with the Core 2021 prerelease. I could read between the lines and see that the curve was trending the wrong way and thought it was a bad idea but at my insistence, everyone would have to wear a mask at all times and hand sanitizer was available every 15 feet and the store had lots of space for players to spread out. The turnout was low which helped as well, and I had everyone who showed up at least aware that I was trying to keep the Discord going and that in case there’s another shutdown that there was another avenue for them.

Well, I got my wish because within a week of the launch of Core 2021, my state had regressed, and cases were exploding and gathering restrictions were sent back in place. Shortly after that, Wizards suspended in-store play again and with that I created the store’s Arena account. At the time, things were pretty good. The locals weren’t playing as much and my server was still fairly empty but most of the Magic Twitch community I interacted with had strongly adjusted to the new paradigm. EDH streaming was commonplace, I had my new Arena account to focus on building up as well as my own. Pro level events and Opens were being held on Arena and the expansion of Amonkhet Remastered gave me hope that Magic was on the mend. But I also think it was with Core 2021 that things started to slide into the negative for me. Grinding the second account was frustrating me a lot. The lack of human interaction was tilting me out for no reason. Some days the server would have me wait a whole minute (the horror?!) for a game and then my opponent would be the world’s slowest red player where everything seemed delayed. There would strings of games I would play where I couldn’t get a third land drop after a mull to 4 and other times where I’d flood out and would have won if it weren’t for generic whiny reason why everyone says they lose.

Maybe it was when I began to see that Arena is not Magic the Gathering as much as it is a video game that it began to really sour on me. For those of you who don’t play a lot of Arena and instead interact with humans over webcams is that Arena is designed for you to not play off beat home brews except in direct challenges with your friends. The game is meant for you to play the best combination of 75 cards and for you to help it machine learn through millions of matches what is and what is not the correct play pattern based on the available information you have. It wants you to play the very best decks in a format against the other best decks. I started to see this in Ikora standard when decks would scoop if you were on the play and went turn 2 Agonizing Remorse. Decks were and still are so linear that they can’t handle that kind of disruption or it’s a matter of the players know it’s faster to accumulate wins by scooping than grinding out a long game.

If you need evidence of whether or not this is true, you should play Arena now and see how often people scoop against the double Ruin Crab opener with a Fabled Passage back-to-back. Or if an opponent against your Lurrus Auras deck will time out when they know they can’t win. In paper Magic, when you drive 4 hours to a major venue, pay your entry fee, you never see your opponent rage scoop unless it’s Legacy and you know what your opponent’s on and you mull to zero so you can see what’s in their deck. You call a judge to your table if they start stalling. Nothing is more annoying that an opponent spamming “Good Game” at you through a match when it’s obvious that you’re not killing them that turn but they’re empty handed and have nothing relevant on board.

I’ll admit myself that what my wife calls “Wizard Chores” for the Daily quests, if I’m 1 red spell short of finishing a quest, I’ll log in for one more game and Boulder Dash my opponent’s creature or cast Shock to face and immediately scoop. Who is that helping? I’d spend the week at work in my down times thinking about what dumb cards I hadn’t played with from a set, start making a list, furiously find the cards on a Friday afternoon and grab dinner with the wife and then race to my LGS for FNM. Magic used to be something I only got to do twice a week with people in a shared setting and we’d unroll our playmats, shuffle up our jank, and laugh and generally have a good time for three to four hours. With Magic at my fingertips, Arena is a distillation of efficiency at spell slinging combined with the minor rewards system we’ve come to recognize the free-to-play traps to “encourage” us to play different things. If I want to play 100 matches in a day, all I need to do is sit at my computer long enough. If I want to play my old jank on Arena, I can’t even count on the Casual play channel to help since it’s always filled with people with 55 of the 60 cards that make the best deck learning how to play before they commit the wild cards for the deck.

Zendikar Rising has been a pretty dark point for everyone on Arena I believe. It seems like a lifetime ago that Omnath was printed and that I had immediately cashed in four mythic rare wildcards for the deck I would get to play with on Arena for 2 weeks before Wizards realized their mistake. Honestly before I had started writing this in the week before Kaldheim will hit Arena, I forgot that Omnath was part of the most recent set as all I can remember Zendikar Rising giving us is the extremely irritating Ruin Crab and Soaring Thought Thief. The few locals I had left on my Discaord server when ZNR released had lost interest in Arena since they enjoyed the Ravnica standard that was rotating out and Pioneer was not yet available for Arena. I’ve encouraged nearly everyone I know from my LGS to buy webcams since October given that the current state of the COVID world is not likely to go away and the new culture and channels that have opened up in the world to fill the void of EDH has some level of benefit even when in-person play resumes. Not many people play and I’ll search for an occasional game on the official Discord when the craving strikes. Some of my friends have been taking advantage of the webcam world and started playing older formats with me over webcam such as Pioneer and Modern to rekindle their love for Magic and the hope that we can start playing tournaments over webcam. Finishing up the ZNR mastery passes on my two accounts and my wife’s account has been giving me a much-needed break from Arena and honestly, it’s probably done the most to lift my spirits.

I’ve been taking a lot more time to reflect on why I love Magic and I plan on doing in the future. The first thing I know I’m going to do and stick to is not get a Mastery Pass for mt LGS store’s account. They don’t pay for all the work I put into the one already grinding multiple accounts is not good for my mental well-being. The second thing I know I am going to do is relearn how to have fun in Magic again. Not really hinted at in this article so far is the fact I love the art in Magic and I’m often inspired by my own crazy mind to illustrate my own works or reimagine my favorite cards with my own art. Since the release of Rise of Skywalker, I had been working on a personal project of creating a second expansion to the largely underground Star Wars the Gathering card game and ended up making 200 unique, draftable cards. I wouldn’t call myself an artist because I’m still learning and I don’t necessarily aspire to an artist but I would love to improve my skills and one day make a piece that’s so good someone wants on a card. Over the last two years, I’ve been deeply jealous of how amazing and hard working the Magic cosplayers are and that I should put my art to good use and make my own cosplays. And then there’s the playing of Magic. I miss the Gathering part of Magic. So this brings us to the bedrock of this piece. I hope to continue this blog steadily as time moves forward. I’m rarely ever satisfied or have my attention on any one project for too long but 2021 is a new year. And I hope that the title is a hint to the future. Whatever it is; whether it’s deck construction, art alters, or Magic cosplay, story, general discussion, that’s what I’m here for. It’s the Thrill of what I might work on next and I promise because I’m terrible right now at doing so, I’ll be sure to take pictures and try and stream when I can to keep myself honest about the whole deal. I hope you’ll all join me or at least join the Discord to yell at me.

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podcastcoach · 4 years

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You Can't Buy An Audience If Your Podcast Sucks

Today we talk about the 1.7 billion dollar mistake that was Quibi and how we can learn from their mistake. We also take a look at the power of follow up questions, and the best place to buy gear.

Table of Contents

01:22 Your Favorite Podcast - Send in Your Answer 02:56 Now That's A Good Question: Howard Stern and Wolfgang Van Halen 06:35 Join the School of Podcasting 07:33 Lessons From Quibi 13:24 They Blew Their Launch 16:12 Big Name Celebrities 19:02 Make It Easy To Share Your Content 21:05 It's Not the Tech 23:28 Clueless About the Competition 29:49 Who is the Audience? 33:29 The Best Place to Buy Gear: Sweetwater 36:07 Your Audience Awaits Exercise

How to Avoid the 1.7 Billion Dollar Mistake that Was Quibi

Quibi is an over-the-top American short-form streaming platform that generates content for viewing on mobile devices. It was founded in Los Angeles in August 2018 as NewTV by Jeffrey Katzenberg (chairman of Walt Disney Studios from 1984 to 1994) and is led by Meg Whitman ( She is a board member of Procter & Gamble and Dropbox. Whitman was previously president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise), its CEO.

In 2019 Variety reported that Quibi had secured 100 million dollars in advertising before the service had even launched.

On February 2, 2020, they spent $5.6 million for 30 seconds on an ad in the Super Bowl that was seen by a reported 99.9 million viewers. That is $18 per person if you round up. This for a service where subscribers can get the service for $5 per month with ads, or $8 per month without them. That $5.6 million was a drop in the bucket.

The commercial was really stupid and didn't really answer or explain what the heck it was. You just knew it was less than 10 minutes. They explained what is was, but not so much why it was or how you would benefit.

It raised $1.75 billion from investors. It had a variety of shows featuring originals with Jennifer Lopez, Chrissy Teigen, Chance the Rapper, Liam Hemsworth, Sophie Turner, Lena Waithe, Nicole Richie, Reese Witherspoon. Quibi offered a 90-day free trial to those who sign up on its website before April 6. Overall, it plans to release 175 original shows and 8,500 episodes in the first year.

Their lineup has a ton of stars, celebrities, etc

It launched on April 6, 2020. It is set to shut down "on or about" December 1, 2020. December 1 is 239 days. That is $7,322,175.73 a day. Here is my thoughts on why this was such an epic fail.

They Blew Their Launch

When you spend $5.6 million dollars on a Super Bowl ad, they should have an idea what you do and what is in it for them. In the event, the ad inspired people to check out the service (it didn't), you should be able to go check it out and not have to wait four months. Yes, you can build buzz, but for me, I never heard from quibi again.

Putting All Their Faith in Celebrities

Here are some of the names that appear on shows: Jennifer Lopez, Kristen Bell, Nick Jonas, Tracy Morgan, Aaron Rodgers, Yara Shahidi, Gabriel Iglesias, Anthony Davis, Kevin Hart and Karlie Kloss. Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, Dapper Dan, Jay Leno, and Wolfgang Puck (and that's just some).

The people involved had experience Phil Abraham has directed the Sopranos, Madmen, Daredevil, Ozark.

No Compelling Content

Yet, there was no breakout show that inspired the people who had found Quibi to tell a friend about Quibi. Nobody was compelled to tell a friend. They did recaps of the previous days news or sports updates. WOW what revolutionary content!

They Made it Hard To Share

According to Media Analyst Josh Consine there was no sharing capability (no screenshots) which limited your ability to go viral. When it first launched you could only watch it on your phone. There were no apps, not Fire TV, Chromecast. They made it "hard" to consume. They took away choices from the consumer.

They Put Their Faith in the Tech

One thing that set them apart was a feature called Turnstyle. This meant that if you rotate the phone horizontal to verticle, you would get a different camera angle. Neat? Sure. Something so cool I had to tell my friends? Apparently not as I had never heard of it until I started researching how you blow 1.7 billion and lose. In a nutshell, Turnstyle served you two video streams simultaneously and “stitches them together” with a single audio track.

Since we're talking about the Tech, a company sued Quibi shortly after their launch company called Eko alleged that Quibi stole the technology after Eko demoed it to employees of the company, including founder and chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg. Even when you have billions in funding, lawsuits are expensive.

Clueless About the Competition

They were charging $5/$8 a month for new content. Look at Disney, Netflix, Hul. While they have original content, they all have old favorites as well. They also have a way to add more than one person under your account (so when your kids login under your account your recommendations don't all turn into cartoons). This was not the case to Quibi. It figured each person was watching on their phone. One person per account. This gets expensive and now anyone who wants to see what you're talking about has to use your phone.

It is reported that CEO Whitman repeatedly said "We're not competing with Netflix." Think about that one for a minute. That's like a radio station saying, "All of our songs are under four minutes long. We don't compete with other stations."

Lack Of Focus Group?

In one article that was published right after they launched it stated, "Quibi’s executives have hinted that the company will deliver on a TV experience if customer feedback and data warrant it. " Well they did add support for Apple's airplay and Chromecast, but at the expense of the Turnstyle technology. They did release an app for Roku and Fire TV - the day before they announced were closing down.

It seemed like they didn't understand how people used their phones or consumed content.

Did they think that because the average length of a YouTube video is 11 minutes that making "short" videos would be the key? Meanwhile, TikTok was taking off with all sorts of celebrities making their own channels. TikTok is free. Did Quibi follow the Facebook strategy and buy them or "borrow features" and add them to their platform? No. They were doing something different and nobody cared.

They Didn't Answer the Number Question: WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE

The idea was people could watch these short clips while waiting in line, or on the bus. When you think of people consuming content on their phone you might think it would be younger people. Yet you're trying to attract those people with Steven Spielberg and Jay Leno? Sure Cardi B appeared in an episode, but they needed to define. If the content is for busy people, who are the busy people and what do they want to watch?

According to an article in Forbes, Katzenberg and Whitman said, "We created a new form of mobile-first premium storytelling."

They did. But the stories weren't any good.

Now That's a Good Question

02:56 Today we listen to Howard Stern ask a great follow-up question to Wolfgang Van Halen. While he started off with a yes/no question, but then asked a few follow-up questions lead to the information you can't get anyplace else, and listen to how Howard shuts up and lets Wolfgang wrestle with a potentially uncomfortable topic.

Sweetwater is My New Favorite Place to Order Gear

33:29 My co-host for Ask the Podcast Coach Jim Collison ordered something from Sweetwater and told me about their INSANE customer service. I recently saw where they were one of the few people to have the new Zoom Podtrak P4 IN STOCK and I see what he means. I was called to let me know my order had shipped, and to let me know if I had any issues I could call them. So here is why I think they are the best:

Prices are just as good (and in some cases better) than Amazon

Free shipping (even on small stuff)

Built-in two-year warranty

Free tech support

Payment plans available if needed.

My goal is to build more of a relationship with Sweetwater (as I have a dedicated rep) which should keep me in touch with podcasting technology going forward. In full disclosure, I earn a referral reward (but that's why I ordered something as I wanted to see for myself)

Your Audience Awaits Exercise

I'm listening to the book Unhackable: The 30-Day Elixir for Creating Flawless Ideas, Leveraging Superhuman Focus, and Achieving Optimal Performance Through Flow its a very interesting book that you can listen/read to one chapter per day. The one exercise was to write yourself an email from your future audience as is these people who are waiting for you to start your show. SO MANY TIMES I hear people worried about having trolls or people say negative things. I say, What about ALL THE POSITIVE that could happen?

Think of going to your inbox and see an email with the title, "Just wanted to say Thank you." You open it and it starts, "Hello, I just wanted to reach out. You may not believe this but due to your podcast....

and the listener explains how you made them feel. How they no longer felt alone. How they were taken to a place where the stress of work, life, and more melted away.

This could happen. But your podcast can't help people if you don't start your podcast. You can't update a show that doesn't exist. Please let me help you, as your audience is waiting.

Check out this episode!

#podcasting #podcast #coaching #new media

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marketingcomcaio · 5 years

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My 6-Step Content Marketing Formula That Drives 3,549 Visitors

Writing a blog post is easy.

If you don’t write often, you may feel otherwise, but just follow this and you’ll be good to go when it comes to writing. Or, you can just watch the video below.

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But still, you write a blog post and then what do you do?

Well, I’ll tell you this… most people forget the “marketing” in content marketing. Most people write content but don’t do a great job of promoting it.

Here’s the thing: I figured out the perfect formula to promoting content.

Best of all, it’s not complex. Heck, it doesn’t even take 30 minutes. It’s so easy that I broke it down into 6 steps.

And just to give you an idea before we dive into the formula, it’s so effective here is the traffic to my latest blog post.

35,492 visits in a week isn’t too shabby. The post didn’t do exceptionally well and it didn’t tank. It was just an average post.

Now you probably won’t see the same results as me as I’ve been doing this for a long time, but your results will be much better than what you are currently getting. Hence, I used the number of 3,549 in the title as you should be able to drive 1/10th of what I am generating.

So, let’s dive right into the formula.

Step #1: Optimize your headline

8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 people will click through on your headline to read the rest of your article.

No matter how well written your content is, promoting it won’t be effective if no one likes your headline.

Now I know what you are thinking… I’ve already published my article, is it too late to change my headline?

Nope, you can always change your headline, just try not to change the URL of the article once it is already published. And if you decide to change the URL, use a 301 redirect.

There’s a really simple way to come up with headlines that work. Heck, it doesn’t even take more than a minute or two.

Just head over to Ubersuggest and type in the main keyword or phrase your article is about.

You’ll see a report that looks something like this:

Now I want you to click on “Content Ideas” in the left-hand navigation.

You should now see a report that looks like this:

This report shows you all of the blog posts around the web that contain your keyword or phrase within their title. And it breaks it down by social shares, backlinks, and search traffic.

You can use this to see what is working in your space.

Ideally, you want to look for headlines that have thousands of social shares (or hundreds if you aren’t in a popular industry), at least 10 backlinks, and more than 100 estimated visits. Just like the example below.

Making your headlines similar to ones that meet those 3 criteria will increase your odds of getting more traffic.

Step #2: Add 3 internal links

The easiest way to get your new content more love is to build links.

Yes, links are hard to build, but internal links are not… plus they are still effective.

I rank for competitive terms like “digital marketing”…

A lot of it has to do with internal links. I link to my main digital marketing page within my sidebar and within my content.

Every time you publish a new blog post, I want you to go into your older content that is relevant to your newly published blog post and add a link to it. Do this to 3 of your older blog posts.

This helps with indexing and it also helps your new content rank higher on Google.

Step 3: Share your content on the social web carefully

The problem with social media marketing is that people think they can just share their content on sites like Facebook or LinkedIn and it will automatically do well.

Sadly, it won’t because billions of URLs have been shared already.

In other words, we just tend to ignore most of the links people share.

But there is a simple way to stand out and get thousands of visitors from the social web, just like I get.

So, what’s my secret?

Well, I will give you a hint. Just look at one of my most recent posts on LinkedIn:

And here is one from Facebook:

Do you notice a pattern?

I’m evoking curiosity. In other words, I am piquing your interest and if you want to know the “solution” you have to click through to my site.

With the LinkedIn post, I tell you that marketing is going to change next year. I also make a point to say how it is going to change in a way that nobody is talking about.

I do this because we all can assume marketing will change. But by saying it is in a way nobody is talking about, it evokes curiosity. And if you want to know how it will change you have no choice but to click through over to my site to read the rest.

With my Facebook post, I also evoke curiosity. I talk about a Google algorithm update, but I hint that I have an answer to leveraging Google’s latest algorithm update. And if you want to know what it is, you have to click through over to my site.

Whenever you post on the social web, evoke curiosity if you want people to head over to your site.

The easiest way to do this is that every time you share one of your articles on the social web, add a few sentences above the link that helps pique peoples’ interest.

Step #4: Message everyone you link out to

It’s common to link out to other sites within your blog posts.

Heck, sometimes I even link out to my competition.

If you don’t ever link out to other sites, you are making a big mistake. It helps with authority and trust.

If you are using stats and data within your article, you want to cite your sources. This brings credibility to you and it helps brand yourself as an expert which can help with Google’s medic update.

Now, when you link out to a site, go and search their email address. You can typically find their email address on their website.

Or if you can’t find their email address, look for a contact page on their site, you’ll typically see a form that you can fill out.

Whether you find an email address or contact form, I want you to message each and every single site you link out to with a message that goes like this:

Hi [insert their first name],

I just wanted to say, I love your content. Especially your article on [insert the name of the article you linked out to].

I linked to it from my latest blog post [insert URL of your blog post]. It would make my day if you checked it out and even shared it on your favorite social network if you enjoyed it.

Cheers,

[insert your name]

When I send out these emails, I am getting 50 to 60% of the people to respond and share my content. But of course, my blog is popular, so for me, it isn’t too hard. But it hasn’t always been that way, and I’ve been leveraging this tactic for ages.

On the flip side, I also use this tactic on a few of my blogs that are in other niches and don’t use my name (no one knows I own them) and I am seeing success rates around 20%.

Just make sure you don’t use this tactic to ask for a link back. Your success rate will be slim.

Step #5: Send an email blast

These last two tactics produce a large portion of my results, and you shouldn’t take them for granted, no matter how basic they may seem.

If you already haven’t, start collecting emails from your site. You can use free tools like Hello Bar to create popups or sliders.

Hello Bar will plug into whatever email provider you are currently using.

Once you are up and running, every time you release a new blog post, send out an email blast.

Here’s an example of one of my email blasts.

It’s so effective it generated 13,544 clicks.

I’ve found that you can drive good traffic from emails as long as you do the following:

Scrub your list – if someone doesn’t open your emails over the last 30 or 60 days, remove them from your list. It helps keep your emails in people’s inboxes.

Send text-based emails – if you look at the email I sent, I keep it simple. No images, nothing fancy, just text and a link back to my site. It’s that simple.

Evoke curiosity – just like how I explained with the social media posts, your emails won’t do well unless you evoke curiosity.

As you write more content you will get more traffic, which will cause your email list to grow. That will also cause you to get more traffic. 🙂

Step #6: Send a push notification

I don’t know why so few sites are leverage push notifications. It’s so effective I believe I will get more traffic from push notifications in 2020 than I will from email marketing.

To give you an idea, when I analyze my competitors in the marketing arena, only 3 out of 19 use push notifications.

In other industries, the percentage is far worse, which means there is more opportunity for you.

Here’s how push notifications work….

Someone comes to your site and through their browser, they get a message if they want to subscribe to your site.

A portion of your visitors will click “allow”. With NeilPatel.com, roughly 5.4% of visitors are currently clicking “allow”.

You can send push notifications and get subscribers using a free tool like Subscribers.com.

And then when you write a new blog post, you log into Subscribers.com and click on the “Create Notification” button. From there you will see a screen where you can enter the title and description of your latest post.

As you can see from the image above, you’ll notice that I use an “icon” image, a “large” image, and I show “custom buttons.”

Using those 3 elements is the key to getting the most traffic from push notifications. Here are some of my stats from using Subscribers.

I’m getting roughly 6,000 visits from every push notification I send. That’s not too bad.

And if you are curious about what a push notification looks like, here’s what people get when I send it out.

What’s cool about push notification is no matter what website someone is on, they will see a message similar to the one above, which will bring people back to your site.

No dealing with spam filters or messages not going through. Plus, if someone isn’t online when you send a push notification, the next time they use their web browser they will see your message.

Conclusion

Promoting your content doesn’t have to be hard.

You don’t need “advanced” tactics or anything that is out of the box. The basics work well, and I have been using the above formula for years… literally.

Now, I know there are other things you can do to promote your content, but let’s be realistic: we are all strapped for time. And I’ve found the ones I’ve mentioned above to produce the biggest bang for the buck.

So, what other simple ways do you promote your content?

The post My 6-Step Content Marketing Formula That Drives 3,549 Visitors appeared first on Neil Patel.

My 6-Step Content Marketing Formula That Drives 3,549 Visitors Publicado primeiro em https://neilpatel.com

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jeffrmayhugh · 4 years

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Bitcoin Trading Analysis! Ripple XRP, COTI and OIL Technical Analysis

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome back to All Buzz. It’s me, Jimbo, back for another market update in today’s video. We’ve got a roundup of Bitcoin technical analysis. We are going to have a look at a pattern on exile P, which could be huge. Coaches pump 25 percent since our last video. And oil is under $20 a barrel. If you want to hear about all that and more, please stick around for the rest of the video. If you want to continue to support the channel, please slap a log on this video. And if you want a chance to win a crypto tax, you start to care. Make sure to subscribe to the channel if you know already and leave a comment down below and we’ll announce the winner on Saturday. So we’re gonna start right here in the weekly chore as we normally do. And let’s just point out some areas of significance. First of all, we did get our weekly close up of the 200 moving average last candle and we have currently gone up today attested to six thousand five hundred before seeing a slight rejection. We are at six thousand three hundred forty-six dollars a time of recording yet to break through that all-important 40 levels on the RSI facing that resistance as we speak. I think if we see rejection, we’re very likely to go on to see a candlewick back down in this three to four and a half K zone if we can break through this RSI without seeing any rejection. And I think we’ll go on to break through the six thousand five hundred and the seven thousand three hundred before testing our all-important Purple Resistance line, which was formed as long term support from an uptrend back in January 2019 is where it began. And let’s start now down to them daily and see what that is showing us. So we’ve been watching the exponential moving average driven on the daily over the last couple of videos. And in our previous video, we were just above the 20 moving average and we were looking to see if we’ve got to go up and test through the band. Well, we’ve been rejected. We’re now below it. We’ve seen our daily work today go on and test that 20 moving average, which exactly coincides with our six thousand five hundred resistance. And as of yet, so far today, we’ve seen rejection. If you’re watching this on Tuesday, we really important to see if we’ve got broken up and closed above this 20 moving average. That’s going to be really key. If we see any rejection, then as far as I’m concerned, we can see a continuation of the downtrend, at least in the short term. And we’ll go and have a quick look at the 4:00 hour and see if there’s any indication there that we’re going to see any continued bullish price action for our show is looking really interesting right now, guys. As you can see, we are between very stiff support and very stiff resistance. We’ve currently got the exponential moving average ribbon sap below us as support. But we’ve got that 6500 and resistance to breakthrough. And you can see that we got really close tightening range here. Which way we break either above or below. One of these two lines here is going to be really key. Break that break down below the ribbon and continue the downtrend, break up above the 6500 an area and we could continue to see this increase. And at the moment, Bitcoin is very much ranging. When you have a look at the one hour chart and I’ll take this off for a moment, if you have a look at the one hour chart and zoom out a little bit, you can see that we are very much range. This is very sideways price action. If you look at this, we’ve got our upper resistant seven thousand one hundred fifty and you could put our bottom range at the moment probably here about five thousand six hundred. But it’s a really tight area, so well worth keeping an eye on, especially as I said on that for our chart, we’ve got a real indicator thereof which way this is going to want to break with having such key support and a key resistance as our tightening range. So definitely we’ll keep an eye on this to see which way we closed. Just a quick one for you, XP fans, probably not the most significant chart pattern we’ve ever seen. But you will have seen people trying to correlate this particular time period of price action to this previous fractal which saw X a burst up forty-two and a half thousand per. The path certainly wasn’t followed exactly the same. But what I did want to bring to your attention is we are on the 180 bar, 182 bar. We’re about to set it that we’re very quickly approaching this eight hundred twenty-sixth day. I wonder if we’re going to see some example of fireworks at the end of this. Sakar said certainly not the strongest pro-child correlation of all times, but they just want to bring it to your attention and say maybe keep your eye on it. Just in case there might be some traders who are looking at this 826-day pattern and thinking, are we going to see it again? Next up, we’re going to revisit Koti Bitcoin, which identified in our previous video as looking like it was on its way to setting a new uptrend. The time of recording in the last video price was at 240 Satoshi, which you can see is where we have the cursor at the moment. Since we identified at 240, so she’s we’ve seen a maximum drawdown of about 10 percent, but a current price increase top of twenty-five point nine per cent wouldn’t be surprised to see this continue to push up unless bitcoin does something like putting a big green or big red candle on the charts. As we know, the old coin charts are very often affected when bitcoin does do that, seeing probably a local top there form with this for our candle. However, it’s still holding support at the moment with one hour left on this for our candle. And certainly, if we start to see pushing back up any time soon, expect it to break out of that 300 satoshi range and continue to push to the upside. Include the T-A for today’s video. We will finish up here on CFD for crude oil. I previously identified you this massive range that we were seeing formed from 2009. And as you can see, we’re right here on this bottom support below it as we speak. And if we go down to the 4-hour chart, I can show you why I’m showing you two right now. And here we go. Here it is. We are below the support line. As you can see, this is the purple’s trend line that you can see on the weekly chart. And we’ve gone below the previous low we set back here on the 18th of March. We’re currently trying to test our way back above it. That is at $20. Exactly. So we’ve seen oil price below $20 today. It’s the first time oil’s been below the $20 level since two thousand and two. That is absolutely crazy. It just shows you the significance of the things that are happening in the world right now. And will we ever see oil significantly above $20? Well, we’ll have to keep our eye on this chart and see if we can break that is all-important. Now, the resistance line, which is going to be seriously heavy. And I expect if we do break that line around the 21, 21, 70 marks, we will breakthrough with some velocity. See, there’s a gap here on the for our future chart. Be interesting to see if a guy can test that. But that’s going to that’s a long way away. That’s almost 100 percent increase in for oil to rally 100 percent. It takes a hell of a lot more price action than it does for an old coin to rally 100 percent. So watch this space. Let’s see what happens. But oil has dropped below $20 on the barrel today for the first time since 2002. And that draws our video for the day to close. I’ll be back on Wednesday for another one. Sorry, it’s been a short one today. I hope you’ve enjoyed the content nonetheless. And if you have police lapper like on the video, if you want a chance to win that crypto tags, you start. Okay. Make sure to subscribe to the channel if you know already and leave a comment down below. We’ll be doing another draw on Saturday. If you’re craving more altcoin news and bitcoin news, come over to Oakland Boaster. Oh, that’s a brilliant place to get all of your crypto information in a one-stop-shop for me today. That’s everything. I’ll be back on Wednesday. Take care, guys. By.

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-trading-technical-analysis/ source https://cryptosharks1.tumblr.com/post/614217475817717760

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scottmapess · 4 years

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Bitcoin Trading Analysis! Ripple XRP, COTI and OIL Technical Analysis

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-trading-technical-analysis/ source https://cryptosharks1.blogspot.com/2020/04/bitcoin-trading-analysis-ripple-xrp.html

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cryptosharks1 · 4 years

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Bitcoin Trading Analysis! Ripple XRP, COTI and OIL Technical Analysis

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

source https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-trading-technical-analysis/

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heatherrdavis1 · 4 years

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Bitcoin Trading Analysis! Ripple XRP COTI and OIL Technical Analysis

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Via https://www.cryptosharks.net/bitcoin-trading-technical-analysis/

source https://cryptosharks.weebly.com/blog/bitcoin-trading-analysis-ripple-xrp-coti-and-oil-technical-analysis

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goodra-king · 5 years

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Transcript of The Biggest Social Media Trends to Watch in 2020

Transcript of The Biggest Social Media Trends to Watch in 2020 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 Gusto, modern, easy payroll benefits for small businesses across the country. And because you’re a listener, you get three months free when you run your first payroll. Find out at gusto.com/tape.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Michael Stelzner. He is the founder of Social Media Examiner and the producer of Social Media Marketing World, a great conference for pretty much anybody in marketing. So Mike, thanks for joining me.

Mike Stelzner: Thanks for having me back, John.

John Jantsch: Yeah, back. This is… I’ve been doing this long enough that I’m having people on third and fourth time. I bet I had you on for your book White Papers, didn’t I?

Mike Stelzner: I don’t really know, but I think this has got to be at least my third time on the show.

John Jantsch: I really… I remember… When would that have been? 2008?

Mike Stelzner: The paper thing? Man, that’s a long time ago.

John Jantsch: I know.

Mike Stelzner: We’re talking like 2006-ish, 2007.

John Jantsch: Well, I’ve been doing the show that long, so I’m going to have to go look that up. I’m probably the only person who has had you on to talk about that on a podcast and then back about trends in social media 2020.

Mike Stelzner: I think that’s probably a fair statement.

John Jantsch: And you’ve been doing your podcast for how long?

Mike Stelzner: Seven and a half years almost. It’s crazy.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, it’s funny, I’m already getting us off topic here, but it’s just amazing how much podcasting has taken off and I’m actually calling audio content kind of a trend for 2020, even though it’s been around. I think it’s just going to just go crazy in 2020.

Mike Stelzner: I’m with you 100%. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Spotify bought Gimlet and Anchor and Apple also reinvigorated all their apps, so I would say for sure there’s a big, big move towards new people starting to listen to this stuff you and I have been doing for a long time.

John Jantsch: And where do you come down on stuff like the Alexa skills and flash briefings and stuff? Do you think a lot of mainstream podcasters are going to start using those as distribution channels?

Mike Stelzner: Well, to be honest with you, we tried it for nine months and we saw almost nothing. So either we were really way too early to the game and we’re talking, we decided to shut that down about six months ago. I don’t think most people are going to use the smart speakers for the kinds of things that they do here. So until I think people start using it for something other than utilitarian purposes, I’m not sure that’s going to be as big a deal as podcasting.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Well, it’s funny because, again, when I started podcasting, it was so hard to get people, to show people how to listen to a podcast, which obviously now that’s every smartphone comes equipped with it and there’s all these places like Spotify. But I have to think that at some point the smart speakers are going to get easier that way. But again, you might’ve been early.

Mike Stelzner: Well, what’s fascinating is most people don’t even know you can ask. If you have an iPhone, you can ask it to tell you the news and it will ask you who’s your preferred news provider, NPR, Fox, or CNN. They’ll give you the news. Most people don’t even know that.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re right, you’re right. So let’s talk about 2020. You follow… you interact with the brightest minds in social media, you follow it yourself, you write about it yourself. So I wanted to kind of do a show on just where you see we’re going. So I’ve got a couple of specific things. We already got into one, but are there kind of your overarching trends for 2020 for social media?

Mike Stelzner: Yeah, there’s a couple of things. First of all, we’re seeing rising ad costs, on Facebook in particular and Instagram, mostly because right now during the holidays, but also because it’s going to be an election year. So you can see a lot of ad inventory be taken up by political candidates, which is going to… and you also have a limited amount of inventory and a rising number of advertisers. Mark Zuckerberg recently said seven million active advertisers are on the platforms competing for limited space. So the ad costs are rising, and as a result a lot of marketers are looking for organic activities. And the areas where we’re seeing a lot of organic growth is on Instagram and also on YouTube.

Mike Stelzner: So I think we’re seeing the rise of very short form video in the case of stories on Instagram and Facebook and also a rise of the number of people utilizing YouTube. You’ve got over a billion daily active users on YouTube with an average session duration of like 27 minutes. So I think both of these things represent big organic activities that are in the realm, the scary realm, John, of video marketing.

John Jantsch: Where do you see those two things fitting in? Like where does Instagram stories fit in for a typical marketer?

Mike Stelzner: Well, first of all, there’s lots of opportunities with Instagram stories because they show up at the top of the feed when you first open the app and in the middle and it’s just… For the small business marketer, it’s just a matter of showing up regularly and just talking about things like, “Hey, here’s what’s going on in the office. Or here’s the new product idea we’re working on, or here’s how we make what you buy, consumer X.” Or even day in the life kind of stuff, so these very short 15 second videos really are getting a lot of play on Instagram and it’s just a top of mind thing.

Mike Stelzner: As you know, John, one of the biggest challenges in this competitive space is being someone that others think of when they’re looking for a solution. You want them to think of your business. On the long form side of it, the benefit to YouTube is that people go there with the intent of watching video. Where an Instagram, they don’t always go there with the intent to watch video. So the benefit of YouTube is it’s a search engine and a lot of people forget about that.

Mike Stelzner: So if you can create answers to questions that people have, prospects have, and they’re searching YouTube and they find your video, then all of a sudden they might subscribe to your channel. They might go a little deeper and check out whatever it is that you do. So I think of YouTube as almost like the new Google search because a lot of people are watching video.

Mike Stelzner: And by the way John, this is part of a mega trend when you couple it with what’s going on with Disney+ and Apple+, two major multibillion dollar companies getting into the video streaming game. I think we’re seeing a mega trend here, which is longer form video consumption becoming like… We’re really in the age of long form video consumption, and it’s going to be one of the things that we’re going to look back on in history and say this is the age of literally digital television like nothing we’ve ever seen before.

John Jantsch: Yeah. You know, one of the things that a lot of people miss too is because so many people go to YouTube to ask it a question, I mean it’s like how do I do something is like the main thing, the related searches there for videos, it just a gold mine for SEO because that’s the stuff people are asking about and that’s the stuff you ought to kind of cement your entire content marketing of all forms around I think.

Mike Stelzner: Yeah, and an important point here, a lot of people like us that have been in this industry for a long time that have been bloggers like you and me, John, videos are the future of blogging. It really is. You can create video blogs that people will spend more time with than they will ever on your website reading your actual blog and when your face is in there, then they get to know you and like you, and those are some of the core principles to people doing business with you.

John Jantsch: Yeah and I think the days of somebody seeking out somebody’s blog, unless it’s on just a really very specific niche or something and reading long form content is probably behind us aren’t they?

Mike Stelzner: I would say yes, but I still get a lot of people, almost a million people a month coming to our blog or out there, in an industry that’s constantly changing and they’re searching. But the scary side of this, John, as you probably know, more than half of all Google searches result in no click. And this is because of that company, Amazon, you mentioned. The Alexa product is competing with the Google products and Google wants to give the single answer. We’re moving towards an era where traffic from search is becoming harder, therefore diversifying into video is another advantage there because it’s like a leg of the stool that so many of us have not built out yet.

John Jantsch: It drives me crazy sometimes. I’ll go out there and search for something and it takes me about five clicks on Google to get to the destination that I’m trying to get to.

Mike Stelzner: Yeah. You have to scroll down a lot if you’re on a mobile phone. It might be like, you could be in the number one slot, but you still have to scroll a couple screens because they’re doing everything in their power to provide you the answer so you don’t have to click.

John Jantsch: Well, and even beyond that. After this show publishes and you Google Duct Tape Marketing podcast, they’ll show our episode in the top search results because they figure that’s what you’re looking for. But guess where it takes you? To Google Play, not to the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, which I’m happy for the listener, but you know, they’re keeping people away.

Mike Stelzner: There you go. It makes sense. I mean, they’re just like Facebook. They want to keep people on property.

John Jantsch: Everyone loves payday, but loving a payroll provider, that’s a little weird. Still, small businesses across the country love running payroll with Gusto. Gusto automatically files and pays your taxes. It’s super easy to use and you can add benefits and management tools to help take care of your team and keep your business safe. It’s loyal, it’s modern. You might fall in love yourself. Hey, and as a listener, you get three months free when you run your first payroll. So try a demo and test it out at gusto.com/tape. That’s gusto.com/tape.

John Jantsch: So let’s talk a little bit about how you see the maturing of social media. Again, we were both talking about this stuff when Twitter was founded, when people were going, “Oh, this is the next thing.” How do you see how social media has matured, just become a part of marketing, becomes a foundational element of a business’s plan? Where do you think we are in that?

Mike Stelzner: Believe it or not, I think we’ve gone back to where we were when we started. It’s kind of like things have come full circle. If you remember, John, back in the day with Twitter and with Facebook, there was no images, there was no video, it was just text. And Facebook is kind of driving everything back towards that by encouraging people to be active inside of groups. Why? Because they can mine that content, right? And they can use that content to sell to advertisers.

Mike Stelzner: So the key thing that a lot of social platforms are talking about is an engagement metric, right? So they want you to take some sort of an action, typically in an ideal world to share and/or a comment. And that’s kind of how it was back in the day. It wasn’t necessarily about you spending a lot of time necessarily consuming media on the platform. It was more about like you connecting with family, friends and it’s kind of moving back to that.

Mike Stelzner: And I think that that’s a good thing, because it’s going to be a little harder for people, like the bad marketers, to ruin the experience, right? Because that doesn’t scale, right? The idea that you’re going to have to engage with people does not scale. And as a result, those who are willing to invest in community development, which is obviously interacting with prospects and customers, are going to be the winners in the long run because in a world where somebody can create a fake persona and act like there’s somebody that they’re not and drive people to sites that are not real, it’s going to be the real people that are going to stand out and are going to thrive. And that’s going to be good news for small businesses because I think if we go back to the way it was, which was true interaction, then that’s how we develop and nurture relationships. So it’s literally coming full circle in my opinion.

John Jantsch: Do you feel that some people are fatigued by social media? Not the good uses you just described, but just the clutter?

Mike Stelzner: Yeah, for sure. The reality is that Facebook doesn’t even reveal the kind of data they used to reveal before because they’re aware of this, right? In the past, they used to talk about how many daily active users are on Facebook and how many were on Instagram. And now they just kind of combine it all together in one bar. And I think it’s because beyond the big seven or so social platforms, you’ve got all these little private communities that people are moving more towards.

Mike Stelzner: So we’re seeing obviously people interacting in private Facebook groups, we’re seeing people interact in apps that nobody’s ever heard of before, like Mighty Networks. And I think what’s happening is the aspect of community is strong, but the question of where you house your community is becoming more and more difficult, because I think consumers are more aware of the fact that there’s a lot of… like if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product, right? We’ve heard this a million times. So they’re moving to platforms where maybe they have to subscribe, but they know that their information won’t be used against them.

John Jantsch: You mentioned bad marketers. So let’s segue to messaging apps. Where do you see, obviously Messenger inside of Facebook, almost everybody’s got some messaging app on their phone that comes native, and then there’s a whole slug of all these other ones out there, where do they fit?

Mike Stelzner: Well, the hype cycle on this is crazy, John, because you know we do this annual report every year. And two years ago the interest in messenger bots was completely off the charts. Last year, the interest in messenger bots was not, it dropped dramatically. And we’re about to do our study here in a couple of weeks in early 2020 on this very same topic again. And I think what happened, a lot of people were sold on this idea that messenger bots are like email, but with better open rates. That lured them in, right? But then when they began working with bots, they began to realize, whoa, this is way more complicated than I thought. And that’s the truth and the reality of bots is that you practically have to learn a programming language, even if it’s drag and drop, and it’s super complicated and Facebook changes the rules all the time on what you can and cannot do.

Mike Stelzner: So I think bots can be really, really effective. But it’s just like anything else. It’s probably one of the most complicated things you can do so you have to probably hire an agency or consultant to do it for you, and that’s where it gets a little bit squirrely. We’ve tried two different bots twice and we ended up shutting both of them down because it was just this big old rabbit hole that we didn’t want to get into. Have you heard better things from others or have you also experienced?

John Jantsch: No. I think that they’re just extremely hard to do well. And if they’re not done well, they’re worse than not being done.

Mike Stelzner: Yeah. And the natural language processing isn’t there, so what ends up happening is you can type in a sentence, but it won’t understand what it is or it’ll wrongly interpret it. So I think we’re going to get there in the next couple of years as artificial intelligence on the natural language processing gets really, really good. But right now, there are some great tools out there and we have a whole track on it at our conference, but it is definitely one of the more complicated things that marketers are doing right now. And I think there’s upside, don’t get me wrong, but I think the hype was pretty crazy off the charts.

John Jantsch: I was listening to an NPR show and I won’t remember any of the names of the people, but they were talking about people who were very deep into this, into the technology of this industry. And they said, one of the scientists said that one of the dirty little secrets that people don’t realize is that where we are with a lot of AI right now is a lot of AI is actually being interpreted by humans in sweat shops all over the world. And that’s… the promise of this technology is just not there yet.

Mike Stelzner: Yeah, it’s kind of like… To be honest, what it is right now, it’s like when you call those toll free numbers and you have to push one to do this and two to do that. That’s literally where bots are right now, except instead of a one or two on your screen, it’s giving you buttons that you push and it’s just logic tree stuff. But where it gets really, really complicated is the fact that there’s all these regulations and rules put on by Facebook in particular that you’ve only got so much time to respond. I mean it can get really, really kludgy. So yeah, that’s definitely an area that I am not an expert in, but I’ve interviewed a lot who are experts, and my data shows that it’s probably one of those things that definitely could provide value, but you better have a decent sized team to focus on this because it could take you off focus of other more important things.

John Jantsch: So let’s talk about more important things like influencers. How do you see, again, the model of going out, finding people who have huge followings, big name brands out there, celebrities, I mean that’s gone on forever. Has social media democratized that a bit? In other words, a person that’s got 50,000 Instagram followers that you’ve never heard of and they’ve just been able to really dig into that platform and get some engagement is now an influencer. Talk to me a little bit about how you feel about that aspect of social media.

Mike Stelzner: Yeah. First of all, Instagram influencers in particular are in a world of trouble right now. John, if you haven’t heard, they removed in certain countries and in America I think it’s… I don’t know if it’s rolled out everywhere or if it’s in testing, but I don’t see the hearts anymore on the Instagram posts. I see it on my own, but my audience doesn’t see it. You just see if it was liked by… it just says and others really if I recall. I think what that’s doing is, because there’s so many young people on Instagram and they understand that this is definitely hurting the mental space of a lot of young people, but they also understand that this also could democratize, if you will, Instagram a little bit where everyone is perceived as equal.

Mike Stelzner: I don’t think the world of influencer marketing is going to survive in the long run in the way it is on Instagram. But I do believe that influence is important. So if I can explain that, it’s not about how many followers the world sees that you have, so the social proof side of it, isn’t I don’t think as important as it was. I think instead what’s important is whether or not you as a creator of any kind of content can yield influence on your audience, which has always been the case, right?

Mike Stelzner: John, you’ve got people that listen to your podcast and they hear about the things you talk about and they choose to act because you said that you believe this to be true. That is you yielding influence to your audience. And the real question is like whether or not that is an industry that can be monetizeable. I prefer instead to help people figure out how to yield their own influence on whatever platform they’re on and use that to help them grow their business, not rely on the influence of others. So I don’t believe necessarily, but I know it works. Don’t get me wrong. I know it does work for certain kinds of businesses as an accelerant, but I think it’s kind of one of those dangerous slippery slopes you’ve got to be careful of.

John Jantsch: So I’m trying to get Pat Mahomes to come on and talk about the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. That didn’t mean anything to you because you’re a San Diego Chargers fan probably.

Mike Stelzner: Yeah, it didn’t.

John Jantsch: Total blank. Sorry. He was last year’s MVP in the NFL. He’s the Chiefs quarterback. But clearly, you gave me within about half a second there that you were not an NFL fan.

Mike Stelzner: I’m not, but I’m sure that he’s amazing. But yeah, exactly. Like that’s the whole point, right? Like remember when Guy Kawasaki had millions of followers and everybody wanted Guy Kawasaki? Just a name that a lot of our audience is familiar with. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. I mean, like the honest truth is that we all want people to advocate for us, and some are worth paying, but that concept has been around forever. Affiliate marketing, right? I mean that’s what built the back of affiliate marketing. So I just think that the influencer marketing world has got to really… I think it’s one of those things everyone’s running from right now because the bad rap of what’s come out of YouTube and Instagram, and I’m not talking about it because I don’t believe it’s important. I believe influence is important instead.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Remember magazine ads from the ’50s with the movie stars with a cigarette. I mean that was pretty much the same thing, wasn’t it?

Mike Stelzner: I would imagine so, yeah. I mean, and trust me, it does work. Obviously if you’re a super, super well known individual in the audience that you’re trying to target with, yes, I mean the idea of leveraging someone who is a celebrity. Celebrity endorsement is probably not dead ever, but the question is how do we label a celebrity? That’s really what we’re talking about.

John Jantsch: Yes. That’s a whole show by itself, isn’t it, Mike?

Mike Stelzner: Could be.

John Jantsch: You have, depending upon when people are listening to this, January 2020 probably-ish and beyond, but you have another edition of Social Media Marketing World coming up in San Diego. What is this the ninth year?

Mike Stelzner: Yeah, I think it’s our eighth and it’s March 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. We’re really excited. It’s a different world for sure. I don’t remember, you’ve been to our event at least three times, right? Or four times or something like that?

John Jantsch: Five or six.

Mike Stelzner: Were you there at the very first year or did you come?

John Jantsch: I think I spoke there for the first four or five, six years, yeah.

Mike Stelzner: Yeah, so it’s really… It’s changed a lot since then. It’s got 16 tracks now covering everything you could possibly imagine, all the major social platforms. This year one of the cool things that we’ve got is four different tracks on video, video creation, video marketing, YouTube for business, and live video. Because that’s a big trend a lot of marketers are trying to understand and how to wrap their brain around. But yeah, thousands of people from all over the world will be coming as they always do, and many thousands also attend virtually. I’m pretty positive… yeah, it is definitely year eight.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And without a doubt, I’m sure there are metrics to back this up, the premier social media show for sure.

Mike Stelzner: Yeah. Last year we had 4700 people there and another couple thousand virtually. So definitely not the biggest marketing conference in the world. That would probably be like, I don’t know, maybe Inbound or something, but for sure for social media we’re the biggest.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Or Sales Dreamforce, if that’s considered a marketing one.

Mike Stelzner: Yeah, of course. It’s its own little animal.

John Jantsch: Pretty good sized one. Well, Mike it was great catching up with you as always. Appreciate you stopping by. People can find you at socialmediaexaminer.com and that’s of course where all the links to all the Social Media Marketing World and your report that you mentioned is always a great read every year.

Mike Stelzner: One last thing, if you have room in your dial, in addition to John’s podcast, you can check my podcast out also, which I don’t think I mentioned the name. It’s just called Social Media Marketing.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Appreciate it, Mike. Hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road soon.

Mike Stelzner: Thanks, John.

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