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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 10, 2016 2:55 PM
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So let’s go back to my question: why do I keep blogging? Why are you blogging? Should you quit? Should I quit? Are there better ways to do marketing, gain traffic, and grow conversions?
Is blogging truly all it’s cracked up to be? More specifically, just how big of an impact does it have on SEO?
In this article, I’m going to do away with niceties, guesses, and “best practice” advice. Instead, I’m going to dish up the data so you can get the cold, hard facts on what happens if you decide to stop blogging.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 10, 2016 9:53 AM
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Most marketers know by now that Facebook is an important business tool for companies of every size and industry. With a daily active user base of 1.13 billion (1.03 billion on mobile alone), you know it can help you reach new audiences you may not have been able to reach otherwise. It can also help you get found more easily in search, create a community around your business, promote the content you create, and develop a strong brand identity. But what about using Facebook for lead generation? Attracting new leads using Facebook -- leads that might eventually turn into paying customers -- is one of the most intriguing reasons to use Facebook in your marketing. And yet, we find that only about half of marketers use Facebook to source leads. This needs to change. And even if you are generating leads on Facebook, we all could probably use a little boost in our lead generation efforts. ...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 10, 2016 9:32 AM
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Pagelines Platform 5 is a free WordPress plugin which allows you to edit any WP-powered website theme without the need to edit code. In addition Platform 5 makes it easy to drop in sections of pre-coded design with a single-click.Free version provides access to 65% of the available features. Pricing info: https://www.pagelines.com/pricing/ ($99/year) My comment: Powerful solution for anyone publishing a website with WordPress and needing to customize and edit specific sections with unique features, content blocks and without needing to rely on a webmaster. Download it now: https://www.pagelines.com/platform/
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 10, 2016 9:03 AM
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Gift cards used to be a last-minute purchase when consumers were stuck for a last-minute gift, but they’re now a gift selected because it gives the recipient more buying choices and flexibility. The gift card marketplace continues to evolve and we’ve got some research and innovations to share to keep you up-to-date on gift card trends. CEB reported US gift card sales in 2015 totaled more than$129.7 billion, a 6.3% increase over 2014 sales of $122 billion. A new research report by CashStar showed 91% of consumers were happy with their gift cards. The same report showed digital gift cards were the biggest growing gift card segment up 26% to $7.1 billion in 2015. According to the Incentive Research Foundation, another big trend in gift cards in 2016 is the increase in luxury gift cards for purchasing electronics (cited by 31% of respondents), open-loop gift cards (28%), luggage (24%), and watches (23%). Lyft and Starbucks launched a joint gift card promotion each selling the other’s gift cards. C-stores have seen the impact of technology and are experimenting with digital and mobile cards. Swych, Inc launched an innovative digital gift platform and iOS mobile app for US consumers who can use a unique app to send “Swychable” gift cards redeemable at favorite retailers. Research by National Gift Card Corp shows 72% of sales came from three categories: big-box retailers (29%), open loop rewards cards such as Visa and AMEX (23%) and entertainment cards (10%)....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 9, 2016 11:16 AM
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The glory of winning a gold medal is a massive incentive for athletes competing in Rio but the impressive bonuses on offer add another more lucrative dimension to the games. The size of the bonus on offer varies hugely by country. For example, British athletes do not receive bonus for winning a gold medal whereas American competitors get $25,000 for every gold they take home. Successful athletes from Singapore are awarded a prize of $1 million Singapore dollars, not a bad day at the office at all. Indonesia offers its successful Olympians around $380,000, according to Fox Sports Australia. The following infographic provides an overview of the biggest estimated cash rewards for gold medal winners in Rio (the values were converted from Australian to U.S. dollars)....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 8, 2016 9:16 PM
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Twitter is one of the best places for ecommerce entrepreneurs to get awesome info to help grow their online store. With a few hundred million different Twitter accounts, it's tough to decide who to follow. To help all the entrepreneurs out there, I've put a list of 50 must follow Twitter accounts for ecommerce entrepreneurs. Check them out below, and follow them here....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 8, 2016 5:16 PM
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Four years ago, The Washington Post covered two major news events the old-fashioned way.
For the Olympics in London, sports reporters tallied up the medal counts on television and hand-wrote briefs for the website. And when the election came around a few months later, four Post scribes took a look at election returns and hand-wrote lots of little results stories — who won what, and where.
This year, that work is being done by robots. Kind of.
Earlier today, The Washington Post announced it's joining the growing number of news organizations who are using language-generation technology to produce stories automatically.
Heliograf, a tool developed by The Washington Post's engineering team, will use data and language templates to generate automatic briefs on medal tallies, event schedules and competition results for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Those briefs will be fed into The Washington Post's main Olympics liveblog, which will also be home to stories written by the newspaper's sports reporters....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 8, 2016 9:18 AM
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When market research firm Gfk was hired by the Australian government to consider how cigarette packs could be designed to prevent smoking, the firm came up with a colorful solution: Make the packs as unappealing as possible by wrapping them in an earthy "dark brown," or what would be matched to Pantone color 448C. The color was found least appealing to prospective cigarette buyers in tests, and it has since been proclaimed "the world’s ugliest color" by the blogosphere. But in the interest of fairness to all colors, we talked to designers Milton Glaser and Debbie Millman, along with Pantone VP Laurie Pressman, to get their professional take on this cancerous, baby poop, lung brown....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 8:51 PM
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Spoiler Alert: The odds are high that a robot/algorithm is going to be better at your job than you are.
The ascendency of the robotic workforce is a complicated issue. On the one hand, millions of human rely on driving to earn a crust. On the other hand, over a million humans die in car accidents every year. Autonomous cars are guaranteed to greatly reduce both of these numbers. It’s hard to know how to feel about that.
If you’re not convinced that self-driving cars would increase road safety all that much, we’ve got an infographic on The Car of the Future that is sure to convince you.
Speaking of autonomous vehicles, I can’t agree that airline pilots are unlikely to be replaced by machines because they practically have been! Autopilot does the majority of the flying already, and it’s a small step from there to obsolescence. I also think it’s much more likely that police patrols get replaced by robots than this graph does, but let’s not dwell on that dystopian possibility....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 8:32 PM
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The Olympic Games typically choose only one poster to represent the host city—and for better and for worse, these posters tend to reflect the design aesthetic of their particular era.
Kobra, Pipas e Sonhos
But this year, a diverse group of 13 artists created a collection of official posters for the Rio games, meant to showcase the multitudinous array of people who call South America's largest country home. Asked to concoct images that represented Rio de Janiero, 12 Brazilian artists and 1 Colombian artist designed posters full of bright colors and emblems of the city. One depicts a child flying a geometric kite over one of the city's favelas, and another shows a muscular athlete running the Olympic torch across a Copacabana beach. Some take the Olympic rings or the ocean as their central motif, while others are more abstract.
"It's really hard for us in Brazil to choose one artist to represent the Olympic Games, or represent the official posters," Carla Camurati, director of culture for the Rio Olympics, told the Associated Press when the posters were unveiled in Rio last month. "The important thing for us and the Olympic Games is to show Brazil as it is, with the colors, with the brightness, with the beauty of the mixture of people that we have here; the mixture of roots that we have."...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 7:50 PM
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Think tanks, which position themselves as “universities without students,” have power in government policy debates because they are seen as researchers independent of moneyed interests. But in the chase for funds, think tanks are pushing agendas important to corporate donors, at times blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists. And they are doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status, sometimes without disclosing their connections to corporate interests.
Thousands of pages of internal memos and confidential correspondence between Brookings and other donors — like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate — show that financial support often came with assurances from Brookings that it would provide “donation benefits,” including setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 11:01 AM
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Adidas, Auto Trader, Gatorade, and Under Armour, among others, are unofficial sponsors of the 2016 Rio Olympics. All have found ways to capitalize on ads connected to this summer's games, but some confusion has led to a bit of controversy. More than one-third of survey participants in a global study by Toluna incorrectly identified Adidas as a sponsor of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. "Brands that sponsor big name athletes like Michael Phelps may be able to gain more exposure for less cost than by becoming an official Olympics sponsor," said Mark Simon, managing director of North America at Toluna. "Ultimately, the IOC will need to consider what brings them more value--allowing non-sponsors to generate broader exposure for the games through their athlete partnerships, or maintaining control over the athletes’ marketing influence by restricting use of the Olympics brand."...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 3:44 AM
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Landscape is a powerful image resizing tool designed to help social media marketers, content creators and business owners develop a standout presence in an increasingly visual social world. Our tool offers social media professionals an efficient way to produce multiple image sizes optimized for social media profiles, messages and campaigns - ultimately giving them more time to focus on what matters most: fostering engagement and authentic conversations through social.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 10, 2016 2:42 PM
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These tasty mouthfuls will stretch your idea of what can get go between two (or maybe three) buns. Would you like pickled lemon with that?
I would try all of these, and I bet some are shockingly good. People seem to like putting the french fries into the burger, which, since I like putting potato chips in my sandwiches, I have no right to hate on. It sounds pretty good actually.
I can’t decide if the Mos Rice burger or the Vada Pav is the biggest departure from a traditional burger. On one hand, at least the Vada Pav uses bread for the buns and has something fried in it. On the other hand, at least the Mos Rice has some layers of stuff in it instead of one ball of fried whatever. Actually, a ball of fried whatever is very in line with burger tradition, so I’m going to say that the Mos Rice is the least burger-like burger on this list....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 10, 2016 9:43 AM
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eLink is a web app which allows you to create public collections of links on a topic by offering a set of pre-designed templates in which you an add images, video clips, articles, social posts and more. You can further personalize the page with a unique opening cover image, a title and a custom URL with your preferred keywords. Free to use. Pro version $10/mo. adds analytics and no ads. My comment: Easy to use content curation solution allows to create high-value content pages without needing to have a website. Try it out now: https://elink.io/
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 10, 2016 9:19 AM
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Callnote is a free downloadable software for both Mac and PC which allows you to record Skype, Google Hangouts, GotoMeeting/GoToWebinar and WebEx events, including the capability to record what is shown on the screen, or the video part(s) of a call. Free version. Only limitation is a maximum of 30 recordings per month and no video editing abilities. Pro version $9.95/year (after 14-day trial!) My comment: The best tool to record any online call, event or webinar whether you are on Windows or the Mac. The free version does already everything you may have dreamt of, but these guys deserve full support and I strongly suggest to give them a heads up by buying the incredibly low-priced Pro version. Download it now: Windows - http://callnote.kandasoft.com/callnote-install-3.5.0.exeMac - http://callnote.kandasoft.com/callnote-install-3.5.0.pkg
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 10, 2016 8:54 AM
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It’s open season on Delta’s handling of the PR crises following its cancellation of more flights this morning on top of more than 1,800 yesterday and Monday after a computer problem in Atlanta stranded passengers around the world. Consider the four-word lede on the AP’s Scott Mayerowitz’ story: “We don’t cancel flights.” The next graf takes down that bit of hubris quicker than a glitch in a power control module can make a finely tuned system go kaflooey. “That’s been the message for the past two years from Delta Air Lines,” he writes. “Double-decker buses roamed the streets of New York, wrapped in ads proclaiming ‘canceling cancellations.’ Delta executives boasted about the number of days without a single flight scrapped.” Mayerowitz posits that the cancellations and delays, coupled with its own delay in explaining what really happened, “threatens to wipe away all that trust that Delta has worked to build” and has allowed it to proudly get 110 cents for every dollar charged by its competitors. That’s tempered, however, by S&P Global Market Intelligence’s Jim Corridore telling him the airline might “get a pass” if the incident proves isolated....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 8, 2016 11:23 PM
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What are you scared of?
If you ask most people, they might say public speaking. In fact, nearly ¾ of people are terrified of getting up in front of a crowd and talking.
As your business picks up, you’ll probably have to start facing your fears of public speaking more and more often. You can send as many cold emails and calls as you want, but big deals get done in person. From investor meetings to team presentations, business owners need to project confidence while convincing people to think their way on a regular basis.
While public speaking might be one of the most common fears out there, there are lots of people who do it all the time. Whether they’re musicians, TV hosts, or entrepreneurs, commanding a crowd is a key skill set for ambitious people in every industry.
I asked 13 professional public speakers for their advice. Here's what they had to say....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 8, 2016 5:25 PM
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The New York Times has embarked on a new form of storytelling to enhance its coverage of the Summer Olympics: Two-way text-messaging.
For two weeks, deputy sports editor Sam Manchester will be sending text messages from the Olympic Games in Rio to readers who sign up for the service.
Unlike email alerts or push notifications, these texts will give readers an informal, behind-the-scenes look at the Games, almost as if they had a friend texting them directly. Readers can also write back to Manchester. And while he won't be able to reply to each message, the responses can be used to personalize each reader's experience.
The innovation is an effort to reach readers on the platforms that are central to their lives, Andrew Phelps, the Times' Director of Personalization, told CNNMoney....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 8, 2016 1:53 PM
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The largest-ever acquisition of an e-commerce company likely won't be enough for Wal-Mart to dethrone Amazon. But there's no shame in playing for second.
In a bid to juice its online business, the world's largest retailer agreed Monday to purchase Jet.com in a $3.3 billion deal. The acquisition will beef up Wal-Mart's e-commerce prowess, from deepening its bench of talent to finding the cheapest way to ship online orders.
These capabilities should help Wal-Mart grab a larger piece of the growing e-commerce pie. They're also the best chance it has of closing the wide — and growing — gap between it and Amazon, analysts said.
"Amazon's got this huge lead. That lead is going to be tough to relinquish but there's a lot of [share] out there," Moody's analyst Charlie O'Shea told CNBC....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 8:56 PM
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On Tuesday, Instagram introduced Instagram Stories, a new feature with remarkable similarities to Snapchat.
Stories provides Instagram users with a place to share posts at a higher frequency. While Instagram photos are typically reserved for perfectly composed shots, Stories allows you to share the little moments that may not be as picture-perfect.
Instagram is positioning this feature as a solution to overposting. Stories live in a separate space, and you can post as frequently as you want without worrying about over saturating your friends’ feeds or filling the grid on your profile page.
So how do you build a Story? And what does this mean for your strategy? Don't worry. We've got you covered.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 8:43 PM
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I left with an urgent curiosity about what sort of artifacts we would display a few decades from now, for future generations to discover. Our contemporary analogues to the personal notebook now live on the web — communal, crowdsourced and shared online in real time. Some of the most interesting and vital work I come across exists only in pixels. Tumblr, for example, contains endless warrens of critical theory about trans identity politics and expression, one of the few havens on the web where that sort of discourse exists. Many of the short videos on Vine feel as though they belong to an ever-evolving, completely new genre of modern folk art. Some of the most clever commentary on pop culture and politics is thriving deep in hashtags on Twitter. Social media is as essential to understanding the preoccupations and temperature of our time as Haring’s notebooks were for his. But preserving materials from the internet is much harder than sealing them under glass.
Building an archive has always required asking a couple of simple but thorny questions: What will we save and how? Whose stories are the most important and why? In theory, the internet already functions as a kind of archive: Any document, video or photo can in principle remain there indefinitely, available to be viewed by anyone with a connection. But in reality, things disappear constantly. Search engines like Google continually trawl for pages to organize and index for retrieval, but they can’t catch everything. And as the web evolves, it becomes harder to preserve. It is estimated that 75 percent of all websites are inactive, and domains are abandoned every day. Links can rot when sites disappear, images vanish when servers go offline and fluctuations in economic tides and social trends can wipe out entire ecosystems. (Look up a blog post from a decade ago and see how many of the images, media or links still work.) Tumblr and even Twitter may eventually end up ancient internet history because of their financial instability....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 8:23 PM
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Instagram is taking a lot of heat for supposedly ripping off Snapchat with a "stories" feature of its own. And at first glance—hell, even at second and third glance—that’s exactly what it’s done: Stories lets you share photos and videos that disappear at the end of the day. But start using it and you begin to get the sense that it’s actually a much better experience from a user interface point of view.
Instagram is taking Snapchat's basic language and tinkering with the grammar, adding new expressions, and polishing up the prose.
In the subtlest of ways—so subtle that they’re easy to dismiss as blatant plagiarism—Instagram has made serious design improvements on Snapchat that are hidden in plain sight—er, swipe. Here’s how....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 7:40 PM
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Influencer marketing is rapidly gaining popularity among brand marketers, and according to April 2016 research, nearly three-quarters of US marketers cite ongoing ambassadorships as one of the most effective uses of influencers.
TapInfluence, an influencer marketing automation platform, and technology research company Altimeter Group surveyed 1,753 influencers and 102 marketers about how they work together. Influencers were selected from TapInfluence’s marketplace, on which each holds at least 10,000 followers.
Marketers use influencers in a variety of ways, from leaving a review for their product to mentioning their brand in some way on social networks. For many (70.6%), ongoing ambassadorships are the most effective influencer marketing tactic. Product reviews are a close second—more than two-thirds of respondents mentioned them as being the most effective use of influencers....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
August 7, 2016 4:04 AM
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InstantLogoSearch is a free web app which allows you to imstantly find and download visual logos for thousands of popular brands. 100% free. My comment: Useful in many situations when you want to include a good quality logo of a major brand in a design, promo, or presentation and you don't want to waste time wading through tens of images in Google search. If what you you want is a cleaned up logo, either in bitmap or vector format, ready to be downloaded in SVG or PNG format, this is a good resource to bookmark and use. Try it out now: http://instantlogosearch.com/...
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Here's the business case for blogging from Neil Patel. It's compelling whether you're B2C or B2B.