Day: July 10, 2019

Why you need GOOD front-end Pizza

Guest author, David Perrera, is MFA Director of Sales.

For the majority of my life I have called the state of New Jersey my home. New Jersey is known for its mobsters, high taxes, and really really good pizza. It’s also home to the greatest football team ever created, the New York Giants. OK maybe I’m embellishing there a bit… or maybe not; you can decide.

About 4 years ago, before I understood the first thing about Direct Response marketing, I recall getting an offer for Monday $8 Pizza from a local Italian restaurant that I had never been to.

Now, if you know anything about New Jersey pizza, $8 pizza is like a fabled unicorn that lives inside your washing machine. It just isn’t there.

So, excited and concerned, I take my coupon to the restaurant the following Monday for my $8 box of takeout pizza.

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Knowing what I do now about marketing — front-end vs. back-end, ROI, ACV, etc. — this seems like a perfectly acceptable play, IF and only if, the intention is to gain a new customer.

In other words, if the restaurant knows that the average lifetime value of a customer is $500 for example, would it make sense to pay $4 for advertising, and $4 to have me walk through the door, if the future value of my patronage would be $500? Of course it would…. If I come back.

Very often marketers get the sense they just need to get a cheap lead magnet out to a prospect in order to gain their information and put them on their list, or better yet – some cheap “tripwire” product (cheap as in value, not cost). That’s exactly what happens when I go to pick up my pizza.

There are about a dozen pre-made boxes of pizza sitting under a heat lamp when I arrive. You can tell they obviously skimped on the cheese and sauce as if to say “hey it’s only $8, what more do you want?”

The pizza is lukewarm and not very good at all.

This is their one opportunity to wow me… their one chance to potentially gain me as a repeat customer and make back their investment.

And I never go back.

At the time I was truly baffled as to why this shop would go through the trouble of placing an ad, driving traffic to their door, and then letting me leave, utterly dissatisfied. The lady at the counter wasn’t even really happy about giving me the $8 pizza (although that attitude is typical of us Jersey Italians so maybe I was reading too much into it).

But the point is valid. Are you offering a flimsy, dissatisfying, front-end offer just to get someone on your list and become a customer? If so, why? Why wouldn’t you go the distance (one of our core values) and give the prospect an over-the-top offer that makes them want to keep coming back for more?

If you OVER deliver on value, your customers will notice, and you might have a customer for life…

If you UNDER deliver, you might lose the opportunity to earn their business… forever.

The post Why you need GOOD front-end Pizza appeared first on Marketing Funnel Automation.

Bruce Lee Can Help You Transform Your Traffic Strategy

Guest author, Shawn Twing, is responsible for Marketing Funnel Automation’s traffic generation strategy and is a member of the MTAM faculty.

Martial artist, actor, teacher, and philosopher Bruce Lee died seventeen years before the debut of the world wide web, yet he may have given the best advice – ever – for creating and executing an effective traffic generation strategy.

While Lee was best known for his movie roles, his accomplishments in the martial arts are also legendary. From his background in Wing Chun Kung Fu, he developed an entirely new interpretation of Kung Fu that he named Jeet Kune Do that emphasized efficiency, directness, and simplicity. Lee’s relentless focus on “hacking away at the unessential” gives us a powerful foundational principle we can use immediately.

Before I dive into that principle and how you can use it, let me give you a little background so you can understand my perspective. I’ve owned a website development and Internet marketing agency for seventeen years, completed more than 350 projects for clients large and small, and managed tens of millions of dollars of advertising spend through Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many other platforms. I’ve seen every crazy scheme you can imagine come and go, and watched traffic opportunities, strategies, and tactics evolve (and often implode) for nearly two decades.

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One more thing that’s crucial to understand is that I am, first and foremost, a student of my craft, always looking for the underlying principles that matter, the tried and true methods that really work, and, to borrow Bruce Lee’s phrase, always “hacking away at the unessential.” Once meaningful metrics/goals have been identified – for example, target cost-per-lead (CPL) or funnel-specific-ROI – I focus relentlessly (and people who work with me would tell you, stubbornly) on the most efficient, direct, and simplest method(s) to achieve those metrics/goals.

How do I do that, and more importantly, how can you do the same thing? The answer can be found in a quote from Bruce Lee which I believe provides the secret to creating a sustainable, predictable, and scalable traffic engine for your business. Lee said:

“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.”

To understand why this is so powerful, let’s compare and contrast a typical traffic generation scenario with a strategy informed by Bruce Lee’s single-minded focus.

Strategy #1 – Variety is the Spice of Life

This strategy is all about action spread across different opportunities. Create an Adwords account, set up retargeting, create a few search campaigns, try some banner ads on the Google Display Network, add some video advertising through YouTube, set up a Facebook advertising account, then LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit, maybe add some third-party services like Sitescout, Adroll, and Perfect Audience…and on and on it goes. There’s always something new and exciting to try, new opportunities and approaches, and certainly new products to learn the newest “secret”.

The fundamental problem with this approach is that effort is spread too thin. By necessity, we become “dabblers” to borrow a phrase from Mastery, by George Leonard. We never have the joy – or the business impact – of truly mastering our craft. The often-used metaphor is light. When diffused (think light bulb) it will illuminate a room, when magnified (think laser) it will burn through steel.

Strategy #2 – The Bruce Lee Method

Instead of looking for opportunities, the Bruce Lee method focuses relentlessly on results. To use this method, we need to ask a better question. Instead of “what could we do?”, we ask “what should we do?” The difference cannot be overstated.

“What could we do” assumes that time, energy, and dollars are infinite and no prioritization is required. If that’s the case, we could do anything and it wouldn’t matter. We have all the time in the world and money is no object.

However, for everyone I know, time, energy, and dollars are finite which means we need to establish priorities.

For example, if the priority is to generate 150 leads per day for a marketing funnel at a cost of $12 or less per lead, the next question we have to ask is “what is the simplest, most direct, and most efficient way to achieve that goal?” In my experience, that’ll quickly and dramatically limit the options available.

Once those options have been identified, then it’s a matter of practicing the one kick 10,000 times.

If YouTube pre-roll videos appear to be the best vehicle for reaching your goal, don’t dabble with them – become a master. Learn everything you can about them, know your audience inside and out, investigate the tools and resources available (and experiment with them) look at your metrics daily (hourly!), study your results, form and test hypotheses until you know that source of traffic and its impact on your business like the back of your hand.

Then – and only then – move on to the next source of traffic and repeat the process.

One amazing benefit of this approach is that each new method becomes easier to understand and integrate. (If there’s any “secret” to my success in traffic generation it’s that I have internalized the fundamental principles of my field and that allows me to understand new developments faster and at a deeper level than most people. It’s not magic; it’s experience.)

How to spread out your actions

But wait – what about the dangers of putting all of our eggs in one basket?

Todd covered this problem very well in a previous post and he’s absolutely right that it’s a very serious issue. Anyone who has spent a lot of time and money generating traffic has had an important source of traffic disappear overnight. Facebook’s often inexplicable (and irrevocable) account shutdowns are the most recent and dramatic form of this, and it happens elsewhere as well.

I believe part of the solution is focusing our attention vertically into methods first, and horizontally across platforms second. For example, if paid search marketing is your starting point, get something working well on Google and then replicate that (and make the necessary tweaks) on Bing.

If you’re reaching a professional audience on Facebook, reach the same audience next on LinkedIn.

If a content strategy is working for you on Facebook, move on to services like OutBrain. Banner advertising on the Google Display Network? Sitescout next. Keep adding layers thematically and continually move along the road to mastery.

Another part of the solution is going out of your way to understand the policies and preferences of the advertising platforms you’re using.

Google, in particular, is very transparent in its expectations, which are focused overwhelmingly on user experience. Google also has a support center with very knowledgeable staff who can answer questions, address concerns, etc. Work with Google and they will work with you.

Facebook does publish its policies and preferences, and live chat is available for feedback. In my experience, however, Facebook also has extensive unwritten rules and that can be problematic. It’s one thing to knowingly break a rule and suffer the consequences, and another to suffer consequences without breaking any transparent rules.

One final recommendation is this – put as much time, energy, and attention into your traffic strategy as you do in developing your marketing funnel. Figure out what works uniquely well for your business and then step onto the path of mastering whatever that is. Build on it over time, adding stability to your business along the way and eventually you’ll look back and wonder how you make so much progress so fast.

The post Bruce Lee Can Help You Transform Your Traffic Strategy appeared first on Marketing Funnel Automation.

New Study: What 100 Social Media Followers Are Really Worth

The social web is huge. From Facebook to Pinterest, they all command billions of eyeballs per year.

Which, of course, makes these channels too big to ignore. In other words, you have no choice but to participate in them or else you’ll miss out on traffic and revenue.

But, how much time and money should you devote to each social network?

Which ones produce the best ROI?

How much are 100 social media followers really worth?

To answer these questions and more, I polled 483 companies who are all leveraging Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Each company has been participating in all these social networks for at least 3 years and they have at least 100 social media followers on each platform.

Of the 483 companies, 159 of them were in the B2B space and 324 were B2C companies. And their revenues varied from $10,000 a year to $250,000,000.

Now before we dive into the data, keep in mind all of the stats are broken down based on 100 social followers.

For example, if we looked at traffic, we looked at how many visitors they generate per 100 followers.

And for the purpose of this blog post, we will focus only on organic social media traffic.

So, let’s dive into what we learned:

Social media traffic over time

Compared to when each social network originally came out, it’s become much harder to generate organic traffic from each of them.

You can still generate organic visits, but of course, reach has died down. But how much has it died down?

social over time

As you can see, it has drastically decreased.

In 2015, you could generate a bit more than 3 visitors a month from the social web for every 100 followers you had, and now it’s dropped down to roughly 2 visitors per month.

I know that data isn’t shocking, but think of it this way, that’s a 38.6% drop in organic social media traffic. And based on the chart, there are no signs of recovery.

But what about traffic by social network?

Sure, organic social media traffic might be dying as each network wants you to advertise, but which networks drive the most traffic per 100 followers?

If you had to take a guess, which one do you think it would be?

traffic social media

It’s definitely not a social network owned by Facebook. Both Facebook and Instagram drive the least amount of visitors per 100 followers.

Instagram isn’t much of a shocker, though, as you can only drive traffic through bio links and asking people to swipe up in stories.

But what was surprising is the amount of traffic Pinterest drives. Pinterest was the best performer, followed by LinkedIn and then YouTube.

Here’s the thing to note about YouTube… although it drives a decent amount of visitors per 100 subscribers, most people using YouTube don’t experience much (if any) traffic because they don’t link out to their site within their videos.

You can use YouTube annotations to do this.

Does posting more often mean more social traffic?

The first chart shows that organic social traffic is slowly dying down, but how about if you increase your posting frequency?

That should increase your organic social media traffic, right?

frequency social media

In general, posting more often does lead to more traffic. But after 8 monthly posts on each social network, the data shows you’ll see diminishing returns.

Why you may ask?

The way most social media algorithms work is that the more people engage with your content, the more of them will see your content as you post it.

So, your goal should be to only post content people love and want to engage with. The moment you start posting mediocre content, it hurts your overall traffic numbers because that means fewer people in the future will see your new content no matter how amazing it is.

Speaking of engagement, which social networks tend to have the most engaged users?

Engagement by social network

I was shocked by the engagement stats because I assumed that Pinterest would have won in this battle as they are driving the most traffic per 100 followers to websites.

But I was wrong.

engagement

Pinterest did perform really well, but LinkedIn won.

Instagram also did extremely well, which I wasn’t shocked by as most of the people I know who use it do so as a “personal” social network instead of leveraging it for work.

That’s why the engagement is so high on Instagram.

One thing to note is that posts not containing a link, such as images or videos, tend to get the most engagement.

This is also because social sites tend to promote content that keeps people on their social sites as opposed to driving their visitors off to your site.

Which social networks prefer videos?

If you aren’t producing videos, you should definitely consider starting. Even though videos don’t rank well on Google, they are the future.

It’s why I create more video content each week than text-based content.

With video, there are 2 main types of videos… one that you just upload and ones that are live.

Let’s see how the different video types stack up against each other.

videos

When you look at the chart above, it’s easy to say that Instagram produces the best results for videos. Then come LinkedIn and YouTube.

But there is something that you have to keep in mind… Instagram auto-plays videos while YouTube is much pickier about what they count as a “video view.”

None-the-less, if you’re going to create video content, you should post it on all of the social networks out there, but I would first focus the majority of your efforts on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

YouTube won’t provide amazing numbers in the first 24 hours of uploading a video, but through YouTube SEO, you can continually get views while you won’t see that happen on any of the other social networks.

For live videos, the results are similar in which Instagram and YouTube lead the pack.

live videos

But what is interesting is that live videos don’t generate as many viewers as just posting and scheduling them.

When we dug into why the main reason wasn’t that social sites don’t want live content, it’s that with non-live videos, businesses spend more time leveraging keyword research and optimizing their videos for the maximum amount of views.

While on the flip side it is a bit harder to do that with live videos.

If you want to get the most views from your videos, use tools like Ubersuggest to see what keywords are popular.

Putting keywords in your title and descriptions isn’t enough, though. Social media sites are able to decipher the sound to see what your video is really about.

Now let’s get into the best part… conversions and sales.

The money is in the list

Have you heard the saying, the money is in the list?

If you aren’t collecting emails, you should start right away. Because once you have an email list, you can always market to people on your list and convince them to buy your products or services.

emails

LinkedIn has the best conversion rates from a visitor to an email subscriber. Pinterest and YouTube also perform really well.

You may think that most of the people on LinkedIn only care about B2B but that is wrong. Remember everyone on LinkedIn is also a consumer. They buy everyday products just like you and me.

What was interesting with the email collection numbers is that the majority of your social media followers won’t ever convert into email subscribers. But as you share and post content on the social web, the followers of your followers may also see your content, which then increases the likelihood of getting more traffic and email subscribers.

What about revenue?

Whether you love or hate social sites, they do drive revenue. And no you don’t have to spend money on ads to generate revenue.

Ads do help, of course, but here is the percentage of revenue that each business generated from organic social media traffic.

revenue

It’s been declining over the years, but the numbers are starting to flatten out.

The decline isn’t just related to social media algorithms becoming tougher, though. It’s that businesses are also diversifying their marketing approach. They are taking an omnichannel approach which means they leverage more channels. Because of that, each one also makes up a smaller portion of their revenue.

Conclusion

Social media is still strong and kicking. You may only be able to generate 2 visitors a month for every 100 followers you have, but that scales as you grow your social following on every network.

Plus, the brand effect you can get by doing things like uploading videos will also help significantly.

Now before we wrap things up, I thought it would be interesting to see what percentage of social media traffic is generated from organic efforts versus paid:

paid versus organic

There is a huge trend of companies spending more and more money on social media, which aligns with the stock price and financials of companies like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

None-the-less, don’t be discouraged by your social media traffic dwindling down.

If you get a bit creative and follow this, you can spike your numbers.

So, what are your social followers worth to you?

The post New Study: What 100 Social Media Followers Are Really Worth appeared first on Neil Patel.

Property Owner Insurance Price Quote

Resident Insurance Price Quote

It is hard to obtain a property owner insurance coverage estimate for a straight resident insurance coverage due to the fact that there is practically no “straight” resident insurance coverage. The homeowner insurance plan you buy is mosting likely to be customized to fit your demands; consequently, your residence as well as its components, in addition to your way of life, your pet dogs, as well as your prized possessions have to be taken into consideration prior to you can obtain an exact property owner insurance coverage estimate. This is a good idea, as you desire a resident insurance coverage tailored just for you and also not a homeowner insurance coverage created for common objectives.

You might have prized possessions that are not covered under regular property owner insurance plan, or prized possessions that are covered under typical homeowner insurance coverage however not to the degree you would certainly such as for them to be covered. You might possess several pricey items of precious jewelry, an antique collection of flatware gave with your family members, an unusual weapon collection, or perhaps a number of hairs you have actually accumulated throughout the years. These sort of costly, occasionally irreplaceable things would certainly call for a recommendation to your homeowner insurance plan, as well as would certainly change your property owner insurance policy estimate.

Investing in recommendations for your resident insurance coverage does not simply safeguard them from being swiped; it additionally secures them from damages. You might acquire a recommendation that would certainly fix a preferred set of jewelry if one of the rocks drops out.

If you have priceless things such as these, you ought to take into consideration buying residence proprietor insurance coverage plan recommendations. While residence proprietor insurance policy recommendations will certainly most likely rise your house proprietor insurance policy rate quote, you will certainly be able to relax guaranteed that you as well as your important things are secured.

It is hard to obtain a residence proprietor insurance policy rate quote for a straight house proprietor insurance coverage plan since there is practically no “straight” house proprietor insurance coverage plan. The residence proprietor insurance coverage plan you buy is going to be customized to fit your demands; as a result, your residence and also its components, as well as your way of life, your family pets, as well as your belongings have to be thought about prior to you can obtain a precise house proprietor insurance policy cost quote. You might have belongings that are not covered under regular house proprietor insurance policy plans, or belongings that are covered under typical house proprietor insurance coverage plans however not to the degree you would certainly such as for them to be covered.

The post Property Owner Insurance Price Quote appeared first on ROI Credit Builders.

New Study: What 100 Social Media Followers Are Really Worth

The social web is huge. From Facebook to Pinterest, they all command billions of eyeballs per year. Which, of course, makes these channels too big to ignore. In other words, you have no choice but to participate in them or else you’ll miss out on traffic and revenue. But, how much time and money should …

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New comment by lebovic in "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2019)"

CoreBiome | Full-stack Software Engineers | Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN | Full-Time | ONSITE or REMOTE | https://corebiome.com

Our company specializes in fast, reliable microbiome analysis using cutting-edge genomics and informatics. Our unit ensures quick, accurate, and reproducible data analysis in a secure environment for ever-increasing dynamic workloads. By facilitating fast and easy data access for our clients, we expedite advances in scientific knowledge.

You would be working in a few key areas of our code base:

– Building internal tools to help automate and record laboratory processes

– Building the API that unifies different portions of our pipeline, internal tools, and customer portal. This is currently written in Flask.

– Optimizing the pipeline for speed and reproducibility. The pipeline is comprised of Python, R, Nextflow, optimized executables and tools, with pytest in CircleCI and Jenkins for testing.

– Ensuring data security. Genomic data is personal data, so security is a top concern with regulatory requirements. Data is stored in S3, with some metadata in PostgreSQL and MongoDB databases.

Interested? We accept two forms of applications:

1. Standard HR application at https://careers-corebiome.icims.com/jobs/1106/software-engin…

2. Via POST request to https://corebiome-api.com, with a JSON body containing the string fields “first_name”, “last_name”, “email”, “phone”, “role”, and a “urls” list containing any relevant links (e.g. LinkedIn, resume)

Credit to Phil Freo for the POST request idea.

Feel free to reach out at nlebovic@corebiome.com!

New comment by lesss365 in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (July 2019)"

Location: New York, NY

Remote: Preferable, but not required

Willing to relocate: No, but would consider if international

Technologies: Python, Tensorflow, JavaScript, ThreeJS, CSS, HTML, Bash, Arduino

Software: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere, Sublime Text, Blender, Cinema 4D, Street Fighter 4 + 5 (Bison)

Porfolio Site: http://shanelessa.com/

Résumé/CV: http://shanelessa.com/_shane-lessa-resume.pdf

Email: shane.lessa@gmail.com

About Me: Creative technologist looking to join a team of individuals who think up unconventional yet practical solutions for complex yet fun problems to be solved. I’m a blend of both design and technology. Been working mainly with local NYC government client for the last 5 years. Would love to continue serving the public sector or a non profit organization. Have several years of experience in user experience design, but been focused on frontend development and automation over the last 4 years.

From First to the current Video Game Systems: The Evolution of Video Game Consoles

From First to the most recent Video Game Systems: The Evolution of Video Game Consoles Having fun with computer game systems is just one of one of the most prominent types of amusement. With the development in graphics as well as audio modern technology, you will certainly see that computer game today can actually take … Continue reading From First to the current Video Game Systems: The Evolution of Video Game Consoles