#AS ALWAYS hit me up if you want a clean copy of my google sheets page that i use for it / info on how i do it IT'S SO FUN

[everymlmhybrid]

everyone go onto desktop you can play bells with the number keys

[godesssiri]

10 Thrifting tips

I scored big yesterday wanted to share some tips. These will be homeware tips as I don’t thrift a lot of clothes - it’s my Mum and Best Friend who have exploding wardrobes. I hope this post will be helpful for anyone setting up a home or wanting to inject some vintage personality into their home.

1) Go often. I can not emphasize this enough. I hit my favorite store at least once, if not twice, a week - it has really high turnover. My second favorite store I hit at least every other week, not so high turn over so it’s okay to go less often. Learn the stores in your area that have high stock turnover and go to them as often as you can.

2) Never go to the thrift store looking specifically for a trash can or a pet bowl etc. Go with an open mind and look for something that may not be designed for the thing you need but it can serve that purpose. I have an umbrella stand that serves as a trash can and candy dishes to feed my cats from - they have a punch bowl for water at the back door since that’s the bowl I always forget to fill so I just leave them a huge bowl and don’t need to fill it as often. You can often find something that works even better than a purpose designed object and it just looks cooler.

3) Use the fancy glass and crystal. The clear glass shelves are always packed because people think it’s fancy and never use it. You can pick it up for a couple of dollars. I eat noodles out of fancy glass bowls, I feed my cats from them, I use them for soap dishes, I store earrings and lipsticks in them on my dresser, I use them as drip dishes under pot plants. Glass is durable and easy to clean.

4) Look for new in the original packaging. Yesterday I picked up $125 of brand new un-used bed linen for $30. How do I know how much it was worth? It still had the original prices on it (I don’t know who buys a $75 pure cotton quilted valance and never even takes it out of the packaging but I’m not gonna complain). You often see full sets of stemware or other glassware in their boxes. Gift boxes full of unused toiletries, scented candles that have never been burned. Don’t buy something just because it’s new in the box - that way lies having cupboards full of as-seen-on-tv crap. But if it’s something you’ll use then grab it.

5) Baking equipment. Thrift stores always have plenty of baking equipment. I’d never buy cookie sheets, muffin tins, cake tins, cooling racks or rolling pins new. I know I can always find these things at thrift stores and often better quality than I can afford new. If you’re really into baking then you’ll occasionally come across specialty tins that you couldn’t really justify buying new (how often are you actually going to bake madeleines or friands?) but there’s no guilt picking them up from a thrift store.

6) Trade up. Especially when you’re starting out you may not be able to afford good quality stuff so you just have to make do with whatever you can afford. I can’t say that you absolutely will walk into a thrift store and find something top of the line but, if you go often, eventually you will come across something that’s better quality than the one you own. You may not be able to justify buying a brand new chef quality frying pan when you have a perfectly good pan at home, but you can absolutely justify buying a chef quality pan when you find one at the thrift store. And donate your perfectly good one - someone else will need it.

7) Collect something. When I’m in a thrift store I have my eyes peeled for pink Arcoroc glassware, mini peacock chairs to sit my plants on, 80s pastel ceramic plant pots, anything seashell. Building up a collection of thrifted items is loads of fun. It’s the thrill of the hunt and the rush when you find the perfect thing to add to your collection. Having a few fun collections of vintage stuff scattered around your home gives it individuality - no one else is going to have that exact collection.

8) Solid wood furniture. Don’t look at the color of a piece, that’s the easiest thing in the world to change. Look at how sturdy it is, and believe me solid wood is sturdy. If you’re considering a piece of furniture rock it, give it a good shake, if it wobbles forget it unless you have some woodworking skills. Look for soft spots or lots of little holes that would indicate rot or borer/woodworm. If it has borer is there a lot? It’s fairly easy to treat with an injection spray if there’s not too much. Solid wood will last a lifetime, it’s easy to make over if you get sick of it, it will survive house-moving and general wear and tear way better than flat pack. And you end up with a house full of unique pieces, not the same Ikea look as everyone else.

9) Can it be cleaned? Inevitably some things from thrift stores are gonna be a bit yuck. There is no point buying something if you are not confident you can clean it. I’ll sometimes do a spot clean, just by rubbing it with my finger wetted from my water-bottle, to see if the grime will come off. I keep an old toothbrush specifically for the seashells and mini peacock chairs I collect because they tend to come covered in the dust of ages and the best way to clean them is with a dry brush followed by a rinse. Barkeepers Friend is wonderful stuff for getting tarnish off metal or cloudiness from glass. Dishwasher powder is great for cleaning out any vessel that you can’t scrub the inside, 1 part powder to 2 parts water and swirl it around. If you find something you love but you’re not sure you can clean it, Google it! Honestly I find it incredibly satisfying to buy something really grimy (and cheap because it’s grimy), get it home and clean it up to sparkling new.

10) Share the love. I have my eyes peeled for things I collect but also I’m on the lookout for things my friends and family collect. I’m looking for blue hand-made pottery for my Mum, peach lustre glass for my best friend, swans for my cousin, lovely old copies of classic girl’s books (Anne of Green Gables, Little Women etc) for my friend’s daughter. It’s as much of a thrill as finding the things I collect but there’s that extra good feeling of knowing I’ll make someone’s day by finding them that awesome vintage piece.

[themalhambird]

Growing Up Broken: I Talk About My (A)sexuality For 4 ¼ Pages.

I am asexual.

No, this doesn’t mean that I’m some form of plant budding off copies of myself if I get enough water and sunlight. It’s a shame. I could do a lot with multiple copies of myself- get someone else to do the dishes, the cleaning, my schoolwork…

I am asexual.

Asexuality is the absence of sexual desires or feelings for other people. I say absence deliberately: sexual attraction is not something that I lack or am missing. I am not going without. I’m just a 23 year old who has never once felt the desire to have sex with another person, who couldn’t describe how it feels to “fancy” someone if there was a gun to their head, who thinks women and men and anyone in between can sometimes be stunningly beautiful, would possibly be nice to cuddle- but kissing on the mouth seems like it would be a really weird thing to do.

I am asexual, and it’s almost Pride Month, and so I want to untangle some of the thoughts in my head and spin them out on to paper, to try and lay out my feelings about my sexuality, or lack thereof, and what it’s like growing up when no one bothers to tell you that not experiencing sexual desire like, ever, is a thing. Let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

It’s 2014. Puberty has doing stuff to me for the last two years or so: periods (urgh), breasts (neat!), underarm hair (why do I have to shave this? no one’s gonna see it), growth spurts (I’m getting taller than my older sister. I want to keep going till I’m taller than mum). The only thing not happening is wanting to have sex, something the nurse who came to Talk To Us All About Growing Up back in 2009 assured us Year Sixes would definitely happen as soon as puberty hit.

Still. It’ll happen soon, probably. Sixteen is still a bit too young to be having sexual feelings, right? The boys…really not interesting at all, but the other girls are pretty. I like their hair. I like the shape of their bodies. I just don’t fancy any of them. When we’re told to imagine our future husbands or wives in class (don’t ask my why, I’ve long forgotten the point of the exercise, I just remember that) I picture a wife.

(Lesbian is the first label I apply to myself. I stick it on tentatively- keep peeling it off my shirt and putting it back somewhere different like I’m not quite sure where it fits. It’s not wrong, necessarily. I’m just not certain it’s right. I like girls a whole lot better but I’m not saying I could never love a guy. I’m just not attracted to them. I’m not attracted to women, either- but I feel like I will be. When I’m old enough to feel that kind of thing. )

Sex Ed lessons are mortifying. We’re asked to list all the sexual terms we know on an A3 sheet of paper. I don’t know what half the things other people say mean- blowjob, 69, masturbate, porn . I don’t know how other people know these things either. We’re sixteen. It’s too young.

That summer I play Sebastian in an abridged version of Twelfth Night and it convinces me to take Drama at A-level, although I didn’t at GCSE. The drama classes teach me two things. First of all, I don’t like acting women. I prefer breeches rolls. I don’t know why. We’re talking about my asexuality, not my gender confusion, so let’s put a pin in that and move on to point two. My drama class teaches me that everyone my age is having sex, or wants to have sex, or is planning on having sex soon; sex is a constant, every class, every conversation. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex. So apparently sixteen (seventeen) isn’t too young after all.

It’s like this. One day you wake up and you realise that everyone else is speaking a language you don’t understand. Suddenly, sexual feelings aren’t something that no one your age is having but you’ll all develop soon- it’s that sexual feelings are something that everybody your age is having apart from you. People your age are dating, kissing, fucking, and it’s not something you’re interested in doing, necessarily, but you still feel so horribly left out. Like you’re missing some kind of major milestone. You try not to let it bother you- you watch Buffy every Monday you get to see your dad. (You watch loss of virginity be portrayed as growing up). You read. (The books you pick up all involve love and love always seems to at least imply sex). You- google things. You google the words you didn’t understand in that sex ed class. You google “how to tell if you’re attracted to someone” in case there’s some secret signal your body sent you that you missed. You feel like you should know if you’ve ever felt sexual attraction but then maybe you’re just really, really dumb. Maybe there’s something wrong with you. The NHS website reckons that if you’ve got a low sex drive you ought to see a doctor. The girls in your drama class keep talking about boys and sex and sex and boys and you aren’t really interested in either of those things. You cling to the thought, lesbian and hope that when you get to university, you’ll stop being so repressed. Girls are pretty- but the ones at school are either your friends or kind of mean. Of course you don’t fancy anyone there. University. University will save you. (Boys are sometimes pretty too. There are boys at school whose personalities are nice enough- who are the type of man you wouldn’t mind dating one day maybe- but you can’t ever picture yourself having sex with one. Dicks seem weird and really not the kind of thing you’d want inside you. I mean for fuck’s sake- why? You can’t even get a tampon in.)

I don’t like looking back on this. Sixteen, seventeen year old me was starting to get pretty freaked out. I like looking back at the first year of uni even less, because if seventeen year old me was freaking out, eighteen year old me was buying alcohol. That’s how it goes, right? Sex and alcohol. You see it all the time on T.V. Fictional people get fictional drunk and fictional cheat while they’re on fictional breaks with their fictional partners. David Tennant is pretty. A man at work is handsome and more importantly intelligent, into Shakespeare, into good conversation. The label switches from lesbian to ‘bisexual but heavily skewed toward women’ and I cling to that as tightly as possible because after that, I’m out of options. It is impossible that I’m not feeling sexual attraction: the whole world screams about sexual fucking attraction all the fucking time, I’m obviously just too uptight, I obviously just need to relax-

I once drank a whole bottle of wine in what was essentially one go. I paused for breath, but that was about it- I don’t think I even bothered with a glass. My goal was to get myself drunk enough that I could feel sexual attraction. I thought that the best way to go about things- to finally ‘grow up’- would be to get super drunk, and then leave the flat and find someone who would screw me. I reasoned that I would enjoy it once I was doing it- after all, the whole world pushes sex as this wholly desirable thing for any normal adult to want, even need- so I would like it once I was doing it and then I would be fixed. Fortunately, drinking a whole bottle of wine when you’ve never had more than a single glass of champagne or a couple of glasses of rum and apple juice before in your life gets you past “lowered inhibitions” to “can’t walk straight or upright” very quickly. I got as far as the bathroom, threw up, a lot, and staggered back to my room. I woke up at 3 pm the next afternoon feeling stupid for drinking, and mad at myself for still being a virgin.

I had a lot of problems in my first year of university and not all of them were about my sexuality crisis. I was isolated, fairly friendless, and not really cut out for socialising with my housemates who were probably all lovely people, but I find new people painfully difficult and hiding away seemed easier. But the feeling that there was something broken inside me because I wasn’t experiencing what everything seemed to be telling me was one of the most vital parts of the human experience- sexual attraction to other people- contributed to my general feelings of self-loathing and disgust. I attempted to induce sexual desire in myself by drinking on several further occasions, although never quite to the same extent as the first time. I’m not sure whether this counts as self-harm, but it certainly wasn’t healthy.

I didn’t know asexuality was a thing.

I knew I wasn’t straight- I’d known that for a while. I learnt that I enjoyed reading, talking, even writing about sex, as long as it was sex between people who weren’t real, but fantasising about fictional characters having sex and fantasying about myself having sex are two very different things. The former happened fairly frequently. The latter didn’t happen once, and still never has. My second year at university was better than my first: I was living with friends, I was further away from campus which meant I had to walk more, which probably helped, I had also started to make several friends online with whom I could happily chat even when I wasn’t in the mood for ‘actual’ people. I used bisexual to describe myself because on the rare occasions I thought about romance, I couldn’t really see myself ruling out anyone who was willing to put up with me.

I’m not quite clear when I first heard the term ‘asexuality’. I became aware of it gradually. Someone I followed on Tumblr identified as ‘grey-ace’. Characters from my favourite fantasy series were being headcanoned as ‘asexual’. At some point I must have learnt properly what that meant.

It sometimes feels like there ought to have been a lightbulb moment- like I should have seen the word, seen the definition, and instantly seen myself. But it is very, very hard to delete the message- ‘sex is important- sex is what grown-ups do- sex is what you should want to do’ – that the world constantly sends to us: in advertising, in entertainment, in the conversations of a drama class that always circled back to that topic, to the detriment of the sole seventeen year old who wasn’t really bothered. To embrace asexuality seemed like I was giving up on trying to fix myself, on waiting for the right person to come and make everything better. On the potential of their being a right person. I can wrap my head around people having casual sex very easily. It’s romantic love without sexual desire that I’m scared won’t work- how am I supposed to know if it’s love without there also being physical attraction? No romance arc that I had ever seen was without an element of sexual tension. So, no lightbulb moment for me. No switch going off- “aha, at last, that’s what I am!”. Just a gradual thought washing across my mind every now and then, like the tide rushing up a patch of sand and drawing straight back, leaving only dampness to show where there had been a good half-inch of water only a moment ago.

I might be asexual?

And ‘I might’ becomes ‘I think I am’, and the tide starts coming in. ‘I think I am’ became ‘I am’ at some point or other.

I am asexual.

I find reassurance in knowing that there’s a word for what I am, for how I (do not) feel. I am asexual. Not broken, or damaged, or too uptight to properly feel, or too dumb to recognise what I do feel. I am asexual- I have an absence of any sexual desire for others and that’s perfectly okay. I might fall in love one day. I might not. I don’t know how you’re supposed to know if you have the capacity to fall in love before you find yourself doing it. It might be nice to have a wife. It would also be nice to have a cat. I could cope with it just being me, a cat, and good friends for the rest of my life. If I fall in love- if I am capable of falling in love- it will just mean I am asexual, but romantic, and I will have learnt something new about myself. The point is-

The point is, I am incredibly lucky that I stumbled across Asexuality before I got myself hurt trying to force something that wasn’t there. The point is, this world assumes that sexual desires are the norm, and maybe they are, but that just makes it all the more important that people know that they aren’t abnormal for not experiencing sexual desire. To all the people who need to hear it: You are not broken. You are not alone.

I’m not sure how to wrap this up. I feel like I should say something profound or something. But I think I’m just gonna leave it like this:

I am asexual. Asexuality is the absence of sexual desires or feelings for other people. I say absence deliberately: sexual attraction is not something that I lack or am missing. I am not going without. I’m just a 23 year old who has never once felt the desire to have sex with another person, who couldn’t describe how it feels to “fancy” someone if there was a gun to their head, who thinks women and men and anyone in between can sometimes be stunningly beautiful, and possibly be nice to cuddle- but kissing on the mouth seems like it would be a really weird thing to do. I am not broken. I am not ‘going through a phase’ or ‘looking for attention’ or ‘trying to be special’. Everyone’s special, fuck you. Knowing that I am not the only person to feel how I feel makes me feel like I’m standing on solid ground. May all people experiencing the same confusion and distress over their sexual orientation that I felt growing up find their way safely to the same solid ground: you are not broken. We’re not broken.

[cancerbiophd]

Hi Julia, I'm a second year grad student and I'm trying to juggle quals(write and orally defend an F31 application) and finishing up paper revisions for the next month.How do I schedule time for reading papers, writing my exam, and finishing experiments for the paper (not to mention self care, bf time, friend time, exercise, chores....) Thanks, as always you are such a great resource/help/human!

Hi Anon!

Oh man I’ve definitely been there done that. My quals was the same format. And it was a difficult time! Juggling all those things and still doing them well (like, we gotta pass our quals) was not a walk in the park! This is what I did and still do to balance my million tasks (including time for self-care, chores, and relationships). I hope some of it will work for you too, or give you an idea for something to try that will work for you. 

The short answer to everything: Schedule everything you need to do. Schedule it in advance, and down to the hour. 

The long answers:

Writing (F31, paper revisions, etc):

First, break it down into doable tasks. Pretend you’re a professor teaching a class on writing an F31–what should the lectures/homework assignments be? For example, the F31 can be broken down into: Specific Aims page; Preliminary Data; Research Approach for Aim 1, 2, and 3; Biosketch, etc. Your manuscript can be broken down into Introduction, Methods, Results (which can be further broken down to each Figure), Discussion, Abstract, etc. 

Then, plan out on a calendar (physical or electronic; I prefer Google Calendars) your due dates for those tasks. You may need to work backwards from the due date for the final thing (ie when your committee members need a copy of your F31 to read before your quals date, or when you want to submit your papers). For example, maybe next Friday you’d like to have a draft of your Specific Aims page done. 

Don’t forget that editing counts as tasks! So if the first draft of Specific Aims page is due next Friday, and then you may decide to finish round 1 editing it on Monday. 

Schedule in a weekly (or daily) time to write and treat it like a doctor’s appointment or class. This is probably the most important thing to do. Studies have shown that writing regularly, rather than writing when the “motivation” hits, yields more finished pieces. And doing things that are related to writing, such as literature searches and editing, still count as writing!

Have a writing buddy so you two can hold each other accountable, and also edit each other’s writings. Preferably this is someone in your cohort who is also working on their F31. Make your due dates the same so you can both edit each other’s work, and also schedule regular meet-ups to rant about writing :) Venting and bonding over shared experiences does help!

Experiments:

Plan your experiments using the same calendar for your writing tasks (so they don’t overlap). By doing this, you avoid scheduling too much or too little, and also you’ll be less likely to forget small tasks. I like to schedule in my experiment as soon as it’s planned so I don’t forget. Some people prefer to-do lists, but imo, a long to-do list is overwhelming; but a schedule that has all the tasks broken down helps me visualize that yes, I can do it. 

Got some down-time during experiments? Use it wisely. I like scrolling through my phone as much as the next person during my 5 min washes, but when it’s crunch-time, I bring my laptop into the lab with me and try to multitask. If I have 5x 5min washes during western blots, that’s almost half-an-hour of glorious time to use! 

Ask for help when you need it (including delegating tasks to other people). A lab is a team, and teams can only function if we all help each other when someone needs it. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it’s encouraged to ask for help. If anything, it’s better for the experiment and thus the science, so it’s in everyone’s best interest to help one another in the lab!

Plan your experiments really really well to save time. Running the right controls, conditions, and combos not only makes the results more robust, but it can save a lot of time, energy, and $$. There’s nothing worse than having to re-run a huge experiment because the correct controls weren’t included. I always like to run my experimental set-up by my PI or lab manager to make sure it’s sound. 

Reading:

Schedule in your reading time too and have a summary sheet. And to help you not have to re-read the same paper over and over because you forgot the details–have a summary sheet attached to the paper with all the important goodies. Or in my case, I just write all those things down in the margins of the first page. 

Save all your readings in an electronic works cited program for easy access if you need to cite it later for your papers or F31. I use and love Mendeley (which also gives you the option to take notes on the paper, add tags, etc). It even has a browser plug-in so you can save a paper you find online directly, as well as a Word Doc module-thingy so you can automatically make a works cited page (and do in-text citations). I highly recommend it if you haven’t used it already. EndNote does the same stuff but costs $$$. 

Read smart, not hard. If it’s a paper on something you’re already familiar with, skip the Intro and Methods and text of Results and just look at the Figures and Figure Legends. That’s all the info you need right there!

Self-care, chores, and relationships:

Schedule it in your calendar! If you’re wondering if I literally schedule everything in my life, the answer is yep. I schedule in when I’m gonna go grocery shopping, laundry, cleaning, hanging out with friends, etc. That way I know I have time to do it, and I also actually do it. If you’re having trouble maintaining a self-care routine, I would schedule that in too! It also takes away the feeling of “guilt” of taking time for yourself when you know you’ve planned well for it. 

When I was at my busiest, I also scheduled a once a week “date-night” with my now-husband-then-boyfriend. It was every Wednesday evening that was just for us–no work, no chores, etc. I have another point of advice for maintaining a good relationship with your significant during something as busy and stressful as grad school.

For more advice on organizing, check out my #organizing-advice tag here!

Yepppp google calendar is my lifeline. I just need that, my heart, and my liver, and I’m good. 

I hope that helps! Good luck on your F31 and your quals!!! 

[kadobeclothing]

A Crash Course on Proper Messaging

Earlier, I was scrolling on LinkedIn and came across this ad.

Instantly, I was impressed with the effectiveness of the language. The language, concise and clear, offers up the benefit of the product being marketed in a way that stops scrollers in their tracks, including me.

Source Qordoba is an IT company that helps companies stay consistent with communication through AI technology. The company’s ad caught my eye by communicating the benefits reading the report will have when it comes to customer-facing content, which does interest me. ‘How are tech companies managing their voice, tone, & writing style guides across their various types of customer-facing content?’

After reading this caption, I knew exactly what I would gain from this product, and why it was worth my time. The beauty of proper messaging is that by communicating either the benefits or features of your product or service, you can tell customers what they need to know in a clever, concise way. As a marketer, you’re likely wondering when you should use benefits versus features in your content. We’ve got an answer, and we’re going to dive into that in the next couple of sections. Features vs. Benefits What exactly is a “feature” or “benefit,” anyway?

Features vs. Benefits

Features describe what the product does, setting it apart from the competition. Benefits describe how the product can help the audience. For marketing messages, it’s typically better to go with a benefits-heavy approach, because benefits are what makes consumers purchase.

Both methods are useful and give customers important information they’ll need during their buyer’s journey, such as design, price, and real-world relevance. Ultimately, however, the benefits of having a product or service are what make consumers purchase. If you do decide to highlight features, you’ll want to make sure consumers understand how they’ll benefit from those features. Let’s look at another example of features and benefits at work. This is a marketing email I got this morning from Marriott hotels: This ad starts with the benefits of becoming a Marriott member — ‘yes to vacation views’ — while the rest of it explains the features of the program, including ‘no annual fees’ and ‘3X points per $1 spent at more than 7,000 Marriott locations. Emphasizing that Marriott members enjoy free perks, then expanding on how this is done (by earning rewards points), is a really effective way to explain the benefits and features of the rewards membership. Which is relatively straightforward — but what if you have multiple products being sold at once? If you’re working with more than one campaign at once, remember the “Features or benefits?” the answer can change depending on the product. If you’re unsure whether you should list features or benefits for a given product, consider this — features are an optimal choice in a saturated market. For instance, a small business making a meal-delivery kit would have some competition (such as HelloFresh or Home Chef), so they would have to communicate their service’s competitive advantage by naming one-of-a-kind features. This would include price, dietary restrictions, menu configuration, etc. Benefits, on the other hand, are the way to go if your brand exists within a niche market or a “drier” topic. You’ll want to answer the following questions with your benefits: How does it work? How does it make a consumer’s life easier? To resonate well with an audience who perhaps haven’t heard of your product or service before, try to include benefits in your demos, ebooks, and other marketing content.. Now that we’re more clear on features vs. benefits, let’s explore some examples to see both in-action. Features and benefits: Examples For the visual learners like myself, below are some real-world examples of how to work features or benefits into ads, product pages, email, or any other marketing materials: 1. Calm This email about an exclusive deal made me excited, which is another way highlighting features in your marketing material can be beneficial — to build excitement. Here’s how sleep meditation company Calm did it: Framing singer/songwriter Lindsey Stirling’s work as an exclusive feature improves customer relationships and makes them feel special. Opening this email made me think about how glad I am to be an email subscriber (especially since I grew up watching Stirling on YouTube) because of cool offers like this. If you’re running a promotion or want to improve customer relationships, consider sending them an offer that reminds customers of your product or service’s unique features. 2. HubSpot Academy In this product page for HubSpot Academy’s social media course, three benefits are listed at the bottom, so prospects can see how completing this course will be worth their time:

Source Benefits don’t always have to be short phrases – in fact, on product pages, more is often better. On web pages, it’s critical you give your customers the helpful information they need — including cost, structure, time required to complete, and a description on how your products or services’ benefits outweigh the benefits of competitors’. 3. Arcadia Can you spot the benefits energy company Arcadia used in this promoted tweet?

Here’s the easiest way to save on your utility bill and get clean energy. — Arcadia (@arcadia) February 18, 2020

If you chose the entire tweet, you’re right! Almost every word helps describe to the reader why they should open the linked website. As a consumer, I would think, “Well, what is the easiest way to save on my energy bill at no cost? That thing is sky high!” Words that help the consumer are going to resonate with those who are just mindlessly scrolling and not necessarily looking to buy anything. To build interest in their promotion, Arcadia’s use of benefits to entice prospective customers was a good choice on Twitter. Impress a scroller by using benefits in marketing messages. You have a few seconds to leave a mark. 4. Airtable Beautiful, descriptive features in this Facebook ad told me exactly what Airtable is and what their software does, despite having no previous knowledge. In less than thirty words, I know that Airtable must be a product or service that makes dull spreadsheets a thing of the past — for free.

Source Marketing teams that don’t have the budget to spend on a full suite of fancy products might come across this ad, see the features, and think “Flexible, beautiful, and fun? Spreadsheets? For free? I should look into this,” and immediately hit that CTA. Many of us use spreadsheets that are mostly text and less colorful, so Airtable does a good job detailing how they’re different from Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, and helps them seem like a game-changer to consumers. 5. KeVita Kombucha is a fermented tea drink with probiotics, which aid in helping digestion and improving energy levels. So, when marketing their kombucha on Instagram, the KeVita brand wanted to show that kombucha isn’t just a summer drink, contrary to popular belief.

Aesthetically pleasing, benefit-enforcing GIFs like this make visual platforms like Instagram a perfect canvas for an ad that displays benefits. Animation often stops scrollers — especially animation paired with bright pink text. The backdrop, a ski lift covered in fresh snow, (“powder” to skiers), shows the accessibility of the drink, while the caption alludes to kombucha-fueled energy to get through a long ski trip. Two benefits that instantly stuck out to me about this post are accessibility and energy. On snowy mountains, those two functions are going to be essential when thinking about snacks. Consider a scenario-based ad if your product is like KeVita, commonly perceived as a summer drink. From phones to shampoo, , the features/benefits marketing method can be applied to almost anything. As we saw, it’s important to know the distinction so audience members can deliver a clear marketing message. Asking yourself, “Does this ad convey features or benefits?” and structuring accordingly is a simple thought to consider when creating copy that could improve the interpretation of product pages or ads by the public. What do you want to say, and which messaging method will be best for that?

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source https://www.kadobeclothing.store/a-crash-course-on-proper-messaging/

[topicprinter]

Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Drew Williams of SWAGGER Magazine, a brand that makes a digital online magazine.Some stats:Product: Online magazine.Revenue/mo: $1,500Started: March 2007Location: TorontoFounders: 1Employees: 10Hello! Who are you and what are you working on?My name is Drew Williams and I run and operate a digital lifestyle magazine for men called SWAGGER Magazine. SWAGGER Magazine is one of the first products created under our parent company, Swagger Publications Inc.Our product is simple. It is targeted to the affluent males that aspire to have great things in life, and are on the path to building themselves to be powerful and successful people in all aspects of life - no matter what their interests are. We focus on Lifestyle, Fashion, Gear, Food, Dating, and Business and Careers.The mission statement for Swagger is to take the average man from nothing to something, by featuring successful individuals in every domain and outlining what steps they took to get there and how anyone else can follow in their footsteps.SWAGGER Magazine currently pulls in about 1-2k per month and is growing rapidly. Our primary source of revenue is sponsored posts, and celebrity features which we call "Kings of Swag". We currently own the trademark for “Swagger” in Canada and share that mark with Proctor & Gamble after a $100,000 trademark war.What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?Honestly, the idea started as a hobby.When I started the blog in 2007, it was meant to be an alternative to the major men’s magazines on shelves because the magazine industry still hadn’t fully accepted the fact that everything was going digital and that print would be dying a slow and painful death. I wanted men to have access to cool guy things online, as well as dating advice, with a focus on realistic male acquisitions instead of focusing on things your average guy could not afford. Promoting the "fake it till you make it mentality".I had worked for a magazine called Performance Auto and Sound Magazine pasmag.com, so I had in-depth knowledge about the business from a print perspective.Make sure people WANT what you are producing and are willing to pay for your product - not only on the consumer side but on the business side.To validate my idea and brand, I printed sample versions of my magazine using Magcloud.com. The issues cost about $20 each plus shipping to print, but they came in individual plastic bag copies and looked so authentic (this sample printing is how I was able to capture funding from an investor as well - more on that later). I went to my local Chapters, Indigo and corner stores, and placed copies of my magazine on shelves, and then sat and watched from a distance. People picked up my magazine to buy and that’s how I knew my brand could sell.The samples magazines I printed had about 50% content pages and the rest were ‘dummy’ pages (pictures of gentlemen lifestyle, nice houses, beautiful women, nice cars, etc.) which was needed to fill out the magazine to make it look authentic on the shelves. I even printed fake barcodes and prices on the samples (if I recall correctly, I made it $6.99 CAN which is roughly one shiny penny USD lol). Finding out just how important my brand name and the visuals of the book were to the consumer was key for me and I did find out in high traffic places that men and women in my demographic (visually between the ages of 25 - 35) would pick up the book to see what was inside. Some read it, and on a few occasions went up to buy it and I had to intercept them before they got to the register.I found the process both uplifting and tedious because it required a lot of patience. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone now because I am sure there are better ways to validate your product, but I was learning as I went along.At the time of inception I was working for a customer experience company called Vital Insights. I created customer satisfaction surveys and software for companies such as BMW, Audi, and Volkswagen. I was doing okay financially but I definitely wanted to build something of my own, something I could pass to my kids one day (maybe I watched Vanilla Sky one too many times. Lol).Describe the process of designing the website.The design of the website was simple for me because I have a background in graphic design and web development.I designed the logo fairly quickly, using inspiration from all the luxury brands I could think of. I found a very bold font that felt masculine as well as clean and expensive at the same time.I built the website using Wordpress and bought one of the most expensive magazine themes I could find on themeforest.net and customized it so that it could contend with the big boys already killing it online. Askmen.com and GQ.Logo design and website production cost me a little over $200 but would have likely cost me upwards of 3k to get everything going and launch the magazine online.Describe the process of launching the website.I had very little funds to spend on this project in the early days.I would use my bi-weekly paychecks to pay for writers to write for my magazine. I had no idea how to source great talent so I used Craigslist and Kijiji to find writers who were looking to make a name for themselves and had no platform to do so. A simple post saying, “Looking for writers for a Men’s Magazine" and posted my cover sample (seen above). I would hire a writer for each category, and have them write an article once a week, because that was all I could afford. I honestly wasn’t seeing any income but I was seeing the readership grow very slowly year to year. It wasn’t until 2016 when I got into SEO, hired an editor, and started producing far better content that was sticky, that I began to see real results.I was getting frustrated so I printed a copy of my magazine and left it on my boss’s desk one day at work. He himself had swagger and definitely could see the potential, so I took a risk. He saw it and called me into his office, asked me what it was, and I told him it’s my after work project. He then offered to invest and suggested we become partners. This started us on the path of building a viable business with the magazine. He threw in 20k to get things going.The biggest thing we learned was that Content is King. We initially spent on content that was weak and written overseas (cheaper labor). However, the quality wasn’t strong enough to capture our audience. Once we started writing longer and more valuable content we saw significant increase in traffic and readersSince launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?Using systems like upwork.com for staffing the business at a rate that was lower than most was key. We hired executive assistants and writers and marketers to help build social media, content and sales.We had used a newsletter but found it didn’t really help our numbers or business in a way we felt added any real value. A huge thing for us has been using Ahrefs.com to find content ideas and target keywords our competitors are using and help increase our organic traffic to acquire more readers. Check out Tim’s blog on Ahrefs.com - we live by his SEO tactics. They work.One of the best tactics Ive used in SEO that has worked in spades for us is finding the low difficulty keywords and writing our articles around that topic.Beautiful thing there is that low difficulty keywords only require 5-10 backlinks to be ranked on first page of Google search! Ahrefs.com makes finding this easy. Simply look at a competitors content that is doing well with traffic (for me, doing well is over 10,000 hits a month) and then look for keywords that are used in the article and find the keywords with low difficulty scores and write your new article on a similar topic with these keywords "baked in" and publish.Your article won’t rank just from that alone, you’ll need to produce the backlinks from high Domain Authority sites. I have an excel sheet for every site I can create a backlink from for free. I use this list for EVERY article we write. So every post made we go and make our backlinks from these sites linking back to our original article. On this list are. Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Medium, Instagram.These sites alone get us enough to rank for a low priority keyword. If I want to make sure my competition can easily pass me on it then I add a few more backlinks from other bookmarking type sites. Like Stumbleupon (now mix.com), Digg, etc. This process is definitely not sexy at all but definitely works. Don’t believe me? Search “top 10 mens online clothing stores” on Google and see where we rank. It was posted May 11th 2018, and we now rank on first page.We used Facebook groups to build our 60k following. Essentially contacting each group and bartering share for share and using similar content to the successful groups that were targeted to our demographic.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?We currently hover around 5K views a day. Low days are 1K - we fluctuate because we are always doing campaigns, etc. Our bounce rate isn’t great at 70%, but we are looking to revamp our site soon as I believe the experience is a bit dated and can be improved. This involves working with a few people now that we have the income to support growth.We are currently not profitable (if you include our startup legal fees), but we are well on our way to making real revenue. Our goal is to establish a stronger sales team and really get onto the radar for some of the businesses that typically printed advertising in magazines and are now looking for an online substitute directed to the male market.Our costs are low. We have writers overseas and in North America, including New York, LA, and Toronto.We schedule all our content the month before and release weekly. The app is updated less frequently as it has many more costs involved to complete and also requires much more custom photography, etc.We have an expanding audience on Facebook and Instagram and we try to keep our content at a premium level to match our branding. Facebook numbers were brought up through post sharing with similar niche pages. It’s amazing how people with the same goals will help you out as long as there is mutual gain.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?In the beginning I trusted no one. I was determined to do it all on my own. I learned the hard way that I couldn’t. The site sat making no money because I couldn’t stretch myself over my fulltime job and my dream to build Swagger into a large media company.Since then I’ve acquired partners and brought on a supreme editor, Stephen Branco, to help day-to-day with organizing content and building the business. His impact on the business is significant.I would recommend finding someone to take over the day-to-day for you even if it means taking a piece of your revenue, especially if you continue to have a day job.What platform/tools do you use for your business?The entire site is built on WordPress but is customized to look and compete with our competitors. We use MailChimp for our email marketing and newsletter communications, and we use Ahrefs for SEO. Our hiring overseas was done using upwork.comWhat have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?The Subtle Art of not giving a F&*^ was an inspirational read in deciding to drive harder at what I wanted out of all this extra work I was putting on my plate instead of spending time with my family. Gary Vaynerchuk’s media was also inspirational in deciphering what would work and what wouldn’t, and how to keep trying when things failed.Another source of inspiration is smartpassiveincome.com. Their podcast is incredible and really eye opening.I started my business before the owner of Foundr, and he was quickly able to get his magazine to where I had hoped to be. His advantage was that the startup industry didn’t have a strong media source for entrepreneurs on the App Store, so he blew up quickly.We are looking for that moment to happen with us, and his success is proof we can do it.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?The best advice I can give is to really do some due diligence on your product and your service. Make sure people WANT what you are producing and are willing to pay for your product - not only on the consumer side but on the business side.Make sure businesses will want to spend money to speak to the audience you are capturing. Pennies add up to dollars. Reinvest that money back into the business, staffing, social media, SEO - build your business and audience so the money you are making multiplies until you can quit your day job.Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?Sales People. I need them. Not just for cold calling and outreach, but sales people that live and breathe male products, and are connected with the companies that have traditionally advertised in print. Print has shifted and capturing those advertising dollars is our key to making SWAGGER a success.Where can we go to learn more?www.swaggermagazine.comwww.defineyourswagger.comFacebookInstagramTwitterLiked this interview? Check out more founders that shared their story on StarterStory.com.

[timbdesign]

How Long Should a Blog Post Be in 2018

What You’ll Learn in this Post:

Why you should still consider blog post length in 2018 How to find the optimal word count for your content

Finding the Optimal Word Count for SEO

SEOs and content marketers are always trying to figure out what it takes to drive their content to the top of search results. One frequently talked about attribute of content is word count. People want to know, what length gives their content the best odds of reaching the top of the organic search results?

You usually get an answer like this:

  Which is true. Always focus on quality over quantity. A lot of words is not going to make up for a crappy post.

However, if you’re already in the practice of producing what you might consider to be “high quality” content, is there a certain word count threshold that drives incremental organic traffic?

The question of optimal content length – be it for SEO, social media, earning backlinks, etc. – has been researched and answered, one way or another, time and time again. In 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. These are just a few examples, but there’s no doubt that you can find dozens of pieces of content on the subject each year as long as SEO has been around.

But as search engine algorithms change year-to-year, you can expect that the “ideal” word count for SEO does too. That’s why we’re rehashing this topic yet again to figure out exactly how long a blog post should be as we approach 2018. Two Ways to Answer this Question Most studies into this topic of word count and SEO take one of two approaches. They either analyze the ranking content for a broad set of keywords across many websites or industries. Or, they look at a single website (perhaps their own) to understand optimal post length for a more limited content set.

Although I enjoy combing through the big analyses, I’m a fan of the latter approach for two reasons:

The ideal length of content is going to vary by industry and region. You probably aren’t competing against Wikipedia’s content, which can be monstrously long. So their content should factor into your analysis. Instead, you’re more likely to reach a valuable conclusion for your business if you’re looking at performance of your content by word count. It’s easier for me to do.

For example, I conducted this analysis for TimBDesign.com. I found that when they produce content of over 1,200 words, it performed significantly better, on average, at driving organic traffic.

However, the same may not be true for your website or industry. In this post, I’ll walk you through the steps I took to arrive at these findings and show you how you can analyze the performance of your content to find the optimal word count for SEO. How to Analyze Your Content for Optimal SEO Word Count At this point, you may be thinking, “I don’t have enough content or organic traffic to my site worth analyzing.” That’s ok. I’ll also be showing you how you can analyze a competitor’s content with this method. Either way, you’ll come away with insights on the best post length for SEO.

First, we’re going to need to gather some data. Specifically, we want to know: Organic traffic by post Word count by post Publish date by post (we’ll use this to exclude recently-published content that hasn’t yet had time to earn organic rankings)

Here are the tools we’ll need: Screaming Frog Google Analytics SEMrush or Ahrefs (if you’re analyzing a competitor’s website)

Now that we have everything, let’s get started. Follow along as I analyze TimBDesign.com. 1- Connect Screaming Frog to the Google Analytics API This will speed up our analysis. If you’re analyzing a competitor’s website, then skip to the next section.

Open Screaming Frog. Navigate to Configuration > API Access > Google Analytics. Then, get your GA account added:

As you see above, make sure that you change the Segment to Organic Traffic.

Next, we need to expand the default date range to one year. Do that on by clicking on the Date Range tab.

When you’re done. Click OK.

2- Set Up Screaming Frog to Capture Publish Date As I mentioned earlier, we need to snag each post’s publish date. Why? We want to exclude recent posts from our analysis. We shouldn’t expect a post published last week to have already reached its organic traffic potential no matter how many words it has.

If the site you’re analyzing is like TimBDesign.com, then somewhere on a blog post you’ll find its publish date. For example, see the highlighted region below:

Screaming Frog allows us to easily grab this information using custom extraction rules. Navigate to Configuration > Custom > Extraction.

The extraction method we’ll be using is XPath. If you want to what XPath is or how you can use it, then I suggest you check out Distilled’s guide on the subject. Name your custom extraction rule “Publish Date”.

Now we need to fill in the XPath query. Here’s the simplest way to do so.

Using Google Chrome. Go to a blog post on the website you’re analyzing. Find the post’s date, and right-click on it. Choose Inspect. You’ll shown the HTML / CSS code that renders the publish date.

In the Inspect window, right-click on the HTML element containing the publish date. Then choose Copy > XPath.

Go back to Screaming Frog and paste the copied XPath into the custom extraction field. Your XPath will be different, but it should resemble something like this:

Change the last drop-down on the right to Extract Text. Then click OK.

3- Run the Screaming Frog Crawl Enter the full URL of the site you’d like to crawl at the top and hit Start.

Make sure that Screaming Frog is successfully pulling organic traffic from Google Analytics and extracting the publish date for each post.

Navigate to the Analytics tab. You should see GA data feeding into the appropriate tabs, like so:

Navigate to the Custom tab. Change the Filter to Extraction. Check to see that there are publish dates for each post.

Don’t worry if you also see text being pulled in. We’ll extract the date in a moment. 4- Export the Crawl, Import into Google Sheets for Analysis Once your crawl is finished, export all the data to a CSV.

In Screaming Frog, navigate to the Internal tab. Change the Filter to HTML. Click Export.

Now, bring that CSV into a Google Sheet. If you prefer Excel, then go right ahead. However, I’ll be using Google Sheets in this example. If You’re Analyzing a Competitor’s Site, Pull in SEMrush or Ahrefs Data Obviously, if you’re analyzing a competitor’s website, you don’t have access to Google Analytics data. However if you have access to either SEMrush or Ahrefs, you can use their reports as a proxy for organic traffic.

Ahrefs: Organic Search > Top Pages report

SEMrush: Organic Research > Pages report

After you’ve exported either of these reports, use the VLOOKUP function to associate it with your Screaming Frog data. 5- Prepare Your Data for Analysis With your data in a Google Sheet, we need to prepare a few things. Plus, you’ll likely want to do a bit of cleanup before jumping into the analysis.

Here’s how I built out my spreadsheet. I recommend taking a look so that you can replicate it for your analysis: http://ift.tt/2ga62zH Clean Up the Spreadsheet At this point, we’re interested in just a few columns of our data; Address, Word Count, GA Sessions, and Publish Date.

Since we’re only looking at blog posts, you can delete any rows that don’t have a Publish Date.

In the case of our analysis for TimBDesign.com, we need to remove the text from the Publish Date cells so that we have a date format that we can work with. I used Data > Split text to columns… to remove all the extraneous text.

Remove Recently-Published Posts I chose to remove any posts published within the last six months. You can decide what works best for your analysis.

Find the True Word Count of Each Post Screaming Frog’s Word Count metric includes all words on a given web page – not just the body content – like words in the header and footer navigations.

Since we’re most interested in analyzing our post’s body content, we’ll need to do our best to remove these extra words from our count.

To do this, follow these instructions:

Navigate to a random post. Copy all of the body content and paste into a Google Doc (use Paste without formatting). In the Google Doc, go to Tools > Word Count

Find the difference between the word count in the Google Doc, and what Screaming Frog reported. For example, the post I chose has 2,902 word according to the Google Doc. Screaming Frog reported 3,249 words – a difference of 347 words. In the case of TimBDesign.com, there are roughly 347 words in the header, footer and sidebar of our posts.

Subtract all of your posts by the number you found in the previous step to arrive at each post’s true word count.

Create Groupings to Make Your Analysis Easier This one is more of a personal preference, but I find it effective to create groupings for Word Count and Publish Date. For example, used IF() / THEN() functions to group posts by word count into these categories so they included a roughly equal number of posts:

< 600 words 600 – 800 words 800 – 1200 words 1200+ words

I took the same approach to group posts by their age:

6 – 12 months 12 – 18 months 18 – 24 months 24+ months Remove Outliers So as not to skew your averages, it’s best to remove any posts that are on the extreme ends of your word count range.

For example, TimBDesign.com has a post that includes a podcast transcript, making it over 8,300 words in length. That’s nearly 4,000 more words than the next closest post. 6- Analyze Data, Find Your Optimal Post Length Pivot tables are your friend as you transform your spreadsheet into helpful charts for visualizing the data.

Here are several ways you should consider visualizing the data:

Organic Sessions by Word Count Scatterplot Viewing the data in this way might confirm what many SEOs experience: some posts blow up and other don’t, you can’t always determine why.

There are more than a few low word count posts that do a great job at driving traffic. When we start to look at the averages, however, the picture becomes a bit more clear. Average Organic Sessions by Post Length Use your post length groupings to see which length of content performs best at driving organic traffic. For this site, that answer is posts over 1,200 words.

Average Organic Sessions by Post Age Use your post age groupings to see how older content compares to newer content at driving organic traffic. You’ll notice that for TimBDesign.com, posts between 18-24 months old are performing the best.

When you look at the next chart, you’ll understand why. During that time frame, TimBDesign.com was, on average, producing higher word count content than the other time periods analyzed.

Average Word Count by Post Age Using post age groupings we can view how the length of the content we’ve produced has changed over time. The average word count of a post was nearly 1,100 for content published between 18 and 24 months ago. Perhaps not coincidentally, the posts that fall in this date range do the best at driving organic traffic.

I’m certainly no statistical analysis expert, so I’m curious to see what you all do with the data. You can, of course, replace organic traffic with any metric you’d like – social shares, email clicks, backlinks acquired… You can use the steps in this post all the same.

Now go out there and discover what makes your content successful.

Griffin Roer is the founder of Uproer, a digital marketing agency based in St Paul, MN. Reach out to Griffin to discuss how Uproer’s SEO services can drive real business growth for your company.

The post How Long Should a Blog Post Be in 2018 appeared first on Tim B Design.

from How Long Should a Blog Post Be in 2018

[karinaibond]

What is a Natural Link? (A Good Backlink)

With tradeshow season and Q4 coming up, terms like natural links, quality links, and good links are going to be thrown around like crazy.

Whether you’re going into a client pitch, attending a search marketing conference, or your boss asks you why you aren’t getting quality links, it’s important to know (and be able to explain) all the different types of links.

This post will help you to understand each type of link, provide you with definitions, and also help you determine which types of links may be able to help boost your rankings – and which you may want to add to a disavow sheet.

Although there is normally debate on specific types of links (.edu and relevant, manually-updated directories, for example), this will be a good baseline for you to use.

What is a Natural Backlink

Natural Link

A natural link is one that occurs organically (not easily seen as being placed by your company).

Natural links don’t:

Have tracking parameters.

Exist within sponsored or paid content.

Redirect through JavaScripts or monetization tools.

A natural link exists as a reference to a piece of content, website, or source.

Unnatural Link

These are paid for, can be placed and tracked by PR firms, media buyers or are being monetized through affiliate programs, CPC campaigns, influencers, or monetization scripts.

If they are do follow, then they can potentially lead to Google taking a manual action on your site or you could get hit by Penguin because they are not earned/natural.

What are unnatural links? Links:

With tracking parameters like UTM source and medium.

Within sponsored content on a site (since search engines do not know who paid for the content to be placed).

From sites using monetization scripts since some scripts say you get paid for linking to retailers.

You can find these in the site’s code, outbound redirects, and other mappable techniques.

Semi-natural Link

On occasion, you’ll discover a mixed link pattern. It is a natural link but uses tracking parameters for example.

If you click through from an influencer who has been paid to share a link.  That link will lead to the landing page that may have the tracking parameters in place.

Bloggers, aggregators, and others who follow that link may copy and paste it directly into their site giving natural links that also have these parameters. This could result in an unnatural but organic link scheme.

To help resolve this, make sure that as a person reaches your site through a tracked link, you set a redirect to pass the parameters but also resolve to the natural page structure. (i.e. the utm_campaign redirects to a version without any utm parameters).

Now you’ll have the standard and non-tracked URL as the one they use and be able to properly attribute sales, traffic, and leads back to the original site.

You can still measure the halo effect of additional links and exposure by pulling a link acquisition report and crawling/scraping the likes, shares, and retweets from the initial influencer.

What Are Quality Backlinks

Quality backlinks are links that come from high-quality sites.

This definition will change depending on the quality of the SEO you’re talking to, but for my agency and the ones I refer clients to, quality links come from quality sites that have at least most of this criteria:

The site is niche or at least has a regularly updated section about the topic.

There are no outbound links to adult, illegal, payday, or scam sites.

You won’t be able to see that they allow sponsored content (with the exception of clearly marked advertorials).

Media kits and publicly viewable advertising sections do not have a price for or mention of text links or backlinks.

Finding them in the Google news feed is a good sign that they are trustworthy or high quality in Google’s eyes.

Acquired links will be by staff writers and not contributors.  Contributors can be bought more easily and many large publications have begun nofollowing their links. Do a Google search for Huffington Post and NoFollow and you’ll see multiple discussions from when they flipped the switch.

They come from body copy that has to be earned.  That means no blog comments, forum mentions, press releases or other things which anyone can do or buy easily.

What Makes a Good Link

A good link is different than a quality link.  It can be any type of link that can have a positive impact with a bit less risk.

The factors of a good link vs. bad link can also change based on the type of SEO you’re doing (local vs. national and country specific vs. international – Russia and Yandex vs. the UK and Google).

A good link for Yandex should be ones that are approved by the Russian government and aren’t also linking to sites that have banned content, contraband, and things that are forbidden in Yandex. Alcohol gifts, for example, could potentially be bad for Yandex traffic, but good links for other countries and search engines.

Local directories that are managed, maintained, and don’t have a submit your site option may be good for local SEOs but probably not national because of the content relevance and potential quality.  If they have a lot of age and continuously clean out old sites, dead sites and 4XX errors they may be beneficial instead of harmful.

If you notice I’m saying may or might, it’s because there is no solid yes or no.  It depends on the specific situation and website.

You could have a blogger who has great niche content but no age or authority and may quit blogging in a year.  Although it looks like a good link, it would fall under “maybe” or “OK” for me.  That is 100 percent debatable.

Then there is an established blog without a huge following and sticks to its niche.  They are not doing well in Google though with organic even though they have great content.  This would fall under “OK” for me as well.

Another could be a new blog that is content relevant but doesn’t have a ton of SEO traffic but does have a lot of engaged readers.  This would be a good link for me because they have a quality audience and if they continue down the niche path they could be a great source of traffic/sales and also pass authority from their links for SEO.

The trick with good backlinks is to determine and watch how they impact you currently and what they may do in the future.  Each site is unique and each link should be considered independently before disavowing it as bad or keeping it as good/quality.

How Can You Build Quality Backlinks

You’ll find a ton of posts on Search Engine Journal about building quality links, including a few I’ve written. (Use the search box and you’ll find them.)

What works best for me is always keeping a few things in mind when creating copy that I want to get links for.

Who have I empowered or made feel important or have an emotional reaction?

Why would that person want to share, link to or call out my content by tagging a friend in it?

Did I provide a solution to a common or unique problem?

What is unique, special, or different about how I’m presenting this content?

Which ways have I better explained, detailed, or given examples of something complex, funny, or useful?

How have I enabled people to easily share and link to this content?

Where have I advertised it so that I can keep it in front of people who can give me quality backlinks and references (sometimes this is an influencer who has a large following of bloggers and journalists)?

When someone mentions natural links, it’s all about quality. That means they can’t be easily acquired, they’re in a good SEO neighborhood, and that they are in topically related content sites that match your services, stores, site, or niche.

Focusing on quality over quantity is what can help to protect your site as Google updates. More importantly, focusing on quality can help constantly bring in relevant readers through referring sites who may also become customers, engaged readers, and a new source of backlinks and social media traffic.

Original Article

The post What is a Natural Link? (A Good Backlink) appeared first on Tokay SEO.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246812 https://www.tokayseo.com/seo/natural-link-good-backlink/

[joshuakhardy]

What is a Natural Link? (A Good Backlink)

With tradeshow season and Q4 coming up, terms like natural links, quality links, and good links are going to be thrown around like crazy.

Whether you’re going into a client pitch, attending a search marketing conference, or your boss asks you why you aren’t getting quality links, it’s important to know (and be able to explain) all the different types of links.

This post will help you to understand each type of link, provide you with definitions, and also help you determine which types of links may be able to help boost your rankings – and which you may want to add to a disavow sheet.

Although there is normally debate on specific types of links (.edu and relevant, manually-updated directories, for example), this will be a good baseline for you to use.

What is a Natural Backlink

Natural Link

A natural link is one that occurs organically (not easily seen as being placed by your company).

Natural links don’t:

Have tracking parameters.

Exist within sponsored or paid content.

Redirect through JavaScripts or monetization tools.

A natural link exists as a reference to a piece of content, website, or source.

Unnatural Link

These are paid for, can be placed and tracked by PR firms, media buyers or are being monetized through affiliate programs, CPC campaigns, influencers, or monetization scripts.

If they are do follow, then they can potentially lead to Google taking a manual action on your site or you could get hit by Penguin because they are not earned/natural.

What are unnatural links? Links:

With tracking parameters like UTM source and medium.

Within sponsored content on a site (since search engines do not know who paid for the content to be placed).

From sites using monetization scripts since some scripts say you get paid for linking to retailers.

You can find these in the site’s code, outbound redirects, and other mappable techniques.

Semi-natural Link

On occasion, you’ll discover a mixed link pattern. It is a natural link but uses tracking parameters for example.

If you click through from an influencer who has been paid to share a link.  That link will lead to the landing page that may have the tracking parameters in place.

Bloggers, aggregators, and others who follow that link may copy and paste it directly into their site giving natural links that also have these parameters. This could result in an unnatural but organic link scheme.

To help resolve this, make sure that as a person reaches your site through a tracked link, you set a redirect to pass the parameters but also resolve to the natural page structure. (i.e. the utm_campaign redirects to a version without any utm parameters).

Now you’ll have the standard and non-tracked URL as the one they use and be able to properly attribute sales, traffic, and leads back to the original site.

You can still measure the halo effect of additional links and exposure by pulling a link acquisition report and crawling/scraping the likes, shares, and retweets from the initial influencer.

What Are Quality Backlinks

Quality backlinks are links that come from high-quality sites.

This definition will change depending on the quality of the SEO you’re talking to, but for my agency and the ones I refer clients to, quality links come from quality sites that have at least most of this criteria:

The site is niche or at least has a regularly updated section about the topic.

There are no outbound links to adult, illegal, payday, or scam sites.

You won’t be able to see that they allow sponsored content (with the exception of clearly marked advertorials).

Media kits and publicly viewable advertising sections do not have a price for or mention of text links or backlinks.

Finding them in the Google news feed is a good sign that they are trustworthy or high quality in Google’s eyes.

Acquired links will be by staff writers and not contributors.  Contributors can be bought more easily and many large publications have begun nofollowing their links. Do a Google search for Huffington Post and NoFollow and you’ll see multiple discussions from when they flipped the switch.

They come from body copy that has to be earned.  That means no blog comments, forum mentions, press releases or other things which anyone can do or buy easily.

What Makes a Good Link

A good link is different than a quality link.  It can be any type of link that can have a positive impact with a bit less risk.

The factors of a good link vs. bad link can also change based on the type of SEO you’re doing (local vs. national and country specific vs. international – Russia and Yandex vs. the UK and Google).

A good link for Yandex should be ones that are approved by the Russian government and aren’t also linking to sites that have banned content, contraband, and things that are forbidden in Yandex. Alcohol gifts, for example, could potentially be bad for Yandex traffic, but good links for other countries and search engines.

Local directories that are managed, maintained, and don’t have a submit your site option may be good for local SEOs but probably not national because of the content relevance and potential quality.  If they have a lot of age and continuously clean out old sites, dead sites and 4XX errors they may be beneficial instead of harmful.

If you notice I’m saying may or might, it’s because there is no solid yes or no.  It depends on the specific situation and website.

You could have a blogger who has great niche content but no age or authority and may quit blogging in a year.  Although it looks like a good link, it would fall under “maybe” or “OK” for me.  That is 100 percent debatable.

Then there is an established blog without a huge following and sticks to its niche.  They are not doing well in Google though with organic even though they have great content.  This would fall under “OK” for me as well.

Another could be a new blog that is content relevant but doesn’t have a ton of SEO traffic but does have a lot of engaged readers.  This would be a good link for me because they have a quality audience and if they continue down the niche path they could be a great source of traffic/sales and also pass authority from their links for SEO.

The trick with good backlinks is to determine and watch how they impact you currently and what they may do in the future.  Each site is unique and each link should be considered independently before disavowing it as bad or keeping it as good/quality.

How Can You Build Quality Backlinks

You’ll find a ton of posts on Search Engine Journal about building quality links, including a few I’ve written. (Use the search box and you’ll find them.)

What works best for me is always keeping a few things in mind when creating copy that I want to get links for.

Who have I empowered or made feel important or have an emotional reaction?

Why would that person want to share, link to or call out my content by tagging a friend in it?

Did I provide a solution to a common or unique problem?

What is unique, special, or different about how I’m presenting this content?

Which ways have I better explained, detailed, or given examples of something complex, funny, or useful?

How have I enabled people to easily share and link to this content?

Where have I advertised it so that I can keep it in front of people who can give me quality backlinks and references (sometimes this is an influencer who has a large following of bloggers and journalists)?

When someone mentions natural links, it’s all about quality. That means they can’t be easily acquired, they’re in a good SEO neighborhood, and that they are in topically related content sites that match your services, stores, site, or niche.

Focusing on quality over quantity is what can help to protect your site as Google updates. More importantly, focusing on quality can help constantly bring in relevant readers through referring sites who may also become customers, engaged readers, and a new source of backlinks and social media traffic.

Original Article

The post What is a Natural Link? (A Good Backlink) appeared first on Tokay SEO.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8246812 https://www.tokayseo.com/seo/natural-link-good-backlink/

[lenakarley]

What is a Natural Link? (A Good Backlink)

With tradeshow season and Q4 coming up, terms like natural links, quality links, and good links are going to be thrown around like crazy.

Whether you’re going into a client pitch, attending a search marketing conference, or your boss asks you why you aren’t getting quality links, it’s important to know (and be able to explain) all the different types of links.

This post will help you to understand each type of link, provide you with definitions, and also help you determine which types of links may be able to help boost your rankings – and which you may want to add to a disavow sheet.

Although there is normally debate on specific types of links (.edu and relevant, manually-updated directories, for example), this will be a good baseline for you to use.

What is a Natural Backlink

Natural Link

A natural link is one that occurs organically (not easily seen as being placed by your company).

Natural links don’t:

Have tracking parameters.

Exist within sponsored or paid content.

Redirect through JavaScripts or monetization tools.

A natural link exists as a reference to a piece of content, website, or source.

Unnatural Link

These are paid for, can be placed and tracked by PR firms, media buyers or are being monetized through affiliate programs, CPC campaigns, influencers, or monetization scripts.

If they are do follow, then they can potentially lead to Google taking a manual action on your site or you could get hit by Penguin because they are not earned/natural.

What are unnatural links? Links:

With tracking parameters like UTM source and medium.

Within sponsored content on a site (since search engines do not know who paid for the content to be placed).

From sites using monetization scripts since some scripts say you get paid for linking to retailers.

You can find these in the site’s code, outbound redirects, and other mappable techniques.

Semi-natural Link

On occasion, you’ll discover a mixed link pattern. It is a natural link but uses tracking parameters for example.

If you click through from an influencer who has been paid to share a link.  That link will lead to the landing page that may have the tracking parameters in place.

Bloggers, aggregators, and others who follow that link may copy and paste it directly into their site giving natural links that also have these parameters. This could result in an unnatural but organic link scheme.

To help resolve this, make sure that as a person reaches your site through a tracked link, you set a redirect to pass the parameters but also resolve to the natural page structure. (i.e. the utm_campaign redirects to a version without any utm parameters).

Now you’ll have the standard and non-tracked URL as the one they use and be able to properly attribute sales, traffic, and leads back to the original site.

You can still measure the halo effect of additional links and exposure by pulling a link acquisition report and crawling/scraping the likes, shares, and retweets from the initial influencer.

What Are Quality Backlinks

Quality backlinks are links that come from high-quality sites.

This definition will change depending on the quality of the SEO you’re talking to, but for my agency and the ones I refer clients to, quality links come from quality sites that have at least most of this criteria:

The site is niche or at least has a regularly updated section about the topic.

There are no outbound links to adult, illegal, payday, or scam sites.

You won’t be able to see that they allow sponsored content (with the exception of clearly marked advertorials).

Media kits and publicly viewable advertising sections do not have a price for or mention of text links or backlinks.

Finding them in the Google news feed is a good sign that they are trustworthy or high quality in Google’s eyes.

Acquired links will be by staff writers and not contributors.  Contributors can be bought more easily and many large publications have begun nofollowing their links. Do a Google search for Huffington Post and NoFollow and you’ll see multiple discussions from when they flipped the switch.

They come from body copy that has to be earned.  That means no blog comments, forum mentions, press releases or other things which anyone can do or buy easily.

What Makes a Good Link

A good link is different than a quality link.  It can be any type of link that can have a positive impact with a bit less risk.

The factors of a good link vs. bad link can also change based on the type of SEO you’re doing (local vs. national and country specific vs. international – Russia and Yandex vs. the UK and Google).

A good link for Yandex should be ones that are approved by the Russian government and aren’t also linking to sites that have banned content, contraband, and things that are forbidden in Yandex. Alcohol gifts, for example, could potentially be bad for Yandex traffic, but good links for other countries and search engines.

Local directories that are managed, maintained, and don’t have a submit your site option may be good for local SEOs but probably not national because of the content relevance and potential quality.  If they have a lot of age and continuously clean out old sites, dead sites and 4XX errors they may be beneficial instead of harmful.

If you notice I’m saying may or might, it’s because there is no solid yes or no.  It depends on the specific situation and website.

You could have a blogger who has great niche content but no age or authority and may quit blogging in a year.  Although it looks like a good link, it would fall under “maybe” or “OK” for me.  That is 100 percent debatable.

Then there is an established blog without a huge following and sticks to its niche.  They are not doing well in Google though with organic even though they have great content.  This would fall under “OK” for me as well.

Another could be a new blog that is content relevant but doesn’t have a ton of SEO traffic but does have a lot of engaged readers.  This would be a good link for me because they have a quality audience and if they continue down the niche path they could be a great source of traffic/sales and also pass authority from their links for SEO.

The trick with good backlinks is to determine and watch how they impact you currently and what they may do in the future.  Each site is unique and each link should be considered independently before disavowing it as bad or keeping it as good/quality.

How Can You Build Quality Backlinks

You’ll find a ton of posts on Search Engine Journal about building quality links, including a few I’ve written. (Use the search box and you’ll find them.)

What works best for me is always keeping a few things in mind when creating copy that I want to get links for.

Who have I empowered or made feel important or have an emotional reaction?

Why would that person want to share, link to or call out my content by tagging a friend in it?

Did I provide a solution to a common or unique problem?

What is unique, special, or different about how I’m presenting this content?

Which ways have I better explained, detailed, or given examples of something complex, funny, or useful?

How have I enabled people to easily share and link to this content?

Where have I advertised it so that I can keep it in front of people who can give me quality backlinks and references (sometimes this is an influencer who has a large following of bloggers and journalists)?

When someone mentions natural links, it’s all about quality. That means they can’t be easily acquired, they’re in a good SEO neighborhood, and that they are in topically related content sites that match your services, stores, site, or niche.

Focusing on quality over quantity is what can help to protect your site as Google updates. More importantly, focusing on quality can help constantly bring in relevant readers through referring sites who may also become customers, engaged readers, and a new source of backlinks and social media traffic.

Original Article

The post What is a Natural Link? (A Good Backlink) appeared first on Tokay SEO.

from https://www.tokayseo.com/seo/natural-link-good-backlink/