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poipoipoi-2016 · 6 years

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Since Google Plus is going away, I’m going to back up Steve Yegge’s platform rant. And confirm the opening paragraph.

One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly.

Looooooong text below the cut

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it. I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't really have SREs and they make engineers pretty much do everything, which leaves almost no time for coding - though again this varies by group, so it's luck of the draw. They don't give a single shit about charity or helping the needy or community contributions or anything like that. Never comes up there, except maybe to laugh about it. Their facilities are dirt-smeared cube farms without a dime spent on decor or common meeting areas. Their pay and benefits suck, although much less so lately due to local competition from Google and Facebook. But they don't have any of our perks or extras -- they just try to match the offer-letter numbers, and that's the end of it. Their code base is a disaster, with no engineering standards whatsoever except what individual teams choose to put in place. To be fair, they do have a nice versioned-library system that we really ought to emulate, and a nice publish-subscribe system that we also have no equivalent for. But for the most part they just have a bunch of crappy tools that read and write state machine information into relational databases. We wouldn't take most of it even if it were free. I think the pubsub system and their library-shelf system were two out of the grand total of three things Amazon does better than google. I guess you could make an argument that their bias for launching early and iterating like mad is also something they do well, but you can argue it either way. They prioritize launching early over everything else, including retention and engineering discipline and a bunch of other stuff that turns out to matter in the long run. So even though it's given them some competitive advantages in the marketplace, it's created enough other problems to make it something less than a slam-dunk. But there's one thing they do really really well that pretty much makes up for ALL of their political, philosophical and technical screw-ups. Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not. Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies. So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses. His Big Mandate went something along these lines: 1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces. 2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. 3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network. 4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care. 5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions. 6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired. 7) Thank you; have a nice day! Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day. #6, however, was quite real, so people went to work. Bezos assigned a couple of Chief Bulldogs to oversee the effort and ensure forward progress, headed up by Uber-Chief Bear Bulldog Rick Dalzell. Rick is an ex-Armgy Ranger, West Point Academy graduate, ex-boxer, ex-Chief Torturer slash CIO at Wal*Mart, and is a big genial scary man who used the word "hardened interface" a lot. Rick was a walking, talking hardened interface himself, so needless to say, everyone made LOTS of forward progress and made sure Rick knew about it. Over the next couple of years, Amazon transformed internally into a service-oriented architecture. They learned a tremendous amount while effecting this transformation. There was lots of existing documentation and lore about SOAs, but at Amazon's vast scale it was about as useful as telling Indiana Jones to look both ways before crossing the street. Amazon's dev staff made a lot of discoveries along the way. A teeny tiny sampling of these discoveries included: - pager escalation gets way harder, because a ticket might bounce through 20 service calls before the real owner is identified. If each bounce goes through a team with a 15-minute response time, it can be hours before the right team finally finds out, unless you build a lot of scaffolding and metrics and reporting. - every single one of your peer teams suddenly becomes a potential DOS attacker. Nobody can make any real forward progress until very serious quotas and throttling are put in place in every single service. - monitoring and QA are the same thing. You'd never think so until you try doing a big SOA. But when your service says "oh yes, I'm fine", it may well be the case that the only thing still functioning in the server is the little component that knows how to say "I'm fine, roger roger, over and out" in a cheery droid voice. In order to tell whether the service is actually responding, you have to make individual calls. The problem continues recursively until your monitoring is doing comprehensive semantics checking of your entire range of services and data, at which point it's indistinguishable from automated QA. So they're a continuum. - if you have hundreds of services, and your code MUST communicate with other groups' code via these services, then you won't be able to find any of them without a service-discovery mechanism. And you can't have that without a service registration mechanism, which itself is another service. So Amazon has a universal service registry where you can find out reflectively (programmatically) about every service, what its APIs are, and also whether it is currently up, and where. - debugging problems with someone else's code gets a LOT harder, and is basically impossible unless there is a universal standard way to run every service in a debuggable sandbox. That's just a very small sample. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of individual learnings like these that Amazon had to discover organically. There were a lot of wacky ones around externalizing services, but not as many as you might think. Organizing into services taught teams not to trust each other in most of the same ways they're not supposed to trust external developers. This effort was still underway when I left to join Google in mid-2005, but it was pretty far advanced. From the time Bezos issued his edict through the time I left, Amazon had transformed culturally into a company that thinks about everything in a services-first fashion. It is now fundamental to how they approach all designs, including internal designs for stuff that might never see the light of day externally. At this point they don't even do it out of fear of being fired. I mean, they're still afraid of that; it's pretty much part of daily life there, working for the Dread Pirate Bezos and all. But they do services because they've come to understand that it's the Right Thing. There are without question pros and cons to the SOA approach, and some of the cons are pretty long. But overall it's the right thing because SOA-driven design enables Platforms. That's what Bezos was up to with his edict, of course. He didn't (and doesn't) care even a tiny bit about the well-being of the teams, nor about what technologies they use, nor in fact any detail whatsoever about how they go about their business unless they happen to be screwing up. But Bezos realized long before the vast majority of Amazonians that Amazon needs to be a platform. You wouldn't really think that an online bookstore needs to be an extensible, programmable platform. Would you? Well, the first big thing Bezos realized is that the infrastructure they'd built for selling and shipping books and sundry could be transformed an excellent repurposable computing platform. So now they have the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and the Amazon Elastic MapReduce, and the Amazon Relational Database Service, and a whole passel' o' other services browsable at aws.amazon.com. These services host the backends for some pretty successful companies, reddit being my personal favorite of the bunch. The other big realization he had was that he can't always build the right thing. I think Larry Tesler might have struck some kind of chord in Bezos when he said his mom couldn't use the goddamn website. It's not even super clear whose mom he was talking about, and doesn't really matter, because nobody's mom can use the goddamn website. In fact I myself find the website disturbingly daunting, and I worked there for over half a decade. I've just learned to kinda defocus my eyes and concentrate on the million or so pixels near the center of the page above the fold. I'm not really sure how Bezos came to this realization -- the insight that he can't build one product and have it be right for everyone. But it doesn't matter, because he gets it. There's actually a formal name for this phenomenon. It's called Accessibility, and it's the most important thing in the computing world. The. Most. Important. Thing. If you're sorta thinking, "huh? You mean like, blind and deaf people Accessibility?" then you're not alone, because I've come to understand that there are lots and LOTS of people just like you: people for whom this idea does not have the right Accessibility, so it hasn't been able to get through to you yet. It's not your fault for not understanding, any more than it would be your fault for being blind or deaf or motion-restricted or living with any other disability. When software -- or idea-ware for that matter -- fails to be accessible to anyone for any reason, it is the fault of the software or of the messaging of the idea. It is an Accessibility failure. Like anything else big and important in life, Accessibility has an evil twin who, jilted by the unbalanced affection displayed by their parents in their youth, has grown into an equally powerful Arch-Nemesis (yes, there's more than one nemesis to accessibility) named Security. And boy howdy are the two ever at odds. But I'll argue that Accessibility is actually more important than Security because dialing Accessibility to zero means you have no product at all, whereas dialing Security to zero can still get you a reasonably successful product such as the Playstation Network. So yeah. In case you hadn't noticed, I could actually write a book on this topic. A fat one, filled with amusing anecdotes about ants and rubber mallets at companies I've worked at. But I will never get this little rant published, and you'll never get it read, unless I start to wrap up. That one last thing that Google doesn't do well is Platforms. We don't understand platforms. We don't "get" platforms. Some of you do, but you are the minority. This has become painfully clear to me over the past six years. I was kind of hoping that competitive pressure from Microsoft and Amazon and more recently Facebook would make us wake up collectively and start doing universal services. Not in some sort of ad-hoc, half-assed way, but in more or less the same way Amazon did it: all at once, for real, no cheating, and treating it as our top priority from now on. But no. No, it's like our tenth or eleventh priority. Or fifteenth, I don't know. It's pretty low. There are a few teams who treat the idea very seriously, but most teams either don't think about it all, ever, or only a small percentage of them think about it in a very small way. It's a big stretch even to get most teams to offer a stubby service to get programmatic access to their data and computations. Most of them think they're building products. And a stubby service is a pretty pathetic service. Go back and look at that partial list of learnings from Amazon, and tell me which ones Stubby gives you out of the box. As far as I'm concerned, it's none of them. Stubby's great, but it's like parts when you need a car. A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product. Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo). We all don't get it. The Golden Rule of platforms is that you Eat Your Own Dogfood. The Google+ platform is a pathetic afterthought. We had no API at all at launch, and last I checked, we had one measly API call. One of the team members marched in and told me about it when they launched, and I asked: "So is it the Stalker API?" She got all glum and said "Yeah." I mean, I was joking, but no... the only API call we offer is to get someone's stream. So I guess the joke was on me. Microsoft has known about the Dogfood rule for at least twenty years. It's been part of their culture for a whole generation now. You don't eat People Food and give your developers Dog Food. Doing that is simply robbing your long-term platform value for short-term successes. Platforms are all about long-term thinking. Google+ is a knee-jerk reaction, a study in short-term thinking, predicated on the incorrect notion that Facebook is successful because they built a great product. But that's not why they are successful. Facebook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone. Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them. You can't do that. Not really. Not reliably. There have been precious few people in the world, over the entire history of computing, who have been able to do it reliably. Steve Jobs was one of them. We don't have a Steve Jobs here. I'm sorry, but we don't. Larry Tesler may have convinced Bezos that he was no Steve Jobs, but Bezos realized that he didn't need to be a Steve Jobs in order to provide everyone with the right products: interfaces and workflows that they liked and felt at ease with. He just needed to enable third-party developers to do it, and it would happen automatically. I apologize to those (many) of you for whom all this stuff I'm saying is incredibly obvious, because yeah. It's incredibly frigging obvious. Except we're not doing it. We don't get Platforms, and we don't get Accessibility. The two are basically the same thing, because platforms solve accessibility. A platform is accessibility. So yeah, Microsoft gets it. And you know as well as I do how surprising that is, because they don't "get" much of anything, really. But they understand platforms as a purely accidental outgrowth of having started life in the business of providing platforms. So they have thirty-plus years of learning in this space. And if you go to msdn.com, and spend some time browsing, and you've never seen it before, prepare to be amazed. Because it's staggeringly huge. They have thousands, and thousands, and THOUSANDS of API calls. They have a HUGE platform. Too big in fact, because they can't design for squat, but at least they're doing it. Amazon gets it. Amazon's AWS (aws.amazon.com) is incredible. Just go look at it. Click around. It's embarrassing. We don't have any of that stuff. Apple gets it, obviously. They've made some fundamentally non-open choices, particularly around their mobile platform. But they understand accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development and they eat their dogfood. And you know what? They make pretty good dogfood. Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft's, and have been since time immemorial. Facebook gets it. That's what really worries me. That's what got me off my lazy butt to write this thing. I hate blogging. I hate... plussing, or whatever it's called when you do a massive rant in Google+ even though it's a terrible venue for it but you do it anyway because in the end you really do want Google to be successful. And I do! I mean, Facebook wants me there, and it'd be pretty easy to just go. But Google is home, so I'm insisting that we have this little family intervention, uncomfortable as it might be. After you've marveled at the platform offerings of Microsoft and Amazon, and Facebook I guess (I didn't look because I didn't want to get too depressed), head over to developers.google.com and browse a little. Pretty big difference, eh? It's like what your fifth-grade nephew might mock up if he were doing an assignment to demonstrate what a big powerful platform company might be building if all they had, resource-wise, was one fifth grader. Please don't get me wrong here -- I know for a fact that the dev-rel team has had to FIGHT to get even this much available externally. They're kicking ass as far as I'm concerned, because they DO get platforms, and they are struggling heroically to try to create one in an environment that is at best platform-apathetic, and at worst often openly hostile to the idea. I'm just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider. It looks childish. Where's the Maps APIs in there for Christ's sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. And the APIs for everything I clicked were... they were paltry. They were obviously dog food. Not even good organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it's all snouts and horse hooves. And also don't get me wrong about Google+. They're far from the only offenders. This is a cultural thing. What we have going on internally is basically a war, with the underdog minority Platformers fighting a more or less losing battle against the Mighty Funded Confident Producters. Any teams that have successfully internalized the notion that they should be externally programmable platforms from the ground up are underdogs -- Maps and Docs come to mind, and I know GMail is making overtures in that direction. But it's hard for them to get funding for it because it's not part of our culture. Maestro's funding is a feeble thing compared to the gargantuan Microsoft Office programming platform: it's a fluffy rabbit versus a T-Rex. The Docs team knows they'll never be competitive with Office until they can match its scripting facilities, but they're not getting any resource love. I mean, I assume they're not, given that Apps Script only works in Spreadsheet right now, and it doesn't even have keyboard shortcuts as part of its API. That team looks pretty unloved to me. Ironically enough, Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace. But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a killer app. Facebook -- that is, the stock service they offer with walls and friends and such -- is the killer app for the Facebook Platform. And it is a very serious mistake to conclude that the Facebook App could have been anywhere near as successful without the Facebook Platform. You know how people are always saying Google is arrogant? I'm a Googler, so I get as irritated as you do when people say that. We're not arrogant, by and large. We're, like, 99% Arrogance-Free. I did start this post -- if you'll reach back into distant memory -- by describing Google as "doing everything right". We do mean well, and for the most part when people say we're arrogant it's because we didn't hire them, or they're unhappy with our policies, or something along those lines. They're inferring arrogance because it makes them feel better. But when we take the stance that we know how to design the perfect product for everyone, and believe you me, I hear that a lot, then we're being fools. You can attribute it to arrogance, or naivete, or whatever -- it doesn't matter in the end, because it's foolishness. There IS no perfect product for everyone. And so we wind up with a browser that doesn't let you set the default font size. Talk about an affront to Accessibility. I mean, as I get older I'm actually going blind. For real. I've been nearsighted all my life, and once you hit 40 years old you stop being able to see things up close. So font selection becomes this life-or-death thing: it can lock you out of the product completely. But the Chrome team is flat-out arrogant here: they want to build a zero-configuration product, and they're quite brazen about it, and Fuck You if you're blind or deaf or whatever. Hit Ctrl-+ on every single page visit for the rest of your life. It's not just them. It's everyone. The problem is that we're a Product Company through and through. We built a successful product with broad appeal -- our search, that is -- and that wild success has biased us. Amazon was a product company too, so it took an out-of-band force to make Bezos understand the need for a platform. That force was their evaporating margins; he was cornered and had to think of a way out. But all he had was a bunch of engineers and all these computers... if only they could be monetized somehow... you can see how he arrived at AWS, in hindsight. Microsoft started out as a platform, so they've just had lots of practice at it. Facebook, though: they worry me. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure they started off as a Product and they rode that success pretty far. So I'm not sure exactly how they made the transition to a platform. It was a relatively long time ago, since they had to be a platform before (now very old) things like Mafia Wars could come along. Maybe they just looked at us and asked: "How can we beat Google? What are they missing?" The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up. We don't do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don't do external ones. This means that the "not getting it" is endemic across the company: the PMs don't get it, the engineers don't get it, the product teams don't get it, nobody gets it. Even if individuals do, even if YOU do, it doesn't matter one bit unless we're treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can't keep launching products and pretending we'll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later. We've tried that and it's not working. The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front. I'm not saying it's too late for us, but the longer we wait, the closer we get to being Too Late. I honestly don't know how to wrap this up. I've said pretty much everything I came here to say today. This post has been six years in the making. I'm sorry if I wasn't gentle enough, or if I misrepresented some product or team or person, or if we're actually doing LOTS of platform stuff and it just so happens that I and everyone I ever talk to has just never heard about it. I'm sorry. But we've gotta start doing this right.

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artbyjenisse · 7 years

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Creative Talent Network Expo. CTNX 2017 Review

I have been going to CTN for about four years now, and this will probably be my last year at the event.

CTNX is one of the very few events (I’ll talk about the others later) that are geared to the animation industry.

Recruiters. The recruiters are all super nice and will answer your questions about the hiring process, studio life, what they like to look for, ect and yes you can connect with them on LinkedIn but I’ve had more than a few admit they don’t actually go to their LinkedIn profiles often. They also don’t act ready to give you an e-mail to contact them by, probably because they don’t want to be spammed with the whole ‘dude I am poor and need a job, pls gimme one.’ Which I get I do, but maybe I just want to drop them a line when I’ve updated my portfolio? Or see if they know a good coffee shop nearby? Also when it comes to the line ‘hey can you get me a job’ they will always direct you to the company job page, because yes you have to go through that process.

Yes, there are big studios there. Disney, DreamWorks, Nickelodeon, Sony Pictures, Blue Sky, Pixar, Blizzard, Hasbro, they are always there. I have yet to see Cartoon Network there though, I’m sure there are reasons they are just unknown to me. Disney and Pixar do offer a portfolio review but only if you a specific ticket then sign up for a review by a specific date, and your review is like 15-20 minutes long. The other studios have turned to doing reviews by sign up onsite or you can wait in line (like I did for DreamWorks). But go talk to small studios, they are usually nicer.

And yes the animations schools are there, CalArts, Animation Mentor, Pasadena ArtCenter, SCAD has been there in the past, they be there. I have already graduated college and am drowning in debt from it but it’s still good to talk to these places because sometimes you can get info on workshops you can attend online or in person. CalArts does a few and I’ve heard SCAD does, but alas that’s all I know. I did try to talk to CalArts about their Visual Development Portfolio workshop they do in the summer… but the guy at the table was not only on the phone the whole ten minutes I was there patiently waiting to ask him about it-but you could just feel the whole ‘I’d rather be anywhere but here’ vibe coming off him. You are there to do a job, please do it.

Artists. Talk to the artist. DO IT. A LOT of well-known artists go to this event and either have a table to sell their stuff or they are doing workshops/panels. Many of them are freelancers and they are happy to answer your art questions, give advice, and yes they might look at your portfolio. I recommend you make a connection/network with them and not the big studios so much. You’re learn more from the artists themselves, and they are more ready to really talk with you than most of the studio staff I ran into (I think the studio staff gets burned out fast from all the gimme-a-job talk). I will usually try go talk to about 5-10 artists, sometimes it’s hard because their tables are flooded with other fans, but hey give it a try. Find artists who do what you want to do and just talk to them, they won’t bite.

Examples: I talked to Ty Carter while I was there and he is a really cool guy, I’m one of his patreons so I made it a point to thank him in person for what he does on patreon because it helps me in my background work. I also talked to Casey Robin and asked for advice on approaching boutiques/shops so I could maybe do a few pop-up shows, because she does that. Another artists I talked with was Elsa Chang, I was asking how she balancing her work at the studio with all the shows she does.

The Venue. So this event is held every year at the Los Angeles Marriott Burbank Airport. It’s right across the street from the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, CA. The hotel is very nice, we stayed there this year, friendly staff, thick walls so you don’t hear the airplanes taking off, large rooms, soft beds (YAY!), and it does have a small convention center attached to it. It’s easy to go up to the room and leave stuff there or just chill for a bit.

Now that you’ve read all that, let me tell you the bad things about CTNX.

Price. This event is A LOT of money. I bought the three day floor pass and spent like $97 on it. A VIP Pass will run you upwards of $300. In my opinion, that’s too much money for what little you get (I’ve been a VIP in the past). On top of what you pay for your ticket, you also pay for parking (discounted but still), and some of the other special events are a separate ticket price. I really don’t feel this event is worth the price tag it comes with.

Venue. Yes, it’s at a hotel. BUT they need to move the convention. It has gotten too big for the Marriott. In the Marriott’s separate convention space they have the workshops, VIP lounge area, and the WACOM work station-which sucked because I wanted to talk to WACOM and couldn’t. They also have workshops and panels in the rooms at the convention center AND they use pretty much all the meeting rooms in the hotel itself at the same time. It can be confusing to navigate all this and find the workshop or whatever that you want to attend.

There is a tent that takes up half the parking lot, that’s where all the vendors and studios are. The tent does NOT work. The ales they create are smaller than your average artist alley ales way and it gets really crowded around the tables, making walking through next to impossible. And when studios are giving portfolio reviews, the lines are a problem and they typically make you go outside to wait and come in. It gets loud and hot as hell. They need to have two separate tents, in my opinion, one for the studios and the other for the artists.

Lack of communication and organization. This a reoccurring problem I’ve seen at the show. When will the schedule be on the webpage? Usually two weeks before the event starts if you’re lucky. What artists/studios will be there? You might find out a month before. Might. Wanna take the shuttle to the Center Stage Gallery? Good luck! Not only is the shuttle spot not clearly marked until the end of day two, but even the info booth admitted, ‘it’s not very reliable.’ First day in and you can’t find the ‘theater’? Oh well that’s the Pasadena Room in the hotel lobby, the sign just isn’t up and it’s not listed as such on the program.

One thing they did this year that really annoyed me was an e-mail they sent out about the Disney pre-show party, you got an e-mail with an excel spreadsheet and you’re told to check and see if you got on the list. They sent that e-mail to everyone. No. You should only send that to the people who actually got in. Don’t get me all excited about something only to tell me I’m not on the list. Just don’t send it do me if I didn’t get in. It’s not that difficult.

As I said at the start, this is probably my last year going to CTN. I just don’t feel the event is worth it for me.

What other events are there?

I know of two:

ACM SIGGRAPH. I haven’t been to this show, SIGGRAPH is for those of you who do more of the tech side of things. Computer driven graphics, interactive design, VFXs (so I hear), 3D modeling, things like that. This event is held up in Vancouver around the August-September time frame so you’ll want a passport. They do also have one in Asia.

Ground Zero Animation Expo. This event is relatively new and I haven’t gone yet, but I’m really thinking about going this year. In it’s 3rd year, GZAExpo will be in Santa Ana this June. It’s been in Anaheim in the past. Admission and parking are free and while there is a separate charge for panels and stuff, it only starts at $15. Again, I might be going to this show in 2018 to see what it’s all about.

Have you been to CTNX? What are your thoughts about it?

Know of any other events like it? Spread the love!

#ctnx #my cons

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t-baba · 5 years

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The frontend highlights of 2019

#421 — December 18, 2019

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Frontend Focus

🚀 To close out the year, this week we're looking back over the past twelve months and linking to some of the top articles, stories, and tutorials that we've shared and that you've clicked on the most. Consider this the highlights reel of all things frontend in 2019. (Oh, and we also have our usual Tip of the Week at the end of the issue so be sure to scroll down for that).

As ever, a big thanks for supporting us and reading the newsletter throughout the year — and we look forward to keeping you up-to-date in the next decade! We'll be back with our next roundup in early January. — Chris Brandrick

📈 Our most popular links of 2019:

1. The Front-End Developer Handbook 2019 — This detailed guide always proves popular, and this year was no different. This resource was updated back in April and is packed with useful resources, learning materials and dev tools. It remains a worthwhile reference.

Cody Lindley

2. 10 HTML Elements You Didn't Know You Needed — This quick look at a handful of HTML elements highlights some stuff you may not have known existed, including the <output>, <meter>, and <progress> tags.

Emma Wedekind

3. Inside Microsoft’s Surprise Decision to Work with Google on its Edge Browser — One of the biggest surprises in the browser landscape this year was Microsoft's decision to switch over to using Chromium as the engine behind their Edge browser. This inside story behind the how and why of such a "monumental decision" got plenty of attention. The first 'full release' of this new browser is expected in early 2020.

Tom Warren

How to Run a Customer-Focused Product Launch — At CircleCI, we use a customer-centric launch strategy to gather feedback early and often in the product development cycle, and you should too.

CircleCI sponsor

4. The Great Divide in Front-End Development Skills — Published back in January, this interesting think piece shares what Chris Coyier (of CSS-Tricks fame) perceives as a widening gulf between different types of frontend devs. Is there such a thing as a frontend developer or are we all moving towards becoming either UX engineers or JavaScript developers?

Chris Coyier

5. The State of CSS 2019 — The results from the first ever 'State of CSS' survey dropped in June. It asked over 10,000 developers what CSS features and tools they favoured. It's still worth digging into all the data, as you'll gain a broad awareness of what people are using in practice as CSS evolves.

Sacha Greif and Raphaël Benitte

6. W3C Approved WebAuthn as the Web Standard for Password-Free Logins — Back in March the W3C shared news that the Web Authentication API (WebAuthn) had become an official web standard for password-free logins on the web. Since then support for the security-focused standard has only been growing, with browsers such as Safari and Firefox, and big names like Twitter and eBay all adding support.

Emil Protalinski

7. A Front-End Performance Checklist for 2019 — Another from January. This checklist has been publishing for several years now and was updated once again with fresh advice for 2019 (I'd imagine we'll probably see a 2020 update in a few weeks). It highlights issues you might need to consider to ensure that response times are fast, user interaction is smooth and your sites don’t drain bandwidth. It's also available in a 'tickable' PDF format.

Smashing Magazine

💻 Jobs

Product Designer - Komoot (Remote Position) — We're looking for a talented product designer to take over the design of one of our core products on all platforms (Web, iOS, Android).

Komoot

Frontend Engineer (Stockholm) — Join an interactive presentation service, Stockholm based, product-first, gender-equal, inclusive and profitable startup with customers from over 150 countries.

Mentimeter

Find a Job Through Vettery — Make a profile, name your salary, and connect with hiring managers from top employers. Vettery is completely free for job seekers.

Vettery

📊 The most popular tutorials of 2019

The Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously — “One of the most impactful things we can do to improve page performance and resilience is to load CSS in a way that does not delay page rendering”

Scott Jehl

Things We Can’t (Yet) Do In CSS — A look at common layout patterns that aren't achievable just yet in currently widely supported CSS standards, plus a review of the forthcoming CSS specs that might enable them in future.

Rachel Andrew

My Favorite CSS Hack — * { border: 1px solid red } is a classic 'trick' for debugging CSS and HTML issues by putting borders around every element. This well-received tip takes things a few extra steps, however, and helps you get a better overview, particularly with nested elements.

Gajus Kuizinas

Data Sharing - A History — From Tim Berners-Lee to request-response HTML interfaces, from e-commerce to CDN, to the event-driven data economy of today, this article takes a tour around the way we handle data.

Ably sponsor

How To Align Things In CSS — There are a few ways to align elements in CSS. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains what they are with some tips to help you remember which to use and why.

Smashing Magazine

The Current State of Styling select in 2019 — If you’ve ever tried styling form controls with CSS, you’ve probably had a bad time (at least initially). Drop-down select elements are particularly thorny. Here’s a look at the basics and what developers really want.

Chris Coyier

Optimizing Performance With Resource Hints — Resource Hints are a simple and effective way for frontend developers to help the browser stay one step ahead of the user and keep pages fast by doing things like DNS prefetching.

Drew McLellan

⚙️ The most popular code examples & demos of 2019

CSS Grid: Excel Spreadsheet — Recreating the Excel user interface using CSS Grid.

Olivia Ng

Infinite Burger — Drag/resize the browser window and the burger will grow, thanks to the background-repeat: round property. …and now I’m hungry.

Thiyagaraj T

CSS Card Hover Effects — A nice hover effect for a card style element.

Jhonier Riascos Zapata

Tried & True Productivity Tips from 25 React Experts

Progress KendoReact sponsor

CSS Effects Snippets — A nice collection of CSS animations, with one-click copy and paste, created with Vue.

Emil Kowalski

Pure CSS: Bob Ross Doing the Floss, Like a Boss — As Bob Ross once said: “The secret to doing anything is believing that you can do it….even in CSS”. Okay, we may have added that last bit, but this is a fun little demo.

Steve Gardner

augmented-ui: A 'Futuristic, Cyberpunk-Inspired' UI Library — The repo is here, and you can see examples of the look here.

PropJockey

💡 Tip of the Week

supported by

Meaningful Formatting

While most of us use the '-' (dash) character as a way of denoting "negative" values, it is not accessible to screen readers. In order for assistive technologies to return the intended meaning, '&minus' should be used instead.

The following examples show how a screen reader would read out currencies:

$10 will read as "ten dollars"

-$10 will read as "ten dollars"

−$10 will read as "minus ten dollars"

This can get a bit more complicated when using the Intl.NumberFormat API as it naturally returns a dash. In order to return an accessible value one should replace the dash with "&minus" as shown below:

new Intl.NumberFormat('en-US', {style: 'currency', currency: 'USD'}).format(-10).replace(/-/, '−')

This Tip of the Week is sponsored by Deque, the makers of axe. Build accessibility into your dev process and automatically catch tons of accessibility bugs with axe. Catch even more with axe Pro.

And in the Xmas spirit of sharing and giving, we just want to give a quick shout out to Web Tools Weekly, a newsletter run by Louis Lazaris that focuses on the tooling side of front-end development.

by via Frontend Focus https://ift.tt/2rahjpS

#HTML5 Branding #HTML5 Weekly

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pinelife3 · 5 years

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Sadness

The treatment of the breaking of the fourth wall in Fleabag is the most compelling thing I’ve seen all year. Throughout the first season, our protagonist Fleabag (played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge who also writes the show) would look at the camera to make witty asides. Usually a sarcastic remark or eye roll to hammer home that she’s sardonic, insincere, perhaps a little underhanded.

You’ve probably noticed how if you’re in a one-on-one conversation, it’s hard to rag on someone but that in a group it works (because you can pretend it’s good natured humour rather than a scathing attack on their very existence). In Fleabag, the breaking of the fourth wall is a way for Fleabag to safely ridicule whoever she’s speaking to. It’s also a succinct way of delivering backstory, revealing her intentions, and getting us on side. These interactions with the fourth wall are pretty standard, see: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Amélie, House of Cards, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Shakespearean asides, American Psycho. It’s an accepted device. But then in season two, when Fleabag speaks to us, someone takes notice, someone spots her dipping out of their diegetic reality as she speaks to us in ours.

I thrilled at this.

Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen everything - but I’d never seen this before. This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen on a TV show (forget the Red Wedding). This is a masterful trick, and great storytelling all at once - it demolishes a literary device. But most of the coverage of Fleabag has focused on how sad the show is:

People seem to like that: they like being crushed, enjoy being devastated. Why is that?

I’ve recently cried over two cowboy related things: Brokeback Mountain and Red Dead Redemption 2.

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I cried when I finished Red Dead Redemption 2 because I love Arthur Morgan so much: he was just the sweetest guy, and I was sad the story was over because we can’t go fishing anymore, or crash his horse into trees and fall, or fight gators in the swamps, or brush his horse while we cruise around the old west. I just felt so wistful for his life and the idea of bad guys working hard to be good in a changing world.

And then I cried at the end of Brokeback Mountain because it is objectively very sad. The shirts tucked inside each other which Jack kept all those years. The possibility that Jack didn’t know how much Ennis loved him. The life they could have had together, and how much they loved each other - but the families and relationships they destroyed along the way as well, because no one ever said what they felt.

I really liked both Brokeback and Red Dead, because they have great stories and characters. In Red Dead, I have so many fond memories - and for that reason it made me feel strong emotions. But I don’t like Red Dead because it made me feel strong emotions. I don’t like Brokeback because it was ‘crushing’ and/or ‘devastating’ - it was enjoyable because it was a beautiful story with tragic, poignant elements. I like the story - not that it made me cry. Most Fleabag reviews seem to focus on the sadness it made the audience feel as a way to recommend it to people.

Watch Fleabag - it will make you feel something.

Prepare to emote because Fleabag is preternaturally sad.

The discourse around the show on Reddit is similar:

Pffft want to feel really sad? Check out this scene from Synecdoche, New York:

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It’s very moving, kind of irresistibly so. And I think that’s because it’s calling out to that scared, bitter, self-pitying part of you which is always cringing in the shadows, waiting for someone to invite it out of the garage into the living room. This speech is designed to frighten you: you’ll make misssssstakesss and ruin your life. You won’t even know you’re doing it until it’ssssss toooooo late. You might think your life is nice - but that’sssssssssssss only because you haven’t ssssssssssseen how bad it will get. It’s giving you permission to feel bad without providing any reason to feel bad, and then it’s allowing you to wallow in that bad feeling. It’s poison.

I promise you, for 99% of people who watched Synecdoche, New York , life is not that bad. People in horrible, war torn places where they aren’t able to watch Charlie Kaufman films because no one dubs indie movies in Kurdish have it bad - and not just because they’re missing out on great films, but because they essentially live in a sandier version of Hell. Haven’t you ever sat in the sun with a dog and seen it look back at you and felt a perfect connection? Haven’t you ever fallen asleep, perfectly comfortable, tucked in beside someone you love? Haven’t you ever eaten pancakes with ice cream, or seen a huge mountain, or been really cold and then gotten into a warm bath? Haven’t you ever seen a baby fake-crying on the tram and then its mum tickles it under the chin and it laughs, and you see everyone around you smile because babies are so pure? Come on! You’re not Othello. Your life is pretty nice. Even Othello’s life was pretty nice right up until the end.

Pretty nice.

But boring. Right?

Pancakes? Cuddles?

How am I to thrill at sunsets and smiling babies?

Good. Now I’m sad again.

And if the realisation that you don’t have anything to be sad about (except for the ordinariness of the pleasures in your life) didn’t make you sad, check out this compilation of the 10 most depressing moments in Bojack Horseman (ranked in order from least depressing to most depressing!).

A major inconvenience of modern life is that most of us have supremely comfortable, happy, safe lives. And when something goes wrong, you can’t go on a tragic rampage and tear out your own eyes, beat your breast, or wail on the moor in a thunderstorm - even though that may be what you feel like doing.

Work sucks, no one respects me, and I messed up that section of the Excel spreadsheet so maybe they are right to not respect me: take me to a moor where my tears can blend with rain and my howls will be swallowed by the wind!

Ordinary people don’t get to live in a tragedy - and besides, there aren’t as many moors around as literature might have you believe. The most you can do usually is make a scene at a family dinner or isolate yourself at a party and then get drunk and walk home crying. Who would write a sweeping, romantic story about an embarrassing fuck up walking home drunk, feeling sorry for themselves.

Oh.

Wait:

And Now For That 2000 Year Old Mystery

Aristotle’s Poetics is the source of the word catharsis (in italics because it’s Greek which is the way I was taught to do it in high school - if only there were Greecian-alics, am I right?), which in common parlance today basically means any kind of dramatic release of emotions. Kickboxing is cathartic. Getting your eyebrows waxed is cathartic. Crying during an emotional episode of a TV show is cathartic.

Because the word appeared in Poetics, it's original usage related to the theatre, in particular the experience of an audience watching a tragedy: the release of emotions they feel in watching things go seriously wrong for the hero. For this reason, catharsis is often tied to anagnorisis - the moment of tragic realisation.

Oh god I killed my father and married my mother.

Oh god, that’s my son’s head on the pike, not the head of a mountain lion.

Oh god, remember when I messed up that bit of the spreadsheet and everyone knew it was me. Existence truly is pain.

You get the idea. It’s not enough that the protagonist is a fuck up: that matter needs to be brought to their attention and they need to reflect on it.

(A more proper (read: academic) definition of catharsis is: “an imitation of an action ‘with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.’” The emotions the audience feel echo what the people on stage are feeling. The jump scare in a horror movie scares the character on screen and the audience watching at home.)

Aristotle never clearly defined catharsis. So for all this time (2000+ years) people have been trying to infer what he meant from a couple of references to a pretty slippery concept. Even though the general public has their understanding of the word, academics still cannot agree on a definition. But we know what it means, roughly, because we’ve all experienced it.

Over the weekend I watched Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s other other TV show (not Killing Eve) which had an exchange between an artist and a drunk girl on sadness and how it factors into art:

Character 1: He’s my muse!

Character 2: Your muse?

...

Character 2: Like an artist's muse?!

Character 1: Yes, he is! You think meeting someone like Colin happens to artists all the time?! He gives so much.

Character 2: Yeah, sure, and you just lap it up and just slap it on a canvas.

Character 1: Pardon?

Character 2: "His pain is so beautiful." You're using him to indulge yourself.

Character 1: I am indulging? And what is this?

Character 2: This is a $4 bottle of wine.

...

Character 2: Sorry if I upset you, Melody.

Character 1: You don't upset me. You bore me. All you seem to want to do is drink and wank and drink and wank.

Character 2: Well, at least I don't have to wank other people's pain onto a canvas, and then shove it in people's faces and call it "my art."

Character 2 in this scene is played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. I can’t be bothered to explain why it’s relevant.

For the eternity of human brains, or at least for as long as preserved creativity, the most comfortable, secure people in the world have tried to experience the things tragic victims feel - perhaps so they can briefly know what it feels like to be a romantic figure struggling in an unjust world. A passport to feelings and drama we aren’t permitted in every day life. Catharsis is the word to express the reaction, but what do we call an audience who seeks out that sensation? Catharsis chasers?

It’s not insightful to say that people like to watch Fast & Furious movies because they’re exciting and perhaps audiences enjoy that excitement because their own lives are un-exciting. But commending a thing because it will make you sad seems aberrant in some way. A fast and dangerous car that will make you miserable. A roller coaster that will make you depressed. An incredible shootout in the streets of LA that will make you sob in the bathroom cubicle at work every time you think about it. I can’t explain the drive, but like Aristotle I will invent a new word, so that academics can never know what I meant but will still write at great length about it, so that it will slip into common parlance and be horribly misused until eventually, 2000 years from now, a girl can waffle on about it on her blog. And the word will be: scartharsio. Or maybe scorpithoniacs? Or sarcastiharsics?

Sadness is entertainment for a scartharsio.

ALL TIME HALL OF FAME: WAILING WOMEN AND MOORS

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Nobody knows what it’s like to be me, a sad woman who weeps on moors!

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I’m not being overly dramatic!

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#Fleabag #phoebe waller-bridge #bojack horseman #kate bush #wuthering heights #sense and sensibility #ang lee #kate winslet #othello #synecdoche new york #charlie kaufman #brokeback mountain #red dead redemption 2

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riichardwilson · 4 years

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The Best CRM Software for 2020

June 24, 2020 15+ min read

This story originally appeared on PCMag

What is CRM software?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is more than initiating contact with potential leads. It involves nurturing contacts and building loyalty while maintaining a dynamic repository of contact information and client history. Making this information accessible for collaborative teams and piping it out to other business software solutions via smart integrations is the logical next step.

User experience (UX) has become more important than ever, and being able to efficiently manage a businesses’ relationship with customers through the entire sales and after-sales process is a key consideration. For small to midsize businesses (SMBs) trying to emulate CRM functionality on a large and unwieldy spreadsheet could lead to a lot of confusion and redundancy. CRM solutions are easier to use than spreadsheets, they also do more than contain user and contact information because they can dynamically create calendar events and set reminders. CRM software often integrates messaging and phone calling functionality, usually with recorded conversations that can be used to track and document customer sentiment and better insights.

A good CRM solution records your customers’ contact information and remembers the details of your relationship and every interaction — whether by phone or email, and nowadays across other channels such as social media or even your customer help desk.

This information is a goldmine of opportunity, letting you identify prospects for up-sell or cross-sell, convert existing customers to new products or services, target new marketing agency, or even track invoices. The software is also a fail-safe, preventing sales people from chasing the same prospect. Choosing the right CRM software for your business can dramatically improve your team’s collaboration and productivity, increase sales, and heighten customer satisfaction.

In its report, “CRM Software Market Research Report – Global Forecast to 2023,” Market research firm Market Research Future forecasts the CRM market to grow up to 35 billion by 2023. In addition, the CRM market’s compound annual growth rate (CAGR) will be 6 percent between 2017 and 2023, according to the report. A key area for CRM growth in 2018 and 2019 will be the addition of artificial intelligence (AI) to leading CRM platforms. Manufacturers like Salesforce and Microsoft are either building their own AI engines to enhance their CRM capabilities or partnering with the likes of IBM’s Watson and similiar players to integrate AI’s benefits into their offerings. This will have significant impact in any CRM’s ability to parse data and draw new insights from all kinds of customer interactions, and that has a direct impact on CRM revenue as market research firm, Statista shows us, details below.

The revenue impact of AI adoption in CRM

Such a revenue impact is possible because AI-enhanced CRM is literally a quantum leap ahead of what many companies still call customer relationship management.

Even now, employees might use a spreadsheet to simply pass on information about past sales via email threads. Or worse, such information is often left to casual word of mouth, which means it’s often missing when needed or it’s entirely forgotten. CRM software keeps this information in one place, efficiently organizes it, and makes it possible to take immediate action with it. Such actions can include sending a loyal customer a gift card on their birthday or offering an up-sell opportunity to a platform from which you know their business can benefit (based on previous conversations). It’s also a great way to woo back inactive customers. The key is to select the software that’s right for the way your team works. The last thing you want is to see employees fighting new software instead of interacting with the customer.

CRM software isn’t just about tracking and maintaining contact information. While most look to CRM software as primarily a sales tool, it’s moved beyond that space. marketing agency and customer service departments can dramatically improve their offerings and operations with CRM as well by using its data to more effectively segment demographics and record and reuse customer incident information. CRM software also helps coordinate interdepartmental actions. For example, the sales team can take advantage of something a customer service representative discovered in a separate transaction. Depending upon the software you choose, you can set and measure sales goals, deliver and track email marketing campaigns, or keep an eye on what people are saying on social media.

Pricing and add-ons

Price can be a significant factor when evaluating CRM software, but that analysis should focus on more than just the upfront costs. Most of the CRM software we looked at offers per-user pricing but it’s important to check what’s included in that price and which features you actually need.

Training can eat up a chunk of the budget as can upgrades and ongoing support. Consider how much it would cost to integrate the software with existing systems and whether or not you would need additional equipment. That mobile implementation looks slick on the vendor’s website, but will it still look that slick once you’ve designed the customized CRM forms your business will use every day? Does it mean the sales or customer service teams need new smartphones or maybe even tablets? These costs can quickly add up.

Taking the time investment into consideration is why trying out more than one program is key. This way, you can choose the software that will be most efficient for your company. If you have the resources to train and onboard staff and customize the software yourself, then eventually it will start to work for you.

Smaller teams can’t afford to invest in software that asks a lot up front; you need something that will be up and running in a day in most cases. Read the support documentation and you’ll get an idea of setup complexity and any issues you might bump into with the software you already have. Use the free evaluation period to try out important features: import data, add information manually, connect accounts, and assign tasks to other users. Take note of how helpful the software is and whether or not it creates more work. Keep track of how often you have to consult the help system to complete a basic task.

One of the continuing trends we’re seeing with CRM solutions is that they are being consolidated into larger product ecosystems. Some products, like the venerable Zoho CRM, aren’t just the flagship suite of solutions in their ecosystem, they set the template for the rest of the solutions the vendor offers. Once a notable standalone solution, Base CRM, was acquired by Zendesk and converted into Zendesk Sell which is a more integrated solution that can feed into Zendesk’s impressive array customer support-driven SMB solutions. Freshsales CRM similarly provides a lightweight and simple SMB-focused CRM solution while offering expanded functionality. This includes providing integrations, workflow automation, and sales intelligence features. Freshsales CRM also synchs nicely with Freshcaller and Freshdesk solutions. A distinct convenience for businesses using those solutions.

Other CRM solutions like Sales Creatio have refined their user interfaces to enable users to switch on specific business processes. Sales Creatio makes it possible to toggle between marketing agency, Sales, and Service functioning as a more dynamic control center for running various facets of CRM.

SMBs need to play the long game with their choice of CRM solutions. For growth stage companies or businesses looking at expansion should start analyzing which integrations will make sense in the future.

Analysis to boost adoption

Taking the time to analyze not only what a prospective CRM can do, but also what you need any CRM to do in your particular sales cycle is key, and not just to get the best price on your investment. CRM has suffered from adoption problems in many companies that simply buy these tools and bolt them onto an existing sales workflow. Do that, and your sales people and even their managers, are likely to see the system as just another hurdle they need to overcome on their never-ending quest for a commission rather than a powerful tool to help them fulfill that quest more quickly.

As CRM software has grown more sophisticated, it has branched out into many different directions. There are plenty of options for implementing your CRM in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model or for deploying it on-premises by using your own server. Cloud-based CRM is rapidly growing in popularity because it means you can quickly get up to speed and don’t have to worry about managing software on your own servers, which adds complexity and cost. You can look for the software that has deep hooks into social media management and analytics platforms so you can record customer interactions on Facebook or Twitter. Plus, you should definitely consider CRM software that integrates with your business phone system so you can capture call and conversation information. Look closely at your business processes, discuss with employees what they need and want, and contrast that with your bottom line. By doing so, you’ll quickly have an accurate picture of the right CRM software for you.

It’s tempting to forgo this homework and simply pay for one of the big, all-inclusive CRM software packages just to have access to every feature you might need now or in the future. But that approach will almost certainly wind up costing you more in both time and money, while probably delivering less flexibility than you’d expect. That’s because these large CRM software packages are often platforms rather than tools. This means that those myriad features they advertise are really the product of integrating with a host of third-party solution providers, not options you can simply turn on. Third-party integration means not only added licensing dollars but also new integration costs.

A better approach is to understand how your employees have to use the software as well as how they want to use it. Think about what tools your team is currently using and what processes they follow. Figure out how those tasks map to the CRM software you’re evaluating. Consider what some of the most common tasks are. For example, if the users have to dig through menus and submenus every single time they want to log a call or email, then the tool will actually complicate their jobs instead of simplify them. More and more CRM tools are also combining the email and sales experience into a single smart inbox or centralized dashboard view to manage all or most daily communications and tasks, without leaving the CRM tool.

As with any piece of software, it’s essential to take advantage of free trials when available. No matter how many reviews you read or demos you watch, you can’t get a real sense of how the CRM software works until you use it yourself. Be sure to have colleagues from different departments try out the software, too, so you can understand how successful it is in different situations and business processes.

Most companies offer at least a 14-day trial (and we consider that fairly short as 30 days is better) and some, including Apptivo CRM, Insightly CRM, and Zoho CRM offer free plans, albeit with limited features or users. These can either serve as a full-time solution for small companies or as a long-term trial for larger companies.

Ease of use and support

CRM software must be intuitive or you’ll never want to use it. Make a note of how many clicks it takes to conduct a basic task and how easy or difficult it is to find the features you need. Beyond being easy to use, CRM software should be able to manage user error. For example, if you try to conduct a task on the wrong screen or input the wrong data, then the best software will identify your error and suggest the right way to do it. On the other hand, poorly designed software will either let you make the error unchecked or will throw up an unhelpful error message.

One way to figure out if CRM software is really easy to use is by training others on how to use it. If you get stuck while training someone else, then that’s worth noting. Think about the time it will take to get your team up to speed and whether or not it’s worth that investment.

Finally, when you run into problems, whether it’s a software bug or a problem using a feature, you’ll need a responsive support team. Verify what type of support is included with your subscription and the hours of availability. If available, read through the support documentation, FAQs, and other self-service help (options include blog entries, public knowledge bases, and even online training videos). If there aren’t any self-service options, then consider that you’ll have to contact support whenever you get stuck. That said, you should contact support while you’re trying out software and make a note of the response time. Ask a lot of questions; this will also help you familiarize yourself with the product. CRM software is complicated, but support shouldn’t be.

And watch out for gaps in the support plan. Many of these solutions, especially the SaaS entries, have tiered, subscription-based pricing. That often means different levels of support depending on the subscription you choose. If your business process requires access to the CRM on weekends, for example, then make sure you’ve got access to support during those hours.

Seek the best email, mobile and social features

Don’t get distracted by CRM capabilities you won’t use. Make sure the software you ultimately select captures the information that’s essential for your business, allows effective follow-up, and is easy enough to use that your team will work with it, not around it.

Remember that new technologies, while slick, aren’t automatically pervasive. For example, social media is a game-changing technology for interacting with customers. But as much as social and collaboration applications such as Slack are catching on, that doesn’t mean email is dead. Most customers still expect to interact with you via email, and an email can still capture much more data than a Facebook post or a tweet can. Understand how your company interacts with customers over email and make sure your CRM software acts as a complement to that relationship, not as a hindrance. CRM software should automatically capture data from email interactions, not force your employees to manually enter email data.

Take the time to also properly evaluate the mobile app; this should be considered a separate app, not just as a mobile “capability,” and you also shouldn’t be asked to pay anything extra for it. Mobile devices are an entirely different breed from desktops or notebooks. Employees use them differently and software renders them differently, which means that business processes that involve them will behave differently.

Make sure your CRM software of choice can support the mobile device platform your team uses and carefully evaluate what the app can do. Some apps offer a read-only view of your sales pipeline or contacts so that you can look up the relevant information while out and about. Those apps won’t let you make updates until you get back to a computer. Others offer a seamless and responsive experience, letting you do everything you would do on a mobile device that you would on a computer (but usually presenting tools and features differently, which can be difficult for some users to get used to). Don’t commit to CRM software until you’ve actually used the mobile app in a way you and your team would on a day-to-day basis. For many SMBs and their agents the mobile component of a CRM app might even be more critical than the desktop version.

Companies, including Sugar CRM and Zoho, cater to the mobile workforce, with full-featured, responsive apps, and mobile layouts. If you have a field sales team that leaves their laptops behind and instead works on their tablets and smartphones, then you need to give them the tools they need.

Marketing automation and lead management

The ability to act as a lynchpin for a well-planned marketing automation strategy is one of the most valuable aspects of CRM software, and it’s a shame that not all software packages offer it — though most are beginning to get there. marketing agency automation is a popular term these days and it refers to the software’s ability to remind sales and marketing agency representatives to follow up with customers at the right time. Automation reminds you — or, in some cases, actually handles the task for you — of needed activities such as following up 30 days after a sales purchase with a coupon or calling the sales prospect 14 days after the individual signed up for a trial of the software. It can also extend to other software, such as kicking off an email marketing agency promotion based on criteria that are reached during a phone call with the customer, even if that call was initiated with the CRM system. marketing agency automation can lead to sales, in such instances where a prospective buyer abandons an online shopping cart without checking out. The system can send a well-timed email to the customer offering further discounts or incentives for closing the sale.

Lead management is the core capability of all CRM platforms. Lead management can track and manage prospective customers (often called leads or “opportunities”) across lead generation and acquisition throughout the sales pipeline. Some CRM software providers use a greater degree of marketing agency automation to trigger actions and sales stages based on lead progression. Lead management is a part of all CRM platforms but how the provider handles it can make a big difference.

Some CRM platforms have email marketing agency built in while others can connect with a third-party service, such as Campaigner or Mailchimp. Automation can also play a part in email marketing agency, where an action by a prospect, lead, or customer, triggers an email or email campaign. For example, if a user signs up for a webinar on your website, then that can trigger a series of emails about what to do next. Likewise, if a user cancels their account, then that action can trigger an off-boarding campaign that prompts them to save their data or it can trigger an incentive campaign offering discounts or other perks if they decide not to cancel after all. Automation can also mean changing the status of a customer or prospect based on an action on their part.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are also starting to show up in CRM software. Sales Creatio uses automation and predictive technology to remind users to complete tasks and guide them what to do next. Salesforce launched its Einstein AI-based business intelligence (BI) platform, which can also provide automation across email management, lead and opportunity scoring, and forecasting. These technologies have a huge potential to save time and to help sales teams perform even better.

Third-party integrations are key

It’s important to determine which features are included with your subscription and which require a third-party add-on. It’s also worth looking at the software you already use to see if it’s compatible with the CRM software you’re considering. Maybe you already have email marketing agency software that you love or you want to connect your cloud storage service, lead management tool, or customer service management platform. As we’ve mentioned, you’ll definitely want to be able to connect your email account and perhaps your calendar, too.

Another excellent example of a value-add integration with CRM would be your product support or helpdesk platform. Next to your sales staff, your product support professionals probably have the most direct contact with your customers and the information they gather in the course of even a short conversation can be gold to a salesperson. Problems with one product line can mean upsell opportunities to another.

Integration today takes two basic forms. The easiest is if the CRM system or the system to which you’re trying to connect supports the other as a “native” integration. That simply means that the company in question has a prebuilt integration module you can simply select, download, and implement as needed. You’ll have the best luck with big-name targets here as many companies pre-build integrations for companies such as NetSuite or Salesforce, for example.

The other method is that, if both system support an open application programming interface (API), usually one based on Representational State Transfer (REST). With an API, you can have your in-house IT staff (provided they can do some coding) or an out-of-house contract programmer build a custom integration for you. That option certainly provides the most flexibility and customization but it can also add significant cost depending on the level of your coding talent.

Reporting and analytics with visualizations and dashboards

Once you’ve been using CRM software to manage your leads and deals, you can see how successful you’ve been and where you’re falling short. Look for CRM software with reporting features that can be customized so that you can see how employees are performing and which types of customers are responding. Look for a tool that lets you export reports if you need to present high-level data to company stakeholders.

Next, take that API or native integration and plug it into whatever business intelligence (BI) tool your organization likes best. That’s because BI can turn that humdrum CSV or PDF file reporting data into live data visualizations and IT dashboards. These can keep you, your sales team, and anyone else with access to the CRM data completely current on sales statistics, demographic information, product popularity, and any number of other metrics. Additionally, only today’s BI tools let you combine data from multiple sources — such as your CRM database on one side of the business and your warehouse and supply chain on the other — and ask complex queries that take multiple data sources into account to provide new insights that any one data source simply couldn’t.

Security should be top of mind

Invest in security. There’s no simple way to put it. When you’re working with the sales pipeline and customer data, make sure security is top of mind — especially if you’re using a SaaS-deployed CRM solution (which means not only the app but likely also a big chunk, if not all, of your customer data resides in the cloud). You should feel comfortable with the company’s security requirements. It is a warning sign if your CRM software lets you select a password but doesn’t generate an audit trail whenever someone makes a change, or if it doesn’t let you define the access controls for each user. Customer data is an extremely valuable commodity especially now that customers are more reluctant to part with it. Securing it isn’t just about maintaining privacy; it’s about protecting profitable relationships that directly impact your bottom line.

Integration plays a role here but it’s mostly about research. From an integration standpoint, you can make sure your chosen CRM software can integrate with as much of your current IT security software as possible, such as your identity management system, for example, so your employees can take advantage of single sign-on authentication. But even more important than that is doing your homework. That means digging deep into the vendor’s service level agreement (SLA) and ascertaining exactly where your data resides, who is responsible for its safety, and what happens if there’s a problem. Doing some Google surfing to see whether this vendor has been breached in the past and what their response was is another good indicator of just what you’re getting your data into.

Putting top CRMs and new entrants to the test

In this roundup, we tested some of the most popular CRM software packages on the market today. The packages include Apptivo CRM, Zendesk Sell, Sales Creatio, Freshsales CRM, HubSpot CRM, Insightly CRM, Less Annoying CRM, Capsule CRM, Pipedrive CRM, Salesforce Sales Cloud Lightning Professional, and Zoho CRM. We’ve worked hard to evaluate this CRM software with the aforementioned criteria in mind, so check out each of the reviews below to figure out which package is right for you. All have their strengths and weaknesses — some are geared more toward small to midsize businesses (SMBs) while others have broader email marketing agency capabilities. Some CRM systems are easier to use out of the box, with simple navigations and standard workflows, while others offer deeper and more complicated degrees of customization. Some are dirt cheap while others can be quite expensive when you start moving up tiers, scaling up your sales workforce, or adding premium functionality.

Our top three selections remain Apptivo CRM, Sales Cloud Lightning Professional, and Zoho CRM, which have all earned the Editors’ Choice distinction for balanced feature sets and thoughtful integration features. Not all CRM solutions fit all business needs’ however, this is why surveying the landscape and trying out newer entrants like Capsule CRM or Zendesk Sell (formerly Base CRM) makes sense. New solutions can bring just the right amount of innovation to capture an SMBs attention. In the end, it is the balance of a businesses’ needs, the size and scope of its sales team, and how the company engages with it is customers that will determine the best CRM solution for a business.

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scpie · 4 years

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The Best CRM Software for 2020

June 24, 2020 15+ min read

This story originally appeared on PCMag

What is CRM software?

The revenue impact of AI adoption in CRM

Such a revenue impact is possible because AI-enhanced CRM is literally a quantum leap ahead of what many companies still call customer relationship management.

Pricing and add-ons

Analysis to boost adoption

Ease of use and support

Seek the best email, mobile and social features

Marketing automation and lead management

Third-party integrations are key

Reporting and analytics with visualizations and dashboards

Security should be top of mind

Putting top CRMs and new entrants to the test

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beyondvapepage · 5 years

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Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 271

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 271 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Adam: Alright, Hey everybody. Welcome to Hump Day Hangouts. We got a special Hump Day hangouts today for episode number 271. Today is the 22nd of January 2020. I’m glad I got that right, because I have still been signing stuff 2019. But hopefully, it’ll be better for me. So before we dive into everything and answer questions and tell you about the special stuff we got going on today. Let’s take a second and say hello to everyone. So off to my left here, I see Bradley. So Bradley, how you doing today?

Bradley: I’m good, man. I was just telling you that we were going to talk about just a minute but the Double Your Agency Training is available today. And I’ve been working on the presentation and the first lesson video. I’ve got to record the first lesson video still because I was working on the presentation. And I actually created this. Well, I repurposed it from my real estate business. It’s just kind of like a marketing calculator that you can use to put in all the different activities that you want to do for prospecting for your own agency. It breaks it down by monthly targeted goals and then weekly goals and daily goals. It has everything laid out into it in a spreadsheet to where you just plug in the numbers and it calculates how many marketing contacts you have to make on a monthly basis, weekly basis, daily basis. And then we put in what your conversion rates are and all that and ends up spitting out like it basically will be a revenue projection tool. So it shows you that if you stick to specific marketing activities, and you do it consistently, which is the key to it all that you should be. You can expect within you know, plus or minus give or take to be able to see these particular numbers. So, it’s kind of a projection sheet. It’s really, really cool and I’m glad I spent a lot more time on it than I planned on. That’s why the video first lesson is not done today like I hope to, but I think it’s a valuable resource that all the agency members will certainly appreciate.

Adam: so awesome. Well, yeah, we’ll circle back to that because I’m a nerd for calculators but it’s also a huge time saver. But anyway, we’ll come back to that. So Hernan! I like your shirt today, man. How are you doing?

Hernan: I’m doing good. I’m wearing the OG. This is the original. This is not for sale. I show up but sometimes they hang out or sometimes or whatever. And people will say hey, we’re gonna buy the shirt for sale. I apologize. This was the first batch that we did. So I’m really excited, really excited, dude. Because today we’re launching the 2xyouragency. It’s good. It’s really good. We’ve been working hard on it. I have some stuff that I want to share with you guys in terms of prospecting as well. How I have been able to land some high level you know retainer fees, some high-level consulting fees, and all that good stuff. So I’m excited to share with you guys that and excited for today.

Adam: Nice. Nice. And last but certainly not least, Marco. How are you doing man?

Marco: Hey, What’s up, man? I’m doing good. Looking forward to the presentation. Today’s should be fun.

Adam: Whoa, just about knocked everything off my desk. I’m not excited. But yeah, before we get into it, then let’s talk a little bit more about 2xyouragency and I like this. I’m gonna lead off with this was pretty fun. I had a meeting group of guys. I meet weekly and one of them owns multiple six-figure agencies and he does a lot but he focuses on funnel design and offers creation for people. And I was asking for their feedback. You know, I said, hey, we’ve got our launch going on today. You know, here’s the outline. I’d like some feedback on a couple of areas. And he’s like, “Oh, yeah, like, really? is it available for purchase?” And I said, “Yeah, give him the URL.” And then his name popped up in Slack. And he bought it. I was like, yeah, that’s awesome. Like he was he was pumped to and you know, he’s a good example of someone where he’s already had some success. And that’s what we’re looking for is people who have clients, you know, this isn’t the right place. If you have zero clients and you’ve never worked with clients, that it may not be a good fit, but he’s a great example of, hey, I’ve already come this far, I want to go further and can be putting this to use. So it was really exciting to see that. Hernan and Bradley, do you guys want to talk a little bit more about some of the specifics?

2XYourAgency

Hernan: Yeah. Here’s how I see the training that’s coming up. There are three main pillars of what we’re doing. And because, you know, again, we have been servicing small business owners or mostly digital agency owners for the past couple of years, you know, with Semantic Mastery. And when we kept on asking, you know, what do you guys need help with, and specifically when working with clients, when it comes to digital marketing, you know, serving digital marketing services to them in whatever capacity. It could be SEO, it can be PPC, it can be web design, it can be graphic design, social media, Facebook Ads, so whatever that is, and everything like the pain points came back over and over again, which were, which were like, basically three. Number one, how do I get more clients? How do I get more clients to my agency? That is number one. Number two, how do I work with better clients? Like how do I increase the revenue that I make for each client that I have? Right? Which basically, it’s like, if you can double that, you’re doubling your revenue without you having to go out there and get more clients. That is pillar number two.

And pillar number three is how do I take my time back because if you’re working with three or four clients, and you’re doing everything yourself, imagine doing the same for tank lines. It’s impossible to scale at that point. And the reality is that if you want to go from four or five clients to 10 or 15 clients, you cannot do it everything yourself. So what we decided to do on 2xyouragency is basically go ahead and kind of give you a framework of a how-to prospect how to get clients how to get that pipeline full of leads, be what type of clients you know, you need to get, I think that there’s an exercise that we’re going to go through into how to recognize your best type of client, like the type of client that you really want to work with, what type of traits and and and and kind of behaviors they need to have in order for you to work with them and be really happy and fulfilled by providing them with services. That is number two.

And number three, how do you actually go ahead and outsource and delegate without compromising quality, which is one of you know, biggest pet peeves that we all have. We don’t want to outsource because oh, well, if I outsource to a VA, then they’re going to screw up, you know, and then it’s my name on the line and all that stuff. So that’s the three pillars that we’re going to be going after. And, you know, we’ve been doing this for the past six years. So it’s basically you know, put it in a step by step, step by step framework for you guys to actually take action and digest and during that community, so I’m really excited about that. And those are the three pillars that we’re going to cover.

Adam: definitely before I know Bradley got some really cool details he wants to share. But some of this too, you know, we’re known I feel and we’ve been told this, but for great video-based training like this. We do a lot of video interaction. We’re continuing that great way of doing things, you know, no details left uncovered. I know Bradley and Hernan are gonna be doing the bulk of the training. But you know, as known, they really give you the good, but we also so there’s a membership area, you’re also going to get access to a members-only Facebook group. And then for every single training lesson, we’re doing we know sometimes, you know, we’ve taken courses ourselves, right? Together, we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on training. Yeah, so the training is great, and you need that, but what if you need to come back or you need a refresher, sometimes you don’t need to watch all of that. So what Bradley’s doing it or Hernan or whoever’s doing the training is putting together these cheat sheets basically, right? Like the resource guide for every single training session that goes on. And so I think that that is going to that’s basically like some people would add that as an upsell or you know, an additional cost but we’re just going to pop that in there. Because we know what it’s like to go through and it’s nice to have a refresher or you need to go back. You want to point someone at it and say this is exactly what needs to happen.

Bradley: Yeah. So we’re for each lesson after the video lesson has been added, you know, basically recorded, then it’s going to be turned into like an executive summary, and checklist so that every single week or every lesson because some weeks there’s going to be more than one lesson. Every single lesson there will be its own executive summary and checklist. So it’ll make it much easier for people to, once they’ve already, you know, go through the video lesson, they’ll be able to review that the executive summary and the checklist to determine what needs to be done. It would be much easier to manage that way, I think in my opinion. And then something else is if we have any lessons that go particularly long or whatever will either timestamp them so that people can jump specifically to the sections of the video or the training and we might even mention those timestamps in the executive summary or we’ll have them chopped up the longer video edited into smaller pieces so that people can jump directly to whichever video they want one of the other so we haven’t really determined that process just yet. But that said, I just want to give a quick preview as to what it is that is inside the training. It’s over the course of the next 12 weeks guys we’re going to be adding training so it is on a drip schedule only while it’s being recorded. Once it’s done it’ll be all available at once so but obviously the price could go up at that point too.

Adam: So yeah, definitely will hop in while you’re bringing that up Bradley and save that you know if you want to get started with this go to 2xyouragency.com and get started because it is at a lower price. Obviously, we want to do it for people who are following us who watch Hump Day hangouts in our email subscribers, but that’s only lasting for four days and it is a one-time payment and there’s some reason behind that we’ll get into in a little bit, but go for it, Bradley.

Bradley: Yeah, so the idea here guys is the 2xyouragency plan comes in three parts as Hernan was just talking about, you know, we’ve been surveying our members, you guys, for two years now maybe even longer. And consistently over time, we hear the same things over and over again. The biggest roadblock or hurdle to people’s success is number one, consistently getting clients. Number two is getting, you know, good clients. Well, that’s so first of getting clients. Number two is getting clients that people enjoy working with, you know, pay decent amounts of money for services and that kind of stuff. And number three is how to get better repeatable results, you know, reliable results, consistent results. A lot of times we hear that people struggle with that. And then also lastly, how to grow how to scale and so the 2xyouragency training program is really going to be broken down into three major parts or three main areas and I hope that each section will be basically four weeks.

So four weeks for the first section, which is 2xyour pipeline, or double your pipeline, right? Consistently fill your pipeline with prospects. You can cherry-pick and close only that is the best fit because that is by far the one that we hear the most. In the first several weeks, we’re going to talk about getting your mind, your mindset, and developing habits to have consistent leads coming into your business. You have to build a system around prospecting and then implement that system consistently. As soon as you take your foot off the gas, you’re going to start slowing down your leads. And that’s the peaks and valleys that most people go through. And I myself have been through that through my own marketing agency, through my real estate business, though many businesses, if you know what happens is we need money, right? We need revenue to come into our business. So out of desperation, we go out and start prospecting for leads to try to pitch our services. And we might we get a few leads, right? Whatever it is that we’re doing, whether it’s email or cold calling, or whatever the case is for generating leads, most of the time, most people will typically, once they have some leads come in, they stopped the prospecting so that they can work on processing the leads, right? Doing audits or analysis of the prospect’s web, you know, doing web audits or analysis, online presence analysis, that kind of stuff, then creating proposals, right? Going through all that and then hopefully knock on wood, if we’re lucky, we’ll end up losing a couple of one or two of those prospects. And then we go into fulfillment mode where we’re working on setting up and doing all the things that they hired us for. And this time prospecting has been turned off. So that once we get that client to a particular point, where you know, we can take our foot off the gas or it’s not so many hands-on, you know, time invested from us. It’s not so labor-intensive for us because we’ve got the kind of up and running now, then it’s back to square one we need leads again. So it’s starting that whole process over again. And that’s the problem, guys, there’s a direct correlation between your monthly revenue and the number of marketing or prospects that you talk to on a weekly basis or pitch or on a monthly basis, if that makes sense. So in order to have, first of all, to be able to get a steady stream of clients, and then also to be able to cherry-pick just the best clients that you want to work with, you have to have a steady lead stream of leads coming in.

So that’s why I think that that’s got to be number one, or the first part of 2xyouragency training is getting your mind right and setting up your pipeline to where it will double or quadruple you’re the number of leads coming in and on a consistent basis. The other part of that just briefly. If you only have let’s say you only have 10 prospects, 10 leads that have come in from whatever prospecting efforts you’ve done. If you’ve only got 10 leads, I guarantee that most of you probably try your damnedest to close all 10 of those leads, you’ll bend over backward at some point to accommodate the needs or the desires of the prospect that you’re talking to just because you need the damn revenue. And guys, prospects can smell desperation, you know, like dogs can smell fear. So, when you’re desperate for revenue, it comes across that way and a lot of times, we will make exceptions to what we would otherwise provide a service or for charges that certain amounts that we charge for services and that kind of stuff will make exceptions because we need the damn revenue. But when you have a steady stream of prospects coming in through the door, you can be very strict as to what it is that your offer is and not deviate from that. You can also not have to try to close every prospect that you pitch to because it’s you can select the prospects, cherry-pick the best prospects the ones that seem to be the best fit and pitch them right or you can pitch all of them but only choose to work with some. So again, you kind of pre-qualify your prospects, which is kind of what Herna was saying. So that’s number one.

Number two is to 2extra results. Okay, first, once you’ve got your prospecting machine up and running, you’ve got a consistent steady amount of leads coming into your business, which is the lifeblood of your business, then you want to be able to produce reliable and repeatable results with proven methods. So how do you do that? Well, we’re going to talk about Semantic Mastery methods and how you can implement those to get reliable and repeatable results for your client without you having to learn how to do everything yourself. You certainly can. We will point you in the direction of resources throughout the training if you want to learn the specifics, the nitty-gritty of how to do each one of the methods that we’re going to talk about. But moreover, we’re going to point you to our done for you services at our store, MGYB, once we’ve explained what methods that work and why they work and why you should be employing these for all or implementing them for all of your clients, in what order, what timeline, all of that kind of stuff. And then we’re going to point you to MGYB because your job as a business owner should not be doing, performing all of these marketing tactics yourself, but it should be to hire it out through trusted third-party providers, such as Semantic Mastery and MGYB or to hire somebody in the house, a virtual assistant. So they don’t have to be an actual employee. They could be a contractor but like a virtual assistant or an in house employee, and put them through the training so that they do it for you. So again, as a business owner, you should be working on sales and working on growing your business, figuring out how to grow your business not working on an actual day to day operations staff. We’re going to talk about 2xing your results, how to get better results. Then lastly, the last section, the last few weeks is going to be about 2xing your business or scaling, essentially, double your business without doubling your time commitment. So it goes hand in hand with section two, which is doing to actually results in that take yourself out of the way, out of the equation because you’re most likely the bottleneck in your business. I have been for many years and for different parts of my businesses and I’ve gotten way better at that. But even my newer real estate business, there are still things where I am the bottleneck. And I’m trying to alleviate that by automating, delegating or eliminating and that’s something that we talked about so 2xyouragency is going to be about how to scale, how to outsource, how to manage, how to use third-party providers, and how to really plan for growth as well. And so, Hernan and I are going to be doing most of the training. Hernan and I will be doing a lot of part one and a lot of part three together. I will probably be doing the bulk of Part Two or section two. But we’re going to try to keep it in three sections of about four weeks per section. And by the end of it, if you take action and you implement what you’re going to learn throughout the 2xyouragency plan, you will absolutely double your agency, whether you’re going from one client to two, or five to 10, or 10 to 20, you should be able to as long as you take action. Consuming the content isn’t going to help you, you have to actually implement what it is that you learn it so it’s going to be kind of a fast-paced thing. We’re going to go through a lot, but it’s going to be very, very beneficial. And obviously if you have any need additional assistance, and you’re ready to take it up to the next level, that’s when you’re going to come to join the Mastermind. What do you think I was at a pretty decent explanation?

Adam: Yeah, and I’ll just add to that and say if anyone has any questions and you’re watching, you know, definitely, Of course, ask questions. If you’re watching the replay, go ahead and leave a comment on the video. And we’ll definitely get back to you something. I mentioned before, see if you guys have anything else was You know we have been asked you know, right now like I said it’s a limited time we’re discounting slightly because we want to offer a good deal for people who hop in right now at the beginning it’s going to $97 but I’ve literally been asked you know, why isn’t this $500 to roughly $1,000 which is kind of what comparable training from some other people out there is available at. We talked about this and we said you know, we want a lot of people to take this you know, this is a combined knowledge that we have. We want people in there so that they can get to the point where they are generating more revenue and they have the time and then come join our mastermind totally transparent on this. We’re not saying haha this is some evil ploy to get you in the mastermind you know about it you can go look at it it’s a mastermind.semanticmastery.com, but we know there’s a lot of people out there. If you have one client maybe or two, you know, if you lose a client, you can’t afford to be part of a group a mastermind, you can’t afford to even spend the time, so we want to get to that point where you’re better spot where you have time to interact with others. You can be a part of the group really contribute, learn, and then that’s just adding fuel to that fire.

Hernan: Yeah, I like I like what Adam just said a lot because you know, one of the reasons why somebody will join the mastermind is because you’re surrounded by people that are successful, right? So we’re kind of giving you the blueprint for you to be successful as possible in whatever area you’re lacking. Whether it is prospecting, or maybe you have to prospect down, but you’re like running with your hair on fire all day. So we want to help you so those things so that by the end of that, you might want to join the mastermind because you will see the value of all of it. As possible, we want to make it like a no absolute no brainer. It’s going to be tons of tons of value as usual Semantic Mastery style. We’ve been around for five, six years delivering a lot of value. So this is not going to be any different. So really,

Bradley: Seven years. Damn it. Seven years. We’ll be in, I think, March or June or something like anyways, it’ll be seven years this year. So very quickly, I just want to showcase this. This is available with week one, again, the video training. And all of that will be available for this tomorrow. But this is what I call a marketing calculator, marketing projection. I basically repurpose this from a real estate, my real estate business. So I spent some time and they’re editing it today to kind of make it apply to a marketing agency. And this is great, guys because it breaks down like it’s a calculator that will break down what your marketing activities should be. And if you plug in all your numbers, which you know, you might not know all your numbers, it’s going to take marketing and tracking to be able to figure out what your numbers are. But then you should be able to consistently predictably project what your revenue will be if you hit specific marketing goals. Right. So as I mentioned before, there’s a direct correlation between your monthly revenue, and the number of marketing attempts that you make, right. So the number of proposals that you make and your number of proposals you make are directly correlated to the number of contacts you make with prospects. So the point is, guys, in order to get consistent results, you have to be consistently marketing, right? I’ve even worked in the virtual assistant, you know so that you don’t have to do all this. You might have to do it at first, I assume most of you guys will have to do this yourself first. But that’s fine. You can do this, build systems around it and then kind of create a standard operating procedure and sap out of what it is that you’ve created, and then turn around and outsource that to a VA and it’s very inexpensive. So, for just an example, if you said that you wanted to spend you know how to $500 in the marketing budget for your own agency, to produce leads for your agency on a monthly basis. You can see that you know, got this broken down to where if you had a VA doing 20 leads per sending 20 emails per day, which could be done in one hour a day or five days a week, in five days per week. So essentially, you’re paying $3 an hour cost you $60 and virtual assistant fees over the course of a month to have a virtual assistant sending 100 emails, prospecting emails per week, right? So 400 per month. And if you get a 4%, which is probably high, but a 4% response rate. So even if we change that to it’s a 2% response rate, that’s going to produce about eight leads per week, right from 400 outbound emails, so that’s eight people that have at least replied positively to prospecting emails.

But then the same thing, sales letters, which I’m having great results with sales letters. Sales letters could be sent out at a rate of 50 per week, right? So 200 per month at a 10% response rate, which is absolutely doable. That would be 20 leads per week, right coming in, or 20 leads per month coming in. And these are your costs right here. And then lastly, and these were just three items that I put in there, guys, there are some other ones that we could put in there like voicemail drops, or ringless voicemail, for example. There’s a lot of things that we can do. These were just the three big ones that I’m using for prospecting right now that works really well. Postcards, for example, that’s another one here shows the costs and everything else. And if you’re sending out 50 or 200 postcards per month, and you get a 3% response rate from postcards at six leads in a month. So that’d be a total from just these numbers here of 34 leads generated per month by targeting these specific monthly, weekly or daily goals. And all the costs are associated there. And then you can talk plugin your percentage of your average conversion rate. So how many times if you make 10 proposals, and you close three of them, that’s a 30% conversion rate, right? So you plug all those numbers in there and your plugin with your average profit per sale is whether that’s average profit on the front end. Or what I like to do is calculate what my average profit of monthly rep, monthly profit will be for a client if I’m able to land them. And so you can play around with these numbers, but then what it does, it will actually project what your gross revenue per month will be. And then after your expenses, and this is what your net monthly revenue will be in your yearly net revenue, based upon those numbers, so you can go in here and really fine-tune what it is that figure out what your primary revenue goals are, what your desired revenue goals are, and then break it down into how many how much marketing do I need to do to be able to make this many presents proposed to get this many leads in per week to make this many proposals with this much of a conversion rate to be able to hit that target revenue goal, then you can adjust your marketing around that number to where you can almost guarantee that you’re going to hit that provided that you do it consistently.

How do you make sure that it gets done consistently? Stop doing it yourself. Right? That’s the thing guys, I guarantee none of you guys are going to want to stay on top of doing sending out. I’m going to show you guys throughout the training how to do how to teach a VA how to do it. It’s all completely brain dead simple to have, you can do some of the programs that I’m using for direct mail, you do it all from online. So it’s just point and click a few clicks and boom, an email goes or a letter gets sent or a postcard gets sent all of that stuff. So you can train a VA to do it and that becomes the VA is the job, right? The VA does this on it could be a daily basis an hour per day or two hours per day or they could block it all in like on Monday work for five hours on one particular task. If that’s the case, however, you want to break it down. But that way you know it gets done because what’s going to happen with you is you’re going to get tied up putting out fires or playing whack a mole which is what we all do as business owners and you’re not going to prospect you’ll allow the process. You’ll put prospecting off because other more important things will come up, right? So that’s why you want to delegate this as soon as you can. So that you know that it’s getting done weekend and week out regardless of your input. Okay. So anyway, I know that were way longer than I want to do, guys, but I thought that was valuable. Any comments on that before we get into questions?

Adam: No, I mean, there’s comments for me. Let’s good stuff, but I don’t see any questions right now. We got some good ones, though, that kind of touch on some of this stuff. So I guess it’s about time to hop into questions. Anybody else? Any closing comments?

Good, anybody? All right. All right. Zoom in one more and we’ll get into this.

What Is The Point Of Siloing The Category If It Is Redirected To The Main Target Page?

Okay, so the first question comes from looks like Justin he says, Hey, guys, support told me to ask this question here. Thanks. I was going over the Battle Plan training and I’m confused on the categories it was said we should do this permalink structure /%category%/%postname%/. That’s not absolutely necessary. That’s if you want to, you know after 2xyour agency is done, guys. In the next 12 weeks, the Battle Plan will be updated. That’s going to be one of our to-do lists. So anyway, just kind of want to point that out. That’s not absolutely necessary, you can do that it’s not going to harm anything. But just to carry on that’s not absolutely necessary. You can leave it at posts name if you’d like. It’s perfectly fine to do that. Create main location pages to a silo, create a category with the same slug as Page Setup, 301 redirect to send the category page to the main target page. What’s the point of creating the category if we’re just wanting it to the page, because if you understand silo structure, then you’re going to want to stack supporting keyword content articles, right? So posts, blog posts, that’s how you build depth into a silo. Right? So you create a category and then you place every related keyword. Every time you do a supporting article, which will be published as a post when you’re targeting a supporting related keyword, right? Then you’re going to place that within that category. So you’re adding depth to that category. Okay, that makes sense? And so all of the ways that the taxonomy structure is within WordPress is all of the link equity that flows through that category, especially when you have proper internal linking too but there’s it also flows through the category structure, the relevancy does, so that you end up creating the content silos. So when the bots come in and crawl a particular contents a category, a content silo, then when it goes from one post to the next to the next to the nest with within that particular category, that silo, it will start to paint a picture, develop a picture of over what the overall theme of that particular category is, which ultimately creates buoyancy. It helps everything within that silo to rise in the SERPs if everything is done correctly. So that’s why because of the category index page guys, for most websites, especially local businesses and such. The top of their silos will be their services that they provide either products or services, right. And so if they’re creating a silo structure where they’re posting articles about a particular service or about a particular product, and they’re placing it in that category, it’s not really necessary for a visitor, a user to go to the website and click on the category just to see all the blog posts within that particular category. So we 301 the category index page, which is like a blogroll page for all the posts within that category, over to the primary service page or product page on the website, because we kind of want to push all of that relevancy to that page on the site, that we’re ultimately going to rank for that top-level keyword, which is also set up for conversions like lead generation or sales or whatever the conversion goal is. So that makes sense? So hopefully you understand what we’re talking about there. But that’s basic silo stuff. You know you don’t have to if you want, for whatever reason you do have a category index page on your site to where people can click to go to a category and see all the posts within that specific category, then you don’t have to 301 the category page to the actual page. Right? You don’t have to you can leave it that way. I like to 301. But you don’t have to. Does anybody want to comment on that?

Hernan: I think that’s great.

Should You NoIndex And NoFollow Categories In WordPress?

Bradley: Okay. He says, and what should and we should both know, index and nofollow follow categories? Or what’s the current best practice for a local service type site? No. Well, see, that’s the thing if you 301 your category, index page or category archive page over to your page, then you wouldn’t want to no-index, nofollow it because there would be no need because even it’s not going to index as a category index archive page because it’s 301 to the primary service page. So it makes sense. So it doesn’t matter. If you’re going to not 301 it, then I still wouldn’t noindex it or nofollow it, because there’s no reason to do that. There is a reason at times to noindex tag pages. But I don’t see the reason for noindexing category pages unless you had category archive pages that weren’t 301. And you only had one post in that category. Because then you end up with a category archive page that, depending on your theme, could publish, show the whole post within that category. And now you’ve got what looks like duplicate content on your site. But most likely, you’re not going to have any categories with just one post. And if you do, there’s no reason to have a category archive page. You should just reopen it to your primary service page. Okay. So anyway, hopefully that was helpful.

Marco: I just want to point out that there’s a really good video in YouTube, about this, the simple silo, and I can post it on the back and go look for it and post it but I really like to channel and go use the channel search function, and you can find the video.

Bradley: In fact, if you just go to, I’m just going to show so that maybe this will help other people too. First of all, go to our channel, youtube.com/semanticmastery. Click the Search icon up here for search channel that will search just the videos on the channel or you can go to playlists and if you scroll down in here somewhere there should be a silo structure playlist. Somewhere in here, there’s a silo structure playlist and it’s got all the videos in there specifically about how to create silos and all that kind of stuff. But all you need to do is just clicking here and click silo. I think structure just silo brings it up.

Yeah, silo went to I’m sure. Simple silo structure setup, complex silo structure set up. Those are the two right there. Four years ago, they haven’t changed a bit.

Marco: The theory doesn’t change. That’s perfect.

Bradley: That’s right. All right, beautiful, next.

Is There A Negative Effect For PR On A Page With Two Different Anchor Text?

Okay, so Sean’s up. He says, Is there a negative effect for PR on one particular page? When for user experience purposes, I use multiple HTML anchor links in the body to link to one other particular page. Okay, so is there a negative effect on page rank? If you link from within the content body of a page or post with multiple HTML links to the same target or destination URL with different anchor text phrases? Um, I don’t think that’s best practice. But Marco could probably do a much better job of explaining why that would be good or not good.

Marco: First of all, there’s no such thing as negative PageRank. So that cannot be a negative effect for PageRank. They can only be diminishing PageRank where you splitting it up. If, you know adding two links on a page splits, whatever page rank, you have two ways. If you have four now you split it four ways. So you only get 25% through each link. Why would you do that if they’re all going to one other particular page, you only need one link doesn’t make sense to add all of those links. I don’t even see it, why you would do it for user experience. And if you have to do it, if you have to do that, then what I always suggest, is find another way to code your links so that you don’t divide your PageRank. And that’s as far as I’m going to go with that in a free group.

Bradley: There you go.

How To Keyword Research For Non-English Languages?

Next question is all the major tools support the keyword research in English, but how to do the keyword research for other languages? an example I have a blog in Hindi for Indian readers, but I’m not sure how to do it for non-English languages. That’s a really good question. I don’t do anything but US-based projects. So I can’t really answer that. But I know Marco and Hernan might be able to help.

Hernan: Um, yeah, so SEM Rush has a big database of different keywords. So even if it’s not in the database, you can actually search Google Keyword Tool within SEM Rush in different, like search engines like different, you know, country to least. So you can actually go that route. So SEM Rush, I think it’s one of the best and now, you know, it has allowed me to do keyword research in Spanish, and you know, other languages, I’m pretty sure that they have Hindi in their database. And yeah, that’s how I would go ahead and do it. You know, it’s a tool. It’s one of the best tools when it comes to keyword research in other languages.

Marco: Yeah, I would say SEM Rush probably has Hindi in its database because of how, how big it is. I’m not sure if my favorite tool of all time and you guys know what that is? It’s a Power Suggest Pro. And you can actually geotarget. So Bradley, why don’t you open that up and use the geotargeting function over to the right. Where you change countries.

Bradley: Oh God, okay. See I’ve never done it. So I’ve never changed countries but yeah, right there. Yeah. So you can set the country up, you know, reset Yahoo. He said, India, right. India. Yeah, India, okay. So I’m going to say reset or okay. India, okay, cool. And then I don’t know.

Marco: And then Okay, and then you start searching. Did he specify what and see what it spits back like, I don’t speak Hindi. So I can’t give you any keywords that you would lookup. But I mean, try it out. But what is this now $57-$67 but it’s literally nothing for For guys, it’s there’s gold in here. Yeah, but I’m saying is, there’s money in this tool, you just have to need you just have to learn how to use it to find the money keywords in your niche. And you could target this is working bottom-up, right? You can target the long tail start targeting the long tail, and then like dead simple to start ranking for.

Bradley: So this is bringing back the keywords from like suggest from Google and YouTube in India, but it’s still returning them in English though, right? That’s what you’re saying?

Hernan: Now probably because we put out we put a keyword in that.

Bradley: Oh, you got to put it in in Hindi, right? Yeah. Yeah. Let me see.

Marco: Let’s do this live. Go Google Translate. And you know, see what the Hindi word for the keyword is the keyword and translate to a Hindi, English to you said Hindi. It looks like that’s what he said.

Where to go? Oh, there it is right there. Okay, let me try that. See if it works. So that’s for the keyword. It brought back a suggestion but it’s got the English modifier. So,

Marco: so why don’t you try the asterisk before the word space? Yeah, yeah, an asterisk after space. See if anything comes back that it brought back to and if that doesn’t work, the last thing I’m thinking is trying the, I don’t know what you call it where it’s like the English side. Right. Spelling before it like KEVARD sub one.

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. Do you mean that version right there?

Yeah. Nothing like a like a live, it’s nine coming up. Yeah, yeah.

It was worth a shot. Nothing beats a try but a fail, right? That’s got that right.

Marco: Answer the Public. I’m like I’m checking all of the ones that are that I know maybe Google Suggest in your native language or I’m setting a goal such as Google Trends in handy. You could start that way, and maybe dig into those keywords and see what Google will suggest. But that would be what I would say.

Hernan: I just went through to SEM Rush, by the way, and they do have a database indeed. So they have a bunch of keywords there. So that’s another option.

Bradley: Cool, thanks, Hernan. All right.

Can You Get The Benefits Of A Site’s Ranking And Leads If You Simply 301 Redirect It?

The next one is from Dan. He says, I have a site where the owner retired, but it is still ranked and giving leads, can I simply 301 redirect all ranking pages to another site? Or how would you handle a situation where I can still take advantage of the traffic, you can throw on it? But the problem is, it’s if you have another site in the same area that’s optimized similarly in that kind of stuff, then you can throw on it and it may very well the one target URL may very well end up replacing in the SERPs where the exit where the current site is ranked. But it’s you know, it’s it’s unlikely unless you already have some like, you can’t just like build a brand new site three, I want it to that and expect it to rank is it’s not likely to happen. You’ll see some usually significant dancing and all that I’m not saying it can’t be done. It can be but you know, One of the other things that you could do would be it so that you don’t lose or do any dancing, or lose positioning would be to iframe in your new website page into the existing pages so that that’s what comes up at the top above the fold. That’s something that you can do that way, you’re still taking advantage of the existing positioning of the existing site, but you can throw one it, that’s something you can do. But again, you’d probably want to have another site built that was similarly optimized, you know, similar structure and all that kind of stuff so that you’re not pointing from a site that is doing well to another site that’s not optimized. Well, where you end up will you’ll lose that positioning, you’re still likely going to see some dancing anyways, Marco would say you?

Marco: Yeah, it’s gonna dance. I mean, I don’t know what it is that he’s trying to accomplish. I understand that he wants to take advantage of the traffic. The 301 redirects will work but as you said, you will have to change the pages and have a similar structure on the 301 destinations so that you could get the most effective. It’s still going to dance. But it’ll probably come back, especially if you put that SEO shield around your new project.

Bradley: Don’t they have? Now they have I didn’t even really like to use them. But don’t they have those rank, like plugins where you can overlay another page on top of a page. I know that’s technically cloaking or something it’s not. It’s frowned upon by Google. But I know there are plugins that you can overlay one page on top of another page so that you could display a different page on top of what’s already ranking. The other way to do it would be to just like I said, embed you were a different web page into the page that’s already ranking, make that the top above the fold everything else to where when a user lands on that page, they’ll still likely and you know, they’ll still see the page that you want them to see, but it’s not actually cloaking. What do you think about that one?

Marco: Well, you can actually We have a responsive iframe to take the whole page. But again, that’s cloaking. What, however, you call it, it’s cloaking. You get caught doing that you’re gonna get deindex. So all that work that you did, you’re gonna lose it.

Bradley: Yeah, that’s true. That’s why I never liked using these WordPress plugins that do that, but that might be one there.

Marco: Yeah, I don’t even like talking about it. Because people can get into a whole lot of trouble. Then they come back and say, well, you told me to do it. No, the fuck I didn’t.

Bradley: Yeah, no. I said specifically, I don’t like to do it. I’d rather use the iframe model. But yeah, you could do that. I’m not telling you to do that though. Be careful because yeah, you can get in trouble for that. You’re psyching me deindex.

What Has Been The Most Effective Method In Getting Clients To Chase After You?

Okay, uh, let’s see. This is a great question. from Matt. He says what has been the most effective method and getting clients to chase after you? Specialization. So niche specialization is number one that’s been the most effective for me. And consistent follow up. Those are the two. That’s it, period. I mean, if there are two things I can tell you. Well, number one you have to prospect have a, you know, a prospecting system in place that is providing a steady stream of leads, right? But then once you’ve engaged with that lead how do you get them to follow up with number one is if you have an if your agents, a boutique agency or a very like a niche-specific where you cater all everything to that one type of business that tends to get people to pay more attention to your pitch than it does to others. Also consistent follow-up and again, we’re going to talk about that. The vast majority of the sales are made through the follow up. So you know, you have to get through a bunch of noise to get to a yes. And that’s going to be you know, if you want and do it like in other words, if you pitch a prospect one time and you and they say no and you leave it and you never contact them again, then you’re going to have a really hard time ever really growing your business, the best thing to do is once you pitch to prospect, they say No, that’s okay just means not yet, right? No just means not yet. So if you put them on some sort of follow up campaign, which again can be automated, or it can be delegated to an outsourcer depending on you know, a virtual assistant or an in house employee, to make sure that the follow up gets done. It might be different for depending on what kind of clients it is, you know, you might just want to reach out every three months, you might want to be more aggressive and once a month, contact them again, various methods, direct mail, email, voicemail drops, you could call them, there’s a number of things that you could do. But you know, typically follow up is where you’re going to because it’s crazy, but especially if you have an aggressive remarketing setup. Once they’ve engaged with you, they’re going to start seeing your brand everywhere anyway. Right. And then if you follow up with them, outreach to them once every three months or whatever time schedule what you want. Send them a direct piece of direct mail, lumpy mail, a postcard, hit them with direct ringless voicemail things like that once every month or six weeks or every three months, whatever schedule you want, but you just remind them besides what they’re seeing from the remarketing ads everywhere, you remind them hey, I’m still interested if things have changed for you yet, give me a call. You know, that kind of stuff. That’s where you’re going to start seeing it guys, but too many people give up after one No. And that’s the biggest problem. I see.

Marco: My top I’m seeing this differently. I’m reading this differently. How you get people to chase you is by providing massive results that just blow people away so that they have no choice but to brag about you. They tell their friends about you they go to their dinner meetings at the business meeting. And they’re talking about you and people are seeing it. This is how you get people to chase you, instead of you having to go out there and takes you it’s called POFU what we talked about all the time, you’re at the position of fuck you so that people are coming to you instead of you having to go to them. And then you’re picking and choosing who it is that you work with. Interestingly enough, just yesterday, we had our mini mastermind meeting. And we have one person that’s actually there that is picking and choosing. We have another one that it’s just getting massive results and the name gets around your neck. Once you start doing that you’re if you’re the person in wherever it is, and I happen to know that matters in Arizona, you become the man in Arizona, and you provide massive results for whoever your client is. They’re going to brag about all of the shit that you I got this fantastic guy who’s just doing all of this for me, and people will come to you, you’ll get referrals you get tons. As a matter of fact they’ll referrals. If you want the You have your client, your current clients coming to you and saying, hey, you mind if I have a buddy? Who does this? Would you mind helping him? And it’s like, he’s he already talked to his buddy, they already know you see? The sale is already done. They’ve done the clothes for you. All you have to go in and it’s just go talk to the person and say, Okay, yeah, make the deposit, and we’ll get started. On terms. Yeah, that’s how you get people chasing after you, instead of you having to chase after them.

Hernan: Yeah. I’m going to add real quick add, you know, how you sign up for some programs or some stuff that they’ll teach you how to how to grow your agency, whatever. And they’re like, what a one-trick pony, right? And if that doesn’t work, the rest of the program doesn’t work. And that’s one of the things that I’m really excited about is that each of us have our own approach to stop, right. I don’t want to get through a bunch of notes to get a yes Bradley does and he’s a machine and I totally respect him because of that, but I’m more like, okay, I want to create a whole lot of like goodwill in the marketplace so that people will search for me and I kind of share that a little bit on the personal branding that I talked about on POFU Live 2019 and that is something that I was definitely looking forward to sharing with you guys. How you can position yourself as an authority in your niche, in your marketplace. I totally agree that you need to niche down but then how do you get you to know, how do you get yourself known. So that is one of the things that I want to share with you guys but it’s basically going out like this, you need to be consistent in putting out good content and putting out like massive amounts of value so that when people reach out to you, I don’t want to reach out to anyone that reached out to me so when people reach out to you, then you have the position to say hey yeah, let’s talk and let’s work together or no. Listen, you know, this is not going to be a good fit and whatnot. I was like literally talking to two a potential customer yesterday but I just had to not go for it because you know, it wasn’t a good fit. So that gives you that leverage and whatnot. And it comes, you know, it all comes down to leveraging the personal branding and a couple of strategies that I want to share with you guys. So this is a great question. And I think that the fact that you have like three or four or even five, like different approaches to client generation, you can pick and choose the one that it’s right up your alley, right. The one that resonates with you, and the one that you want to go out like, do you want to brute force the marketplace? Go ahead and do it, here’s the blueprint of how to do it. Do you want to do it in a way that it’s cool and you know, you know, you don’t have to talk to anyone to follow here’s the blueprint, go do it, you know, so I think that’s pretty. That’s pretty cool. And that’s how you know working with me to have this so

Adam: all right. And last but not least, I’m going to put my two cents in on this and say it’s a good combo to have all of these because like Hernan I know what he’s capable of. Not only have I worked with him, but I’ve seen the results he’s done. And talking about providing value for people, you’ve provided massive value for me. So when I hop off a call with an agency owner who has 50 to 60 clients, and he’s looking for someone for PPC strategy and work, who do you think I recommended? Did I go out and look at Upwork? But now, I can send the email to Hernan said, Hey, here’s the deal. This guy seems like he could use your help. Are you interested in or not said, Yeah, I’ll check it out. You know, and that extends, I’ve done that in the mastermind as well. I know that there are people in there who have certain specialties, and this is not just a pitch for the mastermind, but, you know, it’s about providing results and sharing those and under, you know, so people understand what your value is, and then, you know, that becomes part of your referral network.

Bradley: Absolutely. And just to clarify, yeah, I agree that when I say to get through a bunch of noise to get to a, yes, I mean, if you have people like the best way to prospect, is to have inbound marketing is I totally agree 100% with what Hernan said because that’s when people see you out. When you’re starting out, you might have to do out, you’re likely going to have to do outbound prospecting. In order to get some, some revenue in the door, some clients in the door generate some revenue. But the idea is to build that presence, that brand so that people start to seek you out. And you can do that a number of ways in niche-specific or industry-specific so that you become a big fish in a small pond, providing extraordinary value, which what Marco said that whether it’s in a particular industry, or if you get referrals from just other businesses because you provide massive value to a client and it’s referred you Whatever the case, those are all great ideas, those are all great ways to have clients come to chase you and all that kind of stuff. But what I was saying What I meant was and I might not have been clear about it was you’re not going to close 100% of your proposals, even on a referral basis, most of you guys are including my partners, I’m sure when you get a referral. It’s all Almost a done deal, it’s almost a closed deal, usually just have to agree upon terms, as we had already said, but sometimes you can’t reach an agreement on terms and if that’s the case, don’t give up on that lead because that leads still there, that prospect you’ve already had a communication built some sort of rapport with them you just want it the timing might not be right for them for you for whatever proposal you sent them whatever offer you sent them.

So you have two options, there are three options that let it go entirely, which would be a complete waste of time. Change your pricing structure or the terms which you would say so in other words, you know, kind of lower your standards for what you expect, which I don’t recommend anybody to or number three, put them on just a follow-up schedule to where you touch them you know when I say touch them, meaning you contact them in some way, shape or form on a regular basis, every so often to remind them that you’re there until they’re ready because of time and circumstance change changes almost everybody’s mind.

So anyway, we’re almost out of the time we’ll try to run through one or two more really quickly, guys, sorry, we didn’t get time for everybody. But it is what it is.

How Are You Handling The Changes That Google Made With The January Update?

So the next one is from no marketing says how do you handle the changes that G made after January update to Google mega January update? Anybody?

Marco: I heard there was a core update.

Bradley: I heard there was too, I’m being asked. No, because fortunately, we haven’t seen you know, a lot of times I don’t even know updates occur except for the incessant chatter online, or when people post in the group about Hey, you guys experiencing and I’m only saying that because fortunately, we’ve been. The methods that we’ve been implementing developing for years now have been specifically for strengthening the entity for the Semantic Web, hence our name Semantic Mastery, and it seems like every time we experience or we go through one of these updates that we are that are revealed to us by somebody like you on our Hump Day Hangouts. We haven’t been affected negatively. In fact, a lot of times we are experiencing a positive effect. And, in fact, in our mastermind, community, there have been several people that have talked about that have posted results showing the positive effects that their sites have seen since the January update that you speak of, so we haven’t done it. So the next part of this question, which will probably answer my local service site dropped to the second page and there’s less real estate for organic listings do what organic listings do I need to change anything or just follow the battle plan? Strengthen the entity. I want to hear Marco’s opinion on this is probably all we’re gonna have time for. But if that’s the number one most important thing you can do right now is to strengthen the entity. What do you agree Marco?

Marco: Totally, totally. It’s the SEO shield. We call it the SEO shield for a reason. It’s set up the way it is, for a reason. We’re after basic web principle, we’re not after hacks or things that may well, it may it could change tomorrow. But then again, we could all die tomorrow. So we don’t know. What we have right now has been working for about five years, some even longer. For example, Syndication Academy. And just everything that we do is just based on web principles that even Google has to observe because their foundation is what we’re after. That’s where we are. That’s what we target. That’s where we play. That’s our playground. And so until they do a monumental shift in their algorithms, and in their math, our methods are going to work period.

Bradley: Beautiful.

Is It Okay To Add Another Page When You Mirror The Gsite To The Money Site?

Alright, last question. First is a comment from Fitz and in order to answer fits his question Which is next. And then we’re going to wrap it up, guys. If it says Good day, gents, thank you, Marco, for the amazing charity, you have started to help kids and by helping them help their families to have a pathway to a better life. Thank you also for the charity series of webinars, they’re very, very helpful. So that one’s for you, Marco. Fits then asks the question for today for me is when you were mirroring the G site to money site, is it okay to add other pages that are not on the money site? I like to embed my videos from YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook but not money site. Well, you can’t embed Facebook that I’m aware of. Maybe I’m wrong. But as far as I know, you can’t embed it but not the money site only on a page on my G site. Is that okay? I don’t know what Marco’s answer is going to be on this but I do it. I mirror the relevant pages into the G site. But then, if they’re supporting content that can help to add relevancy to that page, like a YouTube video, for example, then I would add that in there. I might add, you know, I might iframe in a press release, for example, that is particularly relevant to that particular page, for example, something like that. I do it but I don’t know what the actual professionals’ opinion is on this. Let’s say you, Marco?

Marco: In Dadea’s case study, he embedded the corresponding money site page in the G site. And it’s working. You guys have seen how it’s working from what he’s saying in the mastermind. So by all means, and if it’s relevant if it’s part of the entity, why would you not? The beautiful thing about what we do is a sense it’s ours, we can do anything we want with our entity, it’s part of who we are as part of what we are on the web. So anything that reinforces that can only help, especially when you’re doing it through iframe.

Bradley: Yeah, and there are some interesting things you can do there, guys. I’m just going to mention one and it’s five o'clock and we’re going to wrap it up. But you know, for example, you could take your category RSS feed, for example, for it from your website, your money site, and convert that into a feed burner feed, and then use the buzz boost, which will create an HTML version of your RSS feed that then you could embed that into the G site on that page within that particular you know, that corresponding mirrored page for that category. That makes sense. So now you’ve got not only the embedded web page, but you also have the feed with the category with all the posts within that particular category, dynamically updating that page, if that makes sense. Because every time you post something new within that category will update that feed, which is an HTML version of the feed burner feed embedded in the G site, which is another Google property. So it’s another iframe stack within Google. I mean, there’s you can do that with tag feeds, tag RSS feeds, category feeds. It’s really crazy, which you can there’s a lot of stuff you can do with it. So

okay, uh, that’s about it. Anything else guys?

Adam: Yeah, just real quick one. We were talking about at the beginning if you’d like to double your agency and by that we mean doubling your revenue without doubling your time involvement at over two, 2xyouragency.com. As Hump Day hangout watchers, we’ve got a special deal going but it’s only going to last for a few days. So 2xyouragency.com, find out more hop in getting started there, whether you’re a consultant, agency owner, digital marketing, SEO, whatever it is, if you have clients, this is the place you want to be.

Awesome. Thanks, everybody. See you guys.

Bye, everyone.

Weekly Digital Marketing Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 271 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

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angelagiles18 · 5 years