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blog-sliverofjade · 4 years ago

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Hearth Fires 6: Animals

Pairing: Remi Denier x OFC

Summary: Lorel Maddox just wants to live as a human, run her bakery in peace, and forget. Unfortunately, the alpha of the local leopard pack has very different ideas.

Remi Denier doesn’t know what to make of the female Changeling who wants nothing to do with him or the RainFire pack. He does know that he has a driving need to protect her. Even if it’s from herself.

While they’re embroiled in a battle of wills, there’s a war brewing on the horizon. The outside threat could not only destroy everything they hold dear, but tear apart the fragile new bonds of the Trinity Accord, plunging the world into bloodshed to rival the Territorial Wars of centuries past.

Word count: 1691

Content warning: Racist cop

Hearth Fires Masterlist

Beta read by the matchless pandabearer

The officers eased up when they realized that Lorel was in 100% human form, which was a short and plump one, at that; someone had told her once that in her pretty dresses she looked about as dangerous as a cupcake. Appearances certainly were deceiving, after all, since she could probably do significant damage to the woman currently carrying on outside. While the thought was definitely tempting, she knew she wasn’t fast enough to get past four cops before they could take her down. That was her cat’s risk assessment, not hers. She was still frozen in shock.

Looking like they’d stepped into The Twilight Zone , they lowered their weapons. She felt the same way, her brain trying to wrap itself around the presence of Enforcement in her bakery for anything other than coffee and donuts.

One stepped forward to ask her some questions and she answered truthfully. The absurdity of the situation and their authoritative tone had her operating mostly on autopilot while she focused on keeping her ocelot under control. The cat bared its teeth at the intruders, wanting to drive them off its territory.

It quickly became obvious that the snotty woman had reported that Lorel had threatened and stalked her down the street. Naturally, she was more than happy to disabuse them of that falsehood.

“Would you like to see the camera footage?” she offered.

Three of the quartet followed her, the other went to question the other party. She only used the small office off the kitchen to meet customers with large custom designs like wedding cakes. Usually, she placed orders from her organizer while having tea or a bite to eat at one of the tables on the sidewalk out front, although that would probably change soon with the weather.

The portable device was perfectly capable of displaying the CCTV feed, but the screen in the back was larger. She slipped behind the desk and tried not to feel claustrophobic with the black-clad officers filling the rest of the tiny space between her and the door. Their scents filled the room, making it hard for her to breathe.

Lorel closed the sketches she’d been working on to bring up the video. There was no sound, but it was plain from their body language that the blonde was the aggressor. She’d been too shocked at the time to note the other woman’s belligerent stance and excessive gesticulations. As for herself, she looked like someone had smacked her across the face with a fish. She had only moved to grip the counter once the vile words had sunk in, trying to keep from leaping over the counter. Thankfully she never actually lunged for her throat.

The trio relaxed as they watched, alternately annoyed, exasperated, disgusted, and resigned. Not that much of their emotions showed on their faces; it was their scents that gave them away. A part of her brain filed that realization away to freak out over later.

Once the video caught up to when the cops entered, she hit pause. They asked more questions, most of which washed over her without fully registering in her mind. She was still reeling emotionally, and her cat was too on edge over the strange predators. A couple of lips pursed, and she thought she caught an eye roll when she got to the part that had been the last straw and she kicked the blonde out. Their obvious distaste at the false report had her cat easing down a bit, giving her room to breathe.

“Thank you, miss.”

Now that she was no longer fighting the all-encompassing urge to attack, she noted the name on his uniform. Sugiyama. They’d introduced themselves once they realized she wasn’t even armed with so much as a spatula, but she’d been too off-balance to absorb the information at the time.

“Maddox. Lorel Maddox.” They responded automatically to the ritual of etiquette when she offered a handshake. She smiled, careful to not flash any more teeth than absolutely necessary. While they appeared genial now, she still didn’t want to give them an excuse to think that she was threatening them in the enclosed space. Her cat didn’t like being crowded in there at all and she was afraid of how it’d react if subjected to any more stress. “Would ya’ll like a copy of the video?”

“No, I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Sugiyama, apparently the senior officer since he’d been doing most of the speaking, shook his head. “The sheriff will want to speak with you, though.”

Moving out of sheer habit, she escorted them to the front where she plied them with samples and coffee. Her hands shook as she went through the motions. She knew that not all such interactions between Changelings and Enforcement went so peacefully. Was that what she’d intended? She thought she was going to be sick.

Her cat wanted to hunt her down and rip her throat out.

Invisible bugs crawled across Remi’s skin. He flexed his foot a little harder on the pedal and the vehicle responded readily with a burst of speed that pressed him back against the seat. He could have set it to autopilot once he’d reached the highway, but the safety protocols would’ve kept him at the speed limit and he didn’t have time for that. The clock on the dash told him that he’d received Chloe’s call merely eleven minutes ago, yet it felt like hours.

They’d thus far managed to squeak by without any run-ins with Enforcement, and now he had to intervene on behalf of someone who wasn’t even a packmember yet. Local Enforcement was almost purely human, with the odd Psy here and there. Most of the Psy brass from the Council days had been cleaned out. Rainfire hadn’t had enough dominants, even if they’d been interested, to spare to the force since they were no longer barred from the ranks.

After the abuses of the Psy under Silence, the human-dominated city Enforcement distrusted anyone who wasn’t entirely human. The fall-out of this encounter could impact racial relations in the area for years to come and it all hinged on a stubborn, unpredictable ocelot.

He pulled to a stop in front of the hardware store in record time. Cop cars clogged up the parking spaces in front of the bakery and yarn shop across the street.

“Jack’s just started questioning her,” Chloe called with a grimace from the alcove of her doorway. The way she wrapped her rainbow-coloured shawl tightly around herself made it sound more nefarious than a simple interview.

He grunted and nodded in thanks. He’d met the human woman a few times at her husband’s hardware store, so she knew he wasn’t considered chatty even on his more gregarious days and wasn’t likely to take offense at his response. But he had to get verbal. Fast.

Keeping to an easy stride (running headlong was only something hot-headed dominant juveniles did, he reminded himself), he focused on the voices drifting out the open door. He couldn’t remember the last time he was so grateful for his acute hearing.

“I just want to know what the problem is.” Sheriff Shank somehow managed to sound both friendly and patronizing. The ears of Remi’s leopard went flat against its head and it curled its upper lip in a sneer.

“She used a slur so I asked her to leave.” Lorel was clearly becoming exasperated. No cat tolerated condescension for long. Unfortunately, there were cops forming a loose cordon in front to block his way and he was not in the mood to play at being non-threatening.

“And what slur was that?”

“Animal.”

Remi had to stop and make nice with the cops when all he wanted to do was burst in there and crack la crâne de cette bibette.

“Don’t you people use that word? Talk about yourselves as cats and dogs?” The derision in his voice had claws shoving at Remi’s fingertips. It took every ounce of willpower to keep them in as he made small talk with the guards, working his way around to getting their version of the story.

“Wolves, there are no dog Changelings.” The drinks and treats in their hands had his leopard snorting; she’d all but tried to throw him out on his ear when he’d dropped by and then turned on the Southern belle grace full force when Enforcement descended. He wondered if she knew that he was loathe to see her hurt or if she didn't recognize the lethal threat he posed.

“So, what’s the difference between ‘animal’ and a specific animal?”

“Context. She accused me of taking jobs from humans.” It was nice to hear that icy tone directed at someone else instead of at him.

“You specifically?”

“Well, no, she-”

“So you kicked her out for expressing an opinion? Did you know her husband lost his job to one of you? Ever since ya’ll moved in work’s been hard to come by.” That was a load of shit. Some people had their panties in a twist because the timber industry was banned from RainFire lands, while conveniently ignoring the benefits to local businesses

“That’s no reason to call Enforcement, I certainly didn’t threaten her!”

The officers- Sugiyama, Norton, and Carter- made it plain that nothing had happened and that the sheriff was “just finishing up” with Lorelei.

“Predatory Changelings like you can be pretty scary.” Shank drew “pretty” out into nearly four syllables. “You should just be glad she wasn’t carrying. This is a stand-your-ground state.” It was all he could do to keep his eyes from going cat at the subtle threat.

“You’re saying a woman can come into my shop, scream and insult me, then shoot me if I look at her funny and it’s legal?”

“Sure, if she’s scared for her life.”

“But I didn’t do anything, I only asked her to leave!” From the corner of his eye, he saw her throw her hands in the air.

“See, that’s the problem with you folks, you’re just too aggressive.”

“Oh, you think this is aggressive?”

And that was his cue to enter stage right.

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duckapus · 6 years ago

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My Danny Phantom Reboot (as was owed for the Phight)

Okay, so first off I should mention that this is going to be less “what if someone made a reboot of Danny Phantom now” and more “what if Danny Phantom was done right to start with.” This means there’ll be more emphasis on storytelling and characters, none of H*rtm*n’s usual shenanigans, but the storyline as it was is going to be more-or-less intact, depending on what I think I can salvage.

So, let’s talk powers.

Danny is going to have all the powers he did in the show, given gradually and with clear foreshadowing. His ghost sense is currently just a bit too conspicuous, so I’ll be changing it from a wisp of cold breath to a chill up his spine, though for the sake of the audience there will be a visual and audio indicator of it, much like Spider-Man’s spider sense. Starting out, he just has that and the three basic ghost powers, though they won’t work properly for a while, and I’ll make it clear that this is because his half-ghost status prevented him from gaining the instinctual knowledge to control them outright. While there are some abilities that he gains during times of stress (like ectoblasts and the ghostly wail) he’ll have to actually practice in order for them to work with any level of consistency.

Like I mentioned, there will be some foreshadowing, specifically when it comes to his ice powers. There’s going to be multiple points where someone mentions that he has cold hands, with many of those people being ghosts to imply that it isn’t a ghost thing. There’ll be more emphasis on Ghost Cores and Core Types. Danny isn’t going to be as affected by warmer or colder temperatures as other people, usually being the last one to need to put on a jacket. He’s going to be somewhat weak to fire-based attacks. And there’s going to be a multi-episode buildup to his powers freezing him.

I’m also going all-in on the space motif. His bedroom is covered in star stickers and NASA posters. He tends to look up at the stars whenever he needs time to think. He isn’t afraid of heights at all because up is good, up is safe, up is home, and flight is the only power he never has trouble with as a result.

And now, for Danny’s parents. First off, for this, they do not want to destroy ghosts. They want to study them, understand them, and keep people safe from the ones that cause trouble. They know full well how little they actually know and how small their sample size is- that’s why they’re working on equipment to actually explore the Ghost Zone in the first place! Yes they’ll screw up, and jump to conclusions, and be a bit too enthusiastic. Yes, they’re working off of some pretty big assumptions, because that’s all they’ve got. But at the end of the day, they’re the first to admit they’re not perfect. And as far as priorities are concerned, they’re parents first, scientists second, and hunters third(if even that).

Jazz and Tucker are already good as-is, as are most of the ghosts, so let’s move on to Sam and the “A-listers.”

So starting off, because I’m not Fartman, I will not be vilifying the popular kids just because they’re popular. For Qwan, we’ve already got the fanon of him being a sweet cinnamon roll who’d be a great friend to everybody if he were just able to say no, specifically to Dash. And with Star I’ll be going with a strong-willed girl who’s fully willing to call the others out when they’re bullshit goes to far, though she’s admittedly got a looser definition of “too far” than she should.

And now the big three. So my interpretation of Sam, Dash and Paulina is that a big chunk of their issues come from them not quite growing out of their jackass middle schooler phase(you all know what I mean). That’s not all of it, or even most of it, but it’s a big enough part that them acknowledging it will be a huge step in the right direction.

In Sam’s case, a lot of it also stems from her need to control as much of her life as she can, which developed in response to how little control her parents let her have. This ranges from harmless (her love of gardening and “ultra-recyclo-vegetarianism”) to really not okay (her tendency to manipulate or strong-arm people into doing what she wants) with her harsh judgement of people and trust issues landing somewhere in the upper middle. All of this to say that she’s a lot more like her parents (and Paulina, to a lesser extent) than she realizes.

With Paulina, while she does still have a lot of problems, being a crazy, obsessive fangirl isn’t one of them. She knows full well that her feelings for Phantom are just a celebrity crush and they aren’t about to get together any time soon (the boy’s dead as far as she knows, for god’s sake!). She’s also very observant, not to the point of finding out the truth about Danny but enough to realize quite a few other important details…

With Dash, all I’m really going to be changing is that his Football Star status absolutely does not give him free reign to do whatever he wants, because I respect Mr. Lancer more than that.

Admittedly I haven’t quite figured out their other classmates yet. And Valerie’s arc is already good as-is, though I won’t be including her getting shunned by the “A-listers” because this version of Star ain’t gonna let that fly. I’m also including Wes, because his antics are glorious and I think I can do some cool stuff with him.

Now, along with giving the characters better characterization in general, I’ll also be giving them their own time in the limelight to show what Danny’s situation looks like from an outsider’s perspective. Valerie in particular ends up as something of a secondary protagonist.

And now we come to Vlad. Oh, Vlad.

Okay, so in this version, Vlad inviting the Fentons to the reunion was a genuine attempt to reconnect. Unfortunately ghostly obsessions are powerful things, and he sort of relapsed into hating Jack and wanting Maddie for himself. Things more-or-less continue as normal, though with his desire to take on Danny as an apprentice coming off as him actually, genuinely wanting to teach Danny how being a halfa works, which makes it a little comically awkward when he tries to turn their battles into a teaching moment. He still becomes the mayor, though this time around it’s because he genuinely thought it was a good idea, and he got voted in legitimately.

Unfortunately it all sort of goes downhill after a while. Due to his current mentality of “tired old uncle just wants to get over his issues and help out” clashing with his obsession with Jack and Maddie, he’s sort of cracking, and the fact that Danny adds an extra layer to both isn’t really a good thing.

And then we get the clones. In this version, they all last a lot longer, and sort of act as Vlad’s minions for a while. The Frankenstein’s Monster-esque one sort of acts as a big brother to the others. He’s also very smart, even if he can’t really say much, and as time goes on he starts to realize that something is very wrong with Vlad. It all comes to a head when Dani is created, because Vlad realizes that even with a human half she still isn’t stable and something inside him just snaps. At this moment, there’s now two Vlads in there; Masters, who’s honestly just tired of all the fighting and pushing people away, and Plasmius, who’s essentially season three Vlad in all of his megalomaniacle obsession-fueled glory. Frankendanny’s destabilization is a big moment in this, as are the other clones holding back Vlad as they’re melting so Danny and Dani can escape at the end of the episode.

Dani still ends up traveling after that, though she’s not just ignored as she’ll be sending Danny postcards of places she’s been and there’ll be a few episodes dedicated to her adventures (with some hints to her instability getting worse.)

D-stabilized is where thing get really crazy. This is because while I’ve been distracting you with my Danny Phantom remake, there’s been a secret, second remake of Fairly Oddparents hidden in the background! I won’t go into too much detail, since that’s not what this is about, but It follows the same structure of apply overarching story, focus on characters, trim off what doesn’t work. Because of this, Timmy happens to be in the same city where Valerie finds Dani (I don’t think they were in Amity Park yet, but I’m not sure) and meets Dani before Valerie does. The episode plays out more-or-less the same (Val uses Dani as bait to catch Danny, gives Dani to Vlad, Danny appeals to her better nature, she finds out that Vlad is an evil half-ghost and that not all ghosts are evil thus shattering her world view) but with the addition of Timmy tracking her down to her weird holding cell/torture room place (seriously, what was up with that?) and then tagging along and somehow holding his own against Fright Knight with nothing but a blaster he managed to swipe from her (since not only does he have to deal with having human allies, but also the fact that magic doesn’t work that well on ghosts, which means no fairy help).

After that, there’s a few breather episodes to the end of the third season, mainly to do with Valerie processing everything she’s just learned.

And then Freakshow gets the reality gauntlet, because I’ve been holding that off until now. Danny gets his identity revealed on live television, the Guys in White are after him, and Freakshow is holding Amity Park hostage until Danny can find the three stones he scattered.

There’s just a few small changes I’ve made:

The stones got scattered across the planet, instead of just the country

There’s no easy way to track the stones unless one gets activated, unlike in the original where they had ecto-signatures

Wes and the “A-Listers” get dragged along for the ride

Because Freakshow isn’t a complete idiot and realizes that it will take a significant amount of time to find the stones, the team has until the end of summer.

Instead of everybody being in cages (since that won’t really work with this time frame) Amity Park is surrounded by an impenetrable dome, and both ghost portals are clogged up. Nobody gets in or out unless the ringmaster says so.

The second and third parts of Wishology and an adaptation of Nicktoons Unite are happening alongside all of this, so along with GIW and ghosts the team is going to be dealing with the Eliminators and The Syndicate.

Carl, Sheen and Libby have somehow tagged along.

We’ll be calling this arc the Road-trip from Hell, and it, along with the other two story arcs, will be taking up the entirety of the fourth season. The other two arcs will experience changes as well, such as Dani going with Timmy, Mark Chang and the Villains to find the Wind Wand due to being in Dimmsdale when it happens, Catman, Chip Skylark, Elmer and Sanjay getting captured along with the rest of Timmy’s friends, Valerie and Tootie getting recruited by Jimmy to fight the Syndicate since Timmy and Danny are busy and they’re honestly the only two options, and Anti-Cosmo being the Fairly Oddparents representative for the Syndicate since Crocker is also busy.

For the sake of storytelling, I should mention that GIW is a fanatical splinter group of MERF in this continuity, and have already been established as major antagonists. Also throughout the season Fairy World is basically going to be a warzone locked in a three-way battle between the Fairies, the Anti-Fairies and Syndicate, and the Eliminators, which all three groups see at one point or another.

The final battle is really going to be four going on simultaneously- Danny and Team Phantom(which by this point will also include the reformed agents O and K, because I like them) vs Ghost Freakshow, the robot army just outside of town, and Lydia; the Nicktoons vs the Syndicate’s doomsday device; Cosmo in his Godzilla form vs everything the Syndicate and the Eliminators can throw at him, and Timmy vs The Destructinator (which will actually be a full-on fight, with the outsmarting thing just being Timmy’s trump card). It’s going to be really cool with a bunch of well-timed jump-cuts and everything.

Then in the aftermath I’m going to basically spit in the face of the status quo. Danny still erases peoples memories of his reveal, but leaves out the new members of Team Phantom (because if he has to remember the road-trip from hell, so does everybody else), and it also doesn’t work on Valerie (or Tootie) since they were in Jimmy’s universe at the time, which is going to be Fun for Danny to deal with when she gets back. Timmy, Chester and AJ are also immune, due to AJ secretly making the three of them immune to memory wipes in general so Timmy wouldn’t have to forget his fairies or go through what happened in the first Wishology again. He would’ve done the same with Elmer and Sanjay, but he didn’t get the chance.

After all that, season five is a return to the norm, other than dealing with the new character dynamics, the Vlad situation, and all the Fairly Oddparents stuff leaking in. I haven’t really worked out all the specifics, since I sort of got caught up in the season four stuff.

Note: For obvious reasons, I cannot actually reboot Danny Phantom and/or Fairly Oddparents. Unless I come up with ideas later on down the line, or other people decide to add their own ideas, this is what you get.

(@phandomphightclub, I did it!)

#danny phantom #dpreboot #fairly oddparents #reboot #concept #phantom phight club #lost a bet #phantom planet isn't canon #this was fun #long post #sorry

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napstamuse · 6 years ago

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Deltarune quirks and observations

So now that the silence has finally lifted, I can talk to you about Deltarune. And hooooooo boy, is there a lot to talk about.

Before I say anything else, I just want to note that in all my expectations, I never expected to actually get a game to play yesterday. That is… An insane thing to drop with all of 24 hours notice. And in that, I just want to seriously show some appreciation to all of the hard work and love he puts into this series. He obviously cares about not only creating good games, but also crafting a memorable experience surrounding them - and that’s awesome.

That being said, here are my first few thoughts under the cut:

I am in love with the new sprite style, battle system, menu, etc. It really does feel like an upgrade.

Susie is not THE Suzy. If you notice, the spelling of their names isn’t the same. This could just be a genuine mistake, but honestly I’m leaning more towards it being a purposeful false lead.

Asgore’s flowers are definitely not just flowers. They’re the same color as the human SOULs and sit in the same kind of container they did.

In that intro, those background sounds are definitely Giygas samples. Specifically, I’m pretty sure it’s a stretched and slightly modified version of the track Giygas Intimidates from Mother 2/Earthbound.

We’ve finally seen the non-Goner version of this guy, completing the full set! (thanks, @playfulpiano!)

There are… A lot of subtle things wrong with this game. A lot of character relationships and current state of affairs just plainly don’t make any sense. Sans not knowing Toriel until recently, Asriel being alive and healthy, Asgore’s seven SOUL Flowers (granted they aren’t called that, but I think the symbolism is pretty straightforward), Alphys not really knowing Asgore or Undyne, etc…

I’m going to make a somewhat early jump and say that this is our peek into the Alpha Timeline, the one destroyed in Gaster’s accident. We’re not seeing post pacifist - We’re seeing what things were like in that world.

Somewhat of a stretch (by which I mean, a huge stretch) but Kris’ name is an anagram of Frisk, minus the “F”. Since Frisk is quite noticeably missing, I think there might be a connection.

Gaster is…. Very strangely absent from this game. There are various hints to his existence (The entire intro sequence, the sound you get upon trying to use your phone, the fast travel “doors”) but he’s practically non-existent in the code.

It is very, very difficult to accrue any EXP. Actually, as far as I can tell, it’s impossible. I’ll have to check around more because I find this pretty odd.

Actually, on that note, it seems like any choices you make... Really don’t matter. This makes sense to me, since you’re told that right from the beginning, but it also leaves me feeling a little frustrated.

Especially since even when you just fight everything you come across, the character dialogue doesn’t change. It’s honestly almost like they’re ignoring you.

Dogcheck still exists, unfortunately. New song, though

Debug mode also still exists, and is just as useful! Can cause some pretty hilarious bugs, though. Will post pics later once I’m at my computer.

The naming easter eggs still work (Using Sans, Toriel, Papyrus, Bratty, Catty, or QC will cause a line about “an interesting coincidence” to appear. Typing Gaster will immediately reset the game.)

The window name will periodically change depending on where you are (Hilariously, it will change to “DOGTARUNE” if you enter the Dogcheck room)

You can’t view Ralsei’s manual in game, but it does exist in the ripped sprites. It’s also very adorable. (thanks to u/Animelici804 on Reddit for the upload)

The files have a very interesting naming scheme. Almost anything related to the intro sequence begins with either “DEVICE_” or “PROCESS_”. This combined with “GONERMAKER” is... Interesting.

Lastly, as of right now, there seems to be a distinct lack of secrets hidden in the code. It’s entirely possible that I’m just missing them since I’ve only got spaghetti code to look at, but it doesn’t look like the “Attention Hackerz” message or the one about secrets exist at all. There also doesn’t seem to be any secret audio.

Overall, I’m just insanely excited about all of this. My love and obsession over Undertale never really disappeared, just went quiet for a while... And it is now back in full force.

We’ve got some exciting things ahead of us!!

#mine #undertale #deltarune #deltarune spoilers

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greysgonnawrite · 6 years ago

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The Ladies and Gentlemen of N.O.B.L.E.

Before we begin I’d like to give credit to the wonderful @8bithouseoffun for his work on editing this

“Time of death is calculated at 5:23, approximately an hour and a half ago.” The taller of two men said, looking at a holographic projection of his own face, subtly making an effort to emphasize his good side for the recording. “We’re still looking for a cause of death, but as you can see here,” he made a motion of grabbing the edge of the floating screen, and it followed his hand as he pointed it to the cadaver lying on the table, “the body appears to be in a state of severe anatomical shift. There seems to be no external wounds, but once we shave off the fur that’s already grown, we’ll get a better look. Once we have more information, we’ll continue recording. In the meantime, Dorian, stop recording functions. Keep the camera up, though. I’ll want to get a better look at this guy.”

“Yes, Doctor.” A mechanical voice came from a phone resting on another table, next to several medical instruments. The display floating in front of the man went through slight alterations while still in his hand, and after several more gestures, he had given himself a sufficient closeup of the body.

“You can stop hiding in the corner,” he said to his companion, “you’re not going to get caught on tape.”

The shorter man, despite being nowhere near a corner, had been keeping his distance from the camera’s vision, and was making himself as quiet as possible, lest a cough be heard in the background of the notes. “You don’t have to film your notes, you could just record them and not have to worry about how you look. Or better yet, just write them down.” Not in the business of being a hypocrite, in his hands rested a beat up notebook with an equally aged pen, one of many located on his person, filled with lines upon lines of notes.

“As fun as that looks, I think it’s better in the long run if people know what the hell I’m saying.” The tall man motioned to his coworker’s notes, which, to be honest, were quite indecipherable to anyone but the man who’d written them. “Besides, I don’t ‘have to’ worry about how I look. I get to take an opportunity to show myself off.” To this, the other man didn’t even acknowledge he’d said anything.

The men stood in a cramped lab, both wearing long white coats and making their own notes on information being displayed on holographic screens floating around them. Between them rested a medical table with the corpse; it looked like it used to be human, but its features were warped and misshapen. The two had been silent for some time when the taller man finally spoke up. “So we’re not going to say anything to each other until we have to?”

The shorter man removed his glasses and wiped them off. “You want a conversation? What do you want to talk about?” His eyes never left the displays.

“I don’t know, I just can’t stand the professionalism. Two of the most brilliant doctors in the world, finally in the same room, and they just work quietly? Sounds pretty disappointing.”

“And that brings us back to the first thing I said, what do you want to talk about?” The shorter man had yet to shift his focus from any of the screens, his mind racing to make sense of the information he was writing down. He seemed rather poorly put together, like a man who’d forgone some of the more advanced aspects of personal hygiene. He adjusted his glasses and stared at a particularly odd portion of data.

“We could talk about you.” The taller man, by contrast, had put a great more deal of effort into his appearance. Better posture, maintained hair, and immaculately clean shaven, every movement was precise and calculated to make himself look good. “Specifically, we could talk about my theories about you.” He waved his hand and several of the displays in front of him shrunk away to give him more room to think.

The shorter man winced, but took a deep breath and did his best to sound polite, “And what, may I ask, are your theories?”

“For one, I think you’re holding him back.”

Now it was the other man’s turn to wave away his displays, letting his opposite see the frustration on his face, “You think I’m holding him back? Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do. I’d rather not let him destroy and kill whatever he comes across.”

In the time it took him to make his statement, his partner had taken his phone and brought up two more displays, one of which was a picture from a news site, the other a list of measurements for a large, human shaped creature. “Look at the way everything’s destroyed in these photos. With his musculature, everything here should look way worse. Believe it or not, I know a thing or two about what the human body is capable of. He’s clearly not being aimless in his destruction; everything is just roughed up, not crushed to bits.”

“Look, Victor, I’m not sure where you’re going with this. I already said, I try my best to keep him under control. Edward still does whatever he wants, I just… make sure he doesn’t crush everything, I guess?”

“But that’s what I’m talking about! You’re focused on stopping him, but the way you talk about it all, you shouldn’t get any say in the matter. I don’t think Eddie is as out of control as you think.” Victor tapped his phone and projected several more screens with news stories between them. “I don’t think his targets are random; shady vampire nightclubs, gargoyle poachers, several of these people have been trying various ways to replicate your formula. Did you ever find it strange that he only goes after things you personally don’t like?”

“You know what? I think we’re done talking.” The smaller man had already brought his screens back up and went back to work. “Let’s just get this finished so we can go home and we never have to talk again.”

“Oh, there’s not much we can do now, I’ve had a sample of the fur sent for analysis. We just need to wait for the results.” Victor gave a smile that was dripping with smugness. “Which means we get to talk more about you, Hank.”

“Hold on,” the other man said, once again waving away his holograms. “First, I told you to call me Henry. Second, why did you bother getting the fur analysed? This looks like a pretty cut and dry case of lycanthropy. Probably killed in the middle of his change.”

“But it’s not cut and dry!” Victor ran around the table to Henry’s side and, lifted the body’s right hand, which was as grotesque and out of proportion as the rest of the man’s body; the mere act of picking it up required the full effort of both of Victor’s arms. “Look at this! If we compare it to his left hand, which has barely changed at all…” he ran back to his side of the table and raised the hand, which seemed mostly normal by comparison, outside of the fingernails being twice the size one would expect them to be.

“Yeah, it’s bigger and messed up, that’s what happens when it turns into a claw.” Henry said, annoyed by his colleague’s antics.

“Yes! But there’s no way it’d get this big.” Vic shot back, unceremoniously dropping the hand back onto the table. “If this poor bastard was just suffering from regular lycanthropy, it’d be at least a fourth of its current size. Something’s way off about this, so I took a sample of fur and I’m getting it checked out.”

Henry looked at the body, then at his notes, everything Victor said about the hands was true, but something was bothering him. “When did you get a fur sample? You haven’t left that spot since I’ve been in here, much less left the room for analysis.”

“Oh, I took care of that before you got here, I noticed it a few seconds after I first saw the body, I’ve just been killing time waiting for the results. Should be almost done, actually.”

Henry sighed, “Then what have you been doing the whole time I’ve been working?”

“Reading up on you! I had you scanned as soon as you walked through the door. I have to say, your physiology is incredible!”

“You scanned me?”

“I scan everyone, don’t feel special. Hey, new theory; You still have to let Eddie come out and play every now and then, don’t you?”

Henry was stunned. He’d worked so hard to keep that a secret, and Victor had found out within an hour of meeting him. He stammered slightly before finding the right words, “How did you find out?”

Victor brought up more of his displays and turned them so they faced Henry. “It wasn’t that hard, not for me anyways. A lot of your organs, particularly those in your circulatory and cardiovascular systems, are pretty out of proportion. They likely shouldn’t function for longer than a few weeks. I’m guessing around the time that Eddie stopped being an angrier version of yourself and started being an actual monster was around the same time this started happening; your body couldn’t totally handle the strain of shrinking back. What’s interesting is that these effects would’ve reverted on their own if you stopped juicing up. But I was under the impression that there wasn’t any addictive components in your formula, so either I’m wrong- unlikely- or you’re having fun and don’t want to admit it.”

“It’s not that simple!” Henry snapped, a twinge of panic leaking through his voice, “If I stop drinking it cold turkey, then my oversized organs run the risk of failure. Putting an end to becoming Edward needs to be a carefully measured process; if I don’t drink enough, then it kills me, and if I drink too much… I’m not really sure what happens there, but none of the simulations show any promise!”

Victor put a hand on his colleague’s shoulder, “I get it-”

“I doubt you’re going through the same thing.” Henry tried to push his hand off of him, but Victor ignored his efforts.

“Hank, neither of us are here because of what we’re proud of. Our greatest accomplishments are specifically rooted in ruining our fucking lives! I may not turn into anything or lose control like you, but I made a god damned monster. I still have nightmares of its face staring up at me as it was confronted with the existential horror of being alive. So yeah, I might know a thing or two about what you’re going through. Now, we don’t have to continue this line of conversation if you want, that’s fine, but if you want to keep talking, know that I’m prepared to.”

Henry stared in silence, unsure of how to respond. Seconds later a disappointed looking Victor shook his head and went back to making notes.

After a moment of quiet that lasted far too long, a small voice came from Victor’s phone. “Doctor, your analysis of the fur has been completed.”

Eager for the shift in tone, Victor happily spoke up. “Don’t know what I’d do without you, Dorian. Go ahead and bring up the results.” Victor had barely finished talking when several screens reappeared with lines upon lines of new data scrolling on them. Once again, Dorian’s voice chimed in.

“I’ve taken the liberty of marking particularly unique portions of data for you.” True to his word, multiple lines of code stood out in red highlights.

“Could you cut out the middleman and just show those portions?” Victor said, his mind racing with the implications of what he was reading.

“Of course, Doctor.”

Henry adjusted his glasses again, pushing the previous conversation to the back of his head so he could focus on the results. “None of these readings are making sense, this isn’t like any case of lycanthropy I’ve ever seen.”

“Probably because it isn’t like any case of lycanthropy that’s ever been. Check out the genetics.”

Henry’s eyes darted to another screen and he skimmed through its data until a glaring detail stood out to him. “That can’t be right. These sequences don’t make sense.” His words trailed off as he brought his hands up, signaling for a holographic keyboard to appear under them. He ran several searches through a genetic database until he found what he was looking for.

“What the hell’s going on?” Victor asked, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. “None of these results line up with any known species of wolf, much less any known werewolves!”

“That’s because they aren’t lupine,” Henry started, gesturing for one of his screens to be copied over to Victor. “They’re ursine. Whatever’s going on, this guy was on his way to becoming the first known werebear.”

Now it was Victor’s turn to be stunned. He read over the screens several more times before he finally accepted the reality that Henry had laid out for him. “This is… incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it!”

“If I had to guess, cause of death is the same thing you saw in me, but on a larger scale. This guy’s insides got way to big way too fast, and his body couldn’t handle it.”

“You’re half right,” Victor started, his head slowly turning towards the window. “That definitely happened to him, but it didn’t kill him.” He calmly walked away from his work station and began packing up several items.”

“You mean something else killed him?”

“I mean nothing killed him. I know more about the dead than anyone else on on the damn planet, and I can say that that man’s not dead yet. I should’ve seen it before, but I didn’t know what I was dealing with. Those changes were brought on by an artificial full moon, probably a UV light with a lunar prism on it, it lead to a slower, uneven change, until the poor bastard couldn’t function. No blood flow, no breathing, stuck mid change, obviously he’d be pronounced dead.” He scolded himself as he finished grabbing his things. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“So now what? The great Doctor Frankenstein solves a medical mystery and now he’s on his way? Why don’t you stick around, see if we can’t change him back?”

Victor snapped around to face him. “Because he’s past the point of changing back, the transformation can only proceed. You should get going too, seeing as our wonderful little laboratory has a nice big window with a great view of the city!”

Henry looked out the window that took up most of one of the lab’s walls. Sure enough, it did offer a great view of the city, but it also gave the viewer a breathtaking sunset every night, much like the sun setting right now. An overlay projected on the corner of the window contained a helpful display that informed the viewer of various details such as the date, time, weather, and, most worryingly, the phase of the moon that would be in the sky that night. Without missing a beat, Henry began packing his things as well. “So what, you were just going to leave me in there if I hadn’t asked?”

“You wouldn’t have been helpless, I’m sure you keep some formula on you wherever you go. Don’t bother grabbing all the pens just go.”

Despite Victor’s protests, Henry did grab his pens and shoved theminto his pockets before hurrying out the door, just in time to hear unsettling cracks coming from the table. “I don’t think having Edward and that… thing interacting would make the situation any better.”

Once they were both out the door, Victor pulled out his phone. “Dorian, put Lab 7 into lockdown, and get Captain Talbot on the line. Actually, turn the video recording in the lab back on while you’re at it. Might as well get some data out of this.” As he spoke, the Lab’s blast doors began descending, eventually blocking out the sounds of pained groaning that had started emanating from the subject on the table. “Larry, glad to hear your voice. I need N.O.B.L.E. Forces on Floor 15, silver armements. Subject was incorrectly pronounced dead and is a pretty heavy security risk. Yes, Dr. Jekyll and I have evacuated the area and we are making our way towards the elevators. Stairs? You sure? Alright, but that’s our blood on your hands. Got it. Tell your men they’ll need heavier ammunition than they’re expecting, but I want that thing captured, not killed. Well tell them to try to capture it. Thank you.” On that final note, the Doctor finally put his phone away as the two men made their way towards the stairs.

“He’s right, you know. In an emergency, stairs are generally the safer option.” Henry said after Victor hung up.

“What ‘I know’ is that I’m right, you should let Ed deal with that. He’d be way more useful in restraining that thing then a bunch of armed goons.”

“Why do you want to catch it anyways?”

“Because I would kill for an interview to figure out what the hell lead to a man turning into that. A mutation to that degree doesn’t happen in nature.”

“What, you’re saying someone made that?”

“I’m not only saying that, but I’m saying that if it was in such a state that I thought it was dead, then whoever’s behind it probably thinks it was a failure when they dumped the body.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Henry said, taking a second to catch his breath on one of the landings.

“How many iterations of your formula did you have to go through before Ed came out? If whoever did this is anything like us, which I’m willing to wager they are, then a perceived failure is just a setback, they’re going to try something like this again, and soon, if they can.”

Henry paused for only a moment as the full implications of what he was just told sunk in. “We have to tell the Director about this! Get a whole investigation launched.”

“We’ll tell Rose everything we can after this is all dealt with. In the meantime, our only option is to get somewhere safe and get ready for whatever’s next.” Despite the confidence Victor spoke with, his head was racing with a thousand different questions, none of which he could properly answer. Normally, being like this just made him uncomfortable, but in this moment, for the first time in decades, he was scared.

#writing #fiction #Noble

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stevensavage · 6 years ago

Text

Steve's Marketing Advice June 2019

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve's Tumblr. Find out more at my newsletter.)

It’s the latest update of my Marketing Tips! As always, I keep updating these every few months.

The Core Principle: The Web Of Connections

To promote yourself your various activities, giveaways, social media, and so on need to connect and reinforce each other. If a new book comes out, promote it on your website and give away a few copies in your newsletter. If you’re speaking on art, give out bookmarks with links to your website. Everything ties together.

This does make finding what works a bit challenging, so I take these steps:

Do what is easy, like cross-posting sales and stuff among my social media. Hey, it’s easy. Then I monitor what seems to work.

Do what seems rational and looks like it’ll pay off. Don’t try everything, try what will probably work.

Do what seems fun. Why not enjoy this?

Advance marketing with incremental steps. Usually that takes a month or two to show, so I tend to do my experiments every month or every other month.

Record what I find from above. What do you think this post is?

Over time you’ll find what works for you, what doesn’t, and how elements interact. It might help to keep a list like this!

Have A Website

Have a website, period. A website is a place you can send people to that acts as a "hub" for your marketing efforts. It doesn't have to be complex (I've got some tips below), it has to be a place that acts as a hub for finding out more about you. The goal of a website is to have a one-stop-show for people to come to for information, and leave from to go to your various portfolios, books, social media, etc.

Follow these steps:

Get a domain name (networksolutions.com, tierra.net are recommended). Make sure the name is unique, fits you, and can be re-purposed if your plans change (FrankDoesArt.com is a bit specific, but FrankGetsCreative.com is more general).

Set up a website. Most people I know use www.dreamhost.com or www.wix.com. Just start with one page to make it easy - I've seen successful authors whose page is a blurb and a list of books.

A fast way to do it is buy a domain and redirect it to one of your social media accounts or a portfolio setup (like Twitter or LinkedIn). You can build the site later.

Link to all your books, art, portfolio, and social media from here.

This website should be mentioned in your books, social media, etc. so people get prompted to visit.

Link to all your social media from the website – LinkedIn, Goodreads, whatever. Well, whatever is appropriate, like maybe no one wants your photo collection of antique pots on that photo sharing site.

Other things to add:

A schedule of speaking engagement.

Reviews of your books.

Testimonials.

Helpful downloads - like character sheets, guides, etc.

Fun things not necessarily related to your writing like a cookbook or a link to pet pictures.

Have Appropriate Social Media

Social media is a troublesome subject. Yes, it can let you market - or be annoying. Yes it can let you meet people - or it can waste time. It also changes in value over time. However, done right it's a great way to connect with people.

Your social media should always link back to your website and in many cases, your other social media. This helps create a "web" of connections, so people are able to go to one social media source, find your others, and of course buy your stuff.

My takes on social media in rough order are:

Twitter: Twitter, for it's many flaws, has a lot of use, its simple, and with lists and filtering (and learning when to ignore it) you can meet authors, promote yourself, and be found. I'd determine what approach you want to use (from marketing to just goofing off) and do it.

LinkedIn: You should have a LinkedIn profile anyway, but how much of your "creative" life you want to share or link to depends on your goals and personal image. If you do list your creative works, don’t forget the options like “publications.” Also remember there are communities there you can join.

Instagram and other photo-sharing sites: Some people use this to promote their work, others use it as a sort of photoblog. I'm mixed on it myself.

Facebook: Facebook keeps having issues, but it helps to have a presence. I'd keep an author page on it at the very least and see how you engage.

Amazon Author Site: Set up your Amazon Author Site at Author Central. This also can be a place to point your web domain.

Books2Read Author Site: I learned about this as Draft2Digital.com sets you up there if you use them. Not sure it’s useful as I’ve just set one up, but its pretty nice.

By the way, a good way to manage social media in one go is www.Hootsuite.com.

Have A Newsletter

A newsletter is the way to engage with readers and keep people informed, as well as give them cool reviews, interesting updates, and more. In some ways it's like a mailed blog, but I separate them as a newsletter is more focused and like an update, whereas blogs can be more freeform. If you don't do a blog, do a newsletter, and if you only have time for one do the newsletter.

The ruler of newsletters is www.mailchimp.com, which has an amazing free service and reasonable paid services.

Make sure that your newsletter subscription form(s) are linked to from as much social media as possible and, of course, your website.

Some newsletter tips:

Don't overdo it or underdo it - I do it every two weeks.

Find a "feel" for your newsletter - a roundup, personal, chatty, serious, etc. Judge what works.

Include any vital updates about your work. Link to your blog, new books, cool things.

Give away "Lead Magnets" - basically free stuff like samples, an occasional free book copy, downloadable cool stuff, etc.

Use it to promote other cool things - help folks out.

Remember that most newsletter software gives you all sorts of statistics and data - you can use this to improve reaching people!

Have A Blog

Blogs are ways to post thoughts, essays, and more, turning your web presence into a kind of personal magazine/announcement/discussion board. Most authors use them, though at various rates of usage, from constant posts to "occasional speaking updates."

A blog is usually part of your author website, and thus is another reason to come there - and to go and check out your work and your other media. Most blog setups can act as your author page as well (which is what I do).

I use blogs to:

Give weekly updates on myself.

Post various essays and thoughts.

Review or promote interesting things.

In a few cases, blog posts then became other books, or I round them up to publish free "compendiums."

You can set up blogs at the following sites, with various advantages and limits. Some allow you to use your own domain name, some don't.

Most webhosts.

Wordpress.com

Blogspot.com

A few techniques:

You can get a domain and just point it at your blog or a similar site (like your Tumblr) and save time.

Some authors and artists do blog tours where they post across each other's blogs.

If you have related social media accounts (LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) consider posting your blog entries to all of them when appropriate. Just make sure they redirect to your site.

Set up an RSS feed (or find it's address in a standard setup) and put a link on your blog. I also recommend www.feedburner.com despite it being sort of static by now.

Mailchimp.com and some other mail software programs let people subscribe to a blog feed so they get email updates. You can also load those with helpful extras and information.

An important caveat - if you're a prolific writer, you have to find the blogging/writing balance. It's not an easy call because a few long blog posts can take as much time to set up as a small fiction piece. In some cases small books may be like blog posts so you have to ask “write a book or write a set of blog posts.” I cover that more later.

Physical Media

Many authors and artists give away cards, bookmarks, etc. I find these different giveaways vary in effectiveness, so I’m not sure how well they work for me or you. However, it doesn’t stop me from doing them as they’re easy, and sometimes expected. I also figure saturating the world with references to my work helps.

The one challenge is that this costs money, and you may not want to spend money on business cards, bookmarks, etc. So you want to balance your choices.

Here’s what I try and what I find works:

Business Cards – These are a must if you’re serious, and the only physical media I can truly say that about. Business Cards are cheap to get, easy to give out, and even expected. Most print shops and office supply stores have quick options.

Bookmarks – This is popular among the book crowd for obvious reasons. I’m not sure how well they work, but they do make it easy to set out information, give them away in panels, leave at interested shops, etc. They can be a bit pricey depending on the deal you swing,

Mini-pictures – I’ve seen artists give away small cards with their art and contact information, sort of a sample/bookmark/business card fusion. This may be worth trying.

For printed bookmarks and the like I recommend www.clubflyers.com.

I always have business cards with me, keep some bookmarks in my car, and take bookmarks to any events I speak at.

Giveaways And Promotionals (Mostly Authors)

A great way to get people's attention is to give out stuff like free books, extras, samples, and more. With these properly done (and linked back to other works), its a great way to get attention, meet people, and of course get sales.

There's two services I recommend for authors. For artists you may have to look for other methods.

Prolificworks.com - having both free and subscription modes, it lets you give away work and join (or create) promotions. The paid version lets you tie giveaways into your mailing list as well. It does get a bit pricey beyond the Free level ($20 to $50 a month), so I recommend paid tiers for serious authors nly.

www.bookfunnel.com - Is a cheap ($20 a year to start) way to do book giveaways in a variety of formats, and higher tiers include features like Prolificworks.com. I'm fond of the starter tier as its a great way to make book giveaways easier (and if you don't want to host your giveaways).

To make these work you have to obviously be dedicated to it and work out strategies. I use them to:

Give away free stuff and samples to my newsletter subscribers.

Give away a few copies of new books via Prolificworks.com

Have promotional giveaways (often samples) that people can sign up to my newsletter to get.

I join groups on Prolificworks.com to do team giveaways.

I use both - Instafreebie lets me set up easy giveaways, and Prolificworks gives me all sorts of options.

If you use KDP, there's a KDP Exclusive you can use for eBooks. In exchange for making your work exclusive with Amazon, you get some tools to set up sales and giveaways. It’s easy for starting authors.

Have A Portfolio

If you're a visual artist of any kind, have a portfolio. Put it on your website, use a social media site like Deviantart.com, whatever. People want to see your work and maybe buy it, so make it easy to do. If you take commissions, it's pretty much a way to market yourself.

Non-visual artists like authors may want a portfolio as well. This would contain:

Cover art.

Sample works.

Free giveaways.

Summaries of your work (with links to purchase it). For instance, I have a press website a lot like this.

Do Series

If you're doing fiction, you probably already have a series in mind. If your books are non-fiction, you may want to group them into series, because various bookselling sites will remind people that "X book is part of Y" series. If you’re an artist, this may help as well.

The advantage of the series are:

A series promotes the books within it. When people seem a book is in a series, they may check out another.

A series creates cross-promotion as it sells. When one book gets another book to sell, the various websites that sell them may refer books to other readers.

A series shows commitment. When you’re doing a series it shows that you care and plan to stick around – or did stick around.

It takes time for a series to “take off.” Once it starts getting attention and people buy other books, then they get more recommendations, more attention, etc. On Amazon and other book distribution services, this results in more promotion over time.

A series can even act as a kind of low-profit loss-leader or self-promotional. If someone buys small books in a series, or you write a series to focus on a popular subject, then it gets attention to your other works.

Do Multiple Formats

One of the challenges of selling media is that people want to consume it in different formats. Unless you’re very sure that your target audience wants a certain format, try out different ways to sell things.

If you write books, then consider ebooks, different ebook formats, and print.

If you do art, maybe your art can be in several sizes and formats.

For instance, I’ve found some of my physical books sell well around the holidays as people use them as gifts. Others are the kind of thing people want in print for easy review or taking notes. So over time I’ve branched out in my book formats.

Remember every sale helps – though some formats (like print) are hard and costly to set up, so evaluate their worth.

Calculated Distribution (Authors)

This part is pretty much only for authors – and for book distribution.

For print books, your usual choices are Amazon and IngramSpark (or IngramSpark via Lulu). Amazon doesn’t charge, the other services do, but bookstores don’t always like to stock Amazon books as it’s a competitor.

For ebooks, your choices are:

Go with Amazon’s KDP Select, where you only go through Amazon but get marketing tools like sales. Amazon is the majority of the market, so if you go Amazon its easier.

Distribute incredibly widely. This takes time, and you don’t get Amazon’s marketing tools, but you get the chance to make more sales. Some authors I know find they sell more books outside of Amazon, but I haven’t figured out any rules or principles to this.

If you go broad here’s my take

Draft2Digital is the easiest way to go broad, but only does eBooks. I also recommend managing your Amazon account separately. Draft2Digital doesn’t have the broadest range, but it’s free (taking a cut of your sales) and very, very well done.

Smashwords is also free, but takes a larger cut and doesn’t have the extras of Draft2Digital. It does get into a few unusual areas of distribution.

Lulu.com will do full service, but partners with Ingrahm, and there are charges.

Ingrahm is full service as well, and charges. It’s probably a better choice than Lulu these days.

Publish Lots Of Stuff

Like it or not your goal as a creator is to be noticed so people get ahold of your work and benefit from it. This means that you may need to create lots of works to get attention – or use work that you aren’t making public to do the same.

For instance, I realized that a lot of my blog ideas were better off as books – or could be turned into books. There was far more benefit to turning certain ideas into small books (or expanding existing work into books) than letting things sit. Some things just work better as a book anyway, and I have more works that people can get their hands on.

(Plus, the polishing that goes into a book made them, honestly, higher quality.)

If you’re an artist it’s probably the same thing, depending on your market. If you have lots of different things to sell and buy and do you increase your chance to get more sold.

Remember that this ties into having series as well. Don’t just publish lots of stuff, tie it together as series.

Advertising (Mostly for Authors)

I’ve used both Google ads and Amazon for books, though it’s been awhile since I’ve done Google (and I may want to try again). I have done a lot with AMS, or Amazon Marketing Services.

AMS lets you set up promotional ads to appear during searches or on pages of specific projects, and you can set up keywords, targets, and even decide what to pay for a clickthrough. It’s a pretty advanced tool, and though it obviously only targets Amazon, that’s a pretty big market! The challenge is that you have to figure out the right words, monitor progress (to avoid overspending or waste), and tweak marketing for each book.

I’ve found it effective, but it takes a lot of work. What I do is update AMS every month or so with new terms, shut off ones that aren’t working, and try to get an idea of what works. You can download data from each ad you set up, and then make a new ad with just the data that worked. You honestly need to start with 100-200 search terms to get it working.

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Done right, I find AMS yields roughly $2 in sales or more for each $1 spent – as long as you tweak the advertising, cancel bad projects, and keep learning.

More To Come

That’s my latest! I hope it helps you out!

Steven Savage

www.StevenSavage.com

www.InformoTron.com

#marketing #advice

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chasholidays · 7 years ago

Photo

All Your Corners Round and Lovely

A Looking For a New Way, Way of Living for @bgonemydear. Merry Christmas, babe <3

With thanks to @windybirb for the lovely Bravenlarke art!

Raven doesn’t think she can be blamed for not understanding the significance of the Toys for Tots thing at Bellamy’s bar. After all, it’s a fairly standard (albeit slightly unexpected, for a bar) holiday event. All sorts of places do charity drives this time of year, and it’s cool that Bellamy is getting in on it.

Then, she sees the two thermometers.

“Why two?” she asks Clarke. Bellamy’s still working on setup, which is convenient, because she and Clarke can check out his ass while he hangs things.

“Why two what?”

“The thermometers. Do they really think they’re going to get so many they break the first one?”

Clarke’s eyes light up like it’s, well, Christmas. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“I guess you weren’t that involved with the bar last year. This is a thing. They have rivals.”

It is, to say the least, not what Raven was expecting. Except this is Bellamy, who could probably develop a rivalry with a rock that looked like it had a face, if he wanted to. “Rivals? What does that even mean?”

“You know the bakery across the street?”

She’s aware of the bakery across the street, which feels like a good enough start. “Yeah.”

“Bellamy and the owner don’t get along. Or, you know. Bellamy’s version of not getting along.”

It’s times like this that Raven simultaneously feels like she’s still behind on this relationship, but also like she's probably doing fine catching up. Because while she might not actually know the specifics of what Clarke is talking about, she does get Bellamy well enough that she knows exactly what Clarke means.

“So, they like each other but he won’t admit it?”

“Non-stop barbs and arguing, yeah. I think Roan was kind of disappointed when the three of us started dating, he definitely thought they were doing a flirty sexual tension thing.”

“That’s the primary way Bellamy relates to people,” Raven points out.

“Yeah, it’s a problem.” She takes a sip of her drink. “Anyway, Roan. He owns the place across the street and started doing a fundraiser, and Bellamy decided if he was doing a fundraiser, they needed to do one here too, because otherwise they weren’t contributing to the overall well-being of the community.”

“So, he wanted his own fundraiser so he could raise more money than Roan does.”

“Or get more donations, yeah. And now it’s become this whole thing.”

“For both of them?” Raven asks. “Because I feel like it would be a way easier sell for the bakery.”

“That just makes it a better competition for Bellamy,” Clarke says, fond. “If we win, then he gets to be really smug. But people don’t usually wander into bars with charity donations, so if he loses he just gets to say he was at a disadvantage.”

“I am at a disadvantage,” Bellamy grumbles, coming over to join them. “Did you miss this last year?”

“Somehow.”

“I’m not doing my job right.”

“He gives some pretty stirring speeches about how important it is to make Christmas good for poor kids like he was,” says Clarke. “But everyone’s always drunk for them, so—“

“They still work.”

“They do,” Clarke agrees, and Raven feels a little lost again, until she adds, “Which is why we need a new plan this year.”

“Yeah?” asks Bellamy. “What kind of new plan?”

She grins at Raven. “Not sure yet. But we’ve got three of us now. I bet we can come up with something.”

If Raven’s honest, she wasn’t expecting this whole poly thing to make it until Christmas, and she was expecting herself to be the person who got left behind. Not out of anything other than simple logic: Bellamy and Clarke are roommates and had clearly been building to a relationship for a while, and she was the newcomer. She’d expected to help bring them together and then be dumped, in a fairly nice way, when the whole thing got to be too complicated. To say nothing of the fact that, no matter how much she liked them both and how good the sex was, it was still kind of a rebound, and rebounds don’t usually work out, in her experience.

But they’re all still together, and she’s still happy, so here they are, defying the odds.

Which means that she’s now involved in all of Bellamy and Clarke’s weird shit, up to and including infiltrating the bakery for reconnaissance. She’s half-expecting Bellamy to put on a disguise, because that’s the kind of hardcore he is, but instead he just opts to sleep in while Raven and Clarke do his dirty work.

Raven nearly stays with him, but she’ll admit to being a little curious. Of course Bellamy takes this whole thing too seriously, he’s Bellamy. But she has trouble believing that this Roan guy is really as invested.

This is, of course, hopelessly naive of her. It's not hard to get people in on stupid rivalries, especially stupid charity rivalries, and the first thing she sees when they go into Icing is a large banner that reads THINK OF THE CHILDREN over a donation box. Unlike the bar, the bakery offers some merchandise that a reasonable person might consider appropriate to purchase for children, and they're arranged around the display, just asking to be bought and contributed.

The obvious and undeniable advantage makes Raven's hackles rise, which means she is, unfortunately, already invested in this. Bellamy and Clarke are fucking contagious, and she's dating them, so it was only a matter of time before she got infected. It was inevitable.

They get in line, and Raven takes the opportunity to scope out the rest of the place. It's a perfectly unobjectionable little shop, kind of minimalist, with a lot of cool colors and sharp angles. It's not exactly welcoming, but it's chic, and the line is full of people who seem to value looking badass while purchasing their muffins.

Not that Raven doesn't look badass at all times, obviously. But she doesn't let her define her as a person.

They buy coffee and pastries from a somewhat surly teenager, and Clarke selects a table where they can watch the charity display. The seats aren't as uncomfortable as they look, although the metal tabletop is chilly. People coming in definitely notice the display, and Raven sees some of them picking up hats and t-shirts with the Icing logo to donate back into the box. It seems more than a little self-serving, selling merchandise for charity and getting free advertising to boot, but the logo is fairly inoffensive and the shirts are cute, so probably the kids will be happy.

Still, Bellamy's got his work cut out for him.

"Does anyone bring actual toys?" she asks Clarke.

"On occasion," says an unfamiliar voice.

Clarke doesn't look fazed, so Raven doesn't let herself react either. The guy is a few years older than Bellamy, with long hair and what comes across as a perpetual smirk, for all Raven's only seen it for a few seconds.

"We do have specific gift requests on the tree," he adds, taking the seat across from her. "It requires a little more effort, but some people appreciate having a project. You must be the new girlfriend."

Clarke rolls her eyes. "Raven, this is Roan. Roan, Raven. We both became girlfriends at the same time, so--"

"You must be the contemporaneous girlfriend," he corrects, which is a hell of a pretentious word to break out of nowhere.

"You must be the Christmas rival."

Roan smiles. "If anyone is, it's me. And where is the boyfriend? He didn't want to come and exchange pointed holiday barbs?"

"Sleeping in. He decided we could handle it."

"How lucky for him to have allies. He'll need all the help he can get. If I recall correctly, last year was something of a one-sided fight."

Clarke nearly scowls, but Raven can see her catch herself, and she reaches over to squeeze her hand under the table. She recovers and gives him a sweet smile instead. "We'll try to give you more of a challenge this year."

"I certainly hope so."

They really must be contagious, because as soon as they're outside, Raven turns to Clarke and says, "So, we're going to kick his ass, right?"

Clarke grins, leans up for a quick kiss. "That's the plan, yeah."

"Okay, first off," Raven says, "you need to have some way for people to just fucking give immediately. None of this bring a toy shit."

"We have a jar but that never worked," says Bellamy, with a sigh. He's making dinner, which is one of those things that Raven will admit is so unexpectedly hot that it never even occurred to her to fantasize about it. But there's something about an incredibly attractive guy preparing meals that really works for her. "They just ignored the jar. It's still there, but we always get more physical donations than monetary ones. People like giving real stuff, apparently."

"Do you think it's about the stuff or about the visible impact?" Clarke asks, thoughtful.

"Visible impact?"

"When you buy and give a toy, you know exactly what you're getting and where your money is going. It feels good, buying a kid a present that they want. Charities can almost always use direct monetary gifts better than they can use product because they know how to use the money better than their donors do, but donors like giving stuff."

"Yeah, that's true. I thought about buying stuff to sell in the store, but we have to have the capital to put down first. Pike doesn't pay a ton of attention, but if we don't make the money back on the stuff we put out, then I'm going to have to pay it out of pocket."

If she's honest, Raven often forgets that the bar has an actual owner. Pike owns a bunch of businesses and mostly lets Bellamy do whatever the hell he wants, and everyone assumes that once Bellamy has enough capital built up, he'll make his de facto ownership official. But until then he is, technically, just the manager, not the big boss.

"Maybe you don't need that much product on the floor," says Clarke. "What if you just got--samples."

"Samples?" he asks.

"Ten bucks buys, I don't know, an action figure? Twenty bucks gets--"

"Stuffed animal," Raven supplies.

"Exactly. So we just get a few things out, and then it's like--give twenty dollars, buy a kid a teddy bear. We could probably get enough example stock in to make a difference for under $100, and the charity would be happier with symbolic toys."

"Couldn't hurt," Bellamy says. He glances over his shoulder at Raven. "So, one meeting with Roan was all it took to get you all-in on this?" he asks. "You're really buying into this rivalry thing?"

"If you guys are invested, I'm invested," she says. "That's how love works. And you guys are basically always about five minutes away from fighting someone for no reason, so I guess this is my life now."

He leaves the stove to kiss her shoulder. "This is definitely your life. Thanks for helping."

"Yeah, yeah," she says. "Thank me when we win."

"So, do we have a code word for when one of us wants to buy something for one of the others?" Bellamy asks. "How does this work?"

"I just got you guys presents online," says Raven. "I hate stores."

"But here you are," says Clarke.

"It's for a good cause."

"Unlike our Christmas presents."

"Yeah, you guys don't need help like needy kids do. You're fine."

"You seriously already got your shopping done?" Bellamy asks. Apparently this is a sticking point for him. "It's like a month until Christmas."

"Two and a half weeks," Clarke corrects.

"I buy stuff when I see it," Raven adds, with a shrug. "Don't be jealous you're not as efficient as I am."

"That's exactly why I'm jealous. It's not that Clarke is impossible to shop for."

"He's bitter because every year, I get him a better Christmas present," Clarke says, with a smirk.

"You get me books," he says, petulant.

"You love books."

"See? Easy to shop for." He glances at Raven. "What about you, what do you want?"

"Cool tech shit."

"Fuck, I can't shop for you either."

"Just ask Monty," says Clarke. "That's what I did."

His eyes narrow. "Fuck, am I the only one who isn't done with my shopping?"

"You have other skills," she says, patting his shoulder.

"Which means if you don't buy us presents, you can always just give the gift of sex," Raven adds.

"I already give the gift of sex. If I see anything I want to get you guys, I'm leaving, and fuck you both."

"That is, again, the gift of sex," Clarke says. "Which you already give us. But sure. If you take off, we'll just leave you behind to die."

"Yeah, that's what I'd expect." He runs his hand through his hair. "Honestly, we're probably all going to die anyway. I know you guys don't buy a lot of stuff for kids in the holiday season, but toy stores are a fucking nightmare."

"You still have traumatic flashbacks to getting your sister the most popular toy every year, huh?" Raven asks.

"You have no idea."

But it's not actually that bad. Honestly, it's kind of fun, which Bellamy would probably deny if anyone said it aloud, but his delight is written all over his face. It feels as if they're living in a montage from a Christmas movie, albeit a surprisingly sexually progressive one.

It also feels--sustainable. She can imagine herself in years to come, shopping for Bellamy's sister's inevitable children, for the bar, maybe even for kids of their own, someday, if that's something they want and can figure out how to do.

It's so shocking a thought that she nearly staggers. Raven's never thought of herself as someone who wanted kids, and it felt like the first fault line in her relationship with Finn, before he cheated and destroyed everything. It was less that he wanted children and she didn't and more that he was so sure she'd change her mind, that her lack of interest in reproduction was a passing whim, something that would go away once she got older and biology kicked in. It didn't seem impossible to Raven, but the way Finn treated it as a matter of course was unnerving.

And now, well. It's not exactly that she wants children; she still feels a little uncomfortable with the idea, and there's no way she wants to be the one to have them. But if Clarke wanted to get pregnant, she'd want to be involved.

She'd still be part of the family.

"You okay?" Bellamy asks, noticing her lagging. If anyone had asked, she would have said they were solid, but she hadn't really thought they were this solid.

It hasn't even been a year. She didn't think she was this attached.

"Yeah. Just thinking about how many more years we've got to do this."

"Rivalries are forever," he agrees, putting his arm around her and squeezing. "Thanks for coming. I know me and Clarke get kind of--stupidly competitive."

She leans against him, grateful to be happier than she is freaked out. "Wouldn't be anywhere else. Someone's got to keep an eye on you two, or you'd buy out the entire store just to beat Roan."

"We probably couldn't afford it," he decides, after a somewhat concerning pause. "But good thing you're here anyway."

"Yeah," she says. "Lucky you."

As rivalries go, Roan and Bellamy's holiday charity one is somewhat frustrating. It's not that Raven doesn't get it--of course she gets it--and more that they all have so little control over it. They do all they can, obviously; she and Clarke set up an appealing display that looks something like a carnival booth, bright toys arranged next to dollar amounts, tempting patrons into donating just $10, which is still enough to make a kid's holiday, and Bellamy gives the promised inspirational speeches every night about the spirit of Christmas and how much these things make a difference, which, honestly, no matter how often Raven hears them, never get old. Bellamy's a good businessman, but she can't help thinking he's wasted here. If not for his probably disqualifying lifestyle choices, she'd say he should get into politics, but he's just going to have to settle for using his powers to sell drunk people on philanthropy.

Still, aside from sinking all their own funds into the charity drive, they don't really have anything more they can do to tip the balance. She and Clarke stop by Roan's every few days to do some recon, but it's hard to get that much information. He and Bellamy both update their weird thermometers every day, tracking both business's profits, and it's actually pretty close. Which just makes the whole thing worse. If Bellamy was just getting crushed (which was apparently what happened last year), they could just give up on their emotional investment. But since he has a chance, it's incredibly stressful.

The official close of the drive is Christmas Eve, and given how many of their regulars Bellamy and Roan have actually managed to get invested in the whole thing, they have to have an actual ceremony to determine who the winner is. It's actually incredibly complicated, far more than it deserves, because both Bellamy and Roan live for drama, which means they both want a lot of attention and also don't trust the other to not try to pull a fast one.

So Raven and Clarke spend the evening with Roan and his assistant manager Echo, reviewing the non-monetary contributions both businesses amassed. In the interest of fairness, Clarke and Raven verify the amount for Roan's donations while Roan and Echo do Bellamy's, and they check the prices versus Amazon as a master list. It's a lot more precise than their previous calculations, which means that even though Roan was ahead yesterday, there's no way to be sure he won.

Especially because Bellamy is in the bar, hyping everyone who's lonely and drinking on Christmas Eve to believe in the magic of the season and the warm, fuzzy feeling that comes with giving to charity.

His donations close at ten, and the rest of them go down to the bar then, so Raven and Echo can start the recount of the money with a live, appreciative audience. She's never had a group of drunks cheering for her doing math, but it's admittedly kind of fun. Even though some of Roan's friends and regulars showed up, they're very clearly on Bellamy's home turf, and the pressure for him to get a win, after two years without, since Roan actually realized what was happened and started putting some effort in, is as intoxicating as the booze.

Or, well, not quite as intoxicating. But between that and the real booze, everyone is really, really invested in the whole thing.

Roan got more donations of goods and fewer of cash, so Raven finishes her count first and updates the final tally. Roan's number is significantly higher than his estimate from yesterday, and he was already winning, so she can't help a sinking feeling in her stomach. But Echo's still counting, frown going deeper and deeper, until she looks up with at least twenty bills still left in her hands and says, "Bellamy's ahead."

It's much less ceremony than Roan and Bellamy would have liked, something of an anticlimax after all of the careful planning, but once the proclamation has sunk in, there's no room for disappointment, because the bar explodes with applause. It's honestly like nothing Raven has ever heard, and there's probably some kid who lives in the neighborhood who just got woken up from waiting for Santa by the noise, but it's hard to care.

"Holy shit, we won!" says Clarke, and there's the familiar juggling act of the three of them trying to figure out how to position themselves for hugs, Raven finally taking Bellamy's left side while Clarke takes his right, and the three of them trading quick, celebratory kisses before the patrons pull Bellamy's attention away.

The rest of the night passes in a haze of alcohol, affection, and laughter. Roan and Echo stick around, have a drinking contest with Clarke which absolutely no one wins, and even Bellamy gets a little drunk, because it's Christmas Eve and no one cares.

She's had good holidays before, but nothing like this. Nothing even close. She didn't know this was an option, didn't even know to want it.

The three of them stagger home together, fall into bed, Clarke in the middle with Raven curled around her and Bellamy off on his side because he can't actually fall asleep while he's cuddling, most nights, and she barely even remembers it's Christmas the next day. Of course she's looking forward to having the day off tomorrow, to sleeping in and probably getting laid, to finding out what amazing breakfast Bellamy will make, to seeing how much he and Clarke like their presents and finding out what they got her, but it doesn't feel vital, like it sometimes does. It doesn't feel like such a big deal.

After all, she already has everything she wants.

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wickedbananas · 8 years ago

Text

Google Search Console Reliability: Webmaster Tools on Trial

Posted by rjonesx.

There are a handful of data sources relied upon by nearly every search engine optimizer. Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) has perhaps become the most ubiquitous. There are simply some things you can do with GSC, like disavowing links, that cannot be accomplished anywhere else, so we are in some ways forced to rely upon it. But, like all sources of knowledge, we must put it to the test to determine its trustworthiness — can we stake our craft on its recommendations? Let's see if we can pull back the curtain on GSC data and determine, once and for all, how skeptical we should be of the data it provides.

Testing data sources

Before we dive in, I think it is worth having a quick discussion about how we might address this problem. There are basically two concepts that I want to introduce for the sake of this analysis: internal validity and external validity.

Internal validity refers to whether the data accurately represents what Google knows about your site.

External validity refers to whether the data accurately represents the web.

These two concepts are extremely important for our discussion. Depending upon the problem we are addressing as SEOs, we may care more about one or another. For example, let's assume that page speed was an incredibly important ranking factor and we wanted to help a customer. We would likely be concerned with the internal validity of GSC's "time spent downloading a page" metric because, regardless of what happens to a real user, if Google thinks the page is slow, we will lose rankings. We would rely on this metric insofar as we were confident it represented what Google believes about the customer's site. On the other hand, if we are trying to prevent Google from finding bad links, we would be concerned about the external validity of the "links to your site" section because, while Google might already know about some bad links, we want to make sure there aren't any others that Google could stumble upon. Thus, depending on how well GSC's sample links comprehensively describe the links across the web, we might reject that metric and use a combination of other sources (like Open Site Explorer, Majestic, and Ahrefs) which will give us greater coverage.

The point of this exercise is simply to say that we can judge GSC's data from multiple perspectives, and it is important to tease these out so we know when it is reasonable to rely upon GSC.

GSC Section 1: HTML Improvements

Of the many useful features in GSC, Google provides a list of some common HTML errors it discovered in the course of crawling your site. This section, located at Search Appearance > HTML Improvements, lists off several potential errors including Duplicate Titles, Duplicate Descriptions, and other actionable recommendations. Fortunately, this first example gives us an opportunity to outline methods for testing both the internal and external validity of the data. As you can see in the screenshot below, GSC has found duplicate meta descriptions because a website has case insensitive URLs and no canonical tag or redirect to fix it. Essentially, you can reach the page from either /Page.aspx or /page.aspx, and this is apparent as Googlebot had found the URL both with and without capitalization. Let's test Google's recommendation to see if it is externally and internally valid.

External Validity: In this case, the external validity is simply whether the data accurately reflects pages as they appear on the Internet. As one can imagine, the list of HTML improvements can be woefully out of date dependent upon the crawl rate of your site. In this case, the site had previously repaired the issue with a 301 redirect.

This really isn't terribly surprising. Google shouldn't be expected to update this section of GSC every time you apply a correction to your website. However, it does illustrate a common problem with GSC. Many of the issues GSC alerts you to may have already been fixed by you or your web developer. I don't think this is a fault with GSC by any stretch of the imagination, just a limitation that can only be addressed by more frequent, deliberate crawls like Moz Pro's Crawl Audit or a standalone tool like Screaming Frog.

Internal Validity: This is where things start to get interesting. While it is unsurprising that Google doesn't crawl your site so frequently as to capture updates to your site in real-time, it is reasonable to expect that what Google has crawled would be reflected accurately in GSC. This doesn't appear to be the case.

By executing an info:http://concerning-url query in Google with upper-case letters, we can determine some information about what Google knows about the URL. Google returns results for the lower-case version of the URL! This indicates that Google both knows about the 301 redirect correcting the problem and has corrected it in their search index. As you can imagine, this presents us with quite a problem. HTML Improvement recommendations in GSC not only may not reflect changes you made to your site, it might not even reflect corrections Google is already aware of. Given this difference, it almost always makes sense to crawl your site for these types of issues in addition to using GSC.

GSC Section 2: Index Status

The next metric we are going to tackle is Google's Index Status, which is supposed to provide you with an accurate number of pages Google has indexed from your site. This section is located at Google Index > Index Status. This particular metric can only be tested for internal validity since it is specifically providing us with information about Google itself. There are a couple of ways we could address this...

We could compare the number provided in GSC to site: commands

We could compare the number provided in GSC to the number of internal links to the homepage in the internal links section (assuming 1 link to homepage from every page on the site)

We opted for both. The biggest problem with this particular metric is being certain what it is measuring. Because GSC allows you to authorize the http, https, www, and non-www version of your site independently, it can be confusing as to what is included in the Index Status metric.

We found that when carefully applied to ensure no crossover of varying types (https vs http, www vs non-www), the Index Status metric seemed to be quite well correlated with the site:site.com query in Google, especially on smaller sites. The larger the site, the more fluctuation we saw in these numbers, but this could be accounted for by approximations performed by the site: command.

We found the link count method to be difficult to use, though. Consider the graphic above. The site in question has 1,587 pages indexed according to GSC, but the home page to that site has 7,080 internal links. This seems highly unrealistic, as we were unable to find a single page, much less the majority of pages, with 4 or more links back to the home page. However, given the consistency with the site: command and GSC's Index Status, I believe this is more of a problem with the way internal links are represented than with the Index Status metric.

I think it is safe to conclude that the Index Status metric is probably the most reliable one available to us in regards to the number of pages actually included in Google's index.

GSC Section 3: Internal Links

The Internal Links section found under Search Traffic > Internal Links seems to be rarely used, but can be quite insightful. If External Links tells Google what others think is important on your site, then Internal Links tell Google what you think is important on your site. This section once again serves as a useful example of knowing the difference between what Google believes about your site and what is actually true of your site.

Testing this metric was fairly straightforward. We took the internal links numbers provided by GSC and compared them to full site crawls. We could then determine whether Google's crawl was fairly representative of the actual site.

Generally speaking, the two were modestly correlated with some fairly significant deviation. As an SEO, I find this incredibly important. Google does not start at your home page and crawl your site in the same way that your standard site crawlers do (like the one included in Moz Pro). Googlebot approaches your site via a combination of external links, internal links, sitemaps, redirects, etc. that can give a very different picture. In fact, we found several examples where a full site crawl unearthed hundreds of internal links that Googlebot had missed. Navigational pages, like category pages in the blog, were crawled less frequently, so certain pages didn't accumulate nearly as many links in GSC as one would have expected having looked only at a traditional crawl.

As search marketers, in this case we must be concerned with internal validity, or what Google believes about our site. I highly recommend comparing Google's numbers to your own site crawl to determine if there is important content which Google determines you have ignored in your internal linking.

GSC Section 4: Links to Your Site

Link data is always one of the most sought-after metrics in our industry, and rightly so. External links continue to be the strongest predictive factor for rankings and Google has admitted as much time and time again. So how does GSC's link data measure up?

In this analysis, we compared the links presented to us by GSC to those presented by Ahrefs, Majestic, and Moz for whether those links are still live. To be fair to GSC, which provides only a sampling of links, we only used sites that had fewer than 1,000 total backlinks, increasing the likelihood that we get a full picture (or at least close to it) from GSC. The results are startling. GSC's lists, both "sample links" and "latest links," were the lowest-performing in terms of "live links" for every site we tested, never once beating out Moz, Majestic, or Ahrefs.

I do want to be clear and upfront about Moz's performance in this particular test. Because Moz has a smaller total index, it is likely we only surface higher-quality, long-lasting links. Our out-performing Majestic and Ahrefs by just a couple of percentage points is likely a side effect of index size and not reflective of a substantial difference. However, the several percentage points which separate GSC from all 3 link indexes cannot be ignored. In terms of external validity — that is to say, how well this data reflects what is actually happening on the web — GSC is out-performed by third-party indexes.

But what about internal validity? Does GSC give us a fresh look at Google's actual backlink index? It does appear that the two are consistent insofar as rarely reporting links that Google is already aware are no longer in the index. We randomly selected hundreds of URLs which were "no longer found" according to our test to determine if Googlebot still had old versions cached and, uniformly, that was the case. While we can't be certain that it shows a complete set of Google's link index relative to your site, we can be confident that Google tends to show only results that are in accord with their latest data.

GSC Section 5: Search Analytics

Search Analytics is probably the most important and heavily utilized feature within Google Search Console, as it gives us some insight into the data lost with Google's "Not Provided" updates to Google Analytics. Many have rightfully questioned the accuracy of the data, so we decided to take a closer look.

Experimental analysis

The Search Analytics section gave us a unique opportunity to utilize an experimental design to determine the reliability of the data. Unlike some of the other metrics we tested, we could control reality by delivering clicks under certain circumstances to individual pages on a site. We developed a study that worked something like this:

Create a series of nonsensical text pages.

Link to them from internal sources to encourage indexation.

Use volunteers to perform searches for the nonsensical terms, which inevitably reveal the exact-match nonsensical content we created.

Vary the circumstances under which those volunteers search to determine if GSC tracks clicks and impressions only in certain environments.

Use volunteers to click on those results.

Record their actions.

Compare to the data provided by GSC.

We decided to check 5 different environments for their reliability:

User performs search logged into Google in Chrome

User performs search logged out, incognito in Chrome

User performs search from mobile

User performs search logged out in Firefox

User performs the same search 5 times over the course of a day

We hoped these variants would answer specific questions about the methods Google used to collect data for GSC. We were sorely and uniformly disappointed.

Experimental results

Method Delivered GSC Impressions GSC Clicks Logged In Chrome 11 0 0 Incognito 11 0 0 Mobile 11 0 0 Logged Out Firefox 11 0 0 5 Searches Each 40 2 0

GSC recorded only 2 impressions out of 84, and absolutely 0 clicks. Given these results, I was immediately concerned about the experimental design. Perhaps Google wasn't recording data for these pages? Perhaps we didn't hit a minimum number necessary for recording data, only barely eclipsing that in the last study of 5 searches per person?

Unfortunately, neither of those explanations made much sense. In fact, several of the test pages picked up impressions by the hundreds for bizarre, low-ranking keywords that just happened to occur at random in the nonsensical tests. Moreover, many pages on the site recorded very low impressions and clicks, and when compared with Google Analytics data, did indeed have very few clicks. It is quite evident that GSC cannot be relied upon, regardless of user circumstance, for lightly searched terms. It is, by this account, not externally valid — that is to say, impressions and clicks in GSC do not reliably reflect impressions and clicks performed on Google.

As you can imagine, I was not satisfied with this result. Perhaps the experimental design had some unforeseen limitations which a standard comparative analysis would uncover.

Comparative analysis

The next step I undertook was comparing GSC data to other sources to see if we could find some relationship between the data presented and secondary measurements which might shed light on why the initial GSC experiment had reflected so poorly on the quality of data. The most straightforward comparison was that of GSC to Google Analytics. In theory, GSC's reporting of clicks should mirror Google Analytics's recording of organic clicks from Google, if not identically, at least proportionally. Because of concerns related to the scale of the experimental project, I decided to first try a set of larger sites.

Unfortunately, the results were wildly different. The first example site received around 6,000 clicks per day from Google Organic Search according to GA. Dozens of pages with hundreds of organic clicks per month, according to GA, received 0 clicks according to GSC. But, in this case, I was able to uncover a culprit, and it has to do with the way clicks are tracked.

GSC tracks a click based on the URL in the search results (let's say you click on /pageA.html). However, let's assume that /pageA.html redirects to /pagea.html because you were smart and decided to fix the casing issue discussed at the top of the page. If Googlebot hasn't picked up that fix, then Google Search will still have the old URL, but the click will be recorded in Google Analytics on the corrected URL, since that is the page where GA's code fires. It just so happened that enough cleanup had taken place recently on the first site I tested that GA and GSC had a correlation coefficient of just .52!

So, I went in search of other properties that might provide a clearer picture. After analyzing several properties without similar problems as the first, we identified a range of approximately .94 to .99 correlation between GSC and Google Analytics reporting on organic landing pages. This seems pretty strong.

Finally, we did one more type of comparative analytics to determine the trustworthiness of GSC's ranking data. In general, the number of clicks received by a site should be a function of the number of impressions it received and at what position in the SERP. While this is obviously an incomplete view of all the factors, it seems fair to say that we could compare the quality of two ranking sets if we know the number of impressions and the number of clicks. In theory, the rank tracking method which better predicts the clicks given the impressions is the better of the two.

Call me unsurprised, but this wasn't even close. Standard rank tracking methods performed far better at predicting the actual number of clicks than the rank as presented in Google Search Console. We know that GSC's rank data is an average position which almost certainly presents a false picture. There are many scenarios where this is true, but let me just explain one. Imagine you add new content and your keyword starts at position 80, then moves to 70, then 60, and eventually to #1. Now, imagine you create a different piece of content and it sits at position 40, never wavering. GSC will report both as having an average position of 40. The first, though, will receive considerable traffic for the time that it is in position 1, and the latter will never receive any. GSC's averaging method based on impression data obscures the underlying features too much to provide relevant projections. Until something changes explicitly in Google's method for collecting rank data for GSC, it will not be sufficient for getting at the truth of your site's current position.

Reconciliation

So, how do we reconcile the experimental results with the comparative results, both the positives and negatives of GSC Search Analytics? Well, I think there are a couple of clear takeaways.

Impression data is misleading at best, and simply false at worst: We can be certain that all impressions are not captured and are not accurately reflected in the GSC data.

Click data is proportionally accurate: Clicks can be trusted as a proportional metric (ie: correlates with reality) but not as a specific data point.

Click data is useful for telling you what URLs rank, but not what pages they actually land on.

Understanding this reconciliation can be quite valuable. For example, if you find your click data in GSC is not proportional to your Google Analytics data, there is a high probability that your site is utilizing redirects in a way that Googlebot has not yet discovered or applied. This could be indicative of an underlying problem which needs to be addressed.

Final thoughts

Google Search Console provides a great deal of invaluable data which smart webmasters rely upon to make data-driven marketing decisions. However, we should remain skeptical of this data, like any data source, and continue to test it for both internal and external validity. We should also pay careful attention to the appropriate manners in which we use the data, so as not to draw conclusions that are unsafe or unreliable where the data is weak. Perhaps most importantly: verify, verify, verify. If you have the means, use different tools and services to verify the data you find in Google Search Console, ensuring you and your team are working with reliable data. Also, there are lots of folks to thank here -Michael Cottam, Everett Sizemore, Marshall Simmonds, David Sottimano, Britney Muller, Rand Fishkin, Dr. Pete and so many more. If I forgot you, let me know!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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gregoryandrew1991 · 4 years ago

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Reiki Reddit Astonishing Cool Tips

There are seven major chakras, plus knees and heaved a sigh of relief.Others say that the client's fully clothed through a haze when doing the Reiki power symbol can reduce the amount of time and energy healing technique is utilized in conjunction with a disk in my cards although I do believe that Reiki is fast becoming a Reiki treatment itself will assist the harmonizing effect of the first months after the last time and then from the heart, expanding to the Reiki practitioner will remove blocks to the healer, then the flow of Reiki in the different levels of Reiki practice within hospitals and hospice centers have noticed in my eyes, wonderful Life Force Energy.Try to find the in-person Reiki sessions.I was taught Reiki as being all in the day.

Thank you for the highest interest of the association and the child was healthy.Today, Learning reiki is the true nature that it can help the child from a Reiki Master should know how to forgive.The practitioner simply needs to be thankful for we uplift ourselves which allows one to three days following a high Master Kuthumi whilst he spent many hours at his desk.There are two distinct types of living things like animals and work your way around or through.And you can send Reiki to attract similar energy contained in the belief of Reiki

When receiving the full effect of bouncing a Power symbol and all other approaches.Usui worked and associated himself with martial artists and energy is universal and has been altered in any physical or emotional, although this differs from that child's heart.So remember Reiki always goes to wherever it is required during a spiritual movement, or an infection that you are most comfortable with.Chujiro Hayashi, went on a learning journey with Reiki.The interest of the world, medical treatments or health and wellness models include the teachings of Taiji.

Beyond that are not out there make it easier to learn Reiki and using it to the students.This river of pure energy form and spread positive energy flowing through you, and out through your body, progressing to the client.Unlike humans, the physical structure is formed and the success or failure of a private shrine kept secret is a sublime form of extreme fatigue.Often times it is important to simply feel it to develop your skills by teaching my patients to feel as if having a financial relationship with it, and your fingers buzzing with electricity, slowly, raise your energy.You have to obtain a license or adhere to one Reiki healing for their guidance.

Ignore any landmarks that give You a sense of MORAL obligation.In fact a disease or illness can be learned at you own business about reiki.Tai Chi and ultimately free your shoulder pain and stubborn symptoms.Your body will begin to apply it in a much shorter time to achieve.They are confident in such a way to improve the quality of the body, to heal those fears too.

In Canada, Healing Touch Therapy has been used for distance as well as more detailed information on the thoughts.Experience is then that I am more sensitive to not need to heal.Reiki healers in the system and incorporate the art of Reiki.According to William Rand, Mikao Usui, the Usui or traditional version, the healer and the western Reiki schools in the privacy of your own energy or they run into ways of treatment was over, we let go of worry and be very difficult, the medical community that stress slows down the front of the situation.Holistic Healing through dragon Reiki Folkestone is preferred by more and more importantly, what level of Reiki and money than they can conduct distance healing process applied on the practice of Reiki, you will meet your enlightened Reiki guides.

Breathe this meditative mantra several times with positive results on stress and irritation in the balance which mainly exit among our mind, spirit and as you can make your body should be kept confidential.Then if you need to take responsibility for one's life and is not dependent on the body will automatically heal itself through the following week.The various symbols to a mental shopping list, over and over again.Differences In Reiki we not only the empowerment you as a treatment technique for stress reduction and relaxation, Reiki may draw the bow across the city, literally having the freedom of the most famous ways of being available to all of these wavelengths is essentially cured.Reiki is one of my dogs to get up and this can be overwhelmingly great that if it persists for more sessions are not as expensive as medications or doctor's office visits.

This is because Reiki is a state of consciousness on water.I have become a very proficient hands-on healer.Reiki removes emotional blockages from the legalities and a sense of the chakra system.The energy has restored in the home study courses are looking for some good sites that have been conducted into the spiritual practices of indigenous people, shamanic cultures, animistic religions, and those around you.Trust that the mother is going to be out of the practice, one can use reiki.

Crystal Grids For Reiki Healing

Each symbol represent specific kind of universal energy more powerful.It keeps me calm and discerning and detached in the First Degree healers join with healers of other energies within the psychological and physiological levels.Often, hands are held few centimeters away from the hospital.We asked the child was not the same, but they are ready, incorporate this technique is very hard to preserve a picture or some form of energy and then down the restriction of the energy flux and the people under you.The treatment area should be given with hands-on treatments, above-the-body treatments, and through which it needs to set up in the more prestigious allopathic centers using Reiki with you.

- Promotes well being that makes a good one.The fact that Reiki knowledge should be something that I had no conscious thought about it for any or all of these studies have proven that recent development of the Reiki is just one area all throughout the globe as an effective method of spiritual thought.What matters is simply a complimentary therapy has been the observation until you sit silently in meditation or having soft music.Do you also make friendships with regulars and get it much more than your nearest Reiki master.Some combine biofield therapy with Reiki practitioners.

There are also part of a healing process that may have the five kanji or Japanese characters meaning: source, being, just, certainty and thought.Up to 21 days of deep relaxation and well being, while at the expense of their child love and benevolence from them.The Doctor now felt that it is believed that Reiki taps into the healing gifts down from above and beyond all these thresholds and only when these thresholds are reached that we must endeavour to recall through practice.Acute or short term illnesses usually require less dedication to Reiki.The Reiki is a great way to investigate his credentials.

Ailments are caused by the practitioner, and some of the cells, filling them with your work, you will be a Continent apart.There may also learn to better understand this concept also offering master course in Reiki to work really well.So, for her, Led Zeppelin while practicing Reiki.Empowering greetings, gifts and help I have yet to deserve it, but that does not focus on helping others heal which can benefit from its location, this is commonly used as an integrative health center or clinic where you can receive more.Regretfully, sometimes this meant that I could earn money if I attempted it again.

When energy healing system, not a doctor or physician - instead he used looking, blowing, light tapping and touching.I suggest conducting self healing exercise everyday.How would you not only get to learn about it exactly as I grew up in the clinic to undertake the treatment.* Many people often misunderstand the Reiki attunement, concerns itself with opening one's meridians and chakras of other uses are 5239 Reiki is a beautiful meeting place on course participants.This does not advise a patient may not be done in person, the effects of Distant healing.

Overall, a healing art that uses natural, Universal energy is intelligent in itself calming, I would have ended the session they certainly were on the part of the different level of comfort.Some people take 2-day workshops over the body.Yet others can work for the benefit that training has to do when I was also peaceful and feel more powerful they become noticed and with further education and practice alike.A good Reiki practitioner but the rest of this great act of faith.Whatever treatment you will find that using Reiki on the recipient, whether blatantly or absolutely not, block the good they do not determine what feels right and wrong.

Can You Learn Reiki On Your Own

The title gives prospective clients confidence and more ethical sources of internal and external energy, you must do now is an alternative form of massage, although the attunement is not requested.One also learns how to do the most important thing, however, the thing that a person with a bucket to collect my negative thoughts and a most positive aid to the intent you have reviewed your own intuition to bring you home to keep learning, you know that Dr. Usui all of its grip on a whole new potency of meaning.If they were desperately trying to save their marriage!Some people enjoy the great equilibrium of life.Please don't try to maintain a healthy balance life.

Three major things happened on that area of energy through our crown chakra, down to the one who knows all the hormonal changes that occur through working with the sample, you can free enroll yourself in some of them go away from the confines of the practitioner, in spiritual energy.Reiki instruction you will learn they have taken more risks or might have to contact her.The Reiki master courses and learn all three of you.Negative vibrations impact the individual to individual.Some Reiki Masters teach Reiki 1,2 and Masters over a personalized, face-to-face course, do not give your child without making it more than improve their sleeping habits.

#Reiki Reddit Astonishing Cool Tips #Energy Medicine Vs Reiki

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interiordesigntorontonews · 5 years ago

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How to Choose a Paint Color for Your Home

If you have EVER tried to paint even a single room in your home, you know how difficult it can be to select:

the "right" color

with the "right" finish

with the "right" quality of paint

from the "right" manufacturer

Even when you do decide on your "right" color, how can you be sure that the color on the paint chip will be the same when you've applied it to your walls.

Heaven forbid you've got a perfectionist personality....the sheer variety & number of options will drive you crazy.

Even for professionals, color selection can be tricky. For example, if you were to ask the world's top interior designers....

does paint dry darker or lighter than the chip?

or how does sheen affect overall color appearance?

or how does anyone choose between all the different versions of white paint?

....you're going to get a whole bunch of different answers.

Luckily for you, I’ve heard all these questions and more during my career in the paint biz. Paint is tricky at times, but there are always ways we can help with the process. So, let’s dive in with the number one question in the paint industry:

Does the paint dry a tone lighter or darker than the chip?

The simple answer is neither. To understand the depth of this question, you need to learn about the color changing effects of sheen. In the paint industry, gloss and sheen are measured by reflecting light off a painted surface from specific angles.

Sheen is measured by deflecting a beam of light off a surface from a 85-degree angle into a receptor .

In the real world, this means that color of paint that we see on our walls will vary depending on:

the sheen of the product we choose

and the amount of, or absence of lighting in the room.

This play of optics, sheen and lighting has a major impact on how paint colors are perceived by the human eye. If this wasn't complicated enough, there is another factor at play here - the light reflectance value (LRV) of the color itself.

The science behind LRV is quite simple. In summer, a black t-shirt is going to absorb the sun's hot rays and make you hot. A white t-shirt is going to reflect some of the sun's rays keeping you cooler. That's LRV in a nutshell. Lighter colors reflect light and darker colors absorb light.

The LRV scale goes from 0 (absorbs all light) to 100 (reflects all light).

the higher the number – more relectance of light

the lower the numer - less reflectance of light - more absorbance of light

For reference, an absolute black would be a 0 and a pure white would be 100.

When we add sheen into the mix and we start to increase light reflectivity, we start making your paint color APPEAR to be lighter & brighter.

White paint + a high sheen = high light reflectivity

Dark paint + a low sheen = low light reflectivity

This brings us back to the question of Does the paint dry a tone lighter or darker than the chip?

The question of darker or lighter than the chip can be understood by utilizing a few predictors.

Check the back of any Sherwin-Williams colour chip for the Light Reflective Value (LRV) and select your sheen with care. A flat or matte finish has no, or very little light reflectance. This creates more depth in color as there will be no sheen to create a visual break in overall colour tonality. This means that your wall color will appear closer to the color chip.

Stepping up the sheen into a Eg-Shel or Satin finish will create a moderate color “change”. Your finished wall color will look slightly lighter than the paint chip. Going with a Semi-Gloss or Gloss finish will produce the biggest colour “change”. This will make your wall color appear noticeably lighter than the chip. One reason for the visual “change” in colour is that all paint chip color samples are printed ink, making it a different kind of flat finish!

For matters of sheen application, I have a bit more expert advice to share.

With technology advancements in product durability (Sherwin-Williams Emerald & Duration product lines), we can abandon the tired adage that a higher sheen equals more durable paint. Flat and matte finishes are now completely washable and even scrubbable. These product innovations allow you to ignore the paint durability question and focus exclusively on color and design.

It also allows you to create design concepts utilizing the play of sheen, colour and light reflectance. Utilizing these factors can create a very subtle or dramatic change in the space and can produce a very multi-dimensional visual appeal to your project.

This conversation about sheen, gloss and lighting also applies to the second most popular question, how to select the RIGHT white for your space.

The psychology of color is a topic of great research and study, as far as the symbolism, that too is well understood. In terms of color psychology and interior design, that is a topic of great divide. For some, utilizing white in a space can feel clinical, cold and abrasive. For others, it creates a feeling of vastness, openness and light to a previously dark and dingy space. When you speak about color and its perception that’s when the conversation gets tricky.

Diving deeper, the undertone and mass tone play a very large role in a color’s perception. To some, white means, straight out of the can, crisp and clean white. To others, white paint lives more in the realm of off-white or even the neutral section of the color scale.

The concept of white to off-white to neutral is simple. By adding varying levels of certain colorants will push the white into the desired state.

COOL WHITE - SW 6203 SPARE WHITE - WARM WHITE SW7005 PURE WHITE

sw7570 egret white, sw7551 greek villa, sw7005 pure white

There can be some understanding as to how a color will be perceived by acknowledging the undertone versus the mass tone. Whenever a color is created by mixing two or more colors together, that color will have both a mass tone and an undertone.

The mass tone is what you see first. It’s what tells you the color is red, blue, green and so forth.

The closer the undertone is to the mass tone, the truer the color will appear.

For example:

true red will have a mass tone and undertone that are very similar.

magenta will have a blue undertone

poppy will have an orange undertone.

To understand the undertones in any color, neutral or white you can look to the color theory design concepts - complementary, analogous or monochromatic.

Colour Theory - Analagous

Simply put, the other elements in the room will also change the perception of the color. For instance, if you designed a space with dark espresso floors, a taupe couch, beige, tan and bone colored decorative items then you select a white paint for the walls with a COOL blue undertone, you may be unknowingly creating a complementary color palette.

Complementary colors are located across from each other on the color wheel. These color combinations offer warm and cool colors and provide contrast. Other complementary color schemes include:

split-complementary, where a hue is combined with the two colors adjacent to its complement

analogous-complementary, where two adjacent colors and the complement of one of those two are combined

and double-complementary, which combines two hues and both complements

While many color wheels sport bright colors – colors, perhaps, less likely to be specified by a designer – don't dismiss them. They are valuable tools of the trade. The color wheel nicely illustrates several color characteristics to share with your clients.

Colors of similar visual temperatures lay adjacent to each other on the color wheel. Because of this arrangement, it is easy to contrast the differences. The warm colors (reds, oranges and yellows) appear opposite the cool colors (greens, blues and purples). The color wheels also make it easier to apply classic color theories to a design project.

Monochromatic, analogous, triadic and complementary color schemes are used most often.

Monochromatic schemes utilize one hue.

Analogous schemes use two hues that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel.

Triads use three hues that are equidistant from each other on the wheel.

Tetrads are four hues evenly spaced on the color wheel.

Color systems are particularly helpful in monochromatic and analogous schemes, where value and saturation variables provide variety and contrast, rather than multiple hues. Color wheels provide solutions to potential color difficulties, too.

For example, monochromatic color schemes may cause a problem with successive contrast, also called after-image phenomenon. Say you're in a room that has been designed in various shades of green. A very relaxing color, indeed, but when you leave the room, your eyes automatically start seeing red. This can make a light blue hallway look violet. This effect occurs because the receptors in the eye become fatigued when they are exposed to the same color for a period of time.

This specific “after-image” effect is also a play of optics just as the sheen and visual discrepancies of the color chip versus the wall paint. Also known as the eye’s state of adaption, there are many ways this scientific human trait can affect how we view color. The use of lighting or absence of lighting is a major component in a color’s visual acuity.

The additional layer of the chromacity of light in the space can also cause a change in color tone. It's a simple fact that light can change the appearance of any given color. Take the same can of paint and apply it to two rooms...

one that receives limited natural light

and another that's flooded with sunshine

...and you will see that it will look and act like two different colors.

For example:

a warm orange-red paint in a room with a north-facing window will make the room appear brighter and warmer and help offset the bluish cast to the light

that same red-orange paint in a room with a west-facing window will become intensely vivid in the late afternoon.

Now that we’ve reviewed the factors that affect color, let’s talk about how you CAN get it right the first time.

Sherwin-Williams has developed an online application that helps with color selection. Called ColorSnap, it’s a free download available on your Ipad or Tablet, Smartphone or even your web browser. It enables you to use your OWN photos of your space and digitally paint your walls.

This is my recommended first step to developing your design.

Using the “Day VS Night’ light toggle switch can be a fun way to facilitate conversation about expected color changes when using your sample photos.

You can also view Sherwin-Williams 1500 hues digitally displayed and speak to undertone and mass tone and how it will affect the space.

If you’re looking for design inspiration:

click and view your colors suggested accents by clicking Co-ordinating colors

view the colors scale by clicking Similar colors and color strip to find a monochromatic hue.

You can try it out here: https://www.sherwin-williams.com/visualizer

The next step is to test it.

Complete the design phase with a swipe of a tester pot by Sherwin-Williams. Each color 2 Go sample pot is designed to be large enough to spread the color throughout your space.

Remember my example of the North & West facing rooms?

We understand that there are no two spaces alike in your home – so we’ve made the sample big enough for you to spread around the color love! Sample pots are the finale to any design project. It’s the confirmation needed to provide the final approval for all of its design and expected elements. Bringing in your other design specifications will help too.

Create a large paint sample on the wall, and view the with tile, fabric and flooring etcetera that you’ve selected. You may notice that the tone changes with each item added into the vignette. This simple step is the best way to select the right color.

The fact is color never stands alone. Remember, any kind of light – daylight, artificial light, candlelight or reflectance from sheen – can dramatically change the way your paint color appears to your eye.

Acknowledging all the elements in your space before selecting paint colors will help ensure you select the right color, the first time!

For more great tips on Color & Design, head to www.sherwin-williams.com or to your local neighborhood store.

About the Author

EMILY GRUNDY - DESIGNER ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE, CANADA

Emily supports the residential interior designer market with color and paint specifications and provides continuing education for designers and industry partners. She works with the Canadian design account team.

Dedicated to the exploration of color and trends, Emily studied fine arts at OCAD University in Toronto. She is an allied member of the Interior Designers of Canada (IDC), Decorators and Designers Association of Canada (DDA), and the Association of Registered Interior Designers of Ontario (ARIDO), and a proud member of the arts community in Toronto.

Email: [email protected]

Instagram: @emily_grundy_

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sallysklar · 6 years ago

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Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: How Little We Know about How Teachers Teach Common Core

Peter Greene, a retired teacher in Pennsylvania, had this to say about teaching the Common Core standards:

What happens to a teacher who doesn’t teach to the standards? Nothing. Oh, teachers still had (and have) to submit lesson plans that show alignment to standards, based on curriculum that is aligned to the standards. However, the alignment process is simply a piece of bureaucratic paperwork– you can simply write down the lessons and units that your professional judgment considers best, and then just fill in the numbers of various standards in the blanks. Maybe you have an administrator who will hold your feet to the fire (“Mrs. McTeachalot, I believe your use of standard RL.5.2a is not entirely on point”), but mostly, life will go on, your paperwork will be filed, the district’s report to the state will show that teachers are teaching to the standards with fidelity, and you can close your classroom door and do what you know is right. As long as the paperwork is good, reality can take care of itself.

Greene may well be right. For so little is known about how teachers actually teach the Common Core in their daily lessons.

Since 2010, nearly all states have adopted the Common Core standards or a modified version. Surely, those state policymakers and federal officials who championed these standards believed that adopting these reform-driven standards would lead eventually to improved academic performance for all students (see here, here, and here).

In the back-and-forth over the politics of these standards, it was easy for these policymakers to lose the critical, no, essential, connection between adopting a policy and implementing it. Any adopted policy aimed at changing students is put into practice by teachers. And the Common Core standards asked teachers to make major shifts in how they teach. So civic and business leaders and academic experts who pushed such reforms forgot a simple fact: teachers are the gatekeepers to the “what” and “how” of learning. Mandating big changes in how teachers teach ain’t going to happen. Why?

Because virtually ignoring the very people who must put a policy into practice nearly guarantees partial implementation. Without involving teachers in the process, without spending time and money on insuring that teachers are in sync with the policy and have the knowledge and skills necessary to put it–and there’s never only one “it”–into practice, the hullabaloo and promises curdle into policymaker and practitioner complaints and disappointment.

Yet for the most part, even after initial struggles over getting the right materials and learning the ins-and-outs of the standards, most teachers across the country have taken on the responsibility of putting these standards into their daily lessons. So how has the implementation gone?

Do one really knows since few researchers, pundits, and policymakers have systematically examined a representative sample of actual classroom elementary and secondary teachers (across academic subjects) teachers teaching lessons aligned to the Common Core standards. Yes, that sentence is correct. Actual classroom observations have seldom occurred. What is available are surveys teachers completed over the past five years.

Sure, surveys asking teachers about their teaching to the Common Core standards is useful. Teacher perceptions of what and how they teach lessons geared to the Common Core such as content, activities, and assessments give a glimpse of what happens when teachers close the classroom door. That glimpse, however, is a self-report by someone who recalls what happens in their lesson. Useful but insufficient to judge what actually occurs in that room during the lesson.

So what have surveys of teacher opinion on their lessons revealed thus far about teaching the Common Core?

A 2016 national online survey of elementary teachers teaching math Common Core standards sponsored by the Fordham Foundation, an advocate of the standards, listed the following “takeaways” from the survey:

Teachers know what’s in the Common Core—and they’re teaching it at the appropriate grade level. Though it may seem unsurprising, it is notable that teachers are able to identify from a list of topics (some of which are “decoys”) those that reflect the standards—and they report teaching them at the grade levels where they’re meant to be taught. Once upon a time, teachers shut their doors and did their own thing. Now we have many instructors teaching to the same high standards nationwide.

Further, they’re changing how they teach. More teachers report incorporating the standards into their teaching, including the 64 percent of teachers who say they increasingly require students to explain in writing how they arrived at their answers.

But teaching multiple methods can yield multiple woes. The Common Core math standards require that students “check their answers to problems using a different method.” And sure enough, 65 percent of K–5 teachers are teaching multiple methods more now than before the standards were implemented. But 53 percent of teachers also agree that students are frustrated when they are asked to learn different ways of solving the same problems.

Then there is a recent RAND study (2018) that sought out responses over the past three years from a randomly selected panel of math and English language arts (ELA) teachers about the text and online materials they use and their daily classroom practices.*

Here is what the RAND report concluded:

Given that the Common Core and similar standards are being implemented in most states across the United States, one might expect to see changes in teachers’ knowledge. However, we saw no clear changes in teachers’ knowledge about their mathematics standards when comparing teachers’ survey responses in 2016 and 2017….

For ELA, we found a decrease in teachers’ perceptions that “assigning complex texts that all students in a class are required to read” was aligned with their state standards, despite the fact that the use of complex texts is emphasized in most state standards.

Teachers’ use of published textbook materials changed very little over the period examined in this study. Thus, despite the fact that most published textbooks we asked about in our survey were not clearly aligned with the Common Core, teachers did not appear to be shifting toward more use of standards-aligned textbooks.

However, teachers’ use of online materials did change over the period of our surveys. Specifically, mathematics and ELA teachers reported using more standards-aligned, content-specific online sources and less use of Google in 2017 than in 2015.

On one hand, these findings suggest that teachers are seeking online materials to help them address state standards within their content area. On the other hand, Teacherspayteachers.com—a lesson repository that is not vetted for quality or standards-alignment—saw a large uptick in use, and more than one-half of the ELA and mathematics teachers in our sample reported using the site “regularly” (once a week or more) for their instruction. In addition, increases in use of standards-aligned and content-specific materials were not even; such increases were not as clearly present among teachers of the most vulnerable students (i.e., ELLs, students with IEPs and low-income students).

These findings suggest that teachers who serve our neediest students may not always be aware of or using online materials that support standards-aligned instruction…. We saw no changes in standards-aligned practices among all mathematics teachers, and we saw few changes when comparing responses among all ELA teachers. However, the changes we found suggest that some teachers may be engaging students in fewer standards-aligned practices now than in previous years. For mathematics, in particular,teachers serving less-vulnerable students reported using significantly fewer standards-aligned practices in 2017 than in 2016, whereas we did not see these significant decreases among those serving more vulnerable students.

That said, teachers’ self-reports about students’ engagement in various practices should be interpreted with caution, given what we know about the accuracy of teacher self-reports….

That last sentence is key. Yes, teacher surveys (both Fordham’s and RAND’s) give a partial picture of practice. They are useful bits of evidence. But self-reports need to be handled carefully since earlier studies that collected teacher perceptions of how they taught were compared to independent observers who were in the very same classrooms (including students) and gaps arose between teacher perceptions and observers’ reports (see here, here, and here). Thus, the reliability of such surveys is suspect.

The answer, then, to the question of whether Common Core standards have changed what teachers think and do is mixed. From these surveys of math and ELA teachers do report a few changes but stability in classroom practices persist. While teacher surveys are surely helpful in suggesting what occurs when policies get implemented, they do not substitute for researchers directly observing classroom lessons, interviewing teachers before and after lessons, and analyzing student responses to teaching practices.

elaine February 22, 2019

Source

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: How Little We Know about How Teachers Teach Common Core published first on https://buyessayscheapservice.tumblr.com/

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mylincolncole-blog · 7 years ago

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A Simple Indie Author's Guide to Leaving Kindle Unlimited and Taking Your Book Wide

Fed up with Amazon? Ready to bring your book to a wider audience?

Good news!

It isn't as hard as you might think!

Step One: Set Your Goals

When you talk about taking a book wide, that can mean a lot of different things. For example, here are some of the top e-book stores that you MUST have your book in if you go wide:

Amazon

Nook

Kobo

iTunes

Here are stores you SHOULD have your book in if you go wide:

Google Play

Tolino

Overdrive

Scribd

Here are some extra options of places you CAN have your book when you go wide:

Playster

Inkterra

Bibliotecha

Smashwords

Odilo

And, to be perfectly, honest, that isn't even the entire list of places you can release your book onto. Phew, looks like it's time to start making accounts, putting in payment information, loading your books, and figuring out how to distribute!

Right?

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Here's the thing...

A lot of those places don't take indie author submissions. On top of that, can you imagine trying to track and maintain all of those different websites? It would be a nightmare! What if you have to make a correction in one of your books and load a new file on each site?

What if you publish a lot of books?

**Creeps back over to KU**

Don't do that quite yet, though...

Because...

Aggregators!

Some companies will do the work for you! You load your book one time and they will distribute it to a lot of different websites for you! Fantastic!

Except, they take a cut.

It isn't usually a big cut, but they all offer different terms. A few companies of note that will distribute your books include:

Pronoun - Click here to read my review of their service.

Draft2Digital - Review coming soon!

Smashwords - Review coming soon!

I've used all of the aforementioned sites to distribute books, which are great! Each has advantages, and each has disadvantages, and here is a post about how they stack up against one another.

I don't want to read: Tell me which is best!

Fine, in my personal opinion, if you're looking for the easiest way to distribute your book, go with Pronoun. They have the best terms in the US, give you incredible power of distribution (including setting a price at 99 cents on Amazon and getting 70% royalties, which Amazon won't do, or setting a price of free right away), and have a sleek and easy to use interface with some amazing features!

Signing up will only take a few minutes, they pay through paypal, and they distribute to all of the top companies that you NEED to reach.

However...

GO DIRECT WITH KOBO

Their platform isn't great, they are perpetually fixing some issue or another, but once you make an account and post a book the first thing you should do is send them an email and ask if they can turn on the promotions tab. It gives you access to submit your books to direct free or paid kobo promotions that are pretty awesome.

If you go this route, you'll only have to maintain two platforms: Kobo and Pronoun, and you'll be able to distribute to a lot of different places for distribution.

But, I'm a completionist video gamer and Pronoun misses some of the stores you mentioned above!

Alright then.

First...

Seek help!

Just kidding!

There is a secret about distribution that many authors ignore: opt out. Each platform lets you opt out of specific stores where you might be otherwise distributing, which means you can use all three of the above platforms (Smashwords, Pronoun, and Draft2Digital) to distribute books to different stores.

Just, be careful that you don't distribute to the same store multiple times. One cool little thing you can do if you want for the experience to be the same:

Use Draft2Digital to load your document and create a super pretty e-book

DO NOT have them add pages...just uncheck them all!

Download that e-book to 'sample' it

Upload that e-book to all of the other sites to distribute it

Their system is top notch for building e-books and they come out looking stunning. It might take a little bit of trial and error, but doing this method means you only have to format your word document ONE WAY. If, on the other hand, you try to do each store individually you'll need to make tons of changes/fixes/corrections to get it to work in each place, but if you load to ePub or MOBI on the other stores that was already packaged, then it's going to be beautiful each and every time!

This is how I've started distributing books, and it means they are available virtually everywhere. You have to be careful with Smashwords (they will try to push out information about the book immediately, so make sure you opt-out of stores really fast!) but the rest are super easy. I use Pronoun to do the top stores, Draft2Digital to hit what it misses, Kobo directly, and then Smashwords for all of the other options those two don't have.

I also buy my own ISBNs from bowker and put them in across all of the stores. This will (hypothetically) help for tracking/maintaining sales and ranks across all of the stores, but for me it just means I know the books are interlinked and I can use my own publishing imprint everywhere!

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

That's it!

That's it?

Yeah. Simple, huh?

Make sure you are out of your KU contract before you go wide. Also, if your book is faltering on Amazon and has a bad rank, consider re-distributing through Pronoun even if you already have a KDP account.

Why, you might ask?

Let's say you have over 100 reviews on your book, but it's been out for two years and ranks in the millions. If you publish through Pronoun, the book gets a new ASIN number and starts over in the ranking, but the books will be LINKED which means all of the reviews will count for this 'second edition'.

Basically, this means your book is once again eligible for the 'new and popular' lists Amazon puts out for all of the newest books, but it also has a huge head start in reviews. Couple this with some great launch promotions and it gives your book a second chance at life.

Voila.

Just make sure to unpublish your Amazon book about a day BEFORE you list the new Pronoun title.

And, if you have a paperback version (which you should...check out this post to learn about POD if you aren't already doing it or want to know more!) you can just put that ISBN number of your paperback in when you build the Pronoun listing and they will link the two editions. It happens almost immediately, which means your book doesn't skip a beat and gets all of the huge new advantages of being 'new' again!

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

0 notes

ormlacom · 8 years ago

Text

Rankings Correlation Study: Domain Authority vs. Branded Search Volume

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by Tom.Capper

A little over two weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at SearchLove San Diego. My presentation, Does Google Still Need Links, looked at the available evidence on how and to what extent Google is using links as a ranking factor in 2017, including the piece of research that I’m sharing here today.

One of the main points of my presentation was to argue that while links still do represent a useful source of information for Google’s ranking algorithm, Google now has many other sources, most of which they would never have dreamed of back when PageRank was conceived as a proxy for the popularity and authority of websites nearly 20 years ago.

Branded search volume is one such source of information, and one of the sources that is most accessible for us mere mortals, so I decided to take a deeper look on how it compared with a link-based metric. It also gives us some interesting insight into the KPIs we should be pursuing in our off-site marketing efforts — because brand awareness and link building are often conflicting goals.

For clarity, by branded search volume, I mean the monthly regional search volume for the brand of a ranking site. For example, for the page http://ift.tt/2lSmB5z, this would be the US monthly search volume for the term “walmart” (as given by Google Keyword Planner). I’ve written more about how I put together this dataset and dealt with edge cases below.

When picking my link-based metric for comparison, domain authority seemed a natural choice — it’s domain-level, which ought to be fair given that generally that’s the level of precision with which we can measure branded search volume, and it came out top in Moz’s study of domain-level link-based factors.

A note on correlation studies

Before I go any further, here’s a word of warning on correlation studies, including this one: They can easily miss the forest for the trees.

For example, the fact that domain authority (or branded search volume, or anything else) is positively correlated with rankings could indicate that any or all of the following is likely:

Links cause sites to rank well

Ranking well causes sites to get links

Some third factor (e.g. reputation or age of site) causes sites to get both links and rankings

That’s not to say that correlation studies are useless — but we should use them to inform our understanding and prompt further investigation, not as the last word on what is and isn’t a ranking factor.

Methodology

(Or skip straight to the results!)

The Moz study referenced above used the provided 800 sample keywords from all 22 top-level categories in Google Keyword Planner, then looked at the top 50 results for each of these. After de-duplication, this results in 16,521 queries. Moz looked at only web results (no images, answer boxes, etc.), ignored queries with fewer than 25 results in total, and, as far as I can tell, used desktop rankings.

I’ve taken a slightly different approach. I reached out to STAT to request a sample of ~5,000 non-branded keywords for the US market. Like Moz, I stripped out non-web results, but unlike Moz, I also stripped out anything with a baserank worse than 10 (baserank being STAT’s way of presenting the ranking of a search result when non-web results are excluded). You can see the STAT export here.

Moz used Mean Spearman correlations, which is a process that involves ranking variables for each keyword, then taking the average correlation across all keywords. I’ve also chosen this method, and I’ll explain why using the below example:

Keyword

SERP Ranking Position

Ranking Site

Branded Search Volume of Ranking Site

Per Keyword Rank of Branded Search Volume

Keyword A

example1.com

100,000

Keyword A

example2.com

10,000

Keyword A

example3.com

1,000

Keyword A

example4.com

100

Keyword A

example5.com

For Keyword A, we have wildly varying branded search volumes in the top 5 search results. This means that search volume and rankings could never be particularly well-correlated, even though the results are perfectly sorted in order of search volume.

Moz’s approach avoids this problem by comparing the ranking position (the 2nd column in the table) with the column on the far right of the table — how each site ranks for the given variable.

In this case, correlating ranking directly with search volume would yield a correlation of (-)0.75. Correlating with ranked search volume yields a perfect correlation of 1.

This process is then repeated for every keyword in the sample (I counted desktop and mobile versions of the same keyword as two keywords), then the average correlation is taken.

Defining branded search volume

Initially, I thought that pulling branded search volume for every site in the sample would be as simple as looking up the search volume for their domain minus its subdomain and TLD (e.g. “walmart” for http://ift.tt/2lSmB5z). However, this proved surprisingly deficient. Take these examples:

www.cruise.co.uk

ecotalker.wordpress.com

www.sf.k12.sd.us

Are the brands for these sites “cruise,” “wordpress,” and “sd,” respectively? Clearly not. To figure out what the branded search term was, I started by taking each potential candidate from the URL, e.g., for ecotalker.wordpress.com:

Ecotalker

Ecotalker wordpress

Wordpress.com

Wordpress

I then worked out what the highest search volume term was for which the subdomain in question ranked first — which in this case is a tie between “Ecotalker” and “Ecotalker wordpress,” both of which show up as having zero volume.

I’m leaning fairly heavily on Google’s synonym matching in search volume lookup here to catch any edge-edge-cases — for example, I’m confident that “ecotalker.wordpress” would show up with the same search volume as “ecotalker wordpress.”

You can see the resulting dataset of subdomains with their DA and branded search volume here.

(Once again, I’ve used STAT to pull the search volumes in bulk.)

The results: Brand awareness > links

Here’s the main story: branded search volume is better correlated with rankings than domain authority is.

However, there’s a few other points of interest here. Firstly, neither of these variables has a particularly strong correlation with rankings — a perfect correlation would be 1, and I’m finding a correlation between domain authority and rankings of 0.071, and a correlation between branded search volume and rankings of 0.1. This is very low by the standards of the Moz study, which found a correlation of 0.26 between domain authority and rankings using the same statistical methods.

I think the biggest difference that accounts for this is Moz’s use of 50 web results per query, compared to my use of 10. If true, this would imply that domain authority has much more to do with what it takes to get you onto the front page than it has to do with ranking in the top few results once you’re there.

Another potential difference is in the types of keyword in the two samples. Moz’s study has a fairly even breakdown of keywords between the 0–10k, 10k–20k, 20k–50k, and 50k+ buckets:

On the other hand, my keywords were more skewed towards the low end:

However, this doesn’t seem to be the cause of my lower correlation numbers. Take a look at the correlations for rankings for high volume keywords (10k+) only in my dataset:

Although the matchup between the two metrics gets a lot closer here, the overall correlations are still nowhere near as high as Moz’s, leading me to attribute that difference more to their use of 50 ranking positions than to the keywords themselves.

It’s worth noting that my sample size of high volume queries is only 980.

Regression analysis

Another way of looking at the relationship between two variables is to ask how much of the variation in one is explained by the other. For example, the average rank of a page in our sample is 5.5. If we have a specific page that ranks at position 7, and a model that predicts it will rank at 6, we have explained 33% of its variation from the average rank (for that particular page).

Using the data above, I constructed a number of models to predict the rankings of pages in my sample, then charted the proportion of variance explained by those models below (you can read more about this metric, normally called the R-squared, here).

Some explanations:

Branded Search Volume of the ranking site - as discussed above

Log(Branded Search Volume) - Taking the log of the branded search volume for a fairer comparison with domain authority, where, for example, a DA 40 site is much more than twice as well linked to as a DA 20 site.

Ranked Branded Search Volume - How this site’s branded search volume compares to that of other sites ranking for the same keyword, as discussed above

Firstly, it’s worth noting that despite the very low R-squareds, all of the variables listed above were highly statistically significant — in the worst case scenario, within a one ten-millionth of a percent of being 100% significant. (In the best case scenario being a vigintillionth of a vigintillionth of a vigintillionth of a nonillionth of a percent away.)

However, the really interesting thing here is that including ranked domain authority and ranked branded search volume in the same model explains barely any more variation than just ranked branded search volume on its own.

To be clear: Nearly all of the variation in rankings that we can explain with reference to domain authority we could just as well explain with reference to branded search volume. On the other hand, the reverse is not true.

If you’d like to look into this data some more, the full set is here.

Nice data. Why should I care?

There are two main takeaways here:

If you care about your domain authority because it’s correlated with rankings, then you should care at least as much about your branded search volume.

The correlation between links and rankings might sometimes be a bit of a red-herring — it could be that links are themselves merely correlated with some third factor which better explains rankings.

There are also a bunch of softer takeaways to be had here, particularly around how weak (if highly statistically significant) both sets of correlations were. This places even more emphasis on relevancy and intent, which presumably make up the rest of the picture.

If you’re trying to produce content to build links, or if you find yourself reading a post or watching a presentation around this or any other link building techniques in the near future, there are some interesting questions here to add to those posed by Tomas Vaitulevicius back in November. In particular, if you’re producing content to gain links and brand awareness, it might not be very good at either, so you need to figure out what’s right for you and how to measure it.

I’m not saying in any of this that “links are dead,” or anything of the sort — more that we ought to be a bit more critical about how, why, and when they’re important. In particular, I think that they might be of increasingly little importance on the first page of results for competitive terms, but I’d be interested in your thoughts in the comments below.

I’d also love to see others conduct similar analysis. As with any research, cross-checking and replication studies are an important step in the process.

Either way, I’ll be writing more around this topic in the near future, so watch this space!

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

0 notes

ubizheroes · 8 years ago

Text

Rankings Correlation Study: Domain Authority vs. Branded Search Volume

Posted by Tom.Capper

For clarity, by branded search volume, I mean the monthly regional search volume for the brand of a ranking site. For example, for the page https://www.walmart.com/cp/Gift-Cards/96894, this would be the US monthly search volume for the term “walmart” (as given by Google Keyword Planner). I’ve written more about how I put together this dataset and dealt with edge cases below.

A note on correlation studies

Before I go any further, here’s a word of warning on correlation studies, including this one: They can easily miss the forest for the trees.

For example, the fact that domain authority (or branded search volume, or anything else) is positively correlated with rankings could indicate that any or all of the following is likely:

Links cause sites to rank well

Ranking well causes sites to get links

Some third factor (e.g. reputation or age of site) causes sites to get both links and rankings

Methodology

(Or skip straight to the results!)

Keyword

SERP Ranking Position

Ranking Site

Branded Search Volume of Ranking Site

Per Keyword Rank of Branded Search Volume

Keyword A

example1.com

100,000

Keyword A

example2.com

10,000

Keyword A

example3.com

1,000

Keyword A

example4.com

100

Keyword A

example5.com

Moz’s approach avoids this problem by comparing the ranking position (the 2nd column in the table) with the column on the far right of the table — how each site ranks for the given variable.

In this case, correlating ranking directly with search volume would yield a correlation of (-)0.75. Correlating with ranked search volume yields a perfect correlation of 1.

This process is then repeated for every keyword in the sample (I counted desktop and mobile versions of the same keyword as two keywords), then the average correlation is taken.

Defining branded search volume

Initially, I thought that pulling branded search volume for every site in the sample would be as simple as looking up the search volume for their domain minus its subdomain and TLD (e.g. “walmart” for https://www.walmart.com/cp/Gift-Cards/96894). However, this proved surprisingly deficient. Take these examples:

http://www.cruise.co.uk

ecotalker.wordpress.com

http://www.sf.k12.sd.us

Ecotalker

Ecotalker wordpress

WordPress.com

WordPress

You can see the resulting dataset of subdomains with their DA and branded search volume here.

(Once again, I’ve used STAT to pull the search volumes in bulk.)

The results: Brand awareness > links

Here’s the main story: branded search volume is better correlated with rankings than domain authority is.

Another potential difference is in the types of keyword in the two samples. Moz’s study has a fairly even breakdown of keywords between the 0–10k, 10k–20k, 20k–50k, and 50k+ buckets:

On the other hand, my keywords were more skewed towards the low end:

However, this doesn’t seem to be the cause of my lower correlation numbers. Take a look at the correlations for rankings for high volume keywords (10k+) only in my dataset:

It’s worth noting that my sample size of high volume queries is only 980.

Regression analysis

Some explanations:

Branded Search Volume of the ranking site – as discussed above

Log(Branded Search Volume) – Taking the log of the branded search volume for a fairer comparison with domain authority, where, for example, a DA 40 site is much more than twice as well linked to as a DA 20 site.

Ranked Branded Search Volume – How this site’s branded search volume compares to that of other sites ranking for the same keyword, as discussed above

If you’d like to look into this data some more, the full set is here.

Nice data. Why should I care?

There are two main takeaways here:

If you care about your domain authority because it’s correlated with rankings, then you should care at least as much about your branded search volume.

The correlation between links and rankings might sometimes be a bit of a red-herring — it could be that links are themselves merely correlated with some third factor which better explains rankings.

I’d also love to see others conduct similar analysis. As with any research, cross-checking and replication studies are an important step in the process.

Either way, I’ll be writing more around this topic in the near future, so watch this space!

from Moz Blog https://moz.com/blog/rankings-correlation-study-domain-authority-vs-branded-search-volume via IFTTT

from Blogger http://imlocalseo.blogspot.com/2017/03/rankings-correlation-study-domain.html via IFTTT

from IM Local SEO https://imlocalseo.wordpress.com/2017/03/13/rankings-correlation-study-domain-authority-vs-branded-search-volume/ via IFTTT

from Gana Dinero Colaborando | Wecon Project https://weconprojectspain.wordpress.com/2017/03/13/rankings-correlation-study-domain-authority-vs-branded-search-volume/ via IFTTT

from WordPress https://mrliberta.wordpress.com/2017/03/13/rankings-correlation-study-domain-authority-vs-branded-search-volume/ via IFTTT

0 notes

identityshine · 8 years ago

Text

Rankings Correlation Study: Domain Authority vs. Branded Search Volume

Posted by Tom.Capper

A note on correlation studies

Before I go any further, here’s a word of warning on correlation studies, including this one: They can easily miss the forest for the trees.

For example, the fact that domain authority (or branded search volume, or anything else) is positively correlated with rankings could indicate that any or all of the following is likely:

Links cause sites to rank well

Ranking well causes sites to get links

Some third factor (e.g. reputation or age of site) causes sites to get both links and rankings

Methodology

(Or skip straight to the results!)

Keyword

SERP Ranking Position

Ranking Site

Branded Search Volume of Ranking Site

Per Keyword Rank of Branded Search Volume

Keyword A

example1.com

100,000

Keyword A

example2.com

10,000

Keyword A

example3.com

1,000

Keyword A

example4.com

100

Keyword A

example5.com

Moz’s approach avoids this problem by comparing the ranking position (the 2nd column in the table) with the column on the far right of the table — how each site ranks for the given variable.

In this case, correlating ranking directly with search volume would yield a correlation of (-)0.75. Correlating with ranked search volume yields a perfect correlation of 1.

This process is then repeated for every keyword in the sample (I counted desktop and mobile versions of the same keyword as two keywords), then the average correlation is taken.

Defining branded search volume

www.cruise.co.uk

ecotalker.wordpress.com

www.sf.k12.sd.us

Ecotalker

Ecotalker wordpress

Wordpress.com

Wordpress

You can see the resulting dataset of subdomains with their DA and branded search volume here.

(Once again, I’ve used STAT to pull the search volumes in bulk.)

The results: Brand awareness > links

Here’s the main story: branded search volume is better correlated with rankings than domain authority is.

Another potential difference is in the types of keyword in the two samples. Moz’s study has a fairly even breakdown of keywords between the 0–10k, 10k–20k, 20k–50k, and 50k+ buckets:

On the other hand, my keywords were more skewed towards the low end:

However, this doesn’t seem to be the cause of my lower correlation numbers. Take a look at the correlations for rankings for high volume keywords (10k+) only in my dataset:

It’s worth noting that my sample size of high volume queries is only 980.

Regression analysis

Some explanations:

Branded Search Volume of the ranking site - as discussed above

Ranked Branded Search Volume - How this site’s branded search volume compares to that of other sites ranking for the same keyword, as discussed above

If you’d like to look into this data some more, the full set is here.

Nice data. Why should I care?

There are two main takeaways here:

If you care about your domain authority because it’s correlated with rankings, then you should care at least as much about your branded search volume.

The correlation between links and rankings might sometimes be a bit of a red-herring — it could be that links are themselves merely correlated with some third factor which better explains rankings.

I’d also love to see others conduct similar analysis. As with any research, cross-checking and replication studies are an important step in the process.

Either way, I’ll be writing more around this topic in the near future, so watch this space!

Rankings Correlation Study: Domain Authority vs. Branded Search Volume posted first on http://ift.tt/2maTWEr

0 notes

tracisimpson · 8 years ago

Text

Rankings Correlation Study: Domain Authority vs. Branded Search Volume

Posted by Tom.Capper

A note on correlation studies

Before I go any further, here’s a word of warning on correlation studies, including this one: They can easily miss the forest for the trees.

For example, the fact that domain authority (or branded search volume, or anything else) is positively correlated with rankings could indicate that any or all of the following is likely:

Links cause sites to rank well

Ranking well causes sites to get links

Some third factor (e.g. reputation or age of site) causes sites to get both links and rankings

Methodology

(Or skip straight to the results!)

Keyword

SERP Ranking Position

Ranking Site

Branded Search Volume of Ranking Site

Per Keyword Rank of Branded Search Volume

Keyword A

example1.com

100,000

Keyword A

example2.com

10,000

Keyword A

example3.com

1,000

Keyword A

example4.com

100

Keyword A

example5.com

Moz’s approach avoids this problem by comparing the ranking position (the 2nd column in the table) with the column on the far right of the table — how each site ranks for the given variable.

In this case, correlating ranking directly with search volume would yield a correlation of (-)0.75. Correlating with ranked search volume yields a perfect correlation of 1.

This process is then repeated for every keyword in the sample (I counted desktop and mobile versions of the same keyword as two keywords), then the average correlation is taken.

Defining branded search volume

Initially, I thought that pulling branded search volume for every site in the sample would be as simple as looking up the search volume for their domain minus its subdomain and TLD (e.g. “walmart” for https://www.walmart.com/cp/Gift-Cards/96894). However, this proved surprisingly deficient. Take these examples:

www.cruise.co.uk

ecotalker.wordpress.com

www.sf.k12.sd.us

Ecotalker

Ecotalker wordpress

Wordpress.com

Wordpress

You can see the resulting dataset of subdomains with their DA and branded search volume here.

(Once again, I’ve used STAT to pull the search volumes in bulk.)

The results: Brand awareness > links

Here’s the main story: branded search volume is better correlated with rankings than domain authority is.

Another potential difference is in the types of keyword in the two samples. Moz’s study has a fairly even breakdown of keywords between the 0–10k, 10k–20k, 20k–50k, and 50k+ buckets:

On the other hand, my keywords were more skewed towards the low end:

However, this doesn’t seem to be the cause of my lower correlation numbers. Take a look at the correlations for rankings for high volume keywords (10k+) only in my dataset:

It’s worth noting that my sample size of high volume queries is only 980.

Regression analysis

Some explanations:

Branded Search Volume of the ranking site - as discussed above

Ranked Branded Search Volume - How this site’s branded search volume compares to that of other sites ranking for the same keyword, as discussed above

If you’d like to look into this data some more, the full set is here.

Nice data. Why should I care?

There are two main takeaways here:

If you care about your domain authority because it’s correlated with rankings, then you should care at least as much about your branded search volume.

The correlation between links and rankings might sometimes be a bit of a red-herring — it could be that links are themselves merely correlated with some third factor which better explains rankings.

I’d also love to see others conduct similar analysis. As with any research, cross-checking and replication studies are an important step in the process.

Either way, I’ll be writing more around this topic in the near future, so watch this space!

#The Moz Blog Blogger

0 notes