#I’ll add a link once I ge to write this

[beanieable]

Draxum and his turtles

I’ve had this idea for a while now and I still want to write this as one shot, but I felt like sharing it here first.

Basically I want to write a story about Draxum getting the turtles before mutating them. I like to think Draxum hatched them.

First he got a few alligator snapping turtle eggs. Originally he only wanted to use those for his army. When they began hatching one by one, somewhere in the middle Raph hatched, he was by far the biggest of the bunch but also the friendliest. The other snappers did not like Draxum, Raph was curious about him. The other snappers also didn’t like Raph. Which led to Draxum seperating them and eventually he set on a new plan and released all the snappers except Raph back into the wild.

Soon after he got a clutch of red eared sliders. What he didn’t notice the one stray spiny softshell egg. He hatched them and the first two to hatch were Donnie and Leo. They hatched in the middle of the night and Draxum isn’t sure which one is older. They hatched minutes apart from each other. As the remaining sliders hatched, Donnie and Leo ignored them. They didn’t care about the other sliders, always together. Once Dracum tried to seperate them, Donnie bit him. He decided to keep them both, if they got along with the snapper. They did. Raph sniffed them once and was happy with them there. They soon got comfortable with him too. Again he released the remaining sliders.

For his last turtle he got a clutch of ornate box turtles. The majority of the box turtles hatched within two weeks, all except one. The smallest egg took much longer. Draxum almost assumed the egg was a goner. Then it finally hatched. The turtle was by far the smallest but he had an adittute, that turtle is Mikey. Draxum knew that was the one. As soon as he introduced the box turtle to the other three, they loved him. And he loved them.

I want Draxum to be attached to these little turtles well before he even mutates them. He fed them, cared for them and loved them. Then they’re gone. He grieved them and loathed Lou Jitsu at the same time.

Then I want him to see his babies turtles and be so happy they’re alive. The main reason he tries to recruit them is so he can see them again.

He acts like he needs time to grow to love them, he always loved them. He just needed to get to know them for the first time. But that just makes him love them more.

[super-freq]

Factory of FUZZ (fuzz factory clone)

I’m always looking for the cheapest way to build pedals. I found these boards on OSH Park.com. Besides being a service for prototyping boards it’s also an open source repository of projects uploaded by the community. A board uploaded to OSH Park marked public can be ordered by anyone. The search function is not so great but it is searchable. I spent a day searching OSH Park for stompbox projects and found more than a few things that look worth building.

The OSH Park standard service is $5 per square inch with the requirement that you order three boards, and shipping is free. This usually cheaper than ordering boards from vendors but there is no support. One of the projects I found was a this Fuzz Factory. It looked well laid out and the cost was $7.75 for 3 boards, about $2.50 per board, which was pretty reasonable.

Order some of these boards here: https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/xaBILSTV. Check out my projects page for links to some OSH Park boards I designed. I have documentation here on my site.

With no build Docs you’re on your own. The Fuzz Factory is not a complex pedal and the schematic is readily available. Some OSH Park projects will link to documentation and other do not. This is a good way to level up your skills!

Getting Started

The Fuzz Factory is not a hard pedal to clone. The toughest part is wiring the pots. Getting a board where the pots mount directly to the board is a great help. Here three of the five pots mount to the board and two require off board wiring which makes a pretty easy build.

The Fuzz Factory has only a handful of parts. I soldered everything except the pots and the two germanium transistors. You’ll want to test a few transistors if you’re using germanium to get some that sound best. That said really everything even silicon can sound good in this circuit.

The Enclosure

For the enclosure I used a black powder coat 1590B from Tayda. For the logo and labels I milled the box using a desktop mill. The powder coat is removed to reveal the design. I created the design in Sketch on the computer exported some SVG files and loaded these into the mill.

Switching

I decided to try out a relay switching system. This uses a soft touch momentary SPST switch and some circuitry. I used boards from DIYGuitarPedals.com. Their system uses some discreet logic and a relay to handle switching and the status LED.

The PCB is designed to fit a 1590B or larger enclosure. It requires a few parts which are mostly easily available. The relay is available through Mouser. Erik over at DIYGuitarPedals was generous enough to send me two boards and the relays, thanks again Erik! Check out their web site and their YouTube channel.

The system uses a relay which is an electromechanical switch in a little box. The switch in this case is the RY9W-K. It’s a DPDT but rather than being engaged by a button or lever it’s engaging by an electrical voltage applied to a control pin.

In the picture below you can see the relay has 8 pins. The 6 pins on the left are the switching connections, each row is one switch, the center is the common connection that bridge to the outer connections depending on the state of the switch. Hey those six pins on the left are just like the pins on a regular DPDT switch-. The two pins on the right are the control and ground.

The board, relay, SPST switch, and other parts make up a single assembly that replace the 3PDT switches typically used for guitar pedals. You can see it neatly fits the lower bout of the 1590B enclosure.

Here is what the whole system looks like assembled. This is complete and could be dropped into any pedal replacing the standard blue 3PDT.

How does it work?

Unlike many relay systems that rely on a micro controllers this circuit uses only discreet logic. There are pros and cons to each. Using a micro controller requires some extra circuitry since the Micro Controller runs on 5v. They can be proprietary since someone has to write the software that runs the system. Using a Micro controller you can fit all the logic into an 8 pin DIP and add new features or up date the existing code. Using discreet logic your system can run on 9v, might have fewer parts, and won’t suffer from software bugs.

This system relies on the 4011 quad NAND gate to handle the switching logic. Check out this video for a more in-depth explanation of the switching logic.

Assembling the NAND Bypass board is pretty easy. Easier than making the Fuzz Factory board. It’s got very few parts and there is plenty of room to work. If you wanted to give this type of switching a try this would be a good place to start.

Building and wiring the Fuzz Face

The board mounts the three 10k pots and will accept 9mm or 16mm pots. If you are trying to fit this into a 1590B box in portrait orientation you’ll need to use 9mm pots! The two 5k pots are mounted off board. You could also build this in portrait with all 16mm pots.

I mounted the pots in the enclosure then soldered them to the board to make sure they were perpendicular to the enclosure.

I had some ribbon cable salvaged from an old computer. I used this to wire the off board 5k pots. The board marks the pins 1 and 3. Pin 1 also has a square pad. I used 16mm pots with pins that stick out perpendicular to the shaft. I cut a couple pieces strip board to interface the wires and the pots. This made for some nice clean wiring.

The bottom of the PCB is pretty close the corners of the enclosure. I’ll have to be careful it doesn’t short out there! This was a test fit. I needed to mark the positioning for the power, input and output jacks, then disassemble everything and drill these.

Once I got everything drilled I added some wires and reassembled everything. I realized I needed to move the two pots in the second row inboard a millimeter or two. You can see I had to file the holes a little.

I also installed the switching board. I stuck a little piece of wood to the side of the switch to brace it against the back of the enclosure. There was no way to brace the switch when tightening the nut.

You may have noticed the two germanium transistors are missing. Since these are notoriously inconsistent I decided I wanted to audition a few before selecting which would be used for this project. I have a bag of 40 I’ll test and measure these to find suitable pairs.

I have this TC1 Multi-function Tester. This cost about $17 on eBay. Well worth the money. It tests resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, and more. It will tell you all of the most useful information. It will also differentiate NPN, PNP, JFET, and MOSFET devices, and tell which pin is the base, collector, emitter, gate, source, or drain. Super handy.

Germanium transistors have a high degree of variation. Their hfe and leakage is very inconsistent across devices with the same part number. There is a lot of debate about what hfe values work best for different circuits. Some people like to judge by the numbers others like to use their ears. I’m going to go with a hybrid approach use the numbers to get in the ballpark and then audition by ear.

I measured all of the Germanium transistors in the parts bin, marked each with a number and made a spreadsheet of all the values I measured with the TC1.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10O7FYfs_f0x301CYvcvC7pWFFp8Ld2-e3oANXK-AOtc

This is a Fuzz Factory I built using a board from AionFX, it has a few extra knobs. I used sockets for the transistors. I figure I can plug some transistors into this to hear how they sound before soldering them into the new Fuzz Factories.

Here I wired up everything in the box. The NAND Bypass board is well laid out and labeled making wiring easy. Input and output jacks go to the input “In Jack” and “Out Jack” and the input and output from the PCB go to the “To PCB Input” and “To PCB Output”. It’s paint by numbers really!

At this point I gave it a test. I the LED worked, and bypass was working. So we’re goo to go. The last step is finding and installing some Ge transistors.

Tested some transistors in the green fuzz factory and decided on 1 and 9 from the spreadsheet. They had numbers that seemed to be the right range and sounded good.

Taco Fry Fuzz #1

The first us out of the way time to audition a couple more transistors and make the second box.

Tested a few more transistors and decided on #60 for Q2 70 hfe, and #21 for Q3 190 hfe. These sound good and we’re very close to the values for the first pedal. Which should make these sound very close.

What does it sound like?

The Fuzz factory is a highly variable fuzz. The sounds range from standard distortion to fuzz into high gain. It’s possible to dial in gated fuzz and zipper sounds. Not all of it useful in many cases. It’s all fun and inspiring.

Factory of FUZZ (fuzz factory clone) was originally published on Super-Freq

[lilikoi-lacroix]

I need a Xiao Zhan stay at home dad AU fic so bad right now.

Like imagine a few years down the line xz just quietly slips away from the entertainment industry and he and yibo hire a surrogate (who they pay handsomely and are very nice to!!!) and they start trying to have a baby🥺

Like imagine them going through the surrogacy process and trying to make sure potential surrogates aren’t bxgs or solos 😭

Imagine them taking their baby home to Chongqing and Xiao Zhan’s mama is just crying tears of joy and Jianguo has her tail up and very daintily sniffs the baby🥺

And Xiao Zhan is a stay at home dad, still doing his artsy stuff on the side but taking a long break from the entertainment industry while Wang Yibo is still one of the top stars in China and ugh. They’re such a power couple.

They no longer give a single shit about what the public thinks and just start living as an out couple and family and Yibo is so cute with him and the baby. Teaching his kid to bike and skateboard from way too early an age and rubbing it in to Xiao Zhan about how his kid can ride a bike but he still can’t 😭

And oh god they’re so cheesy they would totally have matching outfits for the whole family. Baby vlone shirt. Supreme diapers.... yibo gets a super aerodynamic state of the art stroller and gets it signed by Rossi.

Imagine xz pinching yibo’s chubby cheeks and then then their baby’s chubby cheeks and saying ‘I see no difference here’ and yibo swatting his hand away.

Once their kid gets into school Xiao Zhan starts planning his comeback and writes a play. It ends up as a small production written, acted a designed by him. There are some deeply embedded wwx and lwj refernces in the script and set design. On opening night some of the most artsy people in theater and film are there and Yibo’s in the front row crying tears of joy next to their bored kid who’s playing with a techdeck. It’s a critical and financial success. A lottery system has to be set up to try to avoid a waiting list.

Yibo LOVES being the embarrassing dad. Im thinking World’s Greatest Dad t shirt (but cool). He loves letting everyone and especially his kid know how loved and supported he is. Hearing ‘dadddd you’re embarrassing me’ is the sweetest sound he’s ever heard.

Omg they finally go on that skii trip together but they take the whole family and kiddo’s grandparents are just spoiling him rotten the whole time. Yibo approves and Xiao Zhan tries to be the harsh parent but he’s too much of a softie and just lets kiddo get spoiled rotten, at least on their family vacation.

Xiao Zhan and his mom teaching their kiddo the family recipes 🥺

Yibo back seat driving in the kitchen telling them to make it spicier. Xiao Zhan asking him what he’s trying to prove here.

They’re both perfect sons in law and their mothers in law adore them.

Inspired by

Interviews I can’t find at the moment:

the one where Xiao Zhan talks about being a traditional man and wanting a family (I think that’s in one of his Ma Weiwei interviews *shakes fist at mww*)

the one where Xiao Zhan is asked where he sees himself in 12 years and he says he sees himself living as a normal person with one dog and one cat

DDU episode where Yibo says that in the future he sees himself having more free time and having a kid and a dog. Han ge reminds Yibo that he’s in his 40’s now and he has even less free time. Feng ge replies saying something like wow a woman a kid and a dog huh? And Da laoshi reminds him that Yibo didn’t mention a woman.

If I can find links for those I’ll add them later

And this article about wealthy Chinese gay men seeking children through overseas surrogacy

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/27/chinese-gay-couple-fathers-surrogate

[twistedrunes]

George - Chapter 11

A Peaky Blinders Fanfiction 

This is a series. If you’re new here welcome! I would recommend you start at  the beginning:   Chapter One

More chapters of George are available on the Masterlist

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. All characters, settings etc are the property of their respective owners. All original work is my own.

As always thanks for the love, I can’t tell you how much it means to have evoked an emotional response from someone with my writing. After yesterday’s chapter, I just kept going so here is chapter eleven. Somewhere in this chapter is the line I wanted to write from the beginning - it’s only taken about 45,000 words to get there. Hope you all enjoy it. 

Chapter Eleven: Blood Brother

Warnings - (to be on the safe side NSFW) violence, threatening behaviour, character in danger, blood, gore, implied sexual abuse, language, angst,  implied sexual activity, fluff,  

You smooth the dress over your hips and assess yourself critically in the mirror. The dark blue dress is simple but beautiful. But it just feels weird to be wearing a dress, you almost can’t recognise yourself. But it's just so beautiful. You shake your head stunned that you were considering spending so much on a single dress. Which, you thought guiltily, based on your recent past experiences with dresses, would probably be a tacky bloody mess by the end of the evening.

Daisy stuck her head around the curtain looking you up and down “You look amazing.” She said slipping her hand into yours “Come and show Finn.” She said dragging you out to stand in front of the window. Finn was outside, smoking a cigarette having refused to step foot in another dress shop after a full morning of traipsing in and out of them, claiming you were getting too close to Small Heath and that someone might see him. Daisy knocks on the glass to get his attention and as he turns she waves her hands over you presenting you to him. Finn nods and gives you a double thumbs up. “See,” Daisy said pushing you back into the change room. “Plus I’ve found shoes, a coat, a fascinator, a purse and jewellery that will all match.” She enthused.

You join her at the counter as she plays with a pearl hair slide. The other things she had chosen for you piled high on the counter. The shopkeeper can barely contain herself when you tell her you will take everything. Daisy jumps up and down clapping her hands and you send her back out to Finn to wait for you. Once she is outside you add the hair slides she had been playing with to your purchases and ask the woman to wrap them separately.

Stepping out of the store you clear your throat to get Finn and Daisy’s attention as they gaze adoringly at each other. “Dear God.” You moan. “Here Finn, take this.” You hand him the parcel with your purchases to carry, along with the dress Daisy had chosen earlier in the day. You turn to Daisy “These are for you.” You say pushing the small package into her hands.

Daisy opens the package and pushes it back into your hands “No, I can’t. They were too expensive.” She says frowning.

You push them back into her hands, keeping your hands closed around hers “I never could have got through today without you. You deserve them. Plus they go with your dress.” You insist.

Daisy squeals and shows the slides to Finn, who agrees with her that yes they are beautiful. He takes them and puts them carefully in her bag, holding his arm out for her, positioning himself between her and the street. She wraps her arm around his and skips happily alongside him as they make their way down the street.  

Smiling, you fall a little behind, giving them their space. You place your hand on your stomach trying to calm the feeling of unease there. You couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling that going to Tommy’s party as Anna was a bad idea. But you and Finn had an agreement.

Your agreement had been struck after another of your long conversations alone in the house when everyone else was out. Not long after he had introduced you to Daisy and sworn you to secrecy about her, you had told him about Tommy’s suggestion that you could be Anna and not George at work. It was something you had been thinking about ever since he had mentioned it. You and Finn had discussed the pros and cons at length. Finn finding your worry that Tommy wouldn’t let you wear pants anymore particularly hilarious, as he imagined you dressed in your finery traipsing around the factory floor. Finally, you had decided that you would go back to being Anna, finding yourself tired of constantly having to think about how you walk, talk and mostly about when you could pee. You knew it would probably be difficult at first and that the guys in the factory would probably give you a hard time. But you felt confident that you could win them over again. Even without Tommy, Arthur and John knocking their heads together.

Finn and you had agreed that you would both reveal your secrets at Tommy’s birthday party. Both hoping that the party, with lots of people and alcohol, combined with the shock of both revelations at once would mean you’d all get through it relatively unscathed. So that’s how you had come to be dress shopping on the far side of Birmingham, dressed in Daisy’s mother’s far-too-large-for-you dress following along behind the two lovebirds. You smiled again watching Finn as he held Daisy’s hand helping her into the car. You actually laughed when he did the same for you.

“Tommy’s party tonight,” John says strutting through the door of your workshop. His red ears a sure sign he had already started the festivities.  “Remember?” He says leaning over your shoulder to see what you’re working on.

“Yeah, I’m just going to finish this off and then head home to get ready. Finn and I are going to drive down together. He’s waiting for me at home.” You reply.

“Wow, that’s beautiful.” He says reaching out towards the gun in your hand.

You slap the back of his hand “Keep your greasy mitts off.” You say moving it out of his grasp.  

John puts his hands over his head playfully “Alright, alright. What is it?”

“Tommy’s birthday present.” You say wiping it down.

“He’s gonna love it,” John says honestly. “so hurry up, hey.” He claps his hands together as he struts back out of the room.

You finishing cleaning the gun. It’s the best thing you’ve ever made you admit to yourself. The gold, silver, platinum and pearl inlays you sourced from Alfie really brought it to life. You put it in the box you have made and wrap it in brown paper.

 Finn is literally jumping from foot to foot when you get home “Where have you been?” He moans. “Your dress and stuff are on your bed.” He continues, ushering you towards the stairs.

“Finishing Tommy’s present.” You reply calmly. “I’m just going to wash up and get dressed.”

“Hurry up!” Finn urges.

You grin at him and straighten his bowtie. “You go get Daisy and I will be ready by the time you get back. Okay?”

“You better be waiting by the door.” He says

“Yes, Finn.” You reply already halfway up the stairs.

 You walk back into the sitting room, checking the clock, beginning to get concerned. Finn had been ages.  Then you hear a horn tooting outside and you collect your purse and Tommy’s present from the hall stand and open the door. You fake a yawn to conceal your amusement at the sight of the dishevelled pair. It doesn’t take much imagination to work out why they have been delayed. Finn runs around the car and opens the door for you.

“Good evening Daisy. Lovely night, isn’t it?” You greet her.

“Yes, Anna, lovely. You look beautiful.” She says turning in her seat, her face flushed.

“You too Daisy, but I think you already know that don’t you.” You tease raising your eyebrows towards Finn as you fix the pearl slide which is falling out of her hair.  

Daisy blushes and Finn’s cheeks glow “Anna!” he cries.

  “Finally!” Arthur calls seeing the car pull into Tommy’s drive. He and John wander over to greet you all.

You lean over the seat and put a hand each on the shoulders of Finn and Daisy. “Ignore everything they say.” You instruct them quietly. “If they get too much just come and get me, and I’ll sort them out. Alright?”

“Finn lad.” John exclaims sticking his head through the window of the car “How did you end up with two lovely women in your car?”

“Fuck me!” Arthur grunts

“Shut up you two.” You say stepping out of the car “Try and behave like gentlemen for once. Hey?”

“George?” Arthur slurs trying to get a better look at you in the twilight.

“Yes, but Anna for tonight, alright?” You say, placing your hands on Arthur’s and John’s shoulders turning them and guiding them back towards the house. With a final shove, you stop and wait for Finn and Daisy. Giving them both a quick peck on the cheek as they reach you “Well there’s no going back now.” You say with false confidence. You move to the other side of Finn and link your arm around his and the three of you walk up the drive to the house.

 “Good evening Miss,” Arthur says, with a nod towards Daisy.

“Arthur, John, this is my girlfriend Daisy.” Finn says his chest puffing out with pride “Daisy these are two of my brothers, Arthur and John.”

“Well, it is a pleasure,” Arthur says kissing the back of Daisy’s hand. John nods in greeting and shakes Daisy’s hand.

“All right you two,” you give Finn a little push through the door “inside now and get Daisy a drink. Introduce her to Tommy and Ada.” You instruct. Finn nods and hurries Daisy inside.

You grab the backs of Arthur’s and John’s collars before they can follow. Spinning them to face you. You glare at them both “You will not do a single thing to embarrass that boy or to make Daisy think poorly of him. If you do, I will fucking hurt you.” You whisper menacingly.

“We’re just having a little fun.” John whines.

“No. Right? Fucking No.” You growl.

Arthur leans back against the door frame, swaying slightly “Fuck me.” He rumbles.

“I mean it, Arthur.” You threaten.

“No,” Arthur shakes his head “Fucking gorgeous.” He says looking you up and down and waving his cigar in your general direction.

You smile and give him a peck his cheek. “Thank you, Arthur. Now go find your wife.”

“Fucking right. Now everyone’s here. Time for me to give a fucking speech for my fucking little brother.” He announces loudly, striding through the house.

John gives a little bow and indicates for you to go before him “Ladies first.” He teases. You walk past him, with a little nod. “Come on,” John says putting his hand in the small of your back to guide you.

You stop “I just need the loo.” You whisper “I’ll be back in a minute.”  

You can hear Arthur behind you calling loudly for everyone to “Shut the fuck up.”

Slipping into Tommy’s office you hear clapping, cheering and rowdy cries of happy birthday. Then silence falls again, you assume Tommy is probably making some kind of speech. You put the box on Tommy’s desk, fiddling it into position in the middle of the leather blotter. You can’t help smiling a little as a rousing round of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ seeps through the walls.

The smell of Tommy fills your nose, cigarettes, whiskey and gunpowder, everything about him is smoky. His scent seemingly as much feature of the room of the as the furniture. Your stomach is still churning, you feel awkward and exposed in your dress and heels. But as always, it’s the smell of Tommy that calms you. You’re half tempted to run upstairs and steal one of his suits and wear that instead. But you think of Finn and your agreement and take a deep breath.  You loiter, wanting the calm to last and find yourself drawn to the bookshelf, pulling books from the shelves to flick through the pages.

You aren’t aware of Tommy’s presence until his hand is on your throat. You start, the book you had been flicking through, falling from your fingers and thudding to the floor. You try to turn but he holds you firm, the muzzle of his gun pressed against your spine. His thumb and index finger press against the underside of your jaw, lengthening your neck uncomfortably, forcing you onto your tiptoes. You spread your hands on the shelf to steady yourself.

His mouth presses to your ear, his breath humid on your skin, you can smell the fresh whiskey on his breath and the aftershave on his skin “This is a private party.” Tommy’s voice is more ominous than normal. You try to speak, but his hand holds your words in your throat. He hasn’t finished talking yet. “I know everyone here except you.”

You swallow hard, surprised to hear a small sigh from Tommy as your Adam’s apple presses against his palm. His voice maintains both its timbre and knife-like edge when he speaks again. “And you I find in my private office. Why?”

“Gift.” You manage to breathe, hand stretching past his hip, vainly trying to point to his desk. He either doesn’t notice or ignores your signal, not acknowledging that you have moved at all.

His teeth grate over your earlobe as he uses his body to press you against the shelves forcing you to turn your head uncomfortably. “A new whore for my birthday, how thoughtful.” He says offhandedly. The coldness of his words pushing you closer to the panic which is hovering around you. You shake your head but his grip only tightens, stopping both movement and sound. His foot slides between yours. His knee pressing between your thighs and moving up forcing your legs to part. He holsters his gun and places his now empty hand on your hip, his fingers slowly dragging the fabric of your dress up your leg.  

Hot tears well in your eyes, unable to get enough air to breathe, you can only will him to stop. You blink and a single tear bounces off your cheek and onto Tommy’s wrist. His grip on you loosens minutely “No.” you manage to squeak.

“Who the fuck do you work for?” He hisses releasing his grip a little more.

“You.” you reply, voice tremulous, more tears spilling onto your cheeks.

“And what is it you do for me, hey love?” His voice ice, disbelieving. He spins you to face him, with such force that your head cracks back against the shelves.

The jolt shocks you into action, unlocking your frozen limbs. You lash out at him. Fist connecting with his cheek. Your single stoned ring splitting the skin on the sharp angle of his cheekbone. His fingers rising instinctively to the injury and his eyebrows lifting in surprise to find a smear of blood.

“I’m a peaky fucking blinder.” You hiss, glaring at him, just long enough to watch the realisation dawn on him, before you push him again, causing him to crash awkwardly into a chair and stumble. Finally free of his grasp you run for the door.

You hear Tommy call something at your retreating back, but it is cut off by the slamming of the door behind you. You don’t stop, desperate not to see a soul you run away from the party, racing down the servant’s stairs and bursting into the kitchen and through, past the startled staff, and out into the garden. The cold air punches you in the gut, forcing what air you did have in your lungs out. You fold in half, gasping. You can feel the sobs building in your chest and you stumble desperately towards the stables, looking for somewhere to hide, not wanting anyone to see you.

 The noise of the party wafts across the grounds, loud music and happy voices. Tears half blinding you, you stumble into the stables where you walk headlong into a wall. “Fuck!” The wall grunts.

“What?” Another voice further away hisses.

“Some bitch from the party. Pissed by the looks of her.” The wall speaks again, you manage to lift your head and realise the wall is, in fact, a massive man. You turn and try to run. He grabs your wrist and yanks you back. You feel your shoulder pop and you cry out, pain blinding you.

“Shut her the fuck up!” The other voice yells.

You can barely stay on your feet, pain weakening your knees. The enormous man throws you on top of a hay bale, palm pressed against your mouth. His free hand punching your temple. You see stars but kick out desperately. Your feet find nothing but air. You feel around desperately with your good arm, the other stubbornly refusing to move. Finally, your hand makes contact with a hay hook. You swing it wildly. It catches the man and he yells out in pain, reefing the hook from your grasp.

“Bruce! Shut the fuck up! Let’s go!”

Bruce grunts in response and loosens his grip on you. You roll off the hay bale and begin scrambling towards the door. “Fuck.” You hear Bruce grunt behind you. Lights explode in your head, as fire shoots through your body and you fall. Pain radiates from your gut. Your hand wraps around the metal protruding from your stomach. The pain pulling your body into a ball. Horses’ hooves clatter around your head and then thunder away. You roll on your side, the metallic taste of blood filling your mouth.

You lie motionless for a long time. Encased in a cocoon of pain. Slowly your brain manages to pack the pain in on itself. This is how you survived Victor, packing the pain away. Live now, suffer later. You take hold of the hook, yanking it free. You scream with the release of it. You lay still again, mentally packing the pain up again. Pushing it down.

You need to move. You pull your legs up and use your good arm to crawl for the door. You notice the rake the boys use to muck out the stables. Using the walls for leverage you drag yourself up to a standing position and lean on the rake heavily with your good arm. The other flapping uselessly at your side. Shuffling you slowly pick your way across the gravel. Halfway the rake slips from under you and you slam into the ground. Stars spin around your head and you vomit. You groan and drag yourself along the gravel towards the kitchen door. Eventually reaching it you try banging on it, but no one answers. You drag yourself by your fingertips up the stonework of the door frame, grabbing at the handle, you try to turn it, but your hand, slick with blood, simply slides off causing you to lose your balance. You pitch forward, temple banging against the other side of the stone frame.

“She’s lost too much blood.” The doctor says to Tommy, shrugging indifferently. “She won’t survive the night.”

“Then fucking transfuse her,” Tommy says coldly

“We don’t have the equipment.”

“A piece of tubing and two needles is all they needed in France,” John says joining his brother.

“We don’t have time for typing.”

“We’re all O type.” Arthur says joining his brothers “Tested us in fucking France.”

“So you can start with the three of us while you type the others,” Tommy says slipping off his jacket, his holster and gun becoming visible, Arthur and John follow his lead, none of them trying to conceal their guns. “Now.” Tommy snaps as he rolls up his sleeve.  

“She’s a fucking Shelby now.” Arthur jokes macabrely, rolling his sleeve down and moving aside for Michael to take his place in the chair next to your bed. “That’s four pints of Shelby, now one of Gray. She’ll be fucking telling fortunes in no time.”

Finn carried his bouquet carefully through the halls of the hospital. He hoped you would be awake today. Properly awake, not screaming in terror like the last few times he’d been here. He’d been so relieved when you finally woke up a few weeks ago, but since then you’d been going downhill. 

His breath caught when he remembered yesterday. You had been screaming, crying, and fighting the doctors and nurses. Begging them not to give you any more morphine, telling them it brought Victor back. Once they had dosed you with morphine you had lain in the bed, looking through him. Thinking you were finally calm he had reached out to brush your hair from where it was plastered to your forehead. You had begun sobbing. “I’m sorry George.” Were the only words Finn had understood in the outpouring of grief he had witnessed before the doctor had made him leave, saying he was upsetting you.  

He pushes the door to your room open, nearly dropping the flowers when greeted by the sight of an enormous man receiving a sponge bath. “Fuck, sorry.” He says backing out of the room quickly. Turning on his heel he walks quickly the nurses’ station. “Where’s Anna?” He demands.

The nurse shakes her head slightly. “We have no patient by that name.”

“The fuck you don’t, Anna Hunter, she was in room 251 yesterday.” He says trying to stay calm.  

“I’m sorry I can’t talk about patients who may or may not be in our care.”

Finn was literally seeing red, panic rising in his chest. “Is she dead?”

The nurse looks at Finn with a withering glare. “We can only talk to family sir.”

“She doesn’t have any,” Finn replies helplessly

“I’m sorry sir.” The nurse waves at two orderly’s who come and escort Finn from the hospital.

 Engulfed in fury and fear he doesn’t hear the young nurse until she grabs his sleeve “Mister Shelby.”

Finn turns to her “Yes.” The surprise of being called Mister Shelby softens his tone.

“I’m one of Daisy’s friends.” She says puffing having chased Finn across the lawn of the hospital

Finn looks at her more closely “Sarah right?”

“Yes,” She nods, “I think I know where she is.”

“Yeah, Daisy’s at home,” Finn says distractedly.

“No. The woman in room 251.” Sarah explains.

“Where?” Finn grabs her arms as if to prevent her from running away.

“I think, I mean they have taken her to the asylum. A doctor from there came yesterday to examine her and then she was gone.” Sarah says hopelessly.

 Finn burst into Tommy’s office “They’ve fucking taken her to the asylum.” Tommy and Polly look up from their paperwork.

“Who?” Tommy asks.

“Who?” Finn howls “Fucking Anna! Fucking George!” He slams his palm down on the table.

Arthur, Michael and John who had been in the office next door, join Finn in the doorway.

“What’s wrong little brother.” John teases an automatic reflex to seeing his brother so wound up.

Finn grabs John’s waistcoat at his shoulders, and slams him against the door frame “They have taken fucking Anna to the nuthouse.”

Tommy is now standing, hands open, “Well maybe it’s for the best Finn.” He says calmly.

Finn releases John, turning on Tommy, face scarlet with rage “How would you fucking know? Not once have you been to see her. She fucking saved your life, Arthur’s life, stopped Linda from being raped. She fucking protects this family like it’s her fucking own and you won’t even visit her in the fucking hospital. She’s only there because she was nearly fucking gutted trying to protect your fucking horses. The horses you’ve been to visit three times in the month she’s been doped out of her brain in that fucking hospital.”

The brothers, Polly and Michael are struck dumb by Finn’s outburst. Finn glares at all of them, taking their silence as indifference he continues “You’re a fucking hypocrite Tommy. You say all of this,” he gesticulates wildly around him “all the killing, all the violence is for the family. But she’s protected this family with her fucking life and you won’t lift a finger to help her when she can’t help herself. Fuck you, Tommy.” He spits.

Finn tries to leave but Arthur claps his hand on the back of his neck, pulling him into an embrace. “We know brother. You’re right, she has looked after us.” He presses his forehead to his youngest brothers.

Finn looks at his eldest brother desperately. “It’s the morphine, Arthur. She doesn’t want it. She said it made her see things. She’s terrified. She was seeing people who weren’t there. Some bloke called Victor and then she thought I was someone else.” Thoughts fall from Finn’s mouth haphazardly, as he tries to convince his brother of the peril he senses you are in. “She thinks no one will ever love her because of what she’s done for us.  She doesn’t have anyone. She’s an orphan, like us.” He looks into Arthur’s eyes “She told me we were lucky because we have each other. She’s got no one, Arthur. We have to save her. She’s not mad.” He pleads.

Tommy, expression dark, has crossed the room during Finn’s impassioned plea. Grabbing his jacket, overcoat and cap from the coat rack, he puts his hand on Finn’s shoulder “Come on. Let’s go.” He looks around the Arthur, John and Michael. “Fucking all of you. Let’s go.”

 Doctor Brown damn near pissed his pants at the sight of the Peaky Blinders teeming out of cars in the driveway of his Institute. He called his orderly’s telling them to prevent anyone from entering the building and then phoned the local constabulary demanding a force be sent immediately. By the time he was making his way downstairs the orderly’s were all sitting bloodied and bruised on the floor.

“My name is Doctor Brown and I run this Institute. What in God’s name is going on here?” He demands from halfway down the staircase.

Tommy stepped forward holding out his hand “Thomas Shelby.”

“I have called the police.” Doctor Brown replies, not descending any further and ignoring Tommy’s offered hand.  

“Where is she?” Finn demands, stepping forward, pulling his gun from its holster.

Doctor Brown looks at Tommy as if expecting him to intercede. Tommy stands impassively, seemingly not paying the slightest attention to his brother. “Who?” Doctor Brown says distastefully.

“Anna. Miss Anna Hunter. She was a Birmingham Hospital yesterday when I left at three o’clock in the afternoon and this morning, at ten, she was gone and I was told she was brought here.” Finn says voice even and strong, lifting the gun to aim between, the Doctor’s eyes.

“We have taken on no new patients today.” Doctor Brown says.

“Fuck this,” Arthur says moving across the hall to the locked doors leading to the wards. He kicks the door open shattering the lock. “Right then. Fucking spread out and find her.” He yells back to his family. Finn, John and Michael join him striding down the hallways guns drawn. Tommy remains in the foyer watching Doctor Brown. Hands clasped in front of him, watching calmly.

“Fuck!” John exclaims “I’ve fucking found her.” He yells out into the hall. By the time Finn arrives John has undone the straps tying you to the bed and wrapped a sheet around you to cover your nakedness. Finn bends down over you stroking your hair and speaking softly to you. You don’t respond, not conscious.  

Arthur picks up your hand and holds it in the air, then release’s it and it flops back to the mattress. He shakes your shoulder “Anna, love. Come on wake up!” He says loudly. Lightly slapping your face. You don’t respond. “She’s fucking drugged.” He concludes, eyes blazing.

Finn scoops you up in his arms and begins to carry you down the hall. Tommy sees him approaching and pulls off his overcoat laying it over you and tucking it into Finn's hands. “Put her in the car Finn. I’ll be out in a minute.” He instructs.

John, Arthur and Michael, join him in the hall. “She was fucking naked, Tommy,” John says quietly voice tight, eyes darting to the door to make sure Finn is out of earshot. “There’s a lot of blood,” he pauses not wanting to say the words “between her legs.”

“Fuck ‘em!” Arthur explodes.

Tommy’s jaw tenses and his eyes flash. “I’m taking Anna and Finn to Arrow House. John, Arthur, you lot stay here and find out what they’ve given her and what the fuck happened to her. Michael, call Mary and tell her we’re coming. Tell her to make up a room for Anna and to call the Doctor. Call the cops, get them to work out who else is here who fucking shouldn’t be.” Tommy turns and walks away, as he reaches the bottom of the stairs he looks up at Doctor Brown “Tell ‘em the people here are now under the protection of the Peaky fucking Blinders.”

Tommy slides into the front seat of the car and looks over at you and Finn on the back seat. Finn is holding on to you for dear life. He’s struggling to stop your unconscious body from simply sliding to the floor. Finn is pale, “She’s bleeding Tommy.” He says as he pulls back the sheet and Tommy’s coat, carefully so as not to expose you, showing Tommy the bloodstained bandages wrapped around your stomach.

Tommy reaches out and grabs his brother’s hand, holding his gaze “She’ll be alright now, Finn. We’ve got her now.”

Chapter Twelve: Amongst The Thorns > > >

More chapters of George are available on the George Masterlist

Interested in my other work? Find them on my MASTERLIST

[rainbowravioli]

HEY RITA!!! AN INTERVIEW OF SAYO YAMAMOTO IS OUT!! PLEASE CHECK IT OUT IN FULL AND TELL US YOUR THOUHTS OR IF THERE'S ANYTHING DIFFERENT!!

I love your enthusiasm so much! :D Ok, this is long overdue, let’s get to it! 

So this first part (x) was actually the first time I read a post-finale interview and didn’t feel sad, angry or frustrated. I would love more of this, please. Sayo is just way more professional than Kubo. She also didn’t mention any of that “Yuuri was going to lose from the start” stuff which pleases me, I would hate to have Sayo lie to me. 

It’s nice to finally have Sayo herself talking about YOI though, you can really tell it’s her passion project. 

I can think about the outline of a story by myself, but I wanted to create it with someone who would be able to add punchy and impressive dialogues that would actually make the characters come alive.

(...)

I first came up with an outline of the full series, and talking with Kubo-san about that we decided the details and she drew the manga storyboard for episodes 1-5. (...) Then we discussed the story more in detail and decided the elements and scenes we absolutely wanted to insert and the position of lines. Even so, when I translated this into the anime storyboard it was still too long, and editing required an exorbitant amount of time.

Confirmation that Sayo was heavily involved in the writing of the series and that Kubo was hired mainly for dialogue. I find the “making characters come alive” part interesting though, considering Kubo has admitted more than once that she doesn’t really understand the characters all that much. But really, what’s important here is that Sayo did as much of the writing as Kubo, if not more. And she did storyboard work as well. Good to have confirmation on that. That’s Sayo’s specialty, I always thought it weird that she wouldn’t do it for her dream project. 

The voice actors always performed even better than we expected, so it happened that we changed the animation based on the acting. They were all subtle things, but that’s actually difficult. Anyone can easily be affected by a powerful line, so when a character says it you already get an impression of them, but a fine performance is what makes the difference and makes you feel that the character is really there, not just “a character inside an anime”.

This is really no unusual in animated productions (see how Disney animators incorporate voice actor’s mannerisms into the characters, for example). I find the emphasis on how she wanted YOI to feel “real” vey interesting. 

What made me realize that this anime would become something amazing is Victor’s skating scene in episode 1. When we were editing this part, I was convinced that this would become an animation work no one has seen before. 

Same Sayo, same. Stammi Vicino in episode 1 was the moment this series stole my heart and I was sure it would be amazing. 

—The fireworks scene in the ED is also impressive.

That was Hayashi-san’s idea. The three of them weren’t actually together in Hasetsu in summer, so that scene is not something that happened at a certain time, it’s more like an imaginary world.

I kinda appreciate the confirmation that the fireworks scene never happened because...I kept waiting for the point in the series where the trio would reach a relationship level that would make it believable for the fireworks scene to happen but I never got it. Imaginary world where Yurio got character development and skating family is actually a thing outside of fanon :’)

—Could you tell us about the reading play that is going to be performed at the April 29 event?

Kubo-san and I conceived the basic ideas, and I was able to order the script from Kimiko Ueno-san, who among the people I know is the one who can write the craziest stories. I worked with Ueno-san in “Space Dandy” (2014) and I heard that she enjoyed “Yuri on Ice” until the end. I think it will be pretty crazy (LOL).

I’m so anxious over this whole event, it’s bad for my heart.

—What about the future of the anime?

I’m being told “let’s continue as soon as possible” (LOL). I’ve already decided what to do next. I came up with it while doing the video editing for episode 10, but what I’m thinking is something grand, and I’m wondering, what will happen if I really do all of that…? At this moment, my intention is to continue “Yuri on Ice” as long as I can.

Look, a season 2 was obvious since the finale. I don’t believe for one second that they aren’t actively working on it right now. They probably have been for a while.  

Though really, coming up with a sequel around the time of editing episode 10 just gives more weight to my fav conspiracy theory of the finale being changed to accommodate a season 2. 

Something grand better mean olympic champion Yuuri and on-screen Victuuri wedding.

It’s possible that the relationships between the characters too might look different in some instances. Therefore, if you are unsure about buying the volumes, I would recommend that you do.

This is so intriguing and ideally, IDEALLY, it’s talking about fixing the mess that was Victuuri in episode 12 but let’s be real. At this point, it’s probably Yurio related T-T

Now for this part (x)

....I’m concerned. 

—Please let us know more in detail about how it was created.

First of all, before drawing the storyboard for Yurio’s EX, I thought about how it was created. It’s a story I came up with thinking about Yurio’s feelings when he was going to skate the EX after winning the GPF.

Oh Sayo why do you have to go and lie to me after I said I was glad you didn’t? Ok listen. Welcome to the Madness doesn’t make sense in a universe where Yurio won the GPF. It just doesn’t. So this whole thing about coming up with the concept for it based on Yurio winning the GPF...is pretty much bullshit, sorry. 

And he comes up with the idea of creating a new program the night before the EX.—Is it possible, in real life, to create a program for the EX the day before?

You might think it’s not, but actually it has happened. The athlete Misha Ge from Uzbekistan has done that before. (...) I saw and heard about it, so I know it’s rather normal.

I’m...gonna stop your right there Sayo. Don’t, please. Just don’t. I’m just going to link @vctryr‘s post here (x) 

How do you keep pushing for realism and then add this? Everything about this ordeal in unbelievable. 

Also...so Yurio can choreograph now. In a matter of hours too. I thought he couldn’t get more Victor 2.0 but here we are. Yurio is perfect, he has peaked. 

—Who is the other key person beside Yurio?

I thought that even though we created a “DJ” setting for Otabek we couldn’t really show it in the anime…

This whole DJ thing with Otabek is weird. I’m not opposed to it, but it’s very clearly a recent addition to his character I think. All secondary characters have extra bits to them that we don’t get to see in the anime. Like how JJ does a lot of charity work, or how Emil loves to do extreme sports in the off-season, or how Seung-Gil has no fashion sense. Except all of these things have been part of their official character profiles form the start. DJ Otabek came out of nowhere. This, combined with how Sayo says he uses the SNS a lot, even though one of the first things we learned about Otabek was that he hated SNS, leads me to believe that he got some recent changes done to his character. Probably a result of his popularity. 

Yurio has become friends with Otabek, so of course he thinks he would take him with him. However, since he’s still 15 and cannot enter clubs, Otabek turns him down. Yurio tails him to a place where he sees him coolly doing the DJ, and thinks “I could have him choose my song”…

Bless Otabek for being super aware of Yurio’s age and being responsible. Yurio though...

—So basically, in the GPF Victor joins Yuuri Katsuki’s EX and Otabek joins Yuri Plisetsky’s!?

Otabek doesn’t skate with him. I believe the way he appears is something no one would have imagined.

So is he gonna DJ on the ice or...Thank god he doesn’t skate with him though!

Some subtle parts have been fixed too, therefore it’s possible that the relationships between the characters might look different in some instances. There was a small change in the scene before Yurio goes to perform his FS, I’d like you to pay attention to that.

YEP IT’S ALL ABOUT YURIO. This is probably about the Victor scene, since so many people saw it as manipulative.

I don’t know guys...I’m still just super conflicted. I’ll reserve judgement until the final DVD comes out but it’s still really upsetting for me that Yurio is getting all this love and attention while Yuuri and Victor get...narrative and character derailment. Also half a poorly animated duet with credits on top. 

Why Sayo? Why don’t you love them anymore?

*sigh*

[brianobrienny]

4 Ways a Blog Can Help Your Business Grow Right Now

Are you taking advantage of the massive benefits of blogging for business?

The truth is, having a blog is one of the best ways to connect with your audience. It’s also essential for driving long-term growth.

Check out all the ways a blog can help your business grow. And I also included a handful of blog example I love.

Quick Takeaways

If you want to grow your business, you should be blogging.

A blog offers key benefits that can help you achieve your business goals.

By looking at examples of successful blogs, you can see the potential of blogging for your business.

How Can My Business Benefit from Blogging?

How do more leads, a steady flow of website traffic, stronger customer relationships, and higher revenue sound to you? Appealing, right?

So why haven’t you created a killer blog yet?

I get it – you’ve got a business to run. Who has time to write blog posts and to promote them? In 2019, the average blog post took nearly four hours to write. Add in social media promotion, content planning, and content optimization, and sure, it’s not a cakewalk.

But, the reality is, blogging is worth it. Post regularly, and you’ll expand your customer base and engage with your existing customers, helping to strengthen the all-important brand-buyer bond. Businesses that blog regularly benefit from:

More web traffic

Better quality leads

Brand trust and thought leadership

Highly engaged customers

Not only that. If you don’t make blogging part of your marketing strategy, you’re essentially handing all the benefits over to your competitors.

4 Benefits of Blogging Your Business Can’t Afford to Miss

1. More web traffic

With a blog, you’re going to attract more people to your business. Traffic Generation Café has found that businesses see a proportional increase in blog traffic from the number of blog posts they publish. Once you reach 21 to 54 posts, you can see your traffic go up by as much as 30 percent.

Keep publishing high-quality posts, and you’ll keep increasing your web traffic.

Companies that have a blog get 97 percent more links to their websites. Backlinko has found that the number of domains linking back to a page is one of the most important ranking factors that Google uses when determining page rank.

Also, when you optimize your blog posts for the keywords your audience is using when they search online, your website is more likely to appear on the first page of search results.

Type in the keyword ‘kitchen remodel chicago’ and see what shows up as the first organic result. It’s Chi Renovation and Design, a renovation company with an active blog and keyword-optimized content.

The company posts about twice a month on its blog, uses plenty of eye-catching visuals, and is raking in traffic with its prime Google search results real estate.

This is critical. Seventy-five percent of searchers won’t even go past the first page of search results. Every time your target buyers can’t easily find your website when they’re searching for a solution that your business can provide, you’re losing the opportunity to generate a lead or convert a customer.

2. Better quality leads

When your business uses a blog to reach customers, you’ll also be able to generate high-quality leads.

Why is this?

When users search online for a solution to their problem – and your blog provides the answers they need – you’ve got a winning match. This perfect fit is more likely to eventually lead to a sale.

And, this is why blogging for businesses can be so impactful. You’re connecting with your market through the process of adding value to their lives or helping them with a problem.

You’ve already demonstrated that your brand is the answer to their need with your helpful, relevant, high-quality blog post. As a result, they’re more likely to trust your brand and take the next step down the sales funnel.

Boston accounting firm, FJV is a great example of a blog that’s set up to generate quality leads. The company publishes helpful content regularly, which has helped them land on the first page of Google for the right keywords.

And, if you look at the firm’s blog, you’ll find plenty of long-form educational content.

When a potential customer searches for startup accounting services in Boston, FJV shows up as the first organic search result. They’re even above Yelp!

This process is completely different than paid advertisements. With paid search, you may bring in web traffic when you run a campaign. But you still have work to do to convince a lead your brand is right for them.

Not only is blogging going to bring in better leads, but it’s also going to generate more of them. Content marketing produces three times more leads than paid search.

3. Brand trust and thought leadership

Another key business benefit is brand trust. When you publish blog posts, you’re establishing your brand as an authority in your industry.

You’re not simply saying you have solutions and care about solving your customers’ problems – you’re doing it with content. This instills confidence in your customers. It also positions your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

US consumers say authenticity is one of the top qualities that would attract them to a brand. For B2B businesses, a blog is just as important as it is for B2C brands. Thirty-five percent of B2B buyers spend one to three hours a week reviewing thought leadership content. Of C-suite execs, 47 percent said thought leadership content had a direct impact on their decision to award business.

If you want to see successful thought leadership in action, check out Adobe’s website. Adobe, one of the most innovative companies in the world according to Forbes, offers an incredibly rich online library with blog posts for designers, marketers, and innovators.

The Adobe Blog is a great example of thought leadership in action

You won’t see this level of trust overnight. But, as you continue to post content that your target market finds useful, the trust barometer keeps rising.

4. Engaged customers

The biggest benefit of blogging for businesses is engagement. If you aren’t able to keep your customers interested and your brand top-of-mind, you’re losing ground with your customer base.

With blog posts that resonate with your target buyers, you can keep them hooked. Not only that, but your blog will distinguish your business from your competitors.

Whether you’re a software company that wants to be the go-to source for custom app development for businesses in your area. Or, a local produce delivery company trying to compete with giant grocery store chains, blogging is what will ensure your business stands out.

Here are five examples of engaging blogs you can use as a source of inspiration:

Nutanix’s The Forecast

GE Healthcare’s Insights

Cleveland Clinic Health Essentials

DivvyHQ’s Content Planning Blog

American Express Business Trends and Insights

A Blog Offers Sustainable Business Growth

Once you get your blog going, you’ll start to see some of the business benefits. Increased traffic. More leads. More sales.

But, you’ll also be able to sustain this growth. The thing is, the time and effort you put in now will pay you back in dividends over time.

This is because the blogs you publish today are going to continue to bring in traffic for years. HubSpot has found that one in every 10 blog posts turns out to be a compounding post. These are your old evergreen posts that generate more and more traffic over time.

A large blog library filled with thought leadership posts will also translate to more backlinks and a better position in search engine results. Which means even more traffic, more leads, and more sales.

As a result, your blog can lead to sustainable growth. Easier scaling. And, serious business success.

If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.

Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today – and generate more traffic and leads for your business.

The post 4 Ways a Blog Can Help Your Business Grow Right Now appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

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[mbaljeetsingh]

My Favorite Front-End Development Extensions for Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is one of the newest kids on the IDE “block” and it’s making a lot of noise. It’s taken a little while to gain traction, perhaps because it’s one of Microsoft’s few open source products, but it’s taken the open source community by storm. Developers who once swore their allegiance to Sublime Text 3 and Atom are slowly being converted by the power and simplicity of VS Code–not to mention its incredible library of extensions.

I began my own coding life on Sublime Text 3, moved to Atom, then PHPStorm, then after my subscription expired with JetBrains I thought I’d give VS Code a try. It continues to make my life easier and by doing so, makes me a better developer.

This introduction will take you from zero to hero, getting you up and running with VS Code, focusing specifically on my favorite front-end development extensions, making sure that every aspect of your workflow is covered.

Assumptions

I’m going to assume a few points for this article:

Your front-end development stack is not opinionated. I’m going to assume that at some point you will have the need for jQuery, ES6, React, Vue, PostCSS, or whatever floats your boat.

You’re using Git for version control.

You already have Node and NPM installed and setup correctly.

Some of the extensions listed below require some configuration outside of VS Code, I’ll let you know what does and doesn’t, but if you need any help, feel free to ask!

Installing

First things first, if you don’t already have VS Code installed, head over to Visual Studio Code’s website. VS Code is cross-platform so our configurations will work on Windows, Mac and Linux.

VS Code is also available as a Homebrew Cask package on Mac: brew cask install visual-studio-code

A step that I find a lot of tutorials often leave out is the ability to execute VS Code from the terminal. There are a few ways of doing this. If you already have a .bash_profile setup you can add this:

export PATH="$PATH:/Applications/Visual Studio Code.app/Contents/Resources/app/bin"

Or, for a more cross platform approach, hit the Command Palette shortcut: Shift + Command + P and type the word shell - this will give you an option called: Install code command in PATH - hit enter and you’re done. Now, you can launch files and folders anywhere from the terminal by typing: code path/to/file/or/dir

Linting

Lint your code–it’s the best way to stop errors before they cause you any undue stress!

ESLint

If you’re running the latest version of ECMA Script, then ESLint is for you. This extension integrates the ESLint pattern recognizer straight into VS Code and aids you with common mistakes that developers make with the new syntax. It does require that you have the NPM ESLint package installed either locally in your project or globally.

SASS Lint

For those of you who enjoy writing more programmatic Sass, Sass Lint provides you with an easy to use set of configurations for writing standards-compliant Sass.

JSHint

JS Hint is another great JavaScript Linter that aids you with logic, syntax and more, depending on your configuration.

TSLint

If you’re a TypeScript fan, then the TSLint extension is your best friend. With TypeScript being a precompiled language, you have full control over what the compiler lints for you as well as auto formatting options.

These extensions all offer Git friendly ways of managing custom / shared configurations between developers on your team namely in .eslintrc and .sass-lint.yml  or .jshintrc

I’ve purposely left our HTML Linters here. Whereas I’ll use an extension like Beautify for formatting and tabbing my HTML according to an .editorconfig I find that HTML Linters perform quite poorly. They don’t consider semantics and tend to do a bad job of helping you with accessibility concerns. As the meaning of HTML can be relatively ambiguous, it’s better to use a set of tools that do smaller jobs. 

To extend the HTML functionality in VS Code I use the following:

AutoClose Tag

It could use a bit of improvement, but I always liked Sublime Text 3’s auto closing tag functionality. The above mentioned extension will help you out with this in VS Code.

AutoRename Tag

This is another useful HTML extension which allows users to click inside an HTML element and rename it, while simultaneously renaming the closing tag.

Automation

I moved away from Grunt sometime ago, but coincidentally there don’t seem to be any Grunt extensions on the marketplace, at least not with enough traction to make much of an impact. The extensions below are mainly focused on Gulp and Webpack as they seem to be leading the race in the task management world right now.

Gulp Snippets

This extension allows you to use the Command Palette in VS Code for easily injecting useful Gulp configurations into your Gulpfile.js; a must have if you’re still a little shaky about setting up Gulp.

Webpack

Setting up Webpack can be one of the scariest tasks a developer has to commit to. The Webpack extension for VS Code takes the fear out of it by providing you with a minimal webpack.config.js to start your project. If you’re a progress person, and you don’t like being left in the dark while your Terminal thinks about things, then the Webpack Progress extension is for you. It provides a nice progress bar for when Webpack is doing its thing.

Git

One of the most powerful extensions for version control in VS Code is:  

Git Lens

For newcomers and advanced users alike, Git Lens is powerhouse. It makes an easy job of making Git and its many intricacies more manageable and visual. I’ve enjoyed using it so much that other than using the Terminal to add, commit, branch and push, I’ve completely scrapped Git GUI’s.  

Almost every setting is customizable. Git Lens provides real-time feedback of Git data while you’re coding. Want to know who wrote that function that isn’t working? Want to see how much the code has changed over the last few commits? Not sure how to handle a merge conflict in a file that you never wrote, or have little context of? Git Lens handles this all for you. 

Language Support and Intellisense

Where as other IDEs have full on support for the majority of languages, VS Code leaves it up to you for the most part. As and when you require it, you can add Language Support for whatever technology you’re dealing with, out-of-the-box HTML and CSS, as well as JavaScript are provided, but if you have need for Python it’s just a click away. In my workflow I use Python every so often, but Node was a big thing for me. 

Intellisense essentially takes care of completions. You can hit tab or hover over a file path, for instance, and VS Code will do the hard work for you. 

Babel ES6 / ES7

If you’re one of those people that loves using new technologies in your workflow and you’re crazy about the new edition of JavaScript then the Babel ES6 / ES7 linter is for you. 

File System Path

This is a brilliant extension that autocompletes / suggests file paths while you’re typing. If you come from a PHPStorm background, you’ll know the feeling!

NPM

A great extension when using require() or import {} in Node.js, this extension autocompletes file paths to Node Modules.

CSS Class Names

This is a very useful extension for auto completing CSS class names defined in your linked CSS files. If you’re a Bootstrap, Foundation or just a framework fan in general, this will save you a lot of time!

SCSS

For the precompiled CSS fans, this extension makes intellisense possible for imports, mixins, includes and functions in SCSS.

PostCSS

If you’ve yet to come across PostCSS then you’re missing out. It’s an advanced and extremely forward thinking set of plugins for CSS that makes CSS a lot more powerful. I use two PostCSS extensions: Syntax and Sorting; one enables syntax support for new CSS Level 4 modules like nesting and the other allows me to sort CSS properties alphabetically.

Vue

While not really Intellisense alone this is a great extension for Vue.js development. It’s an all-in-one solution for adding linting, intellisense, and formatting to Vue.js development and already includes some of the extensions I've mentioned above.

React / React Native

This is a full solution for developing React Native applications. By default, VSCode has a ton of support built in for React.

Accessibility and Health

You spend a lot of time in front of your IDE, so making sure it’s easy on the eyes and legible is just as important as any other aspect I’ve mentioned.

VS Code Icons

First, get some folder/file icons so that you can easily distinguish the files you’re using.

Cobalt 2 Theme from Wes Bos

Cobalt 2 is not too dark, not too light, and has great contrast for an editor theme. It also has a corresponding colour setup for ZSH Terminals.

Dash

If you haven’t heard of Dash, it should be your new best friend. Dash is an API documentation app for Mac, but this extension plugs right into VS Code. By clicking any method, it will open up Dash to the respective page. The same plugin supports Zeal which is a Windows and Linux alternative.

Formatting

Beautify

As I mentioned earlier, the Beautify extension is a great tool if you’re adamant about code formatting and editor standardization. It also allows you to set a .jsbeautifyrc file which you can commit to Git repos for collaboration. Beautify can also be used as a replacement for .editorconfig if you don’t support it. Beautify formats JS, CSS, Sass, JSON and HTML.

EditorConfig

More and more IDEs are providing support for EditorConfig, which allows you to include an .editorconfig in your project repos. This gives your fellow developers IDEs and linters to read from one file to standardize tabbing and spacing as well as line ending across projects.

Prettier

For a more robust solution, try out Prettier. Prettier follows the same configuration paradigm as ESLint, providing you with a .prettierrc file which an be committed to repositories. It will also read from the .editorconfig file if it exists. In fact you can get rid of ESLint and Sass Lint and use Prettier as your one stop solution. It has its own extensions for EsLint, StyleLint and more.

Terminal

I recently moved over to ZSH which has completely transformed my terminal experience. Whilst not being a direct extension of VS Code, it can be integrated through the Terminal pane. I had to do quite a bit of configuration to get it working on Mac, especially with colors and themes. 

ZSH features functionality like tab completion for directories, files, Git branches and more. You can read more about setting up ZSH on the Github repo or leave me a message in the comments below if you’d like to learn more.

Debugging

Visual Studio Code comes with Debugging JavaScript right out of the box. You can take it a step further using the following extensions:

Debugger for Chrome

This extension allows a direct sync between the VS Code Debugger and Chrome Developer Tools allowing you to set breakpoints and jump straight into the code.

Conclusion

That about wraps up my extensions setup for Visual Studio Code–which are your personal favorites? Before I go though, don’t forget that coding should be fun; you may need some tunes to help you along. The Spotify extension adds a tiny inline media player to the VS Code UI.

More Visual Studio Code on Tuts+

Visual Studio

Visual Studio Code: My New Favorite Code Editor

Adi Purdila

Visual Studio Code

Essential Extensions for Visual Studio Code

Craig Campbell

via Envato Tuts+ Code http://ift.tt/2oeCvWZ

[malcolmcrockett-blog]

Health and wellness PGAD Can Result in An Aching Male Organ.

. In 2014, 2600 magazine was forced to quit linking to a software application that circumvented DVD duplicate defense. But just what I knew about the results of stress and anxiety as well as anxiety really did not square with that view: on the contrary, worry has the tendency to prevent sexuality through the stress hormonal agent cortisol. We bring individuals together to enjoy Halloween with friends and family and experience the scare of their lives (although we beware to tone things down to make sure that young youngsters are entertained more than terrified).|Unfortunately, most women I encounter aren't sure the best ways to please a male in bed. A lot of males are fairly aware of the variety of things that can go 'wrong' during combining with a partner. Excitement has been lacking at the club since the days of Ferguson, with David Moyes and Louis van Gaal now infamous for the insipid football their teams would produce. Supervisor Peter Houston is entering his third full period with the Bairns and he states that, despite the dissatisfaction of missing out on promotion, stable progress has actually been made.|X Prize Pledges $15M for Software That Allows Children Show Themselves. While social is in reality, an additional emphasis of the experience - competitively playing video games is the very first - it's the social communications that actually protrude as the best that I have actually seen yet in VR. In other experiences where social is the primary emphasis, frequently you obtain a cold beginning trouble where people/avatars are loafing with little to do, or speak about.|Female 'Viagra' declares to earn sex better for ladies. I'll upload an article weekly so please looking forward to seeing a post. It's still too early to pass judgement, of course-- all we understand about the product is just what we have actually seen from leaks But what we have actually seen up until now indicates a firm that has been finding out a number of the wrong lessons of late. I'd highly recommend having a few larger donors lined up to donate on the first couple days of the campaign as well, because no one wants to be the first to contribute.|Here's a reality about sex that very few people have actually informed you - ladies typically take longer time to 'heat up' as well as obtain sexually aroused as compared to guys. Once they have actually attempted all-natural women enhancements they have been screaming for more currently delighting in something they have actually never experienced. Having your successive world battle champions memorial things is bound to obtain you right into the exhilaration while you enjoy your freedom. Guardian columnist John Harris claims leaving the EU was implied to be Thatcherism's ending, however can end up being its death rather.|Valentine's Day is simply around the bend, and whether you're celebrating extravagantly or keeping things low-key, there's an Indiegogo project to assist make this year's holiday special. As she comes close to climax, the clitoris appears to withdraw to the pubic bone, so it can be more difficult to stimulate. We are seeing this in Virtual Reality horror experiences like VRWERX's Paranormal Activity, where the individual can browse the experience at their own pace, as well as audio and music lift at specific minutes to scare, add suspense or misdirect.|Usually individuals are aware regarding just routine erogenous zones, that is factors on the body which activate sexual sensations, but there are numerous other untouched factors in a woman's body which when touched promote sexual sensations in her instantly. Through this campaign you may receive updates on Artipia Games' other upcoming projects. But the researchers working with immunotherapy have actually laid out in an entirely various direction, fooling the body's own defences right into fighting the opponent cancer cells within. Checkers as an example use their mental skills to effectively complete a video game of chess, while joggers use their body's capability to get rid of all-natural challenges like that of wind as well as gravity, or their very own bodies' ability to outrun itself.|Email outreach is an effective way to build very early energy for your Indiegogo project. Yet there's a lot of people with numerous bucks that are still unfinished, unpassionate, burned out, or not living a life they delight in. Each pod was built to scale in order to fit into the hyperloop tube, about half the size of the prospective final product. If you adored this write-up and you would certainly like to obtain more facts concerning eurotel-live.cz kindly check out our web-site. Backers at this level get 4 copies of the Dice and Danger Dragon's Lair Board Game. Our Final Day Stream was 1PM Eastern on Thursday, June 8. For every viewer, we reduced the last stretch goal - now $120,000!|Google for Entrepreneur's Year in Testimonial 2012 Showcases Indiegogo! Get the deluxe version of Dice and Danger Dragon's Lair which includes a copy of the Atlas Kings Easy to Read, Easy to Play Tabletop RPG rulebook (sold on Amazon for $40), and all stretch goals met by this project. Golf is coming to be very prominent everyday which's the reason a growing number of people aspire to understand it. Discovering how to play golf without proper golf devices is difficult.|Emphasizes: GE's FirstBuild is supplying an anticipated $30,000 in prizes for victors of the Cold Brew Style Obstacle FirstBuild launched 2 effective campaigns on Indiegogo in 2015, with over $3 million in sales: the Opal Nugget Ice Maker as well as Paragon Induction Cooktop FirstBuild is an open neighborhood of developers, enthusiasts, as well as designers who are changing ... review a lot more. I so delight in seeing the expression on others deals with when something outstanding, interesting, fun and even shocking takes place to them. Both offer great baseball games for a less costly cost, in an extra kid-friendly setting. We'll also be hosting a few Happiness Hours and Indiegogo Tech Cafe Hours, where you can come chat with our Indiegogo staff about your campaign, your experience or anything else you'd like to discuss!|Sony's IFA 2012 announcements were mostly about the larger image, both in terms of the company's One Sony method and in the literal feeling that the Japanese giant showed off its first 84-inch 4K TV Still, virtually out of routine, Sony likewise refreshed its Android smart device schedule with a triad of brand-new mobile phones: the Xperia T/ TX, the Xperia V and also the Xperia J. If we think beyond package for a minute; if we think in greater dimensional means of seeing things, then, what from a minimal dimensional point of view could look like a path that goes everywhere, from an inter-dimensional viewpoint, or from a greater dimensional, trans-dimensional point of view, may really appear to be like a straight passage, directly right into the light, right right into your goal, right into your objective, right right into your style, right into who you absolutely are.|Amidst the enjoyment surrounding Apple's brand-new 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina screen, the firm quietly eliminated among the enduring experts of its note pad lineup: the 17-inch MacBook Pro is not offered. When we start to associate those greater inspirational powers, when our emotional body's guidance system links our physical being with our spirit being-- with our reality, our quality, our real vision for our life, with truth empowerment for our being and our physical existence-- then our physical existence likewise starts to resemble that more non-linear way of being.|Nokia 808 PureView is a 41-megapixel Electronic camera Phone, Yet Hold Your Enjoyment. Highlights: GE's FirstBuild is offering an expected $30,000 in prizes for winners of the Cold Brew Design Challenge FirstBuild launched two successful campaigns on Indiegogo in 2015, with over $3 million in sales: the Opal Nugget Ice Maker and Paragon Induction Cooktop FirstBuild is an open community of engineers, designers, and enthusiasts who are changing … read more.|Component of the charm of providing women oral sex remains in the sheer passion, strength and excitement of cunnilingus, along with the terrific intimacy it brings to the sex-related relationship you have with your lady. Since this is a Spiel 2015 release, several customers and retailers may purchase the game from the fair which means they will get it before our group shipment goes out to backers. Now-a-days, it has actually ended up being essential to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle using products which are not unsafe to atmosphere as well as are multiple-use or conveniently recyclable. The issue with 3D makes is something that needs to specifically fret you: The practice was outlawed from Kickstarter a while back, for an excellent reason: Without a working prototype, it's hard to know just what you're backing, or how practical it is for a campaign to provide on its pledges.|Although each private varies in exactly how she or he takes pleasure in and reacts to sexual stimulations, the American scientists W.H. Masters and V.E. Johnson have actually identified 4 unique physical stages that male, woman and also everyone, goes through if they attain climax. Please note that you will be requested to pay additional shipping costs since your order will have to be handled separately from our group shipping solution. The Hexagon electronic signal cpu in Qualcomm's Snapdragon 821 chip offers Google the bandwidth to capture RAW imagery with absolutely no shutter lag from a constant stream that starts as quickly as you open the application.|Enjoyment could bring with it happiness as well as stress and anxiety. We first needed to set our funding goal, based on what we would need to hit development milestones. If you're seeking a place to chill out this weekend with your friends or colleagues in order to de-stress yourself after a lengthy week at work, look for a location where you can grab a drink and also appreciate it while watching one of your much-loved sports.|Apart from Apple and Samsung, no phone maker has actually mixed as much attention as well as excitement as the young OnePlus. If something does occur while you're delighting in the world, at the very least you're living! And you 'd be best - somewhere, somebody is being switched on right now by points you never ever also thought about. It is the peculiarity of the male sexual being that so many things, so little recognized, can be sex-related stimulations. I consulted with Marc Levoy, a prominent computer graphics scientist who now leads a computational photography group at Google Research, regarding exactly how software aids make the Pixel video camera as good as it is.|Every woman takes pleasure in sex B, however not every woman really reaches appreciate the act. Comply with New Horizons on Its Trip to Pluto as well as Beyond. I predict that of the exhilaration among the public that is generated by this week's launches will certainly be less than that of a major, significant, apple iphone, Samsung, or currently Google Pixel mobile phone launch. Last year, Dior appointed its first female creative Director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, who like Dior, believes that fantasy and functionalism, softness and tailoring can happily co-exist.|Make ladies delighted to satisfy you the best ways to make a woman curious about you online. Regardless of exactly how active the workplace is, if workers are unhappy with the overall feel of the area they will certainly appear hectic however will certainly not be effective. Tiziano Camporesi, head of the CMS team, has actually offered coworkers 20:1 versus the bit's existence, with settlement in containers of suitable French wine. The inset window shows what New Horizons' collection of tools see (and also which tools are currently energetic).|When you begin a brand-new job your enjoyment might be palpable and you are filled with passion to act to attain your objective. Created in the year 1800, it was designated to the Eurasians as a settlement and also later handed over the Anglo neighborhood. It makes the prospect of going out to play in front of our supporters that much more enjoyable. And while it seems functionally as flexible and qualified as Google's Tango (look into some very early examples of whimsical explores ARKit ), its wider audience makes it much more enticing for severe programmers to invest their money and time into.|Tingle: Reappraising Pre-Performance Anxiety as Exhilaration. Richard Lewis, the president of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, stated schedulers had actually been ruined for choice" however had determined to select the all-time greats" of the guys's Big 4" and the five-time champion Williams. In a series of cutting remarks the EU Council president said reaching an agreement between the two parties would be difficult enough" as it is without leaders on both sides throwing wild accusations at each other.|, if you are like several pairs over a period of time the excitement leaves your connection and also you look at each other and question exactly what occur. Yet it does take some time, decision and also mental endurance to reach these objectives. The neurobiology of excitement does not assist me convey the sensations to others. As a result, Sony pregius technology normally gives the electronic electronic camera sensing unit having wonderful high resolution as well as different valuable features together with numerous years of knowledge as well as experience.

Keep in mind: All placement HUD components (the number that shows up over personality heads) will have a toggle choice in the main food selection, for turning them off! Showing 1 to 23 of 23 Articles matching 'sex-related stimulation' in associated write-ups. Shipping costs will be automatically added when you pledge. Dr Hallowell says study has actually shown that temper, fear, anxiety as well as tension bring about hypertension, a decreased body immune system, colds, headaches, results your sex life and also all of this puts pressure on your heart. Since we have strong equipment base with continuous enhancement of our software program we will magnify our initiatives to boost swimmer's awareness of our training watch through numerous free tasks such as on the internet projects, posts, expert evaluations, swimming competition partnerships as well as others as our team believe there's a real demand for a device like Swimmo amongst swimmers of all kinds. That is the best map of Pluto, and if they release another one tonight we'll update it right away," claims Doug Ellison, a NASA visualization manufacturer. Our Enhanced Reality experiences integrate the fun, engagement as well as excitement of computer games with the exhilaration and also advantages of outdoors play. We are looking to recruit an enthusiastic team player who enjoys the excitement of a busy kitchen operation and is willing to work as part of a team to deliver the best standards possible. If this point ends up being genuine, it's a ten on the Richter scale of bit physics," states John Ellis, professor of physics at King's College London, and the former head of theory at Cern One's excitometer gets completely broken." That if, though, is a big one. Thanks to Creative Partnerships Australia's MATCH program, every dollar you give to this campaign will be matched dollar for dollar, provided we reach our campaign target of $3750. Offered their purported role in social cognition, one noticeable neuroscientist has actually recommended that a defective mirror neuron system is exactly what creates autism, a neurodevelopmental problem defined primarily by disabilities in social interaction and communication. When we originally launched Lockitron using our very own homebrew crowdfunding application after being denied from Kickstarter, we did so with just a solitary financing tier encouraging Lockitrons would certainly be delivered in order to our backers based upon their location in line. Bear in mind, Mayer invested 13 years at Google managing multiple items, including search and also Google Doodles. Teachers and also managers from interested schools can relate to join Top Basecamp, which includes an intensive week-long summertime training session on Top's modern technology as well as approach. This store enables all ladies to shop for their desire wedding dresses by making designer as well as beautiful dress available to all women at a reduced expense compared to retail. Before the show even began, Nokia's next-gen Lumia handset, in particular, was on the obtaining end of a significant quantity of anticipation as well as praise. Sexual dysfunction is highly prevalent in women, especially post-menopause, and they commonly experience problems such as lack of interest in sex, pain during intercourse or problem reaching orgasm. This is not something that is simply for guys given that there are a lot of ladies that are playing currently. In creating Oliver the Ornament, I partnered with an amazing illustrator, Teddy Lu, who has actually brought the magic of the tale to life in an extremely significant style. Because it means we're finally at a place where gadgets could talk to each various other wirelessly without requiring that we, the users, make the plans at every experience (additionally a location where we do not have to compromise our batteries to do so). There were massed ranks of pikemen (the pikes had padded tips); armoured fighters being knocked to the ground with swords and axes; mÍlées of hundreds of men (and women apparently, though you couldn't tell through the armour). For tech or design entrepreneurs, the first perk might be the very product at the heart of the campaign. There are far better places to satisfy women that make it actually simple.

[racheltgibsau]

4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement

Author: Chris Gillespie

There are nearly 17 million Google search results for “marketing and sales alignment”–too many in my mind, given that they all sound pretty much the same.

Most of them beseech marketers and salespeople to “just get along,” but while they advertise “shockingly simple secrets,” most of them are troublingly vague. How, for example, is one supposed to “utilize effective sales collaboration and engagement techniques?” Other than buy a thesaurus, that is. These articles, stripped of their buzzwords, are often little more than empty husks scattered around the base of a genuine and intractable problem.

But this one is different. This article is going straight for the jugular. Today, I’ll share how marketers can achieve alignment by simply enabling sales to close more deals. As a sales leader of mine once said, “When the cowbell is ringing, all sins are forgiven.”

The best way to do that? Create content that’s so good that it becomes the sales teams’ secret weapon.

Here are four assets you can create to enable sales to close more deals:

1. Quick Reference Stats List

Give the salespeople what they want and produce a fast stat sheet! This is the killer asset for salespeople of all stripes and seniority, from SDRs up to AEs, and here’s why: people trust statistics. They just do. Prospects want certainty, and a confident salesperson with access to a lengthy list of well-organized and credible statistics is exponentially more effective.

To see what I mean, compare these two phrases:

A: “Our solution reduces your expenses considerably.”

B: “Research from Accenture shows that software (like ours) reduces expenses by 40%.”

No matter who says the second phrase, they stand safely behind the laurels of Accenture’s credibility and hard facts. Even the entry-level, first-day-on-the-job salesperson can say this and be believed. It gives you instant credibility.

Now, you might be late to the party, but don’t worry. It’s very likely that your sales team has already started to create this list on their own. In my past sales roles, our team built a communal Excel spreadsheet that was sorted by industry, product, and challenge, and we wove them into our calls, emails, and presentations to great effect.

What we could have used, however, was some expert guidance from someone who knew what they were doing. As a marketer, you can not only do it better and save your sales team time but also weed out troublesome, sketchy third-party statistics that have no place being shared publicly.

2. Story-Driven Case Studies

Help your sellers sell with story-driven case studies! Whether you know it or not, if you’re writing case studies, you have some secret admirers on the sales team. All salespeople engage in the act of storytelling to get their prospects to understand why others have purchased from you and how they’ve been happy. For their stories, they turn to your case studies.

Essentially, salespeople want prospects to view or hear them and go through this train of thought:

That company is like mine.

Their problem is like mine.

They solved their problem with this company’s product.

This might work for me, too.

Do your case studies mimic this flow? Do they end in credible but impressive statistics rather than loose phrases about “joint success?” If not, it’s time to revise. For a good example, check out how FunnelWise, an analytics software, organizes theirs.

Case studies that are purposefully written will not only be shared more widely, but the sales team will learn them by heart and recite them to clients. Few things enhance their credibility more than being able to rattle off the name of similar clients who had excellent results. Great sales teams will even incorporate them into their sales onboarding.

For maximum impact, make your case studies easily searchable. Solutions like RO Innovation and Influitive can help.

3. Create Well-Produced, Bite-Sized Videos

Video now accounts for 74% of all internet traffic, and 59% of executives would rather watch a video on a product than read text. Videos are thus extremely valuable for salespeople in snagging executive attention.

Create bite-sized videos (1-3 minutes max) that succinctly whets prospects’ appetites to learn more. These are ideal for salespeople to pepper into email or social outreach because watching video is a passive activity. The barrier to entry is lower than if you ask them to read a case study or visit a website. For an example, here’s a Marketo video testimonial from GE that can be shared on different channels.

While you’re at it, go for gold and produce a series of videos that are segmented by vertical, company size, product, and use case to make them even more targeted and effective. This small arsenal of verticalized video content will improve sales outreach.

4. Deliver Competitive Intel

Salespeople are always dying to know what’s going on with competitors: What products are they planning to release? Where do we compare favorably? Sometimes, they hear so many things that it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t. As a marketer, you can make them more confident and informed by assigning or hiring a competitive intelligence liaison to sales.

This person’s job should be to take all the research that marketing has already done and package it up for sales. This includes competitive one-pagers that outline competitor weaknesses and company strengths, deep-dive decks on their products, suggestions for sales landmines, and links to customer complaints or unfavorable reviews about the competitor. This material should reflect sales sentiment: produce whatever sales needs.

The result of this, in my experience, is a once-a-week meeting that salespeople eagerly attend which opens a much-needed channel for feedback wherein the teams can collaborate. Or, dare we say, align?

Marketers and salespeople may have different responsibilities, but their bottom line is the same: drive more revenue. By creating content that’s so effective that it becomes sales’ secret weapon, you can ensure for happier teams and better alignment.

What other assets would you add to this list? Share in the comments below!

  4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217493 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/modernb2bmarketing/~3/4VhdJ9KkByI/4-secret-weapons-for-sales-enablement.html

[zacdhaenkeau]

4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement

Author: Chris Gillespie

There are nearly 17 million Google search results for “marketing and sales alignment”–too many in my mind, given that they all sound pretty much the same.

Most of them beseech marketers and salespeople to “just get along,” but while they advertise “shockingly simple secrets,” most of them are troublingly vague. How, for example, is one supposed to “utilize effective sales collaboration and engagement techniques?” Other than buy a thesaurus, that is. These articles, stripped of their buzzwords, are often little more than empty husks scattered around the base of a genuine and intractable problem.

But this one is different. This article is going straight for the jugular. Today, I’ll share how marketers can achieve alignment by simply enabling sales to close more deals. As a sales leader of mine once said, “When the cowbell is ringing, all sins are forgiven.”

The best way to do that? Create content that’s so good that it becomes the sales teams’ secret weapon.

Here are four assets you can create to enable sales to close more deals:

1. Quick Reference Stats List

Give the salespeople what they want and produce a fast stat sheet! This is the killer asset for salespeople of all stripes and seniority, from SDRs up to AEs, and here’s why: people trust statistics. They just do. Prospects want certainty, and a confident salesperson with access to a lengthy list of well-organized and credible statistics is exponentially more effective.

To see what I mean, compare these two phrases:

A: “Our solution reduces your expenses considerably.”

B: “Research from Accenture shows that software (like ours) reduces expenses by 40%.”

No matter who says the second phrase, they stand safely behind the laurels of Accenture’s credibility and hard facts. Even the entry-level, first-day-on-the-job salesperson can say this and be believed. It gives you instant credibility.

Now, you might be late to the party, but don’t worry. It’s very likely that your sales team has already started to create this list on their own. In my past sales roles, our team built a communal Excel spreadsheet that was sorted by industry, product, and challenge, and we wove them into our calls, emails, and presentations to great effect.

What we could have used, however, was some expert guidance from someone who knew what they were doing. As a marketer, you can not only do it better and save your sales team time but also weed out troublesome, sketchy third-party statistics that have no place being shared publicly.

2. Story-Driven Case Studies

Help your sellers sell with story-driven case studies! Whether you know it or not, if you’re writing case studies, you have some secret admirers on the sales team. All salespeople engage in the act of storytelling to get their prospects to understand why others have purchased from you and how they’ve been happy. For their stories, they turn to your case studies.

Essentially, salespeople want prospects to view or hear them and go through this train of thought:

That company is like mine.

Their problem is like mine.

They solved their problem with this company’s product.

This might work for me, too.

Do your case studies mimic this flow? Do they end in credible but impressive statistics rather than loose phrases about “joint success?” If not, it’s time to revise. For a good example, check out how FunnelWise, an analytics software, organizes theirs.

Case studies that are purposefully written will not only be shared more widely, but the sales team will learn them by heart and recite them to clients. Few things enhance their credibility more than being able to rattle off the name of similar clients who had excellent results. Great sales teams will even incorporate them into their sales onboarding.

For maximum impact, make your case studies easily searchable. Solutions like RO Innovation and Influitive can help.

3. Create Well-Produced, Bite-Sized Videos

Video now accounts for 74% of all internet traffic, and 59% of executives would rather watch a video on a product than read text. Videos are thus extremely valuable for salespeople in snagging executive attention.

Create bite-sized videos (1-3 minutes max) that succinctly whets prospects’ appetites to learn more. These are ideal for salespeople to pepper into email or social outreach because watching video is a passive activity. The barrier to entry is lower than if you ask them to read a case study or visit a website. For an example, here’s a Marketo video testimonial from GE that can be shared on different channels.

While you’re at it, go for gold and produce a series of videos that are segmented by vertical, company size, product, and use case to make them even more targeted and effective. This small arsenal of verticalized video content will improve sales outreach.

4. Deliver Competitive Intel

Salespeople are always dying to know what’s going on with competitors: What products are they planning to release? Where do we compare favorably? Sometimes, they hear so many things that it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t. As a marketer, you can make them more confident and informed by assigning or hiring a competitive intelligence liaison to sales.

This person’s job should be to take all the research that marketing has already done and package it up for sales. This includes competitive one-pagers that outline competitor weaknesses and company strengths, deep-dive decks on their products, suggestions for sales landmines, and links to customer complaints or unfavorable reviews about the competitor. This material should reflect sales sentiment: produce whatever sales needs.

The result of this, in my experience, is a once-a-week meeting that salespeople eagerly attend which opens a much-needed channel for feedback wherein the teams can collaborate. Or, dare we say, align?

Marketers and salespeople may have different responsibilities, but their bottom line is the same: drive more revenue. By creating content that’s so effective that it becomes sales’ secret weapon, you can ensure for happier teams and better alignment.

What other assets would you add to this list? Share in the comments below!

  4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217493 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/modernb2bmarketing/~3/4VhdJ9KkByI/4-secret-weapons-for-sales-enablement.html

[archiebwoollard]

4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement

Author: Chris Gillespie

There are nearly 17 million Google search results for “marketing and sales alignment”–too many in my mind, given that they all sound pretty much the same.

Most of them beseech marketers and salespeople to “just get along,” but while they advertise “shockingly simple secrets,” most of them are troublingly vague. How, for example, is one supposed to “utilize effective sales collaboration and engagement techniques?” Other than buy a thesaurus, that is. These articles, stripped of their buzzwords, are often little more than empty husks scattered around the base of a genuine and intractable problem.

But this one is different. This article is going straight for the jugular. Today, I’ll share how marketers can achieve alignment by simply enabling sales to close more deals. As a sales leader of mine once said, “When the cowbell is ringing, all sins are forgiven.”

The best way to do that? Create content that’s so good that it becomes the sales teams’ secret weapon.

Here are four assets you can create to enable sales to close more deals:

1. Quick Reference Stats List

Give the salespeople what they want and produce a fast stat sheet! This is the killer asset for salespeople of all stripes and seniority, from SDRs up to AEs, and here’s why: people trust statistics. They just do. Prospects want certainty, and a confident salesperson with access to a lengthy list of well-organized and credible statistics is exponentially more effective.

To see what I mean, compare these two phrases:

A: “Our solution reduces your expenses considerably.”

B: “Research from Accenture shows that software (like ours) reduces expenses by 40%.”

No matter who says the second phrase, they stand safely behind the laurels of Accenture’s credibility and hard facts. Even the entry-level, first-day-on-the-job salesperson can say this and be believed. It gives you instant credibility.

Now, you might be late to the party, but don’t worry. It’s very likely that your sales team has already started to create this list on their own. In my past sales roles, our team built a communal Excel spreadsheet that was sorted by industry, product, and challenge, and we wove them into our calls, emails, and presentations to great effect.

What we could have used, however, was some expert guidance from someone who knew what they were doing. As a marketer, you can not only do it better and save your sales team time but also weed out troublesome, sketchy third-party statistics that have no place being shared publicly.

2. Story-Driven Case Studies

Help your sellers sell with story-driven case studies! Whether you know it or not, if you’re writing case studies, you have some secret admirers on the sales team. All salespeople engage in the act of storytelling to get their prospects to understand why others have purchased from you and how they’ve been happy. For their stories, they turn to your case studies.

Essentially, salespeople want prospects to view or hear them and go through this train of thought:

That company is like mine.

Their problem is like mine.

They solved their problem with this company’s product.

This might work for me, too.

Do your case studies mimic this flow? Do they end in credible but impressive statistics rather than loose phrases about “joint success?” If not, it’s time to revise. For a good example, check out how FunnelWise, an analytics software, organizes theirs.

Case studies that are purposefully written will not only be shared more widely, but the sales team will learn them by heart and recite them to clients. Few things enhance their credibility more than being able to rattle off the name of similar clients who had excellent results. Great sales teams will even incorporate them into their sales onboarding.

For maximum impact, make your case studies easily searchable. Solutions like RO Innovation and Influitive can help.

3. Create Well-Produced, Bite-Sized Videos

Video now accounts for 74% of all internet traffic, and 59% of executives would rather watch a video on a product than read text. Videos are thus extremely valuable for salespeople in snagging executive attention.

Create bite-sized videos (1-3 minutes max) that succinctly whets prospects’ appetites to learn more. These are ideal for salespeople to pepper into email or social outreach because watching video is a passive activity. The barrier to entry is lower than if you ask them to read a case study or visit a website. For an example, here’s a Marketo video testimonial from GE that can be shared on different channels.

While you’re at it, go for gold and produce a series of videos that are segmented by vertical, company size, product, and use case to make them even more targeted and effective. This small arsenal of verticalized video content will improve sales outreach.

4. Deliver Competitive Intel

Salespeople are always dying to know what’s going on with competitors: What products are they planning to release? Where do we compare favorably? Sometimes, they hear so many things that it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t. As a marketer, you can make them more confident and informed by assigning or hiring a competitive intelligence liaison to sales.

This person’s job should be to take all the research that marketing has already done and package it up for sales. This includes competitive one-pagers that outline competitor weaknesses and company strengths, deep-dive decks on their products, suggestions for sales landmines, and links to customer complaints or unfavorable reviews about the competitor. This material should reflect sales sentiment: produce whatever sales needs.

The result of this, in my experience, is a once-a-week meeting that salespeople eagerly attend which opens a much-needed channel for feedback wherein the teams can collaborate. Or, dare we say, align?

Marketers and salespeople may have different responsibilities, but their bottom line is the same: drive more revenue. By creating content that’s so effective that it becomes sales’ secret weapon, you can ensure for happier teams and better alignment.

What other assets would you add to this list? Share in the comments below!

  4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217493 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/modernb2bmarketing/~3/4VhdJ9KkByI/4-secret-weapons-for-sales-enablement.html

[maxslogic25]

4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement

Author: Chris Gillespie

There are nearly 17 million Google search results for “marketing and sales alignment”–too many in my mind, given that they all sound pretty much the same.

Most of them beseech marketers and salespeople to “just get along,” but while they advertise “shockingly simple secrets,” most of them are troublingly vague. How, for example, is one supposed to “utilize effective sales collaboration and engagement techniques?” Other than buy a thesaurus, that is. These articles, stripped of their buzzwords, are often little more than empty husks scattered around the base of a genuine and intractable problem.

But this one is different. This article is going straight for the jugular. Today, I’ll share how marketers can achieve alignment by simply enabling sales to close more deals. As a sales leader of mine once said, “When the cowbell is ringing, all sins are forgiven.”

The best way to do that? Create content that’s so good that it becomes the sales teams’ secret weapon.

Here are four assets you can create to enable sales to close more deals:

1. Quick Reference Stats List

Give the salespeople what they want and produce a fast stat sheet! This is the killer asset for salespeople of all stripes and seniority, from SDRs up to AEs, and here’s why: people trust statistics. They just do. Prospects want certainty, and a confident salesperson with access to a lengthy list of well-organized and credible statistics is exponentially more effective.

To see what I mean, compare these two phrases:

A: “Our solution reduces your expenses considerably.”

B: “Research from Accenture shows that software (like ours) reduces expenses by 40%.”

No matter who says the second phrase, they stand safely behind the laurels of Accenture’s credibility and hard facts. Even the entry-level, first-day-on-the-job salesperson can say this and be believed. It gives you instant credibility.

Now, you might be late to the party, but don’t worry. It’s very likely that your sales team has already started to create this list on their own. In my past sales roles, our team built a communal Excel spreadsheet that was sorted by industry, product, and challenge, and we wove them into our calls, emails, and presentations to great effect.

What we could have used, however, was some expert guidance from someone who knew what they were doing. As a marketer, you can not only do it better and save your sales team time but also weed out troublesome, sketchy third-party statistics that have no place being shared publicly.

2. Story-Driven Case Studies

Help your sellers sell with story-driven case studies! Whether you know it or not, if you’re writing case studies, you have some secret admirers on the sales team. All salespeople engage in the act of storytelling to get their prospects to understand why others have purchased from you and how they’ve been happy. For their stories, they turn to your case studies.

Essentially, salespeople want prospects to view or hear them and go through this train of thought:

That company is like mine.

Their problem is like mine.

They solved their problem with this company’s product.

This might work for me, too.

Do your case studies mimic this flow? Do they end in credible but impressive statistics rather than loose phrases about “joint success?” If not, it’s time to revise. For a good example, check out how FunnelWise, an analytics software, organizes theirs.

Case studies that are purposefully written will not only be shared more widely, but the sales team will learn them by heart and recite them to clients. Few things enhance their credibility more than being able to rattle off the name of similar clients who had excellent results. Great sales teams will even incorporate them into their sales onboarding.

For maximum impact, make your case studies easily searchable. Solutions like RO Innovation and Influitive can help.

3. Create Well-Produced, Bite-Sized Videos

Video now accounts for 74% of all internet traffic, and 59% of executives would rather watch a video on a product than read text. Videos are thus extremely valuable for salespeople in snagging executive attention.

Create bite-sized videos (1-3 minutes max) that succinctly whets prospects’ appetites to learn more. These are ideal for salespeople to pepper into email or social outreach because watching video is a passive activity. The barrier to entry is lower than if you ask them to read a case study or visit a website. For an example, here’s a Marketo video testimonial from GE that can be shared on different channels.

While you’re at it, go for gold and produce a series of videos that are segmented by vertical, company size, product, and use case to make them even more targeted and effective. This small arsenal of verticalized video content will improve sales outreach.

4. Deliver Competitive Intel

Salespeople are always dying to know what’s going on with competitors: What products are they planning to release? Where do we compare favorably? Sometimes, they hear so many things that it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t. As a marketer, you can make them more confident and informed by assigning or hiring a competitive intelligence liaison to sales.

This person’s job should be to take all the research that marketing has already done and package it up for sales. This includes competitive one-pagers that outline competitor weaknesses and company strengths, deep-dive decks on their products, suggestions for sales landmines, and links to customer complaints or unfavorable reviews about the competitor. This material should reflect sales sentiment: produce whatever sales needs.

The result of this, in my experience, is a once-a-week meeting that salespeople eagerly attend which opens a much-needed channel for feedback wherein the teams can collaborate. Or, dare we say, align?

Marketers and salespeople may have different responsibilities, but their bottom line is the same: drive more revenue. By creating content that’s so effective that it becomes sales’ secret weapon, you can ensure for happier teams and better alignment.

What other assets would you add to this list? Share in the comments below!

  4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8217493 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/modernb2bmarketing/~3/4VhdJ9KkByI/4-secret-weapons-for-sales-enablement.html

[sualkmedeiors]

4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement

Author: Chris Gillespie

There are nearly 17 million Google search results for “marketing and sales alignment”–too many in my mind, given that they all sound pretty much the same.

Most of them beseech marketers and salespeople to “just get along,” but while they advertise “shockingly simple secrets,” most of them are troublingly vague. How, for example, is one supposed to “utilize effective sales collaboration and engagement techniques?” Other than buy a thesaurus, that is. These articles, stripped of their buzzwords, are often little more than empty husks scattered around the base of a genuine and intractable problem.

But this one is different. This article is going straight for the jugular. Today, I’ll share how marketers can achieve alignment by simply enabling sales to close more deals. As a sales leader of mine once said, “When the cowbell is ringing, all sins are forgiven.���

The best way to do that? Create content that’s so good that it becomes the sales teams’ secret weapon.

Here are four assets you can create to enable sales to close more deals:

1. Quick Reference Stats List

Give the salespeople what they want and produce a fast stat sheet! This is the killer asset for salespeople of all stripes and seniority, from SDRs up to AEs, and here’s why: people trust statistics. They just do. Prospects want certainty, and a confident salesperson with access to a lengthy list of well-organized and credible statistics is exponentially more effective.

To see what I mean, compare these two phrases:

A: “Our solution reduces your expenses considerably.”

B: “Research from Accenture shows that software (like ours) reduces expenses by 40%.”

No matter who says the second phrase, they stand safely behind the laurels of Accenture’s credibility and hard facts. Even the entry-level, first-day-on-the-job salesperson can say this and be believed. It gives you instant credibility.

Now, you might be late to the party, but don’t worry. It’s very likely that your sales team has already started to create this list on their own. In my past sales roles, our team built a communal Excel spreadsheet that was sorted by industry, product, and challenge, and we wove them into our calls, emails, and presentations to great effect.

What we could have used, however, was some expert guidance from someone who knew what they were doing. As a marketer, you can not only do it better and save your sales team time but also weed out troublesome, sketchy third-party statistics that have no place being shared publicly.

2. Story-Driven Case Studies

Help your sellers sell with story-driven case studies! Whether you know it or not, if you’re writing case studies, you have some secret admirers on the sales team. All salespeople engage in the act of storytelling to get their prospects to understand why others have purchased from you and how they’ve been happy. For their stories, they turn to your case studies.

Essentially, salespeople want prospects to view or hear them and go through this train of thought:

That company is like mine.

Their problem is like mine.

They solved their problem with this company’s product.

This might work for me, too.

Do your case studies mimic this flow? Do they end in credible but impressive statistics rather than loose phrases about “joint success?” If not, it’s time to revise. For a good example, check out how FunnelWise, an analytics software, organizes theirs.

Case studies that are purposefully written will not only be shared more widely, but the sales team will learn them by heart and recite them to clients. Few things enhance their credibility more than being able to rattle off the name of similar clients who had excellent results. Great sales teams will even incorporate them into their sales onboarding.

For maximum impact, make your case studies easily searchable. Solutions like RO Innovation and Influitive can help.

3. Create Well-Produced, Bite-Sized Videos

Video now accounts for 74% of all internet traffic, and 59% of executives would rather watch a video on a product than read text. Videos are thus extremely valuable for salespeople in snagging executive attention.

Create bite-sized videos (1-3 minutes max) that succinctly whets prospects’ appetites to learn more. These are ideal for salespeople to pepper into email or social outreach because watching video is a passive activity. The barrier to entry is lower than if you ask them to read a case study or visit a website. For an example, here’s a Marketo video testimonial from GE that can be shared on different channels.

While you’re at it, go for gold and produce a series of videos that are segmented by vertical, company size, product, and use case to make them even more targeted and effective. This small arsenal of verticalized video content will improve sales outreach.

4. Deliver Competitive Intel

Salespeople are always dying to know what’s going on with competitors: What products are they planning to release? Where do we compare favorably? Sometimes, they hear so many things that it’s hard to know what’s true and what isn’t. As a marketer, you can make them more confident and informed by assigning or hiring a competitive intelligence liaison to sales.

This person’s job should be to take all the research that marketing has already done and package it up for sales. This includes competitive one-pagers that outline competitor weaknesses and company strengths, deep-dive decks on their products, suggestions for sales landmines, and links to customer complaints or unfavorable reviews about the competitor. This material should reflect sales sentiment: produce whatever sales needs.

The result of this, in my experience, is a once-a-week meeting that salespeople eagerly attend which opens a much-needed channel for feedback wherein the teams can collaborate. Or, dare we say, align?

Marketers and salespeople may have different responsibilities, but their bottom line is the same: drive more revenue. By creating content that’s so effective that it becomes sales’ secret weapon, you can ensure for happier teams and better alignment.

What other assets would you add to this list? Share in the comments below!

  4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 4 Secret Weapons for Sales Enablement appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/modernb2bmarketing/~3/4VhdJ9KkByI/4-secret-weapons-for-sales-enablement.html