#THEY HAVE AN ENTIRE DIV CLASS FOR A 'WHAT'S NEW' BOX COMMENTED OUT IN THE CODE INSTEAD OF JUST ERASING IT ENTIRELY

[mountmortar]

i love it when federal sites haven't updated their code since like. 2003 or something

[ladystylestores]

Unilever Pushed Skin Whiteners In Sri Lanka

LONDON — Kinita Shenoy ignored the first package. But then a second one arrived at her home in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Inside were skin lightening creams made by Pond’s, the cosmetics brand owned by consumer product giant Unilever. As the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine’s Sri Lanka edition from 2017 to 2018, Shenoy was used to freebies. But the gift box, sent in December 2017, left her confused. She had told Unilever marketers weeks before that she would never promote skin lighteners.

“I was really irked about it,” she told BuzzFeed News, “but I decided to ignore it.”

Then Unilever staff started to text her, asking her to post about the products on social media. Irritated, Shenoy told her staff to post a story on her magazine’s Instagram account thanking Pond’s for the box.

Courtesy Kinita Shenoy

Shenoy’s Instagram story.

But on her personal Instagram, she posted a different message.

“I appreciate the lovely packaging but I’m not really on board with the concept of ‘White Beauty,’” she wrote, blurring out Pond’s brand name. “Aren’t we past the point where we tell wonderful, melanin-popping Asian women they need to make their skin look whiter?”

When Shenoy wrote her post, she had no idea Unilever representatives would unleash a pressure campaign on her employer for positive coverage of White Beauty products — one that would turn her life and career upside down, she later said, and lead to her leaving journalism altogether.

Shenoy’s experience was not unique. Consumer product giants like Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and Procter & Gamble exert a huge amount of influence over the fashion and beauty industries. In countries like Sri Lanka, among the most popular products these companies sell are skin whitening creams.

“All I said was that we shouldn’t tell little girls to bleach themselves. It’s not a radical thing to say,” Shenoy said. “This isn’t a tacit thing. It’s an intentional and violent way to deal with things.”

Cosmetics make up only some product lines for Unilever, a $140 billion consumer product company headquartered in London. But in South Asia, it’s well-known for a skin whitening cream called Fair and Lovely, which like other whitening creams uses niacinamide to suppress melanin in the skin.

“All I said was that we shouldn’t tell little girls to bleach themselves.”

After years of pressure from campaigners and a new wave of criticism amid the Black Lives Matter movement, Unilever said in June it would stop using words like “whitening” to describe its products. Competitors including Johnson & Johnson and L’Oreal have recently taken similar steps. Unilever has stopped short of Johnson & Johnson’s decision, announced on June 22, to cease selling two lines of its skin lightening products entirely.

But critics say changes in branding do not go far enough. Shenoy and others in Sri Lanka’s fashion industry described intense pressure on journalists, models, influencers, and beauty pageant competitors to use and endorse skin lightening products.

In response to a list of detailed questions about this article, a Unilever spokesperson said the company met with Cosmopolitan Sri Lanka after Shenoy’s Instagram story to “have a constructive conversation and address any concerns.”

“In this meeting, a member of the team exercised extremely poor judgment by insisting that Cosmopolitan give the product positive editorial coverage,” the spokesperson added. “Unilever prides itself on always operating at the highest ethical standards and apologized for this significant misjudgment.”

Unilever now has a strong relationship with the magazine, she added.

In South Asia, skin whitening products are part of a colonial history in which people with fairer skin had better job, housing, and marriage prospects. Beginning in the 1970s, Unilever’s Fair and Lovely was among the first to foreign brands tap the market, and for decades advertised fair skin as the key to wealth and romance. But in recent years, a backlash against the products has grown from critics who say they promote discrimination against people with darker skin tones. Last month, after Unilever posted a Black Lives Matter message on Instagram, South Asians flooded the comments, calling the company hypocritical for selling Fair and Lovely.

On June 25, the company bowed to pressure — in a limited way. It’s keeping the product on the market, but rebranding it as Glow and Lovely.

“Fair and Lovely is a holy grail product, and it has the largest distribution channels and reach in South Asia,” said Nina Davuluri, who was the first Indian American to be crowned Miss America and is at work on a documentary about skin lightening cosmetics. “How Unilever executes their rebranding strategy and new advertisement campaigns will be incredibly telling of their true intentions.”

Gemunu Amarasinghe / AP

Miss Sri Lanka Ornella Gunesekere (center) participates in the swimsuit and evening gown stage of the 67th Miss Universe competition in Bangkok, Dec. 13, 2018.

Like Shenoy, others in the beauty industry in Sri Lanka said they faced heavy pressure to use and endorse skin lightening products. Among them is Ornella Gunesekere, who won the Miss Universe Sri Lanka competition in 2018, but said she nearly lost her crown after refusing to endorse skin lightening products made by a Sri Lankan brand called Facia, the pageant’s chief sponsor. That year, a Facia representative made a presentation to the contestants, in which she used the n-word and also told them “dark skin is ugly” and ‘to win Miss Universe you have to be white,” according to three women who heard the presentation — Gunesekere, Natalee Fernando and Alma Erandi Weerasinghe.

“I was boiling. I could not believe it,” Gunesekere said.

Fernando, who was the second runner-up, was similarly livid.

“We could see her looking at the darker girls,” she said. “It was so awkward sitting in that room.”

Courtesy Kinita Shenoy

A photo taken at a meeting with skincare company Facia.

Amanda Ferreira, assistant general manager for marketing at Alaris, the company that makes Facia products, said the representative, who conducted the presentation in the Sinhala language, had used the n-word, but wasn’t aware it was offensive.

“She was trying to explain how African countries use harmful bleaching products to whiten their skin, and we at Facia do not promote harmful skin whitening products,” Ferreira said, adding that the representative apologized at the time. The pageant contestants who spoke with BuzzFeed News also said that the representative walked back some of her remarks after several of the women objected.

Ferreira, who said she also attended the presentation, said the representative never said that dark skin is ugly or that to win Miss Universe, you have to be white.

The Miss Universe organization declined to offer an on-the-record comment on what took place.

All three women said they were shocked and, along with other contestants, began to argue with the Facia rep. Gunesekere, along with a few other contestants, wanted to drop out of the pageant. If she had at that stage, she would have been obligated to pay the pageant 500,000 Sri Lankan rupees ($2690) “as damages,” according to a contract seen by BuzzFeed News. She decided to stay after the representative apologized.

The winner of the pageant was set to appear in a TV ad for Facia. Gunesekere said that after she won, she told the company that she would not endorse skin whitening products. Only after she arrived at the screen test for the shoot did she learn the ad would include whitening creams, among its other products. She refused to take part in the ad and walked out. “We were asked to sell something we didn’t believe in at all,” said Fernando, who was also at the screen test. “Ornella and I spoke out at risk of getting kicked out of the pageant.”

“The boys and girls coming up don’t know what to do. So you bleach your skin and try to become white.”

Afterward, a production company executive implied she could lose her crown, according to text messages Gunesekere shared with BuzzFeed News. Facia said it had never sought to remove her title. But it stopped sponsoring the pageant, and there has not been a Miss Universe Sri Lanka pageant since.

Publicly opposing skin whitening has career consequences in Sri Lanka, said Kalpanee Gunawardana, a model and entrepreneur who said she was also repeatedly approached to promote Pond’s White Beauty products and has refused. The blowback hasn’t been confined to beauty and cosmetics.

“When I started speaking out about colorism, clothing brands didn’t want to associate with me,” she said. “They said ‘she’s fussy, she’s a social justice warrior.’”

Tymo Carvalho, a Sri Lankan model and influencer, said only well-established models can refuse to promote skin whitening products.

“If you are already famous or if you’ve made a name for yourself in the industry, of course you can pick and choose what you promote,” he told BuzzFeed News. “But the boys and girls coming up don’t know what to do. So you bleach your skin and try to become white.”

“After a while, you realize what you’re doing is wrong,” he added.

Courtesy Kinita Shenoy

Shenoy (right) at a meeting.

After Unilever representatives in Sri Lanka saw Shenoy’s post about Pond’s White Beauty products, two of its executives in Sri Lanka told the magazine’s publisher that she should either be fired or publish two pages in the magazine every six months describing how she used Pond’s skin whitening creams and encouraging other women to use them as well, according to Shenoy. If neither happened, they threatened to pull Unilever’s ads from the magazine. Unilever did not directly respond to a question about whether its representatives had sought to have Shenoy fired.

Unilever was a major advertiser, and the publisher told her the magazine could go under if she didn’t give in, Shenoy said, but she stood firm.

“Unilever then retracted every single brand advertising for the publication,” said Shenoy. “It was a lot of money. They own a whole portfolio of brands.”

She was living, she said, in a “state of fear.” A review of Cosmopolitan Sri Lanka issues in 2018 shows ads for Unilever brands disappearing from the magazine between February and May, and resuming in June. Hearst did not respond to requests for comment.

Shenoy met Aritha Wickramasinghe, a lawyer specializing in international finance and LGBTQ rights, in February 2018, after she had fought with her publishers for weeks. He remembered that he had met Unilever CEO Paul Polman a couple of years before, at an awards dinner where Wickramasinghe was given a prize for his activism.

On Shenoy’s behalf, Wickramasinghe wrote an email on Feb. 19, 2018, to Polman (which he later shared with BuzzFeed News).

“I am sure you agree that this is shocking.”

“I am sure you agree that this is shocking,” wrote Wickramasinghe. “I hope you will be able to take decisive action on this matter so as to ensure that the rest of your organization abides by the values and principles you advocate.”

Polman wrote back the next day to say that he was unaware of the incident, but would look into it. “Let’s get the facts and then see,” he wrote. “At a minimum we should protect freedom of speech.”

Polman, who stepped down in 2018, did not return a request for comment.

Two days later Polman forwarded Wickramasinghe an email that Unilever Sri Lanka chair Carl Cruz wrote to Sanjiv Mehta, the head of Unilever’s subsidiary in India.

Cruz, who is now the managing director for Unilever West Africa, another major market for skin lightening products, did not return a request for comment.

In the email, Cruz said he had contacted the chair of Cosmopolitan magazine in Sri Lanka “to atone for the actions of colleagues in Unilever Sri Lanka.”

“I reiterated the fact that what transpired did not do justice to the high standards and values we all live by in Unilever,” he added, saying Unilever would resume advertising in Cosmopolitan Sri Lanka.

On top of the forwarded email, Polman wrote, “Issue closed. Thanks for pointing out. Warm regards.”

After the intervention from Unilever’s CEO, the company started buying ad space from Cosmopolitan Sri Lanka again.

“Even now I am speaking up but I am afraid. I am afraid of what will happen.”

But Shenoy said her relationship with her bosses had permanently soured, and she left her job and journalism entirely in the spring of 2018.

“I was a woman on my own. I had to pay my rent and medical bills with my salary. I had no safety net. Unilever knew what they were doing by threatening me, and that stuff stayed with me and was the reason I shut up for two years afterward,” Shenoy said. “Even now I am speaking up but I am afraid. I am afraid of what will happen — what they will do.” ●

Source link

قالب وردپرس

from World Wide News https://ift.tt/2Wz8bYj

[biofunmy]

American YouTubers Are Making Videos Reacting To Indian Pop Culture To Go Viral

In January 2019, Rick Segall and Korbin Miles’ YouTube channel, Our Stupid Reactions, had 1,800 subscribers. The two Los Angeles–based actors had started a channel in which they reacted to popular Hollywood movie and TV show trailers  —  already a popular genre on YouTube  —  last September, but nearly four months in, it was sputtering along at best. Their videos reacting to trailers of films like Captain Marvel, Creed II, Aladdin, and Bird Box were getting anywhere between a few hundred to a couple of thousand views. Then, one of their subscribers requested their reaction to the trailer of Gully Boy, a hotly anticipated Bollywood movie about a street rapper in Mumbai.

“I had no idea what it was,” said Miles. They started recording and hit play on Gully Boy. The two head-banged through the trailer’s catchy soundtrack and laughed out loud during its funny moments; it was fun, though not mind-blowingly so. Yet within 24 hours, their Gully Boy trailer reaction had 50,000 views; the comments flooded in with Indian viewers cheering them on. The response was surprising — and addictive. “We would love to do more reactions to movies from India, any recommendations???” they posted to fans in the comments section. Hundreds of requests immediately poured in.

“Brace yourself,” someone posted. “Indian subscribers are coming!!!”

Five months later, Our Stupid Reactions’ Gully Boy trailer reaction had over half a million views, and the channel, which now posts videos of Miles and Segall reacting exclusively to all things Indian, has over 230,000 subscribers  — 70% of whom are from India, and 30% of whom are Indians living around the world, according to Miles.

It’s not just American companies that want a slice of India’s more than 500 million internet users anymore — individual American YouTubers are now looking for their shot there too. Inexpensive data and cheap smartphones have helped bring YouTube more than 265 million users, making India the platform’s largest and fastest-growing market in the world. There will be plenty more as 500 million additional people are eventually expected to come online in India.

There’s not necessarily a lot of money in it — the money earned per thousand views through advertisements, the metric digital marketers use to value online content, is substantially lower with views from India than from the US — but it’s a views-and-subscribers growth hack fueled by India’s video explosion that, for now, seems to be working. Once you have a sizable audience and brand, there are all sorts of ways to try to monetize it besides ads. Just ask any successful YouTuber or influencer.

Indians say they find Americans watching videos about their culture validating. “Finally, the rest of the world is seeing us for who we really are,” said Abhishek Sapre, an Indian engineer who lives in Sydney and watches Our Stupid Reactions and other reaction channels. “Most Americans don’t know anything about India or Bollywood or our culture at all … [This genre] really helps breaks the image of India as a poor country propagated by films like Slumdog Millionaire.”

“Indians want the rest of the world to finally hear their voice and recognize them as world players at every level,” said Segall. “It’s being affirmed by global superpowers, and the global superpowers have always been Great Britain and the United States.”

Dozens of American reaction channels on YouTube — the Reel Rejects, the Tide Pool, and ReactoPhile, among others — have found big audiences reacting to Indian movies, trailers, commercials, stand-up comedy clips, music videos, speeches by Indian politicians, and pretty much everything with an Indian connection.

Typically, a channel posts a video reacting, for instance, to a Bollywood trailer, and YouTube’s aggressive and frighteningly effective recommendation algorithm targets it to millions of Indians, the demographic most likely to click it. More views leads to more engagement, with hundreds of viewers lobbing in their react requests in the comments section. Keep honoring these requests and, with some luck, the channel’s numbers snowball.

One of the most well-known YouTubers in this genre is California-based filmmaker Jaby Koay, whose videos regularly get hundreds of thousands of views each from Indians. In March, Koay’s channel crossed a million subscribers. To mark the milestone, Koay, uploaded a dance video of himself set to a popular Bollywood song, which got more than 740,000 views. In 2017 and 2018, he traveled to India and uploaded a series of vlogs from the country to his channel that showed him frolicking around New Delhi and meeting with his fans in the country. Then earlier this year, Dharma Productions, one of India’s largest movie production companies, posted a clip of Koay’s reaction to the trailer of one of its upcoming big-budget productions to its Instagram. Koay did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ requests for comment, and it’s unclear if Dharma Productions compensated Koay in any way for this.

“He’s extremely genuine and his reactions are heartfelt,” said Aniruddha Gokhale, a financial consultant in the Indian city of Pune who has been watching Koay’s videos for the last two years.

Scientists have attempted to explain the popularity of reaction videos on YouTube by saying that they tap into human empathy and our innate desire to form social bonds by trying to understand people’s emotions. Reaction videos “allow us, at the time of increasing cultural difference, the comforting universality of human nature,” writer Sam Anderson observed in the New York Times.

Segall said, “To have outsiders like us with no connection to India to say to Indians, ‘You know what, everything you feel about your country, we feel it too,’ is pretty deep.”

But there’s a bigger reason why so many Indians seem to be hooked on Americans’ reactions to all things related to their culture: a sense of global validation. At its heart, it’s an Indian desire for white validation, a Colonial-era hangover, and something that still plays out in the country .

You can see traces of this in the requests people leave for the YouTubers in the comments sections. One of the most common is to react to a video called “15 Things You Didn’t Know About India,” which features positive, nationalistic facts about the country (India invented shampoo, thorium-based nuclear power, the number zero, yoga, and plastic surgery, it claims). Another is to react to a witty, powerful speech by Indian politician Shashi Tharoor about how Britain owes reparations to India for hundreds of years of colonization.

“I feel proud that these people are learning about my culture,” said Rakesh Kamble, a data entry operator who lives in the Indian town of Nashik. “We’re rich culturally, and I’d like them to learn about it.”

When Life Meets Family, a Georgia-based YouTube channel, uploaded its reaction to the “15 Things You Didn’t Know About India” video on Jan. 26, India’s Republic Day, it racked up a million views.

The channel is run by 38-year-old Dan, his 36-year-old wife Erin, and their three children, ages 7, 10, and 11. The couple — who declined to give their last names for this story and live in the predominantly white town of Flowery Branch, where Asians, including Indians, account for just 1.6% of the residents — said that they didn’t really know much about India until they started doing these videos. “We have a close friend who is Indian,” said Erin. “Aside from that though…” she trails off. Today their channel has more than 300,000 subscribers, 80% of whom are from India, and 20% of whom are Indians living mostly in Canada, Dan told BuzzFeed News.

“Indians are a proud people,” Dan said. “I think some of what they request may be to sort of gain acceptance with the white man. I take it as, ‘Look, America is the leader there, we are the leader here.’”

One of the most common requests from their viewers? To react to a video of Indians who lead Fortune 500 companies. “We got a lot of requests to do that one,” said Dan.

Still, as these American YouTubers grow their audiences in India off of Indian content, it’s tough to shake off the skepticism around how much of their interest in India is genuine and how much of it is a convenient grab for a billion eyeballs.

Ever since Our Stupid Reactions blew up, Segall and Miles have been overtly catering to their core fanbase: Segall posted a photo of himself wearing a traditional Indian kurta on Instagram and dropped a “Jai Hind!” —  Hindi for “Hail India!” —  in a reaction video. Last month, the duo played cricket with Indian fans in Los Angeles. Segall also got a large Hindi tattoo with the iconic line “Apna time aayega” (“My time will come”) from Gully Boy, the film that catapulted their channel to fame, across the inside of his left arm all the way from the wrist to the elbow. “I’ve got six tattoos and every one of them is something that has changed me and had a permanent impact on me,” he said. When India beat Pakistan in the Cricket World Cup on Sunday, Segall posted a picture of Indian vice-captain Rohit Sharma with a caption that (again) said “Jai…feeaking…hind.”

Yet Segall and Miles of Our Stupid Reactions, and Dan and Erin of Life Meets Family, all insist that their channels’ growth has been entirely organic, driven solely out of their love for all things Indian and a desire to cater to their subscribers’ needs.

“The skepticism is valid,” said Miles. “But if I wasn’t enjoying this, the channel wouldn’t be happening.”

“I know it’s hard to believe, but we wouldn’t sell our souls for views,” Segall said.

The YouTubers also pointed out that having millions of views and subscribers doesn’t necessarily translate to lots of money. While Life Meets Family monetizes using YouTube’s pre-roll ads, they said the money isn’t enough to cover the cost of their cameras and internet.

When the channel was an American family blog with viewers who were mostly from the US, he said, the family made $6 for every thousand views, compared to just $1.23 for a thousand views from India. “A thousand views from India are not the same as a thousand views from North America,” Dan said.

The creators are now thinking of other ways to make money. Dan and Erin are in talks with an Indian chat app to run targeted sponsored content. And Segall and Miles are currently seeking funds from their Indian fans on Patreon to fund a trip to India.

“Hopefully,” said Dan, “as more Indians come online and things grow, there will be more companies willing to sponsor us, and maybe the price per thousand views will go up. I’d like to do this as a living.”

Sahred From Source link Technology

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2L62ufm via IFTTT

[torentialtribute]

Carl Frampton and David Haye question Anthony Joshua’s reaction to shock loss to Andy Ruiz Jr 

Anthony Joshua suffered a shock defeat against Andy Ruiz Jr in heavyweight combat

But his reaction to the loss in New York drew criticism from experts Carl Frampton said that Joshua wasn't there & # 39; absolutely broken & # 39; saw through defeat

Joshua was seen laughing and posing for photos with fans when he left the ring

Adam Shergold for MailOnline June 2019 |

Carl Frampton has questioned Anthony Joshua & # 39; s reaction to his shock defeat against Andy Ruiz Jr., in which he said the deposed British heavyweight champion & # 39; absolutely heartbroken & # 39; should have been.

Joshua seemed to be smiling in the immediate aftermath of his seventh round interruptions by the Mexican in New York and

He later tweeted a picture of himself with Ruiz after the fight with the message: & # 39; This is the night of Andy, congratulations to Champ & # 39; when his three World Title belts were removed.

Anthony Joshua has been criticized for his & # 39; too beautiful & # 39; reaction to losing Andy Ruiz Jr "

<img id =" i-88b217198952dd3f "src =" https://dailym.ai/310OxoF 10 / 14259862-7095841-image-a-118_1559467322717.jpg "height =" 453 "width =" 634 "alt =" Anthony Joshua has criticized his & # 39; too beautiful & # 39; response to losing Andy Ruiz Jr. "

Anthony Joshua has been criticized for his & # 39; too fun & # 39; reaction to losing to Andy Ruiz Jr.

<img id = "i-fcf12a1a20b0f4e6" src = "https://dailym.ai/2W7F8rC height = "718" width = "634" alt = "Joshua took to Twitter after the defeat to congratulate Ruiz on his unexpected victory"

Joshua took to Twitter after the defeat to congratulate Ruiz on his unexpected victory "/>

Joshua took to Twitter after the defeat to congratulate Ruiz on his unexpected victory for his unexpected victory

But Carl Frampton questioned Joshua and said that he

<img id = "i-4d06f4b97354e611" src = "https://dailym.ai/2GfUZyi 6/02/10 / 14259804-7095841-But_Carl_Frampton_criticised_Joshua_saying_he_should_have_been_h-a-124_1559467443077.jpg "height =" 600 "width =" 634 "alt =" But Carl Frampton questioned Joshua and said that he & & # 39; should have been to lose & # 39; class = ". BlCborder img img img-share img-share

[Carl Hughes] [David Hughes] [David Hughes] [David Hughes] [David Hughes] [David Hughes] Joshua & # 39; s response to the defeat also questioned Radio 5 Live "class =" blkBorder ">

<img id =" i-fe3bbeadf61eee30 "src =" https: // i .dailymail.co.uk / 1s / 2019/06/02/10 / 14259806-7095841-image-a-123_1559467436184.jpg "height =" 411 "width =" 634 "alt =" David Haye also questioned David Haye also questioned Joshua & # 39; s reaction to the defeat in commentary on Radio 5 Live

But his reaction to the loss was criticized by featherweight world champion Frampton and also former heavyweight champion David Haye, who was fighting for BBC Radio 5 Live diving 9459016]

Frampton said: "You talk about people who are good losers. It's nice to be merciful and to shake someone's hand.

& # 39; If youlose a fight, you should absolutely be heartbroken, you should rage with yourself, you should definitely be stripped. I don't see that! & # 39;

Haye replied: & # 39; I know Carl, I know myself, I know when I enter the ring, I am willing to die in the ring.

Joshua suffered the first defeat of his professional career. when he lost his title bands for Ruiz "

<img id =" i-1be49656000b9a8d "src =" https://dailym.ai/2W5GOln 7095841-Anthony_Joshua_suffered_the_first_defeat_of_his_professional_car-a-132_1559467536945.jpg "height =" 422 "width =" 634 "alt =" Joshua suffered the first defeat of his professional career when he lost his title belts to Ruiz "class =" blkBorder [194518] [194518]

The British heavyweight was shaken in the third round when sent to the canvas twice.

<img id = "i-52e515af35541f7" src = "https://dailym.ai/313SBo0. jpg "height =" 596 "width =" 634 "alt =" The British heavyweight was shaken in the air

The British heavyweight was shaken in the third round when it was sent to the canvas twice

Frampton then continued: & # 39; People are talking about bad losers, especially with children throwing a tantrum, I like that because it means they wanted to win.

& # 39; This is a completely bizarre scenario.

& # 39; The couple also suggested that Joshua had not shown sufficient determination to continue while counting the referee after the second of his seventh round knockdowns. I wanted to see more despair, "Haye said." I wanted to see someone who h realized & # 39; my entire career is at stake here. This is the biggest fight of my life, it's my American debut. I have to swing, I've been on the deck four times, let me stand up and convince the referee to let me over this little man. & # 39;

Frampton added: & # 39; The reaction to this goes to

& # 39; He will get so much stick from other boxers and social media. & # 39;

Ruiz Jr flew out of the blocks and looked at the much-discussed Joshua asked "class =" blkBorder img-share "/>

and looked at problems the many-thought Joshua asked "class =" blkBorder img-share "/>

Ruiz Jr flew out of the blocks and looked at problems the many-thought Joshua asked

<img id = "i-fa3dc4271ad270c" src = "https://dailym.ai/2W5GOSp = 756 "440" width = "634" alt = "Joshua grinned at the count of the referee in the third round and will be left scratching his head" class = "blkBorder i

Joshua grinned at the count of the referee in the third round and will scratch his head

to drop off Ruiz "/>

He spoke briefly on 5 Live followi ng the fight to say: & # 39; Where did it go wrong? I'll look it back. But it's just getting involved and making some clean shots.

& # 39; But what a f ****** fight. Sorry for my language, what a bloody fight. Congratulations to him. & # 39;

And he was also gracious in his comments to Sky Sports Box Office after the fight: & # 39; Boxing is a tough sport, but I train hard and I am beaten by a good hunter, it will be interesting to see how far he goes, but this is all part of the journey.

Congratulations to the first Mexican heavyweight champion. We bounce back.

Others pointed out that Haye blamed his 2011 defeat on Wladimir Klitschko on a broken toe.

Joshua and Ruiz are expected to have a rematch in the UK in November or December. this year.

Share or comment on this article:

Source link

[roxysbeachlife]

How to Build a Balcony Garden on a Shoestring Budget

A common misconception about gardening is that it requires a big backyard and a lot of money. That’s why a lot of people, namely city dwellers on a tight budget, shy away from growing their own food. If you’re one of them, we have good news for you:

You can certainly grow your own food with a teeny-tiny balcony (or indoor space near a window) and only a few dollars in your bank account!

How?

Containers. All you need is a bunch of containers. It’s entirely possible to grow all kinds of herbs, fruits, and vegetables in all kinds of large and small pots, window boxes, hanging baskets, or used rain boots.

Yes, used rain boots. You don’t need a typical pot; you can use pretty much anything as a container!

Affordable upcycled container ideas

There’s no need to drop $25 on a fancy ceramic pot when you can dig around your garage or a thrift store. There are so many different things you can upcycle into a container for your balcony or window garden. Here are some fun, practical, and ridiculously cheap ideas:

Mason jars

Mason jars are a very versatile type of container for herbs. You can place them indoors by a window, hang them from a window sill, put them on an outdoor table top, adorn them on a balcony railing, or set them on the ground. You just have to make sure they’re in direct sunlight for the most part of the day.

If you don’t have any Mason jars (or empty pasta sauce jars) lying around your house, you can look for some at a thrift store or, as a last resort, buy a dozen of brand-new Mason jars for under $20 at Walmart, King Soopers, Safeway, or Amazon.

Pallets

Pallets are a great container for herbs, lettuce, or strawberries because they let you save a lot of space and money! You can pick up some good pallets behind a department store, grocery store, or pretty much any type of business that orders a lot of inventory on a regular basis. Be sure to check with the manager or owner first; they’d be likely to let you haul away the pallets for free just so they won’t have to pay a company to do it. You can also check Craigslist for free pallets.

Once you get your hands on a pallet, you have to make sure it’s not made of pressure-treated lumber. You don’t want toxic chemicals to leach into the soil and ruin your plants. Look at the cut end of the pallet. If there’s a green tinge, then it’s probably pressure-treated. If there’s no green tinge, you still have to make sure it’s definitely not pressure-treated. It’s better to be safe than sorry, after all! So go ahead and cut a small piece of the pallet. If the inside is yellow or white, then it’s probably not pressure-treated. For further information, check out Instructables.com’s How to determine if a wood pallet is safe for use. If you find that the pallet hasn’t been pressure-treated, sand it down and get it ready to serve as a gardening container! Growing a Greener World has a great set of instructions on how to do it right.

Tin or plastic buckets

You can use paint cans, empty coffee cans, sand buckets, or anything else you can find at the dollar store or around your house. You just have to remember to punch drainage holes in the bottom of each bucket.

Things to consider before getting a container

Before you let your imagination go wild and repurpose something into a container, take a look at the following list of important things to consider. It’ll help you choose the best container for the type of plant you want to grow.

* Size: When it comes to growing herbs, fruits, or vegetables, bigger is always better. The larger the container, the more likely the crop will come out all right. If the container’s too small, your crop will become root-bound and die. Note that most vegetables require a container that’s larger than 5 gallons.

* Weight: If you choose to use a tall container, you have to make sure it has enough weight in the bottom so it won’t fall over. If you intend to move the container around frequently, it’d be best to go with a lightweight container made from synthetic materials (such as a sand bucket or a plastic drum).

* Material: While most materials are safe to use, it’d still be wise to choose one that would suit your needs the best. Here’s a list of acceptable materials to use and how each one will benefit you.

– Plastic: With plastic, soil will not dry out as quickly as with other materials. Also, plastic containers are easy to move around, even after you plant in them.

– Ceramic: Ceramic pots are usually frost-resistant and will last for years. They also look nice and will pretty up your balcony. However, ceramic pots will make soil dry out quickly, so it’d be wise to line them with plastic sheets. You might be able to score a few ceramic pots for pennies on the dollar at a thrift store.

– Stone/concrete: If you’re worried about someone stealing your plants, you should invest in a stone or concrete pot. Those bad boys are extremely heavy, highly durable, and frost resistant.

– Untreated wood: This is a highly versatile material, because it can contain any type of plant. However, soil will dry out quickly, so be sure to line the inner walls of a wooden container with a plastic sheet, or just water the plant often.

– Metal: While this is an acceptable material to use in a container, it doesn’t do so well in extreme weather. Metal containers heat up quickly in hot weather and fail to provide adequate insulation in cold weather. If you must use metal containers in extreme weather, line them with plastic sheets or bubble wrap or just bring the containers inside when the weather gets too bad. Otherwise, only use metal containers in areas where the climate is generally mild.

– Fiberglass: This inexpensive material is ideal for balconies because it’s lightweight and can be moved around a lot. Also, fiberglass containers are weatherproof, but they don’t last a long time because they’re fragile.

Designing your balcony garden

Before starting your balcony garden, ask yourself the following questions to determine which fruits, vegetables, or herbs would fare best on your balcony:

* What type of microclimate exists on your balcony? Is your balcony exposed to wind, cold, and sometimes frost?

* What direction does your balcony face? If your balcony faces west, your plants will get plenty of sun in the afternoon and evening, and they’ll be shielded from the northeast winds. Plants in east-facing balconies are often subjected to frost and the abrupt change in temperature due to the sunrise in the morning. North and south facing balconies get sunlight for the most part of the day, and north-facing balconies get some wind.

* Is your balcony sheltered from the wind? Is there a screen or a wall that can protect your plants from the wind?

Take those questions into consideration and determine the best types of fruits, vegetables, herbs, or other plants for you to grow on your balcony.

Next, grab a sketchbook and plan different options. Be sure to get the measurements right. Figure out which types of containers would fit in your space in the best way possible.

Once you have everything planned out, get the containers you need, start planting, and watch your balcony garden flourish in no time!

Source

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2Gj46hs via IFTTT

[ncmagroup]

Written by: Sarah Brady

Preparation is key. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

Whether you are chopping down a tree or executing an integrated marketing plan, the steps you take ahead of time to lay out your plan and ensure you have all of the proper (and optimized) tools, are crucial to your marketing success.

Your marketing department might encompass digital marketing, print advertisement, PPC management, website optimization, visual identity/branding, event marketing, etc.

As a digital marketing agency, this marketing plan discussion will focus mostly on the digital marketing aspect, but the strategies and concepts in this post can be expanded to encompass your entire marketing department.

For today’s marketers, creating an integrated marketing plan that includes social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and SEO — all tenets of a strong digital marketing, or inbound marketing strategy — is necessary in order to attract and convert buyers in a digital age.

How to Write a Marketing Plan: A Comprehensive Guide with Templates from Vital Design

Maybe you work for a large corporation and have been tasked with developing next year’s marketing plan, or perhaps you are launching a new start-up and need to craft a plan from scratch.

Maybe it’s been 20 years since you graduated from business school or wrote your last marketing plan, and realize that times have changed a bit.

Whatever the case, the steps you take today to create a functional and straightforward marketing plan will lay the foundation for your year ahead, helping you to get results that are measurable and quantifiable.

But before we dive in, let’s take a quick look at an overview of how the marketing plan should be structured.

How to Structure Your Marketing Plan

List your Goals First While developing goals may not be the first step you actually take when forming your marketing plan, listing them first on your final marketing plan document sets the stage for everything to come.

Explain Your Research The research will be the foundation of your marketing plan and should include:

Competitive Analysis

SWOT Analysis – This is an analysis of your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, standard to any business or marketing plan.

Understanding Your Buyer Personas – This will include the demographics of the buyers you are targeting as well as include any personas you want to avoid.

Learning Your Buyers’ Buying Cycle – Understanding how, when, where and why your target market buys is key to converting leads.

Explain Your Strategy Once you have a clear grip on the landscape and understand your buyers, it’s time to explain the strategy. This phase includes:

Defining Your Goals

Knowing Your USP (unique selling proposition)

Ensuring You Have a Strong Brand

Making Sure You Have an Optimized Website

Creating Kick-Ass Content

Defining Your Distribution Channels (email, social, etc.)

Having an SEO Strategy

Define KPIs and Measurement Methods After all the heavy lifting is complete, your strategy is in place and you have begun pulling together and implementing your tactical plans, it’s time to measure.

In fact, even before you have implemented your strategy you should be measuring to establish your baseline. What have you done in the past and what were the results? How can those strategies shift to improve ROI?

Measurement should be done before, during and after — throughout the year, on a monthly or even weekly basis — to ensure your plans are showing positive results and to shift them if they’re not.

List Overarching Strategy and Tactical Plans Having tactical plans and calendars gives life to your ideas and strategy. Try focusing on 4 or 5 main tactics for the year and create execution plans around these tactics.

Keep in mind that your tactics may or may not be the same as your goals. If your goals are high-level, i.e. to increase traffic by 50%, then your tactic would drill down more on how to get that result — and be as the name implies, more tactical.

It’s a Guide, Not a Bible

Nobody can predict the future, which is why it is vital to remember that your marketing plan should be a living, working document. This is not a style book, a brand handbook or a book on company policy.

A marketing plan should be a reference that is used throughout the year, is malleable to a certain extent and is shared with all stakeholders and contributing members of the team.

Transparency is important when developing and finalizing the plan. By getting feedback from all departments and being clear on goals, your marketing plan is more likely to be of value and to be seen as a successful tool.

A marketing plan left to collect dust is useless. What’s not useless is a fluid marketing plan that allows for change and is looked upon as a guide, not as a bible.

Do Your Research

A common mistake that many make is starting on the tactical plan before they have ironed out the strategic plan. In order to formulate a strategic plan, you need to do research.

If you don’t know who you are, what you’re selling or who you’re selling to, you’re going to have a pretty hard time convincing people to buy your product or service, never mind figuring out what tactical initiatives you should be working on. So, if you haven’t already, do your homework.

Start with researching your competitors and audience; examine your customers’ buying habits; and do a SWOT analysis (more on that in a bit).

These steps will help you lay a sturdy foundation for your tactical plans and allow you to develop reasonable expectations and goals.

Feel Out the Competition

In order to determine the likelihood of success and define your marketing strategy, you need to understand the competition. Researching your competition first will also help you through your next step of creating a SWOT analysis.

In the new world of inbound marketing, there are a handful of strategies that are paramount. These strategies can also be useful when researching competitors. Using email and social media, and surveying the content landscape, will give you an immense amount of knowledge about your competition.

Here are some quick tips on understanding who you’re up against:

Subscribe to your competitors’ (or those you perceive to be your competitors) email lists.

Follow your competitors on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram… any social site you can find them on.

Examine what content your competitors are creating — who it is aimed at, how often is it produced, who is writing it, what the content topics are, etc. MOZ recommends using Wordle to get a pulse on the competition and keep your data organized.

For more on why these tactics are important, how to implement them and what data you can glean from them, read Competitor Research in an Inbound Marketing World.

Perform a SWOT Analysis

Standard to any business or marketing plan is the SWOT analysis. The SWOT analysis should help you clearly define your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats so that you can develop goals and objectives that are on point and tied to your overall mission.

The SWOT analysis will also enable you to understand what differentiates you from your competition and how you should position yourself in the market. It will also help in developing your messaging and your unique selling proposition. Brutal honesty is imperative to a truly insightful SWOT.

Use bullets and aim for 4–5 in each section. Limiting your lists will help you to focus on the most critical points and help retain focus.

In addition to completing a SWOT for your overall marketing plan, it is often helpful to do a SWOT analysis for the different segments within your marketing plan.

For example, as we will discuss further down in this piece, content marketing, social media, and SEO will all be important parts of your overall inbound marketing plan and would benefit from SWOTs of their own.

Create Your Buyer Personas

The days of outbound marketing have come and gone. No longer are we looking at audiences en masse. Instead, inbound marketers are honing in on the segments of those audiences that they want to target. This is a crucial step in developing an inbound marketing plan.

Creating buyer personas, in order to understand your target market, will let you see who you are marketing to, what their pain points are, where they live online and a number of other demographic traits. This information will help you to personalize your marketing materials so they are targeted and highly relevant to your audience segments.

Read How to Avoid 4 Buyer Persona Mistakes for advice and a free template on developing your personas. You may need to do research in order to completely develop your personas, but before you dive into that endeavor, check out 9 Questions You Need to Ask When Developing Buyer Personas. You may find you already have all the data you need!

And remember, you aren’t trying to catch every fish in the sea. You are only trying to catch the ones you want, the ones you are targeting because they have the strongest potential to turn into leads. Your net doesn’t need to be wide — it needs to be precise.

Learn Your Buyers’ Buying Cycle

After you have identified your buyer personas, the next step is figuring out how these personas think and ultimately make the decision to buy. According to Hubspot and adopted by all those who believe in the inbound marketing methodology, there are three steps in the buyer’s journey: Awareness, Consideration, Decision.

Each of these stages are major opportunities for you as a marketer to nurture your potential customer by providing valuable content about the product and or problem they are trying to solve for.

Here are three stats from a Forbes.com article that prove just how important content is in nurturing a prospect throughout the buyer’s journey:

70-90% of the buyer’s journey is complete prior to engaging a vendor (Forrester)

A consumer engages with 11.4 pieces of content prior to making a purchase (Forrester)

Consumers are 5x more dependent on content than they were 5 years ago (Nielsen)

To learn more about the buyer’s journey and how you can align your marketing plan with your customer’s buying habits, read Understanding the Buyer’s Journey. And if you are a B2B company, read B2B Lead Generation Starts with Mapping the Buyers Journey.

Create a Strategy

Now that you’ve done your research, you’re ready to start formulating a marketing strategy for your plan.

Whittle Down Your Goals

Goals are the most important part of your plan. If you have completed your research, you should have been able to identify your weaknesses and areas of opportunities. Setting both quantitative and qualitative goals around these findings, as well as developing KPIs, will be essential.

They will help you to set a clear path, understand your marketing ROI and redirect your tactics as you move through the year if you find certain strategies are working better than others.

Goals should be obtainable, but not easy. You want to make sure you are reaching for growth but not shooting for the stars and ending up discouraged and overwhelmed.

Here are some general tips to keep in mind when developing marketing goals and objectives:

Evaluate your current position in the market and set realistic goals

Understand your growth year-to-date and set attainable but challenging goals accordingly

Tie your goals to your businesses overall mission and vision

Don’t overwhelm yourself. Pick no more than 2 main goals and 3-5 supporting goals

Accept that sometimes you will fail and not reach all of your goals. Be OK with that and learn from your failures

Create goal milestones to make reaching the goal more digestible

And remember, we are marketers, not heart surgeons. Have fun, get creative and don’t take yourself or your marketing too seriously.

Know What Makes You Unique

Knowing your unique selling proposition (USP) and marketing that USP is essential to beating the competition and solidifying your company’s value in the marketplace. Your USP ties in closely with your brand and your content because those are the conduits your USP will be communicated through. And communication is key.

Clearly, state your USP and do it often, on your website, in your emails, through your ads etc. For tips on formulating your USP read The Ultimate Guide to Finding Your Unique Selling Proposition.

Ensure You Have A Strong Brand

Branding can be fun, but it can also be tricky. A brand can be one of the strongest assets a company possesses and if done right will attract the buyer loyalty every business dreams of. Brand consistency is key.

Is your brand consistently represented across all channels, including your logo, website design, tradeshow booth, print marketing materials, business cards and email signatures, advertisements, packaging design, social media profiles and sales collateral?

Take a look at all the places that your audience comes in contact with your brand, and ask yourself what each piece is saying about your brand as a whole.

If your brand encompasses several sub-brands or subsidiaries, have you strategically audited your brand architecture to leverage maximum brand equity?

Not only will a well-designed, cohesive brand architecture benefit you in brand value and recognition, but an online brand strategy will benefit your SEO/Search rankings will improve as well.

Optimize Your Website

Website design is more than just a pretty page. Your website is often the first impression your prospects will get of your company.

That means that your website has to be more than pretty (that helps), it needs to be clear and functional. If your site is cluttered and hard to navigate you will automatically lose potential buyers.

Just think about the last time you went to a poorly designed and over cluttered site. Did you stay long? Did you get an immediate impression of that company?

Similarly, if visitors can’t tell what you sell or what your value proposition is, they will leave.

All it takes is the click of a button and they are on to the next provider. There’s often a direct correlation made that if your website is hard to work with, your company must be hard to work with.

So be clear in your messaging. Make sure your site is a place that people want to stay, not only because it is pretty but also because the information they need is easily found.

There is an entire science and methodology behind website design including where to place buttons on the page, what content works best where what colors convey certain feelings and so on.

Read, 4 Examples of Fantastic Web Design for inspiration and consider hiring a web designer who specializes in Inbound Marketing and SEO to ensure your website is reaching its full potential.

Create Kick-Ass Content

If you have read anything about inbound or content marketing you have likely heard the overused phrase “content is king.” While it may be overused, when it comes to inbound marketing, it’s pretty spot on.

Content is the meat that will attract your buyers. It is what Google uses to search for keywords and drive users to your site and what buyers use to glean information and knowledge about their problem as they move through the buyer’s journey.

Content is all of the written words used to convey your brand, from the copy on your site to the landing page users arrive at, to the blog posts, newsletters and emails you write.

But it’s not just having content that matters, it’s having quality content that is consistent. Content marketing is about providing useful information to your customer base. It’s not about selling but about informing.

Think of it this way. If you write intelligent and thought-provoking blog content, say on a weekly basis, that in some way solves a problem, answers a question or simply entertains your target audience, you will become a go-to resource for those potential buyers.

They will come back to your site time and time again because you are providing a free service for them, all the while building trust and establishing brand clout in a non-intrusive way. And when these devoted followers realize they need the product you sell, guess who they are most likely to buy it from? You got it.

They are going to go to you. The company they trust. Read Is Youtility the Future of Marketing by Jay Baer, New York Times best-selling author and social media and content strategist, to learn more about this important concept.

So, your content is essential in nurturing your customers as they move through the buyer’s journey, but in order to do this successfully, you need to know what types of content to use and when.

Here are the recommended content types for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Awareness Stage

eBooks

eGuides

White Papers

Editorial Content

Reports

Blog Posts

Consideration Stage

Webinars/Webcasts

Podcasts

Video

Expert and Solution Oriented Guides and White Papers

Decision Stage

Product Comparisons

Case Studies

Free Trials/Downloads

Product Focused Content

But it doesn’t stop there. Buyers aren’t the only ones that like helpful content. Google does too. Creating solid content is hugely important for your SEO strategy.

To learn more about creating a kick-ass content plan read, How to Build a Compelling Content Strategy for Your Boring Industry or The Secret to a Stand Our B2B Marketing Strategy? Content Marketing.

Define Your Distribution Channels

So if the content is the meat, your distribution channels are the arms that feed that meat. As important as content is, without distribution your content goes to waste.

It is useless. So it is essential to have a clear understanding of how each channel works and to use a mix of paid, owned and earned media.

Social Media

In the world of social media, it pays to have an overall strategy that is tweaked depending on the social channel you are working in. For example, the way you market on Twitter will differ from the way you market on LinkedIn or Facebook.

They are different sites with different purposes and your messaging needs to reflect that. One strategy, however, that does work across them all is using photographs. Posts with pictures get higher clicks and engagement across the board.

And because social media is all about getting your content and your message was seen, timing is important. According to sumall.com, the key is to catch people in their downtime, early in the morning, on their breaks or at night. Here is what they recommend for timing:

Twitter 1-3pm weekdays

Facebook 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays

LinkedIn 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Tumblr 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays

Instagram 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweet spot at 6pm

Pinterest 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best

Google+ 9-11am weekdays

Of course, depending on your industry and audience these times could vary. The key is to test and re-test in order to see when your buyers are engaging. Look at the competition. See who is doing social successfully in your space and note their patterns.

And remember, your engagement on social media is key. When you interact with your audience you are telling them you heard them, you are enhancing your brand and you are showing authenticity.

Much like your content plan, your social media plan needs a strategy of its own that is then integrated with your overall marketing plan.

For more on social media marketing read, Everything Marketers Want to Know About Social Media Marketing But Are Too Afraid To Ask or Three Elements of an Effective Social Media Strategy.

Email

Email marketing is yet another tactic in your inbound marketing arsenal. Email is used most effectively as a lead nurturing tool, in that it is used to engage with potential customers as they interact with specific content on your website.

For example, should a prospect visit your website and download an eBook, they will then begin to receive a set of triggered emails related to the eBook topic, encouraging them to further interact with the brand. Email is also commonly used for announcements, newsletters, and promotions. Just as with social media, email frequency, and timing matters.

While incorporating email into your marketing plan is important, overdoing it can backfire. People don’t want to be overrun with emails and if you are overzealous you could risk losing potential buyers.

Remember, when creating your emails, keep the content short, include one main call-to-action, have links back to your website, use images and make sure the subject line is catchy. And when it comes to email, you can never test or measure too much.

For more on email marketing read, The Definitive Guide to B2B Email Marketing or Best Email Service Providers for Salesforce: MailChimp vs Constant Contact vs Native Apps.

Get Found

SEO

As we have already established, the content you create is important to your strategy but it is only useful if it finds its way into the right hands. SEO is what Google and other search engines use to index your pages and allow your content to be found by your prospective customers.

In a digital world, SEO is hugely important. You could think about it as another distribution channel with a whole different set of rules.

In order to use SEO effectively, you must optimize your content and when we say content we mean all your content – from your blogs to your landing pages to your social tags.

In order to do this, you need to create a keyword list, which will then allow you to create messaging around the words and phrases you are targeting. But SEO is much more than just targeting keywords. Link building, content and social media all play key roles in a successful SEO strategy.

Measure

This is the phase of your plan that should be ongoing. As soon as you put your marketing plan into action start tracking, measuring and reporting.

The ability to measure your inbound marketing efforts is one of the most valuable parts of your plan and the beauty of inbound marketing. The amount of things to measure and test are endless.

And that’s a good thing because when you are able to test and measure you are able to improve areas of weakness, report quantitative results and prove the value of your marketing efforts to the broader organization.

You should be measuring, reporting and testing your inbound marketing on a monthly basis to see what is working and what isn’t and to learn more about your buyer base. It might sound like overkill, but this actually can be the really fun part!

Read The 16 Marketing KPIs You Should Be Measuring (But Probably Arent) and How to Calculate the ROI of Your Inbound Marketing Plan.

Creating Tactical Plans

Once you have your strategy in place it’s time to decide what tactics are most important to the success of that strategy.

For example, a company might decide to focus on four main tactics for the year: blog creation, a website re-vamp, SEO improvement and custom list development for email campaigns.

While they may still want to work on their social media strategy and PR, for the year in question, they will devote the majority of their budget towards the four main tactics listed while continuing to allocate smaller budgets towards social media and PR, to keep them running.

In addition, tactical calendars will be needed to help lay out the specifics of each tactic. For example, an editorial calendar will be needed for the content blogging strategy.

There is a lot that goes into creating an inbound marketing plan. But when it’s done right it can be one of the most valuable assets your marketing department has.

As we like to say at Vital, “Plan the work; Work the plan.” To help get you started we have included a marketing plan template with accompanying excel calendars to help you plan and track throughout the year.

  Go to our website:   www.ncmalliance.com

How to Write a Marketing Plan: A Comprehensive Guide [w/ Templates] Written by: Sarah Brady Preparation is key. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

[jeremybednarsh]

Fyre Up in Flames

The latest blog post from Jeremy Bednarsh:

Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead fans might remember the Altamont Free Concert of 1969, a similarly ill-planned music festival that ended in disaster.

Shortly after Woodstock made American pop culture history, the Grateful Dead tried to recapture that magic with the Altamont Free Concert in California.  The event, despite attempts at becoming “Woodstock West”, was anything but, and everything that could go wrong sure enough did.  Attendees got antsy, and the ill-advised attempt to use Hell’s Angels as security for the event and then pay them in beer proved a recipe for disaster; violence broke out, at least four people died and scores more were injured. The Rolling Stones couldn’t get through their setlist because of fights breaking out in the audience, and the Grateful Dead, meant to headline the entire event, ended up canceling.  Nearly 50 years later, it’s gone down as one of music’s darkest moments.  

They say history repeats itself, and sure enough the Internet is currently ablaze with talk of rapper Ja Rule’s ill-planned and ultimately disastrous music festival, Fyre.  The heavily hyped event, with tickets that cost tens of thousands (and packages as high as $100,000), was guaranteed to be a paradise, with gorgeous beaches, gourmet meals, luxury lodgings and more on the small Bahamian island Exuma.  Yet the reality was anything but; about a week ago tweets began emerging revealing just what the event had become: flimsy shelter tents, boxed lunches, near-total disorganizations, long waits for flights back to the mainland, and just general chaos.  In the same way that the Altamont Free Concert went down in history as a tragic black mark in rock n’ roll’s history, the Fyre Festival has been hailed by one former employee as “incompetence on an almost inconceivable scale”.

Blame originally fell on festival producer Ja Rule and various celebrity endorsers such as Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner, who were baid thousands to promote the festival online.  Yet he wasn’t involved in the day-to-day as his partner, 26-year-old tech entrepreneur Billy McFarland, as well as the self-proclaimed “market genius” behind marketing the event, 24 year-old Grant Margolin.  According to two different production professionals who had worked with the festival, McFarland was warned time and time again that the event couldn’t come off as desired in the necessary time frame.  Yet McFarland ignored the warnings and fired everybody who pointed them out, to evidently disastrous results.  When faced with these warnings, McFarland and Margolin reportedly would just write them off and repeatedly say “we’re gonna be legends”.  While they have become “legends”, it’s hardly in the way they had anticipated.

Sure enough, Fyre is currently facing numerous lawsuits filed in federal court yesterday.  Attendees are seeking damages for “negligence, fraud, and violations of consumer protection statuses”, among other charges.  How they will emerge from the situation remains to be seen, yet without a doubt Fyre will go down in history as one of the greatest disasters in music history.

from Jeremy Bednarsh Car Enthusiast http://ift.tt/2qMNxRU

from WordPress http://ift.tt/2qMkHkL

[suzanneshannon]

Want to get better at code? Teach someone CSS.

A friend of mine recently asked me to teach her to code. She was an absolute beginner, having no idea what coding really involves. I decided to start where I started: HTML and CSS. Using CodePen, we started forking Pens and altering them. Soon, a learning path started to unravel.

The aim of this article is not to teach basic CSS to those who already know it but rather to highlight the things that inspired a newcomer and hopefully inspire you to pass on some knowledge to others if the opportunity arises. It felt good to help someone out and, in turn, I learned some really valuable lessons that have changed the way I think about my code. Win win!

So, here we go: five lessons I learned from teaching someone CSS.

Lesson 1: Don’t start from scratch

When I starting coding for the web 12 years ago, I began with layout — positioning with floats, margins, padding and position declarations. It might seem outdated these days, but still, this is where I went right away with my new coding buddy.

It didn’t go that well.

As you might guess, starting with something like, “Here is how to position an empty box in the middle of the screen,” was a mistake. How uninspiring! And even though I was impressed with my own ability to demonstrate how Flexbox can position an element in the center of the screen (more on that later), I was immediately faced with lots of additional, non-positional questions.

“So how do you change the colors?”

“Can it change shape when hovered over?”

“What fonts can you use on the web?”

I thought we were weeks away from all that.

So, my plans of teaching the 12-column grid went out the window and we pulled up Chris’ named color chart alongside a couple of forked Pens and started playing around. First off, we changed the colors of Cassidy Williams Netflix/Netlify logo. Wow! Instant hit.

<a class="container" href="https://netlify.com" target="_blank">    <div class="logo">     <div class="uno"></div>     <div class="dos"></div>     <div class="tres"></div>   </div>   <div class="name">Prettier</div> </a>

Then a few simple tweaks to the CSS:

body {   background: #F9F2DB;   color: #092935;   font-size: 50px; } 
 a {   color: #092935; } 
 .logo .uno, .dos, .tres {   background: #C61561; } .logo .dos {   box-shadow: 0 0 20px #F9F2DB; } .logo::before {   background: #F9F2DB; } 
 .name {   letter-spacing: 8px; }

Within minutes, my friend was hooked! There was no boring positioning to worry about, just a clear example of how a few simple lines of code can change something so familiar into something entirely different.

Then it kicked in that you can change the color of anything! We loaded up a couple of well known sites in the browser and changed the colors of some text and backgrounds with DevTools, all in a couple of minutes. Mission accomplished! My friend was hooked. 

Lesson learned: Don’t worry about trying to build something from scratch. Have a play with what’s already out there! 

Lesson 2: Comments

This isn’t where I had planned to go with my planned class, but the question of why some parts of CSS start with /* and end with */ came up, so we went with it. 

This one really had me thinking about my own work. I really do not comment my code enough. Watching a new coder comment everything (and I mean everything) reminded me just how helpful comments are, not only for yourself, but also to a wider team, or even future you. (Sarah Drasner has a great talk on this topic).

And here is the thing: until then, I thought I was commenting pretty diligently. However, watching someone else do it made me realize how many times I look at a piece of code (particularly JavaScript) and wish I had put a line or two in there to remind myself what I was doing. A ten-second task might have saved me five (or perhaps even more) minutes down the road. That adds up and is now something I am working on.

Lesson learned: Comment more. 

Lesson 3: Positioning

We started with some basic HTML, and honestly, I saw my friend’s eyes glazing over almost immediately. It just looks so dull when you can’t see it doing anything right away (unlike editing pre-written CSS). However, we stuck with it, and got results.

Take my word for it, don’t start by positioning empty <div> elements with 1-pixel borders around them. You’ll lose your audience very quickly. Put a picture of a dog in there — or baby Yoda or a pizza — just as long as it’s anything other than an empty element.

We then turned to Flexbox. We actually found CSS Grid a bit too much at the start. We looked briefly at CSS Grid, but when reading lots of articles about it, it’s clear that many assume the reader already has familiarity with CSS, Flexbox in particular. My friend decided to start with Flexbox.

An admission on my part: I am so used to using UI frameworks (especially Bootstrap) that I very rarely position anything in Flexbox by writing the CSS myself. I know how it works and (most of) the declarations, but I still very rarely write it out myself, even in situations where it would be relatively easy. Teaching made me think about my reliance on UI frameworks as a whole. Yes, they are undoubtedly amazing and save us tons of time on projects, but I recalled using Bootstrap on a recent project that was essentially two pages and probably didn’t need it! 

Lesson learned: If the project is something small with a minimal number of elements to position, then consider ditching the framework and code from scratch! The end result will be lightweight, fast, and way more satisfying!

Lesson 4: Typography

I love typography. I’ve been lucky enough to work with great designers over the past few years and that has really helped me dial in on the nuances of type. It’s amazing how changes to things like line-height and letter-spacing can really help lift a design from average to amazing. This was something I was keen to impress upon my eager new student. Well, I needn’t have bothered, as the only thing of interest (initially) was changing the fonts and then, crucially for me, the sheer number of fonts available for us to use. The choices are almost limitless and the services and foundries offering web fonts have exploded in the past few years to a point where anything is possible, at speed with little impact on load times.

But here is the thing about designers (and front-end developers like myself): we can be a bit narrow-minded in our font choices. Designs tend to stick to the same fonts from the same services (Roboto and Open Sans anyone?) because we know they are easy to implement and that they work. Exploring fonts with someone new to the trade forced me to look beyond the old staples and try a few new things. I’m now looking for new pairings that work together and dialing in on how they work on screen and impact the whole look and feel of a design. In short, teaching someone else about type has improved my own journey with type, which was probably stuck in something like 2017. 

Lesson learned: Keep up to date with type.

Lesson 5. :hover makes everything fun

Things were going OK up to this point, but as you can probably imagine, things were still pretty static. Without really planning, we stumbling into adding a hover effect on on an element and it was an instant hook, just like it was changing colors for the first time!

Hovers add interaction and easily impress, which makes them great for a newcomer to play around with. Scaling objects, changing a box from square to round, hiding content — these are the types of thing that can all be done so easily that hovers are an ideal way for a new coder to get instant results. And here’s the thing: “‘playing” around like this opens other doors. “What if I just do this?” is something many us rarely get to ask ourselves in our day-to-day jobs. With defined designs to work from, there is often little chance to play and equally less chance to experiment.

CodePen Embed Fallback

So, here is the final lesson: Make time to play. Just by being asked, “How do you make this thing do that?” has forced me to learn new things, see what’s new in CSS, and see what I can take back into my day-to-day work. Experimenting (or better yet, playing) has made me a better designer, and I’ll be doing more.

CodePen Embed Fallback

Lesson learned: Make time to play.

Conclusion

If my time teaching CSS to a newbie has taught me anything, it’s that I rarely write code from scratch anymore. Code snippets and autocomplete save me hours, but it’s those same conveniences that let me forget about some really basic stuff. Stuff I should know. By teaching someone else, even if just for 15 minutes now and then, my coding has generally improved and my eyes are open to new ideas and techniques that I may not have otherwise considered.

And as for my friend? Well, she was so taken by CSS in our short time together that she is now doing an online course that includes HTML, which doesn’t seem so dull now that she knows what it is capable of doing!

The post Want to get better at code? Teach someone CSS. appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

Want to get better at code? Teach someone CSS. published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

[torentialtribute]

‘I’m going to restructure his face and body’: Joshua fires warning to Miller

I'll be his surgeon … I'm going to restructure his face and body & # 39 ;: Anthony Joshua warns Jarrell Miller during the press conference in London, while "Big Baby & # 39; pretends to fall asleep before tense face AJ defends his heavyweight WBO, WBA and IBF.

Joshua promised to & # 39; strip every grain of Miller's mind when they meet

By

Daniel Matthews for Mailonline

Published: 13:32 GMT, February 25, 2019 | Updated: 13:46 GMT, February 25, 2019

Anthony Joshua promised to 'reconstruct the face and the body & # 39; by Jarrell Miller while the heavyweight rivals on Monday again had a dirty press conference. Fighters meet at Madison Square Garden in New York on June 1, with AJ listing his IBF, WBA and WBO titles in his US debut

After their press conference Stateside last week, when Miller blue light lit up touch paper by pushing AJ, the heavyweight rivals came face to face again London .

& # 39; There is not much I can do that face … but I & # 39; I'm going to reconstruct his face and I'm looking forward to the challenge, "said an angry Joshua

& # 39; This is all I know. This is all I do. I know how to knock people out and hit them. All that spirit that this boy has there, s *** s, I'm going to keep him away from him. Every ounce of spirit that he has, that is what I do to people. I'm going to take him from his soul in that ring.

& # 39; Look at his face, I'm going to rebuild his face on June 1st. I do the job, I am a good boxer, a heavy-handed puncher and have defeated better opponents than anyone else.

& # 39; Landlord in the United States, I'm going to be your surgeon in the UK. You are going to have to makeover.

I continued: & # 39; I am prepared for everything, the fans can not fight for him. This is what I did, where I came from.

& # 39; He is coming to New York, we have to fight. He is a loser, I can now freestyle. I do not care what he does. I am a handsome brother, I know what I can do. All cows have eaten, this meat I have to prepare for. & # 39;

There was no pushing and pushing this time, but the tension remained their clash in New York on June 1st.

The pair went chest again for the cameras, with security that disassembled the two hunters before the tensions could overflow.

Miller used to try to push his opponent by claiming: "I've seen AJs too fancy, his nose is sometimes here. For all underdogs out there, they are not good enough; I am proof that one or two cheeseburgers and hard work and dedication can go far. & # 39;

& # 39; I was exiled from the area in which I grew up because I got too many problems & # 39 ;, he said. not from boxing, this comes from street battles. I have changed my entire lifestyle.

There was more cordiality between the respective teams of the fighters, with AJ's trainer Rob McCracken insisting that his hunter would have to adjust to deal with Miller.

& # 39; (He is a) great challenger, great fight this will be, but Anthony will be ready and he will deliver, "said McCracken.

& # 39; (Miller) is good – he can box and fight, but Anthony will adjust. & # 39;

Share or comment on this article:

Source link

[ncmagroup]

by Kimberly de Silva

Shares have become the social media marketing equivalent of gold, especially for small businesses. Each share is a chain reaction where brand messaging is relayed to an entirely new audience, which can greatly help generate leads and sales. As it stands, Facebook is the undisputed king of social shares, making up for over 90% of shared articles in the first half of last year.

Shares are what can bring brand messaging to a worldwide level. Take Poo-Pourri, for example, they started off as a small company that sold toilet deodorizers, not exactly the most glamorous or exciting product. But after releasing some humorous video content, they quickly gained popularity. One of their YouTube videos boasts over 39 million views!

  So what are the tips and tricks to help boost your content strategy and take engagement to the next level, like Poo-Pourri?

  1. Create Compelling Headlines

One of the most important elements, if not the most important, of your social content is the headline. This is what grabs people’s attention. Creating bland and boring headlines is one of the biggest sales-killers of online business. Your headline needs to be enticing, but also clearly explain what sort of information you will be sharing. This is one of the best ways for small businesses to set themselves apart on social media.

Buzzfeed is a site that has truly mastered the tantalizing headline. They post multiple articles a day, and each one features a title that is designed to grab attention by using humor, asking an enticing question, or providing unusual or interesting information.

The reason that Buzzfeed articles are so popular and are shared thousands of times per day is because the site utilizes the concept of “thinking fast and slow” with their content. This model means the headline allows readers to think fast, meaning it’s short and simple to understand, and typically piques some interest. Then the body of the content requires a slower, more concentrated thinking, like reading the full-length article.

This tactic attracts audiences because it is easy to browse through and read headlines quickly without much effort before diving into the deeper content.

This simple example illustrates the importance of nailing the headline. With attention spans shortening, even more, thanks to the ever-increasing amount of distractions online, using a striking headline will do wonders to increase clicks and shares, as long as you don’t fall into the clickbait trap.

2. Choose Effective Visuals

Including a visual element like a picture, video, or gif exponentially increases engagement. In fact, Buzzsumo found that updates with images resulted in 2.3 times the engagement than those without.

Like the adage says, a picture is worth a thousand words, so make sure that including a visual really does add something of value to your post. And don’t limit visuals to just images; adding videos to your post grows your organic reach by as much as 135%!

Southwest Airline’s feed offers a great example of utilizing beautiful and eye-catching content that highlights their brand and “wows” your customers; their posts incite wanderlust with professional shots of captivating, travel-themed visuals:

  3. Research Industry Issues

When you are releasing content, it is vital to provide something that is beneficial to your audience. If what you share is purely self-promotional or you’re just sharing boring and irrelevant content, it won’t get you very far. Before you start creating, you need to conduct a little research to find out what is buzzing in the industry.

Think With Google is an incredibly user-friendly tool that allows you to conduct market research so you can check out what’s trending and what searches are being made by your customers. If you notice your audience is consistently searching for specific information, consider providing a solution to their problem by providing relevant social content.

  4. Post at the Right Times

Scheduling out your posts so they are released during high traffic times can really help to boost shares and views. There has been a good deal of research conducted in regards the best times to share content on social media sites. Interestingly, the data concluded that each social media site has differing peak times.

For instance, Facebook posts receive higher engagement on the Thursdays, Fridays, and the weekends and between 1 to 4 pm. Twitter, on the other hand, is more active during the day from 12 pm to 5 pm, with higher activity during the week. Instagram has a better engagement in the mornings and on Mondays, with lower engagement during the afternoon hours.

It’s important to create a reliable system that keeps your marketing plan on track so you can carefully craft content for the right platform and distribute it at the right time. For this purpose, utilizing a task management software like Workzone ensures that you never miss a deadline, and enables you to seamlessly collaborate with your entire marketing team – including copywriters, graphic designers, and media outreach staff – so you can keep your content plan on schedule.

  5. Look for Common Threads in Successful Posts

Take a good look at the most shared content in your field; notice any similarities? It’s quite likely that the posts share something in common, whether it’s the subject, industry focus, or even overall just style.

With some critical investigation, try to detect a common theme in your competitors’ content that viewers like. For example, even though Red Bull is just an energy drink, it found that sharing content related to extreme sports resonated well with their audience. The brand linked their product by sponsoring athletes and events, and they regularly share videos and photos of the impressive stunts performed, while featuring gear and signage with the Red Bull logo:

It’s important to find what speaks to your audience, whether it is the type of content you share or the valuable information. Once you find that niche that keeps people coming back, always be striving to improve and impress.

In Conclusion

Consistently gaining social shares is one of the best ways to bring small businesses to the next level. Simply releasing content on social media and hoping for the best is not going to bring in great results. You need to strategize your methodology beforehand and plan for maximum engagement on social media.

Capture your audience’s attention with exciting headlines and include visuals that will catch the eye. Give your audience exactly what they want by discovering the topics they are looking for and make sure you post at the most opportune time.

Once you’ve released some content and experienced high engagement or shares, you will want to keep the momentum going by continuously releasing successful posts. Do a little research and keep track of the analytics on your posts so you can continue to release high-value content that gets shared.

  Go to our website:   www.ncmalliance.com

5 Simple Tips for Small Business to Boost Social Shares by Kimberly de Silva Shares have become the social media marketing equivalent of gold, especially for small businesses.