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muses-of-creation · 6 years ago

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Thiefs

Our job was simple. Stealing magical artifacts from dangerous people and trying to not get killed or captured by a organization called Holy Trinity. Everything was going smoothly, until two devil hunters have butted in our job claiming we were demons. This is about a story about how a wizard and a necromancer got themselves into troubles with the two most dangerous devil hunters.

You can also read it here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18566482

Good reading~.

Dante had gotten a new job from Morrison. As much as he wanted to refuse it, Morrison again decided to cancel all pizza orders until he paid the bill in full. To add, Lady too had arrived, and made even more pressure, because of the debts Dante still owed her. With no choice, he went to the mansion Morrison had told him.

Much to his surprise, as he was approaching the mansion, he met an unexpected person. Nero was there, too. Dante greeted him “Hey Kid! What are you doing here?”

Nero sighed in a mixture of irritation and annoyance at the sight of Dante and said “A job. I hope you're not here for the same.”

"So it looks like we're going to have to work together because I have a job here, too." Dante announced, pointing to the mansion.

"Aren’t you too old to take jobs? You should be reforming soon.” Nero retorted not happy with the news.

"And miss all the fun? Do not even think about it. Rest assured I can still play with you. You don’t need to worry.” Said Dante back.

“Go back to sleep old man. I think you're already dreaming.” Said Nero, turning more and more irritated, walking to the gate of the mansion.

Dante laughed and followed him, ending up messing his hair up like Nero was a little kid. That was the end for Nero. If there weren’t so many people on the streets Nero had already started a fight there with Dante, which was what Dante probably wanted, but Nero wouldn’t let him win. He took Dante's arm by the wrist with Devil Bringer and warned him “You do that again, and I’ll rip your arm off.”

“You're in a bad mood, Kid.” Dante observed "recovering" his arm. "Kyrie is not satisfying you, or something like that?"

This made Nero very frustrated with such a question, especially since Dante was not ashamed to say such things wherever he went. Eventually Dante saw Nero’s face the color of his coat. To Nero's great salvation, a butler came to greet them at the gate, thus ending that conversation.

"Please come with me. My master is already waiting for you.” The butler announced with a bow.

Then he turned his back and began to guide them, first through the house, and then to the master's office.

"This rich people don’t have nothing else to do with money." Dante remarked as he watched the house, which was quite rich in pieces of art, but the architecture itself was rich.

“I just hope the work pays well.” Nero thought loudly, with little desire in having to share the reward.

Waiting for them was a man in front of a window. He wasn’t too tall, already old, probably in his seventies, almost eighty years. But he still had short brown hair, a little bald though. He was thin and wore round glasses with a golden wire frame. His eyes were already of a very dull green and he was dressed in a suit, leaning on a cane, which was equally rich, with embed designs and precious or semiprecious stones, like his collection and house.

As soon as he saw his guests, he smiled at them and asked for them to sit down, and they did it.

“Thank you very much for accepting my invitation. Can I offer you something?” Asked the man, in a sympathetic tone.

"If it's not too troublesome, we'd rather go into the details." Dante answered, trying not to be rude, which he failed miserably.

“Of course.” The man nodded, making a sign to the butler, who brought a box with a bracelet that looked quite simple with a pink stone in the center and the rest made of silver. "I got this recently, but I'm afraid about what might happen to it.”

"It sounds simple enough.” Nero remarked in his ignorance.

"That's because you don’t know the true value of it." said the man in a rather rude manner, as well as incredulous with his ignorance.

"Are you saying the bracelet is cursed?" Nero tried to figure it out.

“Nothing like that. And it's a bangle bracelet, not just a bracelet.” Corrected the man. "It may not seem so, but despite its simple appearance, behind it hides a great power. Because of this I fear that it will catch the eye of demons.

“As well?” This time it was Dante who asked, because he didn’t see where the man wanted to go either.

"Haven’t you heard of the demons who steal artifacts? Usually are two, but sometimes four.” Said the man. "I've heard several stories, and several of my friends have been stolen by them.”

"I'm sorry, but we kill demons, we don’t catch thieves. So… you should go to the police.” Commented Dante.

"I don’t think I'm explaining myself well then." The man looked a little unhappy. “Everything happens supernaturally.”

"You'll have to do better if you want to convince us that these thieves are demons." Nero announced.

“I can see it. Usually they’re never seen, very strange things happen when they steal the pieces, like sudden descents of temperatures...” the man began.

"Now it looks like we're talking about ghosts. Not yet our category.” Interrupted Dante.

"No. To solve this, they need an exorcist.” Completed Nero.

The man took a deep breath trying to not to get angry and continued his explanation, as if they hadn’t said anything. "The security systems don’t pick up anything, but the piece from one moment to the other disappears.”

"They still look like ghosts to me." Dante interrupted the man again.

“Can you let me finish?!” Asked the man already angry, eventually losing all his composure.

Both Dante and Nero were silent. The man cleared his throat and continued what he was saying "When they’re confronted, they usually kill everyone in a real bloodbath, or in a rather painful way, like burned alive, melted with poison, among other types of deaths, which have been recorded. No matter what you try, they always end up having what they want. And as they appear, they disappear without leaving any trace.”

“Registered? Are you saying they recorded all the deaths that happened?” Asked Nero, somewhat surprised.

"Yes, just like the robbery happened. If you want, I can give you those records.” Said the man.

"Then let us see those records, and then we'll talk." Asked Dante not believing the man's word.

The man gave the butler a new signal and he fetched a tablet with all the videos and files that had been spoken. The butler handed them the tablet and Nero picked it up so they could see. After watching the videos, they were practically convinced.

"I'll pay you whatever you need for your services. But please get rid of them. It has been very difficult to live in the Art Market in this way.” Asked the man again, half desperate for not being able to see if they would accept it or not.

“Worth trying.” Decided Nero.

“As long as I receive my reward in the end…It's fine by me.” Dante agreed.

And so, they sealed the deal there. All that was left was to know when the attack was going to take place.

§§§§§

I was surfing in the internet when I got new information about a magical artifact that had recently moved. I saw everything that was accompanying the photograph of the artifact. As always came with the purchase invoice of the object, which ended up giving the rest of the information. From the invoice I looked for the rest and found the place where the person lived, only needed to do the rest of the recognition, including see if Inna was interested too.

As soon as she reached the cafe, where we had arranged to meet, I turned the computer over to her and announced “Just look at what just came.”

“Uh ~. New artifact?” She asked excited.

“Yup. I haven’t yet seen which artifact is, or what it does, but I’ve already found who has it and where it lives.” I told her.

"Then we must deal with the rest." Inna decided.

"I was just waiting to see if you'd be interested in participating." I said.

“Of course, I am. It's been a while since the last.” Said Inna clearly annoyed.

“Unfortunately, or fortunately this is how this market works.” I nodded.

“Tonight?” She asked, referring to the house of the new owner of the artifact to analyze the situation and how we would make the robbery plan.

“Sure.” I nodded.

“By the way. Do you think the Holy Trinity is also behind this one?” Asked Inna. "He seems to be one of those who, though simple, is very powerful."

“That's because it is. We'll probably have some fun.” I concluded with a smile.

“I hope so. I need to exercise a little.” Said Inna, smiling, pleased with the novelty.

I laughed and commented “I thought you had become sedentary.”

“Look who's talking.” She retorted. “Just because of this, I give up being sedentary. I hope at least someday I'll find that damn artifact.”

"I'm sure we'll find it sooner or later. Aside from that Catherine and Asura also have an eye on it.” I said.

"Yes. Although they prefer to go around killing demons, rather than artifacts.” Inna wasn’t very confident in them.

"In the end, we're going to be adventurers like Lara Croft, or Nathan Drake." I tried to cheer her up.

“Indiana Jones to by the way.” Added Inna.

“Of course. Who refuses such an adventure?” I asked.

We laughed and we still spent time at the cafe, not only to enjoy the excellent cakes they had, but also the drinks, because they’re divine. In the meantime, we also made more research not only on the artifact itself, but also on the man and his own house.

Ah! Do you want to know the name of the rich man? Fine. His name is Arthur Smith. A not very sociable man who lived basically from his large private collection of art, always looking for more. That's how he got the artifact. The artifact was going to be auctioned, but because he knew the auctioneer, he got it before it was even announced for the next auction, so there were no records of it.

The Magic Academy was where I got the information. It is an organization of protection of magical artifacts, that tries to find them and to surrender them to its rightful owners, or to whom they must belong. Trying to the maximum that they’re used by the wrong people, or even coming into the hands of demons, or the Holy Trinity.

The Holy Trinity is basically the opposite of the former. All that matters to them is to have the power and the maximum knowledge possible to serve their own ends. Thanks to this, we came across them a lot of times and things didn’t go very well, because usually they ended up dead. This made us targets for them. They aren’t only interested in artefacts, but also work with demons, even protect them. Nothing that seemed like the relationship of necromancers with their demons.

Usually the artifacts we steal are already in someone's hands. Even if someone doesn’t know the power he has in his hands. In these cases, the Magic Academy usually deals with these people and ends up giving you an even more valuable offer than the artifact has for these people, only when the Trinity interferes is when someone has to steal it.

Usually it's just me and Inna who do this, but there are two other girls who sometimes help us, Catherine and Asura. Sometimes we end up with the artifacts, because we liked them, the ones we did not like, we give them to the Magic Academy, just the way they wanted it, since they don’t know everything we steal.

We started this because each of us is looking for a specific artifact. In the case of the Inna, is one that is useful to her, because it is an artifact for necromancers that had been in the possession of her master / father, but eventually disappeared. And mine, is one that is specific to me, a wizard, that by chance my grandpa had been looking for him for a long time.

As agreed, that evening, we met at Arthur Smith's house and began to see how we were going to prepare the plan. See what kind of security the house had, how could we get into the grounds where the house was, in which part of the house was the artifact. That kind of boring stuff.

Unfortunately, it took us longer than we’d thought, and it took all night for that because it’s huge. The artifact was in what we took to be a secret mini-library. While I was checking the security where the box was, Inna began to walk, to see what could be there of interest to steal. She reached the desk there and saw an envelope on the table with a seal, which she recognized immediately.

“Rin-chan. Look at this.” Said Inna, showing me the envelope seal.

“Holy Trinity.” I said as soon as I saw the design of the seal.

"It seems that this gentleman here has connections with them." Inna concluded.

“Yeah. I just hope it gives us enough time to steal this.” I said.

"Unfortunately, I cannot say that. Only the envelope is here.” Inna observed. "But that just means we're going to have to steal it tomorrow."

I agreed and we finished everything we had to do there. Now that we had everything done it was easy to draw the plan and we could put it into practice the next night.

The next night we met at the point that had been marked as the meeting place. This time we were fully prepared to make the assault. We even had brought our firearms, which they usually have magical ammunition, because if there were human beings ignorant of the dark edge of the world, we could not use magic to deal with them. The most troublesome would be if the Holy Trinity appeared, after all the work we’d done to be the ones claiming the prize, but in a situation like that, we could use magic at will.

Inna had Lapuree with her to serve as a flying watchman, who was a dragon demon still small, but looked more like a butterfly demon. I did all the spells I knew so we wouldn’t be easily noticed and we could go into the woods and head for the house. Fortunately, everything was as before, which meant that we hadn’t been noticed the night before, and there was still no sign of the Holy Trinity.

We entered the secret mini-library carefully and there was nothing different from yesterday. I took the gadget out of the box and slipped it into a concealed coat pocket, where I was sure nothing was going to happen to it. After this we hastened to get out of there.

We were once again walking through the forest toward our exit, when shots were fired in our direction from our two sides. Luckily Lapuree was more noticeable than us and warned us, giving us enough time to get away. It wasn’t normal to leave anyone to tell the story, much less someone who had noticed us like that, which meant that they couldn’t be normal humans.

We changed our trajectory and shortly after we reached a glade, we stopped with our backs to each other, in the center. We grabbed our firearms, in the case of Inna a shotgun, and in my case one of the pistols, and each one of us pointed at his sniper.

They came out of the forest with their guns pointed at us, too, but they did not fire. They were two white-haired men, but one was older and had a very stylish red coat, and the other was younger and had a shiny arm.

Lapuree was sitting on Inna's head. She made a few sounds, which meant she had something to say, but only Inna noticed and understood.

"She said one of them is half demon, and the other is only a quarter." She translated Lapuree so I could understand.

That was in the minimum curious, and I bet Inna thought the same thing. But there was no time to think about it. They advanced toward us, until they saw a pleasant distance of safety. We watched them, trying to read what their next step was.

“Look that! It's just two girls.” Said the man in a red coat, clearly happy, but in a tone that seemed to degrade us.

"Let's see if these girls can’t be smarter than you”. Inna threatened, disliking his tone.

One thing was for sure, our main goal was to get away. We could not afford to take too long, otherwise the Holy Trinity would appear and make everything more complicated.

“Calm down, babe.” Asked the man, laughing at her attitude.

Inna liked even less than he said this time, eventually giving a shotgun shot, which passed close to his head, since the goal was not to kill him until he proved what they were.

“Don’t call me that!” She warned him.

In response the man whistled and made another comment, but was interrupted by the other man with the luminous arm "Yet they are demons and they are our targets.”

“Devils?” We both asked, clearly confused by the revelation.

But instead of someone giving us an explanation, the man in the red coat said “You're no fun Kid. Here we are. With two cute girls and you don’t care.”

"And one of them has already shot you and is still pointing a gun at you." He twitched the other rolling his eyes.

"I knew I should have shot him in the head.” Said Inna more and more annoyed that we were wasting time there. “Can I kill him?”

“No.” I answered. “That's not what we’re here for”.

"So, we created a new goal.” Inna tried again.

"That will only make us wasting more time." I protested.

"Let's try to do things well.” Said the man in the red coat. "You give us what you have stolen and you can come back to your life.”

"They are demons. You never can get things right.” Retorted the other.

“This is ridiculous.” I announced with a sigh because they continued to call us demons.

“At least we have two hot guys following us.” Commented Inna.

“Seriously?” I asked.

“What? We'll never have such handsome men behind us except for this.” She twisted, seizing the moment for a few seconds.

“Can we go now?” I asked already annoyed.

“Sure.” Inna agreed.

"No." said the two men.

“Fine.” We said both at the same time.

But we didn’t want to know what they wanted, or they didn’t want to. As a distraction we put down our weapons. Just when they were distracted by it, it was time for us to run again in different directions, to get out of there. Still they responded quickly, eventually intercepting us again.

“Already leaving us? The party is about to start.” Commented the man in the red coat to Inna.

“Sorry, but we have to attend another one.” Inna answered with a fake smile, bringing up her naginata, to see if she could make a way to go.

“I won’t let you go.” Said the other man who stopped me.

“Oh yeah? I want to see you try.” I turned back in a defiant tone and smiled, making my sword appear.

They also took each one their swords and we started a fight. If we did a battle of skill and strength, they won clearly, but that wasn’t our fighting style, either. Inna called one of her demons, Alvaro, who was a gunslinger, which made the man in the red coat protest “That's not fair.”

Except that the moment he finished speaking, he was shot in the middle of the forehead by Alvaro.

“Alvaro!” Protested Inna.

"Lady, I know that's what you wanted to do from the start” Alvaro declared with a smile.

“That hurts!” Protested the man in the red coat rubbing his forehead.

This was something that surprised her immensely, because he was supposed to be death, but there he was as if he’d never been shot in the head. They returned to fight each other, but this time Inna began to use also magic to fight, being able to stand better against him.

In my case I started to use the elements in my favor, starting with fire. He was avoiding everything, but my goal was not to hit him, it was too warm his sword hilt. It worked because he finally dropped his sword. This gave me the opportunity I expected, to make my next attack. What I wasn’t expecting was that he would defend himself with the luminous arm, as if it were nothing.

“Let's get this over with.” He said, opening and closing his hand, which now I could see it wasn’t human.

He was going to attack with that little hand from the distance we were, so I formed a shield, defending his attack still with some ease.

“Interesting.” I watched his arm with a smile. "That's really interesting."

“Do you want to taste it?” He asked as he attacked me again.

“If you can get it right.” I challenged him again, this time diverting.

We weren’t going anywhere if we continued this way. Unlike them, we were growing tired and we were already feeling the consequences of it, eventually being pushed back to where we started. Each of us picked up our guns again, but instead of firing at our opponent, we fired at our opposing opponent, which worked. Because the bullets we used were magical we did them some damage.

"How fair is that?" Protested the man with the luminous arm, a little irritated by it.

"You men do not swallow your pride and bow before the circumstances." Said Inna.

“We observe and execute what is best suited to the situation.” I added.

The man in the red coat snapped his sword on the ground and leaned on her, laughing.

“Because of this… it was worth the job.”

He was going to attack us again, but at that moment the Inna ninja immersed and threw one of her smoke bombs to the ground while I did a quick teleportation spell. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do it outside.

"Since our situation could not be better…" Inna began, looking at a spot.

I looked and what I saw there was demons.

“It's perfect.” I commented sarcastically.

“We'd better be quick on this.” Alvaro advised us. "They're already coming our way."

“Wow! How annoying!” I protested already without patience.

"At least they're handsome, but this time I have to agree with you." Said Inna.

We defeated the demons that were there, and we were on our way again, for new demons to appear.

"Do not tell me they smelled the artifact!" Protested Inna.

"They shouldn’t!" I replied. “I took all precautions!”

We got rid of the demons and we met again with our two stalkers.

“Seriously?!” Asked Inna, clearly irritated.

“Our luck is fantastic.” I sighed.

"If you want something with me, you first call me on a date, and then we can talk." Said Inna.

“They are more like ex boyfriends who never leave.” I retorted.

“Seriously? So, you wanna go out with me, babe?” Asked the man in the red coat with a smile.

“Enough!” Exclaimed the man with the luminous arm.

"Demons killing other demons. This is rare now.” Commented the man in the red coat.

“Okay. Now you're going to have to explain it.” Started Inna. "I know I invoke demons, but being one it's still going a long way. Or does this make me one?

"You aren’t a demon, but you have the personality of one, so ..." I said.

“I'll kill you.” Inna looked at me with a murderous look.

"Kill them, not me." I asked innocently.

“Stop it!” He ordered clearly angry.

“Wait. Aren’t you demons?” Asked the man in the red coat, now confused.

"That's obvious!" Protested Inna.

"Just because we use magic doesn’t mean we are demons.” I added.

"But you killed humans." Nero retorted, not convinced.

"He must be speaking of the Holy Trinity." Inna remembered. "The time we went to one's house, remember?"

“Ah! That time. But how do they know that?” I asked.

"Stop talking like we're not here!" Exclaimed the man with the luminous arm.

“It’s all recorded on video.” Replied the man in the red coat.

“What?!” We both said both clearly surprised.

“That’s is impossible! That means ..." I thought, but I had no time for anything.

The next moment I was shot in the left shoulder, putting me on my knees on the floor. It had not been any of the men and Inna just didn’t take one either because Alvaro was faster, yet she carried one in the leg from another angle. We turned to see who the snipers had been, to meet some people in suit.

“Thank you for your cooperation.” thanked a woman with glasses and a ponytail. “Demon hunters Dante and Nero.”

"What's going on here?" Demanded the man with the luminous arm.

“Holy Trinity.” I said as I tried to get me back on my feet with one hand where I had taken the shot.

“Ruby Campbell.” Said the woman, turning to me with a sadistic smile. “Do you like our latest bullets? They are made of iron, so your magical abilities won’t work. And the same goes for you Inna Walker.” She said, turning to the Inna.

"You ..." Inna was about to start cursing.

Alvaro was about to shoot them, but he eventually disappeared, making Inna extremely surprised.

"We have our own measures against necromancers.” Said the woman. “Take them.”

"Why not kill us already?" Inna asked irritated.

"Because you’re useful to us alive.” Replied the woman.

The men who were with her were going to get us, but the man in the red coat gave a shot that killed one of them.

“What do you think you're doing?” Asked the woman, unhappy with his attitude.

“I'm so sorry, my finger slipped.” He replied.

Then the other man stretched and shot in the other. “Ups. My bad. He excused himself.”

"If that's what you want. You don’t even need to be paid." Said the woman, taking a whip.

The men who were with her also prepared to fight. But before they could do anything, they were all unconscious. And when the man in the red coat came to the woman's feet, which was already leaning against the trunk of a tree, he declared "We don’t like being deceived. Our job is to kill demons, not to kill humans.”

And then he put her unconscious. While Inna was in charge of killing some of the men with my pistol, I used my sword to form a spell that killed the rest, including the woman. This caused me to start bleeding from the nose because I was going beyond the limits I could get with an iron bullet on my shoulder. I took the rest I had to freeze my right shoulder so I could not feel any pain.

“Why have you done that?” Asked the man with the luminous arm.

"They're not human anymore. Apart from that it would give us a lot of work if they were still alive.” I explained.

The man in the red coat crouched at the foot of the Inna and went to take her in his lap, but she pointed the pistol at his head, asking "What are you going to do now?"

"We have no reason to kill you. You’re not demons.” He replied.

"If you'd heard us from the beginning, you'd known that for a long time.” I said.

“Yeah. That's why we have to help you now.” He said, carrying Inna in bride style, not caring about the pistol she was aiming at him.

“Get off me!” Inna protested, trying to shoot him, but he swerved.

“Let us help you.” Asked the man with the luminous arm.

"It's not like we can fight any more.” I gave up, managing to get up at great cost.

"Do you have somewhere to stay?" Asked the man in the red coat.

“It's too far.” I said, almost losing my balance if it were not for the man with the luminous arm.

“Okay. Then let's go.” Said the man in the red coat, starting to walk.

“Where do you think you're taking me?!” Protested Inna.

"It's not on a date now, babe.” Replied the man in the red coat. “To my store.”

I followed him with the help of the man with the luminous arm. Fortunately, such a store was not far away. When we got there the man in the red coat sat Inna on the couch and I let myself sit on the floor without further strength.

“What do we do now?” Asked the man with the luminous arm concerned.

“That’s the question.” Said the man in the red coat, still thinking about it.

I remembered the artifact in the pocket of my coat and pulled it out to see if it was everything okay with it. Luckily it was intact and it felt good to have it in my hand. At that moment something occurred to me.

“Help me.” I asked the man with the luminous arm with a signal.

He was kind of confused yet it helped me to get up and get to Inna.

“What are you going to do?” Inna asked with a little fear. “You're dangerous.”

I laughed unhappily and then I said "I think you're going to want to bite something."

I put the bracelet on my right wrist and felt magic returning to my body, also lifting some of the tiredness. Inna was suddenly scared, yet there wasn’t much she could do. I placed my right hand over the bullet wound on her leg and created a kind of ice box around the bullet, since iron and magic do not mix. When I finished, I left a kind of handle coming out of the wound.

"Does anyone want to do the honors?" I asked.

"I think I'd better do it." Replied Inna after recovering from the pain created by the ice.

"Then whenever you want." I said. “Just pull.”

Inna picked it up and started to pull. It was better if it was pulled quickly, but the body wouldn’t respond as she wanted, although as she was doing so, I was using the magic of the artifact to drastically accelerate the healing process. When she had finished pulling, the wound was already closed.

“At least some luck in the middle of everything.” She said with some difficulty.

“It’s true. Who would have thought it was a supporting artifact.” I nodded.

The men were stunned to look at us. But I was still missing, which was going to be slightly more complicated. I defrosted my left shoulder and did the same thing I had done to Inna, the only difference being that I was feeling everything now. At the end of everything I fainted exhausted with everything that had happened that day.

When I woke up again, I was still on the floor, but there was a woman I did not know next to me, but she seemed to be taking care of me. She smiled to see that I was awake and announced “You’re awake.”

I sat down and checked the spot where I had taken the shot, seeing that it was flawless. I looked at her again and asked “Who are you?”

“Ah! Excuse. My name is Kyrie.” She said with a smile. “Your friend is awake too.”

I looked at the place she pointed out and saw Inna eating something that smelled pretty good, like she hadn’t eaten in a week.

“Ruby.” I introduced myself.

“Nice to meet you. Come on, you must eat too.” She said, taking my hands, leading me to the table where Inna was eating.

“Rin-chan!” She exclaimed, only realizing that I had woken up when I got to her.

“Heya.” I said back seeing what the food was.

“This food is fantastic.” Said Inna, eating more.

“Thanks.” thanked Kyrie.

I started to eat and saw that Inna was really right, that food was very good. We ended up eating everything that was there, which made Kyrie surprised, but at the same time very happy. That was also the time when the men arrived.

“We're home.” Announced the one with the luminous arm.

“Welcome back.” Kyrie said with a smile.

“Hey! Where is the food?!” Asked the man in the red coat, looking shocked at the table.

"They ate everything.” Kyrie answered.

“What do you mean?” Asked the man with the bright arm in disbelief.

We looked like two little children looking at them making innocent eyes, as if it were nothing to do with us.

"I've noticed that you two are already fine.” Concluded the man in the red coat.

“Ready for another.” Agreed Inna.

“Please no.” I asked.

We all laughed at each other, only getting Kyrie out because she wasn’t sure what had happened that night.

“We never got to introduce ourselves. Dante.” Announced the man in the red coat.

“Nero” said the Bright arm men.

“Inna.” Inna introduced herself.

“Ruby.” I introduced myself. "Thank you for helping us yesterday."

"Though that situation could have been avoided, if they hadn’t appeared.” Added Inna.

“We already apologized. Okay, babe?” Dante defended himself.

“My name is Inna. Remember it at least.” She asked.

“But it's true. If it was only me, I would’ve known at once you weren’t demons and none of this had happened.” Agreed Nero.

"Are you blaming me now, Kid?" Dante asked.

“I'm just stating a fact.” He defended himself.

"Just because you have an arm who can detect demons, doesn’t mean it illegals you from what happened yesterday. You're as guilty as I am.” Said Dante.

They started arguing there, if it had not been for me. Hearing that last piece of information about Nero's arm, I looked at Inna who had also been surprised. I went to his feet and took him by the hand and began to see the differences, causing him to be surprised.

“Excuse me.” I asked, dropping his hand. "Like I said yesterday you have a very interesting hand."

“Thanks?” He said, not sure what to say.

"Well ... Now that's settled. We can leave.” Said Inna, rising without further delay.

“True.” I nodded.

“Hey! What about my date?” Dante was shocked by the revelation.

“What date?” Asked Inna, confused. “Wait? Were you really serious yesterday?”

“Of course, Babe.” He answered without further delay.

"I'll think about it. It's just that I usually don’t accept invitations from guys who tried to kill me the night before.” Said Inna with a smile.

We all laugh at that situation, except for Dante.

"But what was that yesterday?" Asked Nero, still curious about what had happened.

We looked at each other, wondering if we should tell or not. But as they technically saved us, we thought it was the least we could do.

“Well ... If you ever need anything, call Devil May Cry.” Dante announced with a smile, sitting on his desk, putting his feet on top of it.

“Devil May Cry?” We both asked at the same time.

“That's where we are.” Replied Nero.

“Sure.” We agreed with a smile.

"And if you need…" Inna said, writing her number on a piece of paper.

“Babe! I mean, you don’t want to go out with me, but you give me your phone number.” Commented Dante.

"Just call if you have to, you idiot." She said, already a little irritated.

“Here.” I handed one with mine, too. "Usually we only steal magic artifacts, but whatever magic deals with, we accept."

“Even kill some demons.” Inna concluded.

We departed from them and left as if we had known each other long ago.

“Hey. Do you think he was really serious when he called me on a date?” Asked Inna on our way home.

“Who knows. Were you interested in him? For someone who wanted to kill him yesterday… it's a drastic change.” I commented.

“Shut it. He's hot.” Asked Inna.

“I know he is.” I agreed.

“And you, huh? Aren’t you interested in Nero?” Asked Inna.

“Even if I had. I'm sure that girl is his girlfriend.” He said without much ado.

“How do you know that?” She asked.

"The way they were looking at each other?" I replied.

"You're not so blind after all." Inna looked.

“HEY! If you already knew why you asked?!” I protested.

"You might not have noticed and said something like, He's so handsome I’m sure he has a girlfriend.” Inna explained.

“You ...” I was going to insult her.

“What? In love everything is worth. Never say no before you try.” She declared.

“Yeah yeah.”

And so we made our way to our houses, where we were still considering whether we stayed with an artifact as useful as that, or whether we would deliver it to the Academy of Magic.

#devil may cry #dante #nero #fanfiction #reader #original character #magic

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thelmasirby32 · 5 years ago

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Top tips to grease your email marketing wheels in 2020

Sometime back the COO of Facebook had blurted out some unfortunate things about email marketing – that emails are going away and that marketers will have to focus on teenagers of today to finalize the marketing strategies of tomorrow, and so on and so forth.

Food for thought

Emails are timeless, dependable, unsung moneymakers that have invariably found continued success and more customers for almost 50 years now. And still, there’s no stopping it.

In fact, researches by Radicati Group found out that there were 3.9 million email users in 2019, and the market is expected to grow over to 4.3 million by the end of 2023.

This means, over half of the world population has been using emails in 2019 and the medium happens to generate more ROI than what meets the eye – $44 per dollar spent

Underlining the strength of emails, yet another research by Drift and Survey Monkey revealed that 65% of respondents in the past 12 months have communicated with organizations via emails, ranking it way above the rest.

Being around for so long, this phenomenon in economics is known as the Lindy effect.

The Lindy effect

Author Nassim Taleb in his popular book ‘Antifragile’ speaks about the Lindy Effect. According to him, the life expectancy of a business or an idea is in proportion to its current age.

Taleb states, “If a book has been in print for forty years, I can expect it to be in print for another forty years. And, if it survives another decade, then it will be expected to be in print another fifty years. Every year that passes without extinction doubles the additional life expectancy.”

Now, emails have already been around for 50 years, and so we could expect to see it around in 2070 as well. But then no, you can’t just get out there and shoot emails.

As email marketers, first and foremost, you will have to think about re-inventing the existing email marketing strategies in a big bang way if you wish to sustain your business’ email ROI in 2020 and beyond.

Simply put, email marketing will have to embrace videos, personalization, data, mobile, among many other strategies to retain their respective audience base.

This post is an attempt to highlight the key strategies that businesses need to adopt in 2020 to grease their email campaigns in 2020.

1. Mobile-centric emails

If anything, the mobile-mindset is sweeping across the digital marketing spectrum. According to email usage stats by emailmonday, email opens are happening more on mobile than desktop.

This means, if you still haven’t got your emails mobile-responsive, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Now, the question is how to optimize your emails for mobile?

Simple, you need to cut down the size of your copy, images and the overall design to suit the mobile format. A concise copy gives a clear view of the CTA button, which, in turn, leads to more visitors to your landing pages, blogs or product pages. More importantly, shorter copies make the emails much more scannable.

Here’s an example by campaignmonitor on how short copies offer clean, easy-on-your-eyes email experience to subscribers while checking their messages on mobile.

Unlike the first image, the second image is perfectly tailor-made for mobile screening.

The benefits of such copies can be seen clearly when you open such an email on mobile:

Sufficient white space in the copy offers an easy reading experience

The image on the first fold inspires further scrolling

A short copy means the CTA appears clearly. This saves the recipient from scrolling further down to reach a CTA button.

In case any additional copy or data needs to be added, you could accommodate that on the landing page to which your email CTA directs.

Further, make sure to test your emails from a user perspective. You cannot leave this to chance because users might spare only some time to check your emails on their phones. If they don’t like what they see, they are sure to delete your emails at once, let alone read the message.

2. Voice-friendly emails

Being mobile-centric is just one thing. By and by, you will have to make it voice-technology-friendly as well as the use of voice technology is growing worldwide.

In 2019, almost 112 million people, in the US alone, used a voice assistant, at least monthly, on different devices.

If you look at it, that’s quite a huge pool of users who’d love using voice-enabled emails as the technology progresses in the future. Some of the popular voice-assistant technologies currently in use include Amazon Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google Assistant, Samsung’s Bixby, and Microsoft Cortana.

Presently, if you are using Amazon Alexa it will help you do five basic things with your email.

Read it

Reply to it

Delete it

Archive-it

Switch to the next message

This could prove to one of the most effective and ingenious email marketing strategies of this century as it makes your message heard despite the busy schedule of subscribers. So, even if your email recipient is busy pursuing some other activity, a voice-enabled email would help you to quickly figure out the content of your email.

Even Apple’s Siri is programmed to offer you similar functionalities. You can check out How Alexa Reads Your Emails & Impacts Email Marketing blog to get further ideas on how to use Alexa for your emails.

3. AI-driven emails

Not long ago, email marketing was purely driven by human instinct, be it the subject line or the send time. It was spray and pray strategy, more or less.

No more. AI has taken the hassle out of email marketing as marketers can now make accurate predictions, that too, not just with the subject lines but the send time as well. Plus, it also offers amazing recommendations.

How does AI do that?

AI, powered by machine learning, makes use of massive data to arrive at decisions that keep evolving as it learns. Though humans are involved in AI training initially, but then, by and by, they evolve themselves to find their own solutions and pathways.

Here are a few top use cases of AI in email marketing:

A. Craft outstanding subject lines

AI-powered by NLG, which runs on large and structured data sets, is quite good at churning out outstanding subject lines that could even beat copywriters’ hands down. In addition to subject lines, AI is quite capable of generating content for social shares, press releases and more. From word choice to emojis and sentiments, the copies are spot on and delivered quickly. And, more than anything generates more opens for your emails.

B. Optimization of send times

In 2020, marketers will have to optimize email send times based on historical open patterns of the audience. Say, for example, if Jonny opens his inbox between 10.00 am and 1.00 pm then you need to make sure that your emails reach his inbox during that period of time and not later.

But then, his sister Joanna opens her inbox around 5.00 pm. Manually it’s almost impossible for marketers to shoot so many emails, at different points in time, especially when tens of thousands of customers are involved.

This is where AI could chip in with its expertise. AI is programmed to handle problems of scale easily. The technology dissects mountains of data to come up with a predictive model for every contact on your list. This way, every individual, on your list, is sent an email at a time when they are most likely to open it.

C. Smarter segmentation of email marketing lists

Segmentation of the email list enables marketers to develop a relevant buyer persona, which, in turn, helps them shoot tailor-made emails. Such segmented email campaigns are known to increase revenues by a whopping 760%. However, such segmentation, though it yields good results, isn’t good enough.

Combined with AI, smarter segmentation, on the other hand, helps you generate a list that significantly accelerates open and click rates. This is because it thoroughly analyzes the behavior of the current customers and finds patterns that help you segment the audience in new ways. And, the brilliance of it is, that it gets the job done faster than what any humans could do.

Customization is central to capturing today’s audiences. And with smarter segmentation, you get optimized email lists that help your emails perform better.

4. Video centered emails

Yet another way to bolster your email marketing efforts is to add videos to your email campaign. It’s one of the proven ways to increase leads, educate customers and, in the process, enhance brand awareness.

And being a clear differentiator in terms of content, it manages to stand out from the mass of emails that you receive every day. They offer several advantages:

Immediately hooks the audience and drives engagement

More impactful than plain text as it communicates product or service information better and faster. This, in turn, ensures a faster response rate from users.

Complex topics are easily explained

Videos are viral in nature

Wide social media sharing, thus boosting a brand’s SEO ranking

Also, don’t forget, if your client’s emails are not HTML5-compatible, they won’t be able to view your videos. In such cases, you could do two things: One, you could create an image that looks like a video image. Once the user clicks on it, it would direct the user to YouTube. Just ensure that your video is on an autoplay mode. Two: Embed GIFs or cinemagraphs. According to Experian Research, 72% percent of brands using animated GIF or a cinemagraph experience higher transaction rates.

5. AMP for emails

As it turns out, AMP or accelerated mobile pages was introduced by Google to speed up the mobile web, specifically the landing pages, blog posts, and even full websites. Now, with millions of domains already under the “AMP”ed umbrella, the open-source technology is expanding its reach to emails as well.

AMP for emails will allow email marketers to create more interactive and actionable emails with the help of AMP elements. Broadly put, when you add interactive features such as accordions, confirmation, carousels, and purchase buttons in your email, AMP will allow you to take actions inside their emails without opening a new tab or visiting the website.

Additionally, emails can be updated in terms of news articles, weather, stock prices, and so on.

Of course, each of these things is possible when you run a third party script Javascript inside these emails. However, according to Google experts, running a third party script inside an email may cause loads of security issues, which is not the case with AMP for emails. In this case, the documents are analyzed for spam, phishing, among many other things, which, in turn, ensures the safety of the user.

Other benefits of AMP for Emails

The technology will swap static content with a more dynamic web-page like the content. So users will be able to receive highly personalized content on-demand in the form of current product prices, weather updates, news, and so forth.

It’s a red hot technology. Only a few marketers are experimenting with this technology. This means you have the edge over your rivals if you have a clear cut idea on how to use AMP elements inside your emails while interacting with the users.

Known email service providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook support AMP technology. This means you can add AMP elements into the emails for most of your subscribers.

Examples of AMP emails

Pinterest: AMP allows you to enlarge each of the images, inside the email, and see more detailed information, instead of visiting the Pinterest webpage.

Source: sendpulse

Doodle: With the help of the Doodle website, AMP for emails can help you create, manage, and respond to polls. Plus, you can set dates for meetings without opening a new tab.

Source: sendpulse

Bonus point

Overall quality should be the goal

Integrating all the latest technology and all is fine, but then don’t forget it’s the rudimentary aspects that make your emails click-worthy, that is content and design. So, by all accounts, take into consideration the following points while designing your email.

A. Content

An email shouldn’t have more than 50 words because a reader won’t be putting in more than 13.4 seconds to read it.

So, how do you write a compelling copy in 50 words? Litmus recommends the following tips:

Short sentences

Limited jargons

Localization

B. Design

Some simple ways to make email designs accessible and effective to a broader audience:

Use Real text HTML

Be cognizant of font sizes, line spacing, and text justification

High contrasting colors

Ensure visual hierarchy

C. Code

To make sure that your emails can be read as soon as they are opened you need to slightly tweak your code. A solid code-base assures accessibility.

So how do you ensure a solid code-base?

Enter alternative text for images

Make HTML tables accessible to screen readers

Use semantic HTML

Specify a language in the HTML

Going by the Lindy Effect, email marketing, at the very least, is going to around for the next 50 years. So, no matter what, make it a point to update your current email marketing tactics with the latest technologies, be it AI, voice, video or AMP for emails.

The post Top tips to grease your email marketing wheels in 2020 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/03/10/top-tips-to-grease-your-email-marketing-wheels-in-2020/

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lonesomealley · 6 years ago

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Busy But Not Busy Enough

Alright so I’m going to kickstart a little update section where I’ll be talking about things that are going on and where the blog and/or my projects are heading. This isn’t to be confused with the “free writing” section in Writer's Block because that one is still focused on telling a story where as these updates are just me talking about things that are going on and what I’m thinking.

And one thing that’s been on my mind a lot lately is work/life balance. As of writing this I am about to graduate high school (I’m graduating a year early because I’ve filled out my credit requirements) and plan to be heading off to college as soon as I can. The thing that I’m concerned about is whether or not college is going to be easier or more difficult than high school, from either a workload or actual smarts stand point. I’ve read some information and the basic summary I’ve composed is that, “College is easier and more relaxed than high school, but also requires a good work ethic and motivation to do the work.” Also the thought of having the freedom to schedule my classes in tune to my wants and living by myself with the opportunity to meet new people make me hopeful that things will work out favorably. So the thing about college is that, if I have more free time than I do in high school (going to school from 7:30 to 2:30, and then only having a couple hours of free time because of homework unless I cut into my sleeping time) then I plan on turning up the output for which I work on my little (not so little anymore) passion projects. But why is free time important for this?

Because I am a human who has psychological needs and wants, and my needs involve having the time to waste on enjoyable activities such as video games, friends, relationships, or just getting more sleep in so that I can make my life feel a little more lively. I fully admit, whether I have a bad work ethic or am lazy, that I cannot turn my entire life into a juggling act of time management. I read things such as Elon Musk working 80 hours a week and think to myself, “Wow this guy is really killing himself,” because it doesn’t feel natural, in my opinion, for people to dedicate all of their time to performing one activity. Back in the old-old-old days where human beings were still nomadic hunter-gatherers, their daily responsibilities came down to hunting enough food to eat and taking care of children. Then they got to spend the rest of the day doing whatever they saw fit. And over time industrialization and a strive for efficient innovation drove people to work in factory settings for hours and hours on end. Then eventually, when we realized that people are people and need to not kill themselves in factories, the time was pushed down to a more reasonable (however still questionable) 40 hours a week. Even 8 hours can feel a little frustrating to work around, but with the inclusion of an average 2 days off weekly, sick days, and vacation, I suppose the time is made up for.

But with my current situation, time spent on school work can soar up to 10 hours a day on top of the other lively responsibilities that I have. Factor in the over looming stress of academics and some more personal family issues, and life is kind of hell occasionally. Which begs the question: Where do I have the time to do passion projects? Well obviously the answer should be simple, just fill in my free time with passion projects. Yes and no, because passion projects still require brain power in order to perform and sometimes I just don’t have the energy. Or I feel like my time is wasted because the things I’ll make won’t ever live up to the imaginary standards of my imaginary audience. Or sometimes I just can’t figure out something and just give up, and then maybe eventually I’ll come back to it and fix the problem before drifting away from the project again. And on top of this there are the nagging worries that, “I’m not busy enough,” “I could be doing much more right now,” “I can’t work at the same pace as other people,” “Wow this person’s stuff looks way better than mine from comparison.” These are among some of the concerns following the a current video that I’m working on.

Without spoiling too much, the video is a critique on a video game that follows the same long form formula of my previous video on The Beginner’s Guide. However when I first started this project I told myself, “This will be done in a month and be about the same length as the last video, easily.” Well fuck was I wrong. I posted a screenshot of my progress on Twitter where the word count was in the 7,000 word range, and the script is now currently 10,000 words and going through a rewrite. So this video is shaping out to be about an hour long, and I haven’t even started the editing process which at this point will be lazily done (that’s to say it won’t have many if any fancy editing effects). The one big thing about this video however is that I’m not entirely confident on my opinion on it, because the video is heavily opinionated and comes from a certain perspective. There are a lot of people who won’t agree with my opinion and it’s pretty harsh towards the game, which might stir up some controversy for a little bit if anyone cares at all about the project.

So the video won’t be out for a while, I might (just might) push to get it out during summer break or even as a one year anniversary thing, but who knows at this point. So this is the current situation I’m in, on the flip side I also want to put more attention toward this blog which, unlike video editing or trying to make a game, doesn’t require long periods of effort from me and rotates between different fields of expertise. These blog posts are so easy to write if I have something I want to talk about, and can be done at anytime, in fact most of this post was typed up in my Creative Writing class. Right now I have several planned posts that I’ve started and just need to finish up, rewrite, or get edited. I’m also sticking with this whole long form writing thing outside of a couple exceptions such as video posts. Posts are generally going to stay over 500 words with a push towards a couple thousand.

You’ll also notice that I’ve stripped out some of the social media functionality of my Tumblr blog, and that’s because I frankly just don’t care for Tumblr as a social media platform but rather as a way to make a little website. Because who would seriously consider using a Wordpress website for hobbies when it costs money to use an html editor, Tumblr just gives you that for free and much more. There’s also the problem with Tumblr posts being generally incompatible with posts being written in html that contain image and video embeds or special formatting. There is nothing I can really do about this besides just not using html code to embed stuff. And I don’t entirely care about fostering an audience at the moment, I am more focused on just building a back catalog of good works and doing this stuff for fun. Posts on this blog or on my first youtube channel will be generally devoid of things that would otherwise make them dated but possibly pull more people in such as sponsorships, talking about trendy news, or putting update information in posts that aren’t in the updates section of Writer's Block.

And that’s everything I wanted to put out there. Things will come out eventually, but I’m either lazy or just too tired out, pick your poison. If I do end up less stressed and with more time in college I definitely plan on putting more of that additional freedom into producing this type of stuff because I enjoy doing it, it’s just that I’m not particularly good at it.

If you have any reason to contact me about things, you can do so at [email protected] as I won’t read anything you try to send me over Tumblr or Twitter. As for usage of the things that I make, I fully endorse the use of my content in the creation of new projects given that I am accredited and that the work isn’t plagiarizing or outright stealing my works. What I deem to be “stealing my works�� will be at my discretion in accordance to fair use laws, if I have a problem with how my work is being used I will attempt to use any contact means possible to get the problem sorted out. Should this prove unsuccessful I will use full power to take down the concerning content.

-Count_

#update

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dylan38sanders · 6 years ago

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How Much Does Event AV Cost – Whiteboard Wednesdays 9

Lighting, sound, labor… it’s all part of your AV bid but what’s the bottom line? How much does event AV cost? Do the brands of equipment really matter? What can you look for to make sure you are getting a good and fair price? If these questions come into your mind when planning events you are in the right place. Today Will Curran will walk you through how much event AV costs. He will go into the many complex parts covering labor rates, why brands matter, why new equipment may cost more, video, lighting and scenic expenses and more. After you watch this weeks Whiteboard Wednesday we are sure you will walk away with clarity on how to approach your event AV!

https://fast.wistia.com/embed/medias/yxvdtfggco.jsonphttps://fast.wistia.com/assets/external/E-v1.js

Video Transcript – How Much Does Event AV Cost

What’s going on Endless fans? Will Curran here back another Whiteboard Wednesday and we’re so excited today because we’re talking about the number one question that I probably get every day. And that is how much does event AV cost? Or how much will it cost for me to do my event? How much will it cost for me to do this? How much will it cost for me to do that? Number one question by far.

So, obviously, event AV is super duper complex. There’s a reason why those quotes are so long, full of so much equipment, different labor, this and this and that. And that’s definitely one of the reasons why it can be confusing. However, because it is so complex and every single situation is custom, there’s definitely though, some principles that apply across all quotes that allow you to get at least some general ideas on how much you should be spending and also where things kind of break down when it comes to the cost.

So I’m going to be breaking down a couple different principles when it comes to event AV, as far as how much should it cost, and you know, how can we understand where your money is going. So if you’re ready, we can jump right on in. So let’s start with equipment, which is probably a majority of your budget. Well labor is also a big majority of the budget, but equipment’s a big majority of it.

The 10% Rule

So there’s some principles that come into equipment as far as how much you should be spending. And that comes down to a really simple rule that I call the 10% rule. And that is a rule that pretty much applies to almost all AV companies. Again, this isn’t going to apply to every single company because companies do like to do things slightly different.

But what I’ve found is across the entire world, almost everybody follows this model, which is whatever the cost is to buy a piece of equipment. For example, if it costs $1,000.00 to buy a camera or a speaker, then likely the AV company is charging you 10% of whatever the cost is to buy it. So what that means is they’re usually making their money back on the equipment within 10 rentals, or 10 events.

It might be like slightly varying on that, for example, maybe it’s 15% maybe for somethings it might be 8%. A lot of times when it comes to that, that rule, it depends on the lifespan of the equipment as well and how long it’s going to be in existence. How long it’s going to be on their shelves. How long are they going to have it out at events.

Older Equipment Costs Less

So what that comes to is my second point, which is that older equipment typically costs less as well. So if you’re ever looking at a quote and you’re wondering, man, this one mixer is way cheaper than XYZ’s company’s mixer. Well, chances are if you Google it, which is a term that I love to share when, uh, did another Whiteboard Wednesday video. But if you Google the model name, you might find that that model of mixer that they’re charging for you came out in 1995 or 2000 or whatever it is. Whereas, the new one just came out this year.

So again, older equipment typically is less expensive because they’ve already made their money back on the rentals. But also that they, you know, older equipment likely, uh, you know, they’re not as worried about making as much money off of it anymore. Something really important to keep in mind too, is that this 10% rule really has to do with the lifespan of the equipment as well. So for example, a projector, uh, projectors don’t usually fall into this 10% rule, and the reason why is because projectors have a very short lifespan.

One, the technology gets old very, very quickly. But also they also tend to break very, very easily. So what that means is they want to make their money back faster. So this might be as high as 20% to getting their money back in five rentals, for example. All right, so we’re talking about equipment. Another concept that I want to make sure that you guys understand is this idea of brands mattering.

Brands Matter

We have this great, awesome analogy of Chanel versus Walmart. Um, if you are out there buying clothes, you know exactly what I’m talking about, in that brands are not created apples to apples. They’re not the same in any sort of way. And the best way I can describe this is that, for example, if you’re looking at buying, let’s say a purse for example, and you go and you want to get a really nice purse that’s going to last you a long time that has a great amount of features, and looks cool and people are going to think you look awesome with it. You know, there’s definitely a difference in Chanel’s brand purses versus Walmart’s brand of purses, right?

So, you might be able to get a good deal with Walmart. It might suit what you’re trying to do, but to be honest, it’s not the same thing as Chanel. This same concept applies to AV equipment as well. However, it tends to also go beyond just the looking cool or having a good value as well. For example, um, if you’ve bought a Chanel speaker, that might be a great sounding speaker that lasts a long time, is very durable. Whereas if you literally bought a speaker from Walmart, it’s probably not going to sound as good for your event.

So when it comes to your brands, typically what you’ll find is nicer brands cost more money and cheaper brands cost cheaper money. Very simple concept, right? However, if you ever are looking at a piece of equipment, and you’re wondering, well, this one company says they’re charging me $1,000.00 to do the same thing another company says they’re going to charge me $4,000. Well then look at the brands of the companies. See are they reputable companies? Have they been around for a long time? Do they service large scale events? All that sort of stuff.

It’s also just a great question to ask her AV Company. What’s the difference in brand from JBL to, for example, L-Acoustics? Um, it, those are two brands of, uh, speakers and of audio. So, um, a lot of this stuff too, by the way, guys, like my hope is a bonus tip is that talk to your AV company, you shouldn’t have to figure out all this stuff on your own, for example.

Okay, I’m going to do some reverse engineering as far as how much it would cost to buy a projector and that gives me 10% of whatever this is, um, okay, like I have to figure out the difference in those two brands? A lot of times you can just have these conversations with them and for example, if you are looking at two different quotes and they have the exact types of equipment, the exact counts of equipment, but one’s more expensive than the other. Ask him about the brands. Why did they choose that? Is it better? Does it sound better? Does it look better? Is it going to last longer? How does it give me more features for what I’m trying to accomplish? All that sort of stuff.

Video Is Expensive

All right, so next on, equipment, it’s general rule is, well when it comes to equipment is that the areas that you’re going to spend the most amount of money are starting with video. Video is by far the most expensive area when it comes to AV equipment. You might be thinking yourself, well, why? Well, first of all, video is very, very, um, let’s use the word touchy.

There’s a lot of sensitivity into how things have to work. You have to certain types of adapters, you have to have the right type of switcher this and this and that. It hasn’t been around as long as, for example, audio has. So when it comes to your events, a lot of times you’re going to end up spending a lot of money on video. And what this means is if you’re looking at doing something crazy when it comes to, you want you to multiple screens and you know, LED screens and all this crazy stuff, chances are a lot of it’s going to be spent in video.

Scenic Expenses

The next area that usually money is spent in that is most expensive, is usually the, uh, the scenic portion of things as well. The way you designed your stage, everything like that, because a lot of that stuff is built custom for every single event. And a lot of it ha- has a short lifespan as well. Go back to the 10% rule. Um, same with the video equipment. A lot of it breaks very, very easily. A lot of it gets outdated very, very quickly as well. I mean, just look at, we had 1080p high definition and in less than, you know, 10 years, we already have 4K. And everyone wants 4K everything.

The lifespan is going so quick and things are changing. Same when it comes to scenic as well. Scenic tends to change. The people want newer, cooler things, more exciting things also it tends to break very easily. So that means that it’s lifespans a lot less. So it means that they have to charge more for it.

Lighting

Next area that you’ll usually spend a lot of your money on is lighting as well. Um, there’s another area that’s changing fast but not as fast as video. Um, and also tends things are tending to last longer. Um, you know, LEDs are now very, very popular and now they’re in almost every single lighting fixture. Whereas before, if you want an LED light versus a normal conventional light, which is like more of a regular light bulb, um, you might end up finding that, uh, it’s more expensive. Now, not so much.

Audio Costs

The next to last area that you usually will end up spending your money on is things like audio. Audio hasn’t changed over the years. Everyone wants this great sounding audio sound system. The audience size is, you know, 1,000 person concert is the same thing as 1,000 person concert today. Obviously, there are newer, cooler things always constantly coming out. But we found is that audio tends to be a little bit less expensive than most of the items because it lasts so long. And because the speakers that we use 10 years ago work just as good as today, when it comes to everything.

Labor Costs

So, all right. So we’ve kind of covered some general rules when it comes to equipment. But you might be wondering, “Well, what about labor? That tends to be one of my most expensive areas as well.” Well, I have you as well. When it comes to labor, there’s a couple of different concepts that I want to make sure that you understand. First of all is that the idea of labor rates, and hourly rates. Everyone tends to ask this question, how much does it cost for an engineer, this and this and that?

Labor Rates

Well, the first thing that you can kind of expect is anywhere from $50 to $100 an hour. Obviously, again, this depends on the company and also the region in which you’re working in as well. If you found that your, um, that your labor is really expensive. Well, it might be because the cost of living’s very high in that city. All that sort of stuff. So when it comes to labor, you can usually expect anywhere from $50 an hour to $100 an hour. Usually, the $100 an hour people are really, really advanced. They know everything. They’re usually your technical directors, your producers, your event managers, that sort of thing.

Whereas you know, closer to the $50 an hour’s more your engineers, your technicians, the people on boots on the ground, building things, and tuning sound systems, all that sort of stuff. So you can kind of expect that hourly rate.

Full Day Rates

Well, you might be thinking to yourself, “Okay, cool. Well, my conference is three hours long.” Well, there’s another rule that you need to understand and it’s the idea of a 10 hour day rate. A 10 hour day rate relates to labor is the idea that everything is billed in what’s called a day rate or a half day rate.

So you might be asking yourself, “Well, a day rate, like 24 hours of work?” No, not quite. Well, that’s where 10 hours comes in. Again, this depends also on the region you’re in. For example, in California it’s actually eight hours, so you can, you know, definitely, make sure you talk to AV company. Ask them how many hours are in day rate. But when it comes to your labor, for example, if your conference is three hours long …Um, let’s use a little bi- bit easier example. Let’s say your conference is seven hours long. Well, instead of just getting billed just for those seven hours, you’re also going to get billed for the total of 10 hours. And you know, what they do is they always round up to the nearest 10th hour. So for example, if your conference is 12 hours long, it’s going to get rounded up to 15 hours. Well, 15 hours doesn’t make sense.

Half Day Rate

Well, then there’s half day rates as well. As simple as it sounds, it’s half of a full day, so five hours. So everything usually gets billed in that half day rate when it comes to labor. So what that means is if your event is 12 hours long, round up to 15, if your event is nine hours, round up to 10. If your event is 28 hours, round up to 30. You can kind of see where I’m going. Always round up to the nearest fifth or 10th essentially.

So when it comes to your labor, when you’re thinking about, you can do some really rough calculations. So for example, if you’re in a really expensive market, you can always budget really high and maybe you budget $75, $85 an hour and you know your conference is going to be, you know, 30 hours and let’s say you budget 10 hours for setup and 10 hours for loading, well, okay, that’s a total of 50 hours.

Fifty hours times 85. I can’t do math in my head, but uh, you can kind of get some rough ideas as far as how much you were be spending when it comes to your labor. Um, again, the number of teammates that the company is going to have, and things like that all vary drastically depending on the event, and what they’re comfortable with and everything like that. That’s again where you should talk to AV company, but this allows you to get some initial numbers going.

Markets Matter

So that’s some initial labor stuff. Well, what about some more general concepts for how much AV should cost? Well, we talked a little bit about how labor rates depend, uh, on the market that you’re working in. So something really important to know is the idea of, of what I use city versus like a farm, right? Um, it does matter what market you are in and where you are working.

For example, if you’re in a place that has a lot of AV companies, for example, a very large city, let’s say Chicago, New York, LA, there’s a lot of events going on. So, therefore, there’s a lot of companies supplying those events. What this means is that typically in larger markets costs are lower. And in smaller markets costs are higher. And you think to yourself, “Well that doesn’t make any sense at all. Shouldn’t it be cheaper for me to go to a smaller market where there’s not as much going on?”

No, not exactly. If you use the, the law of supply and demand, uh, I’m not here to teach economics or anything like that, but the more demand there is, obviously there’s going to be more supply to, to fix it as well. So what that means is in these large cities, like Chicago for example, there’s 20, 30, 40, 50 AV companies there, which means there’s a lot of equipment which means that they’re all fighting for relatively the same pie. Which means they’re all trying to win on price, which means they’re driving their costs down.

Bigger Markets More Choice

What this also means that you have more choice as well. So when it comes to your AV company, instead of just relying on, for example, in a small market, you only have one AV company to work with or two. You know, those people are really going to dictate the prices. Here, you could always pick up and say, “Oh, I’m just going to go to the, the sixth company, or the 12th company, or the 20th company along the way.”

So when it comes to doing your events, picking your location is incredibly important because if you’re choosing smaller markets, it might be more expensive to get to. For example, with our company, if, uh, we had an event who is looking to do an event in what’s a city called Pella, Iowa. You might be thinking to yourself, “I’ve never heard of Pella, Iowa.” Well, you’ve probably heard of Pella Windows and Glass. Well they were having a big party and they needed to have a big production.

Well, turns out there’s only one AV company in Pella, Iowa. Well, with our model, um, with our company, we have to bring all the equipment in, we don’t have a location in Pella, Iowa. So we had to ship all of our stuff out of Chicago, which meant that that had a very high trucking cost. So even having to move equipment into a smaller market might be more expensive even if there is a large market like Chicago nearby. So something to keep in mind.

Whereas if you’re in the smack dab in the middle of New York City, boom, all day long, people can get you equipment all day long. So kind of keep that in mind. It’s almost, think kind of a little bit of an inverse reaction because larger markets sometimes have things like unions and usually have higher cost of living. So, therefore, labor might be more expensive, but in smaller markets equipments harder to get to, but labor might be cheaper as well. So. Something you just kind of keep in mind.

The Bigger the Event The Bigger the Price Tag

Alright, and my last concept when it comes to your event, this one’s going to seem pretty obvious, but the larger your event gets, the more people, the more expensive it’s going to cost for you to do the event. And this might seem obvious, right? We know with things like catering, right? A thousand plates of food is going to cost less than 2000 plates of food. However, when it comes to AV, this is very much true as well.

You know, for example, if you have 500 people versus 1,000, it might need more sound. You might need bigger screens. You might need, um, additional support, you might have more breakout rooms. So something to always keep in mind is as your event gets bigger, your AV costs are going to rise. Um, and the best thing you can do is talk to your AV company to see, “Hey, if I’m worried about these costs as my event grows, how can I keep them under control?” And they should be able to give you some really good tactics.

Conclusion

All right, I think I covered everything when it comes to AV. This is a complex topic like I said, and there’s just a lot going on when it comes to the cost of AV. But my hope is that these general concepts help you get a little bit better grasp as far as where you should be spending your money. Where is the cost going? What does this brands have to do with it? All this sort of stuff all coming together, this big gigantic mess. But my biggest feedback I have for you is to work with your AV company as a partner. They should be able to help explain all this sort of stuff.

This isn’t very complex. This isn’t rocket science. It should be all able to be explained in a really simple to easy to understand manner. But my hope is that I’ve given you a little bit more knowledge so you feel more comfortable when it comes to understanding the cost of AV.

Again, if you are looking to get a very specific cost, how much does it cost for my 500 person event with three breakout rooms with a general session with cameras and this and that? The only person that’s going to be able to give you the answer is the AV company.

So talk to your AV company. Ask them questions. Get educated. They’re going to help you out. I think for now we’re probably good to go. So I hope this video was really, really helpful. If you enjoyed it a lot, go ahead and smash that like button. I would love to hear your loving feedback down in the comments as well.

However, if you didn’t like this video, give me a thumbs down and leave in the comments, what can we do better? What sort of topics can we cover? We want to hear from you guys as well.

And if you really love this video, hit that subscribe button, hit the bell notification icon as well, and you’ll get tuned in for every single Whiteboard Wednesday as they come out. But for now, I gotta get out of here. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. And I hope you have an awesome Wednesday. We’ll see you next time on Whiteboard Wednesday.

https://js.hscta.net/cta/current.js hbspt.cta.load(430132, ‘f5d4b0f9-3c68-485b-bc07-c33652f8011a’, {});

from Endless Events https://helloendless.com/how-much-does-event-av-cost-whiteboard-wednesdays-9/

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topicprinter · 5 years ago

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I think we can all agree that the first couple clients are the hardest to land. This is probably the biggest reason why a ton of founders fail and quit early on. Even if you create a great offering, unless people actually pay you, you’re going to go out of business.For context, when I began my company, I didn’t have a huge network that I could just lean on for early sales. I had to get scrappy and creative.Today, I’m sharing with you the approach that helped me during the earliest days of my business fill my calendar with sales meetings, land my initial couple clients, and truly validate that my offering was needed by the market. Cool part is, I did this all in a very cost & time efficient way.As a preface, this tactic is best used when you are pre-revenue or still trying to figure out your product market fit. If you already have a ton of clients and access to cash, there are other tactics that are more efficient.Before I get into the nitty gritty details, I want to give you some context as to why I used the specific growth strategy that I did (and on the flipside, why I chose to ignore certain leadgen tactics). My largest consideration was around certain constraints I had in my business:I had minimal cash, so I couldn’t buy ads or do anything for lead gen which costed $At the time, I didn’t have digital marketing skills, so I couldn’t use fancy funnels or digital lead gen tacticsAs a new company, I didn’t have any client testimonials or quantifiable evidence that showed my offering could add a ton of valueI had a ticking clock, so I couldn’t do anything which would take too long to generate results (ie. creating a ton of content, optimizing for SEO, and waiting for inbound leads to reach out to me)Given that those were my limitations, I wanted a fast way of getting my first few clients which involved very little money and didn’t need me to have a fancy website/funnel/content library.If you’re in the early days of your biz, these limitations may be true for you as well.After a ton of initial research, the only method which fit those parameters was to use free organic outreach (ie. directly messaging my audience on email/FB/Linkedin)Obviously, the downside to this tactic was that it’s manual and time-consuming, but I had the time and willingness the execute.As well, given that I spent my 7 years prior in enterprise sales, I knew exactly how to find leads, get their emails, and write compelling sales outreach which could net me meetings. I was confident that it would work.Below were the tests I ran, and the results:Traditional sales messaging DOESN’T WORK when you’re just starting your businessSo a really huge wakeup call for me was in my first month of outreach, I reached out to over 500 people and ONLY booked 3 total meetings. That’s an abysmal conversion rate. Frankly, it was a bit confusing because I had thought I was good at writing sales emails.But what I realized was that I was going about it all wrong. When you’re an early stage founder, traditional “pitch and persuade” cold sales tactics don’t work.(Note: When I say “pitch & persuade”, it’s when you reach out to someone asking for a sales meeting by claiming you can help them accomplish a certain goal or get to an outcome/ROI. If they actually value the goal you’re promising and believe you can help, they’ll accept your invite for a sales meeting.)After a ton of testing and feedback gathering, here’s why I realized this traditional sales outreach style didn’t work for me:I had no evidence or data to support my claimsI couldn’t point to any previous client success storiesI was unsure about what messaging would resonate best with my audienceThe truth is, the “pitch and persuade” sales outreach CAN book meetings in the right circumstances. Like I said, I used it effectively for 7 years.But the difference is, when a successful company or founder gets results out of that tactic, it’s ONLY because they embed legit proof supporting the “big sales claim” in their outreach. They aren’t simply saying “I can help you accomplish (insert big gaudy claim)” and ending their statement there. They’re also citing real customer testimonials as well. They can link videos, a great website, and helpful content. This all builds credibility.Once the credibility is provided and the seller builds an irrefutable and data-backed case that they can help, the buyer will have no choice but to book the sales meeting (of course, this is assuming the buyer actually cares about solving the problem in question).So why does a founder starting a new business/offering fail during traditional sales driven cold outreach?When you’re just beginning, you have no evidence. No client testimonials. No proof. Your website probably sucks. You may have only a few pieces of content showing your thought leadership (whether it be blogs, or videos). Hell, maybe you have none.So of course, if you straight up pitch someone, they’re going to ignore you. After all, would YOU reply if a stranger emailed you something promising the world, if they had zero supporting evidence or credibility?Probably not.Even if you’ve built a product/service that is really good, your prospect doesn’t know that. And you haven’t earned their trust for them to actually spend half an hour with you to find out.Here’s the crazy hack that landed me my first sale within a week of implementing this methodSo, once I realized that straight pitching doesn’t work, I readjusted my approach entirely.I call it the “Customer Discovery Method”. Here’s the basic premise.Instead of cold messaging someone trying to pitch them, you should cold message someone on the premise of doing “market research and product discovery”.Here is the framework of a message that I literally have sent in the past:“Hey (name),Always exciting to meet experienced folks like yourself that have been in the (insert niche/industry) for a while.I'd actually love if you could help me out with some feedback. Currently, I'm working on a new project that helps (insert the target audience) accomplish/improve (insert specific goal you’re solving for, or problem you’re getting rid of). I’m still in the beta right now though.Not going to try to sell you or anything, but I' d really value your input so I’m on the right track and only creating an offering that people truly want.Would you be open for a quick chat this week (in-person or phone works)? Coffee on me if you can make the time”When I used this approach, I IMMEDIATELY started booking an absurd amount of meetings. In less than 4 days, I had booked 17 meetings with people who were in my ideal target market, and landed my first deal within a week.The reason why this worked was because I was triggering a few unconscious biases and psychological tendencies that people had.Because I was asking for help and telling them I admired their background, I made them feel good about themselves and their expertisePeople then wanted to help me because I made them feel like they had the power to do so, AND they liked me so they were willingI made people feel like they would have a part of something greater than just themselvesWhen you get sold to, your guard naturally goes up. However, this methodology puts people at ease because it’s more relationship driven. You don’t need evidence if you’re just asking for help.Super profitable, super inexpensive, and pretty easy to do.Here’s how to actually implement this tactic in the right way to actually get resultsIt’s important to realize that this is NOT a bait and switch. You do NOT get someone on a phone call and then jam your sales pitch down their throat.It has to be genuine. On the call, you need to be asking real questions to learn more about your audience, their problems, why those problems are impacting them so much, and their honest feedback about your product.The beautiful thing about this approach is that the feedback in it of itself is super helpful. Up to this point, you’ve likely built your features and tech mostly on your own gut feel and instinct. However, with the feedback you get from these conversations, you may realize that you need to add some features, or adjust the problem that you’re trying to solve, even change certain things in your offering, etc.This improves your offering, and even gives you a better sense of what messaging and copy will resonate with your core clientele.But you’re killing two birds with one stone here. Because inevitably, some of the people you talk to will be experiencing the exact problems that you’re solving for.As you’re chatting with them learning about their day, you’ll hear them say stuff like, “Ya. This actually is a big problem or me…” or “Honestly, talking with you is a bit of a coincidence, I’ve actually been having a hard time with this recently...”When you hear them give you that type of feedback, that’s when you pivot and say, “Hey! I can help. Can I share with you about how I (insert what you do)?”At that point, you share with them what you’re up to and get feedback from them about your services.A few things to keep in mind when you do thisJust because you’ve followed this basic formula doesn’t mean that clients will fall out of the sky.You still need to be intelligent about how you find your prospects. If you’re messaging people who don’t care about solving the problem that you’re trying to solve, then you’re wasting your time. That would be like selling fertilizer to someone who lives in a manhattan condo. Message your ideal audience, the audience who likely cares.As well, volume matters. If you decide that you really want to get some early clients, but you’re only putting in the work to message 10 new people a day, then you’re still not going to get results. You need to have the discipline and commitment to find and connect with at least 50 people a day. Any less and you’re not working hard enough. In the early stages of your business, you gotta HUSTLE.Lastly, even if you get meetings, you still have to know how to talk on the phone. Now, I know this is scary. If you’ve never sold before, or maybe it’s your first time building a business, this is super intimidating.I can relate. My first sales experience was going door to door as an 18 year old selling window cleaning to pay off college tuition. I sucked. I probably stood in front of my first house staring at the door for 5 minutes before mustering up enough courage to ring that doorbell. But in the last 7 years, I’ve done over 2000 sales meetings. It gets easier and more intuitive over time.Lastly, I do want to emphasize that this tactic should NOT be relied on any longer than your first 5 clients. By then, you should have adequate client testimonials, data, content, and cash that other tactics are a more efficient way to grow your business. This is only meant for you to get off the ground.If anyone has questions about this, or just wants to get connected, add me on Linkedin, as I'm looking to grow my network. I post content there as well!I also run a group on Facebook that has a community of other likeminded founders, and we're always sharing ideas. Happy to have you join as well if you're growing your business.And lastly, shameless plug, I actually created a webinar that goes into with more detail all the other strategies I utilize that helped me with client acquisition (organic methods like Linkedin and email, as well as how to execute inbound using content)Cheers!

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

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onlinemarketingcourses · 6 years ago

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How I Increased My Organic Traffic 652% in 7 Days

There’s a new SEO strategy that’s crushing it right now.

(“Skyscraper Technique 2.0”)

I recently used this strategy to increase organic traffic to one of my pages by 652.1%.

(In 7 days)

This same approach helped my brand new post hit the #1 spot in Google… within weeks.

And today I’m going to show you exactly how I did it, step-by-step.

My Content Was a Smash Hit… Then It Flopped

On July 26th, 2016 I published this post:

My post got a huge spike in traffic in its first week:

Lots of shares:

And people quickly started linking to it:

Sure enough, my page cracked the top 10 for my target keyword (“SEO checklist”) a few weeks later.

All good right?

Well… not really.

You see, my posts usually get more traffic from SEO over time.

Not my SEO checklist page.

In fact: organic traffic to that page decreased as time went on.

It got so bad that my post averaged only 4-5 visitors per day.

And my rankings dropped to the middle of the second page:

That’s When I Wondered: “What Happened?!”

On paper my content had everything going for it:

200+ backlinks.

Lots of comments (which Google likes).

And social shares out the wazoo.

What was missing?

User Intent.

User Intent + SEO = Higher Rankings

Remember:

Google’s #1 goal is to make users happy.

Which means they need to give people results that match their User Intent.

Never heard of User Intent? Here’s a simple explanation:

Definition

The main goal behind a user’s Google search.

And Google is REALLY good at figuring out User Intent.

In fact, a big part of Google RankBrain is to give users “results that it thinks searchers will like the most”.

And the 2018 Google Quality Rater Guidelines has an entire section on User Intent:

Google has even started asking users about their User Intent:

That’s when it hit me:

My post was getting buried because it didn’t satisfy user intent.

Here’s what happened next:

Skyscraper Technique 2.0: (An SEO Strategy That Works GREAT In 2018)

After I optimized my page around User Intent, organic traffic shot up like a rocketship:

And my rankings went from #11 to #5:

(And these improved rankings have stuck 4+ months later)

With that, here are the steps for The Skyscraper Technique 2.0:

Step 1: Figure out User Intent

Step 2: Satisfy User Intent

Step 3: Optimize for UX signals

To be clear:

The original Skyscraper Technique still works GREAT.

For example, this list of SEO tools is classic Skyscraper Content.

Most SEO tools posts list 10-20 tools. So I decided to review over 180:

And because my page is bigger and better, lots of people have linked to it:

That said:

This page also satisfies User Intent.

Which is why it ranks in the top 3 for my target keyword:

In short:

Ideally, you want to use Skyscraper Technique 1.0 AND 2.0.

Skyscraper Technique 1.0 helps you get the links you need to hit the first page.

And Skyscraper Technique 2.0 will make sure those rankings stick.

Let’s dive into the steps…

Step #1: Figure Out User Intent

Here are two simple ways to identify User Intent:

Analyze the First Page

Google’s first page gives you a HUGE insight into User Intent.

Why?

If something ranks on Google’s first page, you KNOW that it satisfies User Intent.

So all you need to do is search for your keyword…

…and scan the top 10 results.

Specifically, answer the question:

“What kind of intent do these results satisfy?”

Do people want information? If so, are they looking for the basics… or advanced strategies?

Do they want to buy something? If so, are they ready to buy… or comparing two different products?

For example…

If you search for “Office Space Brooklyn”, the results are 100% transactional:

In fact, 10 out of 10 results are sites for booking an office space:

But if you search for “Coworking Space Brooklyn”, you get something completely different:

The results are mostly blog posts about the best coworking spots in the city:

So:

On the surface these keywords seem similar.

But Google’s first page reveals that the User Intent is VERY different.

Look At the Keyword Itself

Sometimes the keyword itself tells you all you need to know.

For example…

With my SEO checklist post, I asked myself:

“What does someone searching for ‘SEO checklist’ actually want?”

Duh! They want an SEO checklist.

Despite that, my original post was a case study… not a checklist.

Sure, there were some steps that resembled a checklist.

But it wasn’t the type of detailed checklist that searchers wanted.

And Google noticed.

Which leads us to…

Step #2: Satisfy User Intent

At this point I had User Intent figured out.

And now it was time to publish something to match that User Intent.

Here’s exactly how I did it:

Covered the Basics

I noticed that other content ranking for “SEO checklist” had steps for people new to SEO:

And I quickly realized something:

My original post was WAY too advanced.

In fact, the first step was: “Delete Dead Weight Pages”.

This is a strategy that people new to SEO should absolutely NOT use.

So I replaced this advanced strategy with steps for SEO newbies:

Changed the Format

Like I mentioned earlier, the original version of my post was a step-by-step case study.

So I changed the format.

This time, I made the content more checklisty.

Covered More Stuff

Google’s top 10 results were clear:

People searching for “SEO checklist” want checklists that cover LOTS of different stuff.

Despite that, my post had ZERO info on:

Technical SEO

Link building

Keyword research

SEO software and tools

So I expanded my post to hit on these important subtopics:

I Emphasized “2018”

I noticed a clear pattern in the search results:

Most of the content pointed out that their checklist worked in 2018.

So I emphasized that my checklist was up-to-date.

How?

I included “2018” in my title tag…

…in the introduction…

…and I even mentioned “2018” a few times in the content itself:

Now:

In this case I rewrote an existing post.

But you can use this same strategy for brand new content.

For example…

A few months ago I wanted to write something about mobile optimization.

The first thing I did was search for “Mobile SEO”… and scan the results.

And I noticed 3 things about Google’s first page results:

They covered WHY mobile SEO is important.

So I led off my guide with a handful of stats:

2. They wrote about responsive design vs. dynamic serving vs. “M. mobile sites”

So did I:

3. They had tips for improving sitespeed.

So I included a section on that.

The end result was “Mobile SEO: The Definitive Guide”.

And largely thanks to The Skyscraper Technique 2.0, it quickly climbed to the #1 for my target keyword:

(Above heavyweights like Moz, Search Engine Land… even Google itself)

And now it’s time to…

Step #3: Optimize for UX Signals

Here’s the deal:

Your content can be a PERFECT match for User Intent.

But if it looks like this…

…people are gonna leave your site like it’s on fire.

And Google will quickly downrank you:

So now that you’ve nailed User Intent, it’s time to optimize for UX Signals.

Specifically, this step is all about engineering your content to:

Maximize Dwell Time

Maximize organic CTR

Minimize bounce rate

Here’s how:

Embed Videos

Wistia found that: “people spent on average 2.6x more time on pages with video than without.”

Now:

I’ve never seen a video work THAT well.

But videos can definitely keep people on your site longer.

That’s why I embedded a few videos in my SEO checklist post:

Table of Contents

I added a table of contents to the top of my new post:

And this table of contents got me some sweet sitelinks in the search results:

Needless to say, these sitelinks boosted my organic CTR.

Short Introductions

What’s the first thing someone does when they land on your post?

They read your intro.

In fact, take a look at this heatmap from the Backlinko blog:

As you can see, there’s A LOT of action on the first few lines of my intro:

And if you start your post off with a long intro… users are gonna bounce.

That’s why I write short and sweet introductions (5-8 sentences).

LOTS of Examples

Examples INSTANTLY separate your content from the regurgitated garbage that most people publish.

So don’t be afraid to use tons of examples in every post.

For example:

I included 19 examples in my new SEO checklist post:

H2 and H3 Subheaders

Subheaders break up your content into chunks:

(Which makes your content MUCH easier to read)

In fact:

My SEO checklist post has over 9 subheaders:

Short Sentences. Short Paragraphs.

Here’s how to make your content 10x easier to read:

Short sentences. Short paragraphs.

That’s why I write short sentences:

And use 1-2 sentence paragraphs:

Which is a big part of why my post’s average time on page is 5:53.

Over To You

Now I’d like to hear from you:

What do you think of The Skyscraper Technique 2.0?

Or maybe you have a question.

Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.

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energyphotos-blog1 · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on http://twoarticles.com/how-i-increased-my-organic-traffic-652-in-7-days/

How I Increased My Organic Traffic 652% in 7 Days

There’s a new SEO strategy that’s crushing it right now.

(“Skyscraper Technique 2.0”)

I recently used this strategy to increase organic traffic to one of my pages by 652.1%.

(In 7 days)

This same approach helped my brand new post hit the #1 spot in Google… within weeks.

And today I’m going to show you exactly how I did it, step-by-step.

My Content Was a Smash Hit… Then It Flopped

On July 26th, 2016 I published this post:

My post got a huge spike in traffic in its first week:

Lots of shares:

And people quickly started linking to it:

Sure enough, my page cracked the top 10 for my target keyword (“SEO checklist”) a few weeks later.

All good right?

Well… not really.

You see, my posts usually get more traffic from SEO over time.

Not my SEO checklist page.

In fact: organic traffic to that page decreased as time went on.

It got so bad that my post averaged only 4-5 visitors per day.

And my rankings dropped to the middle of the second page:

That’s When I Wondered: “What Happened?!”

On paper my content had everything going for it:

200+ backlinks.

Lots of comments (which Google likes).

And social shares out the wazoo.

What was missing?

User Intent.

User Intent + SEO = Higher Rankings

Remember:

Google’s #1 goal is to make users happy.

Which means they need to give people results that match their User Intent.

Never heard of User Intent? Here’s a simple explanation:

Definition

The main goal behind a user’s Google search.

And Google is REALLY good at figuring out User Intent.

In fact, a big part of Google RankBrain is to give users “results that it thinks searchers will like the most”.

And the 2018 Google Quality Rater Guidelines has an entire section on User Intent:

Google has even started asking users about their User Intent:

That’s when it hit me:

My post was getting buried because it didn’t satisfy user intent.

Here’s what happened next:

Skyscraper Technique 2.0: (An SEO Strategy That Works GREAT In 2018)

After I optimized my page around User Intent, organic traffic shot up like a rocketship:

And my rankings went from #11 to #5:

(And these improved rankings have stuck 4+ months later)

With that, here are the steps for The Skyscraper Technique 2.0:

Step 1: Figure out User Intent

Step 2: Satisfy User Intent

Step 3: Optimize for UX signals

To be clear:

The original Skyscraper Technique still works GREAT.

For example, this list of SEO tools is classic Skyscraper Content.

Most SEO tools posts list 10-20 tools. So I decided to review over 180:

And because my page is bigger and better, lots of people have linked to it:

That said:

This page also satisfies User Intent.

Which is why it ranks in the top 3 for my target keyword:

In short:

Ideally, you want to use Skyscraper Technique 1.0 AND 2.0.

Skyscraper Technique 1.0 helps you get the links you need to hit the first page.

And Skyscraper Technique 2.0 will make sure those rankings stick.

Let’s dive into the steps…

Step #1: Figure Out User Intent

Here are two simple ways to identify User Intent:

Analyze the First Page

Google’s first page gives you a HUGE insight into User Intent.

Why?

If something ranks on Google’s first page, you KNOW that it satisfies User Intent.

So all you need to do is search for your keyword…

…and scan the top 10 results.

Specifically, answer the question:

“What kind of intent do these results satisfy?”

Do people want information? If so, are they looking for the basics… or advanced strategies?

Do they want to buy something? If so, are they ready to buy… or comparing two different products?

For example…

If you search for “Office Space Brooklyn”, the results are 100% transactional:

In fact, 10 out of 10 results are sites for booking an office space:

But if you search for “Coworking Space Brooklyn”, you get something completely different:

The results are mostly blog posts about the best coworking spots in the city:

So:

On the surface these keywords seem similar.

But Google’s first page reveals that the User Intent is VERY different.

Look At the Keyword Itself

Sometimes the keyword itself tells you all you need to know.

For example…

With my SEO checklist post, I asked myself:

“What does someone searching for ‘SEO checklist’ actually want?”

Duh! They want an SEO checklist.

Despite that, my original post was a case study… not a checklist.

Sure, there were some steps that resembled a checklist.

But it wasn’t the type of detailed checklist that searchers wanted.

And Google noticed.

Which leads us to…

Step #2: Satisfy User Intent

At this point I had User Intent figured out.

And now it was time to publish something to match that User Intent.

Here’s exactly how I did it:

Covered the Basics

I noticed that other content ranking for “SEO checklist” had steps for people new to SEO:

And I quickly realized something:

My original post was WAY too advanced.

In fact, the first step was: “Delete Dead Weight Pages”.

This is a strategy that people new to SEO should absolutely NOT use.

So I replaced this advanced strategy with steps for SEO newbies:

Changed the Format

Like I mentioned earlier, the original version of my post was a step-by-step case study.

So I changed the format.

This time, I made the content more checklisty.

Covered More Stuff

Google’s top 10 results were clear:

People searching for “SEO checklist” want checklists that cover LOTS of different stuff.

Despite that, my post had ZERO info on:

Technical SEO

Link building

Keyword research

SEO software and tools

So I expanded my post to hit on these important subtopics:

I Emphasized “2018”

I noticed a clear pattern in the search results:

Most of the content pointed out that their checklist worked in 2018.

So I emphasized that my checklist was up-to-date.

How?

I included “2018” in my title tag…

…in the introduction…

…and I even mentioned “2018” a few times in the content itself:

Now:

In this case I rewrote an existing post.

But you can use this same strategy for brand new content.

For example…

A few months ago I wanted to write something about mobile optimization.

The first thing I did was search for “Mobile SEO”… and scan the results.

And I noticed 3 things about Google’s first page results:

They covered WHY mobile SEO is important.

So I led off my guide with a handful of stats:

2. They wrote about responsive design vs. dynamic serving vs. “M. mobile sites”

So did I:

3. They had tips for improving sitespeed.

So I included a section on that.

The end result was “Mobile SEO: The Definitive Guide”.

And largely thanks to The Skyscraper Technique 2.0, it quickly climbed to the #1 for my target keyword:

(Above heavyweights like Moz, Search Engine Land… even Google itself)

And now it’s time to…

Step #3: Optimize for UX Signals

Here’s the deal:

Your content can be a PERFECT match for User Intent.

But if it looks like this…

…people are gonna leave your site like it’s on fire.

And Google will quickly downrank you:

So now that you’ve nailed User Intent, it’s time to optimize for UX Signals.

Specifically, this step is all about engineering your content to:

Maximize Dwell Time

Maximize organic CTR

Minimize bounce rate

Here’s how:

Embed Videos

Wistia found that: “people spent on average 2.6x more time on pages with video than without.”

Now:

I’ve never seen a video work THAT well.

But videos can definitely keep people on your site longer.

That’s why I embedded a few videos in my SEO checklist post:

Table of Contents

I added a table of contents to the top of my new post:

And this table of contents got me some sweet sitelinks in the search results:

Needless to say, these sitelinks boosted my organic CTR.

Short Introductions

What’s the first thing someone does when they land on your post?

They read your intro.

In fact, take a look at this heatmap from the Backlinko blog:

As you can see, there’s A LOT of action on the first few lines of my intro:

And if you start your post off with a long intro… users are gonna bounce.

That’s why I write short and sweet introductions (5-8 sentences).

LOTS of Examples

Examples INSTANTLY separate your content from the regurgitated garbage that most people publish.

So don’t be afraid to use tons of examples in every post.

For example:

I included 19 examples in my new SEO checklist post:

H2 and H3 Subheaders

Subheaders break up your content into chunks:

(Which makes your content MUCH easier to read)

In fact:

My SEO checklist post has over 9 subheaders:

Short Sentences. Short Paragraphs.

Here’s how to make your content 10x easier to read:

Short sentences. Short paragraphs.

That’s why I write short sentences:

And use 1-2 sentence paragraphs:

Which is a big part of why my post’s average time on page is 5:53.

Over To You

Now I’d like to hear from you:

What do you think of The Skyscraper Technique 2.0?

Or maybe you have a question.

Either way, let me know by leaving a comment below right now.

This article is copyright ezinearticles on website http://www.twoarticles.com 2018

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theinvinciblenoob · 6 years ago

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Alice Lloyd George Contributor

Alice Lloyd George is an investor at RRE Ventures and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology.

More posts by this contributor

Thomas Reardon and CTRL-Labs are building an API for the brain

Solving the mystery of sleep

Last week Sketchfab, the 3D content hub, shared an exciting milestone — the company has just crossed 1 billion cumulative pageviews. Taken with the community’s growth — they just surpassed 2 million users, as well as the 200 million people that have experienced content via Sketchfab more broadly, this makes it one of the platforms with the largest reaches for interactive 3D content on the web.

With Google’s Poly turning one and Microsoft’s Remix 3D turning two, it’s an interesting moment to reflect where we are in the trajectory of the 3D web.

Alban Denoyel, the CEO of Sketchfab has watched the industry and community evolve in the six years since he founded the company. In an interview for Flu I sat with Alban and we got into the history of the business and how he’s built a team between Europe and the U.S., what the company has learned from Youtube and why they are pursuing a distributed content strategy. Alban also shared details on how power creators are using the platform to monetize content, the powerful role 3D plays in cultural heritage, and the importance of figuring out standards and formats in 3D. An excerpt of the conversation can be found below and the full transcript is on Medium.

AMLG: Our guest today is Alban Denoyel. He is the founder and CEO of Sketchfab a hub for 3D content on the internet. The company was founded in 2012 and is based between New York and Paris. I haven’t caught up with you for some time, it’s great to see you again. I believe you had a baby girl in the last few months?

AD: Three months ago.

AMLG: Congratulations. Maybe we can start with a bit your history, how you got into graphics, came over from France for Techstars and the origins of the company.

AD: Sure. We started the company back in 2012 in Paris. I actually had a business background so for the first two years of the company I was the only non-developer in the team. I do sculpture as a hobby and was commissioned to make a large piece. I was trying to figure out what was the most efficient way to make it. That’s how I heard about 3D printing. Back in 2011 in France it was very new. I found it fascinating and was telling everybody about it — “3D printing, that’s the future if you haven’t heard about it.”

AMLG: Clay sculptures?

AD: Initially wood sculpture, then for this piece it had to be clay because it was too big for wood and I had to do a mould. A lot of that would have been easier if I had known about 3D scanning and all that stuff. Then in 2012, I left my job because I wanted to start a company. I was trying to meet as many people as possible. I went to a party where I was preaching the 3D printing gospel again. Someone told me, hey you should go talk to this guy back there he’s a 3D guy. So I went to Cedric who is now my co-founder and CTO. He had never heard about 3D printing. But he told me, “I’ve been working on this prototype around 3D. If you are interested I’d be happy to talk more. Let’s have lunch.” So we agreed to have lunch the next day. Then he showed me what was essentially the first web-based 3D player to have ever been built. He had been a 3D programmer in the video game industry for 15 years and was hired by Mozilla to make the first demo of WebGL for the launch of Firefox 4 back in 2011. He built the first WebGL framework — so WebGL is now standard but wasn’t standard back then to display 3D graphics in the browser. He showed me the prototype which was really just an upload button, you uploaded a 3D file and got back a URL and saw the 3D file in your web page. No user interface, no nothing.

AMLG: So he had built the core idea already a bit, tinkered with it.

AD: Yeah. He kind of built it as a tool for himself. He was working with 3D artists in the gaming industry and they were sharing screenshots of their work, which sucked. He said hey maybe I can find something better. So he built it for himself and had told nobody about it.

AMLG: Did you convince him to leave his job?

Sketchfab co-founders Alban Denoyel, Cédric Pinson and Pierre-Antoine Passet

AD: He had already moved to full-time freelancing around WebGL. He was super happy as a freelancer, he had no intention to build a business. And I initially had no sense as to whether this would be a sustainable idea. So I just started helping out on the side. It immediately took off because we were the first platform to do that. Then our third co-founder Pierre-Antoine joined us a few months after. We quickly realized we’re the first mover in the space. And that if we wanted to reach our ambitions and find funding and get partnerships with the big tech guys we had to move to the U.S. fast. If you look at other media platforms — we had DailyMotion for video in France, we had Deezer for music. They both got doubled by U.S. companies because it was harder back then to move to the U.S. So very early on I started applying to the U.S. accelerators. We first got into Web Forward which was Mozilla’s accelerator, so we spent Q4 of 2012 in San Francisco and then back to Paris. We knew we had to go back to the U.S. as fast as possible and we applied and got into TechStars New York in spring 2013. So that’s how we came back.

AMLG: Ok. So to get into what is Sketchfab—it’s essentially a platform for creators to publish and users to consume 3D content. There’s an embeddable player that displays 3D content across the web. So much of the 3D landscape has changed in the six years since you started the company. What is the biggest difference now?

AD: There’s been shifts on the two sides of the platform, both creation and consumption. When we started there were only professional people creating 3D content. You needed advanced professional tools like 3ds Max or SolidWorks and AutoCAD. The crowd of people who could become Sketchfab users was limited to 20 million or so 3D professionals. Then on the consumption side, there was no VR or AR. 3D printing was very early and there were fewer ways to consume the content. Six years later — the iPhone 10 has a depth sensor, which means you can do 3D capture on the spot. That means that anyone with a smartphone will become a 3D creator moving our target user base from 20 million to 2 billion people. Then on the consumption side, 3D used to be meant only for background work, back office stuff like manufacturing. A lot of ads are done with 3D assets but the result is 2D and its the same for movies. Whereas today you can consume stuff that is made in 3D in a 3D form which is VR or AR. So the appetite for 3D content is exploding and there are more and more ways to use and leverage that content. So it’s become increasingly important to be able to share and find that content.

The evolution of capture

AMLG: When it comes to those two sides of the marketplace it feels like on the consumption side we’re at this turning point with VRAR, that we’re about to have all these different ways to consume. But the creation side still feels like a bottleneck. I mean I’m trying to learn Unity so maybe that’s my own personal struggle. But when we talk about how creation has evolved, we started with cave paintings and then went to regular paintings, then photography, then video, and now we’re going to 3D. We’re starting to learn how to capture in 3D.

You mentioned Intel RealSense. Obviously, there was a lot of excitement with Google Project Tango — RIP. I still have my Lenovo Phab. I was very excited to get it, it took such a long time to come. But I was hoping we’d see more uptick in capture and content growth from that. My understanding is that the Tango team rolled into AR Core anyway so that’s been a positive. That’s capture. There’s also Tiltbrush and other tools for creating. But overall, is there still a bottleneck?

AD: It’s definitely true that for the average person there aren’t a lot of seamless ways to create content. But the thing is you don’t need a crazy depth sensor to make 3D capture. Most of our 3D captures on Sketchfab are coming from photogrammetry. It’s an older technique stitching a ton of images together. The downside is that it’s much less seamless than depth sensors because you have to take a lot of pictures. But the upside is that the result looks nicer because the tech is more evolved. I would say about half of our uploads are coming from 3D capture. More and more is coming from drones. We see new use cases for 3D captures every day, we see new solutions coming to market every day. I guess for the outside world it may seem like a bottleneck. But for us, because we have become the go-to place to publish that content, we see a lot of volume.

AMLG: In various talks you’ve said that 3D is eating the world. I think that’s true it’s just, along what timeframe? Is it nibbling, is it taking a large chomp, where are we in that… What do you think will be different about 3D and where are we in format standardization?

AD: It’s important to make a differentiation between the formats and the platform to host it. There’s been a lot of technical discussions around which 3D format should be the holy grail of 3D formats. It’s an ecosystem that is much more fragmented than sound or video. But even if we do get to an agreement around the best 3D format you still need a platform to host it, publish it, share it, embed it, display it. That’s where we come in and where YouTube comes in for video. Today you can display a video on a web page without Youtube. It’s part of any normal html5 markup. We’re going to get to the same state for the 3D world.

ugh

AMLG: I remember the days of “please make sure you’ve downloaded Adobe Flash plugin” — like, what.

AD: Yeah so Youtube made it easy and then reached critical mass, and at that point there was no reason not to use Youtube because it made it easier. That’s what we want to do.

AMLG: And you’ve done that with the embedded API right? You have that built-in capability now, to view Sketchfab content across the web? Through your partnerships.

AD: Yes. We’ve spent a lot of energy on that. The main difference when it comes to consuming the format is it’s a very different medium. Even if now we’re able to support many volumetric movies which are closer to what a video is, a lot of the content is more like objects or scenes. And while a lot of it makes sense to be consumed as is, there are a number of assets that make more sense combined or reused in a different context. So maybe it’s just because the Web part of the ecosystem is too early to do this efficiently. But what we’ve come to realize is that while YouTube is fully optimized for content being consumed within the Youtube player, we’re just starting to see that there is more value in letting the content go, letting it leave the Sketchfab player to be reused in different contexts.

AMLG: So it’s distributed consumption rather than a destination.

AD: Exactly.

AMLG: Which is why it’s such a feat. I saw pinned to the top of your Twitter that “it took six years but I’m proud to say we’ve been able to partner with Google Apple Facebook Amazon and Microsoft.” Slow but steady. I can’t imagine what kind of work that took. I guess it comes back to what you were saying with WebGL. Curious to get into that — it’s really the first web standard that allows you to display 3D graphics in a browser without a plugin. Mozilla has been driving that and you have DNA from Mozilla in your team. What is it about Mozilla? I mean they’re a free open source browser, but why are they such a critical role in this ecosystem? They seem very forward thinking.

AD: They’ve always been pushing for content openness and distribution. A lot of previous formats were quickly grabbed by large tech companies and then locked into proprietary formats like Flash. So they felt this shouldn’t happen for the 3D world. What’s interesting is that they pioneered WebGL back in 2011 2012 and they did it again with WebVR WebAR webXR. They were actually the first browser — Firefox — to launch with built-in WebVR support out of the box a few months ago, ahead of Google and any other browser which is impressive.

AMLG: So how does this all relate to WebVR?

AD: Well VR is just another screen, another way to consume the content. We are the repository and then you can consume it on mobile on desktop in VR in AR. What I like about WebVR is that instead of having people needing to go to one of the VR destination sites like the Oculus store or the Steam platform — people don’t have the habit to do that. We’ve been betting heavily on the concept of embedding content anywhere on the Web. Our content is traveling across e-commerce websites, news sites and so on. Then you run into the Sketchfab player wherever you are — in your Facebook feed, in a tweet. You can consume it the way you want. If you have your VR headset plugged in you can just jump into it in VR without having to worry about anything else.

AMLG: So it’s hardware agnostic right? And the API works for this. That API essentially gives developers access to your 150,000 3D models?

AD: So WebVR lets you consume our entire library of 3 million plus assets straight from our player. Our player is VR enabled for the web. And then our download API is a pipeline to get the content outside of our player to be used natively inside any other — well it can then re-end into WebVR but in another platform —

AMLG: I may have to draw a diagram for listeners. But what you’re saying is you’ve made it really easy for people to access.

AD: Yeah to search — the concept is a search bar for the 3D world. Just like when you are in Photoshop or even Google Slides, if you want to get content, they have integrations with guys like Shutterstock or Getty or Fotolia . It’s just a library of 2D stuff. We want to do the same thing for the 3D world.

November 13th 2018 announcement

AMLG: To get into the numbers and give listeners a sense, as of July you have a community of over a million and a half users who’ve published close to 3 million 3D models, which I believe makes Sketchfab the largest library of 3D volumetric content online?

AD: We’re close to 2 million users now and we just passed 3 million assets.

AMLG: Can you get into uniques per month — you said a few months ago maybe five million. I’m guessing it’s somewhere near 10 million now?

AD: Yeah we’re in between that.

AMLG: OK. I want to get a bit more concrete around the types of content. Initially you were targeting 3D artists, animation, gaming studios — it seems like over time use cases and content types are much broader than you thought?

AD: We’ve had this kind of tension, in terms of market and even in terms of co-founders. I wanted to get traction and critical mass and volume and go for like Youtube model. My co-founders were more like, we need to serve the artists and make a solution for the best content, and having the best content will reflect positively on our platform. So do we go after less great content? We quickly became the market leader and so we decided we might as well go for every type of 3D content. So today we managed to grab the high end of the market. If you go to Sketchfab, the curated part is really high-end stuff that takes a month or six months to build. Then we have the long tail of things that are drawn by kids in Tiltbrush or 3D capture. Like I make portraits of my son, it’s not great content but it’s great content for me.

It seems like shoes come up a lot. I saw your Balenciaga partnership for their trainers, it’s high-quality stuff. You’re into shoes and have uploaded shoes. What is it with 3D shoes and e-commerce, and when is e-commerce 3D going to start penetrating for the average person?

Brands Sketchfab has worked with

AD: It always sounded crazy to me that when you buy your product you go to the product page and then you have 10 pictures of 10 angles of the product. We can do better than that. Then, of course, you think about AR and VR and the day that we will have Apple AR glasses on our head. Every brand will need a virtual version of their products. The good news is that most brands manufacture physical products, and they start with a 3D design because they need to manufacture it. So a lot of them already have 3D files of what they sell. But most of this content doesn’t look good and isn’t meant to be consumed that way.

Sketchfab collaboration with Balenciaga

We want to help 3D get into e-commerce and we’re starting with verticals where 3D is the most relevant and already present and accessible. Those categories are typically things like furniture. We work with brands like made.com. Shoes is an area where 3D is very present in innovation, just to design a shoe, and it’s also easy to 3D scan a shoe and has a great result. Often we combine both. I guess I also have a bias because I’m a shoe person —

AMLG: A sneakerhead.

AD: Yeah. I really want to get all the, well we actually already work with Adidas, Nike, New Balance and Crocs — I want to work with the shoe brands. It also seems like the type of product like you care more about seeing in 3D than a T-shirt. It’s more expensive. And then there are so many differences from one shoe to another. So many components and technical features.

AMLG: Do you think any businesses are proving out an ROI with 3D yet when it comes to e-commerce?

AD: Well we’ve started experimenting with free advertising, partnering with Google and programmatic networks to get our player to run 3D ads. We’ve seen a much better ROI than 2D ads. Like for a jewelry brand we did a case study. But to be honest, when I pitch an e-commerce brand I’m not pitching the ROI angle first. It’s a byproduct and I expect it to be ROI positive. But 10 years from now you will need to be ready for when virtual content is seamlessly shared with physical content. So what do you do today to be ready for that?

AMLG: Get ahead of the curve.

AD: Yes and today it starts with a web-based player of your products on an e-commerce site, and then tomorrow, I don’t know what the user interface is going to be for AR VR —

AMLG: Why am I not seeing more 3D on Amazon . Are they going to do it?

AD: That’s a long conversation but yes they’re working on it.

AMLG: I would think so. They’re usually ahead of these things. I guess to get more into a random question for you— if you could go back in history and 3D capture any human or any place, what would it be?

AD: Well my last grandmother just passed away. She is the only one I was able to capture in 3D four years ago because she came to visit me in New York. It sounds silly but I would love to have 3D portraits of all my grandparents. It’s as close to who they were and who they are.

AMLG: Yeah it’s powerful stuff.

AD: I take 3D portraits of my kids. It sounds silly —

8i’s “mom-and-baby” hologram

AMLG: No not at all. We have a company called 8i and one of the first things they did was capture a mother holding a baby. It’s been one of the most popular assets. She came back a year later and stepped into herself again to hold the baby. She couldn’t believe how much her child had grown, stepping back into her own hologram and holding the baby. It was an interesting moment. That’s what they’ve found in capturing these human moments. I’d be curious to hear what was the first thing you ever uploaded or sold on Sketchfab?

AD: The first asset I sold was a 3D capture of a chocolate croissant. It sold for $4.99. What’s interesting is that first, we had no idea if 3D captures would sell on our store because traditionally it’s an industry driven by high-end computer graphics and 3D captures are usually not optimized, the content doesn’t always look as good. So I was not expecting to sell it. Also, I had no idea who would have use of a virtual version of a croissant that costs more than the actual thing. Then I did a bit of research. It turns out it was an entrepreneur building an AR app to give nutritional advice on food. He’s doing machine learning on virtual versions of foods, so he is able to look at any actual food piece and say, hey —

AMLG: I think I’ve come across this guy. I remember someone doing this.

AD: There are probably several people doing that. But what’s interesting is, don’t assume that things won’t sell. Because you never know how they are going to be used. It was just a great surprise for me and for Sketchfab as a platform.

via TechCrunch

#IFTTT #TechCrunch

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indiegrudge-blog · 6 years ago

Text

SEO in 2019: Predictions, Tips, and Strategies

As with previous years, our SEO team has put a lot of thought into our 2019 SEO best practices, predictions, and SEO ranking tips. Filled with today’s latest and greatest SEO techniques and strategies, you’re sure to dominate your industry if you properly execute these SEO tactics in 2019 and beyond. As with all of our SEO tips and suggestions, please be sure to test and measure, use only white-hate SEO techniques, and thank us when you’re ranked!

SEO Ranking and User Experience in 2019

As search algorithms become more and more advanced, user actions will play an important role in SEO and ranking. In fact, search engines like Google are advancing so much that they are actually learning user intent – this is called machine learning. Something that we’ve always preached with our SEO services is that you should always give the user the best experience possible. This correlates into longer time-on-site and less bounce rate, translating into improved rankings.

As the use of machine learning increases, user signals will factor more prominently into search engine rankings. UX issues could therefore prevent brands from reaching their potential in the organic search results — and, thinking more broadly, could stifle conversion performance.

What is RankBrain?

RankBrain is a form of machine learning that helps Google prioritize search results for their users. Ultimately, Google has a responsibility to provide their users with the best possible results too – RankBrain delivers those results.

In short, RankBrain measures how a user interacts with the provided search results.

Here’s a quick example of how RankBrain affects SEO: Let’s say you do a search for “Best Website Designs of 2018”. You fed a list of Google results based on this query and you click on a listing that’s most enticing to you. You find that this content is the best content ever and you read through every single word of it. Google is picking up on this, noticing the time you’ve spent on this particular article, and guess what? They’ll be using that single to improve the ranking of that page that you clicked on.

The same theory works for content that is not highly valued. If RankBrain sees that users are clicking on the #1 result for this search, arriving on the page but immediately bouncing within a few seconds, RankBrain recognizes this and will demote this page and push it further down on the page.

“In the few months it has been deployed, RankBrain has become the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query.”

Important data points for RankBrain and SEO:

Dwell Time – How long someone spends on a specific page Click Through Rate – The percentage of users that click on a specific result

Clickthrough Rate (CTR) and SEO Rankings in 2019

If you’re looking to really improve your SEO for 2019, you must improve your CTR. Google rewards websites with higher click through rates. If you think about it, if no users are clicking on your page then why would Google reward you with improved rankings?

Content Remains King for SEO in 2019

As with previous SEO ranking guides and lists, content has made the list and will most likely continue to be one of the most important ranking factors for most websites. As the data suggests, content that is informative, educational, creative, and lengthy seems to rank the highest.

Looking back at previous SEO ranking factor lists from years past, Google looked at the frequency and volume of published posts or articles when ranking. Now, Google is much more focused on the quality of content, bumping up content that exceeds the 2,000 word mark. In fact, you can go months without publishing a single piece of content on your website and the be pushed to the top of Google for a single piece of content that is highly researched and well thought-out.

How To Write Comprehensive, In-Depth Content that’s Contextual in 2019

Going back a few years, one of Google’s top SEO ranking factors was content. As previously mentioned, they focused on the volume of content produced around specific keywords. While Google still takes this into consideration to some degree, they’re getting a bit wiser as you may know and focusing more on context.

One topic we try to continuously drive home is the fact that Google wants to provide their users with the best possible user experience. After all, Google keeps its users coming back time and time again because of this. This leads to BILLIONS in ad revenue generated through Google Adwords. While this is a totally separate topic, it’s important to know WHY Google wants to provide the best experience so that users continue to return.

Providing contextual content is important because that page is most likely providing the best information for that specific topic. Think Wikipedia. There’s a reason why Wiki pages always continue to rank high in search results. It’s because of the DEPTH of content on a specific topic. Google knows that the information provided is going to prove to be the most useful to the USER.

If you’re looking to provide in-depth content to your end users, try shooting for content that exceeds the 2,000 word mark. With this goal in mind, you’re more likely to give the user the best and most useful content.

LSI Keywords for Improved SEO Rankings in 2019 and Beyond

After you’ve mastered hitting the 2,000 word count mark, go back into your content and start adding LSI keywords throughout. These are keywords that are most commonly related to your content and page topic.

How to Find LSI Keywords

Okay, so we’ve identified the fact that Google loves LSI keywords when ranking pages, but how can you source LSI keywords for your content and improve your SEO?

Common LSI tools include:

LSI Graph https://lsigraph.com/

Google. Yes, just Google!

When searching Google for your main target keyword, scroll down to the bottom of the results page and look for “Searches related to…” The search terms you see in bold are LSI keywords. Google is actually doing the work for you and letting you know that these should be included in your content.

SEO and Mobile-First Indexing in 2019

In 2017 Google announced that they they’ll be moving to a “mobile-first index”. What this means is that the version that Google see as your mobile version will be used as the most important version. In other words, if you have a separate mobile website with outdated content that differs from your main desktop version, Google will be serving the mobile version first.

This update is huge, but I think we all saw it coming from a mile away. Today, 60% of searches are made on mobile, and we can expect this figure to grow in the future.

How Can You Prepare for Mobile First Index in 2019?

In the past, it was common to see websites with both a desktop version and a mobile version of their site. While the content that was served to users on mobile devices was clean and easy to read, maintaining this content meant double-duty. You needed to update both your desktop and your mobile website. So it’s very important that your content is consistent across mobile and desktop. The best way to do so is to have a mobile-responsive website. As mobile-responsive website will ensure that ONE singular version will fit on almost any mobile device AND your desktop. This should eliminate the need to maintain two separate versions of your website.

Voice Search and SEO in 2019

Did you know that at least 40% of adults perform a form of voice search every single day? In fact, voice searches performed in Google are up for than 35 times since 2008, and, 20% of all searches on a mobile device are made through voice search.

So, how do you optimize your website for voice search in 2019?

First, it’s important to know that your website mush be on the first page of Google in order to appear in the search results. Next, your content is best presented in question and answer format. Data is certainly suggesting that the results generating by voice search are in question format. Feel free to test it out yourself.

Visual Content is Critical for SEO in 2019

Just like text based content, users love visuals. If you notice most forms of ads on social media these days are either video, gifs, or image based. Rarely do you ever see simple links being promoted on social media these days.

To take advantage of this upward trend and to improve your SEO, use lots of images, especially embeddable images. Embeddable images are images that a user can easily grab and use on their own website. The benefit is that the embed link and ALT text will be pointing back to your website.

Run a Blog? Encourage Blog Commenting for Improved SEO

While they sometimes appears to look spammy, blog comments actually help with SEO and rankings. In 2017, Google announced that blog commenting can actually help.

In fact, Google also stating that on-site blog commenting is a better engagement signal than social commenting. So go ahead and produce great content that attracts comments from your community. It can only help!

SEO Ranking Basics Not to Forget

While the landscape and trends typically shifts a bit from one year to the next in the SEO world, there are many SEO ranking factors that are always consistent. Below is a short list of actionable SEO tasks that even the most novice SEO can handle. Tackles this handful of SEO tasks in 2018 to ensure your site is well positioned for the future.

Crawlable, accessible URL whose content Google can easily crawl and parse.

Google has a lot of pages to crawl. So why not make it easy for them to crawl your website and figure out what’s going on? Short, easily distinguish URLs are great for SEO. In fact, for 2018, we recommend keeping your URLs as short as possible. In the past, it was common to see an entire long-tail keyword string appear in the URL. While this isn’t necessarily a bad tactic, it’s not optimal.

Here’s an example:

Instead of https://examplewebsite.com/search-engine-optimzation-checklist-2018

Why not use https://examplewebsite.com/seo-checklist-2018

Both provide the same content, but the latter is more concise and to the point. From what we’re seen with our clients, Google appreciates this and rewards the page with better rankings.

Keyword research

Be sure to keep a good list of your core keywords. On top of that, expand those “money” keywords into long-tail keywords. This kinda goes back to that question and answer format for voice search. Long-tail keywords are perfect for this type of content and great for SEO.

Compelling title, META description, and heading tags

As we’ve mentioned CTR is a great signal to Google that your page has something interesting to say. The best way to get a high CTR is to create compelling titles and META descriptions. Once on-page, users find that content that’s easily organized using proper heading tags is easiest to read. Keeping users engaged on your website is one of the best ways to keep them coming back for more!

Use rich snippets and schema markup

Schema.org is the result of collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! to help you provide the information their search engines need to understand your content and provide the best search results possible at this time. Adding Schema markup to your HTML improves the way your page displays in SERPs by enhancing the rich snippets that are displayed beneath the page title.

Fast loading times

Google has indicated site speed (and as a result, page speed) is one of the signals used by its algorithm to rank pages. And research has shown that Google might be specifically measuring time to first byte as when it considers page speed. In addition, a slow page speed means that search engines can crawl fewer pages using their allocated crawl budget, and this could negatively affect your indexation.

Page speed is also important to user experience. Pages with a longer load time tend to have higher bounce rates and lower average time on page. Longer load times have also been shown to negatively affect conversions.

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#seo #search engine optimization #seo 2019 #seo strategy #seo tips #visionisto #SEO Fort Lauderdale

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sempiternalsandpitturtle · 6 years ago

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Head of Strategy Insight: 6 reasons you’re (still) reading this article

Too many articles are just blocks of boring text made to appease search engines. This doesn’t cut it any more.

Engagement has become an extremely strong ranking factor. Google in particular can monitor how long you spend on a site after you find it in a search result, including whether you bounce immediately and look for a different result.

This means you need to up your game when it comes to the content on your site – and with blog posts in particular.

I will explore some key ways to keep visitors on your site, and demonstrate them through this article.

Reasons to keep reading: an enticing intro

If you managed to get to this stage of the article, half of the battle is done. An enticing intro sets the scene for the rest of the page. You might have a great article with some really useful information, but if you don’t sell it at the start, no one will see it.

Reasons to keep reading: lots of subheadings

For in-depth content in particular, it’s important that visitors can easily locate specific bits of information.

Not everyone wants to read everything you have written. Google’s ‘Position Zero’ feature demonstrates this fact well – the auto-generated snippet that appears at the top of many search engine results pages saves readers from clicking and scrolling by extracting the answers that they need. It also directs readers who might want to know more deeper into the content. In the example here the Position Zero snippet has even timestamped the part of the video where your question gets answered.

You should follow Google’s lead here and make your answers easy to find by using lots of informative subheadings – particularly in long articles that answer multiple questions. After all, there’s nothing worse than having to scroll and scroll to find the specific answer you’re looking for on a long page of text.

Reasons to keep reading: Unique or custom imagery

There’s a good chance that the only reason you made it to this part of the article is the image I used above. Perhaps you’re curious how it related to the title of the article?

Just getting someone to stay on the page for another 5-10 seconds with an interesting image can mean your site is much more engaging in the eyes of Google.

You do need to be careful on the type of imagery you use to do the job, though. This image isn’t something I randomly found. I searched that phrase and took a screenshot, which for a start means it is unique to this article. Unique imagery or graphics are much more powerful at creating engagement than generic stock imagery.

Stock imagery is better than no imagery, however.

Reasons to keep reading: Embeds and more embeds

pic.twitter.com/tRvgJrBJAh

— Trent Paul (@trent_t_paul) October 26, 2018

&nbsp

pic.twitter.com/6N2W152zr6

— Trent Paul (@trent_t_paul) October 26, 2018

&nbsp

pic.twitter.com/xXAF7qbN7G

— Trent Paul (@trent_t_paul) October 26, 2018

Yes, I did have to make some really random Tweets from my own Twitter account to make this point, but it was worth it!

If you were skimming the article, there’s a good chance this is where you stopped to figure out what is going on.

The point I am making here is that text is very easy to ignore, while embedded social media posts catch the eye. These Tweets create curiosity that turns into engagement.

The biggest issue is the load time of the page. Embed as much as you can (if it’s relevant) but make sure it doesn’t slow the site to a crawl. This can undo all of the hard work in trying to improve engagement.

Reasons to keep reading: Embedded videos

Most video services allow you to embed videos directly on your page and watch them without clicking away.

Guess what this does? While people are watching a video on your site the extra time spent on page sends a signal to Google that the content is worth staying for, which can lift your site’s SEO performance over time.

youtube

Reasons to keep reading: Short conclusions – and related links

So the visitor made it to the end of your article. Great! So let’s get greedy and get them to read another one. Ensure you have related articles, or something else clickable under your article.

You also want to keep your conclusions short and sharp, as a lot of visitors already have the information they were after and just don’t read the conclusion. Don’t bore people for the sake of having a long-winded conclusion!

Trent Paul

Head of Strategy

from http://bit.ly/2zchQaO

#content marketing

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alanajacksontx · 6 years ago

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How to Make Money Blogging: The $5.3 Million Case Study

There are lots of guides out there about how to make money blogging, but here’s what makes this one different:

I’ve taken three different blogs to over $1 million per year. In fact, the blog you’re reading right now has made a total of $5.3 million.

And in this post, I’m going to give you a step-by-step case study showing you exactly how I did it, starting from nothing.

Let’s jump in.

Table of Contents

How to Make Money Blogging, Even If You’re a Beginner

Choose a Profitable Niche

Level up Your Content Skills

Figure out Which Traffic Sport to Play

Grow Your Email List with Pop Ups

Begin Monetizing with Affiliate Offers

Develop a Unique Mechanism

Launch the Minimum Viable Funnel

FAQ about How to Make Money Blogging

The Bottom Line about How to Make Money Blogging

How to Make Money Blogging, Even If You’re a Beginner

If you’re starting from scratch with no traffic or influential friends, it’s easy to wonder…

Is it reasonable for you to believe you can make money blogging?

For that matter, how do blogs even make money? Ads? Or something else?

Well, let’s take a look at exactly how I did it at Smart Blogger. Here’s my complete step-by-step process for how to make money blogging:

#1. Choose a Profitable Niche

Let’s start with a little brutal truth, shall we?

Passion does not equal profit.

Neither does expertise.

Hard work doesn’t guarantee anything either.

For example:

You can be the world’s foremost expert on square-shaped tomatoes, wake up every morning with a burning passion to educate the public on their vast superiority to normal-shaped tomatoes, and work until your fingers bleed and your eyes fall out of your head, following all the right tactics for growing a popular blog, and…

You’ll never have a chance in hell at making any money.

Here’s why:

Nobody but you gives a damn about square tomatoes

Even if they did care, they wouldn’t spend any money

In other words, you need a large audience who buys things. Without that, nothing else matters. It’s a prerequisite for everything else.

In the case of Smart Blogger, I noticed early on that bloggers buy lots of different things:

In fact, there are companies with $10 million+ per year of revenue in most of those categories. It’s also a growing space with millions of people:

The only problem?

Loads of competition. Whether it be my previous employers Brian Clark or Neil Patel, my good friends over at Problogger, or the gazillion other “blogging about blogging” peeps infesting the social media space, everyone was intent on snagging a piece of the pie. They also had a several year head start on me.

So, how did I compete? The honest answer:

#2. Level up Your Content Skills

Embed This Infographic On Your Site

How to Make Money Blogging: The $5.3 Million Case Study from SmartBlogger.com

You’ve probably heard that “Content is king,” and it’s true… to an extent. A more accurate statement would be…

The Best Content Is King

If that’s hard to understand, think about it this way:

Lots of bloggers sit down and think, “What will I write today?” They jot down some thoughts, doing their best to be helpful, original, and entertaining. If they’re disciplined, they might even stick with it for a few months.

But it almost never works. Here are a few reasons why:

What you want to say isn’t what other people want to read

You weren’t using a proven content framework

It’s not the best post ever published on the topic

Granted, it’s not your fault. Until today, chances are no one ever told you about any of those requirements. You thought you just had to write interesting stuff and publish it.

No, grasshopper. No.

The truth is, you have to create the best content ever published on topics lots of people are interested in learning more about. And that brings us to the three levels of content creation:

You know what content is popular in your niche, and you write exclusively about those topics

You’ve mastered frameworks proven to make your content more popular (list post, how to post, etc.)

Your content delivers more value to the reader than any other post published on that topic

You’re probably thinking, “Geez. That sounds hard.” And you’re right, it is.

I personally spent about three years honing my skills by writing for other sites before I started my own blog. It doesn’t have to take that long — I’m just a perfectionist, so I wanted to learn from the best people in my space.

It worked, though. Nowadays, my posts get millions and millions of visitors, not because I know some special “secret,” but because I’m really good at what I do. In fact, I’ll go ahead and say it…

Blogging is really no different than anything else. The more of a bad ass you are, the easier it is for you to make money.

So you want to know how to make some money blogging?

Become a badass writer.

Then the next step is to…

#3. Figure out Which Traffic Sport to Play

When you’re a beginner, getting traffic is confusing.

Should you focus on optimizing your keywords? Growing your Facebook page? Leaving comments on blogs? Answering questions on Quora? Creating videos for YouTube?

And so on.

There are a gazillion traffic tactics out there. Everybody says theirs is the best.

But here’s the data:

Source: Facebook and Google dominate web traffic, but not the same kind

Pretty much all the traffic for written content comes from either Google or Facebook. The rest of traffic sources combined don’t even come close to competing with those two Goliaths.

So, how do you get them to send you a bunch of traffic?

One option is you can pay for it. They like that.

But chances are, you’re reading about how to make money blogging because you don’t want to pay for traffic. You want it for free, right?

Well, imagine this:

There’s an arena where all the bloggers in your space go to compete for traffic. The number of other challengers you defeat determines the amount of traffic you receive.

In other words, getting traffic is a sport.

There are winners, and there are losers

To be good, you have to train

You need to study your opponents

There are actually two sports, and I’d bet you’ve heard of both of them: search engine optimization (SEO) and going viral on Facebook. Both take years (yes, I said years) of study to master, but you can start getting pretty decent traffic after just a few months of study and practice.

Which one should you focus on?

Well, here are two questions to guide you:

Is your topic something your friends and family regularly talk about on Facebook? Examples: pets, parenting, self-improvement, and health. If so, focus on playing the viral traffic sport.

Is your topic something people actively search for information about on Google? Examples: product reviews, specific questions they would ask an expert, how-to information. If so, focus on SEO.

For most topics, you can do both, but one or the other will be dominant. In that case, focus on whichever one is dominant.

In the blogging space, for example, stuff about writing and grammar occasionally goes viral on Facebook, because we love criticizing our relatives about their terrible English. On the other hand, you rarely talk with your family about blogging platforms, WordPress plugins, affiliate marketing, or any other blogging topics.

You will, however, search for them on Google. Just as you would guess then, the blogging niche is heavily dominated by search. Here’s a breakdown of Smart Blogger’s traffic by source:

The truth is, we pretty much ignore Facebook. The volume of traffic available there comes nowhere close to the volume of traffic available from Google. So, we focus on Google.

I also spend WAY more time keeping up to date on SEO stuff than I do on social stuff. I’m a geek about it. Throw me in a room full of Google engineers, and I’d probably know more than half of them.

Not to imply I’m the best, though. I’m also competing against people like Darren Rowse, Amy Lynn Andrews, and Neil Patel. They’re pretty freaking good too.

In time, I think I can be better, but who knows? That’s why sports are fun. You never know who is going to win.

If you’re good though, you’ll always be in the “playoffs,” for your space, and you’ll get lots of traffic. Maybe not the most, but still plenty.

And then you can focus on how to…

#4. Grow Your Email List with Pop Ups

Chances are, you see pop ups as an annoyance.

They get in the way when you’re trying to read. They ask you to hand over sensitive information like your name, email address, and phone number. Sometimes you have to deal with multiple pop ups on the same site, and it makes you feel hassled and uncared for.

And all that sucks. In my opinion, you have every right to be annoyed.

But here’s the thing…

That’s where the money comes from. The best predictor of the revenue for a blog is the size of their email list. Here’s a breakdown of our revenue at Smart Blogger comparing revenue device from email to other sources.

The rule of thumb is you can expect to make $1 per subscriber per month. So, if you have 10,000 email subscribers, you should be able to make about $10,000 per month.

So obviously, growing your email list is a top priority. You might, however, feel conflicted about using pop ups. What are you supposed to do?

Here’s a different way of looking at it:

If a visitor comes to your site and doesn’t give you their email address, the chances of them returning are nearly zero. You’ll never have another opportunity to help them.

If you believe your content is the best, and you believe you can help them over time, I believe you owe it to them to be as pushy as possible about staying in contact. In other words, not using a pop up is unethical. A little annoyance is a small price to pay for change.

And remember, that doesn’t mean you have to be extremely pushy or spammy. You can absolutely use pop ups in authentic ways.

But you absolutely must use them. Assuming you want to make money, anyway.

#5. Begin Monetizing with Affiliate Offers

So, you’re operating in a profitable niche, and you have traffic and an email list. What next?

Lots of bloggers jump into creating a course or book or community of some sort, but that’s a mistake, in my opinion. Before you start selling things, you need concrete evidence those things are what people want to buy. Otherwise, you’re risking wasting months or even years of your life trying to push a product no one wants.

The simplest way to obtain that evidence:

Affiliate offers.

By seeing what your audience buys from other people, you can get a much better sense of what they might want to buy from you. If you promote a product and it converts well, you should think about creating a similar product. If it doesn’t convert well, you should probably move on.

In other words, affiliate offers are a form of market research. As a bonus, you just so happen to get paid commissions on the products your customers buy in the process. So not only are you learning what your audience wants to buy, but you’re making money from your blog at the same time. Pretty sweet deal.

At Smart Blogger, I’ve tried lots of different offers. WordPress hosting, landing page tools, email marketing software, WordPress themes, and half a dozen different types of courses. Since we sell courses, I pay the most attention to the results from those programs, and here are a couple of lessons:

End to end solutions sell best. Courses promising to take someone from knowing nothing to making money far outperformed the others. For instance, here’s a screenshot showing us as the #1 affiliate for Danny Iny’s Course Builder’s Laboratory:

Tools with a clear connection to making money also sell better than the others. For instance, landing page builders. As proof, here’s a screenshot of our earnings from promoting LeadPages:

By themselves, neither of those promotions really moved the needle on our revenue, but they did teach us useful lessons that went into creating Freedom Machine, which brings us to…

#6. Develop a Unique Mechanism

Before you think about launching your own products or services, there’s one essential point about human nature you need to understand:

Whenever anyone purchases anything, they expect to transition from where they are now (Point A) to where they want to be (Point B). For example…

When you buy pizza, you want to transition from being hungry and craving pizza (Point A) to tasting delicious pizza and feeling full (Point B).

When you hire a plumber, you want to transition from having a clogged, overflowing toilet (Point A) to having a normally functioning toilet (Point B).

When you buy a course on SEO, you want to transition from feeling bewildered and getting ignored by Google (Point A) to ranking for competitive terms and getting traffic.

The success of a product ultimately depends on helping customers make those transitions. If the customer doesn’t get to Point B, they typically view the experience as a failure.

So, here’s the magic question:

What makes you better equipped to deliver that transition than your competitors?

The answer to that question is what marketing expert Todd Brown calls your “unique mechanism.” It’s a little different from a “unique selling proposition,” because it’s not just something about you that’s different. It’s something about you or your method that makes you better able to help customers than anyone else.

For Freedom Machine, we have multiple unique mechanisms:

Get published on Medium — a platform with more than 60 million active readers looking for content

You don’t have to struggle with setting up your blog. We do it for you.

A research concierge who will do your research for you instead of having to pay for expensive tools

Content frameworks developed behind the scenes at Smart Blogger to produce popular content

A monetization methodology proven by our success with Smart Blogger

Advice on how to automate everything, so you eventually get more freedom

Weekly calls with me where I will help you set up your Freedom Machine

Combined, those unique mechanisms are EXTREMELY convincing at setting us up as the superior solution. Therefore, the product sells like hot cakes.

To be clear… it’s not necessary to have 7 different unique mechanisms. Sometimes just one is all you need (i.e. fresh, hot pizza in 30 minutes or less). The core idea though is to make sure you are obviously far more capable than your competitors at delivering results.

Then all you have to do is…

#7. Launch the Minimum Viable Funnel

Look around at successful entrepreneurs of any type, and you’ll find a surprising trend:

They tend to sell their products before the product is created.

To most people, this sounds like insanity at best or a disturbing lack of ethics at worst. How could you possibly ask people to buy something that doesn’t exist?

The answer:

It’s the same principle as Kickstarter.

You create a fancy minimal sales funnel of some sort (in this case, just a simple sales page), tell people the product is coming soon, and then wait to see if enough people sign up to justify making the product. If they don’t, you refund everyone’s money and start over.

In other words, it’s the final step in validating you have a viable product. The steps go like this:

Identify demand by promoting affiliate products

Find a unique mechanism that makes you clearly superior

Test the demand for that unique mechanism with a quick and dirty launch before you create the product

In my case, the minimum viable funnel was a 90 minute webinar (you can register for the current version here.) The first time I did it, there was no product, no follow-up sequence, nothing. It was just a bare-bones test.

And it resulted in $126,000 in sales live on the webinar.

Seeing that $30,000 sales was my minimum for success, we went ahead and created the first version of the product live with students. About a year later, it’s now approaching $1 million in sales.

That’s also just one product. We have others, and we have still more in the research pipeline.

And guess what I would do if I had to start over again?

The exact same thing. It’s not easy, it’s not fast, it’s not even that sexy, but it works.

Let’s close with some questions and answers, shall we?

FAQ about How to Make Money Blogging

So, we’ve covered the basic process. Now let’s step back for a moment and answer some of the questions I hear the most often:

Do bloggers make money?

I certainly do, but I don’t think that’s what you’re asking. I think you’re asking…

“Is it reasonable for me to learn how to make money blogging?”

The no BS answer:

It depends on how patient and persistent you are.

Starting a blog from scratch is just as difficult as starting any business. For example, it requires the same time and effort as starting your own restaurant, software company, or accounting service. Yes, those businesses are wildly different, but the first few years are usually the same story: low income, lots of stress, big learning curve.

If you want a more concrete answer than that, we’ve found it takes even our smartest, most dedicated students 3-6 years to make enough money from blogging to quit their jobs. And that sounds like a long time, but so what? 3-6 years to be able to work from anywhere in the world, take a vacation whenever you want, and probably have passive income until the day you die?

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

How much money can you make from blogging?

The fact is, most bloggers make as much money as any other type of entrepreneur:

Nothing.

And it’s not because there’s no money in it. This blog makes more than $1 million per year, for God sakes, and it’s nowhere close to the most profitable blog out there. Blogs like The Penny Hoarder, Moz, and Lifehacker power businesses worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

So why aren’t more bloggers rich?

The truth is, most people quit. They start a blog, realize it’s hard work, and walk away.

But if you’re patient and persistent?

You can make millions. I have. So have lots of other smart, dedicated entrepreneurs.

You just have to do the work. Consistently. For years.

Can you do that?

Then yeah, I think you can make six figures at least. Maybe more.

How do you start your own blog for free?

Lots of people say you can’t. They tell you to buy a domain name and a hosting account and a premium WordPress theme.

But I think that’s nonsense.

You can get started for free within five minutes on Medium. They also have over 60 million monthly readers, so you can get a lot of exposure there if you get featured.

This article walks you through that strategy, step-by-step.

Alternatively, you can write on WordPress.com, Linkedin, or any of the other platforms out there. It doesn’t really matter. The point is, start writing and learning as soon as possible.

Once people start sharing your articles, and you begin to understand how everything works, then you can go through the trouble of setting up your own site, installing WordPress, and all that jazz. Until then though, it’s just a headache you don’t need.

What are the most popular blogging platforms?

WordPress is by far the most popular. No one else is even close.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the best for everyone.

As I mentioned earlier, I think Medium is a good place to start. You can also create your own blog with tools like Blogger, Squarespace, Wix, Joomla, and countless others.

What are the top blogs about how to make money blogging?

I’d like to think Smart Blogger is the best (and most comprehensive) site on the topic, but it’s by no means the only one. Not all of these talk about how to make money blogging, but together, they give you a solid foundation:

Backlinko — Brian Dean doesn’t talk much about how to make money blogging, but he’s one of the top experts and educators in the world on SEO. What I love about his content is how easy to understand it is, despite covering some incredibly complex topics. If you’re a beginner, prepare for a treat.

Digital Marketer: — In my opinion, my friends over at Digital Marketer are the best in the world at monetizing traffic. If you’d like to learn about marketing, list building, customer research, automation, or funnels, there’s no better source.

Smart Passive Income — If you’re interested in using your blog to build passive income, Pat Flynn is a master at showing you how to build a tiny little business that can support you and the lifestyle you want. Both his blog and podcast are excellent.

The Bottom Line about How to Make Money Blogging

Is it possible?

Absolutely, but only if you treat it as a business.

Yes, you can start your blog as a side project. Yes, you can slowly grow it in the background. Yes, you can turn your blog into a source of passive income that eventually lets you quit your job, travel, spend more time with your family, whatever you want to do.

But like anything worthwhile, it’s hard work getting there.

You have to study. Practice. Master your craft.

If you love writing, I can’t imagine a better business, though. Not only is blogging a great way to get your writing noticed, but it’s a great way to connect with people around the world who need you, teach them what you know, and get paid pretty damn well in exchange.

There’s never a day I regret dedicating myself to blogging. Never.

It’s not just because of the money, either. It’s because I also get to do what I love and help people at the same time.

What could be better than that?

About the Author: Jon Morrow is the CEO of Smart Blogger. Check out his new blog Unstoppable and read the launch post that went viral: 7 Life Lessons from a Guy Who Can’t Move Anything but His Face.

The post How to Make Money Blogging: The $5.3 Million Case Study appeared first on Smart Blogger.

from Internet Marketing Tips https://smartblogger.com/make-money-blogging/

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laurendcameron · 6 years ago