#and that comes with a bump in the algorithm that could really help the game out!

[tricitymonsters]

AKELLO CHAPTER 4 IS HERE

Check him out now on Steam or Itch!

[thdorkmagnet]

Avenging the Baby Brother (Turtle Tots: Before the Rise)

@flufftober 2024 Day 3- Getting Revenge

Chapter Summary: Some poor unsuspecting scammers learn not to mess with Donnie’s little brother.

Duo: PB&J/ Smarts and Crafts

A/N: This one is actually another alt prompt for the 'make it fluffy challange'. And of course, Donnie was the first person to come to mind for a chapter about revenge, hehe

Also please note that I know nothing about hacking or coding and any efforts to try and educate myself on the subject just leaves me more confused so if I got anything wrong, then sorry. I really tried haha.

Disclaimer: Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles belongs to Andy Suriano, Ant Ward, and Nickelodeon. All rights belong to them.

“It's here! It's here!” came Mikey's excited squeal from downstairs, audible even over the heavy thrum of electronic music in Donnie's headphones. He was content to ignore the yells of his younger brother- as it was really nothing new- until he heard his name called. “Donnie! Donnie it's here! Come see!”

“Sigh,” Donnie moaned, pulling the headphones off and reluctantly rising from his desk. He had been knee deep in algorithms for over an hour and had really wanted to finish up before getting torn away by one of his dumb brothers’ antics. But such was the life of a misunderstood genius, he supposed. 

Oh how he wished for soundproof walls. 

Donnie mentally added that to the project list and, with one last longing look back at the half-finished code, headed downstairs to find out what all the fuss was about. 

…

That fuss was apparently a cardboard box which Mikey was happily brandishing around the Lair when Donnie arrived. Of course, naturally it was what was in the box that was the source of Mikey’s excitement but Donnie was still feeling a bit bitter about the whole ‘interruption’ thing. “Dee, Dee, look! My new toy came in!” Mikey squealed, practically vibrating with excitement. 

Donnie offered him a small smile, saying simply, “Yes, so I see.” 

“What is it, Mikey?” Leo asked as he and Raph crowded around their little brother. They both looked immensely curious and even Donnie had to admit he was getting a bit invested now. 

Mikey beamed back at them, setting the package down on the floor. “It’s a Stella Snail plushie! Y’know from Space Friends?” 

Ah,Space Friends. Yes Donnie was quite acquainted with the show at this point. It was Mikey's favorite non-Lou Jitsu/Jupiter Jim show and he'd been obsessing over it for months now; humming the theme song constantly, forcing Donnie and the others to binge watch it with him, incorporating it into every game they played, and practically memorizing every line of dialogue from all three seasons.

And Stella Snail happened to be Mikey’s absolute favorite character. 

“That’s great, Mikester,” Leo encouraged, lightly bumping shoulders with his little bro. But Donnie had a small concern. 

“Isn’t Space Friends merchandise quite rare?” Donnie asked, narrowing his eyes at the box Mikey was trying to tear into. 

“Um, yeah, but I found a website selling it,” Mikey explained quickly, tongue sticking out as he tried to peel off a strip of tape. 

Donnie’s breath caught. “What kind of website?” 

Mikey shrugged, focus entirely on his prize and not his big brother. Raph stepped in to help rip the last of the tape off, leaving the little box turtle bouncing on the balls of his feet. 

“Um, Raphael, maybe you shouldn’t-” But Donnie’s voice went entirely unheard as the box was finally pulled open and Mikey shrieked in joy, reaching inside to pull out-

The doll in Mikey’s hands hardly resembled the character it was based off of, ragged and cheap and clearly thrown together with little care or attention. The stitching was atrocious, one of the eyes had fallen off in transport (or perhaps never been there at all) and the loose pieces of fabric hardly came together to form a coherent whole. It looked about as knock-off as knock-offs could get. 

And when Mikey’s bright shining face turned to a sad frown it made Donnie’s blood boil. 

“....What?” Mikey said in a small voice and both Raph and Leo grimaced at the sound. Donnie just clenched his fists and glared at the offensive thing in his baby brother’s hands. 

Mikey turned to his brothers with tearful eyes and said, “Why- Why doesn’t it look l-like Stella?” His lip wobbled and it made the blue and red turtles snap into action. 

“Oh I’m sure they just sent you the wrong thing by mistake,” Raph said in his panicked voice.

“Yeah. This is probably just some dumb April Fools joke,” Leo soothed and Donnie held back the urge to mention it was summer. The slider wrapped an arm around his little brother and discretely snatched the doll away from him, examining it with a lopsided smile. “I mean look at this thing! It looks so wrong it's almost funny!” He wiggled it a bit in Mikey’s face, making goofy noises with the motion and the youngest's sniffles turned into reluctant giggles.

“I'm sure they'll send you the real thing soon,” Raph encouraged, patting his head reassuringly. 

Mikey’s sad face pinched with hope. “R-Really?”

“Yes,” Donnie spoke up now, drawing the attention onto him and he did his best to not look violently angry, clenching his hands so tight at his sides they hurt. “I'll do some research and find out what went wrong. I'm certain I can help speed things along for you, Angelo.” 

Mikey smiled again, bright and happy, before launching himself across the room to hug his big brother. Arms and legs wrapped around him, forcing Donnie to readjust his weight so they didn't topple over. Mikey just buried his face in Donnie's plastron, clinging to him like a koala on a tree. “Thank you Donnie, you’re the best!”

Donnie smiled, giving his baby brother an affectionate pat on and head. “I know,” he said, soft. 

“Hey Mikester!” Leo called across the room, dropping the toy unceremoniously back into its box. “I don't know about you but I think I'm in the mood for a Smiling Friends marathon!” 

“Yeah!” Mikey shouted, hopping off his brother and making a beeline for the TV room. Leo was fast on his heels, giggling the whole way. 

“Raph too!” the snapper added, running after the pair.

Donnie watched them go then slunk back to his lab to start researching, scowling angrily the whole way there. 

It didn't take much scrolling to find what he was looking for, a very sketchy website promising “quality products from all your favorite franchises”. Scoff! Clicking onto the home page, Donnie’s nose wrinkled as he took in the truly horrific web design on display. 

The background was an unrelenting neon blue, the bright pop of color hurting Donnie’s eyes and giving him a headache. The text was all written in either impossible to read cursive or bland comic sans. Some entire sentences overlapped and any text meant to accompany photos was bleeding into the picture itself, making it near impossible to tell what it even said. 

But the worst of all was the actual ‘merchandise’ on display, the images clearly either photoshopped or stolen. Donnie even found one that still had a watermark for a different company in the corner. How lazy could they be?!

It quickly became clear who the targets were for this frankly pathetic scam, either grandparents who didn't know better or naive, gullible little kids too trusting to see the metaphorical writing on the metaphorical wall. Like his baby brother. Who was pure and sweet and believed anything anyone told him. 

Donnie could feel his anger rising more and more as he scrolled- practically snarling at his computer screen- but his blood boiled when he came across the fake Stella itself. Because the picture looked like the real deal- like ‘practically stepped out of the show itself’ real- and the description had enticing buzz words like “official”, “limited time” and “rare” so it was no wonder Mikey had bought it. Any of his dumdum brothers would have, despite how incredibly overpriced it was. Because of course it was! 

These scammers, while clearly amateur- one look at their web design and that was apparent- had created quite an effective scheme, robbing poor young kids who didn’t know any better. It was almost cartoonish in how evil it was. 

But lucky for them, Donnie was about to give them a lesson in morality. 

By hacking them. 

Which was painfully easy to do, since their encryption system was complete garbage like the rest of the website. Honestly it was like they wanted to be hacked. It took Donnie less than ten minutes to gain full access to their servers, giving him free reign to cause whatever havoc here he wanted, grinning wickedly to himself. “Relishing chuckle,” he muttered, tapping his fingers together like a supervillain. 

He had plans for revenge and oh, was he gonna enjoy exacting it. 

First things first, Donnie started compiling data, storing it away for later use. He quickly found names behind the shady site as well as personal information for blackmail. And sweetest of all, the company used for the actual production of the toys were notorious for bootlegs. And he just gained full access to their system. If he played his cards right Donnie could effectively kill two birds with one stone here, which made him snicker. 

After some more digging and data mining, Donnie hit the jackpot, the bank account linked to the website. This, this was going to hit them where it really hurt. Where it mattered. 

Donnie drained the account dry, leaving the scammers with nothing but bankruptcy to their names, transferring the dirty money into his dad's checking. 

It was a good thing his father was napping right now otherwise he would probably die of a heart attack to see half a million dollars in his name. 

With the important stuff out of the way, Donnie focused on the more petty part of his revenge, giving the website a full makeover. Starting by changing the hideous background color to a much more satisfying purple, mostly so his eyes wouldn't bleed from staring at the screen too long. Then he got to work swapping out the fake and/or stolen pictures with images that more accurately represented their counterparts. Other small changes were made here and there as he went, Donnie snickering quite a bit to himself at the new tagline heading the page. “Scams'R’Us. Fools’R’U.” He felt particularly proud of that line. 

Finally, he installed a virus to cause a server-wide crash that should keep anyone still trying to get on the website from actually purchasing anything, even knowing exactly what they were getting into. People were gullible that way. 

All in all the changes ended up an improvement over the original- the web page both factually correct and aesthetically pleasing, which were both a mission success in Donnie’s books. Honestly, he should be paid for the services he just provided these amateurs, even if those services did include upending their entire business and dragging their names through the mud. 

At least his webpage didn’t look like the failing grade of a high school web design class. 

Donnie sat back in his chair, arms folded and smile smug, admiring his handiwork. Yes, his revenge really had come together quite nicely if he did say so himself. That would teach them to mess with his little brother and make him cry! 

A shiver of wicked satisfaction crawled up Donnie’s spine and another evil laugh passed his lips, taking a moment to really soak in his victory. 

Once he got his fill, he opened up a new tab and ran a web search. He had more important things to do right now than just gloat. 

He still owed Angelo a new stuffy, after all. 

…

A week later Donnie was once again drawn out of his lab by excited shouting from his baby brother. But this time the softshell gave no token protest, instead smiling and shoving his chair back to stand. He’d been waiting on pins and needles all day for the package to arrive, the independent artist he’d commissioned assuring him it would be delivered on time. They certainly worked fast, much faster than Donnie had expected, and he might have worried they’d ripped him off the same as the scammers had Mikey if not for the extensive research he’d done before ever hiring them. But their credentials matched up and their quality had been backed by multiple sources so it was a safe bet going in. 

The rest of the money he’d redistributed to the victims of the scam, though the temptation to keep it for his ‘uranium fund’ had been hard to fight. Ultimately though it was better to ditch the evidence before his dad or Raph caught wind of what he’d been up to. Because they would definitely have words with him if they knew.

The package had already been ripped apart when Donnie made it downstairs, Mikey spotting him and holding the toy aloft as if it were a trophy. “Donnie! Donnie! It came! You were right! It looks just like the real thing, see!” He held it out for Donnie to inspect and...  yes, the craftsmanship was fantastic. Professional. Not a seam out of place. 

Donnie nodded, saying in a clipped tone, “It does seem up to standards now.”

“Can you tell them I said thanks.” Mikey squeezed the toy tight to his shell, smile brighter than a thousand burning suns, making Donnie feel all warm and squishy on the inside. 

“I will.” He offered a much duller smile in return but his baby brother didn't seem to mind, hugging him tight around the middle, burying his face into Donnie’s plastron and nuzzling. Donnie gave him a pat on the head because he was bad at physical affection. 

“Just please check with me next time you make any purchases like this again,” Donnie said, careful of his wording here. “So I can, ahem, oversee production to avoid this incident in the future.”

Mikey didn't seem to notice the lie, just nodding into Donnie’s chest. “Okay,” he replied sweetly. It made Donnie feel warm with pride. 

He squeezed just a bit tighter before adding, “Thanks for helping me get Stella, Donnie.” And when Mikey looked up at him with that adorable, doe eyed smile, it made every part of him surge with love and protective energy. 

By now the data Donnie had collected would be uploaded onto every social media site across the world, effectively stomping out the last dying flickers of the scammer’s reputation once and for all. But for Mikey, Donnie would do so much more- so much worse- to protect his sweet smile and make sure it was never taken away. 

“Anything for you, Mikey,” he said, voice soft, finally applying his own pressure to the hug, holding his little brother close to his heart.

Donnie would burn the world down for his baby brother. 

But for now, he'd settle for making him feel loved. 

A/N: Remember kids, revenge is never okay. Unless the person you are getting revenge on deserves it and then it's fine.

Haha, I just really love Donnie going all supervillain unhinged on his brother's behalf. It's sweet! Plus, having the big brothers spoil the youngest is like one of my favorite things to write on here.

[blacktobackmesa]

What do you think about Darnold being a tutorial NPC like Coomer? Nobody really talks about his "ACTIVATE DEVIL GUN MODE" bit and how he's seemingly unaware of it.

God, it's FASCINATING.

Darnold is the game's way of adapting to a surprise change in game mechanics. The scenario got bumped around by the existing AI characters, and oop, now Gordon's missing a hand and taking constant bleeding damage. Now the underlying algorithm has to come up with a fix to make it all fit into the gameplay. Hey, you made it through the tough part, have an overpowered weapon with unlimited ammo! Ah, but that's a new feature... there's no audio clips or special behavior present in the data to give to the Long Jump Module scientist.

So the game patches itself up while Gordon is slogging through Act 3, putting together a Tutorial NPC that can give Gordon an upgrade and teach him how to use it. The game has a lot more time to put something together than it did with Dr. Coomer, who had to be generated as soon as the game started. This NPC also had a lot less tutorial behavior to have baked in-- while Coomer had every in-game mechanic and several cut features wired into his programming, Darnold had to be a one-hit wonder. Help a fellow scientist in need, tell him how to use his new ability. That's all he had to work with. The rest of their personality could be randomly generated.

However, since the game was so URGENT in its need to have this bug fix patched in, the instructions ended up a bit. Forceful. And by forceful I mean the game copypasted words into Darnold's mouth without asking. Rude.

[awkwardgtace]

I stay pretty quiet too, but honestly I'd like to give a little run down of AI, especially because I get the appeal. I'm a professional programmer who struggles to draw stick figures that make sense and having a way to get art sounds fun. Having a way to get a story written easier sounds great. AI is awful in the current state.

I am going to put it all under a read more cause honestly it is a lot.

TLDR for my rant cause after writing it all out I feel kinda bad doing it now.

AI bad it scares a lot of professionals and hobbyists. Please do not use it unless you know for a fact it is ethical. Yes this include the voice ai stuff. In fact make extra sure to report voice AI stuff

Let's start with the whole Artificial Intelligence bit. I know people always get mad, but there's a reason it's used to explain. That term is used because it feigns intelligence. It memorizes patterns and prints out the best result based on the given parameters. That game that you play with a challenging enemy AI? It's all random and made to look smart. I have it on good authority a number of those complex systems are simpler than you get. Simple behaviors that it follows consistently.

Even Pac-man ai wasn't smart. Each had a specific behavior it follows. the best artificial intelligence is always following precise parameters to determine behavior.

Now with this you might say "So what I get the story I want and the art I want. It's not that bad and the work is already in the database."

The people who do this for fun, a side job, a hobby, or professionally rely on you seeing their work. They need you to read and share the story, to share the art that touched you. The people doing it for free get the nice serotonin bump and can be encouraged to keep sharing. The people doing it for work have a better chance to get money when you share it.

The AI is stealing from them, it's stealing the happy chemicals, the knowledge someone else likes what they shared, and the money they need to pay bills or survive. Of course this follows in to my next point.

The stuff you're getting is making use of the hard work of everyone you follow. That artist you love? It stole their style and work to make that drawing of your OC for you. The writer you read all the time? It scraped the fics they wrote to give you the story. It's following the patterns as you change things. As you edit and correct what you want. It's learning from you too and using you. IT WANTS TO TAKE THE CREATORS OF STORIES AND ART AWAY SO YOU HAVE TO RELY ON AI TO FILL THE VOID

All of this is coming from someone who wants AI to be good. I would love using something like gpt to help me work out algorithms and problems I have. I can promise you even game companies are worried about things being stolen from the employees using it.

If this ethical issue isn't fixed there are going to be more issues too. More and more people will lose the jobs they actually enjoy because of it. I cannot tell you how much fear the AI art sparked in well placed artists. Programmers discussing the worry that their jobs could be on the line and things would break horribly.

The line has to be drawn to keep the freedom we have. So yeah don't use AI and sorry for this long winded rant that may not make perfect sense.

Let's not even get started on the voice AI. It's quite literally stealing the voices of others. It can make anyone say anything if it has the information. Vocaloid is popular because it's a recorded voice bank that you can purchase to use. The AI should be using a similar structure. NOT THE VOICES OF ANYONE IT CAN SCRAPE. Do we really want deep fakes to get worse?

AI needs to be controlled and collectively we need to leave it alone until it is.

guys. guys i know you’re hungry for g/t content but please. please dont use ai. dont fall for it. character ai is fine but if you make ai art block me rn. i have zero respect for you. go away.

[daenqyu]

— they accidentally confess to their crush

includes: shinsou, bakugou, midoriya, todoroki and hawks

warnings: swearing

a/n: thank you for requesting <3 i love this idea! it’s so cute🥺 also, hawks’ may be a little longer than the others because it’s my first time writing for him and i got a bit excited👉🏼👈🏼 

ps: i don’t mind writing for hawks if it’s a headcannon and/or texts! so feel free to request him :D and yes, this is a repoost because the algorithm hates me.

( gif isn’t mine !! credits go to @tetsuruo )

shinsou hitoshi:

it would happen so randomly and out of the blue

as i said before, i think shinsou is a really reserved and quiet type of guy

but that seems to vanish whenever he’s around you

he’s more talkative and constantly goes out with you so you guys can have some quality time together

you also make him really nervous 

he’s pretty chill with everyone and seems to not give a fuck about most things

but with you?

that’s a whole different story 

whenever you keep your gaze stuck on him when he’s talking and his eyes meet yours, his heart never fails to do backflips because fuck you’re so cute

(oh to have shinsou think i’m cute D:)

ok back to the actual hc,,, 

you two were hanging out in your room, listening to music and just talking 

even tho your best friends, shinsou never really tells you much about his personal life

of course you know the basics like his hobbies and all his favorite things

but he never talks to you about...crushes or anything 

and you don’t like that because :( friends are supposed to tell each other this stuff, right? 

it’s fun and makes the bond even stronger

so you decide to ask him because why not?

“hey shinsou?” 

he’s sitting down next to you on your bed, your legs draped over his

which makes him feel all warm inside

it’s stupid and definitely not a big deal, 

but it’s little things like this that make him fall more and more for you

“yes?” 

“do you have a crush?” you wiggle your eyebrows at him in a teasing way, although he’s not even looking your way

a part of you is nervous to hear his response 

because unbeknownst to shinsou, you reallyyy like him

and have been crushing on him for quite some time now, but since you’re so sure the feelings are one sided, you don’t tell him

he’s too invested on the game he’s playing on your switch, eyebrows slightly furrowed as he concentrates

so he almost misses your question

and when he does answer, he’s not even paying attention to the words that leave his mouth

“apart from you? no”

it takes him a good minute to process what he said

meanwhile you’re sitting there like :o

you certainly weren’t expecting THAT

like it’s a good thing!!!! but you’re kinda flustered 

especially when shinsou finally looks up at you, eyes widened in surprise at his own bluntness as he opens and closes his mouth a few times, not knowing what to say now

“wait! i didn’t mean it like that!”

“you didn’t?”

he notices the slight pain in your voice and the way you move away from him slowly and he’s quick to apologize 

“shit, okay...yes i like you but i didn’t say anything because i don’t want to make things weird between us or ruin what we have right now”

he’s looking everywhere but you

because he doesn’t exactly want to face you when you reject him

but you don’t ???

instead you giggle and before he can ask you what’s so funny, you climb on his lap to hug him, causing him to blush furiously 

“i like you too, toshi”

the nickname makes him hug you even tighter while he hides his face on your neck 

it was such a cute confession and even when you two start going out, you never stop bringing it up

which makes shinsou extremely embarrassed 

“hey remember when you confessed and-”

“y/n, we’ve talked about this”

“oh come on! you were so adorable”

he pouts at you 

“were?”

people think he looks so scary but he’s actually a whole ass baby

you roll your eyes before leaning down to give him a sweet kiss, 

“you’re such a baby”

“hm, your baby”

“oh my god you did not”

yeah no, he’s in love with you👩‍❤️‍💋‍👨

( gif isn’t mine !! credits go to @bakugousmyboy )

bakugou katsuki:

i feel like it would be pretty difficult to have bakugou accidentally confess directly to you

he knows how to control himself and his emotions so i doubt he’d actually ever do something like this

however,

he’s not that good at hiding his crush on you and mostly everyone on class 1A knows the boy is an absolute sucker for you

except you because apparently you think he’s just being nice

and everyone else is like wtf???? 

like he’s ALWAYS screaming at everyone 

but when it’s you he doesn’t 

in fact, sometimes he even lowers his voice so it won’t bother you 

so that behavior is the one that caused him to be stuck in the situation he is right now

he sat in the common room with kirishima and kaminari, trying to eat his food in peace but the two idiots, as he likes to call them, wouldn’t shut up

he had completely blocked out both of their voices, focusing on finishing his meal and getting the hell away from them

until he heard your name being mentioned 

“dude when are you gonna ask y/n out? everyone knows how much you like her  so might as well you know,” kirishima bumps his shoulder against the blonde, only to receive a glare. “get some action”

“yeah bakubro, she’s super cute too” kaminari buts in and bakugou is about to punch them both in the face

“shut the fuck up. i don’t like her” bakugou scoffs

“but you’re such a softie for her”

“huh?! i treat her the same as i treat all of you extras!” oh but he knows he’s lying, you can’t even compare to any of your annoying classmates 

kirishima smirks, “i’m pretty sure you’ve never once, raised your voice at her”

“so? that doesn’t mean shit”

kaminari looks at kirishima and the redhead nods at him, giving him the green light

“well since you don’t like her, you wouldn’t mind if i ask her out? because i’ve been wanting to-” kaminari can’t even finish his sentence before bakugou grabs him by the collar of his shirt

kaminari yelps, looking over at his other friend for help but he moves his head quickly, knowing better than to get involved 

“you try and make a move on her and i swear to God i’ll blast you all the way across japan, dunce face”

bakugou’s voice is threatening and low, and kaminari knows he means every word so he quickly raises his arms in defeat and nods his head

“okay, okay! i swear i won’t”

little do they know that you’ve been standing behind them for a while now

you’re happy to know your feelings are reciprocated 

but of course you want to tease bakugou about it

“hm did my ears deceive me or does boom boom boy have a crush on me?” 

kirishima and kaminari take that as their cue to run away to their rooms, leaving you two alone

“tch, how long have you been standing there?” even as he glares you down, he can’t hide the blush on his cheeks 

he didn’t want you to find out this way

or at all tbh

you walk over to him, a wide smile on your lips

“long enough”

afterwards you ask him if he wants to go watch a movie with you the next day and he’s lowkey mad because he wanted to ask you on a date first, but he doesn’t say no

you end up having way more fun than expected and you actually confirmed that bakugou was a softie for you 

(turns out you were the last one to find out because literally everyone else knew)

( gif isn’t mine !! credits go to its rightful owner )

midoriya izuku:

OKAY HE’D BE THE MOST FLUSTERED OUT OF ALL OF THEM

he can barely function around girls in general so like, what does that tell you?

he likes you so much but he’s so scared 

but he’s also so sweet to you even before you start dating oml

midoriya is a sweetheart, we all know this

and he pays so much attention to you

like if you are the mall one day and you see something you really like but can’t buy it for whatever reason well…

a few days later he gets it for you

he would say something along the lines of, “you seemed to really like it so i got it for you”

“you didn’t have to, izuku!”

“but i wanted to”

you’ll try to pay him back in some sort of way but he absolutely refuses

he loves pampering you

yet whenever you try to do the same he doesn’t let you and it’s: ✨annoying✨

anyways,

you were supposed to go to the movies

but midoriya had forgotten he had some homework to do, which was due the next day

“i’m so sorry y/n! i completely forgot, but i promise i’ll finish quickly” he tried to reassure you and you chuckle at the boy, so cute

“it’s okay, izuku. i don’t mind waiting”

you lay down on his bed, trying your best to keep your eyes open 

but as much as you tried, you eventually fell asleep against the soft sheets, your best friend’s bed being just too comfortable 

midoriya sat on his desk chair, writing down the answers as fast as he could so you guys could go watch the movie you were so excited about

he let out a sigh of relief when he finished, before taking his phone out to check the time

6:37PM, the movie starts at 7PM so we still have time

he stood up to tell you he had finished, but was met with your sleeping figure

your eyes were closed and soft snores left your slightly parted lips, hands gripping his sheets to your chest

the curly haired boy almost combusted at the sight

you looked so peaceful, so pretty

a smile grazed his lips as he made his way over to the bed

he sat down beside you, quietly admiring your features 

feeling the mattress dip thanks to his weight, you began to wake up, but quickly shut your eyes when you noticed midoriya was looking at you

truth be told, you just wanted to scare him by suddenly jumping

but his next words made your breath hitch

one of his hands moved up to your face, resting it gently against your cheek as his thumb massaged the skin

your heartbeat was out of control and you forced yourself to calm your breathing so he wouldn’t notice you were awake 

his touch was so gentle and sweet, you couldn’t bring yourself to push him away

“i wish i could tell you how beautiful you are” he whispered and if you hadn’t been so close to him, you probably wouldn’t have heard him

after hearing him say that you couldn’t stay still

you opened your eyes, a smile quickly spreading across your features as you turned around to face the green haired boy

midoriya almost had a heart attack when you moved, hoping you hadn’t heard him

but based on the mischievous grin you wore, he knew you had

“well you just did”

“y-you were awake?!”

“yup, i’m glad i was tho”

hE’S INTERNALLY SCREAMING

your gaze is flirtatious and you’re still grinning and he’s just >_<

“now let’s go or we’ll be late!” 

midoriya can only nod before following you outside

once you’re on your way to the movie theater, you notice midoriya fidgeting with his fingers, his eyes glued to his shoes

you smile as you suddenly take his hand in yours, interlacing your fingers together 

midoriya looks at you with a nervous expression, what is she doing?

“you know, you’re beautiful too”

you were looking at him with nothing but love in your eyes and he felt so embarrassed yet excited at the same time

because holy fuck you just called him beautiful AND held his hand???

he thinks it can’t get any better than this

and then it does when you kiss him a few weeks later😳🤚🏼

( gif isn’t mine !! credits go to @ambershaydeoffical )

todoroki shouto:

like bakugou, i don’t really think he’d be clumsy enough to accidentally confess

however, he does like to speak his mind and isn’t afraid to do so

he’s just really honest and blunt

way too honest 

which gets him in trouble sometimes but oh well, that’s just the way he is and everyone is pretty used to his personality by now

though, after figuring out he liked you as more than a friend, he started to think more before talking

sometimes you liked to get his opinion on your outfits and/or hairstyles

so you’d drag him to you room and force him to be honest and tell you which one he liked most

it doesn’t matter what you wear, you always look beautiful 

he wants to say that, but instead he goes:

“they all look good, i think the purple shirt really fits you tho”

“i was thinking the same thing!”

he doesn’t want to scare you off or make things weird

so he forces himself to hold back on his bluntness 

at least when he’s with you

but one day he just can’t help himself 

you were on your way back to the dorms after a tiring day at school

todoroki walked next to you, eyes glancing over to you from time to time so you knew he was listening\

you were currently rambling about how shitty your love life was

claiming that there must be something wrong with you since no one seemed to pay attention to you- at least romantically 

“i mean seriously, am i doing something wrong or is everyone i’ve met just not for me??” 

you had your cheeks puffed out, a pout on your lips as you kicked the small rocks on the floor

todoroki smiled softly at your complaints, thinking irony could be quite funny sometimes 

until you spoke up again,

“maybe i’m just too ugly or boring, that’d make more sense”

todoroki almost stops dead in his tracks to see if you have a fever 

how could you say that????

you’re so gorgeous to todoroki, and interesting 

you’re probably the first girl he’s ever liked this much in his life

and you have the audacity to doubt your worth just because other people can’t seem to appreciate you??

uh uh, he’s not having it

and so, the words come out before he can even register them properly

“if you were as ugly as you say are then, i don’t think i’d like you as much as i do”

your eyes widened and you stopped walking, wondering if you had heard him right

todoroki stops walking too, and once he realizes what happened, he’s looking away, trying to come up with a valid excuse as to why he said that

you, however, can’t stop staring at him

finding the way he glares at the ground adorable

a sense of happiness takes over your whole body when he doesn’t say anything to deny his sudden confession 

because he cannot lie to you

you walk towards todoroki until you’re standing right in front of him and before he can even question what you’re doing, you plant a sweet kiss against his cheek

“good thing the feeling is mutual”

your words make him smile and he looks so happy

probably the happiest he’s ever been

and you feel proud of being the one responsible for that pretty smile of his

neither of you really rush into making things official 

but the way todoroki lets you cuddle on his left side whenever you’re cold or how he waits for you every morning so you can walk together to class makes it more than clear that he really likes you

( gif isn’t mine !! credits go to its rightful owner )

takami keigo (hawks)

he’d be the type to not give a fuck about it

like he already confessed so what can he do?

nothing. exactly

he’s so cocky and flirty the whole time oml

he’d be shocked for a few seconds, but after seeing you were way more flustered than him, he’d just start teasing you

in a loving way of course

he’s also surprised you hadn’t noticed earlier on, considered how much he flirts with you, but then again, that’s part of his personality so

kinda makes sense you didn’t suspect anything

but he’s so cute and soft for you 🥺

okok so it happened the same day you got your results for your midterms

(you’re a college student here lol)

you had studied your ass off for this tests

staying up until 4AM and having to ditch your friends when they invited you to go out

so you were really positive

you squealed when your teacher hands you back the papers and you see the grade on the right corner

you felt happy to know that all your hard work wasn't in vain

the nerves you had been feeling since the day you took the midterms quickly vanished and were replaced with the feeling of pride

as you walked out of the building, you dialed the person who you wanted to share the news most with

he picked up after the second ring

“what’s up?” his voice was raspy and you ignored the butterflies that appeared in your stomach at the sound

“hey, i have great news!”

“care to elaborate?”

“you’ll find out when i get to your house”

“oh? and who said you could come over?” his tone is teasing and you can practically hear the smirk on his face, which makes you roll your eyes

“i did, now bye. i’ll be there in five minutes and order some pizza to celebrate” you don’t even get hear his complaints because you’ve already hung up

anyone who saw the way you two acted with each other would automatically think you guys were a couple

you were rather affectionate with each other; occasionally holding hands while you walked down the streets and even calling each other by your first names

that was just the bond you two had, and you loved it

he brought you so much comfort

it was almost ridiculous the way he was able to make you smile by simply calling or texting you

you had grown quite attached to the number 2 hero, but you constantly told yourself you needed to snap out of it

because you were friends

nothing more and nothing less

oh but how you wished there was more to your relationship than just that

you shook your head, as if that could help you get rid of the thoughts

true to your word, you soon found yourself outside of keigo’s house

the college you went to wasn’t that far away from there so

you pushed the doorbell and waited around two minutes before a sleepy looking keigo opened the door

his hair was messy and the way he rubbed his eyes and kept yawning let you know he probably had been taking a nap

you scoff, “were you sleeping?” you ask him as you walk into his home, smiling at the familiar scent

he chuckles from behind you, following you into his living room, “maybe, but you woke me up”

“can’t believe your lazy ass earned the number two spot”

“what can i say? it’s a talent,” he shrugs before sitting down next to you on the couch, resting his face on his hand. “so, what’s the good news?”

“so you know i took my midterms last friday, right?” keigo nods. “well, i got my results today” he raises his eyebrows in surprise and waits as you look for the papers inside your bag

once you get them out, you place them in front of your face so he can see for himself

keigo smiles proudly and it only widens when you look up at him expectantly, biting your lower lip

“holy fuck, that’s amazing! you did so good dove”

the nickname makes you weak on the knees but you’re quick to brush it off

you should be used to it, since keigo has been calling you that for quite some time now, yet it never fails to make your heart beat insanely fast

you nod excitedly and put the papers down before you start talking about your experience

keigo can’t help but admire you

you look so happy and cute

it makes him want to kiss you

he wants to shut you up by kissing you, and it sound mean and disrespectful but you just look so gorgeous 😡

and instead of randomly kissing you, he blurts out a confession

“math was probably the hardest but i managed to pass it too, surprisingly, so i-”

he doesn’t even know what you’re talking about anymore, too focused on your smile

“God i like you so much”

you shut up instantly

did you hear that right?

or was your mind playing tricks on you?

keigo looks away momentarily, before locking eyes with you and tilting his head to the side, waiting for a reaction

which he gets soon after because you can’t handle the way he’s looking at you

you look away, hiding your face the best you can

“w-what did you say?”

he smirks after hearing the stutter in your voice

he gets closer to you, until he’s right in front of your face, before saying:

“i like you, y/n”

you don’t know what to say

what are you even supposed to do???

keigo just confessed

your best friend and crush just confessed to you

that’s not something that happens everyday

“i um, like you too” you don’t look at him and he almost chuckles at your shy expression, but decides not to embarrass you any further

“happy to hear that”

he doesn’t say anything for a while and you wonder what the hell is going through his head right

he’s probably just messing with me. oh my God he probably is and i just said i liked him too so what-

your train of thought is cut off when you feel the blonde ruffle your hair while looking at you lovingly

you slowly look up to him

“i’m proud of you, dove”

fuck

“t-thanks”

“now, i think this is something worth celebrating and i’m not talking about pizza. so let me take you out”

“it’s fine, keigo. you don’t need to-”

“can’t hear you, give me about fifteen minutes and then we’ll get going”

you try to tell him no, that it’s fine and you can just eat pizza but he ignores you and still takes you out to eat

i’ll say it again: he’s so sweet :(((

he pays for the food and gives you his jacket when you get cold

he even treats you to some dessert !!

he also kisses you good night when he drops you off at your house <3

[legends-of-apex]

Loba x GN!Reader x Crypto: ‘Something More’ (Part 1 of 2) FLUFF

Summary: You, Loba and Crypto have been working to find a way to take down the Syndicate together. Its just the three of you against the world. You have a friends with benefits sort of situation with both of them individually but you all slowly begin to reach the conclusion that this is something more than that. 

Warnings: Canon-typical violence, mild references to the Reader having hooked-up with Loba and Crypto (separately) before, fluff, Reader is mildly injured at one point, Loba’s a flirt and is still trying to hunt down Revenant every chance she gets 

Word Count: 2,788

A/N: Part 1 is SFW, only extremely mild references to the Reader being involved with Loba and Crypto. Part 2 will be extremely NSFW and will hopefully be posted next week :D The Reader is gender neutral and is in a support role and has an arm shield similar to Gibby that they can use at any time rather than just when using a weapon! If you’d like to be tagged in part 2 please let me know!

Your banner illuminated the screen above you, sandwiched squarely between Loba’s and Crypto’s. As you stepped onto the descending platform, Loba extended her closed fist for you to bump with your own, her staff twirling in her other hand. Turning to face Crypto, you saw the smirk on his lips and the knowing look he gave you.

His algorithm had worked again. The three of you securely squadded together thanks to his fiddling with the matchmaking system.

Legends that look for information on how to take down the syndicate together, stay together. It was safer that way.

“I’m the jumpmaster, you’re falling for me already!” Loba shouts over the roar of the ship’s engine. Crypto groaned but you couldn’t help but let out a laugh and her antics. The adrenaline from being up so high always made you a little giddy. That and the nervousness of dropping into the ring in a matter of seconds. But you couldn’t have been happier with your team, squadded together with your most trusted companions in the games. They had your back no matter what and even if the games were stressful and violent, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Loba and Crypto brought you a sense of comfort. They made you feel safe.

Crypto suggested landing in Water Treatment and so you did. Red smoke billowing off of another team landing near you. You caught the glint of metal from Revenant and a flash of orange from Mirage. There was no way to tell who their other squadmate was from the speed at which you plummeted towards the ground, your jetpack slowing you just before your feet made contact with the Earth.

“Revenant and Mirage landed with us. Not sure who the third is but stay vigilant!” You shouted, perhaps too loud through your coms link as high landed with Loba. Crypto got separated on the other side of the building but you heard his soft “Copy that” in your ear. Loba was already hunting Revenant but you thought it best to actually grab a weapon and a body shield first. Loba was usually so careful, planning out her every move but when it came to Revenant, all her logic went flying out the window. When she was reckless she wasn’t on the top of her game and it showed.

“I’m hit!”

Shit.

Sprinting to the small room on the ground floor where Loba was downed, Mirage’s bright orange gear glared through the window. With your R301 poised, you kicked the door open and aimed for his legs. He went down before he could turn to see you, Loba must have already done a number on him.

“Hey, no fair!” he grumbled. Loba crawled towards the corner of the room and you knelt beside her immediately, taking out one of the syringes all legends are equipped with to revive their teammates. You lay her down gently, pointing your gun at Mirage when he tried to crawl outside. With one fell swoop of your arm, the syringe is buried in Loba’s chest and she’s sitting up again, squeezing your hand in thanks. You drop all the healing items you have for her to heal her injuries. The door nearest to Mirage opens and bullets are spraying. You feel a sting in your arm and your gun falls, so does Wraith, the third teammate, as Loba manages to down her. Behind her, in runs Crypto.

“You took your time.” Lobs remarks as she walks towards Mirage, a P2020 in-hand. “Where’s the robot?” she asks more sternly than she would ever usually speak to him, even in the games. Hunting Revenant really brought out the worst in her. Mirage, thinking better than to deny her request, looks to his wrist to see his mini-map.

“He’s heading towards the ring, near Hydro Dam. Listen he’s not going to come back for us. You know that. The guy’s a dick. Just make it quick.” Loba is quick to oblige him, leaning her face in so close to his that he can smell her perfume before she presses her P2020 to the underside of his jaw.

“Find the demonio.” She tells Crypto as she moves to finish off Wraith. You sat clutching your arm just across from him and when for a brief moment he looked down to you, his eyes widened and he closed his drone display immediately. “젠장!” He’s by your side in an instant, hand on your cheek asking what’s wrong. “Just my arm. One syringe should do it.” He fishes several out of his pack and is carefully rolling up your sleeve so he can heal you himself before you can tell him otherwise.

“Oh beautiful, what happened?” Loba asks, seeing Crypto helping you once she had finished off Wraith. “How didn’t you notice Crypto?” He didn’t answer but you saw his jaw clench as he gently rolled your sleeve back down, briefly squeezing your hand in his for reassurance before his brow furrowed.His voice unnervingly calm, he turned to face Loba and stood. “Perhaps if you weren’t so hellbent on me finding that robot so you can kill him every match then I would’ve noticed sooner that they got shot on your watch.”

Loba tuts and swings her staff over her shoulders, hanging both arms over it and looking over at him with a scowl, “Forgive me if I was too focused on dealing with the problem to notice a few stray bullets.” Yikes.

“That’s not the point and you know it!” he gestures to you and then back to himself, “We’re here because we have to be, what’s your excuse?” He rarely pulled any punches when it came to Loba and it looked like today wasn’t going to be any different. Her staff was poised in his direction and she walked towards him at such a frightening pace that you barely managed to step between them in time.

“Can you two behave?” you asked, frankly annoyed at their petty squabble, batting Loba’s staff away from Crypto with your hand, “you’re on the same side remember? And if we want to finish what we started then we have to stick together.” You looked between them. Crypto was setting Hack back into its place on his back and Loba slowly lowered her staff. “Come on, you’re not children. You’re better than this.”

They knew you were right. Loba was the first to apologise. “Sorry, hacker. You’re right but it’s hard for me to look past what Revenant did to my family. And I’m sorry you got shot. Had I seen what happened, I would have helped you immediately. It won’t happen again.” She leant back on her staff, batting her eyelashes at you before turning to Crypto. You followed her gaze.

He sighed as his hands found his pockets, looking to you for a moment because he wasn't sure if you actually expected him to apologise. The stern look on your face and your crossed arms told him you did. “I apologise for my harsh words. You’re right, we need to stick together because we’re all we have in this place.”

“Great! Now let’s get going, there’s not much time left before the ring closes.” Their spats were usually quick and resolved just as easily. You all took to looting Mirage and Wraith’s death boxes as quickly as you could, taking anything you thought you might need. “Anyone need light ammo?” you asked, seeing an overabundance of it in your pack.

“Yes, please!” Loba chirped, “You really do take such good care of us. You ought to let us return the favour some time.” Cheeks growing warm, you handed her some of the spare ammo. The double meaning wasn't lost on you, or Crypto apparently given how his face saw a red tinge too. Loba walked away laughing quietly to herself at how easily the two of you were flustered. It was so easy to tease you now that you had told her about your “thing” with Crypto, he knew about your relations with her as well but never really commented on it. Loba, on the other hand, wanted to know every last detail, to the point where you were sure she was planning something. And sure, you’d said you wouldn’t mind having both of them at once when Loba asked but you weren’t sure if Crypto would be down for it simply because you had never discussed it with him. She told you she would try to see if he was up for such an arrangement, stating how she was sure he would be happy to involve himself with almost anything that would make you feel appreciated.

——————————————————————————————————

Hydro Dam neared as the three of you pushed on, stopping briefly in Repulsor for some extra supplies. “I need shields.” Loba’s voice sounded from your communicator. “Shield cell here!” You replied, just happening to come across the little blue canisters on the ground where you were. “Thanks, beautiful!” you heard and felt yourself getting a little flustered again. That was Loba’s forte it seems.

Crypto rolled his eyes so dramatically that Loba caught it halfway across the room even as she was busy looting. “What? It’s not like I’m lying.” She shrugged, turning a weapon over in her hands, deciding whether or not she wanted to take it.

“I know,” he states, “But your advances are relentless.” He stood beside a crate and pulled out his drone, a green hue illuminating his face from the drone’s display. Her eyes narrowed briefly, styling him before realisation lit up on her face; He was jealous and it would be incredibly fun to get him to admit it.

“Oh don’t act like you don’t just want to have her all to yourself. I saw that puppy dog look in your eyes when they were injured.” She opted to take the gun, dropping her old one to the floor. The sound startled Crypto but he retained his composure. He would never show weakness around her. “I can’t afford to think about anything other than what I’m here to do.” He replied, his tone of voice far too flat. He didn’t even look at her when he spoke, eyes still fixated on his drones display.

Bullshit.

Shaking her head, she extended her hand to check over her perfectly manicured nails. Somehow now a single one had been chipped yet but she was more interested in looking as bored with talking about the subject as he was pretending to be.“Oh? I must have misread you. Don’t worry if you’re just a bit jealous, it’s our little secret hm? I’m sure we could learn to share.” To be fair, they already did just not in the way she was suggesting. You weren’t strictly speaking in a relationship with either of them, it was more a series of “casual” hook-ups with the added infuriation of caring so much about them both that it hurt.

That got his attention, he snapped his head in her direction, still taking quick glances at his drone to make sure there weren’t any enemies nearby as he scouted out the area. “Share?” he looked more curious about what exactly she was suggesting but a part of him already knew, “You know we’ve been sleeping together, don’t you?

“Yes! And you, me. I’m presuming.” He did, of course. “So what do you say we suggest a little get together for the three of us? She has been working so hard lately, I think they could use the stress relief, don’t you think?” The look on Loba's face wasn't mischievous or like she was planning something else. She was sincere in wanting such an arrangement for you and if he was being honest, he wouldn't have minded it for you either so long as that was what you wanted and considering Loba was suggesting it to him, she had likely already spoken to you. He nods his head, he did want you to have that experience and he knew Loba only really had your best interest at heart as well but before he can even think of what to say, your voice sounds over their comms, startled and pinging an enemy’s location. You heard their entire conversation through your communicator and were trying to suppress the exited feeling it filled you with.

You were stationed on top of a building, eye aimed down the scope of your Sentinel at a full squad running through Hydro Dam. “It’s a full squad! Coming our way.” Crypto’s drone appeared above their heads, a little sphere of electricity beaming from it as the squad’s shields were depleted. Loba was running towards them, her bracelet extended, ready to teleport behind them. “Shields burst!” Crypto states. You downed Pathfinder with a headshot and a shot to the shoulder. Loba was midway through fighting Bangalore. Crypto ran past below you. Now was your time to move.

Slinging your sniper weapon over your shoulder, you grabbed your R301 and dropped to the ground, running to catch up with them. Loba downed Bangalore but couldn’t find Gibraltar, he was the last of the squad. Catching up to Crypto, you found him in his drone already searching when a grenade came flying in his direction. With a flick of your wrist, your shield sparked to life in time for you to knock the frag to the side so it at the very least didn’t hit him head-on and detonate instantly. You only had a few seconds before it went off, red lights blinking at you almost mockingly. Slamming yourself onto the ground, shield covering you as you pulled Crypto down to your height so his head wouldn’t get caught by the blast. The grenade went off, you had shielded him just in time.

Being completely unaware of the situation until you tugged him down beside you, Crypto gasped when the grenade went off. The blast was enough to break your arm-shield but at least you were both safe. Loba managed to take down Gibraltar on her own.“You really gotta lookup more when you’re in that drone.” You sighed, wiping the dirt from your face after you released him from your hold and got to your feet. “Thank you for having my back. That’s the second time in two matches.”

“Enough flirting, you two, save it for when we win.” As unlikely as that was, it was made even more unlikely by the agreement the three of you had to only very rarely allow yourselves to make it to the top three squads. For the sake of avoiding suspicion and not drawing any attention to Crypto’s algorithm, it was worth the statistics hit.

“Got a chip from the MRVN, looks Syndicate. It should contain a digital signature that could give us some more information on the Syndicate. Where he was made, who by, anything.” You watched as Crypto plugged the chip into a small device he kept on his belt. With a click of a few buttons, the chip was completely duplicated. He passed the original chip to you, metallic fingers gently placing it into your palm. “Definitely Hammond tech?” Loba asked, crossing her arms over her chest but looking hopefully nonetheless.

Giving it the once over and immediately recognising the build as similar to chips used by the IMC. “Most likely. Looks older than most.” You plugged the chip back into its rightful place in a slot at the back of Pathfinder’s neck, a low whirr sounded as it sunk back into place. “We could meet at my place to decrypt it this time?”

“Good idea. Less conspicuous that we don’t always go straight to Crypto’s room every match we have together. Whose quarters are next to yours?” Loba was bored with Crypto's room anyways, there was nothing but tech everywhere and she had never actually been to your room yet. Her quarters were much more luxurious than your own and you always insisted that your room wasn't special enough for her to bother visiting. Crypto much preferred your room to his plus you had a great PC in there and he had already made sure there were no listening devices. It was just as secure as his own quarters but felt twice as welcoming. It felt like an actual home rather than his glorified workstation.

“Noone’s, it’s empty. I politely requested the quietest room possible because last season I could barely sleep from people stomping through the corridors all night." You sighed, remembering how Caustic would stomp past your doorway at all hours of the night to check on his experiments, "You could set off a fire alarm in there and no one would hear you.” Loba and Crypto shared a look.

“Perfect! Your place after the match it is.”

Tagging (Thank you for liking/ rbing that post to be tagged :D ): @kumiakum​ @dragon-chica ​ @lonelyintheclub​ @wintergirlsoilder2 @itsthedoctah10 @quinn-lee @askloba @julestheengineer1 @smolminimonnie​ @peachymochimochi @korean-crypted-trash (If you’d like to be untagged, please let me know!)

[tech-specialist98]

Poco X3 Pro review: More power to you

📷

📷📷 Poco X3Poco hasn’t been around for long and yet very quickly this Xiaomi spinoff brand has built a reputation for itself launching multiple products with “world’s first or India’s first” technologies. Starting off with the illustrious Poco F1, it went on to launch the Poco X2 (first phone under 20k with 120Hz refresh rate display) and Poco X3 (first phone with Qualcomm Snapdragon 732G system-on-chip). The freshly minted Poco X3 Pro, likewise, is the first phone with Qualcomm Snapdragon 860 SoC. More than the chip itself, it is the price of the phone that is grabbing headlines. It starts at just Rs 18,999 (6GB/128GB).Then again, if you know a thing or two about Poco, this is business as usual.Unlike the Poco F1 or Poco X2 or even the Poco X3, the Poco X3 Pro isn’t technically a new product so to say. As the name suggests, it’s a turbo-charged Poco X3. If the Poco X3 was a race car, the Poco X3 Pro with its more powerful hardware should be a rocket ship. That’s expected. But that’s not all that you probably expect from a phone launching in 2021, even if its costs so low. You also expect a little bit of polish and a little bit of promise of futureproofing to go along.High performance, delivered Like the phone itself, the chip inside it is also not completely brand new. The Snapdragon 860 is a Snapdragon 855 from 2019 with a slightly overclocked CPU. Think of it as a refurbished Snapdragon 855 Plus. Considering how fast Qualcomm keeps refreshing its portfolio these days, some might take that refurbished badge with a pinch of salt. Some might call it dated. But when you put a chip like that inside a budget phone like the Poco X3 Pro, all your preconceived notions are instantly blown away. Suddenly, things start to make a lot of sense.Make no mistake, this is the most powerful phone under 20k in the Indian market today. Period. As if it wasn’t already enough, the Poco X3 Pro also comes with UFS 3.1 storage, another first for any phone in this price range.The Poco X3 Pro story essentially revolves around this hardware combo. It is perhaps the only Poco phone worthy of being called a “spiritual” successor to the Poco F1, perfectly aligning with its “everything you need, nothing you don’t” formula which is probably why the brand is going all out on marketing it that way. For good reason. Next to the Poco X3, the Poco X3 Pro is a whole new beast. Like I said, it’s a rocket ship.And it performs like one, for the most part. There are two parts to this story.This is the only phone under 20k that can play a graphically intensive game like Genshin Impact (at medium setting) or Call of Duty: Mobile (all maxed out) effortlessly, which is to say that your experience would be very, very satisfying. The Adreno 640 GPU holds up well. Though it throttles from time to time, this phone latches on and gives you a steady 60fps in many supporting games. Something like this was not possible before. It opens new opportunities, the Poco X3 Pro, for those looking to get some sort of headstart into the world of competitive gaming without breaking their bank. But it is not perfect. The Snapdragon 860, like the Snapdragon 870, and even the Snapdragon 888, is prone to heating, sometimes alarmingly when stressed. There is a cooling system inside the phone — called Liquid Cool Plus — but it seems lifted as is from the Poco X3, a phone that came with a far less powerful chip in comparison. Whatever it is, it can’t hold the beast for long as the Poco X3 Pro gets warm quickly, and near toasty during extended gaming sessions. At this point, it can become uncomfortable to hold.Basic day-to-day tasks are handled well by the phone though. As an everybody phone, this is as slick as it can get at such a low price. Poco gives you an option for up to 8 gigs of LPDDR4X RAM. Storage is capped at 128GB, but the phone supports expansion by up to 1TB. This is via a hybrid slot.Beyond gaming Rest of the Poco X3 Pro is familiar territory. Be it design, display, or battery. Even the cameras. That is not to say there are no changes, but those changes have got more to

do with subtle refinements than anything else. Some choices work, some not so much but you can tell Poco has tried to add a bit of polish to the whole package. The Poco X3 was rough around the edges.This starts with the design itself. The dual tone look is being carried over, which is to say that the Poco X3 Pro — like its predecessor — is also unapologetically bold and flashy. There is a new bronze colourway if you’re into that sort of thing. The pill-shaped massive camera module stays put too. So does the recessed side-mounted fingerprint reader which is, expectedly, fast and responsive. The only change here is the slightly tweaked Poco branding that’s more “3D” than before, but still difficult to unsee — and in my case, difficult to get along with.One of the big concerns with the Poco X3 was its heft. It was big and bulky. A part of this was because of its huge 6,000mAh battery. Poco has tried to address those concerns by reducing capacity — the Poco X3 Pro has a smaller 5,160mAh battery — but the results are nothing to write home about. The Poco X3 Pro is still an all-plastic phone that’s almost 215 gram in weight and nearly 9.5mm in thickness. Not to mention, that watered-down battery means the Poco X3 Pro can’t last as long as the Poco X3 (battery life on average is good though). It’s one of those rare instances where Poco has backed itself into a corner.It’s barely touched that screen though aside from bumping up the protection which is Corning Gorilla Glass 6 now. The Poco X3 Pro has the same 6.67-inch IPS LCD display with 1080p resolution and dynamic 120Hz refresh rate (240Hz touch sampling) as the Poco X3. It works in the same way also which means it is good but not best in class. The panel does not get very bright, colours appear muted and viewing angles could be better. The phone can’t play HDR10 content off streaming services like Netflix despite support. Ghosting or random stutters are common across some UI elements from time to time or when you are browsing through a page that involves diverse elements like text, images/GIFs, or videos. Next to a phone like the Redmi Note 10 Pro Max, or Note 10 Pro, the Poco X3 Pro looks seriously underpowered in this regardThese Redmi phones also give the Poco X3 Pro’s cameras a run for their money. The Poco X3, even though it was a performance-oriented slash gaming phone, had a competitive camera setup. For some curious reason, its “Pro” version takes several steps back. It has a 48MP main (this was 64MP in the X3), 8MP ultra-wide-angle (13MP in X3) and two 2MP cameras, one for depth and another for macros. Output is just about serviceable.You can take good-enough shots with the primary camera (Sony IMX582 sensor) when lots of light is available, but the level of detail and dynamic range could be better. Colours are mostly true to source, which is nice. The ultra-wide camera lacks colour parity with the main camera, but it does a decent job offering a wider perspective when lighting is ideal. Details are still amiss in these photos, but it is what it is. Portraits shot with the Poco X3 Pro come out nice with good subject separation and creamy background blur. The macro shooter is a hit or miss affair. Low light photos (even with night mode which is also available on the ultra-wide) are disappointing, in part due to the aggressive noise reduction algorithm. Video recording tops out at 4K@30fps. The 20MP front camera is same as the one on the Poco X3. It takes decent selfies when lighting is good with occasional smoothening even when beautification is manually set to off.Software has always been Poco’s dark horse and while that’s largely true about the Poco X3 Pro as well, MIUI for Poco is clearly showing signs of ageing, already. It does not show any pesky ads like its other Redmi siblings which is well articulated and appreciated, but Poco needs to do more than that to justify its existence as an independent brand now. MIUI for Poco needs to be more than just MIUI with a Poco launcher to differentiate itself. With Xiaomi borrowing many of its features including the

hallowed app drawer and Google feed on the minus one screen, MIUI for Poco doesn’t really stand out anymore. If anything, it has become buggier by the day. The amount of bloat or unwanted apps has gone up. But the biggest problem is the lack of clarity on future updates. My review unit is running MIUI 12.0.5 (with the April security patch) when an even cheaper Redmi phone like the Redmi Note 10S has been updated to MIUI 12.5.4.An ode to a classic I write this review as I install Battlegrounds Mobile India Beta on this phone, and I can’t help but think how far Poco has come. How the Poco F1 turned the industry literally upside down. That phone was far from perfect. It had a wonky design and terrible cameras. The thing couldn’t even stream Netflix in high definition initially. And yet, here we are, three years later, still asking Poco to launch a successor. Not a lot of phones have commanded so much respect and adulation from fans and critics alike. It was truly one of its kind, the Poco F1, and I think it’s befitting it stays that way. Some things are just not meant to be replacedBut you can always have a product or two that could take you back in time. Something like the Poco X3 Pro. It is the only phone that has been able to recreate some of that lost Poco F1 magic for me.There are phones with better design, more colourful display, significantly better cameras, and longer battery life under 20k, but none of them can play Battlegrounds Mobile India Beta the way it is meant to be played like the Poco X3 Pro. If that is what you are looking for, the Poco X3 Pro comes highly recommended.But here’s the thing, nostalgia and power will take Poco only so far. Considering how a lot of people are still holding on to their Poco F1s, it would have been nice had Poco offered a 5G option (it’s possible since the Snapdragon 860 is compatible with an external X50 5G modem) even if it came at a cost.Pros: Most powerful phone under 20k, 120Hz display, Loud dual speakers, IP53 rating, Good battery lifeCons: Big and bulky, Cameras could be better, Slow Android update rollout

[marrincostello]

45.99% Earnings Increase in 5 Months for a Digital Infoproduct [SEO Case Study]

You’re about to get the strategy behind one of the most challenging SEO campaigns my SEO agency has ever run.

Why was it so challenging?  3 reasons:

First, the niche is massively competitive: A make-money-online infoproduct in the financial niche.  Nuff said.

Second, we only had 5-months to pull this off.

Third, just like any other client, they were extremely hungry for results and demanded quality work.

In the case study below, you’re going to learn the technical playbook, the onsite content strategy, and the link building techniques we carried out to get this 45.99% revenue growth win for this infoproduct business.

The Case Study

Our client takes advantage of the wide reach of the interwebs to teach his students how to earn money trading online. We’re talking currencies, forex, stock markets, crypto, etc.

The business’ revenue is generated solely through the sale of digital download products – in this case, trading guides in an ebook format and video trading courses.

When the owner of this profitable business (which already built some authority in the niche) approached The Search Initiative (TSI) about helping to grow their organic reach and find new students, we were excited to take on the challenge in one of the most competitive spaces there is.

There was also a catch – the campaign was planned for only 5 months, which sounded really scary in this case.

To accomplish this, the game plan was to focus hard on a quick-win strategy, while setting the stage for long term gains post-campaign.

Our strategists were certain that the value we could provide would have a considerable impact on his business’ bottom line.

How?  Because…

By focusing on increasing organic traffic, we could improve sales, while allowing the client to pull back on ad spend.

Over the course of the campaign, our technically-focused SEO strategies were able to grow organic traffic by 23.46%.

But what did the best job for the client’s business was the 45.99% increase in the number of conversions comparing 1st vs last month of the campaign. Sales went up from just over 2,100 a month to 3,095 – this really bumped their monetization.

And we did it in time.

These gains were achieved within only 5 months of the client signing with TSI and our team starting the campaign.

Here’s how we did it…

The SEO Playbook for Infoproduct Websites

Phase 1: A Comprehensive Technical Audit

I’ve said this in every TSI case study we’ve published so far… and I simply cannot emphasize enough:

A comprehensive technical audit is the most crucial part of any SEO campaign.

So before you begin any campaign, always start with a full technical audit.

Starting with…

Page Speed

First, our technical SEO strategists started at the bottom of the client’s tech stack… and you should too.

This starts with you digging into the web server’s configuration, and running a series of tests to measure the site’s speed.

This enables you to ensure that the performance of the web server itself wasn’t causing a penalty or disadvantage on either desktop or mobile connections.

So, what tests we run?

PageSpeed Insights (PSI) – this should be everyone’s go-to tool and shouldn’t need an explanation.

In cases where transfer speeds or latency are too high, we advise you (and our clients) to consider migrating to faster servers, upgrading to better hosting or better yet, re-platforming to a CDN.

Luckily, most of the time, you can achieve most of the gains through WPRocket optimization, as was the case with this case study.

Your Golden WPRocket Settings

Cache → Enable caching for mobile devices

This option should always be on. It ensures that your mobile users are also having your site served cached.

Cache → Cache Lifespan

Set it depending on how often you update your site, but we find a sweet spot at around 2-7 days.

File Optimization → Basic Settings

Be careful with the first one – it may break things!

File Optimization → CSS Files

Again, this section is quite tricky and it may break things. My guys switch them on one-by-one and test if the site works fine after enabling each option.

Under Fallback critical CSS you should paste your Critical Path CSS which you can generate using CriticalCSS site.

File Optimization → Javascript

This section is the most likely to break things, so take extreme care enabling these options!!

Depending on your theme, you might be able to defer Javascript with the below:

Note that we had to use a Safe Mode for jQuery as, without this, our theme stopped working.

After playing with Javascript options, make sure you test your site thoroughly, including all contact forms, sliders, checkout, and user-related functionalities.

Media → LazyLoad

Preload → Preload

Preload → Prefetch DNS Requests

The URLs here hugely depend on your theme. Here, you should paste the domains of the external resources that your site is using.

Also, when you’re using Cloudflare – make sure to enable the Cloudflare Add-on in WPRocket.

Speaking of Cloudflare – the final push for our site’s performance we managed to get by using Cloudflare as the CDN provider (the client sells products worldwide).

GTMetrix

If you don’t want to use additional plugins (which I highly recommend), below is a .htaccess code I got from our resident genius and Director of SEO, Rad Paluszak  – it’ll do the basic stuff like:

GZip compression

Deflate compression

Expires headers

Some cache control

So without any WordPress optimization plugins, this code added at the top of your .htaccess file, will slightly improve your PageSpeed Insights results:

Internal Redirects

You know how it goes – Google says that redirects don’t lose any link juice, but PageRank formula and tests state something different (there’s a scientific test run on 41 million .it websites that shows PageRank’s damping factor may vary).

Whichever it is, let’s take all necessary precautions in case there is a damping factor and redirects drop a % of their link juice.

Besides, not using internal redirects is just good housekeeping. Period.

As we investigated the configuration of the server, we discovered some misapplied internal redirects, which were very easily fixed but would have a considerable effect on SEO performance – a quick win.

You can test them with a simple tool httpstatus.io and see results for individual URLs:

But this would be a long way, right? So your best bet is to run a Sitebulb crawl and head over to the Redirects section of the crawl and look at Internal Redirected URLs:

There you will find a list of all internally redirected URLs that you should update and make to point at the last address in the redirect chain.

You might need to re-run the crawl multiple times to find all of them. Be relentless!

Google Index Management

Everyone knows that Google crawls and indexes websites. This is the bare foundation of how the search engine works.

It visits the sites, crawling from one link to the other. Does it repetitively to keep the index up-to-date, as well as incrementally, discovering new sites, content, and information.

Over time, crawling your site, Google sees its changes, learns structure and gets to deeper and deeper parts of it.

Google stores in their index everything it finds applicable to keep; everything considered useful enough for the users and Google itself.

However, sometimes it gets to the pages that you’d not want it to keep indexed. For example, pages that accidentally create issues like duplicate or thin content, stuff kept only for logged-in visitors, etc.

Google does its best to distinguish what it should and shouldn’t index, but it may sometimes get it wrong.

Now, this is where SEOs should come into play. We want to serve Google all the content on a silver platter, so it doesn’t need to algorithmically decide what to index.

We clean up what’s already indexed, but was not supposed to be. We also prevent pages from being indexed, as well as making sure that important pages are within reach of the crawlers.

I don’t see many sites that get this one right.

Why?

Most probably because it’s an ongoing job and site owners and SEOs just forget to perform it every month or so.

On the other hand, it’s also not so easy to identify index bloat.

With this campaign, to ensure that Google’s indexation of the site was optimal, we looked at these:

Site: Search

Google Search Console

In our case, we found 3 main areas that needed attention:

Indexed internal search

If you’re on a WordPress site – you have to pay attention to this one.

Most of WordPress websites offer a built-in search engine. And this search engine is usually using the same pattern: ?s={query}.

Bear in mind that ?s= is the default one for WordPress, but if your theme allows you to set this up yourself, you might end up having something else instead of the “s” param.

To check if this is also your problem, use this site: search operator

site:domain.com inurl:s=

If it comes back with any results, it means that your internal search pages are being indexed, you’re wasting Google’s crawl budget, and you want to block them.

For our client, we suggested implementing noindex tags.

If your SEO plugin doesn’t have the option to noindex search results (I know that Rankmath does, but can’t remember if Yoast offers it as I’ve been off Yoast for a long time now), you might alternatively add the following line to your robots.txt:

Disallow: *?s=*

Duplicate homepage

This is another fairly common issue in WordPress if you’re using a static page as your homepage.

You see, the CMS may generate the pagination on your homepage, even if you don’t really have it paginated.

Why does this happen? Well, usually when you have a section where you list some of your newest posts. Or (thank you WordPress!) when you used to have your homepage set up as “Latest Posts” and Google managed to index them.

This creates URLs like these:domain.com/page/12/ domain.com/page/2/ domain.com/page/7/ domain.com/page/{number}/

The problem is caused because Google sees different content on these pagination pages – of course, the articles on page 2, 3, x are different, so the paginated list changes.

If you don’t have enough of the other, non-listed content on your homepage, to convince Google that these pages are similar enough to obey canonical – you have a problem.

In this case, even if you have the correct canonical tags in place, but Google finds these pages to not be identical, it might choose to ignore the canonicals. And you end up having all this stuff in the index.

It’s worth a check if you have similar pages indexed – and you should definitely pay attention:

To find these, run another site: search:

site:domain.com/page

To solve this for our client, we set up the 301 redirects so all of these pagination pages were pointing back to the homepage and we also removed them from XML sitemap:

(If you’re wondering, this screenshot is from Rank Math, which is a great free Yoast alternative, but you can also use Redirection plugin for WordPress.)

Please note that if your homepage is set up as a blog page (see below screenshot), this is most likely NOT a problem!

Other unwanted indexed pages

In our case, we also found other pages that were indexed but shouldn’t be:

Old forum pages

Old template pages

Blog tags

Media pages (thanks again, Yoast…)

Each of them might be different in your case, so you might want to consult an agency or professional SEO.

For this client, we removed the pages and used a 410 Gone HTTP header to remove them from the index faster.

Protip: Site: search queries you need to know

site:domain.com

This one is your foundational search queries and allows you to go through the entirety of what Google has indexed under your domain.

I like to run a search like this and switch to 100 results per page, by adding a num=100 parameter on Google:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site:domain.com&num=100

Then, I just click through the SERPs and inspect what’s there.

Things that are the most common issues are:

Query strings

Login/Cart/Checkout

Pagination

Tags

Anything that surprises you 🙂

Note that it doesn’t work for big sites as Google will only show you a sample of URLs.

site:domain.com/{folder}

This is just an extension of the standard site: search and allows you to find everything in a folder.

For example, on a Shopify site, you can list all category pages by running this search:

site:domain.com/collections/

Moving on…

site:domain.com inurl:{part-of-the-URL}

I love this one. It allows you to list all pages that share a common part of the URL.

For example, let’s say you want to find all pages that have “guide” in the URL:

site:domain.com inurl:guide

Voila!

site:domain.com -inurl:{part-of-the-URL}

Did you notice the little minus sign here “-inurl”? This one allows you to list all URLs that do not contain a certain string in the URL.

Let’s say you want to list all pages that do not contain “blog” in the URL.

Here’s how you’d do it:

site:domain.com -inurl:blog

The combination: site:domain.com -inurl:{part-of-the-URL} inurl:{another-URL-pattern}

Get ready for a really serious tool now! This one is a combination of “inurl” and “-inurl” (not in URL) operators and allows you to list pages that have a specific string in the URL, while don’t have another part in it.

For example, if you want to list all pages that are guides on your site, but not the buying guides – here’s how:

site:domain.com inurl:guide -inurl:buying

Make sure not to use spaces between the “:” and the string!

Also, be careful with the queries where operators cancel each other out – Google won’t return any results for these!

There are plenty of other combinations and search operators, so if any of the above is new to you, you should definitely read more about them here:

Get Your Sitemap in Order

In this case study, the team ensured that the XML sitemap was configured correctly so that Google’s crawlers and indexation engine were able to fully understand the site’s structure and present it to their users accurately.

Run a crawl with Screaming Frog to ensure that no URLs that are noindexed or missing are added to the sitemap.

First, switch to “List Mode” in Screaming Frog. Then select Upload → Download XML Sitemap. Type in the URL and let it crawl.

There should be no other pages than only the ones returning a 200 status code.

If there are, just remove them from the sitemap!

Soft 404 Errors

Soft 404 is a URL that displays a page telling the user that the page does not exist, but it returns a 200 OK (Success) instead of a 4xx HTTP status code.

This can definitely be a big problem for your site because, when it occurs, Google will start selecting what it thinks is a 404 with incorrect (200) HTTP response code on its own and, let’s be honest, algorithm sometimes often gets it wrong!

So, you’re facing an issue that good pages, which you’d rather keep in the index, are being thrown out because Google thinks they’re 404s.

Why does it think so?

Most probably there are similarities between the genuinely good and Soft 404 pages.

Unfortunately, these similarities are not obvious and, when analyzed algorithmically, they can be mistakenly taken as anything common and silly: footer, sidebar, banner ads, or whatnot.

So let me give you an example – this is how my 404 page looks like:

It returns a correct 404 status code, so everything is fine:

Now, if it was returning a 200 code – it would’ve been a soft 404. Google would figure it out and it could all be fine.

But there’s a but.

Let’s say I had a page with just a little bit of content – like this made up one:

As you can see – it has a different content, but everything else is the same: header, sidebar, footer.

When you approach it as Google does – algorithmically, it might end up being very similar to the soft 404 page example above. In fact, Google may class it the same. And this is what you don’t want. You don’t want Google to decide for you.

My rule is – don’t allow Google to make any decisions for you!

Our job, as SEOs, is to make it ridiculously easy for Google to crawl and index your site. So don’t leave anything you don’t have to for the algorithm to figure out.

In this case, we had all 404 pages set up to 301 redirect back to the homepage. It’s a common practice, but occasionally a dangerous one.

Why would it be dangerous?

Because we’ve seen cases where Google would simply treat all 301 redirects to the homepage as Soft 404s. And when it does that, it might also start treating your homepage as a Soft 404 page, because all these Soft 404s are defaulting to your homepage, right?

And what does that mean?

No homepage.

And when there’s no homepage? No rankings!

But if you’re really unlucky, Google will think that if your homepage got removed (Soft 404’d and thrown out of index), your entire domain should go out the window! And it’ll go on and de-index everything.

Sounds harsh!? It does, but we’ve seen extreme cases like this, so it’s better to be safe than sorry.

So why were we comfortable doing it?

At TSI our approach to this is simple: 404s are a natural thing on the Internet!

Therefore, we only 301 redirect the important pages, where applicable. By important, I mean pages that have external or internal links and some history.

We leave 404s where its a legit page of content just removed from the site, but has no value anyways.

I know what you’re thinking: What about Excluded or Errors under Index Coverage in Google Search Console?

To put it simply, in this case – Nothing! Because 404s are normal. Google will report them in GSC, but that’s fine.

Fixing Facebook Pixel Issues

Most infoproduct businesses leverage Facebook retargetting, so if you have an infoproduct (or your client does) you need to consider the following issue.

This problem was quite tricky to find a solution to, but our crawls showed that spiders can follow a pixel image:

So as you can see (or not see, because most of it is blurred) above, crawlers were accessing pages like:

domain.com/“https:/www.facebook.com/tr?id={client’s FB ID}&ev=PageView&noscript=1”

The part in red shouldn’t be there. As you can imagine, this was the case for every single URL on the site. Not good!

We didn’t really know how this was possible or what caused it, but the plugin generating Facebook Pixel was doing it wrong…

The problem was the backslashes “escaping” single and double quotes in the Javascript code generating the pixel:

We retired the plugin and inserted the pixel code directly in the source code (header.php file).

Our tech SEO guys keep complaining that there’s a plugin for literally everything in WordPress. Even for the easiest and smallest things.

So maybe next time, when you’re thinking of installing a plugin do us and yourself a favor – think if it’s really needed.

Don’t use plugins where they’re simply an overkill and the same can be accomplished faster and smoother by just a simple copy-paste.

Heading Structure

This was quite simple, but also an important one.

This site did not use any headings other than H2s… None. At all.

I mentioned the importance of semantic headings in another case study, so I’ll just say that the fix here was to simply organize them on every page and use all headings from H1 to H5.

Simple, but important.

HTTP pages and YMYL

Non-secure webpages are quickly going out of style.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is aggressively promoting the movement of the secure HTTPS protocol being used across the entirety of the web.

Google is also supporting the idea through flagging of non-HTTPS content as “not secure” in Chrome.

This client did indeed have the correct SSL implementation in place, but there was a big problem.

The old HTTP pages were not redirected to their HTTPS versions.

Being in the YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) niche, you shouldn’t leave any loose ends.

I mean, you shouldn’t leave any loose ends at all, but when you’re in the YMYL niche specifically, you simply must not.

You could fix it with the use of Really Simple SSL plugin, which enables the HTTP→HTTPS redirects out of the box.

But as I said above, you don’t need WP plugins for every small action.

Here’s the .htaccess code we installed to have a proper HTTP to HTTPS and non-www to www redirect in place:

RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain.com [NC,OR]RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} =httpRewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Be careful, though! Make sure you have access to your FTP server before you click “Save” in the configuration.

In some cases, it might break things and to re-gain access to your site you’ll have to manually amend the contents of your .htaccess file.

All in all, this is what you wanna see if your preferred canonical domain is https://domain.com/:

Content Taxonomy & Internal Linking

In order to improve the internal linking of our client’s numerous blog posts, we recommended a re-organization of the site’s content categorization and taxonomy.

To start with, we suggested creating more categories in WordPress and adding them to the main menu.

This sounds simple, but prior to joining TSI, this site had only 1 big category (about 300 posts): Blog.

Moreover, to save the crawl budget, someone, unfortunately, noindexed all category and pagination pages.

When guys at TSI saw it, they were like this:

​We created 16 new categories in WordPress – all corresponding with the type of course offered and the area of expertise it was teaching. We ensured that there were no more than 20 posts under each category.

See what I mean here?  We’re all about them quick wins.

We also removed the noindex tags from the category pages.

The final trick was to add short, topically relevant text on top of each category page (above the posts), so Google would see them as more than just a list of articles. It meant more love from the G!

Kind of like what I’ve done here for my “SEO News” category page.

Through this, we created topical clusters (silos) under each category.

To create better topical relevance, you can also ensure that the articles would in most cases internally link only within the silo (article to article and article to its root category page).

This helps to better organize the content for the user’s benefit and also made it easier for crawlers to discover the pages.

The process built more internal links to the content, indicating its importance within the site’s information architecture.

A related posts content section was also added beneath each blog post, which amplified the same benefits, as well as providing the additional pros of helping users to find more of our client’s relevant educational content, also improving user metrics and click-through.

Stack those gains!

Phase 2: Creating a Winning Content Strategy

Once the server, site, taxonomy, and Google index were in advantageous positions, it was time to think about creating targeted content that both served the target demographic and would have the potential to rank for their most essential search terms.

Using Ahrefs, our technical team looked at competitor content for potential target keywords and studied metrics that indicated how difficult it would be to rank against them.

Trust me, once you have a list of keywords or topics you’re considering to go after, Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer becomes very helpful:

And to find great keyword suggestions, from the Keyword Explorer you just need to go to Newly Discovered and you’re seeing all examples of new keywords related to your chosen one:

Another worthwhile option is Questions:

From there you can just pick keywords that appeal to you, taking into consideration their difficulty vs search volume.

But if you really want to up your content plan game, you have to check out the Content Explorer on Ahrefs:

It’s an extremely powerful tool, so I suggest you watch the below video to really take full advantage of it:

  For our client, we estimated average monthly search volumes and considered the probable user intent behind each keyword vertical.

And speaking about the user intent – trust me, this is already a huge factor, but it will get even bigger in 2020.

If you would like to learn more about user intent, its types, and discovery, we had a great workshop during the Chiang Mai SEO conference this year. Here’s a video of one of TSI’s resident geniuses, Rad Paluszak, who held the presentation:

  This content research process will give you the information needed to construct a strategy that focuses on creating content to serve users searching for the highest opportunity keywords.

Content Optimization & Keyword Cannibalization

The next task was to look at the existing pieces of content in 2 ways:

Run a keyword cannibalization audit.

I’ve talked about keyword cannibalization quite a bit in the past.

In fact, I think this is one of the most common, content-related on-site issues of this year.

It’s a plague on the industry, I tell you!

At TSI, we’re predicting that keyword cannibalization issues will become less of a problem with Google becoming smarter in natural language understanding (hint: Neural Matching and BERT), but it will probably remain as a hot topic and a big problem for years to come.

So in this case, we faced quite a serious case of keyword cannibalization. Out of around 300 articles indexed, 50 of them were double- or triple-ranking (cannibalizing) around positions 20-40. This was a strong suggestion that it needs to be solved.

This is just one of the keywords:

Since we are not experts in market trading and financial instruments, we had to ask the client for advice. We combined the list of all cannibalizing URLs and keywords, and supplied it to our client for a review.

When we received feedback regarding which pages can be merged, deleted or updated, the work began: We moved and combined the content.

And this is what you want to see:

In the meantime, we purged the pages that were not required and optimized (or deoptimized) the ones that were not preferable but had to stay within the site.

In doing so, we were able to increase the value of the existing content and get the most traffic possible from the client’s previous investment in the content.

Phase 3: An Authority Link Building Strategy

An essential part of any high-impact SEO campaign is the building of high-quality backlinks.

When this client joined us, we did the standard thing we do on every campaign, which you should do as well.

Perform a full audit on your backlink profile and you’ll likely find a mix of lower quality backlinks and some higher-quality inbound links too.

Immediately, some of the lowest quality backlinks were disavowed. You can read more about our approach to the backlink audit here.

Also, do an audit of your anchor text distribution.

In our case, we were slightly concerned about the anchor text distribution having too many exact match, partial match and compound (related to keywords, but not necessarily including the keywords directly – examples of these would be questions, sentence-long anchors, etc) anchors.

It looked like this:

And should look more like this:

With this in mind, during the first month of the campaign, we threw around 25 pillow links (we really propped up client’s social media accounts, created a few About Author pages on the publications he’s been contributing to and posted a few Medium articles) with branded anchors into the mix.

In the next 2 months, we also took a slightly safer approach to anchor texts in our outreach. This was all to balance things out.

Our outreach team began the process of reaching out to relevant sites who were pleased to place our client’s backlinks on their domains.

In the first month, the team negotiated and built 9 strong (DR 50+) outreach backlinks to the site and were able to negotiate 5-8 high-authority links each ongoing month.

Here are some link stats of our outreach job:

This quickly grew the domain’s authority, thus driving up rankings and improving discoverability on the web.

Here’s the link growth over the course of the campaign:

Results

Through completing our campaign using the techniques described in this case study, we were able to achieve considerable tangible growth for this client.

After 5 months of TSI working on the site, the client had enjoyed a 28% growth in the top 10 position rankings in Google, up from 1,713 positions to 2,188.

Stable growth is also shown in SEMRush:

This significantly increased the education business’ organic reach within just 5 months and translated into a 23.46% increase of sessions, an 18.46% increase in users and a 45.99% increase in earnings when comparing the 1st and 5th months of the campaign.

Comparing month-to-month with the previous year, with our help, the site reached a 252.78% increase in organic traffic and a 263.24% increase in goal completion.

The results of this campaign speak for themselves.

After 5 months of working with TSI, our client had seen a nice return on investment, and our proven strategies will continue to bear fruit as the business continues to develop in the long-term.

Conclusion

When a client puts their trust in you, you need to look at it from their perspective.

They’re trading their hard-earned cash for you work on their business, their baby.

With this particular case study, the pressure was on with a 5-month timeline in one of the hardest niches imaginable.

But by focusing on quick wins and optimizing what the client already had, results like this are achievable.

Let’s recap…  remember to focus on:

Technical SEO first – Without a strong boat, you’re not going to sail anywhere. Don’t skip anything in the tech-SEO section above.

Content optimization and strategy – This is the area you want to bank on in the coming years.

Quality Backlinks – Focused on authority and balanced anchor distribution.

As long as you’re doing the right things: fixing everything, providing value and making the site easy for Google to understand – you’re going to win.

And if you need help, you know where to find us: The Search Initiative.

Get a Free Website Consultation from The Search Initiative:

[contact-form-7]

This content was originally published here.

[element-effect-blog]

This user does not have a valid Spin Rewriter subscription.

Timing is everything.

When it pertains to brand-new product or services, we tend to hold back up until it is more established to try it, but often using an early phase tool can offer you some terrific advantages on top of those offered straight by it.

The biggest is having the opportunity to form what the final tool will appear like.

New item groups tend to be really open up to feedback and have fast version cycles. Your feedback could assist shape a tool into something that could be much more beneficial to your business.

On top of that, you can typically get an excellent discount rate by registering early. Often that discount can even suggest complimentary services for a prolonged duration.

This month, I have actually found some excellent new tools that can replace or contribute to your marketing arsenal that, at the time of this writing, are providing outstanding introductory prices (or totally free access)!

This short article belongs to our IMPACT Toolbox series.

With IMPACT Tool kit, we talk about all of the current (and even underrated) marketing tools that you require to try. We make suggestions by classification, assisting you find out what tool is best for your scenario, and introduce you to tools you may not have actually become aware of otherwise.

Have concerns about a marketing tool, whether or not we've evaluated it?

Reach out to us and we'll see how we can help.

Today we're going to look at:

1. engageLively - Interactive Content Backed by Analytics

Rate: Free while in Beta

As marketers, we know the power of the big three content mediums: text, audio, and video. Each serves a series of purposes and they feed into one another

to help construct a strong, cohesive interaction platform with your audience

. How does your audience engage

with that material? With text, they read. Perhaps click a link, share a snippet with their audience, or remark below an article. While incredibly useful and effective, this is a mainly passive medium. With audio, they listen.

One of the factors podcasts are so huge is since individuals can listen while doing something else. Like text, you can motivate someone to take action or hope that they do something with the details you offer, but at the end of the day, still a passive medium.

Video altered the video game.

Here's something that might really clinch attention for some time period, integrating text and audio with effective visuals.

With some tools like Vidyard or Wistia, we can see for how long someone watches a video, when viewership drops off, or include a call-to-action near completion so we understand someone viewed the whole video and wishes to take the next action.

But what if that video is open in another tab? Or they pushed play, and stepped far from their computer? How do you know someone is really engaging with your video?

Like the other mediums, it's tough to understand what part of your video material really stuck with someone, or where they found the most worth.

That's the problem engageLively is attempting to fix.

By taking the big three content mediums and including interactivity, now we can get a much deeper understanding of our audience and what is essential to them.

You can respond to concerns like:

For how long did somebody engage with this piece of content?

Which pieces did they engage with the most?

What part of the interaction were they in when they clicked the call-to-action?

What actions did someone go through in the past striking send on this calculator?

engageLively is a platform where you can build interactive material and track how individuals utilize that material. Your material is made up of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so there are no unique tools or players needed.

Some examples of content produced on their platform consist of:

You may be believing,"My developers can do all of this for me right

now ... why would I utilize another platform?"You're asking the ideal questions. As a developer, material like this is absolutely possible, however unless

your dev group is setup to manage customized tool builds, you're starting mostly from scratch each time. And then when they're built, you'll need to establish tracking for all of

the interactions. Manageable, but hard. Another way to think about engageLively is as a platform for interactive content, comparable to how Vidyard is a platform for video. Your developers could setup a server to host your videos, and build in tracking and call-to-actions, and so on. But opportunities are you are not going to do that (that's a decision you require to make for your business).

Establishing an account is easy (and complimentary while they're in beta).

As soon as you login, you're welcomed with a blank page and some current projects (populated for you if it's your very first login). You can delve into some other tasks to see how things work, or go back to square one.

It's definitely more developer-friendly today, however as long as you comprehend a little

code, you'll be great messing around. And they are actively searching for feedback, so if you run into a problem or have a concern, you'll be able to get a response.

In addition to the sample projects, you can view tutorial videos for getting set up and they're rumored to be beginning routine screencasts where they'll walk through standard and sophisticated setups.

It would take a lot longer to go through a full-blown tutorial. But when you register, you'll get an e-mail with the alternative to Book Your Free Demo. Benefit from that while you can get individually face time with their team!

2. Zag.ai - Artificial Intelligence for Your SEO

Cost: Currently $99/mo with introductory prices, Lite strategy coming in a few months

: 600px; screen: block; margin: 0px automobile;">

I can hear your ideas from here.

Not another SEO tool ... Morgan, please! Just hang on, listen. What comes to mind

when you think about SEO tools? Big control panels, lots of individual tools, and loads of information to comb through. Checking numerous keywords and their variations, cross-checking against other sources. It's a full-time task (quite literally).

Zag.ai is taking that workflow and offering it a much-needed increase with Artificial Intelligence.

You have my attention.

There are 3 main product classifications:

Market Research study

Traffic & & Link Sources

Analytics and Insights

Market Research study

In Marketing research, you'll find tools for maintaining and staying ahead of your market. Things like:

appearing the finest carrying out content around the web in the last thirty days (blog sites, e-mail headlines, ad copy, etc)

scanning news media so you can leap on the news as quickly as it breaks (newsjacking)

showing rival traffic by keyword and page, and

a keyword tool that offers you topic ideas and audiences from a single keyword (based on "zooming out" to find associated topics, interests, people, and organizations

These basic jobs can probably be finished with your present SEO tools and some manual work on your part-- However who has time for that?

Traffic & & Link Sources

The tools in Traffic & & Link Sources will assist you:

Find current discussions around the internet for your target keywords, so you can jump in with your own material shortly after it was requested for

Check how your rivals are getting promotion, links, and traffic ("Great artists take")

Targeting search traffic that has clicked Google's first page of results and setting up advertisements for the keywords that would strike those pages

These are probably a little harder to do with your current set of tools.

The key here is timeliness. Emerging conversations that are no longer top of mind (like looking for them after the reality in your social network of choice) may refrain from doing you any great. This can even provide exact same day traffic if you can capture engagement at the correct time.

Analytics & & Insights Analytics & & Insights is Zag.ai's largest collection of tools.

With these, you'll have the ability to:

Discover opportunities to increase search traffic based upon your current search console

Identify what material is finest performing for conversion, what turns visitors into consumers

Know which channels are best for your service, including clients, earnings, and fastest sales cycle

Geo-target your finest users, which is one of the simplest ways to bump ROI on your paid channels

Identify your crucial influencers that have audiences that reacted well to your material or offering

Instead of the other classifications which manage external sources, these tools are all about getting more out of what you currently know. Similar to a few of the very best and easiest earnings originates from the clients you currently have, a few of the very best insights originate from the data you already have.

As of composing this post, Zag.ai has a 14-day totally free trial prior to their basic $99/month plan (initial pricing, will be $129/month later), however there is also a Lite strategy coming within a couple of months.

The Lite strategy just has access to five apps at a time and has a couple of other constraints, but might be a great way to get your feet wet for quite inexpensive.

3. Intravert - Monetize Your Community with Ads You Control

Cost: $0/mo +7.5% charge per deal, or $49/mo +2.5% per transaction (plus Stripe costs for both)

Do you currently use Google AdSense to monetize your website material? Or would you like to monetize your site

material however have not found a solution yet? Intravert is a prospective revenue opportunity for your organisation by offering custom ad space based on what you authorize. There's no algorithm behind the scenes or required styling from another brand; you select how an ad looks, where it is, and who books that space.

Today, there are just a few personalization options. Advertisements can be text, image/banners, or a mix. They can have some default styling used, or be completely adjustable.

The 2 default positionings are:

Banner - which beings in the sidebar or as part of your content

Sticky box- drifts on top of your content; an example being a"hey there bar" The sign up procedure is relatively fast and includes connecting Stripe for payments. After you register,

you'll get access to your own control panel, where you can setup Advertisement areas around your site. You will need to drop 2 lines of code approximately where you would like the advertisement to show on your site (some customized styling can look after the

rest). For each ad positioning, you'll set up a placeholder that will reveal when the space is not booked.

When a possible marketer clicks that, they'll be taken to a reserving screen with timeframes, advertisement details, and payment details. When they complete the kind, you will get an email notifying you of the request and you can confirm or deny the positioning (depending upon what you want to show your audience).

A crucial note: this reservation is by ad area, not internationally on your site. So, unless you set this up as a worldwide component(very same code for multiple put on your site), then the advertiser will only reserve on one page. You must specify that in your placeholder text so advertisers know exactly what they're asking for to book.

Intravert is complimentary to begin, with a deal fee of 7.5% applied in addition to Stripe fees. There's also a premium choice that costs $49/month which reduces the Intravert cost to 2.5% and has some extra functions like a tailored checkout process.

Whether you use Intravert most likely comes down to how you are monetizing your content (it at all).

If you have an advancement team that can manage your own variation of native advertisements or if your content drives earnings for you in another method, then Intravert might not be a terrific fit, but if you have some stable traffic and an audience that would take advantage of advertising curated by you, then give Intravert a try.

4. GrowSurf - Unlock the Power of Refer-a-Friend Marketing

Cost: Free prepare for basic functions, Paid beginning at $66/month (but complimentary while in Beta)

: 600px; display: block; margin: 0px vehicle;"> I should admit, this one is pretty interesting. When GrowSurf was initially revealed over a year earlier, I took it for a test drive and discovered it to be fast and easy to get started with referral marketing

. And now it's back with some huge upgrades for Version 2.

GrowSurf is a refer-a-friend marketing tool that helps you give benefits to individuals for referring others to your site/product and gives you full tracking abilities throughout that process.

There are four kinds of recommendation benefit programs you can setup:

Single-sided - this is when you reward someone for referring a pal (ex. Get $10 for each recommendation who purchases something)

Double-sided - reward both people for a recommendation (ex. Send a $20 credit to a buddy and get $10 when they buy)

Turning point - rewards based upon specific referral milestones (ex. Refer 2 individuals and get a branded bag, 5 individuals and get a complimentary ticket to our occasion, etc )

Leaderboard - reward the top referrer(s) for your campaign (ex. Go up the early access list with more recommendations)

The project setup process has a nice walkthrough of all the alternatives you have, consisting of:

various benefit types

design of the share widget and recommendation screen overlay

emails that will follow up

additional options (like Zapier, referral credit window, etc)

campaign setup on your website

Each phase has some examples and/or tips, so even if you're coming up blank you'll get a little jumpstart.

After a campaign is published, you'll have access to a project dashboard.

This shows all your analytics such as Impressions, Individuals, and Referrals. Plus crucial metrics and the individuals in your campaign.

Here's a take a look at more of the basic features:

GrowSurf was created because their team desired a tool that was fairly low-cost (with a complimentary option), was easy to plug in to your current website/product, and had a strong feature set.

They weren't able to discover a tool like that on the marketplace, so they constructed their own. And simply to prove their point, they made a mega list of the other recommendation program tools so you can compare to your heart's material.

While there is a totally free alternative, you'll want to pay to get more campaigns and email credits. As of this writing, there is a 14-day trial and after that 100% open door during the beta. You'll just need to fill out a feedback questionnaire to request your free access (you can email team@growsurf.com to ask for that).

Save On These Tools & & Assist Forming Their Future

Get in while the getting is excellent!

All of these tools are early phase so you'll have the chance to enjoy their rewards, aid form their future, and secure free or terrific initial pricing.

Did you find something beneficial in our round-up? Let us know how one of these tools assisted improve your business in EFFECT Elite! And if there's a specific tool you have concerns about, let us understand and we'll see if we can help you figure out the finest choice for you.

This content was originally published here.

[rb-d2]

An update to the current Alpha Test

The latest version is now version 0.2.10b

Download it over on https://rb-d2.itch.io/wingman

Changes :

VERSION 0.2.10

This is an update I released on the 20th May 2017.

Game Difficulty

I noticed in most playthroughs I have been watching throughout the week , people were struggling to even clear the first phase of the mission due to how skilled the enemy is and the odd behavior of the missiles back in 0.2.9. Naturally I don’t want to make missions impossible or hard for most people. So a lot of things has been re-balanced to make the game less frustrating for newer players. Ideally through this “Clear Skies” level I’m currently trying to find what the “standard” difficulty is for the game.

Now that the first phase of the mission is easier and the missiles have been buffed in general(more on that below). The second phase of the mission has also been amped up in difficulty. Though I may have gone overboard on this so that was addressed in the small update below.

That being said, I’m sure there are people who liked the old difficulty back in terms of how the AI fought. Don’t worry those guys will be coming back in the future as a difficulty option.

(Thanks for recording gameplay footage guys!)

Missile Accuracy

Missile behavior has certainly been odd, especially how the STDM kept missing the easiest shots and hit low probability shots which made them rather inconsistent.

So now, missiles should be much more consistent than before and feel snappier in general. Though do keep in mind this goes across to all missiles so enemy missiles are also slightly more accurate. However to balance out the new guidance system, the maximum velocity the missiles can get to has been doubled. Which should counter out the missiles precise guidance system. I think currently it has achieved a nice balance though there are some cases on which the missile guidance will need more work towards.

SP Module Framework + Flares

This is a new gameplay element I have been toying around with and currently experimenting. I’m mostly exposing it early due to the overwhelming amounts of requests for flares. I suppose why not.

At the moment the only function that is currently available is the “FLARE” module and is not interchangeable. At the moment it has a 7 second cooldown and causes all missiles currently targeting the player to lose tracking.

The idea is to eventually expand these modules to bring in different attributes to equip your aircraft with and . I’ve some ideas on what to bring in for this SP module mechanic and hopefully you’ll see it implemented in the next major update.

New UI Rendering

UI rendering has been significantly changed. Now they are a lot clearer and the majority of the immersive UI elements are now affected by post processing.

Hopefully this means that important UI elements such as target indicators and main HUD elements in the cockpit will no longer be obstructed and blend in with the background. This also means that the HUD in the cockpit is slightly more accurate because now they are in world space and not screen space anymore.

Let me know if you like it!

New Settings Options

New options has been added and a couple of settings has been altered for technical reasons.

Cloud Resolution Settings

Cloud resolution settings has been altered. Now instead of having 64,128,256,512 as the resolution options. it’s now 128,256,512,768.

I’ve noticed that on 512 resolution that distant clouds could appear somewhat pixelated on a lower FOV settings. This was the recommended settings given to me from the TrueSKY documentation. However seeing that people are getting fairly decent frame rate on max settings on the old setup, I’ve decided to bump it up to 768. It eliminates most of the pixelation that occurs at a long distance without a lot of performance drop off.

The difference between 768 and 1024 was quite negligible so I’ve decided to not have it on 1024 due to performance reasons.

Subtitle Placement

I’ve received a few requests on subtitle placement. I’ve added the option to have the subtitle placed on top.

Let me know if there’s an issue with the subtitles with weird aspect ratios.

Minimalist HUD

I’ll admit leaving the minimalist HUD in a default checked was ab it of a mistake in 0.2.9. The radar vanished on both nose cam and cockpit cam making it difficult for people to figure out the radar if they don’t go check into the options screen. So for now, the minimalist HUD will include the minimap.

I will however introduce a minimapless option for the cockpit screen in the future.

Controls settings

There’s not much to be written here. But resetting the controls back to default is now functional and bugs related to mouse bindings and other things has now been fixed.

Map Update

The landscape has been significantly altered for “Clear Skies”. I didn’t feel like the plateaus in the previous version really represented the region I wanted to make so I’ve decided to put that kind of environment in the backburner for now and save it for later.

Headtracking (Experimental)

I’ve added a headtracking option in the gameplay options section. It’s still highly experimental and at the moment only supports the FreeTrack protocol.

If you have a freetrack IR setup please let me know how it goes. Thanks!

I will try to contact the TrackIR folks in the coming days to see if I can grab an SDK off them and implement TrackIR support to Project Wingman. Stay tuned!

Targeting algorithm Change

When changing target it now prioritizes targets in front of you and then if there are no targets in front of you, it now looks for the closest target within the vicinity. The radius of whats in “front” of you has now been severely narrowed. I’ll have to see how this goes in the future.

It still needs more work but I hope this change makes the targeting easier to use.

Balance Changes

A lot of gameplay values have been changed for the game.

SAA and MLAA now take longer to reload.

Default STDM count has been increased.

SAA and MLAA count has been decreased for every slot.

Added IA-52′s during the third wave of the first phase.

Reduced the skill of the enemy during the first phase.

Increased fighting ability of the enemy in the second phase.

Doubled the missile maximum speed. Acceleration is still the same as before though.

Increased maneuverability of the SU-27.

Increased Acceleration and Deceleration of the SU-27.

VERSION 0.2.10b

I’ve decided to combine both 0.2.10 and the b version blogpost due to how close i’m releasing them.

Second Phase (QF) Encounter

The enemies in the second phase of the mission has been slightly nerfed due to how difficult people have been finding it. Will be reintroduced in the future as a difficulty option.

Targeting algorithm Change

I’ve increased the radius of what the game will think of what is in front of the camera. So now targeting should feel much more consistent across the board.

Stalling behavior

Just a small fix I’m putting out for the stalling behavior. I’ve noticed that the plane always stalls constantly if there is no throttle or brake being applied. This was not intended and has been fixed.

Fixes

Fixed nose cam issue where it doesn’t lerp the camera anymore.

Miscellaneous stuff

Some stuff that Project Wingman has been featured in. I also did an interview in some of them :)

http://kotaku.com/a-new-jet-combat-game-for-the-pc-1794819914

http://www.capsulecomputers.com.au/2017/05/a-chat-with-project-wingman-developer-rb-d2/

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/58500236/retro-live-2017-issue-2/41

I’m currently working towards the final alpha/demo milestone for Project Wingman in preparation for a Greenlight and Kickstarter campaign. Hopefully it can represent what we’re currently working towards.

I will try to increase the frequency of development related posts now. And hopefully from now on I can release semi regular patch fixes and updates to Project Wingman.

Anyway, that’s it for now. If you’ve reached here through that wall of text I thank you very much for your attention. Hopefully I can continue to deliver on your expectations with Project Wingman.

- RB

Questions and Answers

As usual, I’ll try answering them as best as I can.

Thanks!

The other planes is simply not ready and I didn’t want to showcase it in this demo because it would feel incomplete compared to the rest of the game.

Hopefully I can bring some of them back in a reasonable amount of time.

(Mind you i’m operating on borderline valve time)

It’s been addressed in 0.2.10! Please check it out and let me know what you think of it! :)

Will do, I’ll see what i can do in the future :)

Yes! This is going to be completely reworked and will be the second and final scenario for Project Wingman Alpha.

I can’t say when it’ll be released again but I’ll make sure to make a big deal out of it.

Hey, try updating your drivers if you haven’t already. There is an issue with old drivers if you haven’t updated it.

Feel free to contact me over at wingmangamedev@gmail.com or DM me in tumblr if you want further troubleshooting help.

Thank you!

Trust me, you don’t want to see the spaghetti on this thing.

Yeah, new difficulty options and enemies that are even better than current enemies are currently planned. They’ve been nerfed for this latest demo but it’s because I’m currently trying to balance it for the regular difficulty. Stay tuned for difficulty options!

You can count on that!

SOON

At the moment it’s Km/h.

I’ll be adding Imperial options eventually.

No plans for console release right now.

Hey there, Starting from 0.2.10 there is a dedicated flare button.

Let me know how it goes.

Hey there, This has been fixed in version 0.2.10. Let me know how it goes!

I did, and I’ve changed it again 0.2.10b. Please let me know if it fixed your issue.

Yup, this was a bug. It’s fixed in version 0.2.10b.

[jubilentjarofjam-blog]

Searching for Passion

Preface: I didn’t really think I would write this much. This is really more of a journal entry than a coherent internet post. I just think it’s nice to know that this is out there for someone else to read, should they please. Enjoy my thoughts.

I spent a lot of time last semester trying to find out what my “passion” was. Here I am after working so hard in high school to be in the engineering program, but I can’t really motivate myself to work that hard right now. I wasn’t not taking any science classes last semester, which is what really interests me. And while I love science and math, my engineering design classes have showed me that I really hate design. There’s no sureness about anything. You just make up some BS about why the customer needs this or that. I want to solve unsolved problems with with physics, calculus, and maybe some good old algorithms. I don’t want to make an app look all fancy or figure out how to optimize your workflow.

I don’t think changing my major to physics is the right path. The hard science will in fact come in during the later half of my degree, but God does all this BS suck. Speaking of majoring in physics, I do think doing science research would be amazing. I admire the greats like Einstein and Feynman, but I don’t want to be stuck doing purely theoretical stuff just yet. I want go out and push the limits of human technology. I have a real interest in space travel. (A YouTuber, Exurb1a, has really put into words what I value. He talks about science, feelings, and the fate of humanity.) Maybe after we get to Mars I’ll reside back to the lab. Then I might like to go into teaching to finish out my career. That might be quite nice. I think that’s getting real close to where my passions lie. Wow. Let’s continue.

I’ve also come to realize that making my parents proud has become quite important to me. They’ve worked so, so hard to get me here. They just want to see me succeed. I remember a moment last year, at my grandma’s funeral. She was my dad’s mom. I didn’t really know this grandma too well, so I wasn’t too teary. But then my dad stood up to speak. He told me before hand that he always thought it was a shame how no one hardly ever stood up to say anything at funerals, so he was going to make an effort. He told a story about how his mom would always drive him and brother over this bump in the road and they would scream “again, again!” and his mom would keep turning around over and over. I always knew my parents grew up poor, but had no idea how hard my dad had it until this funeral. I want my parents to know that they raised an amazing child. I want them to know that all of the hard work and suffering they and their parents went through resulted in a better future. I want them to be proud.

Thinking about how much video games were such a huge part of my childhood made me start to remember all the things I did besides video games. I got so hung up on video games that last semester I was convinced for a couple weeks that I needed to pursue a career that involved them. I kept searching within myself for a “passion,” but video games were the only thing other than physics that I really lost myself in. Before adolescence, though, my sights were on other things. I had a very active imagination as a child. Me and my friends would pretend to have great battles against vast armies and wield many powers. My mind was preoccupied not with what the world was, but what it could be. What if real life was like Lord of the Rings with goblins and dwarves? What if I could use the force like Luke Skywalker? What if I could build a lightsaber?

I was very interested in building things as a child. I was obsessed with making booby traps at one point. I liked Legos and was stereo-typically obsessed with minecraft at age 12. Halo Reach Forge preoccupied me for many hours. All these things led me to believe that I was destined to be an engineer. All the signs were there: Making things, enjoyed science, good at math. What went wrong? In high school I delved more into making things, but ha really because I was forcing myself. I wanted to be the smart tinkering kid in all the movies that makes lasers and drones. The fact of the matter was, I just didn’t like it that much.

I think I have now come to realize that it’s not tinkering or even making things that excites me, it’s exploration. What will happen if I do this? My senior year of high school, I finally had one project that excited me quite a bit. I had a bunch of electronics that got because I wanted to look smart. I decided I would put them to use to explore something I actually did enjoy: physics. I spent a lot of time on physics my junior and senior year. It was a nice escape, made me feel productive and smart, and I eventually realized that I quite enjoyed. It revived that curiosity and wonder from my childhood. SpaceTime can bend! Anyways, I decided I would use my kinematics prowess and limited knowledge of electronics to make a device that would shoot various projectiles at various angles and then point a laser where the object would land. I did the math, put the equations into python for the python microcontroller I had, and hot glued a laser pointer to a servo. It didn’t end up working because the servo wasn’t nearly precise enough, but that was the most fun I had building something since I was like 8.

I want to use science and technology to do really amazing things. I just have to find the right way to do so. I need to find the right company to work for. I don’t want to do human-centered design. I want to solve problems that involve physics. I want to work at a place like SpaceX. I want to dream big. I don’t know if I can get there, but aiming for anything else just doesn’t drive me. I want my parents to see a rocket I helped make fly to Mars. I’m tired of being depressed and anxious. I want to want something, I think this is it.

I’m going to write those lab reports I didn’t write and ask for late credit. I’m going to study for my circuits exam. I’m going to ace my physics class. I’m going to explore the universe in the name of my 8 year old self, my parents, and all those who want to dream.

[unixcommerce]

Tips for Holiday Marketing from the Pros, Read On

It’s time to amp up and adjust our marketing strategies for the holidays!

If you want to get ahead of the marketing game and stand out from the crowd, check out these incredible unicorn tips from the top social media marketing experts.

We’ve got insights from Mari Smith, Neil Patel, Virginia Nussey, Dennis Yu, Lilach Bullock, Lisa Dougherty, Marsha Collier, Sujan Patel and Kristel Cuenta-Cortez.

Among the tips?

Leveraging live videos, launching Facebook Messenger chatbots, running social media ads and more — all with the aim of increasing brand visibility, ramping up your holiday sales and boosting ROI.

Tips for Holiday Marketing

So let’s jump right in — and I’ll start with my own No. 1 holiday marketing tip!

1. Run Facebook Messenger Ads | Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey

Ad prices get crazy competitive around the holidays!

Since most of your sales are going to come from customers with pre-existing brand affinity, focus the majority of your social ads budget using remarketing as the targeting option rather than trying out new, unproven audiences at this critical time.

People’s inboxes will be full of offers, so try reaching your audience using new higher-engagement marketing channels like Facebook Messenger ads in Facebook and Instagram to ensure your targeted audience actually sees your important marketing messages

2. Go Live on Facebook | Mari Smith, Facebook Marketing Expert

Use holiday-themed Facebook Live videos to really engage with your audience this holiday season.

Facebook continues to favor content that generates meaningful social interaction, specifically conversations between people within the comments on Page posts.

Live video typically leads to discussion among viewers on Facebook, which helps bump up the algorithms and you should see even more reach on your posts.

In fact, Facebook states that live videos on average get six times as many interactions as regular videos.

Strive to stand out in the news feed and create “thumb-stopping” live video content that draws your audience in.

What if you did a whole “bah humbug” Facebook Live centered around how crazy it is that stores seem to start pushing the Holidays earlier and earlier every year?

Use the broadcast as a fun way to get your audience talking to you–and with one another–about their preferences around the Holidays. You can then retarget your video viewers with different content driving to your website, offers, etc.

Or, perhaps someone in your office would be willing to dress up as Santa Claus and do a whole series of Facebook Live videos where you do prize drawings and giveaways!

Or, mobilize some team members to come on live video as “Santa’s elves” and show behind-the-scenes of how your products are created, or your service is developed.

Think outside the box and get creative to put a smile on the faces of your prospects and customers and have your business/brand be top of feed and top of mind!

3. Collaborate with Influencers and Create Gift Suggestions | Lilach Bullock, Content Marketing and Social Media Specialist

It’s difficult to stand out during the holiday season when everybody is sharing special offers and discounts.

But one way to stand out and generate better results during this period, is to collaborate with a relevant social influencer as they can help you reach a wider audience.

However, you need to start working on this campaign way ahead of time: from finding the ideal influencers to work with to planning the actual content, it’s a big project but one that can yield amazing results.

Another tip I have to mention is to create remarketing campaigns on social media and target all of those people who viewed your products but didn’t buy.

Everyone is looking for gifts during this time period so chances are, they’re checking out a lot of ideas and products — remind them of your products at the right time and it can have an amazing effect on your sales.

4. Give Your Social Media Channels a Holiday Makeover | Virginia Nussey, Marketing Director at MobileMonkey

Holiday fever is not just for ecommerce.

B2B should get hyped for the holidays, too.

Holidays are an occasion for a company to reveal its customer appreciation along with its culture, brand and staff appreciation.

And doing so can have a positive marketing impact through visibility and brand affinity during the cheery time of year.

Give your Facebook chatbot and social media avatars a holiday makeover — and that will mean something different for every brand.

Just because B2B marketers don’t have a Black Holiday sale to promote for the holidays (although, you certainly could!), doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have some holiday fun.

Your customers (and future customers) may fall a little more in love with you when you take the opportunity to get in the spirit!

5. Curate Sentimental User-Generated Content | Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzMetrics

My No. 1 tip for the holidays … ask customers and employees what they’re grateful for, collecting the pictures and videos.

Then after getting their permission, you now have a massive library of UGC (user-generated content) that you can mix and match to drive sales without having to rely as much on sales and discounts.

And now you’ve solved your content issue, too.

6. Run Remarketing Ads | Neil Patel, Founder of Neil Patel Digital

During the holiday season, expect your ad costs to increase.

Consider pushing out more educational content and sharing them on your social profiles.

You can even spend a bit of ad money to promote these educational pieces.

From there remarket all of those users and pitch them your product/service through remarketing ads.

It’s one of the cheapest ways to acquire customers from the social web at an affordable rate.

7. Show the Human Side of Your Business | Sujan Patel, Co-founder of Mailshake

Something I’ve seen that customers and followers of our brand engage with around the holidays is learning more about the team behind the scenes.

We are fully remote, and have employees working literally around the world.

We’ll work with our employees to share interesting stories about them with our audience to give people the human side of our business.

People are in “family” mode, not “business” mode around the holidays.

Sharing our company family with them pulls on that thread a bit.

8. Start Early | Marsha Collier, Social Media Author

It’s a two-pronged approach.

Start by reconnecting with your existing customers very early on without a hard sell.

Let them know you’re there to help make their holidays easier.

Then during the season, your ads should always go for the hard close — make your offer ads irresistible.

9. Create Holiday-Themed Content | Kristel Cuenta-Cortez, Social Media Strategist

There’s so much truth in the statement “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” especially when crafting a social media campaign for your brand.

One best practice successful brands do to ramp up their campaigns is to put together a holiday-themed content schedule based on their goals.

For example, if your goal is to solicit customer reviews and collect user-generated content that you can utilize in the future, you can run a simple photo contest where you ask your customers to submit their entries with a branded hashtag.

Pick a relevant prize and decide on the theme, and find the best time to launch it! Monitor your results and adjust your strategy as you go along!

This doesn’t only provide social proof, but it also saves valuable time and effort since user-generated content is generally free.

10. Leverage Influencers | Lisa Dougherty, Community Manager at Content Marketing Institute

My number one social media marketing tip for B2C marketers is to work with top influencers in your niche.

People like to scroll through their newsfeeds looking for gift-giving ideas. I know I do.

And, they tend to trust brand recommendations from individuals (even if they don’t know them).

But, before you get started, make sure you’ve set a clear goal that aligns with your business objectives.

Once you’ve determined your goals, you’ll need to find the right influencers in your industry to work with.

Once you do, put those influencers to work as your brand’s little elves creating customized content for your social media channels to help increase visibility, trustworthiness, and generate ROI for your brand.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, “Tips for Holiday Marketing from the Pros, Read On” was first published on Small Business Trends

https://smallbiztrends.com/

The post Tips for Holiday Marketing from the Pros, Read On appeared first on Unix Commerce.

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[mcdouglecompany-blog]

America’s Cold Civil War, Tucker Carlson-Google Hacking 2020 Election, Net Neutrality Red Cross Campaign for New Platelet Donors and More!

America’s Cold Civil War, Tucker Carlson-Google Hacking 2020 Election, Net Neutrality Red Cross Campaign for New Platelet Donors and More!

America’s Cold Civil War.

Tucker: Google wants to hack 2020 election.

Google's Censorious Urges are Playing a VERY DANGEROUS Game.

American Red Cross campaign to encourage new Platelet donors to give.

Disappearing Glaciers / No Net Neutrality, 1 Year On / Banning Plastic Bags.

  America’s Cold Civil War

For the entire panel discussion visit- https://youtu.be/07xd4DYywlo

The Heritage Foundation

Published on Jun 17, 2019

Moderated by: Ryan Williams President, The Claremont Institute Panelist: Michael Anton Lecturer and Research Fellow, Hillsdale College; Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute; Former National Security Official in the Trump Administration Christopher Caldwell Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute David Azerrad, Ph.D. Director and AWC Foundation Fellow Hosted by: Arthur Milikh Associate Director and Research Fellow

  Tucker: Google wants to hack 2020 election.

https://youtu.be/2quCgvqeZrY

#Tucker #FoxNews

Fox News

Published on Jun 25, 2019

Tucker examines Google's algorithms and how they benefit Democrats ahead of 2020. #Tucker #FoxNews FOX News operates the FOX News Channel (FNC), FOX Business Network (FBN), FOX News Radio, FOX News Headlines 24/7, FOXNews.com and the direct-to-consumer streaming service, FOX Nation. FOX News also produces FOX News Sunday on FOX Broadcasting Company and FOX News Edge. A top five-cable network, FNC has been the most watched news channel in the country for 17 consecutive years. According to a 2018 Research Intelligencer study by Brand Keys, FOX News ranks as the second most trusted television brand in the country. Additionally, a Suffolk University/USA Today survey states Fox News is the most trusted source for television news or commentary in the country, while a 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation survey found that among Americans who could name an objective news source, FOX News is the top-cited outlet. FNC is available in nearly 90 million homes and dominates the cable news landscape while routinely notching the top ten programs in the genre. Subscribe to Fox News! https://bit.ly/2vBUvAS Watch more Fox News Video: http://video.foxnews.com Watch Fox News Channel Live: http://www.foxnewsgo.com/ Watch full episodes of your favorite shows The Five: http://video.foxnews.com/playlist/lon... Special Report with Bret Baier: http://video.foxnews.com/playlist/lon... The Story with Martha Maccallum: http://video.foxnews.com/playlist/lon... Tucker Carlson Tonight: http://video.foxnews.com/playlist/lon... Hannity: http://video.foxnews.com/playlist/lon... The Ingraham Angle: http://video.foxnews.com/playlist/lon... Fox News @ Night: http://video.foxnews.com/playlist/lon... Follow Fox News on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FoxNews/ Follow Fox News on Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoxNews/ Follow Fox News on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foxnews/

    Google's Censorious Urges are Playing a VERY DANGEROUS Game.

https://youtu.be/s9j2PoeXsKQ

#ProjectVeritas #YouTube #Censorship

Black Pigeon Speaks

Published on Jun 25, 2019

✅ Support BPS Directly: https://blackpigeonspeaks.com/#patron ✅ Support BPS via Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/blackpigeon ✅ Tip Jar: via PayPal to: navyhato@gmail.com ✅ Support BPS via SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/black-p... ✅ Your SUPPORT of this Channel is GREATLY appreciated. ------------------------------- 🔵BTC (Bitcoin) 3NiWatW8cAdGQChcbL9tCickW9JvouTs3L 🔵BCH (Bitcoin Cash) 35GrMSvJHHQ5DvCcNfJNe6Pj46w6HbckoF 🔵LTC (Litecoin) MLbo7xkPJjRX9wFYxHG9YajWwbB14rmpJx ------------------------------- ✅Navy Hato - a Rolling-Stone channel and my take on the places I've been - past and present : https://goo.gl/gM9mCG ✅ BP Stream - new content streaming coming VERY soon: https://goo.gl/ozYUJk ------------------------------- ✅ Tokyo Pride Festival: https://youtu.be/Bbzj2r8wn1w ✅ Links to news stories in this video': https://blackpigeonspeaks.com/lisbon-... ------------------------------- ✅ BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/profile/bBzm... ✅ Gab: https://gab.ai/blackpigeon ✅ Minds: https://www.minds.com/blackpigeonspeaks ✅ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blackpigeons... ✅ DailyMotion: http://www.dailymotion.com/blackpigeo... ✅ Twitter: https://twitter.com/navyhato ✅ Pewtube: https://pewtube.com/user/blackpigeons... ✅ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blackpigeon... -------------------------------- ✅ Amazing Video Editor Materials can be found at: http://www.digitaljuice.com/Intl ------------------------------- ✅ Made with Adobe: -Photoshop -After Effects -Premiere #ProjectVeritas #YouTube #Censorship

  trOy BeAt cAncer

Watch this video at- https://youtu.be/g1LTQwizH08

#missingtypes #redcross

American Red Cross

Published on Jun 10, 2019

Troy was 16 when diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and required 47 blood and platelet transfusions to keep him strong enough to beat cancer. On multiple occasions he went to the hospital needing blood and platelets and his blood type was not available. A few missing letters may not seem like a big deal, but for a hospital patient who needs type A, B or O blood, these letters mean life. This June, the American Red Cross is launching the Missing Types campaign to encourage new blood donors to give and help ensure patients like Troy have the lifesaving blood products they need. Help fill the missing types - schedule your blood donation appointment today at http://redcrossblood.org/missingtypes #missingtypes #redcross

                Consider This!

Let's talk politics, in 10 minutes or less!

Episode 257: Disappearing Glaciers / No Net Neutrality, 1 Year On / Banning Plastic Bags

Monday, June 24th, 2019 at 5:00 pm  

Did these doomsday predictions come true?

Park rangers at Glacier National Park had put up signs to let visitors know that the glaciers there would be “Gone by 2020”. But guess what they’re doing with those signs now?

It’s been a year since the net neutrality rules, created by the Obama administration, were removed by Trump’s FCC. Did the doomsday predictions of what would happen come true?

And does banning plastic bags like California (and an al-Qaeda subsidiary…really) really do anything for the environment? How do we get a better bang for the buck?

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | TuneIn

  Mentioned links:

Climate Oops: National Park Begins Subtle Removal Of “Gone By 2020” Signs After Glaciers Just Keep Not Being Gone

FreedomWorks Celebrates One-Year Anniversary of the Repeal of Title II Regulations

What Will the End of Net Neutrality Do to America?

Sorry, banning plastic bags won’t save our planet

Best-Run States Are Low-Tax Republican, Worst-Run Are High-Tax Democratic, Study Finds

Getting some shopping done? If you're going to shop at Amazon, please consider clicking on my affiliate link. Thanks!

On Apple devices, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes.

If you're on Android, listen with Google Podcasts.

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Browser-based options are the Blubrry Network and Player.fm.

And if you have some other podcatcher or RSS reader, click here to get the direct feed and paste it wherever you need it.

I would love it if you would spread the word about the podcast! Click the Facebook, Twitter, and other icons (or all of them!) at the bottom of this post to recommend "Consider This!" to your social media audience.

Show transcript

The glaciers are disappearing! The glaciers are disappearing! It says right here that the glacier si…um, the glacier signs are disappearing? Oh, well that’s not as big a deal. Turns out that in Glacier National Park in Montana they had been putting up signs all around the park saying, “Gone by 2020”, referring to the fears that those glaciers you see would soon melt away because of global warming, or climate change, or whatever this week’s term is.

But the reality is that the predictions were wrong, and in fact those glaciers have been growing in recent years. The Jackson Glacier may have grown as much as 25% or more over the past decade. So quietly, the Park Service has begun taking down the signs of doom, or changing them from saying that they’d be gone by 2020 to the idea that they’d be gone for “future generations”. That’s some serious bet hedging.

And of course, while the media reported on the signs going up, they’ve been silent on them going down. Of course.

  The Internet has been growing like crazy in the past year. Fiber was deployed to more new U.S. homes than any year before. Small cell deployment quadrupled, as did the deployment of other related wireless infrastructure. We also saw an increase in average broadband speeds across the country.

More importantly, here’s what didn’t happen. You aren’t being nickel and dimed by your Internet Service Provider for access to email or Social Media or messaging or music. Now, you might be paying 3rd parties like Netflix for access to their services over the Internet, but your ISP isn’t charging extra to even be able to access such services.

And those things were predicted at the end of…net neutrality. The Internet would die, squeezed by eeevil ISPs. Now I don’t know about you, but my eeevil ISP, AT&T, bumped up my speeds a few months ago with no change in rates. This is what comes from competition because, fortunately for me, government hasn’t totally limited my choice in Internet providers. Your mileage may vary, but if this is the way they are exploiting me, they’re doing it wrong.

  I’ve got a link in the show notes to an opinion piece that puts into question some of the environmental laws that have been passed recently. Now, up front I want to say that concern for our environment is a good thing. The thing is, we should get the most bang for the buck when doing that.

The writer, Bjorn Lomborg, launches out by noting that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to reduce plastic pollution, which will include a ban on single-use plastics as early as 2021. Lomborg agrees that this is a “laudable” action because of the pollution caused by it as well as how it can kill animals.

Other countries have been doing this as well, more than 20. Even The Shabab, a terrorist group in East Africa that has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda, has banned plastic bag because they “pose a serious threat to the well-being of humans and animals alike”. OK, as an aside, if you’ve been listening to me for a little while, you know how much I love irony. So to have a terrorist group decry a threat to humans and animals is just…well, we need a new term for that level of self-unawareness.

Anyway, while “laudable”, Lomborg also calls it “showy”. Basically it’s virtue signaling on a global scale, because there is hardly any bang; it’s more of a fizzle. If plastic bags were banned tomorrow, it wouldn’t make much of a difference because they comprise only 0.8 percent of the plastic in the oceans.

Further, where bans have been instituted, the result is…more CO2 emissions.

Moreover, banning plastic bags can have unexpected, inconvenient results. A new study shows California’s ban eliminates 40 million pounds of plastic annually. However, many banned bags would have been reused for trash, so consumption of trash bags went up by 12 million pounds, reducing the benefit. It also increased consumption of paper bags by twice the saved amount of plastic – 83 million pounds. This will lead to much larger emissions of CO?.

The thing is, plastic makes our lives better in so many ways. Should we also ban single use plastic syringes? Single use plastic jugs that keep milk and juice fresher? Lomborg also quotes a study by the Danish Ministry of Environment and Food which shows you have to reuse an organic cotton shopping bag 20,000 times before it will have less environmental damage than a plastic bag. We’re being “showy” instead of tackling underlying issue.

He makes the rather obvious point that the focus needs to be on the countries that are the biggest polluters like China, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and we need to address better waste management in developing countries. Going without disposable plastic entirely would leave us worse off, so we need to tackle the problems without losing all of the benefits.

  And finally, about this time last year I reported on an annual study by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University which ranked the fiscal solvency of each state. It uses five financial measures that gauge the states’ ability to pay bills, avoid budget deficits, and meet long-term spending needs and cover pension liabilities. Separate from this, others then label these states Republican or Democrat based on their voting record in the past 3 elections and which party controls the state legislature. If the state is not solidly red or blue, it’s purple.

Well, just like last year, the 10 states most fiscally solvent are all Republican, and of the states least fiscally solvent, 6 are solidly Democratic. In fact, of the 25 most-solvent states, all but four are solidly Republican, and of the bottom 25 states, all but five are solidly Democratic. The trend is continuing but the media won’t tell you that.

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[noithatotoaz]

MozCon 2019: Acceptance. Education. Donuts

Posted by PJ_Howland

We’re digital marketers; we make our living in a constantly changing (and consistently misunderstood) industry. It’s easy to feel like even those who are closest to us don’t really get what we do. Take me, for example, I once mentioned algorithms to my grandmother, and ever since then, she’s been absolutely (and adamantly) sure that I work with clocks. Did she think I said analog?

But despite the dynamic nature of marketing, Moz has always been a solid rock at the center of the storm. It’s been here since the beginning, a place where all the marketing nerds and SEO geeks could hang our hats and feel understood.

And MozCon feels like the culmination of that culture of acceptance.

MozCon: Helping you build your best self

As I’ve chatted with the good folks at Moz about this year’s MozCon, it’s clear to me that they pay attention to data. Why do I say that? Because they’re doubling down on making this year their most actionable year ever. As a past attendee, I can say that hearing that MozCon’s biggest focus is a dedication to actionable tactics gets me excited.

The creative media surrounding MozCon have an under-the-sea theme going on. These nautical nods are setting us all up for the deep dive into digital marketing we’re sure to see this year. Since there’s a good chance that most of us marketers never made it to prom (just me? Okay then...), it’s kind of fun to get a second chance to experience oceanic decor in a congregate environment (What, you’ve never dreamed about being Marty McFly at his parent’s Enchantment Under the Sea dance? Was I the only one?)

The point is that the upcoming MozCon is poised to do what it does so well: Offer a delightful mix of predictability and variety, presented in a way that’s designed to improve us without reforming us. New players will share the stage with established thought leaders and strategists. Innovation will go hand in hand with cherished tradition.

After looking at the initial agenda, here are a few of the front runner speakers and sessions I’m excited for in particular.

Casie Gillette — Thanks for the Memories: Creating Content People Remember

Digital marketers like data, right?

[Cue nodding heads and incoherent mumblings]

While I certainly love data, I also struggle with data. Sometimes I rely on the data so much that I become hesitant to take risks. And if there’s one thing our industry as a whole can improve on, it’s taking more risk.

Casie is taking to the stage with a mission to teach us how to make content memorable. With the promise that MozCon 2019 will be more tactical and strategic than ever before, I am earnestly giddy (feel free to picture that emotion however the mood takes you) to hear about what I can do to take a step back from the data, and instead put it on the line for something my audience will never forget.

Shannon McGuirk: How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom

Link-building, anyone? Yeah, it’s still a thing. After all, if you link-build it, they will come. Shannon promises to teach us how to set up a “digital PR room.” AKA, a link-earning machine! It sounds like she’s pulling back the entire curtain and will be showing us some concrete link-building tactics. I know how many hours go into earning a single link, so I am eagerly awaiting a process that scales.

Ross Simmonds — Keyword's Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing

Like many SEOs, I’m a firm believer in the power of valuable content. So when I hear about a session titled, “Keyword's Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing,” it’s eye-catching. Maybe more than eye-catching, it’s paradigm challenging. I love keywords, LOVE’em! Content marketing without keywords makes me a little uneasy. Let’s just say keywords are at the center of most of my strategy for content marketing decisions. I’m glad I have time to prepare my mind for what mad brilliance Ross will be sharing this year at MozCon.

Heather Physioc — Mastering Branded Search

Before I even jump into Heather’s digital game, let’s start with her taste in music. Her walk-on music was strong last year — real strong.

. @HeatherPhysioc I don't know who chooses the walk-on music. But you win! Ready to listen to everything you have to say. #mozcon2018

— PJ Howland (@askPJHowland) July 10, 2018

This year Heather is going to be chatting us up on branded search. At one glance I’m like, “Okay, color me intrigued…” Branded search seems so surface-level, but knowing Heather, it will be an engaging presentation replete with answers to (what I thought were) unanswerable questions about branded search. Heather has a background in working with enterprise brands, so for me, the opportunity to learn how to leverage big brand names for unique perspectives on what many may think is a pretty straightforward subject, is one I don’t dare pass up. Very excited for what’s sure to be a wild ride.

Britney Muller — Topic TBD, but looking forward to it nonetheless 

I’ve never left a conference with more notes from a single session that I have from Britney’s MozCon address in 2017. I recall her sharing her trepidation about being the lead SEO for Moz. A quick project Britney took on was gutting some old and thin pages on Moz.com — about 70,000 community pages if my notes from the event are correct. But shortly, Moz.com saw a modest organic traffic bump. Britney is fearless as an SEO, and there’s something beyond the sheer value of case studies here. As SEOs, we too should be fearless in our work. I’m looking forward to Britney sharing data, insights, and her gutsy spirit with all of us.

Moz with Benefits...

Speakers and sessions are cool and all, but can I just say that all the little extras MozCon has to offer are amazing.

Networking is something that every conference touts. And sure we all like networking, cause that’s what we have to say right? What’s the phrase? “If you’re not networking, you’re not working”? At MozCon, networking is not a chore; it’s easy and enjoyable. Even productive. From an agency perspective, it’s a cool place outside the office to connect with clients too.

And how have I gotten this far and not mentioned the food at MozCon? The meals are excellent, but can I say a word about the snacks? Moz does not skimp when it comes to eats. Sure, I talked about some cool speakers and topics above, but you know what’s actually stolen my heart at MozCon? Top Pot donuts. I may be that guy that leaves a session 5 minutes early just to get a head start on these donuts. Does that mean I might miss out on valuable insights or strategies? Absolutely it does, and I don’t care. My goal has always been to get a couple of donuts down the hatch before I run into someone I know. That way, when they see me with a donut in each hand, they think that’s all I’ve had.

“Just two donuts this time, PJ?”

“Yeah, haha, just two…” Suckers.

Donuts aside, Moz cares immensely about their community and has done everything possible to make this the best year yet. So come as you are, and leave as you were… only better. The Moz culture of acceptance and education stands to deliver a MozCon experience that will keep you going throughout the year. I can’t wait to take a deep dive into the sea of SEO with all of my fellow marketing geeks. And if you want to chat, I’ll be the guy hovering around the donut table.

Well, what did I miss?

For all the long-time MozCon attendees out there, what are you excited for?

Which speakers and sessions are you looking forward to most?

Do you have any favorite moments from years past?

Where are you grabbing dinner in the city?

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

[nutrifami]

MozCon 2019: Acceptance. Education. Donuts

Posted by PJ_Howland

We’re digital marketers; we make our living in a constantly changing (and consistently misunderstood) industry. It’s easy to feel like even those who are closest to us don’t really get what we do. Take me, for example, I once mentioned algorithms to my grandmother, and ever since then, she’s been absolutely (and adamantly) sure that I work with clocks. Did she think I said analog?

But despite the dynamic nature of marketing, Moz has always been a solid rock at the center of the storm. It’s been here since the beginning, a place where all the marketing nerds and SEO geeks could hang our hats and feel understood.

And MozCon feels like the culmination of that culture of acceptance.

MozCon: Helping you build your best self

As I’ve chatted with the good folks at Moz about this year’s MozCon, it’s clear to me that they pay attention to data. Why do I say that? Because they’re doubling down on making this year their most actionable year ever. As a past attendee, I can say that hearing that MozCon’s biggest focus is a dedication to actionable tactics gets me excited.

The creative media surrounding MozCon have an under-the-sea theme going on. These nautical nods are setting us all up for the deep dive into digital marketing we’re sure to see this year. Since there’s a good chance that most of us marketers never made it to prom (just me? Okay then...), it’s kind of fun to get a second chance to experience oceanic decor in a congregate environment (What, you’ve never dreamed about being Marty McFly at his parent’s Enchantment Under the Sea dance? Was I the only one?)

The point is that the upcoming MozCon is poised to do what it does so well: Offer a delightful mix of predictability and variety, presented in a way that’s designed to improve us without reforming us. New players will share the stage with established thought leaders and strategists. Innovation will go hand in hand with cherished tradition.

After looking at the initial agenda, here are a few of the front runner speakers and sessions I’m excited for in particular.

Casie Gillette — Thanks for the Memories: Creating Content People Remember

Digital marketers like data, right?

[Cue nodding heads and incoherent mumblings]

While I certainly love data, I also struggle with data. Sometimes I rely on the data so much that I become hesitant to take risks. And if there’s one thing our industry as a whole can improve on, it’s taking more risk.

Casie is taking to the stage with a mission to teach us how to make content memorable. With the promise that MozCon 2019 will be more tactical and strategic than ever before, I am earnestly giddy (feel free to picture that emotion however the mood takes you) to hear about what I can do to take a step back from the data, and instead put it on the line for something my audience will never forget.

Shannon McGuirk: How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom

Link-building, anyone? Yeah, it’s still a thing. After all, if you link-build it, they will come. Shannon promises to teach us how to set up a “digital PR room.” AKA, a link-earning machine! It sounds like she’s pulling back the entire curtain and will be showing us some concrete link-building tactics. I know how many hours go into earning a single link, so I am eagerly awaiting a process that scales.

Ross Simmonds — Keyword's Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing

Like many SEOs, I’m a firm believer in the power of valuable content. So when I hear about a session titled, “Keyword's Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing,” it’s eye-catching. Maybe more than eye-catching, it’s paradigm challenging. I love keywords, LOVE’em! Content marketing without keywords makes me a little uneasy. Let’s just say keywords are at the center of most of my strategy for content marketing decisions. I’m glad I have time to prepare my mind for what mad brilliance Ross will be sharing this year at MozCon.

Heather Physioc — Mastering Branded Search

Before I even jump into Heather’s digital game, let’s start with her taste in music. Her walk-on music was strong last year — real strong.

. @HeatherPhysioc I don't know who chooses the walk-on music. But you win! Ready to listen to everything you have to say. #mozcon2018

— PJ Howland (@askPJHowland) July 10, 2018

This year Heather is going to be chatting us up on branded search. At one glance I’m like, “Okay, color me intrigued…” Branded search seems so surface-level, but knowing Heather, it will be an engaging presentation replete with answers to (what I thought were) unanswerable questions about branded search. Heather has a background in working with enterprise brands, so for me, the opportunity to learn how to leverage big brand names for unique perspectives on what many may think is a pretty straightforward subject, is one I don’t dare pass up. Very excited for what’s sure to be a wild ride.

Britney Muller — Topic TBD, but looking forward to it nonetheless 

I’ve never left a conference with more notes from a single session that I have from Britney’s MozCon address in 2017. I recall her sharing her trepidation about being the lead SEO for Moz. A quick project Britney took on was gutting some old and thin pages on Moz.com — about 70,000 community pages if my notes from the event are correct. But shortly, Moz.com saw a modest organic traffic bump. Britney is fearless as an SEO, and there’s something beyond the sheer value of case studies here. As SEOs, we too should be fearless in our work. I’m looking forward to Britney sharing data, insights, and her gutsy spirit with all of us.

Moz with Benefits...

Speakers and sessions are cool and all, but can I just say that all the little extras MozCon has to offer are amazing.

Networking is something that every conference touts. And sure we all like networking, cause that’s what we have to say right? What’s the phrase? “If you’re not networking, you’re not working”? At MozCon, networking is not a chore; it’s easy and enjoyable. Even productive. From an agency perspective, it’s a cool place outside the office to connect with clients too.

And how have I gotten this far and not mentioned the food at MozCon? The meals are excellent, but can I say a word about the snacks? Moz does not skimp when it comes to eats. Sure, I talked about some cool speakers and topics above, but you know what’s actually stolen my heart at MozCon? Top Pot donuts. I may be that guy that leaves a session 5 minutes early just to get a head start on these donuts. Does that mean I might miss out on valuable insights or strategies? Absolutely it does, and I don’t care. My goal has always been to get a couple of donuts down the hatch before I run into someone I know. That way, when they see me with a donut in each hand, they think that’s all I’ve had.

“Just two donuts this time, PJ?”

“Yeah, haha, just two…” Suckers.

Donuts aside, Moz cares immensely about their community and has done everything possible to make this the best year yet. So come as you are, and leave as you were… only better. The Moz culture of acceptance and education stands to deliver a MozCon experience that will keep you going throughout the year. I can’t wait to take a deep dive into the sea of SEO with all of my fellow marketing geeks. And if you want to chat, I’ll be the guy hovering around the donut table.

Well, what did I miss?

For all the long-time MozCon attendees out there, what are you excited for?

Which speakers and sessions are you looking forward to most?

Do you have any favorite moments from years past?

Where are you grabbing dinner in the city?

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

[xaydungtruonggia]

MozCon 2019: Acceptance. Education. Donuts

Posted by PJ_Howland

We’re digital marketers; we make our living in a constantly changing (and consistently misunderstood) industry. It’s easy to feel like even those who are closest to us don’t really get what we do. Take me, for example, I once mentioned algorithms to my grandmother, and ever since then, she’s been absolutely (and adamantly) sure that I work with clocks. Did she think I said analog?

But despite the dynamic nature of marketing, Moz has always been a solid rock at the center of the storm. It’s been here since the beginning, a place where all the marketing nerds and SEO geeks could hang our hats and feel understood.

And MozCon feels like the culmination of that culture of acceptance.

MozCon: Helping you build your best self

As I’ve chatted with the good folks at Moz about this year’s MozCon, it’s clear to me that they pay attention to data. Why do I say that? Because they’re doubling down on making this year their most actionable year ever. As a past attendee, I can say that hearing that MozCon’s biggest focus is a dedication to actionable tactics gets me excited.

The creative media surrounding MozCon have an under-the-sea theme going on. These nautical nods are setting us all up for the deep dive into digital marketing we’re sure to see this year. Since there’s a good chance that most of us marketers never made it to prom (just me? Okay then...), it’s kind of fun to get a second chance to experience oceanic decor in a congregate environment (What, you’ve never dreamed about being Marty McFly at his parent’s Enchantment Under the Sea dance? Was I the only one?)

The point is that the upcoming MozCon is poised to do what it does so well: Offer a delightful mix of predictability and variety, presented in a way that’s designed to improve us without reforming us. New players will share the stage with established thought leaders and strategists. Innovation will go hand in hand with cherished tradition.

After looking at the initial agenda, here are a few of the front runner speakers and sessions I’m excited for in particular.

Casie Gillette — Thanks for the Memories: Creating Content People Remember

Digital marketers like data, right?

[Cue nodding heads and incoherent mumblings]

While I certainly love data, I also struggle with data. Sometimes I rely on the data so much that I become hesitant to take risks. And if there’s one thing our industry as a whole can improve on, it’s taking more risk.

Casie is taking to the stage with a mission to teach us how to make content memorable. With the promise that MozCon 2019 will be more tactical and strategic than ever before, I am earnestly giddy (feel free to picture that emotion however the mood takes you) to hear about what I can do to take a step back from the data, and instead put it on the line for something my audience will never forget.

Shannon McGuirk: How to Supercharge Link Building with a Digital PR Newsroom

Link-building, anyone? Yeah, it’s still a thing. After all, if you link-build it, they will come. Shannon promises to teach us how to set up a “digital PR room.” AKA, a link-earning machine! It sounds like she’s pulling back the entire curtain and will be showing us some concrete link-building tactics. I know how many hours go into earning a single link, so I am eagerly awaiting a process that scales.

Ross Simmonds — Keyword's Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing

Like many SEOs, I’m a firm believer in the power of valuable content. So when I hear about a session titled, “Keyword's Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing,” it’s eye-catching. Maybe more than eye-catching, it’s paradigm challenging. I love keywords, LOVE’em! Content marketing without keywords makes me a little uneasy. Let’s just say keywords are at the center of most of my strategy for content marketing decisions. I’m glad I have time to prepare my mind for what mad brilliance Ross will be sharing this year at MozCon.

Heather Physioc — Mastering Branded Search

Before I even jump into Heather’s digital game, let’s start with her taste in music. Her walk-on music was strong last year — real strong.

. @HeatherPhysioc I don't know who chooses the walk-on music. But you win! Ready to listen to everything you have to say. #mozcon2018

— PJ Howland (@askPJHowland) July 10, 2018

This year Heather is going to be chatting us up on branded search. At one glance I’m like, “Okay, color me intrigued…” Branded search seems so surface-level, but knowing Heather, it will be an engaging presentation replete with answers to (what I thought were) unanswerable questions about branded search. Heather has a background in working with enterprise brands, so for me, the opportunity to learn how to leverage big brand names for unique perspectives on what many may think is a pretty straightforward subject, is one I don’t dare pass up. Very excited for what’s sure to be a wild ride.

Britney Muller — Topic TBD, but looking forward to it nonetheless 

I’ve never left a conference with more notes from a single session that I have from Britney’s MozCon address in 2017. I recall her sharing her trepidation about being the lead SEO for Moz. A quick project Britney took on was gutting some old and thin pages on Moz.com — about 70,000 community pages if my notes from the event are correct. But shortly, Moz.com saw a modest organic traffic bump. Britney is fearless as an SEO, and there’s something beyond the sheer value of case studies here. As SEOs, we too should be fearless in our work. I’m looking forward to Britney sharing data, insights, and her gutsy spirit with all of us.

Moz with Benefits...

Speakers and sessions are cool and all, but can I just say that all the little extras MozCon has to offer are amazing.

Networking is something that every conference touts. And sure we all like networking, cause that’s what we have to say right? What’s the phrase? “If you’re not networking, you’re not working”? At MozCon, networking is not a chore; it’s easy and enjoyable. Even productive. From an agency perspective, it’s a cool place outside the office to connect with clients too.

And how have I gotten this far and not mentioned the food at MozCon? The meals are excellent, but can I say a word about the snacks? Moz does not skimp when it comes to eats. Sure, I talked about some cool speakers and topics above, but you know what’s actually stolen my heart at MozCon? Top Pot donuts. I may be that guy that leaves a session 5 minutes early just to get a head start on these donuts. Does that mean I might miss out on valuable insights or strategies? Absolutely it does, and I don’t care. My goal has always been to get a couple of donuts down the hatch before I run into someone I know. That way, when they see me with a donut in each hand, they think that’s all I’ve had.

“Just two donuts this time, PJ?”

“Yeah, haha, just two…” Suckers.

Donuts aside, Moz cares immensely about their community and has done everything possible to make this the best year yet. So come as you are, and leave as you were… only better. The Moz culture of acceptance and education stands to deliver a MozCon experience that will keep you going throughout the year. I can’t wait to take a deep dive into the sea of SEO with all of my fellow marketing geeks. And if you want to chat, I’ll be the guy hovering around the donut table.

Well, what did I miss?

For all the long-time MozCon attendees out there, what are you excited for?

Which speakers and sessions are you looking forward to most?

Do you have any favorite moments from years past?

Where are you grabbing dinner in the city?

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