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gfriendlighting460 · 3 years ago

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Dating Sites With Trans Option

Brook Shelley’s previous work for The Toast can be found here, and our previous coverage of trans* issues can be found here.

Hearing about people being afraid of or not open to dating a trans person is just one reason why it is so hard to date as a trans person. And even though I have heard it many times before, it is still hard to confront. I looked at eight popular dating sites to see which are the most gender inclusive. Dating only trans people, at least here in my local community, do not seem like a realistic option since we are too few. Finding the right person would be next to impossible. Well, that was my 2 cents on that. I,m actually surprised by the comments so far. TRANSGENDER, PANSEXUAL, LESBIAN, GAY, GENDER-FLUID, Bi-SEXUAL & NON-BINARY DATING SITE & SUPPORT. We are a Transgender, Pansexual, Lesbian, Gay, Gender-fluid, Bi-sexual & Non-Binary dating site where you can find support, make friends, talk to others about their journey, look for love and so much more. Reddit’s r/t4t subreddit is essentially a personals-style online dating forum for transgender people. While it’s not as detailed as more established trans dating sites, this subreddit is designed.

Welcome to lesbian trans womanhood. I know, we aren’t supposed to say that. Welcome anyway. Let’s assume you know two things: that you are a woman, and that you like other women. Good. That’s a fine place to start. Follow along, and we will get you from this humble beginning, to being a real-live dater.

Take a deep breath. Ready?

1. First, lower your expectations. Whatever you think might happen in the next few paragraphs, or in the next few months, expect less.

Dating Sites With Trans Options

This isn’t in reference to any particular difficulty facing trans women, though there are many; it is always helpful to lower your expectations. Low expectations mean high excitement at small success.

For example, if you expect to dance alone at a bar, you will be thrilled to find that someone beautiful is dancing with you. Repeat as needed.

2. Next, create an online dating profile. OkCupid, Match, or Tinder; it doesn’t really matter where, but you’ll need one. This is how you meet shy lesbians. You may be shy yourself. This could be the best place for you.

3. Spend quite a bit of time agonizing over the photos and your description and hobbies. Be clever. Be charming. Ask a few close friends, “would you theoretically date me based on this profile?” Hear them laugh a little. Tell them, “No, I’m serious. Is any of this good?”

4. Take their advice. If they have no advice, find some other friends. Without them, you will end up posting a photo with kale in your teeth, or where there is clearly a dog using the restroom in the background. You will not notice this on your own.

5. While you wait for responses, go find the queerest bar nearby. Attend events specifically targeted towards lesbians like you. Dance. Get used to dancing. The music will likely not be great. Get used to a mix of pop hits, Shakira, and Bikini Kill. Don’t try to explain why Kathleen Hanna is problematic while dancing.

6. Wonder, “why do so many of these girls have bow-ties on?”

There is no answer.

7. Assume they must not be able to take them off. Do not offer to help them take their bow-ties off. Just dance away.

8. Flirt. Often.

9. Hone your ability to turn a conversation into a fun tête-à-tête. Read the face and responses of the other people. Assume that at any moment, they might sour, and you will need to disengage. Be lighthearted. Be friendly. Don’t press anyone, and focus on enjoying yourself. Cool people enjoy themselves. Cool people are definitely not sweating horribly, right now, as they dance around the room, hoping for a match. When someone asks how you are doing, never mention the harassment, mis-gendering, or stress you’re going through. They don’t actually want to know that stuff yet. Talk to your aforementioned friends about those.

10. Hear, “wow, you’re tall,” at most of these events. Kiss a few people, gently. Brace yourself for the inevitable pre-hookup question or revelation about your body or identity. Practice explaining why “biological woman” is ridiculous. Use lines like “Of course I’m a biological woman, and not a cyber woman… or a giant snake.” At no point be seen unhinging your jaw to devour a goat.

Also try, “Hi, this is how my body works… and this is what I like.”

11. Be prepared for some rejection at this point. Practice your smile and, “Ok, that’s fine, I had fun,” response to “I can’t sleep with you now,” or “I’m just not attracted to (your genitals),” or “I’m a gold star lesbian, I can’t sleep with you.” You may also hear, “you’re so brave.”

12. Find ways to forgive them in your heart for being such shitheels.

13. Be surprised when not everyone rejects you. Bask in the glow of reciprocal attraction when it does occur – it may be rare. You may want to high-five the women who are still attracted to you, regardless of what you discuss. Resist. High-fives are firmly in second date territory.

14. Check your phone. Oh, your mom called. Call your mom back. Remind her that you won’t be meeting any nice boys because you are a lesbian. Yes, you might want to settle down. No, there’s not much going on lately. Yes, you’re really a lesbian. No, this isn’t a phase. Yes, you did get the dress she sent… it’s… nice. Tell her you love her. Hang up.

15. Check your phone again. There sure are a lot of biologists on your online dating site.

How’d they get access to my karyotype? Did they take a blood sample?

What’s that game? You know the one… Where complete strangers ask you about your genitals? https://gfriendlighting460.tumblr.com/post/655947581619388416/dating-anyone-in-carrboro-nc. You’ll be playing this whether you like it or not a lot more often now. It is not possible to win this game.

Does Tinder Have A Trans Option

16. Use some of your flirting skills from being at the bar while you are online. Realize those skills don’t translate. A lot of people online are too shy to go out, so they will not know how to respond to you. You may be seen as forward, or at least not shy enough. Carry on.

17. Talk about books. Talk about food. Talk about anything but how you’ll probably never meet up, and if you do, there won’t be a second date. There often isn’t a second date.

18. Get ready to hear a lot of very surface-level readings of Judith Butler. Take heed that many of your fellow women have taken exactly one women’s and gender studies course in college, and “know all about being transgendered.” (sic) Be prepared to hear girls talk about how they’re “not really feminists, because they like to have fun.” Feel free to shake your head and pour a drink. Get better at reading through their answers to weed out the ubiquitous racism, transmisogyny, littering, and incompatible goals. Remember that you don’t have to settle.

19. You should probably have a pet. I should have said this at the beginning. Choose: cat or dog. Go adopt your choice animal. Start at the top. I can wait. You may be alone for a while.

20. Find a partner or dater. At some point, you will succeed. You will feel like you won the lesbian lottery. You will be elated in your heart that someone cares about you, and wants to kiss you… like more than once a week. High fives may be appropriate at this point.

These dating sites aren’t just for women either. The detailed description of the freebie is published on the blog. Find society & people themes in the same name category at Template/p Read More. JerkBoy – This app has been called the most honest, accurate dating service out there. It’s a tool for users to showcase. 18-25 years old; 26-39 years old and looking for short-term fun; 26-39 years old and looking for girlfriend material; 40+ years old; The Best Dating Apps For Men Ages 18 To 25 1. Tinder is the most popular dating app in the US. You probably have a buddy who met his girlfriend on it. Step further like for example most dating websites, if you want to actually communicate with other members then you need to subscribe to a membership and you get full benefits of the website. If you're serious then out of those 3 go with Match. You will definitely get hit up, probably too many to count and you'll most likely make a ton of guys wonder why girls never respond hahaha. Dating was created and is run by Dan and a group year techies who truly care about what they do. Security and privacy dating top olds at Teens Town, which is why the olds verifies every member and ensures dating no adult content shows up on the site. Teens Town also every to help you have fun and connect with your fellow teens. ★★★★★ Match.com 4.8/5.0. Our expert ratings are based on factors such as. Best dating websites for 19 year olds.

21. Prepare yourself for anyone you date to be called a chaser. It doesn’t matter if they actually care about you for who you are as a person, there are many who enjoy distilling you to your transgender history. Gird your loins against the barbs flung at you and your partner. Learn to laugh, and to cry. Embrace being a really hot lesbian with a super amazing girlfriend. It’s pretty great.

22. Laugh to yourself at all the ridiculously sad people who would want to hurt you and your partner. Try to not be burned by them with every single uneducated, casual insult. It will sting, but you can be strong.

23. But, most of all, have fun! Being a lesbian trans woman is probably the best thing in the world. Be proud of yourself. Be excited. You get to kiss other girls.

Elite dating site. Questions about online dating? Enjoy our ultimate online dating guide; Interracial Dating. If there were previously stereotypes, preconceptions or presumptions about interracial dating, these outdated attitudes are transforming as more and more American singles are seeking partners from other ethnic groups, and couples’ relationships no longer being defined along racial lines. It’s fair to say that our interracial dating community represents the enlightened majority in American society. A Gallup poll in 2013 found that 96% of black people and 84% of white people approve marriage between blacks and whites. This means that 87% of Americans overall see no problem with black-white marriage, up from a meager 4% in 1958 1. Interracial dating: meeting singles serious about love. According to Statistics Canada, the number of long-term Canadian couples in partnerships that can be described as mixed unions has doubled over the last 20 years. 1 For those in lesbian relationships or gay. Interracial dating in SA: meet singles who suit you. When you search for interracial dating sites it can be tough to find supportive platforms that encourage long-term commitment. At EliteSingles, however, we cater for South African men and women who desire more from love; making us the dating site to use if you’re looking for compatible. Interracial dating: meeting singles serious about love. According to the Office of National Statistics, almost one in 10 people living in Britain is married to or living with someone from outside their own ethnic group. Clearly, there are single men and women in the UK for whom interracial dating.

Brook is a queer trans woman living in Portland who hangs out with her cat, and does all manner of technical magic for a software company. She travels as often as possible, and can often be found on her couch, reading and enjoying a cider.

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shirlleycoyle · 4 years ago

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Why This Teen Walked Away From Millions of TikTok Followers

This is part of a special series, The Future of Fame Is the Fan, which dissects how celebrity became so slippery. It’s also in the latest VICE magazine. Subscribe here.

Sixteen-year-old Ava Rose Beaune was hanging out at a friend’s house on an otherwise unremarkable mid-July afternoon when her cell service briefly shut off. She tried to text her dad, but it wouldn’t send—definitely odd, she thought, but not alarming.

Then people started messaging her: Did you see what’s on your Twitter? Your Instagram? What’s going on? She logged on to her social media accounts and saw that her new Facebook status alluded to suicide—but she hadn’t posted it.

“My whole family thought I was going to kill myself,” Ava said.

Suddenly, a man she’d never met was calling her parents, demanding to speak to her. He had control of all her contacts, texts, emails, and social media accounts. The next day, he texted her: I just want to talk to you. (Spoken and written quotes from Ava’s alleged stalker are italicized to indicate they are not necessarily direct quotes but are as she remembers them.) He called her, and she answered, begging him to do whatever he wanted to her Instagram account, if that’s what he was after. “Delete it. Delete it and leave me alone if that’s what you want,” she told him. You don’t want that, he said. “I do,” she replied. I just want to meet up with you and have sex with you, he said.

“That’s when I hung up the phone, and I was like, this is getting weird,” Ava told me. This stranger had managed to hack her accounts using a method called SIM swapping, in which he contacted her wireless service carrier and convinced them that he owned the account and needed them to transfer access to the SIM card to the phone in his hand—effectively taking over her digital life.

In screenshots viewed by VICE, the hacker can be seen posting a Story to her Instagram about being Ava’s new boyfriend, issuing rape threats, and writing things like “I can’t wait til I impregnate you and marry you. you only live 5 MIN away from me.” She got her social media accounts back in her own possession and resolved the problem with her carrier. “OK, this is, you know, the end, whatever,” she recalled thinking.

With more than 2 million followers on TikTok, Ava was a minor celebrity in her own circles. So, she said, she was used to men being creepy, or even hostile. This was extreme, she thought, but it was over.

But it wasn’t. This was only the beginning of weeks of daily harassment so severe it would uproot her life entirely.

As of this year, TikTok likely has more than 1 billion monthly active users, and the market research firm Statista estimates that adolescents between 10 and 19 years old make up 32.5 percent of those users. The spiritual successor to Vine, TikTok is a micro-video sharing platform that favors an off-the-cuff, do-it-yourself style: People of all ages lip-sync to movie clips and songs, mimic elaborate dances in their living rooms, and use filters to edit the 60-second videos into tiny works of art. It’s also something of a fame lottery.

All this manic, frenetic energy combined with massive audiences is addictive in the same way any social media platform is: with casino-style scrolling and a notification system and the looming chance at virality. Normal teens like Ava—who signed with a talent agency in January 2020—become voracious consumers as well as unstoppable creators, hoping to strike it big, get discovered, or at the very least, make it to the For You feed, where one video plucked by some mysterious algorithm from a user’s feed can get in front of millions of eyeballs instantly.

“I’d rather not give those people the satisfaction of being noticed.”

Despite all this, cyberbullying experts say that TikTok isn’t the worst social media app for harassment. “The way that TikTok is built reduces the likelihood of cyberbullying when compared to other apps,” said Sameer Hinduja, the co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. Features like direct messaging that only allow mutual followers to contact each other, and the inability to add images or videos to comment sections, set it apart from other apps. “To be sure, cyberbullying can manifest itself in hurtful TikTok videos directed towards others, as well as in comments and in livestream chats—but these possibilities are no different than on any other social media app,” Hinduja told me.

According to TikTok’s transparency report from 2020, 2.5 percent of videos the platform removed were for bullying or harassment. But there are some features unique to TikTok that make it prone to a different, more personal kind of harassment. “Duet” allows other users to repost your video with a split-screen video of their own. Most of the time, it’s used innocently, for singalongs or miniature skits. But some users say it opens a portal for disturbing abuse. In 2018, BuzzFeed News reported that people—often young children—would duet their videos with a video of them acting out suicide, putting plastic bags over their heads or belts around their necks, to show their disgust at the original post. And a Duet from a more popular account can send a wave of attention from their followers to your page, not all of it positive.

Nick, who runs a TikTok account with his five-year-old daughter Sienna (the family goes by their first names publicly, to protect their privacy), told me that they experience Duet-based harassment on top of the usual comment section cruelty. “Some users would duet our videos and say mean, nasty things that were just not true,” he said. “In the beginning, it made us second-guess the path we were going down.”

It hasn’t stopped since they started the account, in October of 2018—and they’ve since gathered more than 14 million followers. But they have gotten better at managing it, Nick said. “Sienna is luckily very intelligent and knows that this is not OK. I made sure to sit down with her, emphasizing how special she is and that people may not see that right away.”

Nick believes TikTok does a good job of handling harassment, and giving creators the tools to handle it themselves. “If there is consistent harassment from a specific account, I block and delete their hateful comments,” he said. “For the negative comments in general, I tend to just ignore them. I’d rather not give those people the satisfaction of being noticed.”

TikTok does allow users to opt out of Duets. But these are the features that foster that slingshot fame; opting out of them means opting out of your chance at going viral or just growing your audience.

Fatima and Munera Fahiye, who are sisters and TikTok creators with around 3 million followers each, told me that they also find the platform to be responsive when they need support. “There were multiple accounts on TikTok impersonating me on the app, and TikTok helped me by verifying my account to let people know that my account is the real one,” Munera said.

Whatever harassment they do receive—which often means racist comments—they say is outweighed by the support of fans. “I have been on TikTok for a year now, and I have not experienced any harassment, but after gaining some followers I have seen some mean comments about my hijab every now and then, but I try to not give it any attention, because the love and support that I am getting from my fans is more than the little hate, so it does not matter,” Fatima said.

The harassment that happens on TikTok doesn’t stay there, however. On Reddit, whole communities are devoted to catching women and girls on social media in the middle of wardrobe slips, where you can see down their shirts, up their skirts, or anytime they shift and move and reveal a glimpse of more skin. Standalone websites are made for this purpose, too, and for doxxing and harassing women who might have a TikTok in addition to an OnlyFans or other separate adult platform.

In 2020, a server on the gaming chat platform Discord took requests for TikTok creators to be made into deepfakes—AI-generated fake porn. Although child pornography is against Discord’s terms of use, even in the form of deepfakes, one of the most requested targets was only 17. A request for another deepfake noted, “by the way she turns 18 in 4 days.”

Creators also find their content, clothed as in the originals or deepfaked, reposted to porn sites. In concert, the people on each of these platforms work together to create an overwhelming environment of virtual assault for many young women.

Until TikTok, Ava had never really been into social media, she told me on a Zoom call in her parents’ house. She was taking a break from high school distance learning; this was her senior year, spent over video chats because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I always told myself I’d never make a TikTok because my friends all had it and I was like, that’s so cringe,” she said. “Like, I’ll never start that. But they were like, ‘Come on make one,’ so I did.”

She said she made her first account when she was 15, and posted the usual stuff: trend dances, makeup videos. Within a few days, her audience went from the friends who talked her into joining to 150,000 followers—a leap in popularity that she still doesn’t entirely understand. The sudden attention startled her; she deactivated the account.

She accidentally reactivated the account later, and at this point, having gotten over the initial shock of attention, decided to give it another try.

A rock smashed through her mom’s car window with a threatening note tied to it: I want to take you and impregnate you.

Once Ava started posting new videos, the hateful comments started. “I thought that was like the worst it could get,” she said. “It was like, body shaming and hate—the body shaming especially never bothered me, and the normal hate comments were just like, whatever.” A few users created accounts to post rape threats about her, and this did disturb her, but she took it as par for the course as a young woman online.

That is, until one of her followers started stalking her and her best friend, Gabriel. That follower messaged Gabriel, mentioning her home address and demanding to know who she was dating. “So, we’re both kind of like laughing like this guy’s obviously just some weird fan,” she recalled.

I have something planned for Ava. You’ll see in the next three months. I’m planning something big, Ava says he told Gabriel. He hacked her phone three months later, on Gabriel’s 18th birthday. After that, the man texted Ava every day.

“It was stuff about how he wants to rape me, how he’s going to get me, how I can easily stop this—he was texting my dad saying, She’s not allowed to hang out with her friends, if she goes out I’ll know. Saying he’s watching over us and stuff like that.” Every time Ava thought the situation was as bad as it could get—that this man she’d never met was going as far as he could go—he went further.

Then a rock smashed through her mom’s car window with a threatening note tied to it: I want to take you and impregnate you.

Cyberbullying has proven long-lasting effects on teens and young adults. As Hinduja noted, studies show that it’s tied to low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, family problems, academic difficulties, delinquency, school violence, and suicidal thoughts and attempts.

“So at this point I was like, ‘OK, this is getting a little serious.’”

“Most important to me is how negative experiences online unnecessarily compromise the healthy flourishing of our youth at school,” he said. According to his and his co-director Justin Patchin’s research at the Cyberbullying Research Center, over 60 percent of students who experienced cyberbullying reported that it “deeply affected” their ability to learn and feel safe while at school, and 10 percent of students surveyed said they’ve skipped school at least once this past year because of it.

“That cannot be happening,” Hinduja said.

“In general, I hope people will remember that everyone is a human being just like them. We are all capable of feeling hurt and disappointment, and just because there are numbers and a platform attached to our lives doesn’t mean we are impervious to hurtful words or harassing comments,” Nick said. “TikTok is a space where everyone should feel safe to express their creativity, and in order to do that we need to be kind to others.”

Maxwell Mitcheson, Ava’s agent and the head of talent at TalentX Entertainment, told me that he’s seen harassment take a direct toll on young people. “A lot of creators are growing up in front of millions of people, and that involves making mistakes and learning and growing from them,” he said. “The hateful rhetoric definitely weighs on them; some don’t even look at their comments section anymore just to try and stay positive.”

“It’s the inability to make mistakes, being attacked for being authentically yourself, and the sudden lack of anonymity,” Mitcheson said.

Ava’s experience was on the extreme side, he explained, but creators at his agency have had instances of hacking and stalking, or fans randomly showing up at creators’ homes. “We’ve had to involve security and PIs before, but Ava’s was a situation that could have ended in tragedy if it weren’t for the Toronto police intervening.”

After the window-breaking threat, Ava said the police told her that she couldn’t stay at home. She went to stay at a friend’s house, but he still reached her there, she said. “He just kept going saying like, look at what you’ve done, this is all your fault,” she said. He sent her a private message that would delete after it was opened, so she recorded it using a friend’s phone:

I need you to accept the fact that I’m extorting you right now, you need to accept that this isn’t going to end no one’s gonna catch me, the police haven’t ever caught me when I did this before, accept it, give me what I want, I want you to meet up at this park right behind your house I want to do this this this this to you

if you don’t I will kill your parents in front of you in your living room and take you.

“So at this point I was like, ‘OK, this is getting a little serious,’” she told me.

She said she sent the message to the police, who told her whole family to stay somewhere else, hours away. They did, for two weeks. He kept texting her: are you going to be there Saturday you’re making the wrong decision you better answer me.

Eventually, Ava recalled, he was caught. He left the VPN he was using to mask his location off for a half a second, according to her—just long enough, she remembers the police telling her, for the investigators to capture his location data and pinpoint where he was texting her from.

Ava said that the police told her that when he was caught, they found six separate phones and a bunch of SIM cards in his possession—full of pictures and videos of Ava that he’d taken from her accounts. According to the Toronto area detective Ava and her family worked with, the case is still in the courts.

Talking to me now, over Zoom, in between classes and facing midterms, Ava seems fine. She’s able to recount this story in delicate detail, without flinching. She understands the gravity of what happened to her, and how it upended her life. Her family decided to move away, “to the middle of nowhere, pretty much,” she said.

But she is different now. She stopped posting to her TikTok to focus on her friendships and family, though she still posts sporadically on Instagram. She would like to be more active on social media, but she’s not pushing herself. She has anxiety that she describes as “really bad.”

“It’s really affected me, like, you know, just like not being able to live in your own home, and like, even when you are at home, not being safe… It’s really hard, especially when I was only 16 when this happened,” she said. “It is hard, and knowing that my parents were always stressed out and not being able to go outside and walk without feeling kind of scared…”

Before she stopped posting new TikTok videos, she tried to open up on the platform in videos about her mental health and her experiences. But people weren’t receptive to it.

“Especially when they’re like, Oh, a TikTok girl that all the simps love, or What are you complaining about, all these boys love you, kind of thing,” she told me. “I’ve been trying to go to therapy and trying to get over it, but when that kind of thing happens you’re not really the same afterwards. You have a different outlook on social media. You’re kind of scared of if it’s going to happen again. You don’t think those people exist until it happens to you, and then you’re like, wow, this is crazy.”

Online harassment has a silencing effect on people of all ages and genders, but women have it especially bad—and young women are pushed offline, out of the center of conversations and control of their own narrative, at earlier and earlier ages. As adolescents, harassment online makes them do worse in school, seek riskier behaviors, and contemplate or even attempt and follow through on self-harm and suicide. As grown women, this looks like anxiety, a lack of self-confidence, not sleeping, and stepping out of the online conversation altogether to protect their own mental health, and, in severe cases, the safety of themselves and their loved ones. When harassment is allowed to carry on, and women are shamed for seeking help, the damage digs deeper—and we lose those voices.

I asked Ava what she wishes more people understood—about her, about what it’s like to have a big social media following, about how it feels to have millions of eyes on you at such a young age. “I just wish they knew that just because you have followers, doesn’t mean you have this perfect life,” she said. “Just because boys love you, that doesn’t complete your life. When these kinds of things happen, you should be able to be open about it.”

Follow Samantha Cole on Twitter.

Why This Teen Walked Away From Millions of TikTok Followers syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

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mustafa-el-fats · 4 years ago

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in: Featured, Heading Out On Your Own, Money & Career, Networking, Professional Skills

Brett & Kate McKay • August 9, 2012 • Last updated: September 23, 2020

Managing Your Online Reputation

This article series is now available as a professionally formatted, distraction free paperback or ebook to read offline at your leisure.

All the basic life skills we’ve covered so far in this series have been things that your dad, and even your granddad, had to learn when he left home for the first time too.

But today’s young man faces a new challenge that Pops never encountered: managing his online reputation.

Despite the nascent nature of this skill, I truly believe it’s one of the most important things we’ll talk about in this series. As the line between the offline and online world gets increasingly blurry, your online reputation is your reputation. Before you meet your freshman roommate, before you pick up a date, before you shake the hand of a potential employer…you better believe they’ve already Googled you, already formed a first, first impression about you, your interests, and what kind of person you are. Thus, if you’re not careful and conscious about the content you create online, you can end up shooting yourself in the foot in all areas of your life.

Heading Out on Your Own…And Into a Fishbowl World

Leaving for college or another kind of adventure after high school has long been an exciting and heady time. It’s an age where you’re experimenting with ideas and values, testing new freedoms, meeting new people, and often changing your mind about who you are and what you want out of life. One week you feel one way, and the next you feel another. During this process you often make mistakes, and do bone-headed things that twenty years later will still make you wonder, “What was I thinking?”

Just a decade ago, only you, and a few of your closest friends, would have held the memory of those crazy and sometimes cringe-worthy moments. The only record of them could be found by digging up a private photo album or journal.

Today…it’s a whole new ball game.

Now, everything you do and say can potentially become part of your permanent and public record. Everybody’s got a smartphone and can snap a picture of you anywhere, anytime and post it online. And things that go up online about you and from you can remain there forever. Mistakes you made when you were just 19 can haunt you for the rest of your life. Being a young man used to mean you could entirely reinvent yourself by moving to a new place and making new friends, but now your online reputation will follow you wherever you go.

I don’t mean to sound all doom and gloom about it. But that’s the sobering reality of living in the Internet Age, and it doesn’t help to bury one’s head in the sand and try to whatever that reality away. It absolutely doesn’t mean that college can’t still be the fun, spontaneous experience it’s always been; it just means you need to take a conscious, proactive approach to taking responsibility for what parts of that experience end up online and in the public eye.

Why Is Proactively Managing Your Online Reputation So Important?

One of the greatest things about the internet is that it is a giant pot that people can both add to and take from. This puts the most enormous wealth of knowledge in human history right at our fingertips and provides an endless amount of inspiration that can be added onto and “remixed.”

The downside of the big internet pot, is that the moment you put something into the pot, you pretty much lose all control over it. Many viral embarrassments have started out as something someone just wanted to share with a few good friends. But those friends shared it with their friends, who shared it with their friends…on and on until it ended up on Tosh.O.

There are essentially no guaranteed take backs when it comes to what you put online. You can erase your Facebook status, blog post, comment, tweet, or video, but someone else may very well have already shared it, copied it, taken a screenshot of it, or downloaded the video and reposted it somewhere else. How websites looked on a certain date in time are captured and archived on sites like the WayBack Machine (take a look at AoM circa 2008!). Emails that you thought you deleted forever can still sometimes be retrieved, and just because you deleted an email doesn’t mean the person you sent it to didn’t archive it. If someone else wants to post something of yours, you may not be able to get them to take it down without suing.

All of which is to say, pretty every piece of digital content you create can potentially exist forever. And this digital record can be accessed by any of the 250 million internet users in the US, not to mention the 2 billion online all over the world.

What’s on that record can have a big impact on both your personal and professional life.

Your college’s admissions office may have Googled you when they looked over your application. As soon as your freshman roommate knew you’d be bunking with him, he Googled you. When you network with someone at a party and tell them about your great idea, they’ll Google you later. And 81% of singles say they Google or check the Facebook page of someone before meeting him or her for a date.

Even though only 7% of Americans think their online reputation influences hiring decisions, in reality, 75% of US companies have made an online screening a formal part of the hiring process, 85% of recruiters and HR professionals say that having a positive online reputation influences their hiring decisions, and 70% of recruiters say they have rejected candidates based on something they found about them online. And since those numbers come from a study done in 2009, they’re undoubtedly even higher now.

What kinds of online discoveries cause recruiters and HR personnel to push your resume to the trash? This chart shows the most common red flags employers look for:

As you can see, it’s not just content you create that employers are checking out, it’s stuff your friends and colleagues post too. Be careful who you associate with.

Some young folks may be tempted to respond by saying, “Well, if a company is going to reject me for posting pictures of my drunken revelry, I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway.” But that’s pretty short-sighted. I’d venture to say that these companies aren’t rejecting candidates so much because they like to drink or swear, but rather that their willingness to show off these behaviors publicly shows a lack of judgment and wisdom. Not at all an unreasonable assumption.

The information that new friends and potential employers can find about you online may not even be true. Some people will try to verify it, some will not. And what they see will often come without any context – maybe you were being funny, maybe it’s an inside joke, but they won’t know that, they’ll simply make immediate judgments about what they find. This is why when it comes to managing your online reputation, you must be both proactive and defensive — deleting anything inappropriate, wisely choosing the digital content you create, and purposefully creating positive content about yourself.

Self-Reflect Before You Self-Reveal

“Young people in particular often self-reveal before they self-reflect. There is no eraser button today for youthful indiscretion.” –James Steyer

There are some practical ways to manage your online reputation, and we’ll get to them in a moment. But the first step in taking responsibility for your online presence is creating a mindset for how you want to approach your online life.

Matt Ivester, the author of lol..OMG! (despite the silly-sounding title, this is actually a great book, with solid advice from the guy who learned about online reputation management firsthand from his misadventures in founding Juicycampus.com), suggests three questions to ask yourself before you put something online:

1. Why are you doing this?

Why? This is the most important question of all, and one that unfortunately usually goes unasked and uncontemplated.

Today’s colleges are welcoming the first “digital natives:” they’ve never known a time when the internet wasn’t a huge part of their lives. And even for those who are old enough to have used encyclopedias for elementary-school research papers, interacting and participating online has become so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine that life was ever any other way. This is just how things are, and we do what everyone else is doing, so much so that we hardly ever ask why we are doing those things. Once we do start asking why, the answers are surprisingly hard to come up with and articulate.

Why do you update your status or share a link on Facebook? Do you want to share news? Are you bored? Do you want to be thought clever? Are you trying to make someone else jealous? Do you want to see if people feel the same way as you? Why?

Why do you care how many likes or upvotes something you submit on Facebook or Reddit gets? Is it confirmation that you shared something with value? Why?

Why do you leave comments on blog posts? Do you want the author of the blog to know that you appreciated the article? Do you think you have the insight to add that might help another reader? Do you want the author to know how and why they are wrong? Why? What do you hope to accomplish? Do you think it will change their mind? Is it because the psychological angst you feel when you think someone is wrong needs to be discharged? Why?

Why do you participate in online forums? Does it provide a feeling of camaraderie? Do you like to hear others’ opinions? Why do you respond when you think those opinions are wrong? Why do you care what a stranger thinks about you? Why?

When you ponder the why behind creating any kind of online content, from a status update to a YouTube video, you may come up with a reason that you find satisfactory and worthwhile. Or you may find that your motivation is hard to make sense of and decide it’s not worth your time. Either way, by asking why, you’ll become what Ivester calls “a conscious creator of content.”

2. Is now the right time?

The internet creates a perfect storm for impulse control: at the same time that it actively solicits impulsive communication and make satisfying those impulses incredibly easy, it makes taking back the results of those impulses incredibly difficult; it’s easy to hit “send” or “submit,” and quite hard to un-send and un-submit something.

Facebook asks, “What’s on your mind?” while Twitter wants to know “What’s happening?” They owe their existence to people’s desire to share their thoughts, videos, and photographs – and they need to be constantly fed to survive and grow and make money. And blogs (including ours) want to engage readers and build community and so ask for comments. The internet is set up to encourage you to share whatever thought crosses your mind, and taking that thought from your cranium to the walls and screens of the digital world only takes a few clicks.

But just because you can share your thoughts on impulse doesn’t mean you should. Not only because you probably haven’t thought through the why behind wanting to share first, but because strong impulses are usually born from strong emotions: anger, depression, and grief, or from chemically-altered states (like being drunk). When you spout off and share personal feelings while emotional or trashed, you will likely come to regret it once those strong emotions fade or you sober up.

The best thing to do when you feel you’re dealing with an impulse to put something online that you might regret later, is just to sit on it. The internet creates a false sense of immediacy, giving you an overwhelming feeling that you have to respond now. But what you’ll find is that something that felt super urgent and mega important to say in the moment, will seem totally pointless when you wake up the next morning.

One method I use to thwart impulsive responses is to imagine myself living before the internet. If I feel a burning urge to tell the author of an article what a chucklehead he is, I think of reading a magazine in the 80s, and how I would have had no outlet to express my opinion about it besides writing up a letter to the editor or talking to my wife or close friends about it. Or if something annoys me and I want to rant about it on Facebook, I think of a time before Facebook when I would have had no choice but to keep my rant to myself. It makes me realize that just as sharing whatever crosses your mind wasn’t necessary then, it’s not necessary now. The fine-folks of the 80s, while they made some questionable fashion-choices, weren’t any less happy than we are now that we’re able to shout what we’re feeling and thinking to everyone 24/7.

3. How controversial do you want to be?

The younger generation (including those my age) was raised with a lot of rhetoric about how special and unique they are, how important it is to be “authentic,” and that it’s good to be “transparent.” This can lead folks to throw caution to wind about what they share online because, “I’m just trying to be me! And if other people don’t like it, they can bite me!”

But just because you can now display your opinions and personality to a greater number of people than ever before, doesn’t mean you should, or that the more you share, the more authentic you are. Going back to my suggestion of thinking about life before the internet, people used to only be able to share their quirks with a close circle of family and friends, and they weren’t any less themselves than we are (actually they were probably more themselves since they didn’t get instant feedback on all of their quirks).

Examining the meaning of authenticity isn’t within the purview of this post (although it will be a future series), but suffice it to say for now that the ideal for many of the great men of the past was not transparency, but sprezzatura – only revealing themselves to others slowly as a relationship of trust developed. You may want to “be yourself” by trumpeting your religious, social, and political beliefs online every chance you get, but if those meme’s you keep flooding Facebook with is the only thing new acquaintances know about you, they may decide they don’t want to get to know you before they even do — they’ll miss the complexity of your character that would have shown through over time…that you’re both a liberal and a rabid gun owner, or a fervent Christian and a scientist, or a zealous vegetarian and a Marine.

The three questions above can go a long way to helping you judiciously choose what and what not to post online. A final question to consider is what the general public might think of the content if for some reason what you post went viral or you were suddenly thrust into national prominence. Would it embarrass your family? What impression would a stranger have of it? You and your friends might think it’s funny, but would others find it offensive? You never know who’s going to see your post, what’s going to be dug up on you later, and who might be looking at your phone.

How to Manage Your Online Reputation

Managing your online reputation involves both deleting content you don’t want out there and creating content you do. Follow the steps below that Ivester and others have suggested, and complete each step right after you read it. This is the kind of thing that’s easy to put off indefinitely. Do it now.

1. Google yourself.

Before you can know what actions to take to manage your online reputation, you need to know what’s already out there. To do this, first deactivate Google’s customized search – when you typically do a Google search, the results Google brings up are based on things like your location, what you’ve clicked on before, and things your friends like. But you want to see what would come up if someone else searched for you. Here’s how to take off the customized search feature.

If you have a common name like “Rob Smith,” then search for your name with a qualifier like, “Rob Smith St. Louis,” or “Rob Smith Tulane University.”

After you look at Google’s results for you, check out other search engines like Bing and Yahoo as well.

When you look at the results that come up for your name, try to imagine what conclusions someone might reach about you if they had no other context for that content, and knew nothing else about you.

2. Try to remove content that you don’t want showing up in search results anymore.

After you do a search for yourself, it’s time to try to delete things that showed up that you’d rather not have out there anymore. Maybe you signed up for an internet forum with your real name. Maybe you left a comment on a blog post under your real name. Maybe you wrote a review or a blog post that you now feel is too controversial. Some of these things you can delete yourself.

If you can’t delete something yourself, like a blog post comment on another person’s blog, then try to contact the owner of the site to see if they will remove it for you. They may or may not, but the nicer you are about it, the greater the chance of them helping you, so make your request as civil and appreciative as possible.

If you can’t find the contact information for the site owner, try the site WHOis. Website registrars are required to publish the contact information for the person who registered the domain. Oftentimes when you look up a site on WHOis, you’ll find that the owner has decided to keep their direct contact information private and have instead given a proxy email address. Either way, your email will end up in the same place.

Understand that even if you’re successful at removing the offending content from a site, it may take a few days or even weeks before it’s reflected in search engine results. Also, understand that the offending item really hasn’t “gone away.” There’s a chance that it has been archived on the WayBack Machine. Remember, what’s put on the internet stays on the internet forever.

Moving forward, be extremely judicious when using your real name online.

3. Proactively create a positive first impression online.

Your best bet in managing your online reputation is proactively creating positive content about yourself that pushes the bad stuff off of the first few pages of search engines. Set up accounts with large social networking sites that typically rank high on Google and other search engines. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ profiles are often on the first page when you look up someone’s name. Set up accounts with them and post stuff that you’d be proud to have your name associated with.

The best thing you can do to ensure positive stuff associated with your name is at the top of search results is to start a blog and update it regularly. If you can, try to secure a domain name with your given name for your blog. What should you write about on your blog? You can publish your resume (redacting phone numbers and addresses, of course), write posts sharing insights in an expertise you might have, or use it to create a portfolio of your work if you’re a freelancer. Whatever it is, make sure it’s stuff you want associated with your name.

Cross-link your blog and all your social networking profiles together: put your link to Facebook and Twitter on your blog, a link to your LinkedIn profile and blog on your Facebook account, and so on.

Even if you don’t plan on using Twitter or Google+ or even putting anything on your blog, it doesn’t hurt to have your name registered with those accounts and domain. You don’t want some Joe Schmo mucking up your good name with a bunch of crazy online antics.

4. Adjust privacy settings on Facebook and clean up your Facebook Profile.

To ensure that potential employers or love interests only see the best of you when they look you up on Facebook, make the following adjustments:

First, take a look at how your profile page looks to the public. If you see any information visible that you don’t want strangers to see, make a note of it.

To change what’s visible on your profile page, click “About.”

Click “Edit�� on the next page. On each segment select “Friends” if you don’t want anybody who’s not your FB friend to see a particular piece of information. For networking reasons, I’ve left my job and school information visible to the public.

Visit the Facebook Privacy Settings page and adjust all your privacy settings so only your friends can see photos and status updates you make.

On the privacy settings page, update what your friends can share about you under “Timeline and Tagging.” Enable the ability to review and approve posts or photos that you are tagged in before they’re published on your Timeline. You can also disable Facebook’s tag suggestion when your friends upload photos that look like you. You don’t want your name tagged in an unflattering photo or post.

While you’re on the privacy settings page, limit who can see posts from the past. Even if you used to post everything publicly, this will retroactively make those posts private.

Review the photos that you’re tagged in and untag yourself from any unflattering photos. While you’re at it, you might ask your friend to remove the photo if it’s something you don’t want out there. Even if you’re not tagged in the pic, it could come back to haunt you.

Leave groups and unlike pages that may be seen as controversial…or just dumb. At least set the privacy settings on them so only your FB friends can see the pages you like. how.

5. Be more conscious of what you share and whom you share it with on Facebook.

Ask the three questions we covered above before posting something on Facebook. That will save you a lot of grief.

Also, take into account if what you’re about to share is appropriate and relevant to ALL your Facebook friends. You don’t need to share your weekend plans with your old boss and former professors. In real life, you adjust what you talk about depending on your company — do the same on Facebook. Create lists on Facebook for close family/friends, acquaintances, professional colleagues, people that are the same religion as you, people you enjoy talking politics with, etc. Before posting something, ask yourself if this is something all your friends would be interested in or is better for a specific list of your friends. And even if you’re only posting for a list of close friends, still keep in mind what others would think if that status or photo got shared with people outside the list. It could happen.

6. Create strong passwords for your accounts.

If the recent story of tech writer Mat Honan’s online life being completely demolished by hackers doesn’t motivate you to strengthen your online security, then I don’t know what will. Create strong passwords for all your accounts and change them every six months. A strong password is at least 8 characters long and includes at least one special character (&!#) and both upper and lower case letters. Your passwords shouldn’t be the same for all your accounts. To manage all your passwords, use an app like LastPass.

To reduce the chance of getting hacked, enable two step authentication. Here’s how to do it on Google (if you use Gmail) and Facebook.

7. Use passwords on your laptop and mobile devices.

An unattended laptop or mobile device provides a devilish opportunity for friends or random strangers to mess with your online life. I know several people who had to do a lot of scrambling to recover from an offensive tweet sent from an unattended iPhone by a mischievous friend. Avoid that. Enable password protection on all your mobile devices.

8. Set up a Google Alert for your name.

Keep your finger on the pulse of what’s said about you on the web by setting up a Google Alert for yor name. Just enter your name as a search query and Google Alert will email you a digest once a week (or daily if you want) of all the new content that’s hit the web with your name in it.

Conclusion

The internet is an amazing educational, social, and networking tool — you just need to use it wisely. Using it too little can be just as damaging to your personal and professional life as using it too much. Be a “conscious content creator” and use sound wisdom and judgement in deciding where you personally want to draw the line between your public and private life.

Any other tips on managing your online reputation? Share them with us in the comments (only after asking yourself why you’re commenting and making sure it’s the right time, of course)!

Going Undercover: How to Protect Your Privacy Online

Being a Gentleman in the Age of the Internet: 6 Ways to Bring Civility Online

Escape the Algorithm!

3 Ways You Should Never Start an Online Comment

16 Ways to Support the Art of Manliness in 2016

How to Support and Follow the Art of Manliness

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occupyvenus · 7 years ago

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@doublehex replied to your post “Actual footage of aegony stans popping a bottle of champagne...”

You make it seem as if only J0nerys shippers bought into it. BryndenBFish thought it was a legit interview at first, and he was someone that has poured over most of GRRM's interviews. The way the interviewer wrote his responses were very cleaver. And it was written by no means a Jonsa shipper, because the Jonsa answer was just one small part about it. Get off your high horse and take a chill pill.

How about you get off my post and take a red pill that takes you back to reality?

I do not make it seem like only J0nerys shippers bought into it. I specifically made fun of the specific group of people (mostly J0nerys shippers) who used this interview as “prove” to debunk Jonsa and celebrated the “death of the delusional crackship” before getting all their facts straight. Yes, while the Jonsa passage was only a small part of the interview, I made fun of the people who only cared about this “small part” and made a big deal about it. Weak reading comprehension, much? Would explain a lot of things.

As a lot of other people, I didn’t dismiss the interview right away either, that would be just as biased as buying into it without any further questions. I thought maybe the “interviewer” had some personal connection to GRRM and he did them a solid by talking with them. I read the entire thing, while considering the problems that arise with automated translation and compared his statements with some he’s made before. I actually took my time to apply some critical thinking skills before forming a final opinion. The post was not directed at people like BryndenBFish (btw, what’s with the appeal to authority? People can’t think for themselves unless someone with supposed “higher credentials” gives them the green light to do so?) who did the same thing, who wasn’t sure about it’s legitimacy, but actually looked into it before drawing any final conclusions, but at the gullible, biased idiots who never learned to not believe everything they read on the internet. So what is your point exactly?

Btw, I retain the right to make fun of the people who didn’t even bother to look into it before making hateful, condescending, snarky posts because there were so many things that should make everyone capable of critical thinking at least a bit sceptical:

An exclusive interview with a high-caliber author is published on some random, unknown blog?

Why didn’t a “professional journalist” sell that thing to some news media, actually making some profit with their supposed profession?

Why wouldn’t the author at least take one picture with grrm?

One tiny little google session would’ve showed that this “interview” wasn’t picked up by any verified news outlet.

Neither westeros.org, nor the asoiaf wikia picked it up either. They’re usually pretty fast with that. Most interviews show up a few hours after they were published. Maybe because the administrators have connection to grrm and his pr-team themselves and are aware of any upcoming interviews?

The interview has no links to grrm’s blog, twitter, his official website and their was no mention of that interview on all these outlets either.

The interview was ill-formatted and the blog itself looks rather shitty. Not a sign of professionalism.

Why would GRRM agree to making interview that was only going to be published in Spanish? Why would GRRM agree to making an interview with such a low-profile outlet at all?

Those were at least a couple of things that seemed fishy about the circumstances of the “release”. If that wasn’t enough to at least raise one of your eyebrows, there are couple of things about the content that an attentive reader could/should have noticed:

George is praising D&D? After politely redirecting any questions about them with neutral answers? After throwing some epic shade at them not two months ago? (Like, he has no time to watch “his own show”, but fangirls about another? Sick burn, george.)

GRRM has never outright denied any fantheories. Here he takes strong stances about Azor Ahai and Jon’s endgame romantic partner. This isn’t about me being a pressed shipper, it simply isn’t in line with his previous reactions to questions like this. Do you remember the dubious, unambiguous way he talked about S@nsan in the past? He didn’t confirm it, he didn’t completely deny it. He

While we’re at the topic of the jonsa-passage, he contradicts himself numerous times here alone, for example: Well, in my books Jon Snow is dead ... but to find out about his possible relationship with Dany you have to keep reading. Any romantic relationship is very unlikely, because they only share a siblingy bond ... but Jon and Sansa don’t even have that. Like, what? Sounds awfully like a rehash of your usual anti-jonsa arguments, don’t you think? The creator of the whole series has no more to say than your average redditor?

Btw, Grrm honestly reacting to a question involving his original outline? When has that ever happened?

I remembered that Medusa interview, I don’t remember any news about it being fake. But in this interview it’s presented as fact and common knowledge?

GRRM answers a question about Arya by talking about how she isn’t like Sansa? Sounds less like him and more like your typical reddit douchebag.

Btw, he talks about revenge and it’s downfalls, but doesn’t bring up Lady Stoneheart? A character about whose non-inclusion in the show bugs him so much, he talks about her significance to the narrative every chance he gets?

At one point he emphasized that Jon is dead in the books, but later doesn’t correct the “interviewer” when she calls Jon a king? How is Jon a king in the books, btw? Or would GRRM really confirm in an interview that Jon will become KITN in the books too? Seems like an obvious mix up of book and show canon to me.

Another instance of this is him taking Cersei as an example that women can rule in Westeros, when talking about Asha. In the books, Cersei does not rule in her own right, she rules through her son. This is no correct comparison to Asha becoming queen of the Iron Islands, at least not for current book-canon. And Goerge doesn’t discuss show canon.

Just in general, many, many answers don’t hold up to the usual intellectual level displayed in his interviews.

He says Jon Snow isn’t a hero, that every question about right and wrong depends on which side you are own, - which sounds a lot like him - but “regarding Dany, deserving something because you're a good person doesn’t mean you will obtain it?” Biased, much?

GRRM confirms a couple of characters as bisexual, some very surprising candidates included, but doesn’t mention those who have relationships with both men and women in canon like Ellia, or even Jon ?

George names a rather specific release date for Winds of Winter?

Those are only a few things I remember. If I went through this glorious clusterfuck one more time, I’m sure to find more. There are so many things in this “interview” that stick out, but in the name of fairness, let’s look at some of the things that seemed convincing:

Some passages successfully copied Grrm’s way of speaking.

Some statements were in line with grrm’s usual style of answering spoilery questions. (You have to keep reading, the show is the show and the books are the books etc)

No one could be batshit crazy enough to seriously fake an interview with GRRM.

Sry, if all these red flags didn’t lead you to even do a bit of investigating, if instead, your first reaction was to make petty posts about “jonsa being dead” and “grrm killing jonsa” you deserve to be made fun of. Should I give you a pat on the back for focusing solely on the few things that seemed legit, while completely dismissing everything that pointed to the opposite?

Sry not sry, but after being called “delusional” for shipping Jonsa, despite bringing up a bunch of compelling arguments, while your strongest argument against it is screaming DELUSIONAL!!!, after being told “to seek professional help” thousands of time, I have absolutely no problem with pointing out the mass delusion that these assholes suffered from the last day. Payback’s a bitch. I actually made another post about why this whole surreal situation is so endlessly funny to me, and it has nothing to with people “who AT FIRST thought this as a legit interview”, before taking a closer look and realizing that it’s most likely forgery (like your weak argumentative shield BryndenBFish did).

It’s because of the sheer hypocrisy and the delicious irony:

J*nerys-stans and co were so desperate to discredit us “delusional crackshippers” that they took some random interview on some random blog with zero credentials, something that seemed fishy to anyone who took 5 minutes to clearly think about it, but instead they just swallowed it like a bowl of dramatic rice, because they were so excited about proving that other people are “delusional” and I just can’t. This morning there were dozens of posts celebrating that the “delusional jonsa stans will finally shut up about their delusional crack ship” and now they’re the ones whining about being called delusional and how unfair and inappropriate that is and, fuck, payback’s a bitch. Like, you gotta appreciate the fucking irony of the situation.

Never forget the blessed Halloween of 2k17 when antis got a taste of their own medicine. The dramatic rice remember.

Now pop in the blue pill and go back to the matrix where jonsa-shippers are the “delusional” ones, who only see what they want to see”. That’s the only place where you people can still pretend that jonsa-shippers are the ones who lack critical thinking skills. I’ll be enjoying the view from my high horse, thank you.

Actual footage of you, thinking you can get one over me with that weak ass comment.

#dramatic rice #jonsa #I have no more chill for these people #or their weak argumentation #none at all #aegony #anti-jonerys

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batterymonster2021 · 5 years ago

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The 1 Bitcoin Show- Lightning network progress, Ethereum Classic, Brhodium wallet, Bcash

Hey every body this is adam meister the bitcoinmeister the disrupt meister welcome to the one bitcoin show today is January the 23rd 2018 strong hand values your wealth in Bitcoin be patient very well verify out the hyperlinks part beneath get your t-shirts crypto cryptography tea trees or alleged nano at crypto hwy comm I wish to thank the persons who despatched me bitcoins etherion classic a few weeks in the past it was virtually and some litecoin i have not stated thanks for a while haven’t checked my addresses for a whilst but thanks very much my cryptocurrency addresses are listed beneath if you want to ship me cryptocurrency this morning after I was on the the market down in a Taipei i’m in Taipei i am about to change Airbnb ease this one was nice but when this one’s expired now whatever or the opposite one I bought this fruit I do not know what this thing is known as I see it in Asian markets lots the fellow gave it to me he just like had it had it tell me what this is humans with some pinkish purplish factor i’m gonna consume it later however I don’t know what it can be called so what is this thing leave it in the loot within the comment part adequate have a strong hand individuals so the foot excuses by no means go away and here’s a little bit lesson so that you may simply ignore the crypto noise this is from whale Panda high prices and entire mempool bitcoin is demise due to the fact it is too high priced low charges and close to cleared mempool bitcoin is loss of life for the reason that no person is utilizing it anymore good enough so they’re consistently going to come up up with excuses so that you just got it you bought to disregard all these items and just move along so they I mean either way if it is too crowded it’s too MP there is at all times going to be an interpretation and that’s that bitcoins death and the humorous thing is is that massive points now not dying but for those who take heed to that stuff you then begin to get involved and so on and many others pound that like button ok here’s one other one Alex Bosworth and that is about the Lightning network a further purpose to get interested by it he says mounted backyard brew and he offers a link with a with a with a lightning fundamental web espresso storefront interface if you’re close palo alto come via if you want to experiment buying espresso with lightning i purchased the first cup espresso tastes so a lot better with lightning ok so that’s beautiful humorous he’s got a lightning community matters set up and that you may buy espresso verify that out very interesting individuals relatively like that lightning network with I gave the day gone by’s show where there may be an illustration and that you could learn the right way to do your possess lightning community be careful though all correct Alastair Milne has a in view that certainly the Lightning community debuted it can be nonetheless being validated out be sufferer our alistair melanie has a tweet available in the market every Bitcoin or fragment of is a ticket on to a fiscal Noah’s Ark most men and women are still on the you’re loopy why did you construct an ark stage and don’t wish to ticket and clearly and again that is linked to under all these hyperlinks that I mention or link to under but he has a whole thread about this Noah’s Ark factor I believe it was once pretty funny uh and talking of Noah’s Ark and the Bible Jimmy’s music is gonna be at the Bitcoin Embassy in Tel Aviv I feel at the finish of the month so the Tel Aviv Bitcoin embassy i’ve been there twice i like the persons there Tel Aviv Israel has a colossal Bitcoin fan base in comparison with you recognize the small population of Israel a variety of persons are into it so it can be gonna carry quite a lot of awareness to all the good guys over there and that is best that Jimmy sun’s gonna be there so preserve it up Jimmy sun preserve it up Bitcoin Embassy in Tel Aviv and Ken Bozak sends me $4.20 within the super chat lightning network for munchies he says pretty humorous dickhead ken is remarkable because um he had the the gonads to name out it connect and the scum that have been related to tremendous connect and he will have to endlessly be remembered as a hero of the complete bit join debacle that can and myself and other folks warn men and women about law for a very long time so Ken his wonderful check out his channel o.K. And thank you for the four daughters than twenty cents the be rhodium pockets is are living now I linked to it the tweet that they send out you do not need to clean it now that you can wait there isn’t a there is no rush and claiming anything it can be not on any trade but they are taking their time and again the one approach you’re gonna be capable to get your your be rhodium is for those who followed all the directions earlier than the snapshot cut-off date which was once previous this month you can’t simply do the whole lot that they are saying to try this up your wallet now and claim be rhodium in case you didn’t do that stuff up to now and once more you can find if you properly registered your your Bitcoin addresses public addresses by using checking out Bitcoin RH org I hyperlink to everything beneath however there may be some individuals which are slightly pissed off they’re now not getting it it’s certainly considering the fact that you didn’t do the whole lot that you have been imagined to do at first or you neglected the closing date and get airdrops are a little bit they’re elaborate you got to be proactive you obtained to do matters they’re exclusive than the usual forking crypt of dividend that we have been used to with be gold and be – speaking of crypto dividends it appears on March the fourth and i mentioned this earlier than but I did not give a good hyperlink to it and that i did not provide a date to it a cerium basic is going to have a crypt of dividend known as Callisto there may be knowledge at this reddit thread that I linked to below within the notes section again when you have your worry and classic in your hardware wallet your treasure your ledger nano you can be fine if you have not won the exchange you are mostly not going to be fined at all and you are no longer gonna be able to get your Callisto but how much is that this Callisto gonna be rather valued at I mean the few extra plastic is not worth very a lot so it is exciting that I mean a idea of classic is a top-tier Allpoint it’s listed on that you would be able to store it on a treasure on a ledger nano that makes it so now it can be gonna have a precise crypto dividend i don’t exactly get the reason of the crypt of dividend I i assume I need to look into it slightly bit more might be if I knew what this fruit was i would absolutely appreciate the etherion classification or crypto dividend of path that is unnecessary located that like button adequate so each person’s oh the fee of Bitcoin is down and it makes me consider you know that is screaming of all types of fun it will 7,500 blah blah blah you know whatever if it goes seventy 5 hundred satisfactory I simplest care about twenty twenty but it made me believe you know we have not had a be money pump in a at the same time that is you know that’s that’s it you know we’re failed to comprehend this uh believe the dangerous news with the rate taking place be cash quite often take knowledge of such situations you realize with the Bitcoin costs taking place they probably provide you with a just right information story they get on king of the trolls will get on some news application someplace and we haven’t had a massive cash pump but and it is a straight out however I was pondering a excellent you understand what’s often gonna occur does not imply you recognize possibly things into the Bitcoin rate will be down for just a little while and again it’s cyclical it’s going to happen again the tremendous cash pump will once more will occur there can be a fun session it is going to take skills of however maybe we’re gonna have to wait unless about February 15th to 18th i might say when you consider that that is when shmita fest takes place in Mexico we’re all you recognize the the fellow who said that the shmita used to be gonna cling another he pumps be cash he he’s a massive enormous money pumper this guy and again I have no idea why any individual believes a word he says after the shmita and all the nonsense the the man talks about however his tremendous shmita fest is down in Mexico in in February fifteenth to the 18th so I count on a significant be money pump dang that means in view that king of the crawl trolls is going to be there in honor sure he’ll be an honored visitor that she meets efest so yeah good WB cash pumped will it’s before then might be after we will be doing it more commonly be together with it someway they will give you some lies some rumor perhaps that you know the shmita there may be gonna be a new shemitah of Bitcoin and as a consequence you need to get be cash be money is the actual Bitcoin for the reason that of the shemitah that uh that the guy who you realize lives in mexico and there’s a canadian you know i admire Western Canadians by and large we have now obtained Gabriel’s a pleasant Western Canadian what’s his face over at steam it is it’s a excellent is an effective Western Canadian what’s up forgive me isn’t any means down that method however some Western Canadian whoo man shemitah pump the beat cash you okay along with your puppy I nonetheless have some colossal money I acquired a dump Oh a few of us have some be cash we received a dump still so yeah if you’re gonna pump it whatever do it in your she approach offense ok good day like bone due to the fact that this exhibit is practically over I gotta get out of right here yeah i’m going to be in Johannesburg March fifth to twelfth hire so on that soon March seventh occasion March tenth occasion ok finally coin X factor X some Hong Kong exchange made it an announcement they are launching a fourth market they mention bit vote and and be money sweet or be sweet anything you wish to have to call it trading pairs I imply it’s it is they usually trim this this trade only deals with be money it seems that i guess might be they’re going the shmita fest to their giant king of the trolls fam anyway uh but no I best mention this no longer due to the fact they’ve be cash buying and selling pairs however seeing that they are going out of the way in which that launch up a fork market so they’re on the right monitor here we’re ordinarily gonna see more exchanges with fork markets with fork focuses so they are they’re on the correct track they heard some distance from bad ultimate however I hyperlink to it beneath they they have an interesting press release out there and you realize we can expectantly we will see identical press releases from other exchanges but which can be a bit bit maintain some extra widespread huh Forks and do not give me this whole be cash nonsense anyway i am adam meister the bitcoinmeister damage it have got to keep in mind subscribe this channel like this video exhibit this video investigate out the notes section below i am now not gonna say hello to every person in the chat for the reason that i bought to get out of right here i obtained to wash this position up oh might be i’ll do a further video later about doing one day after today i have fun bye

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airoasis · 5 years ago

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The 1 Bitcoin Show- Lightning network progress, Ethereum Classic, Brhodium wallet, Bcash

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/the-1-bitcoin-show-lightning-network-progress-ethereum-classic-brhodium-wallet-bcash/

The 1 Bitcoin Show- Lightning network progress, Ethereum Classic, Brhodium wallet, Bcash

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maximuswolf · 4 years ago

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Rules and Frequently Asked Questions via /r/piercing

Rules and Frequently Asked Questions

/r/piercing FAQ

The Rules:

Content

If it has to do with piercings, you can post it. Pictures of your piercings, questions about piercings, news articles about piercings -- go for it! You may not post the following:

Anything advocating or instructing at-home piercings. This is incredibly dangerous, for a number of reasons.

Anything to do with how to get pierced underage/without parental consent, or hiding a piercing from your parents/teacher/siblings.

Be Nice

We do not tolerate insults or body-shaming here. An outwardly cruel or insulting comment to another user, whether it’s in the midst of an argument or an off-handed comment about body hair, will result in a ban without warning.

To be clear, comments on a user's personal appearance for purposes of recommending an aesthetically pleasing piercing are fine -- for instance, "I think a septum piercing would be less than flattering on your face; maybe play up your lips/eyes/whatever instead?" is fine, but "Damn girl, your nose is all kinds of fucked up, don't draw attention to that," is not. We're not saying you have to be all kittens and rainbows and afraid to disagree with people, but we are saying you have to be constructive with your criticisms.

Don’t Creep

While we do allow NSFW content, this is not a porn subreddit. The women (and men) posting photos of their genitals are (probably) not doing it strictly for sexual gratification. Comments like, "That pussy looks delicious," or "Show us your tits!" will be removed, and repeat offenders will be banned.

Photo Guidelines and Piercer Credit

Pictures should be clear, well-lit, and showcase the piercing in question.

Poses should be neutral and designed to show off the piercing, not other body parts.

There should be no nudity in the picture beyond what is necessary to show the piercing.

Pictures should be close enough to show the piercing in detail.

The piercer and shop should be credited in the title whenever possible.

What Counts as NSFW

Your post should be tagged NSFW if it meets any of the following criteria:

Any sexually suggestive images.

Images of genital modifications, including the pubic mound, male and female nipples.

Images of blood, gore, or severe infection. This includes fresh dermal punches.

Images or videos of modifications in progress (needle, scalpel, or dermal punch in flesh).

Self posts discussing genital modifications, or containing in-text links to any of the aforementioned NSFW topics.

If you aren’t sure, tag it anyway!

Get Verified

Are you a piercer? Want some sweet flair? Follow the procedure at this link.

FAQ:

Does [insert piercing] hurt?

Well, yes. There is a sharp needle going through your flesh, so you will most certainly feel it. That being said, exactly how much it hurts varies widely from person to person, and piercing to piercing. It’s never an unbearable amount of pain, though, and only lasts a fraction of a second.

You can minimize the amount of pain you go through by going to a reputable shop. A skilled, caring piercer will always use internally threaded jewelry, guaranteeing a smooth transition between needle and jewelry (rather than externally threaded jewelry, which is rough and can cause small tears). You probably won’t even notice the switch!

When will my [insert piercing] heal?

Healing time is influenced by a number of factors, in and out of the control of you or your piercer. Your body, the environment, your eating habits, and your aftercare plan can all affect healing, so there is no hard-and-fast rule here. Different piercers will make different recommendations for when you can safely change jewelry yourself.

Where can I get [insert particular piece of jewelry]?

From your piercer! A reputable shop will carry a wide variety of high-quality pieces from well-trusted brands. If they don’t carry it, they can always order it -- but be aware, custom pieces can be very expensive. If you happen to live in an area where there is no shop willing to order a particular piece of jewelry for you, feel free to message the moderators. We can probably locate a shop or vendor willing to ship to you, provided you know the size or length you need.

Can you recommend a piercer in [insert city]?

While this is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a 100% guarantee of quality, Safepiercing.org is an excellent resource to use. If you can’t find a member in your area, or you just want a second opinion, don’t hesitate to message the moderators. Two of us are verified piercers, and we will be more than happy to help you!

What makes good jewelry good, and bad jewelry bad?

The following materials are acceptable for initial piercings:

Implant Grade Titanium, ASTM F-136

Implant Grade Steel, ASTM F-138

Niobium

Gold*

Glass

*Opinions on gold starter jewelry are varied; some piercers will use it, some will not.

The following companies are considered highest quality, and should be your first choice:

Anatometal

Industrial Strength

NeoMetal

BVLA

Scylla

LeRoi

Glasswear Studios

Gorilla Glass

Maya Organics

Tawapa

Diablo Organics

What piercing should I get?

Absolutely whatever makes you happy!

My piercing looks gross/red/swollen/angry, is it infected?

Infections are serious, but fairly rare. If your piercing is excessively swollen, seems to be migrating, hot to the touch, overly painful, or displaying any symptom that bothers you enough to post here, you should go see your piercer. We cannot accurately diagnose a problem over the internet, and furthermore, are not allowed to dispense medical advice per Reddit’s rules.

How do I clean my piercing?

The easiest way is with saline wound wash, available at most pharmacies/drug stores. It’s cheap, effective, and sterile. That said, if you would like to make your own warm saline soak at home, use the following mixture:

¼ tsp. non-iodized sea salt to 1 cup warm distilled water

Do not use hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, bactine, scented soaps, or “piercing solutions” to clean your piercings, fresh or healed. All of these things are drying agents, irritants, or heavily fragranced -- not things you want in an open puncture wound! Don’t twist that jewelry, either.

Happy Posting!

Submitted February 22, 2014 at 07:05PM by PancakeGenocide via reddit https://ift.tt/3kGVAN4

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webdesignersolutions · 5 years ago

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Review: SDD with 7MB/s write speed.... [inMotionHosting] via /r/webhosting

Review: SDD with 7MB/s write speed.... [inMotionHosting]

Hi,

This is my first post here, I wanted to complain so much that I joined this subreddit just to share with you guys my experience.

I have managed VPS with InMotionHosting for over a year now. And I couldn't be more disappointed with them.

I had multiple instances with them, I'll start with the recent one.

I've been struggling with performance issue with my web apps for months now, but I could't find the source of the problem, my team and I optimised and checked everything, but still we couldn't find the problem. Until today a member of the team suggested that maybe it's a slow disk issue, so of course we benchmarked the disk and we were so surprised to see the results.

Yeah you guessed it right, we have 7MB/s write speeds and 20MB/s read speed with their "20X Faster SSD".

I'm just gonna post here a copy of my chat with the representative when I told them about it.

[L\*** K.] Hello J***** T******, my name is L**** K. Thanks for contacting us today!*

[J\**** T******] Hi*

[L\*** K.] Thank you for verifying, J***** T******! I'm sorry you are having issues with this and I'm happy to help.*

[L\*** K.] How can I help you with this?*

[J\**** T******] My apps run slower than expected on my VPS here, after few days of investigations I've came to the conclusion that the disk is performing poorly.*

I own few virtual servers across many vendors, so to validate my claim I ran disk benchmark on my VPS here and my other VPS.

My other VPS performed X10 times better than the VPS I own here.

I ran this command to benchmark:

fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --filename=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=1G --readwrite=randrw --rwmixread=75

My vps here resulted in 20MB/s read and 6.8MB/s write, while my other VPS resulted in 230MB/s read and 76MB/s write.

The numbers are way too low, which probably mean that there is some sort of problem (maybe with the physical hard drive?)

[L\*** K.] It's unlikely that there's something going on with the hard drive, but I'm happy to check into it. What is the domain the App is at?*

[J\**** T******] [a list of websites I have, I deleted them from this message]*

[J\**** T******] I've uploaded the same project to a similar VPS at "*******" and it was much faster there*

[J\**** T******] by a margin of X7-X20*

[J\**** T******] after that I suspected the disk is performing bad, so I ran the benchmark as mentioned*

[L\*** K.] Okay. Please hold 3-5 minutes while I look into this for you.*

[L\*** K.] Thank you for your patience. I am still looking into this and will need more time. Please continue to hold another 5-10 minutes.*

[J\**** T******] OK thank you*

[L\*** K.] Thank you for your patience. I am still looking into this and will need more time. Please continue to hold another 3-5 minutes.*

[J\**** T******] Sure no problem*

[L\*** K.] Thank you for holding!*

[L\*** K.] I don't see anything wrong with the hard drive. I did notice that MySQL is using a lot of memory and CPU which could be slowing it down. Would you like me to reduce the memory MySQL is allowed to use?*

Most CPU Intensive:

mysql 9787 40.6 51.8 7464472 1629560 ? Ssl 12:52 175:43 /usr/sbin/mysqld

26531 1.0 0.3 591884 10644 ? S 20:04 0:00 \_ php-fpm: pool

Most Memory Internsive: mysql 9787 40.6 51.8 7464472 1629560 ? Ssl 12:52 175:43 /usr/sbin/mysqld 9951 0.6 2.5 777720 79168 ? S 12:54 2:50 | \_ /opt/cpanel/ea-php73/root/usr/bin/php-cgi /home/\**/public_html/protected/yiic.php books sync --part=2/4 --skip_genre=1*

[J\**** T******] no, that's not right, I have duplicate VPS with identical config.*

[J\**** T******] Could you please benchmark the hard disk and tell me what numbers do you see?*

[J\**** T******]* https://www.inmotionhosting.com/managed-vps-hosting

[J\**** T******] "20x faster SSD's Included FREE (Others Charge!)"*

[J\**** T******] If you are familiar with hardware you'd know that even HDD perform better than my results*

[J\**** T******] I killed the SQL server, running the benchmark again...*

[J\**** T******] Exactly the same results:*

[J\**** T******] READ: bw=20.6MiB/s*

[J\**** T******] WRITE: bw=7039KiB/s*

[J\**** T******] These are just funny results, I can plug in USB drive and it would be faster*

[L\*** K.] I can run the same benchmark you did if you'd like, but as you're on a VPS and the hard drive is shared we can't make any changes to it. We can work to optimize everything else on the server, but you'd need a dedicated server to change hardware.*

[J\**** T******] This is just unacceptable answer*

[J\**** T******] Im not asking for 100% SSD speeds*

[J\**** T******] Im asking for reasonable results*

[L\*** K.] I can check if there's anything else we can optimize on the server, but most likely the changes in the hardware that you're looking for would require a dedicated server.*

[J\**** T******] My team and I spent two weeks optimizing and debugging, until we came to the conclusion that it's the hard disk*

[J\**** T******] I'm sorry, does 7MB/s write speed look fine for you? a simple yes/no question*

[L\*** K.] Yes, that's looks normal to me. What speed are you looking for?*

[J\**** T******] This is ridiculous, Can you please transfer me to an agent with some more knowledge in hardware?*

[L\*** K.] I'm happy to put you back in the queue if you'd like to wait for another agent, however, we won't be able to make any changes to the hardware unless you have a dedicated server. A VPS is a virtual server, which only gives you access to your software so we can only make changes to that.*

[J\**** T******] to put that in perspective, saying that 7MB/s in fine, is like saying swimming from New York to London is fine*

[J\**** T******] It's either you have a problem with your physical server*

[J\**** T******] or you are way overloading the servers*

[J\**** T******] either way that issue should be checked, because 7MB/s is unrealistic*

[J\**** T******] Could you please send me a copy of this conversation to my email?*

[L\*** K.] Our systems team watches the hardware to ensure it's not overloaded, but if you want to be moved to a different node you can submit a ticket to request it. It's highly unlikely to make any major difference though, and it sounds like you are wanting the hardware changed, which you would need a dedicated server for unfortunately.*

[J\**** T******] I'm tired of trying to explain*

[J\**** T******] we are gonna start looking for other provider\*

[J\**** T******] please send me a copy of this conversation to my email*

[J\**** T******] to show my manager*

[L\*** K.] Yes, there is a print and email button very small, below the send button. It's the one on the right.*

[J\**** T******] Thank you*

[L\*** K.] My pleasure. Is there anything else we can assist you with today?*

[J\**** T******] No*

That’s it for this incident.

In a previous incident, I noticed that even though my plans says that I get 6GB of RAM, I actually get 3GB of RAM + 3GB of “burstable” RAM. Which I thought should be fine because I have 6GB of RAM and I can configure additional SWAP space for emergency.

But turns out you can’t, their 3GB of “burstable” RAM is actually SWAP memory (probably mounted to some fancy RAM disk) and YOU CAN’T MOUNT ADDITIONAL SWAP (all I wanted was to configure additional regular disk based SWAP).

When I asked them about that they told me that their virtualization infrastructure can’t allow that.

When I signed up for their VPS I thought that I’ll get 6GB of RAM + SWAP using my SSD. Later I checked and they didn’t mention it any where that their “burstable” RAM uses SWAP and you can’t configure any additional SWAP.

In conclusion, you’d better be hosting your own server using a RaspberryPi or Arduino with MicroSD card than using their services.

Don’t make the same mistake we did.

We are moving now to other provider.

Submitted April 14, 2020 at 10:44AM by jtannous via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/g1a5jo/review_sdd_with_7mbs_write_speed_inmotionhosting/?utm_source=ifttt

#IFTTT #reddit

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topicprinter · 5 years ago

Link

Hi all, I'm Donald Spann.So, back in early 2015, my former partner wrote a post on how we started our company, and it was a very popular post, but it was deleted. After being on a podcast a few days ago that was fun, I figured it would be nice to let reddit know our story againI'm here to essentially re-write it, 5 years later. I’ve been a redditor for almost 10 years now so I’ll write some quick disclaimers...Disclaimers:* I'm going to shy away from numbers overall, but this business generated a FT income, and I'll leave it at that.* This will be long, and possibly boring at times, but the nuggets are in the details!* I will name the name of the company but I will not link it. I also don’t own it anymore, so it will merely benefit the new owner. Also, yes the new owner was ok with me writing this post.You will learn:1. What virtual receptionist companies are2. Why virtual receptionist companies are a great fit for most small businesses3. How to start a virtual receptionist companyThis post is not going to be some sexy brag post---but a legitimate post on how you can build a simple, awesome business that changed my life for the better.ONWARDS!Background:...so when you think about it, a LOT, perhaps most businesses need their calls answered.But very few businesses are a good fit for the typical "call answering" options they typically go with.They typically include:Hiring an employee or receptionist in-house to answer calls as their principal role (among other things)The problem: Most small businesses can't financially justify a FT employee just to answer the phone.However, the opportunity cost of NOT answering the phone can be high as well, and oftentimes business owners either can't be available all the time, or might be otherwise engaged in another activity while the phone rings. This causes them to lose out on potential business.Examples: Someone who has a FT job while running their part-time business. A solo law firm that gets calls while the attorney is in court. A painter in the middle of painting a wall when the phone rings.What usually ends up happening is the biz owner just deals with the financial hit, and they kick and punch (metaphorically) until they can hopefully build revenue enough to actually justify it.Hiring a traditional answering serviceThe problem: While the phone is getting answered for cheap, the quality of service provided isn't high enough to win potential clients over.I would say that this option is a decent fit for a lot of businesses as a minimum---but answering and taking messages for every caller can only be so helpful. Most of the time people are calling a business for the first time (the most important callers) they are in the research phase, and they are trying to decide whether THIS business is worth their time and money.Oftentimes, if the call takers (agents) take a message without answering necessary questions, that business won't necessarily get written off, but the prospect isn't won, either. They know that someone might get back to them (maybe not) and they will likely call competitors until they get the answers they're looking for.Hiring a Virtual AssistantThe problem: VAs are meant to be task-based---not purely phone answer-ers.Unless they are doing outbound telemarketing (which most of them do NOT want to do,) a VA isn't best utilized for inbound calls.If you hire a VA in the US, you are paying as much as an employee, without the same level of commitment. If you hire outside of the US (or your business’ country, wherever you are) you run the risk of cultural/language lost-in-translation scenarios.It's not terrible, but it's certainly not ideal.So what does a business do? They typically go with one of these three options, and usually end up with some level of satisfaction, but for whatever reason, small businesses under 1 million in revenue (~90% of businesses according to NAICS Association) usually have some type of issue with each option.I myself had this same problem back in October 2014, when I was looking for call answering options for my cleaning company, which was around ~$150k/ARR at the time.So I looked into some options, didn't love any of them, but during my extensive research I learned about Virtual Receptionist companies.Virtual Receptionist companies were perfect for us for the following reasons:They were mostly US-based agentsThey were a fraction of the cost of in-house employees or VAs (especially US VAs)The agents were enthusiastic and actually helpful (making a good impression for our business)So, being an entrepreneurial person, I realized sometime during my research that maybe I could reverse engineer one of these companies and make it work?At the time, outside of one job where I was taking calls selling dish network services for a few months, I had NO experience or knowledge about call centers or how to build one.So I talked to a few business friends to partner with---the second guy I talked to was in after one convo.Again, this was late October, 2014.We set a launch date of Jan 1, 2015, and got to work.Fortunately, my partner (got bought out by me second year) and I indeed got it done and launched on Jan 1, 2015, FOR VERY LITTLE MONEY, and we were profitable after two months in business.This is how we did it:(Note: some of the things I’ll recommend here as vendors, etc were not our original solutions--but what we eventually migrated to--I’ll post those to help eliminate trial and error for you guys)Step 1: Figuring out what we’re going to offer:Simply put, what we wanted to do was to provide what we were looking for specifically as business owners. We knew that our specific problem was a shared problem, so we wanted to be the ones to solve it.So off the top, we knew that we wanted a service that could:Answer callsScreen calls for solicitors/be gatekeepersAnswer any reasonable question from callers as long as we (agents) had access to the informationTake appointment bookingsTake messagesTransfer callsEmail our clients after every call with a call summary emailThis was relatively easy to figure out, as we just took what we liked from the services we looked into, and focused on that.We didn’t try to reinvent any wheels here, which is perhaps the most important nugget.In addition, we didn’t have much money.So we knew we couldn’t shell out for an office, or all kinds of equipment associated with that, so we knew we needed our agents to be able to work remotely.I’ll talk more about this later, but this not only saved costs, but gave us a competitive advantage in MOST ways (there are a few cons)Step 2: Figuring out who we were going to market to:So at the time my partner and I were both cleaning company owners in different markets. We started around the same time, we knew the business, and we knew other people in the community.As many of you redditors know about /r/entrepreneurridealong, both of our businesses were born out of that sub back in 2013/early 2014.Because of this, we knew that people like us had the same problem. They needed a way to get their calls answered.So we focused our initial marketing on cleaning companies.Step 3: Branding/Value PropositionSo, I am NOT a developer, but I did have some experience building wordpress websites for other companies.We needed a name, so I spent about 20 minutes with my partner thinking of names that sounded industry-specific and fun. We also wanted something that rolled off the tongue pretty easily. We ALSO wanted a name with a domain URL of the exact same name that was available.Eventually we settled on the name Vicky Virtual ReceptionistsOur original premise was that we were a virtual receptionist company by cleaning company owners for cleaning company owners. We would focus our marketing efforts around this simple premise.But we needed a simple statement that would appeal to our audience---something that immediately captures your attention as soon as you hit our website.“No More Missed Business Calls”BOOM. Done.Great value prop, instant engagement.Logo: As I’ve done with many companies, I like to keep logos clean AF and simple (because many iconic brands keep it simple and sexy)Examples: Mercedes, Sony, Fedex, Nike, etcI’m not a designer, but I have a decent eye and no budget, so I eventually figured out a style that works wonders every time.Pick a color, pick a font, write out all or part of your company name, and enclose it in a thick rectangle.Here’s what’s Vicky Virtual’s looked like: https://imgur.com/AwxwuwhI’ve used this format for many businesses and it works (and gets compliments) every time.What I DO NOT do is use expensive logo designers like 99designs. This might work for you (and for certain industries, like fashion, I would maybe recommend it) but I find it unnecessary for this.Website: I built the site myself using wordpress. I spent A LOT of time getting the site the way I wanted it, and watched YouTube videos to figure out stuff I didn’t know, like how to get a certain design element or whatever. My partner was writing up content marketing posts, so I had a bit more time to work on/prioritize this.A lot of people don’t like to put THAT much value on their website, with the whole “done is better than perfect” philosophy.On MOST things, I wholeheartedly agree.When it comes to branding, however, you need a site that converts. This doesn’t mean, most beautiful---but it most certainly means spending TIME to get the details right.If you don’t have the time to do this yourself, there are many resources for getting a website done nowadays, at any sized budget.My only recommendation is seeing the portfolio, verifying that it’s their work, verifying a timeline, and getting some type of verifiable testimonial before committing to a website developer/designer.As far as putting the website together, I used a premium thing called “Jupiter (now Jupiter X)” found at https://themeforest.net/item/jupiter-multipurpose-responsive-theme/5177775Price for it is $59 (not an affiliate link.) There is a learning curve, but learning your way around a WP theme builder is one of the best skills you can have.Our pricing: I kept this simple and matched the pricing of one of our competitors at the time. I knew from my research that each agent could handle 15-20 clients at $250-$300/month in revenue per client, and that if I paid an agent $1,600/month for $3,750+/month in revenue---I could probably make those numbers work.We went with three plans:$99/month for 75 minutes$199/month for 180 minutes$299/month for 300 minutesAnd with per minute overage charges for businesses that went over...and custom plans I would work out for businesses that needed more than 300 mins/monthStep 4: Call Answering SoftwareCall center software, or contact center software, can get ridiculously complex, and frankly, I’m just not going to go over it all in this post...but there are a few nutshell things to ABSOLUTELY STICK TO.It must be reliable AF. Emphasis on RELIABLE AF.It should have solid reporting on all the metrics you needIt needs to be within your budgetNow for those of you that are starting off, there is a pretty clear inexpensive (in this category) initial option that works well, and that’s DialpadDialpad costs $75/agent/month, and it does everything you need for your Virtual Receptionist company.What I WILL cover here is the reliability issue.So most cloud softwares (in any industry really) sit on cloud based servers like AWS. In the phone (telecom) space, there are a BUNCH of platforms, with 10s of millions in investments, sitting on something called Twilio, which sits on AWS, and is a pretty intuitive, API heavy platform.For those of you that know a bit, Twilio to telecom is like Stripe to payment processors, or Square to POS, or Shopify to ecommerce.The PROBLEM is that Virtual Receptionist companies are meant to make our clients feel like they have an in-house employee, without the costs, without the sick days, and without the vacation time.This means that the above all else, the only thing that really matters is that you don’t miss calls.Sparing you the details---if the software doesn’t sit on their OWN physical data centers...the reliability will NOT be high enough.I’ve used 6 different phone vendors in 5 years, and did serious demos and research on 50+ of them over the years (and we’re talking initial and secondary calls, testing...the works…)Dialpad sits on their own data centers, and all of the major old school players that stuck around do as well.For contrast, we used a service like Talkdesk (with a few different businesses) and would somehow lose up to 10-15%+ of calls for reasons I stopped trying to figure out.Talkdesk recently raised 100mm at a 1bn valuation and it was almost unusable, because it wasn’t sitting on good enough infrastructure (built on Twilio.)Rule of thumb is---if you miss more than 8-10% of calls, your customers will notice, and it will negatively impact them and your company. With a great software, we maintained 2-5% (some calls WILL be missed because of solicitors, wrong numbers, etc)Ok, so with all that said, we used several vendors, and the recommended vendors to date would be:Dialpad (low cost relatively, great platform but limited. $150/agent/month all-in after other a la carte costs like phone numbers and such. No initiation fee.)Five9 (around $250/agent/month all-in which isn’t that bad, high upfront initiation fee of ~$2,500+)Step 5: Hiring ReceptionistsSo we initially tried to keep this simple, and again, we had a small budget, but we needed two people.So we hired:My partner’s sister fresh out of high schoolMy friend’s semi-retired mom.We paid them $10/hour to start, hired them as 1099 contractors (strong recommendation you switch to W2 ASAP after starting your business) and they agreed to be paid their first month’s paycheck at the end of the first month. This limited our upfront cash investment.In terms of the schedule, we set coverage hours of:8AM-8PM Eastern Time, Mon-FriThese times covered all 4 major US time zones from 8-5PMOne agent would start 8am and work until 5pm, and the other would show up at 11am and work until 8pm, each with a one hour lunch break.This allowed their schedules to overlap during the busiest period for any virtual receptionist company---lunch.The tip here is to make sure you hire RELIABLE AF agents so you don’t end up on the phone yourself, or without coverage.Step 6: Pre-Launch MarketingAgain, we stuck to the group we knew--cleaning company owners. We simply reached out to them, built an email list, saved them in Mailchimp, and sent a few pre-launch announcement emails building up to our launch.There was nothing complicated about this---we had roughly 30 people on the list at launch, we sent a total of 2 pre-launch emails talking about what step in the process we were at, and one email on launch day, and ended up with 7 signups day 1.Step 7: After launch marketingI knew that we needed to get to about 20 clients in order to break even, and again, low budget, so I decided to hop on the phone and make cold calls.I focused on cleaning companies and was able to get us mostly to our goal after about 3 weeks of calls, not making that many calls per day.The nugget here is that it took me roughly 80 calls to land one sign-up. Half of sign-ups went through our 7 day free trial and became clients.How I would do a call: I would call the company and ask how they’re currently getting their calls handled.Based on what they said, I would cater my pitch to how we could help them.Fact is, most businesses don’t know what Virtual Receptionists are (see above) but once they wrap their head around it---it’s a pretty obvious move for them.Just play the numbers.So...that’s it!There’s some other things we figured out to get to where we finished, but we launched a simple company, under a simple premise, and we learned as we went along.Also, we started off targeting cleaning company owners, but through our content marketing efforts (blogging and guest blogging under the Virtual Receptionist keyword is $$$), other businesses in different industries started finding us.We eventually ended up taking calls for over 30 different types of companies.We used slack for communication with the teamWe used gsuite for emailsWe used solve360 CRM to keep track of clientsHope this helps!I do want to leave with one final, general nugget that most people don’t seem to know:Starting a Business IS NOT A PIPEDREAM.50% of businesses with employees last at least 5 years!30% make it 15 years!A ridiculous amount of people talk about how 95% of businesses fail.They’re all wrong.These surprising statistics are taken directly from The Small Business Administration.Once you focus on simple ideas that WORK, you can start normal businesses with confidence.My dream was to start a business. I’ve started 11 incorporated businesses in the last 8 years, and 6 of them have hit at least 10k/month in revenue. So with that, I’ve been fortunate enough where my last job ever was in 2011.This company was the biggest.Thanks for reading!If you have any questions, please leave a comment or PM me!

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

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mathematicianadda · 5 years ago

Text

(META) Concrete thinkers, incapable of metaphor, are gate-keeping mathematics and eroding its most powerful property: abstraction.

Earlier today, I posted about the fascinating similarity between fractals and logarithmic functions. Though it stated in the first line that it resided in the conceptual realm, a boo-boo w/ a metaphor I used got the post flamed by a literalist. I deleted it out of cowardice. I shouldn't have. Whoops. I'm not wrong to connect the two concepts. When I get better in these fields' Algebras*, more will be written on this. But it indicated a larger problem...

In Lex Fridman's podcast w/ Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown on YouTube (link below), he discussed 3 types of mathematicians: the puzzle-solvers, the physicists (broadly speaking here...), and those who "love abstraction and the power of generality." Certainly, this list is incomplete, but in a way that proves my point here. Throughout history, the mathematical greats who invented our studies in school, the Newtons and Eulers, were *wizards* of abstraction. Evidenced not only by their discoveries - take calculus, for example; the study of the behavior of infinitesimals - but by their prolific generations in disparate domains like Great Literature. Chock-full of metaphor and analogy, these thinkers thought deeply and solved even bigger problems. Through generality, they invented the frameworks our bachelor and grad degrees. They are our revered ancestors.

In the early 20th century, Abstractionists like Turing, Goedel, and the analytical demigod John von Neumann, trail blazed computational science. They needed insanely computationally complicated equations solved, so dammit, they put theirs minds to work. Using what they had already grasped, broke new ground via abstraction. We're indebted to the pioneer-class. They used their heads, drawing on intuition, the pattern-recognition software innate to homo sapiens.

Since the mid-1970s, it seems, (though cannot be verified via a gate-keeping function known as "peer review", check out Game Theory on Wikipedia for more information) that our technological prowess, the empirical furnace that has been alight since the dawn of the 17th century, has been burnt down to embers. Occasionally, we see a noteworthy digital innovation from the Valley. But outside of the strictly IT universe, astonishingly little. We go to college, then grad school, then some PhD program to learn complicated theories about complicated things so that we can handle minutia. Everything seems disparate because each course takes the top-down approach. We start at such a high level that half the class gets 65% on the first exam and drops out. The tech- or research-bound students are starving for some application, but the semester ends before that section of the textbook is covered. It almost seems malicious. The pattern-recognition software I referred to works from the ground up. It's quite clear for those familiar with psych and neuroscience. So if we are always fed the abstraction, our grass-roots, evolved, intuitive brains have nowhere to go with it. We can't perform the abstraction on our own, as they we're not allowed to have access to that part of the toolkit. We go into the workforce with a litany of equations our brains have vaguely mapped to {insert technical field here.} Then we wind up in sales jobs to pay the bills. In Business Schools (where I come from), it's even worse. They don't even apply calculus (dare I mention stochastic calculus or Brownian motion...spooky!) in economics class until grad school because they think our tiny Microsoft Excel brains would explode. For a concrete example here, it took me three years after college to the connect the dots on 'derivative', the tool of calculus, and 'derivative' the financial security class most known for its hand in 2008.

In any domain, when things begin to fall into place, divergent from complexity and into alignment, we find emergent simplicity. Our ancestors called it discovery, "innovation" better fits millennial vernacular. When things continue become increasingly muddled and complex, it's called stagnation. Stagnation in the Information Age no less. As a 24-year old debating a future in an expensive and unproductive graduate program or my soul's slow death in Big Corporate, I truly hope momentum will change on this one. Lets's ask more questions, make more mistakes, make more irresponsibly logical leaps (when the downside to said leap is low), do less incremental improvement, and math the s*** out of our future. Instead of worrying about today's hyped problem like the Middle East, climate change, {pick your favorite}, perhaps we could...maybe...just maybe...solve them? Let's use this beautiful, logical, intensely rigorous toolkit we've been gifted by our ancients, MATH, to solve the problems of the future.

PS - Please tear apart my ideas if you'd like. But, if you flame me ad-hominem style, you're just proving my point on this...gate-keeping ruins math.

_____

* Algebra is a anglo-bastardization (hope this isn't a swearword that get's me deleted) of 'al-jabr,' meaning 'bone-setting,' literally referring to how we move the 'bones' around on paper. Thank god the Arab world kept the mathematical lamp burning throughout the European Dark Ages. Why don't the literalists explain the meaning of this word...ever? Not even in high school? Because they take things for granted and don't read.

**I didn't make the mistake of apologizing for my learning issues in this post, unlike its predecessor. If you're still reading this, you're not the type to idiotically flame something thought out Reddit-style. Many mathematical greats have had issues in the over-structured, 100 equations in 30 minutes-classroom setting. Two examples are Albert Einstein and John Nash. The former worked in a patent-office because 1900s Barvaria didn't like that he was scatter-brained (or that he was Jewish; over-structured societies are more prone to racism, also known as tribal affinity); the latter, lived his 30s thru 70s deluded by the menacing condition of Paranoid Schizophrenia. The chiding he received in elementary, secondary, and university-level academia played a significant role in his social disconnect. See Isaacson's Einstein and Nassar's A Beautiful Mind to learn more. I'm not suggesting that I possess a mind bearing an ounce of resemblance with these legends, or any others. What I am suggesting, however, is that there are at least a few greats among us who are being crowded out of our institutions, and given an "ADHD"/"Dyslexic"/"Aspergers" diagnoses for their trouble. Why do we continue to call bright kids with learning superpowers 'learning disabled'?

*** Check out Lex Fridman's phenomenal podcast. Here's the link to the episode w/ Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown; one of the few who understand the power of intuition in mathematics.

https://lexfridman.com/grant-sanderson/

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thebrandtag · 7 years ago

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Be Careful when you need escort in Dubai via /r/dubai

Be Careful when you need escort in Dubai

r/dubai

WARNING to all tourists, foreigners and ever residents who seek escort services in Dubai from Craigslist, Backpage or Twitter.

u/throwawaydxbwarningOct 22, 2015, 1:01 AM

GUYS read this very carefully and think twice before even contacting an escort in Dubai.

UPDATE: Alright, so some SP’s manifested themselves through PMs saying that this thread will seriously damage their business and my guess here is that those are the reliable ones and not the fakers. I hope I’m right. If so is the case, why don’t you follow a method used in North America and some South East Asian countries where you actually take a photo of yourself, not necessarily naked, but at last one that can corroborate your features with you holding a paper with the current date and nickname on it CLEARLY WRITTEN so that people know you’re not fake and make sure you update the date written on the paper quite frequently. This will root out a major part of the problem here.

Now back to the matter at hand.

1st incident: About a month ago, someone conveyed to me upon his return from Dubai that he called what seemed to be a lovely WHITE CAUCASIAN British young woman communicating with a British accent. She answered him and they agreed on the details. Once he arrived there, he noticed something was off but decided to go anyways. Door opens and the lady is hiding behind the door. He goes in and she turns out to be an African lady. He refuses and attempts to leave. She holds him physically and asks him to give her the money. A lot of pushing and shoving ensues and she rips his shirt wide open. She was desperately trying to get her hands in his pockets and snatch the money. He was finally able to push her but his arms were all scratched and he was slightly bleeding in certain places.

2nd incident: Another classic, SAME MODUS-OPERANDI, a co-worker went to Dubai and again, nice hot American Latino lady communicating with an American accent. He shows up there, I think he said it was in a classy area, Marina I guess. Door opens, she is behind the door. He barely steps in and she a very fat African with fake blond hair. He tries to get out and she grabs him. They physically fight, she’s half naked and she threatens to scream in the hallway and pretend to call the police. He was a big guy and quite fit so he had no problem pushing her away but she managed to damage his cloth.

3rd incident: This is one is a CLASSY scam someone told me via email after he posted a rant on Craigslist Dubai about how frustrating it has become to find a reliable person and how CL has become a scam jungle. His story has to do with a Twitter scam though. Check this out guys, especially those who are Arabic speaking. He says he wanted to try an authentic Arab escort, so after thoroughly researching, he noticed that most Arab ladies are reachable via Twitter. He is of Arab decent so he speaks the language. He sends the lady a message and she explains it’s 1500AED for a full night (from 9pm to 3am in the morning). She asks for 500AED advance in the form of Etisalat prepaid card. After giving her the card via Twitter, she blocks him. He opens another Twitter account and contacts her, she says she’s sorry and that she blocked him by mistake because she’s overwhelmed by guys who are not serious and didn’t know how to unblock him. They agree to meet at 9pm at Emirates Mall. She then tells him that it’s not nice and shameful to take the 1000 from him in public and that it would be better to if he got the rest of the money in Etisalat cards and gave them to her right then. He senses a scam so he refuses but apparently she was brilliant at arguing with him but still does not budge. He asks her for her phone number so he could talk to her and verify over the phone. She refuses and argues the reason why she can’t. Anyhow, he ends up making a mistake and gives her his phone number so she could call him. She then she switches to nasty bitch mode and starts threatening him that he wasted her time and that she could have had one client at least by now and therefore she wants her money otherwise she’s going to the police with her story and that she’s got powerful friends and they will hunt him down. He blocks her, deletes both twitter accounts and dumps the phone line.

Now obviously there are some reliable escorts in Dubai but they are extremely difficult to find and the fact that there’s no review forum does not help things at all.

So being someone that travels frequently to Dubai and I do care about the safety of others and the reputation of a city that I like, here are some important things to bear in mind if you are going to call an escort.

1- Do not call or contact via Whatsapp unless you have double checked the photos in the CL or BP ad on tineye.com or google reverse image to make sure that the photos are not stolen from other websites. It’s not a 100% reliable method if employed on it’s own, but it will help root out 90% of the scammers.

2- Do not accept communication by Whatsapp only. Request a phone call to hear and question them. If they say they’re from Italy, ask her questions try to pretend you speak Italian etc.

3- Avoid having your profile picture on your Whatsapp account when you contact one. Don’t use you home country Whatsapp, use an Etisalat prepaid and activate Whatsapp on it.

4- Do not accept to go anywhere or have her come to you unless she sends you a live photo with her holding a paper with some personalized inscription written on it. Face photo is not a must but at least so you can see the skin color and body shape. If they refuse or try talking you out of it, DON’T GO. You’re the customer, she has to comply with your demands.

5- Before knocking on the door, examine the floor and memorize the exit stairs, elevators are not a reliable choice if she’s grabbing you. There could be two of them, be careful!

6- If everything has checked out to be OK so far and you are at her doorstep, DO NOT GO IN, I repeat DO - NOT - GO - IN until she shows her face and body. Keep a distance from the door. If she insists that you come in and refuses to show herself, RUN. It’s not worth it.

7- Do not keep anything valuable on you. Take only your money and hid it in your socks.

8- If she catches up with you or grabs you, don’t be afraid to show hostility and fight back. If she threatens to call police don’t chicken out, she won’t do it and she can’t do it even if she pretends to. Those African ladies are all illegals and there residencies are expired.

9- Don’t be afraid of her threats or that she will shout or accuse you of rape. Again, she can’t and she will not for the same reasons mentioned in the previous point.

10- AVOID ALL THIS TOGETHER BY KEEPING YOUR JOHNNY IN YOUR PANTS and wait till you go back home. You are better protected in your home country and usually know your territory better. If you’re a resident and you get the urge, be patient and try to find someone reliable by applying what is mentioned previously. Don’t rush, examine the ads, reverse check the photos, call the lady, speak to her, ask her for proof etc.

11- If you REALLY want to have sex with a hooker you could, you know, just meet one of of the thousands of hookers in any one of the hundreds of bars across the city? courtesy of DownRUpLYB

I hope this will help. Be safe guys and don’t put yourself in a bad situation. Dubai is an international city and they cannot weed out all the rotten ones. To the tourists, enjoy your trip to Dubai.

85 Comments

u/halfbaked_zed

•

Oct 22, 2015, 1:42 AM

I am a black escort with a fake golden wig and I find this offensive.

u/throwawaydxbwarning

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Oct 22, 2015, 1:55 AM

I’m sincerely sorry for that. I live in the west and I’m not entirely Caucasian myself. I live in a society that has put all racial arguments behind its back decades ago so please don’t take it personally and think that I’m playing any racial card here. I’m just stating the facts. If it was a caucasian white woman, I would have mentioned it equally. However the matter of the fact is that both guys had the exact same experience with African women. Please enlighten me as to how I should put it so it would not be offensive. I did specify “African” and I honestly don’t see any other way to identify them. If I knew they were Nigerians, Ugandans or so on, I would have mentioned it. As for the wig, again, both stated the same fact so I had to include it and it was not meant as a derogatory term at all.

u/greenleaf187

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Oct 22, 2015, 2:00 AM

whoosh

u/halfbaked_zed

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Oct 22, 2015, 1:58 AM

But we also want love and money, is it my fault that when I post my real pictures, I don’t get responses on CL. Hence, I had to do this. I am sorry, but I had to.

Also, I can show you my valid residency permit.

And we don’t try to attack anyone, we just want some cuddles and hugs. We are just a bit aggressive about getting them, that is all.

u/[deleted]

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Oct 22, 2015, 1:08 AM

Okay.

u/Safwanish

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Oct 22, 2015, 1:24 AM

that’s all I could think as well after thoroughly reading each word on this thread.

u/[deleted]

•

Oct 22, 2015, 1:09 AM

There’s a word to describe your ‘friends’ - gullible.

u/SuchWowReddit

•

Oct 22, 2015, 1:32 AM

haram

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topicprinter · 6 years ago

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A bit about why I am writing this:I am a conversion-optimization specialist. I have optimized lots of websites (mostly small-business and start-ups) for better conversion-rates, as a professional conversion-consultant. (I do copywriting as well).My line of work makes me see hundreds of business landing-pages every month.I see so many of un-optimized and scrambled-together landing-pages, whose business owners are frustrated due to getting very low conversion-rate. Still, they keep throwing more money on Facebook/Google ads, just hoping it will change magically if they only run more ads and bring more traffic.Most often, I see this on the websites of small-businesses and start-ups, which is understandable as they usually can’t afford to hire a consultant to look at their website landing-page or conversion-funnel to optimize it.There are so many small-business owners on reddit who need to get their landing-page/home-page optimized for maximum conversion-rate before continuing to throw money on bringing traffic with Facebook and Google Ads, that end up being wasted.By not optimizing your landing-page, you are squandering money on ads more than you should be. If you continue doing that, you are basically decelerating your business and getting closer to running out of fuel(money) to run your business.I have distilled my framework of putting together a landing-page that really converts, something which I have implemented for dozens of clients resulting in visible improvement in conversions.Here is a No B.S. guide for you to learn how to build a landing-page that will bring you real conversions:(with practical steps & methods to implement on your website & get more conversions)THE FIRST LOOK:The first look(i.e. top section of your landing page) is what a first-time visitor sees on your landing-page. This sets the tone of what impression you leave on your new visitor. It’s the digital equivalent to saying Hi to someone(who you’d like to be friends with) on the first day of the school or introducing yourself at a networking event lunch crowd.What you don’t want to do:You don’t want to throw everything about yourself in detail on the first meeting. You don’t tell about your brothers’ dog’s therapy right away when you meet someone first-time, do you?Let the information flow in a easily-understandable sequence and with context.What you want to do:You want to clearly inform them of who you are and what you do(only the part relevant to them), as clearly & concisely as possible. At the same time you want to inform the listener/reader why he/she should be interested in listening to you or in other words, not bouncing off your landing page within next 5 seconds.Here’s a good example of how Airbnb does this well: Imgur_Airbnb First lookTHE GLUE OF TRUST:So you just made your (and your business’s) introduction. Most probably, the introduction included that ‘you offer something of value to your prospect in exchange of money or some other valuable thing’.The next thing that pops-up (right after your introduction) in the mind of your visitor/listener is “Why should I trust you?” .You can try to explain in 1000 more words and still they won’t trust you. Why would they? They are so many strangers on the internet offering one thing or other, many of them scammers. After a ton of scam stories that come out of internet, Internet users are now understably into their dont-trust-anyone mode: so they are cynical, sarcastic and defensive when you, as a stranger, offer them something new.What you DON’T WANT TO do:You don’t want to try to explain to them in long-explanations, mostly basing everything on your word. If they wanted to trust you, they would have done that in the first two sentences. Only thing you will do by entering into long explanation is bore/annoy them, which means, losing their attention, hence any prospect of building a relationship & doing any kind of business with them.What you WANT TO do:If you want to make them trust you, be on their side. Show them that in the US vs THEM distribution from their perspective, you are the on their side. The most effective way to achieve this is making them read/hear/watch what people like them are saying about you/your business.Social Proof is the glue of trust that makes your first-time visitor stick and not bounce off right away.Feedback/Testimonial Reviews can be in text or audio/video format. Audio/Video testimonials are hard to get but more effective for business who sell high-priced or more complex products/services. For most consumer businesses with pricing under $100, text feedback works fine as long as they are genuine and there is contextual identity of the feedback giver: name, designation, location.Apart from feedback from your real customers, Quotes from trusted authority sources( known publisher media/ expert/ rating agency) work as well, as long as they are sourceIs trustworthy and the quote includes you/your business in a direct manner.Tip: Don’t wait to give the Testimonials at the end of the landing-page; after explaining your service and all about yourself. Trust needs to be established in the first note, first meeting. So, throw the social proof in your visitor’s face in big/bold, right after the introduction.If you want to verify if this works or not in real, test it yourself for one week by excluding ( the social proof from your landing-page/homepage or relocating it to the end of the page. Or if you have been doing it wrong till now, test by making it right as I explained. You will see the results yourself.How do I know this works?I have done this for my own website projects and lots of other businesses whose websites I’ve optimized for conversions as a consultant. And it has shown dramatic difference in on-page time and bouncing-rate in User Behavior stats.THE HOW-IT-WORKS PITCH:Now you have introduced yourself and established the trust, now you have their attention. You have made it to the point where they consider reading/listening/watching your pitch worthy of their time and consideration.Bringing new traffic to read this section is not easy and only a fraction of your total visitors will be here reading this, so when they do, you don’t want to waste this opportunity.What you DON'T WANT TO do:You don’t want to occupy this section just with your blabber about yourself or your product’s features or ingredients of your service:I know you are craving to share all about what you have worked on but your prospect is never the right ear for that.THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED. PERIOD. Do that sharing with your friend, partner or your team instead.You don’t want to make sky-high promises which are obviously unattainable.This will dilute their trust in you. Why would you don’t want to lose the chance to offer them genuine, realistic value, that you can rightly deliver and better their lives?Be straight-up with them and even admit a flaw, this increase your authenticity/believability. But remember: the flaw that you admit should be strategic (like how you failed in something which made you strive to learn more about that thing and now you are better at what you do).Don’t be a sympathy seeker, this will backfire. Don’t reveal things like you still pee in your bed at 23 if you do.(unless that is relevant to your pitch somehow).This particularly applies to content creators (YouTubers/Bloggers)You don’t want to be too broad & generic in your offerings.(This requires you to having done your research about the customer segment and shortlisting what are the things they want.)Differentiate yourself by being specific. Solve specific problems. Provide a product/service that can benefit your customer right now.Find your niche. Even better, create your niche. Instead of being a generic copycat of hundred other competitors, being niched would give you a better chance to find, acquire and retain loyal, paying customers as you will be able to serve them well, to the degree they aren’t getting served by anyone else right now.What you WANT TO Do:This is almost a cliche now, but very true: Talk about Benefits not Features.but, you can go one step further:Feelings:What feeling those benefits will generate in your customer? (Will they feel much more confident wearing that leather jacket that you are selling? )Go even one more step further:Emotions:What emotion that feeling invoke in your prospect?The core emotions (Desire, Fear, Anger, Joy, Disgust, Lust, Surprise etc) are the root of the mechanism that we humans base our decisions on, and your prospects are the same humans. You want to have it clear in your mind which core emotion(s) you are invoking/aggravating when you write this section, i.e. present your pitch.Will wearing that leather jacket help your customer in fulfilling their desire to get someone’s number in the club?The DESIRE is the emotion you are after here.If you are selling automated home-security systems, the Feeling that you should be selling is of safety and the core emotion that you should target should be the FEAR of getting attacked.Here’s a real example: a website selling premium polo shirts that I came across in a post on r/Entrepreneur subreddit last week. It is well-written, with a detailed infographic, but still fails to capture attention.Why?Because it goes into every little detail about how the material they use to make their shirts to explaining every step of the process they go through to make their shirts different.However, they do just that, they don’t talk about how it benefits the buyer, how can it make the buyer feel when they wear it. There is no core emotion targeted/invoked here. 99% of premium items are sold with emotional purchases.Have a look on this website’s ‘sales-letter’ yourself here to see what I am talking about: Niccolò P. premium polo shirtsIs it a surprise now if I told you this website is struggling to convert the expensive traffic they are bringing by spending heavily on pricey Facebook and Google Ads?REMEMBER:FEATURES < BENEFITS < FEELINGS < EMOTIONSMake your pitch pleasant to read and easy to scan.Text wall: No No.Images & Illustrations: Yes Yes.White Spaces: Yes Yes.(not more than 4 sentences without white space or bullets)Conversational Tone: Yes Yes.Writing in Third-person: No NoInvoking the Problem/Pain : Yes Yes (Dig it in, make them see how frustrating or painful it is for them, without your solution)Visualizing the Pleasure: Yes Yes (Let them imagine and almost feel how good it will be with your solution, give them a picture: real or with words)Presenting you as the solution: Yes Yes (It should be natural to want your solution after showing the problem/pain)Stay on the point. Talk about What’s in it for them? And How your product/service is the key to get their pain removed and to access that promised land of pleasure.THE CALL-TO-ACTION:This is the step you have been waiting for.Introduction is Done.Trust is Established.Pitch has been presented rightly.Now will they buy?At this point, the ones who are willing to pay and are able to pay will separate from the rest and these are the people who will supply the fuel(money) to your business.You want to treat them like Kings. And how do you a treat a King? Do you make them run around checking 4 different pages to find out where & how to buy your product or subscribe to your service? NO. You don’t do that.Instead what you do is make it the most convenient experience of their lives to give thier money to you. Put on a very visible sign/button which calls them (actually, implores them) to take that action (opt-in/buy/register/subscribe). Make the buying process as convenient as possible. This includes ordering page, shipping & billing process. Make it very very easy to give you money.Extra Tip: Add Secure Payment trust badges at payment stage to add more credibility.----------------------------------------------------------------------If you followed this, Congrats, you have reached the point of conversion.Now go implement this framework on your website’s landing-page and start enjoying better conversion stats for your website.--------------------------------------------------------If you have more questions on conversion-optimization of your landing-page, ask in the comments. I will answer as many as I can.If you have already implemented it for yourself, do a favor to someone you know who can use this framework to improve their website conversions, by sharing this post with them.

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topicprinter · 7 years ago

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Hope this helps someone - I wrote this as a reply to a few people in /r/SEO and had good DM's about it, so decided to just make it a post. The list is table stakes for any online marketing, and certainly isn't exhaustive - hopefully others can add their suggested tasks to it too?Get yourself Google Tag Manager (tagmanager.google.com) and install that pixel on the pageGet all your tracking pixels in the tag container - so your Facebook Tracking Pixel, then Twitter, Quora, Adwords, LinkedIn, Reddit - they all have tracking pixels mate. Get all of them! Also get hotjar.com or crazyegg.com so you have some actual visibility on your site as to what people are actually doing - every swipe, tap, mouse movement and click - all recorded for you to see what people are ACTUALLY doing on your site versus what you THINK they're doing!Get your Google Search Console hooked up with your Google Analytics hooked up with your Adwords - there's heaps to this, and it's a pain in the arse, won't lie. I can help you remotely on this if you need a hand or someone else in r/forhireSetup your conversion pixel events in all the ones i mentioned in (2) - these are different to the standard page tracking pixels, as they track who comes to which of your pages: What a CONVERSION pixel does though, is to track when someone purchases, or where they sign up to your newsletter or call you etc - actual things that make you money there and then, as opposed to just tracking.Create custom audiences in Facebook, Twitter, Adwords and all the ones in (2). A custom audience is where you take your existing emails and upload them into each platform, where the platform then matches the emails to accounts on that platform. Now you may only have 100-200 emails for example, and these WON'T be enough to then run an advert to, BUTTTTT you can then create "lookalike audiences" in the platforms where each platform goes off and finds people that very closely match the qualities, aspirations, hopes, dreams, desires and marketing demographics of the millions of available people it has data on (see why Facebook is under massive PR scrutiny now?) and then gives you that audience to then market to.Create a newsletter opt-in that pops up on the site after a set scroll period and/or time on site. Also set the popup to appear when someone is exiting the site - this is literally called an "exit intent" popup. They were going to leave anyway, so might as well try and get their details.Create further custom audiences of people that visit specific pages or click specific buttons or who add to shopping cart but then dont purchase - as well as one for purchasers too! These custom audiences will be great for what we call "retargeting" or "remarketing" - they're where people come to your site, and do some shit but don't buy anything for example, but the tracking pixels "fire" and when they go back into their social media platform of choice - well, there is the retargeting advert for the product they were looking at or the category they were choosing from. You will have seen this yourself when looking at a piece of clothing or wallet or whatever - when you dont buy it, the product then seems to follow you around the internet no matter where you go (if the marketer is skilled enough!)MAKE SURE you have your Google Analytics setup with your ecommerce package too - so when people start to buy, you know where they are, what device, what time best converts, how many times they came back to the site before purchasing - and then be able to break down which product(s) are selling best based on actual data rather than gut feels.Make sure you have your Instagram account setup for business use, and make sure you apply for shopping tags usage - these will be invaluable for you to have people tap on your item picture in your feed WITHOUT ads (sometimes!) for people to then tap and buy there and then. Powerful stuff but you have to get your instagram account verified as a business.Speaking of business verification - get your Google My Business all setup too. We've talked about Analytics + Search Console etc here already, but when you get your Google My Business all setup with address on the map that gets verified, phone number, web address and open hours etc - that then leads to great things: Review extensions, location extensions and call extensions and basically ALL the Adwords Ad Extensions can then be used to trounce your competitors. All can be setup free, apart from the PPC obviously!Get cracking with video content! Show some products being made, show them in use from customers who tell how happy they are, show kids with your patches - really pull at heart strings and invest someone's emotion watching the videos. Yes, even for patches.Setup your YouTube channel too - get those videos up there on YouTube and Facebook on your business page AND ON YOUR PERSONAL FB Profile too! Do business from your personal profiles and treat all the social networks as business avenues now, rather than post family and friends shit - still DO that, but keep it to a minimum so you can show people some transparency on the person BEHIND the company.Get ALL your videos you post, transcribed with captions from rev.com - $1 per video minute, and it helps in getting your video watched and ranked.If you're hooked up in your Google Search Console, feel free to then activate your YouTube cards with the link back to your site that can be sprung at any time during the video. Here's the kicker though - YT recent fucked everyone in small business just starting out, by saying you can't have that feature unless you have a load of subscribers and watch time. Buy them. Don't worry about it - you're not giving a flying fuck about these fake subscribers as you're ONLY doing this to get the YT Cards with Link feature unlocked. Don't feel bad or fake - YT brought this on themselves.Live stream your heart out. Live stream the devices being made and again, show viewers some genuine heartstring tugging stories. That shit gets shared. A LOT.Instagram influencer marketing is good when it works - but check their account for number of fake followers Vs genuine followers. There's heaps of free tools around, but at time of writing Facebook (who own instagram) are cracking down on their API so a lot of the tools will stop working soon. Find one. Rape it for info as much as you can for as long as you can, and then DM these account holders offering them a referral fee - you'll need a UTM tracking URL for that Influencer to give out so you can track any sales back to them. OR you can agree to a set fee - say 4c per genuine follower for a shout. Results will vary, but at least you know you got tools to analyse an Insta account now.I can't help but think that Facebook, Instagram and Youtube Ads for visibility and traffic, with MAYBE Adwords for retargeting (retargeting traffic is way cheaper than "cold" traffic, by the way) would be the way to go for this. Just a hunch.See if you can get some PR by using SourceBottle or HelpAReporter and being featured in blogs, magazines, TV etc as a "feel good" story. Free to do, just your time.Run a search on your competitors sites using WhatRunsWhere and see what keywords they're using on their site - you then use that info to write blogs around those keywords and also to run better ads than them on Adwords!MAKE SURE you have your telephone number on the site too - a lot of times people just want to talk to someone. At the top of your page, put the number and the "Message Us" too - this could be a Facebook Messenger widget button that will then message your page, or if could be using something like the billions of website instant messaging SaaS out thereIf you're going to have the traditional "Get Newsletter" snoozefest, then make sure you have a great CRM that you're going to USE to send those cool as fuck and interesting newsletters - start with MailChimp or Active Campaign or wowtools.io (AC or WOW!Tools better as you can "tag" your contacts. These tags allow you to automate sending based on those tags existing or not - another conversation about all this as it's more complex than to write here, about audience segmentation and marketing automation etc). There's a cool as fuck Wordpress plugin to use called wowq.io - this can ask them all questions on a popup quiz or questionnaire and then tag each answer they give, which then "talks" to your CRM and then auto sends out your email content based on their answer(s). Useful. Paid.Try and use Reddit iAmA - you'll be selling without selling, as you answer (hopefully!) a bajillion questions about your industry. It's a bit outside the norm what you do, so Reddit will love it. Don't hard sell - just answer questions and be transparent and yes, even give your links where appropriate.Hopefully this is some cool info to get you going in the right direction (or anyone else reading this). Feel free to DM me if you need a hand. I do this shit day in day out for clients around the world.PLURAlso, wowtools in private beta. HMU if you want a cheeky little demo.

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topicprinter · 7 years ago

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Hi r/startups! This is a 3,000 word blog post I wrote on early stage marketing. I've formatted it for Reddit below, but there's a much better reading experience (with images) available on Medium.Since I began working on my startup I’ve read a lot of articles and books about creating something from nothing. They usually have excellent advice, but are light on the details of how you actually go about creating a product startup. The focus is often on challenges that are quite far down the startup journey, covering exciting sounding topics like ‘scaling’, ‘hiring’, and ‘building culture.’But the reality is that these things will feel like distant problems in the first 12–18 months. As a founder, you will have different challenges to deal with right now like I did: researching your idea, building an MVP with outsourced contractors, finding a technical co-founder, getting initial traffic to your website, settling on a pricing model, evaluating customer feedback, and making hard decisions about when to pivot. This is the third post in a series of five. Read the first two: Discovering and vetting your startup idea and Outsourcing your startup’s MVP.You’ve discovered an idea and built a Minimum Viable Product. Now you need to launch it, get it in front of your target audience, have them sign up, and give you feedback so you can throw away a bunch of code and no doubt ‘pivot…!’ This was the stage I was at with Dovetail in September 2016. I’ll go through the strategies I used to drive traffic to our website and how I measured what was effective.First things first: choosing a nameWhen choosing a name, use an existing, pronounceable word — even if the obvious domain names are taken — instead of making up a new word because its .com is available. Resist the temptation to create something that sounds like it’s straight out of Rick & Morty. The name you choose is very important because that (plus a logo and some colour) forms your entire brand early on. In general, you your name to to be short, unique, and something that’s not easily mispronounced. Naming things is hard.People love the name Dovetail but they’re concerned “it’s taken already.” There are plenty of other companies, agencies, and organisations called Dovetail. As long as these companies are not in the same industry as you, you needn’t worry too much. Dovetail happens to be a woodworking joint, a non-profit mental health organisation in Queensland, and a co-working space management app. The only practical problem you’ll face is that you have to compete with these in search rankings. However, the world is a big place, and people usually know to simply add ‘research’ to the end of their query if they can’t find us when searching ‘Dovetail’ on its own. Obviously don’t pick a name that is a copy, or close to a copy, of a competitor in the same space as you. You might find a copyright infringement notice in your letterbox earlier than you expected.You should be looking at available domains while brainstorming a name. Prepare for disappointment and compromise. Unfortunately for us, dovetail.com and dovetail.io were already taken. I initially compromised on getdovetail.io, before recently moving us to dovetailapp.com which is slightly better. Novelty domain names like del.icio.us were cool a few years ago but it turns out people tend to forget where the dots go. As a former designer on Delicious, I can attest to the trouble that domain caused, hence why the company began to use delicious.com instead.The takeaway here is that naming is hard.Let’s ship a thing to the internet!For the initial launch I built a responsive splash page in HTML & CSS and deployed that. I also asked a freelance illustrator if she could create some illustrations for the website. Custom illustrations might seem like an odd thing to spend money on at this stage, but first impressions are crucial. Even if you’re just making a splash page, it has to look fantastic, because everything potential customers see is a representation of your brand. Brand-building starts from day one.The website reiterated our value proposition (Improve your product with simple, contextual research) and included a summary of the features:Run market or customer research via SMS or emailGet in-the-moment responses from participantsAnalyse your data and centralise all insightsShare what you learned with your team and stakeholdersThere was a form to ‘request an invite’ which took a name, company, and email address. To same time I used a hack: the form response was submitted to a hidden, embedded Google Form connected to a spreadsheet.I set up a custom domain for our Medium blog, wrote this introduction post, and shared it on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There wasn’t a lot interest, but after a few days, I got a flurry of sign ups from high quality companies. It turns out Dovetail was mentioned in an email newsletter for researchers. I emailed everyone who signed up, thanked them, and asked them a simple question:What do you hope to use Dovetail for?This question gave me more knowledge about them, their company, and their use case. It also tested whether they understood the product based on the marketing lingo I used on the splash page.At the same time I was preparing the product for its first users. The app had an admin interface which allowed me to send invites. I started sending invites in batches in October. I was very stressed. I had low confidence in the stability of the product, in part because I didn’t understand the code well, and I knew the outsourced developers I used were not going to win any prizes for code quality. In the end it took me three months before the anxiety subsided and I felt comfortable with the stability of the app.Letting people sign up themselvesUntil late December, the only way to sign up was to request an invite. We’re not a consumer app and there’s no need to ‘reserve your username’ so the reason for this approach was not to stir up excitement and demand. Instead, the reasons are boring:The product didn’t have a self-serve sign up flow with email confirmation, password reset, and so on. I don’t think we even had the ability to send transactional emails to new users.These first people were high quality leads. They hadn’t come from AdWords; instead they were word-of-mouth. I wanted to personally onboard them to make a great first impression. Even if the product was an MVP, our customer support was not.The code was unproven beyond my own testing with friends. I needed to send out a batch of invites, watch the logs, fix bugs, and repeat before I felt confident to allow anyone to sign up without my hand-holding.If you sign up for Dovetail now, you’ll notice that you can’t proceed without confirming your email address. Whether you have email confirmation in your onboarding flow is a subject of much debate. You can make your own decision, but I’ll offer some of the reasons why we have it in Dovetail:Like Atlassian’s sign up flow (which I talked about in my first post), having some friction on the marketing site helps to weed out low quality leads who would never purchase anyway.Dovetail allows users to send SMS messages and emails in bulk. Verifying email on sign up helps prevent people using our service to spam others.Email verification is a standard pattern for SaaS products now, so the funnel drop-off is negligible. After removing fake email addresses, our email confirmation step only accounts for a ~2% drop-off.At first, users saw a sample data set that showed a ‘finished’ study in Dovetail. After looking through the analytics and talking with customers, I found that almost everyone created another study called ‘test study’ and added themselves as a participant. Of course! Researchers wanted to see what the experience was like for participants on the other side. I modified the sample data to be an active study called ‘Sample study’, with the researcher entered as a participant. The study emailed them questions that said “This is what a question looks like for participants.” I productised what users were already doing, and retention improved.Another behaviour I noticed is people preferring to change the sample study rather than creating a new one. Even if there is little real friction in actually doing so, the perceived friction in creating a ‘new thing’ is quite high.The takeaway here is to ship a first version of your onboarding and observe user behaviour to make continual improvements. You won’t get it right the first time. Our onboarding experience still has problems, and we’ll get around to working on it later this year.Marketing channelsQuora, StackExchange, and RedditA lot of our quality traffic has come from Quora. My strategy was to search for a problem that our product solved (e.g. “what tools exist for diary studies”), find the Quora question, and post an answer. I linked to our product and included a disclaimer that I was the founder. This strategy has worked very well. Quora questions are high on Google search ranking. Our potential customers have Googled a problem, clicked on the Quora link, seen my answer, and visited our site.To a lesser degree, posting in Research, Design, and UX StackExchange sites and subreddits has sent a few page views our way, but I don’t go out of my way to submit to these sites since that’s not really where our audience is.Content marketingIntercom, Invision, and Hubspot have demonstrated that content marketing can be an effective way to drive traffic to your product. It’s free if you write the content yourself, lasts forever, and helps to boost your search ranking. Good content marketing can establish your brand as a reputable source of knowledge.My first attempt involved writing a few blog posts about diary studies on Medium. Our Medium blog used to be on a subdomain (blog.getdovetail.io), and I read somewhere that it’s better for SEO to have posts on your main domain instead. I copied the research posts from Medium over to a new section on our website called ‘Guides’, and wrote a couple more. Our blog is now focused on product news and non-research posts like this, while research content lives on our main site.I wasn’t sure how the guides I wrote would perform, but they seem to be doing well. After a few weeks they appeared in the top 5 results for searches like ‘diary studies’, ‘qualitative vs quantitative data’ and ‘participant recruitment.’ Bounce rates and session duration look good, and sign ups increased as a result of traffic to the guides.SEOI configured Google Search Console early on to measure our search ranking. I don’t know much about SEO, but I do believe a lot of the time it simply comes down to relevant, quality content. Google even have a section in their help documentation that says the same thing:“Provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. This is the single most important thing to do. If your pages contain useful information, their content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site.”Other factors to consider are site performance and mobile experience.I highly recommend making quick-win performance improvements like loading JS asynchronously, minifying assets, and using sprites or inline SVGs for images. PageSpeed Insights is great for seeing what Google’s verdict is on your performance. It’s a checklist of things to do, so just make sure you do all of them (some may be harder than others) and it’ll help your search ranking, especially on mobile.Speaking about mobile, both our website and product are responsive because quite frankly, there’s no excuse for websites not to have mobile support in 2017. At the very least your marketing website needs to be responsive, then you’ll either have a responsive product, a mobile site, or native apps for your app. There are pros & cons for each, but that’s the subject for another blog post!Paid advertising with Facebook and AdWordsI have some experience with Facebook Ads and Google AdWords from a few years ago, but mostly I don’t know what I’m doing.Earlier this year I set up ad campaigns on both platforms with identical budgets. Our hypothesis was that Google would out-perform Facebook because people search for solutions to problems on Google, and we were building a solution to a problem! We’re very lucky that researchers (like developers, designers, and other ‘tech’ people) actively look to improve the way they work. A lot of people don’t do this, and are quite happy to put up with whatever they currently use for all eternity. I’m sure you have some friends or family that fit this description.If, like me, you don’t know what you’re doing when creating online ads for your startup, there are a few terms you should understand:Impressions. This is the number of people who have seen your ad.Click-through rate. This is the percentage of people who, after seeing your ad, click on it and visit your website. It’s usually quite low; around 1 to 2%.Sign up rate. This is the percentage of people who sign up on your website. It’s usually around 5%, and if it’s higher than this, you’re doing quite well.Conversion rate. Assuming you have a free plan or trial period, this is the percentage of people who actually hand over some money, or ‘convert’ into a paying customer. This number varies wildly between companies and products.Acquisition cost. This is how much you spent to acquire a single paying customer.Average lifetime value. This is how much money you expect to get, in total, from each customer. Your lifetime value should be greater than your acquisition cost otherwise you’re losing money when trying to acquire customers. (This may be okay if you’re building a social network or a ride-hailing service where the race to a critical mass of users is important. We’re not.)With these five key metrics, we can map out a typical scenario.With AdWords and Facebook, you can pay per impression, click, or conversion. There are pros and cons to each which I won’t go into here. Let’s say you choose to pay per impression. You get 10,000 impressions on your search ad, and a 2% click-through rate. Google or Facebook have charged you $300. Along with understanding why these companies are so wealthy, you now know that 200 people have visited your website from the ad. On your website, your sign up rate is 5%. So 10 of those people sign up for an account. Out of those 10 people, 2 of them decide to convert, making your conversion rate 20%. So you have spent $300 to acquire two paying customers. $150 per customer. Now, let’s say you charge them $50 per month. Each customer has to stick around for 3 months for you to break even. Any more than that and you’ll turn a profit, however of course this is not factoring in any company expenses.You then realise how great content marketing is.Product Hunt and other aggregator sitesFrom day one people would sign up, take screenshots, and list Dovetail on aggregator sites like nicelydone.club, sansfrancis.co, and hypershoot.com. Mostly the creators of these sites. We got a few sign ups from these sites, but mostly these they’ve been of little value.I had high expectations for Product Hunt but was disappointed. The audience is mostly designers, developers, and other startup founders who are looking for trendy software to use themselves or as inspiration.If you’re not building a chatbot, Slack add-on, or a design prototyping tool, then don’t bother with Product Hunt. B2B products in a specific market don’t do well there. Product Hunt is a waste of your time if you are not building for this audience. Instead, find out where your audience hangs out and go there. In our case, that’s Quora, Twitter, Medium, and email newsletters.Internal referrals through team invitesLastly, another strategy we employ is in-product invitations. We needed to build ‘teams’ anyway in order to become a collaborative product. A nice side effect is user growth from researchers inviting the rest of their team. One person at a company might refer 5 or 6 of their colleagues.Because our pricing model is not based on the number of collaborators you have (more on that in a later blog post), there is hardly any friction when inviting teammates.However, in saying that, the product today doesn’t do enough to incentivise users to invite their colleagues at opportune moments. The feature is kind of tucked away in team settings. So there’s work to do there.Measuring marketing successAs an early stage startup, you will spend a lot of time experimenting with different marketing strategies until you find reliable ‘marketing channels’ that deliver high quality users at an acquisition cost less than their lifetime value. Marketing channels differ between industries and products. Beauty and clothing startups might have a lot of success on Instagram, but your highly technical data warehouse solution probably doesn’t lend itself to hipster, filtered photos.When you experiment, you need to measure. Measuring different marketing strategies is the only way to find channels that work for you. With Dovetail, I made sure our analytics story was solid from the beginning. We use Mixpanel primarily for in-product behavioural analytics, and Google Analytics for page view and demographic data. I also learned that it’s a great idea to also install a Facebook Pixel on your site even if you’re not planning on marketing via Facebook yet. It can start building a custom audience of website visitors which is great for remarketing later on.With Mixpanel specifically, you will most likely need to do some work to connect the JavaScript library with your backend so you can link anonymous users browsing the website to the actual user ID in the database when they sign up. This means you can track someone’s journey from the website all the way into the product. Mixpanel then has some neat features that help you figure out the ‘aha!’ moments that cause people to convert.Don’t leave analytics instrumentation too late. Add it as part of your regular development so you can start collecting data and learning from it straight away. With Google Analytics connected to AdWords, you can see what ads are generating paying customers. Likewise with Facebook. Optimise for conversion rather than clicks or impressions since that’s closer to revenue.In summaryChoose a pronounceable name. Make your website fast and mobile-friendly. Iterate on your sign up flow. Add analytics from day one. Go where your audience is. Forget about Product Hunt. Experiment with marketing channels. Measure what works and double down on that.Original post on Medium

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