#i know it also effects direct-downloads. which will interrupt themselves and fail.
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racke7 · 1 month ago
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Woke up after 4 hours of sleep (if that). Ribs hurt a lot.
Classes was 90% non-teaching stuff. To the point where some fucking life-coach started popping up and talking about shit. So I just left the room after two hours of maybe 10min of actual teaching. Fuck dealing with that.
Actually called my internet-provider about the weird internet-losses that makes watching streams near-impossible (bcs it'll freeze-and-restart every five seconds). They were confused about my problem (I have a cable, this shouldn't be a problem).
Person I talked to commented that it's "weird" that my IP-address is what it is, because it looks like it's a VPN-address, despite me not using one.
Started thinking about how I'm forced to pay a pretty hefty sum to my landlord for the internet-access.
Is it possible that they're secretly running some kind of VPN-service for all of their clients (for "security"), and that this is what's causing so much fucking weirdness (on top of explaining why they feel justified taking a monthly payment)? Unfortunately, I would put this in line with their general competence-levels, so I hope that that isn't what they're doing.
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vagabondanon · 5 years ago
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For posterity; Grand Summoners X KLK Collaboration Limited Time Side Story
Spoilers ahead for Kill La Kill itself, the Side story in GS, and shockingly Kill La Kill: If. An overview of a story only available for a limited time.
It may be surprising to many, if not practically all fans of the show, that Kill la Kill: if was not the first video game story to star a certain pair of scissor crossed sisters (that I might care too much about and will continue to obsess over any and all content for, which led me to downloading a gacha game and grinding for days to level them and their equipment for no other reason than it was them.), and a handful of their closest compatriots/equipment options. Kill La Kill was featured in a (relatively) short crossover story in Good Smile’s mobile game “Grand Summoners”. In it you could (eventually when the event was rerun and all content was put out on the NA version) spend Gems/”alchemy stones” to “summon” Ryuko, Satsuki, and Mako as units. Senketsu, Junketsu, Guts, Mako’s two star fight club uniform, Mako’s brass knuckle, Ryuko’s scissor blade, Bakuzan, Mako’s fight club baseball bat, and the completed Rending Scissors (titled “The Snippity Snips” for some as yet unknown, but probably awful, reasons) as support “Equips” that can be carried by any unit with compatible sized/typed slots. Sukuyo Mankanshoku’s croquettes also featured as a consumable item that dropped as mission loot for minor stat buffs if consumed by your four unit squad before any mission. (Equipment refresh 2% faster, base skill refresh 2% faster).
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While the stats themselves are interesting as they provide direct numerical valuation of everything listed above in terms of what they can do Offensively, Defensively, etc the story itself is the focus of this post. Because it turns out that out of everybody that knew about it nobody else cared enough to preserve it in whole. (And as I have learned from experience, if you like something save it. Before you wake up one morning and find 1/3 of it has been deleted off the face of the earth) And it could only be accessed for a limited time before it was removed, and again basically nobody seems to either know or care that it actually had more than just pixelated cameos at all. (KLK game marketing tho, for real. Twice now.)
So I present a record for the Library, Grand summoners X KLK, a “too long, I can’t read it anymore anyway, so tell me what happened”; I got you.
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(”Stickers” were given for log in streaks that you can post as the only form of communication in multiplayer modes/lobbys.)
The story opens with two of the GS main characters, Rayas and his possible love interest(?, that is at times vague) Mira, out hunting a monster that purportedly had a vitality so high it was unkillable. Upon finally finding the thing the monster hunters as a group had corralled into a forest they are interrupted by a flash of white light. That drops Ryuko, Satsuki, and Mako in full combat readiness between them and the monster.
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(Lower right stickers are Rayas and Mira. Our characters on this wild ride.) 
Confusion ensues all around.
The monster runs off to escape, but not before Senketsu (and Satsuki somehow) could "feel” the monster was empowered by Life Fibers. Ryuko blames Satsuki and becomes suspicious of her involvement because of their presence there. (Ryuko constantly tries to pick up the fight they, per Mako, had been having before they got dragged in. What fight? No idea. Fight club Mako is there, but the post fight club Ryuko and Satsuki are not. Except Ryuko can be upgraded to full Kisaragi. How? No idea.) Satsuki refutes being responsible. She also talks down to everyone. (For reasons somewhat unknown.) In KLK fashion the conversations that follow dip into the absurd. Satsuki's text font is so large at times her lines broke the speech box (though this seems to have been fixed in the cutscenes that can be downloaded today as record provided for beating it while the event was on), before going off in search of answers/on the hunt. Ryuko insults the kinda gary-stu mc by calling him “a geezer” (He claims to only be 25 in shocked response), demands he not gawk at her by minding his own business, and ran off after Satsuki. Mako follows Ryuko to keep from being left behind.
Leaving the GS MCs to give confused ellipses laden speech not sure what just happened, and this continues throughout the story.
(Interesting line from them though, the girls officially have 0 magic in full Kamui. So life fibers confirmed as entirely nature/science/organic based/origin? If this story has any weight.)
Also apparently Satsuki is so in tune with/knowledgeable of Fibers she can sense them. Or maybe Junketsu could. It isn’t specified how Satsuki is picking up what Senketsu is without being able to hear him. The “Life Fiber resonance” as it is called guides them either way. The chase leads deep into a forest/jungle full of dense vegetation (which in the missions slows them down leading to loads of fights against mobs of fiber altered orcs, monsters, and human bandits that get stronger the further they go. All controlled by life fibers.)
Ryuko doesn't know what the word vegetation means.
Mako took a nap as they waited for the GS MCs to catch up so they could get some answers as to where they were, and what they could be facing, after Satsuki points out they are not on Earth.
Between remarks during the missions themselves and in the cutscenes the cast attempts to figure what the Fibers are doing when they link up again. They figure life fibers can't break space or time (when weak, or not an OLF, as we learn in KLK: if) so no teleporting or time travel without magic at that time. So chase is deemed possible, but “so long as a single cell of a randomly infused organism exists the whole can regenerate” leading to more grueling fights the deeper they go toward the “source”. Over the same missions Ryuko butts heads with Mira, pointing to a dislike of tsunderes, as she hates when people are not upfront with her. Cast notes that they have similar voices as they argue eventually, but over time they find common ground to drop hostilities after the discussion.
When they reach the big monster again the GS MCs offer to fight it first, they are obliged. Ryuko actually wants to fight Kaiju though to the point she is actively looking forward to fighting giant monsters. Mako from the beginning thinks “Monster Land” is a theme park as she roots everyone on (she is a support character with buffs/healing equipment). Satsuki wishes to see how “magic” works, and if its effective. During the missions leading up to and including the boss fight Ryuko is confronted on if she would do “what it takes” as things ramp up in seriousness, to which she confirms that she has no issues killing targets to win if necessary. As you go through missions which involve mowing humanoids down by the dozen.
(Did not expect that, but given her life it's reasonable to expect that no Kiryuins have truly clean hands. I don’t suspect she has actually killed anyone before. Though that might not be for lack of trying, or simply lack of caring for opponents after any particularly nasty beat downs that may or may not have been shown to us when she reached high school in flashback.)
The first main boss (of two) is a giant quadrupedal demon like monster (”Betelgeuse” model in game colored differently) with spines on its body, altered seemingly loosely based on Senketsu. They share Yellow Orange “eyes”, some shapes, majority body coloration, and it possesses red clawed feet/hands/spines. Guarded by three dire wolves. (battle oddly enough took place in a desert canyon map, not forest as the cutscenes show they should have been in. Probably just a copy paste of the boss's regular arena.)
Once it is weakened/dropped Ryuko uses Sen'i Sōshitsu, but Senketsu fails to absorb the life fibers in it. The cast notes they see strings beyond the edge of the screen (which we can’t) and corpse though, which (likely) led from it to the true final boss that appears from there shortly afterword.
The final boss was a giant green bipedal monster with a vertical mouth that splits its face, which is based on a bright red boss in the main story (Beta-3), which was artificially created by one of the in game story factions through magi-tech. So one of those surviving living war machines likely got picked by Life fibers as a host in this new world they found themselves. It was powered by “Magically enhanced Life fibers” of some sort. (The battle itself was particularly difficult because the character's “top” ability, “Arts”, are powered by a substance called “Battle Ether” that is generated while in combat by using base moves. In this battle there was a substantial decrees in Battle ether production, likely trying to mimic the monster absorbing all free energy around it. Both Bio, or magically.)
This was also another boss fight that took place in an arena that shouldn't be there as it was inside a lab like structure full of green circuit looking lines over all the surfaces. Again likely because that was the “original” boss's arena. Once it is defeated it drops to the forest floor and reverts into a pile of fibers like the OLF in the show when its core got cut, just red instead of orange.
Mira and Ryuko have a moment ribbing “Ms. President”. Rayas just wants to know what is going on. (He won’t really understand it all.)
Satsuki can somehow read/anticipate people's wills, and life fibers exhibit a will through “vibrations in their strings” (Banshi vibrate? Wut.). She reads the vibrations by stabbing her sword down into the mass and holding the hilt.
Satsuki proclaims the life fibers were made to “fix seams” and somehow activates the monster's magic-infused life-fiber corpse to repair a hole in space and time itself. The monster was figured to be what likely dragged them all there in the first place through that hole to provide fibers from their Kamui it wanted. The hole in reality is propped open until they all passed through back to their own world where it is fixed permanently. After which the GS characters proclaim them immensely brave for literally running into a hole in reality without any hesitation.
Thus ended the Side Story.
Not sure who who wrote the script so its hard to tell how much of their given words are “true to cannon”. But it was credited as involving Nakashima who was directly on hand to make the first long explanation promo video on the JP YT channel. Who honestly knows at this point. But time wise it must have been made during production of KLK: if, which leads back to some very interesting consistent points.
Per KLK if: Life Fibers can in fact fuck with space, time, and reality itself. Though this is a power Satsuki was unaware of, (consistent with GS side story) even if she was the catalyst for initiating it in IF’s case through Junketsu's link to the OLF. Junketsu being Ragyo’s original “final” Kamui this was likely a function Ragyo prepared for her life after Earth. It would explain why she was so willing to give up the planet and everyone on it instead of seeking to rule it at least, she could literally just create her own reality and be its true god. Per how KLK: if ends by dumping “existences/minds” back to true reality at different times through the flashes of white light, with only the faintest of memories in the strongest of minds involved, they also very likely explained how this GS story can both feature fight club Mako and not change official “canon”. Or at least I thought it couldn't, before If once again set down that Life Fibers are the most powerful force in existence basically making up the “fabric of reality” itself on a whim.
Is the GS story retroactively canon if IF is canon?
Did Nakashima use the GS story as a test bed for KLK:IF ideas he had in the works?
Will we see more reality hopping for even more spin off stories?
Can these two finally have a happy reality as a couple?
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:Shrug:
If you want to see all almost 30 minutes of prerendered cutscenes that remains for yourself in all their limited animation, and honestly somewhat questionably translated/proofread, glory I recorded them and threw that here: https://youtu.be/s3FneXNL8eQ
(Apologies for any sounds on top of the game’s already exceptionally loud music. I have never recorded from android before, I have no idea how to mute mics in the Google games app thing, and it picked up some air con being funky near the middle for a sec.)
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webanalytics · 7 years ago
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How to Know If Your Content Marketing Just Isn’t Working
Content is king.
And content marketing in 2018 remains a brilliant and cost-effective method for engaging with leads and customers, spreading brand awareness, and getting around the increasing use of ad-blockers.
Whether it’s an email newsletter, social media post, or blog on your own or someone else’s website, people want to see your stuff. They accept it. Approve it. Whitelist it. Because it’s the user him or herself clicking on it, there are no concerns of spam complaints, or annoying the recipient, or ending up in the junk folder.
It’s popular, powerful, and for all intents and purposes, perfect. If you’re online in any professional capacity, you’re already using it.
Google “content marketing” and you’ll uncover millions (78,200,000 when I did it just now) of results, everything from definitions to how-to guides to case studies. You can quickly and easily pick up the how, why, when, what, and where of content marketing. Every online marketing personality and business has their own advanced guide or step-by-step guide, allowing anyone to grasp, experiment, and eventually master the subtle art of content marketing.
“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” ~ Seth Godin
Strikingly, the only thing you won’t see much of in those millions upon millions of links is how to know when your content marketing isn’t working.
Because there’s a lot more to successful content marketing than just traffic and clicks, and a hell of a lot more than just likes, shares, and retweets. Those are simply vanity metrics that don’t tell you anything of importance by themselves…although it sure does feel nice to see people are loving your stuff.
Now, vanity metrics can be used to find actionable insight, but that’s the subject of another post on another day. Suffice to say, if you’re gauging the success of your content campaigns on likes and shares alone, you’re doing it wrong and wasting your time and energy.
Instead of focusing on the vanity metric, use it to inform your marketing decisions. Dig deeper. Find the corresponding actionable metric.
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Content marketing is an active endeavor, and most of the hard work starts after you hit publish. It’s not about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people.
How do you know when you’re not doing that?
Look for these five red flags before and during the push.
Content Marketing 101
But before we get to that, let’s review some basics.
If you remember only one thing about content marketing, make it this: write your strategy down. Be explicit, detailed, and clear about goals (use SMART goals and stretch goals if applicable), tactics, channels, and how you’re going to measure success.
What will “success” look like? How will you measure return-on-investment? Make sure you and everyone on your team knows and understands.
How often will your marketing team meet? The most successful meet regularly to evaluate, tweak, and manage as necessary. Your content marketing should not be set-it-and-forget-it.
Target your ideal customers. Segment your audience. A/B test. Monitor your efforts. Create evergreen content. Measure the return-on-investment to maximize your budget. Look at your competitors and industry to see what’s working, what’s not, and what others are and are not doing.
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In their 2018 annual report on content marketing, CMI discovered that only 38% of B2C businesses have a documented strategy. That’s appallingly low.
Document your strategy. Do that, and you’re ahead of 62% of the competition.
Diversify your tactics and channels. The same report found that B2C marketers:
Use an average of five social media platforms, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram the top five choices.
Use and average of four formats for distribution, with social media, email, blogs, in-person events, and print the five most popular.
Use an average of five different types of content, with social media posts, pre-produced videos, illustrations/photos, infographics, and interactive tools like quizzes and calculators rounding out the top five most used.
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The tricks and tips and hacks for better content marketing are many. Read some. Read many.
“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson
And that brings us back full-circle. Knowing when your content marketing isn’t working is as important as knowing when it is…if not more so.
How can you tell if you’re on the wrong track and heading in the wrong direction?
Watch for (and respond!) to these five signposts along the way.
Signpost #1: The Wrong People Are Signing Up
Consider this hypothetical scenario: you launch an aggressive content campaign, complete with blog and social media posts, videos, and infographics, to promote your new SaaS product launch.
Everything has a rock-solid call-to-action inviting people to a free 7-day trial. They click the CTA button, are transported to a well-crafted landing page, and sign up.
That’s an undeniable content marketing win, right?
Wrong. It could be a win…depending on who is signing up. Numbers alone don’t answer that question. Even if you’re looking at an insane 60% conversion rate, it’s meaningless if those signing up are the wrong people.
So who are the “wrong” people? Anyone that’s not within your target market. They may be interested in your content for a wide variety of reasons – research, curiosity, education – but they’re not necessarily interested in your product or service.
Now, far be it for me to suggest that you shouldn’t ever target outside your market. I’m not, and you should. Sometimes your best customers down the road are the ones you’re not even considering at the moment.
A portion of signups outside your target audience is not only nothing to worry about, but a positive and worthwhile goal.
That said, if 50%, 60%, or 70%+ of your leads are falling outside of those you were targeting – wrong geographic location, industry, background, profession, income level, interests, or whatever – something’s wrong. If the majority of those signing up for your email newsletters, gated content, or free trials are nowhere near your ideal fit, your content marketing isn’t working.
Before you write a single line of blog post or send a single tweet, you need to be crystal-clear on your ideal customer. Get to know him or her. You’ve no doubt heard about the importance of buyer or customer personas. Build and use them to guide your content efforts. Do that, and the likelihood of the “wrong” people coming to your content goes down exponentially.
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Why? Because a detailed persona allows you to reverse engineer your content specifically for them: their wants, needs, pain points, values, and more. That’s more than half the battle.
If you’re just starting out, this is a bit more difficult, but not impossible. If you have existing customers and sales data to work with, though, you can zero in on the best of the best. According to Duct Tape Marketing:
Identify your most profitable customers.
Identify those who refer within that group.
Identify the common traits and characteristics within that small group.
Create a customer persona based on that data.
That’s your ideal, most profitable customer. Create content for him or her. Share it on the platforms he or she uses and spends the most time on.
Social platforms typically have built-in capabilities, such as Twitter Analytics audience insights dashboard.
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If you’re targeting English-speaking men over the age of 50, and your Analytics report shows most of your visitors are females under the age of 25 and from Italy, all those conversions – sign-ups, downloads, or otherwise – probably aren’t going to amount to much with your bottom line.
The sooner you know that, the sooner you can fix it. If the wrong people are signing up or downloading your lead magnets, you have to change direction. And fast.
Know exactly who you’re targeting, and give them exactly what they want and where they want it. Then monitor to make sure it’s drawing them in.
Signpost #2: Incompatible Backlink Profile
Backlinks are still important for your search engine optimization. In fact, many would argue that they’re the key to your overall SEO success. Quality backlinks from respected sites is a surefire indicator to Google and the rest of the search engine overlords that your content is valuable, useful, and worth a read. It’s a vote of confidence.
And that can translate into a big jump on the SERPs. The closer you are to that coveted top spot, the better the chance someone will click on your link. Increased traffic means increased leads, which means increased revenue. Google is happy, the users are happy, and you’re happy.
Backlinks and SEO go hand-in-hand. But backlinks can also tell you if there’s something amiss with your content marketing.
Imagine if your backlink profile – a report on which external sites are linking to your stuff – is populated with websites you wouldn’t expect your target market to visit. Good? Bad?
It depends on your criteria. If those sites are quality sites, those backlinks are still going to give you a healthy SEO boost. That’s good.
However, it may be evidence that your content is not resonating with your ideal customers. And that’s very, very bad. Your content, after all, is how you introduce yourself to them, educated them on your products and services, and persuade them to open their wallets. If it’s missing that mark, you’re failing at the marketing game. It’s the difference between leaving a flyer on hundreds of windshields in a mall parking lot, and hand-delivering to prospects you know would benefit from what you have to offer.
Luckily, generating a backlink profile and conducting a link audit is fast and easy, and there are many tools to assist with it.
To get a basic list, log in to Google Search Console. Click “Search Traffic” on the left-hand menu, and then select “Links to Your Site”. You’ll get a quick n’ dirty report with the total number of links, and the sites who link the most.
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Now, you can determine if the sites linking back to your content are within your “demographic”. Some you might recognize by name, others you may have to visit and evaluate.
For a more detailed analysis, you can try a dedicated backlink tool. Some of the best include:
Majestic
Ahrefs
Moz
SEMrush
Bing Webmaster Tools
If your target is recent university graduates, and you’re receiving backlinks from retirement agencies, there’s a mismatch. You’re not producing the right content to connect with those just entering the workforce.
If you’ve done your homework, you should have detailed customer personas. You should know not only who they are, but also what they need, and where they are. Too many people outside those parameters linking to your content is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not going to generate massive sales and revenue.
The sites linking to you are an indicator of who your content is reaching. If you’re targeting professionals, but most of your links are coming from gossip sites, stop. If you’re after grandparents, but Millennial Now is your biggest external source, halt.
Check your link profile. Ensure most of them are coming from sites your target audience would frequent to increase your exposure with them.
If not, re-evaluate. Switch tracks. Create more of what they want, need, and desire. Align your content with your customer.
Signpost #3: No One Is Sharing
Yes, I did tell you at the beginning of this post that shares and likes are a vanity metric. That’s still true. But do you know what else is true?
Great content gets shared.
If people are reading your content but not sharing it, then you’re not producing quality content and your marketing is failing. Period.
This is especially true with influencers in your niche. If you create enough fantastic content, eventually some influencers in your market will share that content. If they aren’t, that’s trouble.
Think about your own online behavior. When you read or encounter a great blog post, infographic, or video, you share it with your own fans, followers, friends, and family. It’s almost automatic. Every platform has the ability built-in, and third-party tools like Hootsuite and sharing plugins make it effortless and convenient.
We read or watch it, we instinctively share it. You want your content to be shared. You need your content to be shared.
Every time you create something, you want it to go viral. That kind of reach and exposure is the dream. While it may not happen for you, consistent social sharing increases your exposure exponentially. One retweet puts your content in front of a whole new set of eyes. It gets people talking about you and your brand. And the cycle repeats if only one person from that new group shares it again, and so on.
First, you need to track how many shares you’re getting with your existing content.
Tools like Hootsuite can monitor your mentions across social media, Google Alerts can notify you when your tracked keywords and phrases are used, Likealyzer analyzes your Facebook Page, Snaplytics provides data on both Snapchat and Instagram Stories, BuzzSumo shows you how content on your site is doing on social media, Google Analytics can report on how much traffic to your site is coming from social channels (under Acquisition > Social > Overview), SharesCount displays social shares based on individual URLs, and all-in-one management platforms like Sprout Social can monitor most of the major platforms from one dashboard.
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If you have no shares, you have some serious work to do. If you have some shares, more is always better. If you’re happy with the shares you’re seeing, you’re selling yourself and your content short.
“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” ~Andy Crestodina
More shares, more exposure. More exposure, more leads. More leads, more conversions. So, do everything you can to increase the amount of social sharing you’re already seeing:
Produce only incredibly high quality and valuable content. Share nothing but the best you have to offer.
Spend more time on your headline than you do on the rest of the piece. Your headline needs to hook them and force them to click, read, or watch.
Write on topics that are both relevant and timely. What’s trending in your niche?
Try tools like Click-To-Tweet or a scrolling share bar like AddThis to remove friction and allow your readers to share what and when they want.
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Make it easy to share with conveniently located share buttons at the top and/or side and/or bottom.
Ask them to share. Remind them to share.
Use compelling visuals.
Create evergreen content.
Increasing your social shares should be part of your content marketing strategy regardless of how many you’re currently seeing. Step 1: monitor your shares. Step 2: increase your shares.
None, few, or lots, more are better.
Signpost #4: Your Leads Aren’t Talking About Your Content
This one is reactive. You won’t know until you start generating some quality leads. It requires asking or surveying them about where and how they heard about you, your brand, and your products.
It might be a simple question in your email series or while talking to them on the phone, or a follow-up online survey, or a fill-in field on an opt-in form. “How did you hear about us?” is profitable and relevant data to collect.
The answers should be varied if you’ve diversified your marketing efforts. Some might say it was a referral from a friend, another might mention an online review or recommendation, while others may have clicked a PPC ad, or read a newspaper feature, or googled your targeted keyword.
But some of them will hopefully talk about your content. In a perfect world, they’ll bring it up without any solicitation from you, choosing to mention how much they loved your blog post on X, or how helpful they found your infographic on Y. That’s when you know your content marketing is crushing it.
Great content with great promotion should elicit great (and unsolicited) feedback.
“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” ~Gary Vaynerchuk
If none of your leads are talking about your content, that’s a major red flag. If none of them mention “content” when you ask, that’s a neon signpost. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Ask. And if the answer is anything and everything but content, you know you need to head back to the drawing board. Don’t stop whatever is working, of course, but tidy up your content efforts at the same time. It’s just too lucrative a tactic to allow it to fail so miserably.
Ask yourself: what do my ideal customers most need? What do they struggle with? How can I better/simplify/improve their lives?
Answer those questions and more with the content you create, and tongues will be wagging.
Signpost #5: Your Leads Want What You Can’t Do
Lead generation is a major part of any business plan. A steady stream of leads going in at the top of your sales funnel means a steady – albeit smaller – stream of customers and advocates exiting at the bottom.
But all leads are not created equal.
Picture this: the leads that are reaching out to you are asking about things you can’t or don’t do. Once or twice is an anomaly. But if it happens on a regular basis then your content is likely at fault.
Leads asking for something other than what you do is often a symptom of creating content that is not directly tied to the business.
If you’re in the analytics business, you should write about analytics. If you produce quality content on SEO as an extension of that, don’t be surprised if people contact you asking for SEO advice and solutions.
If leads are asking about things you can’t, don’t, or won’t do, you aren’t creating the right content for your business. Content marketing is supposed to introduce you as an expert and authority in your field. It’s supposed to initiate a discussion between you and those in need of what you have or do.
In your content efforts, stick to only those topics and sub-topics that are directly related to your product or service. Write only about those subjects. Talk, share, comment, and engage only in those areas.
Everything else is just noise.
“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” ~Doug Kessler
Conclusion
No traffic. No clicks. No leads. No ROI. Those are a few common reasons your content marketing isn’t working for you. Those are easy to recognize and relatively easy to correct. Jay Baer suggests four categories to fix a broken campaign:
Fix your topic(s).
Fix your amplification and promotion.
Fix your format(s).
Fix your creators.
But content marketing can fail in many less obvious ways. It’s your job to watch, monitor, and manage those silent killers.
The five discussed here are far from exhaustive. The list of potential content assassins is long. You’ve got to stay vigilant.
It is possible to get and stay on the right track heading in the right direction.
Over to you. What other ways have you found your content marketing falling short? What hiccups have you stumbled upon in your marketing? What red flags are you always on the look for?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2CvAwSv #Digital #Analytics #Website
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samiam03x · 7 years ago
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How to Know If Your Content Marketing Just Isn’t Working
Content is king.
And content marketing in 2018 remains a brilliant and cost-effective method for engaging with leads and customers, spreading brand awareness, and getting around the increasing use of ad-blockers.
Whether it’s an email newsletter, social media post, or blog on your own or someone else’s website, people want to see your stuff. They accept it. Approve it. Whitelist it. Because it’s the user him or herself clicking on it, there are no concerns of spam complaints, or annoying the recipient, or ending up in the junk folder.
It’s popular, powerful, and for all intents and purposes, perfect. If you’re online in any professional capacity, you’re already using it.
Google “content marketing” and you’ll uncover millions (78,200,000 when I did it just now) of results, everything from definitions to how-to guides to case studies. You can quickly and easily pick up the how, why, when, what, and where of content marketing. Every online marketing personality and business has their own advanced guide or step-by-step guide, allowing anyone to grasp, experiment, and eventually master the subtle art of content marketing.
“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” ~ Seth Godin
Strikingly, the only thing you won’t see much of in those millions upon millions of links is how to know when your content marketing isn’t working.
Because there’s a lot more to successful content marketing than just traffic and clicks, and a hell of a lot more than just likes, shares, and retweets. Those are simply vanity metrics that don’t tell you anything of importance by themselves…although it sure does feel nice to see people are loving your stuff.
Now, vanity metrics can be used to find actionable insight, but that’s the subject of another post on another day. Suffice to say, if you’re gauging the success of your content campaigns on likes and shares alone, you’re doing it wrong and wasting your time and energy.
Instead of focusing on the vanity metric, use it to inform your marketing decisions. Dig deeper. Find the corresponding actionable metric.
Content marketing is an active endeavor, and most of the hard work starts after you hit publish. It’s not about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people.
How do you know when you’re not doing that?
Look for these five red flags before and during the push.
Content Marketing 101
But before we get to that, let’s review some basics.
If you remember only one thing about content marketing, make it this: write your strategy down. Be explicit, detailed, and clear about goals (use SMART goals and stretch goals if applicable), tactics, channels, and how you’re going to measure success.
What will “success” look like? How will you measure return-on-investment? Make sure you and everyone on your team knows and understands.
How often will your marketing team meet? The most successful meet regularly to evaluate, tweak, and manage as necessary. Your content marketing should not be set-it-and-forget-it.
Target your ideal customers. Segment your audience. A/B test. Monitor your efforts. Create evergreen content. Measure the return-on-investment to maximize your budget. Look at your competitors and industry to see what’s working, what’s not, and what others are and are not doing.
In their 2018 annual report on content marketing, CMI discovered that only 38% of B2C businesses have a documented strategy. That’s appallingly low.
Document your strategy. Do that, and you’re ahead of 62% of the competition.
Diversify your tactics and channels. The same report found that B2C marketers:
Use an average of five social media platforms, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram the top five choices.
Use and average of four formats for distribution, with social media, email, blogs, in-person events, and print the five most popular.
Use an average of five different types of content, with social media posts, pre-produced videos, illustrations/photos, infographics, and interactive tools like quizzes and calculators rounding out the top five most used.
The tricks and tips and hacks for better content marketing are many. Read some. Read many.
“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson
And that brings us back full-circle. Knowing when your content marketing isn’t working is as important as knowing when it is…if not more so.
How can you tell if you’re on the wrong track and heading in the wrong direction?
Watch for (and respond!) to these five signposts along the way.
Signpost #1: The Wrong People Are Signing Up
Consider this hypothetical scenario: you launch an aggressive content campaign, complete with blog and social media posts, videos, and infographics, to promote your new SaaS product launch.
Everything has a rock-solid call-to-action inviting people to a free 7-day trial. They click the CTA button, are transported to a well-crafted landing page, and sign up.
That’s an undeniable content marketing win, right?
Wrong. It could be a win…depending on who is signing up. Numbers alone don’t answer that question. Even if you’re looking at an insane 60% conversion rate, it’s meaningless if those signing up are the wrong people.
So who are the “wrong” people? Anyone that’s not within your target market. They may be interested in your content for a wide variety of reasons – research, curiosity, education – but they’re not necessarily interested in your product or service.
Now, far be it for me to suggest that you shouldn’t ever target outside your market. I’m not, and you should. Sometimes your best customers down the road are the ones you’re not even considering at the moment.
A portion of signups outside your target audience is not only nothing to worry about, but a positive and worthwhile goal.
That said, if 50%, 60%, or 70%+ of your leads are falling outside of those you were targeting – wrong geographic location, industry, background, profession, income level, interests, or whatever – something’s wrong. If the majority of those signing up for your email newsletters, gated content, or free trials are nowhere near your ideal fit, your content marketing isn’t working.
Before you write a single line of blog post or send a single tweet, you need to be crystal-clear on your ideal customer. Get to know him or her. You’ve no doubt heard about the importance of buyer or customer personas. Build and use them to guide your content efforts. Do that, and the likelihood of the “wrong” people coming to your content goes down exponentially.
Why? Because a detailed persona allows you to reverse engineer your content specifically for them: their wants, needs, pain points, values, and more. That’s more than half the battle.
If you’re just starting out, this is a bit more difficult, but not impossible. If you have existing customers and sales data to work with, though, you can zero in on the best of the best. According to Duct Tape Marketing:
Identify your most profitable customers.
Identify those who refer within that group.
Identify the common traits and characteristics within that small group.
Create a customer persona based on that data.
That’s your ideal, most profitable customer. Create content for him or her. Share it on the platforms he or she uses and spends the most time on.
Social platforms typically have built-in capabilities, such as Twitter Analytics audience insights dashboard.
If you’re targeting English-speaking men over the age of 50, and your Analytics report shows most of your visitors are females under the age of 25 and from Italy, all those conversions – sign-ups, downloads, or otherwise – probably aren’t going to amount to much with your bottom line.
The sooner you know that, the sooner you can fix it. If the wrong people are signing up or downloading your lead magnets, you have to change direction. And fast.
Know exactly who you’re targeting, and give them exactly what they want and where they want it. Then monitor to make sure it’s drawing them in.
Signpost #2: Incompatible Backlink Profile
Backlinks are still important for your search engine optimization. In fact, many would argue that they’re the key to your overall SEO success. Quality backlinks from respected sites is a surefire indicator to Google and the rest of the search engine overlords that your content is valuable, useful, and worth a read. It’s a vote of confidence.
And that can translate into a big jump on the SERPs. The closer you are to that coveted top spot, the better the chance someone will click on your link. Increased traffic means increased leads, which means increased revenue. Google is happy, the users are happy, and you’re happy.
Backlinks and SEO go hand-in-hand. But backlinks can also tell you if there’s something amiss with your content marketing.
Imagine if your backlink profile – a report on which external sites are linking to your stuff – is populated with websites you wouldn’t expect your target market to visit. Good? Bad?
It depends on your criteria. If those sites are quality sites, those backlinks are still going to give you a healthy SEO boost. That’s good.
However, it may be evidence that your content is not resonating with your ideal customers. And that’s very, very bad. Your content, after all, is how you introduce yourself to them, educated them on your products and services, and persuade them to open their wallets. If it’s missing that mark, you’re failing at the marketing game. It’s the difference between leaving a flyer on hundreds of windshields in a mall parking lot, and hand-delivering to prospects you know would benefit from what you have to offer.
Luckily, generating a backlink profile and conducting a link audit is fast and easy, and there are many tools to assist with it.
To get a basic list, log in to Google Search Console. Click “Search Traffic” on the left-hand menu, and then select “Links to Your Site”. You’ll get a quick n’ dirty report with the total number of links, and the sites who link the most.
Now, you can determine if the sites linking back to your content are within your “demographic”. Some you might recognize by name, others you may have to visit and evaluate.
For a more detailed analysis, you can try a dedicated backlink tool. Some of the best include:
Majestic
Ahrefs
Moz
SEMrush
Bing Webmaster Tools
If your target is recent university graduates, and you’re receiving backlinks from retirement agencies, there’s a mismatch. You’re not producing the right content to connect with those just entering the workforce.
If you’ve done your homework, you should have detailed customer personas. You should know not only who they are, but also what they need, and where they are. Too many people outside those parameters linking to your content is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not going to generate massive sales and revenue.
The sites linking to you are an indicator of who your content is reaching. If you’re targeting professionals, but most of your links are coming from gossip sites, stop. If you’re after grandparents, but Millennial Now is your biggest external source, halt.
Check your link profile. Ensure most of them are coming from sites your target audience would frequent to increase your exposure with them.
If not, re-evaluate. Switch tracks. Create more of what they want, need, and desire. Align your content with your customer.
Signpost #3: No One Is Sharing
Yes, I did tell you at the beginning of this post that shares and likes are a vanity metric. That’s still true. But do you know what else is true?
Great content gets shared.
If people are reading your content but not sharing it, then you’re not producing quality content and your marketing is failing. Period.
This is especially true with influencers in your niche. If you create enough fantastic content, eventually some influencers in your market will share that content. If they aren’t, that’s trouble.
Think about your own online behavior. When you read or encounter a great blog post, infographic, or video, you share it with your own fans, followers, friends, and family. It’s almost automatic. Every platform has the ability built-in, and third-party tools like Hootsuite and sharing plugins make it effortless and convenient.
We read or watch it, we instinctively share it. You want your content to be shared. You need your content to be shared.
Every time you create something, you want it to go viral. That kind of reach and exposure is the dream. While it may not happen for you, consistent social sharing increases your exposure exponentially. One retweet puts your content in front of a whole new set of eyes. It gets people talking about you and your brand. And the cycle repeats if only one person from that new group shares it again, and so on.
First, you need to track how many shares you’re getting with your existing content.
Tools like Hootsuite can monitor your mentions across social media, Google Alerts can notify you when your tracked keywords and phrases are used, Likealyzer analyzes your Facebook Page, Snaplytics provides data on both Snapchat and Instagram Stories, BuzzSumo shows you how content on your site is doing on social media, Google Analytics can report on how much traffic to your site is coming from social channels (under Acquisition > Social > Overview), SharesCount displays social shares based on individual URLs, and all-in-one management platforms like Sprout Social can monitor most of the major platforms from one dashboard.
If you have no shares, you have some serious work to do. If you have some shares, more is always better. If you’re happy with the shares you’re seeing, you’re selling yourself and your content short.
“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” ~Andy Crestodina
More shares, more exposure. More exposure, more leads. More leads, more conversions. So, do everything you can to increase the amount of social sharing you’re already seeing:
Produce only incredibly high quality and valuable content. Share nothing but the best you have to offer.
Spend more time on your headline than you do on the rest of the piece. Your headline needs to hook them and force them to click, read, or watch.
Write on topics that are both relevant and timely. What’s trending in your niche?
Try tools like Click-To-Tweet or a scrolling share bar like AddThis to remove friction and allow your readers to share what and when they want.
Make it easy to share with conveniently located share buttons at the top and/or side and/or bottom.
Ask them to share. Remind them to share.
Use compelling visuals.
Create evergreen content.
Increasing your social shares should be part of your content marketing strategy regardless of how many you’re currently seeing. Step 1: monitor your shares. Step 2: increase your shares.
None, few, or lots, more are better.
Signpost #4: Your Leads Aren’t Talking About Your Content
This one is reactive. You won’t know until you start generating some quality leads. It requires asking or surveying them about where and how they heard about you, your brand, and your products.
It might be a simple question in your email series or while talking to them on the phone, or a follow-up online survey, or a fill-in field on an opt-in form. “How did you hear about us?” is profitable and relevant data to collect.
The answers should be varied if you’ve diversified your marketing efforts. Some might say it was a referral from a friend, another might mention an online review or recommendation, while others may have clicked a PPC ad, or read a newspaper feature, or googled your targeted keyword.
But some of them will hopefully talk about your content. In a perfect world, they’ll bring it up without any solicitation from you, choosing to mention how much they loved your blog post on X, or how helpful they found your infographic on Y. That’s when you know your content marketing is crushing it.
Great content with great promotion should elicit great (and unsolicited) feedback.
“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” ~Gary Vaynerchuk
If none of your leads are talking about your content, that’s a major red flag. If none of them mention “content” when you ask, that’s a neon signpost. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Ask. And if the answer is anything and everything but content, you know you need to head back to the drawing board. Don’t stop whatever is working, of course, but tidy up your content efforts at the same time. It’s just too lucrative a tactic to allow it to fail so miserably.
Ask yourself: what do my ideal customers most need? What do they struggle with? How can I better/simplify/improve their lives?
Answer those questions and more with the content you create, and tongues will be wagging.
Signpost #5: Your Leads Want What You Can’t Do
Lead generation is a major part of any business plan. A steady stream of leads going in at the top of your sales funnel means a steady – albeit smaller – stream of customers and advocates exiting at the bottom.
But all leads are not created equal.
Picture this: the leads that are reaching out to you are asking about things you can’t or don’t do. Once or twice is an anomaly. But if it happens on a regular basis then your content is likely at fault.
Leads asking for something other than what you do is often a symptom of creating content that is not directly tied to the business.
If you’re in the analytics business, you should write about analytics. If you produce quality content on SEO as an extension of that, don’t be surprised if people contact you asking for SEO advice and solutions.
If leads are asking about things you can’t, don’t, or won’t do, you aren’t creating the right content for your business. Content marketing is supposed to introduce you as an expert and authority in your field. It’s supposed to initiate a discussion between you and those in need of what you have or do.
In your content efforts, stick to only those topics and sub-topics that are directly related to your product or service. Write only about those subjects. Talk, share, comment, and engage only in those areas.
Everything else is just noise.
“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” ~Doug Kessler
Conclusion
No traffic. No clicks. No leads. No ROI. Those are a few common reasons your content marketing isn’t working for you. Those are easy to recognize and relatively easy to correct. Jay Baer suggests four categories to fix a broken campaign:
Fix your topic(s).
Fix your amplification and promotion.
Fix your format(s).
Fix your creators.
But content marketing can fail in many less obvious ways. It’s your job to watch, monitor, and manage those silent killers.
The five discussed here are far from exhaustive. The list of potential content assassins is long. You’ve got to stay vigilant.
It is possible to get and stay on the right track heading in the right direction.
Over to you. What other ways have you found your content marketing falling short? What hiccups have you stumbled upon in your marketing? What red flags are you always on the look for?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
http://ift.tt/2sCWkMh from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2CwymC9 via Youtube
0 notes
marie85marketing · 7 years ago
Text
How to Know If Your Content Marketing Just Isn’t Working
Content is king.
And content marketing in 2018 remains a brilliant and cost-effective method for engaging with leads and customers, spreading brand awareness, and getting around the increasing use of ad-blockers.
Whether it’s an email newsletter, social media post, or blog on your own or someone else’s website, people want to see your stuff. They accept it. Approve it. Whitelist it. Because it’s the user him or herself clicking on it, there are no concerns of spam complaints, or annoying the recipient, or ending up in the junk folder.
It’s popular, powerful, and for all intents and purposes, perfect. If you’re online in any professional capacity, you’re already using it.
Google “content marketing” and you’ll uncover millions (78,200,000 when I did it just now) of results, everything from definitions to how-to guides to case studies. You can quickly and easily pick up the how, why, when, what, and where of content marketing. Every online marketing personality and business has their own advanced guide or step-by-step guide, allowing anyone to grasp, experiment, and eventually master the subtle art of content marketing.
“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” ~ Seth Godin
Strikingly, the only thing you won’t see much of in those millions upon millions of links is how to know when your content marketing isn’t working.
Because there’s a lot more to successful content marketing than just traffic and clicks, and a hell of a lot more than just likes, shares, and retweets. Those are simply vanity metrics that don’t tell you anything of importance by themselves…although it sure does feel nice to see people are loving your stuff.
Now, vanity metrics can be used to find actionable insight, but that’s the subject of another post on another day. Suffice to say, if you’re gauging the success of your content campaigns on likes and shares alone, you’re doing it wrong and wasting your time and energy.
Instead of focusing on the vanity metric, use it to inform your marketing decisions. Dig deeper. Find the corresponding actionable metric.
Content marketing is an active endeavor, and most of the hard work starts after you hit publish. It’s not about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people.
How do you know when you’re not doing that?
Look for these five red flags before and during the push.
Content Marketing 101
But before we get to that, let’s review some basics.
If you remember only one thing about content marketing, make it this: write your strategy down. Be explicit, detailed, and clear about goals (use SMART goals and stretch goals if applicable), tactics, channels, and how you’re going to measure success.
What will “success” look like? How will you measure return-on-investment? Make sure you and everyone on your team knows and understands.
How often will your marketing team meet? The most successful meet regularly to evaluate, tweak, and manage as necessary. Your content marketing should not be set-it-and-forget-it.
Target your ideal customers. Segment your audience. A/B test. Monitor your efforts. Create evergreen content. Measure the return-on-investment to maximize your budget. Look at your competitors and industry to see what’s working, what’s not, and what others are and are not doing.
In their 2018 annual report on content marketing, CMI discovered that only 38% of B2C businesses have a documented strategy. That’s appallingly low.
Document your strategy. Do that, and you’re ahead of 62% of the competition.
Diversify your tactics and channels. The same report found that B2C marketers:
Use an average of five social media platforms, with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram the top five choices.
Use and average of four formats for distribution, with social media, email, blogs, in-person events, and print the five most popular.
Use an average of five different types of content, with social media posts, pre-produced videos, illustrations/photos, infographics, and interactive tools like quizzes and calculators rounding out the top five most used.
The tricks and tips and hacks for better content marketing are many. Read some. Read many.
“We need to stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.” ~ Craig Davis, former Chief Creative Officer at J. Walter Thompson
And that brings us back full-circle. Knowing when your content marketing isn’t working is as important as knowing when it is…if not more so.
How can you tell if you’re on the wrong track and heading in the wrong direction?
Watch for (and respond!) to these five signposts along the way.
Signpost #1: The Wrong People Are Signing Up
Consider this hypothetical scenario: you launch an aggressive content campaign, complete with blog and social media posts, videos, and infographics, to promote your new SaaS product launch.
Everything has a rock-solid call-to-action inviting people to a free 7-day trial. They click the CTA button, are transported to a well-crafted landing page, and sign up.
That’s an undeniable content marketing win, right?
Wrong. It could be a win…depending on who is signing up. Numbers alone don’t answer that question. Even if you’re looking at an insane 60% conversion rate, it’s meaningless if those signing up are the wrong people.
So who are the “wrong” people? Anyone that’s not within your target market. They may be interested in your content for a wide variety of reasons – research, curiosity, education – but they’re not necessarily interested in your product or service.
Now, far be it for me to suggest that you shouldn’t ever target outside your market. I’m not, and you should. Sometimes your best customers down the road are the ones you’re not even considering at the moment.
A portion of signups outside your target audience is not only nothing to worry about, but a positive and worthwhile goal.
That said, if 50%, 60%, or 70%+ of your leads are falling outside of those you were targeting – wrong geographic location, industry, background, profession, income level, interests, or whatever – something’s wrong. If the majority of those signing up for your email newsletters, gated content, or free trials are nowhere near your ideal fit, your content marketing isn’t working.
Before you write a single line of blog post or send a single tweet, you need to be crystal-clear on your ideal customer. Get to know him or her. You’ve no doubt heard about the importance of buyer or customer personas. Build and use them to guide your content efforts. Do that, and the likelihood of the “wrong” people coming to your content goes down exponentially.
Why? Because a detailed persona allows you to reverse engineer your content specifically for them: their wants, needs, pain points, values, and more. That’s more than half the battle.
If you’re just starting out, this is a bit more difficult, but not impossible. If you have existing customers and sales data to work with, though, you can zero in on the best of the best. According to Duct Tape Marketing:
Identify your most profitable customers.
Identify those who refer within that group.
Identify the common traits and characteristics within that small group.
Create a customer persona based on that data.
That’s your ideal, most profitable customer. Create content for him or her. Share it on the platforms he or she uses and spends the most time on.
Social platforms typically have built-in capabilities, such as Twitter Analytics audience insights dashboard.
If you’re targeting English-speaking men over the age of 50, and your Analytics report shows most of your visitors are females under the age of 25 and from Italy, all those conversions – sign-ups, downloads, or otherwise – probably aren’t going to amount to much with your bottom line.
The sooner you know that, the sooner you can fix it. If the wrong people are signing up or downloading your lead magnets, you have to change direction. And fast.
Know exactly who you’re targeting, and give them exactly what they want and where they want it. Then monitor to make sure it’s drawing them in.
Signpost #2: Incompatible Backlink Profile
Backlinks are still important for your search engine optimization. In fact, many would argue that they’re the key to your overall SEO success. Quality backlinks from respected sites is a surefire indicator to Google and the rest of the search engine overlords that your content is valuable, useful, and worth a read. It’s a vote of confidence.
And that can translate into a big jump on the SERPs. The closer you are to that coveted top spot, the better the chance someone will click on your link. Increased traffic means increased leads, which means increased revenue. Google is happy, the users are happy, and you’re happy.
Backlinks and SEO go hand-in-hand. But backlinks can also tell you if there’s something amiss with your content marketing.
Imagine if your backlink profile – a report on which external sites are linking to your stuff – is populated with websites you wouldn’t expect your target market to visit. Good? Bad?
It depends on your criteria. If those sites are quality sites, those backlinks are still going to give you a healthy SEO boost. That’s good.
However, it may be evidence that your content is not resonating with your ideal customers. And that’s very, very bad. Your content, after all, is how you introduce yourself to them, educated them on your products and services, and persuade them to open their wallets. If it’s missing that mark, you’re failing at the marketing game. It’s the difference between leaving a flyer on hundreds of windshields in a mall parking lot, and hand-delivering to prospects you know would benefit from what you have to offer.
Luckily, generating a backlink profile and conducting a link audit is fast and easy, and there are many tools to assist with it.
To get a basic list, log in to Google Search Console. Click “Search Traffic” on the left-hand menu, and then select “Links to Your Site”. You’ll get a quick n’ dirty report with the total number of links, and the sites who link the most.
Now, you can determine if the sites linking back to your content are within your “demographic”. Some you might recognize by name, others you may have to visit and evaluate.
For a more detailed analysis, you can try a dedicated backlink tool. Some of the best include:
Majestic
Ahrefs
Moz
SEMrush
Bing Webmaster Tools
If your target is recent university graduates, and you’re receiving backlinks from retirement agencies, there’s a mismatch. You’re not producing the right content to connect with those just entering the workforce.
If you’ve done your homework, you should have detailed customer personas. You should know not only who they are, but also what they need, and where they are. Too many people outside those parameters linking to your content is not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not going to generate massive sales and revenue.
The sites linking to you are an indicator of who your content is reaching. If you’re targeting professionals, but most of your links are coming from gossip sites, stop. If you’re after grandparents, but Millennial Now is your biggest external source, halt.
Check your link profile. Ensure most of them are coming from sites your target audience would frequent to increase your exposure with them.
If not, re-evaluate. Switch tracks. Create more of what they want, need, and desire. Align your content with your customer.
Signpost #3: No One Is Sharing
Yes, I did tell you at the beginning of this post that shares and likes are a vanity metric. That’s still true. But do you know what else is true?
Great content gets shared.
If people are reading your content but not sharing it, then you’re not producing quality content and your marketing is failing. Period.
This is especially true with influencers in your niche. If you create enough fantastic content, eventually some influencers in your market will share that content. If they aren’t, that’s trouble.
Think about your own online behavior. When you read or encounter a great blog post, infographic, or video, you share it with your own fans, followers, friends, and family. It’s almost automatic. Every platform has the ability built-in, and third-party tools like Hootsuite and sharing plugins make it effortless and convenient.
We read or watch it, we instinctively share it. You want your content to be shared. You need your content to be shared.
Every time you create something, you want it to go viral. That kind of reach and exposure is the dream. While it may not happen for you, consistent social sharing increases your exposure exponentially. One retweet puts your content in front of a whole new set of eyes. It gets people talking about you and your brand. And the cycle repeats if only one person from that new group shares it again, and so on.
First, you need to track how many shares you’re getting with your existing content.
Tools like Hootsuite can monitor your mentions across social media, Google Alerts can notify you when your tracked keywords and phrases are used, Likealyzer analyzes your Facebook Page, Snaplytics provides data on both Snapchat and Instagram Stories, BuzzSumo shows you how content on your site is doing on social media, Google Analytics can report on how much traffic to your site is coming from social channels (under Acquisition > Social > Overview), SharesCount displays social shares based on individual URLs, and all-in-one management platforms like Sprout Social can monitor most of the major platforms from one dashboard.
If you have no shares, you have some serious work to do. If you have some shares, more is always better. If you’re happy with the shares you’re seeing, you’re selling yourself and your content short.
“It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” ~Andy Crestodina
More shares, more exposure. More exposure, more leads. More leads, more conversions. So, do everything you can to increase the amount of social sharing you’re already seeing:
Produce only incredibly high quality and valuable content. Share nothing but the best you have to offer.
Spend more time on your headline than you do on the rest of the piece. Your headline needs to hook them and force them to click, read, or watch.
Write on topics that are both relevant and timely. What’s trending in your niche?
Try tools like Click-To-Tweet or a scrolling share bar like AddThis to remove friction and allow your readers to share what and when they want.
Make it easy to share with conveniently located share buttons at the top and/or side and/or bottom.
Ask them to share. Remind them to share.
Use compelling visuals.
Create evergreen content.
Increasing your social shares should be part of your content marketing strategy regardless of how many you’re currently seeing. Step 1: monitor your shares. Step 2: increase your shares.
None, few, or lots, more are better.
Signpost #4: Your Leads Aren’t Talking About Your Content
This one is reactive. You won’t know until you start generating some quality leads. It requires asking or surveying them about where and how they heard about you, your brand, and your products.
It might be a simple question in your email series or while talking to them on the phone, or a follow-up online survey, or a fill-in field on an opt-in form. “How did you hear about us?” is profitable and relevant data to collect.
The answers should be varied if you’ve diversified your marketing efforts. Some might say it was a referral from a friend, another might mention an online review or recommendation, while others may have clicked a PPC ad, or read a newspaper feature, or googled your targeted keyword.
But some of them will hopefully talk about your content. In a perfect world, they’ll bring it up without any solicitation from you, choosing to mention how much they loved your blog post on X, or how helpful they found your infographic on Y. That’s when you know your content marketing is crushing it.
Great content with great promotion should elicit great (and unsolicited) feedback.
“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” ~Gary Vaynerchuk
If none of your leads are talking about your content, that’s a major red flag. If none of them mention “content” when you ask, that’s a neon signpost. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.
Ask. And if the answer is anything and everything but content, you know you need to head back to the drawing board. Don’t stop whatever is working, of course, but tidy up your content efforts at the same time. It’s just too lucrative a tactic to allow it to fail so miserably.
Ask yourself: what do my ideal customers most need? What do they struggle with? How can I better/simplify/improve their lives?
Answer those questions and more with the content you create, and tongues will be wagging.
Signpost #5: Your Leads Want What You Can’t Do
Lead generation is a major part of any business plan. A steady stream of leads going in at the top of your sales funnel means a steady – albeit smaller – stream of customers and advocates exiting at the bottom.
But all leads are not created equal.
Picture this: the leads that are reaching out to you are asking about things you can’t or don’t do. Once or twice is an anomaly. But if it happens on a regular basis then your content is likely at fault.
Leads asking for something other than what you do is often a symptom of creating content that is not directly tied to the business.
If you’re in the analytics business, you should write about analytics. If you produce quality content on SEO as an extension of that, don’t be surprised if people contact you asking for SEO advice and solutions.
If leads are asking about things you can’t, don’t, or won’t do, you aren’t creating the right content for your business. Content marketing is supposed to introduce you as an expert and authority in your field. It’s supposed to initiate a discussion between you and those in need of what you have or do.
In your content efforts, stick to only those topics and sub-topics that are directly related to your product or service. Write only about those subjects. Talk, share, comment, and engage only in those areas.
Everything else is just noise.
“Traditional marketing talks at people. Content marketing talks with them.” ~Doug Kessler
Conclusion
No traffic. No clicks. No leads. No ROI. Those are a few common reasons your content marketing isn’t working for you. Those are easy to recognize and relatively easy to correct. Jay Baer suggests four categories to fix a broken campaign:
Fix your topic(s).
Fix your amplification and promotion.
Fix your format(s).
Fix your creators.
But content marketing can fail in many less obvious ways. It’s your job to watch, monitor, and manage those silent killers.
The five discussed here are far from exhaustive. The list of potential content assassins is long. You’ve got to stay vigilant.
It is possible to get and stay on the right track heading in the right direction.
Over to you. What other ways have you found your content marketing falling short? What hiccups have you stumbled upon in your marketing? What red flags are you always on the look for?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
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bonusmediaplus · 7 years ago
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What is Internet Marketing? Your Guide to Today's Online Marketing
Internet marketing is the most inexpensive way to reach your target market, regardless of the size of your business.
But what is internet marketing, really?
Defining Internet Marketing
Also called online marketing, internet marketing is the process of promoting a business or brand and its products or services over the internet using tools that help drive traffic, leads, and sales.
Internet marketing a pretty broad term that encompasses a range of marketing tactics and strategies – including content, email, search, paid media, and more.
These days, though, internet marketing is often used interchangeably with “content marketing.”
Because content marketing is the internet marketing of the present and future.
Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:
“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Think of it like this: content marketing (or inbound marketing) is in direct opposition to traditional advertising (outbound marketing), and in direct integration with the patterns and habits of today’s generation.
Content marketing serves up content that addresses our pain points, and is there when we want it.
Content Marketing vs. Traditional Advertising
Here’s the evolutional pathway behind the modernized form of marketing that is most successful today.
Selling no longer works (a.k.a., traditional advertising).
Traditional advertising focuses on pushing messages at the consumer to get them to buy.
It’s interruptive, obstructive, and intrusive.
It shouts, “Hey, look at me!” while waving its arms.
You may try to avoid eye contact, but traditional ads are persistent.
You know what traditional ads look like because you’re bombarded with them every single day.
Think TV commercials, billboards, magazine ads, radio ads, and web banner ads.
Ads have been around for a long time, as evidenced by this traditional ad for “honest-to-goodness” coffee from the 1950s.
Ads may still work in some strategic places.
But Internet users can just click away from ads if they don’t want to see them.
Which is exactly what happens.
You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.
And, they aren’t the way consumers prefer to learn about new products anymore.
Instead of businesses shoving themselves in consumers’ faces, they need to take a different, gentler approach.
Content marketing is exactly that.
Brands and marketers who use it publish content that teaches, inspires, guides, or solves a problem for their target audience.
With some handy tricks, the targets can find that content on the web without it being pushed at them.
If the prospects gain something useful from the content, they’ll keep coming back for more.
Finally, consumers can interact with the brand organically and share their content on social media.
Authority is established.
These loyal followers can then be converted into leads and sales – naturally.
All of the above happens with a focus on giving value to the user.
Help users – offer them value and they’ll reward you in return.
That is what internet marketing/content marketing is all about at its core.
Why Internet Marketing?
Now that you know what internet marketing is, you still may be wondering why there’s so much hype around it.
Well, the hype is totally founded.
Internet marketing has shown proven success over and over again.
Here are some stats gathered from around the web to help give you an idea of why internet/content marketing stands tall:
From my own content marketing endeavors, I have seen my small business take off.
With 99 percent of our focus on content marketing, we managed to grow our worth to millions of dollars.
Bottom line: This stuff works.
5 Content Examples: Providing Value for Big Returns
Reading about great content marketing is not enough to truly understand how it works. Instead, you have to see it in action to grasp its fundamental value.
Because when content is really good, it can do amazing things.
Here are some top examples of content types from brands who knocked content creation out of the park.
1. Blog Posts & Articles
One of the most common content types is blog posts and articles.
A blog, in particular, is a great content platform because it gives you a foundation for lots of posts, pages, and content that all point back to your site.
Think of a blog as a tree trunk. Your individual blog posts are the branches that reach out into the corners of the internet and search engines. Users can find your branches and follow them back to your core site. That gives you a greater shot at leads and sales.
For a great example of blogging content, look to Content Marketing Institute. They create troves of valuable, useful content for content marketers in order to teach, instruct, guide, or inspire.
Devoted fans, followers, and customers for their events, training, and consulting.
2. Infographics
Infographics are fun, visual ways to present valuable information.
They use charts, graphs, pictures, and illustration to explain concepts. This type of content is easily digestible and totally shareable.
Here’s a fantastic example of an infographic about baking bread from RJ Zaworski:
And here’s another highly-shared infographic from Curata about the anatomy of a content marketer:
3. Case Studies
Another popular and effective form of content is a case study.
In general, a case study is an in-depth look at some action your brand or business completed that had measurable results for success.
Usually, this translates into something you accomplished for a client.
Here’s a great example of a case study by Fractl:
In it, the agency showcases how they executed a successful content campaign for a real estate brand. They talk about how it came together, the “whys” of the project, and the results (presented in measurable stats).
This type of content is an awesome trust-builder for obvious reasons.
4. Podcasts
For those of you who shudder at the thought of writing a blog post or in-depth article or case study, there are content mediums out there for you.
They’re similar to the storytelling and news radio shows of yore, except people can download them and listen to episodes however and whenever they want.
If you are a good speaker or interviewer, this content format can be a great one for sharing valuable information with your audience.
For an example, check out Search Engine Journal’s Search Engine Nerds, about SEO, paid search, social media, and content marketing.
5. Videos
Videos are the hottest content type right now.
The stats are staggering. According to Social Media Today:
It’s easy to see why videos dominate.
Videos are simple to consume, they’re entertaining, and they appeal to the current attention-span deficit that we suffer from when we surf the web.
What You Need for Internet Marketing
So, you’re totally on-board for this internet marketing thing.
You love the idea of getting creative, sharing value with your prospects/audience, and building brand loyalty and customer relationships organically.
Hold on a second, though.
You can’t just jump into this blindly.
You need to understand the key pieces of successful internet marketing, first.
A Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing without a strategy will ultimately fail – it’s just the sad truth.
You must have a direction, a plan, the right tools, and ways to measure your progress if you expect to get anywhere.
Goals. This is vital. You have to know where you want to go, and what success will look like for you (and you alone), before you can head down the road to get there.
Your Brand Persona and Target Audience. When you eventually start creating content, you have to know who you’re talking to and tailor your brand voice to appeal to them uniquely. If you aren’t targeting the right audience (those people who will lean in to hear what you’re saying), you won’t find success. And, if you can’t find a way to stand out, you’ll blend into the hordes of other brands competing for attention in your industry.
Keywords and Research. Once you know the why and the who, you have to address the how. How will you reach your audience? What do they want to learn, what problems do they need to solve? Research keywords to target to get found in search engine results, and find topics that have an inherent interest for your audience before you create any content.
Content Focus and Commitments. What types of content will you create? How often will you post? Where will you post? You have to nail down these foundations so you can create content with consistency and quality.
Content Creation. Once you have topics, keywords, a distinct voice, and a target audience, you can create content. However, if your content isn’t really good, you’re wasting your time. Get help if you need it, spend the time to tweak and perfect your output, and always put out the best content you can.
Content Promotion. Your content will go much farther if you promote it the right ways. Promotion is even more effective if you plan when you publish your pieces, strategize about publishing on your blog and sharing on social media, and build up a community of followers who can help push your engagement over the top.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
These two pieces together help power-up your organic (read: free) reach and visibility on the internet.
SEO encompasses a variety of techniques that help get you into prime spots on search engine results pages (SERPs). This means people can find you just by looking up some topic they’re interested in or need help with.
The overarching goal of good SEO is to get your site pages ranked on the first page of Google. (After all, most people rarely, if ever, click to Page 2 on their quest for information.)
Here are some basic SEO techniques that will help your content get indexed and ranked in search results:
Strategically-placed keywords – You should place your target keyword in the headline, in subheaders, in the content, and in the meta description to help Google immediately pinpoint what it’s about.
A well-designed, well-organized site – Google looks at how usable your site is, or how easy it is for people to click around, find what they’re looking for, and read your content.
Clean page URLs – The URL structure for your pages shouldn’t be gibberish (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/blog/content123xyz-asdfkla). They should be simple and easy to read (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/blog/how-to-do-seo).
A Boost from Paid Methods
Organic search can give you great click-through rates. It also gives you the benefit of the inherent trust people have in Google results.
However, sometimes investing in paid search can give you a boost.
Use paid search to remarket to visitors who found your site through organic search, and tailor ads for them based on their experience.
Test different versions of ad copy (A/B testing) to see which performs better – then use what you learned for your landing pages on your site.
Paid search can increase your visibility in ways that organic search cannot, such as giving you air-time for high-volume keywords for which you’d have a hard time organically ranking.
The combination of paid search and content marketing gives you a cohesive internet marketing whole.
Organic and paid traffic can merge to net you higher visibility and better results for driving traffic, which can increase your leads and sales.
Patience & Fortitude
Content marketing requires some pieces that are far less tangible than strategy or SEO, but are perhaps the most important.
When it’s truly successful, content marketing is a long-term strategy.
It takes time to start seeing the ROI from your content efforts.
The blog post you publish today will not pay off by tomorrow, next week, or even next month.
Instead, you must have the patience and fortitude to wait months – maybe even up to a year or longer – to start seeing the returns.
Content marketing is internet marketing that builds momentum over time. HubSpot calls this phenomenon “compounding.”
High-quality content gets increased visits over time. This helps build the page’s authority, and can increase its reach through the ways people interact with the content as they discover it.
Think linking, sharing, engaging, and more.
Most importantly, all of these compounding returns can help your content climb the Google ranks, which in turn helps it reach more people organically.
Pretty soon, your hard work on that post starts paying off in spades.
It doesn’t happen right away, but it will happen if you set up your content for success, with strategy.
It just takes patience and fortitude to see it through, and to keep putting out content with the months ahead in mind.
What Now? How to Dive into Internet Marketing
By now, you may be hopping with excitement about this thing called content marketing.
You want to dive in, like right now.
If you’re ready and raring to go, here’s what to do next:
1. Pace Yourself & Set Goals
Pacing yourself is essential to doing it right – otherwise, you’ll start spinning your wheels, and burnout will be inevitable.
Instead, take stock of where you are in your business.
Think ahead to where you want to go in the next year.
Do you already have customers?
Do you have a website?
Are you starting from square one?
Make your goals achievable (but not too easy), and make them measurable.
Need some guidance about goals?
Here are some tips from CMI on setting goals, including how to tie them to key performance indicators (KPIs).
2. Secure Your Content ‘Home Base’
For content creation, lead gathering, and more, you need a home base on the web.
Where your content will live.
What you’ll link to when you share your content on social.
Where you’ll gather leads from the traffic you pull in.
If you don’t have a website, start researching options.
If you have a website, make sure it’s optimized, user-friendly, and organized by following SEO and usability best practices.
3. Start Strategizing
Now that you have goals, a home for your content, and enthusiasm, it’s time to surge ahead with the rest of your content marketing strategy.
We’ve already discussed strategy, but here are the actionable steps that make it work:
6 Key, Actionable Steps for Content Strategizing
Target audience research and brand persona development
Keyword research and SEO opportunity research
Topic ideation and content planning
Creating/writing/producing content
Community building and nurturing
Sharing and promoting content on social channels
This is a broad list. Each step has its own set of actions and planning involved.
It’s important not to skip any steps. Each is vital for winning at content marketing.
Yes – this takes time, effort, planning, patience, fortitude, and teamwork to get it all done.
Once you get your internet marketing rolling, though, just one piece of content in your arsenal can have an impact like this:
And that’s just what one piece of content can do.
Imagine if you started up a consistent, quality content publishing schedule and built your cache of content assets.
The possibilities are unreal.
…But only if you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.
Dig in, plot your course, get creative, build relationships, and enjoy the internet marketing of today.
It’s different from what you’re used to – it has a beating heart.
But that’s a great thing.
More Content Marketing Resources:
Image Credits In-Post Photo #1: Voltier Digital In-Post Photo #2: Flickr In-Post Photos #3-4, #7-8: Screenshots taken by Julia McCoy, January 2018 In-Post Photo #5: RJ Zaworski In-Post Photo #6: Curata In-Post Photo #9: HubSpot In-Post Photo #10: Express Writers
Source
http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/13962/7987667
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sebotech-blog · 8 years ago
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Numbers don't lie—it's an ideal opportunity to manufacture your own particular switch With more speed accessible and equipment that can't adjust, DIY fabricates offer pinnacle performance.
I've seen a pattern of late. As opposed to supplanting a switch when it actually quits working, I've expected to act before—swapping in new rigging on the grounds that an old switch could no longer stay aware of expanding Internet speeds accessible in the territory. (Note, I am properly grateful for this issue.) As the most recent case, an entire cluster of Netgear ProSafe 318G switches fizzled me for the last time as independent ventures have overhauled from 1.5-9mbps conventional T1 associations with 50mbps persuade (link).
Yes, urge—not fiber. Indeed, even persuade has demonstrated excessively for the old ProSafe arrangement. These gadgets didn't simply neglect to keep up, they failed on their appearances. As often as possible, the old switches dropped speed test comes about because of 9mbps with the old association with 3mbps or less with the 50mbps association. Clearly, that doesn't fly.
Nowadays, the appropriate response progressively is by all accounts remote switches. These have a tendency to be long on smooth looking plastic and splendidly hued Web interfaces however short on specialized components and dependability. What's a hired fighter sysadmin to do? All things considered, at its center, anything with two physical system interfaces can be a switch. What's more, today, there are parts and loads of generally quick, cheap, and (super imperative!) completely strong state nonexclusive boxes out there.
Along these lines, the time had at long last come. Confronted with maturing equipment and new purchaser offerings that didn't address my issues, I chose to fabricate my own switch. Also, if today's transforming network scene abandons you in a comparative position, surprisingly both the building and the manufacture are very quick.
Why do it the most difficult way possible
A great deal of you are likely murmuring, "right, pfSense, beyond any doubt." Some of you may even be considering smoothwall or unwind NG. I played with the greater part of the firewall distros out there, however I chose to go more essential, more old school: a plain, CLI-just introduce of Ubuntu Server and a couple iptables rules.
As a matter of fact, this presumable isn't the most handy approach for each peruser, however it seemed well and good for me. I have a considerable amount of experience finessing iptables and the Linux bit itself for high throughput at Internet scale, and the less sparkling elements and illustrations and clicky things that are put amongst me and the firewall table, the less lighten I need to escape the way and the less new not-pertinent in whatever is left of my-work things I need to learn. Any administer I definitely know how to make in iptables to oversee access to my servers, I additionally know how to apply to my firewall—if my firewall's running an indistinguishable distro from my servers are.Also, I work pretty vigorously with OpenVPN, and I need to have the capacity to keep setting up both its servers and customers in the way I as of now depend on. Some firewall distros have OpenVPN bolster worked in and some don't, however even the ones with constructed ins have a tendency to anticipate that things will run uniquely in contrast to I do. Once more, the more the framework remains out of my way, the more joyful I'll be.
As an extra reward, I realize that I can without much of a stretch stay up with the latest on my new and totally vanilla Ubuntu switch. It's altogether upheld specifically by Canonical, and it can (and does) all have programmed refreshes turned on. Add the intermittent cron occupation to reboot the switch (to get new pieces), and I'm brilliant.
Equipment, equipment, equipment
We'll experience the how-to in a future piece, yet today it's essential to set up why a DIY switch assemble might be the best alternative. To do that, you initially need to see today's broad scene.
In the shopper world, switches for the most part have itty-bitty little MIPS CPUs in the engine without a ton of RAM (to understate the obvious). These switches to a great extent separate themselves from each other in light of the interface: How sparkling is it? What number of specialized elements does it have? Could clients make sense of it effectively?
At the higher end of the SOHO showcase, you begin seeing some cell phone review ARM CPUs and significantly more RAM. These switches—like the Nightgear Nighthawk arrangement, one of which we'll be pounding on later—include numerous centers, higher clock speeds, and a ton more RAM. They additionally include considerably higher sticker prices than the less expensive rivalry. I got a Linksys EA2750 for $89, however the Netgear Nighthawk X6 I got with it was almost three times more costly (even on vacation deal!) at $249.Still, I needed to go an alternate course. A ton of fascinating and sensibly economical little x86-64 fanless machines have begun appearing available of late. The trap for building a switch is discovering one with different NICs. You can discover two or three genuinely sure things on Amazon, yet they're more established Atom-based processors, and I needed a more up to date Celeron. After some great out-dated Internet scouring and dithering, at long last I took the Alibaba dive and requested myself another Partaker Mini PC from Shenzhen Inctel Technology Company. After $240 for the switch itself and another $48 for a 120GB Kingston SSD from Newegg, I'd spent about $40 more on the Homebrew Special than I had on the Nighthawk. Would it be justified, despite all the trouble?
A challenger shows up
Before we kick testing off, how about we investigate the competitors.That Nighthawk is, by correlation with the others, HUGE and forcing (considerably more so than the photo makes it show up). It's quite bigger than my Homebrew Special, which is a completely utilitarian, broadly useful PC you could use as an impeccably skillful desktop. It resembles DC Comics asked H.R. Giger to help outlining a remote switch for Batman.
The Homebrew Special itself is kinda charming. It has one blue and one red LED inside the case, and around evening time, the light from both spills out of its cooling vents in a roundabout way, giving the system stack a happy gathering look. On the off chance that there were any fans to bring about a glimmering it would make me crazy, yet since it's a consistent state delicate shine, I really like it.The Linksys and the Buffalo, then again, look like precisely what they are—shoddy switches. Notwithstanding, it's important the styling on the Linksys is a major change over the brand's past. It looks more like something expert and less like a youngsters' toy. (Be that as it may, enough about the styling—it's a great opportunity to put these poor switches through the gauntlet.)
The undeniable first test is a straightforward transfer speed test. You put one PC on the LAN side and one PC on the WAN side, and you run a clever little instrument called iperf through the center. Straightforward, right?Well, that would make for a short, exhausting article. The system itself measures gigabit, the three gigabit switches measure gigabit, and the 100 megabit switch measures 100 megabit.
In reality, a test this straightforward doesn't start to recount the story. The main motivation to do it might be to show how trivial it is. Switch makers are winding up noticeably more mindful that individuals really test their item, and no producer needs its item to be anyplace however the highest point of something like smallnetbuilder's switch graph. In light, makers are effectively pursuing details nowadays.
The issue is, details are simply details. Having the capacity to hit a high number on an unadulterated throughput test is superior to nothing, yet it's a long ways from the entire story. I discovered that lesson the most difficult way possible while working for a T-1 merchant in the mid 2000s. Their to a great degree costly Adtran modems could deal with 50 to 100 individuals' ordinary Internet utilization fine and dandy, however a solitary client running Limewire or some other P2P customer would bring the entire thing down instant. (The settle in those days: put an economical yet wonderful $150 Netopia switch before that costly Adtran modem. Issue tackled.)
Notwithstanding for generally straightforward directing—no profound bundle assessment, no gushing malware filtering or interruption location, no molding—the CPU and the RAM accessible to the switch are both imperative well beyond the capacity to immerse the Internet connect. Shared filesharing is about the most fierce action a system will see, nowadays (regardless of whether it's bittorrent, one of the Gnutella or eDonkey variations, or an amusement organization's distributed download framework). I was done playing WoW when Blizzard's P2P dissemination framework was presented, however my flat mate at the time wasn't. On its dispatch day, the new WoW peer download framework unhelpfully defaulted to no throttling at all. It happily attempted to discover and keep up associations with truly a huge number of customers at the same time, and my home system went down like Gilbert Godfried getting handled by Terry Tate. My flat mate and I had words.
In light of such past experience, I would prefer just not to insignificantly "test" my challengers and throw in the towel, I need to truly make them sweat. So to do that, will hit them with workloads that anxiety three issue territories: soaking the system connection, making and breaking singular TCP/IP associations truly rapidly, and holding huge quantities of individual TCP/IP associations open at the same Time.i have a botnet in my pocket, and I'm prepared to shake it
I quickly considered setting up some sort of ghastly, Docker-fueled giant with a huge number of Linux holders with individual IP addresses, all clamoring for associations and additionally serving up pages. At that point I woke up. To the extent the switches are worried, there's no distinction between keeping up associations with a huge number of individual IP locations or just to a huge number of ports on a similar IP address. I invested a tiny bit of energy transforming Lee Hutchinson's most loved webserver nginx into an absurd Lovecraftian beast with 10,000 heads and a hunger for demolition.
For every switch, I utilized ApacheBench to test downloading a jpeg with three diverse record sizes (10K, 100K, and 1M) at four distinctive simultaneousness levels (10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000 synchronous customers). This gives us 12 tests altogether, not including our underlying iperf test, and it merits seeing them all as a sort.
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