#i type in the notes so as not to clutter my follower’s dashboards with all the e-barfights i get into

[theriu]

Hey guys! So I have definitely had some Feelings about this post, but you know what? Despite my severe dislike of some parts of this, there are some good concepts in this plan, too. I do want to acknowledge the bits I think sound like good ideas and show that we as users aren’t JUST raging about everything. So in an effort to be fair, I’m going to point out a few points that are smart AND a few that do not make any sense from my 10+ years experience. I hope this will be helpful!

✅

This is a little vague, but I do like the direction. Tumblr CAN be cofusing when you are just getting started; the tag system especially was mystifying to me when I first logged on in 2012. I’m all for exploring ways to help new users understand how to get started! Perhaps a simple popup tutorial when a person makes their first account, like on some game apps?

❌

What… I don’t… what???? Literally every person I have ever talked to or heard from on this subject (in OVER TEN YEARS) has said that the ability to curate our experience is a PRIMARY OPTIMAL FEATURE of tumblr! Who are you guys talking to who made you think this only serves a small portion of your audience?!? Curatability is one of your most unique and biggest assets!

✅

That sounds like a good idea, honestly! I personally enjoy getting lots of notes, but I know lots of people seek ways to mute notifications when they have a post go viral. This seems like a nice way to help users be less afraid of their posts blowing up (or at least minimize the debris XD) I don’t use push notifications myself but I assume this would also apply there.

❌

I’m guessing this is one of the points that had people thinking you guys were messing with the chronological feed. I point again at my confusion over your claim that a curated dashboard experience is a negative—we do not want random posts from people we don’t follow showing up on our dashboards, mainly because we do not trust algorithms to understand what we as individuals like. Consider how many of us never touch the For You tab because most of the posts on there completely miss the mark.

✅

I’m down for this! The app is certainly slow and buggy sometimes. (As I type this, my keyboard is lagging at least one letter behind what I am typing.) The second claim is kinda vague, but I think we can all agree fewer bugs would be appreciated!

❌❌❌

Tumblr.

@staff .

I am holding your face gently in my hands.

I am begging you with tears in my eyes

PLEASE OH PLEASE PLEASE NO DO NOT!!! COLLAPSE!!! THE REBLOG THREADS!!!

There is NO WAY an algorithm can reliably differentiate “clutter” from “vital pieces of a reblog conversation that are essential to making it funny.” This will inevitably truncate the conversations that are the main reason most viral tumblr posts go viral! More times than not, it’s not the FIRST part of a post that makes it classic—it’s the responses that build off it.

And remember your point about making it easier for new users to engage with the site? Skipping to the end of a chain or not being able to see WHY a post is funny or compelling without the extra (annoying) action of clicking some tiny dropdown arrow will make new users AND old users even less inclined to engage with posts! If ANY bullet point on this list can be rescinded, I BEG you to make it this one!

To wrap up: I do think some of the changes and improvements you guys are working on sound good! I just ask on behalf of myself and other users: Please consider how you can improve the TUMBLR experience, not how you can make us into a new twitter or reddit (both sites that use collapsible reblogs AND are currently having Major Issues). We’re not looking for more of those sites; we love tumblr because it’s the only social media site like it: a self-curated place to interact at the level each of us is comfortable with and share each others’ great posts and interactions, without feeling like products instead of people. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we stay.

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[classlutup]

Saw your post about where the TGM fandom is and if you're using Tumblr correctly.

I have been on this hellsite (affectionate) for twelve years now so let me share my hard earned knowledge with you:

The first thing you have to remember is that your main dashboard has absolutely NO algorithm. Tumblr does not fill your main dashboard with things it thinks you'll like, you have to find your own. Which means everything you see on your dash is totally dependent on who you follow and what they post and/or reblog. Because people will only see your stuff if a) they're following you b) someone they're following reblogs your stuff or c) they come across your stuff when searching through specific tags. Basically, unlike almost every other social media app/site, likes do absolutely NOTHING for engagement. In fact, most people use likes as a way to save something to read or look at later (that's I use them 99% of the time).

Now for tags, keep in mind that only the first 20 tags on a post are used by Tumblr to make your post searchable. Any tag after 20 is you just shouting into the void because Tumblr won't use those. Lots of people also use the tags to add their commentary on a post they're reblogging so as not to clutter up the original post. And lots of people also use the tags to just shout out their emotions and feels into the void as well.

Some people are extremely methodical and super organized when it comes to tagging their posts, while others either don't tag at all or tag randomly and haphazardly. It's also common for people to have a very specific tag for specific types of posts to make it easier for people to both search and/or block certain types of posts. Examples of those would be people having a specific tag for when a post is about their personal life or using a specific tag for posts that are just about writing or tagging all ask answers with a specific tag.

Also keep in mind that reblogs don't show up in tag searches, only original posts do. But it's still a good idea to tag anything you reblog since people can search your blog for specific tags. Another thing to remember about tags is that anyone can see what tags you use on a reblog (you can sort the notes on a post to show you just reblogs w/comments & tags).

And if you really like someones tags on a post you want to reblog, feel free to either copy them into your reblog or take a screenshot of them and post that to your reblog. Doing so is very common and seen as kind of a badge of honor on Tumblr that someone thought your tags were good enough/funny enough to make sure more people see them. Common things to add when doing so are phrases like "why are you hiding this perfection in the tags?" or "you can't just say that and hide it in the tags". It's also common courtesy to tag the person whose tags you're sharing.

It's also common courtesy that if you want to rant about something you don't like you either a) don't use it's tag or b) tag it as anti-X. For example, there is a ship or fandom you don't like and you decide to post a rant about it. Don't tag it "ship name/fandom" but instead tag it as "anti-ship name/anti-fandom". That way your negative post won't show up when people who do like the thing are searching that particular tag.

Tumblr also likes to be really weird sometimes and randomly hide posts from tags for no apparent reason. And since people from all over the world use Tumblr, sometimes you have to post things at different times of day for more people to see it. It's not uncommon to see someone reblogging their own post with a tag or comment that says something like "reblogging for the morning/evening crowd".

Just remember that for the most part Tumblr is a fun and unique corner of the internet. Hope all of this helps! ☺️

Oh wow this is a chunky one I feel like I need to take notes.

So I need to follow people I think are funny, tell people they're funny, show I'm funny, be nice and generally not a dick.

Shouldn't be too hard. I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and cross my fingers??

Thank you so much for this lovely long tell, I cannot tell you how much it means to me!!

[qinghe-s]

GETTING TO KNOW ME

i was tagged by @melodious-tear ♥

why did you choose your url?

i feel like that’s obvious to anyone who’s followed me for, like, two days. i know where my heart belongs. besides, the aesthetic of cql!qinghe fucks

any side-blogs? if you have them, name them and why you have them.

well, this. i also run @masseffectcaps although i haven’t posted in a few months; i probably will again once i get my hands on the legendary edition. i started it because original default female shepard didn’t get the respect she deserves from bioware especially. don’t get me started on this bc i will not shut up. i have a lot of feelings.

@celestecraft used to be popular on mineblr; i went on a lot of adventures while playing with a small group of friends and wanted to save them in some way + sharing a hobby is fun. in the past i also had a fairly well-known lgbtq+ blog and a terry pratchett-centric one but that was years ago and my energy to keep up with providing things for others (rather than just enjoying myself) waned.

how long have you been on tumblr?

t...twelve years by now... oh no

do you have a queue tag?

nah. i used to, on my personal, but i almost exclusively post things through the queue so it doesn’t feel like it matters.

why did you start your blog in the first place?

i was lured into this fandom because a good friend of mine played a character based on him in a d&d oneshot and i was immediately and helplessly charmed, saw this gifset a little while later and told her “this. this will make me watch your show” and, well.

it started consuming enough brain space, especially as i was reading the book, that it made sense to keep it contained rather than expose my original followers to this endlessly when they come for — actually i don’t know. pretentious aesthetic and me being gay over star trek women (well, janeway, mainly) and crying over mass effect?

why did you choose your icon/pfp?

that woman is wife city to me. it was nhs previously because... baby

why did you choose your header?

it matches my blog background on desktop. that’s it. it’s for the aesthetic.

what’s your post with the most notes?

on this blog it’s probably this one of me calling lwj a bitch (honorific). i believe this wangxian fic i wrote for vday is a close second. (a couple of my gifsets of nie mingjue looking beautiful are gaining though which is very pleasing to me)

i also have a few posts that have reached the thousands on my mass effect blog, but i don’t keep track of those anymore.

how many followers do you have?

five hundred... something. six hundred? who knows.

how many people do you follow?

a couple of hundred? many are lgbtq+ resource blogs that post very infrequently though, so my dash generally isn’t that cluttered

have you ever made a shitpost?

a couple! i’m not all that funny (perk of being my friend is that you’ll always be the funny one, it’s the main service i provide) but the bitch!lwj one and an outofcontextyaoi text post edit.

how often do you use tumblr each day?

ehh, depends. some days i’ll only check in at night and refresh the dash once in a while when doing other things, other days my brain requires constant input and i’ll open the app on my phone every hour. there is no average.

did you have a fight/argument with a blog once?

yeah, but not here. i pissed a lot of people off a few years ago when i expressed my opinion on sexist portrayals of women in video games in general and mass effect specifically. my opinion was sexism = bad and some people decided that i was wrong and it’s empowering to put career soldiers in styled hair and a full face of makeup for the sake of marketing, actually, while male characters get to have weathered faces and grey hair. it was a fun time. (it was not)

how do you feel about ‘you need to reblog this post’?

my dashboard is carefully curated and i never see those posts. are they still common? because they suck. don’t guilt people into caring.

do you like tag games?

mostly, yeah! sometimes they require energy i simply don’t have but i also think they’re a nice way to interact without having a direct conversation

do you like ask games?

i’m a lot less fond of those, personally. the chain letter type in particular.

which of your mutuals do you think is tumblr famous?

a lot of them are well known in the fandom actually! which makes me question why they follow me but i am always flattered

do you have a crush on a mutual?

oh absolutely @evakant since we decided we were willing to die for each other after one conversation. wenzhou levels of love happening here.

i’m gonna tag already-mentioned @evakant because reasons but also some people i see in my notes a lot but haven’t talked to — feel free to ignore but also let’s be friends ♥

@shippingsavesmylife @radishsizhui @ahatfullofwords @inappropriatewenning @whateverthemoonhasalwaysmeant

[drcyan]

woaaah chill out, vegeta

I’d bet money that the only economic systems twitter OP and wack-ashimself could actually name would be capitalism, socialism, and communism, and their actual definitions would all be wrong.

I’d love to know how capitalism sabotaged mercantilism, or feudalism.

If you ever find yourself going “the only problem with X is that we couldn’t keep Y from making it fail”, you might want to sit down and have a think. Especially if your side’s previous line was “real X has never been tried!”

@capitalism-and-analytics

[prolestariwrites]

Time To Go [2]: Dante Makes Hot Dogs And Doesn’t Get Laid

Fandom: Devil May Cry Rating: M Characters: Nero, Dante, Vergil, Kyrie, Nico, Trish, Morrison Tags: Mystery, Humor, Missing Person, First Time, Family Drama, Family Bonding, Post-Canon Chapter: 2/9 Chapter [1]

Summary: When Kyrie goes missing, Nero goes on a desperate search to find her. Unfortunately, Dante and Vergil go too. Sparda boys shenanigans, fighting demons, a smattering of family drama, and male bonding (otherwise known as Nero’s worst nightmare). Please check it out below, or you can read on FFNet or AO3. Beta read by @copper-wasp.

Now posted! Chapter 2: Dante Makes Hot Dogs And Doesn't Get Laid, in which Dante and Nero get a clue to what happened to Kyrie.

━━━━━━━✧━━━━━━━

Dante can feel the tension radiating from Nero as he drives the van back towards Fortuna. The kid hadn’t said anything since Dante insisted on the keys, slouched instead in the passenger seat as he stared out the window. It had taken every last ounce of his wits to navigate the city streets—driving the van after being used to his bike felt like he might as well be driving a whale—but now that they are on the highway, he relaxes a bit and glances over.

“Still nothing?” he asks.

“The phone hasn’t rung, has it?” Nero bites back sarcastically.

Dante’s lips press together; the kid is just as sarcastic as Vergil, one of the hundred ways they are similar without meaning to be. Genes are a hell of a thing, he has come to realize, so he tries another approach. “Tell me what you did today—maybe I can help figure out what’s missing.”

Nero looks at him skeptically, but sits up a bit. “I woke up and Kyrie was gone. She uh… she slept in my room last night.” Dante glances over with his brows raised and spots the blush on Nero’s face before he turns back to the window. What was that about? “I figured she had a meeting or something, something to do. It was late enough that the kids had already left for school.

“I went downstairs and got breakfast, checked for messages, checked the mail. By lunchtime I hadn’t heard from her, so I called her cell, but she didn’t answer.”

“Was her phone in the house?”

“Huh?”

“What I said,” Dante replies. He switches lanes abruptly, sending the van rocking for a moment. “Did you check the house for her phone?”

Nero frowns. “No. But I didn’t hear it ring.”

“Could be dead. Or she doesn’t have it on her. But go on.”

Nero hesitates for a second, as if considering, and then continues, “Nico was in the garage. She said she hadn’t seen her either. I walked around a bit, went to the store, checked at the cafe she likes. Nobody saw her.”

“Nico didn’t hear her leave?”

Nero snorts. “Nico wouldn’t hear a dinosaur when she’s working in the garage.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. Would you keep your hands on the wheel?” Dante stops fixing the mirrors at Nero’s exasperated tone. “I called more people. No one had talked to her today. Then I got a phone call about somebody who needed help. It wasn’t the cops though, it was an anonymous tip. But when I got there, nobody was there.”

“That’s weird.”

Nero sighs and puts his foot up on the dashboard. “Happens sometimes. Somebody wants me to fight a demon but it clears off before I get there. When I got back home, the kids were there, but still no Kyrie. That’s when I got really worried.”

His phone rings, startling them both, and Nero nearly drops it out the window as he fumbles for it. “Yeah?” he says quickly, his shoulders tense. “No,” he growls, “we’re at least ten minutes away… No, he can’t have ice cream… For fuck’s sake, Nico, can you just handle it? Tell them to get their homework done and go to bed… I don’t know, make them sandwiches or something.”

He jabs at the screen angrily before rubbing his forehead. “God help us all if she ever becomes a mother.”

Dante snorts at that. “Yeah, she don’t seem the type.”

Nero goes back to staring out the window. He is quiet for a few minutes before he says, “If something’s happened to her—”

“She’s fine ,” Dante insists.

There is another brief silence, and Dante mulls over what to do. Nero is usually a fairly level-headed kid… at least as level-headed as a twenty-four-year-old half-devil can be. But he has a stubborn streak a mile wide and a blind spot the size of the Grand Canyon when it comes to Kyrie, so his main worry now is keeping him from doing something rash and getting his ass handed to him. He swerves a bit while deep in thought to avoid a pothole, but almost sideswipes a car in the next lane. The car blares its horn and Dante blows his own back, flipping them off as the car speeds by. “Watch where you’re going!” Nero yells.

“He almost ran into me!” he protests.

“Christ, just get us home in one piece,” mumbles Nero.

Dante huffs, putting the turn signal on to switch lanes. Soon their exit appears, and they arrive in Fortuna without further incident. When he parks in front of the house Nero leans over to yank the keys out of the ignition. “You are never driving my van again,” he announces as he jumps out of the passenger side.

“Whatever.” Dante walks around the vehicle and follows Nero into the garage. It is empty, and he glances curiously at the array of gadgets in various stages of building that lay scattered on the work table. Nero leads him through the door to the kitchen, where they find Nico. “Finally,” she sighs, hands on her hips.

“Where’s the note?” Nero asks.

“I’ll get it. Here.” She yanks a plate of steaming hot dogs out of the microwave and shoves it at Dante. “Go feed them.”

Dante frowns as she hurries out of the kitchen. “Come on,” Nero grumbles, leading him into the dining room.

Their place is almost as big as Dante’s building, but with nine people in the house it is cluttered with stuff. Bins of toys, shelves filled with books, shoes stacked by the front door, and the cartoons blaring on the television make the house feel much cozier. However, as he navigates the toy-strewn floor Dante decides he prefers his own place. This is especially true when they get through the family room to the dining room, where six faces turn when they enter, all talking excitedly.

Nero actually smiles a bit when they are so happy to see him, and Dante decides to get in on things. “Hey, kids!” he says with fake enthusiasm, lifting up the plate dramatically. “Uncle Dante made you some dogs!”

The entrance goes flat, the room silent as they gape at him. Nero sighs as Dante lays the plate on the table, moving to stand behind the head chair. “Listen, guys, you’re gonna be on your own tonight.” He nods to the oldest boy who looks about twelve or so. “Samuel, you’re in charge. I want you all to eat and get to bed.”

“Where’s Kyrie?” Samuel asks.

“She’s working tonight,” Nero says. “I’m gonna go pick her up, but it will be a while. Nico will be here if there’s an emergency.” He narrows his eyes and drops his voice a bit. “Everyone got it? We need everyone’s help for this team to work.”

The kids agree and Nero starts handing out the hot dogs, stopping when he is done to give Samuel a few quiet instructions. Dante waits with his arms folded until a hand tugs on his jacket.

“Are those real guns?” one of them asks, pointing to Dante’s hips.

“Uh…” He looks over at Nero, who isn’t paying attention. “Yeah, they are.”

“Can I have one?”

“No.”

“Can I touch it?”

He frowns down at the little boy, who is staring at him with an eager curiosity. “No!”

“Do you kill people with it?”

“Nero?” he shouts. “You ready?”

Nero glances over and nods, and after giving Samuel a firm pat on the shoulder, he leads him back out to the garage. Dante glances behind and frowns at the one who was questioning him, the kid nearly falling out of his chair leaning back to watch him leave, and shakes his head as they step through the doorway. “Kids are the worst,” he mutters.

That earns him a sideways glance as they walk over to Nico, who is standing in front of her work table. “Where’s the note?” Nero demands.

“Here.” She hands over an envelope and a folded piece of paper. “It was sealed when it arrived.”

Nero opens the note, reading it for a second before handing it to Dante. In a script that is too perfect to be handwritten, it reads: Don’t look. I’ll be in touch.

He frowns, trying to figure out what it means. “See?” Nero hisses. “Someone’s taken her.”

Dante doesn’t answer, handing the paper back to him. “Where do we start looking? Who would want to hurt you guys?”

He and Nico exchange a glance. “Plenty of people, actually,” Nico replies, and his brows raise. “Everybody knows Nero is the city’s demon hunter, so not only can the demons find him if they know what to look for, any sympathizers can figure it out too.”

“It has to be someone connected to the demon world,” he growls.

“I don’t know, Kyrie has her own set of people who would want her gone, too,” Nico says.

The two men look at her strangely and she shrugs. “I mean, she’s important, right? She’s one of the last survivors of the Order. Lots of people died, so if someone wanted revenge, Kyrie is an obvious choice. Plus now she’s a public figure. People hated the Order, and don’t want Fortuna to have anything to do with it. Other people hate the new charity, wanting the Order back in charge.” She gestures to the letter. “I’d say half of Fortuna could be a suspect. And that’s not even counting anyone who hates the Spardas.”

“I get it,” Dante groans, rubbing his face. “All right. What we need is a clue. We gotta narrow this down somehow.”

“How do we do that?” Nero asks.

He looks at his wrist before realizing he doesn’t wear a watch. “It’s not that late. I know an empath in a town not far from here. Let’s roll.”

“Fine. I’ll drive.” Nero stuffs the letter in his jacket pocket and heads for the door.

“Want me to come?” Nico offers.

“No. Stay here and answer the phone. And don’t let the kids burn the house down.”

Nico makes a face, and Dante salutes her with a laugh before he follows him back out to the van. Both climb inside and shut the doors, and Nero pulls out into the street, heading for the freeway that will take them west.

Dante gives directions and then starts to fiddle with the radio. “This empath any good?” Nero asks.

“Yeah. She’s good.” He settles on a station and drums his fingers on the armrest.

“Has this ever happened to you?” Nero asks.

Dante looks over, his brows drawn in question. “Has what ever happened to me?”

“Demons coming after you like this?”

He thinks about all the times a demon came crashing into his shop or showing up where he was, the times a hoard had overrun a town he was staying in, all the way back to the day an army descended on his childhood home. “Yeah. It’s happened.”

“Fuck this,” Nero hisses. “Why’s it gotta be us? I didn’t ask for this life. I didn’t ask to be a demon hunter.”

“Yeah,” Dante agrees, sighing as he looks out the window. “None of us did.”

━━━━━━━✧━━━━━━━

Nero takes a moment to look at the little house before following Dante towards the front door. It looks completely normal, faded yellow paint on the shutters, a little picket fence, the front path neatly swept. It is nearly eight o’clock by the time they are on the porch, ringing the bell, but the lamps inside still give a glow through the windows and Nero can hear the television on the inside. It’s not until they are waiting that he notices a sign hanging over the front step that says: Psychic Readings, Walk-Ins Welcome.

A moment later the door opens. A young woman with long white hair wearing an oversized sweater and glasses looks up at them. “Can I help you?”

Nero clears his throat but Dante holds out his hands. “Lir! Long time no see!”

“You have got to be kidding me.” She scowls up at him, and it would be almost comical with her height that only goes to about Dante’s shoulder. But her look is fierce and her voice bitter as she snaps, “I can’t believe you have the nerve to show up here.”

“Don’t be like that, hon. Besides, I need your help.”

“Help?” she scoffs.

“Yeah. I’ll even pay you.”

She looks at him suspiciously before giving Nero a once-over. Then she steps back and waves them inside. “You have ten minutes.”

“Thanks, babe.” Nero follows him as they step into the foyer. The house is decorated simply, the walls and floors wood, and she leads them into a small parlor but does not offer them seats.

“Well?” Lir asks, folding her arms.

Dante clears his throat. “Kid’s got a note and don’t know who it’s from. Think you could tell us?”

Lir snorts. “You know my empathy doesn’t work that way.”

Nero’s heart sinks, but Dante moans, “Oh come on, can’t you try? Just see if you pick up something.”

She heaves a huge sigh and walks behind a desk in the corner. As she takes a seat in the desk chair, Nero and Dante move to take the two opposite. Nero leans forward eagerly, his elbows perched on his knees, as Dante sits back and crosses one leg over the other.

“So what is this note?” she asks.

Dante nudges him so Nero says, “My girlfriend has been kidnapped. This was delivered earlier.” He pulls it from his pocket and holds it out with the envelope, but Lir simply looks at it. “Some demon wrote this, but we don’t know who.”

Lir gives a huff of air. “It’s not from a demon, I can tell you that much by looking at it.”

“What do you mean?” Nero frowns. “You can’t just know that!”

“Sure I can.” She looks at Dante blankly. “Twenty dollars.”

“Please! Just—” Nero growls and shakes the note at her. “Just take it! Try something.”

The woman’s shoulders flex a bit as she leans forward, her hands planted on the desk and her voice no-nonsense. She looks intimidating despite her small frame and pretty face, and Nero feels his ears go pink. “You listen here,” she says in a low tone. “I’ve been reading people my whole life, so when I tell you that there’s no demon on that paper, then there’s no goddamn demon on that goddamn paper, you understand me?”

Fury bubbles over as Nero curses and jumps to his feet. “This is bullshit. You’re a hack.” He points an angry finger at Lir who shoots him a scowl. He tries to think of something else to say, but when nothing comes to mind he shouts, “Come on, Dante, let’s go.”

“Babe.” Dante sighs and leans forward, and Nero gapes at him as he props his elbow on the desk and his chin in his hand. “Don’t be too hard on the kid. He just lost the woman he loves. I mean, look at him.” They both glance at Nero, who frowns. “If I had someone to love like that, I’d be losing my shit too. Only…” He gives her a slow smile. “I don’t have somebody to love. I always wished I had a sweet, pretty thing, long white hair and dark lashes, lips full and pink and ready for me to—”

“Okay! Okay. Just… stop.” But she is laughing, and she shoots him a look as she holds her hand out to Nero. “Let me see it.”

He hesitates just a second before giving over the letter. Lir’s brows go up in surprise as soon as her hand closes around the paper. “Well. What do you know? There is a demon on this note.”

She frowns but Nero says, “I knew it! A demon sent this, didn’t they?”

“No,” she answers. “It’s just a trace. Probably from you handling it so much.”

Nero feels the blood drain from his face. “What do you mean? I’m not a—”

“I’m not stupid,” she huffs, looking at him sharply. “I know a half-breed when I see one.” She looks at Dante and rolls her eyes. “Where did you find this kid?”

“He’s my nephew,” Dante explains.

Lir lets out a huge laugh. “Should have known! Just like the rest of you Spardas. Stubborn and stupid.”

Nero slumps a bit in his chair as she goes back to concentrating. “There’s definitely a mix, but again, it’s hard to tell. Should have worn gloves or something at least,” she scolds him. Then her brow tenses. “It’s someone connected to you. Someone close.”

“What?” Nero leans forward, looking at the letter. “Who could it be?”

“Did Kyrie write this?” Dante asks.

He looks sharply at him, ready to argue, but Lir shakes her head. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s not connected like that. It’s a relative of yours.”

Nero feels his ears burn as something churns in his stomach. “I knew it. I fucking knew it.” He stands and looks at Dante, who is frowning up at him. “That bastard.”

“Wait a second,” Dante snaps.

“Fucking Vergil. I’m gonna kill him.” Nero grabs the note and heads for the door, but Dante is quicker. “Move,” he growls.

“You don’t know it’s him. Don’t be stupid.” Dante jerks his head up. “And you owe her twenty dollars.”

Furious now, Nero pulls out a wad of cash and tosses it at Dante, hitting him in the chest. Then he steps around him and storms out of the house, yanking open the door of the van.

Dante climbs in the passenger side as Nero starts the ignition. “You can come, but don’t try to stop me,” Nero warns.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Dante replies, reaching down to lean the seat all the way back.

Nero glances over, not entirely sure if he’s telling the truth. Dante props his feet up on the dash and promptly begins to snore as Nero drives the van back towards the city. Up ahead the lights flicker on the horizon, and he narrows his eyes, knowing that Kyrie is there somewhere, waiting for him.

[vyolla-x]

Dear Followers

I just wanted to come on here and talk to you for a moment. :) 

*Please note this is a bit long* 

If you’re following me because of my hair conversions and that’s why you’re here and you’d prefer not to see any game-play pictures there are somethings you can do so your dashboard isn’t cluttered with anything that you may not be interested in:

1.) You can download an extension called XKit and download their extension inside their program and there is a block feature that can block certain posts that you’d rather not see. 

*You can find XKit Here: CLICK

2.) Also, they have an extension that allows you to limit the posts that are being posted, so if you just wanted to hide some of the posts, you can do that. :)

3.) Another extension that is just one extension and all you have to do is add hash tags to it is called Tumblr Savior. You can install this on your browser and then open it up; once you do, you just type in the words you want to add to your “blacklist” and you can even type in words that are okay to see in a “whitelist”.

*You can find Tumblr Savior Here: CLICK

If you download Tumblr Savior, you can type into the blacklist: Vyolla Plays and it will hide these game-play posts. :) Then you can see when I update with new conversions only.

I hope this helps any of you that are interested in still being a follower, but would like less “clutter”. :) I don’t post often, but I do want to make this a game-play blog, so I hope you all can understand. 

This blog wasn’t meant for just conversions. I want to enjoy the game as well. :) So, if you’re not interested in downloading any extensions, because of any feelings towards downloading things. I completely understand and you also have the option of un-following. 

Conversions haven’t been releasing lately due to me having some issues creating new ones because hair has been too long and messing up when I attempt to resize them to make them fit on children and toddlers. 

When I get that fixed, I will be releasing more - but that is not my main focus of my blog and I won’t be releasing a ton at once or releasing so many a week. :( I have a lot of other stuff going on in my life right now that is affecting me so I just want to enjoy my game. 

I hope you all can understand and thank you for following me, but I definitely understand if you want to make your exit. 

Thank you, 

Vyolla ♥

[juuls]

Absolutely do what you need to do, plus I agree!: you DO deserve a break. But if you want an in-between option you could turn off (all, or just anon) Asks, definitely turn off submissions (I don’t think you even have that on, anyway), and you can turn off replying to/leaving notes on posts.

That way you could still post political things, but people would have to reblog (not leave a note) to yell about their bullshitism and racism and misogyny and wtfever-ny. And even if they just do it in the tags, most people don’t have that thing that shows tags on the notes page of a post (I think that’s just for dashboards and, even if it’s not an add-on, but an actual feature, I think it can be turned off? I don’t know too much about that feature if you can’t tell) so all they would see is people yelling through reblogs, which means it’s also where all of their followers can see, right there on their ‘pretty’, aesthetically ‘pure’, Tumblr page.

And some won’t reblog for just that reason—because they either don’t want to ‘ruin the aesthetic’ or ‘bother their followers’ (I have unfollowed so many bigots because they just had to reblog that neo-n*zi pepe post to add their two cents to something when I had this completely different mental image of them, and I’m sure the same can be said of others with me) or they ‘can’t be assed to tag things so I just won’t reblog because otherwise Eric or Tiffany or Charlie will ask me to tag things properly AgAiN UGH so annoying’ so they just don’t instead of learning how to tag properly for people who actually know how to blacklist and politely ask people how to tag so their blacklisting is not for naught.

And there goes like two-thirds of the hateful spewing. Can’t leave notes/replies, don’t want to clutter aesthetic, ‘can’t let anyone know I turn into a n*zi with an AOC fetish overnight, now can I?’ Pretty well covers a fair few of them.

I mean, am I wrong?

(Quite possibly, but I’m not 100% wrong, either.)

And as much as I often hate politics, I’d still rather come here than go on Twitter itself—which I don’t have anyway, and never will if I can help it—for at least one social media range of left-leaning takes. Which I read alongside my larger range of political and apolitical local, national, and international newspapers and magazines. (It’s good to diversify!)

So sure, I don’t necessarily need the politics, or need it here specifically. And yeah, I think I would like a broader ratio of fun to sad to woah to terrifying —rather than just the state of ‘I am constantly in fear of existence as we know it disintegrating before my very eyes’. It’s nice to have funny things from Twitter on here too! And not just old stuff repeated 50 times like the Macaulay Culkin 40yo thing. Even if it is pretty funny and some folks might not have seen it yet. :P I’d make a joke about dead horses but I like horses, so. . . :(

And Twitter threads are great too! Like the funny answers to questions, but not just one. Give us a bunch of answers togetber, maybe even a conversation that starts up from one! Or a “storytime with Levar Burton” or Betty White telling funny stories or one of those Twitter accounts that tells folktales from around the world or one of the many accounts with pieces of original writing where they post sometimes seriously creepy mini stories or threads of longer things that will definitely keep you up at night. Or celebrities from fandoms weighing in on fandom drama (unless it’s suuuper sketchy because Tumblr is fandom’s general home.

One of the best types of threads of all, though: scientists — especially Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye (or both together) absolutely wrecking plebs or politicians (though that makes us all wonder if we’ll survive another 10 years, yikes) and providing entertainment for all types of people.

Or... or! Threads devoted entirely to dishing out dirt onto the steadily growing coffin-shaped dirt pile around Anish Kapoor, and deservedly so for being the douchiest douche to ever douche. And we will continue calling it the BEAN, not Cloud-wtfever. Pretentious fuck. Threads just to annoy him would be perfect.

Or equal-opportunity generational humour or joke-dissing threads/posts. Millennials answering questions submitted by Boomers, Silents, or even Zoomers. Zoomers owning Gen X on knowledge even they’re supposed to be the masters of. Threads of just, like, 70s things. Or to be meta: posts here about peoplr on Twitter making fun of Tumblr! Extra points if they talk about your page in particular. ;) Yeah there’s lots of these here on Tumblr, but Twitter has its own special way of looking at and framing things and THAT is why I come here to check out what the pulse of the internet is. Rather than actually going to Twitter. *shudders* I’m so glad someone else can do it for me. ;)

Stuff like that could easily and, with great anticipation on our part, replace or at least spread out the political stuff. And adding a simple tagging system of letters could let people filter things, IF you wanted. Like #s for stories or #f for folk/fairytales or #c for comedy or #p for politics or #rp for official (real) politicians or.... I dunno, there’s a lot of options and a lot of things I like the more I think about it. If you need to cut in with breaking news, you just toss it out in the moment as a plain new post or toss it to the beginning of the queue or schedule it or— I’m sure you know all that, psh, what am I even doing hahaha.

Please feel absolutely free to use this @whitepeopletwitter! Or totally ignore it and me! There’s nothing wrong with your system or what you post—you simply got my mind haring off in all sorts of directions when I’m already experiencing a bit of a manic day as it is. :) So, lots of ideas abounding!

Way back to my main point is you could turn off notes on posts and easily cut down on TONS of the bullshit because “Oh no, people could see, in public, on my OWN blog, what I really desperately want to say in private on that dumb post that I don’t agree with’s notes!!! Whatever will I do!???! Not reblog it or say any of that or just tell it to my ‘friend’ privately? ... I mean, uhhh, sure, I. . . guess I could.....”

~

Somehow this is appropriate.

Do you ever look at the comments on your posts?

sadly yes.

that’s why I’m gonna start posting less and less political stuff. 

[thisistotesttheme]

Ayo, it’s ya girl Stella and this is NOT a brand spanking new Lupin role play blog. This blog was established on 9/2019 well at least around that time.. All I remember is making this blog last year! lol So I will keep it that date until I am made aware of the exact date! In this tab you will find a set of Rules and Guidelines! I would really appreciate that you abide by them. If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to message me. I am a very friendly person and I assure you I don’t bite.  

 I do not own Lupin or anything from the series Code; Realize.

The actions of Lupin made on this blog are made by me and have no associations with the original creators. Also, please do not compare me to other Lupin’s out there. I am already insecure about my writing, and if someone were to compare me to another, it would only cause my insecurities to grow.

 All banners are made by me.

 The icons I use on this blog are made by me, and I would appreciate it if you would not steal them. Thanks.

 My best friend commissioned my theme, promo, banner, and dash icon. Eternalworks did them. 

 There is no password. Apparently, that’s a thing now?? I find it unnecessary and give you my trust that you read through this. Plus, I don’t feel the need to push people out of their comfort zones, and I like to let people come to me when they want to.

 Common courtesy

 This is a big one for me, and I really don’t need to explain it. This is something that everyone should have.

Threads

I can write one sentence up to a novel, it really depends on how things are going between our two characters. But I tend to write a lot more if both I and the mun established a plot amongst each other.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO MATCH MY LENGTH! Some times I get inspiration and allow my muse to take me away. So please do NOT feel like you have to match mine. As long as you give me something to work with and progress the thread it’s fine! I swear! So please do not stress yourself out.

I have the right to drop threads and starters / unwritten starters if I am struggling to find inspiration. Please do not take it personally, if I am unable to draw out a muse I don’t want to force it out causing me to stress. If that were to happen I would just feel obligated to RP instead of doing this for fun… Same goes for you as well! If you are having trouble writing with Lupin don’t be shy to tell me! I won’t take it personally. If anything we can try to figure something out! I just want both of us to be comfortable with one another.

 Drama & Callouts

 I will Not participate in any form of drama Point. Period. Blank. I will allow people to come and vent to me, but don’t expect me to talk shit back. What I can offer is a friend who is willing to listen and give you advice and the tools to move on from the situation.

If you try to involve me in any type of drama, I will unfollow and block you. I am on here for fun.

 I will not reblog any call outposts on this blog, but I will read them, and if I see hard proof evidence on why that particular individual is being called out, I will support and block their blog(s).

 Following

 I will only follow back role play blogs that I am interested in roleplaying with. If you’re a personal blog, I am sorry, I just don’t want my dash to be cluttered with random posts. Also I don’t do follow for follow. I will go into everyone’s blogs and check them out. Though trust me, I usually end up following back every RP blog <3  

 Unfollowing & Blocking

 I will unfollow if you

Break any of my rules

 You don’t cut your posts

 Tag your posts properly.

 Cause drama

Steal 

 Don’t follow back

 I will block you if

 You cause drama

Steal

 Or if I followed someone and they don’t follow me back. And the reason being is I WILL  forget about them, and if their blog pops up again, I might accidentally follow them once more, not remembering that they had not followed back. I don’t want to seem like a creeper trying to get someone to follow back, so blocking them will help me from appearing like I’m desperate to get them to follow me.

 I am highly private

 And by that, I mean, I will only interact with my mutuals.

 Interactions

 Okay, I followed you for a reason, and that’s because WOW I am interested in you and how you portray your character(s). So please feel to send me any memes that I reblog. Or you can send me a random IC ask or reply to any open threads.  Heck, you can even tag me in random posts or starters! I highly encourage it!! I really, really want to interact with you! 

Formatting

When doing my replies I tend to make my font small, but if it’s straining to your eyes feel free to let me know! I will make note of it and make sure to leave it normal size for your comfort.

ASKS / MEMES

The anonymous feature is a privilege, so do not abuse it and ruin it for others. I know sometimes people can be shy sending asks so they use anon. But if I noticed someone is trying to harass me or send me hate I will disable it. So do not ruin it for others.

Speaking of anon hate, please do not send. 10/10 I will no respond to it. I will read it and once I start to realize it’s anon hate I will stop and delete it. Enough said. I will NOT engage with anon hate.

I do NOT care if you reblog a meme from me, as long as you sent me something. If you do not send me something please reblog from the source. If the source is no longer there go ahead and reblog it from me.

Tagging & Trigger warnings

Please take note that due to the contents of Code;Realize there will be mention of blood, gore, mutilation, and death. They will be tagged properly in this format TW | Blood, TW | Gore, TW | Mutilation, TW | Death.

I always go to my mutuals pages and make sure to go through their rules and see what triggers they have. But PLEASE realize that I am human and I may accidentally miss something! So do NOT  hesitate to jump in either my ask or insta and give me a friendly reminder.

As for my triggers please tag any mentions of infant deaths, dead babies, and miscarriages. 

ALSO, I WILL UNFOLLOW AND HARD BLOCK YOU IF I SEE YOU MAKING INSITIVE JOKES ABOUT THOSE SUBJECTS! EITHER IT BEING IN CHARACTER OR OCC. I DO NOT TAKE IT VERY LIGHTLY. I have many close people in my life who have gone through the heartache of losing their children, and pregnancies and it angers me to my core when I see people making light of the subject. I stood by their sides as they cried and cursed at the world, and I even held those precious angels in my hands. So call me sensitive or whatever the fuck you want. But I will not stand to see that shit on my dashboard.

Issues

If I have done something to rub you the wrong way, or have done something to make you uncomfortable, I can not stress this enough but PLEASE tell me. I want you to be comfortable with seeing me on your dashboard. I also most likely will NOT know what I did wrong and I would love to talk about it with you. Also that way it won’t happen again. Like I said this is supposed to be fun, and I want to make sure YOU’RE comfortable.

Shipping

This is a multiship blog, every thread is it’s own verse so if Lupin is in a relationship with someone it stays in that thread’s world and it will not leak on to other threads with different people.

He will not be shipped with underage people. If they are younger he will take on the role of a brotherly figure. 

I also will NOT ship him when I am rp'ing him in his young verse. Example his Three houses verse where I rp him as 17 years old. Even if I am portraying him as a 17 year old I will NOT ship him with any of the students. 

More to be added 

Last updated 12/04/2020

[overtaleblog]

OVERTALE’S BACK!!!

After a semester of gruelling senior work, overcoming senioritis, and more importantly to you all, an unannounced hiatus, KK here to give you an update on what’s going on in the wonderful little world of Overtale. (which on a side note I still regret naming it that as it gets confused with other AU’s but too late to change it now ;;;;)

As you can probably tell We’re coming back!!! but as I reeeeeally don’t want to clutter your dashboards (since honestly unannounced long posts irritate me) The majority of the info is below the cut!

But for those only sticking around long enough to read this part, thank you for sticking with this blog through this long hiatus! ^^;;

We’e got a few changes happening so I’d like you all to know what exactly is going on through it all, so without further ado.....

Schedule Changes!!!

As I’m still in highschool and also prepping for college rather than once a week Overtale will be updating every 2 weeks on Sundays at 5pm EST starting today January 28th. Although there may be a few sporadically spaced updates here and there if I have the time, such as how next week I’ll be wrapping up the prologue rather than just nothing, s keep an eye out, maybe turn on notifications too!

As for the next two weeks in one week I’ll be finishing the prologue as I just said, and the next week the comic itself will be wrapping up chapter 2 since there is literally a page or two left of it.

Format Changes!!!

In total honesty I could not keep up with the comic pages as I had to come up with a format and placement, then I’d draw manually on paper, scan it in, clean up the lines, make it transparent, fill in the colors, add in text, and finally any special effects if I needed them. Along with studying and maintaining a social life and a few other blogs, it was honestly too much, so!!! I shall be updating in another format which won’t a) eat all my time up so I can get more content out to you all faster and b) won’t degrade my art quality either (Compared to the art you’ve seen I’m actually much better, check out @kkmcarty​ under the tag “#KK’s art” and you’ll get the idea).

But the format is going to go a little something like this:

much higher quality image of the characters doing what they do (with the occasional animation of course)

beneath each image will be dialogue between the characters such as: William: Frisk are you sure this is a good idea? * You nod, after all it’s your only choice William: Goodness... I really hope you know what you’re getting into.... and so forth!

this format will help allow me to get more out to you all more quickly and I’m glad a friend recommended it to me or I wouldn’t have continued this story in all honesty.

[NOTE: The format changes will be taking place starting in chapter 3, the end of chapter 2 will still be in comic format!!!]

Asks are a thing!!!

While before I attempted to do this in a comic type format, I MIGHT (emphasis on might) bring them back in comic format, but for now, they will be open in general to a list of available characters as listed on the ask page, as well as me myself, and for the most part they’ll be answered in text format, and if you asked a character there will be reaction images as well.

For the most part asks are open to explore lore which I will not be able to get to in comic, and believe me there is a LOT of lore there that unfortunately will not get explored <:/ any asks go of course, but If there are spoilers I probably won’t answer them directly. Though you never know the characters might be a liiittle more receptive since they don’t know their own narrative

And finally.......

Blog renovations!!!!

Over the next two weeks this blog will be undergoing minor renovation, mostly for desktop so mobile users there’s no need to worry. I don’t have a full list of what will or will not be changed, but I can guarantee that I’ll be making all the blog pages accessible to mobile users for certain!!!

That’s bout it for changes!!! for those of you who stuck it out and read through this or as still reading the comic thank you so much for your support, I honestly did not want to let this comic be another dead thing that never got finished and I’m glad to have it up and running once more, and it’s all thanks to you lovely people who, despite the long hiatus and deadness of the blog, have stayed following or followed in the hopes it would continue.

So thank you all again, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day wherever in the world you are.

~ KK

[charllieeldridge]

10 Best Free WordPress Plugins Every Travel Blog Should Have

If you’ve been searching for the best free WordPress plugins for a travel blog, then you’ve come to the right place. After you’ve chosen a travel blog name and learned how to start a travel blog, you’ll then want to customize it and make it your own.

For those of us who don’t have any website design or development background, WordPress plugins are the way to do this. They will help both the look and the functionality of your website.

Think of your new blog as an empty house with no art or decor to spruce it up.

Installing WordPress plugins on your blog is like decorating it with free paintings and decorations that have been pre-made by professionals.

They work well, they match your design and they’re easy to implement. But just like a house, you can quickly over clutter your blog with too many plugins, so be careful and make sure you keep them to a minimum and only download and keep the ones you really need.

In this article, I’m going to list the top 10 free WordPress plugins for travel blogs.

These free plugins are 10 that every single travel blog should have (plus another 6 bonus plugins). Some of them are specific to only travel blogs, but most of them are vital for any new blog, so even if you’re a food blogger or a mommy blogger, these plugins could help you grow your blog faster and more efficiently.

These plugins have all been approved by our developer and our SEO team to ensure that they’re not too heavy for your site and should not noticeably hinder your existing speed rating or Google traffic. It may be a good idea to backup your database and run a speed test on your site before and after any new plugins are added to make sure they’re not affecting your load times.

1. HTML5 Maps

Interactive maps are a great way for travel blogs to show countries that they’ve travelled to and where they have content about.

These maps have clickable regions or countries to bring people to specific categories on your site. The paid Interactive Maps Plugin ($21) is more intuitive and has more features and map options than HTML5, but for a free plugin, you can’t beat HTML5 Maps.

They won’t give you all of the maps without upgrading to premium, but at least you’ll be able to embed a sleek looking map on your destinations page to get started.

It’s worth noting that these maps can load slowly depending on your caching system and hosting plan. If you find that they’re loading slowly, it may not be worth it to have this plugin on your travel blog.

DOWNLOAD HTML5 MAP PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

2. Yoast SEO

One of the most important factors of growing any new blog is to make sure that your website has a solid SEO (Search Engine Optimization) foundation. This is going to help your site rank in search results like Google and thus, drive traffic to your site.

At the time of writing, Goats On The Road receives over 75% of its traffic from direct organic Google searches. That shows just how important it is to keep search engines and SEO on your mind while building a new site.

Yoast SEO is a free plugin that allows you to not only optimize your site map and readability of your blog, but also optimize your on-page SEO directly from the Edit Post screen in WordPress.

If you have Yoast, then after you’re done writing a post you can scroll to the bottom of the page and check the SEO health of your post before publishing.

Yoast tells you how good your SEO is with a handy green, yellow or red light and gives you dozens of tips on how to add to the post to give it an SEO boost.

The plugin will count your keywords, check readability, allow you to edit your metadata, check for optimal length and more.

No blog should be running on WordPress without this handy, free plugin.

DOWNLOAD YOAST SEO PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

3. SEO Smart Links

This is my favourite plugin that you won’t find on other “Best WordPress Plugins” lists. That’s simply because not that many people know about it.

SEO Smart Links allows you to automatically add internal and external links to your blog by simply choosing which words to auto-link.

For example, let’s say you just wrote an amazing post about budget travel and you want to drive traffic to it.

With the SEO Smart Links plugin, you can easily set it so that any time the words “budget travel” appear on any page, post or category on your site, it will automatically link to your budget travel guide. (note: use variations of the anchor text)

I love this plugin for travel blogs because you can go in and add the keyword for every city, region, country and continent on your blog and auto-link them to appropriate posts/pages.

The plugin also allows you to auto-link all of your categories using the slug as a keyword, which is perfect for travel blogs as most have continents and country names as their categories.

Similarly, you can also link outward using the same tactic. If you have a great affiliate for Booking.com, you can set SEO Smart Links to automatically link the words Booking.com (the plugin is in action now, automatically linking that term for me), or any time you type “book a hotel room” it can link to your affiliate as well.

You can even set it to make all external links from the plugin “nofollow”.

Do you have a favourite travel camera that you always talk about on your blog? Make it so that every time you type Canon G7x into your blog, it automatically links to your Amazon affiliate for that product!

This plugin is amazing and it’s definitely one of my favourites.

DOWNLOAD SEO SMART LINKS PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

4. WordPress Editorial Calendar

It’s extremely important that you publish articles on a strict schedule on your blog. Just like a newspaper or your favourite TV episode, everyone wants to know exactly when they can expect new content.

Google also rewards websites for being predictable because they know that users want to receive their content on a predictable time frame.

WP Editorial Calendar is the perfect plugin for organizing your posting schedule and seeing what’s next.

The plugin shows an easy to use, drag and drop calendar. All of your draft posts appear on the right side of the screen and you can simply drag-and-drop the titles onto the day in the calendar that you want it to publish.

You can set the time of publishing and schedule it right from the plugin!

A properly organized calendar with posts going out three times a week should look like this:

Any new blogger who’s trying to follow our 6 Day Success Schedule To Explode Your Website Traffic should definitely use this plugin. It will help you organize your posts and make sure that you are giving your readers their content when they expect it.

DOWNLOAD WP EDITORIAL CALENDAR PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

5. Shortcodes Ultimate

Shortcodes are a bit of coding that you can put in the edit post screen of WordPress to show a specific bit of content. For example, if you have the Shortcodes Ultimate plugin and you type this into the edit post screen of your WordPress dashboard:

  It would look like this when it appears on the live post:

10 Best Free WordPress Plugins Every Travel Blog Should Have

12 Top Safety Tips For a South African Road Trip

Photographing Morocco: Tips on Etiquette and Technique

How To Become an Au Pair and Travel The World

The TEFL Academy: A Complete Guide to the Courses

Pretty cool hey? There are literally dozens of different shortcodes that you can choose from to create different bits of content on your site like tables, carousels, styled boxes, galleries, dropdowns, accordions, buttons and more.

Just look at all of the options.

DOWNLOAD SHORTCODES ULTIMATE PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

6. WP Hide Post

WP Hide Post is a great free WordPress plugin for travel bloggers, because we create a lot of content that doesn’t need to be seen by all of our readers.

Maybe you’ve written an article simply for the purpose of SEO, but it’s not something all readers need to see.

With this plugin, you can simply hide the post from your audience by ticking a few boxes in the edit post screen. This will help your blog to earn money, while not appearing too “advertisy” to your readers.

If you’ve written a post that’s great for your “Indonesia” section, but doesn’t necessarily have to appear on your home page, then you can click a box and hide it.

You can choose to hide it on the front page, on category pages, in feeds, on author pages and more. It’s also great for creating one time sales pages or hidden content that you only want people to find if they click on a certain link on your site.

DOWNLOAD WP HIDE POST PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

7. Wordfence Security

Every website is prone to getting hacked at some time or another. Facebook has been hacked, Instagram has been hacked and even Google Drive has been hacked, so don’t think for a second that your WordPress blog is immune to viruses, malware and hackers.

Our site was hacked earlier this year, but luckily we caught it early and updated our Wordfence Security plugin to prevent it from happening in the future.

To combat the ongoing online crisis of hacking, you need to protect your site using a security plugin. Wordfence is powered by a constantly updated Threat Defense Feed and Web Application Firewall which helps to stop your site from getting hacked.

If you’re reading this post and you don’t have any sort of Malware security plugin installed on your blog, you should stop reading this right now and go download one from the plugin directory. We use Wordfence and it seems to do the job (so far).

DOWNLOAD WORDFENCE SECURITY PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

8. Akismet Anti-Spam

As your blog starts to grow (and even beforehand sometimes) you’ll start noticing a bunch of spam comments appearing in your conversation feed on your blog posts.

“Hey, great post! Check out my new broom that sweeps for you! [insert spammy link here]”

This kind of annoying spamming can never be completely avoided, but Akismet Anti-Spam helps to limit your spam comments to an absolute minimum.

The plugin can be free if you “name your price” at $0 and all you have to do is install it, add your Akismet.com API key and it will clean up your site from unwanted spam.

To date, this plugin has cleaned our Goats On The Road blog of over 500,000 spam comments! That’s a lot of time saved and outgoing links blocked by simply running this plugin in the background.

DOWNLOAD AKISMET ANTI-SPAM PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

9. TinyMCE Spellcheck

I have no idea why WordPress doesn’t have a built-in spell check and grammar check in the edit post dashboard, but until they do, the TinyMCE Spell Check plugin is an absolute must for travel bloggers.

I’m not saying that it catches everything. If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, you’ve still probably seen a few grammatical errors and spelling errors, but this plugin easily cleans up 90% of your incorrect English.

Your readers will expect you to be somewhat professional in your blog posts, and if they’re forced to read through a slew of mistakes, then you’ll immediately lose credibility and they’ll likely click away to another website.

The TinyMCE Spell Check adds a little ABC icon to the WordPress Edit Post screen and when you click it, it will underline all of your spelling errors. It also checks for grammatical mistakes and it will offer suggestions if there are multiple ways a certain sentence or phrase can be written.

Update: you don’t actually need this plug-in anymore unless you want it. I recommend the free Grammarly browser extension instead. Click here to get that. 

DOWNLOAD TINY MCE SPELLCHECK PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

10. W3 Total Cache

A caching plugin is vital to ensure that your website is running as fast as possible. But what is caching?

Basically, web browsers like Google Chrome and Safari actually save data from websites that users visit frequently. So if you visit Goats On The Road, your browser will cache (or save) some of our images, website layout and videos so that the next time you visit, you don’t have to wait for your internet to load the content, it will already be cached in your browser.

To ensure that your website is caching your content and serving it to web browsers around the world, you need to have a good caching plugin.

W3 Total Cache has long been one of the most recommended caching plugins for WordPress and it’s pretty easy to install and implement.

There are 16 pages of settings for this plugin, but you don’t really have to tinker with any of these settings. The plugin will optimize itself for your site and you can pretty much let it run right out of the box.

DOWNLOAD W3 TOTAL CACHE PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS (FREE)

A Few Bonus Plugins To Check Out

The below plugins are not essential, but could add a lot to your travel blog and give it a good boost in speed, traffic and conversions. They’re all free except for OptinMonster and have been approved by our developer and SEO team.

P3 Plugin Profiler: The more plugins you have on your site, the more you can potentially slow it down. The P3 Plugin Profiler plugin analyzes your site and checks for errors and analyzes MySQL queries as well as speed and compatibility issues between plugins. The plugin hasn’t been updated in 3 years, but still works with most themes and is secure.

Smush: This plugin will compress your photos automatically on upload. Photos are likely one of the biggest slowing factors of any travel blog. With WPsmushit, not only can you auto-compress images on upload, but you can also batch compress previously uploaded photos saving up to 70% of the space and not losing out on visible image quality.

jQuery Pin It Button: Everyone is gung-ho over Pinterest these days and for good reason. It drives huge traffic to travel blogs if implemented correctly. This plugin is an easy, one-click solution to give your site a big Pinterest boost. It simply ads a hover-over Pin It button to any image on the site making it easier for your readers to share your content to their boards. You can even use alt tags and size restrictions to narrow down which images have the button and which do not.

StopBadBots: If your site is growing and you’re finding that you have a lot of downtime due to overusage, there’s a good chance it’s mostly because of bad bots crawling your site. There are two things you can do. Pay your host a bunch more money to upgrade CPU and RAM, or, add a bunch of code to your .htaccess file in order to block the bots. StopBadBots plugin does the latter for you and updates the code as new bad bots appear on the web.

MailChimp: MailChimp is one of the best WordPress solutions for fast-loading pop-ups and lead generation technology. If you’re not already capturing emails with your travel blog and starting an email conversation with your followers, you’re missing out big time.

This plugin makes it easy to implement stylish plugins that won’t slow down your site. 

Note: We’re currently using Thrive for pop-ups and lead generation, and while we’re happy with the service, it’s not free, so I didn’t list it here.

Which Plug-Ins Did I Miss?

There are new plugins being added to the WordPress directory every day, so surely there are many new plugins that I haven’t included in this list. What plugins do you find the most useful? Please share in the comments below and tell us why they’re so indispensable!

Like This Article? Pin it!

  The post 10 Best Free WordPress Plugins Every Travel Blog Should Have appeared first on Goats On The Road.

10 Best Free WordPress Plugins Every Travel Blog Should Have published first on https://travelaspire.weebly.com/

[carpelibrurn-blog]

WP Profit Builder 2.0 bonus - Is WP Profit Builder 2.0 Advantageous?

ProfitBuilder review The 10 Minute Foreign exchange Riches Building contractor is a practical, economical, and really fundamental Foreign exchange training program and was ranked a High Top Rate product. Just what I such as most about this system, well there are numerous, so here goes. First, anybody could learn it as well as utilize it. Second, it removes two high chances of failure that all investors face that cause them to shed cash; these are trading too often and trading when they should not. Third, it is a proven regular lasting long-term money manufacturer. For that reason, there was no other method to price it yet a 10 from 10. It fulfills all our credentials and ought to be high your list when attempting to earn the choice on which product to purchase.

Your mobile marketing phone call to action should be very easy ProfitBuilder 2.0 and straightforward. Completing a type is easy to do on a computer system yet can promptly come to be aggravating on a smaller screen of a mobile phone. It must be extremely easy to put themselves on a subscriber list.

Detailed Notes on WP Profit Builder 2.0

Great assessment Adam, aided me in the selection. immediately after reading through it I’ve decided to use Thrive Themes information Builder, mainly because my requires are not exceptionally subtle and I am not a huge enjoyable to pay for subscription fee for this kind of solution. Other attributes which include Leadboxes, Leaddigits and Leadlinks don’t demand just about anything for being put in on your internet site – they’ll do the job wherever you want. I want to share my experiences with a number of the ‘best’ internet hosts in britain to give you my assistance and findings with using Every single. wish to deploy landing web pages devoid of acquiring your own Site wp profit builder or on web-sites that don’t use WordPress? I only use LeadPages and am thinking of also working with OptimizePress 2.0. I tried the main version of OptimizePress Once i was wp profit builder a fresh blogger and it absolutely was much too complicated for me to carry out myself. It’s fantastic to hear that the new version is so much simpler to use. There's a no cost version of this plugin available but it really’s greatly constrained. one example is, decide-in sorts and templates aren’t offered. in fact, my old landing webpages – pre Blogging from Paradise times – have been WAY also cluttered and sales-ey. Not very good, and my poor Electricity about their bad structure created my on line little bit a wrestle. I haven’t checked it out wp profit builder myself, I agree with you. The income website page does look very spectacular. want to examine this out, pretty keen to see how this compares with the likes of prosper, OP and LP. An additional matter worth noting is though the WordPress plugin could be installed on your site, it functions much more just like a website link out of your site to Leadpages. So Although you’ll have landing pages load from URL’s on your web site, they’ll nonetheless be loading from Leadpages servers. Whether you desire to produce a squeeze wp profit builder webpage to develop your electronic mail listing, make superior converting gross sales internet pages, set up webinar pages or even more – you can do it. In this video, I think about the members region available to you after you have bought the product or service, after which you can jump across to my WP dashboard and tell you about the worldwide settings – plus the templates which have been already incorporated with your obtain. This means that you could produce attractive pages that transform like ridiculous – all with no complex head aches or being forced to be a web designer. I just checked a web site of mine I have running Profit Builder, and it came back again which has a rating of 62/a hundred. even so, the main wp profit builder trouble was I hadn’t optimized my photographs, and that is what Google told me to accomplish inside the pace take a look at. Hi Richard, Wow, I had under no circumstances heard of this ahead of, so many thanks for bringing it to my focus. I watched your initial video – great to let's understand what’s included.

The Fact About ProfitBuilder That No One Is Suggesting

Your landing page generator has to be light as well as fast. Avoid putting anything there that's mosting likely to have a long loading time, as well as if you must, put it further down on the page. The heading and major info you want them to see should fast as well as simple. If it takes forever to lots, they'll obtain aggravated as well as click away. The following action is to leadpages where you will certainly be routing your visitors. It is finest that you established a page first where they can check out regarding extra helpful information on the product initially, prior to you send them to a sales duplicate. You can additionally allow them read several of the various other write-ups you have written. When you have your landing pages prepared up, you can start with your write-up creating as well as ultimately submit them to some write-up directory sites. To stay out unqualified web traffic, you need to be specific. If your target market is firms with 50 workers or more, say so. For e-commerce, consider detailing prices. Words like "luxury" may remove bargain consumers.

[mahtewtwook86]

Leveraging Video to Get More Sales Meetings [Podcast]

The more we talk to sales people, the more we realize that cold calling just isn’t cutting it anymore. And when you’re targeting large, enterprise companies, you need every edge you can get just to get your prospects’ attention — let alone land a meeting.

That’s why we’ve been implementing a video-first approach to sales here at Vidyard; video is engaging and helps cut through inbox clutter. After we started using video in our sales process, Scott Ingram, host of the Sales Success Stories Podcast took notice. He recently sat down with Reid Oliver, Business Development Rep here at Vidyard to learn about his sales strategy and how he uses video to land coveted meetings with enterprise prospects:

And in case you’d rather read some of Reid’s answers, here are a few that stood out from this awesome interview:

What kind of research do you do to ensure you consistently get meetings with prospects?

There really are a ton of tools out there to help with research, and I think you really need to pick and choose which ones are going to benefit your style most.  (Editor’s note: If you want to learn more about researching companies for prospecting with video, check out this post!)

We use Salesforce, so I will often look into accounts and run specific reports on whether we’ve had conversations with them in the past, or whether we have met with them at conferences. If we have never had any sort of interaction with them, I will go even deeper. I’ll follow the company on Sales Navigator or set up Google Alerts, so I can understand what people are interested in.

If I can understand when a company has a reason to invest in video or to invest in their digital strategy in our case, I’m going to be more likely to have that conversation. So I really try to be there with the research phase and try to understand — does it make sense to be reaching out at this point in time?

How are you using video for prospecting?

To drink my own Kool-Aid here, video has been a game changer for me in terms of cutting through the clutter. I think I see a LinkedIn post every day about how many emails executives are getting. And I often see people sharing screenshots of poor BDR or SDR prospecting emails, so I try to really think differently and a huge part of doing that is including video in my email strategy.

I’ve found just including a thumbnail of myself, or even me with a white board with the person’s name on it, increased my email click-through rates by 5 to 7x. (Of course that thumbnail links to the actual video.) Like this:

Sometimes I’ll even take that even further and I’ll put together a short demo video of the areas I see on their website where I can provide value. So I’ll do a screencast of their current video setup, and talk about how Vidyard can have a positive impact on that.

What are your favorite sales tools?

First off are a few Chrome extensions that I find that really help me out. I use an extension called Datanyze, which lets me visit a website and immediately see that company’s  revenue, what kind of funding they have, and a host of other details. If they’re a smaller company, I’ll be able to see things like what kind of technology they are using as well. A big piece of the puzzle for us is understanding what type of marketing automation system and what sort of CRM platform the company is using. That arms us with a ton of intelligence to be able to tailor our conversations, especially if they’re not a company that we currently have in Salesforce.

We also use Rapportive, which helps me find contact information from LinkedIn profiles. If it’s someone that we’re not able to find good data on, I’ll use Rapportive in addition to KiteDesk. These 3 extensions are available free as a BDR or sales rep, so I really love them.

And then a big part of my day-to-day is spent in Sales Navigator on LinkedIn. I take full advantage of following specific prospects that I’m not connected with, following full companies and getting alerts from LinkedIn on what they’re doing. I’ll often scan my newsfeed on LinkedIn for information to see what’s going on in my network, and so Sales Navigator gives me another space I can live in for all the companies I’m targeting and see updates day-after-day.

(Editor’s note: If you’re looking for free tools to accelerate your sales process, check out 11 of them in this post!)

How would you describe your sales style?

I’m pretty heads-down when I’m at the office. I’m focused on what I want to be doing today. I always take the opportunity to converse with my team, and talk about what we’re finding effective, but I really try to stay focused on the task at hand and the goals I’ve set.

When I’m focusing, a big part of that is trying to think differently and strategically to differentiate myself. I’ve received quite a few responses from people saying “Wow! This is a great email! I’ve never received anything like this in the past!” and I like to think a big part of that is my strategy. I include video in my emails, and I like to try and blend my personality with video to cut through the clutter.

Differentiation and being strategic are the two biggest sales philosophies I stick with.

What motivates you and keeps your energy level up?

To be honest, the dashboard motivates me quite a bit! When I go in, and I know I’m having a slow month, I always find myself peering at the stats. I’m the same way when I’m playing or watching sports — I’m always in the stats!

On my team, we have a lot of team activities as well. So we’ll be put into groups and have specific stats that we are measured against for the month. A huge part of that is trying to be part of that team and win it for the group that I’m in.

And last but not least, my manager is an awesome guy. I have a ton of respect for him, and I know that he’s a happy camper when the numbers are pouring in from my end as well!

Ready to practice what Reid is preaching?

Download the Video Selling Success Kit, and get tips and tricks collected from top-performing sales reps like Reid. You’ll get a free (forever!) video creation tool, a cheat sheet for creating your first prospecting video, and tips on how to make the most of video as a sales tool!

The post Leveraging Video to Get More Sales Meetings [Podcast] appeared first on Vidyard.

from http://www.vidyard.com/blog/leveraging-video-to-get-more-sales-meetings-podcast/

[logancfrench]

Leveraging Video to Get More Sales Meetings [Podcast]

The more we talk to sales people, the more we realize that cold calling just isn’t cutting it anymore. And when you’re targeting large, enterprise companies, you need every edge you can get just to get your prospects’ attention — let alone land a meeting.

That’s why we’ve been implementing a video-first approach to sales here at Vidyard; video is engaging and helps cut through inbox clutter. After we started using video in our sales process, Scott Ingram, host of the Sales Success Stories Podcast took notice. He recently sat down with Reid Oliver, Business Development Rep here at Vidyard to learn about his sales strategy and how he uses video to land coveted meetings with enterprise prospects:

And in case you’d rather read some of Reid’s answers, here are a few that stood out from this awesome interview:

What kind of research do you do to ensure you consistently get meetings with prospects?

There really are a ton of tools out there to help with research, and I think you really need to pick and choose which ones are going to benefit your style most.  (Editor’s note: If you want to learn more about researching companies for prospecting with video, check out this post!)

We use Salesforce, so I will often look into accounts and run specific reports on whether we’ve had conversations with them in the past, or whether we have met with them at conferences. If we have never had any sort of interaction with them, I will go even deeper. I’ll follow the company on Sales Navigator or set up Google Alerts, so I can understand what people are interested in.

If I can understand when a company has a reason to invest in video or to invest in their digital strategy in our case, I’m going to be more likely to have that conversation. So I really try to be there with the research phase and try to understand — does it make sense to be reaching out at this point in time?

How are you using video for prospecting?

To drink my own Kool-Aid here, video has been a game changer for me in terms of cutting through the clutter. I think I see a LinkedIn post every day about how many emails executives are getting. And I often see people sharing screenshots of poor BDR or SDR prospecting emails, so I try to really think differently and a huge part of doing that is including video in my email strategy.

I’ve found just including a thumbnail of myself, or even me with a white board with the person’s name on it, increased my email click-through rates by 5 to 7x. (Of course that thumbnail links to the actual video.) Like this:

Sometimes I’ll even take that even further and I’ll put together a short demo video of the areas I see on their website where I can provide value. So I’ll do a screencast of their current video setup, and talk about how Vidyard can have a positive impact on that.

What are your favorite sales tools?

First off are a few Chrome extensions that I find that really help me out. I use an extension called Datanyze, which lets me visit a website and immediately see that company’s  revenue, what kind of funding they have, and a host of other details. If they’re a smaller company, I’ll be able to see things like what kind of technology they are using as well. A big piece of the puzzle for us is understanding what type of marketing automation system and what sort of CRM platform the company is using. That arms us with a ton of intelligence to be able to tailor our conversations, especially if they’re not a company that we currently have in Salesforce.

We also use Rapportive, which helps me find contact information from LinkedIn profiles. If it’s someone that we’re not able to find good data on, I’ll use Rapportive in addition to KiteDesk. These 3 extensions are available free as a BDR or sales rep, so I really love them.

And then a big part of my day-to-day is spent in Sales Navigator on LinkedIn. I take full advantage of following specific prospects that I’m not connected with, following full companies and getting alerts from LinkedIn on what they’re doing. I’ll often scan my newsfeed on LinkedIn for information to see what’s going on in my network, and so Sales Navigator gives me another space I can live in for all the companies I’m targeting and see updates day-after-day.

(Editor’s note: If you’re looking for free tools to accelerate your sales process, check out 11 of them in this post!)

How would you describe your sales style?

I’m pretty heads-down when I’m at the office. I’m focused on what I want to be doing today. I always take the opportunity to converse with my team, and talk about what we’re finding effective, but I really try to stay focused on the task at hand and the goals I’ve set.

When I’m focusing, a big part of that is trying to think differently and strategically to differentiate myself. I’ve received quite a few responses from people saying “Wow! This is a great email! I’ve never received anything like this in the past!” and I like to think a big part of that is my strategy. I include video in my emails, and I like to try and blend my personality with video to cut through the clutter.

Differentiation and being strategic are the two biggest sales philosophies I stick with.

What motivates you and keeps your energy level up?

To be honest, the dashboard motivates me quite a bit! When I go in, and I know I’m having a slow month, I always find myself peering at the stats. I’m the same way when I’m playing or watching sports — I’m always in the stats!

On my team, we have a lot of team activities as well. So we’ll be put into groups and have specific stats that we are measured against for the month. A huge part of that is trying to be part of that team and win it for the group that I’m in.

And last but not least, my manager is an awesome guy. I have a ton of respect for him, and I know that he’s a happy camper when the numbers are pouring in from my end as well!

Ready to practice what Reid is preaching?

Download the Video Selling Success Kit, and get tips and tricks collected from top-performing sales reps like Reid. You’ll get a free (forever!) video creation tool, a cheat sheet for creating your first prospecting video, and tips on how to make the most of video as a sales tool!

The post Leveraging Video to Get More Sales Meetings [Podcast] appeared first on Vidyard.

from News By Logan French http://www.vidyard.com/blog/leveraging-video-to-get-more-sales-meetings-podcast/

[peterjcameron]

Leveraging Video to Get More Sales Meetings [Podcast]

The more we talk to sales people, the more we realize that cold calling just isn’t cutting it anymore. And when you’re targeting large, enterprise companies, you need every edge you can get just to get your prospects’ attention — let alone land a meeting.

That’s why we’ve been implementing a video-first approach to sales here at Vidyard; video is engaging and helps cut through inbox clutter. After we started using video in our sales process, Scott Ingram, host of the Sales Success Stories Podcast took notice. He recently sat down with Reid Oliver, Business Development Rep here at Vidyard to learn about his sales strategy and how he uses video to land coveted meetings with enterprise prospects:

And in case you’d rather read some of Reid’s answers, here are a few that stood out from this awesome interview:

What kind of research do you do to ensure you consistently get meetings with prospects?

There really are a ton of tools out there to help with research, and I think you really need to pick and choose which ones are going to benefit your style most.  (Editor’s note: If you want to learn more about researching companies for prospecting with video, check out this post!)

We use Salesforce, so I will often look into accounts and run specific reports on whether we’ve had conversations with them in the past, or whether we have met with them at conferences. If we have never had any sort of interaction with them, I will go even deeper. I’ll follow the company on Sales Navigator or set up Google Alerts, so I can understand what people are interested in.

If I can understand when a company has a reason to invest in video or to invest in their digital strategy in our case, I’m going to be more likely to have that conversation. So I really try to be there with the research phase and try to understand — does it make sense to be reaching out at this point in time?

How are you using video for prospecting?

To drink my own Kool-Aid here, video has been a game changer for me in terms of cutting through the clutter. I think I see a LinkedIn post every day about how many emails executives are getting. And I often see people sharing screenshots of poor BDR or SDR prospecting emails, so I try to really think differently and a huge part of doing that is including video in my email strategy.

I’ve found just including a thumbnail of myself, or even me with a white board with the person’s name on it, increased my email click-through rates by 5 to 7x. (Of course that thumbnail links to the actual video.) Like this:

Sometimes I’ll even take that even further and I’ll put together a short demo video of the areas I see on their website where I can provide value. So I’ll do a screencast of their current video setup, and talk about how Vidyard can have a positive impact on that.

What are your favorite sales tools?

First off are a few Chrome extensions that I find that really help me out. I use an extension called Datanyze, which lets me visit a website and immediately see that company’s  revenue, what kind of funding they have, and a host of other details. If they’re a smaller company, I’ll be able to see things like what kind of technology they are using as well. A big piece of the puzzle for us is understanding what type of marketing automation system and what sort of CRM platform the company is using. That arms us with a ton of intelligence to be able to tailor our conversations, especially if they’re not a company that we currently have in Salesforce.

We also use Rapportive, which helps me find contact information from LinkedIn profiles. If it’s someone that we’re not able to find good data on, I’ll use Rapportive in addition to KiteDesk. These 3 extensions are available free as a BDR or sales rep, so I really love them.

And then a big part of my day-to-day is spent in Sales Navigator on LinkedIn. I take full advantage of following specific prospects that I’m not connected with, following full companies and getting alerts from LinkedIn on what they’re doing. I’ll often scan my newsfeed on LinkedIn for information to see what’s going on in my network, and so Sales Navigator gives me another space I can live in for all the companies I’m targeting and see updates day-after-day.

(Editor’s note: If you’re looking for free tools to accelerate your sales process, check out 11 of them in this post!)

How would you describe your sales style?

I’m pretty heads-down when I’m at the office. I’m focused on what I want to be doing today. I always take the opportunity to converse with my team, and talk about what we’re finding effective, but I really try to stay focused on the task at hand and the goals I’ve set.

When I’m focusing, a big part of that is trying to think differently and strategically to differentiate myself. I’ve received quite a few responses from people saying “Wow! This is a great email! I’ve never received anything like this in the past!” and I like to think a big part of that is my strategy. I include video in my emails, and I like to try and blend my personality with video to cut through the clutter.

Differentiation and being strategic are the two biggest sales philosophies I stick with.

What motivates you and keeps your energy level up?

To be honest, the dashboard motivates me quite a bit! When I go in, and I know I’m having a slow month, I always find myself peering at the stats. I’m the same way when I’m playing or watching sports — I’m always in the stats!

On my team, we have a lot of team activities as well. So we’ll be put into groups and have specific stats that we are measured against for the month. A huge part of that is trying to be part of that team and win it for the group that I’m in.

And last but not least, my manager is an awesome guy. I have a ton of respect for him, and I know that he’s a happy camper when the numbers are pouring in from my end as well!

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from Peter Cameron Business Consultant http://www.vidyard.com/blog/leveraging-video-to-get-more-sales-meetings-podcast/