#i will deal with a touch screen in exchange for safety features

[chaoticbooklesbian]

Told my car-obsessed uncle that I dread having to replace my car not because I love my current one, but because I don't want a touch screen, and finding a car without a touch screen but with up-to-date safety features is damn near impossible. Predictably, he immediately dove headfirst down that rabbit hole, and emerged several minutes later with a troubled expression on his face to declare that I was correct.

(We did have to remind him that I have ADHD and minimizing distractions is Wildly Important when he didn't understand why I wouldn't want a touch screen built into my car. Never mind that it's a dangerous distraction for everyone, he didn't get it until we explicitly reminded him of the ADHD.)

[technicalsupportcenter]

Technical Support Center

Technical support center is help you in resolving any problems or answering your queries. You want focus on your business.

Everyday operational challenges:

·       Security Threats

·       Malware

·       Escalating IT Support Costs

·       Network Viruses

·       Email Spam

·       Data Theft

Whether or not you are going through technical glitches, want steering, or have questions about our products/services, we have got you included. We do have remote tracking 24*7 for your infrastructure management. The quarries can be solved at instance. To attain out to our assist desk, you may touch us through telephone, e-mail, or live chat on our website. Our 24*7 assist desk guide isn't always just about fixing troubles – it is approximately ensuring your peace of mind. Regardless of wherein you are or what time it's far, assume us to be your dependable accomplice in tackling all your generation demanding situations. Your satisfaction is our precedence, and we sit up for serving you anytime, day or night.

What does a help desk support do?

A assist table support position involves presenting technical assistance and help to people or groups the usage of laptop structures, software program applications, and numerous generation-related services. The primary goal of a help table support expert is to clear up technical problems, answer user queries, and ensure the easy functioning of generation systems. Here are some key duties and obligations related to a help desk aid role:

Issue decision: assist table aid specialists are accountable for diagnosing and resolving technical troubles said through customers. This can encompass problems with hardware, software, networking, and other IT-related concerns.

Troubleshooting: They employ trouble-fixing skills to become aware of the root cause of problems and offer answers. This might involve asking customers detailed inquiries to collect information about the problem and its context.

Technical steering: assist table aid affords guidance to users on a way to use software program applications, hardware devices, and different technology tools correctly. They may provide step-via-step commands or remote assistance to deal with user inquiries.

Far off assistance: Many help table guide roles involve supplying help remotely. This can encompass the usage of faraway computing device gear to access users' systems and troubleshoot troubles without being bodily gift.

Person schooling: help table specialists can also behavior schooling classes to teach users approximately new software program features, updates, or best practices for using technology effectively.

Documentation: maintaining correct facts of consumer problems, troubleshooting steps, and solutions is essential. This documentation enables create a understanding base that may be cited in the future for similar problems.

Price ticket management: help desk aid often uses ticketing systems to song and manipulate user requests. Every request is assigned a price tag, that is up to date as the difficulty progresses closer to resolution.

Communication: powerful communication competencies are vital for explaining technical ideas to non-technical users in a clear and comprehensible way. This consists of written verbal exchange in emails or support tickets, as well as verbal conversation over the cellphone.

Escalation: If a hassle is particularly complex or past the scope of the assist table's capabilities, they will expand the difficulty to higher-stage IT assist or specialised teams.

Software program and device upkeep: assist table specialists might help with habitual upkeep tasks, along with software program updates, machine backups, and safety patches.

Customer service: supplying first rate customer service is a key thing of the position. Assist desk guide professionals want to be patient, empathetic, and courteous when managing users, even in worrying conditions.

Monitoring and Reporting: they may screen structures for capability issues or tendencies and provide reviews on routine troubles or areas that require development.

Typical, a help desk assist expert plays a vital function in making sure that users can efficaciously use era to perform their tasks whilst minimizing disruptions due to technical problems.

Is help desk a good first it job?

 

Starting a profession inside the discipline of facts technology (IT) can be each interesting and overwhelming, particularly when thinking about the extensive variety of roles to be had. One popular access factor for freshmen is a help table function. A help table task involves presenting technical support and assistance to quit-customers who're going through IT-associated issues. While it won't be the maximum glamorous IT job, it may be an superb first step for numerous reasons.

1. Talent development: A assist desk position offers a unique opportunity to construct a sturdy basis in diverse IT abilties. You will emerge as proficient in troubleshooting, trouble-fixing, communique, and customer service. Those abilties are valuable and transferable to extra advanced IT roles as you progress for your profession.

2. Publicity to distinctive technologies: assist table employees paintings with a various variety of technology, software program, and hardware. This exposure enables you make yourself familiar with special IT systems, networks, and programs, which can be useful in case you choose to focus on a particular location afterward.

3. Client interplay: Interacting with stop-customers may be challenging but also noticeably rewarding. It improves your conversation competencies, teaches you how to give an explanation for technical concepts in a easy manner, and complements your ability to address annoyed or non-technical users—a talent that is critical in any IT position.

4. Hassle-solving: assist table professionals are basically IT detectives. You may find out how to investigate problems, gather information, and find solutions. This problem-fixing mind-set is relevant to all IT jobs and past, making you a precious asset to any team.

5. Entry degree: assist desk positions are typically access-stage, because of this they often require minimal previous enjoy in IT. This makes them reachable to individuals with numerous backgrounds, which include current graduates or career changers seeking to enter the IT industry.

6. Networking: at the same time as now not inside the technical experience, the connections you're making at the same time as operating in a assist desk position can be tremendous. You may have the possibility to interact with diverse teams inside an corporation, that can open doorways to different IT roles or even mentorship from experienced professionals.

7. Information user angle: operating at a help desk exposes you to the challenges and frustrations that end-customers face. This firsthand revel in can result in progressed product design and person reviews in case you pass into roles along with software program improvement or person enjoy layout.

8. Stepping Stone: A assist desk activity does not must be your end purpose. It is able to serve as a stepping stone to greater specialised IT roles. As you benefit experience and further certifications, you could transition into roles like gadget administration, network engineering, cybersecurity, or even IT management.

9. Learning corporation Dynamics: help table professionals interact with various departments and individuals inside an enterprise. This provides insights into how organizations operate, which may be fine if you're thinking about a circulate into roles with broader organizational responsibilities.

10. Adaptability: In a help desk function, you may come upon a wide range of technical issues, some of that you may not have encountered before. This pushes you to learn fast, adapt to changing situations, and live updated with the contemporary technologies—an important trait inside the ever-evolving subject of IT.

11. Career growth: Many companies offer opportunities for career increase within their IT departments. With willpower and continuous studying, you could improve from a assist desk function to more specialized or senior positions. This boom ability can offer long-time period process security and financial stability.

In conclusion, a help table job can be an superb place to begin for everyone searching to break into the IT enterprise. It offers precious skills, publicity to various technology, and opportunities for career advancement. At the same time as it might not be the very last vacation spot for absolutely everyone, the reviews and information won from a assist desk function lay a strong basis for a a hit and pleasing career in IT.

Is technical support a good career?

Sure, technical assist may be an excellent profession desire for people who have an aptitude for trouble-fixing, robust communication talents, and a preference to help others. Here are a few motives why technical aid can be a promising profession:

Activity demand: In ultra-modern era-pushed world, there is a consistent need for technical help experts. As generation continues to advance, extra humans require help with software program, hardware, and various virtual gadgets.

Variety of Industries: Technical aid roles exist in a wide variety of industries, from IT and software businesses to telecommunications, healthcare, finance, and greater. This indicates you can pick out an industry that aligns together with your interests.

Continuous mastering: the sector of generation is always evolving, which means technical support professionals are continually getting to know and updating their talents. This may lead to personal and professional boom.

Problem-solving: Technical help roles contain diagnosing and solving technical issues. In case you experience troubleshooting and finding answers, this profession can be pleasing.

Customer interplay: if you revel in operating with people, technical aid presents the opportunity to have interaction with clients, assisting them remedy their problems and offering a fantastic experience.

Profession progression: starting in technical guide may be a stepping stone to different roles in IT, which includes machine administration, community engineering, or maybe software improvement. Many professionals use technical guide as a basis to transport into greater specialized roles.

Far flung work opportunities: Technical aid roles regularly offer far off paintings possibilities, which could provide flexibility in in which and how you figure.

Job delight: successfully resolving technical problems for clients can lead to a sense of achievement and process satisfaction, mainly whilst you assist a person triumph over a irritating problem.

But, it's essential to word that technical aid also can have its demanding situations:

Annoying customers: handling pissed off or hard customers may be emotionally taxing.

Repetitive responsibilities: some technical help obligations can be repetitive, specifically in access-level roles.

Excessive pressure situations: depending at the urgency of the technical troubles, there is probably instances of excessive stress and stress.

Non-stop mastering: even as this can be a effective aspect, it is able to also be tough to maintain up with the regular modifications in era.

In the long run, whether or not technical help is a superb career for you relies upon on your interests, strengths, and profession dreams. If you revel in trouble-solving, operating with generation, and helping others, technical assist can provide a satisfying and solid career path.

How much does help desk support pay in New Jersey?

Salaries for assist desk assist roles can vary based totally on factors along with enjoy, vicinity, corporation length, and industry. As of my ultimate expertise update in September 2021, the average revenue for a help table support technician in New Jersey ranged from $40,000 to $60,000 in keeping with year. But, please understand that those figures are approximate and can exchange over the years.

For the maximum up-to-date and correct salary information, I propose checking process search web sites like certainly, Glassdoor, or LinkedIn, in which you could locate current job listings together with income tiers for help table help positions specifically in New Jersey. Additionally, certain industries or sectors, inclusive of finance, healthcare, or era, may offer higher salaries as compared to others. Neighborhood price of residing and demand for IT specialists in specific areas of recent Jersey also can impact earnings tiers.

TECHNICALSUPPORT: A LOOK AT OUR KEY FEATURES

Cloud records Backup by using Artech worldwide is absolutely automated. Maximum businesses put their lives on the road every day without even knowing it. Organizations are relying increasingly more on the data of their computer systems and right backups are getting more and more crucial.

Our assist desk aid has a separate, express procedure and crew that help essential prevalence. The crucial occurrence control (COM) also coordinates with the applicable commercial enterprise to preserve them regularly up to date primarily based at the escalation matrix.

We offer far off Technical support thru 4 express degrees: Tier 0, Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier three assist. Each of those degrees bears assist table ticket help and resolves problems of different severities that require varying levels of knowledge.

We offer each onsite and offsite helpdesk help services. Thru our offsite helpdesk assist, we offer faraway assist control from our guide center. Both of the help services will assist you to cast off your IT assist worries.

Our help desk provider plans consist of live 24x7x365 days on-demand guide. You may get entry to our specialist help table team via the smartphone, email, or net assist.

WAY TO INCREASE YOUR NETWORK

Increasing your network, both personally and professionally, can be pretty treasured. Here are some strategies that will help you increase and improve your network:

Attend events: Attend meetings, workshops, seminars, and networking events associated with your field of hobby. Those events offer a platform to satisfy like-minded people and specialists.

Be a part of on line groups: participate in on-line boards, social media organizations, and systems like LinkedIn. Engage in discussions, proportion your know-how, and connect to individuals who share your interests.

Attend Social Gatherings: Attend social occasions and events, even the ones no longer without delay related to your discipline. Every now and then, casual conversations can cause unexpected connections.

 

Networking Introductions: Ask your present contacts to introduce you to their connections. This heat introduction could make it easier to establish a connection with a new individual.

Stay energetic on Social Media: percentage valuable content related to your field on social media systems. This could help you entice followers and have interaction in meaningful conversations.

#technical #support #center #technicalsupportcenter #technicalissues #supportyourlocal #technicalanalysis #supporting #technicalsupport #supportyourlocaldealer #supportlocalmakers #newjersey

[amistytown]

The Brothers Comfort MC During a Panic Attack

This is my first attempt at writing down my headcanons for the brothers, so I apologize if anything is out of character. I meant it to be short and sweet, but it grew out of my control after a while. I’m a perfectionist and wanted to rewrite everything. I made minor edits and am posting it anyway or it’ll sit in my drafts forever; I admit I put the most effort into Lucifer’s, forgive me. Also sorry for the repetitiveness and any typos you may find. I decided to write how the brothers would comfort MC during a panic attack, especially as someone who suffers from anxiety and panic attacks themselves. Honestly, I wrote this as a way to comfort myself since I’ve been dealing with terrible anxiety lately. Of course, everyone experiences anxiety differently, so I can only speak from my own experiences. I didn’t go into detail when it comes to the symptoms themselves because it’s from the point of view of the brothers and only so many are visible to the eye. Trigger warning for depictions of anxiety and panic attacks. Thank you for reading!

LUCIFER

Lucifer is troubled. Following lunch, you disappeared, currently absent from class. This is unlike you, his worry intensifying every minute you’re out of his sight. Yet he maintains his composure, resigning himself to scouring the academy grounds. Time passes at a torturous pace, his thoughts beginning to take a turn for the worst. He contemplates whether to involve his brothers and Lord Diavolo himself at this rate, however the sound of his D.D.D diverts his attention. A wave of relief washes over him at the sight of your name lighting up his screen, chased by frustration at you, your silence, and himself for losing track of you so easily; he couldn’t bear living if anything happened to you under his watch. He expects this behavior from his brothers, not you. Though his heart sinks, the Avatar of Pride uncharacteristically overcome with guilt while he reads your message. Of course, you are not his brothers. He should not have doubted you.

Your texts are apprehensive, a weighty pause between them as you hesitate to lay bare the darkest depths of your soul. He approaches you cautiously, to avoid upsetting you further. Your words alone convey the sheer panic taking possession of you, the last of your strength used to press send. Outside he discovers you, huddled miserably in an isolated corner of the building, swathed in shadow. The desire to shelter you from the world burns within him, but your eyes widen fearfully in his presence, wounding his pride. Immediately, you apologize. Sorry you’re missing class, that you left without telling anyone, and upset him—especially when you’re aware of his busy schedule. You’re sorry for not having the courage to pull yourself together, succumbing to your anxiety, your shame palpable. The hand clutching your D.D.D is trembling, your chest heaving as you struggle to breathe. He aches for you, each tear shed hurting more than the last, your pain managing to touch the very core of his being and set him alight.

If anyone is sorry, it’s him, pride be damned. Kneeling in front of you, he assures you an apology isn’t necessary—your wellbeing of great importance to him. He wants you to rely on him, grateful you confided in him despite your doubts. Hopefully, he can eventually put your mind at ease. His voice low, soothing, he continues to console you, making sure you’re aware he’s not upset, and your feelings are valid. Although he’s not familiar with the inner workings of anxiety itself, he’s willing to listen, learning how to support you to the best of his ability—starting today, providing you’re comfortable accepting his offer. Initially, he prioritized your safety for the sake of the exchange program and Lord Diavolo’s wish to unite the three realms, now it’s merely out of adoration for you, his beloved. Once you’re ready, he’ll let you know you’re not alone. He’s never too busy on your behalf. 

Offering you his hand, a smile graces his features as you accept. Slowly, he helps you to your feet, steadying you against him. He notes the way you relax at his touch, shoulders sagging and head coming to rest on his chest. Only you exist in this moment, his gaze not leaving you, not even for a second. Standing in silence until your breathing settles and you regain your balance, he sees you through the height of your attack before escorting you back to the House of Lamentation. He’ll personally excuse you from the remainder of your classes, understanding you need a quiet place to recover. Classical music plays softly in the background of his room, and he’s content to have you in his embrace, drawing you onto his lap after you finish the tea he brewed to calm your nerves. Lucifer pays you special attention, massaging your tired body and kissing you tenderly, his breath fanning across your lips as he reminds you how special you truly are—brave, compassionate, and incredibly loved.

MAMMON

Mammon mourns his loss, wondering how he let them gain the upper hand; admittedly, a foolish mistake on his part. He dreads breaking the news to Lucifer, and the resentment that shows on his brothers’ faces once he confesses does little to ease his mind. Still, he worries about your reaction most of all, knowing his stupidity has put you in a precarious position. In that moment he believes their words—only a greedy scumbag like himself dares to place his human’s happiness on the line. Although certain of his win at the time, he should consider how his actions affect you more often; otherwise, how can he claim he’s the Great Mammon? His confidence is his downfall in the end. Now you’ll suffer along with him. Yet you feign optimism, attempting to soothe everything over despite your innocence. His guilt only grows, a heavy weight on his shoulders. One he deserves.

Three days of waiting on and performing for large crowds at The Fall proves hectic for everyone. He can tell you’re struggling beneath the façade of a composed and hospitable server, going above and beyond to ensure the patrons leave satisfied. Furthermore, you lend him and his brothers a hand, coming to their rescue; it should be him making it as easy on you as possible. His concern for you runs deep, no matter how hard he tries to maintain his usual air of indifference, but you have the nerve to reassure him—it’s meant to be the opposite, dammit. Each night he goes out of his way to check on you, frustrated that you continue to dance around the subject. He can see the exhaustion on your face, hear the slight tremor in your voice, the toll his stupid decision is taking on you, and it stung. You comfort him, even when he’s undeserving, so why won’t you allow him to hold you and kiss the pain away? Not that he’s asked. You should realize by now you can rely on him, right?

Watching you suffer in silence tortures him. He can’t deny it regardless of his best effort to make light of the situation. You barely eat or spend time outside your room, saying you’re tired, which isn’t a lie—working is exhausting, no doubt about it—but he understands you well enough to notice the subtle signs of your anxiety, your smile unable to trick him into believing otherwise. Perhaps you find him as insufferable as his brothers do, or worse, and don’t want to see his face after what he’s done. That doesn’t stop him from showing up at your door, hoping he can offer some form of comfort. However, you keep up appearances, supporting the seven of them during the longest weekend of their lives. You work hard too, his chest swelling with pride as he watches you care for his brothers and customers alike. How can you like an idiot like him? You’re selfless and loving, looking past his flaws to see what lay beneath his sin. His human. His angel. He wants—no needs—you to be okay.

The last day comes and goes in a blur. Finally, he can toss these ridiculous clothes and rabbit ears in the trash and never perform that dance again. Better yet, you’re free of his burden, though the guilt remains. He can’t relax until he’s positive you’re okay, knowing he’s genuinely sorry. Standing outside your room, he tries to muster up the courage to open his heart to you—apologies not his strong suit—when he hears you crying. They’re small, muffled sobs that manage to shake him to his core, blood running cold. Yeah, he should knock, but he can’t control himself, throwing the door open without hesitation and rushing to your side. The sight of your tears is almost too much to bear, and he draws you into his embrace, face heating up at his own moment of vulnerability, but this is about you, not him. He can be strong for you too, telling you everything’s going to be okay, that the Great Mammon is here to help.

After his stupidity, you tell him you were afraid to bother him? He can hardly suppress the shock at your confession, the sadness in your eyes breaking his heart. You wanted to make sure it went smoothly for his sake? You suffer through Hell alone because you chose to put his feelings first? Crazy. Though he thanks you, not completely ashamed to admit he’s touched. However, he tells you that you don’t have to put aside your feelings for his benefit; he prefers to be by your side then know you’re having a rough time on your own. He is your first. Taking the initiative, he asks what he can do to make it up to you, no matter how big or small the request is because he’ll do it in a heartbeat. You opt to stay in his arms, burying your face into his chest, and he wipes away your remaining tears, being as gentle as he possibly can. He can feel how tense your body is, your skin unnaturally warm, and it takes a while until you stop shaking. It’s moments like these he’ll tell you how much you mean to him—that he loves you, okay—and he wants you to come to him for everything. He’ll hold you, taking your hand in his, and kiss you with all the adoration in the world because you’re incredibly important to him. Mammon can attest to that.

LEVIATHAN

Leviathan invites you to his room to play video games, a daily routine the two of you have comfortably fallen into. He loves gaming with you, though on occasion you opt to watch instead, thoroughly enthralled by whatever is on the screen. Miraculously, you enjoy listening to him ramble—whether it’s about the game he’s playing, anime he’s watching, or TSL among other things—genuinely showing interest in his passions; he’s incapable of expressing how truly grateful he is for your company. His heart nearly bursts whenever you compliment him on his gaming prowess, encourage him during a particularly intense battle, or merely tell him how you enjoy hanging out. How in the Devildom did a gross otaku like him get so incredibly lucky? He can hardly believe you love him of all demons. The thought alone sounds crazy lmao. 

Unable to contain his excitement, he awaits your arrival that night, ensuring everything is perfect when he hears a knock on the door. However, his smile fades the moment he lays eyes on you, mind beginning to race as he wonders why you look miserable, your gaze trained on your hands. Before he can speak, you apologize, dissolving into tears while you return the game he let you borrow. You’re stuttering, completely winded, and he can barely hear you confess to accidentally corrupting his data in your panic. In fact, he loses track of the number of times you choke out a sorry. He treasures his games, his collection extensive, but he cherishes you most of all. The loss is a minor annoyance, nothing that lessens the feelings he harbors for you. Although difficult, he overcomes his insecurities to show you it’s okay—you’re loved.

Not only are you sad, but you’re also terrified, a part of him wanting to destroy the game itself if it means you never have to experience the pain that torments you now. Regarding you carefully, afraid to make matters worse, he reassures you that he’s not upset—far from it, honestly—and that he cares about you more than any game. No stranger to your panic attacks, he reaches out to take your hand in his, hoping you find comfort in what he has to offer. And when you finally glance up, hope shining in your tear-filled eyes, he can’t help but wrap you in his arms. A warmth spreads across his face, heart pounding in his ears, but he knows you need him, allowing his body to relax around yours.

Holding you against him, he tells you everything’s all right, stuttering out how he loves you and, most importantly, wants to you to feel better. Your arms circle around his waist, causing his heart to jump into his throat, but he only pulls you closer. You’re his Henry, and what friend is he if you can’t rely on him? Leviathan is understanding, wanting you to come to him for support at your most vulnerable. Now he puts his knowledge to the test, easing you into his room with continuous words of affirmation. You always know how to console him at his lowest, and he hopes he can return the favor. If anyone deserves to feel loved it’s you, who brought joy into his otherwise bleak world, and he’ll sit with you every day and night if you need him to. 

SATAN

Satan knows he shouldn’t be awake, though he finds it difficult to satiate his curiosity as he peruses the books lining his shelves. He barely registers the sound of his D.D.D, reluctant to put the book aside to see who’s messaging him at this ungodly hour; Asmodeus most likely. His tune changes after he sees your name lighting up his screen, his annoyance replaced with worry. He knows you struggle, especially at night, but he can tell you’re hesitant to reach out. Nevertheless, you gradually begin to confide in him, his patience limitless if you’re concerned, and he feels a sense of relief that you choose to trust him at your most vulnerable instead of suffering on your own. Pouring over every book he can locate on anxiety, he studies it religiously, engraining each page into his memory. Not by giving unsolicited advice—he doesn’t want to make that mistake twice—but by comforting you the best he can, even if it simply means to stay by your side, waiting for the panic to pass.

A second later, he appears at your door, gaze softening as your eyes meet. In the darkness of your room, he can tell how exhausted you are. You apologize for bothering him, particularly this late, but he dismisses you with a shake of his head and a reassuring smile, sitting beside you on the bed. It saddens him that you feel the need to, but he’s familiar enough with anxiety by now that he understands how much of a manipulative monster it truly is; if only he can destroy it with his own two hands, strangling the life out of it so it no longer taints that innocent soul of yours. To watch you struggle fills him with a rage that he forces deep within himself, fully aware anger isn’t the answer no matter how great his desire to protect you is. So, he cups your face in his hands, your skin warm beneath his fingers as he strokes your flushed cheeks and presses your foreheads together. 

Focus on him, he tells you, the steady rhythm of his breathing, and his voice while he whispers words of love and encouragement. He never tires of letting you know how beautiful and strong you are, that he’s always here for you and loves you—all of you. You unravel in his arms, opening your heart up to him, and he listens intently, pressing a gentle kiss to your lips the moment you look uncertain. You’re not a burden he promises, hoping one day you’ll believe it yourself, but he’ll remind you every chance he gets; forever if he must. It’s worth it in the end, when you relax against him and smile, kissing him in return. Slowly, the anxiety leaves your body, Satan thankful that the waves of panic have receded enough to let you rest your weary mind. He remains next to you, pulling you down to lay your head on his chest and closing your hand in his, entwining your fingers. He’s content here with you, watching you fall asleep and chasing away the nightmares.

ASMODEUS

Asmodeus loves shopping, but he loves shopping with you most of all. The day is bright with you by his side, and he can’t help but buy you clothes and matching accessories to bring out your inherent charm. Your potential is endless, and he gushes over how gorgeous you are, unable to contain his excitement when your cheeks turn a beautiful shade of pink in return. He can hardly control himself around you, gaze fixated on your every movement and heart racing each time you flash him one of the sweetest smiles he’s ever seen; your very soul seeming to shine through and blind him. Nothing prepares him for the love he feels for you, but he considers it a welcome surprise, his desire to grow closer to you intensifying day after day. You captivate him, the Avatar of Lust of all demons. What an exciting turn of events!

Of course, he attracts attention wherever he goes, posing for pictures with adoring fans and basking in the compliments constantly thrown his way; nothing new, but he enjoys it, nonetheless. Who can resist the allure of his very presence? However, anger wells within him at the sight of you being shoved to the side, falling to the ground and lost to the crowd that has gathered. Their words of flattery fall on deaf ears as he rushes to you, throwing a heated glance at the lowly demon who dares to touch his darling human. He desires nothing more than to punish them for such an injustice, but the fear in your eyes tells him otherwise. By the time he scoops you up into his arms you’re trembling from head to toe, and he can feel your heart pounding against him. A part of him places the blame on himself, an unfamiliar feeling, but he chooses to ignore it for now, focusing on getting you home in your worsening state.

In the peace and quiet of his room, he sits you on the bed, wrapping you in his arms as he affectionately runs his fingers through your hair. He can tell you’re upset—in an absolute state of panic by the looks of it—and all he can do is hold you through it, quietly asking what you need and willing to answer your every beck and call if it means that adorable smile graces your features once more. For a moment he considers seeking out Lucifer, worried something has gone terribly wrong, but thankfully you find your voice, mumbling into his chest about anxiety and panic attacks, that you’ll be fine—eventually—and are sorry for ruining your date. He doesn’t understand completely, though he knows you need him, promising to stay by your side for as long as you want. Kissing your cheek, he assures you there’s no need to apologize to him, your safety more important than anything else; the demon who laid his hands on you won’t go without punishment either.

Admitting a bath helps calm you down, he prepares one for you, steam rising from the surface and the heady scent of roses filling the air. Together you slip into the water, enveloped by its warmth, and he hums in contentment as you lean into him, his arms coming to rest around your waist. He watches you carefully, making sure you’re able to relax and preparing himself in case you call on him; he’ll do anything for you if it brings you the happiness you deserve. Your eyes flutter close, Asmodeus showering you with delicate kisses, comforted by the fact your breathing has levelled out and you appear a lot calmer than before. The day didn’t go as planned, and he hopes to make it up to you, vowing that no one else will hurt you on his watch. He loves himself. He loves his brothers. But loves you most of all.

BEELZEBUB

Beelzebub notices you haven’t touched your dinner and is beyond happy the moment you offer your plate to him. Yet he can’t bring himself to enjoy the food in front of him while you excuse yourself from the table, eyes downcast and voice quiet, the usual smile gone from your face and leaving behind an emptiness that rivals his own hunger. His mouth waters at the thought of seconds, but his concern for you grows, and he decides to follow you without question, disregarding the ravenous growl of his stomach. He catches you in the hallway, calling out your name. You turn to him, his brow furrowing in unease at the sight of your tears and the slight tremble of your lip. It hurts him to see you in obvious distress, and he earnestly offers his support.

The only sound is that of your sobbing. He desperately wishes to hold you tightly and rid you of your pain. However, he falters, studying you. Your gaze is trained on the floor, shoulders stiff with tension, and the color drains from your cheeks. When you speak, he’s surprised by how helpless you sound and the fact you’re trying to reassure him, putting his needs above your own although you’re struggling to hold yourself together. Fear flickers across your features at the echo of the brothers’ voices travelling up the stairs, and he mumbles out an apology as he carefully lifts you into his arms, cradling you to his chest. 

Before the others can round the corner, he hurries down the hall and slips into your room, determined to protect his vulnerable human. He notices you relax against him, your fingers curling into his shirt, and he can’t help but want to keep you close, relieved after you lean in closer to wrap your arms around his neck. Stroking your hair, he allows you to cry, his patience and love for you endless. Eventually, you mutter an embarrassed sorry, thanking him profusely, but he’s merely relieved you’re beginning to feel a bit better, reassuring you that you can always depend on him. 

Listening to you intently, he never breaks eye contact. You open up to him about your anxiety, his stomach twisting as you describe what you call a panic attack and how it wrecks you both mentally and physically. Beelzebub knows he has a lot to learn, but he expresses interest in understanding anxiety and, most importantly, how he can help you, so you don’t suffer alone. For the rest of the night, he keeps you company and eases you through the remainder of your attack, giving you plenty of hugs and rubbing your back in soothing circles until you no longer shake, and your heartbeat returns to its usual pace.

BELPHEGOR

Belphegor enjoys the time you spend together, especially when the two of you are alone. He asks you to accompany him in the attic, and it’s not long before he curls around you, falling into a peaceful sleep as he listens to the steady beat of your heart. However, when he awakes it’s to the sound of your soft cries in the dark, which fill him with a fear he can’t seem to shake. Without hesitation he’s at your side, sitting up to softly place a hand on your shoulder and ask you what’s wrong. The sadness in your eyes as you glance up at him, tears staining your cheeks, tugs at his heartstrings. He can’t bear to see you upset.

Once he realizes you’re having a panic attack, he’s attentive to your needs, cradling you in his arms as you cry into his chest. You confided in him about your struggles with anxiety after you fell to pieces in front of him months ago. A part of him understands, the loss of Lilith haunting him throughout the years and instilling a similar feeling of unease within him, especially when his nightmares seem to blur the line between reality and the painful memories of his past. You always came to his rescue and now it’s his turn to comfort you in your time of need. Sleep can wait.

With you in his embrace, he brings you down to relax against the pillows, pulling the blanket around your shivering form. You rest your head on his shoulder, and he gently brushes the remaining tears from your face, whispering words of love and reassurance. He listens to you when you’re comfortable to talk, the slight tremble of your voice causing him to draw you closer and press a kiss to your forehead. Belphegor tells you he’s here for you—forever—and although he’s still learning about anxiety and finding the best ways to comfort you during an attack, he wants you to depend on him no matter what. Even if that means you wake him up in the middle of the night. He won’t rest until he knows you’re okay, and you’re peacefully sleeping in his arms.

[imerdwarf]

Sworn To Secrecy

Requested by @imagine-all-the-fandoms: Hey colleague ❤️ I really love your writing! So I also thought to send you an idea 😊 The reader is Bucky’s girlfriend but just a normal civilian and he keeps it a secret at the compound. One day she visits him but crosses the other Avengers and Sam is immediately flirting with you but Bucky just comes, swoops you in his arms and kisses you. The others are shocked and confused and later that day they finally tell them they’ve been together for a while now and they are all happy for you two? 😊

Pairing: Avenger!Bucky x Civilian!Reader (Modern AU)

Warnings: Absolutely none! Just a lot of fluff 🥰

Author's Notes: Thank you so much my dear friend for sending in this beautiful request, I hope you like it and please let me know if there's anything you want me to change! 💜

Your phone vibrated in the palm of your hand and your smile reached both corners of your eyes when you saw the name light up your screen.

Bucky: I can't wait to see you, how long until you get here?

Your fingers flew quickly over the touch sensitive keyboard to reply back, without any typos might I add.

Y/N: I'm five minutes away. Patience! ;)

The wind blew in your face as you tilted your head upwards and sighed. Your relationship with Bucky Barnes was absolutely not the easiest thing in the world. He had made you sworn to secrecy about it, to protect yourself and him from potential haters and enemies.

You were grateful that you were able to spend a lot of time together when he didn't have month-long missions to go on. The sunny afternoons were spent in your small apartment on the couch watching movies with a blanket draped over the two of you, often accompanied by a hot chocolate made from his secret recipe.

Everything about Bucky screamed safety; his big beefy frame, bulging biceps that he just knew you loved and deliberately bought small sizes to show them off, his thick thighs were a dream for you whenever you draped your legs over them to get comfortable. Nothing about him scared you, not even that matte black and gold Wakandan inspired arm of his. It did wonders when you were burning up with fevers.

You met Bucky by chance at a coffee shop in Brooklyn. It was a cliché moment when you accidentally turned around too quickly and spilled your hot drink over his white shirt. Endless apologies spilled from your lips while Bucky was too busy admiring your beautiful features that your words simply fell on deaf ears. To Bucky, it felt as though time had temporarily stopped ticking, and the only people in the coffee shop at that moment was you and him.

The two of you exchanged numbers with your promises of buying him a brand new shirt to replace the one you ruined. You texted each other every second of every day. The more you talked, the easier and the flirty-er the texts became.

A month after the coffee shop incident, you almost keeled over when he finally asked you to be his girlfriend. He regretted he couldn't take you on a date because of his status, and that never really bothered you.

You didn't date him because he was a popular avenger, with a staggering 100 million followers on his Instagram. For your protection, he couldn't follow you either, but that too didn't bother you. You dated him because you loved his personality and you loved him.

You zig-zagged past the oncoming pedestrians as the tower came into view. Outside of the gates there was already a crowd of people hoping to catch a glimpse of the avengers.

The security guard in the booth next to the gate was trying to reason with the crowd, sadly a building this well known attracted all kinds of attention and tourism. You were told that people from Australia would come to visit.

You approached the guard with a friendly smile. "Good afternoon sir," you greeted politely, pulling some I.D out from your purse.

"Good afternoon! Are you expected here today?" The guard smiled but looked over your shoulder to see the crowd was now taking pictures of the front of the tower. He shooed them away and brought his attention back to you.

"Yes, Sergeant James Barnes is expecting me." The way his name rolled off your tongue was like drops of honey. Smooth and sweet.

The guard checked the list of visitors expected today and hummed with a smile.

"So he is. So what you do is, go to the front desk with your visitor badge and they'll direct you to his floor."

With a quiet thanks and holding on tightly to the badge, you walk through the screeching iron gates. Your shoes crunch underneath the gravel and the wind howls through the trees that gives off extra privacy.

The lady at reception greets you warmly and you relax when you give her your name and show her your visitor badge as directed by the security guard.

"Take the elevator and go to floor 13. Sergeant Barnes is currently in a meeting but he won't be too long." Another thank you passes through your lips as you head off towards the glass and chrome elevator.

The ride up to the 13 floors was agonisingly slow. Classical music filled the emptiness of the elevator. The glass casing gave you a beautiful view overlooking the grounds of the compound. A rose garden of all different shades of roses up the far left of the green garden surrounded by cherry blossoms and hydrangeas. Benches scattered across the grounds that you hoped to one day have the pleasure of sitting on and watch the bumblebees.

This was another reason Bucky loved you so much, you were so passionate and kind against wildlife and nature.

Finally, after god knows how long you've been staring out into the garden daydreaming, the elevator doors ding open and you're greeted with a muscular blond God with a red Cape hung over his back and a creepy wide grin on his face. His scruffy hair made you think he hadn't washed it in a few days.

"I was expecting someone else, but hello!" His voice seemed to boom throughout the space of whatever room this actually was. Some kind of hallway, but you're pretty sure you would hear his voice from all the way from that beautiful garden.

"Uh hello!" You stuttered, taken by surprise that there would be other people here.

"I am Thor, the God of Thunder!" His arms went wide and so did his smile. Your mouth gaped open and closed when you recognised the name. Thor. God of thunder. Of course, you read about these gods and how he ruled Asgard. Or was set to.

"Thor! Of course," you chuckled nervously, stretching your hand out in front of you, "I'm Y/N."

"It's a pleasure to meet you! Please follow me and allow me to introduce you to my mortal friends," you chuckled at that line, and adjusted your sweater.

"Friends, mortals! We have a guest, this is Y/N, A human of Earth." Thor stepped aside and your eyes widened; you were only standing in the same room as the avengers, the same people Bucky spoke so highly of. Thor told you the names of the people in front of you, everyone was there and you wondered where the hell Bucky was.

Tony was the first one to step forward and looked you up and down by moving his tinted glasses to the bridge of his nose. You relaxed when he smiled, but only slightly. You realised they had not asked why some stranger was standing in their living room.

"You know who I am?" Tony asked smugly, his arms folded over his chest.

You nodded, your eyes flickered down his chest, his arc reactor lit up in a bright blue. You almost reached out to touch it but stopped yourself before you could.

"Uh yes. You're Tony I believe?" You blushed under their gazes. Bucky told you they were the best people, but to you they were very intimidating.

"Very good. What brings you to my tower?"

"I'm here to see—"

"Wow! Who is this?" A voice yelled out from behind you. A guy you recognised as Sam, or Falcon, or Birdbrain as Bucky liked to call him.

"Y/N!" Thor answered before you could, the rest of the avengers took a seat on the couch.

"Yeah, hi," a small laugh came out and it made your cheeks heat up when his eyes raked over your form.

"My, my. You are gorgeous!" He kept that grin on his lips as he stepped closer. His over-sprayed cologne was suffocating you. "Beautiful, just perfect, just—"

"Mine!" Bucky yelled from the doorway as he stormed past Sam to get to you. You bit your lip to hide the growing grin and failed, he swooped you up in his arms, your legs instantly wrapped around his waist as he spun the two of you around and kissed you.

Cat calls sounded from the couch and you smiled into the kiss. When you pulled away for air, the expressions on everyone's faces told you they needed and wanted an explanation.

You could only imagine the questions they wanted to ask; how did you know Bucky Barnes? How did a soldier and an assassin manage to keep a relationship so hidden under the eyes of a mind-reader and a super intelligent spy? How did Bucky not slip up to Steve about having a girlfriend? All valid questions of course.

Bucky lowered you back down on your feet and pressed his forehead against yours. Without giving the team an answer, he slipped his hand in yours and pulled you away, leaving the superheroes with confusion etched upon their faces.

Bucky gave you a thorough tour of the tower. He showed you the gym, the kitchen where he made you his favourite sandwich, he even showed you his room. It was painted in a light blue with white curtains and blinds, thick, soft cream carpet covered the floor and his bed was as soft as a cloud. It was a lot more comfortable than your bed, that's for sure.

Later that day, Tony ordered a takeout and invited everyone to the dining room to eat, including you. The way Bucky's hand was slung protectively around your shoulder didn't go amiss by anyone in the room. It was when he finally sat down did the questions start.

"Alright, what's the deal with you two? Is this a prank? Is he paying you darling?" Sam fired off first, pointing his fork at the two of you opposite him.

Bucky glared at him from calling you 'darling', from where you were sat you could hear the heavy breathing. Your hand slipped into your lap and into his, giving his thigh a firm squeeze to keep calm.

"Y/N is not being paid!" Bucky defended, outraged he could even think such a thing.

You cleared your throat and took a sip of water before speaking, "it's true and I understand it's a shock but Bucky is actually my boyfriend and has been for the past couple of months," you smiled, proud of the fact you were in a relationship with this man and it was no longer secret.

"How the hell did that happen?" Tony queried, waving his chopsticks in the air, flabbergasted by the whole situation.

"What, you think I'm not capable of meeting people?" Bucky challenged, not really enjoying the interrogation which was the whole reason he didn't want to say anything at the beginning.

"Well of course I wouldn't be surprised if it was Capsicle here but it's you," Tony snorted.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" Bucky was yelling and turning red with anger when Nat sought the opportunity to take the heat off the two men.

"So, Y/N. Tell us about yourself."

Tags: @smokeybluebrooke-lyn @pinkdiamond1016

[zet-sway]

THE FROZEN SEA CHAPTER 2

I've literally never done a chapter 2 to anything before. It's boring but whatever, I wrote it. Hopefully I can find the stamina to continue. Longfic is so difficult (╥﹏╥)

Word Count: ~3000 Rated: "T" AO3 Link: "The Frozen Sea - Chapter 2" Pairing: Thane / FemShep Summary: "When they finally disembark, she beelines for the elevator with a painfully stiff spine and heavy footfalls. In that moment, Thane can see the weight of her two missing years more clearly than ever before, her humanity practically seeping through the cracks in her hardsuit."

- - - - - - - - - - -

It's shortly after breakfast when Shepard appears in his room unannounced. Fresh mug of coffee in one hand and datapad in the other, she takes the seat across from him without a word. Her eyes are glued to the screen, worried, but focused.

"Shepard, to what do I owe the pleasure?"

Her mug hits the table with a soft thump and her eyes flick up at him from under her lashes.

"What do you know about the collectors?"

Curious, he leans in, hands folded. "I've encountered them before, although not directly."

Shepard raises an eyebrow.

"My work has taken me to some less than desirable reaches of the galaxy," he says dryly.

"Ever killed one?"

By now he's unsurprised by her direct questions, but it's enough of a hint for him to understand there's definitely something afoot. Thane shakes his head. "No, I've only watched from afar. The Collectors have a reputation for black market dealings."

The datapad flickers off as she sets it down and takes a sip of her coffee. Then she summons an image of a planet he's never been to on her omni-tool. Horizon, a human colony.

"This morning I received an emergency directive from The Illusive Man. It's very likely we're about to go head to head with Collector forces for the first time."

Ah, that would be why she's here so early.

"How much longer until we arrive?"

"Sixty minutes. Tell me what you know."

He pauses to consider what might be most valuable to the mission. 

"They fly, like insects."

Shepard visibly chokes on her coffee. "That's different." She transfers the planetary data to his omni-tool. "Suit up and meet me us upstairs in thirty."

With that, she gets up and walks out.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

They load up into the shuttle. Shepard is nearly silent but Garrus seems to be in good spirits.

"So the Collectors can fly? Is that right?" the turian asks, checking the safety on his rifle for the 6th time.

Thane nods in his direction.

"I guess we're about to find out. We'll give em' hell, Commander."

Shepard merely hums her approval. Her mind is elsewhere.

When the shuttle touches down, she's the first one on the ground, motioning for the others to hold position inside the shuttle until she gives her signal. It's not until she's confident that Mordin's protection against the seeker swarms is effective that she allows them to press forward.

While she forges ahead to clear the proverbial brush for them, Thane wonders about the duality of her. Kalahira's messenger, making every attempt to prolong their lives. The goddess does not take life for the pleasure of it, she needs them for the battle ahead. 

He wonders if she, too, will be swept up in the coming tide. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Fighting the Collectors makes her skin crawl. 

The drone of seeker swarms and collector wings never seems to fade out from her mind. Their flesh is… wrong, somehow. Filled with fluids, too soft, with unseeing alien eyes. Garrus bolts one on her flank and its head bursts like overripe, rotting fruit. She cringes and presses forward, Thane by her side tearing down barriers. He’ll have biotic burns after this mission if she’s not careful.

They’re armed with particle weapons - unsurprising given their intel. The air singes in the wake of each shot as they move from cover to cover. The deeper they move into the colony, the more horrors they unearth.

By now, Shepard is accustomed to the knowledge that husks were once people. But two years gone has brought frightening new context to that idea when she sees what other horrors the Collectors have in their arsenal. Grotesque amalgams of... things. People. Other creatures. What is she even supposed to call this four legged thing with a mass of human heads below it's carapace? Is this what the Collectors are doing with these people?

They manage a small number of survivors. Too few. But among them is Ashley Williams - a fucking sight for sore eyes if Shepard’s ever seen one.

"Ash, it's good to see you," she says, face splitting into a grin. It takes all her self control to not throw her arms around the soldier. 

Ever the professional, Ashley stands resolute among her Alliance compatriots. She's grown into a strong soldier, and Shepard beams with no small amount of pride.

"I didn't want to believe it was you. It really is you, right? Shepard?"

"It's me, in the flesh." Shepard says, arms outstretched in a proud gesture.

Ashley looks incredulous, her expression is hard to read. "And you too, Garrus - what happened to your face?"

Garrus flares his mandibles in a characteristic turian smirk. "Just a scratch, really. A rocket to the face will do that."

"Jesus, Shepard..." The way Ashley's tone trails off immediately makes the air turn sour. Her smile twists away into nothing. "You're really with Cerberus, then?"

"It isn't what it looks like, Ash." The words are thick in her throat. Even if it's true, the phrase sounds utterly hollow.

"I thought you died. I… we… had a funeral for you. People don't just come back from the dead,” Ashley says, eyes like daggers.

"I didn't believe it myself until I saw the final report. You can read it if you like," Shepard’s face scrunches up in discomfort. The photos still haunt her. "Meat and tubes, Ash.”

"I'm disappointed you'd even let yourself believe that." Her voice is rising, eyes narrowed in accusation and contempt. The look on her face is every bit as painful as her words.

Shepard chews on her lip, trying to think of something to say, anything at all, because after everything they’d been through, Ashley is one of the last people she’d have expected....

“Cerberus,” she mutters. “Shepard, I trusted you.”

Shepard loses focus rapidly after that, her mind forcibly shrouding the words in a fog if only to get through the moment, second by agonizing second. Some days it's like she's been resurrected into a living nightmare. The sting of rejection after two lost years burns like her lungs in the vacuum of space. 

"I woke up on a Cerberus operating table," she interrupts, loudly. "They told me the station was under attack, so I grabbed my gear and got the fuck on with it. And then they told me I'd been dead for two years." She takes a step back, eyes flicking out across Horizon's dull gray sky. "I didn’t ask for this. For all I know, The Illusive Man put a fucking chip in my head set to blow the minute I disappoint him."

She can feel their eyes on her. Garrus looks lost, Thane is stone still and motionless. The heavy silence threatens to crush her heart into a hundred cybernetic pieces.

"I'm just as confused as you are. But I'm trying to stop this ," she gestures around at the disquieting emptiness of the colony, the grisly remains of slain Collectors. Her heart is racing, her head seething with the heat of indignation. She can taste the bitter words that sling past her teeth, regretting them the moment they hit the air.

"I wish you the best, Ash. If someone ever undeadifies your fucking corpse against your will, I’ll try not to hold it against you."

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

No one speaks as they board the shuttle back to the Normandy. Shepard's eyes are glued to the floor, her shoulders slacked in an uncharacteristic display of upset.

Thane and Garrus exchange glances but neither dare to break the silence.

When they finally disembark, she beelines for the elevator with a painfully stiff spine and heavy footfalls. In that moment, Thane can see the weight of her two missing years more clearly than ever before, her humanity practically seeping through the cracks in her hardsuit. Garrus looks just as worried. They part ways at deck three. Shepard's eyes are distant as the elevator doors snick closed.

When she doesn't appear for dinner, Thane tries - and fails - to knock loose the worry. It's certainly no business of his, and if she wanted his counsel she'd have sought him out by now. Still, he's compelled.

He fixes a fresh mug of coffee, and a mug of tea for himself, before boarding the elevator.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

He finds her sat on the couch, smushed into the corner with a datapad in her hand. Eyes ringed with fatigue, she looks so much smaller than she had on the battlefield. This close to the hull, her cabin is colder than the rest of the ship.

"You didn't show for dinner. I brought you some coffee. May I sit with you?"

She heaves an audible sigh, as though reluctant to accept. "Sure."

Maybe he’s invading her privacy, but there’s something about the way she looks that’s more vulnerable than he expected. Her hair is mussed and she’s wearing a black sweatshirt. The zipper is pulled low enough for him to see her dog tags glimmering against the bare skin in the valley of her chest. If she notices his wandering gaze, she doesn’t seem to care. She's tending to her own needs - without the requisite to prove a damn thing to anyone, least of all him. 

He seats himself in an adjoining chair and passes the mug to her. At least she seems to enjoy the warmth in her hands, bringing it close to her face to inhale the scent of it.

"About what happened on Horizon-" he begins.

She sits up to face him. "Thane, I know you mean well. But please don't concern yourself." 

He can see the pain etched into her features, though. It's hard to imagine, but if he looks close enough, she’s there. This unguarded human, the same woman who put the fear of god in him just days ago. He decides it’s better to respect her boundaries, and stands to depart.

"I understand, Commander. I’ll leave you be.”

“Wait,” she says, tiredly. Thane pauses, waiting on her next words. “Sorry, it’s just been… a long day.”

Slowly, he eases back into his seat to wait in silence while she gathers her thoughts. 

"Did you hear about Eden Prime, two years ago?"”

“Yes, a Prothean beacon was destroyed there,” he nods.

“Yeah. That’s where I met Ashley,” she sighs, leaning back against the cushions. “A lot of things happened on Eden Prime. Video feeds caught Sovereign just before touchdown. We lost Jenkiens within minutes of landing, and Nihlus not long after. The Geth were there, Saren was there. The beacon exploded and knocked me cold.” Life changed pretty fast after that.”

The way she recalls the memory is disorienting. He reminds himself that it probably is confusing for her - and she’s probably better off for it. Sometimes life without perfect recall sounds like a blessing.

Shepard takes a tentative sip from her coffee before continuing.

“Ashley was with me when we stopped Saren. She’s a great soldier, and a good friend. The things we saw together, the people we lost... I never expected her to be so cold.” Another sip, and she closes her eyes. “Shit hurts.”

“I see,” he says, two nearly meaningless words in the storm of his own memories. He thinks of Kolyat, so small all this years ago. Somewhere, he's now a man with accusations and hurts of his own.

Thane shifts in his seat, refocusing his attention on Shepard. “What changed?”

“Cerberus,” she frowns. “She’s angry, and she has every right to be."

"The way you spoke on Horizon gave me a different impression."

"You're right, and I regret what I said to her. But I..." Shepard chews on her lip. "I don't want to... talk down on other soldiers. But I'm not surprised she doesn't see this the way I do. We didn't see eye to eye when Kaidan died, either. There's a reason we aren't all special forces."

Kaidan, Jenkins, Nihlus - Thane hasn’t heard these names before, but he decides now isn’t the time to pry. Instead, he asks, "You believe her military rank cheapens her understanding of what happened?"

Shepard shakes her head. "Not her rank. Her training."

That piques his interest. Thane sets his elbows on his knees and leans in. "You're both Alliance, how was your training different?"

Shepard stares at the ceiling as if searching for the words. Idle fingers trace her dog tags against her chest, holding them out to him. 

"This symbol, N7," she begins. "It's from the interplanetary combatives training program. N is special forces, and 7 is the highest rank of training. The duties and privileges are different, but N7 is... kind of like the Spectres, in terms of a kind of exclusivity."

She lets the tags drop against her chest, and this time she zips her sweatshirt, like she wants to forget about them. 

"You had to be selected?"

"Yeah, for candidacy." She stares into her coffee and downs the rest of it before lacing her fingers behind her head, eyes fixed firmly on everything but him. "No one leaves ICT unchanged. I thought it would be like a fucked up version of boot camp. It kind of was, but that's not what made it so hard. We were thrust on to the front lines, thrown into impossible situations. There were people who…" she leans down on her elbows and sighs, restless. "People die during these promotions, Thane. People depend on you for their lives and you-” she laughs, sort of, "You depend on them not to be stupid.

"You don't feel proud of what you've done. You just... you change how you look at the world. Every wink of sleep, every moment of rest, whatever. It has to be earned. They give you a mission, and you can't go home until it's done. Sometimes you know you're sending good, honest soldiers against fatal odds. It's fucked - it really is, but you're the last line of defense for that mission. And it has to get done, or even more people could die. So you fight - dirty, if you have to - anything to complete the mission without losing more of your men. Sometimes that means…" Her mouth twists into a lopsided half-smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "...the enemy of your enemy is your friend.” 

The enemy of their enemy - Cerberus. The entire ship understands this, but Ashley had not. Polarizing moralities, indeed.

"By the time I was promoted,” Shepard continues, “I got why every N7 I've ever met never stays in one place for long."

"I think I understand,” he says quietly.

A moment of silence passes before she glances at him, curiously.

"Was training like that for you too?"

Thane shakes his head. "Not quite. It was intense for different reasons. But I never knew anything else. Our entire lives were training and discipline. I rarely socialized outside of our…" he pauses, thinking. "I think the closest word would be 'monastery.'"

"Monastery?" Shepard asks, finally meeting his eyes. "Was religion part of your training?"

"No, but the… asceticism of our lives bore resemblance to a monastery." He holds her inquisitive gaze with a smile. "I started going to services just to get away from my studies, but eventually I found comfort in them.” 

The memories are pleasant, actually. Stealing away from the others for prayer service was like a special privilege. 

She smiles. "That's kind of nice, I guess."

He recalls the scent of incense, the chanting, the faces of trusted mentors, and when he speaks there's a hint of nostalgia in his tone.

"The priest became like a father to me, in some ways. At least, I thought of him often when..."

The words almost slip his mouth, but he catches them, freezing them in his throat.

When Kolyat was born. 

Slammed with the realization that he hasn’t felt this glib with another person in years, he fidgets uncomfortabltly. It’s a disquieting change in how he’s used to conducting himself. 

"Another time, perhaps,” he says. If he's lucky, she won't bring it up again.

Shepard raises an eyebrow, but there's no judgement in her gaze. She wrings her hands where they hang between her knees. "I get it. Some things are too painful."

Painful isn't quite the word he would use, but it’s close enough. In truth, the guilt is what withholds him. Like the more time that passes without his son, the less he deserves the memory of him.

"Sorry for all this. Honestly I... It's been two years for everyone else, but a few months for me. Sometimes it can feel isolating.”

He offers a kind smile, standing and collecting her empty mug. “I can relate. Those of us forged under extreme circumstances seldom find others who understand us.” 

She smiles, and this time it reaches her eyes. "Thanks for thinking of me, Thane."

"You're quite welcome. I enjoy your company, Shepard," he says, his voice warm. "I'll let you rest."

"Likewise." She stands to see him out, bidding him goodbye with a grateful hand on his arm. She seems more like herself. "See you at PT."

He leaves, back to the silence of his makeshift quarters to mull over their conversation. The ghost of her handprint lingers on his arm until sleep claims him.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

This is the biggest fanfic yolo I've ever done. Send help writing is hard lol ┐(‘～`;)┌

[ugh-supersoldiers]

It Won’t Be Long

MASTERLIST

Characters: Bucky x reader

Summary: Somehow distance is everything as much as it is nothing at all when it comes to the love you have for Bucky Barnes.

Warnings: Angst & fluff, really bittersweet (but there will likely be a part two that’s allllll fluff), this is a fic about Bucky and the reader dealing with being separated during social distancing so if that’s triggering please don’t read!

Words: 2314

A/N: This is for everyone missin’ someone while in social distancing who might need a little reminder that it won’t last forever (and for anyone who just loves some good ol fashioned bucky barnes charm). I’ve seen so much longing on my dash and I just want to say, I feel you, I love you, you will get through this, you will see the ones you love again. I wish everyone health and wellbeing.

AND AS ALWAYS REBLOGS AND FEEDBACK ARE MEGA APPRECIATED.

Missing someone is hard, even when it’s necessary.

Keep yourself away from everyone, at least six feet apart at all times. Stay in your own place of residence, don’t pay a physical visit to anyone under any circumstances. Avoid any kind of contact with anyone especially those outside of your immediate household for all reasons unless urgent.

Quarentine. You knew it wouldn’t be easy, you’d anticipated it; emotionally prepared for it, but longing for the presense of someone you love simply can’t be rehearsed into familiarity.

Longing inters like you smoke; licking up the walls and permeating even your most primive and forgotten senses until it renders itself all comsuming; suffocating, and in a twist of cruel irony it will scorch the safety of the very fire it specters. 

Longing turns loving someone into torment.

Bucky Barnes. It had been months since you’d been with him.

Months.

You had phonecalls, and videochats, and texting, but it could never match up to his physical presense. It’s amazing the things about someone you realize you took for granted when you’re forced into separation.

Even so much as being in the same room as him felt like something you should have thanked god for at the time.

You’d wanted so desperately to be able to stay with him, to have him live in your apartment with you until social distancing laws were lifted, and that was almost an option - until it wasn’t.

Bucky’s anatomy rendered him in no serious danger of infection, and knowing this as soon as ‘quarentine’ entered his ears he had reached out to every medical facility around to see how he could help. The answers mostly consisted of small routine jobs that doctors and nurses struggled to find the time for, until one really struck him: let us use your biological makeup to see if it helps us solve puzzle of vaccine development.

He’d never signed on to something so quickly in his life.

“My soldier,” You’d laughed, “Always fighting for what’s right, even when it’s not his war.”

“It’s everyone’s war, doll. I’m just doing my part, like everyone else.” He’d replied.

It was true, Bucky would recover quickly from the virus in the extremely rare case that he were to contract it at all, but his work on the vaccine didn’t make him invulnerable to being a carrier and he refused to risk your life in the process of trying to help save so many.

And so, you had spent your time in your apartmen and he at the compound unless at a medical facility being poked and prodded for the sake of humanity. 

It was ungodly early in the morning, nearly three. Far too early to be making a video call, but the world had come to a screeching hault months ago and since then time didn’t seem to matter all that much. And you knew for a fact that he’d still be awake.

You sipped at the tea in your mug as you sat on your bed, reaching for your phone. Your finger hovered over his contact for a moment, a last hesitation as you wondered if perhaps he was sleeping, but it didn’t stop you.

He answered after a single ring.

“I know it’s stupidly early, but I miss you so much and I don’t know what to do with myself because of it.” You whispered immediately, knowing there was little point in offering a salutation.

You could see his face illuminated by the light of his phone screen as he sat cross legged on his bed. His hair was tied back, but a few stray pieces had fallen back onto his face. He looked to be wearing a sweater. It was a soft green. He looked perfect.

“I wasn’t sleeping (Y/N), don’t worry,” He said, “I miss you too, like you wouldn’t believe but it won’t be long now, I promise.” 

He tried his best to reassure you, but you both knew he couldn’t really make that promise. There was no guarentee how much more time would pass until you could be together again.

“I hate this, I can’t do it anymore. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

You were sitting with your covers pulled over your shoulders, sometimes bring a mug to your lips to sip at it. The warm glow of the fairy lights that you’d wrapped around your bedframe gave romantic definition to your features. He could swear he’d never seen something more beautiful in his life, but he thought that every single time he’d been able to see your face since he last saw it in person.

“You’re not going crazy, I would’ve told you by know if you were.” He winked.

The small laugh he earned from you made him smile, even if he could hear the subtly of the tears you were fighting.

“I love you, (Y/N). This is hard, baby, but you have to stay safe for me. We’ll make it, I know we will.”

“I know, Buck. I just feel like a piece of me missing when you’re not around.”

A tear had finally fallen from your waterline and onto your cheek. You quickly wiped it away in hopes he wouldn’t notice. He did.

His face read as if he was in physical agony. He couldn’t stand seeing you like this, but he knew there was nothing he could do other than try his best to make sure you knew he loved you, he missed you, and that this wouldn’t last forever.

“Just think about how great it’ll be when we see each other again.” He whispered, abandoning the crease in his brow in exchange for a small smile.

“It hurts to think about that.” You admitted, trying to swallow the lump in your throat.

You’d purposefully tried your best not to think about it too much for that reason, in fact.

“Maybe, but it’s something to look forward to isn’t it?” He pondered, “This feels like forever, but it isn’t. We’re guarenteed to have that moment someday, so why not imagine it? It’s better than this, baby.”

You stared at him in complete awe for a moment as you remembered the man you’d met years ago. The one who couldn’t even so much as bare eye contact with someone for more than a second before looking away, or handle even the lighted touch. That same man, after so much perseverance and growth, was now explaining to you the benefit of looking forward to life’s guarenteed happy moments.

“I’m so proud of you, Buck.”

“What?” He chucked, running a hand down his face in amusement, “Not that I don’t love it when you kiss my ass, but where’d that come from, doll?”

“I’m not kissing your ass, Barnes,” You chided playfully, “I’m telling you the truth. You’ve come a long way from the person you were when you got out. I love you, and I’m amazed by you.”

‘Got out’ he knew meant escaped Hydra’s grasp. You were right, he’d gone through quite the change since then.

“What’s that saying - ‘behind every strong man’..?” He started, raising an eyebrow at you to finish it.

“‘There’s probably a woman nagging him to make dinner for once’.”

Now this really makes him laugh. You watched as his nose scrunched and the crinkles in the corners of his eyes perk up. That’s the laugh you fell for.

“Okay you know for a fact that’s not it, doll. And, I’ll have you know, in the last few weeks I’ve been forced to learn how to cook better since the only other choice is starve.” He quipped, seemingly rather confident in his new found skillset.

“I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Guess I’ll have to show you in person.”

“Yeah...” You muttered daftly as the mention of being with him again came to fruition once more.

“It’ll be amazing.” He said almost dreamily as he closed his eyes, thinking to himself about the ordeal of you being in his arms after so long. He craved you like nothing else.

“Don’t get too full of yourself,” You giggled, “A few months is hardly enough time to match my culinary ability-”

“I meant seein’ you again, baby.”

“Oh.” 

Apparently ‘oh’ was the best answer you could come up with.

“Entertain me for a minute?” He asked you, cocking his head to the side with that signature lopsided smile of his. Bucky knew very well you could never say no to that, even if it was a topic you’d be entirely avoiding.

“Lay it on me, Romeo.” You rolled your eyes, but he knew you secretly wanted to hear what he would tell you just as much as he wanted to say it, even at the risk of bittersweetness.

“Whenever they lift the distancing rules, I don’t care what you’re doing, I don’t care what time it is, I don’t care where you are-”

“It’s a pretty safe bet I’ll be here.”

“Would you let me finish?” He chuckled playfully at your interjection.

You had a habit of seeing humour as an escape, and he knew that this was no exception. He was grateful. If you were joking around and being playful with him, at least it meant you weren’t crying anymore.

“Alright, alright.” You relented, opting to drink your tea and listen to him intently.

“My point is: the moment I’m able to see you again, I will run to you. If there’s a promise I know I can make to you, it’s that. You are my whole heart, doll. Nothing can change that, not distance, not a pandemic, not even your snoring-”

“I do not snore!”

“You absolutely do and I’m not done, you little punk.” He snorted before deciding it was time to leave all joking prods aside, “Baby, I love you. I love you so much that I go to sleep thinking about the next time I can see your pretty face, and I wake up with the same thing on my mind because you give me so much joy. I can’t wait to feel you in my atmosphere, and to hold you in my arms again, and to kiss you - god - doll, I miss kissing you more than anything in the world,”

Bucky had come a long way since you met him, yes, but he did still struggle with being emotive sometimes. Saying all of these things to you so directly was a huge deal for him. You knew better than anyone else that he must mean every single word.

“And the only reason I’m still sane is because I know that I’ll get the chance to soon. I don’t know when, but I know for sure that I will. I’ll wait for you, and you’ll wait for me... and that gives me the incentive I need to keep going everyday.” He offered you a sweet smile, which you returned immediately.

You sighed, entirely lovesick.

“You’re a wonder, James Barnes.”

“Oh, (Y/N)- The first name, really?” He couldn’t help but to laugh, even while fighting of a toe curling cringe.

“What? I haven’t seen you in ages - and you know it’s torture not being able to kiss you senseless after that display of your undying love for me - and you expect me not to lighten the mood?”

He watched you raise your mug to your lips, the lips he missed so dearly. There was a glint of mischeif in your eye, the one that made him fall in love with you in the first place.

“Honestly, I don’t know how I could’ve expected anything else.” He laughed, still trying his best to read your face to see if your absorbed what he was saying.

“It’s not easy for me to deal with indefinite timelines,” You admitted, looking at the wall of your bedroom in the distance, “But you know that already. I feel this torturous sense of longing for you in my bones, and knowing that it’s going to stay there for god knows how much longer...”

“I know, doll. Trust me, I know.” He told you.

“Uncertain reunion dates in the future aside, what I can say for sure is that I have the world’s kindest, bravest, most prolific altruist for a boyfriend, and knowing that you’re not only safe but offering yourself up for the sake of others like you are-” You stopped for a moment, desperately trying to not get choked up, “It gives me so much hope.”

When he heard that, he knew you’d gotten the message. It was about finding incentives that gave you hope, that allowed you happiness in moments of forlorn longing.

“Well, shucks.” 

Bucky heard you snort in reply to his witticism. He closed his eyes and smiled, truely embracing what you’d said to him. All he ever wanted was to do right by the world; to give back to it. He’d gotten the biggest second chance in recorded history, and he’d be damned if he didn’t make the most of it. Knowing you not only saw the work he put in, but that you were proud of him for it? It made him absolutely melt.

“I’m incessantly in love with you and everything you are.” You said with no chastizing mention of his first name this time.

“I love you too, (Y/N). So much.”

You hummed for a moment, and Bucky tried to decipher if you were doing it out of contentment or if you were thinking.

“You miss kissing me, huh..?”

Thinking. It had definitely been thinking. And by the delish tone of your voice and look on your face Bucky saw when he opened his eyes, it was nothing all too innocent.

You circled the rim of your mug with your finger, drawing out your next words languidly and elicited a low groan from him.

“How about you tell me what else you miss, baby?”

[kiruuuuu]

Thank you so much for allowing me to conclude the unholy trilogy of Doc’s and Jäger’s mutual suffering, anon! For anyone interested, this is part 1 and this is part 2 - though in this case, neither of them are required to read the following snippet. I hope you enjoy ♥♥ (Rating E, smut/humour, ~2.2k words)

.

“You said it’s going to go away on its own”, Jäger states, frustration clearly visible in his face. He’s unable to sit still, shuffling on the chair and digging his nails into his thighs. It’s obvious he can deal with this, uh, affliction less composedly than Doc who peeks at him over his screen from the other side of the desk.

“I did say that”, he replies evenly and presses his lips together at the email being displayed on the monitor right now. “It seems I was wrong, however. A colleague has run into the same substance in California before and she seems to suggest to, um, take matters into one’s own hands.”

The German stares at him in disbelief. “I told you, I tried it, it doesn’t work. I can’t – I can’t finish.”

Doc is fucking tired. They completed a mission earlier that day which almost went off without a hitch, a clean infiltrate and extract, no casualties, an extremely satisfying result. Except for the fact that he and also Jäger breathed in some of the unidentified powder Smoke stirred up when he erroneously shot one of the crates standing around. The effect was… immediate. The two exchanged scandalised gazes to confirm it wasn’t just them feeling like this and awkwardly adjusted their uniforms, taking extra care not to undress in the presence of their colleagues. Doc claimed not to be affected to the rest of their team and hid in the safety of his office whereas Jäger made the mistake of mentioning the, er, effect of the drug to Bandit. Resulting in both of them being chased around by a horny German hoping to get some simply based on the fact that neither of the two have their most intimate parts under their control.

Therefore, Doc is sitting at his desk with a raging erection which is slowly starting to become painful. He kept his hands off it whereas Jäger didn’t display the same kind of self-control, attempted to alleviate the problem himself yet only seemed to make it much worse. It apparently takes all his discipline not to expose and satisfy himself right then and there.

“Well what did she do?”

Doc squints at the monitor. “She… made her girlfriend very happy that day, it seems.”

“Oh my fucking God. I’m going to implode, Doc, I need to do something about this.”

“From what she tells me, an orgasm diminishes the effects and encourages blood flow, so it’s recommended. With her, it lasted the entire day but she, well, seems to have ingested more than we did. So we might be lucky and it’ll all be over in a few hours.”

“It’s been at least two hours. My dick is going to fall off in the meantime. Does she have any suggestions on how to actually get off?”

“The use of specially designed toys seems to be -”

“Fuck, yes. Great idea, I’ve got tons of those at home, I hope you do, too. Otherwise, good luck suffering!” Jäger jumps up and eagerly turns to the door but stops when Doc calls his name the way a parent would call a misbehaving child.

“You’re not going to drive in this state. You’re a liability. Besides, you’d draw attention to yourself – even more than you already did – and I refuse, outright refuse to let anyone know about this. I have a reputation to lose. You can’t disappear right after a mission, not when the only explanation you can offer is your heightened state of sexual arousal necessitating immediate care.”

Jäger pauses and looks down at the very obvious bulge in his trousers. “I guess that’s not an acceptable excuse to go home early, is it?”, he responds sadly and sinks back onto the chair. “So what then? I don’t suppose you’ve got some dildos in your office?”

“If it’s just for a few hours more, there shouldn’t be any lasting damage. How about you just ignore it for now and -”

“I can’t. It got worse when I tried to jerk off and now it’s just… I can’t even think straight. It’s like when it’s spring or summer and everyone’s wearing short sleeves or no sleeves at all, oh God, all those pronounced muscles and sweaty bodies, and the -”

Doc pinches the bridge of his nose in exasperation. “Look. From the way it sounds, having a partner might do the trick.”

“There’s no way in hell I’m letting Dom touch me. He’d probably just tease me and then my dick will really fall off.”

A sigh. “While I do agree that he’s not the answer, there’s an alternative. We could just…” He makes a vague gesture and earns an uncomprehending stare in return. He wonders briefly whether Jäger’s brain always commits suicide every time he’s aroused, which admittedly would explain quite a few things, and simply gets up to lock the door before reclaiming his seat. “We can keep this among ourselves.”

Now he finally gets it. “But you said we were never gonna do this again, did -”

“I did say that. Once again, I appear to have been mistaken as I could not factor in the frankly ridiculous coincidence of the two of us finding ourselves in this predicament. Now get over here and shut up.” He observes Jäger basically jumping to his feet once more, a mixture of relief and excitement written in his features as he straddles Doc, already unbuttoning his own jeans. Now that his erection is freed, there’s nothing stopping him from touching it and suddenly Doc has an involuntarily randy German masturbating on his lap. He sighs and rolls the chair around a little, gathers a pair of latex gloves, a bottle of lubricant and, just to be safe, a few condoms. Jäger is so blissfully stroking himself that he barely notices anything happening around him, leaning back and propping himself up on the heavy desk behind him as he starts bucking his hips into his fist.

Doc tries not to let the sight get to him, puts the white gloves on and covers his fingers in lube before swatting Jäger’s hand away so he can wrap his own around the rock hard member. His own erection twitches at the contact, at the feel of it in his hand, at the warmth and the moan that has Jäger arch his back and for a second, Doc considers joining in. But no, he’s the responsible one here; in a way, Jäger is his patient and his well-being is in his hands – literally. He can’t allow his own lust to take precedence. Slowly, he begins sliding his fist up and down, wrenching a few pleading whispers from Jäger, who seems wholly lost in his pleasure, before he speeds up and tightens his grip.

It seems that he’s not doing anything wrong if the broken sounds stemming from Jäger’s throat and the way he trembles are any indication: the German’s eyes have rolled back into his skull and his hips meet Doc’s every stroke yet he doesn’t seem to be getting any closer for some reason. He’s almost there, just shy of the real thing, claws at the wooden surface under his hands, squirms under the decisive touches and moans continuously – but he doesn’t come. Maybe he needs more stimulation or just a different kind. Doc has his patient undress his lower half and lie down on the desk, adds copious amounts of lube and pushes one finger inside Jäger without asking, prompting a disbelieving gasp which almost immediately morphs into a throaty moan at the sensation.

Doc manages to work three fingers into him before giving up. He has to admit, Jäger takes them like a champ, grinds against them in a manner sensual enough to appeal to Doc’s most primal urges – and if he’s even more frank, he’s starting to understand Jäger’s desperation earlier. The incessant pull of his arousal is nigh impossible to ignore by now, being fed by the view in front of him, Jäger’s unbridled enthusiasm and the fact that it’d be so easy to just…

“Do it”, Jäger tells him breathlessly as if he’s read his thoughts. “Fuck me. You know you want to.”

He does want to. How did Jäger know? The lower half of his body throbs in anticipation and it’s a matter of seconds to discard the slippery gloves, open his trousers, rip open a wrapper and roll on a condom before he can finally, finally sink into this tight, delicious heat. Both of them are moaning now, Jäger wraps his legs around the Frenchman’s waist and pulls him in until he’s fully buried inside and it’s divine. Never before in Doc’s life has anything felt this good, his dick is pulsing gratefully and when Jäger murmurs: “Oh shit, yeah, that’s so fucking hot.” – Doc can only agree.

Right away, they chase their own release, Doc snapping his hips forward relentlessly and Jäger meeting his hard thrusts with his own hips while wanking with abandon. It’s carnal and unrestrained, both of them letting loose in favour of simply enjoying the bright hot pleasure their movements cause. Doc’s brain cares not for any of his previous concerns and is utterly preoccupied with the feel of Jäger’s insides, the sensation of him clenching around him, the fast thrusts that promise relief without delivering.

By the time Jäger comes, they’re both soaked in sweat, have foregone more dramatic motions for the most efficient ones, Doc slamming into him with short, deep thrusts as Jäger writhes and mewls and then – then he reaches his climax with a strangled cry. His body comes alive once more, pulls Doc in and speeds up his hands before ejaculating, spurting all over his t-shirt without a care in the world. He’s loud and it seems violent, makes him shudder and gasp for air but all Doc cares about are the contractions around his own cock. He continues his thrusts throughout Jäger’s orgasm, reaches deep with every thrust, his own climax in sight, treading ever closer to the edge.

When he’s finally pushed over, Jäger is fully hard again and moving against him insistently, grinding on him as an overwhelming sense of relief washes over Doc, his release sweet and brutal simultaneously. It’s elating and forceful at the same time, has his thighs tremble and unknown noises escape his throat. Wave after wave hits him as he comes deep, feels himself throb as Jäger almost rides him by now.

There’s a brief moment of clarity, right when the heavenly feeling subsides, a few sober seconds during which Doc’s mind regains control of him and thinks: This isn’t good. We should stop doing this.

But he’s still hard and even worse, he’s still aroused and Jäger is looking at him with a glint in his eye. “Let me suck you off and then eat you out.”

And both of those options sound equally appealing right now.

.

When he can think clearly again, he’s sitting on the floor in front of his desk, legs outstretched and naked, the upper half of his clothes rumpled and messy and his penis finally, finally not stiff anymore. He’s physically exhausted to a worrying extent, probably dehydrated and faintly dizzy. He’s pretty sure Jäger is draped over his chair behind him in an uncomfortable position as the low whining seems to come from that direction.

“I’m never sleeping with anyone again”, Doc mumbles and earns an affirmative grunt from the puddle behind him.

“I can’t feel my legs. I didn’t even know you could do that. The last position was -”

“Yes. Let’s not talk about it. Ever.”

The room reeks of sweat and sex, there are clothes, a troubling amount of wrappers as well as actual condoms and a long day’s worth of gloves strewn about and both of them are in desperate need of a shower. He’s not sure how much time has passed or whether they were so loud anyone heard it and dearly hopes no medical emergencies arose in the meantime. When there’s a knock on the door, he can’t even bring himself to panic due to the deep-seated fatigue weighing him down.

“Doc? Is everything alright in there?” It’s Blitz, sounding concerned – he has all reason to, is probably looking for his teammate and finds it odd that the office would be locked.

“Splendid”, Doc calls back drily which is accentuated by a snort from Jäger. Neither of them are moving.

“Can you – can you unlock the door?”

“I’d rather not, if I’m honest.” Another snort. There is no way he’s letting anyone see them in this state, wrong conclusions would be drawn and God knows he’s suffered under too many of those already. He’s only recently managed to convince his close family that Jäger and he are neither secretly married nor about to marry nor together in the first place – the last thing he needs would be workplace gossip on top of that.

“It’s just… Bandit was, uh, doing inappropriate things in front of the door and Tachanka found him. And he said that there was something going on inside which -” A pause. “Look, I don’t mean to pry or judge, but… during work? Really?”

Doc is so. Fucking. Tired.

[westsidechevroletdealership]

The 2020 Chevrolet Traverse Is The Ultimate Drive For You

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[3fillruotox-blog]

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The Foolproof Baby Monitor Strategy for Your Angelcare AC300

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[darcyfarber]

The Best 27 Websites Like Craigslist to Buy and Sell

Did you know there are so many other sites like Craigslist to buy and sell your stuff?

Of course Craigslist is the most well-known and for good reason. First, the site features hundreds of thousands of items for sale in pretty much any category you can imagine.

Second, (and probably my most favorite reason) it’s so popular because it’s free. F.R.E.E. Free to list, free to sell, free to buy. If you’ve ever had other types of sites eat up your profits via listing and selling fees, you know what I’m talking about.

However, with the ever-expanding world of e-commerce, there are now dozens of other (better) sites like Craigslist to choose from to list the stuff you want to sell, or to buy the things you want or need. Here are the top 27 of the most popular alternatives to Craigslist you might find helpful for buying or selling things or services.

Quick Links

The Top 10 Sites Like Craigslist

1. Offer Up

2. Facebook Marketplace

3. Facebook Groups

4. Letgo

5. Oodle

6. Locanto

7. Trovit

8. Gumtree

9. US Free Ads

10. AdLandPro

The Rest of the Best Sites like Craigslist

11. Geebo

12. USA Today

13. Ads Globe

14. PennySaver USA

15. City News

16. 10 Day Ads

17. Ad Toad

18. FreeAdsTime

19. Recycler

20. Pawngo

21. Classified Ads

22. Classifieds Giant

23. OLX

24. Bookoo

25. Kijiji

26. U-Exchange

27. Hoobly

How to Safely Buy and Sell These Sites

Summary

The Top 10 Sites Like Craigslist

These sites are listed in order of my favorite sites to buy and sell online that are very similar Craigslist. Right now Offer Up is my favorite, but the Facebook Marketplace is also a very quick and easy way to sell your items as well. When I am looking for services, I lean on Offer Up and when I am looking to sell something quickly, I will head on over to the Facebook Marketplace.

1. Offer Up

Offer Up is a selling site where you list your items or services by type, and you search by type, city or zip code. There’s an added filter letting you choose how far away you can search from that city or zip code.

Categories

Antiques

Appliances

Arts and crafts

Auto parts

Baby and kids

Beauty and health

Bicycles

Boats and marine

Books and magazines

Services

Okay, the list is seriously too long to post here. Offer Up has a lot of categories and a ton of stuff or services for sale from appliances and auto parts to used textbooks and antiques. You can also ask the seller a question or even make an offer. No listing fees or selling fees. Offer Up is my favorite for security as well. They take your safety seriously and will advise you to as well.

2. Facebook Marketplace

If you have a Facebook account, then you already have access to the Facebook Marketplace. Facebook does a really great job with their marketplace and makes it extremely simple to buy or sell. All communication is done via Facebook Messenger and can be done from mobile or desktop. With the amount of people shopping on Facebook, you can usually sell your stuff the fastest on this platform.

Categories

Vehicles

Home and garden

Electronics

Rentals

Hobbies

Home sales

Classifieds

Entertainment

Families

Clothing and accessories

Deals

3. Facebook Groups

Selling on Facebook started inside Facebook groups long before the Facebook Marketplace. Once you request and are approved for a local Facebook group (often called “YOUR CITY Swip Swap), you can begin selling your items and finding other things to buy in your local area.

It can be a bit tedious to find the right sale group for your items on Facebook which is why I like the Marketplace better. However, I do like the fact that if there are any complaints about someone inside the group – they are usually kicked out of the group. This causes buyers and sellers to be extra nice (and fair) with each other to remain in the group.

4. Letgo

Letgo shares items for sale by using your location. The site is easy to use, and there are no listing and selling fees. The site is pretty basic but it works. It’s easiest to search by item.

Categories

Cars

Free stuff

Electronics

Other vehicles and parts

Sports, leisure and games

Home and garden

Movies, books and music

Fashion and accessories

Baby and child

Other

5. Oodle

Probably the most comparable to Craigslist is Oodle, but it also does something Craiglist does not do – Oodle aggregates listings both locally and nationally from sites like eBay, ForRent.com, BoatTrader.com, Cars.com, and many more. Oodle uses these networks of online marketplaces to buy, sell, and trade products and services.

Categories

Merchandise

Motor-operated vehicles (cars, boats, motorcycles, RVs, etc.)

Rentals

Real estate

Jobs

Pets

Tickets

Services

Personal ads

Community-related ads (announcements, groups, etc.)

Currently Oodle has over 15 million monthly users and is available in the United States, Australia, Canada, India, UK, Ireland, and New Zealand. There are no fees for listing or selling, however there are limits to how many listings you can post at a time based on your selling categories.

6. Locanto

When you think of Locanto, think of the word “local”.

Instead of offering up ads from around the country, Locanto is best for those who are looking for something locally such as a used car, a babysitter, a job, or anything particular to the vicinity of where you live.

It’s very simple to post an ad on Locanto and the ads are meant to feel and look like ads you see in the local newspaper (what are newspapers again?). My favorite part of Locanto is your ad will remain live for 60 days which exposes your ad to a very large audience.

Bonus: You can upload pictures into your ad and you can use HTML codes to send a link to your website if you choose to do so.

Categories

Classes

Community

Events

For sale

Jobs

Personals

Pets

Real estate

Services

Vehicles

7. Trovit

Trovit is a site where you can list your homes and cars for sale, or list available job positions you may need to fill. How Trovit works is it lists ads for over 50 countries including the United States, Mexico, the UK, United Arab Emirates, Australia, Mexico, and many, many more.

The site is pretty well organized. When you search for a vehicle you start with the country you want to buy in. From there it brings you to another screen where you can choose a make, model, etc. You can choose cars by area or by make and model.

Searches for real estate work similarly. You start by choosing your area, and from there you can narrow down the search based on the type of house/number of bedrooms, etc. you want.

The site has an expansive amount of listings on it. Most all of the listings seemed to be taken from/linked to other sources. FYI, you can only advertise items for sale on Trovit if you own a coordinating website.

However, if you’re advertising on Craigslist or similar sites you can be pretty sure your ad will show up on Trovit anyway.

8. Gumtree

Gumtree is just like Craigslist and is wildly popular in the UK and is also frequently used in Australia, South Africa, and recently Gumtree has began to increase in popularity within the United States

No matter where you live, Gumtree is still a great alternative to Craigslist because of the ability to buy and sell to anyone in the world.

Categories

Motors

For sale

Property

Jobs

Services

Community

Pets

Gumtree can also be used as an app and can be found in both the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store.

9. US Free Ads

USFreeAds have been around since 1999 and I don’t think they’ve ever done an update on the look of their site. It’s about as plain and simple as you can get which isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes keeping it as simple as possible works the best.

After doing some digging, there are two separate sites for US Free Ads –  USFreeAds and USNetAds.

Categories

Automotive

Pets and animals

Collectibles

Real estate

Home and garden

Hobbies and leisure

Toys, games and models

Health and fitness

Electronics

Miscellaneous

Clothing and footwear

Jewelry and watches

Announcements

Services

Sports

Wanted ads

10. AdLandPro

AdLandPro allows you to post up to 20 ads for free and the ads will stay on their site for 4 weeks. However, if you update your ad inside those 4 weeks, you can keep your ads up indefinitely.

Once you post your ad, it is then sent to their database which is linked to over 57,000 affiliates websites.

Categories

Jobs

For sale

Automotive

Announcement

E-books and online lessons

Real estate

Miscellaneous

Pets

Services

Business

The Rest of the Best Sites like Craigslist

Some of these are older sites that many have forgot about or they may be brand new and just getting started. Often I will find the best deals on these sites listed below because they may not have as much competition from other buyers and sellers.

11. Geebo

What makes Geebo (pronounced G-bo) unique is the personal touch in the digital age. Every single ad is actually manually approved by a human being instead of a robot or algorithm.

Geebo is only offered in the United States and is currently in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, Washington, DC, and Seattle. To date, Geebo has spread to over 160 communities nationwide.

Categories

Merchandise

Construction and farm equipment

Services

Employment

Rentals and roommates

Real estate

Resumes

12. USA Today

Not much to explain here. USA Today is a giant in the print and digital media niche and reported over 102 million unique visitors and 1.2 billion pageviews per month in 2017.

One thing is for sure – your ad will be seen by a lot of people!

Categories

Auctions

Automotive

Business

Careers

Education

Marketplace

Notices

Real estate

Services

Sports and recreation

Travel

Miscellaneous

13. Ads Globe

Ads Globe is a nice looking site, it’s free, and you can choose ads from a drop down list of multiple countries.

However, after looking through their site for United States based ads, very few ads were found. If you’re going to try out Ads Globe, be sure to set your location at the very top left of their site.

Categories

Merchandise

Autos

Real estate

Rentals

Pets

Travel

14. PennySaver USA

I am sure the founder of Craigslist (Craig Newmark) had a PennySaver print ad in his hand well before he ever thought of starting Craigslist.

Penny Saver has been around for more than 50 years and survived the shift from print media to digital media in the online world. If you live in California, you can still find the Penny Saver in print, but everywhere else is online as PennySaver USA.

Also, PennySaver USA is visited more than 1 million unique visitors per month.

Categories

Arts and entertainment

Cars and vehicles

Food and dining

Jobs

Merchandise

Pets

Real estate

Services

15. City News

City News offers free classified ads to help you sell or buy all over the world. You can post in City News if you live in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and more. There’s also an option for upgraded ads, but there are charges to upgrade.

Categories

You can choose from a variety of categories to sell or shop in, including:

Antiques and collectibles

Astrology, holistic and religion

Auto and motor vehicles

Boats and water sports

Business opportunities

Real estate

People connections

And more. I even found ads for medical treatment services, such as knee surgery in foreign countries, which was….interesting.

16. 10 Day Ads

10 Day Ads has an interesting concept going for them. It’s free to list and sell stuff online, however the ads only stay on the site for – you guessed it – 10 days.

The goal, according to the site, is to keep the ads new and fresh so people aren’t seeing the same listings over and over again like can happen when people post on Craigslist.

Not only does this concept help buyers to avoid seeing old ads, it helps them minimize the chances of seeing an ad for an item that is already sold.

Categories

Antiques and collectibles

Employment

Music/records/CDs

Appliances

Everything else/miscellaneous

Personals/video profiles

Art

Fashion

Pets

Automotive

Baby items

Home and garden

And several other categories. The site is pretty well organized and easy to use. The site offered ads from all over the world, however when I checked the listings a lot of the categories had “zero” items for sale.

17. Ad Toad

Ad Toad isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as most of the other sites featured here, but it does have some stuff listed for sale and you can list and sell for free.

Categories

Some of the categories they have include:

Services

Vehicles, boats and aviation

Shopping

Rental and roommates

Personal

Hobby

Houseware

Home electronics

And others. Many of the categories had zero listings, however. I’m not sure this site is real well-known yet, but it is a free place to list your stuff for sale.

18. FreeAdsTime

FreeAdsTime looks and runs a lot like Craigslist. You start by choosing your state, and then the city you want to browse in, from the home page.

Categories

From there you can choose from several different categories such as:

Jobs

Services

Vehicles

Pets

Real estate/rentals

Community

Musician

Items

“Items” refers to things for sale and under this banner you’ll find links to items such as clothing, collectibles, computers, kids’ stuff, heavy equipment, jewelry, furniture and more.

You don’t have to create an account to post here, however, doing so will give you added benefits, such as being able to track the number of views on the items you’ve posted. It’s free to create an account too.

As I searched the site, I found there were several ads to browse for some items, and zero ads to browse for others. The site was attractive and easy to use.

19. Recycler

Recycler is another site where you place your ads directly. The site is easy to use and has categories such as cars and vehicles, pets, real estate for sale, rentals, sports and recreation, community, jobs and more.

It seemed to me that the majority of the stuff listed for sale here consisted of vehicles. Some categories, such as pets, had no listings when I was doing my research, however in the vehicles category there were thousands of ads to browse through.

You have to create an account with Recycler in order to post an ad, however it’s free to do so. This is a site I’d use to advertise a vehicle I had for sale, but it doesn’t look like it gets a whole lot of traffic for other items.

20. Pawngo

Pawngo is a site where you can sell your stuff to a pawn company. Their primary goal is to lend people money using their valuables as security, however it looks like they will buy items within certain parameters.

Items they accept for pawn include: jewelry, precious metals, camera equipment, musical instruments, Apple computers, luxury cars, and designer handbags. You can also buy these items directly from Pawngo.

21. Classified Ads

The Classified Ads website seems to be a pretty popular place to list items for sale.

Categories

Some of the categories they run ads for include:

Vehicles

Real estate

Rentals

Pets

Personals

Jobs

Items for sale

And others. You can place ads directly on the site, but I also noticed they had ads that seemed to be pulled from other sites. The site is simple, but organized and easy to use.

22. Classifieds Giant

Classifieds Giant is a well-organized site that allows you to post ads for a variety of items. Their “for sale” category includes antiques, arts and crafts, baby and kids, appliances, household items, electronic items, sporting equipment and more.

Like most other sites they also have ads for cars and trucks, real estate, jobs, services, community, personal ads, etc. You do have to create an account to post on Classifieds Giant, but it’s free to do so.

23. OLX

OLX offers items for sale that include all of the usual stuff: vehicles, real estate, electronics, used furniture, clothing, etc. They have sites for a couple of dozen countries, including Pakistan, Guatemala, India, South Africa and more.

However, when you click on “United States” it brings you to LetGo’s website. It’s a good place to search and list if you live in countries outside of the U.S.

24. Bookoo

Bookoo brings buyers and sellers together. They have site pages for all 50 U.S. states, as well as sites for Germany, Italy, Belgium, Japan, the UK and more.

As far as U.S. ads go, some states had dozens of cities listed while others, like Minnesota, Michigan and Idaho, had between zero and two cities listed.

Within many of the states and cities listed, however, there were quite a few ads to choose from if you’re shopping. This looks like a site that’s doing very well in some states, but still has room to grow in others.

25. Kijiji

It’s a crazy name, but Kijiji is dubbed Canada’s most popular free, local classifieds site. Kijiji shares ads in all of Canada’s major provinces and surrounding territories. Ads are listed by province and then narrowed down from there.

Categories

There are dozens of categories to choose from, including those listed below:

For sale

Housing

Electronics

Jobs

Pets

Home and garden

Community

Cars and vehicles

Services and resumes

26. U-Exchange

U-Exchange is a bit different than the other sites listed here in that it’s a bartering site – there is no cash or currency exchange. When you sign up with them, you list what services and/or products you have to offer, and what services or products you are willing to give in exchange.

There are a wide variety of services and products offered for trade and needed by others from people all over the U.S. and the world here.

27. Hoobly

Hoobly classifieds offer the usual stuff: vehicles, clothing, jobs, etc. You don’t need an account to browse listings, however you will need to create one (they’re free) to communicate with sellers or to list something for sale.

There weren’t a ton of listings on this site, but it’d be worth a look if you’re searching for something in particular. States, such as Michigan and Florida, had a lot more listings than many of the other states featured here.

How to Safely Buy and Sell These Sites

Whenever you’re buying – or selling – on websites like the ones mentioned here, it’s important to use safety precautions in an effort to prevent scammers or criminals from taking advantage of you.

You can start by never giving anyone your personal credit or debit card or other financial information. Deal in cash only (or a cashier’s check from your bank for large ticket items) and don’t give sellers money until you’re sure you are getting what you are paying for. There are also apps for sending money online.

Also, when meeting up with someone, bring a second person along if possible, meet in a public place and always let someone know where you’re going and when you should be back.

Done right, you can get some phenomenal deals using online websites!

Summary

As you can see there are a ton of great other sites like Craigslist. Whether you’re looking to sell your car, get a deal on a washing machine, you need to create extra cash flow flipping “stuff” or just need money now you have options.

Also, in the comments below, please let me know if you have tried any of these and what you think of them. Or, if I am missing any other sites, please drop me a comment below and I will get them added in!

Thanks so much!

The Best 27 Websites Like Craigslist to Buy and Sell published first on https://mysingaporepools.weebly.com/

[kennethherrerablog]

The Best 27 Websites Like Craigslist to Buy and Sell

Did you know there are so many other sites like Craigslist to buy and sell your stuff?

Of course Craigslist is the most well-known and for good reason. First, the site features hundreds of thousands of items for sale in pretty much any category you can imagine.

Second, (and probably my most favorite reason) it’s so popular because it’s free. F.R.E.E. Free to list, free to sell, free to buy. If you’ve ever had other types of sites eat up your profits via listing and selling fees, you know what I’m talking about.

However, with the ever-expanding world of e-commerce, there are now dozens of other (better) sites like Craigslist to choose from to list the stuff you want to sell, or to buy the things you want or need. Here are the top 27 of the most popular alternatives to Craigslist you might find helpful for buying or selling things or services.

Quick Links

The Top 10 Sites Like Craigslist

1. Offer Up

2. Facebook Marketplace

3. Facebook Groups

4. Letgo

5. Oodle

6. Locanto

7. Trovit

8. Gumtree

9. US Free Ads

10. AdLandPro

The Rest of the Best Sites like Craigslist

11. Geebo

12. USA Today

13. Ads Globe

14. PennySaver USA

15. City News

16. 10 Day Ads

17. Ad Toad

18. FreeAdsTime

19. Recycler

20. Pawngo

21. Classified Ads

22. Classifieds Giant

23. OLX

24. Bookoo

25. Kijiji

26. U-Exchange

27. Hoobly

How to Safely Buy and Sell These Sites

Summary

The Top 10 Sites Like Craigslist

These sites are listed in order of my favorite sites to buy and sell online that are very similar Craigslist. Right now Offer Up is my favorite, but the Facebook Marketplace is also a very quick and easy way to sell your items as well. When I am looking for services, I lean on Offer Up and when I am looking to sell something quickly, I will head on over to the Facebook Marketplace.

1. Offer Up

Offer Up is a selling site where you list your items or services by type, and you search by type, city or zip code. There’s an added filter letting you choose how far away you can search from that city or zip code.

Categories

Antiques

Appliances

Arts and crafts

Auto parts

Baby and kids

Beauty and health

Bicycles

Boats and marine

Books and magazines

Services

Okay, the list is seriously too long to post here. Offer Up has a lot of categories and a ton of stuff or services for sale from appliances and auto parts to used textbooks and antiques. You can also ask the seller a question or even make an offer. No listing fees or selling fees. Offer Up is my favorite for security as well. They take your safety seriously and will advise you to as well.

2. Facebook Marketplace

If you have a Facebook account, then you already have access to the Facebook Marketplace. Facebook does a really great job with their marketplace and makes it extremely simple to buy or sell. All communication is done via Facebook Messenger and can be done from mobile or desktop. With the amount of people shopping on Facebook, you can usually sell your stuff the fastest on this platform.

Categories

Vehicles

Home and garden

Electronics

Rentals

Hobbies

Home sales

Classifieds

Entertainment

Families

Clothing and accessories

Deals

3. Facebook Groups

Selling on Facebook started inside Facebook groups long before the Facebook Marketplace. Once you request and are approved for a local Facebook group (often called “YOUR CITY Swip Swap), you can begin selling your items and finding other things to buy in your local area.

It can be a bit tedious to find the right sale group for your items on Facebook which is why I like the Marketplace better. However, I do like the fact that if there are any complaints about someone inside the group – they are usually kicked out of the group. This causes buyers and sellers to be extra nice (and fair) with each other to remain in the group.

4. Letgo

Letgo shares items for sale by using your location. The site is easy to use, and there are no listing and selling fees. The site is pretty basic but it works. It’s easiest to search by item.

Categories

Cars

Free stuff

Electronics

Other vehicles and parts

Sports, leisure and games

Home and garden

Movies, books and music

Fashion and accessories

Baby and child

Other

5. Oodle

Probably the most comparable to Craigslist is Oodle, but it also does something Craiglist does not do – Oodle aggregates listings both locally and nationally from sites like eBay, ForRent.com, BoatTrader.com, Cars.com, and many more. Oodle uses these networks of online marketplaces to buy, sell, and trade products and services.

Categories

Merchandise

Motor-operated vehicles (cars, boats, motorcycles, RVs, etc.)

Rentals

Real estate

Jobs

Pets

Tickets

Services

Personal ads

Community-related ads (announcements, groups, etc.)

Currently Oodle has over 15 million monthly users and is available in the United States, Australia, Canada, India, UK, Ireland, and New Zealand. There are no fees for listing or selling, however there are limits to how many listings you can post at a time based on your selling categories.

6. Locanto

When you think of Locanto, think of the word “local”.

Instead of offering up ads from around the country, Locanto is best for those who are looking for something locally such as a used car, a babysitter, a job, or anything particular to the vicinity of where you live.

It’s very simple to post an ad on Locanto and the ads are meant to feel and look like ads you see in the local newspaper (what are newspapers again?). My favorite part of Locanto is your ad will remain live for 60 days which exposes your ad to a very large audience.

Bonus: You can upload pictures into your ad and you can use HTML codes to send a link to your website if you choose to do so.

Categories

Classes

Community

Events

For sale

Jobs

Personals

Pets

Real estate

Services

Vehicles

7. Trovit

Trovit is a site where you can list your homes and cars for sale, or list available job positions you may need to fill. How Trovit works is it lists ads for over 50 countries including the United States, Mexico, the UK, United Arab Emirates, Australia, Mexico, and many, many more.

The site is pretty well organized. When you search for a vehicle you start with the country you want to buy in. From there it brings you to another screen where you can choose a make, model, etc. You can choose cars by area or by make and model.

Searches for real estate work similarly. You start by choosing your area, and from there you can narrow down the search based on the type of house/number of bedrooms, etc. you want.

The site has an expansive amount of listings on it. Most all of the listings seemed to be taken from/linked to other sources. FYI, you can only advertise items for sale on Trovit if you own a coordinating website.

However, if you’re advertising on Craigslist or similar sites you can be pretty sure your ad will show up on Trovit anyway.

8. Gumtree

Gumtree is just like Craigslist and is wildly popular in the UK and is also frequently used in Australia, South Africa, and recently Gumtree has began to increase in popularity within the United States

No matter where you live, Gumtree is still a great alternative to Craigslist because of the ability to buy and sell to anyone in the world.

Categories

Motors

For sale

Property

Jobs

Services

Community

Pets

Gumtree can also be used as an app and can be found in both the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store.

9. US Free Ads

USFreeAds have been around since 1999 and I don’t think they’ve ever done an update on the look of their site. It’s about as plain and simple as you can get which isn’t always a bad thing. Sometimes keeping it as simple as possible works the best.

After doing some digging, there are two separate sites for US Free Ads –  USFreeAds and USNetAds.

Categories

Automotive

Pets and animals

Collectibles

Real estate

Home and garden

Hobbies and leisure

Toys, games and models

Health and fitness

Electronics

Miscellaneous

Clothing and footwear

Jewelry and watches

Announcements

Services

Sports

Wanted ads

10. AdLandPro

AdLandPro allows you to post up to 20 ads for free and the ads will stay on their site for 4 weeks. However, if you update your ad inside those 4 weeks, you can keep your ads up indefinitely.

Once you post your ad, it is then sent to their database which is linked to over 57,000 affiliates websites.

Categories

Jobs

For sale

Automotive

Announcement

E-books and online lessons

Real estate

Miscellaneous

Pets

Services

Business

The Rest of the Best Sites like Craigslist

Some of these are older sites that many have forgot about or they may be brand new and just getting started. Often I will find the best deals on these sites listed below because they may not have as much competition from other buyers and sellers.

11. Geebo

What makes Geebo (pronounced G-bo) unique is the personal touch in the digital age. Every single ad is actually manually approved by a human being instead of a robot or algorithm.

Geebo is only offered in the United States and is currently in San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, Chicago, Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, Washington, DC, and Seattle. To date, Geebo has spread to over 160 communities nationwide.

Categories

Merchandise

Construction and farm equipment

Services

Employment

Rentals and roommates

Real estate

Resumes

12. USA Today

Not much to explain here. USA Today is a giant in the print and digital media niche and reported over 102 million unique visitors and 1.2 billion pageviews per month in 2017.

One thing is for sure – your ad will be seen by a lot of people!

Categories

Auctions

Automotive

Business

Careers

Education

Marketplace

Notices

Real estate

Services

Sports and recreation

Travel

Miscellaneous

13. Ads Globe

Ads Globe is a nice looking site, it’s free, and you can choose ads from a drop down list of multiple countries.

However, after looking through their site for United States based ads, very few ads were found. If you’re going to try out Ads Globe, be sure to set your location at the very top left of their site.

Categories

Merchandise

Autos

Real estate

Rentals

Pets

Travel

14. PennySaver USA

I am sure the founder of Craigslist (Craig Newmark) had a PennySaver print ad in his hand well before he ever thought of starting Craigslist.

Penny Saver has been around for more than 50 years and survived the shift from print media to digital media in the online world. If you live in California, you can still find the Penny Saver in print, but everywhere else is online as PennySaver USA.

Also, PennySaver USA is visited more than 1 million unique visitors per month.

Categories

Arts and entertainment

Cars and vehicles

Food and dining

Jobs

Merchandise

Pets

Real estate

Services

15. City News

City News offers free classified ads to help you sell or buy all over the world. You can post in City News if you live in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and more. There’s also an option for upgraded ads, but there are charges to upgrade.

Categories

You can choose from a variety of categories to sell or shop in, including:

Antiques and collectibles

Astrology, holistic and religion

Auto and motor vehicles

Boats and water sports

Business opportunities

Real estate

People connections

And more. I even found ads for medical treatment services, such as knee surgery in foreign countries, which was….interesting.

16. 10 Day Ads

10 Day Ads has an interesting concept going for them. It’s free to list and sell stuff online, however the ads only stay on the site for – you guessed it – 10 days.

The goal, according to the site, is to keep the ads new and fresh so people aren’t seeing the same listings over and over again like can happen when people post on Craigslist.

Not only does this concept help buyers to avoid seeing old ads, it helps them minimize the chances of seeing an ad for an item that is already sold.

Categories

Antiques and collectibles

Employment

Music/records/CDs

Appliances

Everything else/miscellaneous

Personals/video profiles

Art

Fashion

Pets

Automotive

Baby items

Home and garden

And several other categories. The site is pretty well organized and easy to use. The site offered ads from all over the world, however when I checked the listings a lot of the categories had “zero” items for sale.

17. Ad Toad

Ad Toad isn’t as aesthetically pleasing as most of the other sites featured here, but it does have some stuff listed for sale and you can list and sell for free.

Categories

Some of the categories they have include:

Services

Vehicles, boats and aviation

Shopping

Rental and roommates

Personal

Hobby

Houseware

Home electronics

And others. Many of the categories had zero listings, however. I’m not sure this site is real well-known yet, but it is a free place to list your stuff for sale.

18. FreeAdsTime

FreeAdsTime looks and runs a lot like Craigslist. You start by choosing your state, and then the city you want to browse in, from the home page.

Categories

From there you can choose from several different categories such as:

Jobs

Services

Vehicles

Pets

Real estate/rentals

Community

Musician

Items

“Items” refers to things for sale and under this banner you’ll find links to items such as clothing, collectibles, computers, kids’ stuff, heavy equipment, jewelry, furniture and more.

You don’t have to create an account to post here, however, doing so will give you added benefits, such as being able to track the number of views on the items you’ve posted. It’s free to create an account too.

As I searched the site, I found there were several ads to browse for some items, and zero ads to browse for others. The site was attractive and easy to use.

19. Recycler

Recycler is another site where you place your ads directly. The site is easy to use and has categories such as cars and vehicles, pets, real estate for sale, rentals, sports and recreation, community, jobs and more.

It seemed to me that the majority of the stuff listed for sale here consisted of vehicles. Some categories, such as pets, had no listings when I was doing my research, however in the vehicles category there were thousands of ads to browse through.

You have to create an account with Recycler in order to post an ad, however it’s free to do so. This is a site I’d use to advertise a vehicle I had for sale, but it doesn’t look like it gets a whole lot of traffic for other items.

20. Pawngo

Pawngo is a site where you can sell your stuff to a pawn company. Their primary goal is to lend people money using their valuables as security, however it looks like they will buy items within certain parameters.

Items they accept for pawn include: jewelry, precious metals, camera equipment, musical instruments, Apple computers, luxury cars, and designer handbags. You can also buy these items directly from Pawngo.

21. Classified Ads

The Classified Ads website seems to be a pretty popular place to list items for sale.

Categories

Some of the categories they run ads for include:

Vehicles

Real estate

Rentals

Pets

Personals

Jobs

Items for sale

And others. You can place ads directly on the site, but I also noticed they had ads that seemed to be pulled from other sites. The site is simple, but organized and easy to use.

22. Classifieds Giant

Classifieds Giant is a well-organized site that allows you to post ads for a variety of items. Their “for sale” category includes antiques, arts and crafts, baby and kids, appliances, household items, electronic items, sporting equipment and more.

Like most other sites they also have ads for cars and trucks, real estate, jobs, services, community, personal ads, etc. You do have to create an account to post on Classifieds Giant, but it’s free to do so.

23. OLX

OLX offers items for sale that include all of the usual stuff: vehicles, real estate, electronics, used furniture, clothing, etc. They have sites for a couple of dozen countries, including Pakistan, Guatemala, India, South Africa and more.

However, when you click on “United States” it brings you to LetGo’s website. It’s a good place to search and list if you live in countries outside of the U.S.

24. Bookoo

Bookoo brings buyers and sellers together. They have site pages for all 50 U.S. states, as well as sites for Germany, Italy, Belgium, Japan, the UK and more.

As far as U.S. ads go, some states had dozens of cities listed while others, like Minnesota, Michigan and Idaho, had between zero and two cities listed.

Within many of the states and cities listed, however, there were quite a few ads to choose from if you’re shopping. This looks like a site that’s doing very well in some states, but still has room to grow in others.

25. Kijiji

It’s a crazy name, but Kijiji is dubbed Canada’s most popular free, local classifieds site. Kijiji shares ads in all of Canada’s major provinces and surrounding territories. Ads are listed by province and then narrowed down from there.

Categories

There are dozens of categories to choose from, including those listed below:

For sale

Housing

Electronics

Jobs

Pets

Home and garden

Community

Cars and vehicles

Services and resumes

26. U-Exchange

U-Exchange is a bit different than the other sites listed here in that it’s a bartering site – there is no cash or currency exchange. When you sign up with them, you list what services and/or products you have to offer, and what services or products you are willing to give in exchange.

There are a wide variety of services and products offered for trade and needed by others from people all over the U.S. and the world here.

27. Hoobly

Hoobly classifieds offer the usual stuff: vehicles, clothing, jobs, etc. You don’t need an account to browse listings, however you will need to create one (they’re free) to communicate with sellers or to list something for sale.

There weren’t a ton of listings on this site, but it’d be worth a look if you’re searching for something in particular. States, such as Michigan and Florida, had a lot more listings than many of the other states featured here.

How to Safely Buy and Sell These Sites

Whenever you’re buying – or selling – on websites like the ones mentioned here, it’s important to use safety precautions in an effort to prevent scammers or criminals from taking advantage of you.

You can start by never giving anyone your personal credit or debit card or other financial information. Deal in cash only (or a cashier’s check from your bank for large ticket items) and don’t give sellers money until you’re sure you are getting what you are paying for. There are also apps for sending money online.

Also, when meeting up with someone, bring a second person along if possible, meet in a public place and always let someone know where you’re going and when you should be back.

Done right, you can get some phenomenal deals using online websites!

Summary

As you can see there are a ton of great other sites like Craigslist. Whether you’re looking to sell your car, get a deal on a washing machine, you need to create extra cash flow flipping “stuff” or just need money now you have options.

Also, in the comments below, please let me know if you have tried any of these and what you think of them. Or, if I am missing any other sites, please drop me a comment below and I will get them added in!

Thanks so much!

The Best 27 Websites Like Craigslist to Buy and Sell published first on https://justinbetreviews.tumblr.com/

[courtneytincher]

'Take me to Cuba' - outlandish stories from the golden age of plane hijacking

In the last decade, 20 aircraft around the world have been hijacked. That figure still seems worryingly high in a post-9/11 world - how could an airline allow a stranger to wrestle control of a plane full of passengers? - but historically speaking the number is indicative of a comprehensive victory in the battle against crime in the skies.  Track back 50 years and hijackings were commonplace. In 1969 there were 86 in 12 months, according to statistics from the Aviation Safety Network; in 1970 there were 70. In five years, between 1968 and 1972, more than 130 aircraft were hijacked in the US alone, sometimes two on the same day. The startling regularity of seizures at 36,000 feet has led to the era being dubbed “the Golden Age of Hijacking”. So who was to blame? Broadly speaking, Cuba. So keen were some to share in the bounty of the Cuban Revolution of the Fifties that they were prepared to take over a plane and direct it south to the island some 90 miles of the Florida coast. “Take me to Cuba” soon entered satirical lexicon, with Monty Python among those to create a skit on the theme.  Coinciding with the advent of mass air travel, hijackings became common enough that airlines, and indeed passengers, greeted the act not with fear and concern but weariness and acceptance. The Golden Age | Plane hijackings from 1962-82 Time magazine in 1968 ran a piece titled “What to do when the hijacker comes”, revealing that in the past 11 months “more than 1,000 Americans have visited Cuba unexpectedly”. For travellers a planejacking meant a diversion to Havana and a lengthy delay, but not much else. For pilots, they had in their cockpit maps of the Caribbean and knew the routine off by heart.  Brendan I Koerner in his book The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking dissects the phenomenon. “Most skyjackers earnestly believed that upon reaching Havana, their sole destination during the mid-to-late Sixties, they would be greeted as revolutionary heroes,” he wrote. “Every skyjacker was an optimist at heart, supremely confident that his story would be the one to touch Castro’s heart.” Before long the US government decided enough was enough and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was tasked with tackling the problem. Not least, because Fidel Castro was charging American airlines $7,500 a pop to retrieve their planes. Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959 Credit: getty The FAA was initially unsure on what could be done. At a senate hearing in 1968, the FAA’s Irving Ripp said hijackings were an “impossible problem short of searching ever passenger”. “If you’ve got a man aboard that wants to go to Havana, and he has got a gun, that’s all he needs,” he said.  The aviation administrator then turned to the populace, inviting ideas from the general public on how to halt the upward trend. Suggestions ranged from the sensible to the downright ridiculous: have all passengers wear boxing gloves so they cannot hold guns; install trapdoors outside the cockpit; play the Cuban national anthem before take off and arrest anyone who knows the words.  One standout piece of blue sky thinking, Koerner notes, was building a replica of Havana airport on the southern tip of Florida so that pilots could trick the hijacker into thinking they’ve landed in Cuba when really they were still on American soil. Another was the idea of free one-way flights to Cuba for anyone keen enough never to return to the US; Castro was not game and dismissed the ideas as “good riddance flights”. Air stewardesses with National Airline after a hijacking in 1969 Credit: getty Eventually, in 1973, the FAA created its first hijacker profile before introducing passenger screening, metal detectors and bag searches; the birth of airport security.  But not before the hijackings continued. “Starting in ‘69, you had hijackers demanding to go to other places,” Koerner explained to Vox.  “The first was Raffaele Minichiello, a Marine who demanded to be flown from Los Angeles to Rome. And the airline complied with his request. So you had hijackers saying, wait a minute, we don't have to just go to Cuba. We can go anywhere! You have people demanding to be taken to Algeria and North Korea and Sweden and Argentina, and other different locations on the map.” All the while airlines were compliant, which may have helped spur on the Seventies extortion hijackings. “Through the end of '71 and '72, hijackers were demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars, or sometimes gold bars — lots of material wealth in exchange for the passengers,” said Koerner. The incredible tale of DB Cooper and the most fascinating hijacking case in history One such man was DB Cooper - one of history’s most mysterious characters. In short, Cooper (which may or may not be his real name) in 1971 hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight, demanded and was given $200,000, before parachuting out the back of the Boeing 727; he was never found and the FBI only recently gave up on the case.  As the Golden Age drew to an end, hijacking continued around the world, some politically motivated, some purely criminal, but with increasingly brazen demands and a preparation to use more and more lethal force. In between 1968 and 1971, despite scores of hijackings, there were only 21 related deaths. This number rose in the subsequent years, with 114 reported in 1977.  The growing death toll led authorities to take the threat more seriously; snipers were placed at airport tarmacs and plain-clothed officers boarded aircraft. Koerner says that the hijacking of a Southern Airlines flight in 1972 by three men who threatened to fly it into the atomic reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee helped wake the US government to the potential catastrophic consequences of the fad.  Security was still nothing compared to today - much introduced in the wake of September 11 - and hijackings continued. The Aviation Safety Network recorded dozens of seizures through the Seventies and Eighties - in 1993 there were 36 hijackings; 27 in 2000. Through the Noughties, as airport and aircraft security tightened exponentially (prior to 2001, for example, it was not uncommon for cockpit doors to be open or unlocked during flight), the number of instances plummeted. There were, however, in the 2000s, incidents involving Cuba, only this time hijackers taking control of planes on the island and demanding to be flown to the US.  Telegraph Travel Awards 2019: Win one of 15 luxury holidays worth £500,000 Hijackings today are now incredibly rare and make for major news: consider the coverage of EgyptAir Flight 181 in 2016, which was commandeered by an Egyptian man who was labelled not a terrorist but “an idiot”. In 2015 there was not a single hijacking around the world, for the first time since 1964. The feat was repeated in 2017.  From the comfort of a hijack-free airline industry it is easy to look back at the Golden Age of Hijacking as a peculiar, amusing blip in air travel, but it is also clear that the lessons learnt then have the made the sky the much safer place it is today.  Inspiration for your inbox Sign up to Telegraph Travel's new weekly newsletter for the latest features, advice, competitions, exclusive deals and comment.   You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines

In the last decade, 20 aircraft around the world have been hijacked. That figure still seems worryingly high in a post-9/11 world - how could an airline allow a stranger to wrestle control of a plane full of passengers? - but historically speaking the number is indicative of a comprehensive victory in the battle against crime in the skies.  Track back 50 years and hijackings were commonplace. In 1969 there were 86 in 12 months, according to statistics from the Aviation Safety Network; in 1970 there were 70. In five years, between 1968 and 1972, more than 130 aircraft were hijacked in the US alone, sometimes two on the same day. The startling regularity of seizures at 36,000 feet has led to the era being dubbed “the Golden Age of Hijacking”. So who was to blame? Broadly speaking, Cuba. So keen were some to share in the bounty of the Cuban Revolution of the Fifties that they were prepared to take over a plane and direct it south to the island some 90 miles of the Florida coast. “Take me to Cuba” soon entered satirical lexicon, with Monty Python among those to create a skit on the theme.  Coinciding with the advent of mass air travel, hijackings became common enough that airlines, and indeed passengers, greeted the act not with fear and concern but weariness and acceptance. The Golden Age | Plane hijackings from 1962-82 Time magazine in 1968 ran a piece titled “What to do when the hijacker comes”, revealing that in the past 11 months “more than 1,000 Americans have visited Cuba unexpectedly”. For travellers a planejacking meant a diversion to Havana and a lengthy delay, but not much else. For pilots, they had in their cockpit maps of the Caribbean and knew the routine off by heart.  Brendan I Koerner in his book The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking dissects the phenomenon. “Most skyjackers earnestly believed that upon reaching Havana, their sole destination during the mid-to-late Sixties, they would be greeted as revolutionary heroes,” he wrote. “Every skyjacker was an optimist at heart, supremely confident that his story would be the one to touch Castro’s heart.” Before long the US government decided enough was enough and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was tasked with tackling the problem. Not least, because Fidel Castro was charging American airlines $7,500 a pop to retrieve their planes. Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959 Credit: getty The FAA was initially unsure on what could be done. At a senate hearing in 1968, the FAA’s Irving Ripp said hijackings were an “impossible problem short of searching ever passenger”. “If you’ve got a man aboard that wants to go to Havana, and he has got a gun, that’s all he needs,” he said.  The aviation administrator then turned to the populace, inviting ideas from the general public on how to halt the upward trend. Suggestions ranged from the sensible to the downright ridiculous: have all passengers wear boxing gloves so they cannot hold guns; install trapdoors outside the cockpit; play the Cuban national anthem before take off and arrest anyone who knows the words.  One standout piece of blue sky thinking, Koerner notes, was building a replica of Havana airport on the southern tip of Florida so that pilots could trick the hijacker into thinking they’ve landed in Cuba when really they were still on American soil. Another was the idea of free one-way flights to Cuba for anyone keen enough never to return to the US; Castro was not game and dismissed the ideas as “good riddance flights”. Air stewardesses with National Airline after a hijacking in 1969 Credit: getty Eventually, in 1973, the FAA created its first hijacker profile before introducing passenger screening, metal detectors and bag searches; the birth of airport security.  But not before the hijackings continued. “Starting in ‘69, you had hijackers demanding to go to other places,” Koerner explained to Vox.  “The first was Raffaele Minichiello, a Marine who demanded to be flown from Los Angeles to Rome. And the airline complied with his request. So you had hijackers saying, wait a minute, we don't have to just go to Cuba. We can go anywhere! You have people demanding to be taken to Algeria and North Korea and Sweden and Argentina, and other different locations on the map.” All the while airlines were compliant, which may have helped spur on the Seventies extortion hijackings. “Through the end of '71 and '72, hijackers were demanding hundreds of thousands of dollars, or sometimes gold bars — lots of material wealth in exchange for the passengers,” said Koerner. The incredible tale of DB Cooper and the most fascinating hijacking case in history One such man was DB Cooper - one of history’s most mysterious characters. In short, Cooper (which may or may not be his real name) in 1971 hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight, demanded and was given $200,000, before parachuting out the back of the Boeing 727; he was never found and the FBI only recently gave up on the case.  As the Golden Age drew to an end, hijacking continued around the world, some politically motivated, some purely criminal, but with increasingly brazen demands and a preparation to use more and more lethal force. In between 1968 and 1971, despite scores of hijackings, there were only 21 related deaths. This number rose in the subsequent years, with 114 reported in 1977.  The growing death toll led authorities to take the threat more seriously; snipers were placed at airport tarmacs and plain-clothed officers boarded aircraft. Koerner says that the hijacking of a Southern Airlines flight in 1972 by three men who threatened to fly it into the atomic reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee helped wake the US government to the potential catastrophic consequences of the fad.  Security was still nothing compared to today - much introduced in the wake of September 11 - and hijackings continued. The Aviation Safety Network recorded dozens of seizures through the Seventies and Eighties - in 1993 there were 36 hijackings; 27 in 2000. Through the Noughties, as airport and aircraft security tightened exponentially (prior to 2001, for example, it was not uncommon for cockpit doors to be open or unlocked during flight), the number of instances plummeted. There were, however, in the 2000s, incidents involving Cuba, only this time hijackers taking control of planes on the island and demanding to be flown to the US.  Telegraph Travel Awards 2019: Win one of 15 luxury holidays worth £500,000 Hijackings today are now incredibly rare and make for major news: consider the coverage of EgyptAir Flight 181 in 2016, which was commandeered by an Egyptian man who was labelled not a terrorist but “an idiot”. In 2015 there was not a single hijacking around the world, for the first time since 1964. The feat was repeated in 2017.  From the comfort of a hijack-free airline industry it is easy to look back at the Golden Age of Hijacking as a peculiar, amusing blip in air travel, but it is also clear that the lessons learnt then have the made the sky the much safer place it is today.  Inspiration for your inbox Sign up to Telegraph Travel's new weekly newsletter for the latest features, advice, competitions, exclusive deals and comment.   You can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

July 05, 2019 at 01:36PM via IFTTT

[bambiguertinus]

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup

[oscarkruegerus]

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

from Digtal Marketing News https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup

[sheilalmartinia]

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup

[alanajacksontx]

Transformation of Search Summit roundup

This past Friday we held our inaugural Transformation of Search Summit here in NY. Let’s just say, we’re already looking to book our venue for next year! On a scale of one to success, it was smashing.

Firstly, thank you (yet again) to all who came out to sponsor, speak at, and attend the event — couldn’t have done it without you.

As frequenters of many events ourselves, we did our best to ensure this one was full of high quality, fluff-free content. None of those talks where you get the end and think, “okay, but take out the buzzwords, and what did they say?” We asked for the moon, and our wonderful speakers delivered.

Some particularly rich (dare we say featured) snippets from the day:

Where search is heading

Siddharth Taparia, SVP and Head of Marketing Transformation, SAP, kicked off our morning speaking on the future of where search is heading. Social is the new storefront. The top 500 retailers earned 6.5 billion from social shopping in 2017, up 24%.

With the rise of voice search, position 0 is the ultimate prize. Over half of search queries will be voice based by 2020. A quarter of US homes have smart speakers. 92% of 18-29 year olds have smartphones. 90% increase in capabilities for voice search with only 8% error rate

Protecting privacy is a big deal. Alexa is coming to the office, the hotel, healthcare, the car, even learning. When you put a chip in everything, the whole world becomes a security threat. Even Google and Amazon are not immune to these.

New research: The Era of Ecommerce

Kerry Curran, Managing Partner, Marketing Integration, Catalyst & Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ, presented our headlining research report for the day: The Era of Ecommerce. Among many things, this research found a notable gap between how consumers browse, purchase, and behave online, and where advertisers put spend to reel those consumers in. Hint: not the same places.

There’s a lot more we could (and surely will) write about this report — not to mention that it was already 50+ pages long. For now I’ll direct you here for more information and here for the free download — enjoy!

How blockchain will affect search

Jeremy Epstein, CEO, Never Stop Marketing. For those who have never heard Jeremy speak, he is the best kind of fireball on stage. Spirited and smart, with the perfect sprinkle of self-deprecating humor. Jeremy speaks often on blockchain and the decentralized economy, and at this summit he focused on what those will mean for search. There’s a new sector — still in its infancy — of decentralized content that poses unique challenges in the search world: hard for search engines to index, curated by the audience, and where revenue generated goes directly to the creators of that content.

Panel: ClickZ, Adobe, Microsoft, Google

Panel discussion: Clark Boyd, Research Lead, ClickZ. Pete Kluge, Group Manager, Product Marketing, Adobe, Christi Olson, Head of Evangelism, Microsoft. Juan Felipe Rincón, Global Lead, Trust & Safety Search Outreach, Google

This was an interesting panel discussion on what awaits us in the future of search — things like connecting content and searches over several days, and more gender equality for women who search in emerging markets. They of course touched on types of search, and how Amazon is affecting the industry.

Visual search, which starts to answer the long-held question of “how do you search for something if you don’t know what it is?” and which particularly rings true for retail: this person has a nice scarf, where did it come from, where can I get one?

They also discussed how the input:output exchange of search is changing. It used to be only text:text. Now it can be image:voice, voice:voice, or any number of expanding options.

We need a bit of a mindset shift. We do a lot of our planning in terms of old paradigms, but more and more searches are being done by default, through lots of entry points.

They voiced how the future of search is no search, because search implies uncertainty. Instead, it will be about how you populate something before someone knows what they don’t know. In the future we won’t be searching, AI will do it for us. The experience of a user going through search is not here’s a keyword, here’s what I need. Sometimes we actively search, sometimes we want to be kept informed about things interesting to us.

And finally, bringing us a bit back to our feet — they reminded us that while we talk a lot about the future and transformation of search, a lot can be done now. Particularly around visual search, there’s still a lot of basic groundwork that people aren’t doing, such as using alt tags on images and making sure our visual content is properly described. As Rincon put it, “Look at the web as if you didn’t have eyes.”

Mobile search

Jason White, Director, SEO, Hertz. Fun fact about Jason: he started off doing SEO in 2003 because he competed in cycling races and worked at a bike shop to get discounts on parts, and the bike shop wanted to sell excess inventory in the winter. Fifteen years later, he’s Director of SEO at Hertz. Yet another quintessential example of great, self-taught SEOs who stumbled into the field and were pleasantly surprised to find it stuck.

Best quote from Jason? “You’re going to have a smart toilet bowl at sometime in your life. What will it say about you?” He talked about the future of IoT and security. We learned our data is worth $250 per year, and it’s going up every year. And finally, that billions of queries are made every day, 15% of which are completely new — ones Google says people had never searched for before.

Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services

John Denny, VP Ecommerce & Digital Marketing, Cavu Venture Partners (formerly Bai Brands). Luis Navarrete Gomez, Head of Global Search Marketing, LEGO

This was a particularly hands-on session with 7 excellent tips for leveraging Amazon and Amazon Marketing Services, i.e. both paid and organic search. And it was certainly from a trustworthy source — John Denny helped lead Bai beverages to be named 2015 Vendor of the Year by Amazon.

They related how running search campaigns on Amazon has been a struggle, one which many compare to what it was like running Google search campaigns in 2005. Happily, there’s been some rapid development of ad tech platforms changing the game of late.

They also talked about the tangible nature of Amazon campaigns versus elsewhere on the web — marketers selling physical products. As John put it, “A lot of execs hear about Amazon ads and think great, let’s rock and roll! But the reality on Amazon is that you can’t rock and roll anywhere if your product is out of stock. Build your foundation first.”

The full-funnel search approach

Claudia Virgilio, GVP of Strategic Partnerships, Kenshoo spoke to us about the importance of taking a full-funnel search approach. Amazon advertising has 197 million monthly unique visitors, and $4.6 billion spend.

How to optimize for voice search

Melissa Walner, Director, Global SEO, Hilton led another particularly practical session, coming from a brand that certainly gets asked a lot of questions — everything from “what’s the address of my hotel” to “what are fun things to do in Maui with kids?” Melissa had great insight into how to optimize specifically for voice search, and viewing SEO these days as not just search engine optimization so much as search everywhere optimization and search everything optimization.

She pointed out that 1 billion voice searches are made each month already, and that by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done without a screen.

In a voice search world, position 0 is queen: 80% of google home responses stem from a featured snippet. She then gave great tips for securing those featured snippets, on both high-level strategic and in-the-weeds technical levels.

Visual search and ecommerce

Clark hopped back up to cover visual search and how it affects ecommerce. One key quote from this session was pulled from our research report, from Amy Vener of Pinterest: “Shopping has always been visual. We’ve just been taught to do the opposite online.”

93% of consumers consider images to be be key deciding factor in a purchasing decision.

61% of consumers aged 18-34 discover new products through social media. If consumers start purchasing directly through these social platforms, that could pose a big problem for someone like Amazon.

We also learned about structured data to help search engines understand content, and the importance of always marking up price, availability, image, and product name. For the curious, the Pinterest engineering blog is quite open on how their visual search works.

Panel: UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, Condé Nast

Panel: Andrew Spikes, Head of Global Paid Search, UPS. Kunal Arya, Performance Marketing Manager, Codecademy. Nikolai Zeinikov, Ecommerce Director, Heineken. John Shehata, VP, Audience Development Strategy, Condé Nast

To close out the day, we had a final panel discussion on strategies for search transformation. Panelists from UPS, Codecademy, Heineken, and Conde Nast carried us through with light-hearted, quippy, down to earth thoughts on how they strategize search at their organizations.

They reminded us that almost 80% of successful add to baskets happen through search, and that people use search because they can’t easily find the products.

They also exemplified how SEO teams are still very much “lean beasts.” One of them mentioned that even at such a large company, their “search” team was a mere four people — and two of them were UX/UI. “When I first started, it was a huge mess,” he said. Further proof that a lot can be done with few hands on deck, and that strategy has a lot to do with choosing what not to do.

All in all, it was an excellent, enlightening day. We’ll have some more in-depth video content to come on specific sessions. Until then, another s/o to those who joined us!

from IM Tips And Tricks https://searchenginewatch.com/transformation-search-summit-roundup from Rising Phoenix SEO https://risingphxseo.tumblr.com/post/179326859220