#it’s ongoing but so amazing and the author puts so much effort into research and literary allusions it’s beautiful

[someonetosayreprise]

this is a sign that YOU should read the greatest Cyrano OT3 fic ever posted on Ao3. Right now.

[saintobio]

i always love the way you write, it really shows how much effort you put in your writing. and to add i also like the way you base it on reality and research about it. the way your fiction shows so much emotions that it also effects the reader, truly means that your work is outstanding. and the longer it takes you to upload a new fiction to your blog shows how much effort you put into it. i hope you rest well because you deserve it! ٩(˃̶͈̀௰˂̶͈́)و - 🦭

Anonymous said

heyyy, how you're doing?! I'm new here and I need to tell you that I'm OBSSESSED with your work — your histories are SOOOO ADDICTIVE, you've got an amazing way with the words, like, really, I'm complettely astounished by the way you just put everything together with such tell those amazing stories, making me feel every single thing, it's just— I'm literally out of words. I'm so thankfuk that I found your work, it brings me literal JOY to read everything you write,,,,,,, although I end up crying..... several times...... (but I love it, somehow, don't worry). Sooo, I wanted to ask you something, and I don't know if you've ever recieved an question like this before: how would things go if Gojo wasn't in a relationship with Sera? He'd fall for Y/N? Would things workout?

(Also, sorry if ponctuation and grammar feel kinda off, english is not my first language and, sometimes, it's still a struggle for me!!! :D)

Love your work BYEEEE

Anonymous said

please, your writings are sooo out of this world 😭

I remember preparing my heart and sanity to read "wastelands" after a few months before binge reading it (that time the series was still ongoing), I'm already in pain just by looking at the summary and I'm in absolute pain

Currently reading "underground fight club" hoho, your series are *chef's kiss*

Now, I'm preparing myself again to binge read the "sincerely not" series :') THANK YOU FOR the pain YOUR SERVICE! You're such a great writer!

@atsumusoup said

Hiiiii I just wanna say I love sincerely not so much it broke my heart but in a good yet unsettling yet amazing way 😭 thanks so much for all your hard work and although I don’t interact as much anymore watching your blog grow from remember forever to now it’s insane! I binge read the last four chapters of after my midterms and cried so harddddd

Your work literally sends me on rollercoasters and I get so excited to read them 🤩 can’t wait to see what u have I store next! Take care b! 💜

Anonymous said

Saint can I just tell you how much i love your series n the small details that you have put in? Because of you i realized that i have a birkins bag (it was given to me by my mother's boss 😫) and even so your story gave me motivation to learn more abt the business industry? Even the fashion industry also because that's how impactful your story is to me 😂 its funny because when you read sn you're not only reading you're learning too! so i admire your efforts in learning more abt this assigned field or topic even though you have had a hard time in this fic because everything came out well in the end and your dedication for this fic is unlike any others you're an author i aspire to be thank you very much love!! ❤❤

@captainchrisstan said

Saint, great chapter! Im so happy that i was in this adventure with you! What a rollercoaster! ❤️😭😭😭 cant wait 🥰

Anonymous said

me already crying b4 reading:

Saint, thank you for being such a genious and writing this masterpiece.

When I stumbled upon this fanfiction, I was crying and feeling like shit, thinking abt su*cide. I started to read thinking it would be one of those stories that s/n would be like those fragile FL, but I was wrong. Your main character was so original, never expected such a complex personality and how it's similar to reality, where people are like shades of grade, never only white or black.

I was so interested in this story that it became my motivation to continue living because it was one of the only things that would make my day. Your fanfiction saved me.

Thank you,

- ♤

i love love looove every single one of u !! thank you for loving sn and for looking forward to sy <33 all the happiness and pain we’ve shared bc of this series made me feel so connected with u guys aaaaa 🥺 i’m genuinely so grateful for the support and have been reading these messages for the past few weeks. i’m sorry it took me awhile to get back to all of u !!

[iwillgetridofyourangerforyou]

Update on my OPM Journey

An introduction to how I ended up here and what I’m looking for:

Season 1:

Like many of us here, I watched the first season of One-Punch Man when it arrived on Netflix around 2016. It was fun. I enjoyed the humor and the characters. Finished the few episodes that were available and went on with my life with the faint but idle hopes of another season. If you were to have asked me about OPM back then I probably would have said something about it being ‘a fun anime’, ‘worth watching’, ‘entertaining/amusing’, without much additional thought. Then, Season two came out. I was almost surprised that a second season actually came out, it had been so long. I wish I could explain to you how and why the second season hit me like it did, (the quality was not as compelling as the first for one) but that’s a story for another time. 

Season 2:

I was idly curious how the author would keep the concept of ‘a hero who can defeat any enemy in one punch’ fresh and interesting. Superhero franchises often suffer from the crushing pressure to continue to escalate threats indefinitely to always keep a hero’s journey relatable and interesting. When you’re faced with overpowered superheroes like Superman plots can become ridiculous fairly quickly. What I noticed watching through Season 2 (and then season 1 again and then season 2 again) was clear indications that this tired ‘treat escalation trope’ was not at all what the creators were leaning on. There were really powerful conversations and questions being presented by or through characters. Saitama’s conversation with King is one that stands out to me in particular:

I was floored. And suddenly my level of investment in this content went from 20% “eh, it’s fun, I’ll check for new episodes.” to “holy crap I neeed to figure how what is happening here this is f-ing amazing!” 

And so began my ongoing quest to figure out what ONE is trying to teach us through this story.

I started reading the manga. 

At first I fell easily into the habits of most half-invested fans, clinging to overused tropes, enticed by fan predictions that feel more like conspiracy theories now, generally ignoring some of the themes and ideas that more observant fans are able to uncover. I’m getting closer but I feel myself getting frustrated, there is more going on here that I’m not seeing. My internal predictions about what will happen in the manga as I read through were getting closer but I keep missing the mark so far on some areas that I felt blindsided. 

I need to re-evaluate how I’m looking at this. I need more information. 

I started reading the webcomic. 

The webcomic really helped clarify some things for me, it was de-convoluted and direct. It was like looking at the bones of the animal. I could see it’s joints, where it bends and where it’s rigid. You really start to get a sense of what this story is built for. The scenes and dialogue are poignant and every frame has a purpose.

Still, this wasn’t good enough for me. My research is not over. I keep mis-attributing things, and missing clues. Through this process I’ve been getting better at uncovering my own biases and learning how to separate them from my interpretation but my biases are a continual stumbling block. For one thing I don’t value all the characters or the lessons they have to teach, I find my lazy brain getting annoyed at some characters and hoping their voice in the story is minimized while hyper-laser focusing on other characters to the point that they become muddled images, grotesque self-projections, or over-complicated distractions. I need to get out of my head a bit, not forgetting my own biases, and I need to start seeing how ONE thinks, who he is as a person, what he values. 

I need fresh source material. 

So, I watched Mob Psycho 100. 

That gave me so much hope and optimism for what ONE has in store for his characters. I’d gotten used to authors who create characters for the purpose of their deaths. Who creates characters who are intended to be ‘terrible, awful, and no good’ to highlight how ‘amazing, sweet, and good’ other characters are. But that’s not what ONE seems to do (imo). It’s not that he doesn’t use characters to contrast other characters, but that’s what it is, a contrast more than a judgement. From my perspective ONE understands the importance of consequence, he values inter-dependency gratitude and accountability. 

That said, he shows that a character's actions have consequences. It’s not necessarily moral judgement against a person to say that if they make fraudulent claims they may be found out and shamed, or if they’re standoffish they’ll have trouble building connections, if they use power to manipulate and control people with fear they might lose people (especially if that power is taken away). The use of consequence seems to extend past a person’s choices and include the consequence of a person’s circumstance which may not actually limit a person in a meaningful way, but will impact how they’re able to achieve what they desire. There is a moment when Mob runs for student body president and he’s put a lot of additional work and practice into the speech he’s required to deliver, he stretches himself, but unlike other stories he doesn’t have a ‘surprising under-dog upsetting the establishment’ moment. His natural shyness, low charisma, and the lack of real public speaking experience result in him standing in stunned silence during his entire time slot.

He doesn’t win the vote. Similarly, Mob sets an ambitious goal to come in the top 10 people in a race, but as a consequence of being a naturally small kid who has only just begun actively trying to improve his body, he is unable to accomplish his goal. However, as a direct result of the effort and determination he’s put into his goal he does much better than he’d ever done before. 

I had no idea before watching MP100 how much ONE thinks about interdependence and now I have a new perspective on the tension between the hero associations and the heroes, the teams of heroes and their individual strength, how well a team works together or not and why seems to be a very important topic of exploration for ONE. There is a very powerful moment when Mob confronts some esper goons who are looting a store after the destruction of part of a city. When he confronts them he asks “could you guys manufacture this can? Could you actually grow the vegetables in this sandwich?” and concludes that thought with “You should realize that you’re only able to survive thanks to the help of others.” 

There is another powerful moment when Mob is being confronted by another bitter and disillusioned esper who tries to get Mob to tap into his negative emotions to increase his power. He tries to get Mob to despair in humanity as he has but Mob is able to turn the tables on the interaction with gratitude. By recognizing how fortunate he is and how many good people are near him he is able to pull himself (with a little help from Dimple and friends) out of despair. It’s a truly heartwarming moment and it leaves you really feeling bad for the antagonist in that situation. 

Conclusion for this post, (but not the conclusion of my research):

This is getting a bit long so I’ll conclude. Taking this dive has certainly given me some perspective and I have an overwhelming buffer of new OPM analysis that’s just waiting to be put to paper. I absolutely recognize that MP100 =/= OPM and ONE may indeed be exploring entirely different concepts. I don’t believe, however, that ONE’s values have changed much (although I’m sure they’re in constant development) and I’m grateful for the opportunity to see what he thinks about. I’m grateful for the time and effort he’s put into communicating and sharing his ideas though his comics. I still have a lot of personal biases to identify and overcome, that will be a constant struggle. However, part of the charm of my meta’s is that they do come from my own perspective. This little story is only a hint at some of the fish in the ocean of thoughts I’m swimming through trying desperately not to drown in as I open my big mouth to try to share with you all. (Welcome in, the water’s fine.)

[sciencespies]

Crowdsourcing Project Aims to Document the Many U.S. Places Where Women Have Made History

https://sciencespies.com/history/crowdsourcing-project-aims-to-document-the-many-u-s-places-where-women-have-made-history/

Crowdsourcing Project Aims to Document the Many U.S. Places Where Women Have Made History

For nearly 30 years, Alaskan Ahtna Athabascan elder Katie John awaited resolution to her peaceful battle over Native subsistence rights. The legal dispute—centering on her family’s right to fish in Batzulnetas, a historic village and fish camp in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park—made it all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court’s ruling cleared the way for the subsistence fishing rights of many Alaska Native to be included under federal subsistence protection. Although John died in 2013 before litigation was complete, her 2014 win was a victory for Native Americans everywhere.

Today, the fish camp remains a testament to John’s life work, and it represents just one of the many sites where women’s history and achievements happened, often with no official sign or record recognizing their importance.

Since mid-January, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has been crowdsourcing places like the fish camp for its 1,000 Places Where Women Made History, and the process to submit is simple. Anyone can log an online entry, which consists of a photo, as well as a short paragraph about the U.S.-based property and its location. “This is our way of bringing people together to tell us what are the places and stories that matter to them,” says Chris Morris, a National Trust senior field officer who’s spearheading the campaign. Through submissions from local preservation societies, community organizations, and everyday people, they’ve already compiled more than 750 sites. Some, like the fish camp, may not have much recognition of their role in history while others have been named National Historic Landmarks.

“Although 2020’s 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage is the impetus for this work,” says Morris, “we also wanted to use the project to fully honor those many female leaders related to American history and culture.”

According to Morris, the 1,000 Places project is part of a larger mission of the Trust’s to preserve women’s history. The Trust encourages local organizations to take direct action in preserving buildings and homes where women have “made a stand, raised their voice, and found the courage to change the world,” she says, and identifies historic sites that recognize women as part of its annual 11 Most Endangered Historic Places list, which in 2019 included the Excelsior Club in Charlotte, North Carolina—a once-thriving hub of the city’s African American social scene—and Nashville’s Music Row. The National Trust also operates 27 of its own historic sites at which they’re working to bring to light the many amazing women associated with these places. The Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, for instance, was designed by famed modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but it was native Chicagoan and doctor Edith Farnsworth who commissioned it. “So this year Farnsworth House is shifting its perspective to tell the story of the house from her point of view,” says Morris.

The ever-growing list of 1,000 Places Where Women Made History currently includes everything from homes where pioneering women once lived, buildings where specific events that involved them occurred, and where women-led accomplishments happened. It includes spots like the former home of prominent investigative journalist Ida Tarbell in Titusville, Pennsylvania; the historic Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, saved through a fundraising campaign led by Beatrice Spachner; and Trumpet Records in Jackson, Mississippi, the former work site of a young record producer named Lillian McMurry, who recorded both black and white artists during the height of Mississippi segregation.

“We want to reveal those sort of lesser-known and untold stories, because we recognize that women’s history is America’s history,” says Morris. “This crowdsourcing effort has been very successful in revealing such underappreciated tales, ones of women’s vision, courage and leadership countrywide. They make up the majority of our entries. They’re tales of thinkers, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs…those women who have really shaped the nation that we are today, and who continue to help us to move forward.”

One of the Trust’s main goals with this project is to help a new generation of Americans, especially young women, see their own potential in the history of these places, says Morris. “We also will encourage everyone who submitted an entry to consider applying for funding from our many grant programs,” she says, “to support the broader interpretation and long-term preservation of these places where women made history.”

Five Sites Where Women Made History

Here are six lesser-known sites in the U.S. where women made history. Most of them are recognized in the 1,000 Places project, and all are on the Trust’s radar for renovation and reuse in some capacity. Though each is in various stages of preservation and redevelopment, they’re all moving forward as a testament to women’s achievements and inspiration for new stories to come.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas House

(National Trust for Historic Preservation)

Located on a residential block in Miami’s upscale Coconut Grove neighborhood, this uninhabited wood-framed and T-shaped cottage has a special place in American history, as the former home of Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a journalist, author and conservationist known as the “Grand Dame of the Everglades.” (She may sound familiar, too, as the namesake of the high school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed in a mass shooting in 2018.) Douglas published her seminal book, The Everglades: River of Grass, highlighting Florida’s endlessly diverse subtropical wilderness and its need for ongoing preservation, in 1947. A month later, 20 percent of the Everglades’ southernmost portion became a national park. Douglas also founded the still-thriving Friends of the Everglades—an activist organization dedicated to protecting the landscape—in 1970, and often held meetings for conservationists at her Coconut Grove home, where she lived from 1926 until 1998. The Land Trust of Dade County currently oversees the property, which became a National Historic Landmark in 2015, and is working with other local and national preservation organizations for a reuse plan that continues Stoneman’s legacy as an environmentalist, while also being respectful of the community that surrounds it. One possibility, says Morris, is to use the property as a residency where scientists can come to continue their research on environmental issues and climate change.

Pauli Murray House

(National Trust for Historic Preservation)

Pauli Murray was both a civil rights and women’s rights activist, an author, lawyer and member of the LGBTQ community, as well as the first African American woman to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. She spent her formative years in this one-and-a-half-story home, built by her grandfather, alongside her grandparents and aunts—all of whom helped raise Murray. In 1944, this descendent of both enslaved laborers and slave holders graduated first in her class at Howard University. Murray later received a Masters of Law degree from U.C. Berkeley in 1945, and in 1947 was named one of 10 “Young Women of the Year” by Mademoiselle magazine. She was also a founding member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) Foundation, which tackles a wide range of women’s rights issues, from economic justice to reproductive rights.

Murray’s Durham childhood home has been a National Historic Landmark since 2016, and is both an entry on the National Trust’s crowdsourcing campaign as well as one of its National Treasures. The Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute runs the Pauli Murray Project, which oversees the property, renovated it and is preparing to open it to the public as the the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice later this year.

Harada House

(National Trust for Historic Preservation)

In 1915, Japanese immigrants Jukichi and Ken Harada wanted to purchase a home in Riverside, but the California Alien Land Law of 1913 prevented them from doing so. Instead, the couple acquired their modest Lemon Street property by putting it in the name of their three young children—a move that soon became a focal point for the groundbreaking legal case California v. Harada. Under the 14th Amendment, the Haradas won the right to keep their 1884 home, though their lives would never be the same. In 1942, the entire family was relocated to Japanese internment camps where both Jukichi and Ken died. However, their youngest daughter Sumi returned to the Riverside home in the wake of World War II, taking in as boarders other Japanese families who’d lost their properties. Sumi resided at what’s now known as Harada House until 1998, during which time she preserved many of the home’s furnishings and fixtures, and kept a wealth of family heirlooms, including kimonos featuring the Harada family crest, personal letters and kitchenware. She also saved a message that her brother scribbled on a bedroom wall on the day his family was forced into a relocation center.

Today the Riverside Metropolitan Museum oversees the home, which Jukichi had transformed from a single-story saltbox into a multi-story space, and is working to both restore it and turn it into an interpretive center highlighting the Harada story—one of lost city rights, a fight against racial discrimination, and immigrants. The property has been a National Historic Landmark since 1990.

Doolan-Larson Residence and Storefronts

(Scott Hahn/SF Heritage)

On the famous San Francisco corner of Haight and Ashbury streets—the heart of the 1960s counterculture movement—stands the Doolan-Larson building, a mixed-use, multi-story property built in the 20th century. This Colonial Revival-style structure, which survived the city’s 1906 earthquake before being elevated to add storefronts, became home to San Francisco’s first-ever hippie boutique. Twenty-four-year-old Peggy Caserta opened this mod clothing store, called Mnasidika (its name a shout-out to The Songs of Bilitis, a French book of lesbian poetry from the late 19th century), in 1965 and ran it until 1968, during which time it was a pivotal part of the Haight-Ashbury’s counterculture scene. Caserta herself was bisexual—she was Janis Joplin’s lover until Joplin’s death in 1970—and according to Levi Strauss & Co., it was at Mnasidika that Jimi Hendrix developed his iconic Flower Child style. Caserta is also credited with convincing Levi Strauss to create bell-bottom jeans, which she then sold at Mnasidika and became a seminal part of ’60s fashion.

When the property’s owner Norman Larson died in 2018, he donated the Doolan-Larson building to San Francisco Heritage. Mnasidika’s original storefront—now a T-shirt shop—remains largely as it was during the Summer of Love. Though not yet on the list of places “Where Women Made History,” it is a part of the Trust’s National Treasures. San Francisco Heritage and other preservation groups are currently looking at ways to reuse the structure in telling the stories of San Francisco’s counterculture movement, including those of women like Caserta, as well as to highlight both its overall impact and continued relevance today.

Another addition to the National Trust’s 100 National Treasures list, Villa Lewaro was the summer home of Madam C.J. Walker (born Sara Breedlove), an early 20th century entrepreneur who made a fortune in developing hair products for African American women. Walker, who is considered the first African American female millionaire in the U.S., is the subject of the new Netflix TV series, “Self Made,” starring Octavia Spencer as Walker. Along with being a businesswoman, Walker was a philanthropist and political and social activist. She occupied the 34-room, Italianate-style Villa Lewaro from 1918 to 1919, and though it’s not currently open to the public, visitors can take a virtual tour of the estate led by Walker’s great-great granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles. The New Voices Foundation—created to empower entrepreneur women of color— acquired the property in 2018 and is working toward turning it into a “think tank,” according to New Voice’s founder Richelieu Dennis, “to foster entrepreneurship for present and future generations.”

#History

[dust2dust34]

Pieces of Always: May 2018 (FICoN ‘verse)

Life continues after Forever is Composed of Nows.

by @so-caffeinated and @dust2dust34

Summary: Ellie's birth changes a lot of things for Felicity, but not in the way she'd thought it would.

An ongoing non-linear collection of family moments for the Queens. (You do not need to have read FiCoN to enjoy this, but it will spoil the end. Please see the first installment for additional author notes. Thank you @jsevick and @alizziebyanyothername for the amazing beta!)

A/N: Please see the first chapter for an important Author’s Note, as well as under the cut for an additional one.

A/N: The effervescent @so-caffeinated is fully in the driver’s seat and she’s kicking all the ass, so please go send her your love!

PLEASE READ THE READ THE AUTHOR’S NOTE UNDER THE CUT.

Excerpt:

She’s not sad. Sad would be better. Sad would be… Well, it would be something.

(read on AO3)

Author’s Note:

TRIGGER WARNING - Postpartum depression

I put off writing this oneshot for more than half a year. This has been my headcanon for Felicity since we started Pieces of Always, but it’s not an easy thing to write and I was wary of how it would be received. Postpartum depression is a mental illness and it’s common in new mothers (and sometimes fathers). I was never diagnosed with it, but I think by reading this you’ll see it’s pretty clear I’ve got some firsthand experience with it anyhow. I know my mother did, too. I’ve talked with her and some friends about their experiences and I researched symptoms online to make sure everything fit. I’ll be quite honest - I left out the worst of my own symptoms (hallucinations made worse by a reaction to medication I was on) because this was already hard to handle writing and reading. I hope for some of you, you can look at this and see solidarity in your own experiences. If you can’t relate, that’s even better and I’m very glad for you, but please keep in mind that mental illness changes how you think and any blame toward Felicity for how she’s processing things here would be misplaced.

*

May 2018 - In Restless Dreams

She’s not sad. Sad would be better. Sad would be… Well, it would be something.

Right now, Felicity feels nothing.

There’s a gaping hole in her chest, a vacuum where everything that makes her her should be. She’s broken, shattered into tiny bits and she doesn’t know where all the pieces went or how it happened. She knows there’s a way to find them, to collect them again, to put herself back together, but it’s just so daunting, so overwhelming.

Like everything else is these days.

Ellie is just over two weeks old.

She’s a good baby. A great baby. She’s everything that Felicity has always known she’d be. Everything she’s wanted for years, since that little girl with blonde curls had reached for her from Barry’s arms and called her ‘Momma,’ since she’d woken up to a pillow fort in Oliver’s bedroom at the Manor, since she scaled the ladder to an otherworldly fairy kingdom in the trees. She wants this. She knows she does.

But she doesn’t feel it.

The newborn is sprawled across her lap, utterly passed out after a feeding. She’s in that dazed, happy, sleepy place that Felicity’s mom has always called a ‘milk coma.’ Even fast asleep, her little lips are turned upwards in a contented smile, tiny puffs of air slipping through her lips, her eyes darting about under closed lids.

It should be endearing. It should be heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Instead, Felicity feels like she’s separated from the moment, like there’s a giant chasm between her and the baby. Ellie doesn’t even feel like hers, doesn’t even feel real. Everything around her is just mimicking life, like she’s watching someone else’s reality play out in front her, like she doesn’t actually belong, and it leaves her wondering what the hell she’s even doing.

One tear slips down her cheek and then another. Burning sears her eyes, turning Ellie into an indistinct blur.

They deserve better than this, than her. Ellie is beautiful, perfect. And Jules, God, but Jules deserves a mom who can do things for her, who can connect and not have to fake her smiles. And Oliver? Oliver’s the best husband and father in the entire world. He deserves a wife who’s happy, who feels. He shouldn’t have to wonder if he’s done something wrong. He shouldn’t have to pick up the slack while she flounders and fails on every possible level.

Maybe she should just go. Maybe they’d be better without her. Maybe she’s just dragging them all down. Maybe…

“Hey.”

Felicity squeezes her eyes shut, willing the tears away before looking up.

Oliver leans against the doorframe, arms folded casually across his broad chest as he watches her.

How long has he been there? She has no idea. She doesn’t even know how long she’s been sitting here herself. She’d been going through the motions earlier, doing what was required, what she needed to, and then…

She swallows past the lump in her throat and sits up a bit, adjusting Ellie like she should have been.

If she’d seen him earlier she’d have put up a better front, tried to seem more normal, more okay.

He’s not the only one who can wear masks.

“Hey,” she echoes. It feels like she waited too long to respond. She forces a smile onto her face. It’s unnatural, ill-fitting and she has to fight to keep it there.

“She’s really out,” he notes, gazing down at Ellie’s prone form sprawled across her lap. The grin on his face doesn’t just pull at his lips, it lights up his eyes, crinkles the edges of them with happy adoration of their little girl. That’s a thing Felicity knows full well she can’t fake. He pushes off the doorframe. “Let’s get her to bed for a bit.”

Oliver crosses the room before crouching down to gently lift the newborn into his arms. Ellie makes a little noise and her arms jolt like she’s grappling for stability, but she doesn’t wake, instead turning toward the warmth of her father’s chest with a contented, sleepy sigh.

They look right. They look suited, like a picture you might find on Pinterest of some beautiful little perfect family moment that people pin with notes that say ‘goals for someday!’

Felicity doesn’t fit that and she knows it. She’s as far from put together as someone can get and no one’s goal for their future right now. Makeup feels pointless and she can’t remember the last time she bothered with more than a messy ponytail for her hair or clothes beyond sweatpants and Oliver’s shirts. It’ll be nearly another month before the bleeding that follows birth finally stops. She’s carrying excess weight that makes her feel like she’s somehow slipped into someone else’s body. Her breasts ache, and they’re leaking. It won’t stop until she’s done nursing and the smell of breast milk constantly follows her. Dark circles beneath her eyes are well earned, but they leave her feeling hollow, emptied out, like she has nothing left to give and nothing to keep for herself either.

She watches Oliver with their daughter, feeling like a stranger in someone else’s house.

Ellie doesn’t wake when he places her gently into her crib. He leans over to kiss her forehead, brushing his fingers through the blonde wispy curls at her temple before stepping back. And then he turns all his attention back to his wife.

Felicity can’t help it - she shifts, wrapping her arms around herself, shrinking back into the rocking chair. His gaze doesn’t waver an inch. She’s not sure what to do with that. She doesn’t really want to be seen right now. There’s too much she’d prefer went unnoticed.

“Come on,” Oliver says, offering her his hand. “I made us lunch.”

She hesitates before placing her fingers in his and he helps her stand.

The second she’s up, an irrational bolt of annoyance surges through her. She doesn’t need his help, she wants to bite out. She can stand on her own, thanks. Except… except this isn’t new and he’s not saying that at all. He’s always offered her his hand and it’s never once meant he thought her incapable of doing things herself. So maybe her irritation is because she’s not sure how long she’d have sat without his help. Her limbs feel heavy, sluggish, like there’s weights attached to all of them.

Even moving seems like a chore.

Felicity sighs, one she feels to her bones. “I think I’d just like a nap,” she says, letting go of his hand to run her fingers through her hair.

Oliver tries to hide his reaction, but she knows him too well. He doesn’t like her answer. She can tell from the way his face tightens in a grimace and she’s pretty sure she can see him physically biting his tongue in an effort to think through his words before letting them out.

It only annoys her more.

“Just say it!” she wants to yell at him. “Stop walking on fucking eggshells. I’m weak. I’m not good enough. I know that. I know you know that. So just fucking say it!”

But she is weak and she is broken.

Felicity looks to the side, gritting her teeth.  A cheerful cartoon elephant wall decal stares back at her. She wants to peel it right off just to get it to stop smiling at her.

“When was the last time you ate a meal, Felicity?” Oliver asks her. She hates the hesitation in his voice almost as much as she hates the question.

“What does it matter?” she snaps, turning back to him with a sharp glare.

It’s enough that he flinches and that gaping hole where her heart feels like it should be drops further. He doesn’t deserve this. He just cares about her. God, how can she be so horrible to him? She should just leave, just go. He wouldn’t understand, but it would be better. He’d be happier without her, eventually. They all would. But the idea of going makes an echo of sorrow slice through her. How horrible is it that the feeling actually comes as a relief? It’s something. It’s an emotion, a resonance of sensation that feels like the tingle of a missing limb. And she just wants… she just wants…

“I’m sorry,” Felicity whispers, her voice choking, energy draining from her with each word. “I’m just so tired. That’s all. I just… I just need some sleep. I’m just tired.”

“No,” he says quietly. He rests a hand on her elbow, a ghostly touch, like he’s afraid she’s going to scatter. She hates it. “You’re not.”

“I am,” she counters, pulling away from him. She rubs the spot on her arm where he’d touched her. “I have a two week old and a three year old. I’m exhausted. Of course I am.”

“Sure.” Oliver presses his lips together into a thin line. “But that’s not all this is. I know better this time. And so do you.”

Felicity blinks hard, refusing to look away for a long moment because no, no, that is all, but it’s too much and she bows her head. She doesn’t even realize she’s crying until she sees the drop slide down her nose and plop down onto her bare foot. She cries so much these days. You’d think she’d feel it, that it would seem cleansing or at least emotionally charged, but it’s more like a compulsive reaction, something she has to do. And it means so very little.

“It’s all in my head, Oliver,” she says. “It’s fine.”

“No, Felicity, it’s really not,” he replies firmly. She scowls through the tears, looking up at him, annoyance suddenly overtaking the emptiness again, but he doesn’t back down. “You need help. And that’s okay.”

“No,” Felicity snaps. It’s too loud and she glances toward Ellie to make sure she hasn’t accidentally woken the newborn. But the baby sleeps soundly, unaware of everything going on just a few feet away from her. “No,” she repeats in an intense but quieter voice. “It’s not okay. I just need to… I just need to push myself more. I’m sorry, okay? It’ll be fine. I just need to find a new routine and it’ll be alright.”

Oliver watches her, seeing right through her.

She hates the sudden wash of vulnerability that runs through her.

“You aren’t alone, Felicity,” he says, stepping forward and taking her hand in his. She tries to tug it away - she’s fine, she will be fine - but his grip tells her that he’s not letting go, not giving her an avenue of escape. When the realization hits her, it almost comes as a relief. “I already called your doctor.”

Felicity’s jaw drops. “You called my doctor?” she demands. “Did you have a nice chat about the crazy new mom who’s just a little overwhelmed and just needs a damned nap?”

“No,” he counters, shaking his head. “I told him how worried I am about my wife and asked what I could do to help.”

Well… shit. That saps the fight right out of her.

“I love you more than anything, Felicity. You’re sick. And you’re hiding how much you hurt. Everyone wants to help you, honey. But you’ve got to let us.”

“Who is ‘everyone?’” she asks warily.

“Your mom,” he replies before letting out a hard sigh. “Me. My mom. Your doctor. Thea, Digg… Will.”

Felicity starts. “Will?”

“He asked me why you were sad today,” Oliver tells her. “He wanted to know what he could do to cheer you up.”

She shakes her head, turning to the door before looking at Oliver again. “He’s here?”

“Felicity…” Oliver pauses, frowning. “You said hi to him when he got here an hour ago. He’s playing with Jules out back right now because he thought if you saw her happy it might make you happy, too.”

Oh God.

Felicity sags at that, her free hand pressing against her mouth trying to cage in the welling sound of sorrow that suddenly feels like it might drown her. “He noticed?” she asks, horrified by the idea.

“He’s almost ten,” Oliver says, stepping closer. He knows, now, that it’s easier to let her come to him. He doesn’t grab her like he would have a few weeks ago. Now he just skates his hand up her arm, brushing it over her cheek, his touch so soft she barely feels it. “And he loves you. Of course he noticed.”

“I’m so sorry,” she breathes out against her hand. She’s nauseous. She could throw up right now if there were anything at all in her stomach. “I didn’t mean to hurt him, Oliver. I promise. I’m so sorry.”

“He’s not hurt, honey,” Oliver instantly replies. “He’s fine.” This time he does pull her into his arms as he talks. Felicity tenses, because she doesn’t deserve this at all. She shouldn’t be comforted right now. This is all her fault. And, honestly, she doesn’t feel a whole lot better, even with his arms around her. But she does feel like a bit of the weight slides off her shoulders. She’s still hollow. Still empty. But she’s a bit less pulled down and for the first time in days she feels like she can breathe. Oliver’s voice is just as gentle, just as soft as he continues, “He’s just worried about you. Just like the rest of us.”

“I’ll try harder,” Felicity promises. “I will.”

“Wanting to get better is the first step,” he agrees, kissing her forehead the same way he’d kissed Ellie’s a bit ago. She wants to shake her head and wipe it away, because she doesn’t deserve something so tender. “But you can’t do it alone. You need medication and you need therapy. Just like you did after Jules was born. Suffering in silence isn’t doing you any favors, Felicity. It’s not doing anyone any favors.”

“You all deserve someone better than me,” she tells him in the quietest voice imaginable. “What kind of mother looks at her baby and doesn’t feel anything? What kind of wife just gets pissed off when her husband tries to help her?”

“The kind who’s fighting a battle no one else can even see,” Oliver says. “None of this is your fault.”

“But it is!” she argues. “It is. It’s in my head. It’s how I think and how I feel. Of course that’s my fault. How could that not be my fault?”

“You’re a smart woman,” Oliver reminds her. “You know better than that.”

She does. Some part of her knows he’s right. She did research after this happened with Jules, after months of suffering in silence, completely unaware of what was going on with her mind and her body. Once she’d started feeling better, more like herself, she’d read up as much as she could. She knows something like one-in-five mothers wind up with postpartum depression. She knows the sudden drop in hormones in her body have probably set her emotions in a tailspin of hopelessness and anxiety, that she wouldn’t feel this sense of worthlessness or total lack of joy if she were in her right mind.

But knowing that and feeling it are two different things entirely and with an illness in her head, it’s her head telling her she should be able to fix it on her own.

She should have to fix it on her own.

“I made a phone appointment for you with your doctor,” Oliver says. She jerks at that, but he’s not done. “It’s in half an hour. If you’re okay with it, I’d like to be on the call, too. If you tell him what you’re going through, he’ll call you in a prescription right away and we can start fighting this.”

No. It’s her gut reaction. It’s her only reaction. But… she hesitates. She wants to push back, to swear she’ll be fine, that she can handle this on her own. But… but can she? And should she have to? Especially if everyone around her is noticing it in spite of her efforts, if even Will is seeing it… God, has Jules picked up on anything? She can’t even imagine how unfair that would be to the toddler.

“Asking for help doesn’t make you weak, Felicity,” Oliver says. “It means you’re strong enough and smart enough to admit when it’s too much for you.”

“It is,” she whispers before she even realizes she’s speaking. “God, it really is too much, Oliver. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“No one’s blaming you and there’s nothing to be sorry for,” Oliver tells her. He looks relieved as he pulls her closer, holding her. He kisses her forehead again, and this time he lingers. “I’m proud of you. I can’t understand what you’re going through, but I get that it’s hard and I know it’s not easy to ask for help.”

“Took being shot by your mother for you to ask for help,” she points out.

It almost sounds normal, almost seems like her usual self and the grin on Oliver’s face makes her so very happy that she voiced the thought.

“Imagine if I’d asked for help earlier,” he points out.

Felicity scoffs. “You didn’t need me earlier. Not really.”

“Felicity… I’ve always needed you,” Oliver tells her, brushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Even when I didn’t know it yet, I needed you.” Just the thought of that makes her want to cry again, even if she can’t quite pinpoint why. “Come on,” he urges. “Let’s get a quick bite to eat before that call and then I’ll have your mom pick up the prescription while we sit out back and watch the kids play. You can take a nap on the lawn chair, if you need to.”

“That sounds pretty good,” she allows. She closes her eyes, her shoulders falling. “Especially the nap part.”

He pulls her along, leading her from the room, grabbing the baby monitor as they go.

It feels good, honestly, letting him take charge and giving herself permission to show everything she’s feeling - and everything she’s not. They talk about it over tuna sandwiches as Will and Jules laugh together out back and Ellie sleeps. Oliver doesn’t judge, doesn’t hold anything against her, instead wanting only to understand and help her. He keeps hold of her hand as she talks, sliding his thumb against her skin when she cries for no apparent reason. The relief of that is monumental.

Oliver can’t fix her. That’s not how this works. But he’ll help her pick up the pieces as she fixes herself.

And that, in the end, is exactly what she needs.

*

Reviews literally feed the soul and muse, please go send some to @so-caffeinated! 

And please mind the author’s note, which I’m reposting here:

Author’s Notes:

TRIGGER WARNING - Postpartum depression

I put off writing this oneshot for more than half a year. This has been my headcanon for Felicity since we started Pieces of Always, but it’s not an easy thing to write and I was wary of how it would be received. Postpartum depression is a mental illness and it’s common in new mothers (and sometimes fathers). I was never diagnosed with it, but I think by reading this you’ll see it’s pretty clear I’ve got some firsthand experience with it anyhow. I know my mother did, too. I’ve talked with her and some friends about their experiences and I researched symptoms online to make sure everything fit. I’ll be quite honest - I left out the worst of my own symptoms (hallucinations made worse by a reaction to medication I was on) because this was already hard to handle writing and reading. I hope for some of you, you can look at this and see solidarity in your own experiences. If you can’t relate, that’s even better and I’m very glad for you, but please keep in mind that mental illness changes how you think and any blame toward Felicity for how she’s processing things here would be misplaced.

[raymondleonora1993]

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[rachelcarsoncenter]

This is the second installment on mosquitoes to coincide with the Rachel Carson Legacy Symposium “Mosquitopia? The Place of Pests in a Healthy World” being held this weekend (24–27 October 2019). Here, the authors summarize some of the main arguments against trying to rid the world of mosquitoes. This special feature is part of our ongoing blog series “Silent Spring Continued: A World without Insects.”

*Feature image: Pictorial Monograph of Birds (1885) by Numata Kashu (1838-1901). Digitally enhanced by Rawpixel Ltd, CC BY-NC 4.0.

By Marcus Hall and Dan Tamir

Far from a complete list, below we highlight some of the main arguments for saving mosquitoes.

Strategic: We must remind ourselves that we are ultimately battling disease, not mosquitoes, and that there may be more effective, more economical, more ethical ways to do this than mosquito control. Malaria once emanated from swamps and bad air, though with more evidence it became clear that mosquitoes were the vectors of this disease. Should we be putting greater efforts into battling the plasmodia pathogens rather than the carriers of them? Should we be focusing at still smaller levels, such as on the chemicals set in motion by the pathogens? Zoologist Marston Bates once called DDT the “sledge-hammer approach to mosquito control” since DDT caused so much collateral damage to other living things, from birds and fish to desirable insects such as bees.[1] Early anti-malarial medications such as Atrabrine was itself a sledge-hammer approach in human blood streams, since people felt pretty nauseous after taking this medication. Because there are pros and cons to every remedy, we need to return to cost-benefit analyses before marching forward with any one solution.

Mosquito administering vaccine. (Image modified, via pngimg, CC BY-NC 4.0)

Medical: Another issue focuses on the importance of maintaining discrete, residual levels of pathogens in a population so as to maintain an epidemiologic signal that our bodies can react to and maintain resistance against. When malaria was largely eradicated from parts of Madagascar, only to return five years later, it returned with atypically dangerous virulence. Maintaining some mosquitoes and so the disease, means that human physiologies would not become naively adapted to a malaria-free environment. A related issue is that certain kinds of less dangerous malaria can provide protection from more dangerous malaria: a person infected by Plasmodium vivax is given some protection from being infected by more dangerous Plasmodium falciparum. As a protective measure, humans could theoretically be artificially inoculated with P. vivax, yet mosquitoes will inoculate them for free.

Ecological: There are many ecological arguments that point to the beneficial role of mosquitoes in ecosystems. Metric tons of flying biomass certainly alter natural processes, whether as foodstuff for other organisms or modifiers of animal behavior, as in the case of caribou and Homo sapiens who move to avoid them. There are the parasites and pathogens carried by mosquitoes, which infect not only humans, but also many other mammals, as well birds and reptiles. Microbes transmitted by mosquitoes to bats help control bat numbers, and thereby also control the spread of human diseases propagated by bats. Some mosquitoes even control other species of mosquito, since adults of certain species feed on the larvae of others.[2] These mosquito-borne benefits are therefore good reasons for maintaining mosquitoes in ecosystems, or bringing them back if overly controlled.

Evolutionary: Parasites and hosts coevolve, sometimes with beneficial results for both, as each generally becomes more tolerant of the other through time. Or at least this is Joshua Lederberg’s argument for why the virulence of parasites can diminish over time.[3] Cautious, hands-off approaches to vector control therefore allow nature to take its course, with harmful results balanced increasingly by beneficial ones. In short, there are crucial long-term roles for our bodily symbionts, and human interferences in their transmission may produce more harm than good.

Man on mountain, via pixabay (public domain).

Ethical & Social: On a more fundamental level, do humans have the right to kill, or exterminate other creatures—even the right to transform or disrupt whole ecosystems? Is it justifiable to act when we are still quite unsure about how all the pieces of an ecosystem fit together? If we are placing ourselves at the top of the pyramid of creation, what does that tell us about ourselves and our place in the future? We have, to date, never been able to rid the earth of mosquitoes, despite dogged efforts to do so. What makes us think we can do so now? Hubris has been the rule and not the exception in the history of humanity. Yet is it even thinkable that humans have the right not to seek every means possible to control and curtail disease-spreading organisms? Can it be fair to pay more attention to insects than to humans made sick by them? And is it right to rely on expert opinion, when the individuals directly affected by anti-mosquito treatments have different viewpoints?

Economic: Millions of funds and thousands of individuals are now dedicated to vector control and related research. In terms of spending efficiency, should these limited resources be dedicated to other measures, such as bed nets, tighter houses, better-equipped hospitals, and health education? Mosquito control is one of many health measures, and perhaps one of lesser priority depending on circumstances. An ongoing challenge is to focus on effective resource allocation, which may change by the year. Another economic issue focuses on the potential utility of mosquitoes to science or medicine; for example, mosquitoes can detect miniscule quantities of C02, and produce amazing anti-coagulants, with both traits suggesting entrepreneurial opportunities, unless these are curtailed by exterminators.

Aesthetic: Insects in general and mosquitoes in particular, are exquisitely engineered organisms, marvelously adapted to their various roles, and elegantly effective in carrying them out. We cannot help but admire them, even paint them, sculpt them, and marvel at their buzzes. Mosquitoes manage to pair with each other by harmonizing the frequencies of their beating wings, and artists can amplify and project these harmonic sounds.[4]

John Singer Sargent’s “The Mosquito Net,” 1912. Public Domain.

Man at Table beneath Mosquito Net. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1854-55. Public domain, via wikimedia commons.

Mosquito art: mosquitoes near a flood light. Walid Mahfoudh, via flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0.

[1] Marston Bates in J. Logan, The Sardinian Project (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1954), x.

[2] O. Roux and V. Robert, “Larval predation in malaria vectors and its potential implication in malaria transmission: an overlooked ecosystem service?,” Parasites & Vectors 12: 217.

[3] Joshua Lederberg [1993] quoted at Pierre-Olivier Méthot, “Why do Parasites Harm Their Host? On the Origin and Legacy of Theobald Smith’s ‘Law of Declining Virulence’,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 34 (2012): 567.

[4] University College London, “Built-in sound amplifier helps male mosquitoes find females,” Science Daily (2018), 25 September 2018. Available at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180925110014.htm. See also: http://robinmeier.net/?p=38 (thanks to Peter Coates for alerting me to this source).

Mosquitopia Part 2: A few Reasons for Saving Mosquitoes This is the second installment on mosquitoes to coincide with the Rachel Carson Legacy Symposium "

[jeremystrele]

PR On Any Budget, With Tips From The Best In The Biz!

PR On Any Budget, With Tips From The Best In The Biz!

Small Business

Fiona Killackey

TDF Open House promotion by The Project Agency. Photo – Amelia Stanwix.

FIONA’S ADVICE FOR MANAGING YOUR PR   

 1. Know the outcome

Do you know why you want PR, or what you’re expecting in return? For many creative small business owners, marketing and PR are things they feel they “should” be doing more of, but it’s not always clear why. Before you engage with a PR / communications expert, consider why you’re doing so. What would a successful PR campaign look like to you? What concerns, if any, do you have? Understanding your answers to these questions with help both your business and the PR agency / consultant you choose to engage.

2. Set expectations

After working with hundreds of small business owners, one of the most common myths I hear repeated is the idea that one media article or one influencer ‘liking’ an IG post will bring sudden fortunes to a struggling business. While when done well, PR offers an incredible boost to a brand, the stories of small businesses who have hit the jackpot from just one article or one collaboration with a (moderately-priced) influencer are few and far between. As with anything, brand awareness may take some time to achieve, so ensure that when you look at PR for your small biz, you’re aware that achieving the cut-through you seek may not happen overnight.

3. Do your research

The four experts we have interviewed in this article each have different approaches to PR and expertise in a variety of different industries. When choosing a PR / communications agency or consultant to work with, do your research to find the best fit. This person or this agency is representing your business, so it pays to find someone you feel comfortable enough to share your story with the public. You also want to find someone who has networks and connections in your industry and that you, as a small business owner, can really learn from and grow with. Experience counts and as the old adage goes, you get what you pay for. Experienced PR is one area of your business that’s worth investing in.

4. Track, track, track

Brand awareness can be one of the hardest things to track, particularly when you’re working on offline tactics such as events, experiences or word of mouth marketing. Where possible though, consider how you will track the return on investment. This may be by setting up ongoing surveys on your website or asking customers in-store i.e. ‘where did you first hear about us?’, tracking website traffic or brand name searches before, during and after a PR activation/media campaign or simply looking at variations in sales pre and post working with an agency. Most agencies will offer some sort of reporting, so don’t be shy in asking them to explain how this works and what you should expect after 1, 3 or 6+ months of working with them.

5. Learn from the experience

Trends change, and what worked for your business yesterday may not achieve cut-through tomorrow. When it comes to garnering media attention, you’re also dealing with a certain level of uncertainty. Your giant launch may well go live the same day as a natural disaster or a major news story. Or, perhaps the influencer collaboration you have spent months planning launches the day Instagram updates an algorithm. When running a small business, there are very few, if any, guarantees. By working with an experienced PR / communications agency or consultant you are minimizing the risk of money being wasted, or worse, damaging your brand from a poorly thought out media campaign.

Fiona Killackey is a business consultant, author, and mentor for My Daily Business Coach. You can sign up to her weekly email full of small biz insights and tips here or purchase her goal setting (and getting) ebook here.

Camille Thioulouse of Communiqué Group.

Esther Navarro-Orejon of The Project Agency. Photo – Amelia Stanwix.

Esther Navarro-Orejon of The Project Agency is The Design Files’ go-to PR consultant, when we have a specific project to promote, such as The Design Files Open House! Photo – Amelia Stanwix.

Chriss Mannix of Soda Communications.

TDF Collect exhibition with Sean Fennessy opening, featuring Magnum & Queens Wine Merchants ( a relationship facilitated by The Project Agency). Photo – Amelia Stanwix.

The Project Agency. Photo – Amelia Stanwix.

Shrub Hub launch event, facilitated by The Project Agency. Photo – Amelia Stanwix.

Kate Dinon of Character + Distinction.

IN PRACTICE : PR ON A BUDGET   

When it comes to achieving strong brand awareness, working alongside an experienced PR/Communications agency or consultant is key. For this month’s column, we asked four of Australia’s best for their advice for achieving PR on a budget of $1000, $2000, $3000 or $5000.

Expert: Kate Dinon, Founder & Managing Director, Character + Distinction (follow on IG here). 

PR Budget: $1000

‘Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that PR doesn’t have to cost much at all in terms of $$$, the bad news… to do it well, will cost you time.

Start by finding a slightly more advanced competitor, or a brand you look up to in your field. Search for any media/influencer coverage they have received and note down all of the journalists and publications that have written about them. There you have your ready-made media list. You can then use amazing free tools like CrystalKnows to gain insight into how to approach each journalist (it’s spookily accurate). You will need to spend time to craft an individual email to each person – please, please, please don’t ‘spray and pray’. Sending lazy or irrelevant emails will harm your chances of building a relationship.

What you will need is great photography. This is where the $1000 comes in. I would spend it on a shoot to get creative and compelling photography of your work, and of yourself!’

Expert: Chriss Mannix, Managing Director of Soda Communications  (follow on IG here).

PR Budget: $2000

‘Think about the media outlets (mainstream or online) that you think have the best synergies with your brand and maybe focus on a ’top ten wish list’. Make sure you really know what each outlet or section covers so you’re not wasting your time or theirs. Focus on this tight list for sending out any pitches, media materials, kits or product samples.

I’d look at collaborations or joint PR initiatives you can do with businesses or industries that complement yours.

Money can’t buy opportunities and unique experiences create the best angles for media. For $2,000 you should be able to put on a short event that introduces your business product or concept to media. It could be a sample class in whatever you make, a morning tea with a trends forecast of your industry or other industry insights, or an experience that takes media ‘behind the scenes’ of your business. If you are working with other businesses or industries you can make this even bigger and better i.e. you might be a health and wellbeing consultancy, so why not team up with a naturopath and a local Pilates business and work together.’

The launch event for Shrub Hub was a simple but effective way to get the word out. Facilitated by The Project Agency. Photo – Amelia Stanwix.

Expert: Camille Thioulouse, Director, Communiqué Group) (follow on IG here)

PR Budget: $3000

‘More than ever, PR is increasingly becoming essential for any business, and now also encompasses social/digital media. Creating credibility for your business is the purpose of PR and will build brand recognition.  In the first instance, I would make a point of attending events for your industry peers and networking the media and making connections with key media and influencers in your industry.  In PR, personal relationships are key, and they don’t cost anything to develop.

In the digital age, content is fundamental to any business so with $3,000 I would look at using a photographer for around $1,000 to develop beautiful brand images that can be used on the website and also social media and any marketing collateral for the business.  These images are a long-term investment and if done correctly, could be used across a long period of time.

For the remaining $2,000 I would look at investing in paid posts with 1-2 micro influencers who are influential in your area of business.  They don’t have to have a large following, but they do need to have good engagement and have key attributes which are relatable to your business or brand.

Focus your efforts on people who are already influencing your target customer, help them to understand your message and how their followers can relate to you.’

Expert: Esther Navarro-Orejon, Director, The Project Agency (follow them on IG here). 

Budget: $5000

The first step when commencing a PR/communication campaign regardless of budget is to establish a plan and a strategy. Decide on the key activities, define the goals and explore whether you have the skills, expertise and resources to absorb the PR function in-house, or whether you can seek external support.

The next thing would be to decide on how you’ll spend the $5000 – such as partnerships, gifts/seeding, hosting an event or activation, creating or amplifying your online presence, or partnering with a PR professional.

Whilst a $5000 can seem like a lot of money it can be quickly absorbed. Thus, be strategic about your plan, choose the direction you will take and remember consistency is important. Invest in PR beyond one key activity.  We suggest a regular calendar of messaging is established to ensure regular dialogue with media, consumers, influencers, and a commitment to creating new content regularly to keep audiences engaged. Adapt and evolve. Be active, passionate and committed to a long-term PR approach.’

TDF Open House 2017, promoted by The Project Agency. Photo – Amelia Stanwix.

[newssplashy]

NEW YORK — On Global Big Day last month, birders around the world counted all the species they could spot in 24 hours.

In Prospect Park, members of the Feminist Bird Club did their bit for this enormous citizen-scientist data collection effort.

Led by Molly Adams, its founder, the group clocked more than 80 species in less than 10 hours, including one black-billed cuckoo and a cerulean warbler.

These were good “gets”: The cerulean warbler is at risk of extinction — like so many birds, a casualty of habitat loss — so noting its whereabouts is particularly important for conservation efforts.

The cuckoo is not a rare bird, it’s just hard to see and not many of them stop in New York City during their migration; that made its sighting a bit of thrill, Adams said.

“We are seeing lots of males today,” she said, “because they are the first to arrive and establish territory. We’re not just excluding females here.”

She showed off her club’s iron-on patch, an embroidered spotted sandpiper, known for practicing polyandry (yours for a donation of $10 or more; the proceeds go to Black Lives Matter), and promised a female-bird-only walk sometime in the future. (Adams’ backpack was embellished with an “I Love Vultures” button, among other bird pins, but no patch because she does not own an iron.)

Although Adams, who is 28 and the outreach coordinator at the New York Aquarium, would certainly describe herself as a feminist, and her club’s manifesto reads, in part, that it is “dedicated to providing a safe opportunity to connect with the natural world in urban environments and having an ongoing conversation about intersectionality, activism, and the rights of all women, nonbinary folks, and members of the LGBTQ+ community,” this was not a dogmatic crowd, nor was it mono-gendered. The talk was of birds, not humans. Among the 15 or so attendees, there were semi-novices, sharp-eyed experts and total newbies.

“Look, there’s a rubber-soled black bike shoe,” said Michael Silber, 36, a graphic designer.

“I already had that on my list,” said Chelsea Lawrence, 28, a software tester for a television company.

Younger urban birders — yubbies? — like those led by Adams are the new faces in the birding world. They use social media to track their ornithological marks, with digital assists from apps like Ibird or Merlin and websites like ebird — the data collection site run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology — which have replaced old-fashioned Sibley guides to aid in identification (although Sibley has an app, too). They are drawn in by the visual seductions of Instagram, as well as a desire for a community inflected by environmentalism. As Jonathan Franzen, still the literary world’s most famous birder, discovered, many soon find that without the structure of birding, “the stimulations of nature,” as Franzen wrote in “My Bird Problem,” his coming-out-as-a-birder essay in The New Yorker, remain “stubbornly theoretical, like sex on Prozac.”

They also keep up to date with Twitter, now abuzz with local bird alerts. David Barrett, 54, a hedge fund manager turned computer scientist, is the creator of several of New York City’s Twitter bird alerts, marvels of near instantaneous crowdsourced data. He is also the author of the birding memoir “A Big Manhattan Year,” in which he detailed his 2012 battle with Andrew Farnsworth, a noted ornithologist and birding record setter, to see the most species in a single year.

Bird documentaries — like “The Messenger,” out in 2015; “Birders: The Central Park Effect,” out in 2012, and “Emptying the Skies,” out the following year — have also been minting new birders, and making environmentalists out of them, as an “Inconvenient Truth” once did.

Pete Lengyel, a co-founder of the Kings County Brewers Collective, a craft beer brewery and tap room in Brooklyn, was hooked by “Birders” when he saw it a few years ago. Its filmmaker, Jeffrey Kimball, an urban birding convert, captured four seasons of Central Park’s birding community in an engaging portrait of its singular characters. There’s Starr Saphir, the flinty matriarchal figure who led birders even as she became significantly ill with cancer, and Chris Cooper, 55, a biomedical editor who birds by ear (using birdsong to identify his quarry) and whose exposition on what he called the “7 pleasures of birding” pops up all over the internet. Lengyel, 44, sent the film to all his friends and convened his own birding group, the Beerders, which includes two brewers, a baker, a butcher and a fashion designer — a nice cross-section of Brooklyn professions.

“We didn’t know how to interact with nature in the city, and now we have a sort of purpose,” he said, adding that they don’t go out too early, as the practices of his profession keep him from being a dawn riser. Cooper’s “7 pleasures” is a touchstone for his own birding passion. “No. 3 is the joy of hunting without bloodshed,” said Lengyel, a former Marine. “I got a camera early on to capture images, and I feel like I’m carrying a rifle around. The joy of collecting is No. 4. I’m still looking for a prothonotary warbler.”

He screened “Birders” and “The Messenger” at the Brewers Collective this past year, in a collaboration with the New York City chapter of the National Audubon Society. “The Messenger,” which chronicles songbird decline, left some in the audience in tears, he said. This fall, the bar will brew a beer called “Safe Flight,” an easy-drinking IPA with notes of citrus and pines (its sales will aid Audubon).

What to Do in Our Great Green Spaces?

Over the past few decades, as David Ringer, 34, chief network officer at Audubon, pointed out, cities have focused on creating more green spaces, making parks safer and making sure that all communities have better access to nature. “You see with these efforts a corresponding rise in birding,” he said.

Lawrence, the software tester on Adams’ Feminist Bird Club walk, said that her “spark” bird — bird vernacular for the bird that hooks you like a gateway drug — was an American coot, spotted two years ago in Prospect Park. “It was so weird looking,” she said, “I had to go home and figure out what it was.” Now, armed with an old-school (bound, paper) Sibley, a trifold raptor guide and an app or two, she can easily separate the coots from the grebes.

She might spend half a Saturday in Prospect Park, but if she spots a warbler at lunchtime in the planter in front of her midtown office, “that’s birding, too,” she said. “I’m really into citizen science and data collection. It can be as competitive as you want it to be. It’s also really meditative. You have to be very present to be a good birder.”

Audubon’s market research has identified 9 million people between the ages of 18 and 35, Ringer said, “who share that blend of an interest in birds and environmental activism. Twenty five percent are Hispanic, 18 percent are African-American and 10 percent are Asian-American. It’s an amazing representation of the demographics of the country.”

“I think it’s a short path from the joy and wonder of birds to the recognition of what they’re telling us about the environment, and what that compels us to do,” he said.

Birds First!

It was after dusk on Sept. 11 a couple of years ago when Annie Novak, 35, an urban farmer, writer and educator at the New York Botanical Garden — once voted the cutest organic farmer in the country — became a birder. She was tending to a rooftop garden overlooking the Tribute in Light, the annual memorial in lower Manhattan, when she noticed thousands of flickering shapes in the beams. “I thought they were bats,” she said recently, “but was amazed to learn they were nocturnally migrating songbirds.”

Since that night, she’s been researching a book about night migration and the conservation challenges facing bird populations. She now volunteers for New York City Audubon, including for its annual monitoring program at the Tribute in Light, which pulls thousands of birds off course, putting them at risk for injury and exhaustion. (Volunteers assist with counting birds entrained in the beams. When more than a thousand are counted, the lights are turned off for 20 minutes, allowing the birds to disperse and fly on.)

“These species of birds have been flying over Manhattan for thousands of years,” she said. “There is more and more evidence that artificial light at night impacts these patterns of movement. It’s bittersweet to stand on the observation deck of the Empire State Building at night and watch migratory birds, lured in by city lights, circle the spire. It makes you realize how alive the night sky is above the city that never sleeps, which is why I don’t sleep much anymore.”

A taxonomy of birders, said Cooper, mirrors that of the birds. “Every year, you see the same species, but the experiences are different.” Cooper noted new stars like Jacob Drucker, once an elfin teenager whose skills are now off the chart; veterans, like Roger Pasquier, a long-tenured “Jedi master” in Cooper’s estimation, and Lee, a homeless woman who joined their ranks some years ago. “She watched us watching the birds, and asked what we were doing and someone gave her a pair of binoculars,” Cooper said. “We’re all obsessed, but in our own ways.”

A Rare Bird Draws Crowds

At about 5 p.m. on May 11, a Kirtland’s warbler was spotted in Central Park near the reservoir at West 90th Street. Twitter exploded with alerts, pulling ecstatic birders from all five boroughs into the park. “Rare Sighting of Kirtland’s Warbler Sends Birdwatchers Into Hushed Frenzy,” wrote Gothamist. With a migratory path from the Bahamas to Northern Michigan, the endangered songbird — a tiny puff of gray and yellow — has only been seen four times in New York state since the mid-1940s.

Ringer was at a performance of Aristophanes’ “The Birds” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn when the alerts went out. By the time he left the theater, it was too dark to head to the park. But he was there by 6 a.m. the next day, joining hundreds of rapt birders — including Cooper, Barrett and Adams, who missed seeing the warbler, twice, by minutes — in a crowd that swelled and ebbed over the next 24 or so hours. “We all lost our minds,” said Cooper.

By Sunday afternoon, the little guy had vanished. In the days that followed, birders poured their hearts out on their instas and their blogs, sated paparazzi having captured their Beyoncé. “Wow, just got my lifer,” one @pablo_dulce tweeted.

“In bird migration,” Ringer said, “there are always a few individuals who go their own way and end up off course. We’ll never know what happened to this one."By Penelope Green

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Penelope Green © 2018 The New York Times

via NewsSplashy - Latest Nigerian News Online,World Newspaper

[bizmediaweb]

6 Easy Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page

LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most active professional networking platform, with over 13 million companies vying for the attention of more than half a billion users. As such, your LinkedIn Company Page represents a huge opportunity to establish your brand as an industry thought leader and attract top talent.

Here are seven steps you can take today to optimize your business page and improve your presence, authority, and recruitment prospects on the platform. If you’d like to learn how to setup your Company Page, our definitive guide to using LinkedIn for business has those step-by-step instructions.

Bonus: Download a free guide to discover four time-saving tools to help you grow your LinkedIn network faster. Includes one tool that lets you schedule a week’s worth of LinkedIn updates in just three minutes.

6 tips for creating a compelling LinkedIn Company Page

1. Update your profile image and banner

Your profile image is first thing people searching for your company on LinkedIn will see, so make a good impression. Company Pages with profile pictures get six times more visitors than those without.

Choosing a profile image is straightforward: take your company logo (the same one you’re using on your other social media channels) and resize it to fit with LinkedIn’s requirements.

Ideal LinkedIn profile image specs

300 x 300 pixels

PNG format

Maximum 8 MB

Square layout

The profile banner above your company logo offers a bit more room for creativity, as there are no hard-and-fast rules for using this space (other than some sizing requirements).

Ideal LinkedIn profile banner specs

1536 x 768 pixels

PNG format

Maximum 8 MB

Rectangular layout

How you choose to hang your Company Profile banner is up to you. Here are two completely different examples of company profile banners, and why they’re successful.

Sephora: simple, sleek and stylish

Even a simple graphic can add some much-needed flair to LinkedIn’s standard template. Sephora’s banner displays the clean black and white stripes that frame many aspects of their branding, both in-store and online.

Air Canada: active, engaging and actionable

Air Canada’s banner takes a more actionable approach, advertising their involvement in the 2018 Seoul Winter Olympics. It includes bilingual hashtags for a current social media campaign and reps Canadian colors, driving social engagement.

2. Write a compelling “About us” section and include relevant keywords

Carefully-selected images will hook a prospect, but it takes words to reel them in.

A well-optimized “About us” section on your company page is a tightly worded paragraph (2,000 characters or less) telling visitors everything they need to know about your company. Use simple, accessible language informed by keyword research to outline your business goals in words anyone will understand.

Like your other social profiles, the “About us” on your Company Page should answer six basic questions (which I’ve adjusted slightly for the LinkedIn platform):

Who are you?

Where are you based?

What do you offer?

What are your values?

What is your brand voice?

How can people contact you to learn more?

To see an “About us” done right, look at Shopify. Their bio accurately describes the scope of their main product without ever slipping into yawn-inducing wordiness.

My favorite part is how they snuck in “Being awesome” as one of their specialties. This is how you have fun with LinkedIn while keeping things professional.

Remember, LinkedIn is a professional space, and like every social media platform, it has its own set of unwritten rules. Don’t be the company sharing memes from five years ago in an effort to market to Generation Z.

Tailoring your content to a business-minded audience doesn’t mean it has to be boring; just read the room, and plan accordingly.

3. Create Showcase Pages

If the Company Page is a birds-eye view of your business and its core values, then Showcase Pages zoom in on your day-to-day activities.

Bonus: Download a free guide to discover four time-saving tools to help you grow your LinkedIn network faster. Includes one tool that lets you schedule a week’s worth of LinkedIn updates in just three minutes.

Get the free guide right now!

These highly-customizable pages are essentially tailored news feeds on specific aspects of your organization. Depending on their interests, visitors might come here for content about your company’s individual brands and product ranges, ongoing charity efforts and sponsorships, or regularly occurring events like meetups, conferences, and expos.

Post, post, post

Real talk: Showcase Pages require upkeep. They have their own distinct sets of followers, separate from your Company Page. If you want these pages to be successful (and stay that way), ensure they’re regularly populated with articles, videos, slide presentations, and any other content that provides your followers with significant, long-term value.

Showcase Pages are a great place to share Sponsored Content and get more value from targeted advertising.

You can target your posts by location and a recommended number of two other fields, including: industry, company, job type, seniority, group, school, and more. Because people following your Showcase Pages have already shown an active interest in that area of content by subscribing, they’re more likely to read it and share among their networks.

Here’s one last secret about Showcase Pages: they’re surprisingly underused. Capitalize on this! Even one Showcase Page puts you a step ahead of the competition, but you can have up to 10—enough to give you a serious advantage.

4. Build a career page

Glassdoor reports that 69 percent of job seekers are more likely to apply to a company that makes an active effort to promote its culture online. LinkedIn Career Pages are an amazing way to bolster your recruitment efforts by showing your company culture in its best light.

Located under the “Life” tab, Career Pages feature customizable modules where you can display high-quality images, videos and articles about the day-to-day at your organization. Try to include a URL in every post: LinkedIn reports that posts with links get 45 percent more engagement.

Consider employee perspectives

If you’re looking for ways to frame your company as a think-tank for fresh ideas, look to the Career Pages “Employee perspectives” section, where you can publish thought leadership articles written by employees.

According to a survey by Jumpstart HR, the vast majority of job seekers value personal growth opportunities over anything else when considering a new workplace. By sharing content produced in-house, you’re showing your current employees that their perspectives are valued, and telling future talent that there’s plenty of room for recognition—and the opportunities that come with it.

Explore other features

The Careers Page has a ton of other features, too many to list out in one blog post. Here are the major ones you should be aware of:

Create a virtual “meet the team” section from employee profiles

Collect and share employee testimonials

List the causes your employees care about and support on their profiles

Promote diversity by listing spoken languages

Track your recruitment analytics to improve your hiring process

Like Showcase Pages, you should update your Careers Page regularly. This is a space to proudly represent your company as a hub of excellence and new ideas, so post whenever you can; the goal is to have people clamoring to work for you.

With a good enough Careers Page, you might even win over a few employees from the Dark Side…I mean, your competitors.

5. Collect and give endorsements

More than a billion peer-to-peer endorsements have been given on LinkedIn, the platform’s most powerful (and sometimes controversial) form of social proof. Gather recommendations whenever possible, and don’t be shy to ask for them—it’s almost always mutually beneficial.

Ask employees

If your employees haven’t connected with your Company Profile, encourage them to do so, and be sure to write them a great recommendation from your personal profile in return. Your employees’ networks will be notified of work anniversaries, new job opportunities, and other updates about your business. When they share content to their own networks, it’ll also appear with your company name attached.

Ask associates

Some of the most valuable endorsements will come from your B2B interactions—76 percent percent of B2B buyers prefer to work with recommendations from their professional network.

Whenever you have a positive interaction with another company, whether that’s a vendor, an account manager, or someone you met at a networking event, reach out to them for a connection and recommendation, and offer one in return.

This “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” approach almost seems like cheating, but it’s a perfectly valid way to cement business relationships and grow your network. Just make sure you’re following endorsement etiquette by only endorsing people and businesses you have actually interacted with, for skills you can honestly attest to.

Ask customers

Another way to build your brand and gather recommendations is to engage directly with customers and followers. If someone comments on an article you’ve shared on your Company Page, or messages you with an inquiry, use it as an opportunity to create a dialogue and win an endorsement.

Similarly, if a customer posts about a positive experience they had with your company on another social media platform, you could message them privately and ask if they’d endorse your LinkedIn Company Page, too. Even if you don’t get the endorsement, the positive public interaction is its own form of social proof.

6. Keep tabs on the competition

LinkedIn publishes an annual list of the 10 best Company Pages. Visit every one of those profiles and study how they’ve optimized their pages, especially if they’re direct competition.

Once your Company Page is set up, optimized and delivering a steady stream of content that follows these simple guidelines, you’ll be well on your way to networking greatness.

Optimizing your company’s presence on LinkedIn is easier with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can easily manage all your social channels, collect real-time data, and engage with your audience across networks. Try it free today.

Get Started

The post 6 Easy Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

6 Easy Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page published first on https://themarketingheaven.tumblr.com/

[unifiedsocialblog]

6 Easy Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page

LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most active professional networking platform, with over 13 million companies vying for the attention of more than half a billion users. As such, your LinkedIn Company Page represents a huge opportunity to establish your brand as an industry thought leader and attract top talent.

Here are seven steps you can take today to optimize your business page and improve your presence, authority, and recruitment prospects on the platform. If you’d like to learn how to setup your Company Page, our definitive guide to using LinkedIn for business has those step-by-step instructions.

Bonus: Download a free guide to discover four time-saving tools to help you grow your LinkedIn network faster. Includes one tool that lets you schedule a week’s worth of LinkedIn updates in just three minutes.

6 tips for creating a compelling LinkedIn Company Page

1. Update your profile image and banner

Your profile image is first thing people searching for your company on LinkedIn will see, so make a good impression. Company Pages with profile pictures get six times more visitors than those without.

Choosing a profile image is straightforward: take your company logo (the same one you’re using on your other social media channels) and resize it to fit with LinkedIn’s requirements.

Ideal LinkedIn profile image specs

300 x 300 pixels

PNG format

Maximum 8 MB

Square layout

The profile banner above your company logo offers a bit more room for creativity, as there are no hard-and-fast rules for using this space (other than some sizing requirements).

Ideal LinkedIn profile banner specs

1536 x 768 pixels

PNG format

Maximum 8 MB

Rectangular layout

How you choose to hang your Company Profile banner is up to you. Here are two completely different examples of company profile banners, and why they’re successful.

Sephora: simple, sleek and stylish

Even a simple graphic can add some much-needed flair to LinkedIn’s standard template. Sephora’s banner displays the clean black and white stripes that frame many aspects of their branding, both in-store and online.

Air Canada: active, engaging and actionable

Air Canada’s banner takes a more actionable approach, advertising their involvement in the 2018 Seoul Winter Olympics. It includes bilingual hashtags for a current social media campaign and reps Canadian colors, driving social engagement.

2. Write a compelling “About us” section and include relevant keywords

Carefully-selected images will hook a prospect, but it takes words to reel them in.

A well-optimized “About us” section on your company page is a tightly worded paragraph (2,000 characters or less) telling visitors everything they need to know about your company. Use simple, accessible language informed by keyword research to outline your business goals in words anyone will understand.

Like your other social profiles, the “About us” on your Company Page should answer six basic questions (which I’ve adjusted slightly for the LinkedIn platform):

Who are you?

Where are you based?

What do you offer?

What are your values?

What is your brand voice?

How can people contact you to learn more?

To see an “About us” done right, look at Shopify. Their bio accurately describes the scope of their main product without ever slipping into yawn-inducing wordiness.

My favorite part is how they snuck in “Being awesome” as one of their specialties. This is how you have fun with LinkedIn while keeping things professional.

Remember, LinkedIn is a professional space, and like every social media platform, it has its own set of unwritten rules. Don’t be the company sharing memes from five years ago in an effort to market to Generation Z.

Tailoring your content to a business-minded audience doesn’t mean it has to be boring; just read the room, and plan accordingly.

3. Create Showcase Pages

If the Company Page is a birds-eye view of your business and its core values, then Showcase Pages zoom in on your day-to-day activities.

Bonus: Download a free guide to discover four time-saving tools to help you grow your LinkedIn network faster. Includes one tool that lets you schedule a week’s worth of LinkedIn updates in just three minutes.

Get the free guide right now!

These highly-customizable pages are essentially tailored news feeds on specific aspects of your organization. Depending on their interests, visitors might come here for content about your company’s individual brands and product ranges, ongoing charity efforts and sponsorships, or regularly occurring events like meetups, conferences, and expos.

Post, post, post

Real talk: Showcase Pages require upkeep. They have their own distinct sets of followers, separate from your Company Page. If you want these pages to be successful (and stay that way), ensure they’re regularly populated with articles, videos, slide presentations, and any other content that provides your followers with significant, long-term value.

Showcase Pages are a great place to share Sponsored Content and get more value from targeted advertising.

You can target your posts by location and a recommended number of two other fields, including: industry, company, job type, seniority, group, school, and more. Because people following your Showcase Pages have already shown an active interest in that area of content by subscribing, they’re more likely to read it and share among their networks.

Here’s one last secret about Showcase Pages: they’re surprisingly underused. Capitalize on this! Even one Showcase Page puts you a step ahead of the competition, but you can have up to 10—enough to give you a serious advantage.

4. Build a career page

Glassdoor reports that 69 percent of job seekers are more likely to apply to a company that makes an active effort to promote its culture online. LinkedIn Career Pages are an amazing way to bolster your recruitment efforts by showing your company culture in its best light.

Located under the “Life” tab, Career Pages feature customizable modules where you can display high-quality images, videos and articles about the day-to-day at your organization. Try to include a URL in every post: LinkedIn reports that posts with links get 45 percent more engagement.

Consider employee perspectives

If you’re looking for ways to frame your company as a think-tank for fresh ideas, look to the Career Pages “Employee perspectives” section, where you can publish thought leadership articles written by employees.

According to a survey by Jumpstart HR, the vast majority of job seekers value personal growth opportunities over anything else when considering a new workplace. By sharing content produced in-house, you’re showing your current employees that their perspectives are valued, and telling future talent that there’s plenty of room for recognition—and the opportunities that come with it.

Explore other features

The Careers Page has a ton of other features, too many to list out in one blog post. Here are the major ones you should be aware of:

Create a virtual “meet the team” section from employee profiles

Collect and share employee testimonials

List the causes your employees care about and support on their profiles

Promote diversity by listing spoken languages

Track your recruitment analytics to improve your hiring process

Like Showcase Pages, you should update your Careers Page regularly. This is a space to proudly represent your company as a hub of excellence and new ideas, so post whenever you can; the goal is to have people clamoring to work for you.

With a good enough Careers Page, you might even win over a few employees from the Dark Side…I mean, your competitors.

5. Collect and give endorsements

More than a billion peer-to-peer endorsements have been given on LinkedIn, the platform’s most powerful (and sometimes controversial) form of social proof. Gather recommendations whenever possible, and don’t be shy to ask for them—it’s almost always mutually beneficial.

Ask employees

If your employees haven’t connected with your Company Profile, encourage them to do so, and be sure to write them a great recommendation from your personal profile in return. Your employees’ networks will be notified of work anniversaries, new job opportunities, and other updates about your business. When they share content to their own networks, it’ll also appear with your company name attached.

Ask associates

Some of the most valuable endorsements will come from your B2B interactions—76 percent percent of B2B buyers prefer to work with recommendations from their professional network.

Whenever you have a positive interaction with another company, whether that’s a vendor, an account manager, or someone you met at a networking event, reach out to them for a connection and recommendation, and offer one in return.

This “I scratch your back, you scratch mine” approach almost seems like cheating, but it’s a perfectly valid way to cement business relationships and grow your network. Just make sure you’re following endorsement etiquette by only endorsing people and businesses you have actually interacted with, for skills you can honestly attest to.

Ask customers

Another way to build your brand and gather recommendations is to engage directly with customers and followers. If someone comments on an article you’ve shared on your Company Page, or messages you with an inquiry, use it as an opportunity to create a dialogue and win an endorsement.

Similarly, if a customer posts about a positive experience they had with your company on another social media platform, you could message them privately and ask if they’d endorse your LinkedIn Company Page, too. Even if you don’t get the endorsement, the positive public interaction is its own form of social proof.

6. Keep tabs on the competition

LinkedIn publishes an annual list of the 10 best Company Pages. Visit every one of those profiles and study how they’ve optimized their pages, especially if they’re direct competition.

Once your Company Page is set up, optimized and delivering a steady stream of content that follows these simple guidelines, you’ll be well on your way to networking greatness.

Optimizing your company’s presence on LinkedIn is easier with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can easily manage all your social channels, collect real-time data, and engage with your audience across networks. Try it free today.

Get Started

The post 6 Easy Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

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[csrgood]

Big Problems Big Ideas Winner Announced

Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica at Brownsville Early College High School, Brownsville Independent School District has been named the winner of the Big Problems Big Ideas Challenge sponsored by the Taylor Wilson Thompson Family Foundation.

The Challenge, the signature program of the Foundation, is focused on providing middle school and high school students from across the nation an opportunity to identify, analyze, and propose solutions to some of the more perplexing problems facing them as young people. Competing schools were selected based on their history of providing leadership training for students and their dedication to academic excellence.

Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica, Brownsville Early College High School, identified Hispanic student mental health and the educational implications of their Big Problem in their research paper, “Mental Health: The Need for Educating Hispanic Communities About How Mental Health Can Affect Young People and Their Educational Experience.” 

Student mental health is of significant concern among educators in K-12 schools across the country. It has been called a silent epidemic affecting one in five students. Teachers, principals, and other school personnel acknowledge there are many students in their schools who evidence excessive fear, anxiety, depression, and anger. At its worst, this mental health epidemic manifests itself with deep psychosis, rage, and suicide; at best suffering students are detached, uninterested and miss the educational opportunities being offered.

With counseling ratios approaching 450 students to every one counselor, schools lack the resources and personnel to support students who may be in need of mental health support.  As pointed out by Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica, underserved communities suffer the most. This is true especially in communities where mental illness carries unwarranted stigmas, and the community is unaware of the many solutions to aid those suffering. 

In analyzing the problem, Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica examined the literature surrounding adolescent mental health, the many possible solutions offered by educators, mental health authorities and federal agencies to gain current thought on both the likely origins and solutions. They also examined their own student body’s perception of the problem and asked them for answers. Together with current literature and student ideas, they put together a well-designed template and a possible solution that might well apply to other schools. 

Some of the possible activities identified by the students included:

The use of Artificial Intelligence and technological applications that generate personalized mental health assessments to discuss with a therapist. These applications can alert teachers and parents when a student’s mood changes.

Graphically tracking students’ mood and behavior over time and work with school personnel in sharing changes they see in student behavior.

Educating students and parents through seminars offered at school and throughout the community about mental health awareness and strategies for addressing student health concerns.

Providing specialized services to teachers, administrators and students within the school setting that will help identify risk factors and warning signs of mental health challenges common to adolescents.

Providing ongoing training for all school personnel, including ancillary and school employees.

Maintaining a healthy school and social environment that supports students who might be suffering from mental illness or may feel alone and not supported.

Instituting school-wide and community-wide campaigns that assist in the understanding and acceptance of adolescent mental illness.

Increase the number of mental health professionals in school and train teachers and counselors how to assess, identify and assist with students who may be having mental health challenges.

Centralize school efforts designed to assist students who are having problems to coordinate the school's mental health assistance efforts better.

Create different platforms that will assist students that includes coordination of resources throughout the entire community.

Students involved in the program indicated they are advocates for the services and supports that are necessary for students to stay in school and to achieve academic success. Ilse Mascarro, a senior student commented “This award is an amazing honor as well as proof that our efforts are not made in vain. Through this award I am able to securely say that our voices are not going unheard. As a predominately Hispanic population in times of struggle we feel like we are one step closer to making an impact towards a happier and healthier community. Big Problems Big Ideas allowed us to put down in words our ideas and comments to make our community an healthier and safer one. Big Problems Big Ideas has allowed us to give our community the light it deserves.” 

Alejandra Sujo, Yaneli Gallegos and Jaqueline Quintanilla,  members of the Big Problems Big Ideas  Challenge team commented on how much the Challenge had changed their thinking about student mental health and encouraged them to spread information on mental health awareness  to their community. They also  believe applying the learnings from their experiences, and the knowledge of other students’ concerns, along with the expertise of teachers and mental health professionals will be the catalyst for resolving their big problem. 

Shirley Munoz, sponsor for the Challenge team, said “I see great potential in my students. I know they think outside the box. I know they want good things for others. I know they are intelligent enough to see a need in our country and form an educated opinion and even a solution. All they need is a platform to voice their opinion and demonstrate their concerns through a positive outlet. Big Problem Big Ideas was that platform. I am so proud of them for working together endless days and long evenings to research and devise a much needed solution for our nation at this time.”

Taylor Thompson, the founder of the Foundation and developer of the Challenge was extremely pleased with the effort of the group and the spirit of collaborative learning they displayed in developing their Big Idea to solve the Big Problem. “Giving young people voice to share their creative thoughts through analytical, problem solving activities is critical to building an informed and productive citizenry. The students of Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica at Brownsville Early College High School are emblematic of the promise of young leadership and evidence of what can happen when students are given a chance to be heard. The Foundation is indebted to Aimee Garza-Limon, the principal, Shirley Munoz, Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica sponsor for supporting the students and standing with them through this Big Problems Big Ideas Challenge.”

The Chicago-based Taylor Wilson Thompson Family Foundation aims to help develop the next wave of leaders who are ready and willing to change the world in a positive way.  The Foundation and its founder have sponsored leadership activities that have impacted nearly 1500 young people around the country to date. Thompson is also the author of Leadership: It’s Child’s Play. Ten Steps to Children’s Leadership Development. 

source: http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/40941-Big-Problems-Big-Ideas-Winner-Announced?tracking_source=rss

[seoprovider2110]

Our Favorite Free SEO Tools for 2018

Our Favorite Free SEO Tools for 2018

Search engine optimization should be an ongoing effort to improve your website’s organic search ranking and find new avenues to create content to expand your reach in meaningful ways. Free traffic? Who doesn’t want that?

Many people talk about SEO as if it is its own thing, siloed from their digital marketing strategy. Often we hear from new clients looking to improve their SEO when migrating websites or starting a new site altogether. The problem is, if you are just now starting to talk about SEO at these points, you have waited too long. If you are not continually monitoring your website, you are bound to make mistakes or let opportunities fall through the cracks.

So that is why we have complied a list of free SEO tools and organized them into the different use cases for each of them. Despite new tools, paid and free, that come out every year, we take our time to get to a know a tool and resist the urge to promote the *newest* and *shiniest* if we haven’t been convinced of its value.

This post isn’t just for SEO professionals. We did a survey last year about what roles the readers of this post played in their organizations. Over half of our respondents indicated they’re responsible for more than just SEO for their companies, with many splitting their time between Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, and Analytics. Does that sound like you? Knowing what to tools to use and when can keep your schedule manageable so you can tackle that list of tasks that all fall to you.

Here is a quick table of contents so you can easily hop to the different types of SEO tools:

Ongoing Monitoring

On-page Optimization

Technical Auditing

Authority and Link Building

Ongoing Monitoring

Even if you do not have a dedicated team for SEO, it is important to stay on top of things. By doing a checkup every now and then, you can see how your most important pages are ranking, if there are any increases to website errors, and how well your organic search traffic volume is trending.

Google Analytics

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you have used or at least looked at Google Analytics before, and if you haven’t, then you should get on it ASAP. This tool is a must for every website.

The most valuable SEO data is that which helps you better understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. No free tool quite delivers that data like Google Analytics and does a better job providing data that helps you understand the number that matters most – the bottom line.

Google Analytics is the best tool to understand your organic traffic. You can use it to monitor your organic traffic performance and allows you to compare to past performance. Once you notice any major differences to your traffic, you will most likely want to move on to another tool to find out what is causing the changes.

“Just like the dashboard on your car, Google Analytics is a must-have, comprehensive analytical tool that helps you drive your website in the right direction and gauge its speed, condition and more. Replace guesswork with real data—it’s useful, easy to use, informative and free.”

Susan Allehoff HS2 Solutions

Let’s talk pros and cons. Google Analytics gives you aggregated, historical, collected data about your website, how people got there, and what people did on your site. Most other tools are going to rely on samples and estimates, and won’t give you the last part, which is ‘how did your organic traffic perform on your site?’ As far as a cons, Google Analytics used to be able to give us granular keyword data about your visitors and how they got there. But that type of detail, keywords attached to sessions, is not provided anymore inside of Google Analytics.

Here are some resources to get you started in becoming a Google Analytics master:

First and foremost, Google’s official Analytics help section

Google’s Analytics Academy is a great place to start if you’re new to all of this

LunaMetrics: The Google Analytics Syllabus: How to Learn for Free

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a tool that helps you visualize how your site may appear in search and teaches you how to influence different appearance elements. This tool allows you to pull data on your top search queries, pages, countries, devices, and more over the last 90 days. It also can inform you of different errors that occur from website crawls and suggests different html improvements.

The best part is that this is just scratching the surface of all the great things that Search Console can do, and here is an official help guide to get you started.

Google Search Console data is also available inside of the Google Analytics interface, but don’t expect this to magically fix the problem of connecting keywords to users. We can get general information, but we’re still not able to see which keywords led to the conversions.

Search Console Reports in Google Analytics

By: Michael Bartholow Published: July 6, 2016

Keep Reading >

Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)

Often the overlooked brother of Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools is a great way to keep tabs on how your site is working on Bing, which houses more than 20% of the Internet’s search traffic. It also offers benefits beyond Bing by providing insights into crawling, indexation, on-page keyword optimization, and other elements that can impact your performance in Google.

SEMRush

Have specific keywords that you want to keep close tabs on? SEMRush has a Position Tracking tool on their free interface, which allows you to track your organic position for up to 10 keywords and allows you to compare these keywords against your competitors. For more ways to use the free version of SEMrush, check out their article here.

Google Data Studio

This new, free reporting tool from Google, allows you to create and share amazing reports. One of the most beneficial things about Data Studio is that you can pull data from many different sources, making it a one-stop-shop for all your SEO reporting needs.

“Dashboarding is so much easier with Data Studio. We can create client-friendly reports with charts that are easy to understand for the most complex data from multiple sources. DS is far superior to other free dashboard tools I’ve used, and its native connections to Google products makes it an easy choice for Search and Analytics reporting.”

Megan Pritts LunaMetrics

Here are some resources to get you started with Data Studio:

A Free Google Analytics reporting template for Data Studio

More tips from the LunaMetrics team on using Data Studio

On-page Optimization

The objective of on-page optimization is to select phrases that anticipate the questions and needs of your target audience. Then, incorporate those phrases into your website in a manner that indicates to search engines and users the relevance and importance of those terms on the page.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool

The SEO Spider Tool is an awesome website crawler. With it, you can get critical data on every URL. Download it and take it on a spin. You can use the Spider Tool to crawl up to 500 pages with the free version. It will let you know things like which pages have duplicate title tags and where you are missing important tags that will help indicate to crawl bots the content of your page.

Once you see all of the data, you will have questions, and that’s why have some resources ready for you:

Official Screaming Frog User Guide

10 Features in the SEO Spider You Should Really Know

Screaming Frog Explained: Overview Tab Definitions

We’ve also put together a spreadsheet that can take a Screaming Frog export and visualize the results.

Free Excel Workbook for Analyzing Screaming Frog Data

By: Sean McQuaide Published: May 23, 2014

Keep Reading >

Google Trends

Correctly predicting the future moves of your opponent in chess is essential for victory. The same can be said for marketers in their industry. Knowing where your market is heading gives marketers a huge advantage. Here, Google Trends can lend you a helping hand.

Google Trends shows changes in search volume for different topics, search terms, and entities. Mastering this tool can keep your content current and one step ahead of the competition. For search marketing, it just makes good sense to analyze changes in search query behavior. Even everyday bloggers can improve their results by understanding which topics are trending.

“Google Trends is severely underrated as a Search tool. The ability to compare long-term topic trends makes this an essential tool for Search in 2018.”

Michael Bartholow LunaMetrics

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is the creme de la creme of keyword research tools. Simply give it a seed word, and keyword suggestions will start pouring in, along with estimates of average monthly searches. The tool provides many synonyms or similar searches to the seed keywords you provide.

“Coming from a paid search background, AdWords Keyword Planner is usually my first (of many) stops for search volume estimates and trends. It’s quick, easy to use, and gives me the information I need to understand how people search.”

Jeremy Greenwald LunaMetrics

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz is a suite of user-friendly inbound marketing tools. You’ll be hearing more about this tool throughout the article, because you can do a lot with this free SEO tool.

Keyword Explorer gives you insight into the estimated SEO opportunities for different keywords. This tool differs from the Keyword Planner because it will help you prioritize your keywords. It uses a priority metric which tries to calculate the opportunity cost of each keyword through its monthly search volume and the strength of competition for that keyword.

“I really like Moz’s new Keyword Explorer. Specifically their lists feature which gives you a roll-up of metrics so you can determine how competitive a topic is, not just a keyword.”

Sean McQuaide LunaMetrics

Keywordtool.io

This freemium tool is great if you want something that is quick and simple to use to obtain a ton of keyword ideas. A unique aspect to this tool is that you can utilize it for Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and the App Store keywords. Keywordtool.io is especially useful for long-tail keywords that won’t show up in the Google Keyword Planner, because of the low search volume.

Another great feature with this tool, is that you can filter for search queries that come in the form of questions to help you come up with new content ideas!

Another very similar tool is Ubersuggest, which is another fan favorite here in the office.

“Ubersuggest.io is best when paired with a whiteboard and a large coffee. It allows you to brainstorm beyond known phases and associations, tapping into broad, diverse and (occasionally weird) keyword opportunities.”

Andrew Garberson LunaMetrics

Wayback Machine

We all had our awkward phases that you want to forget ever existed. The Wayback Machine lets you relive those moments for your website; the tool is the most complete historical archive of the internet. It allows you to see what a website used to look like. So, if a page begins to drop in its organic ranking over the course of 6 months, you can use this tool to see the old content that used to be on the page!

Fun fact: last year I made a Back to the Future joke when I wrote about the Wayback Machine. As one reader graciously pointed out, the Wayback Machine is a reference to Peabody’s Improbable History, a reoccurring segment to the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends show. Which, oddly enough, Back to the Future also pays tribute to with the characters Otis Peabody and his son Sherman. It all comes full circle.

Google & Bing Search Engines

As obvious as it may seems, it would be wrong not to include them. Google and Bing search engines themselves are very useful SEO tools. Mastery of search engine functionality is part of mastering SEO. With some search magic, you can examine duplicate content, find content scrapers, check keyword rankings, analyze SERP listings, and more!

Here are some helpful guides to get you started:

Search Operators | Google

Advanced Search Options | Bing

25 Killer Combos for Googles Site Operator | Moz

Technical Auditing

Here are the tools that are going to help you when you are trying to figure out what behind-the-scenes aspects to your site are not working. Even if your site used to be running well, little things can happen over time that can effect your SEO performance. It is a good idea to check up on the technical side of your website every couple months, even if there are no noticeable changes in your organic traffic. It is always better to catch and fix your issues before they become a thorn in your side.

Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool

Yes, you have seen this tool earlier in the list. Stop giving me the side-eye, Oprah!

Not only is Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool a great tool for finding issues with your on-page content, it is great for getting a list of technical issues as well! It can help identify links with 404 errors or long redirect chains, find URLs that have been blocked by your robots.txt file, as well as help you generate an XML sitemap. The best part is that you can export a list of these and hand them over to a developer and let them deal with it! Sorry to all developers who are reading this.

GTMetrix

http://ift.tt/2nfzHHZ

[seopt58147]

Our Favorite Free SEO Tools for 2018

Our Favorite Free SEO Tools for 2018

Search engine optimization should be an ongoing effort to improve your website’s organic search ranking and find new avenues to create content to expand your reach in meaningful ways. Free traffic? Who doesn’t want that?

Many people talk about SEO as if it is its own thing, siloed from their digital marketing strategy. Often we hear from new clients looking to improve their SEO when migrating websites or starting a new site altogether. The problem is, if you are just now starting to talk about SEO at these points, you have waited too long. If you are not continually monitoring your website, you are bound to make mistakes or let opportunities fall through the cracks.

So that is why we have complied a list of free SEO tools and organized them into the different use cases for each of them. Despite new tools, paid and free, that come out every year, we take our time to get to a know a tool and resist the urge to promote the *newest* and *shiniest* if we haven’t been convinced of its value.

This post isn’t just for SEO professionals. We did a survey last year about what roles the readers of this post played in their organizations. Over half of our respondents indicated they’re responsible for more than just SEO for their companies, with many splitting their time between Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, and Analytics. Does that sound like you? Knowing what to tools to use and when can keep your schedule manageable so you can tackle that list of tasks that all fall to you.

Here is a quick table of contents so you can easily hop to the different types of SEO tools:

Ongoing Monitoring

On-page Optimization

Technical Auditing

Authority and Link Building

Ongoing Monitoring

Even if you do not have a dedicated team for SEO, it is important to stay on top of things. By doing a checkup every now and then, you can see how your most important pages are ranking, if there are any increases to website errors, and how well your organic search traffic volume is trending.

Google Analytics

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you have used or at least looked at Google Analytics before, and if you haven’t, then you should get on it ASAP. This tool is a must for every website.

The most valuable SEO data is that which helps you better understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. No free tool quite delivers that data like Google Analytics and does a better job providing data that helps you understand the number that matters most – the bottom line.

Google Analytics is the best tool to understand your organic traffic. You can use it to monitor your organic traffic performance and allows you to compare to past performance. Once you notice any major differences to your traffic, you will most likely want to move on to another tool to find out what is causing the changes.

“Just like the dashboard on your car, Google Analytics is a must-have, comprehensive analytical tool that helps you drive your website in the right direction and gauge its speed, condition and more. Replace guesswork with real data—it’s useful, easy to use, informative and free.”

Susan Allehoff HS2 Solutions

Let’s talk pros and cons. Google Analytics gives you aggregated, historical, collected data about your website, how people got there, and what people did on your site. Most other tools are going to rely on samples and estimates, and won’t give you the last part, which is ‘how did your organic traffic perform on your site?’ As far as a cons, Google Analytics used to be able to give us granular keyword data about your visitors and how they got there. But that type of detail, keywords attached to sessions, is not provided anymore inside of Google Analytics.

Here are some resources to get you started in becoming a Google Analytics master:

First and foremost, Google’s official Analytics help section

Google’s Analytics Academy is a great place to start if you’re new to all of this

LunaMetrics: The Google Analytics Syllabus: How to Learn for Free

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a tool that helps you visualize how your site may appear in search and teaches you how to influence different appearance elements. This tool allows you to pull data on your top search queries, pages, countries, devices, and more over the last 90 days. It also can inform you of different errors that occur from website crawls and suggests different html improvements.

The best part is that this is just scratching the surface of all the great things that Search Console can do, and here is an official help guide to get you started.

Google Search Console data is also available inside of the Google Analytics interface, but don’t expect this to magically fix the problem of connecting keywords to users. We can get general information, but we’re still not able to see which keywords led to the conversions.

Search Console Reports in Google Analytics

By: Michael Bartholow Published: July 6, 2016

Keep Reading >

Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)

Often the overlooked brother of Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools is a great way to keep tabs on how your site is working on Bing, which houses more than 20% of the Internet’s search traffic. It also offers benefits beyond Bing by providing insights into crawling, indexation, on-page keyword optimization, and other elements that can impact your performance in Google.

SEMRush

Have specific keywords that you want to keep close tabs on? SEMRush has a Position Tracking tool on their free interface, which allows you to track your organic position for up to 10 keywords and allows you to compare these keywords against your competitors. For more ways to use the free version of SEMrush, check out their article here.

Google Data Studio

This new, free reporting tool from Google, allows you to create and share amazing reports. One of the most beneficial things about Data Studio is that you can pull data from many different sources, making it a one-stop-shop for all your SEO reporting needs.

“Dashboarding is so much easier with Data Studio. We can create client-friendly reports with charts that are easy to understand for the most complex data from multiple sources. DS is far superior to other free dashboard tools I’ve used, and its native connections to Google products makes it an easy choice for Search and Analytics reporting.”

Megan Pritts LunaMetrics

Here are some resources to get you started with Data Studio:

A Free Google Analytics reporting template for Data Studio

More tips from the LunaMetrics team on using Data Studio

On-page Optimization

The objective of on-page optimization is to select phrases that anticipate the questions and needs of your target audience. Then, incorporate those phrases into your website in a manner that indicates to search engines and users the relevance and importance of those terms on the page.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool

The SEO Spider Tool is an awesome website crawler. With it, you can get critical data on every URL. Download it and take it on a spin. You can use the Spider Tool to crawl up to 500 pages with the free version. It will let you know things like which pages have duplicate title tags and where you are missing important tags that will help indicate to crawl bots the content of your page.

Once you see all of the data, you will have questions, and that’s why have some resources ready for you:

Official Screaming Frog User Guide

10 Features in the SEO Spider You Should Really Know

Screaming Frog Explained: Overview Tab Definitions

We’ve also put together a spreadsheet that can take a Screaming Frog export and visualize the results.

Free Excel Workbook for Analyzing Screaming Frog Data

By: Sean McQuaide Published: May 23, 2014

Keep Reading >

Google Trends

Correctly predicting the future moves of your opponent in chess is essential for victory. The same can be said for marketers in their industry. Knowing where your market is heading gives marketers a huge advantage. Here, Google Trends can lend you a helping hand.

Google Trends shows changes in search volume for different topics, search terms, and entities. Mastering this tool can keep your content current and one step ahead of the competition. For search marketing, it just makes good sense to analyze changes in search query behavior. Even everyday bloggers can improve their results by understanding which topics are trending.

“Google Trends is severely underrated as a Search tool. The ability to compare long-term topic trends makes this an essential tool for Search in 2018.”

Michael Bartholow LunaMetrics

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is the creme de la creme of keyword research tools. Simply give it a seed word, and keyword suggestions will start pouring in, along with estimates of average monthly searches. The tool provides many synonyms or similar searches to the seed keywords you provide.

“Coming from a paid search background, AdWords Keyword Planner is usually my first (of many) stops for search volume estimates and trends. It’s quick, easy to use, and gives me the information I need to understand how people search.”

Jeremy Greenwald LunaMetrics

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz is a suite of user-friendly inbound marketing tools. You’ll be hearing more about this tool throughout the article, because you can do a lot with this free SEO tool.

Keyword Explorer gives you insight into the estimated SEO opportunities for different keywords. This tool differs from the Keyword Planner because it will help you prioritize your keywords. It uses a priority metric which tries to calculate the opportunity cost of each keyword through its monthly search volume and the strength of competition for that keyword.

“I really like Moz’s new Keyword Explorer. Specifically their lists feature which gives you a roll-up of metrics so you can determine how competitive a topic is, not just a keyword.”

Sean McQuaide LunaMetrics

Keywordtool.io

This freemium tool is great if you want something that is quick and simple to use to obtain a ton of keyword ideas. A unique aspect to this tool is that you can utilize it for Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and the App Store keywords. Keywordtool.io is especially useful for long-tail keywords that won’t show up in the Google Keyword Planner, because of the low search volume.

Another great feature with this tool, is that you can filter for search queries that come in the form of questions to help you come up with new content ideas!

Another very similar tool is Ubersuggest, which is another fan favorite here in the office.

“Ubersuggest.io is best when paired with a whiteboard and a large coffee. It allows you to brainstorm beyond known phases and associations, tapping into broad, diverse and (occasionally weird) keyword opportunities.”

Andrew Garberson LunaMetrics

Wayback Machine

We all had our awkward phases that you want to forget ever existed. The Wayback Machine lets you relive those moments for your website; the tool is the most complete historical archive of the internet. It allows you to see what a website used to look like. So, if a page begins to drop in its organic ranking over the course of 6 months, you can use this tool to see the old content that used to be on the page!

Fun fact: last year I made a Back to the Future joke when I wrote about the Wayback Machine. As one reader graciously pointed out, the Wayback Machine is a reference to Peabody’s Improbable History, a reoccurring segment to the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends show. Which, oddly enough, Back to the Future also pays tribute to with the characters Otis Peabody and his son Sherman. It all comes full circle.

Google & Bing Search Engines

As obvious as it may seems, it would be wrong not to include them. Google and Bing search engines themselves are very useful SEO tools. Mastery of search engine functionality is part of mastering SEO. With some search magic, you can examine duplicate content, find content scrapers, check keyword rankings, analyze SERP listings, and more!

Here are some helpful guides to get you started:

Search Operators | Google

Advanced Search Options | Bing

25 Killer Combos for Googles Site Operator | Moz

Technical Auditing

Here are the tools that are going to help you when you are trying to figure out what behind-the-scenes aspects to your site are not working. Even if your site used to be running well, little things can happen over time that can effect your SEO performance. It is a good idea to check up on the technical side of your website every couple months, even if there are no noticeable changes in your organic traffic. It is always better to catch and fix your issues before they become a thorn in your side.

Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool

Yes, you have seen this tool earlier in the list. Stop giving me the side-eye, Oprah!

Not only is Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool a great tool for finding issues with your on-page content, it is great for getting a list of technical issues as well! It can help identify links with 404 errors or long redirect chains, find URLs that have been blocked by your robots.txt file, as well as help you generate an XML sitemap. The best part is that you can export a list of these and hand them over to a developer and let them deal with it! Sorry to all developers who are reading this.

GTMetrix

http://ift.tt/2nfzHHZ

[seo90210]

Our Favorite Free SEO Tools for 2018

Search engine optimization should be an ongoing effort to improve your website’s organic search ranking and find new avenues to create content to expand your reach in meaningful ways. Free traffic? Who doesn’t want that?

Many people talk about SEO as if it is its own thing, siloed from their digital marketing strategy. Often we hear from new clients looking to improve their SEO when migrating websites or starting a new site altogether. The problem is, if you are just now starting to talk about SEO at these points, you have waited too long. If you are not continually monitoring your website, you are bound to make mistakes or let opportunities fall through the cracks.

So that is why we have complied a list of free SEO tools and organized them into the different use cases for each of them. Despite new tools, paid and free, that come out every year, we take our time to get to a know a tool and resist the urge to promote the *newest* and *shiniest* if we haven’t been convinced of its value.

This post isn’t just for SEO professionals. We did a survey last year about what roles the readers of this post played in their organizations. Over half of our respondents indicated they’re responsible for more than just SEO for their companies, with many splitting their time between Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, and Analytics. Does that sound like you? Knowing what to tools to use and when can keep your schedule manageable so you can tackle that list of tasks that all fall to you.

Here is a quick table of contents so you can easily hop to the different types of SEO tools:

Ongoing Monitoring

On-page Optimization

Technical Auditing

Authority and Link Building

Ongoing Monitoring

Even if you do not have a dedicated team for SEO, it is important to stay on top of things. By doing a checkup every now and then, you can see how your most important pages are ranking, if there are any increases to website errors, and how well your organic search traffic volume is trending.

Google Analytics

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you have used or at least looked at Google Analytics before, and if you haven’t, then you should get on it ASAP. This tool is a must for every website.

The most valuable SEO data is that which helps you better understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. No free tool quite delivers that data like Google Analytics and does a better job providing data that helps you understand the number that matters most – the bottom line.

Google Analytics is the best tool to understand your organic traffic. You can use it to monitor your organic traffic performance and allows you to compare to past performance. Once you notice any major differences to your traffic, you will most likely want to move on to another tool to find out what is causing the changes.

“Just like the dashboard on your car, Google Analytics is a must-have, comprehensive analytical tool that helps you drive your website in the right direction and gauge its speed, condition and more. Replace guesswork with real data—it’s useful, easy to use, informative and free.”

Susan Allehoff HS2 Solutions

Let’s talk pros and cons. Google Analytics gives you aggregated, historical, collected data about your website, how people got there, and what people did on your site. Most other tools are going to rely on samples and estimates, and won’t give you the last part, which is ‘how did your organic traffic perform on your site?’ As far as a cons, Google Analytics used to be able to give us granular keyword data about your visitors and how they got there. But that type of detail, keywords attached to sessions, is not provided anymore inside of Google Analytics.

Here are some resources to get you started in becoming a Google Analytics master:

First and foremost, Google’s official Analytics help section

Google’s Analytics Academy is a great place to start if you’re new to all of this

LunaMetrics: The Google Analytics Syllabus: How to Learn for Free

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a tool that helps you visualize how your site may appear in search and teaches you how to influence different appearance elements. This tool allows you to pull data on your top search queries, pages, countries, devices, and more over the last 90 days. It also can inform you of different errors that occur from website crawls and suggests different html improvements.

The best part is that this is just scratching the surface of all the great things that Search Console can do, and here is an official help guide to get you started.

Google Search Console data is also available inside of the Google Analytics interface, but don’t expect this to magically fix the problem of connecting keywords to users. We can get general information, but we’re still not able to see which keywords led to the conversions.

Search Console Reports in Google Analytics

By: Michael Bartholow Published: July 6, 2016

Keep Reading >

Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)

Often the overlooked brother of Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools is a great way to keep tabs on how your site is working on Bing, which houses more than 20% of the Internet’s search traffic. It also offers benefits beyond Bing by providing insights into crawling, indexation, on-page keyword optimization, and other elements that can impact your performance in Google.

SEMRush

Have specific keywords that you want to keep close tabs on? SEMRush has a Position Tracking tool on their free interface, which allows you to track your organic position for up to 10 keywords and allows you to compare these keywords against your competitors. For more ways to use the free version of SEMrush, check out their article here.

Google Data Studio

This new, free reporting tool from Google, allows you to create and share amazing reports. One of the most beneficial things about Data Studio is that you can pull data from many different sources, making it a one-stop-shop for all your SEO reporting needs.

“Dashboarding is so much easier with Data Studio. We can create client-friendly reports with charts that are easy to understand for the most complex data from multiple sources. DS is far superior to other free dashboard tools I’ve used, and its native connections to Google products makes it an easy choice for Search and Analytics reporting.”

Megan Pritts LunaMetrics

Here are some resources to get you started with Data Studio:

A Free Google Analytics reporting template for Data Studio

More tips from the LunaMetrics team on using Data Studio

On-page Optimization

The objective of on-page optimization is to select phrases that anticipate the questions and needs of your target audience. Then, incorporate those phrases into your website in a manner that indicates to search engines and users the relevance and importance of those terms on the page.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool

The SEO Spider Tool is an awesome website crawler. With it, you can get critical data on every URL. Download it and take it on a spin. You can use the Spider Tool to crawl up to 500 pages with the free version. It will let you know things like which pages have duplicate title tags and where you are missing important tags that will help indicate to crawl bots the content of your page.

Once you see all of the data, you will have questions, and that’s why have some resources ready for you:

Official Screaming Frog User Guide

10 Features in the SEO Spider You Should Really Know

Screaming Frog Explained: Overview Tab Definitions

We’ve also put together a spreadsheet that can take a Screaming Frog export and visualize the results.

Free Excel Workbook for Analyzing Screaming Frog Data

By: Sean McQuaide Published: May 23, 2014

Keep Reading >

Google Trends

Correctly predicting the future moves of your opponent in chess is essential for victory. The same can be said for marketers in their industry. Knowing where your market is heading gives marketers a huge advantage. Here, Google Trends can lend you a helping hand.

Google Trends shows changes in search volume for different topics, search terms, and entities. Mastering this tool can keep your content current and one step ahead of the competition. For search marketing, it just makes good sense to analyze changes in search query behavior. Even everyday bloggers can improve their results by understanding which topics are trending.

“Google Trends is severely underrated as a Search tool. The ability to compare long-term topic trends makes this an essential tool for Search in 2018.”

Michael Bartholow LunaMetrics

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is the creme de la creme of keyword research tools. Simply give it a seed word, and keyword suggestions will start pouring in, along with estimates of average monthly searches. The tool provides many synonyms or similar searches to the seed keywords you provide.

“Coming from a paid search background, AdWords Keyword Planner is usually my first (of many) stops for search volume estimates and trends. It’s quick, easy to use, and gives me the information I need to understand how people search.”

Jeremy Greenwald LunaMetrics

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz is a suite of user-friendly inbound marketing tools. You’ll be hearing more about this tool throughout the article, because you can do a lot with this free SEO tool.

Keyword Explorer gives you insight into the estimated SEO opportunities for different keywords. This tool differs from the Keyword Planner because it will help you prioritize your keywords. It uses a priority metric which tries to calculate the opportunity cost of each keyword through its monthly search volume and the strength of competition for that keyword.

“I really like Moz’s new Keyword Explorer. Specifically their lists feature which gives you a roll-up of metrics so you can determine how competitive a topic is, not just a keyword.”

Sean McQuaide LunaMetrics

Keywordtool.io

This freemium tool is great if you want something that is quick and simple to use to obtain a ton of keyword ideas. A unique aspect to this tool is that you can utilize it for Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and the App Store keywords. Keywordtool.io is especially useful for long-tail keywords that won’t show up in the Google Keyword Planner, because of the low search volume.

Another great feature with this tool, is that you can filter for search queries that come in the form of questions to help you come up with new content ideas!

Another very similar tool is Ubersuggest, which is another fan favorite here in the office.

“Ubersuggest.io is best when paired with a whiteboard and a large coffee. It allows you to brainstorm beyond known phases and associations, tapping into broad, diverse and (occasionally weird) keyword opportunities.”

Andrew Garberson LunaMetrics

Wayback Machine

We all had our awkward phases that you want to forget ever existed. The Wayback Machine lets you relive those moments for your website; the tool is the most complete historical archive of the internet. It allows you to see what a website used to look like. So, if a page begins to drop in its organic ranking over the course of 6 months, you can use this tool to see the old content that used to be on the page!

Fun fact: last year I made a Back to the Future joke when I wrote about the Wayback Machine. As one reader graciously pointed out, the Wayback Machine is a reference to Peabody’s Improbable History, a reoccurring segment to the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends show. Which, oddly enough, Back to the Future also pays tribute to with the characters Otis Peabody and his son Sherman. It all comes full circle.

Google & Bing Search Engines

As obvious as it may seems, it would be wrong not to include them. Google and Bing search engines themselves are very useful SEO tools. Mastery of search engine functionality is part of mastering SEO. With some search magic, you can examine duplicate content, find content scrapers, check keyword rankings, analyze SERP listings, and more!

Here are some helpful guides to get you started:

Search Operators | Google

Advanced Search Options | Bing

25 Killer Combos for Googles Site Operator | Moz

Technical Auditing

Here are the tools that are going to help you when you are trying to figure out what behind-the-scenes aspects to your site are not working. Even if your site used to be running well, little things can happen over time that can effect your SEO performance. It is a good idea to check up on the technical side of your website every couple months, even if there are no noticeable changes in your organic traffic. It is always better to catch and fix your issues before they become a thorn in your side.

Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool

Yes, you have seen this tool earlier in the list. Stop giving me the side-eye, Oprah!

Not only is Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool a great tool for finding issues with your on-page content, it is great for getting a list of technical issues as well! It can help identify links with 404 errors or long redirect chains, find URLs that have been blocked by your robots.txt file, as well as help you generate an XML sitemap. The best part is that you can export a list of these and hand them over to a developer and let them deal with it! Sorry to all developers who are reading this.

GTMetrix

from FEED 9 MARKETING http://ift.tt/2nfzHHZ

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Our Favorite Free SEO Tools for 2018

Our Favorite Free SEO Tools for 2018

Search engine optimization should be an ongoing effort to improve your website’s organic search ranking and find new avenues to create content to expand your reach in meaningful ways. Free traffic? Who doesn’t want that?

Many people talk about SEO as if it is its own thing, siloed from their digital marketing strategy. Often we hear from new clients looking to improve their SEO when migrating websites or starting a new site altogether. The problem is, if you are just now starting to talk about SEO at these points, you have waited too long. If you are not continually monitoring your website, you are bound to make mistakes or let opportunities fall through the cracks.

So that is why we have complied a list of free SEO tools and organized them into the different use cases for each of them. Despite new tools, paid and free, that come out every year, we take our time to get to a know a tool and resist the urge to promote the *newest* and *shiniest* if we haven’t been convinced of its value.

This post isn’t just for SEO professionals. We did a survey last year about what roles the readers of this post played in their organizations. Over half of our respondents indicated they’re responsible for more than just SEO for their companies, with many splitting their time between Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search, and Analytics. Does that sound like you? Knowing what to tools to use and when can keep your schedule manageable so you can tackle that list of tasks that all fall to you.

Here is a quick table of contents so you can easily hop to the different types of SEO tools:

Ongoing Monitoring

On-page Optimization

Technical Auditing

Authority and Link Building

Ongoing Monitoring

Even if you do not have a dedicated team for SEO, it is important to stay on top of things. By doing a checkup every now and then, you can see how your most important pages are ranking, if there are any increases to website errors, and how well your organic search traffic volume is trending.

Google Analytics

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you have used or at least looked at Google Analytics before, and if you haven’t, then you should get on it ASAP. This tool is a must for every website.

The most valuable SEO data is that which helps you better understand your visitors and how they interact with your site. No free tool quite delivers that data like Google Analytics and does a better job providing data that helps you understand the number that matters most – the bottom line.

Google Analytics is the best tool to understand your organic traffic. You can use it to monitor your organic traffic performance and allows you to compare to past performance. Once you notice any major differences to your traffic, you will most likely want to move on to another tool to find out what is causing the changes.

“Just like the dashboard on your car, Google Analytics is a must-have, comprehensive analytical tool that helps you drive your website in the right direction and gauge its speed, condition and more. Replace guesswork with real data—it’s useful, easy to use, informative and free.”

Susan Allehoff HS2 Solutions

Let’s talk pros and cons. Google Analytics gives you aggregated, historical, collected data about your website, how people got there, and what people did on your site. Most other tools are going to rely on samples and estimates, and won’t give you the last part, which is ‘how did your organic traffic perform on your site?’ As far as a cons, Google Analytics used to be able to give us granular keyword data about your visitors and how they got there. But that type of detail, keywords attached to sessions, is not provided anymore inside of Google Analytics.

Here are some resources to get you started in becoming a Google Analytics master:

First and foremost, Google’s official Analytics help section

Google’s Analytics Academy is a great place to start if you’re new to all of this

LunaMetrics: The Google Analytics Syllabus: How to Learn for Free

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a tool that helps you visualize how your site may appear in search and teaches you how to influence different appearance elements. This tool allows you to pull data on your top search queries, pages, countries, devices, and more over the last 90 days. It also can inform you of different errors that occur from website crawls and suggests different html improvements.

The best part is that this is just scratching the surface of all the great things that Search Console can do, and here is an official help guide to get you started.

Google Search Console data is also available inside of the Google Analytics interface, but don’t expect this to magically fix the problem of connecting keywords to users. We can get general information, but we’re still not able to see which keywords led to the conversions.

Search Console Reports in Google Analytics

By: Michael Bartholow Published: July 6, 2016

Keep Reading >

Bing Webmaster Tools (BWT)

Often the overlooked brother of Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools is a great way to keep tabs on how your site is working on Bing, which houses more than 20% of the Internet’s search traffic. It also offers benefits beyond Bing by providing insights into crawling, indexation, on-page keyword optimization, and other elements that can impact your performance in Google.

SEMRush

Have specific keywords that you want to keep close tabs on? SEMRush has a Position Tracking tool on their free interface, which allows you to track your organic position for up to 10 keywords and allows you to compare these keywords against your competitors. For more ways to use the free version of SEMrush, check out their article here.

Google Data Studio

This new, free reporting tool from Google, allows you to create and share amazing reports. One of the most beneficial things about Data Studio is that you can pull data from many different sources, making it a one-stop-shop for all your SEO reporting needs.

“Dashboarding is so much easier with Data Studio. We can create client-friendly reports with charts that are easy to understand for the most complex data from multiple sources. DS is far superior to other free dashboard tools I’ve used, and its native connections to Google products makes it an easy choice for Search and Analytics reporting.”

Megan Pritts LunaMetrics

Here are some resources to get you started with Data Studio:

A Free Google Analytics reporting template for Data Studio

More tips from the LunaMetrics team on using Data Studio

On-page Optimization

The objective of on-page optimization is to select phrases that anticipate the questions and needs of your target audience. Then, incorporate those phrases into your website in a manner that indicates to search engines and users the relevance and importance of those terms on the page.

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider Tool

The SEO Spider Tool is an awesome website crawler. With it, you can get critical data on every URL. Download it and take it on a spin. You can use the Spider Tool to crawl up to 500 pages with the free version. It will let you know things like which pages have duplicate title tags and where you are missing important tags that will help indicate to crawl bots the content of your page.

Once you see all of the data, you will have questions, and that’s why have some resources ready for you:

Official Screaming Frog User Guide

10 Features in the SEO Spider You Should Really Know

Screaming Frog Explained: Overview Tab Definitions

We’ve also put together a spreadsheet that can take a Screaming Frog export and visualize the results.

Free Excel Workbook for Analyzing Screaming Frog Data

By: Sean McQuaide Published: May 23, 2014

Keep Reading >

Google Trends

Correctly predicting the future moves of your opponent in chess is essential for victory. The same can be said for marketers in their industry. Knowing where your market is heading gives marketers a huge advantage. Here, Google Trends can lend you a helping hand.

Google Trends shows changes in search volume for different topics, search terms, and entities. Mastering this tool can keep your content current and one step ahead of the competition. For search marketing, it just makes good sense to analyze changes in search query behavior. Even everyday bloggers can improve their results by understanding which topics are trending.

“Google Trends is severely underrated as a Search tool. The ability to compare long-term topic trends makes this an essential tool for Search in 2018.”

Michael Bartholow LunaMetrics

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is the creme de la creme of keyword research tools. Simply give it a seed word, and keyword suggestions will start pouring in, along with estimates of average monthly searches. The tool provides many synonyms or similar searches to the seed keywords you provide.

“Coming from a paid search background, AdWords Keyword Planner is usually my first (of many) stops for search volume estimates and trends. It’s quick, easy to use, and gives me the information I need to understand how people search.”

Jeremy Greenwald LunaMetrics

Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz is a suite of user-friendly inbound marketing tools. You’ll be hearing more about this tool throughout the article, because you can do a lot with this free SEO tool.

Keyword Explorer gives you insight into the estimated SEO opportunities for different keywords. This tool differs from the Keyword Planner because it will help you prioritize your keywords. It uses a priority metric which tries to calculate the opportunity cost of each keyword through its monthly search volume and the strength of competition for that keyword.

“I really like Moz’s new Keyword Explorer. Specifically their lists feature which gives you a roll-up of metrics so you can determine how competitive a topic is, not just a keyword.”

Sean McQuaide LunaMetrics

Keywordtool.io

This freemium tool is great if you want something that is quick and simple to use to obtain a ton of keyword ideas. A unique aspect to this tool is that you can utilize it for Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon, and the App Store keywords. Keywordtool.io is especially useful for long-tail keywords that won’t show up in the Google Keyword Planner, because of the low search volume.

Another great feature with this tool, is that you can filter for search queries that come in the form of questions to help you come up with new content ideas!

Another very similar tool is Ubersuggest, which is another fan favorite here in the office.

“Ubersuggest.io is best when paired with a whiteboard and a large coffee. It allows you to brainstorm beyond known phases and associations, tapping into broad, diverse and (occasionally weird) keyword opportunities.”

Andrew Garberson LunaMetrics

Wayback Machine

We all had our awkward phases that you want to forget ever existed. The Wayback Machine lets you relive those moments for your website; the tool is the most complete historical archive of the internet. It allows you to see what a website used to look like. So, if a page begins to drop in its organic ranking over the course of 6 months, you can use this tool to see the old content that used to be on the page!

Fun fact: last year I made a Back to the Future joke when I wrote about the Wayback Machine. As one reader graciously pointed out, the Wayback Machine is a reference to Peabody’s Improbable History, a reoccurring segment to the Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends show. Which, oddly enough, Back to the Future also pays tribute to with the characters Otis Peabody and his son Sherman. It all comes full circle.

Google & Bing Search Engines

As obvious as it may seems, it would be wrong not to include them. Google and Bing search engines themselves are very useful SEO tools. Mastery of search engine functionality is part of mastering SEO. With some search magic, you can examine duplicate content, find content scrapers, check keyword rankings, analyze SERP listings, and more!

Here are some helpful guides to get you started:

Search Operators | Google

Advanced Search Options | Bing

25 Killer Combos for Googles Site Operator | Moz

Technical Auditing

Here are the tools that are going to help you when you are trying to figure out what behind-the-scenes aspects to your site are not working. Even if your site used to be running well, little things can happen over time that can effect your SEO performance. It is a good idea to check up on the technical side of your website every couple months, even if there are no noticeable changes in your organic traffic. It is always better to catch and fix your issues before they become a thorn in your side.

Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool

Yes, you have seen this tool earlier in the list. Stop giving me the side-eye, Oprah!

Not only is Screaming Frog’s Spider Tool a great tool for finding issues with your on-page content, it is great for getting a list of technical issues as well! It can help identify links with 404 errors or long redirect chains, find URLs that have been blocked by your robots.txt file, as well as help you generate an XML sitemap. The best part is that you can export a list of these and hand them over to a developer and let them deal with it! Sorry to all developers who are reading this.

GTMetrix

http://ift.tt/2nfzHHZ