#need to stop buying and save for the biggest purchase of them all: manhattan apartment LOL

[alukaforyou]

stuff i bought this month, one of them is not like the other..

[hotspreadpage]

New Way to Build Personas Over Time

SPONSORED BY CENTERLINE

Centerline’s chief strategy officer John Lane is on a mission to change the way that we think about our personas. Instead of investing a disproportionate amount of time up front creating a perfect persona that you never revise, he recommends adopting an iterative approach.

I asked him more about how this approach works and why he think it’s a crucial shift for content marketers.

Let’s start with the basics. What does iteration mean in a general sense?

Traditional project planning focuses on getting as much information up front as possible and then using it to create a major project that typically takes a long time to complete. Once the project is finished, it’s finished forever. There’s rarely a plan to revisit and improve it in the future, because planning and execution are so labor-intensive.

An iterative approach, on the other hand, prefers to start with the smallest amount of information needed to create something, make it, and see what happens. Based on the incoming data and audience response, the next version, or iteration, is produced and released. This process repeats, steadily improving the project over time.

Both approaches get you a finished product, but one takes far less time, involves direct communication with the audience for the content, and allows for regular adjustments to both the product and plan.

So what makes a persona iterative?

An iterative persona is one that is specifically created to change over time, rather than one that’s designed to stay the same. It’s created with open-ended questions rather than definitive answers.

What attracted you to the idea of iterative personas in the first place?

Well, I’ve been at Centerline for nearly 13 years so I’ve seen a LOT of personas, and various systems for creating them. Some clients had really big binders of hundreds of different types of personas, trying to get down to a highly specific level of understanding for each sub-group. Others had personas that were three or four years old, and they had never been updated.

It started becoming clear that we needed to come up with a better way to understand personas from a human rather than a demographic perspective. We needed to do it in a way that was current, so people didn’t feel like their personas were too precious or that they couldn’t touch them. And we also had to make sure the personas weren’t so highly specific that they blocked you from having creative freedom to reach the people you were trying to communicate with.

After talking to clients we realized the root of the problem was the process of building personas. People were taking so much time to build them, they became things to be revered rather than used. We stripped that process down to make it something that could happen rapidly and be added to over time.

What’s the biggest win when adopting iterative personas?

The primary benefit for our clients has been that these types of personas are freeing. When you have lots of highly prescriptive personas, ones that have gotten down to a really fine level of detail, then people freeze up and don’t know how to communicate with people differently based on these minute changes.

But this is a mindset shift too; it’s a trained thing. It’s not immediately freeing just because you changed the way you do the persona. It’s freeing when you accept the process of change, of having a persona that you feel comfortable changing and questioning.

What’s the best type of situation for using this approach?

Iterative personas work the best when there’s some additional complexity in the buying process.

For example when it comes to B2B buying, there’s an awful lot of complexity. There are multiple stakeholders in the buying process, a lot of different aspects that you have to take into account. That includes the fact that it might not be one department’s budget, it might not be only one division that gets to purchase something and use it. So there could be many different points of view that are involved in the purchase.

But you still see that level of complexity in some B2C buying too. If you think about someone buying a minivan, there are multiple stakeholders in that process. There’s not just the driver, there are the people being toted around, there are different uses for different people within a family. It becomes a much more complex buy because there are a lot more use cases.

So the iterative personas are very useful in these complex situations. They don’t nail you down to one stakeholder, they open your mind to think of multiple stakeholders and where the overlaps in those stakeholder perceptions are.

How would I go about doing this on my team? Walk me through some of the first steps.

I recommend that you start with a particular exercise that frees up the way you think about your audience. You ask people to go out and come back with three or four artifacts related to the audience as they see it now. They don’t have to be things that are related to your product, or even to the value that the audience is seeking from your product. These should just be things that represent the audience.

Even if you do this with a small team, you’ll end up with a lot of different things. And it sparks debate from a human level, making you think about where different people overlap and have things in common. It can also show you distinctions and make you think about what they mean for the kinds of content you should create or the channels you should use to reach them.

When we do this with our clients, we bring in things based on what they’ve told us about their audience. For example, we might bring in these four objects:

Then we use a worksheet like the one below, asking participants to think about the industry the person works in, what kind of information matters to them, what type of communication they seem to prefer, and what that means to them as a content team or brand.

(Note: A large percentage of this worksheet is devoted to Q&A for a reason. This is where we write down the questions these objects bring up, and then try to come up with content ideas that would help you answer those questions.)

What’s great about this exercise is that almost every person or group will come up with a different portrait of the audience member who owns these objects.

Do they belong to an older empty nester with plenty of resources to travel, who’s now spending their time and money going to Broadway plays? Or is their owner younger, maybe a single, recent college graduate with disposable income who lives in a small Manhattan apartment to be close to culture?

It could be either one, and maybe both types of people fall into the audience for your content.

The lesson here is that through the discussion that this exercise produces, you start to see your audience as a collection of individuals, rather than just an aggregated, static image.

And you’re also coming up with commonalities among the differing descriptions that can lead to truly engaging, audience-centered content, regardless of traditional demographics.

Once a team discusses these artifacts, what happens next?

The next step might be to push it to the next level by asking, “What questions and answers does all of this bring up? What content and channels can we use to answer those questions?” Your goal is to expand on this persona with knowledge, and you’ve got to put content out in front of the audience to get that knowledge.

Then you want to see how the audience uses and responds to your content. How is it shared? What’s the language around how it gets shared? Monitoring those things and adjusting your persona accordingly, that’s an active part of building a persona over time.

Rather than infer it or try to assume what people might do, releasing content allows you to immediately come back to that persona and say, “What did we learn? How can we revise it? How can we get more specific? What new questions does this bring up?”

And the next steps can absolutely include things like A/B testing and channel testing with small bets. For example, you could do a promoted tweet and a sponsored LinkedIn post with the same type of content and see which one actually performs better. You also want to monitor what you saw around those posts in terms of action and sharing and sentiment.

How do I really iterate on my persona?

After you put something out you’ve got to come back and look at the persona with a critical eye. Expand it, change it, find some new questions and then do it all again.

If you stop after the first one, you’ve only answered a portion of the question.

Conclusion

By starting with a much less time-intensive version of persona creation at the outset, you can get more relevant content into the market much more quickly. And you can use all the time that you save for moments of examination and adaptation in the future.

You can iterate continually over time, always adding more value for the audience as you learn more about them.

For more detail on iterative personas and the Agile marketing framework that supports them, download this free ebook from Centerline.

The post New Way to Build Personas Over Time appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

New Way to Build Personas Over Time syndicated from http://ift.tt/2maPRjm

[lucyariablog]

New Way to Build Personas Over Time

SPONSORED BY CENTERLINE

Centerline’s chief strategy officer John Lane is on a mission to change the way that we think about our personas. Instead of investing a disproportionate amount of time up front creating a perfect persona that you never revise, he recommends adopting an iterative approach.

I asked him more about how this approach works and why he think it’s a crucial shift for content marketers.

Let’s start with the basics. What does iteration mean in a general sense?

Traditional project planning focuses on getting as much information up front as possible and then using it to create a major project that typically takes a long time to complete. Once the project is finished, it’s finished forever. There’s rarely a plan to revisit and improve it in the future, because planning and execution are so labor-intensive.

An iterative approach, on the other hand, prefers to start with the smallest amount of information needed to create something, make it, and see what happens. Based on the incoming data and audience response, the next version, or iteration, is produced and released. This process repeats, steadily improving the project over time.

Both approaches get you a finished product, but one takes far less time, involves direct communication with the audience for the content, and allows for regular adjustments to both the product and plan.

So what makes a persona iterative?

An iterative persona is one that is specifically created to change over time, rather than one that’s designed to stay the same. It’s created with open-ended questions rather than definitive answers.

What attracted you to the idea of iterative personas in the first place?

Well, I’ve been at Centerline for nearly 13 years so I’ve seen a LOT of personas, and various systems for creating them. Some clients had really big binders of hundreds of different types of personas, trying to get down to a highly specific level of understanding for each sub-group. Others had personas that were three or four years old, and they had never been updated.

It started becoming clear that we needed to come up with a better way to understand personas from a human rather than a demographic perspective. We needed to do it in a way that was current, so people didn’t feel like their personas were too precious or that they couldn’t touch them. And we also had to make sure the personas weren’t so highly specific that they blocked you from having creative freedom to reach the people you were trying to communicate with.

After talking to clients we realized the root of the problem was the process of building personas. People were taking so much time to build them, they became things to be revered rather than used. We stripped that process down to make it something that could happen rapidly and be added to over time.

What’s the biggest win when adopting iterative personas?

The primary benefit for our clients has been that these types of personas are freeing. When you have lots of highly prescriptive personas, ones that have gotten down to a really fine level of detail, then people freeze up and don’t know how to communicate with people differently based on these minute changes.

But this is a mindset shift too; it’s a trained thing. It’s not immediately freeing just because you changed the way you do the persona. It’s freeing when you accept the process of change, of having a persona that you feel comfortable changing and questioning.

What’s the best type of situation for using this approach?

Iterative personas work the best when there’s some additional complexity in the buying process.

For example when it comes to B2B buying, there’s an awful lot of complexity. There are multiple stakeholders in the buying process, a lot of different aspects that you have to take into account. That includes the fact that it might not be one department’s budget, it might not be only one division that gets to purchase something and use it. So there could be many different points of view that are involved in the purchase.

But you still see that level of complexity in some B2C buying too. If you think about someone buying a minivan, there are multiple stakeholders in that process. There’s not just the driver, there are the people being toted around, there are different uses for different people within a family. It becomes a much more complex buy because there are a lot more use cases.

So the iterative personas are very useful in these complex situations. They don’t nail you down to one stakeholder, they open your mind to think of multiple stakeholders and where the overlaps in those stakeholder perceptions are.

How would I go about doing this on my team? Walk me through some of the first steps.

I recommend that you start with a particular exercise that frees up the way you think about your audience. You ask people to go out and come back with three or four artifacts related to the audience as they see it now. They don’t have to be things that are related to your product, or even to the value that the audience is seeking from your product. These should just be things that represent the audience.

Even if you do this with a small team, you’ll end up with a lot of different things. And it sparks debate from a human level, making you think about where different people overlap and have things in common. It can also show you distinctions and make you think about what they mean for the kinds of content you should create or the channels you should use to reach them.

When we do this with our clients, we bring in things based on what they’ve told us about their audience. For example, we might bring in these four objects:

Then we use a worksheet like the one below, asking participants to think about the industry the person works in, what kind of information matters to them, what type of communication they seem to prefer, and what that means to them as a content team or brand.

(Note: A large percentage of this worksheet is devoted to Q&A for a reason. This is where we write down the questions these objects bring up, and then try to come up with content ideas that would help you answer those questions.)

What’s great about this exercise is that almost every person or group will come up with a different portrait of the audience member who owns these objects.

Do they belong to an older empty nester with plenty of resources to travel, who’s now spending their time and money going to Broadway plays? Or is their owner younger, maybe a single, recent college graduate with disposable income who lives in a small Manhattan apartment to be close to culture?

It could be either one, and maybe both types of people fall into the audience for your content.

The lesson here is that through the discussion that this exercise produces, you start to see your audience as a collection of individuals, rather than just an aggregated, static image.

And you’re also coming up with commonalities among the differing descriptions that can lead to truly engaging, audience-centered content, regardless of traditional demographics.

Once a team discusses these artifacts, what happens next?

The next step might be to push it to the next level by asking, “What questions and answers does all of this bring up? What content and channels can we use to answer those questions?” Your goal is to expand on this persona with knowledge, and you’ve got to put content out in front of the audience to get that knowledge.

Then you want to see how the audience uses and responds to your content. How is it shared? What’s the language around how it gets shared? Monitoring those things and adjusting your persona accordingly, that’s an active part of building a persona over time.

Rather than infer it or try to assume what people might do, releasing content allows you to immediately come back to that persona and say, “What did we learn? How can we revise it? How can we get more specific? What new questions does this bring up?”

And the next steps can absolutely include things like A/B testing and channel testing with small bets. For example, you could do a promoted tweet and a sponsored LinkedIn post with the same type of content and see which one actually performs better. You also want to monitor what you saw around those posts in terms of action and sharing and sentiment.

How do I really iterate on my persona?

After you put something out you’ve got to come back and look at the persona with a critical eye. Expand it, change it, find some new questions and then do it all again.

If you stop after the first one, you’ve only answered a portion of the question.

Conclusion

By starting with a much less time-intensive version of persona creation at the outset, you can get more relevant content into the market much more quickly. And you can use all the time that you save for moments of examination and adaptation in the future.

You can iterate continually over time, always adding more value for the audience as you learn more about them.

For more detail on iterative personas and the Agile marketing framework that supports them, download this free ebook from Centerline.

The post New Way to Build Personas Over Time appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/04/build-personas-time/

[ronaldmrashid]

Long Term Investing Is All About Saving Yourself From Yourself

One of the biggest problems I consistently observe is people’s inability to control their spending once they start making money or a lot more money. We all know someone who is making the big bucks, yet is just living paycheck to paycheck (see: Scraping By On $500,000 A Year). After three months of grueling work out of college, I decided to buy a new used car. Not only did I get a car that was parked several subway stops away for $200/month, I also got a brand new motorbike!

What kind of 23-year-old dumb ass idiot buys a car and a motorbike when the subway system in Manhattan is so efficient? My base salary was only $40,000 and I was trying to save money by living in a studio with my high school friend. But I couldn’t help but buy the two things I always wanted since high school. Thankfully, I got a bonus which allowed me to max out my 401k and save something extra. But I could have saved much more.

After I left Manhattan for a competing firm in San Francisco, I promised to start fresh and seriously clamp down on my spending. I got word my job was at risk due to the dotcom collapse, so I felt I had dodged a bullet by escaping by escaping the east coast. 

Disciplined Investing

After two years of working in banking, I knew I wouldn’t be able to last for an entire career. Therefore, I saved like a madman. 100% of each bonus was invested. And my spending was kept to a minimum by living in a crappy 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment at the edge of SF’s Chinatown with a mentally disturbed person I met on Craigslist. I still had a car, but it was a seven-year-old Honda Civic I bought off my mom for $7,200.

Based on my consumption habits in Manhattan, I knew I wouldn’t be able to properly control my spending once I started making more money as an Associate and beyond. Therefore, I began investing ~20% of my after 401k savings in 5-7 year CDs, 50% in real estate, 10% in private equity, and the remaining 20% in stocks each year.

Because I worked in the financial services industry, it was important to diversify from just stocks given my career and compensation were closely linked to the performance of the stock market. But what I realized about my stock investments was that I didn’t have the patience to hold onto securities long enough to make meaningful returns. Instead, I would buy and sell stocks to the point where the department head called me into a meeting to ask whether I had a trading problem. Apparently, I racked up $12 million in trading volume one year compared to the next highest employee who traded $5 million in trading volume!

I apologized for my behavior, even though it was perfectly within the rules to day trade index ETFs, and promised to focus on my career instead. That meeting with the department head was the turning point to start investing everything outside of my 401k into private investments and real estate. If I had continued trading so aggressively, I probably would have been laid off.

Here’s a hilarious portrayal of the daytrader’s state of mind:

As I look back on my investments, the biggest returns are those that I’ve held the longest. San Francisco real estate is up about 5-6% a year un-levered since I first invested in 2003. With a 20% downpayment, we’re talking a 25% – 30% a year return. Then there was my 10-year investment in Bulldog Gin that has annualized an estimated 15% annual rate of return. Finally, there’s a 7-year duration mortgage backed securities fund I was forced to invest in during the crisis that has annualized 24.5% a year.

The S&P 500 has annualized roughly 7% – 8% including dividends since the beginning of time. Not bad in comparison, but actually not as good as any of my real estate or private equity investments. Sure, investing in the S&P 500 has potentially less risk (still went down big in the crisis), with pure liquidity. But who knows, I may have panic sold during the downturn since it’s so easy to click some buttons to get rid of a position. Plenty of people sold and never recovered!

Related: The Inflation Interest Rate Paradox: Why You Must Continuously Invest

Saving Yourself From Yourself

Investing in private funds, long-term CDs, and private companies basically saved me from myself. I still ended up hurting my net worth with my vacation property purchase in 2007, but it could have been much worse. When there is a 7 – 10 year duration for each investment you end up doing the following:

1) Tighten up spending. The more you accumulate, the more tempted you will be to spend the money sitting in your bank account. When you lock money up in a long-term investment knowing there’s a penalty for early withdrawal, you won’t go blowing it on a ridiculously priced car, a crotch rocket, or other superfluous things you don’t need. The feeling is similar to purposefully making yourself poor in order to stay disciplined. Compared to the typical consumer who spends most of what s/he makes, you’re not only not spending, but you’re also likely earning a return that will create a widening wealth gap over time.

2) Staying calm during a downturn. When you’re locked in, there’s nothing you can do. As a landlord, your main concern is receiving a steady rent check. It’s too hard to sell property in a cratering market. As a private equity investor, you’re mainly concerned about whether your company makes it past the dip. Luckily for Bulldog Gin, they were able to raise another round of financing after the crisis. With CDs, you’re just collecting your guaranteed income. When you know you can’t sell with ease, the panic starts to disappear.

3) Experiencing windfall surprises. Given your investments are so long ago, you tend to forget about them. When the funds finally expire or your private equity investment finally has a liquidity event, it’s kind of like winning the lottery because you’ve been living without such funds all this time. In Feb 2014, I had a nice six figure windfall because of an expiring 5-year CD. I used $260,000 of it for a downpayment on my Golden Gate Heights fixer. If I didn’t have that windfall, I don’t think I could have afforded my current home, which would be a crying shame because I love the place so much.

The surprise windfall is a very similar feeling to getting a “surprise” tax refund. Even though the money has always been yours to begin with, it still feels nice when the money finally returns home. With long-term investing, the feeling is even better due to a return.

For those who are undisciplined with money, I highly suggest looking for investments where you can lock your money away for years. Not only will you quickly adapt to living without such funds, you’ll also get motivated to earn more money to make up for your lower liquidity. When it’s finally time to collect, you probably won’t even need the money!

Here are my current long term investments:

* Two Venture Debt funds expiring in 2020 – 2026.

* Various zero coupon municipal bonds expiring in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 with a 3% – 4% yield.

* 4.1% yielding, 7-year CD expiring in 2018.

* 3.75% yielding, 7-year CD expiring end of 2017.

* RealtyShares Diversified Marketplace Equity fund expiring in 2021 with a 8% preferred return and 15% target IRR.

* Looking for more ideas. Maybe the 5-year Fundrise Heartland eREIT or a venture capital fund to find the next Snapchat.

The goal is to consistently lock my money up each year to create a perpetual windfall machine. It’s been years since I last went on a foolish spending spree. But as I enter my 40s, I’m afraid my old habits will return!

Readers, do you find it difficult holding on to public investments during difficult times? Do you have a propensity to spend your raises and year-end bonuses instead of investing the money? What are your best long term investments and how do you control yourself from trading too much?

from http://www.financialsamurai.com/long-term-investing-is-all-about-saving-yourself-from-yourself/