luni, 7 aprilie 2014

Seth's Blog : Some greatest hits

 

Some greatest hits

Talking with Krista Tippett about art and work that matters.

The new ebook about placebos.

Stop Stealing Dreams, on what school is for. (Translations and more are here).

The world's worst boss.

On critics.

       

 

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Photo: I've Got Your Finger, Mr. President

 
Here's what's going on at the White House today.
 
 
 


  Featured

Photo: I've Got Your Finger, Mr. President

President Obama meets the daughter of former Deputy Press Secretary Jamie Smith

President Barack Obama holds the hand of Lincoln Rose Pierce Smith, the daughter of former Deputy Press Secretary Jamie Smith, in the Oval Office, April 4, 2014. Watching from the other side of the Resolute Desk are Sage and Elsa Smith. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

 
 

  Top Stories

Weekly Address: The President's Budget Ensures Opportunity for All Hardworking Americans

In this week's address, the President highlighted the important differences between the budget he's put forward -- built on opportunity for all -- and the budget House Republicans are advocating for, which stacks the deck against the middle class.

READ MORE

Weekly Wrap Up: Millions Get Covered, Team USA Visits, and More

Last week, the President announced that 7.1 million Americans enrolled in private health coverage under the Affordable Care Act; the First Lady worked with students to plant the White House  Kitchen Garden; and 2014 U.S. Olympians and Paralympians visited the White House. Check out what else you may have missed in the Weekly Wrap Up.

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You're Invited: White House Easter Egg Roll Social

On Monday, April 21, the First Family will welcome more than 30,000 people to this year's White House Easter Egg Roll. For our next White House Social, we are giving our followers of @LetsMove and @FLOTUS on Twitter, or @MichelleObama on Instagram, a chance to attend.

READ MORE


 
 
  Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Time (ET)

10:00 AM: The President receives the Presidential Daily Briefing

10:30 AM: The Vice President and Dr. Jill Biden deliver remarks at the 94th Annual Convention of the American Association of Community Colleges

11:15 AM: The President visits a classroom at Bladensburg High School

11:35 AM: The President delivers remarks at Bladensburg High School

12:00 PM: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney

2:00 PM: The President meets with the Commander-in-Chief and Executive Director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars

3:25 PM: The President and Vice President attend the ceremonial swearing in of Maria Contreras-Sweet as Administrator of the Small Business Administration WATCH LIVE

 
 

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Use Paid Promotion to Refine Your SEO and Make Your Visitors More Valuable

Use Paid Promotion to Refine Your SEO and Make Your Visitors More Valuable


Use Paid Promotion to Refine Your SEO and Make Your Visitors More Valuable

Posted: 06 Apr 2014 04:13 PM PDT

Posted by shannonskinner

I recently found myself trying to give a client a rough estimate of the value organic traffic brought them. In the process of doing so, I stumbled upon the world of paid promotion. Considering Rand's Whiteboard Friday about surviving the SEO slog, paid promotion is important to tactics that we know do provide immediate tangible value, and I wondered if there was potential for it to be a part of a wider online marketing strategy that could also enhance the work of SEO. I want to open up that world a bit and discuss what I discovered: how paid promotion can complement organic search.

First, let me define what I mean by "paid promotion." This might include typical paid search, but also display ads, remarketing, and paid ads on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Paid promotion comes in many forms, including sponsored images, sponsored stories, and everything else in the following image (tap/click to enlarge):

Image source: http://imgur.com/z059ueV.png

Recently, there's been lots of discussion of the decreasing organic reach on Facebook. It seems that there's been a shift in the Facebook algorithmâ€"certain posts have seen a decrease, others an increase in organic reach. Pages with over 500,000 likes are seeing a particularly massive decrease in organic reach, perhaps in an effort to encourage them to pay for ads. Additionally, MarketingLand recently reported that Pinterest will be adding promoted pins.

The reality is, paid promotion has a lot to offer online marketing, and can really complement some of what you might be doing with search marketing and optimization. Paid promotion offers a way to test things out to make sure they're worth putting the effort and resources into, as well as add more punch to the impact that search is already making for a site. Paid promotion offers quick results you can control, making it a great complement to your overall marketing strategy.

Test things out: Use Facebook and AdWords to test your ideas

Optimizing for search and creating interesting content that will get shared requires a lot of investment. Paid promotion can be used to test recommendations and creative ideas out before investing a lot of time, energy, and resources into making them happen. It can also be used after content has been made to ensure you're using optimal headlines. Upworthy provided a really fantastic deck for how to make things go viral, and it included the recommendation of using Facebook as a means to test headlines.

Titles can be the difference, according to Upworthy, between one million views and 17 million views. That's a pretty big impact. I particularly love this deck because they use examples to illustrate how you really can't predict which titles will work with people, making it critical to test. And then test some more. 

I've used Facebook ads to estimate interest in projects. Is the click-through rate (CTR) good enough to actually build out a project? If not, it's better to go back to the drawing board and make sure you'll actually have an audience. For a little more depth, this post also explains how to do what Upworthy did to optimize their headlines.

You can set up an ad campaign relatively cheaplyâ€"you can purchase over 200,000 unique impressions for around $100 on Facebook (side ads, not feed ads, which are a bit more expensive). From there, you can calculate whether there is a statistically significant difference in the CTRs of each of your variances (if you need a statistics refresher, you can easily use this fantastic spreadsheet from Visual Website Optimizer).

Image Source: Visual Website Optimizer

It can be used for determining the significance of any test by simply having two sets of conversion statisticsâ€"in this case, for "Visitors," you'd enter the number of impressions & for "Conversions" you'd enter the number of clicks. The spreadsheet provides a YES or NO about whether the difference between the two sets of numbers is significant with 90, 95 or 99% confidence, making the math super easy. If the difference between your tests isn't significant, you'll have to run them again with a larger sample, or they may be equivalently impactful, so you could use another version to test again.

Facebook has the advantage of segmentationâ€"whatever population you want to target can be targetedâ€"cat lovers, people who like a particular musical artist, play tennis or live in a small town, but aren't from that location. Any segmentation you can imagine, you can target.

To test for free, you can use Upworthy's trick of posting to specific cities with different headlines, but considering the recent decrease in organic reach, that may not yield the kind of results you're looking for. 

AdWords can also be useful to test out titles and keywords to target, as well as viability of new products. Each of these tests will vary in price greatly depending upon the type of keywords you're targeting as well as the number of clicks you end up needing to get statistically significant results (same situation as with Facebook). Unfortunately, you won't know exactly what you need until you've got it, but if you can give yourself around $500 of budget, to test a few headlines, you may well be able to get some quality data. 

Either using Facebook or AdWords to test out headlines means you need something to click to. I've found great success with LaunchRockâ€"it's super easy to set up and either use their server or your own to point visitors to. The added bonus is that you can easily collect contact information, generating leads while you're testing things out. 

AdWords can also be a great source of keyword data, in part because you can see what the conversion rates are for different keywords for your site. You could use a similar technique for Twitter, or really any other advertising platform. But these are some of the most commonly used and advertised on, and relatively easy to launch advertising for.

The advantage for SEO of testing in this way is that you can then select which keywords to target and titles to use not just based on volume of queries, but also by how conversion rates for your site are for each query. Getting 500,000 new visitors where only 5,000 turn into new clients is not as fantastic as getting 100,000 new visitors where 10,000 of them turn into new clients. The same is true, of course, for amount of revenue. Not all traffic is equal, and paid search can help SEO determine which traffic should be pursued, and which titles to use to do so. 

Pack more punch: Use remarketing to convert more visitors into customers

It's great to get traffic to your site. It's even better for traffic to generate revenue. Remarketing is basically targeting previous visitors to encourage them to behave in the way you'd likeâ€"buying your product, signing up for your email list, etc. It is extremely effective (one study says an incredible 1,046% increase in trademark lift!). Remarketing is effective because, as AJ Kohn at Blind Five Year Old explains, you are marketing to people who already came to your site. Larry Kim provided an excellent case study on using remarketing to enhance the impact of SEO on Moz last fall. It's a fantastic example of how powerful remarketing can be for search, because it is a way to build brand.

There are some simple ways to do remarketingâ€"remind a visitor to a particular product that they were looking at that exact productâ€"but there are also some other, more inventive ways to use remarketing. Get them to join your mailing list. Offer a discount if they come back and buy. The important thing, as Larry says in his post, is to:

  • Provide them a call to action ("sign up for our mailing list!")
  • Include branding or images that will improve brand recall
Image Source: ReachLocal

Always do some A/B testing with your remarketing campaigns to ensure you're using the optimal ads. If your ad is in your brand voice, and has a message that fits with your brand, you will be getting value out of the ads into the future, because your ads will not only be leading to immediate action off of your call to action, but also building up the recall of your brand.

Twitter conducted a study about the impact of impressions on brand favorability and brand lift, as well as purchase intent. While this information is clearly aimed at encouraging promoted tweets, and should thus taken with a grain of salt, psychology has firmly demonstrated that familiarity breeds likability. If you want people to like your brand, they should be familiar with it. And impressions are one way to enhance familiarity.

As with testing out headlines and keywords that convert, remarketing can optimize value of the visitors search brings to a site. Reaching out to people who have visited the site, and thus clearly shown that they are interested at some level in what you're offering can turn visitors into conversions, either as customers today, or leads to nurture. 

What do you thinkâ€"when have you seen paid promotion complement SEO? Do you think it should be a completely distinct strategy? Let me know in the comments below!


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Seth's Blog : Meandering toward nowhere special

 

Meandering toward nowhere special

Five behaviors that often come clumped together, each conspiring to lead you toward disappointment:

Big dreams: The goal isn't consistent impact or meaningful work, it's a huge hit, the star turn and the ability to change the world. It wouldn't be enough to have 1000 true fans, the big dreamer wants a stadiumful in every town.

Poor work habits: Flitting from project to project, waiting for inspiration to arrive, stalling, not taking lessons, repeating the same early steps over and over...

Shortcut seeking: Why bother with the long route when you can find a shorter, faster path? Get-rich-quick schemes, insider access and the quest to get it right now.

Lottery thinking: This is a variation of shortcut thinking, but it involves getting picked. One person, one organization, one Wizard of Oz who will magically make it all happen.

Lack of self-awareness: The self-delusion that your stuff is in fact world-class, and that the critics, all of them that you've managed to interrupt, are wrong.

Just for kicks, imagine someone who embraces the opposite of all five of these behaviors. Someone focused on doing the work, her work, relentlessly getting better, shipping it, racking up small wins and earning one fan at a time. And doing it all with a trained eye on what it means to do it better.

Hard to imagine a better shot at making a difference.

       

 

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duminică, 6 aprilie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Framework for Understanding Market Tops and Bottoms

Posted: 06 Apr 2014 10:39 PM PDT

Last week I received an excellent article from Variant Perception on "Market Tops", and have permission to excerpt some of it.

Here is a link to the summary page of Understanding Market Tops. What follows are a few snips from the full report.
Framework for Understanding Tops

In the following table, we summarize the signs of market bottoms and tops.

The signs can be divided into the following categories: corporate, valuation, economic, market and sentiment. Clearly many signs of a top are in place, but there are many characteristics that are currently missing. In the coming pages we will look at each category separately.



click on any chart for sharper image

Today the market shows many of the elements that are present near market tops. In particular, sentiment is extremely bullish, investors are long and leveraged, and valuations are extended on a wide variety of measures. However, leading economic indicators are still not negative, and so far breadth and technicals have not deteriorated. The medium-term stock market returns are likely to be negative due to excessive valuation, but there is no imminent sign of a medium-term market top.

Tops are a process, not a single event. They tend to last a long period of time, and markets whipsaw traders and disappoint bears and short sellers. For example, many signs of a market top were clearly visible in late 1998, but it was not until the end of 2000 that most major market indices started to collapse. Likewise, many elements of a market top were evident in late 2006, but markets didn't begin to collapse until very early 2008.



CORPORATE ACTIVITY: WE'RE SEEING TYPICAL SIGNS OF MARKET TOPS

CEOs are bad capital allocators of corporate cash and provide contrarian clues, but insiders are much better at providing insight with what they do with their own cash.

A CEO should issue shares when they are overvalued and buy them back when they are undervalued. Likewise, a CEO should buy competitors when they are cheap and avoid overbidding when prices rise. Unfortunately, most share buybacks and most mergers and acquisitions happen at very high prices near market tops, and companies divest units and issue shares near market bottoms. Insiders, however, are smart. IPOs surge near market tops as insiders sell out. Also, near market bottoms insiders buy their own stocks.

The fewest buybacks in each cycle happened when stocks were cheapest. It is impossible to make this up. CEOs are just like "dumb money" retail investors, buying high and selling low.

If you look exclusively at the US, you can see that M&A levels are very frothy and are near where they were in 2007. Greed is alive and well in the US. They are significantly below levels seen in 2000, but that was the biggest M&A wave ever and marked the peak of telecom, media and internet bubble. It included the likes of AOL's purchase of Time Warner and other mammoth deals.

One area that currently is frothy is the biotechnology sector. The number of biotech deals is the highest it has reached since 2000, and the dollar value is the second highest in history.

During the final phases of bull markets, not only does the number of IPOs rise, but the quality of IPOs deteriorates. The following chart shows that only during the final phases of the internet bubble did we see such a high percentage of money-losing IPOs. Investors are chasing unproven business models.


In the past decade, private equity players have become more important "insiders", and the number of IPOs from private equity backed groups has now reached all-time highs. Furthermore, the follow-on deals from private equity sponsored groups are also at all-time highs. Smart firms were buying companies in the bad times and are now floating them and getting out while they can.



CEOs and managers tend to overpay for share buybacks and for M&A activity with shareholder money. They don't mind sticking it to investors. However, when it comes to their own personal money, they are much shrewder. Insiders consistently sell their own stock when markets are high and buy large quantities of their own stock when markets fall sharply and become cheap.

CREDIT SIGNS OF A TOP: TODAY LOTS OF JUNK DEBT AND VERY LOW QUALITY

In May 2013 Variant Perception wrote a report titled Credit Bubble, Toil and Trouble. We argued that ultra-low interest rates were already leading to a bubble in corporate debt. Investors were issuing large quantities of corporate debt at low spreads. The situation has only got worse since we wrote in our report.

As the following chart shows, in 2013 we saw the highest issuance of junk bonds ever. This was true in absolute numbers and as a percentage of all corporate debt.



Not only is the issuance of junk at record highs, but we have seen the highest LBO transaction volume since 2007. In fact, the market peak in 2007 is the only year where we saw more leveraged buyouts.
There is much more in the 28-page report. You can request a copy from the link at the top.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com 

Investigating Spain's Pledge to Lower Taxes (It Won't Happen)

Posted: 06 Apr 2014 09:41 PM PDT

Prime minister Mariano Rajoy is likely as serious about cutting taxes now as he was in December 2011.

Recall that at the start of the 2012 I noted Promises Go Out the Window as Spain Undertakes Huge Tax Increase Coupled With Biggest Budget Cut in History.

Via translation from El Economista, the director of the Foundation of Savings Banks (Func), Ángel Laborde says Government is "Not Serious" Regarding a Proposed Tax Cut.
Angel Laborde explained in the newspaper El Pais that "government revenues funded only 85% of the costs, excluding financial aid. The remaining 67,755,000, was the deficit had to be financed by increasing debt. This stood at the end of year to 960,640 million, 93.9% of GDP. recall that in 2007 the debt was 36.2% of GDP."

"Despite the widespread belief in our society that public spending is silhouetted sharply, the fact is that in 2013 slightly increased by 0.2% over the previous year. This, coupled with the decline in GDP, made weight representing the same GDP increased from 44% to 44.4%, "says Angel Laborde.

Tax revenues continue to grow by increasing taxes and not by the growth of economic activity, so any tax cut would lead to a reduction in spending or an increase in public deficit.
Anti-austerity promises are being made in Spain and France that have virtually no chance of happening. Of course, that is always the expected promise everywhere.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

French Socialists Revolt Against Prime Minister, Threaten Vote of No Confidence

Posted: 06 Apr 2014 11:28 AM PDT

Further compounding president Francois Hollande's problem with the European Commission Rejection of France's Proposal for Deficit Target Leniency, the socialists are in open revolt against new Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

The socialists consider Valls as too pro-business. They want less austerity and a reduction in personal taxes, not corporate taxes. And they are against Hollande's "responsibility pact" proposal that would reduce labor costs and cut government spending.

Via translation from Les Echos, please consider Socialist MPs Threaten a Vote of No Confidence on Account of Valls
Nearly a hundred of Socialist deputies signed a document calling for political change of course and threaten a vote of no confidence in the government on Tuesday. The members of parliament (MPs), groggy out of defeat in local elections, gain momentum to contest the elements of "pact of responsibility."

Jean-Marc Germain, leader of "rebuilders" and very close to the mayor of Lille Martine Aubry, warned Friday that 65 members wanted to get "insurance", including a stronger role for Parliament. Ranks have swelled with the release of a "contract of majority" launched by Pouria Amirshahi among others, Jean-Marc Germain or Laurence Dumont, Vice-President of the Assembly.

This text calls for the Government to consult further their majority and to reorient its policy and that of Europe to fight austerity, investing directly for employment and to favor a "demand shock" through measures favor of purchasing power.

President Francois Hollande promised on Jan. 14 to engage the responsibility of the Government to the pact of responsibility, which includes a reduction of labor costs by 10 billion euros. But the government reshuffle and  increasingly hard criticism by the socialist majority have changed the situation.

The absence of policy change line has weighed heavily in the decision environmentalists and casts uncertainty over their vote Tuesday. François Hollande and his government are thus caught between two fires, the majority of which are increasingly demanding the end of austerity and that of the European Commission, for the moment, refuses to France a additional time to achieve its deficit reduction.
Demand Shock Spending Spree Not Coming

In light of  the EC's rejection of Valls' request for more time to meet deficit reduction targets, it's safe to say a French spending spree is not coming. It will be amusing to see what sleight of hand magic Hollande proposes in his next budget proposal to Brussels.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : Looking for validation in all the wrong places

 

Looking for validation in all the wrong places

Which people do you look to for criticism? Which metrics are you relying on to tell you if you're doing a good job? Who tells you if you're on to something?

Alas, most of us usually look in the wrong place.

Here are a few you might want to avoid:

  • easy-to-quantify and common metrics that lack granularity or insight (like pageviews, followers and heaven-forfend, likes)
  • critics who are loud, snarky and/or jealous
  • self-appointed gatekeepers looking for more power
  • the mass market
  • ... the media they rely on for their opinion [including sportscasters and news anchors (in any field)]
  • people who never understand or appreciate work that's important and new
  • the cool kids

Change someone who cares.

       

 

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