vineri, 25 septembrie 2015

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


Shelter Dogs Take Their First Trip To Their Forever Home

Posted: 25 Sep 2015 07:18 PM PDT

These pictures capture the amazing moments when shelter dogs finally get taken to their new homes for the first time.























Meet The 5 Month Old Fox That's Become A House Pet

Posted: 25 Sep 2015 03:02 PM PDT

This 5 month old domesticated fox is named Rylai and Rylai is blowing up the Internet. She's become quite the sensation on Instagram and Facebook. She's got home life down for the most part but she's still working on the potty training.























Behind The Scenes Photos That Show A Different Side Of Hollywood's Biggest Hits

Posted: 25 Sep 2015 02:41 PM PDT

On the screen might be where all the magic happens, but behind the scenes is where all the fun happens.










How to Hack the Amplification Process - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog

How to Hack the Amplification Process - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Last month, Rand made a surprise virtual appearance at Full Stack Marketing, part of the Turing Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. He presented a special edition Whiteboard Friday to the audience, and the folks at Stipso who hosted the festival were kind enough to let us share it with you, as well.

Amplifying content to the right audiences is tricky business. It's easy to hope people will find you organically—particularly if you have really great tools to share—but most of the time, it just doesn't work out that way. In today's special-edition Whiteboard Friday, Rand takes an in-depth look at how marketers should be finding the right audiences for their content and tools, effectively hacking the amplification process.

How to Hack the Amplification Process - Whiteboard Friday

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video transcription

Let's talk about how to hack the amplification process. I see a lot of companies, small and medium businesses, startups that are seeking high growth, even enterprises that are launching products, launching services, and they have this problem. They announce to the world like, "Hey, we've just launched." But there's nobody listening.

Because of that, you get these giant crickets -- giant crickets because my stick figure's leg is about the same size as them - just going, "Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp." Nobody is listening.

The problem right here...

is that you might have an amazing product, but when you combine that with a small megaphone that doesn't reach your audience, you get abysmal adoption.

Solution A:

Look, I see a lot of folks, particularly in the startup, high growth, tech industries thinking like, "Oh, you know what the solution to that is? We need to make the product better." There's this mindset mentality that great products will spread virally, and marketing is just for bad products or poor products.

That's a little crazy in my view. But the process that they therefore use is, "Well, let's go add some features. We'll improve the UI/UX, and we'll push our customers to virally spread for us."

I won't argue that this doesn't work sometimes. I think people point to cases like Google and Slack more recently. They sometimes point to Dropbox. Although, all of those companies, I would argue, had some marketing elements in them that were not just add features and improve UX and make customers do it. But still, I think that mentality, if it works for you, great. But if it's not working, I'd suggest you try something else.

Solution B:

Another methodology that some folks try is this Solution B I've got here. You might say, "Hey, here's Cindy. She loves our product. Great. Let's go sell more Cindys on our product." So that process is very sales driven and sales focused. It's identify your customer target, find their contact information, and do outreach, whatever outreach might mean. It could mean phone calls. It could mean in-person visits. It usually means email, and LinkedIn is often big for that.

This process can work, and I think if you are a sales heavy, sales focused organization and you have a lot of experience in that area, great, go try it out. If that's how you want to build your business, terrific.

But I would say that too few folks give this a try. This is an area, this organic amplification that we're trying to hack here with this Whiteboard Friday today, this is really powerful and has high potential, but it's a longer, more indirect process. We need to be aware of that when we're going in, or we can have that slow timed ROI and get cut off by our executive teams, our investors, and our CEO.

Solution C:

So the way that Solution C works is, basically, we identify the folks who are in our audience. They're potential target customers and people who influence potential target customers. We try and figure out what they consume, what they care about, and then we try and get mentioned, included, visible in the places that they already go to organically.

What's great about this is it doesn't cost money. It costs elbow grease. It takes time investment. It takes sweat equity. It doesn't take direct dollars. Although, you could argue that advertising could go into here and could be a way to scale with dollars or, in your case, pounds.

When we go through this amplification process, what we need to do is identify who our audience are, their influencers, the media and publications, and all the things that they might consume. What will resonate with them? What kinds of messages, content, and branding will resonate? Then we need to test, measure, learn, and improve.

I've got some hacks for you. Probably some of you have been through parts of this process or you're doing it in your day jobs right now. So I have some clever little hacks that I want to share.

Who?

When you're doing this "who," trying to figure out like, "Who is my audience? How do I reach them," well, start with some of these. Try some in-person interviews. Look at surveys. By the way, you can survey your audience, but there's actually now a process whereby you can identify custom audiences using Google's audience surveys or SurveyMonkey's audience features. That will actually let you target folks, specifically across the world, through ad platforms that make you take a survey before you can see content. That can be a very powerful and interesting way to get data.

We've used that at Moz ourselves. I did a survey last year, with the help of Mike King from iPullRank, and we got fascinating data about the SEO market from that.

You can also use Facebook ads and Facebook's audience network to reach potential customers. You can use Google AdWords campaigns. These are usable in two ways. You can use them to identify people who might be in your audience and then market to them directly using advertising. Or you can also use them to reach your audience and then give them a survey so that you can learn more about them and who they are and what they need, what they listen and pay attention to, all that kind of stuff.

Influencers

There are some really great tools here. Followerwonk is one that is run by Moz. There's actually a great tool that I think is a very impressive competitor to Followerwonk called Klear. It used to be called Twtrland, but they've moved to Klear now. I think that's an impressive tool. I'd urge you to give that a try. It will help you identify influencers, specifically on Twitter. Klear has some Facebook stuff too.

Fanpage Karma, another great tool for finding influencers and influential pages on Facebook specifically and then trying to figure out what other pages people who follow a given page might follow.

Klout and Kred lists, those provide lists of influencers in specific industries and verticals and niches that you can then go identify and do outreach to them.

I actually find that very few people use this, but powerful is going and looking at conferences and event lists and checking out all the speakers. If you see that someone is speaking at an event that you know your audience attends, that's a great influencer target and potentially someone that you might have missed in these other analyses.

Media and publications

Basically, "What is my audience consuming? If I can figure that out, I can get in front of them with those publications." I think using Google search is a great starting point.

One advanced search query that very few folks use is the "related query." So I can type in "related:website.com" and I can see what Google thinks are other sites about that topic or visited by the same people. Pretty cool, actually. You can use this on both domains and pages. So if you see a resource or an article that's on a journalistic site, on The New York Times, The Guardian, The Observer, or The Independent, you can type "related" that URL and see other articles or other publications that write about those same things. Potentially great for journalist outreach and those kinds of things.

SimilarWeb does something really cool with related sites. I can take a site and kind of hack that process of finding other sites that are visited by that same target audience.

Compass is a tool that I haven't personally used, but several folks have been recommending to me recently. It's sort of like SEMrush in that it gives you data, but about ads rather than about keywords. So SEMrush is great for keywords. Compass, give that a try for the ad side. They'll sort of show you, "Where are my competitors advertising? What ads are they running? What's resonating?" That kind of stuff.

Then Feedly, as well as Twitter and Facebook fan counts. Feedly will give the you the count of the subscribers for any given blog or RSS feed, so you can get a sense of how popular a given publication might be. Then, of course, you can use Twitter and Facebook statistics for those pages, for that account to figure out how popular those folks are as well.

I'm also a big fan of SimilarWeb for that, for figuring out how a popular a given website is. Please, do not use Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Hitwise, Nielsen. The data is not good. You'd be better off flipping a coin. No offense, they're just not good.

What's going to resonate?

So this is us trying to figure out what type of content that if we could get in front of folks on our own site, on other people's sites, what kinds of messages, what would work to reach them?

Look, no doubt about it, search is still very powerful. If we know the search terms that people in our audience are looking for and we can rank for those or we can advertise for those, just a direct way to acquire competent, high conversion likely customers.

AdWords is kind of the default, but you can also check out SEMrush and SimilarWeb. SimilarWeb will give you the terms and phrases that are sending traffic to any given website. If you find a competitors' site, you can plug them in. SEMrush, same story and they'll also give you a bunch of other keyword options.

Then, I love BuzzSumo. I think everyone in the content marketing world loves BuzzSumo. That will show you content that has performed well around a particular keyword.

You can also check out Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs or Majestic for the top pages to see what are the top performing pages on a given domain.

Finally, trial and error. A lot of stuff, when it comes to content, is going to be you putting things out there, those things failing to resonate, and you learning what your audience does and doesn't like. There's no substitute for it. You can learn everything you want from all of these hacks and tools, you're still going to have to try and have some failure rate. If you're unwilling to fail, this is not the path for you.

In order to do this effectively, we need to...

Test, measure, learn, and improve.

So hopefully, we're getting better and better over time. To do that, we need four kinds of analytics.

We want web analytics, like Google Analytics or Omniture, if you're using that. Product analytics, something like a Mixpanel or a KISSmetrics.

We need some finance analytics, especially if you have a software as a service type product or an ongoing subscription product. My recommendation would be to use Stripe and then something like ProfitWell or Baremetrics on top of Stripe to be able to see all of the data about who's performing well, what your customer lifetime value is, where you acquired those people, from which channels, etc.

Finally, some search, social, kind of inbound marketing analytics. Moz is fairly good for that. Searchmetrics is another really good choice. We really like TrueSocialMetrics here for the social aspect of getting analytics.

So now you have these hacks. Now you know this process, and I think you can effectively hack the amplification process. I'm very excited to see what you all do, and I hope to be joining you again, next year, at the Turing Festival.

Thanks so much. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Seth's Blog : Attitude is a skill

Attitude is a skill

You can learn math. French. Bowling.

You can learn Javascript, too.

But you can also learn to be more empathetic, passionate, focused, consistent, persistent and twenty-seven other attitudes. 

If you can learn to be better at something, it's a skill.

And if it's a skill, it's yours if you want it.

Which is great news, isn't it?

[PS Starting today, we're running a seven-day email sequence to teach you about the upcoming altMBA workshop.  Find out more here.]

       

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joi, 24 septembrie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


3rd Quarter GDP Now Forecast Ticks Down to 1.4%

Posted: 24 Sep 2015 01:04 PM PDT

The Atlanta Fed GDPNow Forecast model ticked slightly lower today following recent economic reports.

The GDPNow model forecast for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the third quarter of 2015 is 1.4 percent on September 24, down slightly from 1.5 percent on September 17. The decline occurred on Monday when the model's forecast for third-quarter real residential investment growth fell in response to the existing home sales release from the National Association of Realtors.



I thought today's Durable Goods report (see Orders Decline 2%, Led by Transportation; QE Bounce Effect is Over; Recession on the Way?) would have knocked a tick or two off the model forecast, but it was actually existing home sales that did it.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Why I'm Never Going to "Two-Bit" China

Posted: 24 Sep 2015 11:01 AM PDT

I would never go to China, even if someone paid for the trip and all expenses.

My reason can be explained in one headline: China Arrests US Citizen for 'Endangering National Security'.
An American businesswoman has been formally arrested in China on suspicion of "endangering national security" just days before Chinese President Xi Jinping arrives in the US for his first official state visit.

Phan Phan-Gillis, 55, who also uses the name Sandy, disappeared in late March while traveling as part of a delegation made up of local officials from her home town of Houston, Texas.

Her husband, Jeff Gillis, told US media he later discovered she had been detained by China's Ministry of State Security and that she was suspected of espionage and stealing state secrets.

Judging from news reports and corporate websites, Ms Phan-Gillis has been an active promoter of Sino-US ties.

During her trip to China in March she identified herself as executive president of the America Asia Trade Promotion Association (AATPA) and president of the Houston Shenzhen Sister City Association.
Missing Since March

Gillis went missing on March 19. We are only hearing about it just now because her husband was afraid publicity might jeopardize her chances of being released.

Since then, he has awakened to reality: He is at the mercy of merciless, corrupt Chinese leaders.

As noted by the Financial Times, "In China the definition of state secrets is broad and vague and often encompasses things that would be considered public information in other countries. Authorities regularly detain foreign citizens they suspect of spying but ethnically Chinese foreign citizens are far more likely to be held and charged."

Reader Questions

When I write about China I frequently get comments along the lines "What do you know about China? Have you ever been there?"

In the not-so distant past, such questions were accompanied by comments like "China is booming. Have you seen all the building cranes? They are everywhere. Every city is expanding ..."

My reply was along the lines of "There were cranes all over Florida as well, right before US real estate collapsed."

Now reports of vacant cities, malls, and corruption are all over news about China. Capital flight is the order of the day. China has to prop up the yuan or it might sink.

One does not need to go to China to see the pollution or understand the untenable fraud inherent in its massive State Owned Enterprise (SOE) schemes.

National Security Risk

I am an outspoken critic of planned government, GDP lies, pollution, and in general everything associated with China's corrupt central planning model.

It is questionable whether I could last a day without being arrested.

In regards to Gillis, I have to ask: WTF was a delegation from Houston in China for in the first place? Most likely it was a taxpayer boondoggle.

Regardless, Gillis was no more danger to China's "national security" than I am. But that's the problem, isn't it?

I do not get to decide, nor does an unbiased jury get to decide what constitutes "national security". In China, some unelected Communist bureaucrat attempting to prop up his regime gets to decide what constitutes not only national security, but anything and everything else.

If the state decides to burn Gillis at the stake, then that's precisely what will happen.

How China is Ruled

The BBC explains "How China is Ruled".
The Chinese Communist Party has ruled the country since 1949, tolerating no opposition and often dealing brutally with dissent.

The country's most senior decision-making body is the standing committee of the politburo, heading a pyramid of power which tops every village and workplace.

Politburo members have never faced competitive election, making it to the top thanks to their patrons, abilities and survival instincts in a political culture where saying the wrong thing can lead to a life under house-arrest, or worse.
Two-Bit China

The idea that a centrally planned communist country will soon be the preeminent economic power and its currency the world's reserve currency is laughable.

No one in their right mind believes Chinese growth estimates. And much of the growth we do see is nothing but malinvestment. China does not have a large, open, or liquid bond market that a global reserve currency requires. Heck, China dare not even float the yuan.

As noted above, those in China better be careful about what they say. Anyone who bothers to bluntly speak the truth, like I just did, would not last a day in China.

China may be a big economic power, but at the heart of it all, China is nothing but a two-bit, scandalous, central planning dictatorship when it comes to property rights, human rights, freedom of speech, and freedom of press.

Those who gloat over China's miracle growth and think the yuan will soon supplant the US dollar are mistaken on both counts.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Durable Goods Orders Decline 2%, Led by Transportation; QE Bounce Effect is Over; Recession on the Way?

Posted: 24 Sep 2015 08:45 AM PDT

Those looking for "lift off" material for Fed hikes will not find it in the latest Durable Goods report from the US Department of Commerce.

Durable Goods orders declined 2.0% in line with Bloomberg Consensus Estimates, but details and year-over-year numbers weak.
Transportation equipment, specifically aircraft orders, are once again skewing durable goods orders which fell 2.0 percent in August as expected. Excluding transportation, durable goods were unchanged which is slightly lower than expected. Weakness here in part reflects a pause for core capital goods as nondefense ex-auto orders slipped 0.2 percent following two prior months of very solid growth.

Looking at transportation equipment, both aircraft and motor vehicles were weak. Orders for civilian aircraft fell 12 percent in the month while vehicle orders fell 1.5 percent. Vehicle shipments were down 1.6 percent but follow July's big 4.7 percent surge.

Total shipments were flat in the month but follow solid gains in July and June. Core capital goods shipments, like orders, slipped 0.2 percent but also follow prior gains. Still, the dip in core shipments will not be lifting third-quarter GDP estimates. Factories held inventories unchanged in August and worked off backlog orders slightly, down 0.2 percent.
Shipments and Orders Current vs. Prior



The transportation decline was expected. The decline ex-transportation was not expected.

Also note the revision to last month's ex-transportation number. These numbers certainly will not add to third quarter GDP estimates.

Durable Goods New Orders



Durable Goods New Orders vs. Year Ago



Note the over-sized effect that transportation has on order. Yet the picture is not pretty even when transportation is excluded.

Durable Goods New Orders vs. Year Ago Detail

  

Recession on the Way? 

The effect of QE, and central bank stimulus in general, is over (assuming it was ever really in play in the first place).

If the strength in autos is over, and I suppose a global scandal on Volkswagen would mark a fitting top, then recession cannot be too far off.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Japan Manufacturing PMI Borders on Contraction as New Export Orders Plunge

Posted: 24 Sep 2015 02:54 AM PDT

Japan's Manufacturing PMI is still growing, but barely.

Key Points

  • Flash Japan Manufacturing PMI™ at 50.9 (51.7 in August). Operating conditions improve at slower rate.
  • Flash Japan Manufacturing Output Index at 51.4 (51.1 in August). Growth in production little changed from August's modest pace.

Markit Comment

Amy Brownbill, economist at Markit, which compiles the survey, said: "September PMI data pointed to a general slowdown in the expansion of the Japanese manufacturing sector. New order growth moderated, having increased in August at the fastest rate since January. Underpinning the slowdown in total new order growth was a sharp reduction in international demand as new export orders dropped to the greatest extent for 31 months. A number of panelists blamed a fall in sales volumes from China leading to a decrease in new exports. Subsequently, employment levels declined for the first time since March."

Japan PMI Charts



Treading Water

Japan is clearly treading water here as 50 is the break-even rate. Right now it looks like China will pull Japan down with it. And what about prices?

Glad you asked.



Both input and output prices are back in negative territory. Wasn't Abenomics supposed to cure that problem?

Indeed it was, not that it posed any real problem though. The only problem is going into debt to fight deflation. All you get out of it is more debt.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock

Announcing the 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors Results - Moz Blog

Announcing the 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors Results

Posted by David-Mihm

As we head into the thick of fall conference season, I'm happy to announce that the results of the 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey are in.

Eager to dive right in? Click here for the full results.

At the very least, I hope they help kickstart your Birds of a Feather roundtable conversations. (Or if you have a local search addiction as debilitating as mine, perhaps even an after-party conversation over over a pint!)

My high-level takeaways

Google's local search algorithm seems to be maturing

Overall, we've seen a continuation of the gradual trend towards Google rewarding quality on all fronts—from citations to links to reviews. And as more companies have implemented the table stakes of site architecture, keyword- and location-relevant title tags, and claiming their Google My Business pages, quality and authority become the differentiators in competitive markets.

The influence of Google+ on local results is on its way out (if it even existed in the first place)

With the removal of links to Google+ pages from Maps and even from the primary SERP, the always-awkward integration between Plus and Local has now been completely severed.

At this point, I view Google My Business essentially as a UI for structured data* and a conduit to AdWords. While Google's original "business builder" vision may still come to fruition, it clearly won't be under the social umbrella of Google+.

*as well as photos--increasingly important for conversion in a Knowledge Card-heavy future.

Behavioral signals are increasing in importance

Experts judged behavioral and/or mobile signals to make up 9.5% of the algorithm across pack and localized organic results. Granted, that number is not strikingly high, but it's up 38% compared with last year's 6.9%. Research from Darren Shaw and others in the past year has borne out this factor empirically at least in certain markets.

In localized organic results, clickthrough rate was judged the #4 overall factor, and in competitive markets, it moved up 8 spots from 2014, cracking the top ten factors for the first time. A number of experts noted additional behavioral factors beyond clickthrough rate may be playing a role, including post-click time spent on-site or pogosticking.

Citations are still crucial—but your focus should be on quality and consistency

Oddly, citations went from 15.5% to 13.6% as a general ranking factor, but specifically, citation quality and consistency remain top-five factors for both pack results and in competitive markets.

Reading between the lines, it's the quantity of horizontal citations on traditional directories that is becoming less important. Algorithmically, this makes sense, as many of these sites have been hit by successive Panda releases for thin content. The authority passed by mentions on these sites has clearly declined.

Are links the new links?

Overall, links were up 9% as a general factor compared to last year, and a number of experts noted an increased focus on quality links since the rollout of the Local Stack / Snack Pack. Diversity of inbound links as a ranking factor in pack results moved up 22 spots from last year, and even in competitive markets, it rose 10 spots to #14. And in localized organic results, locally-relevant links, location keywords in anchor text, and product/service keywords in anchor text all moved up at least 10 spots in 2015.

Pigeon's shift to the user as centroid has "stuck"

The decline of proximity to centroid as a ranking factor, particularly in competitive markets, now seems just about complete. As Google has gotten better at location detection--on both desktop and mobile results--this rather arbitrary factor has been almost completely discarded. We saw this trend start in earnest with the release of Pigeon last summer, and since the snack pack / local stack rollout, proximity to centroid is the factor that experts think took the biggest hit.

On the other hand, proximity to searcher moved up four spots in the pack-specific rankings, and 10 spots in competitive markets. Clearly, the location of a business matters immensely, but only relative to where people are physically conducting their searches.

Wrapping Up

This is always the case, but this year in particular there are so many pearls of wisdom from the survey's participants that I hope you spend some serious time diving into the comments section of the results. These little nuggets are every bit as interesting as the numbers, if not more so. I truly appreciate the contributions from all participants this year, and look forward to reading comments from our great community members below!

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Want to see the rest?

Take a look at the full results


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