Pinterest has a login screen where the background is a series of images that scrolls indefinitely. How could I design this in swift? Are there any pods that can help me?

This is some stuff I’ve learned using Roll20 (my best practices) plus a little free GM advice. Basically my gaming group had to transition to this quickly when Covid struck, but this has really allowed me to get my weekly game in and I’ve learned a few things that might help you do the same.
My tech setup: Laptop, $20 Craigslist 2nd monitor, ancient Bamboo Graphics Tablet/ Mouse, Roll20 free account, Discord for Voice, Pinterest for monster tokens/maps
Discord Setup I create 2 channels in Discord: general and an information one with links to cheat sheets, any google drive content etc.
If you plan a long running information heavy campaign with lots of places, characters, plots, items etc setting up a Wiki on something like DokuWiki can be very helpful. This DOES mean you and players need to maintain it, however. (Also, don’t be grandiose if you are a first time DM, run a single session with the option to renew LATER, go ahead and be coy about it - this will save you the headache of committing to do 52 weeks of unpaid labor you come to resent AND kick people out of your game who are lousy players or you just don’t like - I cannot stress this enough - manage expectations up front, it prevents a lot of hurt feelings and awkward or confrontational conversations later)
I have Roll20 open on the 2nd monitor in chrome as well as Pinterest, A google doc with names for NPCs, Interesting sounding places, items etc - this is my Improv tool for DungeonWorld, but I use it for all games because no one I ever met can make up names on the fly.
If you have people who like to eat chips into the mic or have a lot of background noise tell them to enable “Push to Talk” in settings or tell all players to enable this BY DEFAULT.
Roll20 There are a ton of videos on getting to know roll20 on youtube.
Manage your game settings - these are presets before you even create a map, etc. I use a default page size of 40 wide x 25 tall to mirror screen aspect ratio. I also like a 30% grey as default map color - easier on the eyes than bright white. Fog of war is enabled - more on this later. With DnD the default character sheet is nice, you might want to know the “always roll with advantage” check box is in there - it confuses a lot of people that it is on by default.
Once you have a game set up, go into it and go to settings on the right (gear) I recommend: • Set voice + Audio options to NONE • Set your display name (save) • Check Enable 3d dice • Dropdown “Scroll to Zoom” (you can pan with a right mouse click) • Player Video/Avatar set to “Name Only”
Give out your link to Roll20 for players at 1-7 days in advance. Getting a character sheet with a functioning token set up can take a little bit - you do NOT want to be stressing over this wasting 4 other people’s time on game day, though it is inevitable to a point in your first game. They will need to set up the same settings or you will suffer terrible audio feedback. To help this, the first board they enter on login is a blank map with these instructions pasted as a graphic in the middle of the screen (hard to miss). If players have DnD Beyond there is a Chrome Extension called Beyond 20 to import characters a lot of people like, though I personally have not used it.
I tell players to also put there name as follows in settings:
“Drizzt (Bob) AC 15”
This saves me having to ask their AC over and over in game. If you want you can also have them put “Elf Ranger” at the end or anything else you find helpful.
Getting Players I tried Roll20 boards and other websites to find gamers. Facebook groups were most effective by a long shot. A lot of RPG gaming systems have Discord groups as well, which is nice because those people are already fans of the game system. It’s a good idea to build in expectations as much as possible if you are doing this (6-9pm CST weekly for 3 weeks, grimdark game tone...etc). I like to identify who my solid players are too - a mix of some people I know and like and maybe a few newbs. That way you are always meeting new people, and if you have a few new ones that you can’t count on you don’t need to call off the game because you have 3 solid players.
Minimum Viable Setup Some people think you need 15 full color maps, spell effects, etc. This is not true - while those can be impressive and evocative, this is a game of IMAGINATION, and sometimes having those beautiful graphics in my opinion detracts from the active use of imagining the action. The key point of maps is so everyone knows who they are standing next to, threatened by, where they can move, etc.
The smallest, fastest set up is a SINGLE page with hastily drawn maps pointing out key items - most rooms will be squares. I have the advantage of having a very old Bamboo graphics tablet, and can quickly draw on the fly (it helps to go into settings and have it map to a single monitor - the one I am using for Roll20).
I think the roll20 initiative tracker takes forever for the GM to manage, so instead I use a graphic strip for 5e - at the top is 25 (then 20, 15, 10, 5, 0) at the bottom -5. Once you have player tokens set up, you can duplicate them and have the PLAYERS manage their own initiative by placing their 2nd token on the strip in order of initiative (you can copy a monster to track yours on there too). This is MUCH faster in my experience and maintains more excitement when you say “Roll for initiative!”
I use Pinterest to get all my token pics, there are a fair amount of great map boards on there as well, though in my experience you are better off being inspired by a map and building your encounter around it than conceptualizing the perfect encounter and then trying to find a perfect map for it. I have a degree in design and am quite skilled in photoshop and could modify found maps, and I have yet to find a situation where it is worth my time - it most likely is not worth yours either. I have drawn things on graph paper in the past scanned but it is a pain to scan and align. Lately for basic custom maps I’ve been using https://dungeonscrawl.com/, which is amazing.
As a side note, sometimes when I’m stuck on ideas, just flipping through monsters or fantasy art on Pinterest inspires a fun encounter.
If you are ever uninspired, remember 3 dollars gets you a helluva lot on DMs Guild - pick a 5 star adventure and go. I think a lot of new DMs want to be writers and world builders and view writing a custom adventure as part of the fun, which is fine. But if you’ve never read a good adventure in your life, how do you expect to do this? Watch a few movies before you decide to become a director. Run a few great adventures before you decide to become an adventure designer.
For token creation, I try to do a closeup on faces - I do NOT try to get the whole body, though might for something like a horse and carriage which is more important as a map item in a fight. It helps to know how to screengrab Windows+Shift+S on a PC, keep your selection as SQUARE as possible. You can then paste into Photoshop, Paint etc and save a token. Irfanview is a free program for viewing graphics that I use for this. If you are using a map, it’s better to just right click the image and “save as…” to your desktop. Sometimes they list dimensions on maps (23 x 22) I try to save this in the file name as it is VERY useful to set up in Roll20 later. You only get so much space on Roll20 for graphics, so don’t save 20 MB image tokens, no one will see them anyway. My goal for a 1 square token is a few hundred KB tops. If you want to have all the players see the gruesome closeup of the zombie when it appears in game, click it and hit Shift+Z to pop it up on their screen (they can click it off to continue to play). I have never exceeded my image space on Roll20
What is an Adventure? To me 5e is a high prep game. That means the players OWE the DM to either go along with his plot or tell him their plans a week in advance. This is not railroading, it is courtesy to the person doing more work than anyone else in the game. If people don’t like it, they should play something that is lower prep, like DungeonWorld or Fate.
We typically play for 3 hours (6:30 to 9:30, people log on Discord and chat a bit starting at 6). My goal is to have 2-3 combat encounters centered around a plot. With low levels and few players things go fast so I might plan 4-5, at high levels with lots of players I would plan 2 fights and a role play scene or skill challenge. This means my prep is:
Roll plot around in my head for 6 days - What do they expect? What is fun? What would be surprising or shocking? What would happen in a movie or TV show? What character moments would be fun? What would be most dramatic? Can I actually do this idea in a 5e game? Examples of things that do NOT work well: Hostage situations, chase scenes, players deciding to kill goblin babies, torture…
The night before I round up maps and tokens. I paste monster stats and spells into a google doc (once again, google and screen grabs are great for this, you can also create 2 columns in a google doc by inserting a 2 cell table). I also write up short lead in descriptions for encounters. In my experience a lot of GMs try to do this on the fly, but often forget an important feature important to the encounter. 3 sentences summing up the scene, what they see and setting the tone usually works better. I also write up any important bullet points of fun things villains or NPCs might say, or important things they know and tell the PCs after the encounter that will lead to the next encounter or advance the story. If this is the end of an important arc, I write up a dramatic “cut scene”. The key is to have 30% more content than I need in case they tear through prepped material but to NOT overprep. The game the next week will almost always be better if I react to events this week, what players seemed interested in, what they seemed bored with, etc.
Page/ Map Setup As mentioned previously, I usually have a 40x25 page with fog of war enabled. The page should already have an initiative strip and player tokens on it. If it is a dungeon that I will reveal as they go, the monsters should be placed, and I use the 3 circles to enter the AC/ HP in advance. If it is more of an “ambushed by enemies” situation I have the entire map visible (or just draw a few trees and road) and have a fog of war strip on the right hand of the map 3-4 squares wide where I hide my monsters. It is very easy to copy and paste monsters so I usually have 2x what i need JUST in case. I also don’t want to have to construct a goblin army from a single goblin while the players sit bored. A nice thing is you can copy/ paste all the player tokens and initiative strip BETWEEN pages, so those are pretty fast to set up on all your pages.
Table Rules I think it’s a pain in the ass to punch in monster stats into Roll20 for 5e (it was easy though for Shadow of the Demon Lord, hats off to Schwalb) so I roll actual dice for most of the game on my desk. I will roll on Roll20 for something very dramatic (a villain saving throw or something) but usually I keep it fast with real dice. Players on the other hand will ALWAYS be expected to roll using Roll20 as a default and that expectation is built in. You can loosen this up if it’s your trusted group for 10 years, but it’s worth addressing up front especially with a new group you don’t know well. Why even give someone the temptation to fudge a roll? Save yourself a difficult conversation later...
Game Day Schedule
6pm (players log in to discord, BS, chat, catch up)
6:30 I read a short recap, summing up what happened last week, reminding them the context of the plot, what quest they were on etc. I have seen people post these, but 90% of the time players don’t read it, and reading this helps focus people and stops me from wanting to murder players an hour in when they can’t remember why the hell they broke into the Thieves’ Guild last week.
6:40-8:30 play
8:30 this is about where I should start the last encounter. If there are a lot of moving pieces (fighting a goblin army of 30) I might drop half the monsters just so they can chew through it faster.
9:30 end of game.
Thanks for Reading
I hope this is valuable to some and would love any feedback or to hear your experiences. RPGs have become my best social outlet during the last many months. I already loved them as a lifelong GM, but they have really kept me from cracking up in my apartment as well as my players I suspect. Having watched the tools to do online gaming I will say we are blessed to live in a time where this is viable, I feel the technology just wasn’t there 10 years ago. It can take some fiddling but once you have a few games under your belt it’s almost as good as meeting the old group down at the game store every Wednesday, and you don’t even need to drive home after!

I received this message from a Etsy Community "team leader" . I have * out any phishing URLs

From: konchanskayaazetta92 Date: 11-09-2020 **:** AM8
Hello i see you new here I am the captain of our team in the Etsy community. We always help newbies so that you could make money quickly ... To quickly make sales, I recommend using these services:
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The night our new sellers used them, they had multiple sales and a lot of people converged with them on the page.
Today we published a new post on proven methods of increasing sales. Read here -
https://community.etsy.com/t5/Cultural-Design/These-methods-will-help-you-get-more-sales-New-sellers... I have received positive feedback from new sellers who have used this.

I am 100% sure artificially inflating your listing is against Etsy policies so doing this could put your store at risk. It does not increase sales at all, since these favorites are really just bots. Also the links they have provided are self hosted, this means they can grab any details they want when you access the URL's, even grab you password if you unknowingly attempt to login on their fake page.
This is the first time I got a message like this but would be interested to hear about your experiences

if your project isn't listed, just send me a message to see if it's something I can do! I usually respond within an hour. And I promise to get back to you within 12 hours. 

Mood Board: Autumnal Schoolgirl Chic aka when you're in denial about turning 30...it's a coffee-scented, reading a book by the fire, snuggled in a cozy sweater vibe
The vibes:
Picture this: the air is crisp, the leaves are turning orange, and all you want to do is relax by a crackling fire in your softest cream knit. You tuck your jumper into a pleated red tartan midi skirt, loop a cognac leather belt around your waist and sling a black leather biker jacket around your shoulders. You slip on matching ankle boots, add a dainty gold book necklace, and place a burgundy beret at a jaunty angle on your loose waves. You know that you want to get some quality journalling done, so you grab your journal (also leather, of course!), and pop it into your trusty tan leather satchel. You grab your sustainable coffee cup (oat milk latte with a sprinkle of cinnamon), and you're ready to head to the library in style. You've got a big afternoon ahead of you, writing romantic French poetry in your journal hoping that the guitar-playing Harry Styles-lookalike from History class will notice your dreamy expression in the library, realise just how mysterious and sophisticated yet approachable you are, fall in love on the spot, and then the two of you will live happily ever after and turn that poetry into an iconic Gen Z love song for the ages...
The background:
With lockdown, we completely missed autumn and winter here in Melbourne, so I'm totally living out my cool-weather outfit dreams through this moodboard. I'm fast approaching 30 and my denial over this is manifesting in real schoolgirl vibes with a classic jumper, plaid skirt and satchel look. I'm getting close to pulling out my old pleated plaid skirt from school...you can call it vintage if you last wore it 20 years ago right?! I've updated it for 2020/"the TikTok age" with a midi-length skirt, a clashing black leather jacket on the shoulders, and a lockdown-fave-Emily-in-Paris inspired red beret...ooh lala.
I've linked most of the items below, please enjoy! In the meantime, I'll be waiting out the last year of my 20s in lockdown...we can all just pretend 2020 doesn't count, right?
Items featured in moodboard:
Saint Laurent Carre Leather Cross-body Bag

• Uniqlo Light Souffle Pointelle Crewneck Sweater
• Commes de Garcons Girl Tartan Pleated Wool Skirt
• Isobel Marant Lonny Belt
• Saint Laurent Cropped Motorcycle Jacket
• John Lewis Carvela Ankle Boots
• Heritage by Laulhere Burgundy Wool Beret
• Garrett Leight Wilsons in Gold
• Madewell Ruffled Ankle Socks
• Leather Journal
• Reusable Coffee Cup - Wooden
• Book necklace

***
**Mini-Review*\*
Item: Saint Laurent Carre Leather Cross-body in Tan (Original Leather)
Seller: TS Anna, from Orange Couch / Judun via WeChat- very smooth and quick experience
Price: 1580 RMB, less 15% discount as there was an Orange Couch sale. This came to 1343 RMB, plus approx. 157 RMB shipping to AU (this was split across two bags) for a total of 1500 RMB, or approx $300 AUD. I paid via WeTransfer.
Photos: here
What I like about it:
It's just so beautiful! It's the perfect structured yet casual satchel for every day, and goes with so many outfits. I feel like it can dress up a chill outfit, but also lend a cool nonchalant factor to a more dressed up outfit. The crossbody strap is the perfect length for me at 165cm, and the straps swivel 360 degrees which is a cool feature. The quality is great as well - stitching is nice and even, and the warm tan leather is slightly glossy, and no smell whatsoever. In terms of accuracy, I'm no QC expert but I can't see any difference vs auth - in any case, this bag is very lowkey in general, so I have zero concerns about being called out.
What I don't like about it:
Since the leather is so structured and glossy, the straps have started to wrinkle a bit. I'm using leather conditioner to smooth this out a bit but honestly it's not too noticeable - definitely not a dealbreaker. Anyone else have this issue?
Would I recommend it to others?
Absolutely! If you love the design, give it a go - it's gorgeous, versatile, really high quality and I would confidently wear it anywhere.
Just wanted to add I'm absolutely loving this sub - it's become a daily read since I first discovered it a few months ago and I'm super excited for this competition - thank you sooo much for organising. This is my first review and post so I'm a bit nervous...happy to answer any questions if you have any!

The leaves have turned, the air is getting crisper, and Cyber Monday is already here to avail great discounts on all source codes on PieceX.
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Cyber Monday can be thought of as the online equivalent of Black Friday, which is a worldwide sales event that is notorious for its steep discounts and gigantic crowds.
Cyber Monday is a big deal for the e-commerce industry, with companies slashing prices and offering massive discounts on their stock. In the midst of a global pandemic, consumer shopping habits have changed dramatically. ECommerce sales have almost doubled in comparison to 2019. The trend of doing more shopping online to stay safe from the virus will probably continue through the holidays.
This is the best opportunity to set up new business with ready to use source codes from PieceX.
Cyber Monday sale is ON and grab any source code from PieceX at discounted rate.
Checkout few selected products as below and visit https://www.piecex.com/products/promotions/CyberMondaySale to find your required application
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1. Loan Manager - https://www.piecex.com/source-code/Loan-Manager-PHP-Loan-Management-System-495 at just 1687$

Loan Manager is fully functional PHP loan management system. Loan Manager can be used to manage borrowers from first steps of loan acquisition to loan repayments. Loan Manager simplifies the process by automating the tasks involved like auto calculations
of interests using standard methods within and preparing amortization schedule (Repayment Schedule).
It comes with below exciting features.
​

• Easy Installation steps
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• Manage Loan Repayments (View Expected Repayments, Receive Repayments, View Overdue repayments and View Defaulted Loans)  Sending Email Reminder for expected repayments
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1. AI Facial Recognition web system - at just 667$

Ready-to-use code with User Interface for facial recognition and facial detection. Upload images and let the AI find matches for people.
Upload individual or multiple images at the time.
While facial recognition gives an identification or a match between a set of images, facial detection allows identifying if there is a human face (or more) within a picture.
With the following project you will be able to:
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• Use it as it is for web facial recognition and facial detection
• Upload single images or multiple images to build a known faces library
• Find a match by facial recognition for a single image or multiple files
• Submit an image for facial detection
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Includes pre-trained data (pre-trained data from public libraries*, you can also use your own training dataset or another public one)

1. Streamio - Movies streaming PHP script - at just 84$

Streamio is a 100% responsive movies streaming php script and perfectly optimized for SEO. It comes with a powerful dashboard, movies data generator, comments reactions feature, two styles dark & light, smart sitemap generator, multi-languages and much
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Feature set includes,
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• Responsive design (with Semantic-ui).
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• Reset password.
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1. Weaxium Responsive Portfolio Blog PHP script - at just 36$

**Weaxium** is a fully responsive & multi-purpose PHP scrip, it can be used for a blog, portofolio or anything else. With its powerful dashboard, you can view who are visiting your website, their countries, which pages interest them the most, which devices are they using, operating system ... and much more.
It has an auto sitemap generator, supports newsletter, multiple user roles (administrators, authors and moderators), has a recovery system for your posts, pages, comments ..., you can add as much pages as you want, categories and subcategories, a sortable navigation menu, multiple styles (dark & light), fast loading time, seo friendly, easy to install and easy to use.
**Main Features :**
Secure system.
Responsive design (with Semantic-ui).
Manage users (authors, moderators, ...) easily.
Responsive Ad Spaces (google adsense, other advertising companies).
Pop-up ads (PopAds, PopCash ...).
Newsletter.
Seo friendly.
Sortable navigation menu.
Categories and subcategories.
Awesome and powerful dashboard.
Auto sitemap generator.
Visibility option for posts, pages, categories and subcategories.
Block, Activate options for users.
Google analytics.
Comments moderation.
Secure authentication.
Install wizard.
Featured posts carousel.
Unlimited pages.
Detailed documentation.
Posts archive widget.
Posts & Comments by user.
Share on social media (twitter, pinterest, ...).
Restore deleted items (posts, pages, ...).
Dark & Light style.
Contact form.
WYSIWYG editor for posts, pages and newsletter.
Popular posts widget.
Latest comments widget.
Random posts widget.
Posts by author widget.
Search.
Awesome home page.
Show/Hide scrollbars.
Posts rating.
Similar posts.
Reset password.
Email verification.
Database cache system.
Security :
SQL injection prevention.
Session hijacking prevention.
Session fixation prevention.
Cross site request forgery (CSRF) prevention.
Cross site scripting (XSS) Prevention.
Password hashing using ARGON2I algorithm.

1. Single restaurant iOS food ordering app with Delivery Boy and Admin Panel - at just 82$

Restaurant food ordering iPhone Mobile app is a catalyst for the food industry. The app lets you (a restaurateur) connect with the customers who wish to either get food delivered or pick-up food. The app lets you track customers' order till the food delivery. With this app you can easily manage the entire restaurant food business to achieve maximum growth.
Restaurant Food App is built with a mobile-first approach keeping user experience, conversion optimization, and high performance intact. It is built with swift code which is adequately served by a Laravel API.
The most amazing feature of Restaurant Food App is, it can be installed on any device running iOS.
Restaurant Food App includes high-end features like Lazy Loading, Image Loading, Content Placeholder Loading, Bulk items images Upload, Advance Settings Management, Advance Coupon System.

1. Breathe Music Player Pro - at 176$

The original source code of Live App - Breathe Music Player Pro / Ultimate with 14k downloads. For transfer of entire app. App with Music Player, Ringtone Maker, Audio Recorder, Personalize Contact Ringtones, Mp3 editor, Sleep Timer, VR Music Experience and lot more features. One app for all your music needs.
World's first Virtual Reality HD Music Player. The Best free music player for android.One App for all your Music Needs.
Breathe Music Player is an Intuitive, Elegant lightweight Music Player with Audio Recorder, Ringtone Creator, Sleep Timer and lots more.
Core Features :
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• Delightful User Experience with Stunning Animations and Seamless Transitions.
• Listen to High Resolution Music with Ease.
• Instantly Boost and Optimize Low Quality Tracks.
• High Definition Audio Recorder.
• Play with music. Create Ringtones.
• Trim Audio Files. Edit Tracks.
• Fall asleep to your favorite music. Sleep Timer automatically turns off music. Saves your sleep and battery.
• Set Custom Ringtone for Specific Contacts.
• Share your Music across any platform.
• Create Unlimited Playlists. Magic Playlists.
• Auto created playlist featuring Top Tracks, Recently Played and Last Added.
• Listen to Music from local files with the Enhanced Folder View provided in Music Player.
• Hassle Free Navigation and Search.
• Built in Equalizer,Bassboost & 3D Surround Virtualizer with Amazing Presets.
• View Embedded Lyrics . Sync Song with Lyrics.
• Lock Screen Controls with Full Screen Album Art.
• Smart Gesture Controls.
• Swipe to change songs in Play Screen of Music Player.
• Play Random Music with Shuffle Songs option in Music Player.
• Beautifully Crafted Themes.Dual Display Mode featuring List View & Grid View.
• Play Music by song, artist, album or playlist.
• Multi Dimensional Widget Support to play music from home screen.

1. Voice Changer - at 206$

The COVID-19 epidemic has covered the whole world, affecting every aspect of human life around the world. Millions of people were infected, along with millions of people in social distancing. We must be separated from the people we love, our parents, our children, our brothers and sisters, our grandparents, uncles, best friends, our beloved ... It is in these times we only to find that I have overlooked things that are simple but extremely important, that is, the feelings and emotions between people. That shows the true and best in the voice of a real person. Listening to the familiar voice of someone you love can bring out the strongest emotions, motivating people to act for the good of society. So it would be nice to have an application that can record your voice and store it forever so you can listen to it anytime, whenever you remember that person. If once upon a time you needed cassettes or hard disks, now you only need a phone and install this application.
This application is useful because the speed and quality of the task are executed, and a best friend with people usually work with paperwork. This app is fully native, created in the latest Xcode version, support all latest feature of the iOS platform to provide the best user experience. The application is specially optimized, super easy to re-skin, and customization.
With this application, you can
​

• Record the words of your loved ones, meetings, lecture sessions
• You can customize the effects for your recordings
• Playback the recording anytime with excellent quality
• Easily manage and organize files in the application
• You can also share records in a simple and powerful way because it supports so many popular sharing channels
• Application built-in ad types of Admob

1. Repost Save Instagram Image Video Story - at 162$

Over 1 billion users, over 500 million daily active users, each user spends an average of 30 minutes per day in 2020. Instagram is a huge market, a gold mine for mobile developers.
With this app, you can

1. Save video, image from Instagram directly to your device
   
2. Repost item into your Instagram Story/Feed with the copied caption
   
3. Share video/image from to Instagram to anywhere you like
   

This application is useful because the speed and quality of the task are executed, and a best friend with loyal Instagram believers. This app is fully native, created in the latest Xcode version, support all latest feature of the iOS platform to provide the best user experience. The application is specially optimized, super easy to re-skin, and customization.

1. Movie Box - at 91$

A beautifully designed movie application-optimized display with iPhone and iPad allows you to have a rough review of a movie before deciding to spend your precious time enjoying it or simply get more information about movies to chat with friends.
You have a high-quality banner image
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• The duration of the movie
• Average review score
• Movie content summary
• Cast
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And most interesting is that you can watch the video trailer of the movie
This application is for entertainment purpose only and is fully native, created in the latest Xcode version, support all latest feature of the iOS platform to provide the best user experience. The application is specially optimized, super easy to re-skin and customization

1. News Live Flutter App With Admin Panel - at 48$

​

• News Live is complete news app with admin panel which is developed on Flutter framework developed by Google.
• It works on both android & iOS.
• Beautiful UI TabBar with News Categories
• If you looking App to save preference news or article to read later.
• If you looking for app Beautiful UI view
• If you looking for App to fellow live popular news and save it in the app.
• If you are looking for a news or watch the live broadcast of the most important news channels. worldwide for both iOS and android.
• News Live could be the best option for you.

Features:
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• Beautiful Sign In && Sign Up With Admin Panel(FireBase)
• User Registration, Login, Reset Password, OTP & Validations
• Beautiful UI TabBar with News Categories
• Made with Flutter and Dart
• Beautiful view
• Watch the live broadcast news channels on Youtube
• Interactive and beautiful user interface
• Select Countries for news any country in the world
• Top-Headlines important news in the world
• Save Articles to read later inside app SqlfLite
• Share News on any apps like(facebook, twitter,... )
• Easy using
• Search feature
• Clean code comments in all code
• Top quality clean code
• Compatible with devices Ios && Android
• Bookmark feature
• Backend: Firebase , Sqlflite
• Complete App
• Deep link support
• State Management : Provider
• Well documented

Install Plugins
WordPress means that you can customize virtually each side of your website inside their admin interface. For gadgets, you can't customize instantly, there's a plug-in for that! You can visit before start here WpHostsell domain and hosting company.

What Is A WordPress Plugin?

WordPress Plugins prolong and develop the performance of WordPress. As of January 2017, there are 48,605 plugins with 1,548,401,838 complete downloads at your fingertips by their plugin directory.
I all the time prefer to remind folks, they shouldn’t “overload” their WordPresswith plugins as including too many might compromise the pace and safety of the web site. When deciding to put in a plugin one ought to contemplate if the function is REALLY wanted and you'll want to hold it up to date ceaselessly (together with WordPressit self).

My Favorite WordPress Plugins

• WordFence Security – Secure your web site with essentially the most complete WordPress safety plugin. Firewall, malware scan, blocking, dwell site visitors, login safety & extra.
• Yoast SEO – Improve your WordPress search engine optimisation: Write higher content material and have a completely optimized WordPress website utilizing the Yoast search engine optimisation plugin.
• AMP – Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in your WordPress website.
• SumoMe – Free and simple solution to double your e-mail subscribers. And Sharing instruments to double your site visitors from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest & extra.
• Related Posts – Related posts (aaa+) Yuzo is meant to indicate associated put up plugin as correct as attainable, additionally has a number of options with extra customization choices +60 a lot as construction as design.

How To Install A WordPress Plugin

1. Login to your WordPress admin space (wp-admin)
2. Click on Plugins on the left menu
3. Click Add New
4. Search in your desired plugin
5. Click Install Now by the one you want to set up
6. Activate after set up and configure further choices if required

DISCLAIMER: Really long educational content for people trying to get x10 more traffic and sales from a platform better than Instagram
Yes you read that right, Instagram is a great visual platform but let's be real how many sales can you generate monthly from an account with less than 10k followers?
A few sales? Well, let's talk about link clicks, how many do you generate to your store using IG?
50? 100?
Like I said Instagram is a great visual platform for sales but not for your ecommerce business because you need to generate as many High Quality clicks as you can and this is difficult as you can only use one click-able link on IG.
Telling people “Click the link in bio for xyz” is a good strategy, but we both know you're losing a lot of potential buyers because people want fewer clicks to purchase.
So what's the option? Here's the option and how to do it properly:
🔺 Pinterest 🔻
Yes, that's the solution, I used to be sceptical and ask “what does this social platform do” until I decided to get on the platform, fail, fail, fail, learn, and find an easy to replicate formula that can provide you at least 600 high quality link clicks
BUT before we go into that, what is Pinterest?
Is Pinterest a social media platform? No!
Then what is Pinterest? Well, Pinterest is the world's first social search engine because it's like a Google search for ideas which are called “pins”, and this means the traffic you'll be getting from Pinterest is 100% search traffic, crazy huh? 😲
📚 Common Terms On Pinterest
✏ Pin
A pin is a “post” that is saved to a board, pins are the most important part of your Pinterest content strategy as a well-designed pin will get you thousands of impressions while a poorly designed one will just be “meh”
This isn't IG, regular “pretty pics” won't get you link clicks, it's value over pretty here.
✏ Board
A board is a category where you save or repin pins, a board is similar to a blog category but on Pinterest you'll be posting(pining) photos (ideas) instead of 500-word articles
You can have a fashion account, and create different boards for different things such as “Jewellery”, “Dresses”, “Sunglasses” etc
You see it's better than IG because it gives your followers and non followers the chance to sort your posts and find what they want quickly?
✏ Repin
A Repin is like a share, when your “Repin” someone's “pin” to your “board” your followers will see this “repin/share” as your own pin, and they can also “repin” it.
It's like you share a post on Facebook and your friends share that shared post, the shared post now has a “viral” effect.
✏ Monthly viewers
People say this is a “Fluke” stat but it's actually the most important statistic on Pinterest because it helps you understand the momentum your account has gained in a month.
On Instagram this statistic is called “profile visits”, but it's slightly different on Pinterest because followers are not important on Pinterest and the “monthly viewers” statistic is the number of unique users that have seen your pins or repins.
✏ Impressions
This is the number of “TIMES” your pins or repins have been seen on Pinterest
Uhmm what else? I think these are the important terms, OK let's go to setting up your Pinterest account to drive traffic to your store.
💰 Setting Up Your Pinterest Account 💰
📝 Get a pen and paper or use a notepad
📝 Download the Pinterest app
📝 Login to Pinterest with your Gmail account (don't worry we won't use this account, it will only be our research account)
📝 Keyword Research Time
Type in the name of your product in the search bar, you'll get a few suggestions by Pinterest (the type of suggestion you get when trying to search a video on YouTube)
It is important to note these suggestions as they're what others are searching for.
Let's assume I've got a home improvement store and I sell indoor water fountains, when I input “indoor water fountain” into the search bar, Pinterest may suggest.
“indoor water fountains ideas”
“Indoor water fountains small”
and “indoor water fountains for kids”
Now, copy the top 3 suggestions
REMEMBER: Copy the suggestions that appear before you hit the search button
Repeat this step for all your products/product categories until you have 7 – 9 keywords, save these “suggestions into your notepad”
⚗ Time to Create your account
🔗 Go to business(dot)Pinterest(dot)com
Replace (dot) with.
🔗 Create a business account
🔗 Input your business info
🔗 When asked “do you want to advertise?” click I'm not sure
🔗 Add your business logo
🔗 Add business link and verify
🔗 Now go to edit and in account name add one of those suggestions you copied to your account name
Let's assume my indoor fountain business name is Fontana, I'll name my Pinterest account :
Fontana | Indoor water fountain ideas
BUT why are we doing this? Remember I told you Pinterest is a search engine, so we're adding keywords to our brand name, so we can appear on Pinterest search results ⌨
🔗 Now go to your description and write a good description that includes one or two keywords you saved during your Pinterest research
Mine for this example is:
The Best Indoor fountain ideas and indoor fountain for kids design.
REMEMBER: Don't sell with your description
📋 Let's Create some boards
📓 Tap on the ➕ icon in the app and click on create board
📓 Now create board titles with the “keywords” we copied during our research
📓 Use one keyword as a title for each board until you create 7 – 8 boards
🎑 Creating Attention Grabbing Content
🖌 Go to Canva(dot)com or hire a Designer on Fiverr (will cost you a lot tho)
I've got a team ready to help you with design if you wouldn't mind expert help, 2 store owners only!
🖌 Use the default Pinterest dimension on Canva
🖌 Place your product in the frame
🖌 Write a good offer caption
🖌 add a good call to action at the bottom of the photo, a simple “click now to get 30%” off will do wonders to increase your link clicks
🖌 Hire a writer and post how to content on your Shopify blog, then create graphics to post on Pinterest (for ecom)
REMEMBER: Creating high quality pins is the best investment you can make, Canva can do the job or hire a designer on 5ver.
🚀 Momentum Building 🚀
I've told you how to create good pins that'll help you get a lot of clicks, but don't start pining your own content just yet
BUT why?
Pinterest rewards engagement with more engagement and this means it's easier for your own content to go viral when you interact with other people's content through repining, commenting, and following others.
This process is called momentum building, can surfers surf without waves? Nah! Bigger waves = Better surfing (I don't surf but this example just came to me, hope it applies 🤣🤣🤣)
So the steps to moment building include:
🚀 Repin the pins of others to your boards, this can be done by tapping on your board, clicking more ideas, and adding similar pins to your boards
🚀 Repeat this step for all your boards
🚀 It's a numbers game so the more pins you add to a board daily determines how fast you build momentum
🚀 I advise 60 – 80 repins to each board daily, but don't Repin 60 or 80 pins at once, you can do 30 in the morning and 40 in your free time.
🚀 Leave relevant comments on posts (optional)
🚀 Follow others
The number of followers you have doesn't matter, any well-designed and ranked pin will perform once you've got momentum
🚀 Do the momentum building tactics for 15 – 20 days before you begin to pin your own designed content
📌 Pining Your Own Content 📌
Now here's the sweet part, doing this right will get you results and doing this wrong won't have a positive effect
📌 Do the necessary keyword research, and add a few keywords to your pin title and description
📌 Write title descriptions longer than 22 words
📌 Do not engage in keyword stuffing
📌 Don't use sales terms in your titles
It's that easy
REMEMBER: Pay attention to keyword research and pin 3x daily for best results
EXTRA TACTICS
📋 Will Group Boards Help You?
Group boards are like Facebook groups with “board contributors” and these contributors can post to these groups.
It's easy to make posts go viral easily once you use group boards
🙌 Pinterest Influencers
Working with Pinterest influencers gives you the chance to skip the part of setting up your own account, and building momentum.
Working with Pinterest influencers is highly profitable, and they're really humble.
👩 Hiring a Pinterest VA, Yes or No?
Pinterest VA's help you create, schedule, and engage with pins, it's important to hire one of you need time to focus on other parts of your business.
THE ONLY FLAW OF PINTEREST
Yes its a great platform, almost the best but they need to work on their spam filters as a lot of good and non spammy accounts get easily suspended due to error from their bots
If you get your account suspended you may get it back after a few weeks and a lot of emails crying and trying to “present your case”
Yessssss, we finally got to the end!
I'll update this post regularly with the latest Pinterest growth hacks, feel free to ask any questions below.

[This got posted and removed from cscareerquestions so trying here]
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I conducted an exhaustive job hunt and talked to almost every large company in the Valley and got several offers from top tier firms. I had a positive and professional experience with almost every company I talked to with the exception of Uber. My Uber experience was by far the the strangest experience I've had in this job hunt.
TL;DR Would not recommend interviewing at Uber
Here's a timeline of my interview experience with Uber:
Referral Advocate

• I got referred into Uber by a friend and had an intro call with a referral advocate. They went over the interview process (pretty standard) and asked I complete a coding assessment to begin.

Coding Assessment

• The coding assessment was a mixture of coding problems and a few multiple choice system design questions. I was told I passed the coding assessment and was passed to a recruiter to begin the process for an onsite. Here's where things started going awry.

1st Recruiter Call (where it goes downhill)

• The recruiter began the call by stating "Hello is this XXX [wrong version of my name]? hahaha HahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHhahahahaahHa" and continued to laugh hysterically. They stopped laughing for a few seconds then asked again "Sorry is this YYY? [another wrong version of my name] hahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA" and continue to laugh hysterically for a second bout of laughter. They then catch their breath from laughing and sputter out very quickly "Hahahaah. Sorry, sorry I'm not laughing AT you, I'm just laughing that I keep on butchering your name. HahahahahahaHahahahahahaHahaha."
• At this point, I can't tell if I'm being pranked on a radio show. Every company I have talked to has done some variation of "Hello this is ZZ from company XX. Sorry, but I don't know how to say your name. How do I pronounce it?”
• Recruiter uses unprofessional tone and diction throughout call. They start each sentence with a loud "uuuMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM" and then use the word "like" across all of their sentences. At one point the recruiter goes into a (fake?) valley girl falsetto and starts the sentence with "ohhhhh my goddddd" while making fun of how long a competitor takes to interview (Google)

Onsite
Bar Raiser Interview

• I wait in the conference room and the interview start time comes up. I wait for about 7 minutes before I start to worry that my interviewer isn't going to show up. I go outside and see someone waiting outside the room and ask them "are you here to interview me?"
• The interviewer apologizes that they didn't come in and says they didn't know they were the first interviewer so they were waiting for the previous interviewer to exit. While a minor hiccup, this reflects a general theme of unprepared interviewers.

1st Algo Interview

• I get escorted back to the conference room after lunch for my first technical interview. The interview start time passes up. After 8 minutes I email my coordinator. I then text my referrer as well. After 20 minutes (the interview slot is 45 minutes) an interviewer rushes into the room.
• Interviewer seems unprepared for interview. Specifically they mention that it is "bar raiser" interview several times, and I correct them by showing them the paper with the interview schedule
• After interviewer realizes that interview is not behavioral, they pause and quickly think of a problem on the spot. The problem is explained poorly in a rushed and unclear manner. I am able to start work on it because I’ve covered the topic before (topological sort). Any person unfamiliar with this problem would not be able to work on it because the problem description was stated in 30 seconds of rushed, broken, and hard to understand English.
• I ask the interviewer if I can type out the solution and they direct me to use the codesignal site. The site doesn’t work and the interviewer says they do not know how codesignal and asks me to use a whiteboard.
• Interviewer gets phone notifications several during the interview and appears distracted. I catch myself talking for large amounts of time without any communication or interaction from the interviewer side. I ask them if they are following me to ensure they are listening to me. I also notice that the interviewer is distracted and looking at their phone several times while I’m explaining my solution. (My hunch is the interviewer is getting messaged by someone at work or maybe paged for an issue)

2nd Algo Interview

• Interviewer comes into room with paper printout of an algo problem. The problem involves matrix multiplication, and since I am not too familiar with matrix multiplication, I ask how matrix multiplication works. The interviewer pauses, pulls out their phone to check how matrix multiplication works (???), and then explains it to me. It is clear from the pause and the paper that the interviewer is asking a question that they have never studied before. They confirm this by casually mentioning they don’t know the optimal solution to the problem they are asking since it’s a new question.
• Codesignal has technical issues again and the interviewer does not know how to use it. The interviewer attempts to use hackerrank but realizes their Hackerrank login doesn't work anymore. We give up and switch to sublime text.

Overall, I found this onsite to be a mess. All of my algo interviews were poorly run, the interviewers were unprepared, there was technical issues with their coding tools. I also got little to no time to ask questions during the technical interviews due to all of the issues.
Recruiter onsite follow up

• During the follow up call, the recruiter mentioned they had good and bad news. The good news was that most of the feedback was positive, but the system design interviewer felt they didn't have enough information to assess me. The team was passing, but they wanted me to come back in for a system design interview and if that went well they would match me with another team.
• At this point I was completely confused. If the system design interviewer couldn’t assess me, this meant that the 3 technical interviewers all failed as interviewers.
• I was debating coming back given how problematic my onsite was. At this point I had been told by 4 companies including Google I would have an offer.
• The recruiter started laughing uncontrollably during this call again when I voice concerns about impending deadlines. This time it occurs after I state that I am at hiring committee Google and might not have time to come back to interview. The recruiter starts laughing again at me: "hahahahHAHAHAHAHAHAAhahaha. You are totally not going to get an offer from Google in time for your deadlines. hahahhahahahaHahahahaHahaha”. They then started making fun of Google and Amazon by saying they are too slow and would not make the deadline I have with another company. I notice that this is the 2nd time the recruiter is belittling competitors.
• [As an aside, the recruiter was not correct. Both Google and Amazon gave me offers exactly when they promised too and met the deadlines they communicated to me.]

Ending the Process
This whole process felt stressful and disrespectful. I felt like I was on a prank show where they were seeing how they could far they could go by insulting me before I would walk away from the company. After sleeping on it, I told the recruiter I won't be continuing the process and to have Uber never contact me in the future given how unprofessional the experience was.
Overall Thoughts

• My interview experience gave me the impression that Uber recruiting does not communicate respectfully with its candidate, employees are not prepared for interviews they conduct, and the process is conducted sloppily. I have had some anecdotal confirmation from other friends that many of these issues are not uncommon.
• I understand that hiccups happen at interviews but I did not see anything approaching these issues at the other companies I am talking to. To give context, I have finished onsites rounds at Pinterest, Lyft, Google, Square, Amazon, Yelp, etc. All of these companies were professional, respectful, and prepared.
• I have never had a recruiter laugh at me in our calls.

So, standard disclaimer: Am not a lawyer and for legal questions, please refer to a member of the law profession in your area. Your mileage may vary and details may vary from state to state or country to country.
TLDR; Protect yourselves and make an effort to understand your rights. Consult a lawyer or law enforcement in your area for specific details.
I can’t believe I’m writing this, but I figure with everything going on, it’s worth a shot.
Please protect yourselves online.
1) Please use very strong passwords that vary from site to site. A strong password (for the few who may not know) is at least 8 characters with at least a capital letter, a number and a symbol. This should not be things like: pet’s name, your name, any variation of “password”, any variation of “admin”, any variation of “change me”, your SSN, your child’s name, your birthdate, your occupation (i.e. “policeman1234”) or anything that would uniquely identify you. The longer, the better and the less obvious, the better. You can also double or triple up on the password, but this is not ideal. A longer password will take longer for even a brute force, computer driven attack.
2) Please use unique logins for things you do not want to be associated. If you’re using “legale_eagle3222” everywhere, it will associate your Facebook, your social media, your IG, your Reddit, etc. Ideally, you’d have a unique ID everywhere, but let’s face it, that’s a bear to keep up with.
3) If you login anywhere with your Facebook or Google or XXXX login rather than the native login scheme, then you will have the probability that your traffic is tagged and collected and collated AND SHARED with every company out there. There is also the possibility that if your Google/Facebook/etc is hacked, then the hacker can get in everywhere you use that as your login.
4) Most every site has a Terms of Service (TOS) that states that you have to be 13 or older. This is (In the USA) because of COPPA—the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. This states (among other things) that if a site collects data (and most of them do), then they cannot collect on a “child” which is defined as a person 12 or below. The gist is that if you direct your content to children, you have to either get and maintain parental consent or you cannot collect on the user. Now, this impacts advertisements and info sharing, which is how sites get a large part of their revenue because an ad that is shown based on your choices and preferences is more income vs an ad shown generically. If I look up “firm ripe tomatoes” and get 2 ads—one for tomato fertilizer and one for learning German online—then the tomato fertilizer ad will generate more revenue than the learning German online ad. For a child who looks up “Undertale”, companies are supposed to not show directed ads (such as for Undertale merchandise) and if they do track every user, the site must get parental consent to collect.
Most sites will do a simple age gate—“Are you sure you’re old enough to see this?”—and a button agreeing. This is a bit of a legal sticking point because age gates have no way to determine if the person is actually 13 or 18 or whatever, which is where the law could be used to say “You are in violation of tracking regulations”. And if a device is passed from person to person (i.e. parent to child), then the consent from the parent can be in doubt.
At any rate, the Terms of Service generally will have buried somewhere that violating the terms of service (such as being too young) absolves the company/site from any damages. So, if you violate the terms of service by logging in without being of age and get (for example) a virus, then since you violated the Terms of Service, you are not entitled to any damages or holding the site responsible. READ THE TERMS OF SERVICE BECAUSE THAT IS THE GOVERNING DOCUMENT IF YOU NEED TO SEEK DAMAGES.
4) Please turn off location services if you don’t need them. Not sure when this started (and don’t care), but photos and services began logging in your geographical stats and the date/time. This means that anyone getting that photo can potentially get the exact location of where a picture was taken and when it was taken. Facebook had a program that would track your runs and bike trips and then post the information—Hey, I did 10 miles today. Obviously, this turns your run into a step-by-step target of where you are and where you’re likely to be. So, turn off your location services when you don’t need them—photos, Apple GameCenter, Facebook, etc.
5) Please go to your social media’s security and restrict the contents appropriately. Maybe not everything needs to be available to the public. Maybe only family needs to see the baby pictures. Don’t assume that the companies are going to protect you—by default most sites will set you to wide open for public consumption. Some companies will maintain your security settings so you don’t have to reset every week, but things change and you will need to check from time to time to maintain your privacy. Specifically, try to restrict how much the site tries to “help” by tagging your photos or trying to match you with other people via algorithms and face matching.
6) Please clean out your cookies and browser history regularly. Sites will use cookies to help track you from virtual place to virtual place. They will also try to use session tracking by assigning you a session ID. Using “incognito” mode will help, but you can set most browsers to clear your history when you close the browser. Everyone from airlines to hotels to Google will read those cookies and will try to monetize them. It’s how the airline knows you’ve searched for tickets to New Hampshire for a week and they will adjust their prices based on those searches.
7) Please read privacy policies. Privacy policies are there to tell you how they will use the information that they collect. Now, they are long and filled with legalese, but it’s worth being sure you understand what they will do. If there is medical information potentially involved, it is vital that they tell you how they intend to share the information. HIPPAA (In the USA) will dictate how they can share your medical records, so it is vital to understand privacy policies.
8) Please check the email addresses for every suspicious email you get. We will all get spam—not gonna argue—but lots of people will try to spoof Apple or your bank or your company in order to get you to log in. If you get an email “helpfully” giving you a link and instructing you to go login for whatever reason (usually “security” reasons such as to “confirm your account”), then go to the site itself and do not follow the link. For your bank and school, call them directly. A legit system admin will never need you to send them your login and password.
9) Please use HTTPS for sensitive information such as banking or loan information or login to sites. You can usually find a locked padlock on the browser if HTTPS has been set up correctly. If that lock icon is open or yellow/red (browsers have different icons), then do not use that site to login.
10) Please take very great care in photographing yourself and your friends. Totally on board with “wow—look at this dress” or “watch me play my guitar” or “my favorite skateboard trick”. It is a lot of fun to connect virtually and especially when we cannot hangout together, but sending photos is getting more risky. Facial recognition is growing and pasting people’s faces on other people’s bodies is getting easier. (Hence all the celebrity look alike porn.) Now, your SO or fans or whatever might be 100% awesome people—not making a judgement there either. There are some things to consider. If you are under legal age (whatever that might be for your jurisdiction AND the site’s Term of Service) and take/send nude or suggestive pictures, that may fall under child pornography laws. If I as a 15 year old take a nude photo to send to my boyfriend, I have produced child pornography in my area. If I send that nude photo, I have transmitted child pornography. Now, in this example, I am consenting and presumably this hypothetical boyfriend is consenting, but child porn is still child porn and carries strict punishment. Revenge porn is only recently becoming illegal, so check your local regulations and laws.
11) Please take doxing seriously. So, someone found out your information. Please take it seriously. Report it. If someone knows personally identifying information, they can not only humiliate you online, but it can be used to find out more information. If I have a valid address, I can not only find someone, I can direct mail to them (mail fraud, btw) or direct mail away from them. I can build an identity and potentially steal that information to run up credit cards and medical debt.
FOR MINORS, this is especially important because in the USA, a minor cannot report erroneous credit (such as credit cards in your name) and a minor cannot freeze their credit reports so that the information cannot be used. In addition, medial fraud can go on for years and be impossible to remove from your record. Your credit can be ruined as a minor and you can then be denied apartment leases, home buying, student loans.
12) Please learn your region’s reporting requirements. Who do you report internet crimes to? The FBI, DHS and other groups have good reporting tools.
13) Please be careful of public internet such as Internet cafes or free WiFi. This is handy, not gonna lie, but these places are rife with hackers and people who are listening to the traffic for their own purposes. Switch to HTTPS and avoid things like banking and credit inquiries/loan applications in those locations.
Schools generally have the right to monitor and block objectionable traffic in most instances. So do places like libraries. In a home, objectionable traffic can be monitored and blocked by the individual ISP and by whoever owns the account with the ISP.
14) Please be careful of the information you are asked and how it may be used. Not all sites need everything—even if they ask for it. Also, you do not need to answer explicitly for “security questions”. A website that is asking for your mother’s maiden name as a password recovery setup will not check that “Issac Newton” is not really your mother. Your favorite pet’s name can be Splinter or OakTree. Your favorite job title can be “WitchfinderPulsifer”. Your best friends can be “Aziraphale” or “Crowley”. Your mother can be Rainbow Brite. Your school can be Hogwarts. The idea is that someone else will not be able to crack the security and change your password or security information by knowing basic information about you. Legitimate profile information should be covered by the privacy policies and TOS as to how it is stored and how they are going to be used.
15) Please note that everything you do likely will be around a loooooong time on the Internet. By design, the Internet uses caching (kind of an in-memory record of data) to shorten load times. If I created a page in 1990, then the caches and storage of that page may still be around, despite the actual website being taken down and the hardware being scrubbed. This means if you post something, chances are good that it will be stored in other places than the website you put it on. So, if you take down that website, the caches will still have it and the request for that website will potentially find it before the word gets around that you’ve deleted the site. And that’s not counting the lead time between when I request the site go down and the site is actually removed, whether or not Facebook/Pinterest/etc has taken photos or recorded my post.
The practical upshot is that basically, the Internet lives forever. This means that future employers can (and will!) find it. This means that future opportunities such as potentially college applications and graduate applications and so on can (and will!) find it. Law enforcement. The list goes on and on and—professionally—the number of companies doing social media searches is growing. This can be good—your epic fan fiction, your video of winning the rowing competition, etc—or it can be bad. Or mixed. So, the idea of a barrier of separation—a different email and username for example—between the stuff you want grandma and your boss to see is important.
16) Please keep your computers, devices and hardware up to date on security patches and virus scans.
17) Please check the laws in your location. Please check the laws in your location. You may be required to reveal your social media in the event of a police investigation. You may be required to reveal online activities to an employer or to your school. I don’t know and am not a lawyer, so I cannot tell you what your area will require. Please check the laws in your location.
18) Please look out for each other. Do tell people if it looks like they are targeted. Do tell people if you see that they might be in danger. Do tell law enforcement if it looks like someone is crossing the border into danger.
19) Please do talk to law enforcement if someone is doxing or making threats. At least in my area, going online and making statements about attacking a person is “communicating threats” and is a crime by itself. Now, more than ever, people are taking these reports seriously as warning signs that someone can be in danger.
In my final opinion: Continue supporting each other. Spread positivity and support.
Links:
Stop Bullying (stopbullying.gov) https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiwrNyB5LHqAhWTgnIEHRRUCpcQFjACegQIAxAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.stopbullying.gov%2Fcyberbullying%2Fhow-to-report&usg=AOvVaw3UGEVAgmdyRYvwaN8_6ZzQ
FBI Reporting link
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiwrNyB5LHqAhWTgnIEHRRUCpcQFjAEegQIBRAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.fbi.gov%2Ftips&usg=AOvVaw0-9SmuZsfT2NgXD_wdR3pd
Reporting crime in US
https://www.usa.gov/report-crime
Report Human Trafficking
https://www.acf.hhs.gov/otip/victim-assistance/national-human-trafficking-hotline
Department of Justice (US) Reporting a variety of crimes
https://www.justice.gov/actioncentereport-crime
Department of Homeland Security (Page about keeping safe online)
https://www.dhs.gov/blue-campaign/online-safety
Department of Justice Report Hate Crime
https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/get-help-now
FBI Hate crime — statistics and reporting
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil-rights/hate-crimes

Here is the summary of the book Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive growth.
I hope that you find it useful!
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Traction is a sign that your startup is taking off. If you charge, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it means your user base is growing.
If you have traction, all your technical, market, and team risks become easier to handle. It becomes easier to fund-raise, hire, do press, partnerships, and acquisitions.
Traction trumps everything.

How to think about Traction?

Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have is enough customers.
You should spend your time in parallel, both constructing your product and testing traction channels.
This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50% on traction. This rule seems simple but it’s hard to follow because the pull to spend all your attention on the product is strong. You’re probably making a startup because you want to build a particular product. You have a vision, but a lot of traction activities are unknown and outside your vision and comfort zone. So you try to avoid them. Don’t.
Doing product and traction in parallel has these benefits:

• You get knowledge from traction efforts, so you’ll build the right product for your customers.
• You get to experiment and test different traction channels before you launch anything. This means when your product is ready, you can grow rapidly.

Before trying to get traction, you’ll need to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. Maybe your current startup goal is to raise funding or become profitable. How many customers do you need and at what rate? You should then focus on marketing activities that result in a significant impact on your traction goal. It should move the needle.
Your startup has 3 phases:

Phase I: Make something people want

In phase 1, your product has the most leaks, it really doesn’t hold water. You shouldn’t scale up your efforts now, but it’s important to send a small amount of water through the bucket so you can see where the holes are and plug them. \ Your goal in phase 1 is to get your first customers and prove your product can get traction. You focus on building your initial product and getting traction in ways that don’t scale: giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you know, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers.
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Some founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off!

– Paul Graham

Phase II: Market something people want

Once you hone your product, you have product-market fit and customers are sticking around. Now is the time to scale up your traction efforts. You fine-tune your positioning and marketing messages.

Phase III: Scale your business

As your company grows, smaller traction strategies stop moving the needle, so you’ll start to scale.
In phase 3 you have an established business model and significant position in the market, and you’re focused on scaling to further dominate the market and to profit.

Traction for funding

When pursuing funding, first contact individuals who understand what you’re working on. The better your investors understand what you’re doing, the less traction they’ll need to see before they invest. Also, try friends and family who may not need to see any traction before investing as they’re investing in you personally.

To pivot or not to pivot

Many startups give up way too early. The first thing to look for is evidence of real product engagement, even if it’s only a few dedicated customers. If you have such an engagement, you might be giving up too soon. Look for the bright spots in your customer base and see if you can expand from that base.

How to get traction? The Bullseye framework

The Bullseye framework helps you find the channel that will get you traction. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
You’re aiming for bullseye: the one channel at the center of the target that will unlock your next growth stage. Here are the 3 Bullseye framework steps:

Find what’s possible: The outer-ring

The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. It’s important not to dismiss any channel in this step. Think of at least one idea for each channel. For example, social ads is a traction channel. Running ads on Facebook or Twitter is a channel strategy within social ads. You could research what marketing strategies worked in your industry as well as the history of companies in your space.

Find what’s probable: The middle-ring

Go around your outer-ring and promote your best and most exciting ideas to your middle-ring. For each traction channel in your middle ring, now construct a cheap traction test you can run to find if the idea is good or not. These tests need to answer the following questions:

1. What’s the cost of acquiring customers?
2. How many customers are available?
3. Are they the right type of customers for you now?

You want to design small scale tests that don’t require much up-front cost or effort. For example, run 4 Facebook ads instead of 40.

Find what’s working: The inner-ring

The final step in Bullseye is to only focus on one channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel. At any stage of your startup, you should have one traction channel that you’re focusing on and optimizing.
Most founders mess this up by keeping around distracting marketing efforts in other channels.
If search engine marketing is significantly better for you than other channels, you should focus all your efforts on this core channel and uncover additional strategies and tactics within it.
If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated. If you tried several times with no success, then your product may require more tweaking and your bucket might be still leaky.

How to test traction?

Middle-ring tests: You should be running several cheap tests that give you an indication of how successful a given channel strategy could be.
Inner ring tests:
You’re doing two things:

1. Optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be.
2. Discover better channel strategies within this traction channel.

There is always a set of things you can tweak. For targeting blogs, you can tweak which blogs to target, type of content, call to action, etc. For search engine marketing, you can tweak keywords, ad-copy, demographics, and landing pages.
A common approach is to use A/B testing, where A is the control group and B is the experimental group. The purpose of it is to measure the effectiveness of change in a button color, an ad image, or a different message on a web page. If the experimental group performs significantly better, you can apply the change, get the benefits, and run another test.
You can use tools such as Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce.
Over time, all marketing channels become saturated. To combat this, you should always be trying to discover new strategies and tactics within your channel and conduct small experiments. Also, experiment with new marketing platforms while they’re still in their infancy.

Tools

To track your tests you could start with a simple spreadsheet or use an analytics tool with cohort analysis. You’ll need to answer these questions:

1. How many people landed on the website?
2. What are the demographics of my best and worst customers?
3. Are customers who interact with my support team more likely to stay?

A basic analytics tool like Clicky, Mixpanel, or Chartbeat can help you with these questions. You can use a spreadsheet as the tool to rank and prioritize traction channel strategies. You should include columns like how many customers are available, conversion rate, the cost to acquire a customer, lifetime value of a customer for every given strategy.

How to focus on the right traction goals? The critical path framework

Define your traction goal

You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working towards. This could be 1,000 paying customers or 100 new daily customers, or 10% of your market. You want a goal where hitting the mark would change things significantly for your company’s outcome.
Once that is defined, you can work backward and set clear time-based subgoals. Such as reaching 1,000 customers by next quarter.
The key is to follow the critical path towards that goal and exclude all features and marketing activities that don’t help you reach your goal. Everything you decide to do should be assessed against your critical path.

Avoid traction biases

Your competitive advantage may be acquiring customers in ways your competition isn’t. That’s why it’s critical to avoid have traction biases. Stop your urge to refuse channels like speaking engagements, sales or affiliate marketing, business development, or trade shows just because you hate talking on the phone or you find the channel annoying or time-consuming.

Targetting blogs

Targeting blogs that your prospective customers read is one of the best ways to get your first wave customers.
Mint’s initial series of tests revealed that targeting blogs should be its core channel. They asked users to embed an “I want mint” badge on their personal blogs and rewarded them with a VIP access before other invitations were sent out. They also directly sponsored blogs. They sent bloggers a message with “Can I send you $500” as the subject and told them a bit about the product.
To find smaller blogs in your niche:

• Google “top blogs for x” or “best x blogs.”
• Search for your product keywords on YouTube.
• Use tools like FollowerWonk and Klout to find top twitter accounts in your industry.
• Use social mention to find sites with the most frequent mentions for your keywords.
• Talk to people to figure out what your target audience is really reading online.

You can also target link-sharing communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News.
Dropbox, Codecademy, Quora, and Gumroad all got their first customers by sharing their products on HackerNews because their products were a good fit for users on that site.

Publicity

Starting out, an article in TechCrunch or The Huffington Post can boost your startup in the eyes of potential customers, investors, or partners. If you have a fascinating story with broad appeal, media outlets will want to hear from you.
It’s easier to start smaller when targeting big media outlets. Sites like TechCrunch and Lifehacker often pick up stories from smaller forums like Hacker News and subreddits. Instead of approaching TechCrunch, try blogs that TechCrunch reads and get story ideas from. It’s easier to get a smaller blog’s attention. Then you might get featured on TechCrunch and then The New York Times which reads TechCrunch!
What gets a reporter’s attention?

• Milestones like raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier.
• A PR stunt.
• A big partnership.
• A special industry report.

A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it’s not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don’t have a story worth pitching.
A good first step is using a service like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where reporters request sources for articles they’re working on. It could get you a mention in the piece and help establish your credibility. Also, you could offer reporters commentary on stories related to your industries.
You can use Twitter to reach reporters online; almost all of them have Twitter accounts and you’d be surprised how few followers many of them have, but they can be highly influential with their content.
Once you have a solid story, you want to draw as much attention to it as you can:

• Submit the story to link-sharing sites like Reddit and HackerNews
• Share it on social networks
• Email it to influencers in your industry for comment.
• Ping blogs in your space and tell them you have a story that’s getting buzz.

Once your story has been established as a popular news item, try to drag it out as long as you can. Offer interviews that add to the story. Start “How We Did This” follow-up interviews.
As your startup grows you may consider hiring a PR firm or consultant.

Unconventional PR

Nearly every company attempts traditional publicity, but only a few focus on stunts and other unconventional ways to get buzz.

The publicity stunt

• Half.com renamed (Halfway, Oregon) to Half.com and launched it on the Today show with the mayor of Halfway, Oregon.
• Richard Branson made his press conferences as outlandish as possible (dressing like a woman, driving a tank through the streets) to get the media talking about whatever Virgin was launching.
• WePay (a PayPal competitor) placed a 600-pound block of ice at PayPal’s conference entrance.
• DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard highlighting its privacy focus.
• Blendtec created a series of videos called “Will It Blend?” where they blended items like a rake, golf balls, and even an iPhone.
• When Grasshopper did a rebrand, they sent chocolate-covered grasshoppers to 5,000 influential people.

Customer Appreciation

Be awesome to your customers. Shortly after Alexis Ohanian launched Hipmunk, he sent out luggage tags and a handwritten note to the first several hundred people who mentioned the site on Twitter.
Holding a contest is also a great repeatable way to generate publicity and get word of mouth. Shopify has an annual Build a Business competition.
Great customer support is so rare that, if you make your customers happy, they’re likely to spread the news of your awesome product. Zappos is one of the best-known examples of a company with incredible customer service and they classify support as a marketing investment.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is placing ads on search engines like Google. It’s sometimes called “pay-per-click” because you only pay when a user clicks on an ad.
SEM works well for companies looking to sell directly to their target customer. You’re capturing people who are actively searching for solutions.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) The percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks to your site.
Cost per Click (CPC) The amount it costs to buy a click on an ad.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) How much it costs you to acquire a customer, not just a click. If you buy clicks at $1 and 10% of people who hit your site make a purchase. This makes your CPA at $10.
CPA = CPC / conversion percentage

SEM to get early customer data

You can use SEM as a way to get early customer data in a controlled and predictable way. Even if you don’t expect to be profitable, you can decide to spend a certain amount of money to get an early base of customers and users to inform you about important metrics such as landing page conversion rates, average cost per customer, and lifetime value.
Archives.com used AdWords to drive traffic to their landing pages, even before they built a product, to test interest in a specific product approach. By measuring the CTR for each ad and conversions, they determined which product aspects were the most compelling to potential customers and what those people would actually pay for. When they finally built their product, they built something they knew the market would want.

SEM strategy

Find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to keep improving results.
Use tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages.

Keyword research

Use Google’s keyword planner to discover top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours. You could also use tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu to discover keywords your competition is using.
You can refine your keyword list by adding more terms to the end of each base term to create long-tail keywords. They’re less competitive and have lower search volumes which makes them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers.
SEM is more expensive for more competitive keywords, so you’ll need to limit yourself to keywords with profitable conversion rates.
You shouldn’t expect your campaigns to be profitable right away, but if you can run a campaign that breaks even after a short period of time, then SEM could be an excellent channel for you to focus on.

Writing ads

Write ads with titles that are catchy, memorable, and relevant to the keywords you’ve paired with it. Include the keyword at least once in the body of your ad and conclude with a prominent call to action like “Check out discounted Nike sneakers!”
Each of your ads and ad groups will have a quality score associated with it. A high-quality score will get you better ad placements and better ad pricing. Click-through rate has the biggest influence on quality score, so you should tailor your ads to the keywords. Google assigns a low-quality score to ads with CTRs below 1.5%

Tactics

• Consider expanding your ads to the content network of non-Google sites.
• Consider luring people back to your site by retargeting through Google AdWords or other sites like AdRoll or Perfect Audience. These ads often convert better as they’re aimed at prospects who have already visited your site. (Be warned that it may feel creepy to certain people)
• Consider using Google’s Conversion Optimizer to automatically adjust your ads to perform better.
• Use negative keywords to prevent ads from showing for certain keywords you don’t want to target.
• Consider using programming scripts to manage your ads.

Social and Display Ads

Display ads are banner ads you see on websites. Social ads are ads you see on social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Large display campaigns are often used for branding and awareness, much like offline ads. They can also elicit a direct response such as signing up for an email newsletter or buying a product.
Social ads perform exceptionally well is when they’re used to build an audience and engage with them over time, and eventually convert them to customers.

Display ads

The largest display ad networks are Google Display Network, BuySellAds, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade. Niche ad networks focus on smaller sites that fit certain audience demographics, such as dog lovers or Apple fanatics.
To get started in display advertising, you could start to find out types of ads that work in your industry. You could use tools like MixRank and Adbeat to show you ads your competitors are running and where they place them. Alexa and Quantcast can help you determine who visits the sites that feature your competitors’ ads.

Social ads

Social ads work well for creating interest among potential new customers. The goal is often awareness oriented, not conversion oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line. People visit social media sites for entertainment and interaction, not to see ads.
An effective social ad strategy takes advantage of this reality. Use ads to start conversations about your products by creating compelling content. Instead of directing people to a conversion page, direct them to a piece of content that explains why you developed your product or has other purposes than immediately completing a sale. If you have a piece of content that has high organic reach, when you put paid ads behind that piece, magic happens. Paid is only as good as the content you put behind it. You should employ social ads when you know that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it.
Major social sites you may consider are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, and many others.

Offline Ads

Even today, advertisers spend more on offline ads than they do online. When buying offline ads, You should try to advertise to demographics that match up with your target audience. Ask for an audience prospectus or ad kit.
Not sure if magazine ads are a good channel for you? Buy a small ad in a niche publication and give it a test. Want to see if newspapers would be good? Buy a few ads in a local paper. You can also try radio ads and billboards.

• You can save money by signing longer ad contracts.
• Look for remnant ads which are ad space that’s unused; publications accept almost any price when selling empty ads near print deadlines.
• You could track ad effectiveness by using unique web addresses and promo codes. You could also try adding “How did you hear about us” to your sign up process.

Magazine ads

A compelling magazine or newspaper ad will have an attention-grabbing header, an eye-catching graphic, and a description of the product’s benefits. Also, you should have a strong call to action, like an offer to get a free book.

Direct mail

You could also try direct mail by searching for “direct mail lists” and find companies selling such information. (Beware that it can be perceived as spammy)

• Provide a self-addressed envelope.
• Use handwritten envelopes and cards.
• Have a clear call to action.
• Investigate bulk mail to get reduced pricing.

Local print

You could also try local print ads like local fliers, directories, calendars, church bulletins, community newsletters, coupon booklets, or yellow pages. These work really well for cheap if you want to get early traction for your company in a specific area.

Outdoor advertising

If you want to buy space on a billboard, you could contact companies like Lamar, Clear Channel, or Outfront Media. Billboards aren’t effective for people to take immediate action, but it’s extremely effective for raising awareness around events, like concerts and conferences.
DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard and it got big attention and press coverage.
Transit ads can be effective as a direct response tool. You can contact Blue Line Media to help you with Transit ads.

Radio and TV

Radio ads are priced on a cost per point (CPP) basis, where each point represents what it will cost to reach 1% of the station’s listeners. It also depends on your market, when the commercial runs and how many ads you’ve bought.
TV ads are often used as branding mechanisms. Quality is critical for it and production costs can run to tens of thousands. Higher-end ones can cost $200K to make. You’ll also need an average of $350,000 for actual airtime. For smaller startups, you could try local TV spots which is much cheaper.
Infomercials work really well for products in categories like Workout equipment, household products, health products, and work-from-home businesses. They can cost between $50,000 and $500,000, and they’re always direct-response.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is improving your ranking in search engines in order to get more people to your site.
The most important thing to know about SEO is that the more high-quality links you have to a given site or page, the higher it will rank. You should also make sure you’re using the keywords you want to target appropriately on your pages, like in your page titles and headings.
There are 2 strategies to choose from: fat-head and long-tail.
Fat-head: These are one and two-word searches like “Dishwashers,” and “Facebook.” They are searched a lot and make about 30% of searches and are called.
Long-tail: These are longer searches that don’t get searched as much but add up to the majority of searches made. They make up 70% of searches.

• “Wooden toys” is fat-head.
• “Wood puzzles for 3-year-olds” is long-tail.

When determining which strategy to use, you should keep in mind that the percentage of clicks drops off dramatically as you rank lower. Only 10% of clicks occur beyond the first page.

Fat-head strategy

To find out if fat-head is worthwhile, research what terms people use to find products in your industry, and then see if search volumes are large enough to move the needle. You can use the keyword planner tool for that. You want to find terms that have enough volume such that if you captured 10% for a given term, it would be meaningful.
The next step is determining the difficulty of ranking high for each term. Use tools like Open Site Explorer. If a competitor has thousands of links for a term, it will likely take a lot of focus on building links and optimizing to rank above them.
Next, narrow your list of targeted keywords to just a handful. Go to Google Trends to see how your keywords have been doing. Are they searched more or less often in the last year? You can further test keywords by buying SEM ads against them. If they convert well, then you have an indication that these keywords could get you strong growth.
Next, orient your site around the terms you’ve chosen. Include phrases you are targeting in your page titles and homepage. Get other sites to link to your site. Links with exact phrase matching from high-quality sites will give you a significant boost.

Long-Tail strategy

Because it’s difficult to rank high for competitive fat-head terms, a popular SEO strategy for early-stage startups is to focus on long-tail. If you bundle a lot of long-term keywords together you can reach a meaningful number of customers.
Find out what are search volumes for a bunch of long-tail keywords in your industry? Do they add up to meaningful amounts? Also, take a look at the analytics software you use on your site or google search console to find some of the search terms people are already using to get to your site. If you’re naturally getting a significant amount of traffic from long-tail keywords, then the strategy might be a good fit. Also, check if competitors use this strategy. If they have a lot of landing pages (search for site:domain.com in google), then it’s a sign that this strategy works for your market. Also, check Alexa search rankings and look at the percentage of visitors your competitors are receiving from search.
If you proceed with a long-tail SEO strategy, you’ll need to produce significant amounts of quality content. If you can’t invest time in that, you can pay a freelancer from Upwork to write an article for every search phrase you want to target.
Another way is to use content that naturally flows from your business. Ask yourself: what data do we naturally collect or generate that other people may find useful. Large businesses like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Wikipedia all gained most of their traffic by producing automated long-tail content. Sometimes the data is hidden behind a login screen and all you need to do is expose it to search engines, or aggregate it in a useful manner.

How to get links?

Don’t buy links, you’ll be penalized by search engines for it. Instead, you can do:

• Publicity - Get covered by a publication.
• Product - Produce shareable web pages.
• Content marketing - Create strong shareable content. Content that’s highly shareable include infographics, slideshows, images, and original research.
• Widgets - Give site owners useful things to add to their sites which link back to yours.

Content Marketing

Companies like Moz and Unbounce have well-known company blogs that are their biggest source of customer acquisition.
Unbounce started a blog and an email list from day one. They used social media to drive readers to your blog. They pinged twitter influencers to ask for feedback, gave away free infographics, and e-books. These actions don’t scale but they push them to a point where their content will spread on its own.
OkCupid is a free online dating site. They intentionally wrote controversial posts like “How your race affects the messages you get” to generate traffic and conversation.

Tactics

• Overcome writer’s block by writing about the problems facing your target customers.
• Use infographics because they are shared 20x more.
• Show your readers that they have a problem they didn’t know about.
• Engage in online forums where your target customers are, and try to contribute.
• Do guest posting on other popular blogs.
• Keep a regular content schedule.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a personal channel. Messages from your company sit next to emails from friends and family. That’s why email marketing works best when personalized. It can be used to build familiarity with prospects, acquire customers, and retain customers you already have.

Email marketing to Find customers

• Build an email list of prospective customers through your other marketing efforts.
• At the bottom of your blog posts and landing pages, simply ask for an email address.
• Create a short free course related to your area.
• Consider advertising on email newsletters.

Email marketing to Engage customers

If a customer never gets the value of your product, how can you expect them to pay for it or recommend it to others?

• Determine the steps necessary for customers to get value from your product
• Create targeted emails to make sure people complete these steps.
• You can use tools like Vero and Customer.io to automate these messages.
• Send an automated personal email 30 minutes after they signup to ask they if they need help.

Email marketing to Retain customers

Email marketing can be the most effective channel to bring people back to your site. Twitter sends you an email with a weekly digest of popular tweets and your new notifications.
More business-oriented products usually focus on reminders, reports, and information about how you’re getting value from the product. Mint sends a weekly financial summary to show your expenses and income over the previous week.
You can also use it to surprise and delight your customers. Planscope sends a weekly email to customers telling them how much they made that week. Photo apps will send you pictures you took a year ago.

Email marketing to Drive revenue

You can send a series of emails aimed at upselling customers.
WP Engine sends prospects an email course about Wordpress, and near the end of the email, they make a pitch to signup for its premium Wordpress hosting service.
If one of your customers abandoned a shopping cart, send her a targeted email a day or two later with a special offer for whatever item is left in the cart.
You can use email to explain a premium feature a customer is missing out on and how it can help them in a big way.

Email marketing to get referrals

Groupon generates referrals by incentivizing people to tell their friends about discounts.

Tactics

• Use an email marketing provider that helps ensure deliverability like MailChimp.
• Use A/B tests for every aspect including subjects, formats, images, timing, and more.
• Send emails between 9 AM and 12 PM in your customers’ time zone or schedule them at the time they registered for your email list.
• Learn copywriting techniques by checking resources like copy hackers.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is getting your existing customers to refer others to your product. It was the driving force behind the explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
It’s so powerful that even if you can’t achieve exponential growth with it, you can still get meaningful growth. If your customer refers a new customer within the first week, you’ll go from ten customers to twenty and double every week without any additional marketing.
The oldest form of virality occurs when your product is so remarkable that people naturally tell others about it — pure word of mouth.
Inherent virality occurs when you can get value from a product only by inviting other customers, like Skype, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.
Others grow by encouraging collaboration like Google Docs.
Some embed virality like adding “Get a free email account with Hotmail” or “Sent from iPhone” to default signatures. Mailchimp and other email marketing products add branding to free customers’ emails.
Some incentivize customers to move through a viral loop, like Dropbox giving you more space if you invite friends to sign up. Airbnb, Uber, and PayPal give you account credits for referring friends.
Some add embedded buttons and widgets to grow virally, like Reddit and YouTube.
Some broadcast users activities on their social networks, like Spotify posting on Facebook when you play a song, or Pinterest when you pin content.
The viral coefficient K is the number of additional customers you can get for each customer you bring in. It depends on i, the number of invites sent per user, and conversion percentage (who will actually sign up after receiving an invite)
K = i * conversion percentage
Any viral coefficient above 1 will result in exponential growth. Any viral coefficient over 0.5 helps your efforts to grow considerably.
You can increase the number of invites per user i by including features that encourage sharing, such as posting to social networks. You can increase the conversion percentage by testing different signup flows. Try cutting out pages or signup fields.
Viral cycle time is how long it takes a user to go through your viral loop. Shortening your cycle time drastically increases the rate at which you go viral. You can do it by creating urgency or incentivizing customers to move through the loops.

Tactics

• Measure your viral coefficient and cycle time from the start
• Run as many A/B tests as you can. Focus on big changes that would result in a 5-10x improvement in a key metric, like a new email autoresponder or website design or onboarding flow. Then optimize smaller stuff.
• You need a constant stream of new customers entering the viral loop. This is called “seeding.” You could use SEO and online ads for that.
• Copy those who have done it before.

Engineering as Marketing

You can build tools like calculators, widgets, and educational microsites to get your company in front of potential customers.
HubSpot has Marketing Grade, a free marketing review tool. It’s free, gives you valuable information, and provides HubSpot with the information they use to qualify you as a potential prospect.
Moz has two free SEO tools, Followerwong and Open Site Explorer. They’ve driven tens of thousands of leads for Moz.
WP Engine has a speed testing tool that asks only for an email address in exchange for a detailed report on your site’s speed.

• Provide something of true value.
• Make the offering extremely relevant to your core business.
• Put microsites and tools on their own domains. It makes it easier to share and does well with SEO when people search for your tool.

Business Development

With business development, you’re partnering to reach customers in a way that benefits both parties.
Google got most of its initial traction from a partnership with Netscape to be the default search engine and an agreement with Yahoo to power its online searches.
Business development can take the form of:

• Standard partnership, like Apple and Nike producing Nike+ shoe that communicates with the iPhone.
• Joint ventures: Two companies working together to produce a new product. Like bottled Starbucks Frappuccino produced by Pepsi.
• Licencing: Spotify licensing music from record labels.
• Distribution deals: Groupon works with a restaurant to offer a discount to Groupon’s mailing list.
• Supply partnership: Deals between suppliers and Walmart.

You should have already defined your traction goal and milestones, and you shouldn’t accept any partnership that doesn’t align with it. Many startups waste resources because it’s tempting to make deals with bigger companies.

• Create an exhaustive list of all your possible partners.
• Send it to your investors and friends for warm introductions.
• Approach potential customers with a value-focused proposition that outlines why they should work with you.
• Make sure to find out who is in charge of the metric you’ve targeted, and contact them directly.
• Make the negotiation and term sheet as simple as possible

Sales

Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying customers. It’s particularly useful for expensive and enterprise products.

Structuring the sales conversation

Situation questions. Ask one or two questions per conversation. The more you ask situation questions, the less likely they’re going to close.

• How many employees do you have?
• How is your organization structured

Problem questions. Use sparingly.

• Are you happy with your current solution?
• What problems do you face with it?

Implication questions. Meant to make a prospect aware of the large implications that stem from the problem.

• Does this problem hurt your productivity?
• How many people does it impact?
• What customer or employee turnover are you experiencing because of it?

Need-payoff questions. Focus attention on your solution and get buyers to think about the benefits of solving the problem.

• How do you feel this solution would help you?

Cold calls

Be judicious about the people you contact. You want someone who is one-two levels up in the organization. They have enough perspective on the problem and some authority for decision making. Avoid starting at the top unless you’re calling a very small business.
Try to get answers about:

• Process: How does the company buy a solution like this?
• Need: How badly does the company need a solution for this?
• Authority: Which individuals can make the purchase happen?
• Money: Do they have the funds? How much not solving the problem cost them?
• Timing: What are budget and decision timelines for purchase?

Tactics

It’s better to gain traction through a marketing channel first, then use sales as a conversion tool to close leads. The next stage is lead qualification: determine how ready a prospect is to buy. Once you’ve qualified the leads, you should lay out exactly what are you going to do for the customer. Set up a timetable for it and get them to commit with a yes or no whether they’re going to buy. Closing leads can be done by a sales team who does a webinar or product demo and has an ongoing email sequence that ends with a purchase request. In other cases, you may need a field sales team that actually visits prospective customers for some part of the process.
A checklist that can help you with sales:

• Remove the need for IT installs
• Free trials
• Channel partners
• FAQs
• Demo videos or Webinars
• Testimonials or case studies
• Email campaigns
• Low introductory price (less than $250/mo for SMB, $10,000 for enterprises)

I removed the last sections because of the post character limit. Here are two:

Here is the summary of the book Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive growth.
I hope that you find it useful!
​
Traction is a sign that your startup is taking off. If you charge, it means customers are buying. If your product is free, it means your user base is growing.
If you have traction, all your technical, market, and team risks become easier to handle. It becomes easier to fund-raise, hire, do press, partnerships, and acquisitions.
Traction trumps everything.

How to think about Traction?

Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have is enough customers.
You should spend your time in parallel, both constructing your product and testing traction channels.
This is what we call the 50 percent rule: spend 50 percent of your time on product and 50% on traction. This rule seems simple but it’s hard to follow because the pull to spend all your attention on the product is strong. You’re probably making a startup because you want to build a particular product. You have a vision, but a lot of traction activities are unknown and outside your vision and comfort zone. So you try to avoid them. Don’t.
Doing product and traction in parallel has these benefits:

• You get knowledge from traction efforts, so you’ll build the right product for your customers.
• You get to experiment and test different traction channels before you launch anything. This means when your product is ready, you can grow rapidly.

Before trying to get traction, you’ll need to define what traction means for your company. You need to set a traction goal. Maybe your current startup goal is to raise funding or become profitable. How many customers do you need and at what rate? You should then focus on marketing activities that result in a significant impact on your traction goal. It should move the needle.
Your startup has 3 phases:

Phase I: Make something people want

In phase 1, your product has the most leaks, it really doesn’t hold water. You shouldn’t scale up your efforts now, but it’s important to send a small amount of water through the bucket so you can see where the holes are and plug them. \ Your goal in phase 1 is to get your first customers and prove your product can get traction. You focus on building your initial product and getting traction in ways that don’t scale: giving talks, writing guest posts, emailing people you know, attending conferences, and doing whatever you can to get in front of customers.
​

Some founders believe that startups either take off or don’t. Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off!

– Paul Graham

Phase II: Market something people want

Once you hone your product, you have product-market fit and customers are sticking around. Now is the time to scale up your traction efforts. You fine-tune your positioning and marketing messages.

Phase III: Scale your business

As your company grows, smaller traction strategies stop moving the needle, so you’ll start to scale.
In phase 3 you have an established business model and significant position in the market, and you’re focused on scaling to further dominate the market and to profit.

Traction for funding

When pursuing funding, first contact individuals who understand what you’re working on. The better your investors understand what you’re doing, the less traction they’ll need to see before they invest. Also, try friends and family who may not need to see any traction before investing as they’re investing in you personally.

To pivot or not to pivot

Many startups give up way too early. The first thing to look for is evidence of real product engagement, even if it’s only a few dedicated customers. If you have such an engagement, you might be giving up too soon. Look for the bright spots in your customer base and see if you can expand from that base.

How to get traction? The Bullseye framework

The Bullseye framework helps you find the channel that will get you traction. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.
You’re aiming for bullseye: the one channel at the center of the target that will unlock your next growth stage. Here are the 3 Bullseye framework steps:

Find what’s possible: The outer-ring

The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. It’s important not to dismiss any channel in this step. Think of at least one idea for each channel. For example, social ads is a traction channel. Running ads on Facebook or Twitter is a channel strategy within social ads. You could research what marketing strategies worked in your industry as well as the history of companies in your space.

Find what’s probable: The middle-ring

Go around your outer-ring and promote your best and most exciting ideas to your middle-ring. For each traction channel in your middle ring, now construct a cheap traction test you can run to find if the idea is good or not. These tests need to answer the following questions:

1. What’s the cost of acquiring customers?
2. How many customers are available?
3. Are they the right type of customers for you now?

You want to design small scale tests that don’t require much up-front cost or effort. For example, run 4 Facebook ads instead of 40.

Find what’s working: The inner-ring

The final step in Bullseye is to only focus on one channel that will move the needle for your startup: your core channel. At any stage of your startup, you should have one traction channel that you’re focusing on and optimizing.
Most founders mess this up by keeping around distracting marketing efforts in other channels.
If search engine marketing is significantly better for you than other channels, you should focus all your efforts on this core channel and uncover additional strategies and tactics within it.
If no channel seems promising after testing, the whole process should be repeated. If you tried several times with no success, then your product may require more tweaking and your bucket might be still leaky.

How to test traction?

Middle-ring tests: You should be running several cheap tests that give you an indication of how successful a given channel strategy could be.
Inner ring tests:
You’re doing two things:

1. Optimize your chosen channel strategy to make it the best it can be.
2. Discover better channel strategies within this traction channel.

There is always a set of things you can tweak. For targeting blogs, you can tweak which blogs to target, type of content, call to action, etc. For search engine marketing, you can tweak keywords, ad-copy, demographics, and landing pages.
A common approach is to use A/B testing, where A is the control group and B is the experimental group. The purpose of it is to measure the effectiveness of change in a button color, an ad image, or a different message on a web page. If the experimental group performs significantly better, you can apply the change, get the benefits, and run another test.
You can use tools such as Optimizely, Visual Website Optimizer, and Unbounce.
Over time, all marketing channels become saturated. To combat this, you should always be trying to discover new strategies and tactics within your channel and conduct small experiments. Also, experiment with new marketing platforms while they’re still in their infancy.

Tools

To track your tests you could start with a simple spreadsheet or use an analytics tool with cohort analysis. You’ll need to answer these questions:

1. How many people landed on the website?
2. What are the demographics of my best and worst customers?
3. Are customers who interact with my support team more likely to stay?

A basic analytics tool like Clicky, Mixpanel, or Chartbeat can help you with these questions. You can use a spreadsheet as the tool to rank and prioritize traction channel strategies. You should include columns like how many customers are available, conversion rate, the cost to acquire a customer, lifetime value of a customer for every given strategy.

How to focus on the right traction goals? The critical path framework

Define your traction goal

You should always have an explicit traction goal you’re working towards. This could be 1,000 paying customers or 100 new daily customers, or 10% of your market. You want a goal where hitting the mark would change things significantly for your company’s outcome.
Once that is defined, you can work backward and set clear time-based subgoals. Such as reaching 1,000 customers by next quarter.
The key is to follow the critical path towards that goal and exclude all features and marketing activities that don’t help you reach your goal. Everything you decide to do should be assessed against your critical path.

Avoid traction biases

Your competitive advantage may be acquiring customers in ways your competition isn’t. That’s why it’s critical to avoid have traction biases. Stop your urge to refuse channels like speaking engagements, sales or affiliate marketing, business development, or trade shows just because you hate talking on the phone or you find the channel annoying or time-consuming.

Targetting blogs

Targeting blogs that your prospective customers read is one of the best ways to get your first wave customers.
Mint’s initial series of tests revealed that targeting blogs should be its core channel. They asked users to embed an “I want mint” badge on their personal blogs and rewarded them with a VIP access before other invitations were sent out. They also directly sponsored blogs. They sent bloggers a message with “Can I send you $500” as the subject and told them a bit about the product.
To find smaller blogs in your niche:

• Google “top blogs for x” or “best x blogs.”
• Search for your product keywords on YouTube.
• Use tools like FollowerWonk and Klout to find top twitter accounts in your industry.
• Use social mention to find sites with the most frequent mentions for your keywords.
• Talk to people to figure out what your target audience is really reading online.

You can also target link-sharing communities like Reddit, Product Hunt, and Hacker News.
Dropbox, Codecademy, Quora, and Gumroad all got their first customers by sharing their products on HackerNews because their products were a good fit for users on that site.

Publicity

Starting out, an article in TechCrunch or The Huffington Post can boost your startup in the eyes of potential customers, investors, or partners. If you have a fascinating story with broad appeal, media outlets will want to hear from you.
It’s easier to start smaller when targeting big media outlets. Sites like TechCrunch and Lifehacker often pick up stories from smaller forums like Hacker News and subreddits. Instead of approaching TechCrunch, try blogs that TechCrunch reads and get story ideas from. It’s easier to get a smaller blog’s attention. Then you might get featured on TechCrunch and then The New York Times which reads TechCrunch!
What gets a reporter’s attention?

• Milestones like raising money, launching a new product, breaking a usage barrier.
• A PR stunt.
• A big partnership.
• A special industry report.

A good press angle makes people react emotionally. If it’s not interesting enough to elicit emotion, you don’t have a story worth pitching.
A good first step is using a service like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), where reporters request sources for articles they’re working on. It could get you a mention in the piece and help establish your credibility. Also, you could offer reporters commentary on stories related to your industries.
You can use Twitter to reach reporters online; almost all of them have Twitter accounts and you’d be surprised how few followers many of them have, but they can be highly influential with their content.
Once you have a solid story, you want to draw as much attention to it as you can:

• Submit the story to link-sharing sites like Reddit and HackerNews
• Share it on social networks
• Email it to influencers in your industry for comment.
• Ping blogs in your space and tell them you have a story that’s getting buzz.

Once your story has been established as a popular news item, try to drag it out as long as you can. Offer interviews that add to the story. Start “How We Did This” follow-up interviews.
As your startup grows you may consider hiring a PR firm or consultant.

Unconventional PR

Nearly every company attempts traditional publicity, but only a few focus on stunts and other unconventional ways to get buzz.

The publicity stunt

• Half.com renamed (Halfway, Oregon) to Half.com and launched it on the Today show with the mayor of Halfway, Oregon.
• Richard Branson made his press conferences as outlandish as possible (dressing like a woman, driving a tank through the streets) to get the media talking about whatever Virgin was launching.
• WePay (a PayPal competitor) placed a 600-pound block of ice at PayPal’s conference entrance.
• DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard highlighting its privacy focus.
• Blendtec created a series of videos called “Will It Blend?” where they blended items like a rake, golf balls, and even an iPhone.
• When Grasshopper did a rebrand, they sent chocolate-covered grasshoppers to 5,000 influential people.

Customer Appreciation

Be awesome to your customers. Shortly after Alexis Ohanian launched Hipmunk, he sent out luggage tags and a handwritten note to the first several hundred people who mentioned the site on Twitter.
Holding a contest is also a great repeatable way to generate publicity and get word of mouth. Shopify has an annual Build a Business competition.
Great customer support is so rare that, if you make your customers happy, they’re likely to spread the news of your awesome product. Zappos is one of the best-known examples of a company with incredible customer service and they classify support as a marketing investment.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM is placing ads on search engines like Google. It’s sometimes called “pay-per-click” because you only pay when a user clicks on an ad.
SEM works well for companies looking to sell directly to their target customer. You’re capturing people who are actively searching for solutions.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) The percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks to your site.
Cost per Click (CPC) The amount it costs to buy a click on an ad.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA) How much it costs you to acquire a customer, not just a click. If you buy clicks at $1 and 10% of people who hit your site make a purchase. This makes your CPA at $10.
CPA = CPC / conversion percentage

SEM to get early customer data

You can use SEM as a way to get early customer data in a controlled and predictable way. Even if you don’t expect to be profitable, you can decide to spend a certain amount of money to get an early base of customers and users to inform you about important metrics such as landing page conversion rates, average cost per customer, and lifetime value.
Archives.com used AdWords to drive traffic to their landing pages, even before they built a product, to test interest in a specific product approach. By measuring the CTR for each ad and conversions, they determined which product aspects were the most compelling to potential customers and what those people would actually pay for. When they finally built their product, they built something they knew the market would want.

SEM strategy

Find high-potential keywords, group them into ad groups, and test different ad copy and landing pages within each ad group. As data flows in, remove underperforming ads and landing pages and make tweaks to keep improving results.
Use tools like Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages.

Keyword research

Use Google’s keyword planner to discover top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours. You could also use tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu to discover keywords your competition is using.
You can refine your keyword list by adding more terms to the end of each base term to create long-tail keywords. They’re less competitive and have lower search volumes which makes them ideal for testing on smaller groups of customers.
SEM is more expensive for more competitive keywords, so you’ll need to limit yourself to keywords with profitable conversion rates.
You shouldn’t expect your campaigns to be profitable right away, but if you can run a campaign that breaks even after a short period of time, then SEM could be an excellent channel for you to focus on.

Writing ads

Write ads with titles that are catchy, memorable, and relevant to the keywords you’ve paired with it. Include the keyword at least once in the body of your ad and conclude with a prominent call to action like “Check out discounted Nike sneakers!”
Each of your ads and ad groups will have a quality score associated with it. A high-quality score will get you better ad placements and better ad pricing. Click-through rate has the biggest influence on quality score, so you should tailor your ads to the keywords. Google assigns a low-quality score to ads with CTRs below 1.5%

Tactics

• Consider expanding your ads to the content network of non-Google sites.
• Consider luring people back to your site by retargeting through Google AdWords or other sites like AdRoll or Perfect Audience. These ads often convert better as they’re aimed at prospects who have already visited your site. (Be warned that it may feel creepy to certain people)
• Consider using Google’s Conversion Optimizer to automatically adjust your ads to perform better.
• Use negative keywords to prevent ads from showing for certain keywords you don’t want to target.
• Consider using programming scripts to manage your ads.

Social and Display Ads

Display ads are banner ads you see on websites. Social ads are ads you see on social sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Large display campaigns are often used for branding and awareness, much like offline ads. They can also elicit a direct response such as signing up for an email newsletter or buying a product.
Social ads perform exceptionally well is when they’re used to build an audience and engage with them over time, and eventually convert them to customers.

Display ads

The largest display ad networks are Google Display Network, BuySellAds, Advertising.com, Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade. Niche ad networks focus on smaller sites that fit certain audience demographics, such as dog lovers or Apple fanatics.
To get started in display advertising, you could start to find out types of ads that work in your industry. You could use tools like MixRank and Adbeat to show you ads your competitors are running and where they place them. Alexa and Quantcast can help you determine who visits the sites that feature your competitors’ ads.

Social ads

Social ads work well for creating interest among potential new customers. The goal is often awareness oriented, not conversion oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line. People visit social media sites for entertainment and interaction, not to see ads.
An effective social ad strategy takes advantage of this reality. Use ads to start conversations about your products by creating compelling content. Instead of directing people to a conversion page, direct them to a piece of content that explains why you developed your product or has other purposes than immediately completing a sale. If you have a piece of content that has high organic reach, when you put paid ads behind that piece, magic happens. Paid is only as good as the content you put behind it. You should employ social ads when you know that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it.
Major social sites you may consider are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Foursquare, Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, and many others.

Offline Ads

Even today, advertisers spend more on offline ads than they do online. When buying offline ads, You should try to advertise to demographics that match up with your target audience. Ask for an audience prospectus or ad kit.
Not sure if magazine ads are a good channel for you? Buy a small ad in a niche publication and give it a test. Want to see if newspapers would be good? Buy a few ads in a local paper. You can also try radio ads and billboards.

• You can save money by signing longer ad contracts.
• Look for remnant ads which are ad space that’s unused; publications accept almost any price when selling empty ads near print deadlines.
• You could track ad effectiveness by using unique web addresses and promo codes. You could also try adding “How did you hear about us” to your sign up process.

Magazine ads

A compelling magazine or newspaper ad will have an attention-grabbing header, an eye-catching graphic, and a description of the product’s benefits. Also, you should have a strong call to action, like an offer to get a free book.

Direct mail

You could also try direct mail by searching for “direct mail lists” and find companies selling such information. (Beware that it can be perceived as spammy)

• Provide a self-addressed envelope.
• Use handwritten envelopes and cards.
• Have a clear call to action.
• Investigate bulk mail to get reduced pricing.

Local print

You could also try local print ads like local fliers, directories, calendars, church bulletins, community newsletters, coupon booklets, or yellow pages. These work really well for cheap if you want to get early traction for your company in a specific area.

Outdoor advertising

If you want to buy space on a billboard, you could contact companies like Lamar, Clear Channel, or Outfront Media. Billboards aren’t effective for people to take immediate action, but it’s extremely effective for raising awareness around events, like concerts and conferences.
DuckDuckGo bought a billboard in Google’s backyard and it got big attention and press coverage.
Transit ads can be effective as a direct response tool. You can contact Blue Line Media to help you with Transit ads.

Radio and TV

Radio ads are priced on a cost per point (CPP) basis, where each point represents what it will cost to reach 1% of the station’s listeners. It also depends on your market, when the commercial runs and how many ads you’ve bought.
TV ads are often used as branding mechanisms. Quality is critical for it and production costs can run to tens of thousands. Higher-end ones can cost $200K to make. You’ll also need an average of $350,000 for actual airtime. For smaller startups, you could try local TV spots which is much cheaper.
Infomercials work really well for products in categories like Workout equipment, household products, health products, and work-from-home businesses. They can cost between $50,000 and $500,000, and they’re always direct-response.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is improving your ranking in search engines in order to get more people to your site.
The most important thing to know about SEO is that the more high-quality links you have to a given site or page, the higher it will rank. You should also make sure you’re using the keywords you want to target appropriately on your pages, like in your page titles and headings.
There are 2 strategies to choose from: fat-head and long-tail.
Fat-head: These are one and two-word searches like “Dishwashers,” and “Facebook.” They are searched a lot and make about 30% of searches and are called.
Long-tail: These are longer searches that don’t get searched as much but add up to the majority of searches made. They make up 70% of searches.

• “Wooden toys” is fat-head.
• “Wood puzzles for 3-year-olds” is long-tail.

When determining which strategy to use, you should keep in mind that the percentage of clicks drops off dramatically as you rank lower. Only 10% of clicks occur beyond the first page.

Fat-head strategy

To find out if fat-head is worthwhile, research what terms people use to find products in your industry, and then see if search volumes are large enough to move the needle. You can use the keyword planner tool for that. You want to find terms that have enough volume such that if you captured 10% for a given term, it would be meaningful.
The next step is determining the difficulty of ranking high for each term. Use tools like Open Site Explorer. If a competitor has thousands of links for a term, it will likely take a lot of focus on building links and optimizing to rank above them.
Next, narrow your list of targeted keywords to just a handful. Go to Google Trends to see how your keywords have been doing. Are they searched more or less often in the last year? You can further test keywords by buying SEM ads against them. If they convert well, then you have an indication that these keywords could get you strong growth.
Next, orient your site around the terms you’ve chosen. Include phrases you are targeting in your page titles and homepage. Get other sites to link to your site. Links with exact phrase matching from high-quality sites will give you a significant boost.

Long-Tail strategy

Because it’s difficult to rank high for competitive fat-head terms, a popular SEO strategy for early-stage startups is to focus on long-tail. If you bundle a lot of long-term keywords together you can reach a meaningful number of customers.
Find out what are search volumes for a bunch of long-tail keywords in your industry? Do they add up to meaningful amounts? Also, take a look at the analytics software you use on your site or google search console to find some of the search terms people are already using to get to your site. If you’re naturally getting a significant amount of traffic from long-tail keywords, then the strategy might be a good fit. Also, check if competitors use this strategy. If they have a lot of landing pages (search for site:domain.com in google), then it’s a sign that this strategy works for your market. Also, check Alexa search rankings and look at the percentage of visitors your competitors are receiving from search.
If you proceed with a long-tail SEO strategy, you’ll need to produce significant amounts of quality content. If you can’t invest time in that, you can pay a freelancer from Upwork to write an article for every search phrase you want to target.
Another way is to use content that naturally flows from your business. Ask yourself: what data do we naturally collect or generate that other people may find useful. Large businesses like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Wikipedia all gained most of their traffic by producing automated long-tail content. Sometimes the data is hidden behind a login screen and all you need to do is expose it to search engines, or aggregate it in a useful manner.

How to get links?

Don’t buy links, you’ll be penalized by search engines for it. Instead, you can do:

• Publicity - Get covered by a publication.
• Product - Produce shareable web pages.
• Content marketing - Create strong shareable content. Content that’s highly shareable include infographics, slideshows, images, and original research.
• Widgets - Give site owners useful things to add to their sites which link back to yours.

Content Marketing

Companies like Moz and Unbounce have well-known company blogs that are their biggest source of customer acquisition.
Unbounce started a blog and an email list from day one. They used social media to drive readers to your blog. They pinged twitter influencers to ask for feedback, gave away free infographics, and e-books. These actions don’t scale but they push them to a point where their content will spread on its own.
OkCupid is a free online dating site. They intentionally wrote controversial posts like “How your race affects the messages you get” to generate traffic and conversation.

Tactics

• Overcome writer’s block by writing about the problems facing your target customers.
• Use infographics because they are shared 20x more.
• Show your readers that they have a problem they didn’t know about.
• Engage in online forums where your target customers are, and try to contribute.
• Do guest posting on other popular blogs.
• Keep a regular content schedule.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a personal channel. Messages from your company sit next to emails from friends and family. That’s why email marketing works best when personalized. It can be used to build familiarity with prospects, acquire customers, and retain customers you already have.

Email marketing to Find customers

• Build an email list of prospective customers through your other marketing efforts.
• At the bottom of your blog posts and landing pages, simply ask for an email address.
• Create a short free course related to your area.
• Consider advertising on email newsletters.

Email marketing to Engage customers

If a customer never gets the value of your product, how can you expect them to pay for it or recommend it to others?

• Determine the steps necessary for customers to get value from your product
• Create targeted emails to make sure people complete these steps.
• You can use tools like Vero and Customer.io to automate these messages.
• Send an automated personal email 30 minutes after they signup to ask they if they need help.

Email marketing to Retain customers

Email marketing can be the most effective channel to bring people back to your site. Twitter sends you an email with a weekly digest of popular tweets and your new notifications.
More business-oriented products usually focus on reminders, reports, and information about how you’re getting value from the product. Mint sends a weekly financial summary to show your expenses and income over the previous week.
You can also use it to surprise and delight your customers. Planscope sends a weekly email to customers telling them how much they made that week. Photo apps will send you pictures you took a year ago.

Email marketing to Drive revenue

You can send a series of emails aimed at upselling customers.
WP Engine sends prospects an email course about Wordpress, and near the end of the email, they make a pitch to signup for its premium Wordpress hosting service.
If one of your customers abandoned a shopping cart, send her a targeted email a day or two later with a special offer for whatever item is left in the cart.
You can use email to explain a premium feature a customer is missing out on and how it can help them in a big way.

Email marketing to get referrals

Groupon generates referrals by incentivizing people to tell their friends about discounts.

Tactics

• Use an email marketing provider that helps ensure deliverability like MailChimp.
• Use A/B tests for every aspect including subjects, formats, images, timing, and more.
• Send emails between 9 AM and 12 PM in your customers’ time zone or schedule them at the time they registered for your email list.
• Learn copywriting techniques by checking resources like copy hackers.

Viral Marketing

Viral marketing is getting your existing customers to refer others to your product. It was the driving force behind the explosive growth of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Dropbox, Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest.
It’s so powerful that even if you can’t achieve exponential growth with it, you can still get meaningful growth. If your customer refers a new customer within the first week, you’ll go from ten customers to twenty and double every week without any additional marketing.
The oldest form of virality occurs when your product is so remarkable that people naturally tell others about it — pure word of mouth.
Inherent virality occurs when you can get value from a product only by inviting other customers, like Skype, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.
Others grow by encouraging collaboration like Google Docs.
Some embed virality like adding “Get a free email account with Hotmail” or “Sent from iPhone” to default signatures. Mailchimp and other email marketing products add branding to free customers’ emails.
Some incentivize customers to move through a viral loop, like Dropbox giving you more space if you invite friends to sign up. Airbnb, Uber, and PayPal give you account credits for referring friends.
Some add embedded buttons and widgets to grow virally, like Reddit and YouTube.
Some broadcast users activities on their social networks, like Spotify posting on Facebook when you play a song, or Pinterest when you pin content.
The viral coefficient K is the number of additional customers you can get for each customer you bring in. It depends on i, the number of invites sent per user, and conversion percentage (who will actually sign up after receiving an invite)
K = i * conversion percentage
Any viral coefficient above 1 will result in exponential growth. Any viral coefficient over 0.5 helps your efforts to grow considerably.
You can increase the number of invites per user i by including features that encourage sharing, such as posting to social networks. You can increase the conversion percentage by testing different signup flows. Try cutting out pages or signup fields.
Viral cycle time is how long it takes a user to go through your viral loop. Shortening your cycle time drastically increases the rate at which you go viral. You can do it by creating urgency or incentivizing customers to move through the loops.

Tactics

• Measure your viral coefficient and cycle time from the start
• Run as many A/B tests as you can. Focus on big changes that would result in a 5-10x improvement in a key metric, like a new email autoresponder or website design or onboarding flow. Then optimize smaller stuff.
• You need a constant stream of new customers entering the viral loop. This is called “seeding.” You could use SEO and online ads for that.
• Copy those who have done it before.

Engineering as Marketing

You can build tools like calculators, widgets, and educational microsites to get your company in front of potential customers.
HubSpot has Marketing Grade, a free marketing review tool. It’s free, gives you valuable information, and provides HubSpot with the information they use to qualify you as a potential prospect.
Moz has two free SEO tools, Followerwong and Open Site Explorer. They’ve driven tens of thousands of leads for Moz.
WP Engine has a speed testing tool that asks only for an email address in exchange for a detailed report on your site’s speed.

• Provide something of true value.
• Make the offering extremely relevant to your core business.
• Put microsites and tools on their own domains. It makes it easier to share and does well with SEO when people search for your tool.

Business Development

With business development, you’re partnering to reach customers in a way that benefits both parties.
Google got most of its initial traction from a partnership with Netscape to be the default search engine and an agreement with Yahoo to power its online searches.
Business development can take the form of:

• Standard partnership, like Apple and Nike producing Nike+ shoe that communicates with the iPhone.
• Joint ventures: Two companies working together to produce a new product. Like bottled Starbucks Frappuccino produced by Pepsi.
• Licencing: Spotify licensing music from record labels.
• Distribution deals: Groupon works with a restaurant to offer a discount to Groupon’s mailing list.
• Supply partnership: Deals between suppliers and Walmart.

You should have already defined your traction goal and milestones, and you shouldn’t accept any partnership that doesn’t align with it. Many startups waste resources because it’s tempting to make deals with bigger companies.

• Create an exhaustive list of all your possible partners.
• Send it to your investors and friends for warm introductions.
• Approach potential customers with a value-focused proposition that outlines why they should work with you.
• Make sure to find out who is in charge of the metric you’ve targeted, and contact them directly.
• Make the negotiation and term sheet as simple as possible

Sales

Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying customers. It’s particularly useful for expensive and enterprise products.

Structuring the sales conversation

Situation questions. Ask one or two questions per conversation. The more you ask situation questions, the less likely they’re going to close.

• How many employees do you have?
• How is your organization structured

Problem questions. Use sparingly.

• Are you happy with your current solution?
• What problems do you face with it?

Implication questions. Meant to make a prospect aware of the large implications that stem from the problem.

• Does this problem hurt your productivity?
• How many people does it impact?
• What customer or employee turnover are you experiencing because of it?

Need-payoff questions. Focus attention on your solution and get buyers to think about the benefits of solving the problem.

• How do you feel this solution would help you?

Cold calls

Be judicious about the people you contact. You want someone who is one-two levels up in the organization. They have enough perspective on the problem and some authority for decision making. Avoid starting at the top unless you’re calling a very small business.
Try to get answers about:

• Process: How does the company buy a solution like this?
• Need: How badly does the company need a solution for this?
• Authority: Which individuals can make the purchase happen?
• Money: Do they have the funds? How much not solving the problem cost them?
• Timing: What are budget and decision timelines for purchase?

Tactics

It’s better to gain traction through a marketing channel first, then use sales as a conversion tool to close leads. The next stage is lead qualification: determine how ready a prospect is to buy. Once you’ve qualified the leads, you should lay out exactly what are you going to do for the customer. Set up a timetable for it and get them to commit with a yes or no whether they’re going to buy. Closing leads can be done by a sales team who does a webinar or product demo and has an ongoing email sequence that ends with a purchase request. In other cases, you may need a field sales team that actually visits prospective customers for some part of the process.
A checklist that can help you with sales:

• Remove the need for IT installs
• Free trials
• Channel partners
• FAQs
• Demo videos or Webinars
• Testimonials or case studies
• Email campaigns
• Low introductory price (less than $250/mo for SMB, $10,000 for enterprises)