If you’ve ever come across the term darkposting on social media, here’s what to know about what it means…
Gone are the days that all ads look like ads and influencers don’t have to disclose sponsored content. These days, social media is becoming less intrusive, but more transparent when it comes to advertising with darkposting.
Darkposting is the middle ground between obvious brand posts and influencer lifestyle content. But exactly is darkposting, and how does it work?
What is Darkposting?
Image Gallery (3 Images)
Pioneered by Facebook, darkposts are social media ads that don’t show up on the brand or page’s timeline like a regular boosted or sponsored post.
For most social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, you can choose between boosting your organic content or creating a darkpost.
However, darkposts are enabled by default on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.
Darkposting is commonly used to A/B test ad performance, such as testing different headlines, markets, and images.
It’s a great way for brands to keep a clean social media appearance on their main pages, while being able to experiment with their audience feed posts. In combination with whitelisting on Facebook, creators can give brands limited use of their handles or pages and post darkposts for them.
While under the name or handle of the creator, darkposts appear on timelines and feeds without affecting a creator’s main channels.
How Does Darkposting Work?
Darkposting creates the illusion that creators create and share the content themselves. However, if you’re thinking that your favorite influencer replied to your message on a darkpost, chances are it’s actually a brand representative talking to you.
Clicking or interacting with darkposts of any kind counts as interacting with a sponsored post. With this, interacting with a darkpost will affect what kind of ads you will be served within a social media ecosystem in the future.
Don’t Get Tricked by Advertising
When it comes to advertising, social media sites are becoming sneakier with how they present their ads.
While most people would agree that darkposts are a lot less annoying than regular ads, it’s always good to mindful of how they impact your social media experience.
That being said, ads aren’t always bad. They’re the trade-off that many social media sites use to provide us their services. Darkposting is just another way for them to blend into our feeds seamlessly.
You’re fed up with the trolls, the endless bile, the utter vacuity of social media. But as you tell your friends and family, “I would cancel my account, but I need it for work.” But do you, really?
It’s worth thinking about. Because the mental health benefits of leaving social media for good (not to mention the extra time you’ll save for, you know, actual work) are very attractive indeed.
And it’s not like posting on social media is the best way to find new clients anyway. With so much noise and so many people clamouring for attention out there, it can often be the worst.
Plus, if you quit social media – or at least dial down your usage, you won’t be alone. “I left Instagram around five months ago, I rarely use Twitter, and I never use Facebook,” says content writer and SEO specialist Dana Nicole. “And yet I’m fully booked. Deleting Insta hasn’t negatively impacted things at all. In fact, it’s allowed me to re-focus my energy on other areas of business.”
Fancy following in Dana’s footsteps? Then read on, as we offer ten practical tips to win freelance clients without using social media.
1. Send emails
It’s ironic, really. Freelancers are constantly looking for work, and companies are constantly looking for good freelancers. But the two often fail to meet in the middle! This is why it’s important to send a friendly email saying you’re available, both to people you’ve worked for in the past and those you’d like to work for in the future.
Often, that little nudge is all you need to get work. And even if it doesn’t bear fruit immediately, your email will probably get filed and remain searchable when they do need someone. In contrast, finding a Facebook post you read six months ago is a tall order indeed. (If you don’t believe us, just try it!)
2. Send mailouts
Find your emails are getting ignored? Then maybe consider physical mailouts instead. If they’re well crafted, people are sure to hang on to them, suggests graphic designer James Bristow.
“It’s unlikely an approach will be perfectly timed, so I recommend a creative piece of printed mail,” says James. “Make it good, and it’s got a fighting chance of being kept for when the time is right.”
3. Get featured on magazines and blogs
Another classic approach to winning clients is to go old-school PR and get your work featured in relevant magazines and blogs.
Most decent ones will have clear instructions on how to submit your work. (Ours are here. Follow them carefully.) This in itself won’t automatically mean you get featured because there isn’t space for everyone. But like anything, it’s a numbers game: the more blogs you contact, the greater your chances of coverage.
If you succeed, not only will you boost your profile, but any natural links back to your website will boost its ranking. For this reason, it’s also worth getting to know the editors and journalists of your discipline’s favourite titles. Put yourself forward for comment pieces, offer to write a feature, or just keep them updated with new work.
Referrals are the secret sauce to winning new business for many freelancers. But just because you’ve done great work for someone doesn’t mean they’ll naturally recommend you to others – some need to be gently nudged.
4. Start your own blog
A good alternative to getting featured on an existing blog is to start your own, writing about your field. Once you’ve built up an email subscriber list, keep firing out your posts and make yourself an expert in a specific area. That way, people will know whom to contact when they need someone who knows what they’re talking about.
Even if you don’t have a blog, illustrator and animator Connie Noble believes that “just having a banging website” is a great way to win new clients. “Not to toot my own horn, but being able to exhibit my best work at a quick glance has really worked wonders for me,” she says. “There’s no point having a private website or one with only one project, though: clients want to see it all.”
5. Focus on search
Social media isn’t the only way to drive people to your website: far from it. “Organic search brings in over 90% of our clients and customers,” says designer Mike Hindle. “Thankfully, that means I can now take a week off from the business social media pages every couple of months, without it having an impact on the work we get coming through.”
6. Get referrals
Referrals are the secret sauce to winning new business for many freelancers. But just because you’ve done great work for someone doesn’t mean they’ll naturally recommend you to others – some need to be gently nudged along the way.
Writer Luc Benyon advises you: “Ask everyone you know to hook you up with their friends, colleagues and contacts for an informal coffee chat.” While designer and art director Gil Cocker suggests you: “start reconnecting with people you’ve worked within the past; the power of recommendations are so valuable. Having an immediate level of trust has been invaluable to me when gaining new clients. After all, people buy from other people… especially when the risk is lower.”
7. Visit relevant groups
Here’s another fruitful place to seek out freelance clients, which not everyone thinks of. “Look for groups that relate to the field in which you want to work, on platforms like Slack,” suggests designer Mike Smith. “Being a helpful voice in those groups will get you noticed, and before long, people will seek you out for work.”
Motion designer Julian Brown adds: “I’m a big proponent of ‘volunetworking’. Real-life volunteering with others for a common cause creates strong bonds and connections. And if it can include showcasing your marketable skills, then all the better.”
8. Use LinkedIn
Whether or not you count LinkedIn as social media is a matter of debate. Either way, it’s light years away from the kind of mindless posing you find on Instagram or the desperate search for likes that typifies Twitter. And lots of freelance creatives really do find clients via this service.
“I find Linked In really good for finding work,” says fashion, beauty and lifestyle illustrator Niki Groom. “I recently wrote that I was open to clients outside fashion and beauty, and it led to a great corporate project.”
9. Meet people in person
So far, we’ve talked about online alternatives to social media promotion, but perhaps you’d rather get away from the computer altogether? Well, the good news is that the oldest trick in the networking book is still available to you: going out and meeting people in the real world.
Now that society is unlocking, it’s time to start arranging drinks and meetups again. Get out there and look at people in the eye; it’s unnerving at first, but you’ll soon be back in the swing of it. Give more than you get, genuinely support the creative community, and it’s amazing how much the universe will give you back.
But how do you decide who to meet? “One idea is to grab a large sheet of paper and a Sharpie to map out your network and ideal clients, in a bubble diagram or similar,” says life and business coach Helen Jane Campbell. “Then figure out how to approach each person on the list. A coffee? A postcard? Phonecall, or email? Whatever it is, the important thing is to make your ask, or offer, very clear.”
10. Show don’t tell
The idea that “If you build it, they will come” might sound a bit hackneyed. But cliches become cliches for a reason. So Helen’s final recommendation for our list is this. “DO THE THING you want to be known for. Don’t wait till you get your first client to begin. This could look like volunteering, publishing your own newsletter, holding an exhibition… But whatever it is, show, don’t tell.”
Feature Image Credit: Image licensed via Adobe Stock
There are few businesses these days that don’t have a website. Consumers expect them to. Prospective customers will just keep moving if they don’t find a website link in an internet search.
There are more than 1.8 billion websites online, although that number changes by the second. Fewer than 200 million are active, which is still a hefty number to compete with. If your business has one of them, how will people find you? Moreover, what will make them stay?
Website content triggers search engine rankings, which in turn increase traffic to your website. Getting visitors through your company’s online front door is just the first step, though. Content is the critical factor in achieving success on multiple fronts. Here are three ways website content done right can do right for your business.
Website Content Gets You Found
When someone types a query into a search engine, the engine’s algorithms reach out and find relevant content. The more relevant the content, and the more of it the engine finds, the higher a website will appear in search results. Simple, right?
When you launched your company’s website, you might have spent considerable time incorporating keywords, title tags and meta descriptions in an effort to get search engines to discover your shiny new online presence. The challenge lies in continuing that work long after the initial launch.
The more organic your content is to a query, the higher your website will rank. Perhaps you did everything right when you launched, but if you don’t keep your website content up-to-date, you will fall out of favour with search engines quickly.
In their quest to produce the most pertinent results for queriers, search engines constantly change their algorithms. In 2020, Google ran more than 600,000 algorithm experiments, which resulted in more than 4,500 changes to its search feature.
Website content produced for SEO isn’t just a one-and-done proposition. There are too many moving parts, from how people are querying a topic to the algorithms search engines are running at any given time. Your website content must be always fresh, responsive to current events and queries, and in step with the algorithms of the day.
Website Content Makes You Relevant to Customers
Once a visitor finds your website online, the next step is to get them through that online front door. You can do that by engaging potential customers with website content that makes your brand matter to them.
Your website visitors will have goals when they arrive. They may be exploring products or services to solve their problems. Or maybe they’ve been saving to buy something they don’t need but have been wanting for a long time. Your content needs to address whatever goals they have if you want to convert a prospect to a customer.
Notice that I said your brand needs to address the customer’s goals—not the goals of your business plan. Of course, it’s impossible to align your brand with everyone’s goals every time, so focus on the target audience to whom your content will be germane.
Leave the story of your brand on the “about us” page. The balance of your content—web pages, blog posts, videos, photos—should tell the story of people like them who arrived with goals and left with having them met or exceeded.
Most of the time, customers are not querying your brand. They’re querying their own objectives. If your website content is relevant to those goals, your brand will rank high in search results. And that will bring customers through the door.
Website Content Generates Sales
Attracting prospective customers to your website is a must to get a bigger slice of the market pie. However, neglecting to use website content to make existing customers loyal to your brand is a missed opportunity.
Studies have shown that acquiring a new customer costs five times more than retaining an existing one. It just makes sense to use website content to nurture current customers by remaining relevant to them long after they make that first purchase.
Website content can establish your brand’s credibility with customers who prefer to do business with someone they trust. You can instil trust using blog posts that confront customer concerns with solutions and how-to videos that make your website a resource, not just a checkout lane.
Content reinforces messaging customers are hearing from your company’s sales teams, social media and paid advertising. Consistent messaging builds credibility and trust, and those will keep existing customers coming back for more.
That same website content will form the foundation for brand credibility with prospective customers as well. Their initial purpose may be based on achieving a single goal. If they’re delighted with your brand, they’ll return to your website content to see what other problems your offerings can solve for them.
A carefully planned and well-executed website content strategy doesn’t just happen. It requires constant attention and nimble pivoting as queries and search algorithms change. Do it well, and you’ll watch your business rise to the top.
John Hall is the co-founder and president of Calendar, a scheduling and time management app. He’s also the strategic adviser for Relevance, a company that helps brands differentiate themselves and lead their industry online.You can book him as a keynote speaker here and you can check out his best-selling book “Top of Mind.” Sign up for Calendar here.
If you manage multiple social media accounts, scheduling content ahead of time will save you a big headache. Here are some of the best tools for this.
If you’re active in multiple social media platforms, you must try post-scheduling calendar tools for publishing your content.
The world of social media is expanding, and hence it becomes difficult for individual users to post on all the platforms regularly at the right time. In order to manage when and what to publish on social media, you need to stay organized. To make the whole process seamless and hassle-free, check out these eight social media calendar tools for scheduling posts.
This comprehensive social media management tool not only schedules your content; it can also write posts on your behalf. Using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, it extracts the content that’s getting maximum engagement and suggests that to you.
You won’t have any trouble using this tool as it is easy to understand and use. It makes your task of managing multiple platforms easy by letting you handle all of them by logging through only one account. You can schedule posts on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn via this tool.
This social media calendar tool allows you to schedule posts category-wise. Therefore, you can quickly categorize your post into infographics, blogs, promotional posts, webinars, etc. It also lets you highlight the categories in separate colours so that you can easily track them.
Download: MeetEdgar for Android | iOS (Price starts from $19/month)
You may have heard the name of Buffer, as it is a pioneer of social media management tools. It offers you powerful planning and scheduling features. If you manage more than one social media account, this app will be useful for you.
You can create a separate publishing schedule for each account of yours on different social media platforms. The supported platforms of this tool are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. You can draft your posts here and personalize them according to the style of each social network—all using a single dashboard and without any hassle.
The calendar feature of this Buffer is designed for you to visualize the scheduled posts and optimize them as per your requirements.
Download: Buffer for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
Despite being a social analytics tool primarily, Iconosquare can also schedule your posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Moreover, you can monitor your mentions on Facebook and Instagram to manage your online reputation.
Iconosquare’s social publishing tool comes with versatile functionalities. Thanks to its drag-and-drop feature, you can seamlessly order your content according to your choice. The tool allows you to schedule posts, carousels, and stories for Instagram, along with Facebook statuses, and tweets.
You can also check your Instagram feed preview to know how it looks before posting your content. It is also feasible to schedule your first comment along with the hashtags for better reach and engagement.
You can effortlessly upload images from Dropbox or OneDrive to the media library of Iconosquare. The tool lets you segregate your content for searching the photos. By tagging the used images, it makes sure that you don’t end up posting the same content twice.
Download: Iconosquare for Android | iOS (Price starts from $49/month)
If you are looking for an Instagram-friendly post scheduling tool, Hopper HQ is the right choice. If you have more than one Instagram account, you can manage them all through a single Hooper HQ login. However, it also supports Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
This social media calendar planner comes with a neat interface, so you should not have difficulty navigating through this app. Its bulk uploading feature allows you to upload 50 posts at a time. You can also reschedule your posts on social media.
The tool also includes some exciting image editing features. You can make your images catchy and appealing by adding filters, borders, and text overlays. It also lets you preview your post. So, you know how it will look on the mobile screens of your audience and make changes, if necessary.
Download: Hopper HQ for iOS (Price starts from $19/month)
This comprehensive app for social platform scheduling and posting comes with robust features and an easy-to-use layout. It allows you to create visual posts with multiple images and GIFS, add carousel posts, post native videos, and many more. You can also leverage its Canva integration feature to make a new image.
The supported social platforms are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google My Business. The tool lets you reschedule your posts on another date or at a different time on the same day for improved engagement. You can also reshare your evergreen content with this app that keeps bringing you more traffic and better user engagement.
Besides utilizing the direct publishing feature on Instagram, you can also link with your blog fees. Thus, your blog will get shared on your social media accounts automatically after getting published. After scheduling posts for an extended period, you can get a bird’s-eye view of how the plan looks.
Download: SocialPilot for Android | iOS (Price starts from $42.50/month)
When it comes to managing your social media efforts on multiple platforms, Hootsuite is one of the most popular tools. Its interactive and media-rich planner offers a complete overview of your social media calendar.
The app displays a small visual preview of upcoming posts with the image caption and post timing. You can edit them right from the Hootsuite platform.
The supported platforms of this tool are Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. After creating content, its Composer tool lets you preview according to the unique format of each social network. Apart from scheduling, it allows you to identify publishing gaps. Moreover, with its Chrome extension, you can include newly-discovered content to your calendar automatically.
Download: Hootsuite for Android | iOS (Price starts from $49/month)
Besides social publishing tools, Agorapulse comes with a content calendar to make social media account management effortless. It lets you schedule and reschedule your social media posts. You can use post queueing and bulk post uploading features for planning your posts on a monthly or quarterly basis.
Agorapulse supports the following social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Additionally, it comes with a social media inbox. It allows you to administer all the interactions of various platforms from a single place. This feature ensures better engagement with the audience.
Download: Agorapulse for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
If you are tired of juggling between multiple social media accounts, try Falcon. This social media scheduling tool helps you plan and publish all the upcoming social posts from a single calendar.
With this all-in-one app, you can edit, preview, schedule, and publish your social media posts without breaking a sweat.
The app offers support for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and YouTube. It displays all your scheduled content according to date on different social platforms.
Download: Hub by Falcon.io for Android | iOS (Price Starts from $129/month)
Social Media Calendar Apps Are Essential for Managing Your Accounts
Your social media followers grow depending on the regular activities, like the posts and shares, from your profile. Use any of the above tools to make social media content posting seamless and convenient.
When creating content on social media, you can also improve your workflow by using apps that help you create stunning visuals. You might also want to look at what’s trending, and see how you can capitalize on that—along with analysing your social media performance.
Engaging your Sales Brain and Build Brain at the right time can make growth an actionable, repeatable process.
Growth hacking isn’t just a marketing concept. And it’s more than just trying ideas until one goes viral. Growth hacking is a process that starts with your product development and ends with a larger customer base.
It sounds like magic. So how do you do it?
I’ve taken the lessons learned from successful growth hacking stories like AirBnB, Hubspot, and DropBox, and applied them with my own start-ups. Over time, I’ve defined a three-stage “growth hacking” process that’s both actionable and repeatable.
The key to executing these “hacks” is one of the growth concepts I hammer on a lot. You have to learn to engage both your Sales Brain and your Build Brain.
Your Build Brain is thoughtful. Your Sales Brain is aggressive.
The Build Brain is the creator. When you engage your Build Brain, you need time to focus on clarifying your vision, making your solution maximum useful, and building maximum value into your product.
The Sales Brain closes the deal. When you engage your Sales Brain, you need to act much more quickly, and without much thinking. The results from the actions you take using your Sales Brain need to happen immediately. Time kills deals.
When you try to engage both sides of your brain at the same time, that’s when things like paralysis, stagnation, overbuilding, and chasing perfection creep in to take your business down.
After learning this lesson repeatedly, I’ve developed a three-stage process to introduce perpetual growth cycles into my start-ups. I’ll use three known growth hacking examples and how I used them at each stage of the process.
Stage 1 is all Build Brain.
One of the most well-known growth hacks is when AirBnB realized that potential renters often searched on Craigslist for accommodations, so they built a feature for their customers to automatically copy their AirBnB listing to Craigslist.
Lesson: Get customers where they congregate.
I applied this to Teaching Start-up in a little different manner. The plan was to create a partner program using invite codes to reach our customers where they already were.
One of Hubspot’s better growth hacks is its free website grader tool, which also offers tips on how to improve website effectiveness. This free information gets their customer prospects thinking about marketing funnel performance, which Hubspot can then help them maximize.
Lesson: Get over the learning curve.
I used this same hack but built it into the product itself. When you offer a new concept to an established market, the sales process always includes a learning curve. So my product is built to offer a lot of free looks with access limited at various points.
Dropbox has a great take on a referral program hack, gamifying their onboarding process to offer existing users more free storage for linking their Dropbox account to social media accounts, which promotes sharing and spreads the Dropbox brand.
Lesson: Get more by giving more.
I took a different twist on this hack, resulting in a two-tier free trial. Getting a prospect to give up their credit card information is the biggest blocker. So while anyone can use my product for free, all the limits of the free trial come off just by adding a credit card.
Stage 2 is when the Build Brain informs the Sales Brain.
The Sales Brain needs to engage without thinking, so this stage is when I build, test, and second-guess. I’ll walk through my partner program example from above.
Survey and research. I brought the program idea to every partner type I could think of, and did one-on-one calls and surveys to understand what they needed.
Prototype. I applied the learnings from my research, built a prototype, and revised it based on partner feedback.
Beta test. Once I narrowed down to the simplest prototype that worked the best, I built a beta and tested that.
Minimum Viable Product. Once the beta worked well, I ran a pilot with those partners who were interested, and measured the results.
Then it’s time for a go-or-no-go decision.
Stage 3 is all Sales Brain.
If the hack is a go, it’s time to engage your Sales Brain. This is the execution stage, so don’t look back, don’t re-evaluate, don’t hesitate, just close deals. If you do any second-guessing here (and your Build Brain will be screaming at you to let it be more involved), it’ll just slow down the process and maybe force you to change course mid-flight, which will result in bad data.
Let Stage 3 play out until the end. If the hack resulted in acceptable growth, accelerate your efforts. If the hack didn’t result in growth, ditch it completely. And if the results were somewhere in the middle, which is where a lot of them land, weigh the ongoing costs and decide if you should merge it into your offering or not.
I’m actually going through Stage 3 myself right now. And every day I remind my Sales Brain not to think, just trust what my Build Brain came up with and execute.
Five or six hours of sleep a few nights in a row can affect your judgment even if you don’t feel sleepy.
You probably already know how important sleep is to your health and general well-being. You may even know that you need deep sleep every night to clear out the toxins that lead to Alzheimer’s. But if you’re running a company or managing a business, or just have a lot of work to do, it may seem to you that there’s a trade-off between getting as much sleep as you know you need and doing all the work that you need to get done. At least, I often feel that way.
It turns out that’s the wrong way to look at it because scientific research shows exactly how much we suck at our jobs when we don’t get plenty of sleep–at least seven hours a night and ideally eight-and-a-half hours. So it really isn’t a trade-off between getting enough sleep and getting the important stuff done.
There’s a small but growing group of Inc.com readers who get a daily text from me with a self-care or motivational micro-challenge or idea. Often they text me back and we wind up in an ongoing conversation. (Interested in joining? You can learn more here.) Many are entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, or authors, and they tell me that getting at least seven to eight hours of sleep a night is essential for their ability to function and their continued success.
Some recent experiments show why that is, as physician Austin Perlmutter explains in a fascinating article on the Psychology Today website. Here are some scientifically demonstrated ways that not getting enough sleep can affect you as a leader.
1. You can’t focus.
A series of experiments at Washington State University in Spokane showed that participants who haven’t had enough sleep performed poorly on the Psychomotor Vigilance Test, a simple 10-minute test in which subjects must push a button every time a light turns on and that is widely used to measure the effects of sleep deprivation. Not surprisingly, researchers found that participants who’d been kept awake for 62 hours performed very badly on the test. But they also restricted some participants’ time in bed to six hours a night over two weeks. Those participants’ performance also suffered–even though they didn’t feel particularly sleepy. Keep these findings in mind if you think you’re just fine on six hours of sleep a night.
2. Your judgment may be off.
In another experiment at the University of L’Aquila in Italy, 42 subjects were restricted to five hours of sleep a night for five nights. Then the subjects were shown 90 images designed to elicit emotional responses that were positive, negative, or neutral. The subjects consistently viewed the negative images in a negative way. But when they were sleep deprived, they also viewed the positive and neutral images more negatively than when saw those images after plenty of sleep. This wasn’t just a matter of tiredness making people grumpy because the effect was the same even when participants were in a good mood.
For a business leader, the implications are obvious, and they should scare you. If five nights without enough sleep can make you think, say, that a piece of good news is really bad news, imagine how weeks or months of insufficient sleep might affect your ability to make good decisions.
3. You can’t solve tough problems.
Researchers have long explored the association between creativity and dreams. And of course, many of today’s most famous creations, including the Beatles song “Yesterday” and the algorithm for Google’s search engine, came to their creators in dreams. Creativity is essential for problem-solving and researchers have long suspected that the lack of both REM (dreaming) sleep and deep sleep can hamper your creativity.
It can definitely impede your ability to solve difficult problems. Researchers at Lancaster University in England gave a series of problems, varying in difficulty, to 63 subjects. As expected, they were able to solve some of these problems, but not others. Subjects were given the chance to try again, either immediately, a few hours later, or after a good night’s sleep. Those who had slept were better able than the others to solve tough problems that had stumped them the day before.
Are focus, good judgment, and the ability to solve difficult problems necessary in your job? I’m guessing your answer is yes. So next time you decide to skimp on sleep because there’s a task you just have to get done or a meeting you really must attend, stop for a moment and consider what you’re giving up. It might be something even more important.
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“Advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results,” Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, argued in a research paper when they were still working out of their Stanford dorm rooms.
Today, Google is synonymous with the web — but it’s also far from the sort of “competitive and transparent” search engine Brin and Page set out to develop decades ago. Google’s journey into the dictionary and becoming a trillion-dollar empire demanded a slate of fatal modifications to its original blueprint. The result is a search engine that buries organic links under an avalanche of ads, keeps tabs on its visitors’ every move and click, and manipulates results by tapping into the giant pool of data Google harvests from the rest of its services.
An emerging roster of competitors thinks it can offer you a better deal. Their search engines vow not to track you or even show ads if you’re willing to shell out a couple of bucks. Can they save us from Google’s invasive and monopolistic rule, or are they doomed to fizzle out after fighting fruitlessly against an unstoppable behemoth?
The rise of private search engines
Josep Pujol, the chief of search at Brave browser, calls Google the web’s “toll-booth” where “producers of information have to abide by certain rules or directly pay to be reachable.”
Brave Browser
Google may appear simply as one cog in the larger internet machine, but it has more sway than you’d think. For most people, it’s the main avenue through which they access information online, and if something can’t be found via Google, it practically doesn’t exist. Therefore, having only one (or two) ways to access the web is very problematic, Pujol adds.
The startup behind Brave browser, which now hosts about 34 million users, rolled out its search engine a few weeks ago. Unlike Google, it doesn’t profile users and claims it won’t use any “secret methods or algorithms to bias results.”
Brave is indexing the web’s trenches from scratch, which means it ultimately won’t rely on aggregators like Bing and attempts to be everything Google is not. It’s private, offers you more control over how anonymous you want to be while searching, and most importantly, it doesn’t have a vested interest in showing you ads.
Would you pay for a private search engine?
While Brave plans to offer both ad-supported and ad-free premium subscriptions, Neeva, a new private search engine from a pair of ex-Googlers, believes as soon as advertisements enter the picture, the focus shifts away from the user and to figuring out how to “squeeze an additional dollar out of another click” for advertisers.
Without Neeva versus with NeevaNeeva
Neeva’s CEO and co-founder, Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously spearheaded Google’s crown jewel (its $115 billion advertising arm) for over a decade, says, in a way, people are already paying for search engines like Google — by letting them siphon up their personal data, settling for a “bad user experience with wall-to-wall ads, and substandard content.”
Neeva, therefore, has an upfront $5 monthly fee, and in exchange, it gets you a private, ad-free search engine that can also surface your information from third-party apps like Gmail, Dropbox, and Microsoft Office 365.
Although Neeva could potentially shape up to be a compelling, ad-free alternative for those who can afford it, experts say its success and the underlying pay-for-privacy model, in general, present a difficult socioeconomic problem.
“If it’s necessary to pay for privacy,” Dr. Shomir Wilson, the director of the Human Language Technologies Lab at Penn State, said to Digital Trends, “then it becomes a luxury that not everyone can afford.”
Not a level playing field
Neeva and Brave aren’t the first ones to challenge Google, however, and there’s a good reason why it’s been nearly impossible for competitors like Bing to even put a dent in its monopoly. Google controls over 90% of the search engine market, and going up against its swathes of resources has been an uphill battle for newcomers offering alternatives. It has accomplished that by practically starving its opponents of any room to grow.
Google pays platform owners such as Apple, Mozilla, and others billions of dollars to be the default search engine on the most popular operating systems and browsers, including Macs, iPhones, Android phones, and Google Chrome. And there’s little chance users of these platforms will go out of their way to switch search engines, let alone be even aware of choices.
“We build durable habits around search engines,” Dr. Wilson said. “Once a search engine is familiar and useful, going back to the one we like can be kind of reflexive.”
But as awareness for privacy-first products soars among people and Big Tech faces its greatest antitrust battle, Kamyl Bazbaz, vice president of communications at DuckDuckGo, a private search engine that has been up at arms with Google since 2008, is hopeful that the tides are turning.
DuckDuckGo has witnessed unprecedented growth over the past year, and its active users have doubled from 50 million to 100 million. It’s also now the second most used search engine on phones in several countries, including the United States. In addition to a search engine, DuckDuckGo offers tools to protect your identity from third-party trackers and other malicious online practices.
Fighting for a future without Google defaults
Cooper Quintin, a senior security researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees breaking Google’s default power is key for competitors to thrive, but it would take “strong action on behalf of the government to actually enforce such antitrust laws.”
Luckily for Neeva, Brave, DuckDuckGo, and rest, the Justice Department — along with eleven state Attorneys General — has sued Google on those exact grounds.
“Google’s control of search access points,” the antitrust lawsuit says, “means that new search models are denied the tools to become true rivals: Effective paths to market and access, at scale, to consumers, advertisers, or data.”
If history is any indication, the odds are against Google. Last year, the search engine giant lost a similar suit in Europe and now allows Android users to pick their default search engine at startup instead of making that choice for them.
Whatever the outcome of these lawsuits may be, Google’s rivals have a long way ahead of them before they even have a chance at threatening its search engine monopoly, and they realize that.
In the meantime, though, Pujol says Brave is focusing on what it can do, which is building an alternative. “We are crazy or bold enough to try because we know there’s a demand out there.”
HubPages is a platform that lets you write articles and get paid for doing so. Here’s what you need to know about HubPages.
Are you a creative person who loves to produce written content? Or do you like to create written content for any other reason?
With HubPages, you can earn some extra bucks while you simultaneously fulfil your creative desires.
HubPages is a platform that has been around since 2006. It allows users to produce written content—such as blog posts and articles—and publish them on HubPages. You can earn money in two ways:
By adding Amazon affiliate links (Amazon Program by HubPages)
By displaying Google Ads (Ad Program by HubPages)
What Are HubPages’ Network Sites?
Hundreds of thousands of visitors consume content that is published on the HubPages network sites every month. HubPages has a variety of niches that they call “Network Sites.”
You can write for any niche once you sign up and become a member. There is no restriction as to which niche you have to choose, and you can produce content for one niche today and another niche the next day.
Here are some of the websites and their niches that make up the HubPages Network:
Tatring: Everything about tattoos and piercings
Pethelpful: For the love of animals
Bellatory: Everything about fashion and beauty
Delishably: Everything about food and drinks
Axleaddict: Everything about auto (cars and bikes)
Caloriebee: For diet and exercise
Dengarden: Everything about home and garden
HubPages has more than twenty-five websites in their network, and each website serves a specific audience and niche.
Click here to find out more about all the websites and niches under HubPages.
How to Sign Up for HubPages
The first step toward publishing articles and earning through HubPages is to sign-up for HubPages. Go to the signup option on the HubPages website, and you will find this page.
Fill in the necessary details and create your account. Once you create your account, the next step is to update your “Profile” and “My Account” information to start earning money and get paid.
Setting Up Your HubPages Profile
Once you log in to your account, you need to go to the section that says “More.” (You will find this in the top left corner of your screen.)
Once you click on “More,” you will land on a page where you can see many tabs:
Set up your profile and fill in your account information in the tabs of the “More” section.
Next, click on the “Earnings” tab and start configuring the programs you want to use to earn money. I use both programs as it helps to give readers a better experience if we add something relevant from Amazon.
It would be best if you configure your “Google Analytics” as well, since it gives you a better and more detailed analysis of how your articles are performing. You will be able to see things like:
Where your traffic is coming from (Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
Which countries have the most viewers for your article?
How many people read your article.
For how long a person stayed on your article.
And a lot more.
However, you can choose to skip setting up the Analytics step if you choose to. It depends on how serious you are about HubPages and the performance of your articles.
The final step is to set up your payment system. HubPages pays through PayPal, so you need to have a PayPal account for this. If you already don’t have one, you can create one right away. It’s pretty straightforward, and you won’t take more than five to ten minutes to create a PayPal account.
What to Expect From HubPages
HubPages is an excellent way to earn extra money for those who love to write and want to make money while doing it. It’s like killing two birds with one stone.
However, there are a few things that you need to be mindful of before you start your journey with HubPages:
It’s not a get-rich-quick scheme where you can earn thousands of dollars from the get-go.
It might take you months or even years to get significant traffic to your articles.
Most people give up after a couple of months because it’s a slow and gradual process. Don’t expect results overnight.
If you stick around and write quality articles, it’s feasible to make a few hundred dollars every month.
Your earnings can go into the thousands, but you need to understand that it’ll take a lot of effort, consistency, quality, dedication, and hard work to get those results.
Click here to find the FAQs for HubPages. You can learn a lot about what you should expect from them and what they expect from you.
The First Steps Towards Earning Big on HubPages
When you sign up with HubPages, you need to familiarize yourself with the quality standards HubPages wants to maintain. For this, they have a system in place that is known as “The Bootcamp.”
In this, you need to write five quality articles to get featured on the HubPages website. Featured articles are the articles that you will be eligible to get paid for. HubPages will run ads on featured articles only, so you need to ensure that you write high-quality articles every time to get featured.
Things to Remember When Using HubPages
You cannot upload plagiarized content, nor can you upload any content that’s published on HubPages anywhere else.
HubPages has a team that monitors your articles, and you should not try to outsmart them.
If you violate any of their terms and conditions, your account can get banned and you will lose all your hard work.
Click here to find the Learning Center for HubPages. You can learn a lot about what you should and can be doing on HubPages.
Follow Your Passion on HubPages
It’s great to have an affinity for something. It’s even better when that something turns into a money-making affair. If writing sparks a fire in you, you can happily do it and earn from it as well. HubPages will allow you to make your dreams come true.
You don’t need to be unhappy at a job that you don’t like. You can follow your passion for writing and make money doing it. You can start today and see for yourself whether it is something that you like or not!
Some days a little healthy competition can keep you on your toes. Other days, it can knock you off your feet. Few people know that better than Kelly Wackerman, the creator and co-founder of theLONDONmethod, a barre fitness class based on the original teachings of Lotte Berk.
Boutique fitness, including Barre, is a multi-billion dollarindustry. “There are hundreds of techniques that fall under the category of barre classes,” says Wackerman. “It’s everything from ballet classes to hybrid Pilates and yoga classes. It’s a very competitive industry where everyone thinks their way is best.”
With rivalry this fierce, it can feel impossible to get the attention (and the dollars) of paying customers who have so much variety to choose from. “At first, competition in the industry frustrated me, but now it inspires me,” says Wackerman, who has trained thousands of students and teachers in eighteen different countries across the globe. I asked Wackerman for her best strategies for standing out from the crowd.
Shelly Strazis
1. Find Your Unique Angle
What elements can you pinpoint in your business that make you different from everyone else? After all, not every coach inspires clients the same way. Not every artist uses the same techniques. For Wackerman, answering this question was easy because of the foundation she built her theLONDONmethod on.
“If you really want to learn and understand English, you’ll probably spend some time studying Latin,” says Wackerman, who began her career as a fitness instructor 15 years ago. “After getting interested in learning and teaching barre classes, I did my research and uncovered the teachings of Lotte Berk, the woman who is credited with creating barre.” Realizing that many of Lotte’s original tutelage had been abandoned or changed by other instructors, Wackerman decided to revive them with Lotte’s daughter, Esther Farifax. She travelled to Berk’s home in England to study the moves and theLONDONmethod was born.
“Your own story doesn’t have to be that extreme,” says Wackerman. “But whatever it is, it’s unique because it’s yours.” Even if you can’t go back to the source of your particular practice, perhaps you can differentiate yourself by the clients you serve, the science behind your technique, the results you’re able to achieve or the way you deliver your service. Whatever that distinct approach is, be sure to tout it to your clients.
2. Get Collaborative
Spread the word about your technique far and wide so it’s not drowned out by the sound of others talking about their methods. Wackerman not only pitched herself to podcasts that might be considered competitors, but also invited near competitors on her own podcast to talk about their methods. “If you have knowledge you’re willing to share with others, everyone will come to you as a source,” says Wackerman, who picked up additional clients from her guest appearances. “I had foundational knowledge of this technique that other instructors were interested in.”
Wackerman also developed an international training program. “I decided that this was one way I could try to unify all barre teachers and keep the true legacy of Lotte Berk alive,” says Wackerman. “In an industry where everyone is literally fighting over who owns the bicep curl, we allowed our community to learn and teach the original work of Lotte Berk at their own studios.”
3. Adopt an Abundance Mindset
Even if you’ve niched down your clientele, chances are that it’s still in the millions. That’s a fairly unlimited number for you to reach out and offer your services to. The fitness industry is no different. From 2013 to 2017, boutique fitness brands grew 121%. That’s more locations and more teachers for a growing number of students.
“Knowing that there is enough out there for everyone and being confident that what you offer is valuable will set you apart from your competition,” says Wackerman. “There are no limits to who can benefit from what I offer and it’s likely the same for you too.”
Stephanie Burns is the founder of The Wyld Agency, an amplification and visibility agency focused on building the legacy and personal brands of company founders. With a background in brand building, media buying, strategy and entrepreneurship, Stephanie has wide experience with an eclectic portfolio of industries.
