When you get off-task easily, it disrupts your productivity. It may even decrease your overall level of happiness. But mind wandering isn’t all bad.
We’ve all been there: You’re supposed to be working on a report, or you’re watching someone give a PowerPoint presentation, and your mind starts to wander. You find yourself thinking about a conversation you had last night with your friend, your weekend plans, or a television show you watched last week. Then, you have to snap yourself back to the present to focus on the task in front of you.
Mind wandering is a little different from distraction, because it is internally generated rather than a response to something in the environment. However, the two are related, because your brain is predicting the timing of events in the world. If you routinely check your email about every 12 minutes, then (at least when you’re sitting at your desk), your brain will generate “interrupts” from tasks you are performing to get you to think about checking your email.
There are some good reasons to want to stop your mind from wandering. Studies suggest that when you get off-task easily, it disrupts your productivity. It can make it harder to complete tasks. It may even decrease your overall level of happiness.
And there are things you can do. In particular, research by Jonathan Schooler and his colleagues suggests that mindfulness training can be helpful. Many mindfulness training techniques (like the one used in this research) focus both on the body and the mind. Body work encourages people to adopt an upright and calm posture. The mental elements of mindfulness encourage people to identify the sources of their thoughts.
Are they thoughts that arise spontaneously, or are they the product of ruminating about a particular issue? The mental element also encourages people to recognize that anxiety-provoking thoughts about the past are just thoughts and not a signal that the past needs to be worried about.
Mindfulness training can decrease one’s tendency for mind wandering, by helping you to recognize when you are experiencing distracting thoughts. That can help you to reorient yourself back to the present and to re-engage with a task.
That said, mind wandering is not all bad. In particular, when you are working on a task that requires some creativity, mind wandering might actually be beneficial. Getting a stroke of insight involves being reminded of something that will help you to solve a problem in a new way. If you’re not currently being reminded of anything useful, then continuing to think about the problem in the same way will not lead you to think about anything new. As a result, you are unlikely to break out of the rut you are in with that problem.
If you allow your mind to wander, two things happen: one is that your mind may end up wandering to something that will help you to solve the problem; the other is that when you do finally bring yourself back to the problem, you are likely to frame it in a slightly different way than you did when you started working on the problem, and that gives you an opportunity to be reminded of something else you know about that might lead to a creative insight.
This work suggests that most of the mundane work you do will benefit from a little mindfulness training. If you keep your mind from wandering, you’ll be able to check off a number of the items on your to-do list. But, when you’re stuck on a problem and need that lightning strike of creativity, letting your mind wander might be just what you need.
Google Ads is an online advertising platform which you can use to drive potential customers to your website when they are searching on Google for the products or services you sell. Google Ads was launched in 2000 and was originally called Google AdWords.
Google Ads is a way of getting your website to appear in Google search results. But it’s different from search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO is about getting your website to rank highly in the organic search results on Google through a mixture of hard work and good fortune, whereas Google Ads is about paying Google to include your website in their search results.
So how does Google Ads work? Well, the key thing about Google Ads is that it is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system. This means that you only have to pay Google if someone clicks on your advert to visit your website, unlike traditional print or broadcast advertising where you pay the publisher for your advert to appear even if it gets no response.
The Google Ads PPC adverts appear on the Google search results page at the top and bottom of the page, above and below the organic results. On a standard desktop display, there are usually up to seven ads on each page – four at the top and three at the bottom.
Here are my top three reasons why you should be using Google Ads if you want to grow your business (even if you are already doing SEO):
It’s the only way to get to the top of Google
Because Google puts up to four adverts above the organic results, that means that even if you are really successful with your SEO and get to the top of the organic results, there could still be up to four paid listings above you. Basically, money talks. So if you want to get to the very top of the search results, Google Ads is the only way to do it.
Instant results
When you advertise on Google Ads you will typically appear in search results within a few hours of going live. Compare that to SEO, where it usually takes three to six months to start any meaningful results.
Get more traffic and more conversions…
A 2019 survey found that 63% of people will click on an advert on Google (so don’t be put off by those people who tell you they never click on the ads), which means Google Ads is a great way to get more traffic to your website. And, according to Unbounce, people who visit your site via these ads are 50% more likely to purchase something than people who find you via the organic listings.
According to Google’s introductory guides and videos, setting up a successful Google Ads campaign is easy.
First you choose your keywords. These are the words or phrases which will trigger your advert to appear when someone types them into the Google search bar. Your keywords need to be the type of terms that you think will be searched for by a potential customer. So, for example, the keywords for a website selling clothes might be things like: dresses, bow ties, leather gloves, school shoes, short sleeve shirts, black jeans, scarves, etc
Then you tell Google your maximum cost per click (CPC) – i.e. how much you are willing to pay for each click on your advert. Google Ads works on an auction basis, so the amount you bid is one of the things that will affect how good an ad position your get. Generally speaking, the higher your bid, the higher up the page your ad will appear.
Having chosen your keywords and set your bids you then have to write your advert copy. The ads have tight limits on the number of characters you can use, so it’s important to get your message across succinctly.
Finally you need to ensure that each advert points to the most relevant landing page on your site so as your visitors always get straight to what they are searching for.
When you summarise it like that, it sounds like setting up Google Ads is pretty simple. But there’s a problem…
Google might earn more from your ads than you do!
Yes, that’s right. If you follow the default options and don’t take the trouble to explore some of the more advanced features of Google Ads, then you’re likely to end up spending a lot of money on clicks and getting little back in return.
I don’t work for Google and I don’t want you to give them more money than you need to. So I’ve published a short book that explains how to set up your first Google Ads campaign correctly and I’m giving it away to readers of this blog.
The free guide will have you up and running on Google Ads in under an hour and, by the end of today, you’ll have a new source of potential customers coming to your website.
Building an effective email marketing list can help grow your business in numerous ways.
If you have yet to build an email marketing list, you’re missing out on a key way to help you achieve your business goals.
Email trumps every other channel in terms of conversions and return on investment (ROI). Research shows that for every dollar spent on email campaigns, you get a $44 ROI. In addition, 91% of subscribers are open to receiving promotional emails from brands. Digging deeper into research, you’ll find that you can’t go wrong with an email list if you want to grow your business to new heights and cater to customers.
There are nearly four billion email users worldwide, and with so much activity, it’s crucial to take advantage of this channel to market to customers. When built to target the right audience, growing an email list can be one of the most effective and lucrative strategies for your business. It provides communication between brand and customer, sends subscribers relevant content and lets businesses collect user feedback.
Email marketing is important because it turns everyday website visitors into paying customers. When someone signs up to join your email list, it’s clear they’re interested in your brand. All you have to do next is send them relevant content, cater to their needs and keep them happy. Since it costs five times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones, it’s crucial to pay attention to email subscribers.
Based on what offer they signed up for, you can then segment your subscribers, send them relevant content and move them down the sales funnel. Building a list from scratch can be challenging, but it’s not impossible.
Here are 5 key ways how to build an email list from the ground up
1. Create personalized landing pages
It’s better to create separate landing pages for each campaign rather than one landing page for several campaigns. Why? Because people come to your website for different reasons, looking for different things. One generalized landing page is not going to cater to the masses the way you think it will. Instead, it’ll drive visitors away because they aren’t finding what they’re looking for.
Personalization is the key to creating landing pages your visitors want to engage with. If you’re a furniture company and you create a landing page for every piece of furniture in your store, then you aren’t catering to the small group focused on armchairs. When they don’t see offers for armchairs, they’ll quickly leave your website. The same goes for any website that doesn’t use personalization in its marketing strategy.
By using a landing page creative tool, you can create individual landing pages for each campaign. You can take subscribers who signed up for a specific offer or campaign and segment them according to their behavior on your website. The more landing pages you create, the better, since companies who increase their landing pages from 10 to 15 see a 55% increase in leads.
2. Use a timed popup
Timed popup opt-ins are effective because they appear to users after they’ve already spent time scrolling through your content. Unlike static forms, they use the element of surprise to encourage visitors to hand over their information. If someone is already engaging with your content and an opt-in appears, there’s a good chance they’ll join your email list.
Pay attention to the word “timed.” A popup should not appear after one second of someone visiting your website. It’s irritating and doesn’t give people the chance to consume your content before you bombard them with an opt-in form. Set up your popup so that it appears after a set time, or once a user scrolls to a certain point of the webpage.
Take it a step further by turning your popup into a simple survey. Limit it to no more than two questions followed by the opt-in that collects users’ email addresses. You can ask anything that helps you determine how to cater to them better, such as how their experience on your website is or if user navigation is easy. Kill two birds with one stone by collecting user feedback and growing your email list at the same time.
3. Simplify your forms
According to a recent study, 55% of B2B professionals say their top priority is increasing lead generation. It’s a struggle many marketers face as they try to grow their brand and its following. An easy way to collect more leads is by simplifying your opt-in forms.
You need to make it as easy as possible for visitors to join your email list. For new visitors especially, they won’t bother dealing with an opt-in that’s difficult to navigate or asks for 12 different pieces of information. It might not seem like a big deal, but when you go out of your way to make things complicated, you’ll see your conversions remain stagnant. Removing as little as one form field can increase form conversions by 26%, so avoid adding several fields in your forms.
4. Create a lead magnet
Instead of showing a standard opt-in to visitors, what if you incentivized their reason for signing up? As much as 30% of people will return to complete a form if they get something in return, which is why creating a lead magnet increases conversions.
Lead magnets are free resources you provided your audience in exchange for their email. Visitors gain access to high-quality content while you gain a new email subscriber, which is the perfect start to a mutually beneficial brand-customer relationship.
Examples of lead magnets include:
Ebooks
Templates
Checklists
Guides
Whitepapers
Webinars
Whatever freebie you offer subscribers, the important thing is that it has value. No one will bother giving you their contact information for content that doesn’t have anything to offer. Make sure you teach something new or provide excitement and intrigue so that the subscribers you convert stay for the long haul.
5. Host a giveaway
If you want to increase your subscribers, build buzz around your brand, and heighten its recognition, consider hosting a giveaway. Giveaways are fun and encourage those within your target market to check out your website.
It’s important to find a giveaway plugin for WordPress that works for what you’re trying to achieve. Pay attention to the specific features you want so you pick the one that’s right for your campaign.
Choose a giveaway prize that sparks interest in your audience. Offer them something you know they want so they’re more likely to enter.
Set rules that do the work for you. For example, you could create a rule that subscribers must tag a friend in your giveaway post to enter. That way, they spread the word about your giveaway and encourage their friends to enter as well, increasing your subscribers. If you plan your giveaway with a strategy in place, your email list will grow.
Building an email list is something every marketer and business owner must do to succeed. Email is the easiest, most responsive channel for generating leads and sales, and it connects brands to their audiences. When you market your email list to visitors by giving them content they care about and making it easy to subscribe, it makes all the difference in your conversions.
Co-Founder of WPForms, one of the largest WordPress contact form plugins in the market. I have been programming for over a decade and enjoy creating plugins that help people create powerful web designs without touching code.
By now you’ve probably read the headlines and seen the stats from HubSpot and others about the virtues of inbound. There’s no denying that inbound marketing can be effective in generating quality leads for your business. Even so, inbound marketing should be treated as an addition to your other marketing strategies – not a replacement. Even if you are really good at it, inbound marketing only opens a small window into your total addressable market, leaving the rest wide open for your competition. So before you consider abandoning outbound efforts for inbound – ask yourself these questions:
#1 – Is it easy for prospects to find you?
To be successful with inbound, you’ll have to produce a substantial amount of premium content that’s highly optimized for search. While quality content can help build your brand and drive inbound interest, it can be resource-intensive, expensive, and there are no guarantees that your prospects will find it. In fact, with every technology vendor trying to become a publisher, getting your content noticed is harder today than ever before.
If you want to truly understand how much demand you can realistically capture through inbound, start by mapping out how many content assets you can produce a week and compare it to vendors who have leading organic positions for keywords you’d like to own. Are you producing as much content as they are? Can you? Remember, certain keywords are going to require much more effort to make it to the first page, especially if you’re competing against larger vendors and publishers who have entire editorial teams dedicated to creating content. Take TechTarget for example. We have over 1,000 editors and freelancers writing content every day just so we can drive thousands of inbound visitors to our sites. Ultimately, competing with such brands for content volume is unproductive. Redirect your efforts from quantity to quality of content and ensure you’re delivering something new and distinct that can be promoted as such.
Instead of going “all-in” on inbound, consider pushing your content out to target prospects and leads to supplement your inbound efforts. These are the exact same people you’re trying to attract via inbound, so why not engage them with outbound marketing too? Not only will this help you generate quality leads faster, but it will also provide additional coverage in areas where you may lack inbound interest.
#2 – Are you attracting and identifying the right prospects through your site?
Even if you’re able to attract thousands of prospects to your website, are they the right ones? Not always. In many cases you’ll find tire-kickers, partners, or other vendors downloading your content to better understand your solutions or gather competitive intelligence.
And it’s not just about getting the right people to your site; you’ll also have to know who they are. One of the most challenging parts of inbound marketing is converting anonymous website visitors into leads. And with the average inbound conversion rate for B2B/Tech hovering around 3% (WordStream), you’re going to burn a lot of time generating inbound interest that will never turn into deals. Even if you can convert the right person, there’s no guarantee it’s the right time; you don’t have the resources to waste on false positives.
Unlike inbound, outbound gives you control over who to target and the ability to reach known prospects from companies that are more likely to buy from you. This not only helps you focus your efforts on the right prospects but also eliminates wasted time sorting through (or even worse, selling to) unqualified inbound leads.
#3 – Are you effectively reaching entire buying teams?
Let’s say you’re successful at converting inbound visitors to leads. Now what? To turn them into customers, you’ll need to decide how to market or sell differently to every member of the buying team. Relying on an inbound-only lead source limits your visibility into the entire buyer’s journey and may not uncover key decision makers who are involved in the final purchase. This is critical today when an average of 6.8 people are involved in the buying process (CEB). To win deals, your sales team is going to have to know exactly who is on the buying team and what they’re researching – when they’re with you AND when they’re not.
Instead of relying exclusively on inbound, TechTarget can consolidate your efforts by making your inbound traffic more valuable and employ a strategic outbound approach. TechTarget’s Priority Engine includes Inbound Converter, which identifies accounts visiting your website and exposes active demand from those accounts directly within the platform, including members of the buying team and insights to help you better understand the topics and competitors the buying team is researching when they’re not with you. Overall, Priority Engine identifies the accounts that are most active and interested so you can target the right people at the right time.
We’ve come a long way since the early days of the internet, in regard to different web design trends. Yesterday’s dos are today’s don’ts and nobody knows for sure what the future will bring.
But what we know for certain are web design turn-offs and things virtually no one likes to see on the internet of today. This is a highly competitive place, and you don’t want to risk anything by having an off-putting design of your website. What you want is to provide users with delightful surfing experience. It’s the only way you can hope to retain each hard-won customer and eventually make your company profitable.
That’s why, in this article, we’re going to give you 5 things you simply need to avoid if you don’t want users to leave your website in frustration.
It Takes Ages for the Website to Load
This was maybe ok in the 1990s when we were all using dial-up connections to surf the web, but in today’s day and age, it’s almost a sacrilege to have a slow website. No user likes to see when the page takes ages to load. In fact, today’s users are much more likely to try somewhere else, if a search result they click on sits on a blank page loading for three seconds or more.
There’s also a report by BBC from 2018 which illustrates nicely just how important it is to load your pages fast: every additional second that people have to wait for the page to load will cost you around 10% of your users. To further emphasize just how huge this is in internet terms, this would mean that by the time the first 10 seconds are up, you’d lose all your website traffic.
If you think this is an exaggeration on BBC’s part, Google also did their fair share of research with similar results. More than half of mobile users will be gone if a site takes more than three seconds to load, and if it takes six seconds you can bid farewell to all of them.
Too Many Popups Will Kill Off Your Traffic
How many times have you visited a webpage and it felt almost impossible to get to the actual content you were looking for because of all those annoying popups? We know the answer to this question is ’too many’, so it’s every webmaster’s job not to let this happen.
Losing users and customers because of the popups makes you think if they actually defeat their own purpose. On the one hand, some designers and advertises swear that popups lead to improved conversion rates. On the other hand, the statistics also show that 70% of people find them annoying.
If you want to be absolutely sure that your web page makes the best out of both of these researches, consult reliable professionals from Orion Creative, for instance. That way you’ll be certain that you’re actually utilizing popups and not overly irritating anyone. If the popups are done badly, they don’t respond to the user’s needs, or there’s just too many of them at once – you’re bound to lose traffic. At the same time, if done properly, you can actually gain profit.
Not Catering for Mobile Users
It may be strange to see that there are still many mobile-unfriendly websites out there, but it’s a sad reality that we’re all unfortunately witnessing.
The fact that it’s still not uncommon to see sites where items are misaligned, overlapping, formatted strangely, and so on is almost disheartening. Not only does this mean that you’re not following the latest trends that say that more than 50% of all internet traffic happens on mobile phones, but you’re also neglecting the fact that a low-quality mobile site will almost definitely affect your SEO performance negatively.
Going All-In On Animation
Sure, everyone likes to see a professionally-designed and trendy website, and there are few things that scream this louder than smooth transitions, transforms, and appearances, or well-deployed animation. All these things can be pretty vital and make a huge difference in comparison to the otherwise static and sterile layout.
But what you want to avoid at all costs is too much animation. Just like with popups, you need to use them sparingly. In any other way, they’re a distraction that simply no one wants or will tolerate – rest assured that the users and customers will jump ship if they get heavily distracted by your aesthetic presentation.
Autoplay Media
This was always a big no-no, and one of those irritating web design faux pas things that you have to avoid at all costs.
We’re not saying that there aren’t ways to do this tastefully, but it’s much more frequent than you’ll see (and hear) something which irritates and annoys you so hard that you’ll want to click that ’close’ button as fast as you can.
A word to the wise: don’t incorporate autoplay media to your pages unless you’re absolutely positive that it won’t interfere with the user’s ability to concentrate on the content she or he came for in the first place.
Wrapping Up
Essentially, all these 5 examples we’ve discussed in this article stem from bad UX design and lack of research. If you want to have a website that helps you attract more users and also retain the old ones at the same time, you’ll definitely try to do your best to avoid these 5 problems and issues. Ideally, you want to anticipate the user’s needs and treat both their time and attention with utmost respect.
By Nick Brown
“Nick is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged in projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business, and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.”
Are you making the most of Adobe Stock? Here are some extra ways it could save you time.
When you need a stock image for your graphic or web design, Adobe Stock is the place to turn. Integrated seamlessly into the Creative Cloud, it provides you with access to millions of high quality photographs and illustrations, not to mention templates, vectors, video footage and more.
But even if you’re already using Adobe Stock on a regular basis, you may well be missing a trick or two, that could save you a serious amount of time and energy.
Read on as we highlight some of the less-obvious uses for Adobe Stock that you may not have considered. And if they inspire you, then why not take out a one-month free trial to Adobe Stock?
01. Visual inspiration
Adobe Stock is a stride ahead Google Images when it comes to visual inspiration
(Image credit: Adobe Stock)
Right at the start of a project, when you’re still thinking loosely about concepts and ideas, it’s natural to go looking for inspiration. And for most people, Google Images is often the default.
But think about it: the images you’ll find there are going to vary hugely in quality, while on Adobe Stock there are millions of consistently high quality, professionally created photos, illustrations and videos to inspire you and give you fresh visual ideas. So you’re far better off using the sophisticated search filters provided by Adobe Stock, and seeking out visual inspiration there instead!
02. Website mockups and wireframes
The main aim of a digital mockup or wireframe is to get the functionality right, and make sure that the site or app can fulfil the needs of the user in a fast and efficient manner.
For this reason, they’re often created as “bare bones” designs, with zero imagery, and that approach can be appropriate when you’re just working on things in-house. But once you get to getting sign-off from stakeholders and clients, it can be worth using some of the high quality stock photography or illustrations available on Adobe Stock to make it look a little nicer and more approachable.
Because however much you ask people to “see past” the lack of visuals, it’s often a psychological hurdle that non-designers find difficult to navigate.
And the best news is, if you don’t want to spend any money, you don’t have to. You can use watermarked versions of any Adobe Stock image in your designs, and you only have to pay once you’ve got sign-off. If you don’t use them, you don’t pay: simple!
Adobe Stock saves you time by letting you search for pics of a certain shape (in this case, square)
(Image credit: Adobe Stock)
From Facebook and Twitter to Instagram and Snapchat, there’s so much noise on social media these days that attracting people’s attention with a brand campaign is a tough ask.
But one thing’s for sure: the brain processes pictures far more quickly than words, and so powerful and eye-catching images are key to attracting those eyeballs.
A small investment in the high quality photography and illustrations that Adobe Stock can provide, then, will pay off handsomely when it comes to clicks and likes.
And not only are you free to crop the images you license to whatever shape and size you need, but you can even save yourself time by, for example, searching for only square, horizontal, vertical or panoramic images.
04. Moodboards
The moodboard is a time-honoured tool in conveying the mood and spirit of a proposed campaign, and getting approval from clients and stakeholders before you head too far down the wrong path.
To create one, many people often just scrape images from Google, because while this is technically copyright infringement, in practical terms they’re unlikely to ever get sued for it.
However, legal issues aside, it’s worth considering using images from Adobe Stock instead. After all, they’re available in high resolution, so will look much better blown up at size. Plus the millions of high quality images available, in combination with sophisticated search filters, means that you’ll be much more likely to find the right images to bring your moodboard to life.
The email newsletter seen a massive resurgence in recent years. Perhaps as a reaction to the amount of noise on social media, people seem to like like the idea of a regular, curated and above all, short summary of what they need to know about a certain subject.
In some cases, they’re even willing to pay for this service, and some people now make their living entirely based on producing a must-read email newsletter.
Whether your newsletter is paid-for or free, though, success isn’t guaranteed, though. You have to produce one kick-ass newsletter if you’re going to succeed in this busy marketplace.
And so here again is an arena where the right images can play a key role. Liven up your email newsletter with some high quality imagery from Adobe Stock, and – as long as the content is equally high quality – your sign-ups and open rates should soon start to climb.
06. Your blog
If you’re writing a personal blog or the official blog for your design studio, imagery is again a great way to lure people in.
Most of the time you’ll probably want to use killer images from your latest design work, but that may not always be possible. The client may not have given permission, for example. Or perhaps there aren’t great visuals from the work to show (if your work was in the field of strategy, or web development, for example).
In such cases, don’t just leave a blank, or post an uninspiring image. Think outside the box, and search Adobe Stock for images that represent the theme of the story instead. For example, if you’ve has been invited to sit on a government panel to discuss how the creative industry should respond to Brexit, you might want to use the image above to highlight your news.
07. A/B testing
Want variations on this pic? Click here, then scroll down to ‘More from this series’
(Image credit: Adobe Stock)
A/B testing is about serving up two versions of a web page, Facebook ad, etc, to your audience and seeing which one leads to the most conversions. Given the importance of imagery, it’s often useful to test different lead images, to see which one leads to the best results.
The good thing about Adobe Stock is that there are often images from the same photoshoot, which means you can choose between small variations on the same image. This makes Adobe Stock ideal for when you really want to nail down the perfect image to help your website conversion rate.
08. Your personal videos
Most video professionals will know about Adobe Stock’s motion design templates, which allow you to add cool effects, titles, transitions and more to your projects with very little effort. But they’re so simple to use that anyone can use them for their own personal videos too. Especially as many of them are free!
To see how easy it is to use Adobe Stock’s motion design templates without any training, check out our tutorial on how to add wow to your holiday videos.
Planning a wedding? Adobe Stock can help here, too! It has an amazing range of top quality templates for your wedding designs that are fully customisable within Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.
Finally, Christmas is approaching, you’re a designer so why not design your own bespoke Christmas cards? It’s a great way to delight a client or potential client, and make sure they remember you. Or alternatively, you might just want to put a smile on the face of a friend or family member.
It isn’t just meant for criminals and suspicious activities
In cyberspace, the darknet is the equivalent of that dark, seedy alley that you’re advised to steer clear of.
Often referred to as the corrupt underbelly of the internet, common lore is that it’s the place where the drug dealers, human traffickers, terrorists, arms dealers and child pornographers hang out. But here are five things about the darknet that aren’t so dark after all.
It’s probably the only place to live freely on the internet
Net neutrality is the idea that all internet traffic is created equal. The very fact that we are having a conversation about it and that laws are being pushed to challenge it, is, safe to say, the stuff of nightmares for the forebears of the internet and World Wide Web. The darknet, given that it exists outside of the monitored internet, may soon be—and may even already be—the only online space where you can be truly free.
It’s the only place you can have total privacy
We live in an age of constant surveillance—by governments, by advertisers, by service providers and so on. Most of us often have no idea that every move of ours is being watched, or if we do, we don’t quite understand why that might be a problem. Nothing on the internet is private—unless, that is, you go rogue and take the late train to Downtown Darknet.
The darknet doesn’t have to be so dark … it depends wholly on the people who use it.
It’s where whistleblowers roam freely
If you have information that no one wants you to have or share, the darknet is your safe haven. From conspiracies against states to corporate misconduct, from fraud to malfeasance, whether disclosure or secrecy, the underground tunnels of the darknet are where whistleblowers roam. There are underground channels, such as activist groups, whistleblower forums and even media presences for secure and anonymous exchanging of sensitive information.
It allows for decentralized currencies
There’s a reason cryptocurrency is the money that talks inside the darknet: the absence of centralized control. Cryptocurrency transactions are recorded in blockchain ledgers. In plain English, this means that rather than having a central bank maintain records of transactions of assets held by individuals or of the amount of currency in circulation, cryptocurrency records are stored in public databases, secured by cryptography. This allows for privacy in financial transactions and easier peer-to-peer or international trade. Of course, the legality of cryptocurrency is dubious in many countries, and it is used for all manner of nefarious activities—but one could say that of legal currency as well.
It has its own justice system
In tech speak, this is called hacktivism. These under-the-radar vigilantes carry out their own justice, which can be in the form of shutting down seedier activities, like child pornography or human trafficking, or generally striking a blow for human rights. One of the most well-known of such groups is Anonymous, which took down a large network of child porn on the darknet.
But, yes, there is a “but.”
Every one of these instances has equally effective use for illegal—or inhuman—activities. The darknet doesn’t have to be so dark, but like all technology, it depends wholly on the people who use it.
Feature Image Credit: If you have information that no one wants you to have or share, the darknet is your safe haven. Illustration: Trent Joaquin; Sources: Unsplash
Newsletters are all the rage these days, and with good cause: in the age of cluttered social media feeds and algorithmically-sourced content, newsletters remain one of the few ways to reach readers in a way that feels refreshingly personal. We’re big fans of newsletters over here, and we’ve heard many of our readers feel the same way.
However, The Atlantic’s newsletter infrastructure was from another time, and was showing its age. When we first built our newsletter codebase several years ago, we wanted to be able to publish every newsletter as an article on our website, which limited what we could do. That’s changed — newsletters are now a standalone editorial product, and the old restrictions don’t apply.
We’d reached the technical limitations of what we could do with our current code, and our editors were finding creative workarounds to the limited styling available, such as using emojis in place of actual section dividers. It was long past time to burn down our old newsletter infrastructure and start from scratch.
Building a complete editorial toolkit
Our legacy newsletter system was good for editing text and adding images, but the landscape had evolved to where we wanted to provide a complete editorial toolkit for our writers to create richer email reading experiences.
From a product design perspective, we had to think about two sets of users: our writers, who would be interacting with the newsletter admin system to create and publish these emails, and our readers, who would be reading the newsletters. We worked with editorial folks to map newsroom needs and came up with a range of formats we wanted to better support: photo essays, interviews, excerpts, timelines, news roundups, feature stories… the list goes on and on.
Our new backend provides a more flexible set of tools to accommodate these formats, while laying the groundwork for whatever the newsroom cooks up in the future. Through multiple rounds of design reviews and testing, along with good ol’ documentation, we made sure the new system was clear and the toolkit was easy enough to use that writers could run with it themselves.
Some new modules and heading stylings
A modular design system
Designing for newsletters means accounting for how different email clients render various elements and fonts (more on that later), while also providing enough flexibility that editors can create a new newsletter with a unique look while still having it feel consistent with The Atlantic’s newsletter brand. Back in the day, we basically stored newsletter content as raw HTML in our database. But to achieve our new goals of flexibility and brand cohesion, we created a range of styleable modules that editors could stack together to build a newsletter.
While each module’s structure is consistent across the suite, certain elements such as typefaces or background colors can be changed so different newsletters can be themed in distinct ways, while still being recognizable as Atlantic newsletters.
Some examples of potential ways to style Atlantic newsletters, using the same fundamental modules
This modular system also gives editors a lot more flexibility with creating new kinds of newsletters. They could put together an image-heavy newsletter that primarily uses image blocks, or they could make a text-centered version that relies on big quotes and lists. Both versions are easy to make with the new system, and since we’re using modules that have already been tested across email clients, we know they’ll look great no matter where they’re found.
Progressive enhancement approach
Coding for email is notoriously challenging because different email clients display the same newsletter in different ways. One of the biggest inconsistencies among email clients? Fonts.
Not all major email clients support custom fonts. However, a progressive enhancement approach with our typography allows everyone, even people using older versions of Outlook, to receive the best experience we can deliver. In practice, this means organizing our font stack in the following tiers:
1. Our Brand Fonts
These are web fonts that need to be loaded externally, so they will only appear in the best-case scenario: that is, a user on an email client that supports loading external fonts. In the following example, we’re using Graphik for our heading and Lyon Text for our body text . This is how the component would ideally appear in the browser and in Apple Mail/iOS:
Brand fonts (Graphik and Lyon Text) rendering in Apple Mail/iOS 🎉
2. Modern Native Fonts
Because many major email clients, notably Gmail, do not support loading web fonts, our brand fonts will unfortunately not always be available. However, the good news is that Gmail now has a few of its own fonts built in natively, namely Roboto and Google Sans. Operating systems have also upgraded their system fonts in recent years, each with its own proprietary sans-serif answer to Helvetica. For OSX & iOS, there is San Francisco, for Windows, Segoe UI, and for Android, Roboto.
These fonts are good news for email developers because they expand our options a bit more — these new system fonts typically come in a wider array of weights than your run-of-the-mill system fonts. The only bad news is that serifs are nowhere to be found (however, Georgia is an old standby in the next tier down).
Here’s how our example above would look in Gmail on a desktop using Chrome — note that the headline font has been replaced with Google Sans, and the body font we’re seeing is Georgia:
Google Sans and Georgia rendering in Gmail desktop 👍
3. Ye Olde System Fonts
For older machines and Outlook, we’ll fall back to default system fonts. Some more styling degradation happens here too, like losing the red border and some spacing irregularities, but with some experimentation, we were able to devise an experience that still looks correct even in this limited environment.
Here’s a system font scenario, Outlook 2013 on Windows 7. For fonts we’re back to good old Arial and Georgia, but hey, it’s still legible:
Arial and Georgia rending in Outlook 2013
So that’s the overview of newsletter design and development techniques that will power the next generation of Atlantic newsletters! The flexibility of the modular design system and progressive enhancement techniques will allow the framework and designs to be applied to various newsletters.
Are you connecting with the right people on LinkedIn? Want to build a stronger LinkedIn network?
In this article, you’ll learn how to make strategic LinkedIn connections to grow your influence and your business.
Why Build a Selective LinkedIn Network?
Whether you’re an entrepreneur or a business professional, LinkedIn is the perfect social media platform to grow your business network. The platform is deliberately designed to encourage you to make connection requests to people you already know.
The key to building a powerful LinkedIn network is to choose your connections strategically. Instead of adding anyone and everyone, limiting the number of people you add to your network will ensure you see posts in your feed from people who are truly relevant or of interest to you.
Sales on LinkedIn come when you’ve developed a valuable network and start to engage with that network. A soft-selling approach works best. Sharing content that helps your network, highlighting examples of how you’ve worked with clients, and answering questions about your field of expertise are all good approaches.
How do you add people to your network? You can send out your own connection requests to your colleagues, clients, and local business network. You’ll also receive connection requests from people you may have never interacted with, either on- or offline.
Rather than accepting every request you receive or sending out hundreds of requests a week from your own account, here’s how you can build a genuine network by being selective.
#1: Control How People Can Connect With You on LinkedIn
By default, anyone can send you a connection request on LinkedIn; however, there are ways to control how people can connect with you.
The idea of making money completely independent of any employer is a dream for many. But what skills do you really need to start living with that kind of freedom?
When you’re working for a company, you’re often a single part of a larger machine. You only have to focus on being the best gear or crankshaft that you can be to keep collecting that paycheck.
For many, this is a perfectly fine way of surviving. They occupy their desk, they collect their cash, and they “live” during the hours they can be home.
What does it take to live free?
There are some, though, who want more freedom. They aren’t satisfied being a piece of a machine. They want the flexibility and sense of pride that comes from steering their own life from the ground up.
When you’re running your own operation, you are the machine. That means all of your individual parts (skill sets) have to be up to snuff if you want to be profitable. So what skills do you need to be a business online?
Core skills for the entrepreneur:
Marketing
SEO
Copywriting
Business management
Data management and visualization
That list isn’t so daunting, is it?
Unfortunately, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Each of these bullet points represents a body of knowledge that entire degrees are dedicated to.
Do you really need 5 degrees to be a successful online business?
No! Thankfully not!
In the past, when information was less available, higher education or apprenticeship were the only ways to access this knowledge. Nowadays, you don’t have to waste your time with humanities classes you’re not interested in or fill out a tedious list of requirements all while accruing a debilitating amount of debt.
All the specific skills you need are readily available through online courses.
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If you’re interested in freeing yourself from the grind and striking out on your own, consider investing $39 in yourself. Get the full breakdown by clicking the button below!
