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6 Things Every (Atheist) Blogger Should Know

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By Rebekah K

Recently, my blog turned two and a half years old! That means that today, I’ve been blogging for 136 weeks and this is my 136th post. Over the years, people have asked me for my greatest advice for blog writing, whether that is how to grow a following and get noticed or how to go about writing for an atheist blog when you’re still in the atheist closet. Today, I want to share with you some of my answers to some commonly asked blogging questions.

1. How do I start a blog?

This is a fairly simple question with a straightforward answer. Ask anyone who has ever started a blog, and they will tell you that this is by far the easiest step in blogging. For me, it involved choosing a blog name (The Closet Atheist at the time) and clicking on the big, unmissable Get Started button on WordPress.com. WordPress (almost) literally holds your hand throughout the blog-building process, and there is nothing technical to it. Any WordPress blog can be free, by the way, if you don’t mind a URL ending in .wordpress.blog and a few ads on your site. My blog started off as theclosetatheist39.wordpress.com (does anyone remember this?) because theclosetatheist.wordpress.com was (and still is) reserved. But oh, how far we’ve come!

2. How do I start an anonymous blog as a closeted atheist?

The first thing of which I must warn you—which I had to learn the hard way—is not to expect it to stay hidden forever. I think I did a pretty good job of writing anonymously for that year and a half. My name or face were nowhere to be seen on the site, my Twitter, or anywhere related to them. You better believe The Closet Atheist was not only the name of my site, but my second identity. It was my email address and my Twitter handle, and there was not any way that anyone who didn’t know me could have ever found me on Instagram or Facebook through it.

But writing anonymously, continuously, is hard. You can’t write your life story without details of your life slipping in. Even when I was writing anonymously, you would have known that I was raised in the Lutheran Church, that my mom was an organist, my brother-in-law was a pastor, and I went to a Christian college where I played in a marching band. But I think that giving up that many details of my life were worth how much this blog saved my sanity. Even YouTubers make videos anonymously, but I think that puts you at a much higher risk of being found by people you know.

3. How do I keep my blog going?

I’ve seen more blogs than I can count with one post, or a handful of posts, which were then left and never touched again. Thinking of a cool name, a sleek design, and a catchy topic is simple until you realize that if you want your blog to succeed, you are going to have to keep writing. And writing. And writing. And writing. (Repeat, in my case, 136 times so far.)

Not to be harsh, or overly obvious, but you probably shouldn’t start a blog if you don’t have a pretty long list of post ideas. You don’t want a blog with a total of four or five posts, but you want to be able to write for as long as possible, and to do that, you need things to talk about. I think that generating topics is more difficult as a blogger than it would be for a podcast or for YouTube, because on those media, there are endless other videos to reply to, and endless people to invite onto your podcast to interview (wink, wink—like me!). But I find that it is nearly impossible to collaborate with others or review videos through blogging, so I stick with reviewing books and articles, and in the past I’ve responded to sermons, speeches, bible studies, and class lectures.

4. How will I ever come up with that much to talk about?

The best way to come up with post ideas is deciding the overall topic of your blog. It absolutely has to be something you are passionate about, and that you could talk about for literal years. And you should be able to put your own spin on it, own it, and write about it from your perspective. If you’re telling your story, it should be easy because no one else can or has told it before. For me, I combined my story of becoming an atheist, living as an atheist at a Christian college and in a Christian family, and coming out to the people in my life. On quiet weeks, I interspersed my life experiences with the aforementioned reviews and responses. Nowadays, with my atheist story being quiet and peaceful, I’ve started branching out from the topic of atheism and religion—to posts like this!

5. How do I grow my following?

Here’s my practical, tried-and-true advice: Engage. This is true for every content creator: YouTubers, Instagrammers, and traditional bloggers alike. Comment on, follow, and like other people’s blogs and blog posts. Follow them on social media and interact with them there. The audience will follow if you have built relationships with people. This also means that you can’t make it all about you. If you comment on anyone’s blog saying only “Nice post! Check out my blog at doucheymcdouche.wordpress.com,” they will probably delete it immediately, if it doesn’t get sent automatically to spam. If the post you are commenting on is something you’ve also written about, you should still summarize your thoughts in your comments before linking to your specific post and explaining why. But I find that it is always good enough to not self-advertise at all. Just be logged in, where your blog link will be in your username automatically.

But on a more authentic, less marketing-centered level, it is really all about what you are actually writing. I am a firm believer, when it comes to personal blogging (as opposed to marketing blogs or other paid content), in this unpopular opinion.

The writer comes first. The readers come second.

This probably goes against any blogging advice you have ever read. But for he or she who blogs unpaid, just to tell their story, it is vital. If you write what you want to write, you will have more fun, you will write better, and your readers will know that you love what you’re doing. This is how you keep them around, and this is how you keep your blog going before you decide that it’s “just too hard,” it’s “not fun anymore,” and “no one’s reading it anyway and I can’t figure out what they want!” Just keep going. At the very least, you will be enjoying it. Even among my own readership, I can tell you right now that no matter what, this blog’s biggest fan is me!

6. What’s your biggest advice for anyone who wants to get into blogging?

STICK TO A SCHEDULE!

I cannot stress this enough. At all. Is it absolutely crucial.

I follow a number of blogs, and I can’t tell you how much it drives me crazy when they do not keep a posting schedule, especially when they claim to! If you tell your audience you will upload every Tuesday at 11 a.m., you have to upload every Tuesday at 11 a.m. This is part of building trust. My readers knew that this post would be up today at 8 a.m., and I know that my views are always highest on Sunday mornings. I have never kept my readers wondering for longer than 12 hours where my last post was or when I would write next. There are many Saturdays when I don’t have time to write, and there are no Sundays (anymore) when I am up by 8 a.m. One of the greatest things about WordPress is the ability to write a post any time you want and schedule it to go up when you want it to.

When I was in a graphic design class in college, one of my projects was to make an instructional infographic. I chose a how-to on personal blogging. So if you want a more concise and design-centric list of blogging tips from me, you can look at this poster called “5 Traits of a Successful Personal Blog”.

By Rebekah K

Sourced from The Curious Atheist

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Why The Rise Of Social Commerce Is Inevitable

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By Jia Wertz

The line between social media and e-commerce is increasingly becoming blurred, commonly known as social commerce. The sheer amount of time spent by people, especially younger generations, on social media apps has positioned social commerce as the indisputable market breakout trend for e-commerce in the coming years. Generation Z spends 2-3 times more shopping on social channels than the average consumer, with Instagram and Snapchat taking the lead, while Generation X prefers shopping on Facebook. 

Hubspot defines omni-channel commerce as “the ability to deliver a seamless and consistent experience across channels while factoring in the different devices that consumers are using to interact with your business.”

Their definition highlights the mounting pressure on brands to streamline their marketing models across devices and applications. With Generation Z connected online near-constantly, mainly on social channels, and on track to become the largest consumer generation on the planet, the importance of social commerce is obvious for forward-thinking e-commerce brands.

Video Content, Social Apps, And Evolving Technology

One of the primary drivers of the success of social commerce has been the shift of preference by Generation Z and Millennials away from Facebook and towards platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. The key is short-form video content, which is rapidly becoming the dominant form of online content.

For example, 91% of consumers prefer interactive or visual content, such as video, over conventional static media, and internet video traffic is expected to have a compound annual growth rate increase of 33% from 2017 to 2022. This trend is complemented by new technology that underpins mobile applications and video streaming, from progressive web applications (PWA) to the pending materialization of 5G.  

“One of the most overlooked aspects of digital marketing campaigns, especially with smaller businesses, is that YouTube is the second largest search engine behind Google,” says George Konidis, an SEO expert and Founder of Growing Search. 

“It’s hard to achieve digital growth among younger consumers when you ignore video content. We are seeing an enormous boost in video content consumption, and the transition to hybrid social apps, like PWAs, will only accelerate this trend,” he says.   

PWAs are a form of hybrid e-commerce website and mobile application. They arose out of the market need for faster and deeper integrations of e-commerce functionality into mobile apps – particularly social media. They load faster than mobile sites, and brands like West Elm and Lancome are some of the technology’s early adopters. 

For younger users that grew up on the internet and are impatient when it comes to loading times and buffering, PWAs represent a marked opportunity for brands to capitalize on social commerce. For example, when Lancôme converted its mobile site to a PWA, conversions went up 17% and mobile sessions increased 51%. 

Depop, who just closed $63 million in funding as a social fashion app targeting Millennials and Generation Z, is an excellent example of the convergence of social commerce and technology. Similarly, the popularity of “merch-drops” and exclusive branding on new social media channels like Monkey and TikTok are gaining steam.

And marketers are taking notice.

For example, Sprout Social cited prudent evaluation of emerging social media channels as an important marketing tactic for online brands. 

Instagram and Snapchat are both working on built-in e-commerce projects, hoping to keep pace with upstart social commerce apps.

“Online shoppers do 12 searches on average before engaging on a specific brand’s website. Social commerce can connect social media users directly to brands with a simple click; it’s a powerful way to onboard more consumers and reduce the average number of searches,” says Konidis. “Small online businesses have never had the opportunity to bring in more consumers and experience outsized growth.” 

Young People Shape Consumer Markets

Quite simply, young people determine what is trending culturally, and consequently, what drives demand in consumer markets. The combination of Generation Z and Millennials, who have very similar social and political tastes – not just commercial – represent a paradigm shift in digital commerce.

What once consisted of static online brand websites is becoming a much more fluid ecosystem defined by multiple threads of content mediums.

The rise of social commerce is poised to coincide with some significant technological boosts, and even perhaps threaten the dominance of social media giants like Facebook and Instagram. Facebook has even gone as far as to discreetly develop a proprietary cryptocurrency, seeking to enter the payments market for what seems like an eventual integration of e-commerce features too.

What’s clear is that social commerce is inevitable, driven by the changing cultural and consumer preferences of younger generations.

Feature Image Credit: Pixabay

By Jia Wertz

I am the CEO of Studio 15, a socially responsible fashion brand. After leaving behind a 15-year career in the corporate fashion world, I started a company that focuses on doing good and supporting women. It’s Studio 15’s mission to promote and collaborate with other female-owned businesses and to support female entrepreneurs in developing countries through a partnership with Kleos MFG, a non-profit organization.

Sourced from Forbes

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Blown Away by Some Instagram Stories? Here’s Exactly How Creators Are Making Their Feeds Look So Ridiculously Good

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By Amanda Pressner Kreuser

Make your visual storytelling easier and more impactful with themed templates, accessibility features, and user-friendly video editing.

We all start out with the same tools to create our Instagram stories–but there are those creators out there who just know how to make magic happen. Their images and video demand to be seen, and you can’t stop clicking til they’re gone.

As both founder of a content marketing company (and a human who loves visually arresting content) I can’t get enough of stories and I’m always trying to reverse engineer what makes someone’s feed so addictive.

For those people and brands who can unlock–or rewrite–the equation, there’s massive potential. Not only does IG stories have 500 million daily active users ready to discover you, but if you have the “swipe up” hyperlink feature (either by having more than 10,000 followers or being verified), Stories can lead to direct conversions ($$$).

Of course, reaching both goals is closely tied to the quality of content you publish. That means it’s definitely worth your time to create well-designed, engaging images and video before you share them. Sound…expensive? It’s not. You don’t have to employ a dedicated design or social media team, thanks to a bevy of apps that make it easy (or at least, easier) to bring out your Insta A-Game. Here are six of my favorites.

Unfold

Unfold makes it easy to create aesthetically gorgeous Instagram Stories without a huge investment. The app includes a wide selection of professionally-designed templates packaged by theme (think: “Journal 1” that mimics a nostalgic scrapbook, or “Digital Wave 1” that incorporates computer and web design elements), some of which are free and the rest of which come at a relatively low cost ($1.99 for a package of 15 templates). And in the wake of their massive app success, the company launched Unfold for Brands, a design agency to further help brands customize and perfect their story game.

Canva

This app is an all-around incredible free design tool that you can use to elevate any of your company’s visuals (from amping up your presentations to editing photos for your website) — and Instagram Stories is no exception. Among the thousands of free templates is a vast selection of Instagram Story options to suit pretty much every brand aesthetic or campaign. Bonus: Canva’s other templates, like those for logos, can be useful in creating thumbnail covers for your Instagram Story highlights.

Clipomatic

Too few brands consider digital accessibility when planning their online and social strategies–but making your content available to all customers is a truly worthy goal. Clipomatic can support accessibility by enabling you to create written captions to go along with the videos you share on Instagram Stories. The app instantly translates speech into text, so any followers who are hearing impaired (or who simply don’t watch Stories with the sound on) can still easily follow along. Clipomatic isn’t free, but the $5 price tag is pretty reasonable for the product.

Hype Type

There’s a lot you can do with both the fonts native to Instagram Stories and those available in apps like Unfold and Canva to make your text stand out — but Hype Type takes it to a whole other level. Through the app, you can create dynamic, animated captions to overlay on your photos and videos. The tool gives you a variety of font and color options, as well as the ability to add music, so the possibilities are plenty extensive. The app itself is free, but you can pay to get access to all of its features and to remove the watermark.

Life Lapse

Ever wonder how brands make those cool how-to, stop motion tutorials, product features or, well, really any other fancy animations? It’s possible that at least some of them are using Life Lapse. The user-friendly app makes it easy to create pro-level stop motion videos from groups of individual photos (and it includes tutorials if you want to step up your game). This is another one that’s free, but offers additional features if you subscribe to the Pro level (which is $35.99 per year).

InShot Video Editor

You don’t have to be a complete video whiz to make quality, engaging videos for your Instagram Stories, especially when you have a solid app like InShot Video Editor to help you. The app gives you the ability to do basic video editing (like rotating, trimming, merging clips and adjusting speed) and add in more snazzy elements (like voice-overs, sound effects, filters and text), so you can customize as you see fit. You can get plenty of features for free; make small, one-time purchases to remove watermarks and adds or access extra stickers; or buy a subscription ($3.99 per month or $14.99 per year for an auto-renewing subscription) to have unlimited access to all features and add-ons.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Amanda Pressner Kreuser

Sourced from Inc.

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Knowing Your Data: What Businesses Should Expect From Their Marketing Partners

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By Korena Keys

I am lucky to talk to key executives from hundreds of companies each year. Inevitably, the conversation typically rolls around to the effectiveness of digital marketing. The one common link in each of the conversations is understanding if their marketing is effective and interpreting what it means. In some cases, the organization has never received a report. In others, they get numbers but don’t know what they mean or how to decipher them.

If you are paying someone (an individual or an agency) to execute a digital marketing initiative, then you should expect to receive regular updates, reports on progress and interpretations of what the data is telling you and what should — or should not — be done about it. If you are missing this information, there are two possible solutions: Meet with your provider and ask for reporting data and recommendations to be delivered consistently, or find a new provider.

Understanding your campaign performance is critical in order to make decisions, allocate budgets and understand your customers and their needs. Let me explain in greater detail.

1. Search Engine Marketing: Paid and organic efforts relating to search marketing are able to provide key insights that can boost your page visibility within your specific sector, improving your page rankings while creating a better experience for your customers. As it relates to your paid search marketing (SEM or PPC), you will want to know what terms your customers are using, as well as which of your keywords has the strongest click-through and conversion metrics. Additionally, ask for reporting on ad group and ad copy performance, site links and call extensions. This will help you better understand your customers and what they want from you while providing insights that can be applied to other areas of your marketing. You should review this information monthly with your contracted provider.

2. Website Optimization: With an SEO contract, you can expect to see regular reports on your website performance in relation to your search engine rankings — how and where you are showing up on Google, Yahoo or Bing search results pages. The actual report may vary by contract, but at a minimum should include a review of your website speed on mobile devices, your current ranking and any change in your ranking for 5-8 keywords, identified technical errors and a summary of what work has been completed to improve in these areas.

3. Video (pre-roll, streaming, promoted): Video marketing has a little different report and KPI structure. With this type of advertising, the goal is typically to increase awareness or evoke some type of emotion. That is difficult to measure in clicks. When you are looking at performance metrics as it relates to video, ask for the video completion rate (VCR) and total time played in addition to any attributed clicks or conversions. This video data will let you know how effective your message is as well as if you are targeting the right audience within your ad buy.

4. Online Display Ads: While many professionals within our industry provide reporting on display ad impressions served and click-through rates (CTR), they really do not tell us the whole story. Request reporting data on ad performance by message and size, conversion metrics and website analytics data that will indicate the quality of the click. In today’s marketplace, it is easy to buy clicks and flood a website with cheap traffic. You will want to ensure that you are paying for quality web traffic, not just quantity.

5. Email Marketing: Reporting on this activity is more straightforward than other digital aspects, mostly because it is more of a standardized service. Ask for a summary for each email sent. It should include the date and time it was deployed, total sends, total opens and reads, number of clicks (and on what links), as well as any results from A/B testing of subject lines and content.

6. Social Media Marketing: Depending on the scope of services of your social media contract, your contractor should be providing a monthly summary of their activity and the results. If the intent is to boost your page engagement, the report should include posts made, activity for each post, change in page engagement over the previous month and data on paid activity. If you are trying to promote an event or sell a product, the report should also include hard numbers on the registrations, sales or leads attributed to the campaign efforts.

7. Website Insights/Usability: The goal of a paid online campaign is to grow your business. Looking beyond impressions and clicks will tell you how well your campaign is working for you. Look for key indicators, such as time on site, pages per visit and new visitors. These data points will let you know how good the quality of traffic is (how many pages they are looking at and for how long). They will also provide insights as to what pages of your website need attention through better/more content or flow.

The data collected from your marketing campaigns provides valuable knowledge. Accessing this information, understanding its meaning and applying the insights will propel your organization further, faster and with lower acquisition costs.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Korena Keys

Korena, the Founder & CEO of KeyMedia Solutions, applies 25+ years marketing experience to drive a startegy first approach

Sourced from Forbes

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The hottest web design trends of 2019

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Create cutting-edge sites with these must-have looks and techniques.

Working in web design means that you’re constantly having to keep track of all the latest developments. New technologies and techniques are cropping up all the time, and if you want to deliver the sites that your customers demand then you need to at least be aware of up-and-coming web design tools.

Beyond the technical, though, there’s also the visual angle to consider. Tastes are always evolving, and what looked good a couple of years ago is likely to look less appealing today. If you want your website layout to look fresh and stand out from the crowd, it pays to be up to speed with the latest trends. So read on for eight of this year’s hottest looks, some of them technical, some of them more aesthetic, and most of them essential.

01. Strong typography

The hottest web design trends of 2019: Strong typography

Safari Riot’s site is big on typography and bigger on doing amazing, attention-grabbing stuff with it

Web design has always been a bit of a poor relation of graphic design, and part of the problem is that while a graphic designer has more or less complete freedom to create across the page, web designers were for a long time shackled by primitive layout options and the most basic typography.

This is, thankfully, changing; CSS Grid and Flexbox give designers the opportunity to create more print-like pages, and vastly improved typography tools have meant that big, bold, and experimental typographic layouts are very much the in thing right now, making full use of oversized retro fonts in all the styles and weights, and complete with assorted effects and deformations to add extra character.

02. Progressive Web Apps

The hottest web design trends of 2019: Progressive Web Apps

The Starbucks PWA won’t set your world on fire, but it’ll just work, whatever

They’re not a one-size-fits-all solution, but if you’re building a site that’s predominantly targeting mobile users who don’t always have the bandwidth they want, a Progressive Web App is an elegant way of doing it. PWAs are progressive and responsive, so they should work on any platform and look good too, and they deliver an app-like experience that, crucially, isn’t dependent on having an internet connection, using service workers to allow offline use. And while you wouldn’t want to use a PWA for your next full-blown desktop site, they’re ideal for creating fast and lightweight ecommerce sites when high engagement is a must.

03. Illustration

The hottest web design trends of 2019: Illustration

Cytora’s guide to AI underwriting uses illustration to make a complex subject understandable

It’s hard to visit a new startup’s site these days that doesn’t have a smattering of flat and funky cartoon figures illustrating its business and providing some much-needed character for visitors to identify with. They’re everywhere and they don’t seem to be going anywhere for now, but while we’re sure this particular style of illustration will fall out of favour sooner or later, illustration itself as a staple element of web design is one that seems set to stick around; it’s just the style that’s likely to evolve. If you’re keen to incorporate modern-looking illustration into your site, be sure to read our guide to 2019’s illustration trends to know about.

04. Animation and video

The hottest web design trends of 2019: Animation and video

The Stonewall Forever site mixes video and 3D animation to fabulous effect

While it’s not always wise to build sites that deliver a performance hit while guzzling bandwidth, if you want to make an impact then it’s a lot easier these days to go full-on with all the attention-grabbing visual flair you feel you need. It’s not that long since embedded full-screen video was simply unthinkable; now it’s visible on an ever-increasing number of sites, and a great way to deliver instant visual interest while getting a brand story across. And for a less heavyweight visual punch, JavaScript or CSS animation used well not only looks good on the page, but can also be used to breathe life into navigation and enhance the user experience.

05. Pastel palettes

The hottest web design trends of 2019: Pastel palettes

We’re not sure what Liebe Quark is, but its colour scheme is to die for

Because web design trends are so much more closely linked to more general visual trends these days, it’s not surprising that many of the must-have looks for web sites tend to mirror the sort of design decisions you can already see in print pages and advertising. An outmoded palette is the perfect way to turn people off, and if you want a site to look bang up-to-date then you need to reflect current colour trends.

Right now gentle pastel tones are a strong look – see Pantone’s 2019 colour of the year, ‘Living Coral’, for example – but what can really help bring them out is adding one or two really vibrant shades in the same way that print designers use spot colours.

06. Custom cursors

The hottest web design trends of 2019: Custom cursors

Romain Avalle’s portfolio site does some impressive things with your mouse input

With modern websites being home to so much visual interest these days, the humble mouse cursor can sometimes feel a bit lost, which would go some way to explaining the increasing number of sites that try to do something exciting with the pointer.

Merely changing the mouse cursor into something else has been possible for a very long time, but the return of custom cursors sees much more elaborate techniques coming into play, such as reactive cursors that change in response to site elements, and secondary pointers that follow the cursor around, but sweeping across the screen in a much more organic manner. They’re very much the fashion right now, but we suspect this trend will run out of steam before too long.

07. Colour gradients

The hottest web design trends of 2019: Colour gradients

Just look at Abella Andrade’s gradients; whatever they’re selling, it looks delicious

Beautiful colour gradients have long been available to graphic designers, but until recently they’ve been difficult to bring to web designs as they have to be rendered as bitmaps that don’t always scale well. Now, though, CSS gradients mean that it’s easy to enliven a page with an eye-catching gradient, whether it’s simply to provide a gently colourful backdrop, or as an overlay providing an attractive way of fading in photography from one side. CSS gradients are just as versatile as the ones you’ll find in Illustrator or Photoshop CC, and combined with CSS blend modes there are almost unlimited ways to use them imaginatively.

08. Micro-interactions

The hottest web design trends of 2019: Micro-interactions

A better Montreux Jazz Festival experience through micro-interactions

Sometimes the devil is in the details, and spending time on adding delightful extra touches can add a much-needed dose of personality to a site. A little animated feedback can be a great way to keep users engaged and entertained, but there’s more to micro-interactions than simple visual feedback.

They can be used to make navigation clearer, to reassure visitors while they’re waiting for something to load, or to draw attention to useful features such as the inevitable hamburger menu. And used imaginatively, they can help your audience find the information they need without any unwanted noise; for example, check out this site for the Montreux Jazz Festival, which will put together a custom list of the acts you’ll want to see, based on a handful of decisive swipes. Nice.

Feature Image Credit: istock.com

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Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

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Stop Funding Fake News in talks with media agencies to demonetise misinformation sites

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By John McCarthy

Stop Funding Fake News, the social movement pressuring brands to boycott newsbrands that it believes routinely spread misinformation, is turning its attention to media agencies.

Anonymous officials from the activist group told The Drum that for it to achieve its goals of demonetising fake news sources, it has realised it must court the middlemen between brands and publishers.

Inspired by Sleeping Giants in the US and Stop Funding Hate in the UK, the group operates anonymously, claiming activists could be at risk if their identities were known.

Adobe, Chelsea FC, Harry’s, Experion, eBay, Moonpig and Manchester United are among the 40 brands and charities that the group has convinced to block out a number of sites off the back off a campaign it launched March 2019.

Now, it’s looking to advertising and media agencies to engage in a dialogue about the news industry. A spokesperson said agencies have approached the group, keen to grasp what sites should be considered for blacklist.

This is particularly beneficial for Stop Funding Fake News’ cause as agencies handling multiple clients ought to be able to widely blacklist offending sites – a step-up from the brand-by-brand approach the group previously took.

It said it is now expanding its network to help “persuade” ad agencies that it is “bad for their clients to be associated with the lies and racism found on these sites, so it’s in the interest of ad agencies to ensure they don’t put them there.”

It urges agency figures to get in touch at [email protected] for discussion.

Misinformation has been linked with deaths around the world, not to mention that fact that generating clickbait lies can be a lucrative trade. Earlier this year, The Drum explored the harms fake news causes globally, talking to misinformation experts, Wikimedia, and BBC News about how to curtail the issue.

As a largely ad-funded media, greater scrutiny is being placed upon the brands that are enabling these stories.

By John McCarthy

Sourced from The Drum

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Streamline your creativity with this design assets bundle

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Get your hands on premium design assets for life.

Is your creative project taking longer than you anticipated? If so, check out EpicPxls. This design package will streamline your productivity by providing you with premium curated fonts, graphics, templates, mobile app designs and much more.

Whether you’re a graphic designer, web developer or a blogger, there’s plenty to enjoy with this EpicPxls deal. You’ll be able to download 20 premium items per month for life, all for the reduced price of $99. That’s a massive 95 per cent saving on the regular price of $2,400.

With no recurring payments, you can sign up today safe in the knowledge that you’re not going to get stung by charges further down the line. Supercharge your creativity and your productivity today by getting your EpicPxls deal for $99.

Feature Image Credit: EpicPxls

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Sourced from CREATIVE BLOQ

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3 HUGE Mistakes Most Entrepreneurs Make that Diminish Their Brand & Cost Them Leads and Sales

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By Marisa Murgatroyd

I’m sure you’ve heard the famous phrase, you don’t get a second chance to make a great first impression.

It’s true about life… and it’s definitely true about business.

A well-crafted personal brand speaks FOR you even before you say a word. It helps you attract ideal customers and clients who are inspired and motivated by who you are and how you show up in the world.

And it demonstrates to your clients and customers that you can do what you say you can do and that they can rely on you to deliver on the promises…

And when that happens, you’ll easily make an awesome first impression in any situation.

From working the room at networking events, to connecting with random website visitors and people watching your FB Lives and reading your blog posts, a powerful personal brand will do pretty much all the hard work of grabbing attention in all the right ways.

But there’s more to a successful personal brand than creating a great first impression.

Personal branding is also about consistency.

It’s about making an awesome “first impression” again and again and again.

I’ve helped countless clients and students build out powerful brands using my Personal Brand Power Framework (I share exactly how to do this in my Ultimate Guide to a Powerful Personal Brand).

And not to be overly dramatic, but a personal brand is a sink or swim kind of deal.

Create a great brand that works for you and it quickly leads to lucrative business connections, steady growth, lots of sales and happy customers.

But get it wrong and you could damage your reputation and demolish your bottom line.

And so many gifted entrepreneurs get it wrong (and don’t even know it).

So,  I’m sharing hidden traps to avoid if you want to create a personal brand that powerfully and consistently establishes your reputation and your expertise.

Brand Trap #1: Being a Jack of All Trades

When you want to build a personal brand that seals your reputation, grows your client base and your income, it’s about lasering in on who you are and what you want to be known for.

But that’s not what most entrepreneurs do.

They try to be all things to all people and this mindset often shows up in their title or designation.

I’ve seen it happen and you probably have too…

I’m talking about people who call themselves a “speaker-coach-author-designer” or something to that effect!

Then there are those who focus on a bunch of different niches and areas of expertise…

I’ve seen super talented designers offering copywriting services and business coaches selling crystals.

They do this thinking that it’s a great idea to get  their “name out there” or they just want to make a quick buck any way possible.

But the result is a confused, uncertain audience and a damaged reputation and credibility because nobody is going to believe that one person can be truly great at so many different things!

When it comes to your personal brand you don’t want to be a “Jack of all trades, master of none.”

You want to laser in on one or two products or services that will establish your expertise so you can get to the top of the charts in specific industry or niche… especially if you’re a new entrepreneur. 

For instance, 2 of the most successful online entrepreneurs around — Jeff Walker and Ryan Levesque — did exactly that…

They focused on a single area of expertise from day one and they’ve stuck to that one thing for years.

Jeff is known as the “launch expert” and he’s built his entire business around the Product Launch Formula while Ryan is known for his wildly successful marketing funnel methodology and software called the Ask Method.

So trying to be an “expert” in a whole bunch of niches right out of the gate — this is one of the biggest personal branding traps entrepreneurs fall into.

Brand Trap #2: Drowning Your Audience 

If you want a powerful personal brand start by focusing on just one thing… your reputation.

A powerful personal brand is built on a rock-solid reputation but it’s where lots of entrepreneurs go wrong…

They think a great reputation is about “overdelivering.”

They want customers and clients to feel like they received a TON of value and got their money’s worth… and then some.

So, they go out there and build massive A to Z, 12-week courses or programs in their area of expertise… maybe for you that’s web design or internet marketing or copywriting or whatever it happens to be.

BAD IDEA.

When you teach people everything you know — when you overshare or “overdeliver”  — what you’re really doing is creating anxiety, overwhelm and confusion for your clients and customers… hit ‘em with everything you’ve got and they won’t know what hit ‘em!

Instead, you need to hone in on one specific thing inside your zone of genius that helps people complete a project or achieve a goal.

If you’re a designer, for example, you could teach your customers how to create a gorgeous logo for their business.

If you’re a copywriter you could show them how to write an effective sales page.

If you’re an internet marketer or business mentor, you could teach them how to create kicka$$ courses that sell (that’s exactly what we did with Experience Product Masterclass and it’s one of our most popular courses of all time!).

And if you’re a transformational life coach, you could teach them how to laser in on and overcome their limiting beliefs around achieving success in business or finding true love.

Whatever you do, don’t drown your customers in value.

The trick is to keep things simple so that they get the results they’re looking for — this is the path to building trust, creating transformation, establishing that awesome reputation and  building a powerful personal brand that works for you.

Brand Trap #3: Focusing on the What 

Most entrepreneurs believe customers and clients want to work with them and buy from them based on what they know

But the most successful personal brands in the world — think Michelle Obama or Oprah or Gary Vaynerchuk — are built on how they make people feel.

The internet changed the world and how it works. Knowledge is SO cheap right now, it’s literally free.

Anything and everything you want to know is at your fingertips and available to you faster than you can say “Google.”

But your energy, your essence, your values and how you share and teach that’s unique because YOU’RE unique.

And that’s what people want…

They want what they can’t find on the internet and that’s who you are and how you make them feel NOT what you know.

So, give yourself permission to be yourself… focus on being vulnerable, authentic and real.

At different touch points in your business — your content, your website, your products and services — ask yourself…

How do you make them feel? 

That’s the #1 thing to think about in personal branding and we’ve helped clients and students build multi-million dollar brands starting with that one question.

So, powerful personal branding starts with focusing on becoming a hit-maker versus throwing a bunch of products and services at your audience to see what sticks…

It’s about creating results over drowning them in value…

It’s about becoming more YOU and how you want people to feel when they connect with you and your business.

That’s how you build a  personal brand that works for you and your business, a brand that projects who you are and how you want to show up in the world, a brand that matters, and creates the income and impact you want.

Feature Image Credit: pixabay

By Marisa Murgatroyd

Sourced from live your message

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The Best Websites You Probably Don’t Know About

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By Nick Douglas

“What is a website that everyone should know about but few people actually know about?” asks redditor tj007s13. This is a common question on Reddit, but every time it gets new answers. Here are some of our favourite answers from the thread.

Real Life Resources

Music and Media Browsing

In-Browser Software

Shopping

Downloads

Assorted

  • The Electric Typewriter: Collection of long-form journalism and essays, curated according to topic and author.
  • WebOas.is: Tiny portal centred around multi-site search (kind of like those pre-Google search aggregators). Also has pages for cryptocurrency prices, tech news, and other “stocks! weather! sports scores!”-style content.
  • Airport wifi: User-made Google map of Wi-Fi passwords at airport lounges around the world. (Previously on Lifehacker.)
  • Privacy Tools: Compare VPNs to protect yourself while on airport Wi-Fi.
  • The Cutting Room Floor: Wiki of “unused and cut content from video games”.
  • Lightning Map: Real-time map of lightning strikes.

Check out hundreds more in the thread.

What is a website that everyone should know about but few people actually know about? | AskReddit

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Nick Douglas

Sourced from lifehacker

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Why you should start using SVG to boost your website speed

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By Hector Herradura

Graphics are an important field of your visual identity, but also can make your web to load slowly. In this post I will show you how using SVG graphics you can optimize and improve overall customer’s experience and your site load time.

If you know what is a vector graphic and it’s differences between a bitmap image you can skip the introduction and jump to How to improve your server speed with SVG icons section where I talk about how to increase the speed of your site.

Introduction: what is SVG hence a vector

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is a format standardized by W3C on 1999 that aims to port the advantages of vector images to the web.

To understand what is a vector first we must know how images store their info. There are two ways to define an image: to store which primary colour of the additive model (Red Green and Blue) is inside a pixel grid, or to use maths to define a geometric form and store it’s info with numbers and text.

  • Bitmap photos and videos formats use the grid approach.
  • Vector graphics use maths to calculate the final render.

Let’s say we have two images of a box, one is bitmap and the other one a vector. Focus your attention at the bitmap box (we will rotate it slightly to see the effect) and we will make zoom on it. It’s dimensions are 100×100 pixels and 72 PPI ( how many pixels are contained in an inch, Pixel Per Inch).

Example of a bitmap image against a vector image.

As you can see our bitmap box is pixelated, while the vector image is not. This happens because bitmap images are defined in the space and limited by attributes such as resolution (how big is an image, heigh and width) or PPI. The grey pixels are a result from interpolation. So now you know one vector’s advantage, quality is mantained when you make zoom on them because they are being defined by maths and are scalating their dimensions.

Well, you maybe encounter yourself thinking if there could be a photograph represented by vectors, the answer is yes, but that’s not what vectors are for. For photos and videos, bitmap format is the right choice because it has another advantages such a better realistic look, a more affordable way of processing and modifying data and a very good relationship representing complex forms with subtle colour transitions such as clouds or skin tones.

Vectors on the other side were made to describe simple and complex geometric images where there is normally not many transition of colours and than can be scalable to big sizes.

So what is SVG?

SVG is a format / way of writing vector images using markdown language just like html is made for layering text. A box in SVG format will result in something like this:

<svg height=”100" width=”100">
<rect width=”100" height=”100" style=”fill:rgb(0,0,255);stroke-width:3;stroke:rgb(0,0,0)”></rect>
</svg>

which result in this :

Let’s get dirty, for example this time we will use my logo which has a clearly difficult path and we will convert it to SVG. You will see it doesn’t matter how difficult the shape it is, it can be always be defined by maths. My logo in SVG result in this:

Example of a complicated icon path converted to svg

How to use SVG on the web

Is very easy to use SVG on the web the only thing you have to know is the SVG code of your icon. All kind of vector drawable software like Adobe Illustrator or Inskcape have an option to export your work as an SVG. Then, you only have to paste it onto your html and you are done.

Of course you will need to add some code to your taste (exmaple; a SVG inside a div to position it on the right of the page). If you become competent with SVG you can make changes directly at the code, no need to use Illustrator to make little changes anymore.

When to use SVG

SVG is specially good for icons. You should try to use it every time you can. There is an png icon on your web? change it and convert it to SVG.

How to improve your server speed with SVG icons

Think, when you enter a webpage and your browser has to download images from the server, these occur via HTTP GET request. While making request, the server can be slowly due to some reasons or you computer can have a slow internet connection resulting in a slow load time. When you use SVG you are reducing the number of petitions to the server.

Imagine that you have 10 PNG icons on your page, that results in 10 request more to the server, an increment of 0,300ms. You can get rid of that 0,300ms and make your web load faster using SVG icons. Now because your icons are part of the code and are sent to you via the html file, you are downloading only one archive and making only one petition to the server.

Here you have an example: this site, which I created for this case, is using 10 .png icons, downloaded from mdi-icons page, and it’s hosted on GitHub. When we use the inspector tool ( Ctrl + Shift + C) from our browser and go to network tab, we get the site’s loading speed in ms. You can see that there are a total of 12 request which result in a load time of 655ms.

Site created for this case
Notice the 12 request made to the server and how they affected the site’s load speed.

Now if we visit the same site with svg icons notice what happened to all the request, they are gone and the load time is faster.

Notice the total request reduction from 12 to 2 resulting in a faster speed

Well, we have gotten a really good result, we have gone from 655 miliseconds to 343 miliseconds! but also pay atention to the other parameters, all except DOMContentLoaded are faster. SVG let’s you icrease your site speed while increasing your icons quality, it is a win-win situation.

In the next section I will explain some others advantages of SVG.

Others advantages of SVG:

Quality and size

  • Your will improve the quality of your site when the user makes zoom in the page icon the quality will be the same.
  • You will forget about colour profiles (ICC profiles) since the colour is read directly from the code and profile is defined by the browser.
  • SVG is made of text, text always means less consumption of resources and the lesser weight of all of kind data types. You will gain some free space on your server and remember text can be compressed to the maximum (if you server have some kind of compression) bitmap images can’t be compressed to maximum, just a tinny fraction.

SVG will Increase your workflow

  • As we have talked before you can make direct changes to the code, no need to open your favourite vector software to retouch it, save and upload the img to a server again.
  • You can share your vectors easily via e-mail with your teammates or you just can copy it directly from the source code of the page in case you don’t have access to the archive.

You can animate SVG with CSS

  • Yep, you can animate SVG with CSS, say goodbye to GIFs embrace the code. For example you can change the colour of some path from your SVG when hovering the mouse. This opens you to a world of new possibilities the limit it’s on the code side.

SVG animation

You can use text inside SVG

  • You can put text in it and modify it as you desire. It’s selectable and also you can make curved text.
SVG curved text

You empower you brand against illicit use of your logo by commons folks

  • SVG are a double-edged sword, the common folks are not going to be able to download any image from your site, it will be almost impossible to them figure it out how to print and modify your logo; but people with techie knowledge can use it instantly instead of having to recreate it again from an image.

Conclusion

You should always try to use SVG in web development. They are fast, they have the most quality of all img formats and they are easy to implement, and you server will have less request to attend.

 

By Hector Herradura

Sourced from UX Collective

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