Wednesday, November 29, 2017

7 Trials and Tribulations Of Email Outreach

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

It’s the grand old way of getting your website noticed online, but despite its long-in-the-tooth reputation, the effectiveness of email outreach is showing no signs of slowing down – despite what some experts might have us believe.

An old-fashioned email campaign can seem like the loneliest method of promotion available in the 21st Century. It’s not unusual to write thousands of outreach emails knowing full well that well over half of your messages will never even be read.

Neil Patel believes that a reasonable expectation from an outreach campaign is to get around five links for every 100 emails sent, amounting to a success rate of 5%. Meaning that 95% of the time you spend composing messages and hitting that ‘send’ button will be a fruitless endeavor.

So why do we bother? In a world where cold emailing is heavily frowned upon, and a third of all emails are opened based solely on whether the recipient likes the subject line or not, you could be forgiven for thinking that it might all be just a waste of time and resources.

However, this isn’t the case. Email outreach is an extremely powerful tool when correctly utilized, but effective email etiquette is a minefield – and many people struggle to run engaging campaigns.

So it’s for this reason that I’ve decided to offer a list of the seven biggest trials and tribulations that face email marketers today.

1. Making Sure your Campaign isn’t too Spammy

It’s the first and perhaps the biggest point to make. Absolutely nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a cold email. They’re annoying, irritating, frustrating and every other synonym of awful. Think about cold calls – where you pick up the phone and listen to somebody with no idea of whom you are speaking from a script with the intent of getting you to give their business money. It’s soulless and often insulting. The cold email is just that in written form.

Like with many websites that aim to expand their network, we try to avoid the risks that come with cold emailing by adding a personal touch to our campaigns. It’s a tricky business because personalization takes time, but if you treat your target audience with respect, it can pay dividends.

In a bid to reach out to people personally, while keeping our quantity of outreach emails high, we’ve constructed a template to customize based on the individual we’re contacting. This enables us to utilize a personal touch that impersonal general marketing emails are devoid of. Here is the one we’re using:

Hey NAME,

Hope you’re doing well!

My name is Dmytro Spilka, and I’m a Head Wizard at Solvid, an Inbound Marketing Blog based in London, UK.

I recently stumbled upon your post on POST TITLE (LINK TO THE POST), and found it incredibly useful. In the post (point #7 to be precise), you mentioned a POST THEY’VE MENTIONED by NAME OF THE PERSON THEY’VE MENTIONED. Although it’s a great resource, it feels slightly outdated and incomplete to some extent.

Anyway, the reason I’m contacting is that I’ve recently put together YOUR POST TITLE (YOUR POST LINK). SOMETHING UNIQUE ABOUT YOUR POST. Basically, did everything to create the ultimate go-to resource.

In fact, our post has been recommended by Rand Fishkin (founder of Moz), Brian Dean of Backlinko and Smart Blogger (BE HONEST HERE).

I would really appreciate if you could please take a second to scan our post and see whether it could be of any help to you and your audience as an additional resource.

Apologies for eating up your time!

Best Wishes,

Dmytro

Web: https://solvid.co.uk
Email: hello@solvid.co.uk

As you can see above, we’re using a few personal touches.

  • The actual name of the person. Believe it or not, a lot of ‘outreachers’ use phrases like Dear Webmaster, Hello Editor, Hi Sir, etc.
  • We’re mentioning the exact location in the article where they’ve mentioned a resource. This shows that we’ve actually looked at the article and know what it’s about.
  • We’re using influencers to add value to our resource. Be honest here. If, in fact, your post hasn’t been featured or mentioned by anyone – don’t make it up – this can easily undermine your credibility.

2. Nailing the Subject Line

The importance of the subject line can’t be emphasized enough. This is your big hook to get the recipients to read on – and there are plenty of theories behind the recipe for an irresistible heading.

Convince and Convert state that 69% of recipients report emails as spam based solely on the subject line, while 35% open emails because of the allure of the heading. These are substantial figures that underline the importance of the few words that pop up first in your recipients’ inboxes – so nailing your subject line is imperative.

So what’s the secret formula behind the perfect email subject? Throwing their two cents into the ring is Adestra, which believes that the use of words like ‘Alert’, ‘Daily’ and ‘Free Delivery’ bring marketers the best responses.

However, our outreach campaigns try to show honesty without the use of superfluous superlatives – our subject line is simple:

‘Typical outreach email’ shows that we have no interest in click-baiting our intended audience. It also indicates that we have enough faith in our service that we don’t need to rely on tricks of the trade to lure prospective customers in. That being said, email subjects will vary on a case-by-case basis. Hence, we’d suggest to A/B test different subject lines to see which one performs better. In our tests, ‘Typical outreach email’ performed much better, improving an open rate by roughly 20-30%.

3. Optimizing your Open Rate

You could be marketing the best product or service on the web, but if your open rate is lacking then it means that your recipients aren’t interested enough to even look beyond the subject line of your emails.

According to research conducted by MailChimp, the average open rate varies between 20 – 25% – depending on the industry you’re in. This is unsurprising and disappointing in equal measure, but it’s also a great benchmark to incorporate a bit of trial and error into your campaign.

All sorts of factors can influence your open rate, from the aforementioned subject line, to the relevance of your target audience, to the time of day that you send your emails out (no, really – RingLead have compiled stats that suggest the sweet spot for posting outreach mail is between 2 pm and 5 pm on a Tuesday afternoon).

Premium services like reply.io, buzzstream and outreach.io not only offer the opportunity to personalize automatic outreach emails, but also provide very useful stats on open rates and click-through rates, allowing you to monitor what aspects of your campaign is working better than others and giving you the chance to fine-tune your messages.

For instance, here are some open rate stats for our latest outreach campaign:

In all honestly, 71% open rate is pretty decent (even our regular email subscribers aren’t that active).

4. Sussing out Whom to Target

Figuring out whom to target is risky business – if you pick the wrong recipients, then you’re in danger of wasting valuable time.

There are many great services that can scout out relevant email addresses to aid your campaign, and hunter.io is a good example that offers a free email search engine (albeit with limited usage for non-premium members).

A good alternative to hunter.io is Voila Norbert.

To find an email address, simply enter the name of the person and a domain name of the company they work at.

Although the information isn’t 100% accurate all the time, this way of finding the right email address can save a lot of time, especially if that particular domain has hundreds of registered emails.

5. Finding the actual recipients

It pays to be attentive in finding which website staff to email – if you believe your blog has a resource that you feel should be added to a website’s list, you could contact the author of an existing article in which you believe your site would make a good reference point. However, a generic ask for a link would not bring the numbers, as it’s likely to be regarded as spam. Answer the following questions before asking for an inclusion of your link:

  1. Is the site relevant to my resource?
  2. Is my resource of an exceptional quality and is better than the rest?
  3. Does the site look trustworthy?
  4. Do I have the name of the website owner or the author of the article?
  5. Do I have the right email address?
  6. When was it published? If the article is 4-5 years old, it’s very unlikely that someone will update it for the sake of one additional resource.
  7. Did I use enough personal touches? See point 1 for examples.

If only 2-3 of these questions fall under the category of ‘No’ or ‘Negative’ then it’s not worth the effort outreaching – simply because your email will appear spammy.

You need to be observant – if you’re targeting an author of an article that you feel your work would benefit as a reference, be sure to check whether the author is a guest poster or a member of staff for the business. If it’s the former, you’d be better off contacting the editor – though getting in touch with the original content producer may lead to your work being linked in future publications.

Many websites now shy away from publishing emails of editors and content producers in favor of using website contact forms, but if you’re looking to get your posts or resources noticed, the best way of having your message read by those who matter is to find the details of the content producers themselves.

6. Keeping on Top of Your Follow-Ups

It can be easy to neglect a follow up to your outreach email. If the recipient didn’t want to reply the first time, why would they bother a second time? While chasing a less responsive target may seem counter-intuitive, it works as a great simple call to action and indicates to them that you’re serious about showing off your work.

Our follow up template is a simplified reminder of our original email – our intention is to drop a subtle reminder that we have a great product that would benefit the user and their readership:

Hey NAME,

Just a quick follow-up on a message I sent earlier (attached below) about our awesome POST TITLE (LINK TO THE POST): I would really appreciate to hear back from you.

Best Wishes,

Dmytro

Web: https://solvid.co.uk
Email: hello@solvid.co.uk

We use the reply function on our initial email for ease of reference for the recipient, while including a transparent subject line informing our target that we’re simply following up to an original email.

It’s important to refrain from trigger-happy follow-ups. Becoming a nuisance outreacher risks alienating your audience and even damaging your reputation. Therefore, we wouldn’t suggest going for more than 2 follow-ups after the initial outreach email.

7. Managing the Scale of Outreach

The business of outreach is a long-winded one that carries no guarantee of success. You could invest days of hard work into emailing 1000s of recipients and receive no interest in return.

Luckily you can maximize your chances of success and minimize the time spent chasing poor leads by doing a little bit of market research.

Try to understand who your target would be and whether they would have any affiliates or backlinks that would also benefit from utilizing your work or service.

It’s better to have 100 quality recipients than 1,000 poorly researched ones – this is how we got 20-25% success rate of our latest email outreach campaign.

We like to run tidy outreach campaigns, so take the preemptive measure of identifying leads to investigate to assess whether associated websites would benefit from using our work. If we feel that they would, we add their information to our spreadsheet and invite them to take a look at a relevant piece that would make a good reference point.

Conclusion

So there you have it – with some good prep and honest marketing, the age-old slog of email outreach doesn’t have to be such a pain.

As long as you’re outreaching to a relevant personal with a resource that can potentially bring value to that website’s audience while keeping your emails reasonably personal (without being too creepy), you should see a positive return for the time spent.

Now it’s time to get out there and put your website on the map!

 

About Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics combines behavioral analytics with email automation. Our software tracks actions of your users across multiple devices allowing you to analyze, segment and engage your customers with automatic, behavior-based emails in one place. We call it Customer Engagement Automation. Get, keep and grow more customers with Kissmetrics.

 

 

About the Author: Dmytro is a Head Wizard at Solvid, a creative inbound marketing & software development agency in London, UK. His work has been featured and mentioned in a wide range of publication, including The Next Web, Business2Community, Huff Post, Crazy Egg, Sitepoint, SEMRush, and more.

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

Monday, November 27, 2017

VRWERX: Scaring the crap out of you

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!


Presented by Intel


The brief history of modern VR is a history of scaring people. Even a whimsical adventure can elicit moments of terror if you find yourself standing on the edge of a cliff or trying to make a huge jump. Overt horror experiences, then, can be truly terrifying, but virtual reality studio VRWERX and its managing partners Russell Naftal and Alex Barder want to push things even further.

“Our goal was to make people crap themselves,” says Barder.

Paranormal Activity: The Lost Soul was the studio’s first game project, a spin-off of the ‘found footage’ horror films. Barder and Naftal don’t scare easily, they say. Naftal doesn’t love heights, and Barder once got freaked out by a music-playing teddy bear in his wife’s old bedroom, but horror movies don’t typically faze them.

“That’s why we wanted to make Paranormal Activity as scary as possible,” says Barder, before admitting with glee that the game “can absolutely destroy you.”

They may have gotten their wish. Reviews, from both critics and users, are full of tales of screaming and yelling and lots and lots of swearing. Naftal boasts that, during a screening of one of the films, they showed off a demo of The Lost Soul, and one unfortunate person got so scared that they wet themself. It absolutely isn’t for the faint of heart.

“This game is going to give me a heart-attack,” one positive review on Steam reads. “I can’t play it for more than an hour without putting it down, it’s just frightening. Two thumbs up.”

“We maybe went too far, though, and we had to scale back,” Barder concedes. Some of the most terrifying moments were held back from the initial launch, but they’ve not been scrapped. Instead, these bladder-emptying parts are being put in a special, extra-horrifying version of the game that will be available at a later date.

Getting the audio, locomotion, and scares just right has been a challenge, but like other VR companies, one of VRWERX’s biggest obstacles is trying to strike that balance between immersion and accessibility. Exacerbating the problem is a perceived disconnect between traditional gamers and what is required to make players feel like they’re actually in the game.

“Traditional gamers, like people who play Call of Duty and things like that, want to be told what to do, where to go, what button to press,” Naftal says. “They want handholding. But we wanted to make an immersive experience.”

“We didn’t want to have an interface or handholding,” Barder adds. “We wanted players to figure things out for themselves. That’s the challenge, making it immersive but something you can just put on a headset and play.”

A lot of work that players will never really notice goes into finding the perfect balance, creating the most immersive experience, and something as simple as changing the way a door opens can make or break the fantasy. It’s why there needs to be so much playtesting, and include people unfamiliar with games in the testing.

“The thing about VR is that it’s all about these tiny details,” Naftal explains. “Like if someone opens a door and that door doesn’t open in just the right way, that’s going to be noticeable. Even if it’s been like this for years, in VR people pick up on these things.”

Beyond horror

Despite the desire to make players’ hair go white with terror, VRWERX isn’t a horror studio, specifically. Naftal notes that VR is such a visceral experience that it’s a perfect fit for horror, but he considers the studio to be “consumer focused,” leading to a diverse set of projects. These include 360 VR movies, like Jesus: The Story of Christ for the evangelical audience, and the upcoming Mission Impossible game, inspired by the movies, that the company is working on with Paramount.

Given that both Paranormal Activity and Mission Impossible are movie properties, Naftal and Barder are well aware of the bad reputations of most movie tie-ins. “Movie tie-ins have a bad reputation because they normally just follow the movie and don’t try anything new,” Naftal says. “But we wanted to create a new experience set in that universe with Paranormal Activity’s lore.”

“If people want that experience, they can just go and watch the movie,” Barder interjects. They liken their approach to the Arkham and Shadow of Mordor series, both of which have links to movies and literature, but aren’t beholden to them. “It’s that universe, but a different story,” Naftal adds.

That’s why, in Mission Impossible, players won’t be playing as Tom Cruise/Ethan Hunt. VRWERX wantsthese experiences to be more personal. It’s the player doing these things, becoming an action hero, not a Hollywood star or a fictional secret agent. Players want to be the ones doing a death-defying climb up a skyscraper in Dubai, not somebody else. Of course, the source material still provides plenty of inspiration for the sort of stunts, acrobatics, and misadventures VRWERX wants to create in the game.

While gaming is what’s currently driving VR, Naftal and Barder see its future as a lot more diverse, emphasized by the studio’s mix of projects. They think that one day VR could become ubiquitous, but gaming alone won’t make that dream a reality.

“1000 percent I believe that VR can be ubiquitous, something that’s in everyone’s home,” says Barder. He thinks it could be a powerful tool for education, as well. “Kids go to school and they’re still learning everything from books, memorizing books, but imagine what could be done with VR?”

Naftal suggests putting children in a VR simulation of the Revolutionary War to teach them about that period in America’s history, but he also thinks there’s a long way to go. First, the wires need to go. Though there are wireless headsets, like the Samsung Gear VR, the Vive and Rift are still shackled to PCs and specific rooms in people’s homes—there are wires and sensors and all the faffing that comes with setting everything up. He thinks audio needs to improve, too, especially for horror, making it clear which direction noises are coming from.

There’s a lot of work to do, then, but VRWERX is optimistic about VR’s future, especially if the company’s pioneering VR tech, games, and other experiences add to collective innovation and mastery.

“There are a lot of great VR games out there, but it’s still very new, so we should support each other,” Naftal says. “You see some negativity and criticism, but we should work together to make VR better.”


Sponsored posts are content produced by a company that is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. Content produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

The PC Gaming channel is presented by Intel®'s Game Dev program.

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

Saturday, November 25, 2017

6 ways the world would improve if Uber died today

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!


Imagine it’s December 2018 — one year after a spectacular corporate meltdown at Uber. The dust has settled, and we’re beginning to see the far-reaching consequences of the company’s collapse. Here’s how I see that possible future scenario:

1. The fire sale has turned into a wildfire

Much of Uber’s valuation related to future projections about self-driving vehicles, but in the short term, the board’s decision post-crash to licence the brand’s core ride hailing and driver management software has led to at least 50 companies in different countries building small-scale and moderately successful local equivalents. All have been widely accepted by local city populations and regulators alike, proof that much has been learned from the regulatory challenges Uber faced prior to its collapse.

The resulting licensing fees have helped turn Uberify.Inc, the scaled-back patent and licensing entity that arose from Uber’s demise, into a highly successful software and training licensing provider. The valuation may be nothing like the scale of Uber’s, but the social impact has been greatly appreciated. Ride-hailing services that play nicely with city authorities are becoming the norm.

2. Workers or small business owners?

The debate rages on, but landmark legislation in both the UK and Germany has now enshrined solopreneurship in law, with protections aligned to key aspects of employment law, such as health, unemployment benefit, and paid holidays/sick days. This development has given rise to at least two new startups in London specializing in so-called “solopreneur platform rights.” Their work involves consolidating workers’ ratings and performance data from 10 of the major gig operators so that workers’ reputations travel with them. It’s a promising start. Last month’s flash strike of Laundrapp workers in Spain illustrates the importance of gig economy workers’ rights. Not only are startups now designing these rights into their platforms; they are building whole businesses around them.

3. The rise of the personal data broker

Europe’s GDPR data protection legislation was too late to address the data breach controversy Uber faced back in 2017, but Uber’s behavior in covering up the breach, served to showcase the importance of that particularly European piece of legislation. With the US poised to address the possibility of individual rights over data, it’s clear that the Uber case massively advanced the cause of privacy advocates, if not individual control and monetization of data. Would the current crop of startups offering regular people the chance to monetize, pool, and trade their data have been as successful were it not for the massive public awareness of GDPR brought about by Uber? And with at least two major banks now offering data consultancy services for paid current account customers, it’s clearly becoming the next big Fintech wave.

4. It’s OK to leave without paying

The user experience leap that Uber took by allowing users to exit the vehicle without physically paying has had a massive impact on almost every industry. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Open Banking has its roots in Uber’s decision to implement this significant step. Within retail, the no-pay store has become a reality at least for some of the higher end brands, and there are promising experiments even with the supermarkets. The shopping-cart-as-payment engine debate rages. And several oil majors are very close to adoption of payment-less fuel stations.

5. Governance, and more governance

At least three of the major Silicon Valley VC funds have now appointed Chief Ethics Officers to look at the politico-ethical ramifications of their investments’ business models. Obviously, it should be incumbent on every investor to have a broad social view of her or his portfolios, but at least it’s a start. And various country-level and supranational bodies now have ethics and investment committees to bolster the capability of anti-trust or competition authorities.

There’s a widespread acceptance that the “fail-fast” mantra of the early 2010s is officially dead. In its place is a greater emphasis on “question your motives” in the various blogs and books that Silicon Valley never ceases to produce. We are also moving beyond the “disrupt or die” mentality and seeing many more cross-industry collaborations as a result. These include energy companies and electronics retailers jointly managing supply chains and financial services providers partnering with LinkedIn for loan provision. Uber’s demise also brought about the demise of the alpha-male bullishness so prevalent in Silicon Valley in the late 2010s. The future may not yet be entirely green and equitable, but the signs are promising.

6. Self driving cars are less selfish

With Uber’s driverless cars project screeching to a halt, its rivals — tech companies and auto manufacturers — have had a chance to consider the business model for self-driving cars within the context of their potential impact on jobs and the environment. Instead of racing to launch the next driverless car prototype, the likes of GM, Geely, and Apple are thinking long and hard about how self-driving cars need to be more cognizant not just of the road ahead but of the city ahead, its population, and its workers. With a thought to workers who drive for a living, we’ve seen massive activity around re-employment and papers on “jobs of the future” once the self-driving car is here.

Those of us who were sceptical about Uber’s meteoric rise have been surprised by the circumstances but not the fact of its demise. Now that we’ve come out the other side of a painful bubble-burst and a restructure, we can observe many green shoots of a complete politico-socio-economic rethink, powered by technology and design. We dream big but keep rooted.

This article is obviously fictional and the outward manifestation of a great deal of optimism as well as mild cynicism about the sectors covered here :)

John Oswald is Global Principal at Futurice, an international agency that helps businesses become future-capable.

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

Friday, November 24, 2017

VPN provider TunnelBear expands into password management with RememBear app

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!


Popular virtual private network (VPN) provider TunnelBear is extending its paws into a new privacy-focused product with the launch of a cross-platform password management app.

Available now in beta, RememBear (get it?) is currently available on Windows, Android, Mac, and iOS, as well as through a Chrome browser extension. In a nutshell, the app sets out to achieve what TunnelBear tried to do when it went to market more than six years ago — make password management as easy and user-friendly as possible to encourage uptake among millions more users.

Founded out of Canada in 2011, TunnelBear gained a reputation as a fun, user-friendly VPN that uses funky bear-burrowing animations to bring privacy to mobile and desktop web browsing. The company claims around 20 million have used its service since inception, and a few months ago it opened up to businesses with a new Teams product.

Above: TunnelBear for Mac

Security hygiene

With shoddy security practices and high-profile breaches now a near-daily occurrence, it can be all too easy to become desensitized to the threat posed by hackers and cybercriminals — after all, if billion-dollar companies can’t sort their security practices out, what hope do we have? But password management promises to make it easier for people to adopt a healthier approach to, well, password management, as they don’t have to rely on the same one or two passwords across dozens of apps and websites and can even auto-generate passwords that are incredibly difficult to crack.

Based on our brief tests, RememBear is pretty slick, though it does more or less does what its competitors do. Creating an account is simple — you input your email address and then set a master password.

RememBear can then store all your passwords and credit card information — in an encrypted vault — and it auto-fills the details across myriad apps and websites. RememBear can also randomly generate impossibly long and strong passwords for each of your online accounts, and it includes various controls that let you stipulate the number of characters and how many of those are symbols, capitals, and digits.

Above: Create account and store credentials.

Once you’ve set things up on one device, it’s easy to log in on other devices, too. Let’s say you first create an account on your iPhone, then want to sync things across to your tablet — simply tap “Add a New Device” from the main menu in the iPhone app, then scan the code when prompted during set-up in the tablet app. You can also elect to manually enter a code (unique device key).

Above: Adding devices

As you add items to RememBear, you will see your list of synchronized accounts populate the main screen of the app.

Above: Apps on RememBear

State of play

Password management is, of course, a busy field, including the likes of DashLane, which is funded to the tune of more than $52 million, and LastPass, which was snapped up for $110 million by LogMeIn a couple of years back. Elsewhere, fellow Canadian company AgileBits operates the popular 1Password app. But with an army of existing VPN users, and a reputation for being fun and user-friendly, TunnelBear has a strong foundation from which to shoehorn users into its password management service. With that in mind, it would’ve been good if users could have used their existing TunnelBear credentials to access RememBear, but, alas, you do need to create a new account from scratch.

TunnelBear cofounder Ryan Dochuk said in a blog post.

When TunnelBear began development in 2011, we started with a simple theory. There were dozens of VPN services already available, but they were generally geared towards technical users. To make VPN an effective privacy tool, people had to understand security settings like ports and proxies, protocols like OpenVPN vs. IPSec, and encryption types like Blowfish vs. AES. The idea for TunnelBear was to manage all these complicated security decisions for users and give people a privacy tool that was as easy as “on and off.”

Password management apps share many of the same challenges as VPN did in 2011. Less than 3 percent of people currently use a password manager and many of the existing tools are still complicated and frustrating to set up.

When we started RememBear development, our goal was to replicate many of the same things that made people fall in love with TunnelBear. A friendly, approachable design. A simple, fun user experience. Strong, independently audited security.

For the record, RememBear currently offers the ability to import passwords from LastPass and 1Password to make it easier for existing password-management app users to make the switch. During its public beta, RememBear will be completely free, but a subscription model will eventually be introduced.

It’s also interesting to note the tendency of privacy-focused companies to start out in one specific area and expand into new realms. We’ve also seen this with ProtonMail, which began as an encrypted email service provider and now offers a VPN. And TunnelBear launched an ad-blocking app on iOS a couple of years back.

It makes sense: Companies may as well leverage their reputation to offer related services to those who want them.

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

CyberMiles Successfully Completes ICO With Record Token Contribution Rush

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!


Revolutionary blockchain protocol, designed to decentralize the online marketplace, experiences overwhelming global community participation following a Nov. 21 launch

DALLAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)–November 22, 2017–

CyberMiles, a new blockchain platform designed and optimized for commercial applications, has completed the crowd-funding phase of its initial coin offering in less than one day-among the fastest-moving ICOs in history. Empowering the decentralization of the online marketplace, CyberMiles has had participants from 111 countries contribute close to $30 million to fund the build-out of its groundbreaking technology.

With 420 million CyberMiles Tokens quickly spoken for during this contribution event, in addition to 280 million CMT already allocated during the preceding private stage, CyberMiles has enjoyed one of the swiftest, more successful ICOs on record.

“We’re delighted that our token contribution event has been met with such enthusiastic interest from the community,” Dr. Lucas Lu, a founding member of the CyberMiles Foundation as well as the 5miles peer-to-peer marketplace, said. “The public blockchain platform we’re developing has the potential to revolutionize e-commerce, so community support is critical to funding this initiative.”

CyberMiles’ blockchain technology emerged from 5xlab, 5miles’ blockchain development laboratory. 5miles will be the first decentralized app (“dapp”) to use CyberMiles’ blockchain protocol, intended to be a mainstream blockchain technology for real-world businesses.

The modular solutions that are integral to CyberMiles have protocols for 12 commercial applications and more than 300 sub-categories of transaction types widely in use. These cover a large portion of potential online marketplace and e-commerce applications via “smart business contracts.”

For its part, 5miles is planning to migrate its 12 million existing users (along with more than $3 billion in marketplace transactions annually) to CyberMiles. The user identity, credit history, reputation, and transaction history data all can be encrypted and recorded on the CyberMiles blockchain, enabling myriad business applications for e-commerce partners like 5miles.

To learn about CyberMiles, visit cm.5miles.com. To join CyberMiles’ online community, go to t.me/cybermilestoken.

About CyberMiles

CyberMiles is a new decentralized blockchain protocol optimized for business transactions. Initiated in the fall of 2017 by 5xlab, a blockchain development laboratory, CyberMiles uses innovative “smart business contract” modules to facilitate and process transactions simply, effectively, and with transparency. This technology focuses on commercial applications with protocols that ensure the appropriate balance between vertical effectiveness and network compatibility. Learn more at cm.5miles.com.

About 5miles

5miles is a free, local marketplace app, one of the fastest-growing online shopping ventures in the United States. The app is the first of its kind to include services, housing and jobs, in addition to second-hand trading. 5miles launched in January 2015, immediately setting itself apart with an easy-to-use mobile interface, identity verification capabilities (for added safety and security), mobile payment and shipping options, and a hyper-local curation of offerings users can search-all within their very own neighborhoods. Since then, buyers and sellers in every major market coast-to-coast have transacted more than $5 billion in merchandise through 5miles, which Google Play has ranked a top 10 shopping app. Visit 5miles.com.

App Store: http://ift.tt/1vcJIHb
Google Play: http://ift.tt/1vcJIXs

5miles
Mark Brinkerhoff, 817-681-5739
mark@5milesapp.com

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition is Beamdog’s next D&D game project

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!


One of the best Dungeons & Dragons game series is getting that ol’ Beamdog black magic — an upgrade for modern PCs. Say hello to Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition, which will include the two expansions and several of the premium modules that the original development studio, BioWare, included postrelease.

Beamdog consists of a number of former BioWare developers who worked on classics such as Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights. It’s made a business taking these old games, which were built with the Infinity Engine game tools, and making enhanced editions, cleaning up the old code, fixing bugs, and introducing new characters. It’s made four enhanced editions thus far: Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, Icewind Dale, and Planescape. It also made a new experience, Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, which takes place between the first two in the series.

Neverwinter Nights, however, is the first time the studio will turn its attention to the Aurora Engine, which Obsidian Entertainment used to also make Neverwinter Nights 2. CD Projekt Red also turned to Aurora for its first Witcher game, and BioWare used the tools as the base for Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic’s updated Odyssey Engine.

Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition will include the two expansions — Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark — along with three premium modules: Pirates of the Sword Coast, Infinite Dungeons, and Wyvern Crown of Cormyr. It will support play for up to 64 other people in online worlds that players can create with the game’s hefty mod tools. It will support 4K visuals, and it’s going to include a number of improvements that longtime modders have wanted.

It will also work with past Neverwinter Nights saves and mods — you can find many on sites such as The Neverwinter Vault.

Neverwinter Nights was a departure for BioWare, which had built a reputation for story-driven games with the Baldur’s Gate series. This new game didn’t have a character party — instead, you get a companion character you cannot control. It also introduced the modding tools, which people used to make adventure modules, shared online worlds that mimic MMOs, and oodles of monsters, characters, and other items that people used in their own creations.

This is welcome news to fans of Neverwinter Nights, or people who like replaying old RPGs (or diving in for the first time). I’ve had a hard time getting the GOG version running on Windows 10 PCs, so it’ll be nice to dive into Hordes of the Underdark without having to jump through some technical hoops. Even better, I’m looking forward to the new mods that come from a younger generation of Neverwinter Nights fans.

The PC Gaming channel is presented by Intel®'s Game Dev program.

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

Monday, November 20, 2017

Designing secure games from the ground up (VB Live)

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!


Cyber attackers are targeting the video game industry more than ever. In this VB Live event, security experts share the secrets to proactively securing your environment and protecting against the increasing number of hacks, DDoS attacks, and more. 

Don’t miss out! Register now for free.


Cybercrime will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021, and the video game industry in particular is being targeted. Indie game developers, such as those like free-to-play gaming company Smilegate West, are particularly vulnerable.

Smilegate is known particularly for CROSSFIRE, a popular first-person online shooter, and to monitor and combat fraud, says Arash S.Haghighi, Smilegate’s manager of infrastructure, they have not just anti-fraud tools, but a security team on the clock 24/7.

When attacks happens, Haghighi says, they’ve discovered how important it is to be able to analyze the scope of the attacks, find the issue, and begin to resolve it immediately — before repercussions can start to multiply.

And that’s because they’ve thought ahead, he adds, which is the central key to ensuring your game is as secure, and as defensible, as possible.

“We have the policies and procedures in place, we know our architecture, and which parts are most vulnerable,” Haghighi says.

For example, if your service will be just serving on a port AT or 443, when you launch the service, you don’t need to open another port to the public. It’s the kind of planning that needs to start in game development, and needs be on par in importance with things like character design and monetization strategies.

“Before launching any actual game, any new service, you have to have your architecture and your security plan designed,” Haghighi says. “Your design has to be secure, and has to include security procedures and policies, including which ports and IPs should you open to public.”

Not only are you securing your service, you’re also ensuring you know exactly how to navigate your system’s build and mitigate an attack.

Once you launch your game, it takes systematic monitoring, whether that’s via third-party tools or an in-house security system that detects and alerts your team that fraud is occurring — or, in a review of game logs, detects that it is likely to have occurred.

Smilegate doesn’t just keep an eye on external attacks like DDOS, brute force attacks, and security injection attacks; they’re also looking for in-game cheating as well, by monitoring gameplay with a tool that detects cheating software or other unauthorized use of the game or its resources.

When a user connects to the game online, the anti-cheating software checks the course of a game, the game files, and hardware RAM to identify unauthorized third-party programs — add-ons, mods, hacks, etc.  — running simultaneously with a game and modifications to game files which facilitate or support cheating.

In fact, they consider being proactive across all of their vulnerable points one of their most important security tools. This includes both employing your very own hackers in web tests, or penetration tests, of your own site and service across the board, and running security tools in account managing systems that monitor user activity and IPs. This is particularly important in catching fake user accounts that are deployed to steal personal data from legit players.

“Our users are very important,” Haghighhi says, “Which is why we have security and disaster recovery plans. We are not going to lose any data.”

To learn more about how to design a more secure game from the ground up, detect and act against cyberattacks, and protect both your users and your reputation, don’t miss this VB Live event!


Register here for free.


You’ll learn about:

  • How to prevent data breaches, SQL injections, cross-site scripting, remote file inclusion, and other cyberattacks
  • Integrating cloud and on-premises solutions
  • How to handle larger, Internet-scale attacks
  • Preventing the reputation hit that hacked accounts or downed sites bring

Speakers:

  • Ryan Safarian, VP Engineering, JumpRamp Games
  • Arash S.Haghighi, Manager of Infrastructure, Smilegate West
  • Stewart Rogers, Analyst-at-Large, VentureBeat
  • Rachael Brownell, Moderator, VentureBeat

Sponsored by Akamai

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor

Geomodified Searches, Localized Results, and How to Track the Right Keywords and Locations for Your Business - Next Level

Something every woman should know - WHY MEN LIE!

Posted by jocameron

Welcome to the newest installment of our educational Next Level series! In our last episode, our fearless writer Jo Cameron shared how to uncover low-value content that could hurt your rankings and turn it into something valuable. Today, she's returned to share how to do effective keyword research and targeting for local queries. Read on and level up!


All around the world, people are searching: X sits at a computer high above the city and searches dreamily for the best beaches in Ko Samui. Y strides down a puddle-drenched street and hastily types good Japanese noodles into an expensive handheld computer. K takes up way too much space and bandwidth on the free wireless network in a chain coffee house, which could be located just about anywhere in the world, and hunts for the best price on a gadgety thing.

As we search, the engines are working hard to churn out relevant results based on what we’re searching, our location, personalized results, and just about anything else that can be jammed into an algorithm about our complex human lives. As a business owner or SEO, you’ll want to be able to identify the best opportunities for your online presence. Even if your business doesn’t have a physical location and you don’t have the pleasure of sweeping leaves off your welcome mat, understanding the local landscape can help you hone in on keywords with more opportunity for your business.

In this Next Level post, we’ll go through the different types of geo-targeted searches, how to track the right keywords and locations for your business in Moz Pro, and how to distribute your physical local business details with Moz Local. If you'd like to follow along with this tutorial, get started with a free 30-day trial of Moz Pro:

Follow along with a free trial

Whether your customer is two streets away or gliding peacefully above us on the International Space Station, you must consider how the intertwining worlds of local and national search impact your online presence.


Geomodified searches vs. geolocated searches

First, so you can confidently stride into your next marketing meeting and effortlessly contribute to a related conversation on Slack, let’s take a quick look at the lingo.

Geomodified searches include the city/neighborhood in the search term itself to target the searcher’s area of interest.

You may have searched some of these examples yourself in a moment of escapism: “beaches in Ko Samui,” “ramen noodles in Seattle,” “solid state drive London,” or “life drawing classes London.”

Geomodified searches state explicit local intent for results related to a particular location. As a marketer or business owner, tracking geomodified keywords gives you insight into how you’re ranking for those searches specifically.

Geolocated searches are searches made while the searcher is physically located in a specific area — generally a city. You may hear the term “location targeting” thrown about, often in the high-roller realm of paid marketing. Rather than looking at keywords that contain certain areas, this type of geotargeting focuses on searches made within an area.

Examples might include: “Japanese noodles,” “Ramen,” “solid state drive,” or “coffee,” searched from the city of Seattle, or the city of London, or the city of Tokyo.

Of course, the above ways of searching and tracking are often intertwined with each other. Our speedy fingers type demands, algorithms buzz, and content providers hit publish and bite their collective nails as analytics charts populate displaying our progress. Smart SEOs will likely have a keyword strategy that accounts for both geomodified and geolocated searches.

Researching local keywords

The more specific your keywords and the location you’re targeting, generally, the less data you’ll find. Check your favorite keyword research tool, like Keyword Explorer, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. In this example, I’m looking at search volume data for “japanese noodles” vs. “japanese noodles london.”

"Japanese noodles"

"Japanese noodles London"

So, do I toss this geomodified keyword? Hold on, buddy — while the Monthly Volume decreases, take a look at that Difficulty score — it increases. It’s an easy search term to dismiss, since the search volume is so low, but what this tells me is that there's more to the story.

A search for “japanese noodles” is too broad to divine much of the searcher’s intent — do they want to make Japanese noodles? Learn what Japanese noodles are? Find an appetizing image?… and so on and so forth. The term itself doesn’t give us much context to work with.

So, while the search volume may be lower, a search for “japanese noodles london” means so much more — now we have some idea of the searcher’s intent. If your site’s content matches up with the searcher’s intent, and you can beat your competition in the SERPs, you could find that the lower search volume equates to a higher conversion rate, and you could be setting yourself up for a great return on investment.

Digging into hyperlocal niches is a challenge. We’ve got some handy tips for investigating hyperlocal keywords, including using similar but slightly larger regions, digging into auto-suggest to gather keyword ideas, and using the grouping function in Keyword Explorer.

Testing will be your friend here. Build a lovely list, create some content, and then test, analyze, and as the shampoo bottle recommends, rinse and repeat.


Localized ranking signals and results

When search engines impress us all by displaying a gazillion results per point whatever of a second, they aren’t just looking inwards at their index. They're looking outwards at the searcher, figuring out the ideal pairing of humans and results.

Local rankings factors take into consideration things like proximity between the searcher and the business, consistency of citations, and reviews, to name just a few. These are jumbled together with all the other signals we’re used to, like authority and relevancy. The full and glorious report is available here: http://ift.tt/1E65sTq

I often find myself returning to the local search ranking factors report because there's just so much to digest. So go ahead bookmark it in a folder called “Local SEO” for easy reference, and delight in how organized you are.

While you may expect a search for “life drawing” to turn up mostly organic results, you can see the Local Pack is elbowing its way in there to serve up classes near me:

And likewise, you may expect a search for “life drawing london” to show only local results, but lookie here: we’ve also got some top organic results that have targeted “life drawing london” and the local results creep ever closer to the top:

From these examples you can see that localized results can have a big impact on your SEO strategy, particularly if you’re competing with Local Pack-heavy results. So let’s go ahead and assemble a good strategy into a format that you can follow for your business.


Tracking what’s right for your business

With your mind brimming with local lingo, let’s take a look at how you can track the right types of keywords and locations for your business using Moz Pro. I’ll also touch on Moz Local for the brick-and-mortar types.

1. Your business is rocking the online world

Quest: Track your target keywords nationally and keep your eye on keywords dominated by SERP features you can’t win, like Local Packs.

Hey there, w-w-w dot Your Great Site dot com! You’re the owner of a sweet, shiny website. You’re a member of the digital revolution, a content creator, a message deliverer, a gadgety thingy provider. Your customers are primarily online. I mean, they exist in real life too, but they are also totally and completely immersed in the online world. (Aren’t we all?)

Start by setting up a brand-new Moz Pro Campaign for your target location.

Select one of each search engine to track for your location. This is what I like to call the full deck:

Another personal favorite is what I call the "Google Special." Select Google desktop and Google Mobile for two locations. This is especially handy if you want to track two national locations in a single Campaign. Here I’ve gone with the US and Canada:

I like to track Google Mobile along with Google desktop results. Ideally you want to be performing consistently in both. If the results are hugely disparate, you may need to check that your site is mobile friendly.

Pour all your lovely keywords into the Campaign creation wizard. Turn that keyword bucket upside-down and give the bottom a satisfying tap like a drum:

Where have we found all these lovely keywords? Don’t tell me you don’t know!

Head over to Keyword Explorer and enter your website. Yes, friend, that’s right. We can show you the keywords your site is already ranking for:

I’m going to leave you to have some fun with that, but when you’re done frolicking in keywords you’re ranking for, keywords your competitors are ranking for, and keywords your Mum’s blog is ranking for, pop back and we’ll continue on our quest.

Next: Onward to the SERP features!

SERP features are both a blessing and a curse. Yes, you could zip to the top of page 1 if you’re lucky enough to be present in those SERP features, but they’re also a minefield, as they squeeze out the organic results you’ve worked so hard to secure.

Luckily for you, we’ve got the map to this dastardly minefield. Keep your eye out for Local Packs and Local Teasers; these are your main threats.

If you have an online business and you're seeing too many local-type SERP features, this may be an indication that you’re tracking the wrong keywords. You can also start to identify features that do apply to your business, like Image Packs and Featured Snippets.

When you’re done with your local quest, you can come back and try to own some of these features, just like we explored in a previous Next Level blog post: Hunting Down SERP Features to Understand Intent & Drive Traffic

2. Your business rocks customers in the real world

Quest: Track keywords locally and nationally and hone in on local SERP features + the wonderful world of NAP.

What if you run a cozy little cupcake shop in your cozy little city?

Use the same search engine setup from above, and sprinkle locally tracked keywords into the mix.

If you’re setting up a new Campaign, you can add both national and local keywords like a boss.

You can see I’ve added a mouthwatering selection of keywords in both the National Keywords section and in the Local Keywords field. This is because I want to see if one of my cupcake shop’s landing pages is ranking in Google Desktop, Google Mobile, and Yahoo and Bing, both nationally and locally, in my immediate vicinity of Seattle. Along with gathering comparative national and local ranking data, the other reason to track keywords nationally is so you can see how you’re doing in terms of on-page optimization.

Your path to cupcake domination doesn’t stop there! You’re also going to want to be the big player rocking the Local Pack.

Filter by Local Pack or Local Teaser to see if your site is featured. Keep your eye out for any results marked with a red circle, as these are being dominated by your competitors.

The wonderful world of NAP

As a local business owner, you'll probably have hours of operation, and maybe even one of those signs that you turn around to indicate whether you’re open or closed. You also have something that blogs and e-commerce sites don’t have: NAP, baby!

As a lingo learner, your lingo learning days are never over, especially in the world of digital marketing (actually, just make that digital anything). NAP is the acronym for business name, address, and phone number. In local SEO you’ll see this term float by more often than a crunchy brown leaf on a cold November morning.

NAP details are your lifeblood: You want people to know them, you want them to be correct, and you want them to be correct everywhere — for the very simple reason that humans and Google will trust you if your data is consistent.

If you manage a single location and decide to go down the manual listing management route, kudos to you, my friend. I’m going to offer some resources to guide you:

3. You manage multiple local businesses with multiple locations

Quest: Bulk-distribute business NAP, fix consistency issues, and stamp out duplicates.

If you are juggling a bunch of locations for your own business, or a client’s, you’ll know that in the world of citation building things can get out of hand pretty gosh-darn quick. Any number of acts can result in your business listing details splitting into multiple fragments, whether you moved locations, inherited a phone number that has an online past, or someone in-house set up your listings incorrectly.

While a single business operating out of a single location may have the choice to manually manage their listing distribution, with every location you add to your list your task becomes exponentially more complex.

Remember earlier, when we talked about those all-important local search ranking factors? The factors that determine local results, like proximity, citation signals, reviews, and so on? Well, now you’ll be really glad you bookmarked that link.

You can do all sorts of things to send appealing local signals to Google. While there isn’t a great deal we can do about proximity right now — people have a tendency to travel where they want to — the foundational act of consistently distributing your NAP details is within your power.

That’s where Moz Local steps in. The main purpose of Moz Local is to help you publish and maintain NAP consistency in bulk.

First, enter your business name and postcode in the free Check Listing tool. Bounce, bounce...

After a few bounces, you’ll get the results:

Moz Local will only manage listings that have been “verified” to prevent spam submissions.

If you’re not seeing what you’d expect in the Check Listing tool, you’ll want to dig up your Google Maps and Facebook Places pages and check them against these requirements on our Help Hub.

When you’re ready to start distributing your business details to our partners, you can select and purchase your listing. You can find out more about purchasing your listing, again on our Help Hub.

Pro Tip: If you have lots of local clients, you’ll probably want to purchase via CSV upload. Follow our documentation to get your CSV all spruced up and formatted correctly.

If tracking your visibility and reputation is high on your to-do list, then you’ll want to look at purchasing your listings at the Professional or Premium level.

We’ll track your local and organic rankings for your Google My Business categories by default, but you can enter your own group of target keywords here. We account for the geographic location of your listings, so be sure to add keywords without any geomodifiers!

If you want to track more keywords, we’ve got you covered. Hop on over to Moz Pro and set up a Campaign like we did in the section above.

4. You’re a dog trainer who services your local area without a storefront

Quest: Help owners of aspiring good dogs find your awesome training skills, even though you don’t have a brick-and-mortar storefront.

At Moz HQ, we love our pooches: they are the sunshine of our lives (as our Instagram feed delightfully confirms). While they’re all good doggos, well-trained pooches have a special place in our hearts.

But back to business. If you train dogs, or run another location-specific business without a shop front, this is called a service-area business (or SAB, another term to add to the new lingo pile).

Start by tracking searches for “dog trainer seattle,” and all the other keywords you discovered in your research, both nationally and locally.

I’ve got my Campaign pulled up, so I’m going to add some keywords and track them nationally and locally.

You may find that some keywords on a national level are just too competitive for your local business. That’s okay! You can refine your list as you go. If you’re happy with your local tracking, then you can remove the nationally tracked keywords from your Campaign and just track your keywords at the local level.

Pro Tip: Remember that if you want to improve your Page Optimization with Moz Pro, you’ll have to have the keyword tracked nationally in your Campaign.

In terms of Moz Local, since accuracy, completeness, and consistency are key factors, the tool pushes your complete address to our partners in order to improve your search ranking. It's possible to use Moz Local with a service-area business (SAB), but it's worth noting that some partners do not support hidden addresses. Miriam Ellis describes how Moz Local works with service-area businesses (SABs) in her recent blog post.

Basically, if your business is okay with your address being visible in multiple places, then we can work with your Facebook page, provided it’s showing your address. You won’t achieve a 100% visibility score, but chances are your direct local competitors are in the same boat.


Wrapping up

Whether you’re reaching every corner of the globe with your online presence, or putting cupcakes into the hands of Seattleites, the local SEO landscape has an impact on how your site is represented in search results.

The key is identifying the right opportunities for your business and delivering the most accurate and consistent information to search engines, directories, and your human visitors, too.


Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Reverse Phone - People Search - Email Search - Public Records - Criminal Records. Best Data, Conversions, And Customer Suppor