Self-driving drone Lily has had quite the success in sales and it’s not even on the market yet. The startup pulled in a whopping $34 million in pre-orders by the end of 2015, with 60,000 units already sold. While that’s not as massive as Apple Watch pre-sales (1.2 million sold in the first day), it’s still a pretty good indicator Lily is onto something. The little flying bot… Read More

In 2016, digital display ad spending will eclipse search ad spending in the US for the first time. Combined, the categories of video, sponsorships, rich media and ldquo;banners and other rdquo; will account for the largest share of digital ad spending: 47.9%, worth $32.17 billion.

Posted by tallen1985 We know Facebook has a huge amount of data on people. For the last 18 months, they've been sharing more of this information than ever before through their platform, Audience Insights. As a result, we can begin to pull together audience personas for very little cost other than time, effort, and a Facebook account. This post is going give a whirlwind tour of how we can begin to use Audience Insights to build personas for our business that will allow us to target content better and keep people in mind rather users sessions. What is a persona and why should we build them? A persona is the summary of research or observations based on a key group of users who show similar behaviours and lifestyle choices.It allows us to collectively group users into buckets, rather than having to focus on thousands of individual needs and wants. This is then distilled into a fictitious person that can be referenced to guide business decisions, whether they be the type of design we use, the content of our email marketing, the tone of voice we use for our brand, or even the types of products we may look to be selling. We may end up generating multiple personas to connect to various users we are looking to share our brand with. This will help guide business decisions, rather than taking a one-size-fits-everyone approach. Three things to be aware of Facebook offers two audience options — “All of Facebook” or “People connected to your Page.” In the past, if we have paid for Facebook followers or used extremely broad advertising options, the “People connected to your Page” data could potentially be an inaccurate representation of our target audience. If our audience segment is less than 1,000 people, Audience Insights won’t display any information. If you select more than one option in the faceted navigation, this uses an “or” functionality. This can make data hard to dissect, particularly if you input multiple interests. How to build a persona using Facebook Audience Insights Let’s assume here that we are building a persona using all of Facebook’s data, either because we are a new brand, doing some client research and we don’t have access to their Facebook account, or as mentioned earlier, our existing Facebook followers have been dirtied by either buying followers or previous advertising campaigns being too broad. *If we decide to build personas based on existing Facebook followers, the process is extremely similar; however, if the number of followers is low, we may not be able to segment our audience interests as much as in the steps that follow. 1. First thing, head over to Facebook Audience Insights . You don’t need an advertising account — all you need is a Facebook profile. 2. Let’s assume we have a fictitious sports clothing brand who are trying to appeal more to runners. Enter an interest closely aligned to your brand or products; in this instance, it's “running.” 3. The initial search gives us some pretty broad options that probably aren’t that useful. However, they do indicate that of those interested in running, 60% of them are women, so let’s narrow by gender for our first audience persona. Remember, we will end up creating multiple personas for our brand — this is just one demographic we are targeting. 4. The results show that a large portion of our audience sits between the ages of 18 and 44 — however, that is once again a quite broad segment of our audience. Let’s focus on where the bulk of the market appears to be by also filtering by age, 25–34. 5. From the Demographics screen we can start to dig into the type of people who might be interested in our product and start building their persona. Audience Insights categorizes our audience into Lifestyle demographics and provides us with a brief description about the type of lifestyle they may lead from which we can extract relevant information to filter our audience further. The table below indicates those lifestyles that fit best with our running brand for the demographics defined so far. Lifestyle Definition Tots and Toys Affluent, well-educated working couples, with preschool-aged children. They are homeowners, mainly in single-family houses. Truckin’ and Stylin’ Mid-to-late 30s and live in rural towns. On average, they earn middle incomes; they rank below average for income when compared to the nation. Shooting Stars Childless couples in their 30s and early 40s. Home-owning households often include professionals with postgraduate degrees. Career Building Young, childless singles. Mixture of mobile renters and first-time homeowners, living in condos and single-family houses. 6. From here we can build a better picture of the type of person that may be interested in our products. Using the above information, we now know the following information about one group of potential customers. They are: Females aged between 25-34 Mainly homeowners Both singles and couples Working Mixture of childless or young children families. Adding all of this information as facets and we have cut our audience down to between 300k and 350k monthly active people. 7. From here, we can drill into each of the individual tabs to extract relevant information about our target persona, such as: Demographics: Age, gender, job title, relationship status, education level Interests: Categories and page likes Location: Where they live Activity: Frequency of online activity and device usage Household: Income, home ownership, home market value, spending methods Purchase Behavior: Likelihood of online purchases, purchase behavior Example of a persona that can be built using Audience Insights We now have a decent amount of information that we can pull together to start to build the profile of the type of person we want sell our products to. We can keep this person in mind when pulling together any content or carrying out any type of marketing activities. Below is just one audience persona that we might look to target for our fictitious running brand. Name: Mummy Michelle Age: 25–34 Relationship Status: In a relationship Education Level: University Household: Homeowner Estimate Household Income: $125,000 Interests: Running events Jewelry (brands such as Tiffany Co. and Verragio Engagement Rings) Clothing Boutiques Romance Novels/Movies (The Notebook) Reality TV (The Hills and Keeping Up with the Kardashians) Device Usage: Her primary device is the mobile phone and she is more likely to be using an iPhone Spending Habits: Michelle primarily spends using a credit card rather than cash. She is also highly likely to complete an online purchase, particularly on clothing. So, that’s all we have to do? We would need to rinse and repeat this process for different demographics that we believe may be interested in our brand. But yes, these are some initial steps we can take to building audience personas that we can target our products and brand towards. However, I’m not saying that this is the only task we have to complete to build audience personas. Yes, Facebook has a lot of data, but they're still piecing together all the parts. In the same way we know we shouldn’t completely trust the numbers that Google Keyword Planner gives us , they just give us a ballpark to play in. As such, the data we are given by Audience Insights should be just one of multiple research methods we should be looking to use to build audience personas. Big brands spend huge volumes of their budget trying to understand their customers. Many of us can’t compete on that level. We need to look to the tools and data we have available to us, and build the best personas we can for our budget. Here are a handful of resources that can be used to help develop personas that won’t cost a lot, other than perhaps in time: Dig around Google (other search engines are available) for other surveys that have previously been carried out within your niche. Everett Sizemore discussed this in a post on inbound.org on how to carry out audience persona research on a budget . My colleague Craig Bradford took a look at how to use the the Alchemy API to build personas from users Twitter profiles Google Analytics has been giving us demographic data for a while now (if you’ve turned it on). A quick insight on how to do this can be found from Steven Sparber here . Actually speaking to people. Zachary Cohn has a great slide deck discussing 18 tips on running customer interviews . What other processes do you use to help build audience personas? Have you used Audience Insights to build personas, and if so, do you have any further tips? Please share in the comments below or reach out to me on Twitter @the_timallen . 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!

Apple Music has surpassed 10 million subscribers, according to a report from the Financial Times. Showcasing rapid growth, the number is a 50% increase from the 6.5 million paid subscribers that CEO Tim Cook claimed in October. Apple launched its music streaming service last June, offering free three-month trials (Apple Music for Android launched in November). Those who didn’t cancel… Read More

As free music streaming continues to grow in popularity, one of the bigger services has hit an important milestone in its bid to build a profitable business. SoundCloud — the Berlin-based audio uploading and streaming site with some 175 million users — has inked a licensing deal with Universal Music Group. For SoundCloud, it marks another step away from potential lawsuits… Read More

HBO’s quest to more directly compete with streaming service rivals like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu is kicking off this week, with the company’s launch of a new “Kids” section in its mobile application and the rollout of new children’s programming on its TV network. At launch, the Kids section will feature popular kids shows like “Sesame Street,”… Read More

Content marketing is different these days. You used to be able to publish blog posts on just about anything, and you’d get at least  some traffic. But now, you won’t get any. Content creation levels are at an all time high as more and more marketers start to understand how effective it can be. This has created a phenomenon known as “ content shock . ” Now, if you want to really succeed, you need to do two things. First, you need to create truly great content — there’s just no way around it any more. But second, you need to promote it. You need to find the people who would find your content useful and get it in front of them. The more you promote a piece of content, the higher your return will be from it. I’ve written about content promotion strategies quite a bit before because they are really important. But there’s another issue: Content promotion takes a lot of time. In many cases, it takes longer than it does to create the content itself. This means efficiency is key. And to achieve efficiency, as well as consistent results from your promotion efforts, you need tools. Tools help automate boring, repetitive tasks and give you insight into the relevant data by helping you analyze it. Tools are what this post is all about. I’ve put together a list of 15 tools that can help you promote content more effectively. I’m positive that at least a portion of them will be brand new to you and worth a try.  Get more responses by sending more effective emails Effective modern promotion should be based around email outreach. You need to make connections with influencers, site owners, and writers and get them to take a look at your content. If your content is relevant and high quality, you’re all set. The most difficult part in this type of strategy is creating those connections and getting them to open and read your emails. There are a few tools that will help you either get a better open rate, save time sending emails, or get a better conversion rate (converting views into reads and responses). 1.  Nimble : Nimble solves a big problem of keeping track of everything you know about a contact. Plus, it can save you a ton of time. The tool has a few really useful features. The main one is the “contact record” function. When you add a contact to the tool, it will pull up any easily findable information on that contact (like social media profiles on all the big networks): You can go into any individual contact at any time and see all their social profiles as well as the information collected. On top of that, it functions almost as a typical CRM ( customer relationship management) tool by allowing you to add tasks for a person (for you or your team) and to keep track of your past communications with them. One of the most useful parts of all this is that the tool actually draws information from all of those social profiles and somehow cuts out a lot of the redundant information. You end up with a really concise and useful profile of each contact : 2.  Yesware : Before I found tools such as Yesware, I always had a huge question on my mind when I sent outreach promotional emails: Are they actually reading my emails? When you’re first starting out, you might get a low reply rate from the emails you send. Before you jump to the conclusion that your emails need to be written better, it helps to know if people are getting or opening the emails. If they’re not getting the emails because they end up in the junk box or promotions tab in Gmail , that’s an issue you can fix. Or they might be getting the emails but not liking your subject line, so they don’t open them. And this, of course, kills your overall reply rate. Finally, you may  see that your emails are getting opened but aren’t generating a response. That’s when you know you need to write better. You need to optimize all three of these areas to maximize your promotion success. Enter Yesware. It’s primarily a Gmail plugin, and it allows you to track the specific times when your emails are opened by someone as well as if that someone takes an action (clicks a link or downloads something attached). You can activate it by checking the little Yesware box at the bottom of any email you send. This allows you to look into whether or not specific people are opening your emails. On top of that, Yesware provides several insightful reports. They allow you to look at the performance of your emails as a whole. If you’re sending a consistent number of emails and are trying to improve your process, these kinds of reports will make it obvious whether your results are improving or not. 3.  BananaTag : This is another tool that is primarily a Gmail plugin (although it can be used with other email clients), and it works very similarly to Yesware. I’ve tried them both, and they both work well, so it’s a matter of personal preference which one you choose. It works the same way: you just check the BananaTag box at the end of an email you’re sending. It will track when emails are opened and what actions are taken. At any time, you can look at the detailed performance of a single email or look at an overall report of opens and other activities: 4.  FollowUpThen : When you start sending (and receiving) hundreds of emails in a short time period, things get hectic— fast. At first, you might be able to keep your inbox fairly clean, but as soon as you don’t respond to a few right away, they start to build up. This tool is the solution to that and a really simple way to keep your inbox clean so that you don’t miss important messages and are not stressed out. Here’s how it works: When you don’t want to deal with an email right away, for whatever reason, you simply forward it to an email address controlled by the tool. There are tons that you can choose from . But here are some examples: 2hours@followupthen.com 3days@followupthen.com 4weeks@followupthen.com 3m@followupthen.com (3 months) 11am@followupthen.com 1132am@followupthen.com mar30@followupthen.com 22april@followupthen.com All you do is send the email to one of those addresses, and it will resend you that original email when you’ve specified. Keep in mind that you could also BCC one of these addresses when you send out an email if you want to make sure that you follow up with the recipient. Here’s an example of it in action. Let’s say you get an email from me about a new post. You’re super excited (right?), but you just don’t have the time to read the post right now. Instead of letting it wait around in your inbox, possibly forgetting about it, you forward it to “3days@followupthen.com”. Now, you can clear the email from your inbox and know that it will be back in three days when you’ll have more time. 5.  BuzzStream : BuzzStream is probably the most established email outreach tool there is. It’s been around for years and is a really useful tool. Its main goal is to save you time by helping you find contact information and send emails in bulk. To start with, you can add domains or people to the tool that you’d like to connect with. Then, the tool will find as much contact information as possible so that you can choose from the different options. Then, you can select as many of those contacts as you’d like and pick a template (that you create) to send them. The tool will automatically fill in details like name and site name if you include it in the template. Finally, it’s created mainly for marketers, so it has a few nice features like being able to set the stage of your relationships. This helps you keep track of the people you shouldn’t contact again, those you need to contact, and those you might want to follow up with. Finally, there’s another really cool aspect of the tool. It integrates right into your browser. That means you can automatically pull all the information on any page you come across. Next, you can import these pages into your BuzzStream account, and it will begin pulling additional contact information. There are many sites that this is useful for; one of them is BuzzSumo (which we’ll look at later in this post). You can do a search on BuzzSumo to find popular content  and then import all those popular websites into an outreach campaign. If you’ve ever done an outreach campaign from scratch, you can understand how this tool will save you several hours per week. 6.  ContentMarketer.io : This is a more recent alternative to BuzzStream, and it’s specifically geared toward content marketers. It has a beautiful design and is really user friendly, so you can start using it immediately. Once you start a project in the tool, you have three functions to choose from (the big blue buttons at the top): The first feature, “scan a post,” lets you enter one of your posts to allow the tool automatically find website owners who publish relevant content. You can then reach out to them to try to get a link. The next feature is the “research contacts” function, which is pretty self-explanatory. The tool finds email addresses and social media accounts of contacts you add. The final function is the “outreach” component, which allows you to send emails quickly using your own (or their suggested) templates: Again, this can save you an incredible amount of time, and it combines three important functions in one simple tool. Get more views from social media with these tools There are many goals of content promotion, but most of them revolve around getting more traffic. As you might know, social media sites are one of the best places to find traffic for your new content. There are some things you have to do manually, but there are now a ton of great tools that will help you save time on social media and get better results. 7.  Narrow.io : This is a new tool, but it seems to have a lot going for it, which is why it’s on this list. I haven’t used it extensively myself, but others have reported being able to use it to grow their Twitter followings up to 2,160% faster . The tool has one goal: get you more Twitter followers. What sets it apart from all the other tools that have the same goal is a slightly more sophisticated algorithm. You can find users who might be interested in your business by searching for relevant keywords and hashtags. With this information, the tool will create an audience you can target. Then, Narrow will follow those users and even favorite relevant tweets. If those people don’t follow you back, Narrow will unfollow them automatically. There is a risk: Using tools to automatically follow and unfollow people could get your account suspended. However, you can lower your risk by not being very aggressive. Additionally, the creators of the tool claim that they have actual people manually doing the following and unfollowing, which may circumvent the rules. Just remember that there is still probably some risk. Also keep in mind that there are no free accounts. You can get a 7-day free trial, but then you’ll have to shift to a paid account. 8.  Topsy : This is another tool that is a must if you use Twitter for content promotion. Topsy is basically a high quality Twitter search engine. I don’t know if you’ve ever used Twitter’s internal search engine, but it’s mediocre at best. Here’s how you use Topsy. Say you just wrote an article about content marketing. Ideally, you want to promote this article to people who already have an interest in content marketing. Search for “content marketing” in Topsy, and it will bring up a list of results of the most shared content marketing articles on Twitter. Notice that you can specify the time range on the left sidebar. This is really useful if you’re writing about time sensitive topics. For example, if someone was interested in a beginner article on content marketing a year ago, they’re probably way past that stage by now. But if they shared a beginner’s guide last week, chances are that your new content (if it’s for beginners) is perfect for them. Next, you need to do something with these results. Click the orange “# more” link on any of the results. This will give you a detailed breakdown of everyone who shared it on Twitter during that time period. If you have limited time, focus on reaching out to the “influential only” users because they have many more followers than the rest. Once you have a list of people who might be willing to share your content (as well as read it themselves), it’s up to you where you go from there. Here are a few basic strategies: Follow them, then send them a direct message if they follow you back, and ask if they’re interested in your content Tweet at them (include “@username” in the Tweet), and share your content For influential users, click through to their websites and find their email addresses. Send them an email about your content. 9.  Tweetdeck : This is the final Twitter tool, I promise. It’s actually offered by Twitter itself. It’s a great tool to monitor your Twitter activity all at once, similarly to HootSuite. You can have as many columns as you’d like, but you’ll probably only want 4-5 so that they all fit on your screen at once. You can remove any of them at any time and add new ones by clicking the “add column” button on the left sidebar: There are a ton to choose from, so you can really customize it to stay updated on the parts of Twitter you care about. In addition, you can send tweets right from the tool and even schedule them beforehand (although other tools are easier if you need this function often): How does this factor into your promotion? First, you’ll want to tweet out your content to your followers, and not just once, but multiple times over the following few weeks and even a few times sporadically after that. It’s nice to be able to schedule all of these activities at once, which you can do with TweetDeck. The other side is monitoring. There are a few ways you can use this tool to your advantage. The first is by monitoring tweets of your content. If someone is nice enough to share it, you’ll want to favorite it, retweet it, or reply to it. In addition, you can connect with any of that user’s followers who liked it as well. Another great way to use it is to set up a search column for a main term in your content. For example, I would set one up for “content promotion tools” if I was promoting this article. Then, when someone tweeted asking or saying something about some good promotion tools, I could reply with a link to this post. 10.  Buffer : If you want to save time scheduling your social media sharing on any of the main social networks, Buffer is the tool to go with. It’s probably the only tool used by almost every professional social media marketer. Buffer lets you schedule posts on all major social networks: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Pinterest Google+  To top it off, you can schedule one post to be posted on multiple networks at the same time. It can save you a lot of time, which you can then use to send more emails. The first thing you’ll need to do when you create an account is to set up your posting schedule for each network (they can all be different). You can choose how often you post on any specific day of the week, and you’ll never need to do it again after the first time: The main component of your Buffer account is your “queue,” which contains all the posts you want posted in the future to one or more of your social media accounts. Once you add posts to your queue, Buffer will post them at the times you specified. You can add posts to the queues of any of your profiles in the tool itself. Just type it in, and click “ add to queue . ” On your main queue page, you can also see all the posts you currently have in your queue and edit them if needed: But if you had to do it all manually, it’d still be kind of a pain. That’s why you install the Buffer browser extension . Then, when you’re on a page you want to share, you just click the icon in your browser (or any sharing icon on the page). Immediately, you can add a post to your queue (for multiple social profiles if you’d like): On top of that, you can tell Buffer to schedule the post multiple times by going to the power scheduler : When you publish a post, visit it, and schedule your own sharing of it right away. It’ll take less than a minute this way, whereas it would take several minutes with most tools or if you were to do it manually. Finally, Buffer also offers some good insights through its analytics. It will track how often posts are viewed, shared, and clicked: This lets you try out different posting styles, and then you can continue using the ones that work best. 11.  Image Sharer plugin : The last tool in this section is a plugin by SumoMe . Including images in your social media posts automatically makes them more successful. People are attracted to images and are likely to share them. This plugin makes it easy for your blog readers to share your pictures on their favorite image-based social networks. Once you install and activate the SumoMe image sharer plugin , all of your images will have sharing buttons added to them (you get to pick which networks you want displayed): When a visitor clicks one of the buttons, a pop-up for that network will open, which will let them make a post that includes the link to the page and the image selected. Not only does this make it easier for your own readers to share your content but it also guarantees that you will get more traffic from those shares (since the images get more attention). Get more high quality backlinks (and the SEO traffic they bring) The final class of tools in this post focuses on helping you get more links to your content. Links are a hugely important part of any promotional campaign. Often, links bring you immediate traffic, but they also bring you steady, long-term traffic because they help you rank better in search engines (that’s SEO 101 ). 12.  Citation Labs : Citation labs isn’t actually a single tool; they offer many: However, there are two in particular that are very useful for what we want here. The first one is the broken link builder tool. I’ll break down the main features for you quickly here, or you can just watch this 2-minute video: The tool is very simple to use. You add in a keyword or multiple keywords that describe the topic of the content you created: Then, the tool will bring up a large list of broken URLs. These no longer work the way they’re supposed to. But there’s one more column of the results that is crucial: the number of links that point to that broken page. The idea here is to contact as many of those sites that link to the broken page as possible and tell them that their link no longer works. Then, you can suggest your new content as a replacement. The closer your page is to the old content, the more successful you will be. For more in-depth guidance, check out my guide to broken link building . The link prospector: This is the second Citation Labs tool that can be useful here. Again, you search for a keyword that matches your content. This time, the tool brings up a list of pages and websites that you might be able to get links from: Some of these will be resource pages. You can just email them and ask them to add your content. Others might be guest posts. In this case, you will have to pitch your own guest post topic, and then you might be able to link back to your original piece of content. This tool returns several types of content that are relevant to your content, so if you can get links from any of them, they’ll be useful. It leaves you quite a bit of work to do yourself, but it will save you some time finding good sites and pages to target for links. 13.  Ahrefs : You can’t do scalable link building without access to a good link database. There are a few different options, but Ahrefs has arguably the most complete database of links. You can test it out with a free account, but it will be pretty limited. Eventually, you’ll need a paid account, which costs a decent bit. If you want a slightly cheaper option, you can opt for the next tool—Majestic. There are two main parts of Ahrefs. The first is the content explorer , which is still relatively new. When you search for a topic, the tool returns the most popular content in its database that is relevant. You can sort by the number of social shares on any of the major networks as well as by the number of sites that link to the content. The most basic way to use this information for promotion is to sort by linking domains and then to look at who linked to each of those results. Then, do email outreach to each of those linking domains, and see if they’d link to your content as well. The second main part of Ahrefs is the link database, which is what it was originally known for. Type in any domain or URL into the tool: It will then return you a ton of useful linking information. This pairs up nicely with the content explorer because then you can find all the sites that link to each piece of popular content. You can also order the links by authority so that you only spend time reaching out to pages with a high URL rating that will have a significant effect on your search rankings. 14.  Majestic : This is a realistic alternative to Ahrefs when it comes to a link database. It doesn’t have the content explorer, but it has one of the largest and most useful link databases there is. It works almost in the same way as Ahrefs does. You input a URL or domain, and the tool returns all the link information it has : You’ll notice that the tool splits the URL and domain ratings into citation flow and trust flow. It makes it really easy to spot spam links because their trust flow numbers are always much lower than their citation flow numbers. Again, you can use this in a similar way. Find content that is similar to yours and that has backlinks to it. Then use Majestic to find those backlinks and contact them to try to get one to your content. 15.  BuzzSumo : I saved a good one for last. BuzzSumo is probably the best tool when it comes to finding popular content around a topic. It’s very similar to Ahrefs’ content explorer but was created long before it and for this single purpose. Again, you use the same basic strategy for promotion. Type in your content topic in the tool: You’ll get a list of the most popular content based on shares on all the major social networks. Then, you can either put those links into a link database tool (like Majestic), or you can click on “view sharers” to see who shared the content on Twitter (and reach out to those users). Conclusion You should always be developing your skills as a marketer. However, to fully utilize your skills, you need the right tools to help you out. You wouldn’t ask carpenters to build a house with a spoon; instead, you’d give them hammers and saws. These content promotion tools will help you get more traffic in less time—both are very good things for you as a marketer. If I missed a content promotion tool that you love, I’d appreciate if you shared it below in a comment. It might be a useful one I’m unfamiliar with, and everyone else reading might like it too.

Curious to see which apps are in the Top Charts on the Apple TV App Store, without having to actually browse to that section on Apple’s new media player? Starting today, you can get this information more easily, thanks to App Annie’s addition of Apple TV data in its Store Stats product, which now tracks the top free, paid and top grossing apps on the Apple TV App Store. The… Read More

The topic of placing products on the homepage always comes with debate, but when thinking in the context of customer experience design, the reasons against presenting products are straightforward.  I've previously taken an in-depth look at product page design , and now it's time to turn the spotlight on the homepage. Read more...

Well I wish I could say this every month! Record numbers for the second month in a row! Certainly the year-end push helped with my passive income portfolio but I hope you take away both the good and the bad from this post (plenty of both). When I started my income post my numbers were TINY and as the number increases I understand they can start to break from what is achievable in front of people. However, what I hope people take away is that no one of my businesses is CRAZY numbers and picking any one of the businesses and tackling it first is very much achievable! Never shared before – I share the simple process I credit the majority of the businesses success to. I think it is the single greatest reason that I have been able to build a team which can execute all this work so well with me only working a couple hrs a night! In this report I will talk through my monthly results for… Passive Income Website Portfolio AuthorityWebsiteIncome Blog SEO Expired Domain Services: Domain Finding Service (buy domains that meet my metrics) Done for Your Private Blog Network (let my team build you a personal PBN) LightningRank (get access to the most powerful PBN available!) Brand Builders (FBA Branded Site Creation Affiliate Site Creation) Amazon FBA Business ( see latest updates here ) Key Successes This Website Redesign (let me know your thoughts opportunities to make it better!) – It has been long overdue and I finally have a site that looks ½ decent… not mind-blowing awesome but at least decent. Also I finally have some really solid opt-in bonuses and the site organized to make sense with its current topics. My New favorite page – http://authoritywebsiteincome.com/start-here/  ( Thrive can do awesome stuff easily) Amazon FBA Results – Not surprising December was a great month for the FBA business. The income results are still growing in January so excited to continue to watch. PBN Procedure Improvements – Doing an analysis on all customer feedback from 2015 for my 2016 Done For You PBN Service I saw content quality to be the biggest issue. My project manager followed my very boring system for implementing a new procedure expertly and the results were dramatic… 25% of the writers were fired, new writers hired and no comments about article quality being anything but great since. How To Get A Lot Done When You Only Have 2 Hrs a Night! A common question on this site is how with working only a couple hrs a night is it possible to get everything done and keep so many balls in the air (portfolio of sites, this blog, lightningrank services, FBA business + others)? The fact is it is the process described below executed repeatedly over years and years which has resulted in building up an awesome team with robust procedures and all measured/tracked weekly. My Process for Getting Work Done: Identify need/problem (me, project manager or one of my team leads) Create a quick procedure for it (me, project manager or one of my team leads) Assign it to a team member or hire 3-5 people on UpWork.com (project manager or team lead) Give the 3-5 people a similar test assignment with no interview and minimal training (project manager or team lead) Review quality of work done and communication and then  fire all but the best Assign the (potentially new) team member to execute the created procedure and work together to improve it (project manager or team lead) Manage the change to the new procedure (project manager or team lead) Input the new procedure into the procedure database (list in a google doc) Communicate the new procedure and the basics of the change to the affected team members Begin executing the procedure (new team member) Improve Track Desired Results of the New Procedure New team member to send out weekly update with basic update to entire team including myself focusing on the metrics of both what has been done and how it has impacted the key end result the new procedure was put in place to improve (new team member) Key metric(quantitative or qualitative) for the new procedure added to the team lead or project managers weekly business scorecard which gets reviewed at the weekly 1 on 1 meeting I have (most important 1hr I do all week)! (project manager and myself) I realize those were probably the most boring 255 words in this websites history but very likely this simple process deserves the majority of the credit for this businesses steady and meaningful growth. Key Failures Planning Priorities – A lot of irons in the fire is the normal and although I certainly didn’t feel overwhelmed I did find I was pushing the pace I was working at a little harder than normal which resulted in me cutting down my critical planning time. Giving up some planning time occasionally is ok but eventually I find myself doing stupid work that provides minimal value and neglecting what really matters. December as a consequence of actually having more time to work I became less efficient with the work I was doing (ie entering blog comments for a lower performing niche site) The business continues to run if I did nothing but the issue is I am uniquely positioned to do many of the activities that are needed to push it forward so I can’t spend my time on stupid stuff! PPC – Why I can’t crack this nut is still a mystery! I enjoy numbers, enjoy testing, enjoy procedures but for whatever reason I still struggle to get PPC working in any part of my business. Part of the problem is I set something up and then re-visit it 2 weeks later. I believe more focused and frequent testing is required. Below is a summary of my progress towards my goals for 2015. Next months income post will have my goals for 2016 and I am very interested to hear what changes you would like to see to these income reports! 2015 Business Goals Download This Easy to Edit and Printable Goals Template – FREE Part 1 – Passive Authority Niche Website IncomeProfit/Loss (Main Goal Achieved) 5 Goals in 2015 for my Website Portfolio Business 1. Build Six Figure Website(Failed in 2015) DEC UPDATE – NOT ACHIEVED – Built a solid website that gets a nice amount of traffic and income but it is about 10x smaller than I wanted. It makes 500-600/month (more in the busy months). Definitely very profitable after investing about $6k to get it going a year ago but not as good as I wanted. Every month traffic increased with the exception of December (typically low month for this niche) Oct Stats Traffic =32,588 Income = $612 2. Continue Building Smaller Profitable “Niche” Sites (Failed in 2015) DECUPDATE – A few of the sites I started have built up to be valuable sites. Most of the sites I only very briefly focused on did not do well. 3. Systematize Top 20 Sites in Portfolio (Achieved in 2015) DEC UPDATE –The content machine is humming along. 3 great writers turning out 10+ articles per week each for my money sites along with niche specific PBN and PBN links being built is continuing to improve rankings and search results. So far the simple combination of quality Content + quality Links = Success 4. Buy 2 Sites Per Month(Achieved in 2015) DECUPDATE: For only the second month of the year I did not purchase any websites! GOAL = 22 sites purchased by Nov 2015 ACTUAL = 26 sites (+1 in Nov) If any readers are looking to sell their profitable site(s) VERY QUICKLY let me know by emailing me. I can let you know in 12hrs if I am interested and complete the purchase in 24-48hrs – Contact Me Here I have found the right sellers are those… Looking to sell FAST (under 24hrs has been accomplished!) (shorter time for due diligence on my end increases risk for me) Not wanting to spend a lot of time on the sales process (analytics and income proof is all I need) Sites are medium-questionable quality (questionable SEO, non-native English articles are OK ) High quality sites making over $500/month often make sense to sell via other channels (EmpireFlippers is a great marketplace) Understand that the benefits of the bullet points above means the sales multiple will be lower If you have an Amazon Affiliate site you are looking to sell fast please let me know! 5. Improve Monetization of Existing Sites(Achieved in 2015) DEC UPDATE – Success in the numbers! Beyond just the seasonal push with my Amazon sites my student loan and six figure site had a record month!RECORD month for my niche website business! PRIMARY GOAL – OVERALL INCOME FOR WEBSITE PORTFOLIO Near doubling of my affiliate sites in Dec! Part 2 – Authority Website Income Blog Profit/Loss My commitment on this site is to provide once per week posts from me in and one MONSTER of an ultimate guide a little later in the year. 3 Goals in 2015 for AuthorityWebsiteIncome.com Post 1-2 times per week(Achieved in 2015) DECUPDATE – With a late push as part of the redesign and counting some additional non typical articles (such as my start here page) I was able to just hit my goal. Plan = 4 Actual = 7 2. 2 EPIC Posts Published(Achieved in 2015) NOVUPDATE –SUCCESS! Epic Post One – The 301 building block strategy ( Part 1 , Part 2 ) Epic Post Two – In November I published my How to Build a PBN Guide 3. PRIMARY GOAL – GROW TO 30k VISITORS PER MONTH(Failed in 2015) Definitely didn’t hit my goal in 2015 here… plan to certainly keep pushing in 2016! Very interested in hearing from people in what they would like to see more of in 2016! Part 3 – Services Business Profit/Loss Create Stand Alone Business(Success – See LightningRank.com) Rework and Customize Systems(Progress – But More Improvement in 2016) Systematic Customer Acquisition(Failed in 2015) PRIMARY GOAL – STAND ALONE SYSTEMATIZED SERVICES BUSINESS Although not as far along as I wanted I will still call this one a success! The good news is that the framework is now in place with ActiveCampaign and Zaxaa to continue to improve! Overall Income Update Original Monthly Net Income Target (original goal $15k/month reliable income by age 35) Target Net Income = $8,125 Actual net Income = $31,525.81 2015 Average Monthly Net Income = $15,937 Gross revenue would be a vanity number for my business and as such is not shared (note Amazon FBA Income was wrong for NOV – not corrected here (it made more than shown) Final Comments Average income hit my goal in 2015…just realized this! That is a very satisfying feeling knowing I have been working towards that number for many years! That is enough celebrating… time to get back to the grind… reliability of income was poor $2.2k income in Feb! Lots of opportunities left un-explored. Lots of goals missed! Results will be better in 2016. But overall I am thrilled with the year, the progress of the business and most importantly the people I have had the opportunity to work with has been very rewarding! Here is to you! Thank you for reading what can often be simply an internal analysis of my own business! Your pushing and proddding and question asking keep me motivated to show you everything except my passwords in my online businesses. I will continue to show you both the good and as often as possible the bad as well! Big plans for 2016 stay tuned! 2 requests… Let me know how you would like my 2016 income reports to change? Let me know what you think of the new site design

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. The post SearchCap: Google Core Ranking Update, Panda Algorithm Now A Core Signal & TV Influence appeared first on Search Engine Land. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

In celebration of its 10th year anniversary, Skype announced today the launch of free group video calling on Android, iPhone, iPad, and Windows 10 mobile devices. The feature has been available for a couple of years on the desktop, for those on both Mac and PC, but had yet to make its way to mobile. The addition, says Skype in a blog post announcing the news, will roll out to the… Read More

According to a report by Re/Code, Google is doubling down on virtual reality, with its VP for product management, Clay Bavor, dropping his responsibility for other apps like Gmail and Drive to focus solely on VR. Bavor has been with Google for over 10 years, so trusting this budding unit with him is a massive signal that Google is in it to win on as far as VR goes. Its success with… Read More

Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” But what if your measurement data is incorrect? What if you’re not measuring correctly or completely? What if there’s a whole pile of things you think you’re measuring when really… you’re not? The fact is that a lot of the people relying on Google Analytics are relying on bad data. No, not because Google Analytics is awful. Because their configurations are broken. And if your configuration is broken? Well, you’re likely managing the wrong things and making poor choices based on incorrect (or incomplete) data. What’s a Google Analytics Health Check? In the past, we’ve covered setting up and using Google Analytics fairly extensively. If you haven’t already, you can read our Google Analytics 101 and Google Analytics 102 guides. More recently, we covered segmentation and how to do it right . Still, things go wrong. Problems arise. Errors come up. A Google Analytics Health Check is a series of checks that help you answer the following three questions: Am I collecting all of the data I need? Can I trust the data I’m collecting? Is anything broken or tracking / reporting incorrectly? Why? A checklist will guide you, but this is an exploratory mission. If you’re an agency or freelancer, this is especially true. Since you might not have had control over the Google Analytics setup stage, you might not know what to expect. Unexpected or irregular issues might arise that you hadn’t even heard of. As time goes on, add these types of issues to your checklist. Step 1: Account Settings Within the Account administration panel, here are the questions you should be asking yourself… Filter Creation Is the office IP address filtered out? Are the IP addresses of your affiliates filtered out (agencies, freelancers, etc.)? Is your home IP address filtered out? Are the IP addresses of remote employees filtered out? AdWords Integration Is it configured correctly? Is PPC data showing in Google Analytics? Are the resulting clicks and sessions being recorded properly? Step 2: Property Settings Within the Property administration panel, here are the questions you should be asking yourself… Is the default URL set up correctly? Are subdomains and cross-domain tracking set up correctly? Is enhanced link attribution turned on? Have you enabled demographics and interest reports? Is Google Webmaster Tools linked properly? Step 3: View Settings Within the View administration panel, here are the questions you should be asking yourself… Are your Views set up correctly? Is eCommerce tracking turned on? Is site search tracking turned on? Do you have your “Virgin View” and “Working Views” configured properly? Are you doing country filtering? Is your default page and time zone configured properly? Are all of the Filters correct and necessary? Are your Goals set and tracking properly? Have you set up advanced segments and shared them? Step 4: Common Issues 1. AdWords Account Not Connected What It Is: You can sync your AdWords account to your Google Analytics account to monitor impressions, clicks and cost. Solution: Gear icon > Linked accounts > View Details under Google Analytics > Select “Set up link” > Import site metrics to the View of your choice. 2. AdWords Auto-Tagging Not Used What It Is: Auto-Tagging adds a unique ID to the end of the destination URL. Using this, you can calculate your advertising ROI by combining that data (campaign, keyword, cost per click) with Google Analytics Goals. Solution:  Gear icon > Account Settings > Preferences > Tracking. 3. AdWords Cost Data Not Importing What It Is: AdWords sends cost data (CPC, for example) to Google Analytics. Solution:  Acquisition > AdWords > Campaigns > Ensure there are no irregularities and cross-check with Google AdWords. 4. Time Zones Not Matched What It Is:  Your Google Analytics and Google AdWords accounts should be in the time zone your campaign targets. Solution:  Admin > Choose a View > View Settings > Time zone country or territory. 5. PPC Keyword ID’s Visible on Landing Pages What It Is: When PPC keyword ID’s are visible on landing pages, they are harder to analyze because Google Analytics thinks they’re two different pages. Solution:  Admin > View Settings > Exclude URL Query Parameters (e.g. OVKEY or OVRAW). 6. Bing Tagging Not Set What It Is: If you don’t tag Yahoo and MSN paid traffic as Bing traffic, the traffic will be recorded as organic. Solution: Ensure your Bing adCenter landing pages are using a tag that includes ?utm_medium=cpc utm_source=bing. 7. Manual UTM Tags Not Used What It Is: Adding manual UTM tags ensures your channels are being properly credited. Offline marketing, newsletters, social media, affiliate links, etc. all need these tags. Solution:  Use the Google Analytics URL Builder . 8. Site Search Category Search Not Enabled What It Is: Site search and category search show user intent, and provide additional keyword lists for PPC and search campaigns. Solution: View Settings > Set Site Search Tracking to ON > Enter the parameter(s) that indicate(s) a site search > Enable categories > Enter the parameter(s) that indicate(s) a category search > Apply. 9. Not Tracking “mailto” What It Is: You can easily track when (and which) email links are selected on your site. Solution:  Add a Google Analytics onclick, trackPageview push code to all email links. 10. Homepage Filter Not Used What It Is: If you don’t filter your homepage correctly, you could end up tracking multiple homepages (e.g. / and /en/ and /fr/). Solution:  Admin > All Filters > + New Filter. 11. Log Spam Not Filtered Out What It Is: If you don’t add a filter to remove staging traffic or traffic from developers, you’ll be acting on false data. Solution:  Admin > All Filters > + New Filter > Filter this traffic out by hostname. 12. Error Pages Not Tracked What It Is: Broken pages are low hanging fruit, if they can be identified easily. Solution: Add your Google Analytics code to 404 and 500 pages. 13. Duplicate eCommerce Data Not Filtered What It Is: Duplicate data occurs when a visitor (a) refreshes the page, (b) uses the “Back” button, restores tabs from a closed browser, etc. Solution: Use a transaction ID and time stamp when tracking eCommerce transactions. If you’re especially tech-savvy, you can handle this server-side . 14. Bounce Rate of Less Than 10% What It Is:  Start by looking at pages where entrances are greater than 100 and sort them by bounce rate. If your bounce rate is less than 10%, something has gone wrong. Solution: Ensure you haven’t added two scripts to the page. If not, visit the site and look for other issues that could be impacting your data. Every good conversion optimizer has a Google Analytics health checklist of some sort. Here’s a look at part of Peep’s checklist… Peep Laja , ConversionXL : “Missing tracking code on some pages, resulting in self-referrals or visits not recorded. Missing tracking code on 404 pages and server 500 pages. setDomainName missing on blog.mydomain.com, resulting in referring keyword lost and 2 visitor sessions. pageTracker and gwsoTracker double cookie due to inconsistent use of setDomainName. iFrame banner tracking resulting in double cookie. Event or double pageviews for same account being called onload, resulting in 0% bounce rate. CustomVar called after pageview. Missing eCommerce category. sessionID’s in URLs. Thank you or sale complete pages not using separate URLs. Site Search using static URL or mod-rewriten URL, thus q=keyword not extractable. Quotation marks not escaped or ansi characters not encoded in eCommerce category or item names. Server redirect is stripping off gclid. Meta refresh redirect causing gclid to be lost. Missing manual tags in emails and newsletters RSS, social, Google products, Google News. Inconsistent tracking used; mixing ga asnc and legacy code. Full URL entered in Goals or Goal matching too broad due to “header setting”. Blending of goal values + transaction values.” Annie Cushing of Annielytics checks Google Analytics health using an audit… You can get access to the full audit spreadsheet here . For more advanced help, she also has a self-guided site audit template you can purchase. For now, here’s a look at some of the items on her free checklist… Annie Cushing , Annielytics: “Has the site had any significant drops in organic traffic? If the site has experienced drops, are they seasonal? If the site has experienced drops, do they correlate with any major algorithm changes? What tools are they using for tracking? Are they tracking conversions? Are they using ecommerce tracking? (See more checks at the bottom of the list.) Is their analytics tracking code missing from any pages? Do other sites have their GA code on them? Do they have subdomains? If the site has subdomains, does GATC include _setDomainName() method? If the site has subdomains, are they including hostname in content reports? If so, is GATC set up properly? Do they have PPC campaigns showing up in organic results If the site offers site search, are they tracking it in their analytics? If so, does their site search appear to be effective? Are they using asynch? Is site is using asynch, are pages on the site still using traditional? Are they using annotations? Have they set their homepage in GA? If running Google AdWords campaigns, is your AdWords account linked w/ GA? If running Google AdSense campaigns, is your AdSense account linked w/ GA? Do content reports contain utm parameters? Does the site use a third-party cart? If so, do they have cross-domain tracking in place? Does the profile use filters correctly? Should the domain use URL rewriting? Does the site have excessive sampling? If so, is it b/c they have more than one website in a property? Does site use campaign parameters on internal links? Do any pages use meta refresh? (This will artificially lower bounce rate.) If the site runs email campaigns, are they tagging URLs that point back to their site with campaign parameters? Does the profile use event tracking? If so, are they naming category, action, and label as they’re intended? If they’re using event tracking, are they using events as goals? Does the site use custom variables? If so, are the being scoped properly? Do custom variables share the same slot? If site uses ecommerce tracking, is the tracking code on all conversion pages? If site uses ecommerce tracking, are there JavaScript or server-side programming errors before the _trackTrans() method keeping it from firing? If site uses ecommerce tracking, does the code have currency symbols or or thousands separators in code? If site uses ecommerce tracking, do their products or store ID use apostrophes? If site uses ecommerce tracking, is it international / use multiple currencies? Does the site have a YouTube channel? If so, does it track it in GA?” If you don’t have the time (or interest) to perform your own site audit, you can use an app . 4 Common Tracking Issues 1. The Basics Starting with the basics, here’s a list of common tracking issues that Google has publicly published… Using incorrect snippet and/or viewing the wrong account or view If you track multiple websites and/or have access to multiple Analytics accounts, you might be using the snippet from another account and/or view. Make sure you are viewing the correct account and view. See Finding the Tracking Code for additional information. Extra whitespace or characters Be sure to copy the snippet and paste it directly onto your website using either a text editor or an editor that preserves code formatting. Don’t use a word processor to copy the snippet from your account. Doing so can add an extra space or change the quotation marks in the tracking snippet, which requires precise formatting in order to work. Customization errors If you are making customizations to the tracking code, make note of the following: function names are case sensitive and should have correct casing boolean values (e.g. true or false) should not be enclosed in quotes Incorrect filter settings Incorrect filter settings can affect the data you see, and can inadvertently filter all of your data from your reports. In most cases, this occurs when users apply multiple “Include” filters. For details, see the article on Include and exclude filters. Using multiple instances of the Classic Google Analytics tracking snippets The Classic Google Analytics JavaScript library (ga.js) doesn’t support multiple tracking instances. If you have multiple tracking code snippets on your webpages, make sure you’re using a supported configuration. Learn more about multiple tracking codes on web pages. Other scripts on your page If you’re running other scripts on your page, make sure you’re not using any variables that Google Analytics uses. For more information on variables that the Google Analytics tracking code uses, visit our Developer Guides for the Universal Analytics (analytics.js) JavaScript library, and the Classic Analytics (ga.js) library. 2. Missing Pages To identify pages that are missing your Google Analytics code, you can look for irregularities in your data. Or, you can use a tool like Google Analytics Checker . Once you’re sure every page of your site has the code, you need to ensure it’s the latest (asynchronous) code. This means that instead of Google Analytics loading synchronously, it will load asynchronously to avoid blocking resources that load later on the page. Essentially, it enhances the speed that the tracking code is loaded. Click here for more information on asynch. 3. Different Data in Your Shopping Cart Tool If you’re in the eCommerce space, you’re likely using some sort of shopping cart tool. So, what happens when the data showing in your shopping cart tool is different than the data showing in Google Analytics? Essentially, there are four possible issues… Your Google Analytics eCommerce Tracking is not properly installed. Read this thorough guide to setting up eCommerce Tracking to ensure you’ve done it correctly. Time zone.  If your shopping cart tool and Google Analytics are configured to report in different time zones, you may have mismatched data. Time of day. If you set up your eCommerce Tracking in the middle of the day, transactions that occurred before will not appear in Google Analytics, but will of course appear in your shopping cart tool. Cancelled transactions. Transactions with no value ($0) and cancelled transactions do not appear in Google Analytics. 4. Cross-Domain Tracking You’ve seen cross-domain tracking mentioned a few times now. What is it exactly? Chris Mercer from SeriouslySimpleMarketing.com explains… Chris Mercer , SeriouslySimpleMarketing.com: “It’s called ‘Cross-Domain Tracking’ and it could come into play if your client’s site has multiple domains as part of their funnel or ‘buyer’s journey’. In these cases, you’ll absolutely want to setup Cross-Domain Tracking. I know what you’re thinking… ‘How do I do that?’ If you’re using the traditional Google Analytics (boring) try doing this . If you’re using Google Tag Manager (you should be) it’s faster to do this .” For example, your checkout process might be on a different domain. Unfortunately, Google Analytics uses first party cookies, which can only be read by the domain that issued them. So, in order to do cross-domain tracking, you need to share cookie information with the different domains involved. An alternative to the Google Analytics resource Chris provides above is Optimize Smart’s  Google Analytics Cross Domain Tracking – Complete Guide . 3 Common Google Tag Manager Issues Now, there’s a good chance that some of you are using Google Tag Manager. Of course, there are common tracking issues associated with it as well. Here are the top three… Tag Isn’t Firing – There are a number of reasons your tag might not be firing. You have unpublished changes, your triggers are too specific, your triggers are configured incorrectly, etc. Find a full list and begin troubleshooting here. Wrong Filter Settings – When you apply multiple include Filters, you can accidentally end up filtering all of your data out of your reports. Read up on how to properly use include Filters (the hit is discarded if the pattern does not match the data) and exclude Filters (the hit is discarded if the pattern does match the data). Unpublished Container – Before adding the tag, be sure you published the container. Changes you make to a container will not be saved until you publish the container. For more information on publishing containers, click here . Conclusion Without a Google Analytics Health Check, you’re analyzing data with both of your eyes closed. [Tweet It!] Don’t be one of the many people making important business decisions based on bad data from a broken Google Analytics configuration. Here’s what you can do to get your Google Analytics back in shape… Create a Google Analytics Health checklist that you can use to evaluate your setup. Go through your Account, Property, and View settings and ask yourself the questions above. Review the 14 most common Google Analytics issues and check to ensure you’re not making them. Review the 4 most common tracking issues and check to ensure you’re not making them. Review the 3 most common Google Tag Manager issues and check to ensure you’re not making them. Run through your checklist annually. As time goes on, new issues can arise. The post Google Analytics Health Check: Is Your Configuration Broken? appeared first on ConversionXL .

VLC, the popular video-playing software offering support for a wide range of media formats, is now available for Apple TV. For those with large video collections, that means you’ll be able to play your files on your TV’s big screen without having to convert them to a supported format. One of the more notable features in the new release is that the VLC app now supports… Read More

When it comes to optimizing your mobile presence, where do you begin? Columnist Aleyda Solis shares the questions you should ask yourself to get started. The post Discovering Opportunities To Drive Your Mobile Web App Optimization Strategy appeared first on Search Engine Land. Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Along with the release of new versions of its software across its all platforms yesterday, Apple also rolled out a change that will have a major impact on those publishers building apps for Apple TV. Developers are now able to track analytics data related to their apps’ performance on the new streaming media player, which, with the launch of the fourth generation Apple TV, now… Read More

Ever wanted to learn a bit more about a song you’re listening to on Spotify? Now you can. To help set it apart from the rest of the music streaming pack, and possibly to capture a little more of your attention, Spotify is linking up with Genius, the startup that annotates music lyrics and other online content, to add backstory and commentary that pops up as you play tracks on Spotify. Read More

Periscope, Twitter’s livestreaming app, has played around in the outskirts of Twitter, with nothing more than a screenshot and link being shared when you see a stream pop up in your timeline. That changes today as Periscope gets fully baked into the iOS version of Twitter and coming soon for Android and web. You might be asking “what took so long?” but since Periscope… Read More

As ecommerce sites become richer experiences designed to showcase products to their fullest, imagery is getting bigger and crisper. A small product shot was once par for the course and is now underwhelming compared to those retailers at the forefront of ecommerce. In our continuing look at web design trends for 2016 and beyond , I thought I'd showcase 10 ecommerce websites that use big and beautiful photography. Read more...