Skip to content Brad Johnson is an author and blogger who helps writers discover their niche, build successful habits, and quit their 9-5. His books include Ignite Your Beacon, Writing Clout and Tomes Of A Healing Heart. For strategic content and practical tips on how to become a full-time writer, visit: BradleyJohnsonProductions.com.
https://wordtothewise.com/2020/01/using-reply-to/
Yesterday I learned that some ESPs don’t support the reply to: address. I asked around to discover which ESPs did. Here’s what I learned.
ESPs that support reply-to:
ActiveCampaign
AmazonSES
ConstantContact
Cordial
Delivra
Eloqua
Emma
iContact
Listrak
Mailkit
Marketo
Responsys
Sailthru
SFMC
Sharpspring
Twilio / SendGrid
Zeta Global
Thanks to all the colleagues who answered my question.
Every morning and night I walked through that city, to and from the museum, fall turning into winter. Each doorway, even mine, its own theatre of something, with its own suggestion or promise.
I allowed myself to go into clothing shops, and when I found a delicate black blouse I thought would go well with a simple skirt, and when I had saved enough money, I allowed myself to buy it. Trying it on in the dressing room, I became different. I left the shop, the small bag tucked under my arm. I don’t think I looked different to anyone else, but I carried the bag proudly with me.
After work, if Antoinette came too, we would find ourselves walking next to the cold black river, following it to the black lake, sometimes stopping to throw crumbs for the birds. Two figures on a canvas. I saw us that way.
‘I want a bathing suit,’ she said one evening. I don’t like to hear a person’s voice during this kind of moment.
Then we walked again. At a market we bought hot chocolate and drank it while sitting on a bench in front of the lake. Other people sat on other benches and the air was chilly. We were anything but alone. This time I didn’t mind listening to the things she wanted: a one-piece, backless bathing suit, a silk dress, a gold necklace with stars on it, a turquoise blouse. A portrait of her desires, there at the lake with the waves rising gently up in the darkness. I wanted her to have all of it.
‘Can you imagine,’ she said dreamily, ‘a party in which you receive all the things you’ve wanted all year, and then you put them on one by one?’
‘To be honest, I can only imagine receiving one of them.’
‘Why only one?’
‘I try to imagine things that might actually happen. It’s more pleasurable that way.’
‘None of it will come true, so what does it matter.’
‘You’re right, and yet . . .’
I would get her the blouse. After all, I had just saved enough for my own, why shouldn’t I get one for Antoinette? A few more skipped meals and I would be able to afford it.
For a while, then, my breaks at the museum were spent in the galleries. If I couldn’t eat, at least I would see something nice. I would write about it. One of the drawings I liked most was Three Virtues, and I went to it often. I would sit on the bench facing the drawing and forget where I was. Three different figures of a man fading into a red background while I faded into the room. It was certainly a strange drawing, though I don’t think it was meant to be. Sometimes I looked at pages from the Quran, studying its lettering. But I knew I was different from the other museumgoers; I had my work to do. Only when I was walking or at home could I be myself.
I wrote down my descriptions of the paintings, my notes, but I wasn’t sure what I would do with them. The Trojan Women Setting Fire to Their Fleet, The Annunciation, Margaretha van Haexbergen.
Then I would see Antoinette, looking at herself in the mirror in the bathroom, careless, her sponge on the floor. In the courtyard in her – it was true – ugly coat. I started to write descriptions of her, the things she did when she was supposed to be cleaning, the way she looked when she spoke or was silent. I liked doing this as much as I liked describing the paintings, but I didn’t tell her I was going it. I didn’t talk about writing at all. She continued to tell me the things she wanted, that she had seen in the shops. Sometimes I wrote these things down in my notebook too. In my mind I began to picture her in the clothes she wanted, as if the intensity of her desire had made them appear. Very clearly, I saw her in a maroon dress.
*
Today as Antoinette and I were leaving the museum, we stopped to look at a painting of Mary. Or maybe it was me who looked; Antoinette was restless. In this painting, Mary is lying down but she’s awake to something. She’s looking up, her eyes open just enough to see what’s in front of her, or perhaps what she’s seeing is inside her own mind. Her white robe is slipping from her shoulders, her hands clasped, her arms resting on her pregnant belly. A red blanket. A dark room. It must be cold outside. Inside too. She is lit not radiantly, but with a half radiance and shadows all around. They touch her. And the red blanket gives off warmth, but Mary’s skin also looks warm. She appears as if she’s in ecstasy. I wonder what it feels like.
*
Antoinette visited me at my apartment only once. She came over and I made us mint tea. We each ate an orange. A biscuit.
‘You have hardly any furniture,’ she said in surprise.
‘I have enough.’
She looked around. ‘Hardly anything at all.’
It was true, but the things I liked were around me. Lying on my bed and waiting for me to return to it was a novel about a poet. An autumn leaf sat on the table between us, Antoinette in one chair and me in the other. We drank our tea.
‘Someday I hope to have a parlour with very beautiful furniture in it,’ she said. ‘I would spend all of my time there. A place to relax when I am not out visiting and a place to entertain my own guests. Wouldn’t you like that?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘The parlour or the visiting?’
‘Both, but especially the visiting.’ Antoinette appeared hurt. ‘I don’t mean you. This is different. I consider you to be my friend and so it’s my pleasure to have you here.’
‘Do you really think of me as a friend?’
‘Of course. And me? Do you see me as a friend?’
‘Yes,’ she said shyly.
‘Go on. What would the parlour look like?’
‘The wallpaper would be navy blue with orange flowers on it.’ She stopped and thought awhile. ‘A magenta-and-black Turkish rug in the shape of an oval would sit in front of the sofa. I don’t know what colour the sofa would be.’
‘Something neutral,’ I offered.
‘Grey.’
Though we have only dirtied a few dishes, and she always tried to clean as little as possible at work, Antoinette insisted on washing them before she went. It was sweet and I began to love her then.
Image, Detail from Three Virtues, Lorenzo Monaco, c. 1420
Indelicacy is published on 11th February 2020 by FSG and on 21st May 2020 by Daunt Books.
The post Indelicacy appeared first on Granta Magazine and Granta Books.
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Building consistent organic search traffic is every digital publisher’s dream. But what does it really take to make your content SEO friendly?
The good news is it is not a rocket science.
On top of that, despite what many people think, it has nothing to do with “tricking” Google into thinking your content is high-quality or SEO friendly.
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, which basically means making sure a search algorithm can easily access and understand your content. There’s no dark art involved.
So you have an idea in mind which you feel like writing about. This is where any content creation starts: “I have something to say on this topic, and I feel like it will be interesting and/or useful”.
Is anyone searching for this topic?
Chances are, if you have come up with the topic, there should be other people who may feel intrigued enough to research it in Google.
But how exactly are people searching for it?
This is the key question you should ask if you want to generate organic search engine traffic to your future content.
You need to know what people type in a search box when trying to find answers to questions you are covering in your content.
So your first step is to find those actual search queries.
This exercise is also useful because it helps research. Knowing what people are typing in Google’s search box will likely help you discover interesting angles, narrow your initial idea down to make it more specific and even structure your future article to make it more useful.
So even if you don’t really care about organic search positions, keyword research is useful to do.
But how?
The keyword research process — at its core — hasn’t changed much over the years. We do have much more data to work with, but the actual process is the same.
These days, we have a variety of tools that help you identify a keyword to focus on. Here are a few tools and approaches you can try:
Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer is a great tool for that because it offers “All keyword ideas” tab that broadens your initial idea to related and synonymous terms.
So if you were to type [grow tomatoes] and click through to that section, you’d find both phrases containing the term (e.g. “how to grow tomatoes”) and related concepts (e.g. “when to plant tomatoes“):
This broadens your outlook and helps you come up with more words to include in your copy.
If you’ve done at least some research on your content idea, you may have found some resources that are on the same or similar topic. So use those URLs to discover what they are ranking for.
Serpstats’ URL Analysis section is great for that:
Notice that Serpstat is also showing all “extra” search elements that show up for each query in Google, so you get a good idea of what your future target SERPs (search engine result pages) may look like.
Note that both of these platforms offer “keyword difficulty” metric signaling of the level of your future organic competition. Obviously, the lower the keyword difficulty is, the better.
On the other hand, the higher the search volume, the more clicks each SERP may drive. So you want to try and pick a keyword that has high search volume and low keyword difficulty.
Here’s a more detailed guide on keyword research for you to become better at it. And here are even more keyword research questions answered.
While the process of researching keywords hasn’t changed much, the way we use keywords within content has.
These days, we don’t sacrifice the quality or flow of our copy for the sake of keyword density. In fact, we don’t pay attention to how many times we have used those keywords on-page.
We do use those keywords in prominent places on the page to make both Google and our human visitors more comfortable and confident there.
To put it simply, upon landing on your page, your users should clearly see terms they initially typed in the search box. That will put them more at ease and prompt them to linger a bit longer.
Keyword prominence means making your keywords visible on the page. It helps both search engine optimization and user-retention. Both of these help rankings.
Basically, you want those keywords to appear in:
Many SEO plugins (like Yoast and SEO Editor) can handle a lot of these SEO elements, so it is a good idea to pick one.
As I have already stated before, Google has moved away from matching the exact query to the pages in its index. Ever since its Hummingbird update, Google has slowly but surely become better and better at understanding each query context and searcher’s intent behind it.
To match that context better and optimize for the intent, use semantic analysis, which is basically about clustering each query into underlying and related concepts and covering you in your content.
Text Optimizer is a tool that takes Google’s search snippets for any query and applies semantic analysis to identify areas of improvement. Text Optimizer can be used for writing new content from scratch:
You can also use the tool to analyze your existing content to identify areas of improvements:
As you can see, Text Optimizer also helps analyze whether your content meets the query intent.
To increase your score at Text Optimizer:
Google loves textual content, but the Internet in general and Google in particular has moved beyond text-only. Web users expect to see more formats, including videos and images. And Google recognizes that demand for content diversity, so it will feature all of those content formats.
In my previous article for Convince and Convert I described how videos improve SEO on many levels, including more exposure in search engine result pages and better on-page engagement.
With that in mind, any time you work on your article, think which other content assets can be created to enhance its value and improve SEO.
Luckily, creating videos doesn’t require any budget or skills. With tools like InVideo you can turn your articles into videos in a matter of seconds:
You are done! Now, upload the video to Youtube, add a keyword-rich title and description and embed it to your article.
For images, you can use Venngage or Visme to create nice visual takeaways or flowcharts (in case you have instructions to follow).
Finally, there’s always room for improvement, so monitoring your organic traffic is an important step here.
The must-have tool for that is Google’s own Search Console, which will show you which queries are sending you traffic. Just check your “Performance” tab regularly:
Another useful tool to have is Finteza, which shows your organic traffic performance allowing you to dig deeper to see whether your organic traffic clicks engage with your ads.
… or whether each search query sends traffic that brings conversions.
Obviously, it is more to Google position than on-page optimization. You still need those backlinks that would help Google assign some authority to your content. But that’s a topic outside of the scope of this article. Besides, there’s a lot of content already written on that. And here’s another collection of tips on how to build links.
Finally, the above steps apply to any kind of optimization, whether it’s a blog, product pages or lead-generating landing pages.
I hope this guide will help you optimize your content to make it easier for Google to understand and hence help the search giant’s algorithm assign search positions it truly deserves.
The post How to Make Content SEO Friendly appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/markgrow/~3/uN907Png5ZE/
I often get asked about the art and science of building a healthy and growing social media community and today I’d like to introduce an unusual concept — the surprising math behind building your online tribe.
Here’s an example to illustrate the lesson for today …
Let’s say you’re having wonderful success building a growing social media community, whether that means a blog, YouTube channel, or Facebook Group. You’re creating a safe and meaningful environment, adding unique value, and engaging with an active audience.
For argument’s sake, I’ll assume you’re doing so extremely well that you’re adding an average of 20 new members to your community every single day. Good for you!
Now comes the surprising part. Here is a chart that shows the expected total growth of your community over 600 days if you add an average of 20 new members every single day:
At this point, you might be thinking that I am really bad at math.
This is simple right? 600 days x 20 new people means you should have a total audience of 12,000 people, not 2,000!
How is it possible to have zero growth over time? This should be a straight line up into the atmosphere, right? You’re adding 20 people a day!
Well … yes and no.
When forecasting your community growth, you have to consider a very sad fact of life. People leave the community.
My daily struggle!
It might not be your fault. People leave their jobs, move away, they become disinterested in your good work and move on to something else. There are a lot of reasons, but people come and go.
How many people can you expect to leave a community? As you know, the answer to every marketing question is “it depends!”
But for me, I average an audience loss of about three quarters of one percent, week in and week out. Let’s round up and call it 1 percent. So, for every 100 people active in my growing social media community, one of them leaves.
Here are the reasons I lose subscribers in a typical month:
UNSUBSCRIBE — Means people just don’t want my content any more. When people unsubscribe it might because the content is no longer relevant to their job or they are simply getting too many emails.
HARD BOUNCE — A hard bounce indicates that the subscriber’s email address is no longer any good. They may have changed email provider, switched jobs or moved.
PERSISTENTLY UNDELIVERABLE –These subscribers have been marked as undeliverable for at least two weeks and more than three delivery attempts. They appear to be unresponsive, unreachable or abandoned email accounts.
Like any proud papa, I hate it when people leave the tribe. But it’s a fact of life. You will keep gaining people, but you may also lose about 1 percent for whatever reason. On the first chart, we observed that once we hit about 2,000 people in our vibrant, growing social media community, we are also LOSING 20 people (20 is 1 percent of 2,000) every time we add 20 people.
So, at that community size, gaining 20 people per week or over whatever timeframe, means your growth had flatlined! There are weeks I get 70 new subscribers and have a net gain of one!
To compensate for the natural attrition in your community or content audience, you actually have to set a target to grow your followers at an increasing rate.
In this example, when you reach 2,000 subscribers, to keep a growing social media community going at a steady pace you actually have to add 40 people, not 20!
The implication is, the more you grow, the more you have to grow.
The bigger your audience, the better you have to be just to stay even.
Maybe you have not considered this little dilemma before, but when you think about it, it makes sense, right?
I see this dynamic happening all the time in my client work. They don’t understand why they are working so hard yet don’t seem to be getting anywhere.
The simple reason is, good enough today isn’t good enough tomorrow if you want to keep growing.
Make sense?
Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.
Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com.
The post The surprising math behind a growing social media community appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.
You’ve spent hours drafting query letters. You have suffered through rejections.
Finally, after almost giving up, a literary agent has expressed an interest in representing you and your book.
She has sent you a contract, perhaps in the form of a letter. You read it over and notice a few things in it you don’t like, as well as some terms you don’t understand.
Can you change the things that you don’t like?
How can you get an explanation of what you don’t understand?
As an attorney who has helped writers work through contract issues, I’ve seen many agent agreements and I’ve developed a sense of how to guide writers through the process.
Here’s what you need to know before signing a contract with an agent.
Proposed contracts with agents are just that — proposed. They are not set in stone. They can be changed; terms can be negotiated.
When an agent sends you a contract, it is written to benefit the agent. Until it is signed, the agent is not looking out for your best interest. She’s looking out for her own best interest.
Once the contract is signed, the agent will be working for you to obtain the most beneficial terms possible from the publisher. Until then, you must look out for yourself.
You may hesitate to question the contract terms you are being offered when you’ve worked so hard just to get the offer. It’s understandable to worry about losing the representation offer entirely if you ask about or request changes to the agreement. All the same, your questions should be answered to your satisfaction before you sign the contract.
By signing, you are beginning a relationship that could last a long time. In some cases, the relationship lasts for the life of the copyright of the work — and that can be up to 70 years after you have died.
If the agent balks at answering your questions or fails to respond respectfully to your request for changes, she may not be the best person to work with you. (Note: I’m not saying the agent must agree to the changes you request, only that the contract negotiation process must be respectful.)
Make sure that this agent is the right one for you by asking questions, like these suggested by the Association of Authors’ Representatives, a membership organization for agents.
Ask to speak with her other clients. Has she represented writers like you? (Debut, previously self-published, multi-genre, etc.) Why did the agent select you? What is it about your work that looks promising?
Hopefully, you did your research before you sent out query letters and you know that this agent has experience in your genre.
Do not assume the agent works in your genre. It may be that she is looking to broaden her book of business. If that’s the case, you need to decide whether you want to be her test case.
On one hand, being represented by a new agent (or an agent new to a genre) may give you the benefit of her unbridled enthusiasm. On the other hand, she may not have the contacts needed to land a publishing deal.
You need to understand the role the tagent will play in your career.
Once you understand what the agent is going to do for you, you can scrutinize the contract to see if the agent’s promises are in it.
The “Work” being represented is the first definition in the contract. Agents require that they be appointed as sole and exclusive representatives of the Work. If the contract is for representation of one book only, clarify that you are under no obligation to submit any further work to the agent and are free to use another agent or no agent for your next book.
The definition of the Work clarifies the scope of the contract. The agency agreement should be clear on your freedom to create derivatives of the Work that are not subject to the agent’s representation. A derivative is a piece that is based on or derived from the Work that is the subject of the contract.
This clarity is particularly important for a non-fiction writer. If your book is about your life’s passion or expertise, you do not want to be locked into a contract that requires you to pay the agent a percentage of everything you do, write or say about that passion from that point forward.
Tip: If the definition of the Work is vague, ask to have it tightened up to reflect your understanding that your entire body of work that exists now and in the future is not part of the deal. If the relationship is a good one, the scope of the contract can be broadened later.
The goal of having an agent is to secure a publishing contract to produce a printed volume in the English language. But there is a host of other rights encompassed in the representation agreement and ultimately in any publishing contract.
Often the subsidiary rights, the right to produce the same material in different formats, are not defined. It is to the agent’s benefit to keep the term vague.
Subsidiary rights can include foreign publication rights, first and second serial, motion picture, television, radio, audio, dramatic performance, abridgments and all other rights broken down by geographic territory. The key is to understand which rights you are giving to the agent for representation.
Tip: List exactly which subsidiary rights are included in the representation agreement to eliminate any ambiguity in the contract.
Remember that you have control over your own rights and you can divide them between different agents, especially if an agent specializes in a particular type of transaction and not others.
Tip: Keep the subsidiary rights to the minimum generally required by a publishing contract: audio, foreign, first and second serial. Again, if things are going well or a publishing contract calls for it, you can always broaden the contract with the agent.
“Best efforts” means that the agent is going to work hard on your behalf to secure a publishing deal. But without detailing the specifics, the best efforts clause is toothless. The contract should outline what the agent is going to do:
Tip: Include an accountability clause in the contract. This requires the agent to report regularly and to document the efforts made on your behalf.
If the agency relationship is no longer working out, you will want to end it. Agent contracts can last from 30 days to the life of the work’s copyright.
However, an agent needs to be given enough time to sell the book. The gears of publishing turn slowly, even in the digital age.
An author must be able to terminate the agency agreement if the agent fails to use her best efforts, or if the agent secures a print publication deal and then chooses to “sit on” or not actively seek exploitation of the remaining rights in the contract.
If an agent fails to use her best efforts to secure a deal or sell the subsidiary rights, you will have a difficult (if not impossible) time finding another agent to help you exploit those rights unless you can end the contract with the first agent.
Tip: If you sign a long-term representation agreement, ask for a provision that allows termination if the work hasn’t sold after a certain period of time — a year, for example.
Agents have relationships with publishers that you do not have. You are paying them a percentage of your sales because of who they know.
You are also paying them to negotiate with the publisher on your behalf. Should a deal arise, there will be critical terms to work out between you and the publisher. Agents have knowledge and experience that you may lack.
Knowing what to expect (and what not to expect) in the relationship between you and your agent and understanding the contract that defines that relationship will help ensure a successful business partnership.
Are you looking for a literary agent? What questions do you have about what should be in your contract?
While Kathryn is a lawyer, this post does not constitute legal advice. For specific advice, please see a legal professional.
This is an updated version of a story that was previously published. We update our posts as often as possible to ensure they’re useful for our readers.
Photo via Amnaj Khetsamtip/ Shutterstock
The post Signing With a Literary Agent? Here’s What Should Be In Your Contract appeared first on The Write Life.
https://conversionsciences.com/the-cluetrain-manifesto-twenty-years-later-still-relevant/
Having trouble viewing the text? You can always read the original article here: The Cluetrain Manifesto Twenty Years Later: Still relevant
“Markets are Conversations.” This the opening salvo in the Cluetrain Manifesto. It’s 95 theses were written at the dawn of the commercial internet to help businesses understand how things had changed. Twenty years later, did we heed their advice? Is the Cluetrain Manifesto still relevant? Contrarians. They’re trouble. At least they’re trouble in structured organizations. […]
The post The Cluetrain Manifesto Twenty Years Later: Still relevant appeared first on Conversion Sciences.
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