Greedy Internet Overlords

 Greedy Internet Overlords: FCC Approves Net Neutrality Rules

While most days we find ourselves confronted with society's woeful inability to manage our own Frankenstein, and generally terrifying implications for our future, the Federal Communications Commission has finally after a year-long morass of debate and creeping corruption passed net neutrality rules that will prohibit greedy bastard Internet service providers from granting faster access to companies that are able to pay for this privilege. Not so surprisingly, the FCC commissioners voted in lockstep with party lines; three Democrats voted in favor of the prohibition and two Republicans voted against. A quick and dirty lowdown: The American peopleand policymakers have been hotly debating net neutrality for a good 365 days.

The general public believes the Internet is a new "public" service and serves as a fundamental democratizer; it's a virtual utopia where theoretically, everyone can have an equal voice and access to people to share it with. This is called net neutrality. The FCC and particularly the commission's chairman Tom Wheeler has repeatedly gotten into hot water. Wheeler's proposal for an "Open Internet" sounds good, but is actually a euphemism for a classist, capitalistic wet dream. Basically, it would allow service providers to offer a "pay-to-play" option where shocker! the wealthiest people could have superior service to the rest of us peons. Oh, and large corporations would have faster websites and generally elbow out dissenters and other small-fish independents that are vital to keeping free speech alive and well. On May 15 of last year, following a 3-2 vote along party lines, the FCC announced that pay-for-priority deals would be against the rules “until proven otherwise" opening the door to ISPs potentially getting special treatment. In September, the FCC held a 120-day purgatorial review to foster a "public debate" about how the Internet should be regulated in the wake of their pending decision. According to a report by the Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog, open government advocacy organization, 99% of the 1.1 million comments submitted to the FCC were in favor of maintaining net neutrality. Cut to today, where, of course, Internet bigwigs are none too pleased in fact both AT&T and Verizon have taken serious umbrage with the decision. AT&T is currently previewing two pending lawsuits which basically argue that A) the FCC didn't pursue a proper analysis of all the ins and outs of their decision and B) whether these Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be classified as "common carriers" under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, which places them in the same category as utility companies like gas and electricity.

TikTok For Business

 6 Ways You Can Use it to Boost Your Brand

TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms ever. The numbers are staggering: It was the most downloaded app of 2021, topping out with 656 million downloads. In the summer of 2021, it hit one billion monthly active users. It’s also the only non-Meta app to hit the three billion install mark. It’s not just a place for dance challenges or pranks, either. Brands can use TikTok to build their reputation, engage audiences, and drive conversions. However, unlike Facebook and Instagram, it’s not immediately obvious how brands can best use TikTok to their advantage. That’s why TikTok created TikTok For Business. This marketing tool offers everything brands need to create awesome TikTok ads that drive real business results. This article explains what TikTok For Business is and how it works, who should use TikTok For Business, and how you can get the most from this tool. By the end of the article, you’ll have a clear idea of how you can succeed with this phenomenal social network.

What Is TikTok For Business? 

TikTok For Business is highly recommended. It won B2B Brand of the Year at The Drum Awards for B2B in 2021, thanks to its rebranding efforts and glowing recommendations from brands of all sizes.

What Is TikTok For Business? TikTok For Business is highly recommended. It won B2B Brand of the Year at The Drum Awards for B2B in 2021, thanks to its rebranding efforts and glowing recommendations from brands of all sizes. The tool makes it easy for brands to start advertising on TikTok. It contains in-depth guides on the solutions it offers, including: Introduction to TikTok For Business Creative Best Practices The Creative Exchange The TikTok Shop It also offers plenty of inspirational success stories (something we’ll cover in more detail below) and loads of blog posts and how-to videos. The tool makes it easy for brands to start advertising on TikTok. It contains in-depth guides on the solutions it offers, including: 

Introduction to TikTok For Business 

Creative Best Practices 

The Creative Exchange

The TikTok Shop

It also offers plenty of inspirational success stories (something we’ll cover in more detail below) and loads of blog posts and how-to videos.

Why Should You Use TikTok For Business?

TikTok For Business sounds great. However, is it right for everyone? I think almost every business has a lot to gain from TikTok. For one, it is the leading app for consumer spending. In 2021, users spent a whopping $2.3 billion in the app, up from $1.3 billion in 2020. It also offers the following three major benefits to brands. 

Enormous Exposure Potential Consumers love videos. In 2022, we watched an average of 2.5 hours of online video content per day, up from 1.5 hours per day in 2018. The same study also shows we’re twice as likely to share video content with friends than any other online content. There are few better places to watch videos than on TikTok. As the leading video-based social network, TikTok gives brands access to millions of potential views. As I mentioned in the introduction, TikTok has a phenomenal number of users in over 140 countries. What’s even more important is that those users are highly engaged. Data released by TikTok shows the average user opens the app 19 times a day and actively uses the app for 89 minutes per day—basically an hour and a half. Even better, almost anyone can create a viral TikTok video. The nature of the platform’s algorithm means even creators with tiny audiences can become viral hits. Just ask Nathan Apodaca, whose video become so popular it reached Fleetwood Mac, whose song he sings in the soothing video he records while skateboarding to work. Brands Look More Authentic on TikTok No one wants to be known as the company that runs cheesy adverts on social media. Consumers don’t want crap ads, either. Consumers want an emotional connection to brands now more than ever, and 90 percent say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they support. Thanks to the solutions offered by TikTok For Business, it’s easier for brands to come across as authentic and create the same level of content pushed out by veteran content creators. Of course, it’s easy to go too far and jump on all of the latest TikTok trends. While it’s important to be creative and authentic, take care to stay true to your brand’s personality. If the trend doesn’t mirror your brand image, you don’t need to jump on the bandwagon. 

Access to Endless Influencers The power of influencer marketing is well understood. Three in four marketers use influencers as a marketing tool, and 90 percent believe it to be effective. TikTok takes influencer marketing to a new level. Because it’s possible for someone with very few influencers to go viral on TikTok, brands have access to a potentially unlimited number of influencers. TikTok also makes it easy to connect with influencers thanks to its Creator Marketplace. We’ll talk about this analytics tool below, but it’s a great way to find partners with the engagement, reach, and demographics you care about. 

Who Should Use TikTok For Business?

            It doesn’t matter who you are or what kind of business you run; TikTok has something to offer everyone from large enterprises to small businesses and agencies. Big brands with even bigger marketing budgets have quickly made TikTok their home. Companies like Coca-Cola, Google, and Sony have already established effective partnerships with popular TikTokers to promote brand awareness and drive conversions. The New York Times reports that at least 18 public retail brands have referred to marketing efforts on TikTok on calls with analysts and investors between August and December. TikTok goes to great lengths to promote itself as the social media platform of choice for small businesses. In 2021, the company unveiled its Small Wins initiative, which showed the value it can bring to smaller businesses around the globe. This includes a bakery that turned 3,000 followers into 2 million and a candlemaker who went viral. 

10 Best E-commerce Email Marketing

There are plenty of e-commerce marketing channels available to grow your business, such as social media, PPC, SEO, and network marketing. Successful e-commerce business owners, though, know that email marketing is one of the most profitable channels available. Let’s take a look at “what is e-commerce email marketing?” and why e-commerce businesses should use it. Finally, we’ll delve into the 10 best e-commerce email marketing strategies that you can implement immediately for great results.

What Is E-Commerce Email Marketing? 

                                E-commerce email marketing is a marketing channel that enables you to send marketing messages to current and potential customers. The strategies you use can be simple, like sending a weekly email blast with featured products, or complex—with multiple automated email series for cart abandonment, customer re-engagement, and exclusive membership deals. Either way, the ultimate goal is to increase customer engagement and drive conversions. Why Should E-Commerce Businesses Do Email Marketing? As an e-commerce business owner, you’ve probably heard the sales pitch for just about every marketing channel there is. You may even dabble in email marketing currently, but perhaps you don’t understand just how valuable a tool it is to your sales strategy. Email marketing is a unique process in that, unlike social media or SEO, you own every piece of the funnel. Most importantly, you own the email subscriber list.

Why is that so important? With 4 billion daily email users (which will climb to 4.6 billion by 2025), you can’t afford to miss this incredible opportunity. Through email marketing strategies, an e-commerce business can benefit from brand awareness, customer engagement, and high-intent customers. We also can’t ignore the conversion rate boosts that e-commerce businesses see when they implement a solid email marketing strategy, with the best ROI when compared to other marketing channels. With an average of $36 earned for every $1 spent, that’s a whopping 3,600 percent ROI! 

How to Do Email Marketing

            While much of this article will focus on email marketing strategies for active marketers, we understand that not every e-commerce business is yet set up for email marketing. If that’s you and you are completely brand new to email marketing, here are the steps you should take first: Set realistic and sustainable goals to grow your business, such as building an email list or improving customer retention by X percent. Select an email marketing software like MailChimp or Constant Contact. Map out your initial campaigns (e.g., welcome series, abandoned cart series, or new product launches.) Decide how you’ll collect email addresses. Many e-commerce companies offer a small coupon in exchange for email addresses. Set up landing pages as needed for campaigns. Set up campaign tracking with your chosen analytics provider. Take the time to establish a firm foundation and you’ll be off to a better start than even many seasoned e-commerce businesses. 

Best E-Commerce Email Marketing Strategies 

        Whether you’re new to email marketing or you’re looking to optimize your current setup, our best e-commerce email marketing strategies will provide you with a solid foundation to build your email marketing empire. 

1. Start With a Welcome Series 

For the best impression with new subscribers, establish a welcome email series. This gives you a chance to share your brand story, highlight your best products, and even offer a discount to drive sales. Beyond that, a welcome series drives serious engagement. With an average open rate of 68.59 percent and an average click-through rate of 16.05 percent, a welcome series is a great part of your larger email marketing campaign. Why? First and foremost, a welcome series implies more than one email. Two or three emails is the sweet spot and anything beyond that is considered “spammy” and may scare off new subscribers. With two emails, you have the chance to welcome the customer and invite them to connect. With three emails, you have the chance to do the previous two while also getting to know the customer more personally. Take, for example, the NewEgg welcome series below which welcomes the customer and then invites them to connect with the mobile app:

Enjoy Daily Life

With the pivot from Gin Lane to Pattern Brands in full swing, the team focuses on how to take their new business to market. The road to building a new company isn’t a straight line and there are plenty of challenges to navigate along the way. In this episode, we hear how Nick approached sharing the pivot with the Gin Lane team and how they navigated the rollercoaster of raising investment. Camille and Emmett share insights into building the new brand and we also hear what went down on launch day and go behind-the-scenes at the the Pattern Brands launch party.

Must-listen moments 

4:00  The problem is Pattern Brands trying to solve

"I think at a top-line it's solving this notion of a burnout in our society, in our culture, in our generation."  Camille Baldwin 

5:49  The importance of creating a memorable brand "The fun thing about branding and marketing is you can do years worth of research. But if you can't boil it down to this thin sliced visual, logo or tagline, it doesn't matter."  Emmett Shine 

8:25 How Pattern Brands approached raising investment “We probably talked to 30 to 40 investors over the time period all the way from very large investment funds to seed funds and I think the big learning process for us was figuring out not how we pitch, but who was the right partner for us.” Nick Ling

14:27  Saying goodbye to Gin Lane and embracing discomfort "I think we're excited to go back to zero. When you're at that moment when you don't know anything and you're really uncomfortable that is probably the most motivating feeling in the world." Camille Baldwin 

21:02  Nick reflecting on the Pattern Brands launch “The last 6 months have been way harder than we thought they'd be. Convincing 30 people to change their lives with you  to go from Gin Lane to Patten  is a journey and now is the time where we have to live up to these ambitions we're putting out there."  Nick Ling
 

What is Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements. The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. There are also a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms listed above. For example, Buffer is a platform of social media management tools, which can help you achieve success with your social media marketing. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.

A Quick Overview of Social Media Marketing Social media marketing

                first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content. Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A business that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising). As a whole, these are often also known as social media management.

The Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing
 1. Strategy Before you dive right in and publish something on social media, let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The first step is to think about your social media strategy.

What are your goals? How can social media help you achieve your business goals? Some businesses use social media for increasing their brand awareness, others use it for driving website traffic and sales. Social media can also help you generate engagement around your brand, create a community, and serve as a customer support channel for your customers.

2. Planning and Publishing

 Publishing to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image, or a video on a social media platform. It’s just like how you would share on your personal Facebook profile. But you will want to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. Also, to ensure that you are maximizing your reach on social media, you need to publish great content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency.

3. Listening and Engagement As your business and social media following grow, conversations about your brand will also increase. People will comment on your social media posts, tag you in their social media posts, or message you directly. People might even talk about your brand on social media without letting you know. So you will want to monitor social media conversations about your brand. If it’s a positive comment, you get a chance to surprise and delight them. Otherwise, you can offer support and correct a situation before it gets worse.

4. Analytics and Reporting Along the way, whether you are publishing content or engaging on social media, you will want to know how your social media marketing is performing. Are you reaching more people on social media than last month? How many positive mentions do you get a month? How many people used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts?

5. Advertising When you have more funds to grow your social media marketing, an area that you can consider is social media advertising. Social media ads allow you to reach a wider audience than those who are following you. Social media advertising platforms are so powerful nowadays that you can specify exactly who to display your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.

Logo Designing Urdu Tutorial

Logo Designing Urdu Tutorial is a complete guide for those who want to learn logo designing. In this tutorial I am going to teach you everything you need to know about logo designing. In the first part of this tutorial, I will explain you what actually a logo is and general misconceptions about logo designing. Then I will share several tips that will help you to build an outstanding logo. In the second part of this tutorial, I will teach you a premium logo designing software from scratch. 

There is so much to learn in this course. A logo is a mark, business name written with a specific style or combination of name and mark. A logo is an identifier for your business entity, products and services. Building an effective, memorable and simple logo is as important as any other branding strategy. Logo designing is considered as a complicated task.
 

Online Jobs for Students to Earn More money

Online and work at home jobs on the whole have an opinion of being scam but real online jobs do exist. Online jobs are slowly gaining prominence across the globe due to the fact they can help you utilize your talents in the best possible way, in addition they convey the comfort of your own house, flexible timings and saving on travel expenses. Whether you are a student, housewife or even an employed person, online jobs can offer that extra income.

Best Work from Home Jobs 

1.Writing Jobs: Each website across the web needs content and accordingly, writers are an important part of the web ecosystem. There are usual writing jobs like creative writer, copywriter, editor and article & blog writer along with more advanced jobs like technical writing and ebook writing etc. A writing task will easily fetch a decent amount of money depending on your skills. we can apply on various freelance websites or technique websites & blogs you follow (tech, travel, news, productivity, DIY, movies, etc) and we are attractive sure we will be paid well enough. Additionally, we can try Pro Blogger for specific online blogging work or join various Facebook groups where people post various job postings for writers. 

2. Designing Jobs: If you are a designer, we can easily get a decent online job. People on the web look for UI/UX, web and graphic designers for their apps and websites. There are also jobs available for illustration, business card, logo, banner, infographic, social media and merchandise designers, so we can selectsomething suits the best. Even thoughwe can search for jobs on maximum freelancing websites or Facebook groups, we recommend 99 Designs for its specific focus on designers. The design community and several contests on 99 Designs make it the appropriate area for designers viewing for work.

3. Programming Jobs: There are several companies viewing to outsource their smaller coding projects to outworkers and that’s where students well experienced with programming can get a part-time online job. It all depends on programming languages. There are programming jobs available online for mobile & desktop apps, games, web development, website building, software/app testing etc. Along with the casual websites, we can checkout Upwork for diverse online job openings for programmers. 

4. Tuitions (Online Tutoring) With the rise of online training, there is a rise of online tuitions and tutor jobs. So, when we have good teaching skills, we can teach students from home and earn a handsome amount. Tutor jobs are available for various skill levels, be it different subjects & courses from school, college or even something that is of general interest. we should give CheggTutors a shot for a tutor job and we could easily make $20/hour. 

5. Data Entry Jobs Ifwe believe in your typing skills, a data entry job should be good. There are various companies looking for people who can enter all their physical data online or to keep an online record. There are lots of data entry scams all over the internet but there are some legal jobs available on good freelance websites like Upwork and Freelancer. So, we don’t get caught in scams and apply for these jobs only on legal sites like Upwork, Freelancer, etc.

6. Translation Jobs: There are some great translation jobs available online for people who are multi-lingual or well experienced in more than one language. With businesses going worldwide, there’s a need to translate their work to cater to different languages and they are on the lookout for good translators. The job includes translating a document, movie subtitles, interpreting different languages, editing etc. we can get a number of online translation jobs at Translatorscafe or Gengo. 

7. Voice Over voice overs for exciting videos sounds like a really interesting job and if you assume you have the voice and the skills, you might as well give it a shot. we can upload the languages and the pronunciationswe can do to get freelancing voice over jobs. People look for voice overs for narration, dubbing, impersonation, audio books etc. we can try for voice over jobs on Fiverr. 

8. Customer Service and Tech Support Jobs: call center offices are still the main stay of tech support and customer services, virtual call-centers are slowly gaining traction. At a virtual call center, a tech support or customer service call is routed to the home number of an agent. This job requires to have a quiet environment at home, good & professional speaking abilities along with some training for tech support. There are different jobs available like tech support specialists, customer service managers, live chat agents, phone support etc. Along with the freelance websites, there are specific tech support websites like LiveOps that offer work from home tech support jobs. 

9. Video Services and Animation Jobs Video consumption is on the rise and that has certain to increase jobs aimed at video producers. These freelancing jobs require people to create video commercials, intros, edit videos, do the post-production and add animations or graphic designs. So, when you have the abilities to create some cool videos, we should give this a try. we can search for video animator jobs on freelance websites like People Per Hour.
10. Sell Your Photos or Art Great photos and arts have wonderful value and if we good photographer or an art creator, we will have no problem selling your collection online. we can sell your art images on websites like DeviantArt and your photos on SmugMug . These websites should fetch a good amount for all your creativity, in addition give confidence in your talent.