#fridayroundup

I never took up fishing. I decided a couple of years ago that having a good cane pole and some nice new bobbers would really spruce up my life. I remembered my very short and very wide grandma in her house dress and a giant wide-brimmed straw hat kerplunking into her rowboat with her cane pole and a coffee can full of worms. It was a great memory but apparently not very inspirational. An estate…

The homeless outreach group I work with came upon a wandering, bewildered, hapless man last night and sent him home to his mama. The stories are always complicated. This one involved landing in Milwaukee somehow, losing everything, including his phone, sleeping behind gas stations, eating scraps he could find and having no idea how to get help. The team gave him dinner, listened to his story,…

Your challenge today is to share an actor or actress you love. Thank you Teresa! https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/101678805/posts/2597591958

Forest Whitaker

One of my absolute, all time favorites!

Each and Every Friday – I outline a few of the articles and /or books that I have read over the last week or two that are worth ta king a look at.

PsychoCybernetics by: Maxwell Maltz

I have mentioned this book a few times this year - but it is one of the few books I read a couple of times a year. Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon. As he was treating his patients, he noticed something very interesting. Maltz tells us that one of the most important discoveries of this century is the discovery of the "self-image." It's the mental blueprint we carry around of ourselves - your belief of "the kind of person" you are. It's something you might not even be consciously aware of, but it directs your every waking thought and action. Most of these beliefs come from our past experiences. Our successes and failures over time build up a detailed picture of who we think we are, and then, on day, we treat it as fact. There are two things about your self-image that are important to understand.  First, all of your actions, feelings, and behavior are consistent with your self-image. You will always act like the person you believe yourself to be. Second, your self-image can be changed. And as soon as you change it, you can have a new life.

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How to Combine Google Shopping Ads with Facebook Ads to Win in 2019

Google Shopping ads and Facebook ads are powerful channels for e-commerce advertising.  While each of these channels is strong on its own, the winning advertising strategies are holistic campaigns that maximize on conversion opportunities by combining Google Shopping ads with Facebook ads. They are very different approaches to advertising that, when used together, allow advertisers to reap a number of benefits. It will allow you to engage with a wider audience that can boost your bottom line, for one thing. However, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to getting your multi-channel advertising strategy ironed out.  The specifics will greatly depend on many factors such as your site, industry, and campaigns (as well as what you want to track in your campaigns). To help you build your Google Shopping Ads and Facebook Ads combined advertising approach, we created a 10-step checklist that you can follow when getting your strategy off the ground.

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7 Welcome Email Examples to Increase Open Rates

Got a new subscriber to sign up to your list? Congratulations! You have successfully cleared the stage of ‘lead acquisition’. Now, how do you make sure that new subscriber gets connects with what they need from your world? A welcome email can help you do this.  With every new subscriber, it’s important to set the right tone with them by sending a great welcome email to start their journey with you. Welcome emails have a remarkably high open rate of 50%. That makes them more effective than newsletters. Therefore, it’s crucial that you take time to get it right. If you’re still stumped on how to get people to sign up for your mailing list in the first place, have a read through our complete guide on how to build an email list to sell more online courses.

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The Ultimate Traffic Guide for Messenger Bots

I remember the first time I ever set up a Messenger bot. It was mind-blowing how fun it was to set up, and all the different engaging customizations I could include in my messages (buttons, images, videos, emojis etc). …and these would land in my prospects main Facebook inboxes? Sign me up. BUT my excited-state slowly crept towards disappointment. I had created such a cool experience to help automate my marketing, customer support and sales inside the Facebook Messenger.…but I had all but 3 people actually USE the bot. I just couldn’t get traffic. Sound familiar?

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Each and Every Friday – I outline a few of the articles and /or books that I have read over the last week or two that are worth ta king a look at.

Atomic Habits by: James Clear

  A habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly, and in many cases, automatically. In the long run, the quality of our lives depends on the quality of our habits. This summary includes a step-by-step plan for building better habits – cue, craving, response, and reward – and the four laws of behaviour change that evolve out of these steps.   There’s no one right way to create better habits, but this book goes through an approach that will be effective regardless of where you start or what you’re trying to change.  Too often, we convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action. However, the difference a tiny improvement can make over time is astounding. The effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.   We often dismiss small changes because they don’t seem to matter, but over your lifetime, these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.

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Compare 15 top marketing automation platforms

Regardless of your company’s size and marketing sophistication, marketing automation tools can provide the following benefits to the organization: Increased marketing efficiency. Enhanced ability to generate more and better-qualified leads. A multichannel view of prospect behavior. Better alignment of sales and marketing goals. Improved lead conversion and ROI. MarTech Today’s “B2B Marketing Automation Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide” examines the market for B2B marketing automation software platforms and the considerations involved in implementing this software in your business. This 48-page report includes profiles of 15 leading B2B marketing automation vendors, capabilities comparisons and recommended steps for evaluating and purchasing. If you are a marketer looking to adopt a marketing automation software platform, you need to read this report. 

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  Sacred Bow: An Intentional Way to Close Out the Year & Start the New Year

  We’re entering the last month of the year, and it can be a crazy, shopping-filled, party spree of a month for many people. Or it can be a simpler, more mindful period of closing out the year and getting ready for the coming year. I’d like to invite you to a monthlong process that I’m calling Sacred Bow: An Intentional Way to Close Out the Year & Start the New Year. What will this process be? Here’s how I envision Sacred Bow..

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Google Ads Update – Here’s What You Need to Know Now

  Google Ads continues to make waves in the PPC community for their improved product updates. With the big changes we have seen this year in Google Ads, one thing was clear from the branding shift and message change: They want to make it easier than ever before to run ads and be successful with those ads. Too many advertisers have tried and failed with Google Ads because it’s often too complex (or too time-consuming to learn). But as Google Ads grows and expands, they are delivering on that promise. And this month’s updates prove it. We have new updates on search metrics, Google Sheets, goal-based campaigns, TrueView, bidding types, Ad Pod testing, and call/message reporting.

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Each and Every Friday – I outline a few of the articles and /or books that I have read over the last week or two that are worth ta king a look at.

The Laws of Human Nature by: Robert Greene

The Laws of Human Nature will help you understand why people do what they do. It will teach you how you can use both your psychological flaws and those of others to your advantage at work, in relationships, and in life.   It will make you a calmer and more strategic observer of people. It will teach you the true levers for motivating and influencing people. It will make you realise how deeply the forces of human nature operate within you. It will turn you into a more rational, self-aware and productive individual.    1. Master Your Emotional Self - You may think you are rational, but you are not. Rationality is the ability to counteract your emotional effects, to think instead of react, to open your mind to what is really happening, as opposed to what you are feeling. Our minds are governed by emotion, but with enough practice, we can cultivate rationality.

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Guide to Facebook Ad Placements: Everything You Need to Know

Facebook Ads feels like the land of limitless options. The world is your oyster and all that. You can create so many types of ads that it’s hard to keep up with them all, and you can even reach people off of Facebook altogether. This can be a great thing, but it can also be overwhelming.

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An Intentional System for Working with Goals

Goals, like any tool, can be used to bludgeon ourselves over the head with shame and guilt, or can be used with intention, as a way to consciously deep our practice in life. I’ve been known to rail against having goals from time to time, to espouse goal-less living … but the truth is, goals can be used to guide us if they’re used intentionally. Goals are not the answer to everything, but neither are they evil. They’re simply tools. Imagine that you wanted to sail to a certain port (your career goal) … there are two ways that could go, depending on how you work with that goal.

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Top Instagram Updates You Need to Know in 2018 – November Edition

We’re closing in on the end of the year, but Instagram isn’t ready to slow down yet, and since we’re in the middle of the holiday marketing season, we hope that you aren’t either! This month, Instagram has released some great new features that give businesses new ways to connect with their customers and give customers new ways to interact with the content marketers are creating for them. We’ve also got a few great features in testing that are in the mix. We’ve got the scoop on everything from IGTV video previews to a new big analytics that’s in testing, so let’s go through all the new Instagram updates and discuss what they mean for marketers and brands.

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Each and Every Friday – I outline a few of the articles and /or books that I have read over the last week or two that are worth ta king a look at.

The Art of Possibility by: Benjamin Zander

Benjamin Zander is the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic and is one of the most passionate communicators you'll ever meet. Watch his TED talk on the power of classical music if you haven't already.  His wife, Rosamund Zander, is a psychotherapist who is a genius in creating distinctions that create change in people's personal and professional lives. Together, they've written a book that will show you the power of possibility to create changes in yourself and others that you previously thought impossible

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A Multichannel Holiday Marketing Strategy to Maximize Your Sale

It’s no secret that the holiday season is a big time of year for retail companies. And consumers aren’t just dropping a couple dollars here and there, either. eCommerce sales are expected to rise a whopping 14.8% throughout the 2018 holiday season (while brick-and-mortar sales look to increase a mere 2.7%). So, while the coming weeks will definitely provide some major opportunities for your company to make a killing, it’ll certainly take some effort on your end to cut through the noise and stand out from your competition. With that in mind, we’re going to discuss how you can use email, social media, and paid advertising to make the most out of this special time of year.

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6 Inspiring Holiday Email Campaigns and What Makes Them So Good

Ah, holidays – the time of year all ecommerce businesses are impatiently waiting for. Their long, meticulous preparations will soon repay them with increased website traffic and sales revenue. But the businesses who are going to be the biggest winners of the holiday season race aren’t just the ones who can simply manage the increase in customer enquiries and product orders. They are the ones who successfully capture the attention of their target audience and convince them to do the holiday gift shopping at their store.

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A New Approach for When You Realize You’re Overcommitted & Overloaded

Many of us are pretty busy, not only with a full plate in front of us, but constantly piling more and more onto the already overfull plate. What’s going on here? Why are we so overloaded? And how do we start to deal with this constant problem? If you’re like me, you have a habit of starting new commitments, new projects, new challenges, new books, new programs … and then halfway into it, you realize you already had too much to do, and what were you thinking anyway? At this point, my usual approach is to start to simplify — I realize I’ve taken on too much, and then I start to cancel commitments. I tell people I just can’t do what I said I’d do, which feels pretty bad (to let people down) but it’s also a huge relief to let go of a burden.

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Each and Every Friday – I outline a few of the articles and /or books that I have read over the last week or two that are worth ta king a look at.

Dare to Lead by: Brené Brown

Brene Brown - a four time #1 New York Times best-selling author - has spent the past two decades studying emotions and experiences, and how to use them to create meaning in our lives. In Dare To Lead, she's turned her focus to how to use those principles to leadership.  The outcome of that work is four skill sets that are teachable and measurable, and thus, can make a positive difference for you and your entire company.   Daring is not saying, “I’m willing to risk failure.” Daring is saying, “I know I will eventually fail, and I’m still all in.”  Vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. There are six myths of vulnerability.   Myth #1: Vulnerability is a weakness. Truth: One cannot be courageous without also being vulnerable.   Myth #2: I don’t do vulnerability. Truth: You can do vulnerability, or it can do you. When you pretend that you “don’t do vulnerability,” you let fear drive your thinking and behaviour.

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Train Your Mind Using the Puppy Method

The mind can be trained to do almost anything. It can be trained, for example, to get used to any situation, like sitting in silence for a long time, or concentrating on a task. However, usually we’re training our minds to do what we don’t want: be distracted, give in to cravings and urges, complain, avoid discomfort, procrastinate. We do this by rewarding our minds for these behaviors — if we do any of these things, we give the mind something pleasurable or comfortable. That’s exactly what we’d want to do to reinforce these behaviors. Think about it: you’re not feeling like doing a task, and the ideal behavior would be to open up to the task, see its importance, and stay focused on it. But the behavior we normally do is put it off (procrastinate) and head to our favorite distractions. The distraction becomes its own reward, so this behavior is reinforced. We do this all day long. Every day. What if we wanted to train our minds to do something different?

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Hooked on a feeling: The forgotten factor in online advertising

If there’s anything the recent past has reminded us, it’s that feelings still trump considered thought. This is also true for advertising, but not in the way you might think. The marriage of ad and tech has brought some amazing advances. But as we move to the future, does that mean we’re also doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? The CPM pricing model we still use today is a direct handover from the world of print and TV. And we still use it, even though ads are more often bought and sold one at a time in programmatic marketplaces these days. Maybe that’s a minor point. But what if the entire basis of programmatic were also based on an old, outmoded idea? Even as we’d inherited and hadn’t even noticed it, the ghost is at the programmatic feast.

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Facebook Account Optimization and Organization Techniques 

It’s definitely that time of year. You’ve done so much brainstorming, preparing, and worrying about your Q4 campaigns and now you feel fried. You wake up every morning poised for disaster. Perhaps one or all of these thoughts races through your head: “something doesn’t seem to be working as well as it was last week,” “accounts aren’t spending what they should be right now,” or “my campaigns are tanking, the client is going to fire us.”  But wait… as Michael Scott from Dunder Mifflin would say, are we really at threat level midnight?! In all honesty, probably not, but that doesn’t mean your campaigns couldn’t use some tweaking and fine-tuning. Every account needs a 100,000-mile tune-up. NOW is the time to make sure all the hard work you’ve done to prepare for a successful Q4 isn’t lost thanks to overthinking, disorganization, and pulling random levers just to see what works and what doesn’t.

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