Logic makes people think but emotions make them act. Manage both.

Observe and develop higher understanding of social dynamics, relationships, and influencers within a group.Predict responses and adapt your style, framing, and messages to each person's unique motivations and priorities to relate effectively.Humans are emotional, social creatures - logic alone doesn't persuade.

Developing Social Intelligence to Understand Motivation

Display warmth, empathy, wit, humor, and genuine positive regard to increase your likeability. People are instinctively drawn to those who make them "feel good."Forge personal connections and elevate positive emotions in others. Likeability builds influence.

Establishing Likeability and Warmth

Build trusted influence by consistently keeping your word, delivering on promises, demonstrating competence, and showing integrity under pressure.Trust derives from proven dependability. It becomes the foundation for your powers of persuasion.

Earning Trust Through Consistent Reliability

Revealing appropriate vulnerabilities, flaws, and your human story builds rapport with groups. Avoid pretending to have all the answers.Mutual openness forges authentic connections. People relate to shared struggles.

Welcoming Vulnerabilities to Build Rapport 

Shape persuasive, vivid messages using metaphors, analogies, and anecdotes that paint a compelling vision, resonate emotionally, and align to the audience's priorities and goals.Stories engage minds far better than dry facts.

Crafting Compelling Communication and Stories

Convey your confidence through assertive body language, direct eye contact, vocal power and passion in your core area of expertise.Back up claims with facts and successes. Insecurity sabotages credibility. Authenticity convinces.

Projecting Authentic Confidence

<ul><li>Understand people's filters, biases and values impacting perception.</li><li>Where appropriate, strategically manage outward perceptions by highlighting credentials, skills, and values you share with them.</li><li>Accentuate resonance.</li></ul>

Managing Perceptions Strategically When Appropriate

<ul><li>Guide people toward desired decisions and change using social intelligence but allow them autonomy and space.</li><li>Exert influence artfully and ethically without manipulation, aggression or coercion.</li><li>Inspire change vs impose it through force.</li></ul>

Guiding People Skillfully to Desired Decisions

In Convinced!, Jack Nasher provides frameworks for establishing credibility and trust with others through developing social intelligence, managing perceptions, and influencing people ethically.

Competence does not speak for itself! You can't simply display it; you have to draw people's attention to it. World-renowned negotiation and deception detection expert, business professor, and mentalist Jack Nasher offers effective, proven techniques to convince others that we are talented, trustworthy, and yes, even brilliant. Nasher offers the example of Joshua Bell, possibly the world's most famous violinist. In January 2007, at rush hour, he stepped into a Washington, DC, subway station, dressed like any street busker, and began to play a $4,000,000 Stradivarius. It was part of an experiment staged by a journalist of the Washington Post, who expected Bell's skill alone to attract an immense, awed crowd. But Bell was generally ignored, and when he stopped, nobody applauded. He made $34.17. The good news is that you don't have to accept obscurity: you can positively affect others' perception of your talent. Whether you're looking for work, giving an important presentation, seeking clients or customers for your business, or vying for a promotion, Nasher explains how to use techniques such as expectation management, verbal and nonverbal communication, the Halo Effect, competence framing, and the power of nonconformity to gain control of how others perceive you. Competence is the most highly valued professional trait. But it's not enough to be competent, you have to convey your competence. With Nasher's help you can showcase your expertise, receive the recognition you deserve, and achieve lasting success.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

communication

Communication

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Competence does not speak for itself! You can't simply display it; you have to draw people's attention to it. World-renowned negotiation and deception detection expert, business professor, and mentalist Jack Nasher offers effective, proven techniques to convince others that we are talented, trustworthy, and yes, even brilliant. Nasher offers the example of Joshua Bell, possibly the world's most famous violinist. In January 2007, at rush hour, he stepped into a Washington, DC, subway station, dressed like any street busker, and began to play a $4,000,000 Stradivarius. It was part of an experiment staged by a journalist of the Washington Post, who expected Bell's skill alone to attract an immense, awed crowd. But Bell was generally ignored, and when he stopped, nobody applauded. He made $34.17. The good news is that you don't have to accept obscurity: you can positively affect others' perception of your talent. Whether you're looking for work, giving an important presentation, seeking clients or customers for your business, or vying for a promotion, Nasher explains how to use techniques such as expectation management, verbal and nonverbal communication, the Halo Effect, competence framing, and the power of nonconformity to gain control of how others perceive you. Competence is the most highly valued professional trait. But it's not enough to be competent, you have to convey your competence. With Nasher's help you can showcase your expertise, receive the recognition you deserve, and achieve lasting success.

Jack Nasher is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Jack Nasher has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Jack Nasher's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Jack Nasher

Convinced!

There are two literary dystopian visions:<ul><li>George Orwell, who in “1984” warned about a tyrannical state that would ban information to keep the public powerless</li><li>Aldous Huxley, who in “Brave New World” depicted a population too amused by distractions – entertainment, leisure, and laughter – to realize that they had been made powerless</li></ul>

The Two Classics

<ul><li>Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.</li><li>Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.</li><li>Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.</li><li> In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure.</li></ul>

How George Orwell Of 1984 Differs From Aldous Huxley's Vision

Politics, religion, news, athletics, education, and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business. America favors all those who possess both a talent and a format to amuse. As a result, we as people are on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

The Medium Is the Metaphor

Although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication. Each medium creates a unique mode of communication by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Communication on television is largely done in images, not words. The medium is the message. We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as “it” is but only as our languages are. Languages are our media, the metaphors that create the content of our culture.

The Medium Is The Message

The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression. The truth must be presented in a certain clothing or it’s not acknowledged. Each culture conceives of it as being most authentically expressed in certain symbolic forms that another culture may regard as trivial or irrelevant. Truth is a product of a conversation man has with himself about and through the techniques of communication he has invented.

Junk TV Is Okay, It's The Serious TV That Is The Problem

Since intelligence is primarily defined as one’s capacity to grasp the truth of things, it follows that what a culture means by intelligence is derived from the character of its important forms of communication. A major new medium changes the structure of communication by creating new forms of truth-telling. While some old media do, in fact, disappear, other forms of conversation – speech and writing, for example – will always remain. Thus the epistemology of new forms such as television does not have an entirely unchallenged influence.

The Medium Keeps Changing

The influence of the printed word in every area of public communication was insistent and powerful not merely because of the quantity of printed matter but because of its monopoly. If you wanted to exchange ideas, you did so in a pamphlet, a debate forum, or a lecture. These were all places where the form of printed language lent itself to a more sophisticated and elegant content. Lectures and debates didn’t sound like idle conversation—they sounded like writing.

The Power Of The Written Word

In a culture dominated by print, communication follows a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The definition of intelligence gives priority to the objective, rational use of the mind. At the same time, it encourages forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. The printed word had a monopoly on both attention and intellect, as there were no other means to have access to public knowledge.

The Printed Word

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, print began to show the early signs of its replacement. Its replacement was to be the Age of Show Business.In the middle of the 19th century, two ideas laid the foundation for the Age of Show Business:<ul><li>Transportation and communication are disengaged from each other</li><li>Space was not an inevitable constraint on the movement of information</li></ul>The solution to these problems was electricity. The telegraph wrapped the continent in an information grid and created the possibility of a unified American discourse.

It's Showtime!

The value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action but may attach merely to its novelty, interest, and curiosity. The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.Daily news give us something to talk about but do not lead to any meaningful action. With the abundance of irrelevant information, the information-action ratio/signal to noise ratio is dramatically altered.

Characteristics Of The New Type Of Communication: Irrelevance

Before telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew about had action-value. However, this sense of potency was lost with telegraphy, precisely because the whole world became the context for news. Everything became everyone’s business. We were sent information which answered questions we didn’t ask and that did not allow the right of reply.

Characteristics Of The New Type Of Communication: Impotence

Telegraphy brought into being a world of broken time attention. Its main strength was the capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.The telegraph introduced the language of headlines—sensational, fragmented, impersonal. Its language was discontinuous: one message had no connection another, each “headline” stood alone as its own context. “Knowing” the facts took on a new meaning: intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.Telegraphic communication permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative.

Characteristics Of The New Type Of Communication: Incoherence

Pseudo-context: a structure invented to give fragmented and irrelevant information a seeming use. The use it provides is not action, or problem-solving, or change, only information with no genuine connection to our livesThe Peek-a-Boo World: all new media that entered the electronic conversation followed the lead of the telegraph and the photograph, amplifying their biases. It is a world without much coherence or sense but also endlessly entertaining. There is no subject of public interest—politics, news, education, religion, science, sports—that does not find its way to television.

The Peek-A-Boo World

The television is devoted entirely to supplying its audience with entertainment. The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds. The eye never rests and has always something new to see. It offers a variety of subjects that require minimal skills to understand and is aimed at emotional gratification. Even commercials are exquisitely crafted, always pleasing to the eye and accompanied by exciting music.

The Age of Show Business

People no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. We do not exchange ideas, we exchange images. We do not argue with propositions but with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.A news show is a format for entertainment, not for education, reflection or catharsis. Thinking does not play well on television, as there is not much to see in it. It’s not a performing art.

The World Is On TV

On television, nearly every half hour is a discrete event, separated in content, context, and emotional texture from what precedes and follows it. News are fragmented and without context, consequences, value, or seriousness; they are pure entertainment. The average length of any news story is forty-five seconds, which is not enough time to explore the whole depth of a story. And no matter how grave the news, it’s followed by a series of short commercials.

News Is Pure Entertainment

Television alters the meaning of “being informed” by creating misleading information: misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information that creates the illusion of knowing something. We lose the sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

Being Misinformed

Changing the form of expression also change its meaning, texture or value. Being present and talking to a friend who just lost a loved one has a different meaning than a condolence card. What is televised is transformed from what it was to something else, which may or may not preserve its former essence.

Being Present Vs Seeing On TV

Show business main business is to please the crowd. With the switch to television, politics became show business. The idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty, but to appear as if you are. The television is the main vehicle to present political ideas, used in political campaigns and through commercials. Commercials are on average 15 seconds and use visual symbols that help us learn the lessons being taught. Being sold solutions is better than being confronted with questions about problems.

Politics And Show Business

A book is all history. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. Television is a speed-of-light medium that permits no access to the past. Everything presented in moving pictures is experienced as happening “now”. Its purpose is to move fragments of information, not to collect and organize them. Television does not ban books, it simply displaces them.

A Book Is Better Than TV

The new education is based on the speed-of-light electronic image, with new conceptions of knowledge and how it is acquired. There are three commandments that form the philosophy of the education which television offers:No prerequisites: every television program must be a complete package in itself with no previous knowledge required. No perplexity: perplexity means low ratings. There must be nothing that has to be remembered, studied, applied or endured.  No exposition: television-teaching always takes the form of story-telling, conducted through dynamic images and supported by music

The Three Commandments Of TV

When people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. The problem, in any case, does not reside in what people watch. The problem is in that we watch. The solution must be found in how we watch. No medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are

The Bottom Line

Examines the effects of television culture on how we conduct our public affairs and how "entertainment values" corrupt the way we think.

movies

Movies & Shows

entertainment

Entertainment

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Neil Postman

Amusing Ourselves to Death

Working a second job is nothing new. Moonlighting is as old as moonlight. Most who moonlight are hovering around federally defined livable wages and are disproportionally women and single parents. These people need the extra funds.  However, remote workers make $66,000 annually on average, far above the livable wage. The WSJ reports that those they interviewed are on track to make $200,000 to $600,000 per year with that extra job. This is fundamentally different from someone who labors in landscaping during the day and in restaurant kitchens in the evening.

Making A Living

There is a reason people working remotely are opting for a second job.Remote is hard to manage, much less lead. Virtual leadership is a mystery. The nature of remote work allows for minimally acceptable performance and weak enforcement means. There is no readily available mechanism for supervisors to insist on excellence or assign ancillary tasks.If people with well-paid remote jobs can pull moonlighting off, why not seek another job? Why not increase income? That’s only rational. Self-interest is a powerful motivator.

Why People Are Moonlighting

Fifty-seven percent of remote employees are only doing their primary job. They’re plenty busy. A fair number, 18%, report some moonlighting that they might have engaged in before working remotely. Maybe those hours come from entrepreneurs who recruited some part-time talent. A strong percentage (13%) admits to working 10 to 20 hours for another company. Perhaps that moonlighting is labors of love. Eight percent say they work 20-30 hours outside their primary job. Four percent reported working two jobs.

Outside The Primary Job: The Findings

It should be that the more one works outside of their primary job, the more one believes their performance is negatively affected. That just makes sense. It turns out that’s only true up to a point. There is just one explanation that captures these results: When double the work is taken on, the less one believes their performance is adversely affected. The explanation here comes from research into <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance">cognitive dissonance</a>, which reasons the harder one works, the more they value the pursuit because they have to justify the effort. It’s a “sunk costs” or “escalation of commitment” phenomenon.

Extra Work Negatively Affecting Performance

This research punctures a widely held myth: <a href="https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249107">that remote workers are using any extra time to better themselves</a>. They aren’t all exercising or planting gardens or painting or digging Koi ponds. They’re working. Often a second job. Not necessarily to benefit their primary employer or their primary colleagues, but to benefit their own pocketbooks.

The Myth Is Busted

Remote work has allowed homers to moonlight. Because all of those informal office dynamics—camaraderie, citizenship, sociability, information exchange, bonding, and others—have been stripped away by late rising and sweat pants and polo shirts.It appears that the day of employee loyalty is long gone. Loyalty has been waning for decades and was always elusive. Leading remote workers is hard enough. Now it means you have to keep your people working for just you, much less jumping ship.

Remote Work: The End Of Loyalty

remotework

Remote Work

career

Career

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

Reason people want to keep working remotely

An elevator pitch is a 30-second description of what you do and the products or services you sell. The goal is to make a connection between you and the listener, be it a potential investor or a recruiter at a job interview. 
Also known as an elevator speech, it should take as long as the time you would spend in an elevator ride with someone.

The Elevator Pitch

<ol><li>Your brand name, category, and product offerings.</li><li>The problem you aim to solve.</li><li>Your solution and key benefits.</li><li>Your ask.</li></ol>Every elevator pitch should start with who you are and your expertise. You’ll want a brand name that’s compelling, memorable, and intriguing in itself. Then, a quick and straightforward sound bite that sums up what your brand does. The conclusion of an elevator pitch will be your ask, or your final question for the listener. It could be as simple as asking for advice or information.

The Four Parts Of An Elevator Pitch

A carefully crafted pitch delivers your unique value proposition, anticipates questions before they come up, and lets you start strong without tripping or scrambling for an answer. It’s the sales pitch for your startup and it makes a good first impression on listeners. It is a versatile tool that can be used to: <ul><li>Spark interest from potential investors</li><li>Sell directly to consumers at events</li><li>Guide your copywriting and personal brand</li><li>Pitch to bloggers and open up strategic partnerships</li></ul>

When To Use An Elevator Pitch

A good hook should be flexible and depend on how well the person knows you, if they do at all. By the end of your introduction, the listener/reader should know: <ul><li>Who you are (work experience, education, etc.)</li><li>Your brand and business model</li><li>Your product/service category and what you’re selling</li></ul> One can start with the name of the brand, and personalize the approach for the listener and their existing knowledge in order to hook them from the get-go.

The Perfect Elevator Pitch: Grabbing Attention With The Hook

You need to exemplify who your target customer is and the opportunity you’re tapping into. <ul><li>The pain points you’re solving.</li><li>The passions you’re letting people express.</li><li>The gap you’re filling and opportunity you're creating.</li><li>The amount of time/money you’re helping people save.</li></ul> You can illustrate these needs with some facts, testimonials and stats if you have the time.

Your Target Market

Instead of glossing over your competition, acknowledge it—especially if you’re pitching to someone who knows your industry or market. Drawing attention to the competition gives you an excuse to explicitly differentiate your business from others. A comparison regarding what value you are adding helps you start a conversation with a one-up position over the competition. Be sure to avoid buzzwords and include key points about what makes you the best solution.

Competition And Comparisons

You want to tell them just enough so they really want to find out more, and want to book that meeting/call where you can go into more detail, or are prepared to make time immediately to talk in more detail. But what you do want to make sure you land within that elevator pitch is how your business makes money. The next steps can be: <ul><li>Handing someone your business card.</li><li>Recommending a product or sending a sample.</li><li>Asking someone to connect with you on LinkedIn or by email to discuss working together.</li><li>Suggesting that the person pass your information along to their own circles.</li></ul>

A Call To Action

Templates offer a good starting point, but you want to make it your own as much as you can. As always, practice makes perfect, and the more feedback you get over time, the more you can improve your pitch. My name is [YOUR NAME], founder of [YOUR COMPANY]. We offer [PRODUCT/SERVICE] for [TARGET MARKET] to [VALUE PROPOSITION].Unlike [THE COMPETITION], we [KEY DIFFERENTIATOR]. And we recently [RECENT MILESTONE].[CALL TO ACTION]

Template: The All-Purpose Elevator Pitch

My name is Vicki, a marketer at Acme Tech. We offer a platform that enables both the early entrepreneur and the large enterprise to build and run their own stores.Unlike most marketplaces where you can sell your products, Acme lets you build and brand your own online store with the tools to sell across a variety of channels, manage inventory, start small, and scale fast.Today, over one million entrepreneurs use Acme to power their businesses.If you’ve got a product to sell, visit Acme.com to start your 14-day free trial.

Example Of An Elevator Pitch

<ul><li>Social proof is simply people doing what they observe others doing. </li><li>People are more likely to engage with what is already popular. </li><li>Social proof is used in advertising all the time. </li><li>People want to belong and command the respect of others. It results in people copying what’s already popular. </li></ul>If you propose that your ideas are already accepted, the listener is more likely to engage with it.

Effective Elevator Pitch: Social Proof

<ul><li>Storify your pitch and make the narrative compelling and attention grabbing.</li><li>Explain the product using a quick analogy(We are the Netflix of Laundry Detergents!)</li><li>Include concrete numbers.</li><li>Use words that are easy to remember and slogans that roll off the tongue or rhyme.</li><li>Use multimedia.</li></ul>

Tip And Tricks: Elevator Pitch

Whether it's in an email, over the phone, or face-to-face, a persuasive elevator pitch can help you get others excited about your business or project. Here's how to write your own elevator pitch, along with some templates to help you get started.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

business

Business

How to Write a Compelling Elevator Pitch That Sticks

Content intelligence is the process of using software that combines machine learning and AI in order to conduct market research about the effectiveness of specific types of content that will help marketers to create a high-quality content strategy.

Content Intelligence

A lot of marketers use content marketing in order to communicate with the audience and draw them in. The benefits include:<ul><li>Generating a deep understanding of your target audience and what they like based on data and analysis</li><li>Helps you to create content that is centered around your users and what they enjoy</li><li>Gain insight to various content types & how they're created</li><li>Predict the effectiveness of content based on historical performance</li><li>Generate authority in your niche that helps you get more visitors, increase conversion rates, and gain visibility in search results</li></ul>

The Importance of Content Intelligence

<ol><li>BuzzSumo</li><li>Contently</li><li>Curata</li><li>Crayon</li></ol>

List of Content Intelligence Software

Learn how content intelligence helps you create an effective content strategy, and discover high-quality tools that will automate the process. 

What Is Content Intelligence?

There are three steps in order to ensure progress toward a shared destination:<ol><li>Ensure that you have created an actual and shareable objective. Having a well-articulated stretgy will deliver value to the business.</li><li>Define what success means to all of you. By doing so, you will get an indication of the key results you'll use to measure your objectives. </li><li>Design your analytics. There is no single tool that can elegantly and definitively indicate achieved key results so instead, your analytics tools must assess several activities.</li></ol>

Creating Shared Success Measures

Without a clearly defined and shared vision of what success means, you can't measure anything meaningful

Follow these three steps to ensure your content marketing analytics are doing what they should – Content Marketing Institute

Measuring Content Marketing Impact: How To Set Objectives That Matter

Your bucket’s name is the name of your website, project, client or web application that you are building. I named mine “AngularJS Single Page Website” to remain concise for our example blog.

Create a New Bucket

Once you’ve signed up and named your bucket, you’ll be prompted to start from scratch or “see some apps”.&nbsp;Simply click the right button to “see some apps” so that you can begin the installation process for the <a href="https://cosmicjs.com/apps/wedding-site" target="_self">AngularJS Single Page Website</a>.

Install the Cosmic JS AngularJS Website (Wedding Website)

<a href="https://cosmicjs.com/" target="_blank">Cosmic JS gives you the ability to filter between programming languages such as Node.js, PHP, React, AngularJS and more.</a>Simply click “Install” underneath the AngularJS Website icon to get started, or visit the Cosmic JS Apps Page.

App Installation Options

Click “Deploy to Web”. You can then edit Objects while your web application is deploying.&nbsp;You will receive an email confirming the deployment of your web application. If you encounter any issues during deployment, you may be routed to the Cosmic JS Troubleshooting Page.

Deploy to Web

Editing is a dream come true in the Cosmic JS Dashboard. To read more about how Cosmic JS was built with editing content in mind, read Building With the Content Editor in Mind.

Edit Global Objects

Cosmic Js is an Api-First Cloud-Based content management platform. It Decouples content from code, allowing Devs to build slick Apps and Websites in any programming language they want. We are now accepting submissions and happy to discuss advertising&amp; Sponsorship opportunities. If you enjoyed this story, we recommend reading our latest Tech stories and Trending Tech stories.

App Deployment Confirmation

In this blog I will show you how to pick up an existing codebase example to build your very own beautiful AngularJS Single-Page Website. Our example app is sure to delight as it’s geared towards the…

Build an AngularJS Website in 4 Steps

<ul><li>“Personality-based” businesses&nbsp;</li><li>People with large, pre-existing audiences on other platforms&nbsp;</li><li>Individuals — “solopreneurs”&nbsp;</li><li>Casual users&nbsp;</li><li>Brands with a shit ton of money&nbsp;</li></ul>

What Snapchat works for

<ul><li>Big brands looking to be “relatable”&nbsp;</li><li>Businesses not based around an individual or personality&nbsp;</li><li>People without a social following elsewhere&nbsp;</li><li>Most small to mi-sized businesses&nbsp;</li></ul>

What Snapchat is not for

Snapchat is not a platform to grow your audience. It’s a platform to nurture your already-existing audience.It’s a platform for those who have proven they’re interesting enough to grow an audience already. It’s a platform for people to take the relationship with their audiences to a more intimate level.

Snapchat is a nurturing platform. Not a growth platform

In marketing, all we’re hearing nowadays is that all brands should be on Snapchat. That if you’re not on Snapchat you’re falling behind or stuck in the 1960’s. Some of the biggest voices in the…

Snapchat is NOT for Everyone — Don’t Believe the Hype…Here’s Why

The concept of an “influencer” is pretty clear. An individual who can reach many people through various communication channels and can, therefore, potentially, influence them to like or dislike, to adopt or ban, to buy or skip buying, products, and services.The more people the “influencer” can reach, the better, stronger, and more of an “influence” he or she has.There is a whole marketing strategy called “influencer marketing” or “influencer outreach”. There is even a concept called “micro-influencer” to describe people with less following who are still considered “important” in their niche.

Influencer Marketing

While Influencers are about follower numbers, thought leaders are about expertise and knowledge. Real thought leaders care and make a point to be knowledgeable about the topics they cover.&nbsp;Don't think about numbers and individual sales you may or may not generate at a specific point in time. Instead, think of how you can develop genuine added value in the long term for your community. A thought leader is someone who cares about their niche and industry for real and enough to invest time and money in becoming experts in their niche

Genuine Thought Leadership

Earlier this week a major shitstorm hit the Internet, when a boutique hotel owner posted a screenshot of an email he received from a travel blogger and “influencer”, asking for a free stay (in the…

It’s time to address the elephant in the room: Influencers don’t really influence anything or…

It’s critical to determine what channel will work best for you and execute accordingly.Here are three factors to consider when deciding if Medium, or any other channel, is right for you:<ul><li>Where is your audience?</li><li>What is your skill set?</li><li>How strong is the competition?</li></ul>

Determine if Medium is right for you

One of the most significant benefits of writing on Medium is the network effect. Medium has a large and active user base, actively seeking new stories to read. But reaping the benefits requires more than just publishing.When a story is published on Medium, there are up to three separate audience buckets it can reach.<ul><li>The author’s audience</li><li>The publication’s audience</li><li>The tag’s audience</li></ul>

Understand how to get read on Medium

Writing great stories is central to any effective Medium strategy.If your stories suck you will not get recommends. If they’re awesome, they will.Here are two factors that can maximize your click to view conversion rate:<ul><li>An engaging title that displays the value the reader can gain and intrigues them to read on.</li><li>An attention grabbing and engaging image.</li></ul>

Write great stories

When readers find your story outside of Medium, then highlight or recommend it, their followers on Medium see it.&nbsp;In addition, Medium sees that it could be worthy of featuring more prominently to more users — giving you an exponential boost.

Promote your stories outside of Medium

Medium Publications drive distribution to two audiences rather than just one.1. Step One: Check out “Top Publications”, a leaderboard for the top Medium Publications2. Step Two: Choose the right Publication for your story.There are two primary factors to consider when choosing a publication:<ul><li>How many followers does the publication have?</li><li>How relevant is your story to the publication’s topic areas?</li></ul>3. Step Three: Craft a compelling pitch.

Get published on big publications

Medium users follow tags based on their interests so that the stories in their feed are more relevant to their interests. By selecting the right tags, you can increase the number of relevant readers who will find your story.When you click the “Publish” dropdown button on your draft, you’ll have the option to add tags.

Use ‘tags’

Even with the best stories and the best promotion strategies, there is some degree of chance to success on Medium. Some stories will “blow up” and others will hardly whisper.To increase my chances of success, you need to make more attempts.

Write regularly to increase your chances off success

I first started writing on Medium because, like most writers and marketers, I wanted to reach my target audience. To do so, I went where my readers already were — and there are many on Medium. In…