Archive for the ‘knowledge’ tag
Why Learning is as Important as Teaching
In a recent TED Talk, Bill Gates shares this compelling statistic: “Until recently 98% of teachers got one word of feedback: satisfactory.”
We all need feedback. With no feedback, says Gates, no coaching, there’s just no way to improve. Learning is as important as teaching, if not more. As he says in the talk, even great teachers can get better with smart
feedback.
Teaching doesn’t happen only in the classroom
Mentors, coaches, and peers who are willing to provide constructive feedback enrich our opportunities to learn more about what works. In the absence of deliberate feedback, I recommend signing up and volunteering to work with people and teams you look up to.
For example, on the agency side, one of the main ways in which you can learn what works and what can be improved is by working on pitches. In a short period of time, you will gain feedback both from the rest of the team, and the prospect.
The key is to observe, take note, and be available to incorporating what we learn.
Learning does not have an expiration date
It is a continuous process of seeking both quantitative and qualitative input to get better. Getting and giving feedback is not easy, yet it pays dividends in the long run. Taken and given through the lens of learning blunts the emotional sting.
There is a difference between the abstract of how we see ourselves and our practice and the pragmatic and actual output we provide, how it works in real life.
Whenever I am invited to keynote a conference, or to moderate a panel, in addition to preparing visuals and an abstract of key take aways, I use a Flip camera to tape myself giving the talk.
This accomplishes three main goals:
- shows me where to improve — by getting to see how you do vs. how you think you do
- highlights gaps in thinking — usually that’s where you get stuck
- acts as dispassionate feedback mechanism — no emotion involved
It’s the best method to do a dry run I’ve found. In many instances, it’s enough to be aware of something to improve it.
[hat tip Shane Parrish]
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She is also frequent speaker at
conferences and companies on a variety of topics. To book her for a
speaking engagement click here.
SPONSOR: Email Webinars from AWeber
One thing we are certainly blessed with at Marketing Pilgrim are great sponsors.
Our Email Marketing channel sponsor, AWeber, is a leader in the email marketing space and has been for many years. Their clients include some of the larger names in the online space. You may recognize the likes of Copyblogger, Problogger, Social Media Examiner, Elance and many more.
So how did they get there? Why being experts at what they do, of course. They are share that knowledge in a webinar series that can take you from 0 to 60 in e-mail marketing faster than ever before. A good place to start is at the beginning so check out this video on Getting Started with AWeber.
This is just one of many webinars AWeber offers. Be sure to check them out!
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Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: August 10, 2012
This week, Google pushed out the knowledge graph worldwide, adding a carousel feature in instant knowledge to the search box. Your Gmail emails can now show up in your search results…
How Much Sleep Do You Really Need to Work Productively? [Sleep]
Every one of us, on average, will be sleeping for 24 years in our lifetime. Still, there are many unanswered questions about sleep and how much we need of it. With this post, Leo Widrich sets out to uncover what the most important research has taught us about sleep. And of course, how you can use this knowledge to create an unbeatable daily routine. More »
Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: August 10, 2012
This week, Google pushed out the knowledge graph worldwide, adding a carousel feature in instant knowledge to the search box. Your Gmail emails can now show up in your search results, if you want. I showed an example of why you really can’t let Google handle canonical issues. Google gave advice on how to do A/B testing and not mess up your rankings. Google also gave advice on how to handle multilingual web sites. Google is testing a smartphone optimized icon in the search results. Google AdWords may have their own internal campaign building tool.s Google Translate added a nifty feature taken from Google Goggles. Google AdSense is discontinuing paying by check for many publishers. Google now lets you merge your Google+ Local page with your Google+ Business Page. You must check out the Google logos this week for the Olympics, they are a lot of fun. That was this past week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
Make sure to subscribe to our video feed or subscribe directly on iTunes to be notified of these updates and download the video in the background. Here is the YouTube version of the feed:
For the original iTunes version, click here.
Search Topics of Discussion:
- Google Knowledge Graph: Worldwide, Carousel & Instant
- Gmail In Search Results Test Concerns Users
- Here Is Why You Need To Manage Your Canonicals Right
- Google: A/B Testing? Don’t Cloak, Use 302s & Use Rel Canonicals
- Google: Do Not Force Users To A Specific Language
- Google Smartphone Optimized Icon In Search Results
- Google’s Internal Campaign Builder Tool
- Google Translate Now Translates Pictures
- Google AdSense Discontinuing Payments By Check
- How To Merge Google+ Business Page With Google+ Local
- Google’s Hurdles & Curiosity Olympics
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Google Knowledge Graph: Worldwide, Carousel & Instant
Google announced changes to the Knowledge Graph yesterday.
The big change is that Google’s Knowledge Graph is now available worldwide for all English language versions of Google. So now if you are in the UK, you will and should get the knowledge graph results.
The second big change is that Google added a carousel to the knowledge graph results. The carousel expands up at the top of the page, and then flips through various results. Here is a picture:
In addition, the knowledge graph results show up in the search box as you type now:
Here is a video showing these features off:
I personally do not see these results yet, so I haven’t personally played with it.
Forum discussion at Google+ and WebmasterWorld.
Google Knowledge Graph Going Global For English Speakers, Will Appear In Auto-Complete Results
Google just announced two updates coming tomorrow to the Knowledge Graph feature that it launched in May.
The Knowledge Graph is the summary that now appears to the right of the results for US searchers. This allows users to see factual summaries related to their search queries (biographies of notable figures, tour dates for musicians, the cast of movies, etc.) and disambiguate their searches (focus their search on Rio the movie, Rio the casino, or Rio de Janeiro the city). Senior Vice President of Engineering Amit Singhal says that since launching the Knowledge Graph, Google has been “able to get users to get users to the right query much faster,” adding that “whenever people are able to get to their results faster … they search more.”
So naturally, Google wants to expand the feature. Starting tomorrow, Googler Shashi Thakur says the Knowledge Graph will become available to users across the world, as long as they’re searching in English. Under the hood, Thakur says Knowledge Graph results are now being localized for different regions. For example, if you search for “chiefs” in the United States, the Knowledge Graph will give you information about the football team the Kansas City Chiefs. If you search in Australia, you’ll get information about the Chiefs rugby union team.
In addition, Thakur says the Knowledge Graph results are now being added to the auto-complete box that appears when you type Google searches. In other words, if you start to type a search for “rio”, then, going back to the earlier example, you can select Rio the film, Rio the casino, or Rio de Janiero the city, directly from the auto-complete box. If the Knowledge Graph is supposed to “get users to the right query much faster”, adding the feature to auto-complete is an important step in that direction. It allows you to focus your results, even before the first page of search results actually appears.
Google also demonstrated a carousel interface for the Knowledge Graph that will appear tomorrow. That should make it easier to scroll, slideshow-style, through a bunch of items related to a Knowledge Graph entry. For example, if you decide to focus your search on a specific amusement park, the Knowledge Graph can give you a carousel of pictures of all the different rides.
The Knowledge Graph improvements were announced at a press event in San Francisco, where Google also announced that it will be conducting a field test where it adds information from your Gmail inbox into your search results and also updating its Search app for the iPad with voice features. You can read a few more details at The Official Google Blog.
Google’s Knowledge Graph Now Worldwide & Adds Carousel
Today at the Google Search Breakfast, Amit Singhal, head of Google search, said Google is launching the Knowledge Graph worldwide. The launch seems to be rolling out slowing to all countries with English based language. The complex thing with rolling this out globally is that searching for [chiefs]…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
How to Add Hundreds of New Subscribers to Your Email List Overnight
It’s common knowledge that building large and responsive email lists is one of the easiest ways to profit from your blog. Unfortunately, this can be a slow and arduous process for many bloggers.
Even with a blog rich with high quality content and a free giveaway to incentivize people to join your email list, it can be frustrating watching the number of subscribers increase at a snail’s pace.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way you could quickly and easily add interested subscribers to your newsletter without having to wait months for them to come naturally?
Luckily, there is a way to accomphish this, without resorting to spam or other shady black-hat tactics. Using a technique called list swaps, you can easily add hundreds of new targeted subscribers to your email list overnight!
How do List Swaps Work?
Imagine you and a friend both have blogs on a similar topic. You each know that having a large, responsive email list is one of the best ways to profit from your blog, so you have each been building email lists since you started. Let’s say that you each have about 300 subscribers on your list.
One day you and your friend are hanging out and you start comparing email lists. You notice that almost all the names on his list are different than yours, despite each of your newsletters being about the exact same topic! You both realize how great it would be if you could just add each other’s lists to yours.
Of course just taking the emails from each others lists would be a poor decision; nobody wants to recieve a newsletter they didn’t opt in to. Many people would consider these emails spam, and some would probably report you. Having a profitable email list depends on having a good relationship with your readers, so giving away their emails to anyone else without their permission will hurt you in the long run.
List swaps are similar to trading email lists with a friend, but in a way which lets readers of the other list decide whether or not to opt in. When you and another list owner decide to perform a list swap, each of you send out an email to your lists advertising the other person’s squeeze page. Not everyone will sign up of course, but assuming both of you have lists on similar subjects you should get a decent amount of new subscribers.
How to Perform List Swaps
There are a number of different web sites which help people interested in doing link swaps meet up. These sites often list different categories which allow people with similar email lists to easily find each other. Simply make an account and browse different listings until you find one which seems like a good fit.
Many of these sites have ranking systems in order to track the size and responsiveness of their user’s lists. This allows you to only do business with people who have large and converting email lists. This cuts both ways of course, if most of your list doesn’t even open your emails other people won’t be very likely to want to work with you.
If you can build up a small but enthusiastic list of subscribers, you can then use list swaps with other high rated people to quickly build a powerful and well converting list.
Leveraging a Large List
Once you’ve built a large list, and hopefully a good rating on one or two different list swap sites, you can really start to profit from your list. For example, if you sell an ebook you can have someone advertise it on their list in return for you running an ad on yours.
The larger your list, the larger the lists of the people who will run your ad on them. If you can get ads for your ebook on a few large relevant lists you could easily sell hundreds of copies overnight.
How to Add Hundreds of New Subscribers to Your Email List Overnight is a post from: We Blog Better. © 2012. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.
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Apple yanks those unfunny, cringeworthy Genius Bar commercials
Apple decided to stop running its latest batch of mildly humorous television commercials today, barely a week after their debut.
Aside from painting the over-40 crowd of computer owners as completely inept, the new set of TV spots attempted to highlight the usefulness of its Apple Store Genius Bar employees by demonstrating their vast knowledge of Apple products as well as the benefits of using them. That’s much different from the company’s typical outlook on advertisements, which allows the products to sell themselves by simply showing them off.
The three Genius commercials first appeared on television during the Olympics, and their quick demise was all part of the plan, according to Apple’s advertising agency TBWA/Media/Arts.
“The ads were intended only for a ‘first run’ during the Olympics, which meant just the first weekend of the Games,” a TBWA representative told Business Insider.
I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. We’re reaching out to Apple for further comment and will update this post with any new information.
Historically, Apple usually admits its mistakes by quietly brushing them aside. But that was the Apple under Steve Jobs — not under new CEO Tim Cook. Some have suggested that Jobs would have hated the Genius commercials because they contained customers, so it’s unlikely they’d even have been approved in the first place.
Regardless of why the cringeworthy advertisements got banished, the decision comes weeks before Apple’s rumored iPhone 5 announcement — meaning Apple will have something pretty to focus on in its next round of commercials.
We’ve embedded the commercials below via YouTube for anyone who is in the mood to cringe.
Screenshot via Apple/YouTube
Filed under: media 