Tuesday, May 1, 2018

Facebook for Dating, and 5 Key Takeaways From F8

We kind of saw this coming, did we not?

In Facebook's most primitive days -- if you can remember a time when it was restricted to college students, there was no News Feed, and status updates forced the inclusion of the word "is" -- there was also the "Poke" feature.

Poking, as many of you recall, was a fairly simple feature in which you could click a button that allowed you to "poke" someone else on Facebook -- often, even if you weren't friends with the person. That user would then receive a notification that you had Poked them, and could Poke you back, ignore you, or send you a message.

And I'm about to get real with y'all. Back in the day, I loved the Poke feature. As a fresh college grad/twenty-something, Poking was a simple gateway to indirectly introduce yourself to someone with whom you had mutual friends but didn't yet know yourself, or -- as was more often in my case -- flirt with someone.

So now, nearly 12 years after the height of my Poke usage, the inevitable has happened: Facebook is getting into the dating game. And that was just one of the major announcements made in today's opening keynote at F8: Facebook's annual developer conference in San Jose, California.

Facebook for Dating, and 5 Key Takeaways From F8

1. Leading up to the Event

There was a lot of speculation around what the nature of this year's opening keynote might be like. I predicted that one of three things would happen:

  1. Mark Zuckerberg would ignore the recent Cambridge Analytica and data privacy scandal entirely -- which is not entirely unlike what he did for the opening keynote at Oculus Connect in October, not long after it had been revealed that foreign actors had weaponized the network to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
  2. Zuckerberg would mention the scandal at the beginning of the keynote, but quickly move on to product announcements and new initiatives.
  3. Zuckerberg would lean into the "mea culpa" aspect of the scandal to the point where the keynote would almost go overboard.

In the end, it seemed that the keynote was a combination of the second and third predictions, with Zuckerberg kicking things off with a mea culpa and maintaining that theme of safety, people first, and privacy reverberating throughout the two-hour opener.

"This has been an intense year," Zuckerberg said. "I can't believe we're only four months in."

And not just for him, he was sure to point out -- but for many of the developers that have long leveraged the Facebook platform to build experiences and marketing initiatives. Those in the audience, Zuckerberg acknowledged, were trying to use the platform to build good things, and that was why Facebook has reopened app review. (More on that here.)

Before the keynote even began, Zuckerberg published a post on his official Facebook page on the soon-to-be-launched "Clear History" feature, which will allow users to see which websites and apps send Facebook information on when they're used, and delete that information from their accounts. Users will also be able to turn off Facebook's access and storage of that information in their accounts moving forward.

It's not entirely unlike the ability to delete your browsing history, cookies, and cache from a web browser, causing many to argue that this move is long overdue for Facebook. And yet, writes Facebook VP and Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan in a formal written announcement, "It will take a few months to build Clear History."

But overall, Zuckerberg opened the keynote with remarks not entirely unlike those used to start his congressional hearings last month: acknowledging Facebook's role in organizing good things, but how that's come with the bad -- including Russian interference and major setbacks from data privacy problems.

From there, it the focus was almost entirely forward-facing, with a constant underlying theme on "people first."

2. The Emphasis On "People First"

Not long into his opening remarks, Zuckerberg commented on "how little of our industry is focused on people first. ... I believe we have to design technology to bring people closer together."

That's one thing Facebook set out to do even before the Cambridge Analytica fallout, but after foreign interference was revealed, when it overhauled its News Feed algorithm in January to give better ranking to content from friends and family.

Since then, Facebook has continued to lean into the narrative, announcing several new initiatives today to emphasize experiences on the network and the other apps it owns that bring people together.

Watch Party

Facebook first unveiled its plans for Watch Party -- a group video-view feature that allows Facebook friends to watch an event on the network as a group -- in January, when Facebook VP of Product Fidji Simo published a blog post on the experience.

Today, Watch Party had its official debut, with Zuckerberg making light of his recent Congressional hearings as an example of something your friends might want to watch on Facebook together while commenting it in real-time -- something that some of his friends actually did last month, he said.

3. Facebook for Dating

Yes, here we arrive at the inevitable: new features that Facebook will be rolling out within the realm of dating.

To cover the ground rules, here are a few of the items Zuckerberg immediately addressed when he first unveiled this new, yet-to-be-named product:

  • Dating will not "co-mingle" with the rest of your Facebook experience and will "live" separately from the rest of the network's tools or features.
  • Your friends will not be able to see if you're using the dating features, nor will you be matched with any friends who are using it.
  • According to tech journalist Molly Wood, it won't be available to those who have indicated they are "Married" or "In a Relationship" on their profiles.

The news of Facebook for dating seemed to spook many investors in competing apps, like Match Group, which owns many of the players in the space like Tinder. Here's a look at how MTCH's stock was behaving as of writing this post:

Screen Shot 2018-05-01 at 12.56.38 PM

Source: Google

As I mentioned in the introduction, this move makes sense for Facebook, especially when you consider that it will be integrated with the network's event and group features. For the former, for instance, users enrolled in the dating features can see other "singles" who will be at an event that interests them, and given tools to connect in advance.

It also aligns with Facebook's recent "bringing people together" campaign and the messaging around it making a statement that the company wants to go back to its roots of connecting people. Where once that was limited, at least on the surface, to friends and family, now there will be a designated system for forging romantic relationships through the site. That's the plan, at least.

But it serves as a possible significant new revenue stream for Facebook. Its pricing structure, if any, was not mentioned in today's announcement, and given the financial reprecussions (even if they are only short-term for now) experienced by publicly-traded competitors, this could be another space for acquisition for Facebook.

One of the first brands in the space that I thought of was dating space Bumble ... 

... who, according to a statement, had already been in talks about ways to collaborate before today's announcement was made.

4. New From Instagram

Watch Party wasn't the only new group chat feature unveiled today. Similar capabilities will also be coming to Instagram, with a video call feature due to roll out in the coming weeks.

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Source: Instagram

But perhaps even more significant was Instagram's announcement that it would be adding a new filter for bullying comments. This filter will have a particular emphasis on younger members of Instagram, especially those who are public figures.

"This new filter hides comments containing attacks on a person’s appearance or character, as well as threats to a person’s well-being or health," the official announcement reads. "The bullying filter is on for our global community and can be disabled in the Comment Controls center in the app. The new filter will also alert us to repeated problems so we can take action."

This announcement comes after what Facebook later called a temporary "bug" that allowed all users to respond to a prompt asking if a given post contained hate speech. While it wasn't a carbon copy of these new Instagram filters, the timing was interesting, to say the least.

Finally, Instagram is introducing new integrations within Stories: adding your listening activity from Spotify to your Story in real-time, as well as seamlessly adding GoPro video footage.

5. And finally, VR

In what was arguably the most exciting moment for most of the keynote audience, Zuckerberg announced that its VR headset Oculus Go would be shipping starting today -- and that everyone attending F8 would be receiving their own.

Priced at $199, many of today's speakers made the case that at that price point -- combined with its wireless nature -- the Oculus Go is the "most accessible" VR headset on the market.

It's another step in the direction of Facebook's efforts to make VR a mainstream technology. That was an underlying theme at Oculus Connect in October, where Zuckerberg stated his goal of getting one billion people using VR -- by when, we aren't sure.

But it would be yet another revenue stream for Facebook, and the company might be leaning into these other brands and how they can be monetized in the wake of shell-shocked advertisers who might be straying from the platform in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

In the meantime, Facebook is also leaning into augmented reality (AR) technology, namely by integrating new AR camera effects to Messenger: a program that will first launch in closed beta.

That's a wrap on the major announcements from today. Day 2 of F8 kicks off with another keynote at 10:00 AM PST, and I'll be there, live-tweeting and offering insights.

Of course, after the event, there will likely be more thoughts coming out of the woodwork regarding how these changes can impact the tech industry at-large and the businesses that use it -- and I'll be offering up an analysis of it when the conference has concluded.

In the meantime, if you've got questions or something you're hoping to come out of tomorrow's keynote, feel free to weigh in on Twitter.

Featured image credit: Facebook

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What Does a Future With No Jobs Look Like?

In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, British economist John Maynard Keynes published the essay, "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren."

Keynes concluded that the Depression was only temporary and predicted that by 2030, people would work no more than 15 hours a week, devoting the rest of their time to leisure and culture.

Keynes was right about economic growth recovering, but most of us work far more than 15 hours a week. We’re still living in a time of over-rapid changes. Technological innovation has fundamentally changed the way we work, but are we really moving toward a society where humans are free to pursue culture and leisure while enjoying an age of abundance?

We Are Living in An Unprecedented Age of Change & Progress

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For the majority of human existence, we’ve made progress at an unremarkable pace, but in the last 80 years, as this chart shows, progress has exploded.

Human progress can be marked by five significant revolutions, the most transformative of which occurred 50 years ago, as Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Sapiens. First was the Cognitive Revolution; about 70,000 years ago, we invented language and started to preserve knowledge. Then came the Agricultural Revolution; about 11,000 years ago, we transformed from nomadic tribes to town and city dwellers after we learned how to harness the power of nature to farm instead of forage for food. The Scientific Revolution brought Europe into the age of imperialism and rapid expansion about 500 years ago. This in turn kickstarted the Industrial Revolution, about 250 years ago and Information Revolution, about 50 years ago.

Each time human history jumps forward, we’ve replaced countless jobs by inventing ways to do them better: The farmer replaced the hunter, steam engines replaced human workers. At every single point, such inventions have coincided with rapid economic growth, making the lives of humans better off as a whole.

Even though we’ve demonstrably been good at replacing ourselves with machines, we still pride ourselves on being the best thinkers and decision makers on earth. Because while machines could help a farmer increase his crop yield, the ultimate decision on what to sow and when to harvest still lies on him.

We believed we were the best thinkers and fastest learners on earth. But it’s no longer true.

In 2016, history was made when AlphaGo became the first computer program to beat the highest ranked professional Go player, Lee Sedol, without handicaps. One reason this was so impressive is that Go is considered much more difficult than other strategy-based board games, with over 250 possible opening moves compared to chess’ 20.

Machines are rapidly replicating (and improving upon) our previously unique ability to learn quickly and make decisions in reaction to changes in our environment. Eventually, machines could replace most types of jobs  --  including roles where the worker has to make decisions based on limited amounts of information, not just routine and predictable human labor.

It’s Hard for Humans to Predict Technological Change

If someone invented a time machine and transported an ordinary person from the 16th century to the 18th century, she would not, for all intents and purposes, have a hard time understanding the world. The same would not be true if someone was transported from the 18th century to the 20th century  --  technology has changed so quickly that she’d probably think she’d been brought to a different universe!

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The changes in outputs of key industries created a drastically different worldThe changes in outputs of key industries created a drastically different world.

In the same vein, if you asked a factory worker from the 1970s if he believed that machines would eventually put him out of a job, he would find the question hard to understand, let alone answer. That’s why we must constantly question our understanding of the rate of technological progress and acknowledge that the vast majority of us are ill-equipped to make sense of it all.

It’s estimated that as much as half the world’s labor could be automated over the next 20 years. There are two potential outcomes of this massive disruption of the labor market:

(1) an era of mass unemployment and social instability, or
(2) an age of abundance where we are free to pursue creative work

Scenario 1: An Era of Social Instability

In 1990, the real inflation-adjusted income of the median American household reached $54,932, but then started falling. By 2011, it had fallen nearly 10%, even as overall GDP hit a record high, according to The Second Machine Age by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

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Source: The Second Machine Age

In contrast, productivity grew at an average of 1.56% per year during this period, and most of this growth directly translated into comparable increases in average income. Brynjolffson and McAfee argue that median income shrank because of increases in inequality.

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Source: The Second Machine AgeRay Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates , came to the same conclusion. In October 2016, Dalio evaluated the US economy by separating it into two cohorts, the top 40% and the bottom 60%.

He found that the average household in the top 40% earns four times more than the average household in the bottom 60%. While the bottom 60% has experienced some recent income growth, real incomes have been flat to slightly down since 1980 (in the same time period, income has increased for the top 40%). Those in the top 40% now have on average 10 times as much wealth as those in the bottom 60%.

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Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that the main driver of this inequality in income is the rapid downward pressure on wages for jobs that are being fully or partially replaced with automation.

For example, if one hour’s worth of human labor can be done by a machine for one dollar, then under a free-market system, profit-focused employers won’t offer a wage of more than one dollar. That worker will need to settle for lower wages, and could be laid off entirely.

Because digital technologies can replicate innovative ideas at low cost, a person who finds a way to leverage them will earn exponentially more than has been possible  --what Brynjolfsson and McAfee call a “winner-take-all” market. For example, a relatively small number of designers and engineers could create fact-checking software. Once the software works, it can be delivered to millions of users at almost zero cost. If this software gains widespread adoption, tens of thousands of fact checkers will be put out of work while a small group of individuals capture the wealth their software created.

A second important characteristic of winner-take-all markets is that individuals who create disruptive technologies don’t just get relative advantages — they win the whole market. In a traditional market, someone who was 90% as good would make 90% as much money. But in today’s market, there’s no reason to use the second-best fact-checking software when you can access the best.

In this type of economy, innovators gain disproportionate wealth while reducing demand for previously important types of labor.

This wealth gap will likely intensify if we fail to implement preemptive measures. In a hyperbolic scenario where technology causes mass unemployment, consumers will have less money to spend on products and services. Businesses will have to chase a shrinking pool of customers by cutting prices, sending the whole economy into a deflationary spiral.

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Scenario 2: An Age of Abundance

The economic inequality that’s resulted from technological progress doesn’t show any signs of slowing, and the gap has implications beyond just differences in net worth. Another data point from Dalio’s study suggests that as differences in wealth get wider, premature deaths among the bottom 60% will also increase. We’ve already been seeing this trend from an increase in deaths associated with drug and alcohol use (up 100% since 2000) and an increase in suicides (up over 50% since 2000).
Unless action is taken to reduce this inequality, it is very likely that it will only continue to rapidly worsen. It won’t be an easy path  --  potential solutions require major changes in social policy that can only occur through a political process and require a dramatic shift in how we distribute wealth.

If policies aimed at solving this issue are successful, there’s a chance technological advancement could create an age of abundance, where we find viable solutions to mitigate the effects of a widening income gap caused by a consolidation of wealth.
One possible solution to provide people with basic security is a Universal Basic Income (UBI). A country using this system would pay citizens a basic wage that is conditional on their participation in the economy. By providing people with a safety net given their participation in the economy, people are incentivized to be productive and given the means to participate in the market.

Some proponents of UBI argue that we’ll be able to eliminate all social welfare programs once UBI is instituted, since those programs are just alternate ways of giving people money. One income system eliminates the need to run multiple programs side by side, reducing cost and complexity.

Another potential solution is the negative income tax. Under the present tax law, we operate a positive income tax, where a household is progressively taxed after income reaches a certain cutoff point. Under a negative income tax system, a person earning less than that cutoff point has a negative taxable income of the difference between their earnings and a cutoff point. Think of the cutoff point as a mirror of progressive tax brackets — the higher a person’s total earnings are before they hit the cutoff, the less taxable income they have and the less they’ll receive from the government.

This system provides a minimum income while incentivizing people to work. Research by Brynjolfsson and McAfee shows that people still stay productive if a negative income tax is in use. For example, if a cutoff point was $3,000 in annual income, someone who earned nothing could receive something like $1,500 in negative income tax and have $1,500 in total earnings for the year, but someone who earned $2,000 might receive $500 and would still end up with higher total income.

This system incentivizes people to find work, even if the income for that work is low, because they still get an uplift from every dollar they make.

A universal basic income or negative income tax could:

  • Allow people to pursue work that has traditionally not been compensated well in a capitalist economy, such as community-building and social work.
  • Create a more progressive entrepreneurial environment by enabling people to take bigger risks in pursuing valuable work.
  • Help reorder social expectations. At the moment, we treat employment as a choice — but UBI and NIT treat unemployment as a market failure, not an individual one. As more and more people face being phased out of their jobs by automation, reframing how we think about work is essential to maintaining social stability.
  • On top of UBI, another option is what Nobel Prize–winning conservative economist Milton Friedman termed as Negative Income Tax. Under the present tax law, we operate a Positive Income Tax, where a household is taxed on a Progressive Income Tax system above a certain cutoff point. Under a Negative Income Tax system, a person earning below the cutoff point will get a certain percentage of that difference from the government.

A future without jobs does not equal a future without work.

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For either of these systems to work, we still have to focus on productivity, the driver of economic growth. Distributing money to be used just for consumption as a basic income rather than for improving production will diminish the value of money and stagnate the economy.

Unconditional grants of money can cause demand-pull inflation to occur because the aggregate demand for goods and services in an economy will increase more rapidly than an economy’s production.

So the key to an effective tax program would be:

  1. A cutoff point or grant amount low enough that people will still strive for more
  2. Grants that are only released to eligible consumers
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Technology like blockchain creates an unprecedented opportunity to test out decentralized decision making on resource allocation. Using a distributed ledger system to ensure money is distributed only to people who’ve done productive work, as determined by an ever-changing set of conditions or priorities monitored by an artificial intelligence engine.

While we are still far away from developing general-purpose artificial intelligence, the computational tools we have at hand are already helping us make decisions on the factors that motivate different people. For example, Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Yale University and the author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters studied how campaigns use big data and machine learning to mobilize voters. The algorithms developed to analyze voter behavior might be a precursor to developing more sophisticated models that predict how best to encourage participation in the economy.

Ultimately, the question of whether to adopt a tax system that could help solve for growing inequality is more of a political than an economic question. It’ll be difficult to suggest the concept of ‘free money’ to a country built on the idea of free markets and fiscal conservatism. Any solution will have to blend new and existing policy, and allocate spending to training programs that can help workers be better equipped to work in a post-job economy, rather than just offering a universal payment for consumption.

The fact remains that no one has all the answers, and navigating the political landscape to arrive at a solution will be an uphill battle.

The policies advocated in this piece will not be easy to implement, and even if they are successfully adopted, rising inflation and decreasing wages will not be curbed immediately.

The Way Forward

As technology continues to progress, more traditional jobs will be threatened by automation. Any solution will involve government intervention to regulate the free-market conditions that create inequality in the first place.

One potential outcome of is the call for technology to be regulated or restricted in a way so fewer jobs will be threatened. That would be a huge mistake that can happen because progress in technology is the reason why we are better off today than even just a decade ago. Research done by the team at Human Progress shows that the cost of light has fallen by a factor of 500,000, where the amount of labor that once bought 54 minutes of light now buys 52 years of light.

However, the belief that the American government agreeing to tax reformers’ idea on handing out monthly checks to support a working class is a huge leap of faith.
My hope is that we have to actively tap on technology to help make our lives better and if not, change the way we utilize it with small course corrections instead of halting advancements through regulation or denying UBI and negative income tax based on pre-conceived notions of what a free capital market is.

The policies that are currently evaluated include:

  • Support sectoral training, apprenticeships, and earn-while-you-learn programs.
  • Implement universal pre-K, with subsidies that phase out as incomes rise.
  • Raise the minimum wage and index it to inflation while raising the overtime salary threshold.

It is likely no single solution is perfect and we have to discuss and explore a multitude of policies to create a better future. While there’s a lot of work to be done, I’m just hopeful and optimistic that the future is bright.

Interested in taking a first hand look on how Artificial Intelligence can help you do your job better instead of replacing it? GrowthBot is a chat based digital assistant to help growth professionals (Sales & Marketing) grow better.

Message GrowthBot on Facebook Messenger or Slack.

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3 Overlooked Facebook Lookalike Audiences That Will Improve Your Ad Results

Want better results from your Facebook lookalike audiences? Wondering which custom audiences yield the best-performing lookalike audiences? In this article, you’ll discover how to create three highly tuned Facebook lookalike audiences from your most valuable custom audiences. #1: Reach a Lookalike Audience of People Who Spend Time on Your Website’s Product Pages Website traffic lookalike [...]

This post 3 Overlooked Facebook Lookalike Audiences That Will Improve Your Ad Results first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

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9 of the Best Free Website Builders

Today, it’s almost impossible to maintain a successful business without a fully functional, responsive, SEO-compatible website -- but you don’t have to shell out the big bucks to afford one.

There are plenty of options for building and designing a website for free -- whether you know how to code, or not -- and these website builders are often comparable in quality to their paid alternatives, particularly for small businesses or personal brands.

The free website builders we're sharing today offer SEO benefits, embedded analytics systems, mobile optimization, and professional-looking templates. If you’re on a tight budget and can’t quite swing the paid builders, these are the next best thing. Read on to check out nine of the best free website builders, so you can build a website for free without forfeiting quality.

Best free website builders

  1. Wix
  2. Weebly
  3. WebNode
  4. Jimdo
  5. Mozello
  6. Webstarts
  7. Webflow
  8. IM Creator
  9. SITE123

1. Wix: Wix is one of the most popular free website builders out there, with 110 million users. The fully hosted platform offers an easy drag-and-drop editor, and a large collection of professional-looking templates that are well-suited for small businesses, online stores, restaurants, or personal portfolios.

Wix supplies built-in Google Analytics to monitor your site, and even offers additional apps for individual preferences. If you want, Wix can even design your site for you. The biggest downside of Wix’s free version is it doesn’t come ad-free, and each page of your site will have a prominent Wix ad. Ad-free is only an option if you pay for the premium version.

2. Weebly: This open source SaaS offers web hosting, domain registration, web design, and even ecommerce functions, making it suitable for businesses and startups. Weebly’s a particularly flexible website builder, compatible with every device and platform, and easy to use -- like Wix, it has drag-and-drop functionality, as well as an integrated CMS solution, and hand-coded HTML files. The in-house editor comes with SEO tools and Google Analytics. With PayPal integration, an automatic tax calculator, digital gift cards, and more, Weebly is a smart choice for ecommerce businesses. Unlike some of its other free competitors, Weebly is ad-free.

3. WebNode: WebNode is a popular choice for both personal brands and professionals -- it’s easy to use, and you can create a website in a different language or on a different platform to suit your business’s needs. WebNode supports ecommerce stores, and the sites are compatible with Android, Mac, and IOS devices. WebNode will provide statistics to track your site’s success, free of charge, and even with the free version, you won’t have ads.

4. Jimdo: Based in Germany, Jimdo is a valuable option for international companies, with options to create a site in more than nine different languages. The builder is compatible with smartphones and tablets, and there’s a mobile app you can use to build a mobile-optimized site, as well. With no page limit and 500 MB of space, you’ll likely have more than enough space to build your site, and it even provides HTTPS/SSL encryption, meaning your visitor’s information will be kept safe. Plus, you’re able to integrate your site seamlessly with social media accounts. If you do decide to use Jimdo, beware of one thing: the builder prevents free websites from being indexed by search engines.

5. Mozello: One of the biggest selling-points for this Latvian-based company is the builder allows you to create a multilingual site for free -- something unmatched by other website builders. Its features include a blog, online store, SEO options, and 500 MB of storage. There is an advertisment, but it’s just a link in the footer, so most visitors won’t see it. The only drawback is the drag-and-drop system isn’t as intuitive or complex as some other options, and there aren’t a ton of design customization options.

6. Webstarts: With a wide collection of beautiful templates and a user-friendly drag and drop functionality, Webstarts makes building a website as simple as possible: best of all, whatever you see when you’re designing is exactly what your visitors will see when you publish the site. This can take some of the guess-work out of the process.

7. Webflow: While most of the other builders in this list are for people without a ton of coding knowledge, Webflow is specifically for designers and agencies who build sites for clients -- this means the HTML and CSS is entirely in your control. After you’ve built a site on Webflow, you will need to transfer it to a content management system. There are some features, like drag-and-drop widgets for adding social components, maps, and videos, that don’t require coding knowledge, but if you want the full benefits of Webflow, you’ll need to know HTML or CSS. There’s a limited set of themes, a responsive interface, and your Webflow site can be customized for desktop, tablets, or smartphones. Apart from the necessity of knowing code, one other drawback of Webflow is you can only have two pages, and there’s a limit of 500 visits for free users.

8. IM Creator: With over 11, 240, 766 sites build on IM Creator, it’s a popular option for a few reasons: there’s an easy point-and-click interface, an extensive range of templates and images, and unlimited web hosting and domain services. Plus, the platform is scalable, and you can have either single or multipage layouts. This builder is unique for its built-in ecommerce tools, and offers SEO and Google Analytics to fully optimize your site for search engines.

9. SITE123: Arguably one of the most flexible and easy-to-use builders, Site123 lets you customize anything and offers a one-click installation wizard with graphics and templates. Site123 stands out as particularly helpful with its free images library, professional fonts to add visual elements to your site, and creative DIY plans for creating multiple pages (which are unlimited). Plus, since it offers web hosting domain registration, 500 MB storage space, Google Analytics, and is ad-free, you won’t feel pressured to switch to a paid plan.

And there you have it! Since all of these website builders are free, try out a couple if you’re unsure of the best fit. In particular, take note of what you really want to get out of your site to ensure your needs will be met by one of these free builders.

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Monday, April 30, 2018

Top 5 Behavioral Interview Questions to Ask in 2018

As an employer, there's no right way to host a job interview. But you can ask each candidate the right questions to learn the most important things about them.

Learning what makes a person qualified to work for you is difficult, especially if you have just a half-hour interview with them in a conference room. Because of this time crunch, you might feel compelled to race through the candidate's resume, asking them questions about each job title and bullet point they've written down from top to bottom.

But if you want know what makes the applicant valuable to you, it's important to get to know them beyond their written job application. The best way uncover this value is to ask behavioral interview questions.

What Are Behavioral Interviewing Techniques?

The behavioral interview technique asks job candidates to describe how they've handled themselves in real situations during their career. Depending on the job qualifications, behavioral questions can call on a variety of past experiences to help employers determine how the candidate might fare in the position for which they're applying.

The most informative answers to behavioral interview questions don't just describe how a candidate behaved, but also how this behavior benefited them and the business.

To help you develop your list of questions, we've put together five of the most effective behavioral interview questions you can ask your job candidates, and explained what an answer to each question can reveal about the interviewee.

Top Behavioral Interview Questions (and What You'll Learn by Asking Them)

1. 'Tell me about a mistake you made during a project or at a certain point in your career.'

Think of this behavioral question as a more specific way to ask an interviewee: "What are your greatest weaknesses?" By asking candidates this question, you can discover many important things about them that you wouldn't learn from their resume.

Listening to a candidate describe a mistake they once made can show you how much self-awareness they have. The best answers indicate both their thought process in making that mistake and what they learned from it. Just because it was a mistake doesn't mean the candidate was being negligent -- encourage them to explain their choice and what they'd do differently today.

2. 'Tell me about a success you're particularly proud of in your career and why it was a success.'

Similar to the question above, think of this one as a better way to ask an interviewee: "What are your greatest strengths?" Pitching a question the candidate might find flattering and fun to answer can empower them to come out of their shell during the interview.

This is what makes asking about their past success so useful -- you can uncover more intimate details about their professional growth and the types of assignments they thrive on. The best answers to this behavioral question won't just reveal the work a candidate is most comfortable with, but also why this work plays to their skills and if those skills would be of use to your company.

3. 'Describe a time you had a conflict with a coworker, and how you resolved it.'

Candidates who know how to diffuse issues with their colleagues help foster the healthy, nurturing culture your company needs in order to grow.

Asking about the applicant's experience resolving a conflict with a coworker can reveal how diplomatic they can be toward differing opinions among team members. Specifically, employers can learn two big pieces of information about a candidate from their answer to this question: how they view themselves in conflicts, and where the candidate ranks their priorities in relation to the other employees involved.

It's not important that you agree with the resolution the candidate came to. It's more important that you can determine how effective their resolution was at accommodating everybody's -- and ultimately, the business's -- needs.

4. 'Tell me something you had to learn very quickly but knew nothing about before.'

This behavioral question is a popular one among employers today. It's simply not realistic to expect candidates to already know your business or industry when they first walk through the door. What's important is how fast they can learn. Want to find out if your applicant can learn the skills needed in your industry? Ask them how they've done so for others in the past.

Employers can infer a lot about candidates as they explain their past experience with a challenging new concept. Not only will you find out what subjects a candidate isn't often exposed to, but you can also learn how confident they are in unfamiliar territory.

Did an applicant's answer impress you? Ask them a bonus follow-up question: "How would you explain this concept now to someone who isn't familiar with it?" The answer can give you deeper insight into the applicant's learning style, as well as any mentorship potential that would allow them to pass on their knowledge to other employees.

5. 'Tell me about a time you had multiple assignments with conflicting goals or deadlines, and how you completed each of them.'

At some point in our careers, we all inherit a workload whose contents pull us in different directions -- and yet, everything in this workload needs to get done. So, if it's such a normal experience, what are you really getting out of posing the question above to your interviewee?

When asking about a candidate's experience with conflicting assignments, the insight you're looking for isn't how many things they can handle at the same time. It's how efficient they are at completing it all.

Ultimately, answers to this question can tell you a story of creative problem solving, letting you in on effective approaches to time management that the candidate might be able to bring to your team.

While questions that focus on a candidate's resume can give you appropriate context around the experiences they've had, it's crucial that you incorporate these behavioral interview questions as well. Ask a few of the above questions in your next interview -- whether it's in person or over the phone -- and see how they help you come to a final hiring decision.

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A Comprehensive Guide to Local SEO in 2018

Local search is powerful for small businesses: four out of five consumers use search to find local information, which means if your business isn’t optimized for local search, you could be missing out on 80% of your potential customers. In short, local SEO is critical if you want your business to stay relevant.

To help you optimize your business for local SEO, we’ve created a comprehensive guide, which will cover local SEO tools, local search best practices, how to optimize for Google My Business, and more. By the end of the guide, you’ll have a firm understanding on how to optimize your business to reach potential consumers who use local search to choose which products or services they’re going to buy.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO helps businesses promote their products and services to local prospects and customers. To gather information for local search, search engines rely on signals such as local content, social profile pages, links, and citations to provide the most relevant local results to the user.

Best Practice Local SEO Tactics

To thrive in local search, you need to do three things: optimize your Google My Business account, improve your on-page SEO by updating your website, and excel on the Wild Wild Web. While it might sound overwhelming, it’s entirely feasible to succeed in all three with some patience and perseverance. Stick with us, and we’ll explore each one in-depth.

Optimize for Google My Business

Google My Business has become the creme de la creme of local search -- since Google understandably feels most comfortable sharing content it can support and verify, Google My Business is their tool to help your business meet Google’s needs. If Google can verify your business as authentic, it will potentially reward your business with a coveted sidebar space in Google local search.

To ensure you’re optimized for Google My Business, you’ll want to create and verify a Google My Business page, use Google Posts within your account, encourage your customers to share reviews online, and respond authentically to reviews, specifying location. For example, “We appreciate your feedback on [product/service] in [city, state]. We value your input and look forward to working with you again. Thank you from the [full company name] team.”

To learn more about using Google My Business, check out our full post here.

Website Updates

Now that we’ve discussed optimizing your business for Google My Business, let’s take a look at five simple website updates to improve your local SEO.

1. Improve Internal Linking Structure 

Although external links pointing to your site are ideal (which I’ll discuss soon), adjusting your internal linking structure will also boost your SEO rankings.

Why does internal linking matter? It does the following:

  • Supports website navigation
  • Assists with information architecture and website hierarchy
  • Distributes page authority and ranking power among pages

If you want to improve your internal linking structure but aren’t sure where to start, check out Kissmetrics’ The Seven Commandments of Internal Linking for Top-Notch SEO.

2. Optimize URL, Title Tags, Headers, Meta Description, and Content

When it comes to content, every new blog post is a new indexed page for your site, a new page on which to target a geographic search phrase, and a new opportunity to get found in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Every time you write a piece of content, you need to optimize the content for search engines by using high-volume keywords in the URL, title, header, meta description, and body. If you're having trouble coming up with geo-targeted content, consider highlighting customer success stories and case studies.

3. Add Location Pages to your Website

If you have more than one brick and mortar location, create location pages. Location pages provide readers with your NAP, store hours, unique store descriptions, parking/transit information, promotions, testimonials from happy customers, and more. It's also important you avoid duplicating content across multiple location pages. For single location businesses, create a locally descriptive About Us page. You’ll get big time bonus points if you add a Google Map to your website on your respective location page(s).

4. Create Local Content

Google continues to get smarter, which means content creators are now able to truly write for users, not search engines. But while writing about general topics will attract a wide crowd, sometimes it’s more important to hone your focus and write about local or industry news to attract a local audience. Be the local authority for your industry by promoting local industry gatherings, news, employees, and other educational content on your blog. Think of top-of-the-funnel content that goes beyond what your business sells.

For example, if you're a local security company and you’re trying to attract businesses that are new to the area, create a helpful resource to get these businesses well-acquainted with your city. A map of local service providers or a calendar of city-wide events could both provide value for your persona and contain highly relevant on-page local signals.

5. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

Local search and mobile search go hand in hand (nine out of ten smartphone users conduct local searches on their devices!). Some of the most common ways people will use your site in a mobile environment is to look up reviews, find directions to your location, and search for contact information. Make it easy for your prospects and customers by making your site mobile-friendly.

Engage with Directories and the Wild Wild Web

You’ve learned how to optimize your business for Google My Business and how to update your website for an internal SEO boost -- now, let’s take a look at how you can use NAP consistency, directories, and inbound links to take your business one step closer to that number one spot on local search.

Name, Address, Phone Consistency

You've got to make it easy for people and search engines to find you. To do this, set up your NAP, which stands for name, address, and phone number (with area code). This should be included as crawlable HTML text on your site. Avoid the common mistake of only including the NAP within an image -- images can’t be crawled from search engines like HTML text. The most common location for the NAP is in the footer or header of the site.

Optimize Online Directories and Citations

For United States companies, these four map data aggregators provide a large amount of the map data for Apple, Yelp, Bing, Google+ local, Trip Advisor, and more.

Consistency is key: verify that your citations are consistent and complete across these four data aggregators. Discrepancies like misspellings, abbreviations, lack of suite number or wrong phone number can be problematic. If Google can’t determine which information about your business is correct, it may not show your business at all in search results. Additionally, be sure to remove any duplicate listings you find. Bonus points for emphasizing a Chambers of Commerce membership in your community, which will garner you an external inbound link.

Get Inbound Links with Relevance and Authority

Inbound links are incredibly powerful opportunities to boost your local SEO -- every inbound link tells Google you’re a legitimate company, and inbound links can also raise your domain authority. Here are a few ways to get inbound links:

  • Sponsorships or Partnerships
  • Guest Blog Posting
  • Scholarships

Start with your own personal network, which may include the Chamber of Commerce, business improvement districts, licensing bureaus, trade associations, resellers, vendors, and/or manufacturers and other affiliates. Consider sponsoring a webinar or meet-up, hosting a community event, promoting something local you love, and building relationships with prominent people and influencers. Additionally, learn to feel comfortable reaching out to partners to see if they can feature you on their partner directory.

Be a guest blogger, talk to and about (positively, of course!) other people in your industry, and act as a resource provider for the community. If you're an active participant in community conversations, the buzz around you grows in the form of inbound links, social media growth, and media coverage.

Given that .edu links are the bee’s knees for domain authority, why not earn some links by featuring a scholarship in your geographic region? It should be relevant to your industry, send the right signals to your domain (given the backlinks from schools) … and make you feel good, too! Moz built up a solid guide on the steps to success for effective scholarship outreach.

Engage with Social Media and Add Posts to Google My Business

Google considers content shared on social media more important now than ever before. Now that you’ve carved out a beautiful Google My Business page, share the page on social media, further aligning social and search.

Local SEO Tools

Now that we’ve covered how to optimize your business for local SEO, let's explore some useful tools you can leverage to improve your ranking in the areas where it matters most.

1. Whitespark Local Citation Finder. A local citation is any online mention of the name, address, and phone number for a local business. Citations matter because they help surface local businesses in online search, and when local businesses actively manage their citations to ensure data accuracy, it promotes trust of these online listings. Whitespark knows this realm well -- really well. With a free starter version and a popular $24/month option, Whitespark offers local listing management, recommends where to list your business, examines your competition, and robustly builds and monitors your citation growth for better local search rankings.

2. Screaming Frog. This desktop program crawls websites' links, images, CSS, script and apps from an SEO perspective. Curious if you have any 404’s? Wondering about missing meta descriptions or H1’s? Screaming Frog will analyze up to 500 URLs for free and offers an unlimited paid version for $200/year.

2. Moz Local. Less expensive than most of its counterparts (starting at $99/year with a professional level of the service at $179/year), Moz Local will ensure your business listing has been verified on Google and Facebook, and distribute your listing across the search ecosystem. Additionally, Moz Local will collaborate with data aggregators to help push listings, ensuring your business gains visibility.

4. Ahrefs. Ahrefs helps with backlink checking, which is important as these links (which are directed toward your website) serve as an indicator of website authority. Ahrefs also offers competitor analysis, keyword research, and insight into the anchor text other websites use when backlinking to your site. This tool has a starter version at $99/month and a standard option at $179/month for more extensive tracking.

5. Buzzstream. Starting at $24/month with professional functionality at $299/month, BuzzStream facilitates earning local backlinks, which helps you identify and build relationships with local influencers by researching influencers, tracking conversations, and providing reporting insights into your outreach campaigns, team performance, and link placements.

What’s Next?

This Comprehensive Guide to Local SEO in 2018 is intended to drive your local success. While some of the tips are one-off activities where you can set it and forget it (e.g. making sure your NAP is clearly written on your site), other tasks, such as building reviews and publishing locally relevant content, is an activity your organization needs to do on an ongoing basis for long-term local SEO success. Keep both in mind as you work toward better online visibility and we look forward to seeing you on the first page of Google!

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How GDPR Impacts Marketers: What You Need to Know

Are you confused by the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)? Wondering how GDPR affects your marketing? In this article, you’ll find a plain-language overview of GDPR, how it could impact your data collection, and what you need to do to make sure you’re compliant before May 25, 2018. What Is GDPR? The [...]

This post How GDPR Impacts Marketers: What You Need to Know first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

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