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nickhembery · 4 years

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trigger warning: shit gets dark

I've been thinking about writing this for a while. It's going to be a long one, because it's going to tell a story of a long period in my life. It's going to get into a lot of banality of office work, and its going to go to some dark places, because it's also the story of depression. My depression. My sink into some pretty dark thoughts and the path out of them.

The story starts in 2007. I was a year out of university with a degree barely worth the paper it's printed on, so was struggling to find a job. A task made a lot harder because I still didn't have any idea what I wanted to do for a career. So I was going from short temp job to short temp job, feeling kind of down. When one day I get a text from an agency that had given me a few jobs. "Want to be working Monday?" I think it said. I replied in the affirmative. I was given an address and told to be there at 8.30am on Monday. I said I would be there.

The company I had just agreed to work at was at the time a freshly independent arm of Zurich bank. It operated in a very niche area of financial services. When you want to get a mortgage, insurance, or some other financial thing, you can go to a bank. Or you could pay someone else to go to the banks and find the best deal for you. These people are called financial advisers, they go and talk to random people and convince them to act as intermediaries to the bank, and doing this they earn commission. This commission can vary, unless they are part of a large group, not quite a union, of similar advisers that can collectively bargain better commission rates for the advisers. That's what this company was, an intermediary for an intermediary, a company that only dealt with other companies and to the public at large is invisible.

My job at the company was quite simple. When the financial advisers sell things, they earn commission, that commission comes from the bank, goes through the company, and on to the adviser, except when the computer system failed to process it. My task was to look at these system failures, figure out why they failed, get them working again and the money passed on to the adviser. It sounds quite slick when you say it like that, except it was monotonous, easy and boring. There were only actually about six reasons that a payment failed to process automatically, and quite quickly you got good at spotting what the cause was with just a glance at the data. From there, it was simply a case of following the steps and pushing buttons in the right order to get things moving again. After that, you moved onto the next payment in your list of payments to deal with. Because there was always more.

That, in a nutshell, was my job. The digital equivalent of the old-timey footage of the factory worker doing the same thing over and over. I was there to correct a failure in an automatic process, and at any time could be made redundant when they figure out how to stop it happening. But this is where things take a dark turn. I was never made redundant. In all the time I was at the company, no one ever changed the system in an effort to effect the automatic processing. It was easier for the company to employ me, and a lot of other people, to push the buttons in the correct order, than it was to get someone to actually fix the system. That's a heavy thing to carry with you. You're not worth enough to be a saving if you're made redundant. So you sit there, working your tools on the conveyor line.

Let's talk about the tools for a minute. Those didn't change much in my tenure either. The thing the advisers used to send us information about the things they sold changed twice. It started they were using paper. Then a digital system was built over a few years by many, many contractors. But it basically didn't work, so was scrapped and replaced in about two years after launch. There was one particular time when £10,000 had been spent on a button that would stop some errors happening. It didn't work, so we saw no difference. The thing that all our records of payments were stored on was excel spreadsheets. Thousands upon thousands of records per sheet, switched out monthly. We were using it like a database table. Information was constantly being entered and changed, by multiple people at once. So it broke a lot. You'd try to save changes and you'd get an error message. The source file was corrupted, or deleted. When that happened there was a twenty-minute procedure to fix things and get back on track. It happened at least once a month. IT apparently spent a long time trying to solve it. One time they announced they had solved the problem, and while they had, they also caused an even worse problem, so I demanded we be rolled back immediately. We were rolled back after the second instance. The last tool we had was the main database and payments system. Every record on the spreadsheet already existed on the payments system, but there was no way to retrieve records in the filtered form we needed on the fly. So we went between the spreadsheet and the payments system, sorting things out and amending data. The payments system in a word, sucked. It crashed four times a day and you had to reset it on your computer. Once a month it went down for the whole company for about an hour. Imagine you're typing an email, you hit send and you get an error message. You restart your email client and it doesn't want to open. You ask the person next to you to check their email, theirs is broke too. You ask around, no email for anyone. Then someone has to call IT and report that email is down. Then you wait, and no one can do anything without email. Every month, the tools we relied one would break down and we had to wait for them to be fixed. And neither of those was changed.

One more thing to talk about in the structure of the job. Crunch time. You ever have a big deadline, where a lot of work needs to be done in a short space of time so everyone has to put in extra hours? And it's really important so everyone is expected to come in and help out, because you have to hit that target? How often does that happen for you? In this job, there was one every single month. I mentioned the spreadsheets were swapped out monthly. That's because our cycle of work was on a monthly pay run cycle. Everything that came in during the month was processed in the same month. Well, mostly. 99% was the average. And you'd think okay, so you see what you get at the start, figure out how many then work to the speed so you're done at the end, right? Wrong. Stuff keeps coming in throughout the month, and all of it has to be done. This includes the mammoth file that comes in three to five days before the deadline, and is equivalent in size to half of all of what you've done in the month to that point. Three days to process thousands more payments. And this was routine. Every month, the file lands and everyone gets to work on it. The spreadsheet and system crashes frequently happened during these periods. One time the bosses did trial offsetting the mammoth file to the following month so there wouldn't be crunch for us. But the bosses upstairs didn't like it, so it was put back. A crunch period. Every single month. It's worth pointing out that this was my first proper job, so I didn't actually know this was abnormal. So I just got on with it.

So this is all pretty sad. The work is easy to the point of mind-numbing boredom. The tools break frequently. Nothing is being done to make things better. Periods of high stress all the time. What do you do? You try to leave. Except. I was hired as a temp in July 2007. Made permanent in late 2008. Then the financial crises happened. No one was getting out. Every job advertised was crap or worse. It was a while before it was worth job hunting seriously again. And that didn't go well. At one point I talked to a career's adviser because as I put it "the phone doesn't ring", no one was interested in me. I was overqualified for the crap and underqualified for everything else. Trapped. Doing the same crap, over and over, in a monthly cycle, over and over. I had already identified and openly talked about how I disliked the job. I described myself as a professional button pusher. Or, bored office worker by day, insane video gamer by night. Or, everything positive in my life is outside of work.

The positive things. They were there. I had met a group of friends that are still with me today. My family were and still are incredibly supportive of me. I travelled, going to various events and seeing strange sights. And I found the thing I wanted to really do for a career. In 2011 I was a founding member of a writing group in which we all read and critiqued each other's work. And while I could be cutting in my comments, I was honest and very good at it. And I enjoyed it. Pursuing that, I looked into how to do it for a job. It's very tough when you're not ten years younger than I was, doing or done an English degree at a better university than I went to, or just had decent connections in the industry (that I didn't have). So, freelance work. What a mess that is. Various websites offer connecting freelancers to customers, but those are fiercely competitive, to the point that it's a race to the bottom, working virtually for free, if you find work at all. The freelance market is a full-time job to find part-time work. Not fun. Something I started doing was seeking out courses on proofreading in order to boost my profile. And this is when things get very, very dark.

In 2014 I received the results of my third (I think, it might have been second) attempt at one of these courses, and I didn't make the cut. Feeling sad and not having anything else to do that day, I went out to the gym. Driving along a dual carriageway, I noticed that there wasn't a barrier in the grass verge between the opposing lanes. I thought about veering across and causing a head-on collision. What stopped me was the thought "no, that's really rude to the other driver". The thing about low-burning anxiety is that you're constantly afraid of strangers. What if they attack me? What if he tries to mug me? What if that bus jumps the curb and hits me? All of these things are imagined external threats. This thought of veering my car was the first time it would be me causing the damage, so it flagged immediately as something that shouldn't be there. In a bit of a daze I continued to the gym, worked out for a bit then went home. When I arrived I switched my computer on and googled "depression test". I found seven online tests on various sites, and did all of them. The results across the board, were that I was seriously depressed. I sat back, and thought about this for a moment. Then I thought that the suicidal thought incident probably triggers a thing in them for maximum safety. Anyone that thinks of killing themselves is automatically told to seek help. So I did all the tests again, and this time I left out the suicidal thought bit and lied a little for good measure, saying I wasn't as bad as I really felt. The results were the same. Heavy depression. Get help.

I quickly arranged an appointment with a doctor, got a prescription for anti-depressants and various reading material. At the time I was struggling to read for long periods, my attention wasn't holding, so I got a couple of audiobooks on depression and low self-esteem. I figured there was a lot of overlap. I also met with a therapist, and attended a seminar series to talk about my issues. The cause of this sadness was immediately obvious. The job. But, I couldn't quit. When I had met with the career's adviser a few years previous, the same one that I had told "the phone doesn't ring", I had asked about quitting so that I could become 'immediately available' as some ads requested. He advised me against it, stating that those currently in work were 40% more likely to find new work. The logic is there, you're proving that someone wants to hire you, so the new people should too. Though I sometimes wonder on the accuracy of the figure. But what to do when the job gives you depression and you can't quit? I decided to give myself six months to learn about my condition and let the medication kick in, then start job searching with a seriousness hitherto unseen. I have no idea if I just used 'hitherto' correctly. Anyway, learning.

How does depression work, and how do you cope with it? In reading (listening) and talking, I learned about various coping mechanisms, and that somehow I'd done everything right. It was part of how the job was so identifiable as the cause. I didn't do anything other than the job that didn't give me happiness, reward or satisfaction. Like going to the gym. That started because I was feeling pains in my arms and shoulders from lack of exercise, so I joined up to make that go away. Exercising is highly recommended to depressives because of all the endorphins. Another was staying up late. Lying awake in bed is classic bad thoughts time, so I avoided it as much as possible. I would stay up on the computer until the early hours, then I would climb into bed and play a different game, keeping going with that until I was almost passed out from exhaustion. Only then would I switch everything off and go to sleep. It wasn't healthy, but it kept the bad thoughts at bay. Living with other people also helped greatly. They could keep an eye on you, make meals so that you actually ate, and be someone to pretend to be normal for. One time I was alone in the house for a while, and it took me three hours to get out of bed, wash and dress. Wouldn't have got away with that if anyone else had been home and needed to use the toilet. But the most important mechanism by far, was the first one.

Most people when they work listen to music. A radio is the classic. These days it’s youtube or spotify. But I didn't listen to music, because it wasn't enough of a distraction. I could do my job, listen to music and daydream at the same time. And they weren't good daydreams. So I listened to podcasts and audiobooks. Thousands upon thousands of hours, I heard quiz shows, tech news, movie reviews, historic stories, short stories, random rants and books and books and books. I didn't talk to my colleagues much. I would arrive, switch on my PC, plug in my headphones, and be silent for most of the day. I didn't like saying good morning to people, I can't recall why, and I thought it would be horrible if all I said to people was goodbye, so I didn't engage them unless absolutely necessary. Sometime people ask how I could work and listen to spoken word at the same time. I always equated it to driving and listening to the radio. I was looking at shapes (numbers) and hearing words. I kept the two separate in my head and kept going. If I had to write an email I would pause the audio. Needless to say, with all the silence, I wasn't popular. I didn't care. I really didn't want to be there, so I did my best to pretend I wasn't.

Slight tangent, how often does the phone ring at your work? Once a day? Once a week? Several times a day? Well, when I started at the job the phone would ring a lot. Because as well as being the correction mechanism for the automatic system, we were also the second line support for the contact centre. A payment would go wrong, an adviser would call up, the person they reach wouldn't know anything about it, so they would call us. Again and again. And these were important calls, our customers the advisers couldn't just be ignored, no. So there always had to be someone to answer the phone, which meant everyone couldn't be on lunch at the same time, which in turn meant that everyone had a set period when they went to lunch. From twelve till one or one till two. The team was split down the middle. You left on the dot and you were back on the dot. Annoying, but also strangely fortuitous. Because it gave me a set period every day of non work. Where I could leave and partake of another activity. Some people went for walks, or read a book. Me, I wrote. Many thousands of words. Then I edited. Then other stuff, I'll get back to that later. The 'wrong' part about this rigidness was that unlike my job, things changed for the contact centre. What was once six people and no clue was grown to twenty who were well trained and knew their stuff. My phone stopped ringing. They didn't need us anymore, but the rigid lunch times stayed. I wonder why. Anyway, the writing I did in my lunch breaks was a great coping mechanism, gave me a massive sense of accomplishment. "What did you do at work today?" "I wrote 1000 words" In my lunch break.

That was all stuff I was doing by accident when I was diagnosed. After the six month to learn and let the meds kick in, I really got going. It was here that I started my annual goal setting, which has featured heavily in the blog before. "In the coming year I will X, Y and Z". I wrote many drafts of books. I learned to touch type. I learned how to animate. I tried several times to learn how to code. I tried and failed and tried some more. But the big thing was that I put on the list was to get a new job. And here is why it took so long to come off anti-depressants and declare myself well: job searching is hard. You write a CV, you search for jobs in your area, you put in applications for every one you think you could get, and you wait. Every day, searching, writing, applying. I also signed on with almost every job agency in the area. For the most part the experience was the same, you go in, fill out forms, sign up, lots of smiles and handshakes, you leave, you never hear from the agency again. Attempts to contact them are ignored or brushed off. There's a couple specific stories to tell here. One agency approached me and asked me to sign up, I happened to have a day when I could come in as I was also going to the dentist. I told them what time I would drop by and to let me know if that wasn't good. The day came, I drove over, got buzzed through the door, sat in the reception area, and waited. For an hour. I went back outside, got on the intercom again and was buzzed inside again. This time someone turned up and told me politely that she couldn't help me as she oversaw a different area, the person I was there to see was busy, and they also don't take walk ins, so please leave. I left. At half past four that afternoon I got an email from the contact saying sorry but they don't have time that day, is there another time I'm available. I did not reply. Another story. One time after applying I got a call, it was from the agency that listed the ad. They had me on file, I had signed on with them two years previous, but could I please come in and sign on again. I replied that none of my information had changed, and I had never actually left the agency's rolls, so why did I need to sign on again? She agreed and ended the call. I never heard from them again. To this day I am confused as to what people who work in job agencies actually do.

Back to my search. Every day I checked a few different websites and applied for whatever I had a shot at. When you do this everyday, you're effectively staying current in the market, seeing stuff the same day it's posted and you can skip the things you've seen before. The upside of this is that you're not wasting time on old listings that already have lots of applications. The downside is you see how few jobs are being posted day to day. But still, you apply, and you actually get results. People call you and invite you in to interview. Things get more frustrating than when dealing with agencies. You get a date, time and location. You make arrangements, put on your suit, show up. You smile, you shake hands, you answer their questions. They say thank you and goodbye. It's some time until you hear from them, or from a representative. The answer is always no. The reason for why it's no is rarely there. Occasionally you get told that one of the other candidates was better in some way, which is understandable. The rest of the time, nothing to tell you why. One time I got the call that I hadn't been selected, and when I asked why they said "client suitability". I asked what that meant, they replied that I didn't tick all the boxes that they wanted. I asked which boxes were lacking. We went round and round a little until I backed them into a corner, and they admitted that they didn't know why I wasn't chosen. I just about held back from asking why the fuck they bothered to call. Just.

After about two years of searching, applications, rare interviews, no feedback, I decided to do something about it. I got in touch with careers advisers again and they forwarded me to a local office where I could be given a mock interview. I wanted to know why I was being told no all the time, and I was determined to get an answer. The nice group sent me a list of questions ahead of time to make prepared answers for, which was good. On the day I suited up, went along and we sat down. The questions were all generic, as they couldn't do an interview for a specific job. It was all about my skills, what I could bring to the table, my goals. I answered everything as best I could. The mock interview ended and I asked what I'm doing wrong. I was told "that was great, I'd hire you on the spot". I think that's the worst bit of feedback I've ever received. No advice or ideas on why I wasn't being selected. The best they could offer me was to flat out ask how I did on the day to get immediate feedback.

We're into the final stretch now. The last year at the bad job. I didn't know it yet of course, I was still getting rejected all the time and had days when I felt I could lie down on the floor of the office and go to sleep in the middle of the day. It's worth noting this period because things got a little better, and they also got worse. What to go over first. How about promotions? The entire time I worked at the company, I was not promoted. I was the same grade the day I left as the day I was made permanent staff. The way to get promoted and the raise that goes with it was to make your boss like you. That's a bit difficult when you're unsociable, depressed, and your immediate superior is an idiot you refuse to talk to. Really, on paper she was my manager and was responsible for my annual assessments. In practice, her boss handled those for me and I refused to go back. So no promotion for me. It was promised by the CEO in that last year that the company would formalise the way to get promoted. You don't need to be liked if you're good at what you do, I think. That method was yet to be published when I left, likely because there was so many people that could rightly kick up a fuss at being passed over in the past. So there's that. Next, bonuses. The company, when it was formed, was an offshoot of Zurich as I said. Being a limited company, there were shares available that could only be held by certain people, including employees. These shares were allocated out to the staff as bonuses each year on the reason that one day the company would be sold and everyone would get a big payout. Well, in my last year with the company, it was announced that these shares actually had an expiry date. Ten years after allocation, if the company wasn't sold then the shares were void. All that promise of a payout evaporated. The company wasn't going to sell, the plan was to go public. But, bonuses for the staff. What to do instead? Well, they instituted a "long term incentive plan", where on four-year cycles staff would be given a moderate payout by the company. The first cycle would start the following year, and as a reward to all the staff that had been with company for a decade already, they would be getting *slightly* more than people who had joined yesterday. No one cheered. Related to bonuses, annual raises. Inflation is real, you need to keep pay going with it. But how much? That is what the annual appraisal determines. For a long time you were given a score out of 150. Most people got 85-95. Reasonable. It got you a modest bump in pay. In the last year, the system was changed to grading out out of five. Not five hundred, five. The lowest you could get was a one. Things got a bit more black and white. And, I was given a two. Not because I had actually done badly, but because I wasn't fulfilling my potential, apparently. No, I don't know what that could look like. So a few months later (after the boss' boss had changed) when everyone was getting letters about how much they were getting extra, I didn't get a letter. That two cost me all possibility of a raise. That grates. What grates more is that also in that last year a new guy was hired to the team who had no more responsibility than me, but was hired to a the upper grade (with the extra money). Similar to the money situation, was the wellbeing situation. Every year the company ran a survey to see how the staff felt things were going. Every year I filled it out and told them how miserable I was. In the last year, it turned out that everyone in my team had filled out the survey to similar effect. 40 people who all worked together weren't happy with their lot. So one day we were excused from normal duties (button pushing) and taken next door to a hotel to sit in a conference room and talk. We were shown graphics of our survey results and asked what could be done to improve those scores. What weren't we happy about? What could be changed? Being someone who had given this a lot of thought, I was able to answer. I spoke of all the problems, the unmoving, the boredom, the being ignored. And after that day, nothing changed. I sometimes wonder if anything ever did. By far, the strangest story of that last year is when I was asked to train a new hire. I didn't want to, but the bosses insisted. What's strange about this is that the person exposed a flaw in the hiring system. They were a simpleton. I taught them the basics of how spreadsheets worked, once answered a question with "you asked me that yesterday and wrote down what I told you", and I corrected their work again and again. It would be called amazing if it wasn't tragic. The job that was so easy and boring it gave me depression, was too hard for this person. Eventually, an excuse was found to fire them. And new hires after that described tests they took before being taken on.

The incredible thing about this entire journey, is that I don't remember the most important part. The day I applied for my current job. I can't remember seeing the ad, or filling out a form, or writing an email. That single, critical moment that would see my life change is missing from my memory. It was the job hunt of course. Searching every day, the phone ringing occasionally, always being told no, what's the point of remembering a single application? So I didn't. And it was a surprise when the phone rang to invite me for an interview. Naturally, I suited up and went along. I remember the clock on the wall over the interviewers' shoulders. I remember finding a fleck of white in the glass of water I had been given and looking up to see if the paint was peeling off the ceiling. I can't really remember the questions. I can remember when my car stopped on the drive home. The battery had died, I had to get a jump start to get home then order a replacement. Aside from the car trouble, it was just another interview. So it was a greater surprise when I got the call about the second interview. When I went along, one of the people I had met the first time remembered me and said hi. I was shocked, I also didn't remember them. I met the people that are now my bosses and spoke to them. I recall near the end I asked the 'how did I do?' question, and expected to get a non-answer. I was told that so long as I did well on the test then I had it in the bag. Okay then, more pressure please. They had told me about the test beforehand, and I brought along my own pens for it. One day, I hope to interview an assistant or replacement proofreader, and I'll ask to see what pens they brought. By far, the biggest shock was when I got that phone call, and was told I had the job. I can't recall exactly what I said, but I doubted that it was real, wanted to know if they were sure, something like that. After that call, I had to collect my thoughts and hold back from bursting into tears. I went back to my desk and immediately handed in my notice. It was within two days either way of eleven years after I had started at 8.30am on a Monday.

The month of my notice was an epilogue. Word spread that I was leaving. I smiled more than I ever had. People asked how I'd gotten the job, I told them about the journey. No one asked me if I was sure, I was the guy that said "I would love to be made redundant". But there was the meeting. In the larger team of 40, I was in a pod of eight. We all worked on the same stuff. This pod included the guy who was hired to be above me, and the idiot boss. A few days before the meeting, she asked me if there was anything I did that I thought other people would need to take care of when I wasn't there. I had a list. I wrote it down, and this list was put onto the agenda for the meeting. They were going to hear about all the busywork I did when there was nothing else to do that was actually really productive. On the day, we stood and left our desks to go to the meeting, the boss turns to me and asked me to take the minutes of the meeting. I told her that as I was doing the explaining and handover, I was going to be doing a lot of talking. She said, and I kid you not, "But last time you did the minutes it was really funny". I put my foot down and refused. In the meeting, no one quite believed what I was doing when they weren't watching me. The small things that kept everything moving. Keeping a spreadsheet updated. Pushing a button off and on each day. Checking for data entry errors. The majority of this work went to the grade-above guy. Finally, the day came. I left on a Friday. The following Monday I did my new commute to the new office, with new people and new work. I try not to look back, to get angry. But things keep bubbling up, so I thought I would write it all down here.

I have to recognise through all of this how lucky I was. Friends and family were there to support me. I had the resources to maintain my coping mechanisms. I caught the problem before it became an issue big enough to interfere with my work. I live in a time of the Internet that I could search for a phrase like "depression test" and find free resources. I live in a country with free healthcare, so saw doctors, pharmacists and therapists for no cost. That same country has subsidised medicine, so for the same cost (less then £9) as any other prescription, I got custom-made bottles with enough liquid to last a month. I was given a medication that gave me no ill effects on the first try. Said medication didn't become ineffective while I was taking it. I had the support and energy to keep working and job hunt at the same time. Four and a half years of living in a house of cards where anything could have brought it all crashing down. And then where would I be? Maybe back on the dual carriageway, looking at the gap in the barrier. But I was lucky, and now I'm here.

I stopped taking the antidepressants six months into the new job. Aside from a little lightheadedness of withdrawal, nothing happened. No exhaustion. No sadness. No lack of appetite or inability to sleep. It was over. I don't like saying 'cured', and I can't say 'free', because in a sense I'll never be free. This happened to me. All of it. And I can't just forget it, pretend it didn't happen. For starters it's eleven years of my life, I can't sweep that under the rug. I guess what I can do is learn from it, and keep it as a warning. Know the red flags in case it happens again.

If you've read all of the above, thanks I guess. It's definitely the longest blog I've written to date, and will likely be the longest I ever write. It took several days to pull it all together. While the events are true to the best of my recollection, it is possible that I'm misremembering them, putting things in the wrong time or attributing to the wrong person. If you or someone you know is experiencing depression, and don't have a good societal infrastructure to go to for help, I recommend talking to friends, family or colleagues. There's the cliche of the person that attempts suicide and survives, then the self harm being labelled 'a cry for help'. Don't let it get that far. Be open with your feelings, and encourage others to do likewise. In the end, it's okay to admit that you're not okay.

#mental health #working life #bad job

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theatremarketinginsights · 3 years

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What I Discovered About “Rethinking” Theatre Marketing in a Pandemic

By Roger Gonzalez

This past week, I spoke at the TRU (Theatre Resources Unlimited) annual Marketing panel. This is the second annual panel I’ve participated in, and I love that it forces me to rethink what new, hot marketing topics theatre marketers should be thinking about. But a year is a long time, and this year was remarkably life-changing. I don’t need to tell you about the pandemic, the recession, the quarantine, the stay at home, the racial unrest, the political upheaval, and generally the dozens of things that changed so dramatically in the past year. In fact, when TRU’s Bob Ost reached out to me, he was uncertain if there was anything new to really talk about, given that live-theatre was still vaguely in the future. But my feeling was, and is, that we can always talk marketing even when it seems that the whole world is on shut-down with no major changes in in the horizon. In fact, that’s the best time to talk. That’s exactly when you need marketing the most. So I said, yes, let’s do it, even if we don’t have all the answers, which maybe I don’t (don’t hate me for not having a crystal ball).

And just as we agreed to move forward, just a few weeks later, changes began unfolding. Within days, a few public press conferences, and announcements from government officials followed, and we learned that venues would indeed begin the opening process. For Off/Off and Off-Broadway, the dates seem to loom closer than the Fall 2021 dates being thrown around for Broadway. And on the day of the panel (March 25th), it was announced that theatre workers would soon be getting their vaccines. The conversation was all over social media, even though details were still mostly lacking. For me, the challenge was to talk on subject with what TRU described as the theme of their marketing panel for 2021: Rethinking Marketing Strategies to Reach the Wider Virtual Audience.

Rethinking. That word stood out for me. I literally sat down at my sofa one afternoon and started thinking, er, rethinking.

The more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that little had actually changed. Sure, performing live-theatre is going to be a major safety challenge as we reopen and that won’t satisfy everyone. Audiences are still very much split on returning to live venues, with some saying they won’t return for some time, and others anxious to don a mask (or two) and sit in a theater and start watching anything.

A year ago, digital platforms like Zoom were unknown. Now everyone seems knows how to use it. Restaurants survive on takeout, retailers on e-commerce, and mask-wearing became political. So how is it possible that "little has changed,” you may ask?

Allow me to explain.

As a marketing consultant, a producer, development consultant, publisher, actor, and stage-director working with hundreds of theatre companies, playwrights, and other marketers outside of the entertainment business, as well as being a college professor teaching marketing, the realization surprised even me. That’s because while the way we do marketing may have shifted, marketing principles have not changed that much. After some “rethinking,” it occurred to me that if you apply five basic principles to your theatre marketing that existed a year ago to today’s approach, you will always have a better chance at succeeding than if you panic, complicate the process, and jump into a reactive mode of marketing. You still need a marketing plan and strategy. You just have to update it to accommodate all the external and internal changes that have happened.

So, here they are. Give them the attention they merit, and spend time doing your own “rethinking.” And please, don’t hesitate to share or discuss. Here goes:

5 Things about your pre-pandemic Theatre Marketing that remain exactly the same one year later.

1. You still must offer a good product, meaning your show, event, or whatever you are presenting or trying to sell. Whether it’s a workshop, class, online course, online symposium, or conference, quality is paramount. Why would anyone want to pay anything (even if it’s free which involves investing your time) for a bad product? A playwright friend of mine says he hates Zooms and so do I...bad Zooms. Another playwright I know also hates Zooms and says she’ll wait for theatre to reopen. Bad idea. The reason we may hate Zooms is because they are not often well-executed. But if you set your mind to creating a great Zoom presentation, or even a better Zoom presentation than the other gal, then you are elevating the platform. To me, that’s worth it. Zooming is not live-theatre and never will be. But shit is shit, and gold is gold no matter what platter you serve it on. Sure, I prefer live theatre, but I’ve walked out of a few live shows in the past because they were awful. If you can provide good production values, great acting, excellent direction, and all the things that make a story worth seeing, people will see it and enjoy it. Give that some thought before you throw some actors together on a live-stream with shaky wifi reception, give them minimal direction, and a script that they can barely read, much less perform. Make your story, and story-telling as great as possible.

2. Find your audience(s). This is still the biggest challenge we face. Even before the pandemic, identifying, finding, and serving the right audience for your show was a mighty challenge. Getting them into the theater was even harder. But now you may find that you actually have some advantages on both the live and virtual platforms. Whereas live theatre restricts your audience to geographic limitations, virtual theatre can be enjoyed by anyone around the globe with access to wifi, a device, and a link. This means you can brand your work, your company or yourself, and build a following bigger than ever before. Last year, you might have been struggling to “put fannies in your seats,” a phrase I’ve always despised for being so narrow-minded. This year, the world is your oyster…identify your ideal audiences, talk to them, embrace them with the story behind the story, and present your product. It’s a different type of targeting, but the principle is the same. Identifying audiences is still a priority, but now the net is larger, requiring a slightly different angle of approach.

3. Figure out how to reach/engage those ideal audiences. If you’ve identified them, where are they? Are they in Facebook groups, on Instagram under a particular hashtag, on a certain website, or other platform? Can you identify that audience because they are following a certain influencer? And if so, what are some ways you can engage them in the conversation and generate interest in you, your theatre company, and your show, or event? Once you matched your product to the right audience, you must decide on the best way to reach those audiences and hook them. Post, talk, engage, and bring them into the fold. Make them life-long followers. You can choose to do it with no-cost organic posts, or low-cost email marketing, even paid advertising. You will need to determine what works best, and what you can afford. And remember, don’t always be selling...engage with stories, and conversations first. Repetitive selling is desperate and annoying.

4. What does that audience would want or need that you can deliver. Why would they see your show? If you can put your finger on that want or need and deliver, you’ve won half the battle. That aspect has never changed. Maybe the need or want has changed, but your ability to connect and deliver is still the same challenge. Think about this, maybe your audience no longer wants to see your show live, but is willing to see it online. Maybe your show fulfills something that can only be delivered in a live show. It really depends on your ability to understand this challenging attribute. Follow that lead. Do your homework.

5. Deliver with a communications strategy that engages that specific audiences’ needs or wants. Make sure your message is clear and convincing. Make sure you begin communicating early enough to hook them when you’re not selling. Then find the right way to communicate your message and proceed to deliver a good product.good product. To do this, you will need to think, plan, strategize, and execute. You need to start the process early...maybe even months or years before. Very importantly, you will need a new, updated marketing plan. (another article coming soon).

Sure, this still may not answer every question you have, but trust me, this is exactly where to start. Human nature hasn’t changed all that much, good story telling is still good story telling. Many little elements have changed, but at the core of all your theatre marketing, these simple 5 principles still apply today and tomorrow. Audiences may have also changed; how you deliver your show is now constantly evolving, ticket pricing could be reconsidered, the competition is different, casting, union requirements, safety issues, media coverage, and what we define as the theatre experience has undergone huge shifts. This is all true (Coming soon, we will touch on these subjects). But if you root yourself in sound marketing principles, the rest falls in line.

Let’s get started here.

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holytheoristtastemaker · 4 years

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AWS is just too hard to use, and it's not your fault. Today I'm joining to help AWS build for App Developers, and to grow the Amplify Community with people who Learn AWS in Public.

Muck

When AWS officially relaunched in 2006, Jeff Bezos famously pitched it with eight words: "We Build Muck, So You Don’t Have To". And a lot of Muck was built. The 2006 launch included 3 services (S3 for distributed storage, SQS for message queues, EC2 for virtual servers). As of Jan 2020, there were 283. Today, one can get decision fatigue just trying to decide which of the 7 ways to do async message processing in AWS to choose.

The sheer number of AWS services is a punchline, but is also testament to principled customer obsession. With rare exceptions, AWS builds things customers ask for, never deprecates them (even the failures), and only lowers prices. Do this for two decades, and multiply by the growth of the Internet, and it's frankly amazing there aren't more. But the upshot of this is that everyone understands that they can trust AWS never to "move their cheese". Brand AWS is therefore more valuable than any service, because it cannot be copied, it has to be earned. Almost to a fault, AWS prioritizes stability of their Infrastructure as a Service, and in exchange, businesses know that they can give it their most critical workloads.

The tradeoff was beginner friendliness. The AWS Console has improved by leaps and bounds over the years, but it is virtually impossible to make it fit the diverse usecases and experience levels of over one million customers. This was especially true for app developers. AWS was a godsend for backend/IT budgets, taking relative cost of infrastructure from 70% to 30% and solving underutilization by providing virtual servers and elastic capacity. But there was no net reduction in complexity for developers working at the application level. We simply swapped one set of hardware based computing primitives for an on-demand, cheaper (in terms of TCO), unfamiliar, proprietary set of software-defined computing primitives.

In the spectrum of IaaS vs PaaS, App developers just want an opinionated platform with good primitives to build on, rather than having to build their own platform from scratch:

That is where Cloud Distros come in.

Cloud Distros Recap

I've written before about the concept of Cloud Distros, but I'll recap the main points here:

From inception, AWS was conceived as an "Operating System for the Internet" (an analogy echoed by Dave Cutler and Amitabh Srivasta in creating Azure).

Linux operating systems often ship with user friendly customizations, called "distributions" or "distros" for short.

In the same way, there proved to be good (but ultimately not huge) demand for "Platforms as a Service" - with 2007's Heroku as a PaaS for Rails developers, and 2011's Parse and Firebase as a PaaS for Mobile developers atop AWS and Google respectively.

The PaaS idea proved early rather than wrong – the arrival of Kubernetes and AWS Lambda in 2014 presaged the modern crop of cloud startups, from JAMstack CDNs like Netlify and Vercel, to Cloud IDEs like Repl.it and Glitch, to managed clusters like Render and KintoHub, even to moonshot experiments like Darklang. The wild diversity of these approaches to improving App Developer experience, all built atop of AWS/GCP, lead me to christen these "Cloud Distros" rather than the dated PaaS terminology.

Amplify

Amplify is the first truly first-party "Cloud Distro", if you don't count Google-acquired Firebase. This does not make it automatically superior. Far from it! AWS has a lot of non-negotiable requirements to get started (from requiring a credit card upfront to requiring IAM setup for a basic demo). And let's face it, its UI will never win design awards. That just categorically rules it out for many App Devs. In the battle for developer experience, AWS is not the mighty incumbent, it is the underdog.

But Amplify has at least two killer unique attributes that make it compelling to some, and at least worth considering for most:

It scales like AWS scales. All Amplify features are built atop existing AWS services like S3, DynamoDB, and Cognito. If you want to eject to underlying services, you can. The same isn't true of third party Cloud Distros (Begin is a notable exception). This also means you are paying the theoretical low end of costs, since third party Cloud Distros must either charge cost-plus on their users or subsidize with VC money (unsustainable long term). AWS Scale doesn't just mean raw ability to handle throughput, it also means edge cases, security, compliance, monitoring, and advanced functionality have been fully battle tested by others who came before you.

It has a crack team of AWS insiders. I don't know them well yet, but it stands to reason that working on a Cloud Distro from within offers unfair advantages to working on one from without. (It also offers the standard disadvantages of a bigco vs the agility of a startup) If you were to start a company and needed to hire a platform team, you probably couldn't afford this team. If you fit Amplify's target audience, you get this team for free.

Simplification requires opinionation, and on that Amplify makes its biggest bets of all - curating the "best of" other AWS services. Instead of using one of the myriad ways to setup AWS Lambda and configure API Gateway, you can just type amplify add api and the appropriate GraphQL or REST resources are set up for you, with your infrastructure fully described as code. Storage? amplify add storage. Auth? amplify add auth. There's a half dozen more I haven't even got to yet. But all these dedicated services coming together means you don't need to manage servers to do everything you need in an app.

Amplify enables the "fullstack serverless" future. AWS makes the bulk of its money on providing virtual servers today, but from both internal and external metrics, it is clear the future is serverless. A bet on Amplify is a bet on the future of AWS.

Note: there will forever be a place for traditional VPSes and even on-premises data centers - the serverless movement is additive rather than destructive.

For a company famous for having every team operate as separately moving parts, Amplify runs the opposite direction. It normalizes the workflows of its disparate constituents in a single toolchain, from the hosted Amplify Console, to the CLI on your machine, to the Libraries/SDKs that run on your users' devices. And this works the exact same way whether you are working on an iOS, Android, React Native, or JS (React, Vue, Svelte, etc) Web App.

Lastly, it is just abundantly clear that Amplify represents a different kind of AWS than you or I are used to. Unlike most AWS products, Amplify is fully open source. They write integrations for all popular JS frameworks (React, React Native, Angular, Ionic, and Vue) and Swift for iOS and Java/Kotlin for Android. They do support on GitHub and chat on Discord. They even advertise on podcasts you and I listen to, like ShopTalk Show and Ladybug. In short, they're meeting us where we are.

This is, as far as I know, unprecedented in AWS' approach to App Developers. I think it is paying off. Anecdotally, Amplify is growing three times faster than the rest of AWS.

Note: If you'd like to learn more about Amplify, join the free Virtual Amplify Days event from Jun 10-11th to hear customer stories from people who have put every part of Amplify in production. I'll be right there with you taking this all in!

Personal Note

I am joining AWS Mobile today as a Senior Developer Advocate. AWS Mobile houses Amplify, Amplify Console (One stop CI/CD + CDN + DNS), AWS Device Farm (Run tests on real phones), and AppSync (GraphQL Gateway and Realtime/Offline Syncing), and is closely connected to API Gateway (Public API Endpoints) and Amazon Pinpoint (Analytics & Engagement). AppSync is worth a special mention because it is what first put the idea of joining AWS in my head.

A year ago I wrote Optimistic, Offline-first apps using serverless functions and GraphQL sketching out a set of integrated technologies. They would have the net effect of making apps feel a lot faster and more reliable (because optimistic and offline-first), while making it a lot easier to develop this table-stakes experience (because the GraphQL schema lets us establish an eventually consistent client-server contract).

9 months later, the Amplify DataStore was announced at Re:Invent (which addressed most of the things I wanted). I didn't get everything right, but it was clear that I was thinking on the same wavelength as someone at AWS (it turned out to be Richard Threlkeld, but clearly he was supported by others). AWS believed in this wacky idea enough to resource its development over 2 years. I don't think I've ever worked at a place that could do something like that.

I spoke to a variety of companies, large and small, to explore what I wanted to do and figure out my market value. (As an aside: It is TRICKY for developer advocates to put themselves on the market while still employed!) But far and away the smoothest process where I was "on the same page" with everyone was the ~1 month I spent interviewing with AWS. It helped a lot that I'd known my hiring manager, Nader for ~2yrs at this point so there really wasn't a whole lot he didn't already know about me (a huge benefit of Learning in Public btw) nor I him. The final "super day" on-site was challenging and actually had me worried I failed 1-2 of the interviews. But I was pleasantly surprised to hear that I had received unanimous yeses!

Nader is an industry legend and personal inspiration. When I completed my first solo project at my bootcamp, I made a crappy React Native boilerplate that used the best UI Toolkit I could find, React Native Elements. I didn't know it was Nader's. When I applied for my first conference talk, Nader helped review my CFP. When I decided to get better at CSS, Nader encouraged and retweeted me. He is constantly helping out developers, from sharing invaluable advice on being a prosperous consultant, to helping developers find jobs during this crisis, to using his platform to help others get their start. He doesn't just lift others up, he also puts the "heavy lifting" in "undifferentiated heavy lifting"! I am excited he is leading the team, and nervous how our friendship will change now he is my manager.

With this move, I have just gone from bootcamp grad in 2017 to getting hired at a BigCo L6 level in 3 years. My friends say I don't need the validation, but I gotta tell you, it does feel nice.

The coronavirus shutdowns happened almost immediately after I left Netlify, which caused complications in my visa situation (I am not American). I was supposed to start as a US Remote employee in April; instead I'm starting in Singapore today. It's taken a financial toll - I estimate that this coronavirus delay and change in employment situation will cost me about $70k in foregone earnings. This hurts more because I am now the primary earner for my family of 4. I've been writing a book to make up some of that; but all things considered I'm glad to still have a stable job again.

I have never considered myself a "big company" guy. I value autonomy and flexibility, doing the right thing over the done thing. But AWS is not a typical BigCo - it famously runs on "two pizza teams" (not literally true - Amplify is more like 20 pizzas - but still, not huge). I've quoted Bezos since my second ever meetup talk, and have always admired AWS practices from afar, from the 6-pagers right down to the anecdote told in Steve Yegge's Platforms Rant. Time to see this modern colossus from the inside.

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helshades · 6 years

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Far from me to use the crude tumblr speech but, here I have to say, I believe you're "reaching" quite a bit. As much as i agree that a lot of people involved in fandom(s) have… unusual… taste… I'm skeptical about the idea that sexual fantasies have much to do with political or belief systems. One fantasy can be more or less encouraged, sure, but overall, the big ol' classics stay in fashion. Usually a variant of "what if something that's supposed to be horrible happened… and I liked it???"

Human beings are bizarro primates, after all, and if left to their own devices in the company of most inanimate objects, will probably try to either eat it or have sex with it, it’s true. Add to this the fact that bodice-ripping novels have been a thing for way too long for many of fandom’s twistier fantasies to look that new (although you can bet your sceptic arse that the whole Alpha-Beta-Omega item is a strictly postmodern horror) and you’re quite right in assuming that in spite of numerous variants, overall fannish forays into Sigmund Freud’s censored nightmares aren’t that original. On the other hand…

Nevertheless, I’ll contradict you on a few points:

When I was sardonically linking fandom’s most hive-minded tendencies to a certain state of contemporary society, and I used the term ‘liberalism’, I wasn’t either announcing my conversion to Trumpism or alluding to a system of beliefs, rather to a structural phenomenon pervasive in our Western societies—and one must never forget that politics is by essence a res publica: civic life, what is common to all in the public space, and on which all can operate equally provided that they concert… Fiction doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it reflects a great part of our current preoccupations, personal ones indeed, but also ones we’ve absorbed from social osmosis, you might say.

Liberalism in Occident isn’t a mere set of political beliefs so much as the default structure of our respective and common economies, dictating the way States interact with one another in regards to a common market. This is capitalism triumphant, where in the initial idea resisting absolutism has long dissolved into pretty antisocial individualism as social constraint has come to be perceived as the worst kind of oppression possible. This has to be conjugated with the rise of consumer society—which, symptomatically enough, doesn’t have a Wikipedia page—in the 1960s, whose core issue is that the desire for consumption eventually overrides most ethical principles.

Economy completely informs social interactions, and that includes the way we educate children, actually. Did you know that an entire social phenomenon and bona fide psychological condition happens to be a direct consequence of mass consumption? In French we know this as the ‘kid king’ issue, what happens when a whole society is encouraging parents to spoil and coddle children so much that they grow into adults incapable of handling frustration, or indeed any type of adversity. Bear with me, because this is actually fascinating:

▬ Human beings are in a way programmed to seek pleasure and flee discomfort; they instinctively seek to fulfil basic needs, and once these are satiated, try to find as much comfort as possible. Any human infant and young child is ruled by this principle of pleasure, and the role of education is to basically teach children the reality principle, that they aren’t alone in life, that others exist and have to be taken into account, that impulses have to be controlled; this is done essentially by setting limits for the little child not to cross. Balance between the two principles is paramount to the construction of the self.

▬ Psychological resilience pioneer Boris Cyrulnik commented on the fact that if animals regularly abused in their infancy tend to find themselves as adults at the bottom of the social scale since they’ve acquired a certain aptitude for subjection, those never exposed to aggression tend to stand outside the group because of their inaptitude to participate in socialising rituals. Yet, adversity is absolutely needed to set sane limits to one’s behaviour: deprived of any real frustration, a child will grow up still believing himself omnipotent, becoming hedonistic, selfish, egotistical; throwing tantrums at any opposition. Typically, these children end up suffering from attention disorders—with or without hyperactivity—anxiety issues, oppositional disorders…

▬ This is also an unplanned consequence of widespread contraception, as most children nowadays are born of the

desire

of their parents to have them meaning that family no longer makes the children as much as a child makes a family; the main problem being that as the immutable centre of his parents’ attention, a child tends to become a perpetual consumer of everything that a society of mass consumption is ready to provide to keep him sated in his own desires. French psychologist (specialist of cognitive immaturity) Didier Pleux listed the ‘five Os’ of the overattentive parents: overconsumption, overstimulation, overestimation, overprotection and overcommunication; the parents will spoil their child with toys and sometimes food, seek to keep him busy at all times because boredom is perceived as yet another form of violence (but it is crucial in the development of creativeness), laud every single of his realisations, prevent him from making any real effort and prioritise his expression (letting him interrupt others when they speak, for instance) at all times.

▬The thing is, contemporary society harasses all of us with the injunction to consume, perpetually, at every opportunity, and in the case of good-willed parents it furnishes with the means to spoil their children just as advertisement convinces them that if they don’t cater to their every supposed need, they’ll be bad parents.

▬The phenomenon, because that type of behaviour, essentially consumerist, was being so encouraged by the rise of neoliberalism (a more aggressive form of that rapidly-globalising capitalism), quickly snowballed into public education, and I can tell you, most especially because I used to teach for a living, that in France a whole educative system got based on the notion that collective education would be better off if it was made to cater to the personal needs of pupils—but this is a can of worms to be opened on another day, preferably one when my cold has abated and I’ve stopped sneezing my brain away all over my keyboard.

Believe it or not, I’m not digressing that much. We are the grandchildren of the first mass consumers and the kid-king phenomenon is a Generation Y thing. My generation is having children of its own. Most importantly, this is the generation that got to grow up with the Internet first, meaning that we were born in a very, very different world. You noted that fandom fantasies aren’t really unheard of and I concur, but I’d argue that the Internet allowed for fantasies to be shared on a massive scale and amplified into becoming cultural phenomena that have much to do with group emulation. Psychologically and sociologically, it’s pretty fascinating, too: there is this uncanny collection of intensely personal feelings, really intimate stuff, stuff that used to be considered private (for some good reasons and a couple bad ones as well, I suppose), now exposed very publicly on the ground basis that the Internet preserves a certain anonymity—which isn’t untrue, mind you, unless you carelessly sign into one of those many websites and applications that syphon your data and manipulate your online browsing, but I digress again (if only a bit).

Sexuality has become incredibly public, as of late. Let me remind you that there are political movements asking governments to give an official status to their sexual habits (or lack thereof, in the case of ‘asexuality’) or, more aggressively, their feelings. Sorry, folks, but that’s the whole basis for the ‘transgender’ movement, and as far as I’m concerned people may live as they choose but I’m not entirely certain that the State has a rightful place in this? Anyway, the frontier between ‘private’ and ‘public’ has been melting, unfortunately so, and most of this must have to do that Western societies have been considerably depoliticised over the last few years, inasmuch as we’ve been rapidly losing our means of popular representation, decent public information, or generally civil services, due to an overabundance of capitalism, precisely.

Sex in fanfiction… it’s not quite sex in fiction, either. Oh, granted, there’s quite enough raunchy literature out there to make you doubt, but the particularity of fanfiction is that most works are an ongoing affair between an author and her readers, who often swap places, very much informed by public demand, meant to cater to very specific desires. In that, it’s not too different from many a published novel, albeit not the best ones probably, only fanfiction is… unbridled. But that’s not actually the point.

The point is, simply, that fanfiction is a cultural product issued from a certain period in time and it reflects part of the expectations of a society; because its producers are mostly young women, it has a lot to tell on the mechanisms of a modern young woman’s psyche—I can tell you it contains a lot of misogyny, for one, if not even gynecophobia…—but it also proposed a certain picture of the modern world that acts a little too much as a two-way mirror for my intellectual comfort. It’s not that every single writer of a Baby-Daddy kinkfic is going to develop paedophilic tendencies growing up, but one, although one mustn’t indulge in full-blown paranoia either, one absolutely has to consider the fact that sexual pleasure is the most powerful incentive out there. For realsies, I mean, it’s actually one of the most prominent arguments to be made against pornography, because we know its devastating neurological effects for regular consumers, who rapidly become incapable of dissociating the unrealistic portrayal, notably, of women, to the detriment of all real-life relations and rapports male consumers of porn could have with women. Sex rewires the brain with exceptional efficiency, because it’s linked directly to our reward system and programs us to want more of the pleasurable thing.

I assure you there’s no pearl clutching in remarking that pornographic fiction written by fans can have enormous influence on the budding sexuality of young people in a day and age where we have this paradoxical relationship to sexuality as a social concept: on the one hand, it’s absolutely everywhere and even children can’t escape it, since magazines and clothings brands do their worst to groom them into mini-pimps, sexy baby Barbie dolls and overall future (antisocial) disasters; on the other hand, we seem to have somehow revolved into the most shameful anti-intellectualism possible, and nobody needs to bother being rational anymore, and adults make desperate attempts to look like kids for fear of growing old, and they act like it, too.

I’m ending this long-arse comment on an anonymous post just sent to me, which is bound to ignite some… conversation as well:

I’m reluctant to make this point publicly for a myriad of reasons (mostly my own cowardice), but I think the then-concurrent rise of the Brony fandom, more specifically futa porn and its prevalence in adult male MLP “fans” has had a larger impact on current transwoman narratives.

I’ll be waiting patiently on the sides with a hot drink to see my followers count drop again, I reckon.

#answers #nonnies #fanning the fandom #long post #this is a readmore-cut hate blog #i don't believe in half measures #go big or go home #and go take some ibuprofen while you're at it #ouchie

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hmollik · 4 years

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How to buy bitcoins on Localbitcoins

Localbitcoins is one of the fastest growing and safest bitcoin marketplaces where users (traders) can buy bitcoins directly from the sellers (advertisers). The number of global btc traders exchanging bitcoins on Localbitcoins continues to increase with each passing second, literally. Currently, localbitcoins is available in 248 countries and in over 16, 000 cities.

However, in an industry now known to be plagued by rampant cases of fraud, how are people on localbitcoins getting bitcoins with so much ease?

The following piece delves deep into how to buy bitcoins on the localbitcoins P2P (peer-to-peer) platform by answering common questions such as: how to buy bitcoins with localbitcoins, what is the easiest way to buy bitcoins on localbitcoins, and provide a step by step how to buy localbitcoins guide for beginners. It also includes a few tips on how to get low price bitcoin on localbitcoins and discuss how to do a cash deposit through localbitcoins among other payment methods.

Both seasoned and beginners will find all the answers regarding how to buy bitcoins from localbitcoins on this review.

But, first things first…

How to buy bitcoin from localbitcoins?

Buying bitcoins from locabitcoins is relatively easy compared to other bitcoin platforms. Learning how to buy btc from localbitcoins is also very simple because navigating the interface is straightforward, even for new bitcoin buyers. Here is how to buy localbitcoins first time buyer:

* The first step is signing up for a free account (for new users). Existing users can skip to step 2.

* The second step is logging in and finding local sellers (advertisers) with the best btc prices, and suitable payment method(s).

* Step three is initiating trade with your preferred seller and transferring money to the seller’s account according to the seller’s terms of trade. Other verification methods may be required depending on seller.

* The fourth and last step is receiving bitcoins to your localbitcoins wallet.

How to buy through localbitcoins using custom advertisements

For those with a clear idea of what buying price they want and they have time to wait, creating a trade advertisement to announce your intention to buy bitcoins at your specified price is also an option. You can do this by simply clicking on the Post a trade button.

How to create your buyer advertisement

Clicking on Post a trade takes you to the advertisement posting page where you are provided with five sections to specify your trade requirements.

1. The first section describes all the trade agreements and requirements. Follow each step correctly and fulfill all the verification processes to facilitate smooth trades.

2. Choose the trade type: Buying or selling.

3. Enter your location (street address, city, or postal code, for local trades; country for online trades).

4. Select the payment method and the currency you wish to use for the trade.

5. Set your margin. A negative margin means you are willing to buy bitcoins over the prevailing market price and it will attract more sellers. A positive margin does the opposite; it shows your willingness (or intention) to pay below the market price which attracts less attention from sellers. Leave it as 0 – Zero – if you are not interested in margins.

6. Determine the minimum and maximum amounts per transaction (optional).

7. Set your opening and closing hours which basically means the time you are expected to be available online, and detail your Terms of trade (optional for buyers).

8. Specify how long (in minutes) it will take you to complete payment when trades are initiated.

9. Select the security options to include trusted people only (marked as trusted), identified people only (ID verified), or people with verified phone numbers (SMS verification required).

10. Publish your buying advertisement and wait for sellers to contact you.

What is the easiest way to buy bitcoins on localbitcoins?

The easiest and most recommended way to buy bitcoins on localbitcoins is to find local traders dealing in easy local payment methods and currencies. Payment methods and currencies vary from country to country (or from city to city).

For instance, if you’re looking for how to buy btc from localbitcoins inr, go to the search filter and change the location to India – the currency switches automatically. All traders in India and all their preferred payment methods (e.g. IMPS Bank Transfer India), as well as their prices per 1 BTC and the amount limits, are clearly listed in Indian Rupee for you to select the deal that suits you best. Each row represents one advertiser.

Here is why you should buy from local advertisers.

a. All local buyers are listed in order from the lowest to the highest exchange rates, and their limits are tailored to specific economies or regional trends.

b. You can meet the sellers in person to build more trust. However, this should also be done cautiously and in public places. Please note that Localbitcoins removed in-person cash payments in order to comply to European anti-money laundering laws.

c. Using local currencies and local methods of payment allow for easier and relatively faster negotiations, and secure transactions that are familiar to both parties.

d. In the rare occasion where you come across unscrupulous traders, you can track down the seller physically using local law enforcement and prosecute them in a court of law to recover your money or get compensated for any other accruing damages. Going after fraudulent international sellers and recovering your money can be a bit tricky.

How to purchase bitcoins through a cash deposit through localbitcoins

If you’re looking for how to buy bitcoins with direct deposit localbitcoins, or how to buy on localbitcoins cash deposit, then follow the steps outlined below:

1. Log in and go to the homepage or buy bitcoins page and search for sellers with cash deposit as their preferred (or one of the preferred) payment method(s).

2. Select advertiser and enter the amount of bitcoins you want to buy. It will show you how much you should pay in your local currency.

3. Receive sellers account number and make deposit.

4. Confirm deposit and upload deposit slip as proof of completed cash deposit.

5. Receive purchased bitcoins into Localbitcoins wallet.

The above simple steps should guide any buyer on how to purchase bitcois through a cash deposit through localbitcoins.

How to buy through localbitcoins moneygram

If you’re a new user looking for how to buy at localbitcoins using remittance services, then buying through Moneygram is also another easy way to buy bitcoins on localbitcoins.

There’s no correct answer to how fast to get bitcoins on localbitcoins.

First, there is the issue of buy/seller location (city or country). Buyers from countries with streamlined fast payment methods will definitely receive their bitcoins a lot quicker compared to buyers from countries with complicated payment methods.

The buyer/seller location also influences the speed at which a buyer receives their bitcoins in cases where the two parties may be in different countries or cities. Such transactions may cause delays in the transfer of bitcoins to the buyers’ account/wallet depending on the terms applied in the agreement.

Secondly, the type of transaction; whether online or in person. While localbitcoins allows you to carry out online transactions through a number of wallets and wire transfers to hundreds of banks, there’s also an option to meet the trader(s) in person for a face-to-face negotiation.

Third, the method of payment also matters. Different countries have different local payment methods that are convenient for local buyers (and sellers). Online payments through Paypal, Neteller, Perfect Money, Google Pay, WebMoney, Advcash, or Skrill (and other similar wallets) are almost instantaneous – if the seller is readily available online to confirm the purchase (or basically the receipt of your money) in real-time. Receiving your bitcoin when using such online payment methods can take 5-30 minutes in some instances, especially when buying from localbicoins through Paypal.

Other methods of payments such as cash deposits may require you to upload proof which may take you time to prepare. For instance, some sellers ask you to upload a photo of the actual deposit slip from any specified bank with a few ink markings or torn corners to show proof of identity. Receiving your bitcoins in such cases where further verification of payment or identity are required can be delayed until the seller is done with the verification. It can take a few hours to receive your bitcoins when using other methods of payment.

Fourth, the seller’s reputation and response time. The advertisers’ (or sellers’) reputation is indicated by the number of successful transactions and feedback displayed next to their usernames. Sellers who are keen on maintaining clean reputations always respond in good time and never default on any agreement.

The process can take anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of hours depending on the responsiveness of the parties involved, and the chosen method of payment. Therefore, the question of how long it takes to receive your bitcoins is one that varies from transaction to transaction. On the upside, the escrow system on localbitcoins guarantees that you always receive your purchased bitcoins, regardless of how long it takes to receive your bitcoins.

How to purchase bitcoins from localbitcoins and not get scammed

If you’re wondering, how do i buy bitcoins from localbitcoins without getting scammed?, then the following tips should help you conduct your trades smoothly while avoiding scammers.

plagued by rampant cases of fraud, how are people on localbitcoins getting bitcoins with so much ease?

It also includes a few tips on how to get low price bitcoin on localbitcoins and discuss how to do a cash deposit through localbitcoins among other payment methods.

Both seasoned and beginners will find all the answers regarding how to buy bitcoins from localbitcoins on this review.

But, first things first…

How to buy bitcoin from localbitcoins?

The first step is signing up for a free account (for new users). Existing users can skip to step 2.

The second step is logging in and finding local sellers (advertisers) with the best btc prices, and suitable payment method(s). Step three is initiating trade with your preferred seller and transferring money to the seller’s account according to the seller’s terms of trade.

Other verification methods may be required depending on seller. The fourth and last step is receiving bitcoins to your localbitcoins wallet.

How to buy through localbitcoins using custom advertisements

How to create your buyer advertisement

Clicking on Post a trade takes you to the advertisement posting page where you are provided with five sections to specify your trade requirements.

The first section describes all the trade agreements and requirements. Follow each step correctly and fulfill all the verification processes to facilitate smooth trades.Choose the trade type: Buying or selling.Enter your location (street address, city, or postal code, for local trades; country for online trades).

Select the payment method and the currency you wish to use for the trade.Set your margin. A negative margin means you are willing to buy bitcoins over the prevailing market price and it will attract more sellers. A positive margin does the opposite; it shows your willingness (or intention) to pay below the market price which attracts less attention from sellers.

Leave it as 0 – Zero – if you are not interested in margins.Determine the minimum and maximum amounts per transaction (optional).Set your opening and closing hours which basically means the time you are expected to be available online, and detail your Terms of trade (optional for buyers).

Specify how long (in minutes) it will take you to complete payment when trades are initiated.Select the security options to include trusted people only (marked as trusted), identified people only (ID verified), or people with verified phone numbers (SMS verification required).Publish your buying advertisement and wait for sellers to contact you.

What is the easiest way to buy bitcoins on localbitcoins?

Here is why you should buy from local advertisers.

All local buyers are listed in order from the lowest to the highest exchange rates, and their limits are tailored to specific economies or regional trends.You can meet the sellers in person to build more trust.

However, this should also be done cautiously and in public places. Please note that Localbitcoins removed in-person cash payments in order to comply to European anti money laundering laws.

Using local currencies and local methods of payment allow for easier and relatively faster negotiations, and secure transactions that are familiar to both parties.

In the rare occasion where you come across unscrupulous traders, you can track down the seller physically using local law enforcement and prosecute them in a court of law to recover your money or get compensated for any other accruing damages. Going after fraudulent international sellers and recovering your money can be a bit tricky.

How to purchase bitcoins through a cash deposit through localbitcoins

If you’re looking for how to buy bitcoins with direct deposit localbitcoins, or how to buy on localbitcoins cash deposit,then follow the steps outlined below:

Log in and go to the homepage or buy bitcoins page and search for sellers with cash deposit as their preferred (or one of the preferred) payment method(s).Select advertiser and enter the amount of bitcoins you want to buy.

It will show you how much you should pay in your local currency.Receive sellers account number and make deposit.Confirm deposit and upload deposit slip as proof of completed cash deposit.Receive purchased bitcoins into Localbitcoins wallet.

The above simple steps should guide any buyer on how to purchase bitcois through a cash deposit through localbitcoins or any other method. If you have questions leave a comment.

Tagged With: How do you receive your bitcoins localbitcoins, How long to receive bitcoins on localbitcoins, How to anonymously buy bitcoins on localbitcoins, How to buy bitcoins online western union localbitcoins Source : https://localbitcoinswiki.com/how-to-buy-bitcoins-on-localbitcoins/

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gangin-n-bangin-blog · 7 years

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Short Drivepipe Business T Shirts For Uniforms

Both UNC and N. C. State will be traveling Wednesday night time on the primary day from the ACC/Big 10 Challenge, whilst Duke may wait for a house game on Thursday.

Why not check out some internet sites that are located right through your nose? According to the size of the town you live within, you may have pretty much sights to go to, but your visit need not become confined to merely your home metropolis - nearby urban areas are just as good or even better. Go to some community museums, theaters, landmarks, chapels, galleries, planetariums, amusement parks as well as other "touristy" sites that you in no way had the time to explore before. Treat yourself using a dinner within a nice eating place you've never ever been to, but always wanted to go to. Take a night time stroll from the top green places, and just usually take the time to stop and smell the blossoms. Don't forget your current camera!

After a day check the soap by gently pressing the surface. If it feels like cheddar cheese, so a little give but definitely solid, lift it from the box onto a chopping board. If it's not hard enough leave another 12 hours and check again. Cut the soap into bars using a cheese cutter or sharp knife and put the slices somewhere to air dry (or cure) for 4 weeks. After the 4 weeks the soap should be hard and dry. Sometimes you get a little white dust on the surface and this can be cut away to show good soap inside. I always test soap on a non sensitive part of myself to make sure it's good before I let anyone else try it - particularly if I'm using a new recipe.

You may use video websites such as You tube in addition to Google Video clip to drive plenty of traffic to your site. This is a free way of marketing and advertising your products and sometimes it could even be better than paid for advertising. When creating your videos, you will need to make sure that you put your website information at the bottom of your video. Individuals will by hand type in your on line address for more information about you and what you have to offer.

Now to the story through the day. In the continuous effort to get public attention a new fight seems to be waging between tech giants Search engines and Microsoft with the airing of two videos before this week when it comes to email. Google aired a video on the "Email Intervention" campaign that encourages existing Gmail users to do their particular friends and family a favor by simply saving them from out-dated email services and inviting them onto Gmail, which gives free phone calls and video clip chatting.

6) Basically, there is no research to do every evening. Remember, you are trading all "500 stocks" at the same time. You don't need to research this stock and that stock, worrying about pre-announcements, whisper numbers, quarterly reporting, and accounting minefields.

No matter whether it's details entry, design at house or any of some other function at property work you should usually make optimistic you match up them towards your operate from house account. This will guide be sure you choose software programs that meet your long-term focuses on. It will also be sure you have the essential talent models.

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smartdigitalwork-blog · 7 years

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Content Marketing

Content marketing is about information.

In other words, it’s the marketing of a business or brand through the sharing of educational, entertaining, or insightful information that will ultimately help readers improve their lives.

This may be in the form of a change in personal behavior or, as most marketers hope, it could be in the form of a purchase decision.

It’s not about forcing a sales pitch at people, but helping them move towards the best course of action (that just may be buying from you).

Content marketing is also defined as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

I’d say that accurately sums it up, but perhaps a more accurate description is provided by Content Marketing Institute:

“Content marketing’s purpose is to attract and retain customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behavior. It is an ongoing process that is best integrated into your overall marketing strategy, and it focuses on owning media, not renting it.”

In 2016, few businesses doubt the power of content marketing, but sadly, only a few companies are executing it with the skill and expertise truly needed to make an impact.

This guide will show you how to successfully promote your brand, attract more qualified leads, and nurture customer relationships through content marketing.

If you’ve read any of our content, you’ve probably heard us throw around the term “inbound marketing.” Content and inbound are often used interchangeably, but for the sake of minimizing confusion I will explain the difference. This article is part of the “Content Marketing & Blogging” Hub in the IMPACT Anthology. This hub will help introduce you to the basics of blogging for business and best practices for producing amazing content.

Inbound Marketing vs Content Marketing

The difference between inbound marketing and content marketing depends on who you ask. In fact, a HubSpot survey found that most marketers agree that content marketing is a subset of inbound marketing.

More specifically, however, content marketing refers to the act of sharing knowledge, advice, or entertainment in a consumable format that may include:

Blog articles

Videos

Podcasts

Social media marketing

Emails

Webinars

Infographics

Cartoons

Quizzes

Generators/Calculators

Assessments

Apps

Inbound marketing, however, is more focused on using tactics like content marketing to generate and nurture leads towards a sale. Inbound includes all aspects of digital marketing and sales.

Another distinction between content marketing and inbound marketing is how they target their marketing. Content marketing focuses on a broad “target audience” and inbound focuses on specific “buyer personas.”

Blogging is the Foundation of Content Marketing

Blog articles pioneered content marketing. Blogs have become commonplace in the business world, as well as society in general. It allows for people to access high-quality information for free.

When informative content is shared through a business blog, you inevitably come across as an industry expert, which will not only keep visitors returning to your blog, but can also turn these readers into potential buyers.

When you freely share content, it allows for your business to build trust with its readers. After all, you’re providing them with industry tips and information — for free. eBooks, Videos, and Email

Blogs are just a gateway for other mediums of content marketing. While blogs articles are often on the shorter side, quickly but thoroughly addressing industry topics, these other forms of content marketing act as a more detailed vehicle to share information and convert customers.

eBooks, for example, allow for an extensive amount of information to be shared regarding some aspect of your business. These usually focus on the most frequently asked about part of a business, and go to great lengths to explain and point readers in the right direction — to you!

Videos are oftentimes a nice change of pace and are more engaging to your buyer personas. Have fun with it, as the great ones have a tendency to go viral, which can bring all kinds of traffic and attention to your brand.

Most of what is done through the advent of content marketing is done in hope that businesses can obtain the reader’s contact information. Whether the readers are subscribing to your newsletter, or simply filling out forms to access eBooks or other helpful tools, they are granting you future contact with them by giving you their personal email address.

Having email subscribers allows your brand to share more content, nurture leads, and eventually close those leads into sales through various email campaigns. Why Content Marketing?

After asking “What is content marketing?” the next question should be “why?”

Josh Steimle answers this question in a Forbes post about content marketing.

“First you need to understand the four steps of the typical buying cycle:

Awareness.

Research.

Consideration.

Buy.

Traditional advertising and marketing is great when it comes to the second two steps, but after that it tends to trail off. Content marketing taps into the first two stages of the buying process by raising awareness of solutions and educating consumers about a product they may have never considered before….

The return on investment for content marketing can be phenomenal….It provides additional content for social media marketing and contributes to SEO efforts by generating natural inbound links and building up good content on your website that gets found in search engines.

In fact, for many companies the bulk of their SEO efforts should be focused on content marketing.”

The Benefits of Content Marketing on SEO

There are many tasks you can do to improve SEO, but as John explains, nothing comes close to the impact of content marketing on your website’s SEO power.

And it makes perfect sense. Content, simply put, is just information.

Google aims to match the highest quality, most relevant information with the search queries of their users — but if you’re not creating content sharing this information, you have no chance of ranking and getting found for it.

Explains the connection between content marketing and SEO best:

“SEO demands content. Content marketing is content.

There is no such thing as SEO without content. You need words, articles, substance, keywords, verbiage.

I wince whenever I have to say it, because it’s so cliche, but it’s true: Content is king.”

When you rank in search engines, you rank for specific keywords in your written content. More content equals more keywords, meaning you have more opportunities to rank in Google.

This is why keyword research is essential for successful content marketing.

The other major factor in SEO is getting backlinks. When other websites link to your site, Google views you as a respected authority and bumps it up in the rankings.

What’s the easiest way to get backlinks? You guessed it — Produce great content that educates and entertains and that people want to link to and share.

Lastly, Google favors websites and resources that are updated consistently. So, when you publish content regularly, your website will likely rank significantly higher.

On the other hand, if you stop producing content, Google will assume your website is out-of-date and stale, so it’ll drop your drank to avoid sending people to mediocre content.

This article is part of the “Content Marketing & Blogging” Hub in the IMPACT Anthology. This hub will help introduce you to the basics of blogging for business and best practices for producing amazing content.

Content Marketing Improves Customer Service

If you think creating content is solely for attracting prospects, you’re gravely mistaken. A good content marketing strategy also includes resources for your existing customers such as:

Tutorials — These help them get the most of your product/service by showing them how. FAQs — Frequently asked questions are great content topics because you can spend the time to answer the question thoroughly, then when a customer asks you have a great resource to send them. Plus, FAQs can also generate a lot of organic traffic. Community Updates — Sharing testimonials or simply giving a shout out to your customers/clients helps build a sense of community, while also promoting your brand in an authentic way at the same time.

Content Marketing in Public Relations

The internet has shattered barriers that once prevented businesses from reaching their target customers.

In the past, getting featured on TV was difficult or expensive — now you can upload a video to YouTube or Facebook and reach millions of people for free.

The same thing goes for making an announcement. You don’t need a publicist to communicate with your customers and fans.

Blog posts have replaced press releases. Facebook Live has replaced the traditional press conference. Everything you need for PR is right at your finger tips, and it’s mostly free! Content Marketing is an Industry Standard

If all of the other benefits of content marketing don’t convince you of why your business should use it, you might consider the fact that content marketing is essential to building a brand in 2017 and beyond.

We’re past the point where doing content marketing gives your business a big advantage over the competition and transistioning to a phase where not doing content marketing puts your business at a tremendous disadvantage.

All markets and demographics are consuming information online and quite simply, content marketing is marketing by today’s standards.

The Worst Content Marketing Mistakes You Can Make

The effectiveness of your content marketing can make or break your business. Here are the worst content marketing mistakes you could be making:

1. Not Knowing Your Audience (Buyer Personas)

Not understanding your buyer personas is one of the biggest mistakes in regards to content marketing. By not taking the time to research and understand your audience, how can you know what topics grab their attention?

There’s a chance you have no idea.

A great way to learn more about your audience is by not only developing buyer personas, but also reader personas. Not all of your readers are going to be your buyers.

However, the topics within your blog should depend on the goals you want to achieve. For most companies, they see their blog as an opportunity to educate and nurture prospects and hopefully pushing them down the sales funnel.

Ask yourself these questions about your readers:

What is their age range?

What is their job title?

What is their financial status?

Their education level?

What are their hobbies?

What are their pain points?

To really hone in on your buyer personas, conduct a buyer persona interview.

2. Failing to Provide Quality

The primary goal of content marketing is providing your readers and leads with quality information. To keep your content fresh and maintain readership, it’s important to publish frequently and consistently.

When you don’t post blog articles for a significant amount of time, readers will stop coming to your site. Post as often as you can, while ensuring you are publishing quality content.

If you can only post once a week, it’s ok. Focus on quality over quantity. When you start putting out junk, you start losing readers, leads, and ultimately customers.

Also, with Google’s search algorithm, ever-evolving, creating quality content is the only reliable way to get found and rank.

3. Not Proofreading or Editing

For all of you grammar nuts out there, this is probably one of your biggest pet peeves.

How often do you read a blog article and the person or company doesn’t even know the difference between your and you’re?

Little mistakes like this tend to send readers running for the hills. Something you should always do before publishing your content is to proofread it and make any necessary changes. Make use of your spellcheck, Grammar.ly, and have a peer read through it as well. Better safe than sorry.

4. Failing to Reuse and Repurpose

If your company has been creating content for a while, you’ve likely published a ton of content that covers a wide variety of topics. The best part about all of that content, is that you can use it over and over again.

Ideas for reusing and repurposing content:

If you have a report, it can be broken up into several blog articles

Create a video or slide presentation out of your how-to articles

Have your audio and video materials transcribed into written format

Build on existing content by expanding certain points, introducing new ideas, etc.

Share older, popular content with new members of your audience

No one wants to reinvent the wheel by creating new content every time. A great way to promote your eBooks is by providing your readers with an excerpt in one of your blog articles. Just don’t forget to add a call to action at the bottom of the blog article telling your readers to download the full eBook.

Don’t let your hard work just fade away. Keep your content working for you instead by repurposing it.

5. Missing a Call-to-Action

When it comes to content marketing, many marketers forget to add calls-to-action (CTA) to various places across their marketing channels. There is no better way to guide people to other parts of your site than through clear, distinct CTAs.

If you don’t tell your visitors or prospects about your services or products, how are they going to know you offer them? They most likely won’t. Which is why you should add CTAs that send them to those pages or information.

Each piece of content should have a purpose and a CTA. Whether it’s to get a quote for your IT services or an opportunity to get a free checklist, it doesn’t matter.

Consider placing a CTA:

On your blog

In your email messages

On your Facebook page

On every page of your website

Within your eBooks and webinars

In presentations

Within your email signature

Need more insight into how to choose the right CTA for your next post? This article can help.

Our former content marketing Manager, Carly Stec, once shared 4 more content mistakes that may be costing your business valuable opportunities.

According to Sirius Decisions, 60-70% of B2B marketing content goes unused.

How is it that one of your blog articles can see hundreds of views, while another one just sits on the shelf collecting dust?

The truth is, there are a ton of factors that contribute to both the success and demise of the content you serve up.

Just because something you wrote seemed to really catch on, it doesn’t guarantee everything you produce from there on out will follow in its footsteps. If your content is failing to support the type of engagement necessary to advance the buying process, you’re doing it wrong.

In order to get your content creation strategy on track, we’ve outlined 4 content mistakes that could be costing your business valuable opportunities.

1. Lackluster Titles

The title of your content often serves as the first line of communication between a customer and your brand.

If you’re looking for a way to format your titles to ensure they receive the attention they deserve, consider revisiting your website’s analytics. By looking back on titles that performed well in the past, you will uncover information that can be used to form future titles.

Additionally, social analytics will help you pick out the titles that were well-received by your audience on social media platforms. A social share is valuable in terms of content distribution, as it opens up a new path for your content to reach an untapped audience.

2. No Social Sharing

While it may seem like a real @firstworldproblem, asking your readers to manually copy, paste, and share your content can often be asking for too much.

Think about the way you consume content.

Often times you find yourself reading an article, you see the value in it, you go to find the social share button so that you can spread the word to your followers.. and then it’s nowhere to be found. Talk about a let down.

You want to make it as easy as humanly possible for readers to share your content. If you fail to create a quick and easy way for them to share your content right on the page, you run the risk that they will open up a new window, log into their social media account, and get lost in their newsfeed before they post it.

Social share buttons not only improve the user experience, but they ultimately contribute to your brand’s level of exposure. All it takes is one social share to open your content up to a new reader, who may then share it with their following, who could then tweet it out to their audience, who.. well, you get the point.

3. Speaking to the Wrong Crowd

When creating content, many marketers are plagued by the idea that they have to please everyone. They recognize that compelling and consistent content creation has the ability to attract, convert, close, and delight customers — which is why they are afraid of alienating prospects.

The trouble with this approach to content creation is that you simply can’t please everyone, and do it well. Write about what you know, what you understand, and what you feel strongly about.

If you try to wear too many hats, you’ll find it is difficult to attract a loyal audience, as your content will be all over the place, rather than focused on the interests and needs of a particular group.

In order to create truly resourceful content, you must know what motivates your buyer personas. If you are well-versed in their consumer behaviors and business/personal goals, you will find it is much easier to create and deliver content that they will enjoy and share.

4. Selfishly Selling

There’s nothing worse than a party guest who only wants to talk about themselves. They’ll chew your ear for hours and wont let you get a word in, while you’re left standing there, eyes glazing over, nodding in agreement at everything they say.

Often times you walk away from the conversation with a bad taste in your mouth, as you are unable to comprehend how someone could be so egotistical. Well, the same applies to content creation.

Nobody wants to get stuck reading a blog article written by a self-serving writer, so avoid creating content that is all about you, you, you.

Instead, focus on guiding your content around the needs of your audience. Think of your blog posts as an opportunity to provide prospects with a valuable resource, not a sales pitch.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when creating new content is that it must speak to the needs of the intended audience, not yours.”

Content Marketing Best Practices

So you’re familiar with content marketing and its importance in an effective inbound marketing campaign, but are you doing them correctly? As mentioned in our intro, this is usually the area that most marketers struggle with, but thankfully, by following a few basic best practices, we can help you in your quest to get started in creating quality, relevant content.

Simply put, blogging is the fastest way to create a platform for sharing and turn your brand into a content generating machine.

Consider this statistic: businesses that blog get 55% more website visitors than those who do not. This will greatly help your standing in the search engines, which in turn will help to drive more relevant traffic to your website.

Marketing expert, Heidi Cohen, shared the following best practices in a blog post for content marketing Institute:

“1. Give your audience a behind-the-scenes glimpse of your SEO company.

…Even “boring” businesses can leverage the power of talking to employees to make a product come to life. Find those members of your team who are passionate about your product, regardless of what their roles are within your organization. It’s these internal evangelists who can really bring your brand to life.

2. Special content: Provide exclusive information that your audience won’t find elsewhere. It’s useful for getting people to visit your other content and social media locations, and you can utilize a wide range of content formats, such as checklists, videos, how-to articles, and worksheets….

3. Interviews: While many media companies use interviews as the core of their content offerings, take a page from Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart, who specifically extends his on-air interviews to be used as unique web-only content….Consider talking to key people related to the topic. For many businesses, this means your employees, as well as outside experts.

4. Q&As: Extend the value of your content by answering questions that have been posed to you by your audience, or your industry colleagues and peers…Once again, this content can be developed through the use of video, audio, and/or text…

5. Outtakes: Learn from the movie industry, which often packages its DVDs with special extra scenes. No movie promotion is complete these days without additional content that entices the audience into developing a deeper relationship with your business…

6. Content curation: The goal here is to offer related resources for your audience that underscores your insight and expertise in the field…Rather than just producing a collection of links, add commentary to existing content to help your audience better understand the issues involved…

7. Background: Don’t assume that your audience will be familiar with all the ins and outs of your chosen topic. Create content that delivers the information they need to better understand the issues you discuss in your content offerings —without talking down to them.

Sharing Through Social Media

Social media websites are among the most valuable resources a business can have. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are chock full of members of your niche audience and other potential customers waiting to be found — so be sure to share your content with them! It can even help answer many of their questions while simultaneously establishing your credibility.

You’ve spent the time to create quality blogs, so sharing these through social media sites will maximize the potential of each individual blog post and expand your reach through shares and discussion among your followers.

B2B marketers often get hung up on how to use social media, because they fear social media doesn’t work as naturally for B2B brands.

Fortunately, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The following are 8 best practices for B2B marketers to integrate content marketing and social media, provided by Kapost:

1. Make the Case Internally

Before marketers can gain the budget and resources necessary to see results from the combined power of social media and content, the strategy needs to be marketed internally. If people don’t buy into the idea of inbound marketing and support it fully, it won’t succeed.

2. Establish Goals

Before beginning to plan content, marketers must first understand the larger initiatives planned for the quarter and year. This clarifies what messaging needs to be pushed, which content types make the most sense to support those initiatives across networks, and when those pieces of content should be completed….

3. Maximize Popular Networks

Identify where target audiences are spending their time online, and where relevant conversations are already taking place. For retail companies, maybe it’s Instagram and Pinterest. For B2B, it might be Twitter and LinkedIn. Instead of wasting time and resources on social media that won’t deliver, focus on the right channels with the biggest payoffs…

4. Use an Editorial Calendar

Between internal collaborators and external agencies, it’s key to have one place where everything from the higher-level campaigns to the specific tweets and blog posts can be organized and planned. That’s where an editorial calendar comes in handy….Without one, planning ahead will be a lot more difficult than it needs to be.

5. Share Content Around Popular Topics

Timely and popular topics tap into the buzz of already active conversations. Sharing content around these topics keeps brands relevant, and helps them establish a reputation as a go-to resource for information.

6. Don’t Forget About Content with Long-Term Relevance

Trending topics are important, but it’s also critical to focus on content that will remain relevant beyond a day or week. This kind of content can be recycled across channels and continues to provide value and engagement long after the publish date.

7. Analyze Data to Discover Which Content Works

Understanding what works and what doesn’t is key to the continued success of a social and content marketing strategy. Track and measure key metrics and KPIs that align with the goals of the team, department, and organization and adjust your actions accordingly.

8. Evolve Your Content and Social Strategy

After reviewing the data and evaluating content performance across social networks, marketers need to revisit and reevaluate the original strategy. Determine what worked and why, then replicate those elements in upcoming campaigns. If something didn’t work, learn from those pieces and avoid making the same mistakes.

Most importantly, stay in tune with updates and changes to the networks and channels where content lives.

Create Content Worth Reading

As we discussed above, potential customers have questions or problems that you should take aim at through your content. However, a good way to drive away these potential customers is by boring them to tears with poorly constructed content.

61% of consumers say they feel better about a company that delivers custom content, they are also more likely to buy from that company. (Source: Custom Content Council)

Blogs give websites 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. (Source: Kapost)

Interesting content is a top 3 reason people follow brands on social media. (Source: Content+)

We simply can’t stress the importance of quality content enough.

While I can’t sit down and write it for you, I have put a lot of thought into how to simplify the process.

Provide Benefits

Your content should have real value, which can include useful information, applicable how-to advice, or even entertainment.

There has to be something in it for the reader to capture their attention, and ultimately, their business.

“How to” articles tend to perform really well with customers.

Why? Well, people are constantly seeking out new information, and articles that are formatted to answer questions are incredibly valuable.

Not only do people respond well to them, but they help to establish your business as credible. If you can provide answers to the questions your buyer personas have, it is likely that they will return to you in the future for more information.

The more you can help people or give them something of true benefit, the more favorable they will view your brand — and the more likely they are to tell others about you!

Seek Urgency

Urgency is powerful because it gets people to take action. You want to inspire urgency with your content.

Do your best to crerate content that require’s your audience to sweat a bit. Work towards seeking out new, relevant information that is time sensitive, yet of great value.

Detailing industry trends is effective because it gives your audience the inside scoop, and it also encourages them to take action, and implement the tactics themselves.

If you know of a time-limited opportunity, share it with them as quickly as possible.

Anything that gets your readers to take action is good for you because it will most likely benefit them quicker and it will encourage them to take action on future content you produce (as well as your CTAs).

Back it Up

The fact of the matter is, people love facts.

While you may have a lot to say yourself, it doesn’t hurt to pepper in a bit of support every once and a while.

Using data to back up your point is an easy, effective way to bulk up your content, and bring your concepts full circle.

Whether it be statistics, or visual examples, utilizing additional resources within your content will ensure that people take you seriously, and it simplifies the reading process a bit.

After all, you want people to trust your brand as an authority, so backing up your claims with evidence only makes your content stronger. Feed Curiosity

Your audience is looking for information that makes their life easier, and provides solutions to their problems.

Take advantage of this.

Do your best to implement headlines that people simply cannot avoid. This means you really have to start thinking out of the box.

Not only should you aim to solve their problems, but you should also do your best to find a way to keep it interesting. It’s easy to answer a question that you are knowledgable about, but it is more effective to present the information in a new, creative format.

This is also where it helps to be honest with your opinions, as long as you let your readers know that they are your opinions.

As an expert on your industry or subject matter, people genuinely care about what you really think — not just what you’re supposed to say. Feed their curiosity and give them the truth.

Curiosity is the same reason that personal branding is so effective with content marketing. People are curious about the faces behind the brands they shop. Tap Into Emotion

While you don’t want to create all of your content around it, information that evokes emotion can be extremely effective.

Emotion acts as a major motivator when it comes to the buying process, however it is important to appeal to emotion without making people feel like they are being manipulated.

Great content plays with your emotions, while simultaneously utilizing logic to establish trust and credibility.

However, a touch of emotion will help you create content that is powerful, and it will also increase the chances that your audience will share the content in order to justify their emotional reaction with others.

Tapping into emotion doesn’t mean you’re always trying to make your readers cry or feel scared — create content for every emotion.

Jeff Bullas shared a case study on using humor in content marketing, which you can read about below:

“Because the research from Wharton showed that most people want some fun and that humor and jokes were consistently shared, using humor in content marketing is extremely effective. Large companies do it all the time, in order to keep their brand name “out there”.

They know that humor does the following things:

It grabs and holds attention

It results in an emotional response – not just positivity but a connection to you and your brand

It shows you are just “one of them” after all

You are remembered and shared. And if you use humor on all of your social media pages, you will continue to increase your number of followers.”

Below is an example of how Virgin Airlines used humor to wish their audience a Happy Thanksgiving — an employee guiding a plane on the runway with turkey drumsticks, instead of lights.

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neon-mooni · 7 years

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Why I boycott Autism Speaks, and you should too

Autism Speaks’ senior leadership fails to include a single autistic person. Unlike non-profits focused on intellectual disability, Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy and countless other disabilities, Autism Speaks systematically excludes autistic adults from its board of directors, leadership team and other positions of senior leadership. This exclusion has been the subject of numerous discussions with and eventually protests against Autism Speaks, yet the organization persists in its refusal to allow those it purports to serve into positions of meaningful authority within its ranks. The slogan of the disability rights movement has long been, “Nothing About Us, Without Us.” Almost nine years after its founding, Autism Speaks continues to refuse to abide by this basic tenet of the mainstream disability community.

Autism Speaks has a history of supporting dangerous fringe movements that threaten the lives and safety of both the autism community and the general public. The anti-vaccine sentiments of Autism Speaks’ founders have been well documented in the mainstream media. Several of Autism Speaks’ senior leaders have resigned or been fired after founders Bob and Suzanne Wright overruled Autism Speaks’ scientific leadership in order to advance the discredited idea that autism is the result of vaccinations. Furthermore, Autism Speaks haspromoted the Judge Rotenberg Center, a Massachusetts facility under Department of Justice and FDA investigation for the use of painful electric shock against its students. The Judge Rotenberg Center’s methods have been deemed torture by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture (p. 84) and are currently the subject of efforts by the Massachusetts state government and disability rights advocates to shut the facility down. Despite this, Autism Speaks has allowed the Judge Rotenberg Center to recruit new admissions from families seeking resources at their fundraising walks. We believe this is not the type of action you anticipated when you agreed to provide support to Autism Speaks events.

Autism Speaks’ fundraising efforts pull money away from local communities, returning very little funds for the critical investments in services and supports needed by autistic people and our families. Only 4% of funds donated to Autism Speaks are reinvested in services and supports for autistic people and our families. Across the country, local communities have complained that at a time when state budget cutbacks are making investment in local disability services all the more critical, Autism Speaks fundraisers take money away from needed services in their community. In addition, while the majority of Autism Speaks’ funding goes towards research dollars, few of those dollars have gone to the areas of most concern to autistic people and our families–services and supports, particularly for autistics reaching adulthood and aging out of the school system. According to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Inter-Agency Autism Coordinating Committee, only 1% of Autism Speaks’ research budget goes towards research on service quality and less than one-quarter of 1% goes towards research on the needs of autistic adults.

Autism Speaks’ advertising depends on offensive and outdated rhetoric of fear and pity, presenting the lives of autistic people as tragic burdens on our families and society. In its advertising, Autism Speaks has compared being autistic to being kidnapped, dying of a natural disaster, having a fatal disease, and countless other inappropriate analogies. In one of its most prominent fundraising videos, an Autism Speaks executive stated that she had considered placing her child in the car and driving off the George Washington Bridge, going on to say that she did not do so only because she had a normal child as well. Autism Speaks advertisements have cited inaccurate statistics on elevated divorce rates for parents of autistic children and many other falsehoods designed to present the lives of autistic children and adults as little more than tragedies.

Autism Speaks’ only advisory board member on the autism spectrum, John Elder Robison, announced his resignation from the organization this month in protest of the organization comparing autistic people to kidnapping victims and claiming that our families are not living, but merely existing, due to the horror of having autistic people in their lives. In his resignation letter, he discusses his four years spent attempting to reform the organization from the inside without success, stating, “Autism Speaks says it’s the advocacy group for people with autism and their families. It’s not, despite having had many chances to become that voice. Autism Speaks is the only major medical or mental health nonprofit whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a large percentage of the people affected by the condition they target.”

The disability community recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act, legislation first signed into law by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. The law begins with the statement that, “disability is a natural part of the human experience that does not diminish the right of individuals with developmental disabilities to live independently, to exert control and choice over their own lives, and to fully participate in and contribute to their communities through full integration and inclusion in the economic, political, social, cultural, and educational mainstream of United States society.

Also, they released a commercial called “I am Autism”.

youtube

Here is the transcript.

“I am autism. I’m visible in your children, but if I can help it, I am invisible to you until it’s too late. I know where you live. And guess what? I live there too. I hover around all of you. I know no color barrier, no religion, no morality, no currency. I speak your language fluently. And with every voice I take away, I acquire yet another language. I work very quickly. I work faster than pediatric aids, cancer, and diabetes combined And if you’re happily married, I will make sure that your marriage fails. Your money will fall into my hands, and I will bankrupt you for my own self-gain. I don’t sleep, so I make sure you don’t either. I will make it virtually impossible for your family to easily attend a temple, birthday party, or public park without a struggle, without embarrassment, without pain. You have no cure for me. Your scientists don’t have the resources, and I relish their desperation. Your neighbors are happier to pretend that I don’t exist—of course, until it’s their child. I am autism. I have no interest in right or wrong. I derive great pleasure out of your loneliness. I will fight to take away your hope. I will plot to rob you of your children and your dreams. I will make sure that every day you wake up you will cry, wondering who will take care of my child after I die? And the truth is, I am still winning, and you are scared. And you should be. I am autism. You ignored me. That was a mistake. And to autism I say: I am a father, a mother, a grandparent, a brother, a sister. We will spend every waking hour trying to weaken you. We don’t need sleep because we will not rest until you do. Family can be much stronger than autism ever anticipated, and we will not be intimidated by you, nor will the love and strength of my community. I am a parent riding toward you, and you can push me off this horse time and time again, but I will get up, climb back on, and ride on with the message. Autism, you forget who we are. You forget who you are dealing with. You forget the spirit of mothers, and daughters, and fathers and sons. We are Qatar. We are the United Kingdom. We are the United States. We are China. We are Argentina. We are Russia. We are the Eurpoean Union. We are the United Nations. We are coming together in all climates. We call on all faiths. We search with technology and voodoo and prayer and herbs and genetic studies and a growing awareness you never anticipated. We have had challenges, but we are the best when overcoming them. We speak the only language that matters: love for our children. Our capacity to love is greater than your capacity to overwhelm. Autism is naïve. You are alone. We are a community of warriors. We have a voice. You think because some of our children cannot speak, we cannot hear them? That is autism’s weakness. You think that because my child lives behind a wall, I am afraid to knock it down with my bare hands? You have not properly been introduced to this community of parents and grandparents, of siblings and friends and schoolteachers and therapists and pediatricians and scientists. Autism, if you are not scared, you should be. When you came for my child, you forgot: you came for me. Autism, are you listening?”

If you would really like to donate to charity, then please donate to these charities instead. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network | The Association for Autistic Community | AANE | Autism Women’s Network |

#Boycott Autism Speaks #Autism awareness #Actually Autistic

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arabellaflynn · 4 years

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I quit Facebook a few weeks ago. Shortly after the lockdown protests began in Michigan, I posted an explanation of what their mindset was, why the protests were inevitable, and how bad an idea it was to pretend we could keep them from happening. I was dog piled by a load of people trying to explain to me in tiny words why the best way to keep the novel coronavirus from spreading was to keep people inside and away from each other. The only reply I could give them was yes, I know what science says, I'm telling you what people are actually going to do. This exact thing has happened during every pandemic in recorded human history, up to and including the fictional Corrupted Blood debuff in World of Warcraft.

It is a horrible idea to predicate your public health plans on the assumptions that 1) people will behave rationally all of the time if you just shout at them loudly enough, or 2) people looking at the same data set will always draw the same conclusions.

All things in life include an element of risk. I don't know about other places, but I don't personally remember a time when Americans were not bombarded with dire warnings about everything in their quotidian existence. Eat eggs, don't eat eggs, living in a city raises your risk of cancer, living in the country raises your risk of tick-borne diseases, coffee will make you live longer, coffee will kill you, salt is dangerous, fat is dangerous, carbs are dangerous, the sun is dangerous, breathing is dangerous.... and all of it is fed to us as if we have a moral imperative to do everything in our power to bring our risk of dying as close to zero as possible. It is acknowledged that the results of a lot of these studies are in conflict, and that it's difficult to sift through all the information to decide which one is more 'correct' about how to keep yourself safe. But never is there room for anyone to conclude that maybe they would rather have that thing in their life, than gamble on statistically raising the odds of living a few more years without it.

In the early days of the AIDS pandemic -- before PrEP, before HAART, after we had acknowledged that HIV was a thing and was killing people -- the only messaging was dire. Sex could kill you! Think twice before you get laid! The underlying assumption was that if you could get people to pause and remember the risk, of course they would decide not to go through with it. We do the same thing today with teenagers, in the secular version of abstinence-only sex education. It does not seem to have crossed anybody's mind at any point that anyone might go over the numbers and decide, yeah, that level of danger is acceptable to me. I want the possible positive outcomes of that action enough to risk the negative ones.

When people start doing just that -- and they always start doing that -- the reaction of the moral authorities is to start bolstering their side of the "rational" argument with fear. They may genuinely believe that their side holds more weight, but surely that will be more obvious if they help it along with a thumb on the scale. It is a known phenomenon that the scarier and more profound the consequences seem, the more probable they look, even if the odds have not changed. It is also a known phenomenon that people will weigh personal experience more heavily than abstract arguments featuring strangers. As anyone who has gone through the DARE program will attest, the more you (and your friends) do something "bad" and come out of it unscathed, the more you view anyone who claims to be an authority as being completely full of shit. Whether they are or not.

All of this is to say, riots were inevitable under the "abstinence-only" model of self-isolation and social distancing. They were as inevitable as the Summer of '69, and the failure of the War on Drugs. They made it a moral imperative to fight a basic human motivation (stay away from your loved ones, abstain from sex, don't seek out pleasurable drugs), "for the good of society". People can only deny basic drives and force themselves to suffer for so long. People still die from complications of AIDS, and they fuck anyway. People still ruin their lives over addictions, and they still take drugs. It was only a question of when it would happen, and what would tip it off.

In this case, the propaganda urging people to accept suffering "for the greater good" has blown up in their faces. All of the people in the streets have done the calculus and decided that overturning the system "for the greater good" is more important than avoiding the personal risk of catching COVID. Which, to be honest, a lot of them were becoming inured to anyway.

We are tired of being told to be afraid, and that the correct way of dealing with this fear is to wall yourself off from the scary thing. I was horrified when I first saw advertisements for "Safr", a ride-sharing service whose selling point was that it was women-only. I mentioned this to a friend, and his reaction was oh of course, it's horrifying that rape culture is so entrenched that the only way to escape it is to establish your own alternate economy. And I said no, that's not it. The part I find upsetting is that we as a culture are normalizing the idea that the correct way of dealing with your personal anxieties is to just refuse to engage with anything in the outside world that makes you uncomfortable. I have seen this accusation lobbed (rightfully) at hyper-conservatives who complain about the push for diversity, but it is just as often true, in other contexts, of hard-line liberals. Men make you nervous? Don't interact with men. Afraid immigrants will take your job? Bar them from entry. Racist words in old books offend your moral sensibility? Demand to be excused from the class. Resent bisexuals for being able to "pass" as heteronormative? Form a group exclusive to gold-star gays and lesbians.

You cannot pad, pillow, and gatekeep your world until nothing in your bubble makes you nervous. That's not how this works. I have not been more than half a mile from my house since March 13th. I have only once been farther than the garbage bins, and it freaked me out so badly I came back in after fifteen minutes. To be clear: I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder. This is very bad. The point where I normally yeet myself to the nearest emergency room came and went at least a month ago, and the only reason I didn't go was rampant plague. I am coherent enough to operate a keyboard right now because I had the foresight to order a metric fuckton of gray-market diazepines at the beginning of this whole shitshow. People with fewer resources and less internet savvy are drinking themselves blind, or just melting the fuck down.

And yet, this is the mindset the power structure has been sowing since at at least 2001. Stay in, stay insular. Cocoon yourself. Outside is a threat. The miasma will seep in and destroy your way of life. The authorities are special, they are allowed to roam freely -- but be afraid of other people, be afraid of their proximity, their difference, of the very air that they breathe. Be afraid of Black people, they break laws. Be afraid of strange people, they break quarantine. It is a matter of life and death, so it's okay to emotionally-blackmail your loved ones into doing the same. Be afraid of the police, if they scare you that means they're scaring your enemies away too!

We can't do this anymore. We're tired. If everything is deadly, then nothing is particularly deadly, and it doesn't matter. If all roads lead to ruin, then we're free to just pick which mess we want to be in. A life in unremitting isolation is not a life. It doesn't matter whether we're told it's because of a virus or because "other people" are dangerous animals. No one can do that. No one is going to do that. Have you not, like, met other humans? I don't know why anyone thought that was going to work.

I really don't know where all this is going, other than I fucking told you so, and maybe a warning that if you try to talk to me and I seem a little incoherent, it's only because I refuse to be sober right now for what I feel are completely valid mental health reasons. For the record, I am 8-10 miles outside of the parts of Boston that are intermittently on fire, on the north side of the river, in a very calm suburb where absolutely nothing is happening. The local police force consists of like three bored cops, who spend most of their time attending traffic accidents and telling drunk teenagers to go home. The most violence I have seen in the past few weeks are the squirrels outside my window squabbling over ownership of the pine tree.

The rat is handling this much better. He was chittering his fool head off, loudly, for almost an hour after I turned the lights out last night. I finally went over there to make sure his unbridled joy wasn't because somehow gotten hold of an entire chocolate bar. No; Durnik was just settled down in a HAMMOCK, and it was COMFY, and this made him so HAPPY he had to announce it. I fed him half of a pitted medjool date, making him even happier, and went back to bed.

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#IFTTT #Blogger #Unsolicited Advice

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networkingdefinition · 4 years

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Buying Quotes

Official Website: Buying Quotes

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• A book worth reading is worth buying. – John Ruskin • A woman does not spend all her time in buying things; she spends part of it in taking them back. – E. W. Howe • According to the Mayans, the world is supposed to end in the year 2012. Are you buying that? When’s the last time you even ran into a Mayan? – Jay Leno • Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don`t need, with money they don`t have, in order to impress others who don`t care, is probably the phoniest field in existence today. – Victor Papanek • After years of buying clothes I intend to diet into, I’ll say this: the skeleton in my closet has some really nice outfits. – Robert Breault • All the real money in investment will have to be made as most of it has been in the past not out of buying and selling but out of owning and holding securities, receiving interests and dividends therein, and benefiting from their long-term increases in value. Hence stockholder’s major energies and wisdom as investors should be directed toward assuring themselves of the best operating results from their corporations. This in turn means assuring themselves of fully honest and competent managements. – Benjamin Graham • Americans aren’t buying the hate these anti-LGBT extremists are selling, so they’ve been forced to take their take their dangerous rhetoric abroad. These radicals are now travelling from country to country advocating for the persecution of LGBT people under the guise that they’re saving children. – Chad Griffin • An argument is made that there are just too many question marks about the near future; wouldn’t it be better to wait until things clear up a bit? You know the prose: “Maintain buying reserves until current uncertainties are resolved,” etc. Before reaching for that crutch, face up to two unpleasant facts: The future is never clear and you pay a very high price for a cheery consensus. Uncertainty actually is the friend of the buyer of long-term values. – Warren Buffett • And if you’re not buying my dinnner or you think you fancy, you’re not getting a date with The Miz!- Alex Riley • Apple Stores Offer the Best Buying Experience and Customer Service On The Planet – Tim Cook • Architects are today routinely indoctrinated against the dumb box. Even advertising urges us to “think outside the box.” Why? Because it is thought we all hate the box for being too dumb, too boring, and we want to escape it. If we do escape, by buying the advertised product, we usually find ourselves inside another dumb box populated by boring people just like us. It is clearly possible to live an extraordinary life inside a dumb box. Question: is it possible to lead an extraordinary life in anything other than a dumb box? – Lebbeus Woods • As an artist, you don’t stop making art because people are not buying it. – Damien Hirst • As long as society tells men to be the salespersons of sex, it is sexist for society to put only men in jail if they sell well. We don’t put other salespersons in jail for buying clients drinks and successfully transforming a “no” into a “maybe” into a “yes.” If the client makes a choice to drink too much and the “yes” turns out to be a bad decision, it is the client who gets fired, not the salesperson. – Warren Farrell • Ask your child what he wants for dinner only if he’s buying. – Fran Lebowitz • Athletes, coaches and parents today are increasingly aware of the danger of concussion, and this awareness influences decisions about buying new and reconditioned football helmets. – Tom Udall

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Buy', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_buy').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_buy img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Basically the most fun part about the first day of anything is buying all the supplies. – Tim Federle • Because of piracy there has been a massive downturn in people buying music, which makes it more difficult for artists to make money from the sale of records. – Lily Allen • Brigitte Bardot was one of the first women to be really modern and treat men like love objects, buying them and discarding them. I like that. – Andy Warhol • Business is not financial science, it’s about trading.. buying and selling. It’s about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. – Anita Roddick • But I fail to see how that (not buying gifts) would bring back the essence of Christmas. And I don’t think it would affect retailers. Besides, that’s part of the joy of Christmas – to give someone a gift to show your appreciation for them. – Mathew Staver • Buy real records in real shops, or I’ll come round your house and scream at your mother. – Ian Gillan • Buying a car used to be an experience so soul-scorching, so confidence-splattering, so existentially rattling that an entire car company was based on the promise that you wouldn’t have to come in contact with it. – Susan Orlean • buying a fly rod in the average city store, that is, joining it up and safely waggling it a bit, is much like seeing a woman’s arm protruding from a car window: all one can readily be sure of is that the window is open. – John D. Voelker • Buying a home wouldn’t make much sense if house prices were likely to decline further; no one wants to catch a falling knife. – Mark Zandi • Buying a matching blouse and skirt from the same store is a crime. A clever mix of chic and cheap hits the jackpot. Know how to mix styles and labels. – Ines de La Fressange • Buying an aggregator and calling it a content play is a little like a company’s announcing plans to improve its cash position by hiring a counterfeiter. – Bill Keller • Buying and selling is essentially antisocial. – Edward Bellamy • Buying art is not understanding art. – Anselm Kiefer • Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. – Arthur Schopenhauer • Buying gold is just buying a put against the idiocy of the political cycle. It’s that simple. – Kyle Bass • Buying land is not like buying antique. It is not the only deal available. – Li Ka-shing • Buying pollution credits is folly; it doesn’t help the environment. Instead of using tax dollars to buy credits overseas, we’ll use them at home. – Stephen Harper • Buying real estate is not only the best way, the quickest way, the safest way, but the only way to become wealthy. – Marshall Field • Buying stock is exactly the same thing as going to a casino, only with no cocktail service. – Ted Allen • by then I was getting a little work, doing some playing and getting paid for it, not very much, but enough for me to feel justified in buying a real instrument. I bought a Gretsch with a De-Armond pickup on it and a second-hand Gibson amplifier; it looked like the one Charlie Christian used. I guess it was the same, although there were several models coming out at that time – this would be in I939. – Tal Farlow • Can’t you see that everyone is buying station wagons? – Neal Stephenson • Cena, love him or not, connects with the ticket buying public better than any one in the biz. End of story. – Jim Ross • Christmas is the time for celebration, so I’m not against decorating, putting on lights, buying gifts. In fact, the whole reason we give gifts is the wise men gave gifts to Jesus at the first Christmas, and that started the gift-giving process. – Rick Warren • Corporations invest in sophisticated CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, programs to effectively oversee their relationship with their customers at every point during the buying process. – Marc Ostrofsky • Do I have a problem with Larry Ellison buying Sun? No, that’s part of the capitalist system. As soon as we go public we’re for sale, that’s part of the deal. And do I have a problem with him exercising his intellectual property rights? No, I don’t have a problem with that. Would it be how we necessarily ran and operated? Obviously not. – Scott McNealy • Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity … we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance. – A. Edward Newton • Everyone says buying your first apartment makes you feel like an adult. What no one mentions is that selling it turns you right back into a child.- Anderson Cooper • Everything changes all the time, and unfortunately, everyone who knows what you do by buying records only hears a small amount of what’s going on in your life. – Pat Benatar • Families buying dog food now, starvation roams the streets. Babies die before their born, infected by the grief. – Stevie Wonder • Finally, I would like to remind record companies that they have a cultural responsibility to give the buying public great music. Milking a trend to death is not contributing to culture and is ultimately not profitable. – Tony Visconti • First of all I trust my own instinct, experience that I gained over years and feeling when the moment is right for buying shares. That is what one calls intuition. – Alisher Usmanov • For average working folks, America was becoming a puzzle. Who was buying all these two-hundred-dollar copper saucepans, anyway? And how was everyone paying for these BMWs? Were people shrewd or just stupefyingly irresponsible? – Daniel Suarez • For me to be a billion-dollar author, I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart. – Amanda Hocking • Gold is not overvalued at $500, and gold will not be overvalued at $1,500 or $2,000. The real money is buying gold and putting it away. – Peter Schiff • Have you been working on Sunday? Have you been buying or selling without necessity in the course of this holy day? Give to the poor some alms which will exceed the profit you have made. – John Vianney • Having acquired an espresso machine as good as a solid e-61 and a very good grinder, your incremental dollars will be best spent on either buying truly badass coffee, or setting up a roasting setup yourself that with lots of effort will allow you to produce high end roasted coffee. – Ken Fox • Having cakes as a business certainly changes things for me – I don’t now sit at home doing a cake for the fun of it anymore. But it’s an extremely happy and pleasureable business to run because people are generally buying cakes for celebrations. – Jane Asher • He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do. He lies and cheats; he snubs the mandate and authority of international weapons inspectors; and he games the system to keep buying time against enforcement of the just and legitimate demands of the United Nations, the Security Council, the United States and our allies. Those are simply the facts. – Henry Waxman • Here’s to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy. – Charlaine Harris • Here’s another way of putting it. Roosevelt wants recovery to start at the bottom. In other words, by a system of high taxes, he wants business to help the little fellow to get started and get some work, and then pay business back by buying things when he’s at work. Business says, ‘Let everybody alone. Let business alone, and quit monkeying with us, and we’ll get everything going for you, and if we prosper, naturally the worker will prosper.’ – Will Rogers • I am proud that my humble attempts to predict Tuesday’s prices on Monday are an indispensable component of our society. By buying low and selling high, I create harmony and freedom. – Victor Niederhoffer • I bought singles until I started working properly and then I started buying albums, so this brings back a lot of teenage memories from being in London before I got work • I buy stocks when they are battered. I am strict with my discipline. I always buy stocks with low price-earnings ratios, low price-to-book value ratios and higher-than-average yield. Academic studies have shown that a strategy of buying out-of-favor stocks with low P/E, price-to-book and price-to-cash flow ratios outperforms the market pretty consistently over long periods of time. – David Dreman • I came to terms with not fitting in a long time ago. I never really fitted in. I don’t want to fit in. And now people are buying into that. – Alexander McQueen • I can understand that an audience, buying a ticket to see a picture of mine, wants to see something funny because they feel confident that at least I have a fighting chance to make a funny film when I make a film, whereas if I make a dramatic film there’s one chance in a thousand that it’s really going to come out great, so I understand how they feel about that and they’re completely right. – Woody Allen • I didn’t want to pretend to be a conceptual artist that charges $10,000 for an experience. It’s just not what I am. I’m a photographer and I make prints. And people buy a print, and I understand that. But I’m uncomfortable with buying an experience. – Alec Soth • I do a lot of curiosity buying; I buy it if I like the album cover, I buy it if I like the name of the band, anything that sparks my imagination. I still like to go to record stores, I like to just wander around and I’ll buy whatever catches my attention. – Bruce Springsteen • I do have fantasies of buying a helicopter and a lot of machine guns, but I don’t know if I can do that. I’d like to have a lot of weapons, grenades and things. And I want to have a solar energy machine. And I want to have a sunken garden with a glass roof. I guess that’s about it for now. I have a few other wants but I can’t remember them. – Debbie Harry • I do love Louboutin shoes, but I need to stop buying them because I don’t go to many ‘dos,’ so they just line up. I’m normally in my trainers. – Sheridan Smith • I do try to work out a little. I go swimming twice a day. It beats buying golf balls. – Bob Hope • I don’t get it: they re-package the same shitty football games every year, update a few stats, call it a new game and millions of suckers keep buying them. What’s the point? Why not just go outside and play real football instead? Or even better yet, get bent. Nobody likes football. – Maddox • I don’t really spend money like crazy. I buy what I need and what I really want, and if I’m buying expensive things I do think about the purchase many times before I buy it. – Caroline Wozniacki • I don’t think humans are meant to be looked at when we’re buying pants. – Ricky Gervais • I don’t think they like the idea that the people who are buying the record get to choose what goes out, because it’s their job. The fans even pre-ordered stock to make sure that I had some sort of presence. – John Otway • I ended up buying a restaurant. Already we had invested in a gas station and a metal products plant. – Esther Williams • I ended up buying business.com for $150,000 because I wanted to make it a magazine. It would have been a ‘Time’-type magazine: how to do business on the Internet. And I was offered a lot of money for that domain. I played two buyers against each other. – Marc Ostrofsky • I feel like if I’m going to give you a book about my dad, then I really want to give you my dad, because he is interesting and he is funny and if you’re buying a book about him, I don’t want you to have to sit through stuff that’s not him. – Justin Halpern • I get maximum satisfaction out of buying children’s clothes online. – Samantha Bee • I got a job as soon as I could – 11 or 12. I started babysitting and then I got a part-time job at a pharmacy in England. I just remember loving the feeling of going out and buying my own clothes! I’d go bargain-hunting and get secondhand vintage stuff. – Natasha Bedingfield • I have discovered the most exciting, the most arduous literary form of all, the most difficult to master, the most pregnant in curious possibilities. I mean the advertisement. It is far easier to write ten passably effective Sonnets, good enough to take in the not too inquiring critic, than one effective advertisement that will take in a few thousand of the uncritical buying public. – Aldous Huxley • I have seen books made of things neither studied nor ever understood … the author contenting himself for his own part, to have cast the plot and projected the design of it, and by his industry to have bound up the fagot of unknown provisions; at least the ink and paper his own. This may be said to be a buying or borrowing, and not a making or compiling of a book. – Michel de Montaigne • I haven’t bought anything excessive. I do plan on buying an island and filling it with baby tigers, though. – Kesha • I kept buying bigger and bigger jeans, and once the size 14s got too tight, I thought: ‘That’s it. I’m not buying the next size’. – Valerie Bertinelli • I know real people, whose names I could tell you, people I know who have said “I’ve stopped buying the New York Times.” Why? Because their editorial position has filtered, has leached into the news pages. – Bernard Goldberg • I like buying clothes, especially as I get a tax-deductible allowance. – Wendy Cope • I like collecting comics, I like buying comics, I like looking at comics, but I also read comics on digital readers. – Geoff Johns • I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don’t make enough money. – Andrew Motion • I looked at my family and I said, “I’ve got a spouse. I’ve got three kids. There’s no way I’m ever buying a music subscription service for the five of us. It’s just not going to happen.” So we wanted to do something really great for families… It wasn’t easy. We had to convince the labels it was in their best interests, too. – Eddy Cue • I love Cheetos, those hot, spicy kind. And chocolate. Every time I’m in the airport I’m buying Cheetos and eating them on the airplane. – Alessandra Ambrosio • I never buy a piece of art. I don’t see the point in buying something because I know my eyes will get bored of it eventually. – Karl Pilkington • I never look at it like I’m wasting money when I’m buying gold. – Big Sean • I ran my own business when I was 19, buying condos and renovating apartment buildings. – Jared Kushner • I say a vote for the Democrats or Republicans is the ONLY wasted vote…. By buying into the rhetoric that there are only two parties worth voting for…you increase their power. And with it, you promote the watered-down freedoms and endless government growth that these two parties consisently vote for. – Carla Howell • I started buying records in the 80s. I listened to everything new wave, disco, funk synth-pop, rock, but in my house we were listening to bossa nova, tango, and folk. – Steven Sater • I started getting back into buying old analog gear while we were recording. Lots of old drum machines and synths. It wasn’t a conscious thing. I didn’t consider myself a collector, but boxes of vintage gear would turn up virtually every day. – Martin Gore • I tell young entrepreneurs to use the leader in their industry as a benchmark as they work to create their own brand. Dont look at what your competition is doing – if you emulate the leader in your industry, you will achieve a higher level of engagement with consumers and make their buying experience richer. – Steve Stoute • I think I learned a lot about not buying into a lot of hype. I wanted to be a kind of faceless entity; I didn’t want to be Dhani Harrison and the Muppets or something like that. – Dhani Harrison • I think that the thing you have to do is, people have to start being held accountable for their decisions. If somebody’s not buying insurance, then they’re going to have to be selling their car, or whatever it is to try to help cover that. – Todd Akin • I think the music business is probably not happy with what we’ve done, because the people buying the record have actually got to pick what they want to buy, rather than being told what they should buy. – John Otway • I was buying Bob Dylan mainly, everything I could get hold of by him. – Robyn Hitchcock • I watched my parents go from having very basic jobs to educating themselves, to buying a house. They set a really good bar for what they wanted their kids to achieve. – Tinie Tempah • I worked in between carpools and buying food and cooking and whatever else I had to do. I lived an outside life, but really I was living an inside life. – Anne Truitt • I would avoid any product that contains genetically modified (GMO) corn, because there are still questions regarding the long-term health effects of genetically altered foods on the human body have not been thoroughly tested. Sugars are also sneaked into tons of different foods, especially foods marketed to kids. Again, study the labels carefully before buying. – Deirdre Imus • I’d like to see Manhattan underwater. I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire—all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over. – Hayao Miyazaki • If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. – John Ruskin • If I see a movie star in the department store buying something, I’ll kind of sidle up and see what they’re saying, what they look like, how they sound. That’s an invasion of privacy. – Tom Lehrer • If people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual. – Donald A. Norman • If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I’d go for the Pollock every time. – Damien Hirst • If we could just go back the last two or three years and do our buying a little more carefully, why… we would be O.K. – Will Rogers • If we’re talking about buying exchanges abroad, we have to have global securities standards, as we have global banking regulations. I’m talking about margins. Now, the United States has certain margin requirements that are not the same in London. Investors and hedge funds that want to borrow more money against securities ? if they can’t in the U.S., they go abroad. That could add additional risks to the global economy. – Muriel Siebert • If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa. – David Brooks • If you look at the economics of Nokia roughly half of the company, half of the business, half of how we think about the business is focused on those emerging markets and on those lower-priced devices. But, of course, people who are aspirational and buying those lower-priced devices today are looking at smart phones tomorrow, and so forth. – Stephen Elop • If you’re buying an album because of the face on it, you’re stupid. – Enrique Iglesias • If you’re buying tomatoes pick them up and smell them-they should have a lovely perfume. They need to be kept at fifty degrees or above, particularly during the growing season, because that’s when they develop their flavor. – Julia Child • I’m a drugstore beauty girl, I love going to the drugstore and buying makeup. – Melanie Fiona • I’m a firm believer that all this packaged stuff that Americans are buying up in gobs is making them fatter. – Michael Symon • I’m a Virgo and I’m more – I don’t want to say ‘negative’ – but I’m the girl who thinks no one’s coming to my birthday party, no one’s buying my clothes, no one’s reading my book, no one’s watching my show – that’s just how I think. – Rachel Zoe • I’m a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you’re getting out. I’m also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write. – Sam Shepard • I’m as embarrassed as hell about it. I purged myself of my shame by buying the Beatles ‘all you need is love’, one of the most evocative singles of all time. – Jon Snow • I’m not a consumer. I hate buying clothes. I don’t have a mobile. I just don’t need things. I don’t like things. – Yann Martel • I’m not buying a boat because of writing skits. – Jason Sudeikis • I’m not making any money, but I view it as some sort of investment, or like buying myself a great present. – Christopher Owens • Im saving up to buy art. Nothing famous, but every time Im in a new city I wander into galleries and dream about buying great pieces one day. -Nicola Formichetti • Im thinking of buying a monkey. Then I think, Why stop at one? I don’t like being limited in that way. Therefore, I’m considering a platton of monkeys, so that people will look at me and see how mellow and well-adjusted I am compared to these monkeys throwing feces around. – Robert Downey, Jr. • I’m very much involved in art. I started buying art a few years ago and really like the work of T.C. Cannon, who is a native American artist. Then I was introduced to Soviet-era Russian impressionism and started collecting that, especially Gely Korzhev.- Ronnie Dunn – Art, Native American, Years • Immersing yourself in the environment of a real record store where music is celebrated and cherished adds real value to the experience of buying music. In some ways, that retail experience is as important as the music. – John Mellencamp • In China, you’ve got six people buying for one child. But the thing is, you’ve got the largest rising upper-middle class in the world. – Angela Ahrendts • In spite of all this noise, customers are still definitely buying in North America, and they’re really, really buying internationally. – Jim Balsillie • In the area we’re discussing, leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings. – Norman Lear • In the summer of 1990, I was buying stocks and I was probably three or four months early there. But we had a great rally in 1991. – Peter Lynch • In writing advertising it must always be kept in mind that the customer often knows more about the goods than the advertising writers because they have had experience in buying them. – John Wanamaker • Individual investors have become far more powerful than anyone gives them credit for. Today, 85 million Americans invest in stocks. Collectively, that kind of buying and selling power can move markets. – Maria Bartiromo • Instead of buying airplanes and playing around like some of our competitors, we’ve rolled almost everything back to the company. – Bill Gates • It doesn’t matter how good you are as a band or how good your music may be; if the fans aren’t supporting it and buying your music, it’s hard to make it. – Chris Daughtry • It got to the point in the late 70s and early 80s that I was spending so much money buying golden age comics that I could only justify it if I got work in the media. – Bill Mumy • It is haram [religiously forbidden] to use narcotics in any way because it results in considerable adverse effects in terms of personal health and social cost. By the same token, it is haram to deal in narcotics in any way, i.e., carrying, transporting, storing, selling, buying, etc. – Ali Khamenei • It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets. I’ve known many men who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine–that is, they made no real money out of it. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. – Edwin Lefevre • It sounds to me like selling a car with faulty brakes, and then buying an insurance policy on those cars. – Phil Angelides • It wasn’t what we needed then that was hurting us, it was what we was paying for that we had already used up. The country was just buying gasoline for a leaky tank. Everything was going into a gopher hole and you couldent see where you was going to get any of it back. – Will Rogers • It’s about time we stopped buying things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like. – Adrian Rogers • It’s still so rare for anyone to be personally acknowledged by a brand that the impact of such a simple, polite gesture on a customer’s buying habits could be huge. – Gary Vaynerchuk • I’ve come to learn that my initial investment is more about the person versus the product that I am buying into. I’ve also learned that I really do enjoy giving worthy people an opportunity of a lifetime. – Daymond John • Journalists aren’t supposed to praise things. It’s a violation of work rules almost as serious as buying drinks with our own money or absolving the CIA of something. – P. J. O’Rourke • Labour day is a great American holiday that people celebrate by going out and buying products made in China – David Letterman • Learning about factory farms and their horrendous treatment of animals is what made me become vegetarian in the first place. I also support the education of the public on adopting pets from animal shelters or saving homeless animals off the street in lieu of buying them from pet shops. – Laura Mennell • Less is more. I truly believe in buying a few pieces with better construction. – Stacy London • Look at someone like Ke$ha. I wouldn’t say she’s got the most rangy, incredible voice, but she’s got a thing. She stands for something, and people are buying into that. – Kara DioGuardi • Many a man thinks he is buying pleasure, when he is really selling himself to it. – Benjamin Franklin • Many of life’s decisions are hard. What kind of career should you pursue? Does your ailing mother need to be put in a nursing home? You and your spouse already have two kids; should you have a third?such decisions are hard for a number of reasons. For one the stakes are high. There’s also a great deal of uncertainty involved. Above all, decisions like these are rare, which means you don’t get much practice making them. You’ve probably gotten good at buying groceries, since you do it so often, but buying your first house is another thing entirely. – Steven Levitt • Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That’s not management, that’s deal making. Management is the opportunity to help people become better people. Practiced that way, it’s a magnificent profession. – Clayton Christensen • Marrying a man is like buying something you’ve been admiring for a long time in a shop window. You may love it when you get it home, but it doesn’t always go with everything else in the house. – Jean Kerr Martin Freeman • Mentally imagine you are buying the business or applying for the job that will earn your fortune. Review each step you’d take, the obstacles you might meet, the difficulties you would meet. Continue imagining each step until you mentally reach your wealth goal. – Tyler Gregory Hicks • Millions of animals are euthanized every year because shelters can’t find homes for them. Buying animals from pet stores also tends to support puppy and cat mills, many of which have deplorable conditions for animals, which shouldn’t be tolerated. – Laura Mennell • Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. – Erich Fromm • Money can be issued only in the act of buying, and can be backed only in the act of selling. Any buyer who is also a seller is qualified to be a money issuer. Government, because it is not and should not be a seller, is not qualified to be a money issuer. – E.C. Riegel • Money cannot buy peace of mind. It cannot heal ruptured relationships, or build meaning into a life that has none. – Richard DeVos • Most people view the artistic process as something of a mystery. Leverage that, and engage your prospective clients with good stories. For many, buying art is their escape from the real world. Make it entertaining and enjoyable. – Cory Trepanier • Music is so hard. It’s a struggle to get people to care. It’s hard to make an impact in today’s world because people aren’t buying records anymore. – Juliana Hatfield • My earliest memory from childhood is of fishing with my father. And I remember vividly we were in a store, and we were buying a pup tent to go on our first camping trip. – David Suzuki • My granddaddy on my momma’s side, he was a romantic. He loved love songs. Every Valentine’s Day, I remember him buying a red carnation for my grandmomma, my momma and my sister. That was something you could count on every year. – Josh Turner • My idea of rich is that you can buy every book you ever want without looking at the price and you’re never around assholes. That’s the two things to really fight for in life. – John Waters • My life had become an endless race against the clock. I was always in a hurry, scrambling to save a minute here, a few seconds there. My wake-up call came when I found myself toying with the idea of buying a collection of One-Minute Bedtime Stories Snow White in 60 seconds. Suddenly it hit me: my rushaholism has got so out of hand that I’m even willing to speed up those precious moments with my children at the end of the day. There has to be a better way, I thought, because living in fast forward is not really living at all. That’s why I began investigating the possibility of slowing down. – Carl Honore • My responsibility is simply being who I am and not buying into any projection as real. No projection is finally real, but projection does play a very important role. – Gangaji • My world. My rules. I would command everyone to do so many things! Be kind. Oh, I would command everyone to stop buying tabloids! – Jennifer Aniston • No man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily – or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play. – Edwin Lefevre • Not to be avaricious is money; not to be fond of buying is a revenue; but to be content with our own is the greatest and most certain wealth of all. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • Now and then, living more with less means paying more money. It may mean buying better quality – leaving behind repetitive purchases of discount junk for one expensive, well-made, thoughtfully designed tool that will last. – Doris Janzen Longacre • On the one hand, we’re constantly told about recycling and cutting back, and on the other hand we have to buy the next gadget that comes along three weeks after the last one you bought. It’s absolutely insane. We’ve been suckered into buying and buying and upgrading and upgrading. We’re being given two very different mantras at the moment, I think. • Once you start buying first aid kits you start having accidents. – George Mikes • Once you turn pro and you’re making the big money and kids are buying your sneakers and your skates and your gloves and so on, you are a member of that role model club. – Bobby Orr • One market paradigm that I take exception to is: Buy low and sell high. I believe far more money is made by buying high and selling at even higher prices. – Richard Driehaus • One of my favorite patterns is the tendency for the markets to move from relative lows to relative highs and vice versa every two to four days. This pattern is a function of human behavior. It takes several days of a market rallying before it looks really good. That’s when everyone wants to buy it, and that’s the time when the professionals, like myself, are selling. Conversely, when the market has been down for a few days, and everyone is bearish, that’s the time I like to be buying. – Jack D. Schwager • One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it’s a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster. – John Michael Greer • Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years. – Warren Buffett • Opportunity cost is a huge filter in life. If you’ve got two suitors who are really eager to have you and one is way the hell better than the other, you do not have to spend much time with the other. And that’s the way we filter out buying opportunities. – Charlie Munger • Over many generations, fortunes in the business world were made through buying and selling products in physical stores. Internet fortunes have been made buying and selling products online. – Marc Ostrofsky • Over the long run, the price of gold approximates the total amount of money in circulation divided by the size of the gold stock. If the market price of gold moves a long way from this level, it may indicate a buying or selling opportunity. – Ray Dalio • People always worry that buying tech products today carries a risk of obsolescence. Most of the time, that fear is overblown. – Walt Mossberg • People tend to look at their businesses from the inside out – that is, they get so focused on making and selling their products that they lose awareness of the needs and buying behaviors of their customers. – Lawrence Bossidy • People who get to express their voice are paid by the people who make profit from it. So they’re going to make you believe you have to spend your money buying these products otherwise you won’t be happy. This is really wrong. Especially the implication it carries. – Michel Gondry • Recently I’ve been collecting Star Wars figures again. When I was a kid I couldn’t afford them. Now I can so I’ve been buying them and keeping them in their box for a later date when they’ll be worth a lot of money. – Mackenzie Crook • Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you’re really buying into someone else’s system of values, rules and rewards. – Bill Watterson • Since I was 13, I’ve been buying things because they are ridiculously cheap. – Ronald Burkle • Since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters’ own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians. – Milton Friedman • Sisterhood is powerful. Woman can support each other as women, in their pursuit for enlightenment or anything else, without fear. But as long as she’s still in the commodities exchange market, buying and selling, she must fear the competition. – Frederick Lenz • Sometimes when I pick up a book off the shelf, when I’m buying a new book to read, I’ll look at all of them and they all have the exact same words inside, but I’ll think that one is meant to go home with me. I’ll never pick the first thing off the shelf, I’ll always go one behind. – Jennifer Carpenter • Stop paying or buying into the ideas that don’t resonate with the reality you prefer. Stop giving them credence. Appreciate, Appreciate your chosen vibration and allow the vibrations that are not aligned with you to de-preciate. – Darryl Anka • Suddenly, the world is realizing that gold is still a safe haven asset. We’ve seen pretty substantial losses in equity markets. I think this is genuine safe-haven buying. – James Moore • That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing-from dresses to underwear. – Susan Faludi • That’s what I paint, I paint people. They’re portraits, but you won’t always be pleased with the way you look in my paintings. Which is fine, I guess. Unless you’re buying it, and it’s of your kid! – Jemima Kirke • The chattering bloody classes, or what I call the liberal Guardian readers, they’re all buying SUVs to drive around London. I smile at these loons who drive their SUVs down to Sainsbury’s and buy kiwi fruit, flown in from New Zealand for Christ sakes. They’re the equivalent of environmental nuclear bombs! – Michael O’Leary • The chief obstacle to success lies in the stubborn fact that if the favorable prospects of a concern are clearly apparent they are almost always reflected already in the current price of the stock. Buying such an issue is like betting on a topheavy favorite in a horse race. The chances may be on your side, but the real odds are against you. – Benjamin Graham • The disaster in the Gulf was no accident. It was the result of years of oil money buying off politicians to lead to an unregulated and ill focused addiction to oil and drilling. The doomed fate of the local fisherman and the environment were foretold in the infamous chants of ‘Drill, Baby, Drill. – Robert Greenwald • The next time you lose heart and you can’t bear to experience what you’re feeling, you might recall this instruction: change the way you see it and lean in. Instead of blaming our discomfort on outer circumstances or on our own weakness, we can choose to stay present and awake to our experience, not rejecting it, not grasping it, not buying the stories that we relentlessly tell ourselves. This is priceless advice that addresses the true cause of suffering—yours, mine, and that of all living beings. – Pema Chodron • The old process of social assimilation used to be mainly about English new money – generated in London, the mucky, brassy North or the colonies – buying those houses and restoring them, and doing the three-generation thing, mouldering into the landscape, and the ‘community,’ identifying with the place in a familiar way. – Peter York • The only way to shrink the trade deficit is for the government to prohibit us from buying whatever we want. – John Stossel • The people who are buying stocks because they’re going up and they don’t know what they do, deserve to lose money. – Jim Cramer • The perfect mystic is not an ecstatic devotee lost in contemplation of Oneness, nor a saintly recluse shunning all commerce with mankind, but “the true saint” goes in and out amongst the people and eats and sleeps with them and buys and sells in the market and marries and takes part in social intercourse, and never forgets God for a single moment. – Abu-Sa’id Abul-Khayr • The person that is buying a share of stock is convinced he knows something that the other person who’s selling it to him does not know. There’s no zero sum game in Wall Street. – Bernard Madoff • The real story in housing will be a recovery in the economy that will drive a recovery in housing, When people are working, when there are more jobs, more households forming and people go back to buying cars, they’re going to want their apartments and homes. And that’s when you’ll start to see a recovery in home prices. – Jamie Dimon • The reason that so many of us cannot save money is because of our friends. They’re always buying something we can’t afford. – Sam Ewing • The subscription model of buying music is bankrupt. I think you could make available the Second Coming in a subscription model and it might not be successful. – Steve Jobs • The thing about Paris, it’s a great city for wandering around and buying shoes and nursing a cafe au lait for hours on end and pretending you’re Baudelaire. But it’s not a city where you can work. – Malcolm Mclaren • There are a set of men who go about making purchases upon credit, and buying estates they have not wherewithal to pay for; and having done this, their next step is to fill the newspapers with paragraphs of the scarcity of money and the necessity of a paper emission, then to have a legal tender under the pretense of supporting its credit, and when out, to depreciate it as fast as they can, get a deal of it for a little price, and cheat their creditors; and this is the concise history of paper money schemes. – Thomas Paine • There are countries that prefer to think that they’re buying comfort at the cost of others, but I don’t think that’s the way you can act in this world. There are no neutral groups. – Jose Maria Aznar • There are no bad days in the market. When the market is down, you’ve got bargains, and it’s lovely to think of what you are buying at low prices. When the market is up, the bargains have gone, but you’re rich. – Bruce Greenwald • There is a difference these days between who’s making the music and buying the music, in terms of the way that they think, grew up, and their perspective. It’s become much more diverse. – El-P • There is as much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it. – Jean de la Bruyere • There is far greater peril in buying knowledge than in buying meat and drink. – Plato • There’s a character that I play onstage, and I can’t let him loose in the supermarket when I’m buying my beans on toast. – Alex Kapranos • There’s no credit buying on eternal things, none at all. Anything that is worthwhile has to be paid for in advance. – Boyd K. Packer • Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants. – Henry David Thoreau • To me, the beauty of a quilt or a dress lies within the stitches and the thought of the person who made them. When you spend time making something with your two hands, you impart love in a way that buying never can. – Natalie • To understand KKR, I always like to say, don’t congratulate us when we buy a company. Any fool can buy a company. Congratulate us when we sell it and when we’ve done something with it and created real value. – Henry Kravis • Too many people are buying gifts for themselves when they pick out a gift for a friend. – Phoebe Cates • Too many people spend money they haven’t earned to buy things they don’t want to impress people they don’t like. – Will Rogers • Unwarrantable installment buying is a pit into which those who covet fall. – John H. Vandenberg • Water must be free for sustenance needs. Since nature gives water to us free of cost, buying and selling it for profit violates our inherent right to nature’s gift and denies the poor of their human rights. – Vandana Shiva • We are going to have to do something about all this violence, or people are going to keep buying tickets. – Conn Smythe • We can sell our time, but we can’t buy it back. – Paulo Coelho • We love all kinds of music: We love pop music, we love rock music, we love R & B and country, and we just pull from all our influences. So I don’t really take offense as long as people are coming out to the shows and buying the records and becoming fans of the music. At the end of the day, the music is what’s gonna speak to you. – Charles Kelley • We never will have any prosperity that is free from speculation till we pass a law that every time a broker or person sells something, he has got to have it sitting there in a bucket, or a bag, or a jug, or a cage, or a rat trap, or something, depending on what it is he is selling. We are continually buying something that we never get from a man that never had it. – Will Rogers • What about the rat race in the first place? Is it worthwhile? Or are you just buying into someone else’s definition of success? Only you can decide that, and you’ll have to decide it over and over and over. But if you think it’s a rat race, before you drop out, take a deep breath. Maybe you picked the wrong job. Try again. And then try again. – Sheryl Sandberg • When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators. – P. J. O’Rourke • When buying shares, ask yourself, would you buy the whole company? – Rene Rivkin • When even the analysts are bored, it’s time to start buying. – Peter Lynch • When governments are selling, you should be buying. And when governments are defaulting, we should look at that as an opportunity. – David Bonderman • When I bought my farm, I did not know what a bargain I had in the bluebirds, daffodils and thrushes; as little did I know what sublime mornings and sunsets I was buying. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • When I turn on my central air conditioner, I feel like, “Wow, I really have come a long way.” Or buying the super expensive organic raw food for my dogs, and I remember when I had to buy the cheapest big bag of kibble. So I think for me it’s often in terms of comfort. – Kristin Bauer van Straten • When I was older and I first started working, I was obsessed with buying my first Chanel jacket. I saved up my hard-earned money, went to Barneys, and bought a little black Chanel jacket. It saw many, many job interviews and many, many events. I’m not fitting into it lately, but I still have it. – Nina Garcia • When I’m bearish and I sell a stock, each sale must be at a lower level than the previous sale. When I am buying, the reverse is true. I must buy on a rising scale. I don’t buy long stocks on a scale down, I buy on a scale up. – Jesse Lauriston Livermore • When my daughter wanted a toy and I had to check the price of it before buying it – that was one of the worst feelings. – Tablo • When no one’s buying your records, it’s easy to justify selling a song. But once you start selling records, you can’t really justify having two songs in Cadillac commercials. It looks greedy. And it is greedy. This whole music thing should be about music. – Patrick Carney • When the buying stops, the killing can too. – Yao Ming • When there is some fear about accounting and growth and the economy, food stocks are a decent place to be, … This company has been through a bit of a restructuring the last couple of years. Management is doing a great job. The company is improving and people are buying chocolate. So, what a great week to buy it. – Liz Miller • Whether I’m doing music or I’m walking down the street or I’m in a record store buying a record or I walk into a comic store and I’m buying comics or having a drink with my friends, it’s the same me. – Glenn Danzig • Whether we’re talking about socks or stocks, I like buying quality merchandise when it is marked down. – Warren Buffett • Whether you’ve done anything wrong or not people will write whatever they want, so it’s just a matter of not reading it, not buying into it, and hopefully the people that do read it realise that it’s just fictional stories for entertainment. – Holly Valance • Why are people unemployed? Because there is no work. Why is there no work? Because people are not buying products and services. Why are people not buying products and services? Because they have no money. Why do people have no money? Because they are unemployed. – Craig Reucassel • Why don’t somebody print the truth about our present economic situation? We spent six years of wild buying on credit – everything under the sun, whether we needed it or not – and now we are having to pay for ’em, and we are howling like a pet coon. – Will Rogers • With all this talk of Going Green, Buying Green, Living Green, and Green being the new whatever, I’ve come to realize that, although we had no green, my grandmother was actually the ‘greenest’ person I’ve ever known. – Joy Bryant • With modeling, you are the client and you give them what they want… with music, it is all about you, people are buying into you as a person. – Caprice Bourret • Women aren’t embarrassed when they buy men’s pajamas, but a man buying a nightgown acts as though he were dealing with a dope peddler. – Jimmy Cannon • You are still lucky – you have a certain type of people who keep buying your music – but then you can get typecast and have to keep making that same music, and you can change only slightly. It’s risky to bounce around and change your type of music. – Randy Bachman • You can’t buy something which does not exist. In a way, let’s make things exist and then judge later. Don’t cancel the process of creativity too early; let it flow. – Ross Lovegrove • You don’t change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or buying indulgences in the form of ‘Save the Earth’ bumper stickers. You do it by articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity humanity can muster. – Alex Steffen • You just realize that you have to be committed to this thing in this kind of world that we’re in the more your support group dwindles and you start seeing your peers buying houses and getting corporate jobs. So that can be discouraging. – J. Robbins • You’re going to be buying your ticket with your heartache, you’re gonna be payin’ the man with your dues. You’re gonna be living alone when you hear that whistle moan, you’re gonna be learnin’ to live with the blues. – Don McLean

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equitiesstocks · 4 years

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