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whatwouldyourbiasdo · 4 years

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Finding Cinderella | Series | Chapter Two

Title: Finding Cinderella

Pairings: Donghae x reader,(Primary) Heechul x reader (Secondary), Kyuhyun x reader (Secondary)

Author’s Note: I have been planning this story for a while but have been battling many writers’ blocks in doing so. This story will mainly focus on Donghae and the reader but will have branching stories between Heechul, Kyuhyun and two secondary OC characters.

Sidenote: Yes, this series will include Kangin and Sungmin. This was originally started back when the two of them were still active members and in my heart they will always be members so I will include them wherever I see fit.

SM Entertainment plans to host the event of the century and you are invited!

The news headline offered as click bait got a lot of people talking. It wasn’t a complete lie as SM Entertainment was gearing up to host what they believed to be the event of the century and even a handful of lucky fans were going to be granted access to this exclusive party. But there was a catch.

Only a few lucky fans were going to receive a V.I.P. invitation to the party, a chance to meet all their favorite artists and celebrities as well as experience the best food and music they had ever come across.

In order to be considered for an invitation, fans had to record a video message stating why they loved SM Entertainment, what they felt like the company’s artists changed their lives and why they should be one of the honorable guests for the party. SM Entertainment artists would judge the videos and each group would collectively vote on one fan to personally invite to the party.

Some netizens criticized the requirements, stating that they were basically begging for people to praise them on video so they could use that to their advantage later as part of a sneaky promotional stunt, while other netizens praised the company for including fans who helped the company gain so much success over the past year.

Videos came flocking in as soon as the signup had opened, people had to create a personal account on the official SM Entertainment event page, fill out their profile and personal information and upload the video. On the first night, the event page managed to crash due to the traffic from all over the world though many netizens claimed the company would end up picking fans within Korea as they always seemed favorable to their country.

Not all the applications were valid to the competition, however. Some people thought this would be the perfect opportunity to get their own rise to fame and uploaded a video of them dancing, singing or acting in a desperate attempt to get discovered. Paying tribute to their favorite artists they sang their hearts out and tried to mimic the complicated choreography for as much as possible to showcase their own talents and abilities. Unfortunately for them, SM Entertainment wasn’t looking for new trainees and took no heed of these desperate audition attempts. And then there were the desperate fans who were just grasping the chance of conveying their messages to their favorite idols, hoping that their love confession would set off a series of events only seen in dramas.

Some, however, took it to the extreme. This platform was also the perfect opportunity for the so-called “sasaengs” to come forth with extreme and desperate messages stating that their “oppa” needed to love them and whoever would love them instead would face serious consequences. Most of them would receive a message that their account had been disabled for not following the rules and the company even issued a warning that those would continue sending disturbing messages would face legal repercussions.

Lee Chanhee had hesitated several times about signing up and giving it a shot. She had been a big SM Entertainment fan for years, their artists and music ignited a light within her which sparked her passion for singing. There had even been people who told her she had actual star potential, the only thing that held her back was her fear. A fear to audition and get rejected. A fear of people who were supposed to be experts, rejecting her and crushing her dreams, killing the fire that fueled her passion. And the idea of the stress and demanding schedules she had heard about, it definitely made the idea of signing as an artist less favorable. Having all eyes on her, judging her every action and movement, commenting on anything she did or said or didn’t do or say, the pressure of being perfect… That was something she rather lived without. Instead, she decided to keep it low and sing for fun. Releasing online songs under a pseudonym to keep the mystery going, she gathered quite a fanbase of followers and viewers. And that was enough, for the time being.

But a chance to be invited inside SM Entertainment, to meet, greet and party with her favorite artists and get an idea of how the people she admired were in real life, without the cameras and the pressure to keep up their good image, that intrigued her. And so her mouse hovered over the signup button on the event page. But she didn’t click.

“Signing up means I have to record a video...” She let out a soft sigh as she considered her options. “Which means people will see my face… And they’ll judge my story...” They made it quite clear in the promotions that the artists were actually going to be reviewing the applications themselves and personally pick out a fan to invite. Which would mean she could have the chance to personally convey her feelings and experiences with her favorite artist, but that could also mean making a great fool out of herself. She could just imagine the groups watching her video, laughing at how ridiculously cringeworthy she looked.

But what exactly did she have to lose? None of them knew her and if her video was laughable at best, they wouldn’t invite her over which means that they would just as easily forget about her embarrassment. And if she did get invited then maybe, just maybe her video wasn’t as cringeworthy as she imagined it in her head.

“Yah! Chanhee-ah!” A voice called from the hallway as she heard the front door slam shut. Footsteps approached her bedroom door and a second later the door flung open revealing the dark haired girl that had burst into her apartment. Sometimes she regretted giving her the password. “Aish, there you are!”

“Oh, Miya-ah!” The curly haired girl nodded as she finally moved from her spot behind her computer and greeted her friend. Miya was a student at the Korean National University of Arts, majoring in vocal and dance courses whom Chanhee had met online right after she released her first ever song online under the pseudonym 월광 신데렐라 (moonlight cinderella). Miya was her first subscriber and commenter and had proceeded to comment, like and even promote every song she released after that. When Miya sent her a message asking if she was a student at her university and that she could introduce Chanhee to one of the music producer majors, she took the plunge and met up with Miya. And they have been friends ever since.

“Sorry, I’m late since the semester is ending they are killing us with exams and preparations,” The slightly shorter girl huffed as she dragged her bag over the floor.

“No problem!” Chanhee smiled as she inched closer to the girl with a curious gaze down on the bag she was dragging along. “So… You got the goods?”

“Ah?” Miya exclaimed, looking up at the taller curly haired girl with a somewhat confused gaze before realizing what she meant. “Oh! Yes! Miya's goody supplying service has done it again!” She grinned proudly as she crouched down and rummaged her bag until she pulled out the small USB stick. “Tadaa! I swear, Yunghwa was going to have a mental breakdown since his program kept crashing and it deleted his final project, you should have seen his face!” She mused, showing no signs of consideration towards her music producer friend she put in charge of helping produce and mix Chanhee’s releases.

“Aigoo, please thank him for me!” Chanhee humbled as she held her hands out for the USB stick, impatiently waiting to hear the final product. She had worked hard on this release, usually, she only produced covers of popular and lesser known songs, but this was the first re-write of a song she composed and she was eager to hear how it turned out before releasing it online.

She did feel sorry for putting so much pressure on Miya’s friend who she could imagine was under a lot of stress as was with finals creeping up. And to top it off, Yunghwa wasn’t even getting paid for the producing he did. Chanhee did offer, but Miya somehow found a way to have him do it without any reward. Chanhee decided not to ask questions.

“Psh, all he needs is a couple of cups of coffee and he’ll be good to go!” Miya smirked as she placed the USB in her hands. “So what were you up to?”

“I was wondering if I should sign up for the SM Entertainment event...” She muttered as she made her way back to her computer, playing with the USB in her hands.

“Oh, right… The fan event where they’re asking you to stick some feathers up their butts to make them feel good,” Miya hummed thoughtfully. She had heard about the event, not surprising since it was advertised everywhere and several of her fellow students had signed up. Not to mention her former roommate had been talking about all the things she had to arrange for it seeing as she found a full-time job at the company after dropping out of university.

Personally, she didn’t feel the appeal of the event, she highly doubted those lucky fans would even catch a glimpse of their idols and would most likely be stuffed in one corner of the venue. She could imagine most of the people that signed up merely did so to get to meet their wannabe husband or wife.

“It would be a chance of a lifetime to attend… Even if it’s just for the food.” Chanhee explained. “But I’m not sure if I’m so comfortable with recording a video message. Especially since the artists will hand pick the winners themselves.“

“Huh, you would think they’d have better things to do than to go through millions of fan videos.” Miya clicked her tongue as she brushed her fingers through her already messy hair. The thing about college students was that after a certain amount of time you stopped giving a crap about your appearance, the dress code was pajamas and dark eye circles most of the time anyway. “But these idols don’t know you, right? So what’s the worse that could happen? You’ll be one of a million rejected and they’ll probably not even remember your face or voice or anything.”

“See, that is what I was telling myself but still...” She bit the inside of her lip as she stared back at the signup screen.

“C’mon! Just do it, you know you want to or you wouldn’t be hesitating so much!” The smaller girl pressed her finger onto the curly haired girls to make her point. “Don’t think too much and just do it. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain!”

“Yes! Yes, you’re right! Let’s do it!” Chanhee encouraged herself as she finally clicked the sign-up button and filled out the information they requested. It also asked for a preferred group, seeing as they were going to divide the applications between all the groups to limit the amount of time their artist had to spent on watching and judging the videos. After thinking about it, she decided to sign up for Super Junior, reasoning that the group barely seemed to take themselves too seriously so if she ended up making a fool out of herself they would most like just brush it off as adorable at least. Or that’s what she kept telling herself as encouragement.

“Lemme know how the track sounds before releasing it and if you need anything changed hit me up and I will pester Yunghwa into fixing it!” Miya mentioned as she hoisted her bag over her shoulder again. She didn’t have enough time to stick around unfortunately, a student’s duty called and she had to get back to campus for a couple more classes.

“Thanks a lot, Miya!” Chanhee beamed as she turned to look at her friend. “I owe you a lot!”

“Aye, what kind of fan would I be if I didn’t go to the extreme for my precious unnie!” She flashed her a cheeky smile and winked as she finished her words before heading out. “Good luck!”

Chanhee waited for her friend to leave and the sound of the door falling back into its automated lock before opening her recording program and turning on her camera. She stared at her own reflection in the screen, huffing as she brushed her fingers through her soft curls trying to get them to twirl a way that would look decent on camera. Patting her cheeks she wondered if she needed to add some more makeup or if it were best to just go with the natural look to give them the right idea of the girl proclaiming her love to the company.

“Ok Chanhee,” She took a deep breath, her finger hovering over the record button. “It’s now or never, I can do this!” She cleared her throat and hit the red button.

“Annyeonghaseyo, Lee Chanhee imnida. Twenty-five years old, veterinary assistant... “ the curly haired girl introduced herself with a shy smile and soft voice. She was fidgeting with her curls as she seemed to try and think of the right words to say.

“I guess I should be answering some of these questions…” Her eyes darted off to the words on the screen for a moment as she mouthed the question first before turning back to the camera with a thoughtful look on her face.

“Um… How has SM Entertainment influenced my life? I guess I would say it has turned my world upside down...” A soft chuckle escaped her lips as she finished her words. “Ah, but not in a bad way! Not at all… It has shown me that music is so much more than a simple melody and some words. It’s about the feeling and message that it’s trying to convey. Connecting people with a mutual feeling, regardless of boundaries set by society… I think that’s what makes it beautiful.”

She seemed to really be contemplating her words as she no longer focused on the camera and as her mind wandered off to the message she was trying to convey, she seemed less nervous. “The first song from SM Entertainment that I had ever heard was sung by Super Junior, and it seemed to speak to me in a way I never expected music to do… In particular when Kyuhyun’s part came up. His voice managed to capture the words and the message, touching every heartstring by singing. It felt like he was conveying the message straight to my heart without ever having met. That’s the power of real talent, it says a lot about the artist's abilities.”

A soft hum escaped her lips as she let her own words sink in for a moment, hesitating whether or not she should keep speaking. It was clear that there was more to say, but she wasn’t sure if she could. “Music has saved my life in more ways than one. And to show gratitude I have always supported all the artists. If I ever had the chance to meet them, I would like to thank them for all the strength their music has given me…”

Her eyes moved up to the question on the screen again as she read the final question. “Ah… In all honesty, I’m not sure if I can answer the last question. I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who would deserve being invited more than me. So I’m not going to answer why I think I’m more deserving or special than all the other fans, everyone has their own reasons for being and their own story to tell. So if I get chosen I will feel blessed and thankful, but if not then I will still be right here, supporting the artists to the best of my abilities, that’s the least I could do.”

As she spoke her final words the screen turned to black as the video had finished. The boys stared at the screen for a moment as they let the message sink in before speaking.

“Wow, that has to be the most genuine message we have seen so far...” Sungmin finally spoke up, breaking the silence filling the Super Junior office.

So far they had seen fans declaring their undying love to the company and them as artists draped in every single Super Junior merchandise they could find. Swinging lightsticks, screaming out their names, high on energy drinks and showing the posters that covered their bedroom walls.

But this girl seemed to really take the requirements seriously. She recorded a video and answered the questions diligently and genuinely. Judging by appearance compared with some of the other videos, you could hardly tell she was a fan. But listening to her words, it was clear she thought long and hard about what she wanted to say and she actually knew what she was talking about.

“Tch, unbelievable she chose Kyu’s voice over mine!” Heechul smirked as he nudged the younger male playfully. He had seemed flustered when the girl started speaking about his ability to convey a message. Sure, he had been praised for his voice and talent before but for some reason the way she praised him felt different.

“She knows her stuff, that’s for sure!” Ryeowook nodded in agreement, it wasn’t surprising that someone praised Kyuhyun’s voice. He was one of the main vocalists after all.

“Let’s just pick hers since I doubt there will be any other actual entries on this list!” Kangin stated as he pulled out his phone. They had been watching videos for several hours now, some more cringeworthy and loud than others. He could understand that people were excited to have a chance to meeting them, but after several hours of sitting in one spot and watching these videos, he was in dire need of some change of scenery.

“That wouldn’t be fair towards the other fans,” Leeteuk felt somewhat guilty about the idea of skipping the rest of the entries right away. “I’m sure all of them put a lot of thought and dedication into it.”

“Well, can we at least call in for some food and drinks then?” Shindong suggested, maybe if they had food to keep them busy, enduring these videos would seem a lot less tiring. It was nice to hear all the praise their fans had given them, it definitely made all of them feel grateful for having such a dedicated fanbase.

“Pizza?” Yesung suggested, feeling peckish himself.

“No, chicken!” Eunhyuk protested as he was craving the taste of juicy fried chicken a lot more at the moment, already licking his lips at the thought of it.

“Why not both?” Donghae shrugged, it wouldn’t be the first time they mix and matched their food preferences because honestly, trying to decide on what to eat with ten - thirteen different cravings wasn’t exactly the easiest task in the word.

“Pizza and chicken sound good to me!” Kyuhyun nodded, finally joining in on the conversation. His mind had been replaying the words of praise Chanhee had spoken before, wondering why those specific words seemed to get to him so much.

“I’ll be right back, you guys keep watching!” their manager nodded as he left the room and headed down the hallway. “Ah! Park-ssi!”

The girl stopped in her tracks as she heard her name being called, turning in the direction of the voice as her crimson locks danced around her face. She bowed in greeting as the manager approached her.

“Yes? How can I help you?”

“I need you to order a couple of pizzas and boxes of fried chicken,” the manager told her as he nudged his head back to the office behind him. “The boys are going through the applications and they’re starting to get restless so they need some food to tie them over.”

“The boys?” She arched a brow curiously as she glanced over at the door leading to the office, hearing muffled voices from the other side. “Ah, Super Junior right? Pizza and chicken? Sure, of course, I can arrange that for you.”

“Thank you, I knew I could count on you!” he smiled thankfully as he bowed his head in gratitude. “Don’t take too long, though. They still have a lot of applicants to review.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll have them deliver in fifteen minutes,” Eunmi grinned as she nodded in understanding. “You know how persuasive I can be after all.”

#super junior #super junior donghae #donghae #lee donghae #super junior scenario #super junior scenarios #super junior imagine #super junior story #donghae scenario #donghae scenarios #donghae imagine #donghae story #donghae x reader

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oysterspace6 · 3 years

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How you May Maximize your Facebook Viewers Immediately

It is no hidden secret that having a company profile on Facebook is certainly a major element of a contemporary internet business plan. Yet, even while just about all companies have accounts on the social network, many have difficulties with obtaining website visitors. If this seems like you, do not stress. Whether you're developing your following from the ground up or looking to improve your present Facebook membership, we have a couple of very creative guidelines and resources for anyone to carry out this without delay. 1. Market Your Facebook Accounts on Each Of The Channels The extremely first action to attracting more fans is to improve your Facebook communities and webpages! You really want your social backlinks to appear wherever you provide a brand name existence, thus you might increase the chances that individuals will follow your social media profile. Right here are a number of places to add these hyperlinks for high visibility. Internet mail Welcome your email subscribers to participate in on the enjoyable on your Facebook profiles. You can send a devoted email, or you might incorporate your social media buttons in the web page. Including these buttons in the web page of your e-mail design template is an easy tactic to guarantee your customers will see them whenever they open your emails. Website or blog Customers want to discover businesses on social networks so they can keep updated with discounts, new arrivals, and sales events. Doing this is excellent news for those aiming to improve their Facebook membership with little bit of effort! Create your social buttons as effortless as feasible to discover. You can include these in your site's footer, however ideally, you need to also put social buttons around the top of your webpage. Your clients will never have to scroll downward to find them. Marketing Materials Your advertising efforts don't have to be exclusive to virtual ways. In case you're a physical business or a pop-up store, you're already making marketing products to encourage foot traffic to your establishment. Use these items to enhance quality traffic to your Facebook web page or group also. Customs t-shirt, flyers, and organisation cards can all include social back links or a call-to-action to suggest consumers to follow you. Social Accounts Whenever you get an Instagram company account, welcome your audience to participate on the enjoyable on your Facebook site and group as well. You can quickly tease exclusive rebates, preview for brand-new arrivals, or Facebook Live online sales to excite them. Cross-promoting works between Facebook sites and Facebook organizations, also. If you have a group, make sure that it's linked to your page so your shopper can easily find it! 2. Run Facebook Advertising Campaigns Maybe the most apparent service to acquiring more followers is to operate Facebook advertising campaigns. Paid advertising campaigns ensure that your Facebook page will be found by a larger target viewers than you might naturally. While any advertisement will get your page more exposure, interaction ads are especially developed to market relationships on your web page. If consumers find the content in your advertisement informative, these individuals'll potentially engage along with it and follow your account. 3. Take Advantage Of Facebook Live

Facebook Live video is the holy grail of natural reach. These particular video presentations reveal up more typically in the newsfeed, might captivate your viewers 6x more than pre-recorded web videos, and enables a two-way, real-time conversation among retailers and consumers. You might use this to showcase your new arrivals, demo your products, perform a Facebook Live sale, and even to chat with your people. Facebook Live is a terrific method to improve your engagement rates. In turn, it will increase the possibility that Facebook will favor your video and disperse it to others who might have an interest in following you. 4. Benefit From Facebook Groups If you have not produced a Facebook community, what are you waiting for?! Facebook communities are an excellent method to build trust, encourage engagement, and inspire individuals to follow your company on Facebook. Even though Facebook pages supply an area to display your goods and solutions, Facebook groups offer an area to construct neighborhoods around brands. They are basically specific niche forums for similar individuals. In your scenario, this specific niche forum is about your business and brand name lifestyle. Not like Facebook web pages, you control the privacy configurations of your community. The easiest method to encourage people to participate in your community is to alter your group setups to private. Then you can tease unique advantages for joining. Dibs on brand-new arrivals, discounts, and/or sales are normal benefits for members of personal top quality groups. 5. Market Competition & Prizes Contests and giveaways are an exhilarating way to excite customers and drive particular behaviors, such as liking, feedback, exchanging, and welcoming other people to your page or community. You can easily provide away almost anything from devices to Starbucks gift cards to high-end designer label bags. However, rewards do not require to be pricey. The majority of people will get involved in contests and giveaways for their opportunity to win small prizes. Among the most reliable ways to use contests is to ask consumers to tag themselves in a picture using your products for a chance to win a prize. This particular UGC, or user generated content, is a simple way to catch the attention of their family and friends. Considering that your service is tagged, those that see it can easily find and register with your company. 6. Integrate Social Network with Retailing Offering on social media is not brand-new. The past couple of years have actually provided increase to the comment selling phenomenon. Comment selling has actually significantly increased engagement, along with natural reach, for those that use it. Comment selling is a technique of offering where sellers ask consumers to comment to purchase products on their social media pages. With an automatic remark reader and invoicing system, like CommentSold, consumers get an automated remark reply in addition to an invoice with Messenger, and email. When people find your Facebook website or organization, and discover some people commenting to purchase, they naturally want to participate too. Remark purchasing shows social proof of brand trust and an item's basic charm. Offering through Facebook can also give you other opportunities to switch engaged onlookers into fans. As pointed out earlier, using discounts and benefits can incentivize individuals to follow you. Remark selling makes those benefits much more immediate. Instead of leaving Facebook to sort through a website, they can haul a product and snag a discount rate straight through the newsfeed. The ending instant gratification drives online sales, interaction, and intensifies the possibility of these people following your webpage or community. To elevate your remark offering campaigns, execute a commitment and recommendation program. Commitment programs encourage repeat purchases (more comments), while recommendation programs motivate clients to tell their pals about your place and your Facebook store. Last Thoughts Improving your following doesn't need to be a difficult task. Use these suggestions to drive organic reach, grab your market's consideration, and rope these guys into adopting your organisation on Facebook. Whichever strategies you go with, ensure to publish regularly in a manner that improves engagement. Over time, maximized interaction can transform passive viewers into Facebook fans. For best outcomes, create a social networks marketing and advertising program to develop valuable content that resonates with your perfect viewers.

#social media #cellphones

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serpsupseoccontent · 4 years

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How to Measure Email Marketing KPIs – PLUS Tips to Drive Business Growth

Elevated View Of A Woman Sitting On Carpet And Shopping Online With Shopping Bags

How to Measure Email Marketing KPIs – PLUS Tips to Drive Business Growth

There is no such thing as “going with the flow” in the business world. When our money and our business are involved, we would rather rely on data, analytics & colorful graphs. If you were looking for some help on how to measure email marketing KPI’s to govern your email automation with efficacy, you’ve come to the right place!

Keep reading to pick up some pro advice on measuring your email marketing analytics and grab some free .tips tot drive business growth while your at it!

First, Let’s Discuss Your Open Rate (OR)

Email marketing is one of the easiest types of marketing to measure because you own the content, the list, and every bit of your data. Smart marketers use this as an opportunity to use their data to draw insights that help them take action.

So the first thing that we are going to talk about is Open Rate. What is Open Rate?

Well, open rate is the percentage of people who actually open your emails, out of all of the people that you sent an email to.

How is Open Rate Calculated?

Simple… Take the total emails opened and divide it by the total emails delivered… And then multiply it by 100.

Example of How Email Open Rate is Calculated:

Okay, let’s say you sent an email to 1,000 people. Out of that 1,000, let’s say that 100 people actually opened the email Open Rate = 100 divided by 1000 times 100 would = 10%

Your open rate would be 10%.

What Influences Email Open Rates?

The open rate is mainly influenced by the subject line.

If you want to know an easy way to improve your open rate, just go through your mailbox and see if you see any other examples of interesting headlines. Do they have something in common?

Here are some good examples that I found in my inbox:

Many of them use my first or last name.

They use numbers to indicate listicles or to convey discounts.

They convey their excitement if there is something is new, updated or super interesting.

They use emojis

They use thoughtful questions

Use words that invoke excitement, urgency or exclusivity

The key to good open rates is not using the same trick every time. If you put your recipient’s name in the subject in every email, they will start blocking them out. Keep your subject lines new and interesting, switching up your tactics to get the best results.

Now, here are some things not to do with your email marketing:

Email Marketing No Nos:

Don’t use lazy subject lines, or subject lines that are too flowery. If you promise your readers the sun, moon, and stars, you will sound like those guys that we all hate who are now the reason that non of us will ever know if we’ve really won anything…

You know then ones…

Comngratulations! Eric Allson is the WINNER of $50,000!

Don’t SCREAM in your subject lines by using all capital letters. Don’t lie and use dirty tricks to get people’s attention. Keep them relative to the topic of your email content, and genuinely try to help people. The same marketing tactics that worked 200 years ago will still work today, it’s the inescapable truth of supply and demand.

People hate it when you say, “Free Amazon Gift Card!” in the subject line and then try to sell them a toaster oven. Those people SUCK!

Now, Let’s Talk About Click-through-rate (CTR)

So what is Click-Through Rate?

Easy… Click-Through Rate is the percentage of recipients who clicked on one of the links included in your email.

How is Click-Through Rate Calculated?

Click-through rate is calculated by taking the total number of unique clicks and dividing it by the number of emails delivered, then multiplying times 100.

Example of How Click-Through Rate is Calculated?

Let’s say that your total emails delivered was 1,000 again. Let’s say that out of that 1,000, you got 150 clicks on link #1, and 50 clicks on link #2. So, your total clicks is 200 in this case.

Your Click-Through Rate (CTR) would be calculated like this:

150+50 = 200 divided by 1000 times 100 = 20%

So your CTR is 20%

Dependent upon: Content, CTA, Responsiveness of your email design

This metric tells you how ‘engaged’ your audience is in your brand and content. CTR helps you judge the performance of your A/B testing or multivariate testing emails.

The content of your relational email should be inspiring, informational, or educational. Are you telling them something new or something they already know, but in a fun and simple way? People should bother enough to read it.

Just providing great content and value in emails is not enough. You have to lead the reader to the next step. The next step is guided with a clear call to action.

What do we mean by clear CTA? It means that:

It is distinctly visible among the rest of the content. Draw people’s attention to it by making it clearly visible with enough white space around it. If you are using it as a hyperlink, make the copy obvious. It is specific. Use a precise copy of what will happen when the reader clicks on the button/link. It is placed after you have given some context about the emails. Use text that’s not too pushy, e.g. choose to say ‘Learn More’ instead of ‘Buy Now’. Have one CTA above the fold.

Bounce Rate It’s the percentage of people who didn’t receive the email in their inbox.

How to calculate

Bounce Rate = (Total number of emails bounced/Number of emails sent) * 100

Example: Total emails sent by you: 1,000 Emails that reached the inbox: 970 Total Emails that bounced = 1000-970 = 30 Bounce Rate = (30/1000)*100 = 3%

Dependent Upon: Sender’s IP reputation or validity of email address

A soft bounce occurs when either the recipient’s mailbox is full or the server is down or the message is too large for the recipient’s inbox. This is a temporary issue and you can ignore it if it’s not too high.

A hard bounce occurs when the email address is invalid or doesn’t exist. Sometimes, people might make a typo or intentionally add an invalid address to just get a hold of your free lead magnet.

So the best thing to do is to immediately remove hard-bounced email addresses. This will improve your sender’s reputation too, eventually ensuring high delivery rate.

List Growth The rate at which your email list is growing. You can calculate it weekly or monthly. Once you choose a time period, then stick to it to make accurate comparisons each time.

How to calculate

List Growth = [((Number of new subscribers – (Number of unsubscribes)) ÷ Total email addresses on your list] * 100

Example: No. of Total email addresses on the list = 1,000 No. of new subscribers = 200 No. of unsubscribers = 10 List growth = ((200-10)/1000)*100 = 19%

Dependent Upon:It is dependent upon your subscriber acquisition strategy.

You should optimise all the sources to gather emails. Like, look at the conversion rate of your landing page. You can run some social media ads directing people to your signup form or landing page.

List growth is important because eventually some people will churn out of the list or become non-engaged so you should keep adding new contacts. And of course, higher the list size, more the business and impact of your work.

List growth won’t always go upwards, especially if you are in seasonal business or your volume is very high. Here is a snapshot from a list of 100K members. As you can see, the list growth keeps fluctuating.

Unsubscribe Rate It’s the percentage of people who opted out of receiving your emails.

How to calculate

Unsubscribe Rate = (No. Of unsubscribers/Total email delivered into the inbox) * 100

Example: No. of total email addresses on the list: 1,000 No. of unsubscribers: 5 Unsubscribe rate = (5/1000)*100 = 0.5%

Dependent Upon: Content, Quality of your email list, Frequency of emails

If your content is not adding value to the subscriber, or it’s too hard for them to go through the content, they will unsubscribe. So make sure you get some feedback on your content.

If your content is valuable but still if your unsubscribe rate is high, then maybe the audience you are targeting is not right. This is where you focus on the quality of the list for your particular business or content.

The frequency of your emails is also important. It shouldn’t be so frequent that people get irritated. Also, it shouldn’t be so delayed that they don’t remember signing up or relating to your brand. Thus, unsubscribing.

Every time you send an email, there will be some churn, so don’t worry if someone unsubscribes. It’s better than a non-engaged audience. But if there are unusually high unsubscribes then you need to look at your strategy, content, and the kind of audience you are attracting.

To find out why your subscribers are leaving, you can add a short survey for people to fill out when they hit the unsubscribe button.

But make it optional. If unsubscribing it too hard, then the next step the reader will take is to mark your emails as spam. And we want to avoid that to maintain a good sender’s reputation.

How to compare? There are two kinds of benchmark to see if your metrics are good or not: Industry benchmarks, and your own benchmarks.

Industry benchmarks can be looked at once and then you just try to stay in the ballpark figures. But you should pay attention to your own benchmarks.

The best way to have your own benchmarks is to compile data over a period of time – over a few months. Then you can compare weekly numbers with your benchmark to see if they are on track, growing or declining.

Wrap Up Paying attention to email analytics will help you better grow, maintain, and convert your email lists. That will boost revenue, impact and your influence. So don’t just send an email and forget. Track the key metrics we discussed above.

You don’t have to deal with calculations and spreadsheets of numbers all by yourself. These days, most email marketing softwares provide an analytics dashboard that you can look at after every campaign or over a period of time.

If you are looking for an email marketing software that can help you gather these important pieces of data and provide them in easy to understand dashboards, then you should try SendX. You can take a 14-day free trial that will give you access to all the features, analytics, reporting and charts. You don’t even need a credit card to access the free trial. So give it a try today.

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soobadnoonecanstopher · 7 years

Text

I Give Up - part 27 (A Baekhyun Series)

Genre: suspense / angst

Characters: Baekhyun X You

A/N: Trigger warning: violence, attempted assault: sexual/physical, drugs/alcohol.

I Give Up - part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5 , part 6 , part 7 , part 8 , part 9 , part 10 , part 11 , part 12, part 13, part 14, part 15, part 16, part 17, part 18, part 19, part 20, part 21, part 22, part 23, part 24, part 25, part 26, part 27, part 28 FINAL,

I Give Up Deleted Scenes Masterlist

The Notebook Kinks 1 Pink Heart Days

You were putting on mascara when your phone buzzed, letting you know of an incoming text. It was probably one of the friends who were meeting up later at the small bar near campus. You swiped when you recognized Minah’s name, your best friend who you had invited along. Your exams and being so busy with your boyfriend had made you neglect your best friend lately and you made her promise to join tonight.

When Baekhyun found out you were bringing Minah along he seemed to settle down a bit about your classmate, and study buddy Kim Youngshik who was going as well. While you understood his reservations, you really didn’t think he had to treat the guy like his arch nemesis simply because the guy seemed to have a little crush on you.

Surely an intelligent guy like Youngshik had enough understanding to accept that you were unavailable and clearly not interested in him that way. He was a friend. A good friend who lent you notes for classes he had already taken that he knew you would need soon, and even gave you heads up about which professors to stay away from. With how far removed Baekhyun was from college life, it was difficult for him to understand the benefits of making friends with your classmates, especially the super helpful ones like Youngshik.

It wasn’t like you gave Baekhyun a hard time about hanging out with all of those beauties from the different idol groups. Just recently you had seen him being sweet online with Yoona of SNSD, during one of those LOL broadcasts. You knew the man well enough to recognize his body language and you knew what a slightly flustered nervous flirt looked like.

You hadn’t said a thing about it! You just closed the browser on your laptop with a few more mouse clicks than necessary and maybe you slammed the screen shut a bit too hard. You handled that like a perfectly reasonable adult and the funny noise your laptop had been making lately had nothing to do with your jealousy.

Did he really have to speak so cutely to his translator like that? Did he have to give her all those coupons too? Couldn’t he just….not?

No no…that was just him. He was sweet and generous and he was easy for a laugh and quick with a blinding smile. There was nothing at all behind the gifts. That was just Baekhyun.

And he was yours.

”Oh shit, Is this you?!!!” the text from Minah was well punctuated and had a link leading to some sort of celebrity news article site. You usually tried not to pay attention to these things. Celebrity gossip news was garbage and rarely based on any real facts, but you felt your stomach drop a bit when you clicked on the link, seeing the word EXO in the link words.

When the page loaded you felt dizzy and just a little more nauseated than you should feel right now.

EXO Member Caught Dating - Exclusive Photo Evidence Inside

You have never clicked on a link so fast in your life, feeling an instant annoyance at the slow loading website with annoying ads. The article was sparse. Promising loads of juicy details without actually delivering a thing and by the time you reached the end you had learned that the gossip reporters had received a tip. Absolute proof that a member of popular Idol Group EXO had a girlfriend and the article cut off with a link accessible only to paid subscribers of the news site.

Your phone was out and you were texting Baekhyun as that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach swelled and settled like a stubborn rock refusing to budge.

Your fingers weren’t quite working on your touchscreen keyboard and you groaned in frustration as you opted to call him instead.

“Hello?” His answer was instantaneous and you checked the tone of his voice for any signs that anything at all could be wrong.

“Baek, what–” You could feel the panic bubbling inside your throat and a quick steadying breath to calm yourself some interrupted your words, “–what are you doing now?”

“Hmm?” He hummed on the line, sounding like the same sweet man you had grown so used to, so comfortable with and you tried to ignore that stupid rock in your gut.

“Ahh, I’m laying down in my bed, feeling abandoned and unloved because my girlfriend is going out with her friends tonight and she told me I can’t come along. I’m thinking about crying a little bit later.”

His dramatics were perfectly intact and you came to the instant conclusion that he either didn’t yet know about the gossip article, or it wasn’t anything concerning. You hoped and prayed it was the later.

“Umm.” You inhaled a deep breath and decided the best way to approach this was to be direct.

“T-There’s an article on some stupid website that Minah just sent me…and I was just–”

“Ahh, is it the one about an EXO member dating?” He interrupted you in his soft voice and you felt a small speck of relief when you heard that voice.

He knew about it, yet he didn’t sound upset at all. He didn’t sound nervous or mad and you simply hummed in response to him. The panic you felt earlier had shifted into a sort of confusion about the reality of the situation.

“It said there were pictures, but I couldn’t see them I dont–” this time you interrupted yourself, unable to formulate any real conclusions without any facts about the situation.

“You dont think…it’s that person do you? The one that Hilda found? S-She said she had pictures, what if…what if she did something already?”

“Well if she did, we will have to handle it.” His words sounded so casual you stared ahead in disbelief, trying to will yourself to feel as calm as he sounded.

Could you really handle it? Could his career handle a huge scandal and could you handle the knowledge that you contributed to such a damaging blow to the man you loved?

“The pictures haven’t been released yet anyway, so we don’t know if their claims are even true. My manager said something about someone on twitter and I heard a couple of other members names. I’m not that concerned. Hilda will take care of it.”

How could he be so calm and dismissive about this? You felt like you wanted to vomit and he wasn’t that concerned.

“What time are you meeting Minah at the bar? What are you going to wear? Will you eat before you drink?” He was talking faster, asking his usual overprotective questions that somehow served to settle your mind back into your usual light mood when you spoke to him.

“I’m wearing the shortest skirt I own of course.” You teased in response and you heard him whine. You knew the look you would find on his face. The usual disgruntled pout.

“Are you sure you’re only going to one bar and then coming straight home?”

You had reached a point in your relationship with Baekhyun where you knew when it was time to put a stop to his dramatics, or risk getting stuck in this trap. His endless worries and protectiveness, paired with his capacity for impressive theatrics usually had to be kept in check for his own good.

“Oh, Minah just texted me that she’s leaving. I’ll be good I promise and I’ll call you later, I love you baby.” You may have had to stretch your truths with him when he got like this, and you really would text Minah as soon as you hung up with him. He didn’t need to know every single detail.

“You better answer my calls.” The threat in his voice sounded pretty believable this time and you hummed into the line before you hung up the phone to finish getting ready.

Okay so maybe your shortest skirt stayed behind in your closet, opting for skinny jeans and a flowy top. But you swore to yourself it had nothing to do with your sweet, slightly fragile boyfriend who was waiting at home for you to send him a selfie of you arriving safely in the bar. You pulled Minah close beside you and made her smile for the picture, sure to capture your whole image so he could verify that you were, in fact, in one piece and completely safe.

“Where is whats-his-face?”

His response came quick and you assured him that you didn’t know where Youngshik was, nor were you in any hurry to greet him tonight.

“Put your phone away, he will be fine without you for one night!” Minah had two drinks in her hand and was shoving one of them into your open hand as she pulled you further into the bar. You heard the sounds of music growing louder and what sounded like karaoke. Some pour soul was butchering one of your favorite songs and you decided that a few shots might help you handle that better.

Your first drink went down fast and with your giggling best friend on your arm, encouraging you to let loose you may have lost track of how many drinks you had as the laughter grew louder, the music grew more fun and much more tolerable, despite the endless chain of off key singers who took the stage and familiar smiles around the tables greeted you again and again. Some with hugs, others with jokes and one in particular with a request.

“Oh come on…” Youngshik was tugging on your arm. From the glassy look in his eyes you could tell he was drunk. Not falling down, but he definitely felt different than the usual studious dean’s list student you had gotten to know well during the semester.

“Come dance with me,” he whined with a pout on his face and a silly little hip wiggle that made you snort. You were too drunk to refuse the silly request and you headed toward the small space between the tables where a few friends were dancing to the upbeat song playing on the screen.

Dancing with Youngshik was fun. You weren’t particularly aware of much but he kept his hands to himself, thankfully and when the song was over you turned to head back to your table where your phone sat alone, waiting for you to check on. You thought you saw it light up once when you were making your way toward it but the lights in the bar were flashing with the music played too loudly, making you second guess yourself…making you think you saw things. Was it buzzing? You had nearly reached it when you felt a hand reach for yours and the surprise made you turn to look.

Youngshik was back. His glassy eyes blinking at you wide, you felt his hand wrap around your wrist and pull you back. Almost roughly, just enough to surprise you and make you look down at your wrist as it moved toward where he pulled.

“You need to come back, please dance just one more with me, come on.” He turned back toward where you had been dancing and you noticed the song had changed. The lights in the bar were pulsing with the beat of the music and every turn of your head sent the room spinning in a way that took just a second too long to settle.

“Are you okay?” Your feet had traveled, carrying you to the same spot where you had been laughing and dancing just minutes before…before you had left for something. What was it?

Someone was tapping and rubbing along your back now and you looked up, finding his eyes.

“Oh…oh it’s you, Youngshik.” You smiled a wide smile that he watched with curiously strange eyes for a moment before you saw him return it with a bright inviting smile of his own.

“Yeah its me. We were dancing remember? And then you ran away.” He frowned dramatically and you lifted your head feeling the shift in the music. The song that played now was slower and your dance partner didn’t seem to be bothered by the change one bit.

“Are you sure you’re okay? You seem to be drunk.” He giggled now and Minah howled with laughter in the background. The boys she had been talking to were making her laugh, feeding her new drinks with the sort of reckless abandon reserved for college life. This time when you were young and invisible and game for anything.

“I’m okay,” you said with a smile on your face that hopefully looked at least a little bit sober, “let’s dance then.”

You felt yourself give in to him. Had he always been this convincing?

The song was slow and you swayed with the beat for a while, willing the room to settle down some. There was a bit of relief when the chaotic lights stopped their assault on your senses and you could finally open your eyes.

You felt warm. Flushed and humid and someone had you in their arms as you swayed to the music.

How long was this song?

You had to check your phone. You were sure you saw it light up before. Before when you had tried to come back to the table and you were pulled away by…who was holding you so tightly?

Your head swam as you lifted it and you found the owner of the arms who held you upright was so familiar, yet different somehow. He held on too tight and he smelled wrong. Not like the one you loved, this one was…wrong.

His hands held too tight and when you looked up saw his face descending quickly. What was he doing? He wasn’t about to kiss you was he?

You pushed back, resisting, expecting him to loosen his grip around your waist quickly but feeling a weird resistance and a darkening in his eyes that sent a chill down your spine.

“Where are you going? We are dancing.” The voice that sounded close to your ear had an edge to it that you didn’t like and you felt a wave of something wash over you. What was that? It wasn’t pleasant. But the alcohol in your system was clouding everything you felt and made it hard to describe.

“I don’t want to dance with you anymore.” You said suddenly as you pushed out of his arms. Why did you have to push so hard to get him to let go? Perhaps your strength had been used up during the dance. Maybe he was holding on that tight.

The shove had been hard and you saw him stumble back, hitting his leg against a chair behind him that bumped against the table with your friends and classmates. A beer fell, a shout was heard out and you turned and made your way toward the bar. Your destination wasn’t for more alcohol but the bathrooms and you found the familiar symbol that told you this was the ladies room, pushing inside.

The air inside the bathroom felt cooler. The door closed behind you and muted the loud music that you hadn’t even realized had been muddling your brain until it shut off and the relief you felt was palpable.

You took your time, emptying your bladder and washing your hands in the sink before you splashed the cool tap water over your face, careful not to mess up your eye makeup, but feeling comfort in the coolness over your cheeks.

Your face was flushed and red from the heat and the drinks and you stared for a long while at your reflection before you heard a sound behind you.

You saw a familiar face and Minah smiled at you, clearly drunker than you were. You remembered the drinks the boys at the table had been pushing on her and she bounded in with her arms wide as she hugged you tightly, kissing your cheek over and over as she giggled.

“Youuu–” she slurred and you laughed. “Youngshik likes you. Didn’t you tell him you have a boyfriend?”

“It’s not like that Minah. We are just friends.” you responded, all the while thinking of the tense discomfort you felt moments earlier while dancing with him. In the quiet of the bathroom you began feeling a more clear headed now that you were out of the noise and the lights of the bar.

“I think I’m going to go home with Hoseok,” she giggled, “have you seen his ass lately? I’m going to get that.” Her voice was full of drunken confidence and you leaned against the counter as you waited for her to pee and come back out of the stall she had disappeared inside.

“Hoseok? Is he the one with the shiny shirt or the one with the mushroom haircut?”

“Shiny shirt. Mushroom is Minhyuk…although Minhyuk is really fucking hot too. I don’t care, either of them would do–” her giggles echoed out from behind the stall, “or both of them.”

“–if I disappear forever tonight, just know that I died a happy woman.”

You both emerged from the sanctity of the ladies room, feeling the stifling heat, the smell of too many patrons in one place and the raucous laughter of drunken mischief surround your head instantly.

“Oh you and your casual hookups…just be careful Minah. You know I need you.” She leaned into your arms around her as she laughed.

“And I need sex sometimes. We can’t all be as lucky as you…sex god as a boyfriend and all.” Her voice was loud and you raised your hand to her mouth to silence the ridiculous words she was spewing before she could accidently say his name, or anything else that definitely didn’t need to be broadcasted in this place.

She pulled your hand down and gave you a sassy look

“Oh settle down, I may be drunk but I still remember the confidentiality agreement that showed up with a lawyer at my house the day after I met him.”

Her words made you stop your forward movement and you felt her stumble when you suddenly stopped. Her arms around you going slack for a moment before she let go.

She looked into your surprised face before she wrinkled her nose and shook her head, taking a few unstable steps to close the distance between you both.

“I guess you didn’t know that part. Yeah, we all got them. Dahee, Jaewoo, Taeil, everyone who knows about you and him–”

Your fuzzy mind was having trouble processing the flood of information you suddenly had thrust at you.

Baekhyun had sent lawyers to your friends and made them sign legal documents? Your expression must have looked worried because you felt her warm arms around you, pulling you in for a tight hug.

“Don’t worry about it. You know more than anything I was…impressed,” she rubbed along your back as she hugged you, reassuring you with her words against your ear, “he seems to really love you. The measures he takes to keep you safe and happy feel very genuine.”

You felt her release you and she smiled as you began to soften up some.

You had both reached the tables, walking by groups of classmates who laughed, flirted, even made out with each other and you looked around for Youngshik, feeling a weird unease at not knowing exactly where he was for some reason. You couldn’t be sure of the source of this weird feeling, but even significantly dimmed by the alcohol in your system, you were certain that this Youngshik felt different than the one you had been close with all semester.

Was it just the alcohol?

When you sat down at the table you saw your phone right where you had left it and you picked up to check for messages or missed calls.

Honestly you expected at least one message or one call. Something.

But strangely the thing was bare. Not a single message waiting, no notifications pending. Not even a voicemail.

Perhaps you had imagined it. The illumination you were sure you had seen on your phone as you tried to return to the table, only to be pulled back by your drunk dance partner demanding another dance. Was it really just the lights in the club?

You grabbed your phone and glanced around once more, checking for your small change purse that you had stuffed in your pocket with important things like your license and your cash, you stood, suddenly deciding that you needed just a bit of air. Just a bit of a break from this stuffy club and the loud laughter and these two people all over each other in the booth next to you.

The front door of the bar was busy, packed with people filtering in and out and you waited for what felt like forever for a pause in the traffic. Finally you saw an out and you took it, slipping past the people onto the sidewalk outside.

The peace wasn’t as overwhelming and instant as you hoped it would be because the crowds of people out here were just as thick, just as drunk and just as obnoxious.

“Hey baby where you going?” A bro with a backwards cap and a ridiculous accent shouted in your direction as you brushed past him, ignoring the laughter that seemed to be cut short suddenly behind you.

Your curiosity was overshadowed by the haze in your vision as you walked and tried to keep your feet moving forward.

The one thing he told you, don’t get wasted. And here you were, having completely lost track of the number of drinks you had as you wandered outside of this club alone, desperate for the ground to quit trying to spin away from your legs like that.

The ground wasn’t cooperating and you felt your phone buzzing inside the back pocket of your jeans. Waking and finding your phone was too much so you had to stop and lean against the quiet space off to the side of the bar. Nearly in the alleyway, the light from the street lamps provided enough light for you to see ahead of you just fine.

His name flashed across your screen…well the name you had in your phone for him. A leftover from your first meeting, when he showed up in your parents dry cleaning shop with a stained shirt.

“Hello My love…” You held the phone to your ear, feeling the overwhelming love you felt course through you just by seeing him call your phone.

“Where the fuck are you?” His words flew through your ear like a bullet seeking its target and you flinched at the harshness you heard. It was his voice, you were sure of it, but he sounded so tense and worked up that you had to pull the phone away from your ear for a second to control the flare of nerves that rushed through your body.

“W-What do you mean? You know where I am?”

“And Him? Where the fuck is that piece of shit? Do you know what it feels like to–” You could hear the anger now, flooding through the phone and you knew he would be so consumed by it that the words were getting jumbled.

You felt blindsided by it though. Where was this coming from? He had been happy when you last talked to him and he didn’t even call you while you had been out.

Your heart sped up inside your chest and you shook your head, trying to make some sense of this sudden mood. This sudden rage that had taken over him again.

He groaned away from the phone and you heard a car horn honking noisily on the line. Was he driving? While this mad? What if something happened to him?

“Would you care to explain to me, why he is answering your phone for you…asking, no fucking demanding to know who the fuck I am and why I would be calling your phone?” His voice dropped to a low growl as he spoke words you couldn’t quite make any sense of.

“Who a-answered my p-phone Baekhyun?” Your mind was a mess and your mouth didn’t get the words out as smoothly as you wanted, not with him yelling at you like this. You felt nervous and confused and quite drunk to be honest.

“How drunk are you? You sound like you’re completely wasted, I can’t fucking believe this.” He let out a loud puff of air over the mic of his phone and you could hear the squealing of brakes before he came back on the line from whatever he had done in his car.

“‘S-She doesn’t have a boyfriend? She’s mine now?’ Did you tell him you didn’t have a boyfriend? Why would he say that to me?”

“Who are you talking about Baekhyun? I don’t know what you are saying–”

The words cut off when you felt the absence of the phone that laid warmly over your ear just a second before.

Where was his voice? His angry breathing and the sounds of his horn honking and his brakes stopping short? Your hand was empty and you looked behind you as soon as you felt it. The tell-tale presence of someone warm and alive standing behind you.

The surprise of the phone being taken didn’t quite compare to the chest trembling shaking that you felt when you heard that same cell phone fly across the alley way you stood in and hit the wall of the opposite building, shattering glass and plastic as it hit.

You shrieked in genuine fear and surprise but that sound was muffled by a hand over your mouth. You felt your legs moving, shoved deeper into the darkness of the alley as the wall behind you came up fast. Too fast, it hit you hard and the sensation of heavy arms over your chest made it hard to breathe.

Your eyes were wide as your heart beat fast in your chest. The fuzziness of the alcohol made your reality swim and you looked ahead into cold glassy eyes as a sick sinking feeling consumed your body.

Eyes that looked familiar, yet so different from the same ones you had seen all semester. Sweet, friendly, smiling and helpful before, but now you saw nothing but coldness. And anger? But…why?

“You just don’t get it do you?” Youngshik whispered out in a soft voice against your face. The smell of his breath, acrid and vile up close made your stomach churn and you pushed against the weight of his arms over your chest as you tried to scream.

The sound didn’t come out. His hand over your mouth was too tight and the effort made you dizzy. Your hands gripped against them, trying desperately to pull his hands off of you in vain. He was too strong and too blinded by whatever rage was happening inside his head.

“I thought you were smart, but you keep on disappointing me.” You felt a pain where his arms pushed against your chest, leaning over you too hard now and your faced screwed together in agony. The action felt deliberate, but the look in his eyes was suddenly disconnected as he watched your face. Those eyes moved slowly, taking their time as he watched you up close and you felt your skin crawling as he did it. When he shifted his weight you felt his arm move from the crushing hold it kept over your chest and the weight of his legs moved around yours, pinning you against the wall with strong thighs that kept you from escaping. The heat of his body was on you, making your stomach churn as the nausea took over your body. With the way he pushed up against you like this you felt the unmistakable bulge he pressed against your thigh. You whined and tried to wiggle away from him.

His eyes followed his fingers now, the arm he just freed was trailing lightly along your hairline when you felt him grip roughly, the hair on the side of your head, pushing it hard against the wall.

The pain was intense and you winced as you tried to move in the direction he pulled.

“I gave you so much. I worked so hard for you, helping you as much as I could and for what? What have you given me? Not a thing. But stupid girls like you just don’t get it. I guess should just fucking take it.” Your cries were still muffled by his hand that grew sweaty now as he partially covered your nose, making you feel dizzier and light headed the longer he did it. The tears streaming from your eyes now added to the wetness of his hand. Your breathing gasped through your nose desperately trying to get some fresh air, anything you could get, but his hand was too tight. Your hand swung out, trying to grab ahold of something, anything. You made contact with skin, somewhere on him, his arm or his face, you couldn’t know for sure but each scratch of your nails went ignored.

“All you had to do was break up with him. That’s it. I made it so easy for you. I even used my sister’s stupid fancafe account and her stationary so you would take the threat seriously … when I found out who he was I couldn’t fucking believe my luck. She just happened to be one of those stupid morons who in hopelessly in love with that asshole.”

His words had an echo that rattled inside your ears but their truth hit you hard. Had he sold the pictures he had? Was this bomb waiting to drop as soon as that magazine decided to release the proof. But what were the pictures? You didn’t doubt Youngshik’s insanity at this point. The lengths he was willing to go to get what he wanted had been made abundantly clear. How damning would those pictures be? Career ending? Cataclysmic and so revealing they would follow Baekhyun around for the rest of his life? Your panic rose inside your chest and you felt the world grow just a little greyer as the ugliness was made more pronounced.

The street lights behind his head in the alley had taken on a flickering behavior, as if they were going out. Blinking in and out over his head the dizziness was changing the longer he kept his hand over your nose and those lights were so dim.

“He’s not even that special. That’s not a real man, I’ll show you a real man–”

You heard a sound. Something loud and something significant so up close and those glassy eyes that had been glaring wicked at you shifted with that sound.

What was that sound? Your eyes tried to open but you were slipping lower, down onto the ground, the rough bricks at your back scraping against your shoulders as you sunk lower until you sat on the floor, dizzy and gasping.

Because you could breathe. His hand was gone and you gasped in desperately, filling your lungs with precious air finally, but unable to get enough. It wasn’t enough. You needed more, you gasped and choked, filling yours lungs over and over. Your mind was pulled by a sick fleshy sound as you fell forward onto your hands. The trembling in your chest was too much and there was something happening right in front of you.

Something noisy. The sounds of impacting flesh…someone hitting something, or someone, again and again and you then you saw him. He grunted and growled with each punch. His familiar black coat and a facemask over his face, hood over his head and he was on top of that…that.. evil man who had tried to hurt you.

Baekhyun must have pulled him off of you but something felt so wrong with the man you loved. His sweetness was gone. His smiles and laughter were a distant memory as he hit Youngshik, over and over again, the growling you heard from him as he hit had stopped and his breathing echoed out so hard. His eyes were focused and driven as he hit, smashing his fist into the man’s face with such force you knew something would break. Whether Baekhyun’s fist or Youndshiks face or both.

Baekhyun was gone. He was so consumed with the rage you saw trembling as he pulled up roughly on the bloody faced man, shaking him hard with his fist tight around his collar until his eyes slit open, waking up just enough for another punch.

You stared at the scene before you trying to recognize either man.

“Baekhyun,” you said, finding that your voice worked. The tremors in your body had subsided enough for you to recognize what was happening and you knew you had to stop him.

He had to stop. For his own sake, for the sake of the man you loved, you had to stop him. Before this destroyed him and everything he had worked for his entire life, this had to stop.

“Baekhyun stop,” you said again louder and you caught the tick of his head as he looked up, fist raised mid air. His knuckles were red and bloody and his head turned to you.

Youngshik coughed weakly, spitting out blood from his lips and the grip that Baekhyun had around the man’s collar fell, sending the back down onto the pavement with a grunt of pain.

Baekhyun looked down at the man below him before he looked back at you, his eyes changing and clearing the more he saw you and he was moving, scrambling away from the fight, from the violence and from the anger he was moving toward you with his arms outstretched.

“Baby…” his voice was quiet and muffled by the mask and the heavy breathing but his voice was his own.

You felt his hands reach for yours and closer as he crouched before you on his ankles. His hands reached for your face before you saw his eyes glance down at his hands. He winced at the bloody mess of his hands and pulled them back, not touching your skin with his hands like you had wanted him to.

You reached instead. If he wouldn’t do it you would and you felt him lean closer when you reached for his waist, slinking your hands under his coat, against the warmth of his body, over the thin tshirt that seemed much too cold for this night.

Baekhyun gave in to your touch and fell down off his ankles onto his knees before you and you felt his warmth wrap tightly around you.

“Shhh…” you heard him whispering over your head and your mind whirled to realize that the crying sound was coming from your own lips.

“Shhh, baby you’re okay,” he said as he held you tighter and rubbed harder over your back.

Even now, with the sweat from the fight, the dirt and blood on his hands and the stress from the night you felt it. The complete and undeniable comfort and safety in his warm arms. You breathed in as best you could through the quiet cries that shook your chest and the smell of him filled your senses. Drowning out the fear and the noises erupting around you as people arrived.

“Mr. Byun, Didn’t I tell you not to come here alone?” A serious voice spoke over your head. Familiar and accented, you looked up to see Hilda, the woman in charge of security.

Baekhyun didn’t respond to her and you felt him pulling you up to your feet, his arms firm and steady around your waist.

“Come on, let’s go to the hospital.” He wasn’t responding to Hilda or to anyone else from the group of men in black suits that asked him questions.

You heard Hilda’s voice again, the curt all business way she spoke made you open your eyes again.

“You must not go to back to your car. There are crowds now. People have been taking pictures. It’s not exactly a conspicuous car… your name is already being circulated on twitter” .

“What about the ones I hit,” he responded.

“The driver of the motorcycle on the sidewalk and the other parked car have already been dealt with,” she let out an exasperated sigh as her eyes narrowed in his direction. “But did you really have to drive on the sidewalk? This is such a mess.”

“And what would have happened to her if I waited behind with you? I don’t pay you to follow the fucking traffic laws, I pay you to protect my family,” he snapped and you saw the glance the woman gave you before she shut her mouth with a small nod of her head.

“Give me your car.”

She nodded and lifted her eyebrows in the direction of a black sedan that was parked in the alley.

“At least let me drive,” she said.

The first steps felt uneasy and you leaned into him, not quite getting why you felt so weak. Was this just from the alcohol. Perhaps you were in shock from the attack.

“Can you walk?” He said above your head and your feet stumbled against themselves.

He bent down and you were flying. Lifted so high into the air you felt swaying and the breeze along your face, your arms wrapped around his neck and you felt the dizziness take over as you slumped against his shoulder, nuzzling into his neck, you craved his warmth and his smell. Anything that would tell you you were safe with him now. That he was okay and that you were okay.

“Me. Byun I will take her to the hospital. Please you should leave before someone sees you.” A low voice you didn’t know spoke with authority and you felt his grip tighten around you.

“Absolutely not. She doesn’t leave me.”

The path to the car took you by by the man who did this. He was awake and sitting up against the wall, what looked like a private doctor for hire examining him, asking him questions with big scary looking men with suits and ear pieces looming over them. Next to the men stood another man in a police uniform. Strangely silent and uninvolved, you wondered if the policeman was real or if he was just there to look real. He definitely didn’t feel like a policeman the way he ignored you, not even bothering to take any statement from you before you were taken away. He didn’t once look up at Baekhyun as he carried you away, despite having clearly been involved in this fight that left the other guy so broken and hurt.

Youngshik looked dazed and hurt and you watched until he moved. You stiffened and gasped when his dark eyes looked up at you.

“Don’t look at him, love,” Baekhyun whispered into your ear and you closed your eyes tightly.

Hilda drove quickly and you found your mind drifting as you laid against his chest in the back seat of the car and listened to his heartbeat.

You must have fallen asleep because you woke hours later in a hospital bed with an awful taste in your mouth. You lifted your hand, feeling the tug of the IV in your hand and you heard voices you recognized.

Weird words were thrown around and the dizziness in your head was fading as you listened.

You heard the word drugged and lucky and you searched searched for the source of the voices.

Baekhyun and your mom stood at the foot of the bed speaking with a doctor in a white coat and you moaned at the pain you felt in your head.

Their three faces turned and you were rushed upon by your mom who reached for your hand, squeezing tight as she looked closely at your face, asking a million questions in only one breath that made you blink wide at the woman as you willed her to speak quieter.

“If Baekhyun hadn’t been there–” She was crying now and from the look of her puffy eyes, this wasn’t the first time tonight. His hand was on her shoulder and she rose quickly to wrap her arms around his neck as she wept and muttered her sincere thanks. He hugged her tight, catching your eyes for a moment before he closed them. Swallowing away the pain you saw behind those eyes with his closed lids.

The fuss died down and you were made to eat something that you could only choke down half of. Your mom left making him promise to take care of you and soon you found yourself sitting up in the bed with his eyes watching you silently.

Baekhyun looked tired. His hair was flat and lifeless against his forehead and his right hand had bandages over the knuckles.

“Did you crash your car?” You broke your own silence and he licked his lips and swallowed before he blinked with a small nod of his head.

“Yeah, a little bit.” His eyes were still on you, a strange look in them. Neither admonishing or disappointed, he looked at you with what you could only describe as a silent reverie of thanksgiving.

He had been there.

You felt the emotions sneaking up on you as he looked at you. He leaned forward with his lips parted and let out a quiet exhale of breath before his hands lifted and he covered his face with both of them. His elbows rested on your bed, near your hand with the painful IV and you reached your fingers out to graze against his arm. Lightly touching, feeling the warmth of man you loved more than anything else in the whole world.

He let out a quiet, nearly inaudible gasp and his shoulders began to tremble. He was so silent as he wept.

He has been so strong and you felt the pain inside your chest as he gave in to it. The fear, the stress, the near tragedy of it, he withstood it like a pillar of strength.

Yet with you, at your hospital bed without another soul present, he could finally break down.

“I thought… I thought I wouldn’t make it in time.” Muffled by his hands over his face and by the quiet sobs, you made barely out his words.

“Don’t…don’t you scare me like this again, I can’t –” he pulled his hands down and wiped the tears from his face. His lips trembled and his nose was red and you wiped the tears from your own face.

“I can’t live without you. It’s not just that I don’t want to, I can’t.” He stood and leaned over you and you felt the wetness on his cheeks before you felt his lips on yours, pressing down hard, paying no attention to the tears and the wetness that dropped from your nose now, he kissed you firmly and with meaning.

When he pulled away you heard a bell chime. He was reaching for tissues and he held the box out for you when he pulled his phone out of his pocket. Absentmindedly wiping at his face with a tissue now.

His eyes took in the information on his phone.

And you saw the way they flew wide when he registered something and you felt a different kind of tension building inside your chest with his next words.

“The pictures are out.”

I Give Up Deleted Scenes Masterlist

The Notebook Kinks 1 Pink Heart Days

#exo angst #exo scenarios #exo smut #exo fanfiction #exo #baekhyun #baekhyun smut #baekhyun fluff #baekhyun fanfic #baekhyun angst #byun baekhyun #exo fic

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dorothydelgadillo · 5 years

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Try Things and Iterate Fast (The IMPACT Show Ep. 64)

In this week's episode of The IMPACT Show, Nick and I talked about our latest website redesign and why we did it, what the heck BTCT is, lessons from using GoVideo and more!

Plus, Nick recorded from HubSpot headquarters this week!

Check out the video recording below as well as the show notes. Enjoy and let us know what you thought in IMPACT Elite.

Like what you saw? Make sure to subscribe to email reminders and give us a review on iTunes.

Have feedback or questions? We’d love to hear it. Comment on this article, hit us up in Elite, or email us at [email protected]

IMPACT Updates

Our Latest Website Redesign

We recently updated our website (again). Christine talks about it in-depth in this article. You can see in the article the difference between the old site and the new one. I think this line from the article sums it up well: "Rather than distracting the user with other messages about our company, we made our content shine alone." Check out the updated homepage and see what we're talking about.

Nick pointed out how this was a good move for IMPACT specifically because we know that prospects who are a good fit to be a client of IMPACT's are the ones who read our content and educate themselves. However, we do need to make sure our prospects know how to easily take the next steps and learn about our service offerings. We're still finding the right balance here and making steps in the right direction!

Brand New Pillar Content

We've got two brand-spankin'-new pieces of pillar content for you! Liz Murphy and Franco Valentino shared their recent pieces of pillar content in IMPACT Elite and we wanted to call some attention to them because they're not only great content, they're also great examples of beautifully designed pillars! Liz's is called How to Create a Content Style Guide and Franco wrote Is SEO Dead in 2019? | A Comprehensive Analysis for Digital Marketers. Check out these pillars if you're interested in either topic because they really did a fantastic job covering everything you need to know! Plus, they're well-designed .

When Plan A Fails...Recent Live Video Lessons

We had another Elite Exclusive Live Conversation this week...but we almost didn't. Due to some scheduling and technical challenges we almost weren't able to have our live conversation with Salma Jafri this week. We did end up having it but just starting an hour later. However, this resulted in me having to frantically update the broadcast time across a variety of places and quickly spin up some announcements to send out to subscribers to let them know the broadcast was going to start late.

This was another reminder that I really need to take my own advice and create a true backup plan/crisis plan for our live broadcasts (conversations, throwdowns, webinars, etc.). The recent Facebook outages have made this all the more apparent and now I will be sure to create a plan for these instances so we can be prepared for the next time the inevitable happens!

I also shared how this live conversation may have reversed my original thoughts, from recent live streams, that live video isn't working as well anymore.

What Marketers Be Talkin' 'Bout

Where we go over what you're saying in IMPACT Elite.

MPACT Elite is a community of officially over 4,000 passionate inbounders looking to help each other succeed. Join us in IMPACT Elite.

Speaking of Facebook outages... yeah, it happened again. Since our last episode just two weeks ago Facebook had yet another major outage - the third recent one. This one was especially frustrating because it happened right before the Thanksgiving (and subsequent crazy shopping days) weekend.

While I calmly wrote an article about how when Facebook goes down your business shouldn't during the last outage, I couldn't stay quite as calm this time. I wasn't able to do so many things I needed to do the day of this most recent outage and it hit those doing Facebook ads (and Instagram) even harder. Fortunately, IMPACT's Liz Murphy rounded up some fun tweets (for a much needed laugh) and combined them with some thoughts from both me and IMPACT's resident Facebook expert, Ali Parmelee. Check out the post aptly titled: With Yet Another Facebook & Instagram Outage, What Are Marketers Supposed to Do?

From Workshops Come Many Great Things

Leah Hovland posted in IMPACT Elite: “after an inspiring workshop with Marcus Sheridan in October, KOGGER has increased content and finally published a video (1 of hopefully many more:) Would really appreciate it if as many of you as possible, look at it and tell us what you think. Thankful for any feedback!" We love that Leah has already taken the steps to get a first video created and that she shared it with the group for feedback at this point in the journey!

Then Leah also posted: “By the way, the workshop with Marcus Sheridan hosted by Chris Marr also inspired to create a KOGGER acronym: BTCT. Wonder if Marcus and Chris can figure out what the letters stand for?”

It stands for: Be Transparent Create Trust. We love that they created something that showed they understand the lessons from Marcus Sheridan but made it their own and something that will truly work for them.

What Elite Members are Thankful For

Last week in IMPACT Elite, Liz Murphy shared a timely episode of her podcast, Content Lab, which covered apps and inspiration for which she is thankful.

Then she said: “OK, Eliters. What marketing stuff are you thankful for? And by "stuff" I mean any apps, little-known tricks, your favorite thought leaders, awesome articles, or anything else that has just made your life better as a marketer? Would love to see us crowdsource an amazing list of inspiration for all of us to enjoy, as we head into the holiday weekend!” Check out the discussion in Elite and add your own addition to the thread! I love how many of these were ambient sounds for people to use while working - including a Harry Potter one!

NEW: From [The Latest]

Nick and I decided to add a new section here where we highlight our favorite content from the last two weeks (6 editions) of The Latest, IMPACT's newsletter. First things first, if you're not subscribed be sure to sign up and check out recent editions of The Latest.

Nick shared this video he liked where Zach Basner talks about YouTube vs. Vidyard. I shared an article by Morgan VanDerLeest which was part of IMPACT's new segment called IMPACT Toolbox. Morgan shared six little-known tools that could transform your marketing strategy including tools for transcription, SEO, and more.

Inbound in Action

This is where we talk about what we’re doing and what we’ve learned lately right here in the trenches.

What We've Learned Using GoVideo

This week in Inbound in Action, Nick shared what he learned recently using GoVideo in his sales communications. Nick has been using Vidyard's GoVideo to add a more engaging component to his emails for a while now. He recently experimented with sending an agreement to a prospect and doing a screenshare recording that walks through the document.

He quickly learned that, no matter how many great answers you give in the video, if you link to the document, most people will go right into the document and skip the video. We never send an agreement without going over it with the prospect. Since there were time constraints, Nick decided to try the video approach. The next time this happened, Nick decided to do a shorter video, reviewing the agreement, to the prospect that said "let me know if you think this is good to go and if so, I'll send over the agreement OR we can meet if you're not 100% sure yet." So, lesson learned: if you want to be absolutely sure someone watches your video make sure it's the only thing you send!

We would love your comments. What did you think of the show? Let us know in Elite. Make sure you never miss a show or update by subscribing at impactbnd.com/latest.

Join Us Next Time!

Until next time...we'll see you in Elite!

from Web Developers World https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/try-things-iterate-fast-impact-show

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thegloober · 6 years

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6 Goal-Oriented Content Marketing Strategies You Need to Be Using

A quick look at most business websites will quickly reveal that many feature a prominent “blog” title somewhere in their navigational menu. We’ve come a long way from the days when blogging meant publishing bad poetry on WordPress.com.

Today, content marketing is a valuable tool that businesses can use to drive traffic to their site, generate leads, establish relationships with clients, and more. If you want proof, you can read about how we did it for our own business here.

Content marketing can do a lot. There’s no doubt about that. But it’s not going to do much if you don’t set specific goals and create strong plans and strategies in order to accomplish them. Content marketing without strategies is like going to the grocery store for the week with no meals planned—you’ll come home with a cart full of groceries, only to realize that you barely have enough cohesive ingredients to maybe make two real meals.

Writing, research and the topic selection isn’t easy, but for most brands, it’s the actual content strategies that are difficult. There’s plenty of strategies that you can implement when it comes to content marketing, but in this post we’re going to take a look at 6 specific goal-oriented content marketing strategies and how to use them to accomplish specific things.

1. Optimize Content Fully

All content should be well optimized for SEO so that you can improve your SERPs and get more traffic to your site. Even if you’re focused on other goals, I always advise clients that we treat SEO as a “secondary” goal to all content, if it’s not the first goal outright. And sometimes it will be—sometimes we write posts exclusively for the SEO benefits, and as long as the post is well-written, informative, and contributes to our brand and reader relationships, that’s still a great call.

Some people, however, just pick a keyword and then hope it all works out. In addition to selecting great keywords, you’ll also need to make sure your content is optimized for that keyword.

Here’s how to do that:

Use tools like Yoast SEO to help you track how well your optimization efforts are going. It will provide specific feedback.

Include images in your post, and add the keyword to its alt text.

Place your keyword in at least one subheading, your title, and the first paragraph if possible.

Link to outside relevant, credible content, and use internal linking to your own.

Target multiple keywords when possible, as it will help you appear in more searches.

Include .SRT files to any video content; they provide closed captions to users who need them, but the SEO benefits of being crawlable by search engines is crucial to showing up in more searches

2. Utilize Multiple Distribution Methods For More Traffic

Getting more traffic to the site—no matter where it comes from—is one of the most common reasons people come to me wanting to start content marketing. And, in order to truly maximize potential traffic, you need to be actively distributing your content. Relying on SEO alone isn’t going to work, especially if your site is getting started.

There are a number of great distribution methods available that aren’t SEO. These include:

Sharing your content on social media. This puts your content in front of a warm audience, and if it gets shared on-platform, they’re introducing you to new potential audience members with a hefty helping of social proof. When posting on social media, explain why the content is valuable in the description instead of just dropping the title in the update box and hitting “post.”

Run Facebook or Twitter ads promoting your content. It should be informational instead of promotional, but this is a great way to increase traffic and build up a subscriber list.

Create cohesive content plans. Create a YouTube video that aligns with a blog post, which aligns with a Facebook Live or a webinar. This allows you to send interested users to different locations, and ultimately back to your site.

Guest post on other credible sites. You typically get at least one link back to your own non-promotional content, so this can send huge numbers of relevant users to you. It also gives you backlinks, which helps SEO.

Email relevant content to your audience. Most subscribers won’t want to receive an email notification every time every post goes live, but sending them a list of recent posts or an email with an important post can be well-received. Again, you have a warm audience so this can work well.

3. Establish Credibility with Expert Posts

Building credibility and trust is an excellent goal for content marketing and a great way to do that is with what’s sometimes called “expert posts.” These posts feature advice from known influencers in the field and are even more powerful when you have advice and actual quotes from multiple experts. It shows that you have industry connections and that your publication may be important enough to get a quote from someone of that caliber.

Even if you aren’t able to get direct quotes from individuals, you can quote them on a small passage from their of their posts and speeches. Make sure you credit them and link to their site. This still gives you the benefit of establishing industry connections and shows that you’re following credible people. It also can put you on their radar and they may be more likely to share your content. This gets you more traffic, but it also gives you some credibility, too.

4. Boost Lead Generation with a Lead Magnet Funnel

If a random person walks up to you on the street and asks for $100, do you give it to them? Probably not. But if one of your best friends or family members asks the same thing, you’re a lot more likely to say yes.

Lead generation works the same way. Because of this, lead generation funnels are the way to go with content marketing.

Start with the lead magnet that you want to promote. For this example, we’ll use a webinar about how plant-based diets can improve health and how to incorporate them more often. Go ahead and create the webinar and know what it covers and who your audience is.

Next, create a list of relevant blog posts and/or YouTube videos that are connected to this topic. Examples might include:

6 Plant-Based Dessert Recipes You’ll Love

The importance of increasing plant-based foods in your diet

# Natural Superfoods to Have In Your Pantry

You could funnel users from one blog post to the next, and then—after they trust you and are familiar with your brand and your content—you get them to sign-up for your webinar. Place CTAs to sign up for your webinar in each these posts and use interlinking to keep people bouncing around until they’re ready to do so.

5.Get Sales By Providing a Solution to Question Keywords

Plenty of businesses start content marketing with the ultimate intention of getting more sales. That’s what we all want, right?

In order to do this effectively, one of the best strategies that I use is to target question keywords at different levels of the sales funnel.

In order to find question keywords, I use SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool. They have a feature that lets you only see keywords if they indicate a question.

Let’s say you sell athletic apparel. It’s a competitive space, so you need to be smart with your marketing strategies. Different question-based keyword topics you might write about include:

How to take care of athletic clothing? At the end of the post, stress getting high quality clothing that holds up to standard care (like yours!).

When is it time to buy new gym clothes? Explain why you need to replace clothes frequently and cite legitimate concerns like “they could get thin and show more than you want when you squat” or “all that bacteria!” Then, offer a link with a potential discount or free shipping for users who need to upgrade their wardrobe.

What should I wear to kickboxing (or yoga/spinning)? This is a more high-intent search, where potential kickboxers/yogis/spinners are looking for help on what to wear so they don’t show up looking as clueless as they feel. They likely need to purchase these items and are intending to do so—you just need to make sure they buy your clothes. Offer informational posts, links to your products at the end and reasons why those clothes are perfect for their needs. Write a distinct post for each type of sport, because they’re all different keywords.

This works because it establishes trust, demonstrates value and then immediately offers your product as a solution to a problem they’re having right now.

6. Increase Retention With Well-Timed Informational Posts

The content that you can create can actually help to increase customer retention and—if done correctly—can actually help with reengagement, too.

Writing content that is strictly informational explaining why regularly interacting with your product or service is important is a good call here. A lot of people will typically hire a professional or buy a subscription product or service only once or twice, then figure they’re good until there’s dire evidence they need it again.

Split testing is an example in the marketing world. A lot of people like to run one split test and leave it at that, while it should be a more ongoing thing.

A great example of how to execute this is the blog post below. A “home comfort” servicer wrote a post explaining why it’s important to maintain your AC regularly—even if you don’t think there’s anything wrong. Since this is a service they offer, it’s a great way to get more clients calling them for services they wouldn’t have otherwise.

Regular customers may see this on their own, but your best bet for retention and reengagement is to distribute content like this through email or an focused retargeting campaigns on Facebook Ads. Show AWOL customers an ad with this as the content, and you’ll see more calls or sign-ups or purchases quickly.

3 Content Marketing Strategies You Should Always Use

In addition to the specific strategies discussed above, there are also three things you should always do in every piece of content you create, whether it’s a blog post or a video or a webinar.

Always include some sort of CTA. This can be “sign up for our newsletter” or “leave us a comment.” Your CTA should be aligned with the goal you’re focusing on and it should make sense in context of the content itself.

Have a specific goal in mind for each piece of content. As you can see above, a single blog, YouTube channel, newsletter, or even webinar can be used to accomplish multiple goals. The key to doing this successfully is to have a specific and singular focus for each piece of content. You can still optimize a lead-gen post for SEO, but you want to remember that getting traffic to that lead magnet is the goal instead of getting lots of comments on that post.

Distribution is key. We talked a lot about distribution methods above, but it’s still important—no matter what your goals are—so we’re mentioning it here, too. Don’t just sit back and hope people find your content. In addition to switching it up, you should also track your referral traffic in Google Analytics to see which sources are actually working for you best.

Conclusion

If you want to actually accomplish specific goals, you need to put strategies in place to optimize for them, encouraging users to take certain actions. This is the only way to ensure that you’re putting steps in place to actually take you where you want to go. A blog may be full of valuable content that very well could help you get leads, but if you don’t have a CTA to those webinars or that eBook, what’s the point?

It’s essential to choose the goals that you want to optimize for before you start working on the actual marketing. If you haven’t done that yet, pause and head back to the drawing board so you can decide exactly how you want your content marketing to work for you.

What do you think? Do you use any of these strategies? Are there any others that you use that we left off our list? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below!

The following two tabs change content below.

Ana Gotter is a freelance writer specializing in social media and content marketing, though she writes on a variety of other niches and subjects. She can be contacted at anagotter.com.

Source: https://bloghyped.com/6-goal-oriented-content-marketing-strategies-you-need-to-be-using/

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madehq · 6 years

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Mission Driven Digital

PART TWO: MOVING TOWARDS MISSION-DRIVEN DIGITAL. Adapted from a talk delivered at the Arts Marketing Association Conference in Liverpool, July 2018. In part one of this blog, I introduced the concept of mission-driven digital and talked about some of the motivations for taking a mission-driven approach to your digital strategy. In this second part, I will sketch out a roadmap for moving towards mission-driven digital in the arts and cultural sectors.

How do we bring together the often-separated ‘mission’ and ‘digital’ worlds in arts organisations? We need to take a human-centred look at our mission, and find opportunities to use digital technology to meet users’ genuine needs and requirements.

“Most business models have focused on self interest instead of user experience”

- Tim Cook, Apple CEO

In my previous blog post, I suggested that one of the problems suffered by cultural organisations is that their digital channels focus almost entirely on sales and ticketing content, to the exclusion of any information related to their mission. But in many cases, this is self-inflicted. If you want to engage users in the mission of your organisation, you need to give them something of value to engage with.

The answer to this is user-centred design. Although there’s been a gradual shift towards user-centred design in the arts and culture sector, it hasn’t developed far enough or fast enough, especially when it comes to how the mission of arts and culture organisations is reflected digitally.

What dominates instead is the shared ‘big idea’ — often an inspired hunch agreed by a group of people who work for the organisation. Or, even worse, the idea comes from the HiPPO in the room, and everyone else just has to go along with it.

Taking a data-enabled, user-centred approach to your mission-driven digital strategy is key, and it’s not that difficult to do. There are essentially 5 steps:

1. Research your users.

This is the step that is most often substituted for assumed knowledge and inspired hunches, so it’s vitally important to challenge what you think you know about your audiences.

Research can take many forms, but should always be focused on users in direct or indirect ways.

It can be really tempting to skip this part of the process, or to try and force well-known institutional dogma (“our audiences behave like this”) into a box called research. One way to test your assumed knowledge is to start the research phase with a blank piece of paper, and draw four quadrants. In each quadrant write ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’ etc.:

The purpose of this chart is to provide a direction for the research you undertake, and also to ensure you persevere with research until you have at least one insight in your ‘unknown unknowns’ column. If you end the process with nothing in the unknown unknown box, don’t end the process! Because I guarantee there is something that you don’t already know about your audiences that you will uncover as part of this process.

In terms of what research to carry out; this will vary depending on what you already know about your audiences, as well as the type of project, but there are three basic approaches you can take:

Watch them. You can carry out formal user testing, either in-person or remotely via testing services. We regularly use tools like Hotjar or FullStory to recreate web sessions, and they are incredibly useful tools if you want to look at how real users engage with digital interfaces. If you’re testing prototypes, you might need to rely on in-person or remote testing of specific parts of your user journey. If you’re looking at information architecture, you might want to engage users in card-sort exercises — in-person or remotely — to find out how they categorise information.

Ask them. Talking to users can be really helpful, whether that’s through focus groups, surveys, stakeholder interviews or workshops. You should bear in mind though that all surveys, workshops, focus groups and interviews will convey some form of bias on the part of the people conducting them, as well as betray biases of the people being asked. This doesn’t remove the usefulness of these tools, but should affect how you structure the questions you ask, and how you combine this data with other observations.

Include non-users. One of the challenges of mission-driven digital is that we are currently over-focused on our existing digital users (who we see almost exclusively as ticket-buyers), so it’s important to reach out to people who are potential users as well as current users, so that we can see how we might expand our digital offerings in ways that are useful to and needed by people we’re not currently reaching online. Do this by identifying potential users from your database who are known to be engaged with your organisation, but not digitally, and inviting them to take part in surveys or focus groups.

2. Identify requirements

The next step — once you have a picture of your users in mind — is to identify the specific needs or requirements of the user for the project that you’ve identified. Maybe you’re looking to improve the donation flow on your website, via an app. Or perhaps you want to work on your membership registration process.

If we want to engage users with our mission, and to provide genuinely valuable features and functionality to them, then we need to express requirements in a way that reflects their needs, rather than ours.

We capture requirements for our projects in a number of different ways, but one of the most powerful ways that we do this is through user stories.

If this is something you find yourself doing, I really recommend reading the UK Government Digital Service service manual entry on user stories. It illustrates very clearly that the most important thing, when capturing requirements, is to focus on the user’s required outcome rather than any organisational objectives.

So when the Government Digital Service redesigned the electoral registration system, their user story was: “as a UK resident, I want to get my details on the electoral register so that I can vote”. The way that they wrote the requirement didn’t mention technology, or websites, or any desired outcome on the part of the govt related to cost-saving or anything else. It clearly and unequivocally focuses on the user.

3. Design

Alright, so we have our research, and we have our user stories. Step 3 is design. This requires action, so it can be the hardest step to move onto. We humans are often paralysed by complexity, especially when dealing with it involves motivating groups of people.

A useful tool for getting going with this step is to employ a tool called user journey mapping to plot out the desired steps that you want your users to go through. Using your research from step 1, and requirements from step 2 as a guide, you create a map of interactions that will help you fulfil the users’ needs. Again, the Government Digital Service has a really helpful blog on creating user journey maps which talks through the process of creating these.

These user journey maps can be as hi-fi or low-fi as you want. You might find value in even sketching these out, without too much considered design, so you can start to identify areas for improvement, even if you can’t tackle the whole journey in one go.

4. & 5. Test & Repeat

Steps 4 and 5 are inextricably linked. They’re so important, because the cyclical nature of the user-centred design process is critical to its success. We should always be aiming to improve things for our users — either as their needs change and evolve, or as our capacity to meet those needs increases.

However, testing mission-driven digital is hard, because many of these interactions are more longitudinal than transactional.

For example, consider the case of a new donor prospect. Depending on what research you look at, it takes between 7 and 13 interactions to move someone from a first meeting to making a donation. Those interactions can take place across multiple platforms, online and offline. And the final ‘conversion’ step may not even take place online.

This means we need to shift from a ‘session oriented’ view of digital behaviour to a ‘customer oriented’ view.

Tools like Hotjar allow you to access live site testing data at a customer level, seeing where users return to a site on the same device and how they interact with the site over multiple visits. Survey tools can also help you capture qualitative data about the site experience and user motivations, which can be used to refine the user experience in the future.

Similarly, combining data from CRM systems with your web analytics data helps to present you with a customer-oriented view of your digital activity. For example, with a bit of web development work, you can send high-level information about logged-in users to Google Analytics, so you can examine web sessions segmented by user type (like ‘member’, ‘subscriber’ etc.).

Testing mission-driven digital is not always as straightforward as counting pageviews and conversions; it requires a more sophisticated measurement protocol and some ingenuity.

But if you get it right, you can gather vital intelligence about the ways in which your users want to interact with you online, and move ever closer towards a genuine mission-driven digital strategy.

In the final part of this blog series, I will look at some recurring themes of mission-driven digital and discuss how organisations can employ these to engage their users more effectively.

#MissionDrivenDigital

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jamesbaggaleymade-blog · 6 years

Photo

PART TWO: MOVING TOWARDS MISSION-DRIVEN DIGITAL.

Adapted from a talk delivered at the Arts Marketing Association Conference in Liverpool, July 2018. In part one of this blog, I introduced the concept of mission-driven digital and talked about some of the motivations for taking a mission-driven approach to your digital strategy. In this second part, I will sketch out a roadmap for moving towards mission-driven digital in the arts and cultural sectors.

“Most business models have focused on self interest instead of user experience”

- Tim Cook, Apple CEO

Taking a data-enabled, user-centred approach to your mission-driven digital strategy is key, and it’s not that difficult to do. There are essentially 5 steps:

1. Research your users.

This is the step that is most often substituted for assumed knowledge and inspired hunches, so it’s vitally important to challenge what you think you know about your audiences.

Research can take many forms, but should always be focused on users in direct or indirect ways.

In terms of what research to carry out; this will vary depending on what you already know about your audiences, as well as the type of project, but there are three basic approaches you can take:

2. Identify requirements

We capture requirements for our projects in a number of different ways, but one of the most powerful ways that we do this is through user stories.

3. Design

4. & 5. Test & Repeat

However, testing mission-driven digital is hard, because many of these interactions are more longitudinal than transactional.

This means we need to shift from a ‘session oriented’ view of digital behaviour to a ‘customer oriented’ view.

Testing mission-driven digital is not always as straightforward as counting pageviews and conversions; it requires a more sophisticated measurement protocol and some ingenuity.

But if you get it right, you can gather vital intelligence about the ways in which your users want to interact with you online, and move ever closer towards a genuine mission-driven digital strategy.

In the final part of this blog series, I will look at some recurring themes of mission-driven digital and discuss how organisations can employ these to engage their users more effectively.

#MissionDrivenDigital

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smartoptionsio · 6 years

Text

Signals Thursday #2 – Interview With Bitmex Lifestyle

In the second issue of our Series “Signals Thursday” we will squeeze some answers from the head trader of Bitmex Lifestyle. To me, this group always was a rough diamond. The start was humpy, but then they cleaned up the house – exchanged traders, refined their strategy and opened up to the community. We always respect this kind of restless efforts to become better with each day and we can assume that this channel will offer even much more value with the upcoming times. A thing I like especially about them is that the trader team has started to verify the work of each other, so they send only signals which are confirmed, confluence-wise, by a bunch of traders. A warm welcome for Leo in our #2 edition of Signals Thursday.

SmartOptions.io: I am observing your channel almost since its inception. You evolved pretty much and professionalized the way you give Bitmex signals. What did you change to get these great results, you have been able to show off in August?

Leo (Bitmex Lifestyle): Our business was always the trading itself, so the administrative part of the channel and management of the members has been adjusted as needed. We elaborate a strategic plan with medium and long-term goals to make our channel a reference for those looking for a quality service focused on Bitmex, the main one being that all involved are in the same footprint, wanting to innovate and improve every day to have excellence in what we do.

SmartOptions.io: You went through some rough times with many changes within your team. How is in your trading team now and what is their history with trading? Which trading style do you prefer?

Leo (Bitmex Lifestyle): Our team has been adjusted over time, we started with people who are no longer part of the team and have brought new people with a different vision and are adding up in our decisions/analysis. We have a very close team, all traders with many years of experience, ideas are aligned and the environment is very pleasant and exciting, we have very consistent results and we have great prospects, I believe our project has matured a lot and today it is in a very good level! Our focus is on day trade and swing trade operations, eventually, we send out some scalps.

SmartOptions.io: What is the most important thing you want your subscribers to know? Is there anything that makes you go nuts reading in your chat room?

Leo (Bitmex Lifestyle): I want them to know that we have a great project for the future of the channel and that we are constantly improving to reach the highest level of satisfaction possible and to thank everyone for the opportunity and confidence in giving us a space in their daily life in this market. We have a very friendly approach, the overall mood is good, so there is not something that drives us crazy, but something that makes us upset is when a member seeing a signal reaching the stop loss, forgets the positive track record comes before him, but it is normal it is part of market psychology.

SmartOptions.io: Do you have future plans for Bitmex Lifestyle? What can we expect from your channel?

Leo (Bitmex Lifestyle): We have good plans for the future of the channel, we have some good deployments ahead. We intend soon in addition to the telegram send signals through a mobile app, start some live trades on YouTube and do some more dynamic activities with customers, in addition to a website for better monitoring and management of operations.

SmartOptions.io: Can you tell us about your personal views on the crypto ecosystem? What do you think about “the bubble”, how will crypto evolve and what is the missing link for mass adaption and the crypto takeover in your opinion.

Leo (Bitmex Lifestyle): I believe in the market potential, but it is challenging: it is relatively new and the market needs to mature, I believe this will come with the growth in the value of that market. Compared to the largest financial markets in the world, crypto is still a market relatively small and has plenty of room to expand! The “bubble” is part of the valuation cycle of this market and should continue until it reaches 2 or 3 trillion in capitalization, because it is a market “easy” to enter, volatility is higher and corrections are also a little sharper than in the conventional markets, but I do not see it as a catastrophe, in the long run, the market is still in a beautiful uptrend, and the downturns also provide us with great opportunities for profit. I believe that regulations are necessary, it is the only way to connect crypto in mass with society, people need to trust to be further disseminated, so the regulation should bring that feeling and make infiltration into all possible layers of society.

SmartOptions.io: Last but not least, what are your personal gems – do hold any cryptos for the long-term with no intention to sell them in the short-term?

Leo (Bitmex Lifestyle): Basically, because I believe in technology and all the many financial and social solutions that may come with the concept of blockchain that Bitcoin brought, I would like to be able to say that I am a legitimate Hodler, but it is not my case. I do not maintain any fixed hold, I maintain relationships with every currency or token while it is worth financially. In the past, I have been more hodler with crypto, but over time, there are few projects that remain attractive and with a good engagement, so I ended up leaving some technology and the concept of each project aside, giving almost exclusive attention to charts. But always attentive to the news that can influence the market of crypto as a whole or the tokens that I often follow, which are those listed in bitmex. Once you dip into the bitmex and get to a good level, the other exchanges end up losing the grace and the holds too, in it, you are not subject to a bull market to be consistent with the results, enjoy the whole cycle.

➲FACT SHEET for Bitmex Lifestyle

Free Channel: https://t.me/bitmexlifestyle

Telegram Contact: https://t.me/LifestyleVIP

Result Tracking: Constantly updated sheet on Google Docs

Signals with TA: Sometimes.

Chatroom: Yes.

Trading Timezones: Signals came in all time zones.

Discount: 10% with code “SmartOptions”

Pricing: [30 days membership] 0.035 BTC (-10% if you mention our review) [6 months membership] 0.11 BTC (-10% if you mention our review) [Lifetime] 0.18 BTC (-10% if you mention our review)

How to enroll:

Contact Discount code: “SmartOptions” (10% Discount).

How the channel looks inside:

Trusted Signal Provider

Bitmex Lifestyle is a Trusted Signal Provider

The post Signals Thursday #2 – Interview With Bitmex Lifestyle appeared first on Smart Options.

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innerkryptonitebanana-blog · 6 years

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wingedtragedyconnoisseur-blog · 6 years