#how fundamentally wrong it all is when you lose someone everyone expects you to bounce back so fast and confront your damn problems but

[antiticketmaster]

.

#I’m not a sheerio or a big fan of Ed Sheeran but I do like some of his music and I just caught wind that his grandma passed away #and he wasn’t able to go to the funeral because of his trial and I am so sick to my stomach after losing my dad I have seen #how fundamentally wrong it all is when you lose someone everyone expects you to bounce back so fast and confront your damn problems but #it’s so hard #I feel as though I had to postpone my own grieving process for school for this final semester college #America is so weird with death like I was suspended from work even though I said I was taking a leave of absence #I even lost a family member who shares my birthday in April so like I’m just not ya know #all this over chord progressions LIKE HE COULDVE GOTTEN THE DAY OFF #anyways #subtract is gonna wreck me if it has more songs like visiting hours #tw grief #tw death #tw cancer

[villainever]

"I See You Got What You Wanted": Niko & Villanelle's Relationship + What Gemma's Death Means for Villaneve

i think it’s fairly safe to say that gemma’s death in 2x07 has been one of the most controversial of villanelle’s murders. in this mini-essay, i want to look at the eve-niko-villanelle-gemma dynamic, why villanelle might’ve killed gemma, what that means for the show’s plot, and for villanelle/eve. although in my last post i talked about how villanelle and eve DON’T have an “i / it” relationship, villanelle certainly does position most other people in the “it” category. eve is an exception, not the rule – unless someone really captures villanelle’s attention, she doesn’t really bother to contextualise them as more than an object, or in gemma’s case, a tool.

villanelle is aware of gemma before eve is, and meets her minutes after, as one of her many characters – one specifically designed for interacting with gemma. remember, this is 2x03, and even though raymond has told villanelle that eve isn’t interested in her anymore, she doesn’t believe him yet, because a) she doesn’t view raymond as a reliable source, and b) eve came to julian’s house when villanelle called her, even though they ultimately missed each other. at this point, villanelle is happy with her and eve’s progress, and understands that they’re more connected than they’ve ever been (“she [stabbed me] to show me how much she cares about me” / “sometimes when you love someone, you will do crazy things”). but one obstacle remains between her and eve: niko.

i believe her actions at this juncture reflect how seriously villanelle takes her relationship with eve, and its potential future. because the obvious, easy answer to someone like villanelle would be, “kill niko”. it’s fast and efficient and neatly removes him from the equation. BUT. villanelle has learned from killing anna’s husband that people don’t just bounce back from having a partner murdered, even if they were already having an affair with you. so villanelle takes killing niko completely off the table; she doesn’t want eve to hate her, to resent her even years later, like anna did. notably, though, her first strategy is NOT to tell him about the stabbing, and to try and make him hate/distrust eve. she tries the carrot, not the stick. 

“squirt your perfume in his room so it always smells like you. flatter him. make him doubt his wife.” not only is this transparently from villanelle’s playbook (lmao), it’s an attempt to give gemma a viable plan to solve everyone’s problem: gemma seduces niko > niko leaves eve > eve is single > villanelle and eve rail each other into the next century (i can only assume this is how villanelle’s brain works lol). gemma gets niko, and presumably both are happy and far away. and most importantly, villanelle gets eve for keeps. i think this is probably the max of empathy we can expect from villanelle when it comes to two people she literally couldn’t care less about except for their roles in eve’s life. however, villanelle’s massively impatient. her idea doesn’t work instantly, probably because she’s overestimated niko’s willingness to abandon a long-term relationship for new possibilities and chemistry – and who can blame her, seeing as she’s making her calculations based on eve’s readiness to do the same when villanelle comes into the picture. anyway, villanelle isn’t getting instant results, and then the game changes: eve doesn’t come to amsterdam. villanelle’s suddenly freaking out, because god, what if eve’s not into her anymore, when villanelle still so crazy about her?

so after meeting up with eve in 2x05 – which confirms yet again that this thing between them isn’t something villanelle can bear to lose – she shifts it up a gear, and tells niko that eve stabbed her. it’s the pincer approach: on one side, there’s gemma, looking sweet and simple, and on the other, eve, appearing increasingly grey and complex. obviously, that’s a very easy choice for villanelle, and she’s hoping it is for niko too, only in the opposite direction. everything that makes villanelle like eve more, makes niko like her less. 

then niko and eve hook up in 2x06. villanelle probably kicks over every trash can along the street and taps on all windows creepily to scare people until she feels better. after this, she’s a bit petty with eve until eve reveals that niko left. then it’s all genuine effort at AA, and “maybe eve’s lonely, i should text her”, because hey, the window is open, and impatience cuts both ways. she’s not going to lose the opportunity.

by 2x07, things are going well between villanelle and eve, but villanelle wants reassurance, and insurance. she’s tying up loose ends – getting the recipe, making sure gemma and niko are riding off into the sunset and leaving her and eve alone. side note: while villanelle tells niko that she wants the shepherd’s pie recipe because “eve likes it”, i think it’s also because to villanelle (who loves food) it’s a significant piece of the memory of her first proper meeting with eve in 1x05. she might be hoping it reminds eve of this night too, but even if it doesn’t, villanelle likes it, and it has all-round positive associations for her.

anyway. villanelle asks niko if he loves gemma – no, he doesn’t. he loves eve. “of course i do, she’s my wife”. in this scene, after he says that line, villanelle’s eyes get shiny, like they did in amsterdam, almost like she’s about to cry. ive tried to grab it in the screenshot, but it’s hard when it’s not a gif. 

here’s the thing. i don’t think villanelle would’ve killed gemma if she’d waited until after rome to have this confrontation. why? because in rome, it’s pretty clear that even if niko’s not over eve, eve is pretty much over him. when niko leaves, eve says, “don’t leave me alone!” crucially, this line, this FEAR, isn’t really about him at all. eve’s relationship with villanelle is so volatile that she hasn’t made the leap yet, unsure of the landing. niko is her safety net. we’ve been shown all season that eve’s basically bored with him, and has been since pre-villanelle (“you’ve missed [teacher’s night] for three years”), but she keeps him around so that she has someone. at this point, eve isn’t certain whether she has other people in her life, so she doesn’t want to lose him.

EXCEPT. seeing him with gemma at her house kind of puts him in a new light, and eve’s abruptly faced with exactly how normal he is, and how different they are. earlier that day, she and villanelle were running an undercover op, and villanelle killed someone in broad daylight (at least a lil to impress eve), but here niko is, hanging out with someone who collects music boxes, and is painfully ordinary by contrast. it’s enough to get eve to walk away, but her decision is affirmed in rome. hugo’s more than happy to sleep with her, and far more significantly, villanelle is too. eve’s suddenly available, but villanelle hasn’t lost interest now that the chase is effectively over (they’re hardly enigmas in different countries anymore; they work together and text and have conversations about jealousy). with niko gone, eve ISN’T alone. and i think eve will find that life without a safety net is even more of an adrenaline rush, plus now there’s nobody to slow her down or question her (questionable) decision-making. she’s not thinking about niko AT ALL, and he’s barely crossed her mind this season anyway. but rewind to pre-rome, and villanelle sees an eve/niko reunion as a possibility. now, i really doubt niko would’ve told villanelle he still loved eve if he’d realised it was the wrong answer. in fact, i believe he thinks it is the right answer for villanelle, because he fundamentally misunderstands villaneve’s relationship.

he still thinks it’s a cat-and-mouse, power-trip thing. in season 1, he accuses eve of getting off on being the only one who can predict villanelle (not landing on the fact that it’s villanelle herself eve likes, not just the rush of a high-stakes mission), but even with villanelle saying, “we’re more than friends”, his “what are you talking about?” is actually in response to her telling him she’s forgiven eve – he’s asking, “forgiven her for what?”. niko doesn’t get that villanelle and eve are inherently romantic, albeit in an unconventional (and twisted) way. he does infer that villanelle cares for eve in some way, so i think he incorrectly adds it up, and comes to the conclusion that in 2x07, villanelle’s come to see him and gemma because she’s mad at him for leaving eve, and has come for revenge on eve’s behalf. but she’s not there for revenge, she’s there for closure. and he turns around and does the exact opposite of what she wants. so she kills gemma.

even though many of us were expecting a recurring character death this season (i saw some speculation around hugo, particularly), gemma’s death wasn’t exactly predictable. while villanelle killing people is very par for the course with this show, and killing eve does an excellent job of using close narration to warp viewer’s morality while they watch (another essay in that point), gemma evoked a lot more of an emotional response than villanelle’s typical marks. i think this is for a few reasons. firstly, even though she was far from the show’s coolest or most interesting character, gemma was nice and considerate; she tried to shoot her shot, but she never pushed niko to cheat on eve, and when she met eve, she was kind (and friendly to villanelle too when she was “kim”). secondly, she was really normal – most of killing eve’s cast of characters feel exceptional, almost fantastical in the best way, but gemma was someone you could meet in real life. lastly, gemma didn’t opt-in to any of this; unlike bill, nobody warned her of the risks, and her life was completely extrinsic to the main plot – from her perspective, she basically got killed completely out of nowhere. villanelle won’t kill people eve cares about anymore. she killed bill, when their relationship was nascient, but in 1x05, villanelle telling eve “he was slowing you down” is what prompts eve to reach for the knife that first time before villanelle pins her to the fridge. but eve dislikes gemma, so villanelle decides this is unlikely to have negative repercussions for her.

is she intending to frame niko for murder to eliminate him permanently without killing him? maybe. she did use materials she found on-site (i.e. crime of passion). but villanelle has a certain flair for narrative, and i think if she was trying to do that, she probably would’ve staged some kind of scene to make niko seem more guilty (e.g. a domestic dispute). that said, the murder did have less of her usual drama, so she might be trying to keep it realistic for niko to have done. if yes, this was a bit risky, because it might pull niko into the MI5 investigation, and put him in proximity to eve. what i think is most likely is that, just as villanelle has positive associations with niko’s shepherd’s pie, she’s trying to give niko a negative association with eve. trying to ensure that every time he looks at her, he sees gemma dying for no real reason, sees the harsh reality of the path she’s chosen, and can never be truly close to her again. if it’s niko’s choice to stay away from eve, then eve will be less mad at villanelle – she might be more cross if he got falsely imprisoned. this way, she’ll see him as someone who can’t hack it, just as she already does. and he’ll see how she keeps going on, relatively untroubled, and his image of her as “the best person [he] knows” will be irreparably shattered. so will eve be mad about gemma? im not even sure she’ll find out about it this season. it seems like there’s a lot going on in rome next episode; it might not even come up. honestly, given eve’s current development, i’d guess the consequences will be eve acting huffy at villanelle for a few days in a way that villanelle will weather in relatively good spirits, knowing that once it’s passed, they’re in the clear. eve doesn’t care about gemma, maybe even dislikes her, and if she was able to move past bill’s death, then this is unlikely to bother her that much. with eve, we are able to more and more often see these “i / it” relationships shine through, and to eve as well as villanelle, i think gemma is an “it”. carolyn will probably make this mess go away, to keep her own plans sailing smoothly.

gemma’s murder also has the symbolic value of the death of normality, specifically eve’s normality, which she’s been drifting further and further from over the whole show, but particularly this season. gemma’s body literally has “fragile” written on the murder weapon: eve’s ordinary existence was always fragile, because eve didn’t fit. she’s a sociopath, and her life was a performance that was suffocating her, just as gemma suffocates. personally, i liked gemma, and was quite sad that she died. while i was shocked when it happened, the longer i’ve had to reflect, the less i feel that surprise. part of what makes killing eve fresh is that it doesn’t pull punches, and it’s not interested in trying to make villanelle more human, it’s interested in seeing how far it can take her and still have us love her. given the fates of bill, frank and nadia (she even shot konstantin), this was hardly out of the left field for her – the most notable deviation is that gemma’s death was her last resort, not her first idea. just as eve is changing, villanelle is adapting too. ive mentioned a few times that they’re meeting in the middle, and this is another step towards that. now, for anyone who actually made it through that slog, i have one more point. villanelle is really hung up on niko’s moustache, and i think that’s a great choice from the writers’ room, to have the thing she uses to identify him as being something explicitly masculine. to villanelle, niko is just The Man. The Husband. The “i / it” relationship here is between villanelle and a moustache.

this mini-essay is for @enter-the-mind-of-a-degenerate , who asked in the comments of the last one. if anyone else has any requests, inbox me or reply to this post :D also any and all of your comments give me life, and i have so much fun reading them/the messages you guys send me. 

#killing eve #ke #killing eve season 2 #killing eve s2 #killing eve 2x07 #ke spoilers #killing eve spoilers #ke 2x07 #villanelle #ke analysis #ke theory #killing eve commentary #killing eve analysis #killing eve theory #villaneve #eve polastri #villanelle x eve #villainever #eve x villanelle #niko polastri #gemma killing eve #gemma ke #ke 2x05 #villainever writes #ke essay #villanevest writes

[worryinglyinnocent]

Fic: What Comes After (14/18)

Summary: Dead Like Me AU. After Belle French loses her life in an accident, she finds out that she has been recruited to join the ranks of the Grim Reapers, helping souls pass on. It’s a huge upheaval to deal with, but her fellow reapers are there to help her out, especially head reaper Gold.

Who says you can’t find love after life?

Rated: E overall, this chapter is T.

CW for this chapter: mild gore.

[One] [Two] [Three] [Four] [Five] [Six] [Seven] [Eight] [Nine] [Ten] [Eleven] [Twelve] [Thirteen] [AO3]

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Fourteen

The Rabbit Hole was just as it had always been. The lights were still dim, the bartender not bothering to replace the blown bulbs. The floor was still sticky with spilled drinks and various other substances, and she wondered if it had ever been cleaned within her lifetime. The pool table was where it always had been, and the drinks prices had not changed.

She didn’t know why she thought that it would be any different to the last time that she had been in here. She guessed that she was still having some trouble getting to grips with the idea that life was still going on around her as normal even though she herself had died, and that although so much upheaval had gone on in her own life, not everywhere had suffered the same fate.

“Are you ok?” Ella asked. “You’ve spaced out again. I noticed that you weren’t entirely with it this morning in the diner.”

“Just nostalgia,” Belle said. “I was remembering coming here with Ruby sometimes. I wonder if I’ll see her and Dorothy in here tonight. It shouldn’t be a problem if we do. We’ll just keep to ourselves and they’ll hopefully have fun and not be too traumatised by what’s going to happen here later.”

There were still a couple of hours to kill before the reaping time, and in such a comparatively small space, it wasn’t going to be too hard to work out who was who. The method of death was still eluding her though. There were a lot of things in a bar that could be potentially dangerous, and the patrons ranked top of the list – especially the patrons of the Rabbit Hole. She really hoped that they weren’t looking at a reap similar to Ella’s a few weeks ago, with a drunken fight turning deadly.

At least this time none of them would have to row anywhere to collect the victims’ souls, and Ella laughed when Belle voiced this thought to her.

“I have chalked that one up in my tally of ‘most interesting reaps’,” she said. “It was very amusing once I got over the indignity of having to row myself. I should have got David to come along and chauffeur me.”

“I don’t think that it’s really called chauffeuring when you’re in a boat,” Belle said, but they were prevented from any further discussion of syntax by the arrival of Mulan and a woman with a mass of bright red frizzy hair that was presumably Merida. They were both giggling, and Belle could safely say that it was the most vibrant and happiest that she had ever seen Mulan.

“Belle, this is Merida,” she said as she came over to the bar beside them, practically bouncing in her excitement. “Merida, this is our new reaper Belle, and you’ll remember Ella from the Spain trip, of course.”

“It’s good to see you, darling. How are the highlands doing?”

Merida wrinkled her nose.

“Considering the sparsity of the population where our area is, we do quite well for external influences,” she said. “But it’s so, so boring at times. Going to other places is always a bit of an adventure.”

“Well, you’re in luck today,” Ella said. “We’ve got a double reap in this very bar this evening, and we’re taking bets on what the kicker’s going to be.”

Belle and Mulan just looked at Ella, who rolled her eyes.

“All right, I’m betting on it, and everyone else is being boring as usual.”

They stayed speaking to Mulan and Merida for a while until Ella took Belle’s arm and steered her over to a free table, ostensibly to give the two girlfriends some time to themselves without a third and fourth wheel. Belle got the impression that there was a lot more that Ella wanted to say.

“So, since I know that this morning’s lapse in concentration can’t really be put down to nostalgia for a somewhat dodgy bar, and since I had a rather interesting conversation with Gold – well, it wasn’t really a conversation, it was more along the lines of me teasing him mercilessly until he gave in and divulged a few spare details – I was hoping that I could help.”

Belle sighed. “Well, things were a bit weird this morning,” she said. “Last night was great, don’t get me wrong, but this morning, everything seemed awkward. Gold didn’t really know what to do with himself and I felt that it would probably be easier for everyone involved if I just absented myself from the situation.” She paused. “I guess that he would probably do the same if he hadn’t been in his own house with nowhere to run.”

Ella nodded. “Likely. He does like running away from things sometimes. And by things I mean feelings.”

Belle laughed. “I don’t think that he’s really running away from his feelings, I’m just not sure if he knows what those feelings even are.”

“I think that one of the fundamental problems that you face is that for all Gold seems to be caught up with the modern world, he was born a hundred and fifty years ago and he’s not a big dater. He missed out on the free love movement, which was a real shame because damn, he needed to get laid around that time. Anyway, enough of that. He’s moved with the times in a lot of things, but when it comes to relationships, he’s not had any experience since before the turn of the century. The twentieth century. So I’m not surprised if he’s somewhat overwhelmed at the moment, but don’t hold that against him. He just needs educating in the ways of the modern world and how dating works.”

Belle felt heat suffuse her cheeks. “We’re a little bit past dating now.”

“Well, he needs to learn how that works as well. Let’s just say that he didn’t get a lot of encouragement from his wife in such matters.”

Belle traced a fingertip around the rim of her glass and thought back to the morning’s awkwardness. She’d had a good time last night; and she was sure that they both had. Was it really just a case that Gold had never had to deal with a morning after before and had no idea how to go about it? No, there was definitely something more at stake here.

She hadn’t come last night when they’d made love, but she hadn’t really been expecting to. It was her first time with a new partner and she knew that said new partner was a century out of practice. It was never going to be perfect, but surely Gold knew that too. Except if he didn’t, and he was worried about what she had thought of his own performance. Maybe that was why he had been reluctant to go for a second round in the morning and had fumbled over breakfast instead. It was certainly food for thought, but she was never going to get to the bottom of the problem if he wouldn’t talk to her, and she said as much to Ella.

“I would suggest tying him to a kitchen chair and not letting him up again until you’ve actually got to the bottom of it all, but that might be a bit drastic.” She spoke with air of someone who had experience of doing just that, and Belle couldn’t decide if she wanted to know more about Ella and Gold’s early reaping exploits or not.

“You speak to him in the shop often enough,” Ella said. “It doesn’t have to be an incredibly scary conversation. But I don’t think that this is the end of the world for either of you. It’s just a miscommunication because you come from very different eras. You’re never going to be able to get over that fact so you might as well embrace it and accept it. And you know, the Victorians were kinkier than everyone likes to remember. Well, not Gold, I don’t think that you could find someone less kinky than him, but you’d be surprised.”

Belle raised an eyebrow. “They were so concerned about ankles that they covered their chair legs,” she pointed out.

Ella winked. “Not all of them.”

“You know, I’m not even going to ask.”

Belle glanced at her watch; time was ticking down before the reap and she should probably focus on that for a while before getting distracted by Ella again. Once the souls had been despatched, she could return to the topic of kinky Victorians.

She looked around the bar for any signs of trouble, but things seemed to be going pretty smoothly, no signs of fights breaking out on the horizon. There were a group of men by the bar showing off for Mulan and Merida with all the usual swagger of young men. Mulan and Merida weren’t at all impressed and caused the most sensational reaction when they simply started kissing each other instead, meeting with some whoops and applause from the other patrons and stunned stares from the men who had been trying to get their attention.

“Ah, the alpha male,” Ella said happily, looking over at the one who seemed to be the leader of the pack, looking particularly gobsmacked. “He really can’t understand why, when faced with such a prime specimen of the male form as himself, any self-respecting girl would choose another girl instead. Do you think I ought to go over and console him? Mind you, he’s not that handsome.”

“Well, if you do decide to help him bemoan his loss, can you find out if his name’s K. Nottingham?” Belle asked.

“I shall go and do that,” Ella said. “By the way, a graveling just kicked some empty peanut packets off that table over there. I’m sure there’s going to be some significance to that later.”

Belle looked over at the peanut packets on the floor, but there was no sign of the graveling. Ella’s sixth sense when it came to these things seemed to have paid off again.

Ella left her, going over to the bar to speak to the group of young men and see what she could glean from them. They didn’t look to be too impressed by her flirting, and Belle had to laugh at just how fearful some of them looked when confronted with Ella. She really was a force of nature, and it was wonderful to behold sometimes. She hadn’t been on all that many reaps with Ella, but she always made them more entertaining whenever she could.

After a few moments conversation at the bar, she came back over, grinning from ear to ear like the Cheshire Cat. One of the men, a greasy, weasly looking sort, wearing black leather despite the summer heat outside, was following her.

“Lacey, this is Keith,” she said. “He saw you sitting all alone down here and wondered if you would oblige him and his friend George with a game of pool.”

Belle looked at Keith, then looked at the man pointed out as George, who was still at the bar and appeared to be attempting to get Mulan and Merida to have a threesome with him. Mulan sighed, then suddenly slapped him, the action taking out his soul. Belle could see the satisfaction in her friend’s face, and smiled to herself. Keith and George were fate’s chosen victims today, and she really couldn’t say that she was at all sorry for it.

She sidled out of the booth where she and Ella had been sitting and came over to Keith, swaying her hips. She’d never usually been one for flaunting her feminine wiles before, but in this case, she thought that it would just add the icing on the cake for these two losers.

“Well, how can I turn down such a wonderful offer?” she purred. “Two for the price of one.”

She brushed past Keith, dancing her fingertips over his shoulder to pull out his soul. They’d both been reaped. Now all she had to do was play a few shots of pool and see what the gravelings had in store for them, and where on earth the peanut packets fitted in.

George came over, rubbing his jaw and grumbling about Mulan and Merida not taking him up on his generous offer, and soon the game was in full swing.

Belle had potted two balls when she felt Keith’s hand on her backside, and everything happened very quickly after that. Instinctively, she shoved her elbow back into his solar plexus, and by the time she had turned around to give him a piece of her mind, Fate was already in motion. Keith staggered backwards with the force of her blow, slipping on the shiny peanut packets just behind him. This sent him flying and there was a blood-curdling thwack as his head hit the table.

It was not just Keith that had been sent flying by the trip, though. It was also his pool cue, which managed to hit George in the side of the face and stun him enough to make him fall too – right onto his own pool cue.

For a long time, no-one in the bar moved. Keith and George’s souls stared at each other, and then down at the grim sight of their bodies on the ground.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” George said faintly.

“No you won’t,” Merida said cheerfully, slipping off her bar stool and giving George a smack on the shoulder. “You can’t throw up when you’re dead. Come on boys, I think it’s last orders for you.”

She shooed the souls towards the doors; no-one in the bar seemed to see her, too engrossed with the calamity that had just occurred.

“You know, I think that now would be the perfect time to make a judicious exit,” Ella said as voice and movement returned to the stunned bar patrons and the place descended into chaos.

Belle and Mulan nodded their agreement.

X

“Well, that was certainly one of the more gruesome reaps that I’ve seen in my time,” Ella said conversationally as she and Belle were walking along the road back in the direction of Belle’s apartment. The souls had been despatched to their lights with very little fuss, and Mulan and Merida had gone off in the other direction towards home. Belle was happy to leave them to it. It was wonderful that they had remained so close despite the distance between them, and she wished them every happiness. Now all that remained was to get to the bottom of her own relationship problems. “Although, there was that accidental beheading back in ’75; now that was certainly one for the history books.”

“You know, Ella, I really don’t think that I want to know.”

“You’re right, it’s not for the faint of heart or stomach. Onto happier and less bloodthirsty topics. Have you decided what you’re going to do about Gold?”

Belle nodded. She had considered just calling him as soon as she got back into her apartment, but she accepted that it was late and she was somewhat intoxicated, so it probably wouldn’t have been the most satisfactory of conversations.

“Excellent. I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding boiling down to the fact that he hasn’t had any kind of romantic experience in something close to a geological eon and now he’s overthinking it. He does that a lot, you know, although he’s getting a lot better at hiding it. Still.” They had reached Belle’s building and stopped outside the door. “I’m sure that you’ll be able to work something out. I have every faith in you both, and if it does all go pear-shaped, I will be waiting in the wings with a baseball bat to keep you both in line. Now that Mulan’s headed towards her happy ending I’ll be damned if you and Gold don’t get yours as well.”

Belle laughed, and accepted Ella’s exuberant hug goodbye. She was a good friend to both of them, and Belle knew that whatever happened, she had Ella fighting in her corner. As she climbed the stairs to the apartment, she thought that the future was looking bright.

X

As expected, Mulan wasn’t present at the morning meeting the next day, taking advantage of her time off to spend as much time with Merida as possible. Having one reaper down meant that the rest of them were going to be busy for the next few days, but luckily fate seemed to know that they were understaffed and had not been too unkind in the amount of people who were due to meet their demises.

Ella and David left the diner quickly after receiving their post-its, and Belle knew that it was because they wanted to leave her and Gold alone together to get to the bottom of whatever needed to be got to the bottom of.

They stayed in awkward silence for a while, looking at their drinks rather than each other, and finally Belle spoke.

“About the other night,” she began, but she didn’t really have any idea where she was going to go next with the sentence.

“Yeah… I probably didn’t handle that quite as well as I should have done.” Gold gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Forget a reaper’s handbook, I think I’d be better off with a guide to life in the twenty-first century and how to navigate the perils and pitfalls of dating in it.”

“It’s all right,” Belle said. “I just didn’t really know where I stood with the whole situation.”

“Neither did I, which was part of the problem. What is the etiquette for things like that?”

“I don’t really think that there is one,” Belle said. “You just sort of take it all as it comes and work it out as you go along. There aren’t any hard and fast rules these days, which I think there were when you were last… You know. Courting.”

“Please don’t make me sound even older than I am.”

“You’re not that old, honestly. I think you need to stop being so worried about your age. We’re reapers. It’s irrelevant.”

Gold nodded. “Yes, Ella keeps telling me that.”

“Well, she does have a point.”

Gold looked around the diner. “Can we discuss this somewhere with less people?” he asked. “Maybe the shop?”

Belle nodded. “Of course.”

They settled the bill and left the diner, Belle wheeling her bike along in the direction of the shop. She was almost done with her mail round and the final couple of houses could wait a little longer for their letters.

“I guess I panicked,” Gold said once they were in the back room of the shop. It was dark and cool in there, and Belle felt that it was much more conducive to honest discussion than the crowded diner was. “I was worrying about what you were thinking.”

“I already told you that it didn’t matter,” Belle said. “It was our first time together, it was never going to be amazing. Believe me, there are definitely people out there worse than you. You just need practice, that’s all.” She smiled. “You know, I’m more than willing to help you practise.”

Gold laughed softly. “Are you sure about that?”

“You’re hardly going to get worse. So, you were worried about your prowess. There’s really no need to compare yourself to whatever anyone else might be doing. We have all the time in the world, Alistair. We can go at our own pace, whatever that might be.”

Gold nodded. “Thank you.”

She had never really thought of him as having any issues with self-esteem before, but now that she thought about it, she wondered if that was where the uncertainties had come from. He could be confident and calm in everything to do with reaping because he had so much experience of it, but when it came to other things where he had less practical knowledge, then naturally he wasn’t going to be as confident. Maybe he was thinking that since he was so long-lived and had so much experience in other fields, he ought to have more experience and more confidence in this particular area and that was why he was panicking so much.

“Don’t panic,” she said. “Maybe that should be the first rule of functional immortality as well as the first guideline for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

Gold laughed, then he leaned in and kissed her, a kiss full of promise.

“Thank you,” he said. “I promise that you will not need to massage my bruised ego in the future.”

“That’s good to hear. I will not, however, be averse to massaging other things.”

Had he been drinking at that moment, Gold would probably have spat all over her, such was his stunned expression. Belle smiled. She couldn’t wait to get started on their relationship once more.

#rumbelle fic #rumbelle #Belle French #Mr Gold #Fic: What Comes After

[honeylikewords]

In a perfect world where you were hired to help write and direct the final movie of the new trilogy, how would you want Rise of Skywalker to go? What adjustments would you want made to either address anything from the previous films, or to avoid what has thus far been hinted at in trailers and interviews?

Oh, man, there’s SO much to think about here. Let’s start with, I think, things I’d want to change from previous films (either retconning them in RoS or providing context that makes them fundamentally changed)…

So, to that effect, here’s an itemized list!

Just as a precaution, I make some assumptions or pull from information I’ve seen around the internet. Some of these MIGHT turn out to be close to canon, so if you want to avoid anything, just steer clear of this post. I’m trying not to theorize too hard, and thus avoid spoilers myself, so I don’t know anything with any solid confirmation, so I could be wrong. Just wanted to cover my bases!

Without further ado, here’s the list!

1. I think I’d retcon out the idea that Luke would ever hurt Ben as a padawan. The general characterization of Luke felt very… off in The Last Jedi, and I wasn’t sure why the writers went in the directions they did for that. 

I’m not saying Luke can’t have a darker side– we know he struggled with a call to the Dark side during his training and feared it would overtake him– but the idea that he’d go as far as to even imagine killing a sleeping child, much less the son of his two most beloved people in the universe is… weird. And wrong. 

So I’d retcon that out with it being a false memory planted by, let’s say, Snoke or Palpatine, in order to create a rift between them and bring Ben to the Dark side. I think that would make a great deal of sense, frankly, and bring some much-needed closure and relief to the idea that Luke would ever hurt someone so defenseless.

2. On a similar note, while I understand that the thesis of TLJ was “making mistakes and learning from them”, I felt like most of the “mistakes” engineered into the movie didn’t actually make sense for the characters making them. Poe being “selfish” and “glory obsessed” doesn’t at all match with what we’d seen of him in TFA, nor does it match with any of the extended (and canonical) material about him.

He left the Republic Navy because they were too accepting of the idea of sacrificing their soldiers. In the military, that’s called “acceptable losses”: the amount of cannon-fodder that the military’s willing to wave off and accept as the “expected amount” of dead soldiers. If that idea enraged Poe enough to leave the Republic Navy, why would he be so accepting of the same idea for the Resistance? As far as I’m aware, the only life Poe is ever willing to sacrifice is his own; he wants everyone else safe. So why write him like he doesn’t care?

Here’s a direct quote about him from his official Star Wars Wookiepedia entry: 

“… Dameron developed a strong sense of commitment and duty, but had trouble with the line between his commitment to the Resistance and the commitment to his comrades, willing to disobey a direct order from his superior, General Organa, to make sure that the Millennium Falcon safely left Starkiller Base before its imminent destruction.”

Oh, yeah, that definitely sounds like the kind of guy to blindly let HUNDREDS of his comrades die. Yeah. For sure.

And then to act like he’s a bad person for not trusting a leader who isn’t making themselves clear in a time when clarity is of the utmost importance? To act like he’s a narcissist for trying to take the lead and help as best he can in a chaotic and, for all intents and purposes, leaderless situation? To frame him like he’s a bad guy for not trusting Holdo immediately, or acting like his distrust comes from a place of sexism or self-interest? Absolute rubbish.

So while I can’t retcon the whole “insubordinate bad listener self-obsessed narcissist” behavior that got written into TLJ, I’d try my best to re-contextualize Poe’s frustrations that he expressed in the film by showing why it would make sense for him to take the lead, to demand answers, to do his best to destroy the Dreadnought. 

For example, showing why it was important to take down the Dreadnought: he’s constantly concerned about civilian casualties at the hands of the First Order. With a Dreadnought still active, millions of people could be killed at the First Order’s whims; by taking the ship down, he saved millions of lives.

Another good way to dispell the idea of him as a self-centered hotshot willing to throw away lives is to show just how much he values the lives of others and wants to keep them away from harm; show his own self-sacrifice. Show him being willing to take the damage to protect someone else. Show him telling someone to get behind him, to stay safe, telling them “I’m not going to lose you, too”. I think that would be a helpful step away from the perception of him as a glory chaser; show that his self-sacrifice is genuine.

Honestly, I’d put so much effort into fixing the fallout from the Poe mischaracterization that I could go on forever about it, but I’m sure you all want to read other stuff, too, so let’s move on for now.

3. Absolutely retcon the shit out of the idea that the Force connection between Rey and Kylo was anything more than platonic or an intervention of Snoke. Sure, you can indicate that there’s still a lingering connection, but clarify that it’s more about the battle between the Light and the Dark, and the inherent connection that such mirror images will have to each other, but don’t get it twisted as some kind of galaxy-spanning love story. 

I’d put a lot of emphasis on Rey clearly expressing frustration with Kylo and saying “He’s failed himself. His pain is his own choice now; I tried to help him, but he rejected it, so it’s up to him to stop himself or we’ll do it for him” or something to that effect. And having her definitely avowedly denying any kind of “attraction” out loud. That’d be nice.

4. In a parallel train of thought, we gotta talk about Rey’s parents. While I’m certainly fine with the idea of Rey Nobody, because it’d be so great to have a Star Wars story where someone NOT from the Skywalker bloodline is just as strong as one of them, and is just as worthy and important, regardless of their bloodline or heritage, I’m also concerned that leaving her a Nobody would give credence to all that bullshit Kylo was spewing about her “not mattering” to anyone but him, ugh.

And it’d leave a door open for R*ylos to be like “WELL THEY’RE NOT RELATED SO OBVIOUSLY THEY CAN HAVE SEX!”, ew. 

So we’d have to give her some kind of actual backstory, and finally clear up what that is. It’s not something I actually want to do all that bad– I’m genuinely totally happy to not know everything about Rey’s parents, and the story would be fine without ever knowing anything about them– but I feel like so many people would demand it, and ensuring that Rey and Kylo are somehow related would finally put a cork in that insufferable bottle.

I don’t really have any great suggestions for how to deal with it, but I think there’s definitely the potential for a cool twist where Ben isn’t actually Leia and Han’s biological son, but Rey is their biological daughter. A sort of switched at birth idea, if that makes sense, and while it might be hard to believe (wouldn’t a mother know if she gave birth to a boy or girl?), there are lots of ways to work around it, and I think it could be a cool twist, though it does leave the loophole of them still not being related…

Hm. Well, at any rate, I’d have to iron it out with some other brainstormers, but I’m sure there are ways to fully cap off and prevent R*ylo from ever happening. Don’t worry, I’ll name some later in the list.

5. I’d also do my best to take away any lingering ideas about Finn being “goofy” or “cowardly”. TLJ decided to present him as this selfish weirdo more interested in wealth and himself than in the greater good, which was… odd. While he’s certainly careful about self-preservation, he also has a good heart, so I’d do a lot to emphasize his strong, heroic nature, and not just use him as a guy for all the gags to bounce off of. He deserves serious, thoughtful moments, heroic moments, AND silly, light-hearted moments. 

6. While on the topic of Finn, I’d also put FinnRose to rest and just… not have that be a ship. I’ve talked about it before, but I’ll summarize my basic issues with it: they just didn’t have any chemistry, it was a very forced and hasty relationship, and it didn’t make sense for either party.

Rose has a problem with hero worship; that much is evident. So why indulge her in it by pairing her with someone she childishly idolizes? Why not have her character arc be about finding her own personal bravery, not being reliant on others or their stories, but forging her own?

As for Finn, I’d love to see him end up staying close to Rey, possibly even beginning to walk the road towards their own relationship (though I do also value the idea of Rey not needing to have any romantic relationship in the saga at all), at the very least as friends. 

The whole “what we love” line in TLJ made no sense (except as a shoehorn to explain the validity of R*ylo in future films?), so I’d just have her explain in RoS that she was talking about “what we love” being belief systems that we fight to protect, like defending human decency, freedom, and peace, and that the kiss was a weird, juvenile decision that she’s embarrassed about in the same way one might be embarrassed about a childhood diary entry about a crush. It was just a fleeting moment of weirdness, but now that she’s more grown up and sturdy in her own personality and life, she doesn’t have to rely on the childish ideas of heroes and romance to keep her going.

I think that’s a long enough list of the retcons for now, so I’ll move into things I’d like to see happen in the movie and things I’d rather NOT see in the movie (i.e. things from the trailers that are being hinted at that I want GONE).

1. I’m just gonna get out in front of this: I don’t think I’m gonna like Zorri Bliss. I don’t. I’m really tired of “badass female characters” in that “badass female character” is such a boring stock trope by now. Skinny white woman who engages in violence and is flippant and emotionally removed, oh, joy, I’ll hold for applause. But what I’m really concerned about is the angle they’re trying to push with her and Poe; specifically, that Poe may not be “that good of a person” because he used to hang out with her, and she’s implied to be a smuggler or mercenary of some sorts.

Look, I get it. We don’t like “perfect” characters. I know that I love characters with oddities and quirks and flaws, and who make mistakes. But there’s a difference between that and fundamentally re-working a character so that they’re “not so nice” anymore. 

Poe already has flaws to work with and explore. Why make him have a “dark” backstory when he’s already interesting enough? And why make it connected to a “past relationship” with this random new woman?

I’m also concerned about them pushing a romance, which we simply don’t need, especially because it looks like it’s being done to finally quash any perceptions of Poe as queer. Which is just so shitty on so many levels, but I don’t have time to unpack them all.

So what I would do is probably just… cut Zorri altogether. We’re already introducing new characters in this film, and specifically adding Jannah to the roster, and tossing in new characters to an already crowded roster won’t really help. None of them will get enough screen time to properly reach catharsis in their arcs, so we just have to nip the least helpful bud, and Zorri’s seems like it’d be the first one to go, in my opinion. 

Maybe she’ll turn out to be great in the film. Who knows. But if it was up to me, I’d drop the whole subplot of her, and making Poe’s backstory a sullied one. I don’t need that.

Instead, I’d use that time to allow the main trio to DO THEIR THING. We need to see THEIR character journeys: not random newcomers.

2. No Bendemption.

This is gonna be a slightly controversial take, I guess, but I think a redemption for Kylo would be kinda hackneyed and forced.

That’s not to say I don’t think villain redemptions are possible, fun, interesting, or worth exploring. But I’m saying that I think this particular one just… wouldn’t work. 

Kylo doesn’t seem to be at all legitimately sorry for the things he’s done. He seems to be aware of his choices and capable of making them independently. Sure, the writers might force the idea that “oh, it was PALPATINE controlling him all along!”, but I feel like that would be so counterintuitive to the point of these stories.

The whole point is about choice: who we choose to be, what we choose to do. We can all choose to be kind, or we can choose to be cruel. We can choose to put others first or serve ourselves. We choose the Light or the Dark, and we get to decide what we do with that. Everything we do is a choice, and the Star Wars saga is about becoming out better selves and choosing to help those around us because it’s right.

So making the baddie secretly mind controlled would be… dumb. And hollow. And devoid of substance. So that’s out, not an option (if they want to tell a valid story).

So that just leaves us with Kylo Ren, Ben Solo, whatever, has been CHOOSING to be this way. And while he’s certainly felt pained by it, he also keeps making his choices; he’s now Supreme Leader, and he could choose to destroy the whole thing, leave, fight for good, but he doesn’t. 

So he can’t BE redeemed. Because he doesn’t want to be.

I mean, I’d honestly have to write a whole essay on just this singular topic to accurately convey my point, but here’s a shortened version of it:

I think a Bendemption wouldn’t be prudent at this point because he just doesn’t have the time to make a satisfying arc in one movie without it feeling forced, rushed, and out of character. So, to tie off the saga, he has to go out like Vader did: he has to die to be redeemed.

He can either die a villain or die a hero, but regardless, I think he just… needs to die in order to properly close the book on him. It needs to end with sacrifice, and either he sacrifices himself or someone else makes a sacrifice of him. Only then do we reach the catharsis.

And, look, I know the Bendemption is gonna happen. But if I was writing it, I wouldn’t let it happen: he’d have to have his Vader death. At the very best, it could be a noble one. At the worst, he’d die as he deserved to. But it would finally be over.

3. No grey Jedi Rey.

I don’t really love this whole cultural direction we’re taking with our movies where “the bad guys are secretly good and the good guys are secretly bad and the real truth is just to be in the middle!” because it’s so unhelpful.

Yes, extremism is bad and blindly believing any one group is the best and most moral, without ever questioning that, often prevents people from critically analyzing their choices, but it’s not that there isn’t an objective truth in the world; there is. There are objectively good and evil things to do. So we can’t pretend that relativity is universally applicable, because it isn’t.

So having Rey “accept the Dark and the Light” would be… difficult without seeming clownishly college-philosophy-student-y. 

While it would be important for her to accept that the Dark can exist in all of us, and that it’s not inherently evil to be tempted or to acknowledge it, the difference is in choice. She shouldn’t be allowed to have the best of both worlds because that isn’t how it works in real life, either. 

Indulging in our worst impulses, darkest desires, or lowest cruelties doesn’t make us more “real”, it makes us worse people. So having her “use the Dark side” would also just feel like this weird attempt to allow her to love Kylo or accept evil as “alright because we’re all bad inside”.

This isn’t to say she has to live in a world of harsh absolutes, but rather that she should, ultimately, choose the Light, kindness, and a journey towards making sure that she is keeping herself in check, as well as making sure that she is doing her best work for herself and others. 

So I’d write a clear moral line in: anyone can change, yes, but the important part is to change for the better, not just to accept the worst and stagnate in one’s most awful, darkest qualities. 

The idea would be lenience by extending kindness, which anyone can choose to accept, not just “you’ve been evil but I love you anyway”. Nah. We can’t just tolerate people’s evil behavior and let it continue: we have to extend the possibility of mercy and tell the person they can come to the Light if they so choose, but we won’t descend to them. They rise, or they fall, and it’s in their own hands.

4. On a less philosophical note, DON’T make Finn, Jannah, and Lando all related. 

A lot of the content I’ve seen circling for them seems to imply a familial relationship, possibly that Finn is Jannah’s lost brother, and that Jannah is Lando’s daughter. And, yes, while I’d love to see Finn reunited with his family and given a chance at a happy life… it’d be kinda cringey and bad to imply that the few black characters in Star Wars are all related.

I get that Star Wars is a dynastic story centered on families and genealogies and inheritances. But holy shit, it’s kinda racist to imply that the, like, only three black people in the series are going to be related.

It’s a galaxy full of people.

Not all of them have to be related just because they have similar melanin.

5. As for the overall plot, I think what I’d just want is the final triumph of good over evil. I really need to see that. I don’t need an ambiguous ending, I don’t need a dark one, I need one where the Light wins out, because that’s what we need to see, what we need to believe, and what we need to strive for.

The First Order NEEDS to fall. Kylo NEEDS to be out of power. And there NEEDS to be an emphasis on the value of lives, on the importance of taking care of the people in our universe, and on the belief that good does prevail, even when it doesn’t necessarily seem like it will. 

I’m not too bogged down with details– planet-hopping is fine, traveling to new worlds and seeing new people is all cool– but more concerned about the overall message. The MESSAGE is what I’m most interested in. And we all know what my message would be.

6. Oh, and just focus on keeping the trio together. Structurally, I’d just need to see them working as a team; we’ve had way too much time of them apart, so it’d be nice to see how they interact and function as a group. I’d like that.

Anyway, this is just a short-list of things. If I were to actually talk about this, I’d need, like, a whole essay just to unpack my thoughts. Oh, and I’d probably prepare a full alternate script. Just because.

I have plenty of other ideas for things I’d love to see happen, but this is just a list of things I don’t want or things I’d do to prevent things I don’t want. LMAO.

I’ll come back to this idea, this list-ish format of thoughts, after the film is out and after I’ve seen it, in order to talk more about things I’d have done differently or changed (provided there’s anything I would have done differently or changed), but for now, this is just a handful of my ideas about things I’m concerned with. 

Let me know what you guys are thinking; I’d love to be able to discuss this and kinda get a feel for what other people are thinking about, concerned about, worried about, or excited about. 

#long post #gif warning #messages #anonymous #k reviews #(Sorta!!)

[cancerbiophd]

Hey yo have you ever had to "mentor" a junior before? I'm just a MSc student new to the lab and my supervisor decided that he'll assign a A level student to me. I'm scared because I know how a bad impression could potentially make her lose interest in research. I don't wanna be That Teacher. Any advice on being a good mentor?

hi there! that is an excellent question and i’m so glad that this is a concern for you and you want to learn how to be the best mentor you can be. we need more proactive teachers like you!

i’ve mentored many undergraduates and a few high school students, so here are some things i’ve picked up. 

but firstly, you should set up a meeting with your supervisor to ask them for advice as well, and to be on the same footing as to what is expected from the student project-wise, time-wise, etc. there’s nothing more confusing to a student than when their supervisors have fundamental misunderstandings regarding expectations. 

Tips on Mentoring:

Get to know your mentee (and vice versa). Sit down with them before you start anything, and have them tell you about themselves. Ask them why they want to work here, what their interests are, what they want to get out of being here, what their career goals are, what their time commitment/schedule is etc etc. Then tell them about yourself, like what you’re working on, what your goals are, how you got there, etc. Not only will this help to establish a good relationship, but will also help you get a sense of how to best organize their project and time. 

Set some ground rules. It’s good to think about these beforehand so there are no misunderstandings. Here are a few to think about: 

How many hours/week should they be in lab? Should it be a set schedule, or should they come in when necessary? (eg. some experiments may require them to be here in the morning, some in the afternoon, etc)

Will they eventually have their own little project, or will they just be working with you? 

What are your policies on time off? I tell all my students that their academic career takes priority, so if they need to study for an exam instead of coming into lab, please do so, and if they’re sick, or something comes up, etc (but make sure to let me know and try to plan ahead if possible, so I’m not stuck doing their work for them)

How detailed should their record-keeping/data analyses/etc be? They technically should have their own lab notebook, and preferably a file on a lab computer for their files, but this is up to you and/or your supervisor.

How strict will you be on how the student uses their time in lab? For example, can they surf the web or do homework when there’s downtime, etc. 

How can they contact you? (And also when? Like will you be checking your emails in the evening?)

Safety first, so make sure they know where the emergency exits and safety equipment are, and who to contact in case of emergency, and that they also do the required training for your particular work (eg. biohazard training, etc). 

Bring them up to speed on any background information they should know, and always be constantly explaining things (like why you’re doing what you’re doing, how something works, etc). When I first get a student I like to bring them into a meeting room with a whiteboard so I can draw flowcharts and signaling pathways. Keep in mind that everyone has different learning styles, so it may take some creative ways to get certain tough concepts across. Pause often to ask them if they have any questions, and take cues on whether they look lost to explain something more in-depth. It’s also good to ask them what they already know beforehand, so you’re not repeating something, or skipping over something vital. You also don’t need to teach them everything right now; many things, like specific techniques, can be learned as you do them. If you have some great review papers on their project, send it their way. And reassure them that they do not need to understand all of it; it’s just a resource for them, and though they should try to read it, it’s not something to lose sleep over. 

Practice explaining concepts in a concise, easy-to-understand manner. This is definitely a skill that takes time. But I’ve found that one of the ways someone gets turned off by a particular subject is if their teacher is horrible at explaining something. I like using metaphors, and drawing things out, and asking my student questions to move the flow of what I’m teaching (eg. “So based off what I just told you, what do you think the conclusion is?”). A good way to practice this is to write it out, like a tumblr post. That way you can visually see how you can organize your thoughts. 

If you two are working on a project together, plan it with them so they see the big picture. I like to tell them why we’re doing this project, and what we predict the results will be. I also give them a flowchart of the steps and print out a calendar to actually plan it out day by day. This is also a great way for them to organize their schedule so they can be there for the important stuff. Of course it’s all tentative and things do come up, but this is a) good practice for them if they ever want to become an independent researcher and b) a great way for both of you to organize your time. 

Encourage them to take notes on anything and everything. When showing them a protocol, either print out the protocol so they can take notes on it, or give them a notebook so they can write stuff down. They should always feel free to ask you questions, but sometimes these questions could be answered if they had taken notes. This encourages them to become independent (especially if they’ll have their own project). And when they’re writing something down, pause so they can take the time to do so. 

Teach in baby steps. My format for teaching a technique/protocol/anything is: 1) they watch me (and take notes), 2) they do it while I watch/dictate/help, then 3) they do it while I watch but I keep quiet and let them figure things out (until I need to step in). Of course, everyone is different, and they may need more or less guidance, or there are some things that they probably shouldn’t ever do alone due to the nature of the protocol/equipment, but in general this format has worked for me. This also works for things like experimental design and data analyses. 

Let them make mistakes. Unless it’s hazardous or expensive, I let my undergrads make mistakes, and then we go through how to fix that mistake. Because we’ve all been there, and sometimes doing something wrong is the best way to learn how to do something right! And if they ever do make that mistake again, they’ll know the steps to clean up/fix it. Making mistakes and fixing them is part of becoming independent (in anything, really).

Meet with them often if/when they do become more independent. Maybe check in every day they’re here, or set up a weekly meeting so you two can go over experimental design, data interpretation, next week’s goals, etc. 

Meet with your supervisor often as well, either as a group, or just you and the supervisor. Not only will your supervisor probably want to hear updates on the student (person-wise and data-wise), but this is a good chance to express grievances and/or get advice. 

Be proactive in showing your passion for the subject, and include them in your excitement. When I think about my favorite teachers, they’re always the ones who were super passionate about their subject, and that kind of excitement was seriously contagious. So release that inner nerd. Get excited! If you see an article that you think is super cool, share it with your student. Talk to them about new discoveries. Bounce ideas off them. Call them over when you’re looking at something cool under the microscope (even if it’s not directly related to their project). If they see how much you love the subject, then they’re more likely to put in the effort to do so too! A win win!

Be patient, kind, and supportive. Above all, you should be these things. Treat your student with respect and compassion. They’re going to be nervous, so someone who is friendly goes a long way. And because you’re the leader here, they’re going to look up to you. Think about how you’d like your supervisor/mentor to treat you if say, you’re having a bad day and you mess something up. (Though if there really is a serious conflict, please get an applicable 3rd party involved, like your supervisor). I also try to help them on other non-lab-related aspects if I can, like if they’re applying for something, I offer to peer review their personal statement. That’s just me though; I like to help as much as I can, because sometimes I may be the only helpful person in their life. 

And be patient, kind, and supportive to yourself as well! This a learning experience for you too. I tell my students that I’m still training on becoming a better mentor, so if they think I should do something different, please let me know. And none of us are perfect, so I make mistakes too, and that’s ok. Once I taught my undergrad how to do a math formula wrong and we ended up having to repeat the entire experiment. It wasn’t the end of the world, and it was a good teaching moment for both of us. I can only give you so many pointers, but at the end of the day, becoming a mentor is an experience that you will have to customize based off of what you do and who you are. So let yourself live this experience and grow from it :)

That’s all I can think of right now.. If anyone has anything helpful to add, please do! 

And good luck anon! Your willingness to learn how to be good teacher already tells me that you’re going to be a great one :)

#Anonymous #advice #gradblr #grad advice

[lessonsinkindness-blog]

sweating the small stuff.

More often that not, if I spend more than a couple of hours with one of my close family members, the conversation will eventually turn to our upbringing, and some kind of sense that other people aren't "quite like us". I imagine we are by no means alone in this, nor are we the first people to feel alienated at times by the distance between how we see the world and how those around us seem to.

 It's particularly prevalent for us, I think, because we are a very tight knit family - many of my family literally live around the corner from each other. I grew up being as close to my cousins as I am brothers and sisters, and there have always been an abundance of aunties and uncles on both sides who have had a great influence on the values I have been brought up to hold as important. I've learnt so much more from each and every one of my family members than I could ever articulate in one blog, but I guess something that really shines through it all, is a very high standard of expectation of others' behaviour, the counterweight to which at times has been varying degrees of disappointment when these are not met.

 I think it's very important, whatever your background, not to hold yourself up as some kind of beacon of virtue. As a sociology graduate, and someone who strongly believes in nurture over nature, I am really aware that the way we see the world is very much shaped by social influences such as familial and cultural context, class, gender, age, life experiences - and as such, there are very few things, even if they are things I ardently disagree with, that I would actually argue are objective "wrongs". I never intended this blog to become a way to preach about all of me and my family's virtues, and everyone else's shortcomings. My brother and I actually talk a lot about how sometimes the way we have been brought up - with high emotional intelligence, stronger than typical sensitivity, and conscientiousness - can at times really be a hindrance which has the danger to set the bar immeasurably high for those we interact with.

 That disclaimer out of the way, there are a few basic beliefs I have instilled in me that I find it very hard to compromise on. Probably the most central to my identity is the idea that unless and until someone does you intentional harm, you treat them with a baseline of respect. This might mean being honest and transparent, making an effort to maintain friendships, giving people the benefit of the doubt before assuming the worst, being mindful of how you interact with people, having self-awareness and understanding the impact your own actions could have on that person's wellbeing, placing value on authenticity and connection...any number of things.

 Lately, I find myself coming up against a bit of a brick wall, and I'm in danger of something I didn't want to happen. I'm in danger of becoming cynical. And I think that's to do with the level of reciprocity I am feeling. I don't consider myself a naive person - I've had a lot of life experience for my age, I've been exposed to quite a lot of diversity of lifestyles and value systems, and I make it a point to learn more about things that challenge my thinking (to avoid confirmation bias, always a step worth taking as a lefty liberal!). I haven't lived in a world of rose tinted glasses my whole life and I've seen enough of some really bad behaviour to know that some people just can't (read "won't") change. But for a pessimistic person, I have managed til now to hold up some kind of hope that people fundamentally try hard for the most part to be decent people. Even if their thinking is a little, how shall we say, "creative", even if they don't hold views I would find acceptable - I tend to assume that people are doing the best they can.

 I'm not so sure any more.

 In the last few months, something has changed in me, and although it's something I thought would never benefit my life, I am starting to realise it can be an advantage, if for nothing more than self-preservation. Slowly but surely, I am starting to distance myself from "sweating the small stuff".

 Richard Carlson tells us "it's all small stuff". Hmmmm. I don't know. I'm a great believer that a lot of that "small stuff" adds up to cumulative effect over time - and it's those things that eventually steamroll into the "big stuff" that causes the breakdown of relationships. I also believe that if people took a little more time and effort on the smaller things in life, we'd probably all get a long a bit better.

 But there is something I am starting to realise. You can't change everyone. Some people are just....crap.

You can waste so much energy trying to understand why some people act the way they do. You can make excuse after excuse for why effort isn't reciprocated. You can try to convince yourself they didn't mean to sound self-centred, they didn't mean that joke to sound so harsh, they didn't mean to make me feel that way when they did (or didn't) do X, Y or Z. Sometimes, enough just has to be enough.

 If I had a tally chart of all the hours in my life so far I have spent tying myself up in anxious knots about what this person or that person thinks of me, or what terrible thing will happen to me if I challenge behaviour I don't like, or what awful repercussions there will be if I walk away from one sided relationships, there wouldn't be enough paper in the world - trust me! I always thought I would care about that stuff. I always thought I would live this kind of dampened life squashed down by misplaced guilt about every choice I make. But I have to admit, it's getting a little easier.

 There's a kind of clarity that comes when shit things happen in life. Once you've had your world blown apart by something major, or experienced those minor tremors from other bumps along the way - every time that happens, the one good thing that happens is you lose a little bit of guilt. You start seeing self-care as a prerogative rather than an indulgence, and little by little, stop wasting time on worrying about the things you have little to no control over.

 It doesn't mean people aren't crap any more. It just means that the axis of your world doesn't spin around that fact any more. People will always be crap. So the question is, what do you do about that?

 You start re-balancing things. You don't have to become a hardened shell of the person you once were. You certainly don't have to stop doing all the kind hearted things that make you a good person. It would be such a shame to lose your enthusiasm for life, or belief in people. But maybe you re-direct those qualities to the people who are bouncing them back.

 3 years ago, if I'd have gone home from a day from work and someone spoke to me like a piece of shit on their shoe, I would have spent about an hour feeling angry, and about 10million hours after that fretting about what it is I'm doing (or not doing) to bring out that attitude in someone. Now, I won't lie: I stew on it. But the difference is, I allow myself to be angry, and then I move on quicker. I am also now able to take on a reasonable proportion of responsibility in a given situation - I take a slice, rather than the whole pie!! Yes, maybe I could have changed A or B to make that interaction a little more successful, but you know what? That person is a bit of an idiot, and they're known for speaking down to people. That's not my stuff.

 3 years ago, if someone didn't make an effort with me, I would have thought I'm a boring person, or that I needed to change something to be more likeable. Now I understand that you can be the nicest person in the world, and sometimes you're just not everyone's cup of tea. Situations in life change, and people grow apart. It's not the end of the world. And it doesn't have to be personal. Even if it really feels it sometimes.

 And 3 years ago, if I wasn't spending every waking minute going over 110%, I would have called myself lazy and self-pitying. These days, I recognise sometimes I just need to be nothing, to nobody, all day, and that's how I personally recharge. And it's okay once in a while to take my foot off the gas and just work at 75% capacity. Or even 10% if that's all I can manage. I just do the best I can. And when a guilty thought washes over me, I try to distract myself as quickly as possible with something that makes me feel positive.

 It's such a cliché, but I guess a cliché for a reason. The most valuable thing my counsellor ever taught me was being kind to myself. The question I ask myself (and I hear her gently encouraging voice every time I do this in my head!) is: "if this was a friend, would I say the same?". Would I tell a friend they were lazy if they'd spent all week commuting for 3 hours a day and wanted to spend a day vegging out on the sofa watching TV? Would I tell a friend they were being over sensitive if they were hurt by something someone had said to them? Would I chastise a friend if they made a mistake?

 Or would I tell them to take it easy, forgive themselves, and do what they needed to do to feel calmer?

 Life is full of the "small stuff". Some of it you can see - most of it is invisible, but very real. I don't believe in trivialising day to day frustrations because I know first hand how horrible the day to day grind can get at times. But I would say this. Life really is too short to waste it worrying about what everybody thinks. As long as you can say you have a clean conscience and treat people well, it's okay to let yourself off the hook occasionally. Anxious people are often said to overestimate the emphasis other people place on their actions. How many times have you walked into a party thinking everyone's going to make fun of what you're wearing or think your social skills are rubbish?

 Shall I let you in to a secret?

 They're too busy to notice.

 They're too busy sweating their small stuff.

#blog selfawareness anxiety forgiveness guilt kindness

[webanalytics]

Unsexy Fundamentals Focus: User Experiences That Print Money

Like me, I'm sure you are working on complex challenges when it comes to data.

Multi-petabyte data warehouses. Multi-touch, cross-channel attribution analysis. Media mix modeling. Predictive analytics. Human-centric analysis. Oh, and let's not forget the application of machine learning to every facet of your work.

It is genuinely fun to work on these opportunities. They’re difficult, and every step forward offers a renewed sense of excitement and inspiration.

Despite the joy in these high-level, forward-thinking initiatives, I've disciplined myself not to let the unsexy fundamentals go overlooked. I’m particularly vigilant about avoiding friction in the core systems that facilitate the flow of money into the company and beloved products out of it.

So today, that valuable reminder for you kicked off via a case study inspired by Condé Nast. To inspire, and jump-start, a change in your focus, we’ll also look at Heal, Facebook and prAna.

Before we proceed with the stories… The unsexy fundamentals in this post focus on user experience. If you are a reader of my newsletter, The Marketing < > Analytics Intersect, you’ve seen me apply it to metrics (last TMAI was on Bounce Rate), reports, frameworks and more. The concept touches all facets of our professional universe.

Condé Nast | A Story of Unrequited Love.

Condé Nast is in a world of hurt, along with everyone else in the print business. In 2017, they've twice replaced the company's Chief Revenue Officer. They are pursuing a variety of digital experiments, and it remains unclear whether any of them will stick (unlike the New York Times, where new initiative such as "The Daily" podcast and T Brand Studio have proven overwhelmingly successful).

You might assume that Condé Nast, through these changes and new initiatives, would have solved the fundamental issue of subscriber retention.

Join me on that journey.

I love The New Yorker.

"Love" is an understatement. I ADORE The New Yorker magazine. I love David Remnick. And Amy Davidson and Sheelah Kolhatkar and John Cassidy and Jia Tolentino and… all of 'em. Hence, I'm proud to be a paying subscriber. The nourishment that your soul craves is in The New Yorker, and I encourage you to consider your own subscription.

As I almost exclusively read the articles online, I visited the website to switch to digital-only (from digital + print) when my subscription expired in October.

I recall this simple task posing a surprising challenge. I was busy, and ultimately, I gave up. Last week, in my guilt for reading articles online for free, I decided to try again.

The first step was to log into my New Yorker account.

I was already logged into the site and thus found this to be a bit of a nuisance. But, no biggie.

Post-login, I was taken to my profile page, where under the Edit button I received a lovely reminder of my tardiness.

[Full disclosure: The New Yorker, starting May 2017 had sent me at least 14 reminder letters via postal mail with a form to complete fill out and return with a check. I don't know who does this anymore, certainly not us. I want to add that I did not get a single reminder via email – with a direct link to renew. This despite the fact that The New Yorker has my email address, and it would be cheaper to send me 14 emails than printed letters. Clearly, the Department of Postal Mail is vigorous at Condé Nast.]

I clicked on Customer Care (but not before taking a tangent to explore what "Amazon Digital Subscriptions Manager" is, turns out to be the most expensive way to get a subscription to the magazine!).

Amazingly, I was asked to log in again, this time on a completely new domain.

It was a bit odd to see the captcha. I wonder just how many hackers are dying to access the Condé Nast subscription website to help process renewals!

Mildly irritated, I did as I was asked.

Once again, I was presented with a summary of my account, and I began scanning for my next action.

I simply wanted to change my subscription from digital + print to just digital, and to know what it will cost.

I scanned my options on the left navigation, with few promising options.

I give "Renew" a try.

Wrong choice.

My only choice was to up the game to two years.

I wondered what the Wired cross-sell says about New Yorker subscribers. Had it been tested?

I re-focused.

Next, I tried "Digital Access." It seemed to smell right.

Wrong choice again.

This just told me how to access the magazine anytime, anywhere! :)

Back to exploration mode.

(At this point, I was not irritated. I realized there was a lesson to be learned. So I began taking screenshots of this unnecessarily painful journey, wondering if any Condé Nast employee had ever tried to change their personal subscription.)

I revisited "Manage Your Subscription," to make the next best choice: "Adjust auto-renewal."

Right choice? No. Wrong again.

I didn't want to update my credit card.

This, I was forced to resort to the last bastion of the frustrated: "Subscription FAQs."

I hate FAQs; they are almost always useless. Will Condé Nast prove to be the one exception to the rule?

"How can I renew my New Yorker subscription," seemed somewhat promising. I dutifully choose "clicking here."

Wrong choice.

I was right back to where I started, amazed that this company is in so much trouble financially but won't offer someone desperate to pay them a seamless way to do so.

Left to the footer, I clicked "Subscribe." At that point, what did I have to lose?

This took me to a third site, where, finally I was able to choose a digital-only subscription!

No. Not really.

This is a "12 Weeks for $12" offer that only applied to new subscribers. This offered no path for an existing subscribers.

What was even more frustrating — massively so — is that there was also no answer to my other question: How much would a digital-only subscription cost?

In fact, on this subscription page (the one I linked to when recommending The New Yorker above), there is no way to determine how much The New Yorker costs per year.

Let me say that again. If you are trying to subscribe — new or returning — Condé Nast does not tell you the annual subscription cost!

#OMG

What kind of con are these people running?

This put me at my wit's end. I'd failed to give them my money.

I revisited the second site to select "Chat Now."

Having logged in three times, as indicated in the top-right corner, I am asked once again to supply my credentials.

I waited an eternity for the chat session to start, completely absent of any status indication (x minutes remaining, or you are 10th in the queue).

Bored, I jumped back to the other window to tinker.

That's where I noticed the suddenly appealing "Cancel" link. Click!

I found the three choices intriguing.

How many of those who visit the page to cancel their subscription would like to improve the experience? (It was also not clear what "experience" meant.)

I opted to "Reconsider and save $10," simply because I love The New Yorker, and I wasn't going to give up on them. I am going to subscribe no matter how inept Condé Nast is.

A friendly message informed me that I was to wait for an email containing my $10 discount.

Why do I have to wait, I wondered.

Did Condé Nast have so many employees that someone was going to review my "case history" and validate my worthiness for the $10 discount, which, let me remind you, they offered proactively?

Ding!

My chat window came alive. Hurrah!

No. Not really.

"Leah" seemed unfamiliar with the Condé Nast platform. She directed me to pages I couldn't see, and asked me to go sign up for an intro offer which I knew I wasn't allowed to get (that was clear in the legal terms on the page).

After not helping at all, I admired her chutzpah in asking if she can help me with anything else.

Frustrated, I choose "End Chat."

I decided to wait for my $10. I felt I'd earned it by now.

Now, it has been a couple weeks. Crickets from Condé Nast.

Since I still love The New Yorker, I'm considering a digital subscription under my wife's name. She'll get 12 weeks for $12, which is sad as I want to pay full price.

12 weeks into that subscription, perhaps I'll finally come to find the full annual fee.

Ensuring loyal customers are able to renew and modify their subscription is the most fundamental of functions. It is not revolutionary to say that you really don’t want friction there.

Condé Nast has analysts upon analysts upon analysts. They have a world of user experience experts. I am genuinely and absolutely confident that these 400 people are executing large complex projects to save Condé Nast from financial trouble. None of them though thinks that that starts with something simple and fundamental: Fixing renewals. Or, telling people what a subscription actually costs.

To say that this breaks my heart is an understatement of galactic proportions.

Up next, you.

Condé Nast is hardly alone. I highly recommend a close self-evaluation to ensure that this isn't true for you as well.

To inspire prompt action by you, let me share a few more UX examples that are super-close to the company making money (the thing they/you should positively nail).

Heal | A Story Unfulfilled Forms.

Heal has an irresistible value proposition: They’ll send a doctor to your house!

I’m blessed to have health insurance. Still going to a doctor is such a pain, and even with an appointment the doctor makes me wait. Heal it is.

I install the mobile app, and proceed to making my first appointment.

The very first thing I have to enter is my date of birth. Seems reasonable.

Here’s the screen I get…

What!

What is the reasonable number of times the Heal UX team thinks a human should be expected to click the little < button to get to their date of birth?

I won’t tell you how old I am (very!), it is a lot of back clicks for me. A lot.

I just gave up.

For this article I opened the app again. There has to be a (hidden) better way.

I tried to click on “January 2018” hoping it pops up a calendar. No dice. I then clicked on “Sun, Jan 7.” Nope. Nothing else seems clickable. Looking… Scanning… Then, I clicked on the little “2018” on the top left. I get a list of years, score! I scroll, scroll, scroll, I’m old, scroll, and find my year of birth.

Consider this: You are a startup trying to upend the existing insane healthcare system. Should you have a simpler way to fill out the date of birth? Unsexy fundamental.

In the month of December, when I needed an annual exam, I could not get the address field in the Heal app to get my home address in there. (Unsexy fundamental.) I had to make an appointment and drive to the doctor. Oh, the humanity!

Facebook | A Story of Unsent $100s.

The only way now to get to your followers on Facebook is to buy ads.

[Bonus read: Stop All Social Media Activity (Organic) | Solve For A Profitable Reality]

No problem. After I would post something I want my Facebook followers to see, I would click the blue Boost button and pay Facebook $100. That seemed to solve the Reach problem.

Then one day a little while back I’m greeted with a new button: Boost Unavailable.

I have 45k followers on Facebook, without boost I get just 4k.

So I want this problem fixed. I want to give Facebook my $100. Except. Boost Unavailable.

When I click on that button, I get this, to me, confusing message.

A long time ago I had a personal page on Facebook. A couple years ago they informed me that I was not a person, I was a brand and forced me to change that page to “brand page.” I lost all my connections, and got followers instead.

Now, I don’t know what to do with this message. This account is all I have.

I click on Manage Page Roles, to see what my choices are…

I have to admit I am lost.

I am confident someone at Facebook understands what is going on, they even understand every option in the 19 choices in the left nav. Sadly, I don’t. The end result is that I can’t give Facebook my $100 and get my posts boosted.

As you might have heard, Facebook is just fine without my $100 every other week. They are clearing $10 bil a quarter. Still, an example of an unsexy fundamental that their user experience team could consider solving for.

prAna | A Story of Unfiltered Sadness.

I appreciate the opportunity to support businesses that solve for fair trade, green and sustainable business practices. If their products last forever, even better as I have to buy a lot less over time.

prAna is a good example of such a company. I also admire their brand building efforts – from the logo to the shipping envelopes.

I can’t afford their clothes at full price, but can’t resist looking at the men’s sale section when I need something.

Filters are your BFF when you are in environments with lots of choice. You can quickly go from being overwhelmed to narrow focus.

prAna’s site has loads of filtering choices: Gender, size, activity (yoga, hiking…), fit (slim, fitted), inseam, color, fabric (fair trade, HeiQ…), performance (PFC Free DWR, quick dry…), rating, silhouette (button down shirt, flannel, that’s it, really!), country of origin.

Guess what’s missing?

Imagine you have go trawl through hundreds of items on sale for clothing you need. What is the first thing you want to filter by?

Think.

Yes! Type of clothing.

Pants. T-Shirts. Jackets. Shorts.

That is the one filter prAna does not provide. Unsexy fundamental.

Even with the other 9 filters, it is hard to quickly find what I’m looking for.

#arrrhhh

I have received 7 emails in the last handful of weeks from them with this subject line: “40% Off: End of Season Sale – Your Favorite Looks are Going Fast – Don’t Miss Out.” I wonder how long it will take the User Experience experts at prAna to figure out why the conversion rate is zero percent.

If the UX experts shop on the site, they’ll find these unsexy fundamental issues everywhere.

The most common reason I return pants are that they are not long enough. Pants with 34” inseam fit me.

I was looking for new pair of travel pants. The Calculus Pants look like they could do the job.

Two weird things.

No waist size. I can take a gamble on M, but length is not a gamble I’m willing to take. I scroll around a bit. Nothing.

I click on “Size & Fit Guide,” in case it specifies something for these pants.

I get the generic guide. It is helpful in that it confirms that I need “Long Inseam.”

Except. That information is not on the Calculus pants page.

Scroll up. Scroll down. Scroll around. Switch to mobile site, because why not. Nope. Nothing.

Perhaps these pants don’t come in the three choices (Short, Regular and Long). But at least tell me what the inseam size the Calculus pants are! Unsexy fundamental.

prAna charges $8 for returns, for any reason. That is a lot. Hence… No pants for me.

[For prAna’s UX team, possible inspiration: Patagonia’s men’s sale page]

Bottom-line | Recommendations.

Unsexy fundamentals are very sexy. I recommend two actions on your part:

1. Create a dedicated (small) team to obsess continuously about the most fundamental functions. Ensure that you have a special rewards mechanism in place for them (like every other company out there you currently only reward people who work on shiny object projects).

The team’s work will start with the fundamentals closest to your core transactions. Cart and checkout for digital; cashier experience in your store. Build from there.

2. Create incentives for your employees to be secret shoppers. In fact, ask your CEO to try and do business with your company. The frustration she/he/they feel will drive amazing impact (on User happiness and company profit).

Sure, it will delay your multi-channel attribution predictive analytics powered single source of the truth initiative, but it'll be worth it.

2018: the year of doing the unsexy fundamentals well!

As always, it is your turn now.

Do you have a program/team in place to focus on unsexy fundamentals? What currently stands in the way of your company obsessing about ensuring all pathways to making money have been smoothed over? What is the primary mechanism in helping you figure out what unsexy fundamentals are broken? Do you have an example of a user experience, any mobile app or site, that is persistently frustrating?

Please add your insights, stories, frustrations, and wonderful accomplishments via comments below.

Thank you.

Bonus | Read: More examples and lessons in UX/Design, from HTC, United and Patagonia: Suck Less | A Plea For User-Centric Design: Powered By You

Bonus | Process to Implement: Heuristic Evaluations

Unsexy Fundamentals Focus: User Experiences That Print Money is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

from Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik http://ift.tt/2CNwlFR #Digital #Analytics #Website

#Analytics #Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik. Web Analytics #Tracking #Metrics #Performance

[samiam03x]

Growth Hacking vs. Growth Mapping: What You Should Be Doing To Scale Your Business

So, you’ve tweaked your landing pages until your conversion rates can’t get any better, split tested every facet of your ad campaigns and collaborated with influencers in your niche to maximize your exposure.

What’s next?

These tactics are wonderful and can generate explosive growth, but after a while, you’ll reach a plateau.

Once your startup is a fully-fledged, profitable business, growth challenges become different. While a startup is focussed on big wins to make the cash register ring, established businesses need to think in terms of more stable, incremental forms of growth. It’s no longer about growth hacking; growth mapping has to take center stage.

This continuum of business growth can be explained using sports as an analogy.

Mixed martial arts have one of the most significant learning curves out of all sports.

In the first six months of training, you can learn the fundamentals of striking, wrestling and jiu-jitsu.

However, the longer you practice, the smaller the improvements you’ll make. Once you’re proficient at the basics, the real journey to mastery begins.

Sure, adding a spinning wheel kick to your arsenal of attacks is beneficial in the short-run, but elite level UFC fighters didn’t reach mastery by continually learning new techniques – they did it by refining their fundamentals, year after year.

Jiu-jitsu expert Demian Maia understands all facets of the game, but he didn’t start achieving spectacular results until he centered his strategy around his strongest skills: wrestling his opponents to the mat and securing a rear-naked choke. Fans often comment that his opponents know exactly what he’s going to do, yet are unable to stop it.

To achieve mastery in any discipline (especially business), tactics that provide short-term explosive growth are great – but the long game requires slower, sustainable progress.

This is the difference between growth hacking and growth mapping.

Whatever stage your business is at, consider using these growth tactics to take you to the next level.

1. Growth Tactics

Here are some non-technical growth tactics to try. These don’t require a/b tests or changing any forms to increase conversions. Instead, they’re simple tactics to test to see if they drive meaningful acquisition.

Personalized Discounts

The generic, one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is no longer applicable.

Nowadays, businesses can leverage user data to deliver more personalized, emotionally resonant messages to their users in order to maximize engagement and profits.

Email marketers have a good understanding of this. Depending on the actions people have taken in response to email campaigns, different email sequences can be fired off.

If a person opened an email promoting a webinar and attended, they might receive a sales-oriented email, whereas if they miss the webinar, their next message might be a gentle reminder of when the next webinar is available.

To take this a step further, I recommend using your analytics data to provide special deals to warm prospects. If a person has viewed a product page numerous times but hasn’t converted – there is a proven interest but something isn’t quite right.

In my experience, offering limited discounts to these users can push them over the edge and get them to convert. In this scenario, leveraging scarcity marketing in a highly personalized way can drive explosive growth.

Incentivized Referrals

Instead of pumping money into ad campaigns to acquire new customers, have you ever considered getting your existing customers to do your marketing for you?

In recent years, Dropbox and Airbnb have achieved extreme growth partially due to referral marketing. However, PayPal created the blueprint many years prior.

Initially offering $20 to new users and $20 for them to refer their friends (this was later scaled down to $10 and then $5), PayPal acquired over 100,000 users in the first month of being operational.

The bold referral program was masterminded by PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk. A consummate scientist, Musk described the viral nature of the program as “bacteria growth in a Petri dish.”

While you may not be able to spend tens of millions of dollars like PayPal did to acquire new customers, a good double-sided referral program (both the referrer and friend benefit) can stimulate tremendous growth.

If you’re not ready to create a formal referral program, consider sending your repeat customers a referral discount code via email. Since they have a positive impression of your brand (proven by repeat purchases), they’ll be happy to refer their friends to you – especially if they’re incentivized to do so.

Guest Posting

A few years back, people used guest posting for all the wrong reasons. In order to game search engines and acquire inbound links, marketers would submit sub-par content to external sites with no concern for providing value to the audience.

Fortunately, Google caught on to this unsavory practice and it’s being phased out.

However, Google is still perfectly happy for people to publish guest posts that, “inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company.”

In other words, guest posting is no longer a link building game; it’s all about delivering value and long-term brand building.

As a free growth tactic, I find guest posting to be exceptionally effective. I aim to write multiple guest posts every week.

If you don’t consider yourself a particularly strong writer, you can hire a quality ghostwriter. You can expect to spend between $150-$300 per post. Make sure you find a quality guest writer that is an expert in their niche. They should have published on reputable blogs before, and are not a “jack of all trades”, meaning they can write on daycare blogs and b2b marketing blogs. Find writers that stick to one niche.

For startups, I recommend saving your best content for guest posts. This sounds counterintuitive, but guest posts will be read more than the posts on your site – so it makes sense to deliver the most value where you’re receiving the most eyeballs.

Gamification

If you’ve ever played the old school MMORPG game, Everquest, one of the most compelling features of the game’s interface was the experience bar, which would tell you how close you are to moving up to the next level.

LinkedIn use a similar gamification tactic to encourage new users to fill out their profiles.

There is a core psychological component to gamification tactics such as progress bars.

Research indicates that the simple act of completing something, whatever it may be, leads to a release of endorphins. When the act of completion is associated with positive emotions, you’re compelled to keep completing things – which leads to a large user base for both SaaS companies and MMORPG games!

Think about how you can incorporate gamification into your user experience and you’ll reap the rewards.

Free Merchandise

In the digital era, free merchandise (a.k.a. swag) can seem like a pretty low-tech growth tactic, but this is exactly why it’s so powerful – because not many people are doing it anymore.

By handing out branded t-shirts, mouse pads, pens and other accessories, you can let your free merchandise do your marketing for you.

Counterintuitively, you don’t need a huge upfront investment.

I recommend browsing Alibaba and conversing with manufacturers. You can get your logo branded on a gigantic range of products – just shop around for the right price.

Sometimes, manufacturers will be happy to drop ship your orders, so you don’t have to hold inventory.

Instead of handing out gifts to everyone and anyone, I recommend shipping free branded accessories as rewards to customers who have a high Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Someone who has made repeat purchases already holds your brand in high regard, so they’re more likely to show off their free t-shirt or pen to their friends. Since they’re already a profitable customer, you’re not going to lose money on sending them a free gift – whereas you might with non-customers or one-time buyers.

Print on demand t-shirts work excellently in this scenario.

2 – Growth Mapping

Growth Scoring

Once you’ve exhausted all possible growth tactics, the first step to sustainable growth is to examine what’s working and what isn’t.

If content marketing is a core part of your company’s success, I’d recommend tracking key metrics for your campaigns.

When doing growth scoring for clients, I like to be as in-depth as possible. Before moving onto the subsequent mapping phase, I need to be able to answer the following questions:

What is the ideal blog post length in terms of generating engagement?

What is the ideal article title length?

What’s the average bounce rate and time spent on pages?

How many social shares are generated per post?

Do some types of content create more engagement than others (i.e. infographics and video posts)?

Do articles by certain authors perform better than others? If so, why?

Strategy Mapping

After analyzing our scores, we can tell where we should maximize our investment to get the best returns.

For instance, if infographics consistently perform better than blog posts (in my experience, they often do) – allocating additional resources to producing infographics will be beneficial in the long run.

Also at this stage, we have the opportunity to revisit highly performing blog posts and optimize them.

One of my favorite optimization tactics is to provide downloadable content upgrades at the end of these popular posts.

A content upgrade is simply a lead magnet (a checklist, eBook or other item of value that marketers trade in exchange for contact information) with one key difference: they’re contextually relevant.

If you’re a marketing agency, you might feature a lead magnet on your homepage in the form of an eBook about driving website traffic. However, if you’ve seen that an evergreen article about email marketing continually gets lots of views – you might want to provide a checklist at the end of the post describing the steps to creating a killer autoresponder sequence.

Growth mapping is all about examining the data, and then mapping out a course of action for sustainable long-term growth.

Have you used any other growth hacks that have been effective for your business? Please let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear your replies.

About the Author: Aaron Agius, CEO of worldwide digital agency Louder Online is, according to Forbes, among the world’s leading digital marketers. Working with clients such as Salesforce, Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, and scores of stellar brands, Aaron is a Growth Marketer – a fusion between search, content, social, and PR. Find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or on the Louder Online blog.

http://ift.tt/2gPzskl from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2yvZhQ6 via Youtube

#MarketingRSS

[marie85marketing]

Growth Hacking vs. Growth Mapping: What You Should Be Doing To Scale Your Business

So, you’ve tweaked your landing pages until your conversion rates can’t get any better, split tested every facet of your ad campaigns and collaborated with influencers in your niche to maximize your exposure.

What’s next?

These tactics are wonderful and can generate explosive growth, but after a while, you’ll reach a plateau.

Once your startup is a fully-fledged, profitable business, growth challenges become different. While a startup is focussed on big wins to make the cash register ring, established businesses need to think in terms of more stable, incremental forms of growth. It’s no longer about growth hacking; growth mapping has to take center stage.

This continuum of business growth can be explained using sports as an analogy.

Mixed martial arts have one of the most significant learning curves out of all sports.

In the first six months of training, you can learn the fundamentals of striking, wrestling and jiu-jitsu.

However, the longer you practice, the smaller the improvements you’ll make. Once you’re proficient at the basics, the real journey to mastery begins.

Sure, adding a spinning wheel kick to your arsenal of attacks is beneficial in the short-run, but elite level UFC fighters didn’t reach mastery by continually learning new techniques – they did it by refining their fundamentals, year after year.

Jiu-jitsu expert Demian Maia understands all facets of the game, but he didn’t start achieving spectacular results until he centered his strategy around his strongest skills: wrestling his opponents to the mat and securing a rear-naked choke. Fans often comment that his opponents know exactly what he’s going to do, yet are unable to stop it.

To achieve mastery in any discipline (especially business), tactics that provide short-term explosive growth are great – but the long game requires slower, sustainable progress.

This is the difference between growth hacking and growth mapping.

Whatever stage your business is at, consider using these growth tactics to take you to the next level.

1. Growth Tactics

Here are some non-technical growth tactics to try. These don’t require a/b tests or changing any forms to increase conversions. Instead, they’re simple tactics to test to see if they drive meaningful acquisition.

Personalized Discounts

The generic, one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is no longer applicable.

Nowadays, businesses can leverage user data to deliver more personalized, emotionally resonant messages to their users in order to maximize engagement and profits.

Email marketers have a good understanding of this. Depending on the actions people have taken in response to email campaigns, different email sequences can be fired off.

If a person opened an email promoting a webinar and attended, they might receive a sales-oriented email, whereas if they miss the webinar, their next message might be a gentle reminder of when the next webinar is available.

To take this a step further, I recommend using your analytics data to provide special deals to warm prospects. If a person has viewed a product page numerous times but hasn’t converted – there is a proven interest but something isn’t quite right.

In my experience, offering limited discounts to these users can push them over the edge and get them to convert. In this scenario, leveraging scarcity marketing in a highly personalized way can drive explosive growth.

Incentivized Referrals

Instead of pumping money into ad campaigns to acquire new customers, have you ever considered getting your existing customers to do your marketing for you?

In recent years, Dropbox and Airbnb have achieved extreme growth partially due to referral marketing. However, PayPal created the blueprint many years prior.

Initially offering $20 to new users and $20 for them to refer their friends (this was later scaled down to $10 and then $5), PayPal acquired over 100,000 users in the first month of being operational.

The bold referral program was masterminded by PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk. A consummate scientist, Musk described the viral nature of the program as “bacteria growth in a Petri dish.”

While you may not be able to spend tens of millions of dollars like PayPal did to acquire new customers, a good double-sided referral program (both the referrer and friend benefit) can stimulate tremendous growth.

If you’re not ready to create a formal referral program, consider sending your repeat customers a referral discount code via email. Since they have a positive impression of your brand (proven by repeat purchases), they’ll be happy to refer their friends to you – especially if they’re incentivized to do so.

Guest Posting

A few years back, people used guest posting for all the wrong reasons. In order to game search engines and acquire inbound links, marketers would submit sub-par content to external sites with no concern for providing value to the audience.

Fortunately, Google caught on to this unsavory practice and it’s being phased out.

However, Google is still perfectly happy for people to publish guest posts that, “inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company.”

In other words, guest posting is no longer a link building game; it’s all about delivering value and long-term brand building.

As a free growth tactic, I find guest posting to be exceptionally effective. I aim to write multiple guest posts every week.

If you don’t consider yourself a particularly strong writer, you can hire a quality ghostwriter. You can expect to spend between $150-$300 per post. Make sure you find a quality guest writer that is an expert in their niche. They should have published on reputable blogs before, and are not a “jack of all trades”, meaning they can write on daycare blogs and b2b marketing blogs. Find writers that stick to one niche.

For startups, I recommend saving your best content for guest posts. This sounds counterintuitive, but guest posts will be read more than the posts on your site – so it makes sense to deliver the most value where you’re receiving the most eyeballs.

Gamification

If you’ve ever played the old school MMORPG game, Everquest, one of the most compelling features of the game’s interface was the experience bar, which would tell you how close you are to moving up to the next level.

LinkedIn use a similar gamification tactic to encourage new users to fill out their profiles.

There is a core psychological component to gamification tactics such as progress bars.

Research indicates that the simple act of completing something, whatever it may be, leads to a release of endorphins. When the act of completion is associated with positive emotions, you’re compelled to keep completing things – which leads to a large user base for both SaaS companies and MMORPG games!

Think about how you can incorporate gamification into your user experience and you’ll reap the rewards.

Free Merchandise

In the digital era, free merchandise (a.k.a. swag) can seem like a pretty low-tech growth tactic, but this is exactly why it’s so powerful – because not many people are doing it anymore.

By handing out branded t-shirts, mouse pads, pens and other accessories, you can let your free merchandise do your marketing for you.

Counterintuitively, you don’t need a huge upfront investment.

I recommend browsing Alibaba and conversing with manufacturers. You can get your logo branded on a gigantic range of products – just shop around for the right price.

Sometimes, manufacturers will be happy to drop ship your orders, so you don’t have to hold inventory.

Instead of handing out gifts to everyone and anyone, I recommend shipping free branded accessories as rewards to customers who have a high Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Someone who has made repeat purchases already holds your brand in high regard, so they’re more likely to show off their free t-shirt or pen to their friends. Since they’re already a profitable customer, you’re not going to lose money on sending them a free gift – whereas you might with non-customers or one-time buyers.

Print on demand t-shirts work excellently in this scenario.

2 – Growth Mapping

Growth Scoring

Once you’ve exhausted all possible growth tactics, the first step to sustainable growth is to examine what’s working and what isn’t.

If content marketing is a core part of your company’s success, I’d recommend tracking key metrics for your campaigns.

When doing growth scoring for clients, I like to be as in-depth as possible. Before moving onto the subsequent mapping phase, I need to be able to answer the following questions:

What is the ideal blog post length in terms of generating engagement?

What is the ideal article title length?

What’s the average bounce rate and time spent on pages?

How many social shares are generated per post?

Do some types of content create more engagement than others (i.e. infographics and video posts)?

Do articles by certain authors perform better than others? If so, why?

Strategy Mapping

After analyzing our scores, we can tell where we should maximize our investment to get the best returns.

For instance, if infographics consistently perform better than blog posts (in my experience, they often do) – allocating additional resources to producing infographics will be beneficial in the long run.

Also at this stage, we have the opportunity to revisit highly performing blog posts and optimize them.

One of my favorite optimization tactics is to provide downloadable content upgrades at the end of these popular posts.

A content upgrade is simply a lead magnet (a checklist, eBook or other item of value that marketers trade in exchange for contact information) with one key difference: they’re contextually relevant.

If you’re a marketing agency, you might feature a lead magnet on your homepage in the form of an eBook about driving website traffic. However, if you’ve seen that an evergreen article about email marketing continually gets lots of views – you might want to provide a checklist at the end of the post describing the steps to creating a killer autoresponder sequence.

Growth mapping is all about examining the data, and then mapping out a course of action for sustainable long-term growth.

Have you used any other growth hacks that have been effective for your business? Please let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear your replies.

About the Author: Aaron Agius, CEO of worldwide digital agency Louder Online is, according to Forbes, among the world’s leading digital marketers. Working with clients such as Salesforce, Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, and scores of stellar brands, Aaron is a Growth Marketer – a fusion between search, content, social, and PR. Find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or on the Louder Online blog.

[filipeteimuraz]

Growth Hacking vs. Growth Mapping: What You Should Be Doing To Scale Your Business

So, you’ve tweaked your landing pages until your conversion rates can’t get any better, split tested every facet of your ad campaigns and collaborated with influencers in your niche to maximize your exposure.

What’s next?

These tactics are wonderful and can generate explosive growth, but after a while, you’ll reach a plateau.

Once your startup is a fully-fledged, profitable business, growth challenges become different. While a startup is focussed on big wins to make the cash register ring, established businesses need to think in terms of more stable, incremental forms of growth. It’s no longer about growth hacking; growth mapping has to take center stage.

This continuum of business growth can be explained using sports as an analogy.

Mixed martial arts have one of the most significant learning curves out of all sports.

In the first six months of training, you can learn the fundamentals of striking, wrestling and jiu-jitsu.

However, the longer you practice, the smaller the improvements you’ll make. Once you’re proficient at the basics, the real journey to mastery begins.

Sure, adding a spinning wheel kick to your arsenal of attacks is beneficial in the short-run, but elite level UFC fighters didn’t reach mastery by continually learning new techniques – they did it by refining their fundamentals, year after year.

Jiu-jitsu expert Demian Maia understands all facets of the game, but he didn’t start achieving spectacular results until he centered his strategy around his strongest skills: wrestling his opponents to the mat and securing a rear-naked choke. Fans often comment that his opponents know exactly what he’s going to do, yet are unable to stop it.

To achieve mastery in any discipline (especially business), tactics that provide short-term explosive growth are great – but the long game requires slower, sustainable progress.

This is the difference between growth hacking and growth mapping.

Whatever stage your business is at, consider using these growth tactics to take you to the next level.

1. Growth Tactics

Here are some non-technical growth tactics to try. These don’t require a/b tests or changing any forms to increase conversions. Instead, they’re simple tactics to test to see if they drive meaningful acquisition.

Personalized Discounts

The generic, one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is no longer applicable.

Nowadays, businesses can leverage user data to deliver more personalized, emotionally resonant messages to their users in order to maximize engagement and profits.

Email marketers have a good understanding of this. Depending on the actions people have taken in response to email campaigns, different email sequences can be fired off.

If a person opened an email promoting a webinar and attended, they might receive a sales-oriented email, whereas if they miss the webinar, their next message might be a gentle reminder of when the next webinar is available.

To take this a step further, I recommend using your analytics data to provide special deals to warm prospects. If a person has viewed a product page numerous times but hasn’t converted – there is a proven interest but something isn’t quite right.

In my experience, offering limited discounts to these users can push them over the edge and get them to convert. In this scenario, leveraging scarcity marketing in a highly personalized way can drive explosive growth.

Incentivized Referrals

Instead of pumping money into ad campaigns to acquire new customers, have you ever considered getting your existing customers to do your marketing for you?

In recent years, Dropbox and Airbnb have achieved extreme growth partially due to referral marketing. However, PayPal created the blueprint many years prior.

Initially offering $20 to new users and $20 for them to refer their friends (this was later scaled down to $10 and then $5), PayPal acquired over 100,000 users in the first month of being operational.

The bold referral program was masterminded by PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk. A consummate scientist, Musk described the viral nature of the program as “bacteria growth in a Petri dish.”

While you may not be able to spend tens of millions of dollars like PayPal did to acquire new customers, a good double-sided referral program (both the referrer and friend benefit) can stimulate tremendous growth.

If you’re not ready to create a formal referral program, consider sending your repeat customers a referral discount code via email. Since they have a positive impression of your brand (proven by repeat purchases), they’ll be happy to refer their friends to you – especially if they’re incentivized to do so.

Guest Posting

A few years back, people used guest posting for all the wrong reasons. In order to game search engines and acquire inbound links, marketers would submit sub-par content to external sites with no concern for providing value to the audience.

Fortunately, Google caught on to this unsavory practice and it’s being phased out.

However, Google is still perfectly happy for people to publish guest posts that, “inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company.”

In other words, guest posting is no longer a link building game; it’s all about delivering value and long-term brand building.

As a free growth tactic, I find guest posting to be exceptionally effective. I aim to write multiple guest posts every week.

If you don’t consider yourself a particularly strong writer, you can hire a quality ghostwriter. You can expect to spend between $150-$300 per post. Make sure you find a quality guest writer that is an expert in their niche. They should have published on reputable blogs before, and are not a “jack of all trades”, meaning they can write on daycare blogs and b2b marketing blogs. Find writers that stick to one niche.

For startups, I recommend saving your best content for guest posts. This sounds counterintuitive, but guest posts will be read more than the posts on your site – so it makes sense to deliver the most value where you’re receiving the most eyeballs.

Gamification

If you’ve ever played the old school MMORPG game, Everquest, one of the most compelling features of the game’s interface was the experience bar, which would tell you how close you are to moving up to the next level.

LinkedIn use a similar gamification tactic to encourage new users to fill out their profiles.

There is a core psychological component to gamification tactics such as progress bars.

Research indicates that the simple act of completing something, whatever it may be, leads to a release of endorphins. When the act of completion is associated with positive emotions, you’re compelled to keep completing things – which leads to a large user base for both SaaS companies and MMORPG games!

Think about how you can incorporate gamification into your user experience and you’ll reap the rewards.

Free Merchandise

In the digital era, free merchandise (a.k.a. swag) can seem like a pretty low-tech growth tactic, but this is exactly why it’s so powerful – because not many people are doing it anymore.

By handing out branded t-shirts, mouse pads, pens and other accessories, you can let your free merchandise do your marketing for you.

Counterintuitively, you don’t need a huge upfront investment.

I recommend browsing Alibaba and conversing with manufacturers. You can get your logo branded on a gigantic range of products – just shop around for the right price.

Sometimes, manufacturers will be happy to drop ship your orders, so you don’t have to hold inventory.

Instead of handing out gifts to everyone and anyone, I recommend shipping free branded accessories as rewards to customers who have a high Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Someone who has made repeat purchases already holds your brand in high regard, so they’re more likely to show off their free t-shirt or pen to their friends. Since they’re already a profitable customer, you’re not going to lose money on sending them a free gift – whereas you might with non-customers or one-time buyers.

Print on demand t-shirts work excellently in this scenario.

2 – Growth Mapping

Growth Scoring

Once you’ve exhausted all possible growth tactics, the first step to sustainable growth is to examine what’s working and what isn’t.

If content marketing is a core part of your company’s success, I’d recommend tracking key metrics for your campaigns.

When doing growth scoring for clients, I like to be as in-depth as possible. Before moving onto the subsequent mapping phase, I need to be able to answer the following questions:

What is the ideal blog post length in terms of generating engagement?

What is the ideal article title length?

What’s the average bounce rate and time spent on pages?

How many social shares are generated per post?

Do some types of content create more engagement than others (i.e. infographics and video posts)?

Do articles by certain authors perform better than others? If so, why?

Strategy Mapping

After analyzing our scores, we can tell where we should maximize our investment to get the best returns.

For instance, if infographics consistently perform better than blog posts (in my experience, they often do) – allocating additional resources to producing infographics will be beneficial in the long run.

Also at this stage, we have the opportunity to revisit highly performing blog posts and optimize them.

One of my favorite optimization tactics is to provide downloadable content upgrades at the end of these popular posts.

A content upgrade is simply a lead magnet (a checklist, eBook or other item of value that marketers trade in exchange for contact information) with one key difference: they’re contextually relevant.

If you’re a marketing agency, you might feature a lead magnet on your homepage in the form of an eBook about driving website traffic. However, if you’ve seen that an evergreen article about email marketing continually gets lots of views – you might want to provide a checklist at the end of the post describing the steps to creating a killer autoresponder sequence.

Growth mapping is all about examining the data, and then mapping out a course of action for sustainable long-term growth.

Have you used any other growth hacks that have been effective for your business? Please let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear your replies.

About the Author: Aaron Agius, CEO of worldwide digital agency Louder Online is, according to Forbes, among the world’s leading digital marketers. Working with clients such as Salesforce, Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, and scores of stellar brands, Aaron is a Growth Marketer – a fusion between search, content, social, and PR. Find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or on the Louder Online blog.

Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2017/10/growth-hacking-vs-growth-mapping-what.html

[reviewandbonuss]

Growth Hacking vs. Growth Mapping: What You Should Be Doing To Scale Your Business

So, you’ve tweaked your landing pages until your conversion rates can’t get any better, split tested every facet of your ad campaigns and collaborated with influencers in your niche to maximize your exposure.

What’s next?

These tactics are wonderful and can generate explosive growth, but after a while, you’ll reach a plateau.

Once your startup is a fully-fledged, profitable business, growth challenges become different. While a startup is focussed on big wins to make the cash register ring, established businesses need to think in terms of more stable, incremental forms of growth. It’s no longer about growth hacking; growth mapping has to take center stage.

This continuum of business growth can be explained using sports as an analogy.

Mixed martial arts have one of the most significant learning curves out of all sports.

In the first six months of training, you can learn the fundamentals of striking, wrestling and jiu-jitsu.

However, the longer you practice, the smaller the improvements you’ll make. Once you’re proficient at the basics, the real journey to mastery begins.

Sure, adding a spinning wheel kick to your arsenal of attacks is beneficial in the short-run, but elite level UFC fighters didn’t reach mastery by continually learning new techniques – they did it by refining their fundamentals, year after year.

Jiu-jitsu expert Demian Maia understands all facets of the game, but he didn’t start achieving spectacular results until he centered his strategy around his strongest skills: wrestling his opponents to the mat and securing a rear-naked choke. Fans often comment that his opponents know exactly what he’s going to do, yet are unable to stop it.

To achieve mastery in any discipline (especially business), tactics that provide short-term explosive growth are great – but the long game requires slower, sustainable progress.

This is the difference between growth hacking and growth mapping.

Whatever stage your business is at, consider using these growth tactics to take you to the next level.

1. Growth Tactics

Here are some non-technical growth tactics to try. These don’t require a/b tests or changing any forms to increase conversions. Instead, they’re simple tactics to test to see if they drive meaningful acquisition.

Personalized Discounts

The generic, one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is no longer applicable.

Nowadays, businesses can leverage user data to deliver more personalized, emotionally resonant messages to their users in order to maximize engagement and profits.

Email marketers have a good understanding of this. Depending on the actions people have taken in response to email campaigns, different email sequences can be fired off.

If a person opened an email promoting a webinar and attended, they might receive a sales-oriented email, whereas if they miss the webinar, their next message might be a gentle reminder of when the next webinar is available.

To take this a step further, I recommend using your analytics data to provide special deals to warm prospects. If a person has viewed a product page numerous times but hasn’t converted – there is a proven interest but something isn’t quite right.

In my experience, offering limited discounts to these users can push them over the edge and get them to convert. In this scenario, leveraging scarcity marketing in a highly personalized way can drive explosive growth.

Incentivized Referrals

Instead of pumping money into ad campaigns to acquire new customers, have you ever considered getting your existing customers to do your marketing for you?

In recent years, Dropbox and Airbnb have achieved extreme growth partially due to referral marketing. However, PayPal created the blueprint many years prior.

Initially offering $20 to new users and $20 for them to refer their friends (this was later scaled down to $10 and then $5), PayPal acquired over 100,000 users in the first month of being operational.

The bold referral program was masterminded by PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk. A consummate scientist, Musk described the viral nature of the program as “bacteria growth in a Petri dish.”

While you may not be able to spend tens of millions of dollars like PayPal did to acquire new customers, a good double-sided referral program (both the referrer and friend benefit) can stimulate tremendous growth.

If you’re not ready to create a formal referral program, consider sending your repeat customers a referral discount code via email. Since they have a positive impression of your brand (proven by repeat purchases), they’ll be happy to refer their friends to you – especially if they’re incentivized to do so.

Guest Posting

A few years back, people used guest posting for all the wrong reasons. In order to game search engines and acquire inbound links, marketers would submit sub-par content to external sites with no concern for providing value to the audience.

Fortunately, Google caught on to this unsavory practice and it’s being phased out.

However, Google is still perfectly happy for people to publish guest posts that, “inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company.”

In other words, guest posting is no longer a link building game; it’s all about delivering value and long-term brand building.

As a free growth tactic, I find guest posting to be exceptionally effective. I aim to write multiple guest posts every week.

If you don’t consider yourself a particularly strong writer, you can hire a quality ghostwriter. You can expect to spend between $150-$300 per post. Make sure you find a quality guest writer that is an expert in their niche. They should have published on reputable blogs before, and are not a “jack of all trades”, meaning they can write on daycare blogs and b2b marketing blogs. Find writers that stick to one niche.

For startups, I recommend saving your best content for guest posts. This sounds counterintuitive, but guest posts will be read more than the posts on your site – so it makes sense to deliver the most value where you’re receiving the most eyeballs.

Gamification

If you’ve ever played the old school MMORPG game, Everquest, one of the most compelling features of the game’s interface was the experience bar, which would tell you how close you are to moving up to the next level.

LinkedIn use a similar gamification tactic to encourage new users to fill out their profiles.

There is a core psychological component to gamification tactics such as progress bars.

Research indicates that the simple act of completing something, whatever it may be, leads to a release of endorphins. When the act of completion is associated with positive emotions, you’re compelled to keep completing things – which leads to a large user base for both SaaS companies and MMORPG games!

Think about how you can incorporate gamification into your user experience and you’ll reap the rewards.

Free Merchandise

In the digital era, free merchandise (a.k.a. swag) can seem like a pretty low-tech growth tactic, but this is exactly why it’s so powerful – because not many people are doing it anymore.

By handing out branded t-shirts, mouse pads, pens and other accessories, you can let your free merchandise do your marketing for you.

Counterintuitively, you don’t need a huge upfront investment.

I recommend browsing Alibaba and conversing with manufacturers. You can get your logo branded on a gigantic range of products – just shop around for the right price.

Sometimes, manufacturers will be happy to drop ship your orders, so you don’t have to hold inventory.

Instead of handing out gifts to everyone and anyone, I recommend shipping free branded accessories as rewards to customers who have a high Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Someone who has made repeat purchases already holds your brand in high regard, so they’re more likely to show off their free t-shirt or pen to their friends. Since they’re already a profitable customer, you’re not going to lose money on sending them a free gift – whereas you might with non-customers or one-time buyers.

Print on demand t-shirts work excellently in this scenario.

2 – Growth Mapping

Growth Scoring

Once you’ve exhausted all possible growth tactics, the first step to sustainable growth is to examine what’s working and what isn’t.

If content marketing is a core part of your company’s success, I’d recommend tracking key metrics for your campaigns.

When doing growth scoring for clients, I like to be as in-depth as possible. Before moving onto the subsequent mapping phase, I need to be able to answer the following questions:

What is the ideal blog post length in terms of generating engagement?

What is the ideal article title length?

What’s the average bounce rate and time spent on pages?

How many social shares are generated per post?

Do some types of content create more engagement than others (i.e. infographics and video posts)?

Do articles by certain authors perform better than others? If so, why?

Strategy Mapping

After analyzing our scores, we can tell where we should maximize our investment to get the best returns.

For instance, if infographics consistently perform better than blog posts (in my experience, they often do) – allocating additional resources to producing infographics will be beneficial in the long run.

Also at this stage, we have the opportunity to revisit highly performing blog posts and optimize them.

One of my favorite optimization tactics is to provide downloadable content upgrades at the end of these popular posts.

A content upgrade is simply a lead magnet (a checklist, eBook or other item of value that marketers trade in exchange for contact information) with one key difference: they’re contextually relevant.

If you’re a marketing agency, you might feature a lead magnet on your homepage in the form of an eBook about driving website traffic. However, if you’ve seen that an evergreen article about email marketing continually gets lots of views – you might want to provide a checklist at the end of the post describing the steps to creating a killer autoresponder sequence.

Growth mapping is all about examining the data, and then mapping out a course of action for sustainable long-term growth.

Have you used any other growth hacks that have been effective for your business? Please let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear your replies.

About the Author: Aaron Agius, CEO of worldwide digital agency Louder Online is, according to Forbes, among the world’s leading digital marketers. Working with clients such as Salesforce, Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, and scores of stellar brands, Aaron is a Growth Marketer – a fusion between search, content, social, and PR. Find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or on the Louder Online blog.

[alissaselezneva]

Growth Hacking vs. Growth Mapping: What You Should Be Doing To Scale Your Business

So, you’ve tweaked your landing pages until your conversion rates can’t get any better, split tested every facet of your ad campaigns and collaborated with influencers in your niche to maximize your exposure.

What’s next?

These tactics are wonderful and can generate explosive growth, but after a while, you’ll reach a plateau.

Once your startup is a fully-fledged, profitable business, growth challenges become different. While a startup is focussed on big wins to make the cash register ring, established businesses need to think in terms of more stable, incremental forms of growth. It’s no longer about growth hacking; growth mapping has to take center stage.

This continuum of business growth can be explained using sports as an analogy.

Mixed martial arts have one of the most significant learning curves out of all sports.

In the first six months of training, you can learn the fundamentals of striking, wrestling and jiu-jitsu.

However, the longer you practice, the smaller the improvements you’ll make. Once you’re proficient at the basics, the real journey to mastery begins.

Sure, adding a spinning wheel kick to your arsenal of attacks is beneficial in the short-run, but elite level UFC fighters didn’t reach mastery by continually learning new techniques – they did it by refining their fundamentals, year after year.

Jiu-jitsu expert Demian Maia understands all facets of the game, but he didn’t start achieving spectacular results until he centered his strategy around his strongest skills: wrestling his opponents to the mat and securing a rear-naked choke. Fans often comment that his opponents know exactly what he’s going to do, yet are unable to stop it.

To achieve mastery in any discipline (especially business), tactics that provide short-term explosive growth are great – but the long game requires slower, sustainable progress.

This is the difference between growth hacking and growth mapping.

Whatever stage your business is at, consider using these growth tactics to take you to the next level.

1. Growth Tactics

Here are some non-technical growth tactics to try. These don’t require a/b tests or changing any forms to increase conversions. Instead, they’re simple tactics to test to see if they drive meaningful acquisition.

Personalized Discounts

The generic, one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is no longer applicable.

Nowadays, businesses can leverage user data to deliver more personalized, emotionally resonant messages to their users in order to maximize engagement and profits.

Email marketers have a good understanding of this. Depending on the actions people have taken in response to email campaigns, different email sequences can be fired off.

If a person opened an email promoting a webinar and attended, they might receive a sales-oriented email, whereas if they miss the webinar, their next message might be a gentle reminder of when the next webinar is available.

To take this a step further, I recommend using your analytics data to provide special deals to warm prospects. If a person has viewed a product page numerous times but hasn’t converted – there is a proven interest but something isn’t quite right.

In my experience, offering limited discounts to these users can push them over the edge and get them to convert. In this scenario, leveraging scarcity marketing in a highly personalized way can drive explosive growth.

Incentivized Referrals

Instead of pumping money into ad campaigns to acquire new customers, have you ever considered getting your existing customers to do your marketing for you?

In recent years, Dropbox and Airbnb have achieved extreme growth partially due to referral marketing. However, PayPal created the blueprint many years prior.

Initially offering $20 to new users and $20 for them to refer their friends (this was later scaled down to $10 and then $5), PayPal acquired over 100,000 users in the first month of being operational.

The bold referral program was masterminded by PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk. A consummate scientist, Musk described the viral nature of the program as “bacteria growth in a Petri dish.”

While you may not be able to spend tens of millions of dollars like PayPal did to acquire new customers, a good double-sided referral program (both the referrer and friend benefit) can stimulate tremendous growth.

If you’re not ready to create a formal referral program, consider sending your repeat customers a referral discount code via email. Since they have a positive impression of your brand (proven by repeat purchases), they’ll be happy to refer their friends to you – especially if they’re incentivized to do so.

Guest Posting

A few years back, people used guest posting for all the wrong reasons. In order to game search engines and acquire inbound links, marketers would submit sub-par content to external sites with no concern for providing value to the audience.

Fortunately, Google caught on to this unsavory practice and it’s being phased out.

However, Google is still perfectly happy for people to publish guest posts that, “inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company.”

In other words, guest posting is no longer a link building game; it’s all about delivering value and long-term brand building.

As a free growth tactic, I find guest posting to be exceptionally effective. I aim to write multiple guest posts every week.

If you don’t consider yourself a particularly strong writer, you can hire a quality ghostwriter. You can expect to spend between $150-$300 per post. Make sure you find a quality guest writer that is an expert in their niche. They should have published on reputable blogs before, and are not a “jack of all trades”, meaning they can write on daycare blogs and b2b marketing blogs. Find writers that stick to one niche.

For startups, I recommend saving your best content for guest posts. This sounds counterintuitive, but guest posts will be read more than the posts on your site – so it makes sense to deliver the most value where you’re receiving the most eyeballs.

Gamification

If you’ve ever played the old school MMORPG game, Everquest, one of the most compelling features of the game’s interface was the experience bar, which would tell you how close you are to moving up to the next level.

LinkedIn use a similar gamification tactic to encourage new users to fill out their profiles.

There is a core psychological component to gamification tactics such as progress bars.

Research indicates that the simple act of completing something, whatever it may be, leads to a release of endorphins. When the act of completion is associated with positive emotions, you’re compelled to keep completing things – which leads to a large user base for both SaaS companies and MMORPG games!

Think about how you can incorporate gamification into your user experience and you’ll reap the rewards.

Free Merchandise

In the digital era, free merchandise (a.k.a. swag) can seem like a pretty low-tech growth tactic, but this is exactly why it’s so powerful – because not many people are doing it anymore.

By handing out branded t-shirts, mouse pads, pens and other accessories, you can let your free merchandise do your marketing for you.

Counterintuitively, you don’t need a huge upfront investment.

I recommend browsing Alibaba and conversing with manufacturers. You can get your logo branded on a gigantic range of products – just shop around for the right price.

Sometimes, manufacturers will be happy to drop ship your orders, so you don’t have to hold inventory.

Instead of handing out gifts to everyone and anyone, I recommend shipping free branded accessories as rewards to customers who have a high Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Someone who has made repeat purchases already holds your brand in high regard, so they’re more likely to show off their free t-shirt or pen to their friends. Since they’re already a profitable customer, you’re not going to lose money on sending them a free gift – whereas you might with non-customers or one-time buyers.

Print on demand t-shirts work excellently in this scenario.

2 – Growth Mapping

Growth Scoring

Once you’ve exhausted all possible growth tactics, the first step to sustainable growth is to examine what’s working and what isn’t.

If content marketing is a core part of your company’s success, I’d recommend tracking key metrics for your campaigns.

When doing growth scoring for clients, I like to be as in-depth as possible. Before moving onto the subsequent mapping phase, I need to be able to answer the following questions:

What is the ideal blog post length in terms of generating engagement?

What is the ideal article title length?

What’s the average bounce rate and time spent on pages?

How many social shares are generated per post?

Do some types of content create more engagement than others (i.e. infographics and video posts)?

Do articles by certain authors perform better than others? If so, why?

Strategy Mapping

After analyzing our scores, we can tell where we should maximize our investment to get the best returns.

For instance, if infographics consistently perform better than blog posts (in my experience, they often do) – allocating additional resources to producing infographics will be beneficial in the long run.

Also at this stage, we have the opportunity to revisit highly performing blog posts and optimize them.

One of my favorite optimization tactics is to provide downloadable content upgrades at the end of these popular posts.

A content upgrade is simply a lead magnet (a checklist, eBook or other item of value that marketers trade in exchange for contact information) with one key difference: they’re contextually relevant.

If you’re a marketing agency, you might feature a lead magnet on your homepage in the form of an eBook about driving website traffic. However, if you’ve seen that an evergreen article about email marketing continually gets lots of views – you might want to provide a checklist at the end of the post describing the steps to creating a killer autoresponder sequence.

Growth mapping is all about examining the data, and then mapping out a course of action for sustainable long-term growth.

Have you used any other growth hacks that have been effective for your business? Please let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear your replies.

About the Author: Aaron Agius, CEO of worldwide digital agency Louder Online is, according to Forbes, among the world’s leading digital marketers. Working with clients such as Salesforce, Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, and scores of stellar brands, Aaron is a Growth Marketer – a fusion between search, content, social, and PR. Find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or on the Louder Online blog.

from WordPress https://reviewandbonuss.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/growth-hacking-vs-growth-mapping-what-you-should-be-doing-to-scale-your-business/

#New Post

[ericsburden-blog]

Growth Hacking vs. Growth Mapping: What You Should Be Doing To Scale Your Business

So, you’ve tweaked your landing pages until your conversion rates can’t get any better, split tested every facet of your ad campaigns and collaborated with influencers in your niche to maximize your exposure.

What’s next?

These tactics are wonderful and can generate explosive growth, but after a while, you’ll reach a plateau.

Once your startup is a fully-fledged, profitable business, growth challenges become different. While a startup is focussed on big wins to make the cash register ring, established businesses need to think in terms of more stable, incremental forms of growth. It’s no longer about growth hacking; growth mapping has to take center stage.

This continuum of business growth can be explained using sports as an analogy.

Mixed martial arts have one of the most significant learning curves out of all sports.

In the first six months of training, you can learn the fundamentals of striking, wrestling and jiu-jitsu.

However, the longer you practice, the smaller the improvements you’ll make. Once you’re proficient at the basics, the real journey to mastery begins.

Sure, adding a spinning wheel kick to your arsenal of attacks is beneficial in the short-run, but elite level UFC fighters didn’t reach mastery by continually learning new techniques – they did it by refining their fundamentals, year after year.

Jiu-jitsu expert Demian Maia understands all facets of the game, but he didn’t start achieving spectacular results until he centered his strategy around his strongest skills: wrestling his opponents to the mat and securing a rear-naked choke. Fans often comment that his opponents know exactly what he’s going to do, yet are unable to stop it.

To achieve mastery in any discipline (especially business), tactics that provide short-term explosive growth are great – but the long game requires slower, sustainable progress.

This is the difference between growth hacking and growth mapping.

Whatever stage your business is at, consider using these growth tactics to take you to the next level.

1. Growth Tactics

Here are some non-technical growth tactics to try. These don’t require a/b tests or changing any forms to increase conversions. Instead, they’re simple tactics to test to see if they drive meaningful acquisition.

Personalized Discounts

The generic, one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is no longer applicable.

Nowadays, businesses can leverage user data to deliver more personalized, emotionally resonant messages to their users in order to maximize engagement and profits.

Email marketers have a good understanding of this. Depending on the actions people have taken in response to email campaigns, different email sequences can be fired off.

If a person opened an email promoting a webinar and attended, they might receive a sales-oriented email, whereas if they miss the webinar, their next message might be a gentle reminder of when the next webinar is available.

To take this a step further, I recommend using your analytics data to provide special deals to warm prospects. If a person has viewed a product page numerous times but hasn’t converted – there is a proven interest but something isn’t quite right.

In my experience, offering limited discounts to these users can push them over the edge and get them to convert. In this scenario, leveraging scarcity marketing in a highly personalized way can drive explosive growth.

Incentivized Referrals

Instead of pumping money into ad campaigns to acquire new customers, have you ever considered getting your existing customers to do your marketing for you?

In recent years, Dropbox and Airbnb have achieved extreme growth partially due to referral marketing. However, PayPal created the blueprint many years prior.

Initially offering $20 to new users and $20 for them to refer their friends (this was later scaled down to $10 and then $5), PayPal acquired over 100,000 users in the first month of being operational.

The bold referral program was masterminded by PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk. A consummate scientist, Musk described the viral nature of the program as “bacteria growth in a Petri dish.”

While you may not be able to spend tens of millions of dollars like PayPal did to acquire new customers, a good double-sided referral program (both the referrer and friend benefit) can stimulate tremendous growth.

If you’re not ready to create a formal referral program, consider sending your repeat customers a referral discount code via email. Since they have a positive impression of your brand (proven by repeat purchases), they’ll be happy to refer their friends to you – especially if they’re incentivized to do so.

Guest Posting

A few years back, people used guest posting for all the wrong reasons. In order to game search engines and acquire inbound links, marketers would submit sub-par content to external sites with no concern for providing value to the audience.

Fortunately, Google caught on to this unsavory practice and it’s being phased out.

However, Google is still perfectly happy for people to publish guest posts that, “inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company.”

In other words, guest posting is no longer a link building game; it’s all about delivering value and long-term brand building.

As a free growth tactic, I find guest posting to be exceptionally effective. I aim to write multiple guest posts every week.

If you don’t consider yourself a particularly strong writer, you can hire a quality ghostwriter. You can expect to spend between $150-$300 per post. Make sure you find a quality guest writer that is an expert in their niche. They should have published on reputable blogs before, and are not a “jack of all trades”, meaning they can write on daycare blogs and b2b marketing blogs. Find writers that stick to one niche.

For startups, I recommend saving your best content for guest posts. This sounds counterintuitive, but guest posts will be read more than the posts on your site – so it makes sense to deliver the most value where you’re receiving the most eyeballs.

Gamification

If you’ve ever played the old school MMORPG game, Everquest, one of the most compelling features of the game’s interface was the experience bar, which would tell you how close you are to moving up to the next level.

LinkedIn use a similar gamification tactic to encourage new users to fill out their profiles.

There is a core psychological component to gamification tactics such as progress bars.

Research indicates that the simple act of completing something, whatever it may be, leads to a release of endorphins. When the act of completion is associated with positive emotions, you’re compelled to keep completing things – which leads to a large user base for both SaaS companies and MMORPG games!

Think about how you can incorporate gamification into your user experience and you’ll reap the rewards.

Free Merchandise

In the digital era, free merchandise (a.k.a. swag) can seem like a pretty low-tech growth tactic, but this is exactly why it’s so powerful – because not many people are doing it anymore.

By handing out branded t-shirts, mouse pads, pens and other accessories, you can let your free merchandise do your marketing for you.

Counterintuitively, you don’t need a huge upfront investment.

I recommend browsing Alibaba and conversing with manufacturers. You can get your logo branded on a gigantic range of products – just shop around for the right price.

Sometimes, manufacturers will be happy to drop ship your orders, so you don’t have to hold inventory.

Instead of handing out gifts to everyone and anyone, I recommend shipping free branded accessories as rewards to customers who have a high Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Someone who has made repeat purchases already holds your brand in high regard, so they’re more likely to show off their free t-shirt or pen to their friends. Since they’re already a profitable customer, you’re not going to lose money on sending them a free gift – whereas you might with non-customers or one-time buyers.

Print on demand t-shirts work excellently in this scenario.

2 – Growth Mapping

Growth Scoring

Once you’ve exhausted all possible growth tactics, the first step to sustainable growth is to examine what’s working and what isn’t.

If content marketing is a core part of your company’s success, I’d recommend tracking key metrics for your campaigns.

When doing growth scoring for clients, I like to be as in-depth as possible. Before moving onto the subsequent mapping phase, I need to be able to answer the following questions:

What is the ideal blog post length in terms of generating engagement?

What is the ideal article title length?

What’s the average bounce rate and time spent on pages?

How many social shares are generated per post?

Do some types of content create more engagement than others (i.e. infographics and video posts)?

Do articles by certain authors perform better than others? If so, why?

Strategy Mapping

After analyzing our scores, we can tell where we should maximize our investment to get the best returns.

For instance, if infographics consistently perform better than blog posts (in my experience, they often do) – allocating additional resources to producing infographics will be beneficial in the long run.

Also at this stage, we have the opportunity to revisit highly performing blog posts and optimize them.

One of my favorite optimization tactics is to provide downloadable content upgrades at the end of these popular posts.

A content upgrade is simply a lead magnet (a checklist, eBook or other item of value that marketers trade in exchange for contact information) with one key difference: they’re contextually relevant.

If you’re a marketing agency, you might feature a lead magnet on your homepage in the form of an eBook about driving website traffic. However, if you’ve seen that an evergreen article about email marketing continually gets lots of views – you might want to provide a checklist at the end of the post describing the steps to creating a killer autoresponder sequence.

Growth mapping is all about examining the data, and then mapping out a course of action for sustainable long-term growth.

Have you used any other growth hacks that have been effective for your business? Please let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear your replies.

About the Author: Aaron Agius, CEO of worldwide digital agency Louder Online is, according to Forbes, among the world’s leading digital marketers. Working with clients such as Salesforce, Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, and scores of stellar brands, Aaron is a Growth Marketer – a fusion between search, content, social, and PR. Find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or on the Louder Online blog.

Growth Hacking vs. Growth Mapping: What You Should Be Doing To Scale Your Business

[webanalytics]

Growth Hacking vs. Growth Mapping: What You Should Be Doing To Scale Your Business

So, you’ve tweaked your landing pages until your conversion rates can’t get any better, split tested every facet of your ad campaigns and collaborated with influencers in your niche to maximize your exposure.

What’s next?

These tactics are wonderful and can generate explosive growth, but after a while, you’ll reach a plateau.

Once your startup is a fully-fledged, profitable business, growth challenges become different. While a startup is focussed on big wins to make the cash register ring, established businesses need to think in terms of more stable, incremental forms of growth. It’s no longer about growth hacking; growth mapping has to take center stage.

This continuum of business growth can be explained using sports as an analogy.

Mixed martial arts have one of the most significant learning curves out of all sports.

In the first six months of training, you can learn the fundamentals of striking, wrestling and jiu-jitsu.

However, the longer you practice, the smaller the improvements you’ll make. Once you’re proficient at the basics, the real journey to mastery begins.

Sure, adding a spinning wheel kick to your arsenal of attacks is beneficial in the short-run, but elite level UFC fighters didn’t reach mastery by continually learning new techniques – they did it by refining their fundamentals, year after year.

Jiu-jitsu expert Demian Maia understands all facets of the game, but he didn’t start achieving spectacular results until he centered his strategy around his strongest skills: wrestling his opponents to the mat and securing a rear-naked choke. Fans often comment that his opponents know exactly what he’s going to do, yet are unable to stop it.

To achieve mastery in any discipline (especially business), tactics that provide short-term explosive growth are great – but the long game requires slower, sustainable progress.

This is the difference between growth hacking and growth mapping.

Whatever stage your business is at, consider using these growth tactics to take you to the next level.

1. Growth Tactics

Here are some non-technical growth tactics to try. These don’t require a/b tests or changing any forms to increase conversions. Instead, they’re simple tactics to test to see if they drive meaningful acquisition.

Personalized Discounts

The generic, one-size-fits-all approach to marketing is no longer applicable.

Nowadays, businesses can leverage user data to deliver more personalized, emotionally resonant messages to their users in order to maximize engagement and profits.

Email marketers have a good understanding of this. Depending on the actions people have taken in response to email campaigns, different email sequences can be fired off.

If a person opened an email promoting a webinar and attended, they might receive a sales-oriented email, whereas if they miss the webinar, their next message might be a gentle reminder of when the next webinar is available.

To take this a step further, I recommend using your analytics data to provide special deals to warm prospects. If a person has viewed a product page numerous times but hasn’t converted – there is a proven interest but something isn’t quite right.

In my experience, offering limited discounts to these users can push them over the edge and get them to convert. In this scenario, leveraging scarcity marketing in a highly personalized way can drive explosive growth.

Incentivized Referrals

Instead of pumping money into ad campaigns to acquire new customers, have you ever considered getting your existing customers to do your marketing for you?

In recent years, Dropbox and Airbnb have achieved extreme growth partially due to referral marketing. However, PayPal created the blueprint many years prior.

Initially offering $20 to new users and $20 for them to refer their friends (this was later scaled down to $10 and then $5), PayPal acquired over 100,000 users in the first month of being operational.

The bold referral program was masterminded by PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk. A consummate scientist, Musk described the viral nature of the program as “bacteria growth in a Petri dish.”

While you may not be able to spend tens of millions of dollars like PayPal did to acquire new customers, a good double-sided referral program (both the referrer and friend benefit) can stimulate tremendous growth.

If you’re not ready to create a formal referral program, consider sending your repeat customers a referral discount code via email. Since they have a positive impression of your brand (proven by repeat purchases), they’ll be happy to refer their friends to you – especially if they’re incentivized to do so.

Guest Posting

A few years back, people used guest posting for all the wrong reasons. In order to game search engines and acquire inbound links, marketers would submit sub-par content to external sites with no concern for providing value to the audience.

Fortunately, Google caught on to this unsavory practice and it’s being phased out.

However, Google is still perfectly happy for people to publish guest posts that, “inform users, educate another site’s audience or bring awareness to your cause or company.”

In other words, guest posting is no longer a link building game; it’s all about delivering value and long-term brand building.

As a free growth tactic, I find guest posting to be exceptionally effective. I aim to write multiple guest posts every week.

If you don’t consider yourself a particularly strong writer, you can hire a quality ghostwriter. You can expect to spend between $150-$300 per post. Make sure you find a quality guest writer that is an expert in their niche. They should have published on reputable blogs before, and are not a “jack of all trades”, meaning they can write on daycare blogs and b2b marketing blogs. Find writers that stick to one niche.

For startups, I recommend saving your best content for guest posts. This sounds counterintuitive, but guest posts will be read more than the posts on your site – so it makes sense to deliver the most value where you’re receiving the most eyeballs.

Gamification

If you’ve ever played the old school MMORPG game, Everquest, one of the most compelling features of the game’s interface was the experience bar, which would tell you how close you are to moving up to the next level.

LinkedIn use a similar gamification tactic to encourage new users to fill out their profiles.

There is a core psychological component to gamification tactics such as progress bars.

Research indicates that the simple act of completing something, whatever it may be, leads to a release of endorphins. When the act of completion is associated with positive emotions, you’re compelled to keep completing things – which leads to a large user base for both SaaS companies and MMORPG games!

Think about how you can incorporate gamification into your user experience and you’ll reap the rewards.

Free Merchandise

In the digital era, free merchandise (a.k.a. swag) can seem like a pretty low-tech growth tactic, but this is exactly why it’s so powerful – because not many people are doing it anymore.

By handing out branded t-shirts, mouse pads, pens and other accessories, you can let your free merchandise do your marketing for you.

Counterintuitively, you don’t need a huge upfront investment.

I recommend browsing Alibaba and conversing with manufacturers. You can get your logo branded on a gigantic range of products – just shop around for the right price.

Sometimes, manufacturers will be happy to drop ship your orders, so you don’t have to hold inventory.

Instead of handing out gifts to everyone and anyone, I recommend shipping free branded accessories as rewards to customers who have a high Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Someone who has made repeat purchases already holds your brand in high regard, so they’re more likely to show off their free t-shirt or pen to their friends. Since they’re already a profitable customer, you’re not going to lose money on sending them a free gift – whereas you might with non-customers or one-time buyers.

Print on demand t-shirts work excellently in this scenario.

2 – Growth Mapping

Growth Scoring

Once you’ve exhausted all possible growth tactics, the first step to sustainable growth is to examine what’s working and what isn’t.

If content marketing is a core part of your company’s success, I’d recommend tracking key metrics for your campaigns.

When doing growth scoring for clients, I like to be as in-depth as possible. Before moving onto the subsequent mapping phase, I need to be able to answer the following questions:

What is the ideal blog post length in terms of generating engagement?

What is the ideal article title length?

What’s the average bounce rate and time spent on pages?

How many social shares are generated per post?

Do some types of content create more engagement than others (i.e. infographics and video posts)?

Do articles by certain authors perform better than others? If so, why?

Strategy Mapping

After analyzing our scores, we can tell where we should maximize our investment to get the best returns.

For instance, if infographics consistently perform better than blog posts (in my experience, they often do) – allocating additional resources to producing infographics will be beneficial in the long run.

Also at this stage, we have the opportunity to revisit highly performing blog posts and optimize them.

One of my favorite optimization tactics is to provide downloadable content upgrades at the end of these popular posts.

A content upgrade is simply a lead magnet (a checklist, eBook or other item of value that marketers trade in exchange for contact information) with one key difference: they’re contextually relevant.

If you’re a marketing agency, you might feature a lead magnet on your homepage in the form of an eBook about driving website traffic. However, if you’ve seen that an evergreen article about email marketing continually gets lots of views – you might want to provide a checklist at the end of the post describing the steps to creating a killer autoresponder sequence.

Growth mapping is all about examining the data, and then mapping out a course of action for sustainable long-term growth.

Have you used any other growth hacks that have been effective for your business? Please let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear your replies.

About the Author: Aaron Agius, CEO of worldwide digital agency Louder Online is, according to Forbes, among the world’s leading digital marketers. Working with clients such as Salesforce, Coca-Cola, IBM, Intel, and scores of stellar brands, Aaron is a Growth Marketer – a fusion between search, content, social, and PR. Find him on Twitter, LinkedIn, or on the Louder Online blog.

from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2x3OOaS #Digital #Analytics #Website

#Analytics #Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog