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How social media marketing has changed in four years

Video Marketing,

What you need to do to ride the social media wave…

 

It doesn’t seem too long since I started my social media agency along with my co-founder Gaurav Mishra in 2013. The beginning wasn’t a humble one, it was a “viral” start. Things went uphill from there and we were constantly working with clients, creating social media campaigns, making them viral and what not.

Four years have since passed and I still remain deeply with social media.

Here I share what it took to be a social media success then and what it takes to be one now. I will provide an insight into how things have changed and what you need to do in order to ride the social media wave.

Decline, eventual death and rebirth of Facebook organic reach

The ultimate buzzword on social media was The Facebook Organic Reach. Marketers have been attempting to devise ways to increase the organic reach of their Facebook posts. While it started declining towards the end of 2013, it finally started playing down the success of all Facebook page owners in 2014. So much so, they started calling 2014 – the year when Facebook Organic Reach declined.

Facebook pages that had sprung up since 2012 began having a hard time coping with the Facebook page reach decline. Slowly Facebook started coaxing everyone to pay in order to get reach. At one point, in 2015, marketers started advocating that a 17 percent Organic Reach can be considered great.

Facebook had its own reasons to cut your page’s organic reach. Content on user news feeds was increasing at an exponential rate and the media platform wanted to show the consumer only what was relevant to him.

In 2016, several social media influencers started emerging in the digital scenario. People started switching to YouTube and then Netflix to consume video content. On the other hand, Facebook was still not giving organic reach to creators.

Things changed at the end of 2016, when Facebook started giving reach to video content. In fact it started promoting video content across its channels for free. Creative images started gaining more reach as well.

Lately, Organic Reach has seen a rebirth. Influencers and content creators had started overlooking Facebook as a mode to grow their community. Thus Facebook started giving organic reach to good content again.

Facebook Organic Reach growth tips in 2017

  • Create engaging content for your audience. Make Facebook analytics your best friend. Analyse what worked and create more of that content.
  • Video is the king these days. Facebook gives more reach to video as compared to other forms of content. Ride on the video wave.
  • Facebook has started identifying “trending” content and giving it more reach. The first 24 hours are important. If your content gets likes and comments when it reaches the first 500 people, it is more likely that Facebook will show it on the Newsfeed of the next 1000 people for sure.

Rapid rise of Instagram posts, stories and recently, links

Instagram was never considered as a marketing channel back in 2013. However by 2014, it had started getting popular and brands began using it extensively. Later that year, several individual Instagram users had even started generating sales for their products from the platform. I had written about some Instagram marketing tips for startups that work well.

Several brands and users had built mechanisms to capture leads from Instagram and created follow up systems via chat tools like WhatsApp. Thus, Instagram had begun to become a source of business for many.

Instagram then went on from posts to introducing stories and now, links. In the present times, Instagram is no more an optional marketing channel. It has become a channel that you cannot miss having a presence on. However, the golden days for organic reach have long passed by on Instagram as well. In mid-2016, Instagram announced an end to chronological feed.

However, Instagram still offers better opportunities for someone seeking organic reach. Instagram ads have also been introduced and are being used by brands worldwide.

Tips to grow your brand on Instagram in 2017

  • High quality pictures – The ultimate secret to Instagram reach is posting high quality, aesthetically pleasing pictures, which is the whole point why Instagram exists.
  • Stories – Post as regularly as you can. It would be a crime to not post stories on Instagram. In fact, Instagram stories help you get new followers more than Instagram posts.
  • Post candid, funny and relatable content on Instagram Stories.
  • When you grow to 10,000 followers on Instagram, the link option opens up on Stories. Thus, if you want to drive traffic from Instagram, grow, grow, grow!

Rise of the influencers

Back in 2013, influencer was not even a word in the social media world. Twitter did have some influencers, however very few. Things started taking shape in the influencer world in 2015.

Several influencers, started becoming popular in the food, fashion, and even humour niches. It didn’t take too long for BB ki Vines to become a household name. Women started looking up to other young women on Instagram for fashion tips, styling tips, make-up tutorials, and life advice in general.

In 2016, the number of influencers started growing by hundreds. People started writing blogs, using Instagram channels, uploading Vlogs on YouTube and more. Being an influencer became a real career. Brands started flocking to pay these influencers for product placements. It started looking like a golden egg, a win-win for everyone.

Let’s come to 2017. Influencers became one too many. Brands hardly pay the influencers anymore (except the extremely popular ones). Most beginners and mid-level influencers work on barter – for products being sent to them in exchange for marketing on their channels. At the same time, the extremely popular influencers are growing strides by launching their own fashion labels, brand product tie-ups, multiple YouTube channels and more. However, the future of influencer as a career is the subject of an endless debate.

However, one thing is certain – a brand’s social media strategy is now incomplete without influencer marketing.

Tips to create a successful influencer marketing campaign in 2017

  • Find the relevant influencers for your niche. Go through their social media following and communities carefully.
  • You can engage with multiple beginner level and mid-level influencers or engage with the popular one or two in a given budget. In most circumstances you would have to make a choice.
  • Keep the guidelines for influencers clear. Give a brief and let them use their creativity for the implementation of a campaign.

Here were some excerpts from the journey of social media marketing through these few years. Presently, the dynamics of social media has completely changed and it’s time you adapt to it as well. Instagram and Influencers have become unavoidable for your brand’s presence. Keep growing keep hustling!

A Journey Through the Strange, Scary, and Awe-Awakening World of Video Games

Video Marketing,

I was born in 1982, the same year the Atari 2600 went on sale. My dad waited until I was older and could fully appreciate it before purchasing the system for me. That purchase would shape my life more than he anticipated. In his spare time, we would sit in front of the TV together and play Tank and Pong and attempt to decipher the disastrously designed E.T. For my dad, it barely ranked as a hobby. He was more interested in fishing and grilling.

But I had a lot more spare time than him and was far less interested in the outdoors. Every Christmas list was packed with requests for video games and the systems that played them. Faced with requests for a new console every four years or so, my parents would complain about forced obsolescence, that frustrating moment when you realize that a perfectly good piece of technology is no longer useful—a trend that started with the Nintendo-Sega arms race and not with Apple’s iPhone, as many assume.

As a result, I was intimately aware of the evolution of the video game medium. This may be why I was both intrigued and underwhelmed by Andrew Ervin’sBit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World. Ervin seeks to provide a kind of historical walkthrough of the form, offering us a bird’s-eye view of just how drastically the aims and audience of video games have changed over time. He comes at his subject matter from an outsider’s perspective, transporting himself back in time to the first-ever video game, Tennis for Two, and exploring the twists and turns of the art form’s history by way of its most noteworthy creative innovations.

An Outsider’s Encounter

So much attention has been given to the evolution of the video game industry—financial models, money earned, misguided marketing, and the player acquisition and manipulation that comes with it—that the art form itself has been mostly overlooked by the mainstream. This makes perfect sense in a world that proclaims value based on dollars spent, and dollars spent has indeed been the industry’s claim to fame. As video games came into their own in the ’90s, the industry was generating revenue more than two and half times larger than the film industry.

Add in marketing typically aimed at a primary audience of teenage boys and an innovation cycle tied to realistically depicted violence, and it’s easy to see why video games largely lost the trust and curiosity of the mainstream. Ervin himself writes, “I never wanted to associate myself with the millions of people for whom bloodlust—even virtual bloodlust—became a virtue.”

As part of this disinterested mainstream, Ervin was disgusted when he first encountered the darker tendencies of some video games. He writes of trying the violent first-person-shooter DOOM: “While dated, the original incarnation remained disconcertingly brutal, even in our desensitized age.” And on the prospect of shooting his friends in Goldeneye, he writes, “If shooting creatures from hell had felt vaguely disconcerting, shooting human avatars of my friends felt positively sickening.”

Oklahoma plants its flag in payback win at Ohio State

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Sep 9, 2017

Let’s consider this « Show-Me-Something » Saturday. This was a chance for a few of the top teams in the country to give us a little more clarity on who they truly are.

Well, it’s pretty clear that Oklahoma isn’t going to let Bob Stoops’ retirement spoil its chance to make a run to the College Football Playoff. The fifth-ranked Sooners absolutely manhandled No. 2 Ohio State 31-16 in Columbus.

A year after hearing chants of « O-H, I-O » inside their own stadium, the Sooners brought the boom to The Shoe, thanks to a runaway fourth quarter and another stellar performance by Heisman Trophy hopeful Baker Mayfield, who threw for 386 yards and three touchdowns (all three coming in the second half).

Sans Stoops, the Sooners are dispelling the preseason narrative that they’ll be too shorthanded to make a run with newer, younger coach Lincoln Riley. Mayfield, who proudly planted a giant OU flag in the center of Ohio State’s midfield scarlet « O » after winning his 10th straight road game, is a special player, and this team played special football against a Buckeyes team many picked to make the playoff and win it all.

On Saturday, Oklahoma looked like a playoff contender — maybe even the favorite — while Ohio State was a total pretender, completely out of sorts against a much better Sooners team.

While two of the three national champions in the playoff era have suffered home losses in September (Ohio State in 2014, Alabama in 2015), the Buckeyes still have a lot of defensive issues, and their offense continues to be an inconsistent mess against good defenses.

Clemson’s defensive front is absolutely the real deal, turning in a magnificent performance against one of the SEC’s best offensive lines in a 14-6 win over No. 13 Auburn. Clemson sacked Auburn’s Jarrett Stidham — supposedly a savior at quarterback — 11 times and held Auburn to 117 total yards (15 in the second half), including only 38 rushing yards — both are the lowest for Auburn during Gus Malzahn’s head coaching tenure.

Clemson only needed two rushing touchdowns from quarterback Kelly Bryant, but as long as that defense is as dominant as it was Saturday, the offense won’t have to carry much water post-Deshaun Watson.

Florida State quarterback Deondre Francois’ season-ending injury helped thrust Clemson into the ACC driver’s seat, but it’s the defense that is going to put the Tigers’ paws on that gas pedal.

The gap between USC and Stanford probably isn’t as wide as the score indicated, and few would be shocked to see them meet each other again in the Pac-12 championship game.

Looking for a possible sleeper? Maybe 15th-ranked Georgia is a team to keep an eye on. Even without starting quarterback Jacob Eason, the Dawgs escaped South Bend with a 20-19 win over No. 24 Notre Dame because of that ravenous defense.

Freshman quarterback Jake Fromm wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t let the moment get too big on the road. This offense currently lacks an identity and much explosion, but the defense more than made up for it. The SEC East might not be overflowing with offensive fire, so keeping things simple on offense and keeping that defense hungry might be all the Dawgs need for a big 2017 run.

It’s hard to declare a season-defining win in September, but several playoff contenders cleared difficult hurdles on their schedules and separated themselves from the pack in the process.

Remember me?

College football has a short attention span, and we are quick to anoint the next big thing. Still, how did we get to the point where we ignore the reigning Heisman Trophy winner even when he returns a season later with the same insanely offensive-minded coach who helped him earn that bronze beauty?

With Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson struggling at the end of last season and the Cardinals losing their last three games, much of the Heisman focus heading into this season became fixated on USC QB Sam Darnold. Jackson felt like an afterthought.

We can just stop that nonsense. Jackson shouldn’t have been knocked off his pedestal before the season, and he better be atop everyone’s list now. He looked like his old self in an opening win over Purdue, throwing for 378 yards and two touchdowns and running for another 107 yards, but Saturday brought another reminder of why Jackson ran away with the trophy last season. In the 17th-ranked Cardinals’ 47-35 win over North Carolina, Jackson threw for 393 yards and rushed for 132 more with six total touchdowns (three pass, three rush) to become the second quarterback in FBS history — and the first from a Power 5 school — to throw for 300 and run for 100 in back-to-back games.

He bounced off defenders like a pinball, and he’s learning how to stand in the pocket like a true dropback passer. He’s crazy slippery and smooth with everything he does, and it’s time we start realizing it … again.

This guy again.

A post shared by ESPN College Football (@espncfb) on Sep 9, 2017 at 3:25pm PDT

North Carolina linebacker Andre Smith said this week the Tar Heels did not want Saturday’s matchup to become « a Lamar Jackson show » before adding: « So if he’s able to beat us with his arm, then, well, he’s not going to beat us at all. I take that back. He’s not going to beat us. We’re just going to stop anything he tries to do. »

So much for that game plan. Jackson seems to be playing with a chip on his shoulder this season. He told ESPN’s Andrea Adelson this spring that he’s using the disappointing finish to 2016 as motivation.

« We didn’t finish last year, » Jackson said. « A lot of people have seen that and feel like we quit. It wasn’t right. I’m still hot about that. I don’t like that. I’m just teed off about it. I can’t wait to play. »

Against UNC, Jackson became the third player in the past 14 seasons to record 500 yards of offense, six touchdowns and no turnovers on the road. He has started the season with 1,010 total yards and eight touchdowns with just one turnover.

Normally bustling Miami Beach turns into a ghost town after millions flee Hurricane Irma

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The signature Art Deco hotels along Ocean Drive were all shuttered, a sullen sky yielded sheets of rain, and the elegant seaside palms swayed like elastic bands in the fierce wind.

Miami Beach, an iconic destination for generations of merry-makers, was a veritable ghost town Saturday in the aftermath of unprecedented evacuation orders in response to the threat from Hurricane Irma.

Although Irma appears likely to veer to the west and not hit Miami head-on, meteorologists say the area still faces potentially deadly, hurricane-force winds and storm surges of 3 to 6 feet.

On Saturday, as the storm’s effects began to be felt, relatively few ventured onto a wind-whipped and mostly deserted beach, normally filled with weekend revelers in search of sun.

Irma’s Fearsome Winds Reach Florida Shores, With Full Strike Yet to Come

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In Miami, the storm was announcing its soggy might with periods of heavy rain, electricity that wobbled in and out and gusts strong enough to make walking difficult. Around the state, more than 100,000 people had already lost power.

Even when the rain and winds quieted down, Irma found another way to make noise: A National Weather Service alert blared from cellphones in parts of Miami-Dade County just after 7:30 p.m., warning of potential tornadoes.

A hotel guest watched the increasingly bad weather blow by in Miami on Saturday. Many buildings in Florida, unlike in the Caribbean, are built to withstand powerful hurricanes.


Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

But officials emphasized that the greatest danger lay in the water. Mr. Scott said the storm surge could reach 15 feet in places. “Do not think the storm is over when the wind slows down,” he said. “The storm surge will rush in, and it could kill you.”

Over the previous few days, Irma had already reduced a string of Caribbean islands nearly to rubble. It had killed at least 25 people by the time it made landfall in Cuba Friday night as a Category 5, trampling directly through the island’s northern coast.

The hurricane was downgraded to Category 3 as it moved away from Cuba on Saturday, but gained strength and was reclassified as Category 4 early Sunday as its eye approached the Florida Keys.

With phone lines cut, there was little word yet of how coastal Cuba’s residents or tourist businesses — a significant economic driver — had fared. Residents in the central provinces of Camagüey and Ciego de Ávila awoke Saturday to see whole houses destroyed, roofs ripped off warehouses and downed trees scattered around like so many matchsticks.

Elsewhere, the power had gone out, while the coastal town of Caibarién was under several feet of water. The post-storm outlook was not encouraging: For one thing, most people in small coastal communities live in one-story buildings.

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In Florida, unlike the Caribbean, many buildings are constructed to withstand powerful hurricanes. But if the projections for the storm hold, cities all along Florida’s west coast will confront storm surges that could inundate whole neighborhoods.

In recent days, the projected path of the storm bounced between Florida’s east and west coasts. By Saturday, however, the models were converging, pointing to the area between Naples and St. Petersburg.

For officials and residents up and down the Gulf Coast, it was time to make new plans.

In Collier County, which includes Naples, last-minute evacuation orders went out on Friday and Saturday. All of Collier’s more than two dozen shelters had filled by Saturday afternoon, prompting officials to open two more, though they warned arrivals to bring their own supplies and leave pets behind. They were still searching for more shelters in the evening.

A bust of John F. Kennedy was secured ahead of Hurricane Irma in North Bay Village, in Miami-Dade County.


Eric Thayer for The New York Times

Space was so tight that in one flood-prone area, county officials told people living in two-story homes to stay put.

“We thought we were safe like 36 hours ago,” said a Naples Police Department official who declined to be identified because the official was not authorized to discuss the situation.

More than 390 shelters had opened across the state, receiving more than 72,000 people, and more were opening on Saturday night to try to meet demand. Mr. Scott asked for volunteers to help at special-needs shelters.

“All available nurses, if you’ll please respond,” he said at the news conference.

At Largo High School, one of more than a dozen shelters in Pinellas County, hundreds of evacuees colonized classrooms and auditoriums, assembling makeshift beds and sitting areas from whatever they could bring from home — air mattresses, blankets, light furniture.

Sherrie Webber, 64, and her husband, who live in nearby Pinellas Park, arrived at the school with a chaise longue to sleep on and the heart medication she has been taking since her open-heart surgery a year ago. It was her first time being forced to evacuate in 46 years of living there.

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“My husband retires in May,” she said, frustrated by the timing. “We’re moving to Washington State. So I wasn’t exactly expecting this to happen now.”

As of Saturday night, 29 hospitals, 239 assisted-living facilities and 56 other health care facilities in the state have been evacuated, according to Jason Mahon, a public information officer at the Florida State Emergency Operations Center.

The storm is so vast, stretching more than 300 miles, and so powerful, with winds reaching 130 miles an hour, that virtually no place in southern Florida could be considered completely out of danger.

The first winds of Hurricane Irma in Miami on Saturday.


Joe Raedle/Getty Images

But one of the most imperiled parts of the state was the Keys, the string of pearls dangling for more than 100 miles from the state’s southern tip.

Forecasters said hurricane-force winds would begin hitting the Keys by daybreak Sunday. Those who had ignored orders to evacuate could only hunker down and hope for the best behind hurricane-impact windows, metal storm curtains or hastily built plywood barriers.

“This is the big one, the hurricane we have all feared,” said Roman Gastesi, the county administrator for Monroe County, which encompasses the Keys.

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Even the county’s emergency operations center was forced to flee its Marathon headquarters Saturday. Most of the staff went to the Ocean Reef resort in Key Largo, said the county spokeswoman, Cammy Clark.

At the Key West Bed and Breakfast, Jody Carlson and the six people on their way to ride out the storm with her could do little more than trust in the Bahamian shipbuilders who built her three-story wooden guesthouse at least 120 years ago. Up until Saturday morning, she had been convinced Key West would be spared.

Then she checked the latest advisory. “I started feeling a little queasy,” said Ms. Carlson, who has lived in Key West for more than 40 years and weathered past hurricanes — though none this strong. “Had I known it was going to change, and not head north, I would have left. But now there are no gas stations open. There are no hotel rooms, I’m sure. I have a dog and a cat. And my cat screams every time he’s with the dog.”

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Some Floridians were given no choice but to clear out.

About 400 homeless people who live in a community of cabins and tents in a low-lying parcel of land near St. Petersburg, which has a sizable homeless population, had to leave after a mandatory evacuation order.

In Miami, the police invoked the Baker Act, a state law that allows authorities to institutionalize people if they pose a danger to themselves, to force the city’s homeless into shelters.

Robert McCarthy and his son Brian McCarthy loading lumber they planned to use for home protection outside a Lowe’s in Port Orange, Fla., on Saturday.


Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Meanwhile, the preparations drummed on. The mayors of Miami and the city of Miami Beach issued curfews starting Saturday evening. All along Interstate 75, the major north-south artery on the Gulf Coast, workers had lowered the lighting fixtures that normally sit atop high steel poles, so they would offer less resistance to the wind and have a better chance of surviving.

Brig. Gen. Ralph Ribas of the Florida National Guard said that more than 7,000 troops were positioned around the state and would be ready to move once the winds died down to tropical storm levels.

Because the storm was so vast, the Coast Guard positioned its response force in New Orleans. It also declared “Condition Zulu” at the Tampa, St. Petersburg and other major ports, forcing the suspension of all activity there.

The images of Irma’s rampage through the Caribbean, just after Hurricane Harvey swamped Texas, seemed to add to the anxiety.

Even as officials were trying to assess the wreckage on islands including Barbuda, Antigua and St. John, where the aftermath was so disorienting that people had resorted to a community Facebook page to find information on friends and family, they were forced to confront the fresh emergency of Hurricane Jose. Wielding winds of over 130 m.p.h., that storm caused a scare as it passed by the region on Saturday, but it headed north into open ocean without reports of major additional damage. It was not expected to threaten the continental United States.

With Hurricane Irma expected to move up the west coast of the Florida and then to Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee, it was difficult to judge how many people in the Southeast might be left on their own, and for how long.

Officials said people in the direct path of the storm should have two weeks of supplies. But in the days before landfall, there was a run on basic goods, with shelves picked clean of water and many gas stations left with only fumes. By Saturday night, people had to make do with what they had.

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Once the hurricane moves on, Keys residents who stayed could find themselves cut off from the mainland — and from food, gas and other supplies — if any one of their 42 bridges is damaged. All Keys hospitals were closed, and the local authorities said emergency responders were pulling out. The holdouts were on their own.


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Four ways to boost your holiday marketing strategy

Video Marketing,

Published Friday, Sep. 8, 2017, 10:48 pm

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marketing seoIt’s that time of year – fall and winter, which means your business must have a holiday marketing strategy in place. There are plenty of upcoming holidays and events that you can utilize in your marketing strategy. Not to mention, people are ready to start spending.

Continue reading to learn more.

 

Create Holiday Explainer Videos

People love videos because it takes out a lot of the work that is needed for reading text. In addition, creating an explainer video to supplement your content marketing helps to boost traffic and followers.

Think of all the ways your products and services can be tied into the various holidays during the fall and winter season. Then, create an explainer video showing your audiences exactly how they can benefit from your products and services during the holiday season.

This is the time of year where people are willing to spend the most. So, make sure you get your piece of those shopping dollars.

 

Start Planning Now

It is never too early to plan for the holidays. One of the most important lessons you can learn is what took place during the previous holiday seasons. Today, it is important to understand your target audience and to personalize your marketing.

People won’t pay attention to one-size-fits-all marketing techniques and deployments. To illustrate, millennials have interests that differ from that of baby boomers. If you want to dive even deeper, people in different zip codes want different things too.

So, while this time of year is rife with spending, you must earn those dollars through personalization.

 

Market for Every Event

The holiday season starts in October and ends in January. It is a long stretch of celebratory events that feel like a whirlwind. Let’s start with Halloween marketing, perhaps you can offer some spooky discounts.

If you sell food items, well, now is the perfect time for pumpkin spice. Other seasonal events to market for include:

  • Kwanzaa
  • Hanukkah
  • End of fall
  • Start of winter
  • Christmas
  • New Year
  • Holiday vacations

Of course, this list also depends on your customer base and target audience. If you cater to families, then your marketing may center around gifts and activities. For consumers without children, they will be celebrating too and will appreciate specials and coupons.

 

Communicate with Your Customers Where They Are

The bulk of the holiday spending is done between November and late December. Still, people are already thinking of what they will buy from gifts to food to their holiday attire and tickets to events.

As a result, now is the time to reach out to your customers where they are, which is on platforms such as:

  • Pinterest
  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Don’t hesitate to reach out to your customers now because they are expecting the holiday deal floodgates to start pouring wide open. The excitement has just begun, and it will last for several months. Plus, if you start marketing now, you can fine tune your tactics just in time for prime holiday spending.

 

Final Thought

The holiday season is the biggest shopping stretch of the year. Make sure your marketing is aligned with all the upcoming events and the needs of your target customer.

Here’s how to become a social media marketing guru for less than $35

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Just to let you know, if you buy something featured here, Mashable might earn an affiliate commission.

Internet history was made on May 22, 2005, when YouTube co-founder Steve Chen posted a video of his cat called « Pajamas and Nick Drake. » That 30-second clip was the very first cat video ever uploaded to the video-sharing site, according to The BBC, marking the beginning of a bona fide digital phenomenon that eventually spawned a handful of feline celebrities. 

Pop on Instagram right now and you may run into the profile of a rescue cat named Nala, who currently has a dedicated community of more than 3.4 million followers (and counting) liking her adorable daily posts. Not too shabby for a tabby.

SEE ALSO: An entire MBA in one course — for just $15

As Nala and her furry friends have proven, social media can be a legit (and lucrative) way to build a brand. With the Social Media Management Pro Bundle, even humans like you can learn marketing techniques and tricks that will help you stake your claim in the increasingly competitive and in-demand field of social media marketing.

Here’s a breakdown of the included courses:

Become a Freelance Social Media Manager

Before you dive head-first into social media consulting, you should first master the essential skills needed to succeed on your own in the industry. This 48-lecture course will give you the low-down on everything from finding clients and pricing your services to creating business plans and conducting audits — knowledge that will make you quite valuable in the eyes of brands and businesses alike. Alone, this course is valued at $200. 

The Complete Twitter Marketing Bootcamp 2017

A little birdie told us that Twitter is one of the best places for digital marketers to find followers and turn them into actual customers. This course will teach you how to do just that during three hours of lectures, which include lessons on crafting a marketing strategy, using Twitter ads, and building engaging relationships with a community of followers. By itself, this course is worth $200.

The Complete Instagram Marketing 2017 Training

You don’t have to be an ~influencer~ (or a cute cat, for that matter) to make big bucks off the ‘gram. Learn how to attract followers to your account, organize a daily posting schedule, optimize Instagram ads, and create bomb pictures and videos through this 72-lecture course, valued at $195.

The Complete Facebook Ads 2017 Training

Since everyone and their grandma has a profile nowadays, Facebook ads can be a huge revenue driver – if you know how to use them correctly, that is. In this hands-on course, you’ll find out how to assemble a custom audience, develop a marketing plan, and build different types of ads for Zuck’s site while avoiding common mistakes. On its own, this course is worth $195.

Blogging For Business: 3x Traffic Without Ads

Unless you can find and engage an audience for your blog, you’re basically just sending missives out into the void. Get active readers’ eyes on your content (and keep them coming back) using the lessons you’ll find in this course, which covers everything from content curation and analytics techniques to email outreach and social media promotion. By itself, this 2-hour course is valued at $95.

Email List Building: 4 Systems To Grow Your List

No updated email list, no online business — that’s just how it works. With this course, you’ll learn how to build your list using tactics like email campaigns and capture plugins, driving traffic to your site without ads and helping it thrive. As a standalone course, it’s worth $150.

Buying all of these courses separately would set you back $1,035, but right now they’re available as a bundle for just $34 — a savings of 96 percent.

Watch #19 Purdue Volleyball Take on Campus (VIDEO)

Video Marketing,

The Purdue women’s volleyball team earlier this semester took on an interesting marketing campaign to draw the student body to their home games at Holloway Gymnasium.

Rather than using t-shirt cannons and souvenir volleyballs to throw out to people already at the games, they took to the streets and used them to get people to the games. A group of volleyball players cruised around campus building hype for their home Mortar Board Premier event in West Lafayette, where they hosted Oral Roberts, Cleveland State, and Alabama. The marketing worked: They drew more on average 1,868 fans per game, and for the highest-profile of those, a dominating 3-0 (25-21, 25-12, 25-14) win over Alabama, they drew 2,207 fans: effectively a sellout of the 2,288-seat arena.

That 3-game performance ranks them 12th nationally in average home attendance so far this season. Last year, they ranked 9th nationally with 2,537 fans per match (which is, on average, 110% of a sellout) – with attendance always jumping even higher once Big Ten play start. The Big Ten had 7 of the 9 best teams in average home attendance last year, and those numbers spill over to road games as well.

Top 15 teams in 2017 average home attendance so far, through September 7th:

  1. Nebraska – 8,030
  2. Hawaii – 6,232
  3. Wisconsin – 5,841
  4. Florida – 5,668
  5. Minnesota – 4,695
  6. North Dakota – 3,140
  7. Colorado State – 2,398
  8. Creighton – 2,129
  9. Northern Iowa – 1,971
  10. Iowa State – 1,950
  11. Texas – 1,924
  12. Purdue – 1,868
  13. South Carolina – 1,681
  14. San Diego – 1,670
  15. Michigan State – 1,667

‘Trump betrays everyone’: The president has a long record as an unpredictable ally

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President Trump prepared for the pivotal meeting with congressional leaders by huddling with his senior team — his chief of staff, his legislative director and the heads of Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget — to game out various scenarios on how to fund the government, raise the debt ceiling and provide Hurricane Harvey relief.

But one option they never considered was the one the president ultimately chose: cutting a deal with Democratic lawmakers, to the shock and ire of his own party.

In agreeing to tie Harvey aid to a three-month extension of the debt ceiling and government funding, Trump burned the people who are ostensibly his allies. The president was an unpredictable — and, some would say, untrustworthy — negotiating partner with not only congressional Republicans but also with his Cabinet members and top aides. Trump saw a deal that he thought was good for him — and he seized it.

The move should come as no surprise to students of Trump’s long history of broken alliances and agreements. In business, his personal life, his campaign and now his presidency, Trump has sprung surprises on his allies with gusto. His dealings are frequently defined by freewheeling spontaneity, impulsive decisions and a desire to keep everyone guessing — especially those who assume they can control him.

President Trump pauses during an Oval Office meeting Wednesday with, from left, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). (Evan Vucci/AP)

He also repeatedly demonstrates that, while he demands absolutely loyalty from others, he is ultimately loyal to no one but himself.

“It makes all of their normalizing and ‘Trumpsplaining’ look silly and hollow,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist sharply critical of Trump, referring to his party’s congressional leaders. “Trump betrays everyone: wives, business associates, contractors, bankers and now, the leaders of the House and Senate in his own party. They can’t explain this away as [a] 15-dimensional Trump chess game. It’s a dishonest person behaving according to his long-established pattern.”

But what many Republicans saw as betrayal was, in the view of some Trump advisers, an exciting return to his campaign promise of being a populist dealmaker able to cut through the mores of Washington to get things done. 

In that Wednesday morning Oval Office meeting, Trump was impressed with the energy and vigor of Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D.-Calif.) relative to the more subdued Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.). Far from fretting over the prospect of alienating McConnell and Ryan or members of his administration, he relished the opportunity for a bipartisan agreement and the praise he anticipated it would bring, according to people close to the president. 

On Thursday morning, he called Pelosi and Schumer to crow about coverage of the deal — “The press has been incredible,” he told Pelosi, according to someone familiar with the call — and point out that it had been especially positive for the Democratic leaders. 

At the White House later that day, Trump asked Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) how he thought the deal was playing. “I told him I thought it was great, and a gateway project to show there could be bipartisan progress,” King said. “He doesn’t want to be in an ideological straitjacket.”

In some ways, White House officials said, Trump is as comfortable working with Democrats to achieve policy goals — complete with the sheen of bipartisan luster — as he is with Republicans. Though he did not partner with Democrats to spite McConnell and Ryan, aides said, he has long felt frustrated with them for what he perceives as their inability to help shepherd his agenda through Congress, most notably their stalled efforts to undo former president Barack Obama’s signature health-care law. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), flanked by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), left, and Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) speaks at the Capitol after President Trump overruled Republicans and his treasury secretary to cut a deal with Democrats on Wednesday. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

On Thursday, Trump took to Twitter to express dissatisfaction with his adopted political party, complaining about Obamacare: “Republicans, sorry, but I’ve been hearing about Repeal Replace for 7 years, didn’t happen!” He also bemoaned the legislative filibuster, which requires Republicans to work with Democrats to meet a 60-senator threshold for most votes, writing, “It is a Repub Death wish.”

Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush’s press secretary, said Trump deserves credit for staving off, at least in the short term, a possible default and government shutdown. 

“It’s going to internally hurt him that he didn’t work with Republicans on this one, but by avoiding a mess, he likely saved Republicans from themselves,” Fleischer said. “I consider it a small victory that congressional Republicans didn’t once again trip themselves up over this issue. At least for now.”

King, a moderate who represents a Long Island district that Trump carried, said, “I think this could be a new day for the Republican Party.”

Trump’s agreement with the Democrats is hardly the first time the president has flouted his allies, including those around the world, sending them skittering nervously in response to a threat or a sudden turnabout. 

In April, Trump thrust Canada and Mexico — as well as many of his advisers and Cabinet officials — into a state of panic during a frenetic, if brief, period when he threatened to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement. In May, speaking in front of NATO’s sparkling new headquarters, Trump alarmed European allies when he chastised them for “not paying what they should be paying” and refused to embrace the treaty’s cornerstone — that an attack on one represents an attack on all. And in September, as the crisis with North Korea escalated, Trump abruptly threatened to withdraw from a free-trade agreement with South Korea.

Foreign diplomats euphemistically describe the president as “unpredictable,” and even those with good relationships with the United States say they are “cautiously optimistic” that Trump’s behavior will continue to benefit their nations.

On the issue of the debt-ceiling extension and short-term government funding, a GOP aide familiar with Wednesday’s meeting said many Republicans viewed Trump’s decision as “a spur of the moment thing” that happened because the president “just wanted a deal.”

“He saw a deal and wanted the deal, and it just happened to be completely against what we were pushing for,” said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment. “Our conclusion is there isn’t much to read into other than he made that decision on the spot, and that’s what he does because he’s Trump, and he made an impulsive decision because he saw a deal he wanted.” 

From the outset, the meeting did not go as Republican leaders and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had hoped. They began by pushing for an 18-month extension of the debt ceiling, with Mnuchin lecturing the group of longtime legislators about the importance of raising the debt ceiling, according to three people familiar with the gathering.

“It was just odd and weird,” one said. “He was very much a duck out of water.”

The treasury secretary presented himself as a Wall Street insider, arguing that the stability of the markets required an 18-month extension. 

At one point, Schumer intervened with a skeptical question: “So the markets dictate one month past the 2018 election?” he asked, rhetorically, according to someone with knowledge of his comment. “I doubt that.”

At another, Pelosi explained that understanding Wall Street is not the same as operating in Congress. “Here the currency of the realm is the vote,” she told reporters in a news conference Thursday, echoing the comments she had made privately the day before. “You have the votes, no discussion necessary. You don’t have the votes, three months.”

The Republican leaders and Mnuchin slowly began moderating their demands, moving from their initial pitch down to 12 months and then six months. At one point, when Mnuchin was in the middle of yet another explanation, the president cut him off, making clear he disagreed.

The deal would be for three months tied to Harvey funding, Trump said — just as the Democrats had wanted.

On Friday morning, at a closed-door meeting of House Republicans, numerous lawmakers vented their frustrations to Mnuchin and White House budget director Mick Mulvaney. One of them, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), stood up to make clear he thought Trump’s snub of Ryan — who had publicly rejected Democrats’ offer hours before Trump accepted it — was also a snub of Republicans at large.

“I support the president, I want him to be successful, I want our country to be successful,” Zeldin said in an interview afterward. “But I personally believe the president had more leverage than he may have realized. He had more Democratic votes than he realized, and could have and would have certainly gotten a better deal.”

Democrats remain skeptical about just how long their newfound working relationship with Trump will last. But for Republicans, the turnabout was yet another reminder of what many of them have long known but refused to openly admit: Trump is a fickle ally and partner, liable to turn on them much in the same way he has turned on his business associates and foreign allies. 

“Looking to the long term, trust and reliability have been essential ingredients in productive relationships between the president and Congress,” said Phil Schiliro, who served as director of legislative affairs under Obama. “Without them, trying to move a legislative agenda is like juggling on quicksand. It usually doesn’t end well.”

Mike DeBonis contributed to this report.