Apple’s treatment of rival streaming apps being investigated

Apple recently launched a new music streaming service, Apple Music. It also provides the App Store platform for competing streaming services including Jango, Spotify, Rhapsody and others.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1Cwiq1M

Fighter shut out from wearing sponsored apparel because of UFC deal

Ultimate Fighting Championship welterweight champion Robbie Lawler, who is sponsored by sports apparel company adidas, will not display a stitch of the adidas brand because UFC has a $70 million deal with Reebok to outfit all UFC fighters in Reebok fight kits.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1M0D1OL

GM recalls 780,000 SUVs amid lift gate issue

General Motors Co said it was recalling nearly 780,000 crossover SUVs, mainly in North America, because their rear power lift gates could suddenly fall and hit people.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1JV8L7y

Insert Coin(s) closes, but owner hopes to reopen

Insert Coin(s), the boutique video-game nightclub/lounge in downtown Las Vegas, has closed after four years because of financial problems but the owner hopes he can reopen it one day.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1dR9o3K

‘F***ing useless’: Giant mine no one can stop

IT’S a $1 billion project that will swallow up 4000 football fields’ worth of prime agricultural land. And despite angry protests, no one appears to be able to stop it.

Source NEWS.com.au | Business http://ift.tt/1gt5Y9h

Inaugural Fantasy Sports Combine set for next week in Las Vegas

The first-ever Fantasy Sports Combine is scheduled for next Friday and Saturday at Wynn Las Vegas and Encore. The sessions will include talks by fantasy sports experts, broadcasters and sports personalities, including former NFL coaches Mike Shanahan and Mike Ditka.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1HkXauP

Ninth annual Women’s Leadership Conference begins Monday

MGM Resorts Foundation is presenting its the ninth annual Women’s Leadership Conference on Monday and Tuesday.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1HriMCE

There Are No More Secrets Left In Programmatic, Only Work To Be Done

How do you achieve higher yield in programmatic? Columnist Rob Rasko digs deep into two "non-secrets" to bring you programmatic wisdom.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Source Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/1HTkpNZ

Marketing Day: Embedding Facebook Auto-Play Video, Email Marketing Tips & More

Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web. From Marketing Land: Committing To Calls: 5 Tips For Integrating Calls With Digital Marketing Optimization Solutions If you want to boost your ad optimization,...

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Source Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/1JZIcLQ

How to Take Advantage of 401(k) Catch-Up Contributions

There’s a special tax perk for retirement savers over 50, but most people can’t afford to use it.

Source U.S. News - Money http://ift.tt/1HkInAj

7 dumb money mistakes new adults often make

Before your children turn 18, they are considered minors by law and are limited in what they can do with money. But once they are legal adults, they can make all sorts of financial decisions that can have long-term consequences for good or ill.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1eNG5Q9

Garber nurtures Caesars Interactive to growth mode

Mitch Garber has turned Caesars Interactive into a social gaming giant. After having zero cash flow from social gaming in 2010, the balance sheet may show some $250 million in cash flow this year.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1JUy4GT

Income Disparity in a Relationship: What to Do When One of You Makes More Money

It’s safe to say that talking about your finances — early and often — with your significant other is a great way to avoid fights about money later on in life.

But what if talking about money is a fight?

Odds are that in most relationships, one partner makes more than the other, and sometimes that difference can be significant. So how should a couple handle their income inequality?

A lot of factors play into this decision, such as whether or not you are married, have children or are in school. And with even fewer clear-cut answers, what happens if one of you has more debt than other?

While there’s no right way to manage your money when one person makes more than the other, here’s a look at how to talk about the situation, plus how several real-life couples handle their finances.

How Does the Difference in Income Make You Both Feel?

The first step is always admitting there’s a problem. If an income disparity is a tricky subject in your household, maybe it’s because you haven’t actually talked it through yet.

Making less than your significant other can come with a big ol’ ball of guilt, feelings of inadequacy and even self-denial if you feel like you can’t spend money you didn’t earn.

Making more than your significant other can come with its own concerns. It might be the need to always have the last say in how the money is spent, or maybe that you constantly feel like your partner won’t accept the financial help you are gladly willing to give and that you hate to see him or her struggling when there is no need.

So ask each other how your disparate incomes make you feel. Be candid and open to what your partner has to say, and consider your options moving forward. Here are a few ways couples have made vastly different incomes work for them.

Joint Accounts

My husband makes twice what I make — and it used to be three times as much. While I was still finishing up college, he made all of our household income.

We’ve always solved our income disparity by treating it like it doesn’t exist. It might sound a little head-in-the-sand, but we married young and never knew a time where our money wasn’t his and hers: We’ve always had a joint account and we’ve always decided together how we would spend what was in it.

Our joint-account-for-everything approach is pretty traditional: It’s what both sets of our parents did, and I suspect our grandparents as well. In fact, when we were newly married, we were shocked to learn that some married friends had separate accounts at all!

We make it work by talking about all of our spending decisions together when we make our budget each month. We know where our money is going to go before we spend it, so there’s no need to fight about it after the fact. If a big unexpected expense pops up, we address it together. We also plan for each of us to have some fun money each month to spend without question, which I think is a key strategy for making everyone feel like they can splurge a little, guilt free.

We’re married and have no children yet, so this approach works pretty well. We have already discussed — and did so in the very early years of our marriage — that if and when we have children, I would be the stay-at-home parent. My husband’s job as a line technician for the local utility company pays more, holds the better benefits and is also extremely unpredictable: He can get held over after work at a moment’s notice, and often gets called in the middle of the night to come in and fix things. While my full-time gig at an ad agency is great, it’s not on the same level as his steady, recession-proof career. Once children enter the mix, one parent will need to be as flexible as possible, and in my case, that means being unemployed or able to work from home.

Our decision to handle our accounts in a joint fashion from the beginning will help make this transition a smoother one — the money will continue to be “ours” even when I’m not contributing any. It’s also a reason I started my own freelance business on the side. I won’t have to go from full salary to zero salary; there will be a little cushion in the process.

Separate but Equal

Some friends of ours go a different route: They have a joint account where they each contribute half of the expenses necessary to pay their rent, utilities, etc. — and then they’re on their own for individual expenses like their car insurance and big-ticket items they want to purchase.

In fact, I’ve known several of these couples — even two friends who lived together with no romance involved. Contributing to a joint account made it easiest to pay bills in a timely fashion, but still allowed them to have complete autonomy in their finances. It was a win-win for them, and I suspect many couples take advantage of this easy-to-calculate way to manage their finances together, yet separately.

Separate but Proportional

Dozens of people around the Internet swear by the proportion rule: If one person makes 60% of the household income, they contribute for 60% of the expenses. The other person contributes the other 40%, which is proportionately fair considering their lesser income. Then, each individual can spend the rest of their income as they wish.

If the difference between your incomes is so drastic that even this doesn’t seem fair, consider rolling in household chores as part of the equation. Do you make only 10% of your total income as a couple, but do 90% of the housework? Seems like a balanced equation to me.

What About When There’s No Choice?

Kelly Gurnett faces a different situation altogether: being the sole earner in a relationship where the other person is physically unable to hold a full-time job. Her husband has been out of work for more than two years now, and he’s still waiting on disability benefits to kick in. In the meantime, Kelly’s income is what’s on the table.

“As much as I’d like to say that ‘love conquers all’ and ‘money is just a number,’” Kelly says, “when only one person is working and the responsibility to carry the household expenses lies entirely on one person’s shoulders, it’s difficult, and it can cause some friction.”

So how do Kelly and her husband make it work? Transparency, open communication, and a lot of give and take.

“Every week, we sit down with our household budget and discuss what’s coming due and how we’re going to pay for it. It helps take some of the stress off of me just to know my husband is in on our finances and I don’t have to make all the decisions by myself,” says Kelly.

When the idea gets a little tough to handle, Kelly also reminds herself of what her husband does bring to the relationship: patience, love and a consistently upbeat attitude even though he is a lot of pain on a daily basis.

“It’s a good kick in the butt that humbles me and reminds me a marriage is about a lot more than just money; it’s about partnership and support and each person doing what they can, whatever that winds up looking like.”

The Bottom Line

Overall? Each system seems to work best when you emphasize the team, no matter which financial arrangement you decide works best for you.

And when those feelings of inadequacy rush in, making you feel “less than” because your paychecks are smaller, or like you are carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders by being the bigger earner? Remember: You didn’t begin a relationship with your partner because of the money they do or don’t make. There’s probably a solution out there that works for you. Keep trying until you find it.

Your Turn: Have you managed a significant difference in income in your relationship? Share your strategies in the comments!

Abbigail Kriebs loves words, food and photography, probably in that order. She’s a Midwestern gal who somehow became a city-dweller and is slowly writing her way back to her roots at Inkwells & Images.

The post Income Disparity in a Relationship: What to Do When One of You Makes More Money appeared first on The Penny Hoarder.

source The Penny Hoarder http://ift.tt/1RoHuhP

15 things wealthy people do every day

It’s true that money can’t buy many things — but some things can buy money, and wealthy people have a unique understanding of the difference.

Source Business http://ift.tt/1D5Lbxk

10 Apps to Use Now to Make Taxes Easier Next Year

There's no time like the present to start thinking about your taxes. These 10 apps will make next April a breeze.

Source U.S. News - Money http://ift.tt/1HS7QEv

Committing To Calls: 5 Tips For Integrating Calls With Digital Marketing Optimization Solutions

If you want to boost your ad optimization, call-click integration is a no-brainer. Columnist CJ Arseneau has tips for incorporating calls into your digital marketing optimization solutions.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Source Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/1LWloi5

How to Leverage Crowdsourced Content to Exponentially Grow Your Audience

Isn’t it a pain?

You spend all that time researching and writing a post, but people would rather tweet Seth Godin’s 100-word posts—in thousands!—than to share yours.

There’s a good reason for this, though.

Seth is a ridiculously successful entrepreneur. He’s written over 17 bestsellers and shows no sign of slowing down.

So while some of his posts may seem simple (maybe you could’ve written them), people love them because they trust his opinion.

You don’t build this kind of success, trust, and audience overnight, however—it takes years of hard work.

But what if you could get Seth (or an expert in your niche) to write some content for your website? It would get a lot more attention than your writing normally does.

And it’s possible, I promise. 

You can even take it a step further by getting several experts with large followings, whom your target audience instinctively trusts, to help you write content.

This is called crowdsourced content.

The reason for the name is pretty obvious: you generate content from a crowd. Technically, the crowd could be anyone, including influencers in your niche.

Crowdsourcing has been growing in popularity ever since KickStarter exploded as a platform for people and companies to crowdsource investments for products.

The amount of money raised through crowdsourcing has nearly doubled every year since 2009:

And it shows no signs of slowing down. In 2014, crowdfunding grew by 167% to $16.2 billion in raised funds, and in 2015, it will continue to grow to an estimated $34.4 billion.

We’re not talking about crowdsourcing product development (that’s an interesting topic for another day). What we’re talking about is using the connectivity of the Internet and the work of several others in order to create remarkable content that grows your business.

There are 3 main benefits of crowdsourced content:

1. Reach a larger audience: People share things they feel invested in. When they contribute to content, most are happy to share it with people they know. In the case of influencers, this can be a huge audience.
2. Connect with people: Whether you want to connect with an influencer or an audience member, creating a great piece of content together is a great way to open a dialogue and start a relationship.
3. Build your authority: The more you’re associated with other people in your niche that readers trust, the more you become an authority. I told you that it takes a long time to build up authority, and employing this tactic can accelerate it a bit.

So crowdsourced content is the best thing ever, right?

While it has some massive upsides, it also has some limitations.

First of all, it’s not easy. I’m going to show you how to create effective crowdsourced content in this article, and trust me, it will take you several hours to put together a great post. Secondly, you can’t solely rely on crowdsourced content for two reasons.

If you’re constantly crowdsourcing your content, your website will lose your voice, which is something you need to have to develop a loyal following. Additionally, you will run out of sources or annoy the ones you have if you’re always asking them for help. You can’t do a crowdsourced post more than once every few months.

That being said, a crowdsourced article is a powerful tactic that you should have at your disposal. I’ll show you later how it should fit with your content strategy to get maximum benefit from it. For now, let’s look at how you should approach creating crowdsourced content.

Pick one of two types of crowdsourced content

As a general rule, there are 2 types of crowdsourced content.

The first type involves surveying or polling your target audience. This is typically most useful when you already have a sizeable following. You can find out what their problems are and write an article such as “The X Biggest Mistakes Made by [Audience],” or “The X Biggest Problems of [Audience].”

Carol Tice does it very well. She regularly tries to find readers with useful stories and combine them to create articles that resonate with her other readers:

To a smaller degree, I like to do this as well when possible. For example, in my post on the 11 Things You Should Do After You Publish a Post, I included an example of a comment left by Maham to illustrate a point.

The second type of crowdsourced content is where you ask experts to answer a question, and then you compile their responses. This is commonly referred to as an “expert roundup.” At its core, it’s just like an interview, except you’re only asking one (or a few) questions, and you’re posing it/them to multiple people.

While polling readers and users is a great way to get feedback and create some good content, it won’t do much for blog growth. However, this second type of content leverages your experts’ authority and capitalizes on their audience to help your blog.

That’s why I recommend that small- and medium-sized blogs, those focused mostly on growth, start with crowdsourcing content from experts. And that’s exactly what I’m going to focus on for the rest of this article.

The way you do it is extremely important. Some crowdsourced articles get barely any shares, while others get thousands. I want you to achieve the latter.

I’m going to take you step by step through the process you should follow to maximize your results from an expert roundup.

Step 1: Pick the right question

Pick the wrong question, and you’re done before you even started.

Seriously. If you pick a bad question to ask your experts, they just won’t respond.

Guidelines for choosing a question:

1. Don’t pick a question that’s too simple.
2. Don’t pick a question that’s too complicated.
3. Don’t pick a question with an obvious answer.

If a question is too simple, it’s not worth answering. For example: “Do you think businesses should create a blog?”

That’s a yes or no question, and literally everyone will say yes, so it’s a pointless question.

If a question is too complicated, it’s too much work for an expert to answer. A question such as: “What is the best step-by-step process to promote a blog post?” would take thousands of words to answer.

Finally, if the answer is obvious to a particular expert, they’ll realize that your main goal is to try to get them to send you traffic, and not to create a great piece of content (which it should be). For example, if you asked an expert who blogs about email marketing: “What is your favorite marketing channel?”, the answer would obviously be email marketing, so why would you ask this?

Your question should be not too simple, complicated, or obvious, and be a question that your target audience cares about.

The best way to find a good question is with some simple keyword research.

Before we get started, make a list of keywords in your niche—they can be pretty broad.

For example, keywords for a nutrition site might be:

• healthy eating
• exercise
• cooking tools
• best diet

Now that you have your keywords, let’s see where you can get ideas for your question(s).

Idea source #1: Quora

Enter your first keyword into the search box. Click on “Topics” on the left menu to find the most popular relevant topic. Assuming you picked a popular and broad keyword, you’ll find a group with at least a few thousand followers:

When you click on a topic, you’ll see a mixture of current and past relevant and popular posts. Look at the questions that have the most “upvotes,” preferably at least a few hundred.

Remember, you need to look for a question that can be answered by someone giving their opinion because that’s the main point of having experts answer it.

The question “How do I ensure I’m eating well for university on a $30 a week budget?” has 546 upvotes, so it’s a popular question that people want answered.

However, this question is far too open-ended and complicated to ask an expert. What you could ask instead is: “What is your favorite healthy meal that can be made for under $2 per serving?”

For now, just note down the popular questions on a spreadsheet so you can come up with one later. Go through as many keywords and groups as you can.

Idea source #2: Reddit

As always, Reddit is a great way to see what people are most curious about.

If you’re not familiar with Reddit, it’s a community site where users can submit questions and links, and the rest of the community votes on them. We’ll be looking for questions that come up a lot and get a decent number of upvotes.

Start by searching for your keyword in the sidebar:

The results will come from a variety of communities called subreddits.

You can either click the subreddit there to filter out results for that specific community, or you can navigate directly to that subreddit.

If you choose to filter the results, you’ll only see the most relevant results for your keyword. Look through these, and note down popular questions.

From these results, it’s clear that questions about snack ideas are very popular.

You could derive the following questions for your experts from them:

• What is your favorite healthy snack for traveling?
• What are the 3 cheapest and easiest snacks you know of?

If you go to the main subreddit, you’ll see posts about all relevant topics (not just your keyword).

To see the most popular questions, click “order by top”:

Do the same thing as before, noting down any questions that you think you might be able to turn into an appropriate one for your experts.

Idea source #3: Google Keyword Planner

While it’s a basic keyword research tool, it’s still really useful for a task such as this.

Type in your keyword, and click “Get ideas”.

Then, click on the “Keyword ideas” tab, and start noting down popular keywords that lend themselves to questions:

Based on the above results, you could ask: “What do you think is the most important healthy eating habit?” or “What is your best healthy eating tip?”

Overall, it’s really not that difficult to find a good question to ask. You can find several good ones with each method. The tricky part is transforming it into the right type of question of the right difficulty.

The reason why you’re looking for popular keywords and questions is because the more popular the question you ask, the more interested your target audience will be in the answer.

Not only will it be an interesting article for people to read (more subscribers), but it will also lead to more sharing and traffic.

Step 2: Decide who you will ask

This next step is just as difficult as the first one.

You need to target experts based on the question(s) you want to ask.

I get hundreds of requests every month to participate in expert roundups. Some of them are asking me about topics such as nutrition and technology, where I’m not known as an authority. Obviously, I never answer such questions.

Not all examples are that obvious though. Experts who write about nutrition are very different from experts who write about healthy recipes or fitness. The influencers you ask your question(s) must regularly write about that topic.

If you target the wrong people, you will get a dismal response rate.

Your best targets: past participants

Not all experts like to participate in these roundups—or not very often. The good news is that unless you’re in a very uncommon niche, other bloggers have already filtered out these people for you.

The idea is to find experts that regularly participate in roundups.

Start by Googling “expert roundup + [keyword]”

Depending on your niche, you will have to search for several keywords relevant to your question.

Go through at least a few pages for each term.

For each relevant roundup you find, write down all the experts that participated in it.

If you’re in a niche such as marketing, you’ll have no trouble finding hundreds of experts. In those cases, scroll down to the comments and see which of the experts commented (or shared). It’s likely that they’ll at least comment on your roundup as well.

Find some fresh blood

In addition to the same old faces that participate in many roundups, it’s a good idea to find a few low- to mid-level bloggers to include.

Since they don’t get asked very often, they’ll be more likely to participate and eager to share the article. Plus, it gives you a chance to get new opinions that your readers may not have heard before.

To find these hidden superstars, you will have to do some digging. You can employ three methods.

Method #1

Use BuzzSumo’s Influencer search. Enter a general keyword related to your question. In my example, I chose “healthy”. Use the filters as shown below to include only bloggers and influencers.

What you’re looking for are influencers who aren’t extremely well known. Ideally, they’ll still have at least a few thousand Twitter followers (which you can see on the right).

Add as many quality experts as you can, and repeat the process for any additional keywords.

Method #2

Next, we’re going to use twtrland. Create a free account, and enter a key term in the search bar.

This tool is designed purely for identifying influencers on Twitter, which is perfect for this. A free account only shows 50 results per keyword, but you should still be able to find at least 10-20 new influencers (try a few keywords).

Method #3

Finally, head over to Alltop. This site is a directory of blogs organized by niche. The other good thing about it is that almost all blogs were added by their owners, which means they’re highly active in promoting them (and more likely to participate).

Try to find your niche/topic in the menu to make sure you don’t miss any relevant blogs. If you can’t, search for your keyword:

Either way, you’ll get a page of relevant blogs. You can click on the site titles to visit them.

I left this method till last because it takes more work.

At this point, you need to check whether your question is appropriate for these experts, so look through a few posts to make sure it’s a good match.

Additionally, see if they have any following by looking at the number of comments and/or social shares.

Don’t stop until you have at least 50 quality experts in total. More is always better.

Find their email addresses

You will need to contact all the bloggers/experts at some point with your question.

Start by going to their sites and seeing if they publicly list their email addresses. Most likely, they don’t.

The simplest way to get their email addresses is to join their email lists. Go to their homepages or blog posts and look for a signup form somewhere. Any good blog will have one.

You should get a few emails from their personal email addresses within the first few days of subscribing—perfect.

If for some reason you can’t find an email address, opt for a Twitter or LinkedIn account instead.

Engage your experts to boost your success rate

If you send 50 emails, would you rather get 20 or 30 responses? Obviously 30.

The biggest mistake most people make when trying to do an expert roundup is sending cold emails.

“If I know the person that’s sending the pitch…, I’m 20x more likely to contribute.” — Brian Dean

In general, the bigger the expert, the more you need to do to get on their radar.

You need to find a way to stand out enough that they know who you are by your name or at least don’t think you’re a stranger.

Here are some ways you can use to establish contact in almost any niche:

• Leave thoughtful comments: Unless they only get a few comments per post, you’ll need to leave thoughtful comments—ideally, near the top of the commenting section of each post. There are four or five names I recognize just because they’re always leaving me detailed comments within an hour or two of me publishing a post on Quick Sprout.
• Mention them in articles: While you can’t do this for everyone, you can mention some experts in your other blog posts. Send them a quick email, telling them you featured some of their work, or mention them on a social network by using an “@” or a “+” symbol, depending on the network.

• Submit their best content on Reddit (or similar site): Then send them a quick email once it gets a few comments and upvotes. Tell them you submitted it and that the commenters would probably appreciate a response if your influencer has a spare minute.

The key thing in any of these methods is to do something useful or valuable for the expert and then let them know about it in a non-pushy/polite way. Don’t be limited to just these three techniques if you have other valuable skills you could offer.

Step 3: Pitch perfect

If it’s your first time doing this, the first two steps probably took at least a few hours. You’ll get faster over time.

Now you need to contact your experts through the email addresses you’ve gathered (it’s okay if that took a few days).

Just to set your expectations, you need to realize that even very successful bloggers get only 50-60% reply rates when they do expert roundups. If you have an unknown blog, it’s going to be at least a bit lower (but it should be over 30% if you follow everything here).

When emailing, the most important things to keep in mind are:

• keep it as short as possible
• make the question clear
• don’t seem desperate
• be polite/sincere

I’ll give you a template you can use, but as always, you should take the concepts here and create your own. That way, your email won’t look as everybody else’s.

Subject: Expert roundup for [website]

Hi (name):

I’m a big fan of your blog. You’re my go-to resource when I want to learn about [specific topic they write about – get this right!].

I’m creating an expert roundup, and you were one of the first names to come to mind that I’d love to include. Here’s my question for you:

[question]

If you could provide a 50-100 word answer, that’d be fantastic.

I’ve invited X other experts to add to the article. [Expert 1, 2, and 3 have already agreed – optional].

I’ll craft a great custom bio for you to attach to your response.

The deadline for an answer is [date – at least a week]. I really hope you are able to contribute.

Thanks,

[Name]

An alternative way to collect the responses is to include a link to a Google form that you create.

You can include whichever fields you like. Only include what is necessary, though; otherwise, some experts might see the forms and decide it’s too much work.

I recommend including:

• Name – so you know who’s answering
• Email – only if you don’t have everyone’s email already
• Question – obviously you need to include your question
• Specific requests – ask them if they’d like to promote anything or link to a specific place

When people submit their answers, they will be sent to a Google Sheet that you can use just like any other spreadsheet:

This will save you some work going back and forth between emails.

Important: After someone replies and answers the question, send them another email as soon as possible thanking them for contributing, and tell them that you’ll notify them when the article goes live.

Step 4: Craft an article that stands out

Now that you have your responses, hopefully at least 10-20, you can create your article.

Start with the headline. The rules for creating a strong headline here are the same as for any other article, but it’s much easier in this case.

The reason that it’s easier is because you’re limited in your options. You already have:

• A number of experts
• The fact that they are experts
• The topic from your question

That doesn’t leave a whole lot of wiggle room.

If my question was: “What is your favorite healthy snack for traveling?”, my headline would be something like: “22 Nutrition Experts Reveal the Best Healthy Snack for Traveling.”

Write an intro to introduce the topic, then summarize the results if you can (will depend on the question):

Next, you just need to present the answers in an attractive layout. There are no specific rules as long as you are consistent.

Here’s an example:

Get your experts’ pictures from your their About pages or Twitter profiles.

To write a good bio, you should have two or three sentences that explain:

• who they are – not all the readers will know everyone
• a highlight – say something notable about them (get from their About page)
• any promotions – if you’d like to highlight a book or product

Don’t get lazy here. A good presentation will have a big effect on the number of shares and amount of traffic you get.

If you have a lot of experts (20+) and want to go the extra mile, sort the experts by categories.

To wrap up your content creation, you need to add click-to-tweet links throughout the content.

Install the TweetDis plugin. Then, select a good quote in each expert’s answer, and click the shortcut button in the WordPress menu.

In the options, click on the dropdown arrow beside “Add” and choose “hint”:

When you’re done, your text will look to your readers like this:

If you pick a good sentence for each influencer, you’ll get quite a few extra tweets from your readers.

Step 5: Be clever with your promotion

The whole point of an expert roundup is to leverage the authority of your experts, so we’ll start with that.

Send out your thank-you emails

As soon as you publish, send an email to each influencer thanking them for participating, linking them to the post, and asking them to share it.

Here’s a template you could use:

Subject: Expert roundup is published!

Hi [name],

Thanks again for being one of the X great experts who contributed [what their opinion was on – e.g., their favorite snack]. The roundup is now up at:

URL

Please let me know if you’d like me to make any changes to your section.

If you’re happy with it, I’d really appreciate it if you shared it with your audience. I created a custom Twitter link that already has the title and link filled in if that makes it easier:

http://ctt.ec/Tab7Y

If I can ever help you share your work, just let me know, and I’d be happy to help.

Thanks so much,

[name]

To make that custom Twitter link, you’ll need to use ClickToTweet. Create an account and then fill out the form with your Tweet info:

When you click on “Generate New Link,” you’ll get the HTML code for the link. Just copy the actual link from it, and paste it in the email.

Email some more—to your list

Even if you don’t have a huge email list yet, this is still a great piece of content that they will be interested in.

Let the experts first share and comment, and then promote your post to your list a few hours later.

Contact commenters of other recent articles on the same topic

If you have the time, you can try this effective strategy to add highly engaged members to your readership.

The idea is to find other recent articles on a very similar topic. Anyone who has commented on these articles is probably still interested in the topic, and since you have a way better article, they’ll be happy to hear about it.

You can contact them to let them know about the article. You can also gently nudge them towards commenting and joining your email list.

To start, Google your article topic. Be specific:

To filter the results to last week, click on “Search tools,” and then change “Any time” to “Past week”.

Open these links, and scroll down to the comment sections. Depending on your topic, you may not find any commenters that link to their sites (you can use their contact form). Even if you don’t, this only takes a few minutes to check.

If you do find someone, send them a quick email like this:

Hi [name],

I saw that you commented on [article title] on [website] a short while ago.

I thought I’d drop you a quick line and let you know about another article you’ll probably like. I rounded up X experts and got them to reveal [topic].

If you’d like to check it out, here’s the link:

[URL]

Let me know what you think about it. If you’re interested in more content like that, just sign up for email updates.

Cheers,

[Your name]

Alternatively, if the site uses Facebook comments or Disqus, try to leave a (non-spammy) comment that includes a link to your roundup.

Share it on social media

Just like any other post, you should promote this roundup according to your social media strategy. This means sharing it during the next few weeks.

Like I said before, you can also tag your experts on social media if they haven’t shared the post yet:

Tag only a couple of experts each time you share the post so that you’re not bothering the same people over and over again.

In addition, find a relevant subreddit, and submit the post. Expert roundups typically do pretty well in most subreddits, which could drive another few hundred visitors to the post.

Step 6: Repeat and scale

I told you at the beginning that creating great crowdsourced content wasn’t easy.

That being said, it can produce great results for growing blogs.

If expert roundups work well in your niche, I recommend repeating them on a regular basis: somewhere between two to four times a year. Schedule them in your content calendar because it can take three to four weeks to put them together, as you’ve seen.

If you get exceptional traffic or links to your first roundup, you might be tempted to create them more often than that. But when you do them too frequently, you’ll either have to keep including the same people (many will get annoyed after a few requests), or you’ll have to include lower quality experts (which won’t produce the same results).

If you’d like to scale up your expert roundups, you’ll need to contact more experts. If you put together an article that featured 50, 60, or more experts on a really interesting question, it could have a long-lasting effect on your traffic.

To do so, you’ll probably need some help. Think about hiring a virtual assistant to complete the easier parts of this process. Show them this article, and have them find influencers and collect their contact information.

Additionally, they may be able to do some of the groundwork (creating bios, leaving comments) so that you could create your article without working on it for weeks or months.

Conclusion

If you don’t have authority, borrow it. I just showed you how.

Crowdsourced content is only going to get more popular in the future as other marketers and companies recognize the massive potential it has.

Most influencers get dozens of requests every month to participate in expert roundups but typically choose only a few to contribute to. If you do everything I laid out here, you will be one of them.

Have you ever put together an expert roundup? Let me know how it went in a comment below.

Source Quick Sprout http://ift.tt/1Mkxy2x

Most Users Would Reject Opportunity To Pay To Avoid Mobile Ads

Despite the fact that most consumers are wary about digital advertising, they are also unwilling pay to avoid ads either. This finding comes from AppLovin, which surveyed 5,000 US adults and asked them if they’d be willing to pay a monthly fee to remove ads from their smartphones. According...

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Source Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/1UJRrWo

How To Stay Relevant When Your Email Subscribers Are Always On The Move

As more people than ever are traveling or moving to new locales, how do you ensure your emails are relevant, no matter where your subscribers happen to be? Columnist Andrew King has some tips.

Please visit Marketing Land for the full article.

Source Marketing Land - Internet Marketing News, Strategies & Tips http://ift.tt/1NYBqY8

Millennial Leadership Changing the Management Game

A decade ago, the idea of seasoned professionals being managed by someone half their age seemed like a dream to some and a nightmare for others. Today, it's becoming the new normal.

Source CBN.com - Finance http://ift.tt/1Hk6gYD

Frugality and Self-Confidence

One thing I often do when I’m looking for inspiration or new angles for The Simple Dollar is simply go back and read my journals and other writing from before my financial turnaround.

Honestly, that stuff is often fairly painful to read. I can just see the huge financial mistakes I’m making, whether I discuss them directly or not. I see huge expenses barely even mentioned because, honestly, they didn’t bring me any deep joy or fuel any internal passion.

Instead, I see a lot of worry.

I see a lot of worry about what other people think about me. I se a lot of concern about whether I’m up to the task at work. I see a lot of tension about all kinds of things, from my own marriage to my relationships with my friends, from my career to my own happiness, from my quality as a community member to (later) my quality as a father.

Underlying all of it was a sense that I was not really doing any of these things well at all. I felt I was not good at my job. I felt like I wasn’t good as a husband. I felt I wasn’t a good friend. I felt like I wasn’t a good father. I wanted to be better at those things, but in the end, I didn’t feel like I was good at those things.

My solution? I didn’t have actual self-confidence, so I chose to “fake it until I could make it.”

I chose to act like the people around me that I perceived as successful.

What did that mean? It meant buying expensive clothes so that I dressed like the people who I felt were successful. It meant buying an expensive vehicle so that I had a vehicle like the people who I felt were successful. It meant buying gadgets (like the nascent smartphones of the day) so that I had the things in my pocket that I perceived a successful person having.

I tried to look successful and confident, and I threw a lot of money at doing so.

But it didn’t work.

Even worse, I felt really burnt out by the end of the day, so I would often throw myself into expensive hobbies and buy lots of stuff in order to make myself feel a burst of happiness.

The end result of all of that was a lot of money spent on stuff to either try to impress others and put up a false sense of confidence or to try to make myself feel better about what I perceived as myself not actually being good enough.

Both of those things were caused by one central issue. I lacked self-confidence.

I did not believe in myself with regards to many of the aspects of my life. I didn’t feel like I was “good enough.” So I tried to paint on an appearance of believing in myself by buying lots of things that made that image, and when I went home and felt like a fraud, I would spend money on frivolous things just to feel better.

Self-confidence – or the lack of it – was the central ingredient in both parts.

Over time, though, I began to realize a few things. These things started to really occur to me during the period when I was making my financial turnaround, so they really went hand in hand.

First, there were simply some things I was good at and other things I wasn’t good at. I am good at writing computer code. I am good at learning a lot of material pretty quickly. I am good at taking a big collection of ideas and organizing them into something that’s readable and doing that pretty quickly. I am good at making others laugh. I am good at connecting with children. I am good at self-deprecation and making others feel comfortable. I am good at being reliable.

On the other hand, I am not good at making small talk. I am not good at tolerating some behaviors. I am not good at keeping the house perfectly clean. I am not good at keeping my thoughts to myself at times. I am not good at perfectly remembering sequences of past events (and this has caused me real trouble in the past). I am not good at talking positively about things I don’t know about and thus don’t naturally feel positive about.

In other words, I’m good at some things and not good at other ones.

For a long time, it was hard for me to accept that. I wanted to be seen and perceived as being good at everything and so I put a lot of effort into methods for covering up the things I wasn’t good at. However, I didn’t perceive myself as actually being good at very many things.

So what did that lead to? Eventually, I realized that people are going to value me mostly for the things that I am good at. I am the guy who can code well and can lighten a room. I am the guy who makes their children laugh and the guy who picks up information quickly.

At the same time, no matter how much I “cover it up,” I can’t make the things I’m not good at disappear. The only way I can truly make them vanish is through a lot of self-improvement work. Anything other than that is paint, and paint eventually flakes off.

Because of that, I began to realize that it was kind of a fool’s errand to spend a lot of money trying to “hide” the things about myself that I didn’t like. People will see them anyway. Some people will judge me based on them regardless of what I do. Many more will judge me instead based on the good things, and some on the total package.

What does that add up to? I started to become happy with what I was good at, and I started worrying less about most of the stuff I wasn’t good at. I am good at some things, and that’s well worth being happy about. I don’t have to be good at everything as long as I’m good at some things.

Sure, there were – and still are – things that I want to improve, but having things you’re not good at and things that you want to improve doesn’t undo the things you are good at.

In short, I started building a little self-confidence. I began to feel good about the things I was good at and accept many of the things that I was not good at. I don’t need to be good at everything. I just need to be good at some things and be happy that I’m good at those things.

More importantly, when I genuinely begin to feel concerned about a negative aspect of myself, I start to do the necessary self-improvement to actually fix it. Simply covering it up doesn’t solve the problem and it really doesn’t even disguise it over the long term. The best solution is always to put in the real work to fix it and to genuinely improve yourself.

As I began to realize those things, several changes naturally happened in my life.

I began to feel far less incentive to spend money on certain things. A car became not a tool to impress people, but merely an object to get me from point A to point B. Thus, I didn’t need an expensive car. Clothes became not a tool to impress people, but merely something to keep myself warm and covered. Thus, I didn’t need many expensive clothes. Gadgets became not a tool to impress people, but merely a tool for communication. Thus, I didn’t need the latest and most expensive gadget (my smartphone is at least two generations old, for example). I didn’t need to buy name brands for most things at the store – they’re just names on a box, essentially meaningless.

I began to focus on genuine self-improvement. Obviously, the first big “improvement quest” I took on in my life was improving my finances. After that, my next big “improvement quest” was entrepreneurship. I’ve moved on to other personal improvement projects – many of them have involved deeply studying specific topics so that I understand them better – with the goal of making myself a better person and actually solving flaws I see in myself. I will never be perfect or anywhere close to it, but I can become better. The way to become better is to invest time and effort, not necessarily money.

The natural outcome of these two things combined had a really interesting effect. It made me quite frugal. I began to realize that the most valuable resources I have are my time and effort and natural skills, and buying stuff almost always just creates distraction that eats away at that time and effort. Not only that, the more money I spend, the less control I have over that time and effort, so that’s a big disincentive to spend money on things that do not bring me value.

Improving my self-confidence made me more naturally frugal, and the core to that improvement was recognizing that I do have some good traits (and some not-so-good traits), that people will value those traits, that spending money can’t truly hide those not-so-good traits, and that only time and effort can fix them.

Spending money doesn’t make you a better person. It doesn’t even make you appear to be a better person over the long haul. What it does do is cause you to lose more control over your time and effort, which makes it harder to actually build a better life for yourself.

Spend some time thinking about what you’re actually good at, and be proud of those things. Don’t worry so much about the things you’re not good at – and if one of them really bothers you, put in effort to genuinely make that better.

The post Frugality and Self-Confidence appeared first on The Simple Dollar.

Source The Simple Dollar The Simple Dollar http://ift.tt/1IOQNSH