One of the most fundamental principles of marketing is to bring your message to the places where your potential customers can be found. And one place people can be found online is YouTube. The video site sees 2 billion global users every month, and those users are highly engaged.
And how's this for impact…ads on YouTube actually get more attention from viewers (62 percent) than TV ads (45 percent). That's probably why 8 out of 10 marketers call YouTube the world's most effective video marketing platform.
For marketers and YouTubers of every experience level, this course by online business professional and YouTube expert Nick Nyxson gets right to the heart of how best to leverage YouTube's unique marketing powers.
For beginners, the training offers all the features to get started marketing on YouTube. From understanding how the platform works, students get experience with topics like naming and branding dos and don'ts, the equipment needs for a YouTube content creator, and the exactly how to record, edit and upload your first videos.
Once you've got the basics, the instruction progresses to intermediate level, including important points like channel layouts, creating attractive thumbnail images, music and copyright issues, and even a look at the YouTube analytics platform.
Finally, the training elevates student learning to levels that are usually only reserved for the true YouTube masters. But with a firm grasp on ideas like keyword and title research, A/B testing, audience retention totals and prime methods for engaging with an audience, you'll have a channel with content optimized for your brand and your potential customers.
This YouTube masterclass is usually a $199 value, but right now, it's available at 85 percent off the regular price, down to just $28.99.
If you're a music aficionado with an appreciation of the arcane for whom the forgotten tunes of the 1910s and '20s are just as compelling as anything you might stream on Spotify, and you've never heard of Janet Klein: welcome to a wonderful sinkhole of fun, where every day is Throwback Blursday.
Klein is a Los Angeles-based ukulele virtuoso and singer who began her career performing live in local venues like El Segundo's Old Town Music Hall in the late-'90s, and after nine full albums, has taken her turn as the toast of Tokyo, the sweetheart of the silent movie house set, and the darling of the old-time dance halls. Through a 20+ year career, she's recorded a beguiling assortment of hot swing, French ballads, early jazz, tin pan alley novelty tunes, and arcane Vitaphone numbers, keeping exactingly true to the spirit of each genre, its context, and singular sound. Whether accompanying herself on uke, or performing in front of Hal Roach-style arrangements with her full band, The Parlor Boys, Klein is a music historian as much as she is a musician and singer. She's an essential worker on the front lines of forgotten music, resuscitating life into material lost to disintegrating celluloid or marginalized due to limited test pressings. Using music halls, old rehearsal spaces, or anyplace else she and her Parlor Boys can find toasty acoustics for their studio recordings, Janet Klein's voice ices a cake baked with mandocello, xylophone, ocarina, lap steel guitar, accordion, the washboard, and the singing saw.
She's just released Yiddisha Follies, a collection of her notable Yiddish Vaudeville numbers on Bandcamp, including the tunes "Yiddish Hula Boy," "The Sheik of Avenue B," and "Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars."
"The story telling of these songs has everything to do with immigrant experiences…What results are songs that reveal a mashup of dialects, malapropisms, inside jokes and often are only thinly veiled references to people like Theda Bara, a tailor's daughter from Cincinnati, but in the movies, an exotic vamp from Egypt, inspiring the song 'Rebecca Came Back From Mecca.'"
Is blockchain currency too intangible and complicated for you? Does Facebook Pay feel too In-Zuckerberg-We-Trust? Does your couch potato lifestyle prevent you from going on a Sweatcoin shopping spree?
Could Goldbacks, the world's first local, spendable, voluntary currency made of physical gold, be the alt-tender answer? The Beehive State is leading the way with the Utah Goldback, a new currency that holds legal status in the state by way of the Legal Tender Act of 2011, which recognized specific forms of gold as currency, and allowed small amounts to be used as a form of payment and monetary exchange within the state among individuals and businesses who accept it. The polymer paper bills are coated with real gold and come in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 25, and 50.
An alt-currency enthusiast friend recently gifted me with a fiver (a bill backed with 1/200th of an ounce of pure gold), which left me feeling like Charlie Bucket and my wallet looking like a winning Wonka Bar every time I opened it. Glimmering, brilliant, yellow gold illustrated with a depiction of Veritas; it was maybe the first time in my life I actually wanted to hold onto my money rather than spend it. Probably a good thing, since I don't live in Utah. Maybe the nationwide use of Goldbacks would encourage Americans to save more because you just don't want to give these beauties away, the way they catch and reflect light is nothing short of mesmerizing. Cats would probably love them too.
Goldbacks have been praised as an inflation-proof alternative to the dollar, which might come in really handy soon enough, and while it addresses the problems of fiat currency, some critics say they aren't cost-effective; much more is spent on Goldback production than paper money. There are also concerns about wear and tear with use, causing a diminishing supply. And what happens to one after it's forgotten in a pocket and goes through the washing machine? I'm not willing to experiment.
1000 Goldbacks = 1 ounce of gold (1 Goldback is backed by 1/1000th of an ounce), and because the price of gold is fluid, the price of Goldacks is too. You can buy them from an authorized dealer, or even shake shit up and start a Goldback movement in your own state.
Speak the names of 1970s & early-'80s women rock icons such as Patty Smith, Debbie Harry, or Joan Jett, and you'll undoubtedly receive a nod of recognition. Say Suzi Quatro, and for the few who know the name, most will point to Happy Days, the American Graffiti-inspired hit '70s sit-com that featured Quatro in the recurring role of her Fonzie-adjacent character, Leather Tuscadero (footnote: Debbie Harry was also considered for the part). Few could name one of her many hits.
But Suzi Quatro was already a bonafide rock star by the time she was cast on Happy Days. It was, in fact, because she was a bonafide rock star that she got the role. As a kid, I understood that the woman singing with a seductive rock 'n' roll rasp wearing skin-tight leather jumpsuits and sporting the very un-1950s shag haircut, sharing the screen with Ron Howard and Henry Winkler, was a real rocker somewhere, someplace, but there was always a strange disconnect with Quatro. A popular culture gap. Why didn't I hear her on the radio? Where did she exist beyond the world of Happy Days? Why did she somehow seem both here and nowhere at the same time? And why now, with a career that spans more than four decades and record sales totaling over 55 million, is this Detroit native still barely known within the US? The compelling and revealing documentary, Suzi Q—from the Australian-based team of Liam Firmager and Tait Brady—fills all the gaps and satisfies every question.
Stream it, you won't regret it. It's the stuff a great rock 'n' roll documentary is made of. She'll inspire. You'll run to Spotify. You'll tell your friends.
In the first issue of The Magnet (my new newsletter), I shared my recipe for very low-carb almond flour bread. It calls for 3 egg whites. When I make this bread, I usually make a double batch, which leaves me with 6 egg yolks. I didn't want to waste them, though, and I knew ice cream often uses egg yolks, so I decided to try making ice cream. I also had an old, inexpensive Cuisinart ice cream maker that I hadn't used in at least a decade. (I stopped using it because I didn't think it made very good ice cream. It was too soft.)
I looked around for recipes and found this one in The New York Times. It looked easy to make — the only ingredients were cream, milk, sugar, salt, vanilla, and, most importantly, 6 egg yolks.
For the past four weekends, I've been experimenting with the ingredients and the churning time, and last weekend I finally made ice cream I love enough to share the recipe for.
When it started in 1999, San Francisco-based upstart Salesforce wanted to become the primary digital home for companies to track their interactions with clients and work on converting more sales through better communication and smarter analytics.
Fast forward 20 years and Salesforce has mostly accomplished that goal. As the world's no. 1 customer relationship management platform and the world's fifth-largest software firm, Salesforce is now uniquely positioned to be even more. Integrating production, marketing, app development and more, Salesforce can realistically serve as a beating heart of a company's entire digital life.
These seven courses are each led by certified Salesforce expert Jimmy Tanzil, who uses Salesforce's own Trailhead training process to guide students through their first tentative interactions with the Salesforce platform all the way up to mastery status.
The training gets started on the Admin Trail, a collection of modules, examples, quizzes and other training that helps first-timers understand all the capabilities of Salesforce. Over three Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced Trail courses, Tanzil first explains the basics of using Salesforce, including how to load data, use formula fields, control system access and automate simple processes. From there, training builds to more complicated operations like customizing workflows, monitoring events, and even setting up company-wide organizational settings.
Now that students understand how to work in Salesforce, the next step is understanding how to make Salesforce work for you and your company. With Developer Beginning Trail and Intermediate Trail training, learners start creating their own Salesforce apps keyed to each individual business. That includes topics like development basics, how to use Visualforce, Apex testing, Search Solution basics, User Interface APIs, and some of the powerful mobile and integration tools that make Salesforce an industry titan.
The package also includes training in how to navigate Salesforce's highly useful Declarative Lookup Rollup Summary feature; as well as the Developing AppExchange App Trail, which outlines how to develop, package, and test an AppExchange app of your own.
Regularly $299, this deep dive into the Salesforce world is now available at a big discount, only $25 with the current offer.
At The New Republic, Alex Shephard traces the rise of "zombie" magazines: respected but failed outlets raised from the dead to crank out bizarre, low-quality or extremist content that wears the old masthead's prestigious corpse. Zombie king is "Newsweek", in the news this week after publishing a racist legal falsehood to suggest Kamala Harris is ineligible for high office.
Even by the volatile standards of journalism in the twenty-first century, Newsweek's recent problems are extraordinary. There are the usual issues: a sharp decline in print subscribers, Google and Facebook, the difficulty of running a mass-market general interest news magazine in an age of hyperpartisanship. But Newsweek has also been raided by the Manhattan district attorney's office (a former owner and chief executive pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges in February) and has been accused of deep ties to a shadowy Christian cult, amid many other scandals.
It's not just Newsweek…
In recent years there has been a rise in "pink slime journalism": outlets that pose as local news outlets but rely on algorithms. These outlets manipulate readers' trust in local news as a means of delivering right-wing talking points. Something similar is happening at Newsweek. The response to the Eastman op-ed suggests that many still see the magazine as the middlebrow, general-interest publication it was in the not-that-distant past—evidence that pink slime has entered the sphere of national publications as well.
I'm not sure Newsweek is a good example of the pink slime phenomenon in local news. Local news runs pink slime because their dearly departed revenues can't be recovered through growth. They have to cut their newsrooms or give it up to media conglomerates that shave expenses to the bone; the resulting conservatism comes free with the "wires" they provide.
With zombies at the national level (like Newsweek), though, growth is the game, the exploitation of a recognizable brand to dress a more explicit political agenda or to generate real traffic and advertising revenue. Pink slime exploits trust and local monopoly; zombie media exploits prestige and traffic. Pink slime is passive, zombies active. A smalltown pink slime news outlet is a fossil forming. A zombie magazine is a gas-filled corpse exploding.
One sign of zombie media is that it tends to pursue strategies for growth that are obviously out of date. The new Newsweek, for example, tried to game social media in the late 2010s the way every else did five years earlier. Forbes (not technically a zombie, but certainly undead) began content farming just as Google began punishing such material in search results. The new Deadspin is an uncanny emulation of its own Fin de Obama-era voice. And so on.
We all know the way a cup of coffee can immediately jump start our day. Yet, we also know that for many, coffee is…well, an acquired taste. Coffee has bite. It's also pretty acidic and not always everybody's idea of a good time beverage-wise.
That's part of why the cold brew phenomenon has taken hold in recent years. Cold brew is sweeter, smoother and almost two-thirds less acidic than hot coffee. Maybe more importantly, cold brews also has the advantage of being healthier, including compounds that may reduce your risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and even Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease.
Of course, the process of reducing that acidity is part of why cold brew generally takes so much longer to make. Since it's a pain to wait up to 24 hours for your beverage, the Gourmia Digital Accelerated Cold Brew Coffee Maker is cutting that time down, from hours to as little as only 4 minutes.
Despite that blinding speed, the Gourmia is as simple to use as most coffee makers. Simply fill the Gourmia with grounds, choose one of four brew strengths, push the button and wait a couple hundred seconds. You can also add ice to activate the chill cycle, an exclusive system that circulates coffee over the ice basket so you can enjoy your coffee icy cold without further diluting your brew.
Cleanup is quick with the system's easily removable parts. By lifting the valve at the bottom, you can give the unit a simple rinse to remove any old coffee grounds.
In addition to the improved taste and a cold brew's impressive health benefits, the drink also settles easier on the stomach and doesn't cause the yellow coffee staining on teeth that everybody hates.
The Gourmia Digital Accelerated Cold Brew Coffee Maker is perfect for those who don't want to plan out their cold brew situation the night before. Retailing for $109, you can save almost half off the price of this maker with the current offer, cutting the price down to only $59.99.
I've been using this Wen rotary tool for a few years. It has plenty of power (I've never turned it up to full speed for anything I've used it for), comes with a bunch of tool bits, and costs a tiny fraction of the price of a similar Dremel tool.
Brattleboro, Vermont has initiated an innovative project leveraging CARES Act funding to keep local restaurants in business, while at the same time supporting local farmers and feeding members of the community hit with the economic impact of the Covid health crisis. The project is called Everyone Eats!, and it's a program that integrates the diversity of Brattleboro's food scene with the economic realities that the health crisis has thrown to many area food businesses, farmers, and residents.
Everyone Eats! is a food assistance program that leverages federal relief funds to support local restaurants, small farms, and families by providing free meals to anyone negatively impacted by Covid due to a job loss, underemployment, homelessness, and other well-being challenges. NBC News reported on the program, which is serving as a template for other communities wrestling with impending restaurant closures.
One of the more unexpected racial reckonings in the wake of George Floyd's killing is the collapse of Bon Appétit magazine's YouTube channel. As Jack Saint says in his terrific analysis, "This was a burgeoning giant of online video, and it just completely shit the bed because it couldn't stop being racist."
As a palate-cleanser, here is Binging with Babishtempering chocolate with Sohla El-Waylly, one of the highly-experienced experts who was treated most unfairly on the show. She has since resigned.
As they're marketed, air fryers are miracle devices, supplying crispy fries and fish sticks without the oil and mess of a standard deep fryer. But like all things that seem too good to be true, this one mostly is, too. Your taste buds will always know that you skimped on the crispy-making, calorie-laden oil of real frying, and you can achieve the exact same results using a convection oven. Mic drop.
Twenty years ago, Cameron Crowe wrote and directed Almost Famous, a fantastic, coming-of-age rock-and-roll tale based on his teenage years as a journalist for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s. Rolling Stone published a new interview with Crowe in which he shares stories of screening it for Led Zeppelin, the magic of "Tiny Dancer," and the future of Stillwater. From Rolling Stone:
Did you ever think while you were conducting those interviews at Rolling Stone back in the day that it would make for a great movie? Never. Because my dream then was to get a story in Rolling Stone, and then it was in the wildest dreams that I would be able to write a cover story. And then, everything after that was dream-come-true time, but beyond your dreams. I never thought [in scholarly voice] "One day this will become an autobiographical film, which will reflect on this very time."
I've been working on a memoir from those early days in San Diego, so I've been going back through all my stuff. I found this Day-Timer from 1973. It's packed! It's like, "Jimmy Page phone interview. John Prine, Bonnie Raitt." Every day, it felt like a kid in a candy store that I could interview these people whose music I loved.
If I got lucky enough, every day I was able to represent that fan who was also me. And sometimes they would give me shit. Some of the editors of Rolling Stone, kind as they were about it, they would often take me aside and say, "You should write about somebody you don't like. Test yourself. Go write about somebody whose music you don't care about, and practice doing a portrait like that." And I always used to say, "But why waste time with somebody you don't care about? Somebody somewhere will care about them. So send that person." That was the dialogue that went on quite a bit.[…]
The film featured several Led Zeppelin songs. You flew out to London to screen it for Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. What was their reaction? We knew we were going to roll the dice. We had four Led Zeppelin songs in there. [Soundtrack producer] Danny Bramson made sure communication was good. We were coming to them hat in hand. We timed it to the one day of the year Jimmy and Robert got together and went over tapes and talked about Led Zeppelin business. At the end of that day, they came to watch our movie in the basement of a hotel.
It was just Joe [Hutshing] the editor, Danny, and me. We're in the back row, and Jimmy and Robert are three rows from the front, sitting together. Watching behind, you saw their heads framed by the film, which was iconic in itself. They would lean and say things to each other, and you'd just see this outline of their heads talking privately, and we looked at each other like, "Oh, we're fucked. They're trying to figure out how they can leave."
Then came the "I am a golden god" scene, and Plant just laughs. It's the greatest laugh, and we're looking at each other like, "Oh, my God! We're still OK. We're still OK." Then came the scene where Jeff Bebe says, "Russell, he has you high on a roof saying, 'I am a Golden God.' And Billy [Crudup] says, "I didn't say that. Or did I?" And Plant goes, "I said it!" [Laughs.] We're giving quiet high-fives.
The movie ends, and they're both smiling. Plant walks up the aisle, so he's in our row. He says [with a perfect Robert Plant impression], "Cameron, was your mom really like that?" I said, "That and more." He laughed, and he looked at Jimmy, then he said, "I have a bottle of quaaludes that's been on my shelf since the early Seventies. I think I'm going to go home and crack it open tonight."
In the visible light spectrum, standard glass is almost completely transparent, and the metalloid germanium is almost completely opaque. But in infrared light, the opposite is true.
ProTip: if you find yourself hiding from authorities looking for you with an IR camera, your best bet is to find a large cardboard box and make sure you're not too close to the surface. Make sure it's well-vented so the heat doesn't build up inside!
B.J. Fogg is the founder of Stanford University's Behavior Design Lab.
In his FBM [Fogg Behavior Model], behaviors are guided by motivation, ability, and triggers, and the reason we procrastinate is that we are having a problem with one or more of these. To build motivation, you need to have a compelling, emotional reason to do a task. To improve ability, you need to break a job into small, achievable steps. And to create a trigger, you should develop a set of cues that prompt you to act.
Here's a guide with more details on how to use FBM to stop procrastinating.
Derek Muller from Veritasium uses some Google-fu to look into the common claim that dust is mostly dead skin. While a significant amount is, about half of typical household dust in one study was other things like clothing and carpet fibers, pollen, and other small floaty bits. Grossly engrossing!
In addition, he found out that the cloud of dust and microbes that surrounds a person is essentially a fingerprint that can be sampled and used to identify someone (and not just by the DNA in the skin cells). With some of us, it's easier than others.
