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VB.net Check datatable for an existing account number

Hi group,

I'm attempting to write code to check to see if an existing account number exists. The user is to input a 10 digit account number. The code then is to query the database to see if that number exists. If it does, the message box displays the message that the number exists. However the code I've written isn't working as I wish. Can you offer some suggestions as to how to do this correctly?

Here's what I've attempted:

Private Sub tbxAccountNo_TextChanged(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles tbxAccountNo.TextChanged
    If GlobalVariables.custpnl1 = 2 And tbxAccountNo.Text.Length = 10 And IsNumeric(tbxAccountNo.Text) = True Then
        Dim dt As New DataTable()
        Dim rowIndex As Integer = 0
        Dim searchID As Int64
        Dim strQ As String = String.Empty
        Dim conStr As String

        Dim msgAcctNo As String

        strQ = "SELECT CUST_ACCT_NO
                FROM CUSTREC 
                WHERE CUST_ACCT_NO = " & searchID
        conStr = "Data Source=(LocalDB)\MSSQLLocalDB;AttachDbFilename=C:\Users\Don\Documents\Visual Studio 2019\SalesForm\DWHRPT.mdf;Integrated Security=True"

        Dim dataAdapter As New SqlDataAdapter(strQ, conStr)
        dataAdapter.Fill(dt)
        dataAdapter.Dispose()

        For i As Integer = 0 To (dt.Rows.Count - 1)
            rowIndex = i
            If IsDBNull(dt.Rows(rowIndex)("CUST_ACCT_NO")) Then
                acctNoExists = False
            Else
                msgAcctNo = CStr(dt.Rows(rowIndex)("CUST_ACCT_NO"))
                acctNoExists = True
                MessageBox.Show("This account number exists.  Please enter a unique 10 digit account number.", "", MessageBoxButtons.OK)
                Exit Sub
            End If
        Next
    End If
End Sub

The "Text_Changed" event is used to fire this off - when there are 10 numeric characters in the textbox. That part seems to be working correctly as I've toggled it to stop at "For i As Integer = 0 To (dt.Rows.Count - 1)". But at this point, that's the only thing that seems to be working.

If you can teach me what I'm doing wrong, please feel free to do so.

As always, thanks for your help.

Don

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Celebrate Earth Day by Learning about Environmentally Friendly Web Development on WordPress.tv

Today is Earth Day, a worldwide annual event first celebrated in 1970 that focuses on addressing environmental concerns. Earth Day Network coordinates 192 countries with more than a billion people participating in today’s event. The organization uses WordPress to build the world’s largest environmental movement through education, public policy, and consumer campaigns.

Over the past few years, environmentally-friendly web development has become an increasingly popular topic at WordCamps. Several presentations are available on WordPress.tv that highlight how web developers have the ability to make a positive impact on reducing the internet’s carbon footprint.

Jenn Schlick, a project manager at the MIT Energy Initiative, was one of the first WordCamp speakers to bring greater awareness to this topic with her presentation on Low-Carbon Web Design at WordCamp Finland in 2016. She explained a few ways that developers can minimize a website’s carbon footprint by choosing online services that are powered by renewable energy and optimizing for performance.

In 2017, Tom Greenwood gave a presentation titled Zero Carbon WordPress that challenged the community to help tackle climate change. With WordPress powering such a large percentage of the web, the community has the opportunity to lead the way in developing sites that use less energy, powered by hosts that run on renewable energy sources.

More recently, Jack Lenox spoke at WordCamp Bordeaux 2019 on “How better performing websites can help save the planet.” His presentation had a stronger emphasis on performance with practical steps for simplifying the interface, reducing code, using the right image file types, caching, accessibility, and more.

Lenox has also created a tiny WordPress theme called Susty that he said is “an experiment in minimalism.” It loads WordPress with just 6KB of data transfer.

At WordCamp Nordic 2019, Jaakko Alajoki gave a presentation titled Environmentally friendly WordPress development, with experiments that used a Raspberry Pi web server and power meter to demonstrate power consumption. The session should be available on WordPress.tv soon.

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TranslatePress WordPress Translation Plugin Guide

TranslatePress WordPress Translation Plugin GuideI think you will agree with me when I say creating a multilingual website is no easy task. Especially for a beginner. Which translation plugin do you choose? Do you translate your website manually or automatically? Do you hire a professional translator? Does translating your website affect your SEO rankings? All these (and more) are […]

The post TranslatePress WordPress Translation Plugin Guide appeared first on WPExplorer.

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Push Strategies for Getting More Visitors

A push strategy usually involves interrupting the content that is being consumed.

You aren’t the tweet they want to read, but instead, you’re the tweet ad that they read on their stream. You aren’t the YouTube video they want to watch, but you are the pre-roll ad that they watch to get to the content they were after in the first place.

Pull is analogous to Hansel and Gretel. The sweets lure the children into the house on their own accord. Push is analogous to the Three Little Pigs. The wolf just huffs and puffs and breaks into their homes. You can pull them into your world, or you can push yourself into their world. That’s the main difference between pull and push tactics for getting visitors.

Understanding Lifetime Value of a Customers

The lifetime value of a customer (LTV) is basically the amount of money that you are going to make from a customer throughout their life. If you built an e-commerce app and you profit an average of $100 per customer, per year, and they typically buy for 5 consecutive years before they get bored with your inventory and stop shopping with you, then your LTV is $500.

This is important because another primary difference between pull and push tactics is that push tactics usually cost money. Going back to our example above, if a customer is worth $500 on average then it would be foolish to spend $501 to move someone through your funnel. You would ultimately lose $1 each time you retained a user. Keep this simple idea in mind with all of the tactics covered in this section.

1. Purchase Ads

It may not seem like growth hacking at first glance, but ads are definitely a place to hack the distribution of your product. Sure, if you just purchase ads without a strategy, void of creativity, doing nothing to gain an edge, and ignore the process of multivariate testing, then you will be like everyone else (and it probably wouldn’t be considered growth hacking). But that’s not what we’re going to do. Here are some things you must keep in mind as you approach this push tactic:

Understand Your Ad Platform Options

There are many different ways to purchase ads. Most people assume that there is just Facebook, Google, and Twitter, but there are so many more. You can also purchase ads on LinkedIn, which would make a lot of sense if you’re selling to corporate customers. There are niche ad networks such as Carbon (carbonads.net) or The Deck (decknetwork.net), both of which will allow you to target specific verticals. There is BuySellAds (buysellads.com) which allows you to purchase website banner ads, tweets, newsletter sponsorships, RSS includes, and even spots on mobile apps. There is a relatively new ad network that just focuses solely on email sponsorships called LaunchBit (launchbit.com). There is even a solution called Trada (trada.com) that will crowdsource the purchasing of your paid advertising and only take a cut if they exceed your goals. If you want to focus exclusively on mobile users then you can advertise using Tapjoy (tapjoy.com).

Here is a screenshot of Carbon, a niche ad platform.

Carbon Ad Network

Here is a screenshot of BuySellAds, one of the generic ad platforms.

This doesn’t even include the platforms that focus on retargeting. Retargeting gives you the ability to track users to your site and show your ads only to those people as they browse around the internet. Now, even your ads can be pre-qualified. If this sounds magical it’s because it is magical. In this space alone you have a number of platforms like AdRoll, Perfect Audience, and Retargeter.

Here is a screenshot of AdRoll, which was named the #1 advertising company by Inc. Magazine.

Adroll

There has been an explosion of ad networks over the last few years. Some would argue we have too many ways to purchase ads. This can be a good thing if you are willing to investigate the options to find the ones that meet your needs.

Learn the Technical Details of Your Chosen Platform

Once you’ve found an ad platform that meets your specific needs then it will be imperative that you learn the technical details of their offering. The difference between making money or losing money could easily be the difference between knowing the technicalities or not. The most complicated and advanced platform is probably Google AdWords, and it could easily take months to truly master their product, but most of the other options can be learned in a weekend with a high degree of proficiency.

Buying Ads is a Business Model Competition

It’s always hard to know how much you should spend for a single click, or for a set of impressions, but the answer is actually a factor of your business model. If you are targeting the same audience as another company, but your business model is more efficient and your LTV is higher, then you can afford to pay more for the traffic without going upside down. The best thing you can do to win customers using ads is to have a great business model. It’s almost an unfair advantage because no amount of tips or tricks can overcome this one stronghold. If you can pay twice as much to acquire a customer then you have a very defensible strategy.

Consider the Various Personas of Your Customer

Your customers can probably be reached using various platforms. For instance, they are more than likely on Facebook and LinkedIn. You must then decide which persona they are utilizing when they want a product like yours. When someone is on Facebook they are thinking about friends and family. They are looking at photos of other people’s experiences. When people are on LinkedIn they are thinking about climbing the corporate ladder and how networking with others can help them reach their goals. If your product is for project management in agile environments then I wouldn’t choose Facebook, even though technically you could reach your demographic there. Yes, they would see your ad, but their mindset would be incorrect because you are introducing yourself to them in the wrong place. Always think about the persona your customers exhibit while using your particular product before choosing an ad platform.

Circumvent the Ad Networks When Possible

This tactic may not scale easily, but it is still well worth mentioning. You could go to BuySellAds (or other places) and buy banner ads on a particular blog that your audience reads. However, if you cut out the middleman (BuySellAds) and go directly to the owner of the blog then you can get cheaper rates for two reasons. First, BuySellAds is making a cut of every transaction, so if you go direct that is money that you can recoup without the blog owner losing anything. Second, you are able to negotiate. Very rarely is the lowest price and the advertised price the same thing. You can ask for a lower rate and often close a deal relatively simply.

If You Are Paying Per click Then Qualify Every Click

There are two ways to buy ads. First you can purchase them on a CPM basis, which means you pay for set number of impressions and it doesn’t matter how many clicks they get. Second, you can pay per click and this means that it doesn’t matter how many times your ad appears, you only pay when your ad is clicked. If you are paying per click then you don’t want people to click your ad unless they are seriously interested, because it costs you money every time they do. Luckily, there are things you can do to qualify clicks using the ad itself. Consider putting the price of your product in the copy so that people don’t click unless they are interested in spending money. Also, don’t use emotion to pull them in unless that same emotion will cause them to buy from you. Don’t put a picture of cute cat on your ad, just to get cat lovers to click on it, if your product doesn’t have something to do with cats.

Test Variations of Your Ad

One of the most fundamental lessons of ads is that you have no idea what your audience will respond to. You have to test multiple versions of the copy, multiple versions of the imagery, and then multiple combinations of the copy and imagery together. The numbers will tell you the truth about which ads you should be running, but your intuition or gut is probably not accurate.

2. Promo Swap

One of the easiest, and free, ways to drive traffic to your site is through cross promotions with other companies. If you find a company who is already serving your target demographic, and you wouldn’t be considered a threat to them, then there are plenty of ways that you could coordinate to promote each other. Here are some ideas to help you brainstorm possibilities:

  • Swap Tweets: Each company sends out a tweet to their followers about the other company.
  • Swap Facebook Posts: Each company writes a post on their Facebook page about the other company.
  • Dedicated Email Swap: Each company send out an entire email about the other company.
  • Sponsored Email Swap: Each company puts a “sponsored by” link in their existing newsletter, linking to the other company.
  • Ad Space Swap: Each company allows the other company to place a banner ad on their website or blog.
  • Pre-roll Video Swap: Each company gives away video ad space to the other company.
  • Giveaway Swap: Each company promotes a giveaway from the other company on their blog.

3. Affiliates

Another way to push people toward your site is by hiring affiliates. This is an arrangement where you pay someone every time they reach a certain goal for you, like getting a visitor to your site, or activating a member. An affiliate might use many of the tactics in this book, but you are paying them to do it instead of worrying about it yourself. Here are a few things to know if you are going to use this tactic:

Think Carefully About the Incentives

If you give an affiliate $100 for every new signup, but there is no clause that says the new signup has to stick around for a certain number of months, then you could find yourself in a situation with misaligned incentives. The affiliate would be rewarded for getting you low quality customers that cancel quickly because it doesn’t affect their profit either way. Create a system where the affiliate only benefits if you benefit.

Don’t Roll Your Own Affiliate Solution

There are a number of products that will allow you to easily get up and running on the technical side of creating an affiliate system, and on the acquisition side of finding affiliates to promote your product. There are products like Commission Junction that will connect you with affiliates, and products like Omnistar that actually track affiliate payouts.

Vet Every New Affiliate Early On

When someone becomes an affiliate for you then they are representing your business to some extent. The tactics they use, the language they employ, and their general style, is a reflection on you. They may not be an employee, but they will be the front of your brand for the people they reach. Choose your affiliates very carefully.

4. Direct Sales

I’m going to be honest, this is a hard one to categorize as a growth hacking tactic, but it is a way to get traffic at the top of the funnel so I would be remiss to completely ignore it. Direct sales teams do not work for every kind of product, but in some cases it is a worthwhile tactic. AppStack, a startup that creates mobile websites in conjunction with mobile ads for local businesses, was able to grow revenues to over 50k a month in a relatively short amount of time, and their primary strategy was direct telephone sales. I use them as an example because it’s hard to imagine a startup using this method, but some of them do, and it actually can work.

Key Takeaways

  • A push tactic usually involves interrupting the content that is being consumed.
  • Push tactics usually cost money.
  • Since money is involved with push tactics you must understand the lifetime value of your customers (LTV), so that you don’t spend more money on a customer then you’ll make from them.
  • We covered 4 push tactics: purchase ads, promo swap, affiliates, and direct sales.
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Get the Word Out With Public Relations

You’ve launched an amazing product or service. Now what? Now, you need to get the word out.

But you’re on a budget and can’t afford the $10K a month to hire a fancy agency and put out press releases. That’s fine. You’re better off executing you’re on strategy or hiring a really awesome consultant.

When done well, good PR can be much more effective and less expensive than advertising. For cost-conscious businesses, ROI is crucial. Every penny spent on marketing should generate revenue. PR is no different. Here are the steps you should take to form a successful strategy for your business:

1. Let go of the agency allure

The sad truth about PR is that existing process are broken. They’re outdated, costly, and inefficient.

  1. Many agencies are still buying very expensive ‘media lists’ and blasting our press releases and pitches to hundreds of journalists at a time.
  2. It’s hard for the PR industry to track and measure the value of what they do.
  3. Press release blasts entirely miss the mark on target audiences.

To succeed with PR, you need to focus less on the appeal of an agency and focus more heavily to focus on results. Prioritize what you want to achieve, not outdated ‘best practices.’ If you want to get in front of journalists, for instance, you are likely better off forming 1:1 relationships than bombarding them with irrelevant pitches.

2. Know When to Use a Press Release

A press release is worthwhile if your announcement is over-the-top catchy and newsworthy. But here’s the thing — most press releases read like giant sales pitches. If you think that journalists and publishers are going to be attracted to lukewarm content, guess again. They’re not. They don’t care. Their email inboxes fill up with 100s of spam messages again.

We hate to say it but marketers — get your head out of the clouds. The world does not revolve around your business, and journalists could care less about what you have to say.

If your goal is to get targeted placements for your brand, you will be better off cultivating a unique and thoughtful pitch in your area of specialty. A press release won’t cut it. Position your organization as a valuable, reliable, and trustworthy source of information instead.

3. Focus on Building Relationships and Making Connections

The problem with PR is ‘spray and prey’ or ‘broadcast’ mentality. If you shout at journalists with a megaphone, they’re not going to listen.

Above all, journalists care about compelling stories. They want to hear about your founders’ emotional journeys. They want to know what problem your company is solving and what motivates your team to wake up and come to work in the mornings.

Treat journalists like trusted business partners, not eyeballs. Develop a conversation. Let them ask questions.

Strategic Planning Wins the Race

Every so often, you’ll come across startups that generate insane amounts of traction on almost zero budget. You might think that it’s the outcome of luck — most likely, that isn’t the case. The more likely scenario is careful, strategic planning. WIth online media, Hollywood success stories are few and far between. Behind the scenes, marketers are hard at work — building key relationships with key stakeholders.

Karen X Cheng founded Dance in a Year, a platform that helps users learn anything in a year.

Dance in a Year

Karen learned to dance in a year and videotaped her entire journey. The outcome was an amazing video that went viral on YouTube. In just a few short months, her video has amassed millions of views. She makes the experience of learning to dance look seamlessly easy. She makes the process of making a viral video look pretty darn easy too.

That’s how you know that she put some real muscle behind the process.

Dance in a Year YouTube

  1. First, she posted her video to Facebook and Twitter, as well as social news sites like Reddit and Hacker News. She asked her friends to share the it and tweeted it to established bloggers. She also reached to bloggers who had previously written about viral dance video. Of the channels she pursued, Reddit was the top performer. The video gained attention and made its way to the top of the GetMotivated subreddit page. After day 1, she received 80K views.
  2. Day 2 was discovery day. The bloggers who had seen her video previously began telling her story on sites like Mashable, Jezebel, and the Huffington Post. These blogs were significant traffic drivers to Karen’s video. This coverage amplified her web traffic numbers to 800K views.
  3. The video’s popularity pushed Karen to the YouTube homepage. That chain of events helped take Karen to 1.8 million pageviews on the third day.

Karen also leveraged her video to connect with potential sponsors and stakeholders in her project. These included companies like Lululemon and American Apparel – two organizations that she was happy to support. Some of these companies supported Karen and shared her video on their social networks too.

She also released her video on Tuesday, guessing that on Monday, people are most likely to be catching up on emails from the weekend.

Use Public Relations Tools

The problem with PR is that the supply/demand ratio is completely imbalanced. PR seekers are constantly spamming writers, journalists, and bloggers for attention.

A service called Help a Reporter Out (HARO) can help to alleviate some of this crunch. Using this service, journalists can find sources to interview for upcoming stories. People seeking PR can monitor journalist queries and join the conversation where they’re qualified to contribute.

You can sign up for a simple e-mail digest that looks like this:

HARO Email Digest

Here is what it’s like using HARO as a journalist:

For some queries, they’ll receive 50+ responses and most of the pitches I get are totally irrelevant. They make the journalist jump through hoops to get the information they need.

The thing to know about journalists is that they’re incredibly strapped for time and working under short deadlines.

From a journalist’s perspective, here are some tips for making your HARO query stand out:

  • Answer the question specified in your pitch. Don’t assume the journalist can hop on a call. Tell they the story you want told upfront — offer to schedule a phone conversation as a follow-up. Send ready-to-quote material instead.

    • Don’t send a generic pitch. Send a unique, compelling story. Share something that stands out from a typical PR blast.

  • Stop bombarding the writer. Journalists work on a deadline but do not necessarily know when their work will be published. Don’t bombard journalists with follow-up questions. Don’t harass them on LinkedIn, and don’t aggressively talk them via multiple email addresses. If you don’t hear a response, move on to the next story. Don’t be offended. HARO writers receive a ton of emails, and it’s impossible to respond to each and every one.
  • Write a really compelling email headline. Instead of just replying to the query, take the time to craft a unique headline that summarizes your story’s value proposition. Remember that there is a human being on the other end of the computer screen. Make it really, really easy to deliver your message, and the reporter will be more likely to open your email message.
  • Set-up Google Alerts. Make sure that you have Google Alerts set-up for the keywords you’re monitoring about your brand. Especially with HARO, you may not know when a writer will feature your story. Don’t bombard the writer with questions. Run Google Alerts to help you keep your eyes peeled.

Use Tools To Save Time

Save yourself the time and hassle of combing through spreadsheets and sending hundreds of emails. Use tools that have been developed to solve your exact pain point — scale with limited resources.

One example resource is BuzzStream — a CRM (customer relationship management) platform that helps PR professionals build relationships, monitor conversations, and maintain historical records of conversations with PR and media platforms.

Features include:

  • Automated tools for researching link-building prospects
  • Resources for identifying campaign opportunities
  • Team-based tools for building and managing relationships with influencers
  • The ability to prioritize a human, relationship-based touch

BuzzStream lets you automate mundane tasks like saving information about key contacts and partners. Teams can also collaborate on initiatives and delegate outreach tasks.

Collaborate With Other Business to Boost Your PR

Content marketing means that brands are becoming publishers and building their own audience bases. Companies, like you, are looking to connect with key audiences through PR and distribution.

Team up with fellow-business blogs who are looking to reach the same audiences as your organization. There are two ways to get going — guest post on industry blogs, or invite others to create content for your blog.

Grasshopper, a virtual phone system for entrepreneurs, uses its blog as a platform for giving props to their best customers. The company has a “submit your story” program and will write about their customers who have something awesome to share. For Grasshopper, PR is an invaluable way to say “thanks” to their trusted business partners.

Grasshopper PR Story Form

Give Samples of Your Product or Service

One way to get press coverage is to give away trials or samples of your product or service. Reach out to prominent journalists and bloggers, and ask if they would be open to doing a product review. Give them a free trial or sample to try.

Engadget Phone Reviews

Always Say Thank You

When a journalist, blogger, or fellow business writes about you or your company — reach out and say thank you. Offer yourself as a resource for future stories. Position your organization as a company that wants to return the favor and help.

PR is, first and foremost, about building relationships. To the best extent that you can, maintain a personal touch. Take journalists out to dinner as a ‘thank you’ (not a bribe) for writing about you.

Show that you are grateful, and you’ll stand apart from the crowd of people who aren’t. Add value to your industry — don’t extract it. Pay it forward whenever you can. Connection karma, and you never know when something small will materialize into something much, much bigger.

Key Takeaways

  • PR is an inefficient and frustrating rat race. Cut through the noise by zeroing in on the results you want to achieve.
  • Treat PR like business development. Build key relationships with journalists.
  • Put yourself in the shoes of a journalist. Craft meaningful, compelling pitches. Don’t ‘spray and pray’ a salesy advertising message.
  • Personalize pitches to the journalists’ needs and interest.
  • Develop a powerful brand story to share.
  • Give more than you get. Say thanks. Offer to add as much value as you possibly can.
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Could Grouping HTML Classes Make Them More Readable?

You can have multiple classes on an HTML element:

<div class="module p-2"></div>

Nothing incorrect or invalid there at all. It has two classes. In CSS, both of these will apply:

.module { }
.p-2 { }
const div = document.querySelector("div");
console.log(div.classList.contains("module")); // true
console.log(div.classList.contains("p-3"));    // false

But what about grouping them? All we have here is a space-separated string. Maybe that's fine. But maybe we can make things more clear!

Years ago, Harry Roberts talked about grouping them. He wrapped groups of classes in square brackets:

<div class="[ foo  foo--bar ]  [ baz  baz--foo ]">

The example class names above are totally abstract just to demonstrate the grouping. Imagine they are like primary names and variations as one group, then utility classes as another group:

<header class="[ site-header site-header-large ]  [ mb-10 p-15 ]">

Those square brackets? Meaningless. Those are there to visually represent the groups to us developers. Technically, they are also classes, so if some sadist wrote .[ {}, it would do stuff in your CSS. But that's so unlikely that, hopefully, the clarity from the groups outweighs it and is more helpful.

That example above groups the primary name and a variation in one group and some example utility classes in another group.

I'm not necessarily recommending that approach. They are simply groups of classes that you might have.

Here's the same style of grouping, with different groups:

<button class="[ link-button ] [ font-base text-xs color-primary ] [ js-trigger ]" type="button" hidden>

That example has a single primary name, utility classes with different naming styles, and a third group for JavaScript specific selectors.

Harry wound up shunning this approach a few years ago, saying that the look of it was just too weird for the variety of people and teams he worked with. It caused enough confusion that the benefits of grouped classes weren't worth it. He suggested line breaks instead:

<div class="media  media--large
            testimonial  testimonial--main">

That seems similarly clear to me. The line breaks in HTML are totally fine. Plus, the browser will have no trouble with that and JSX is generally written with lots of line breaks in HTML anyway because of how much extra stuff is plopped onto elements in there, like event handlers and props.

Perhaps we combine the ideas of line breaks as separators and identified groups... with emojis!

See the Pen
Grouping Classes by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)
on CodePen.

Weird, but fun. Emojis are totally valid there. Like the square brackets, they could also do things if someone wrote a class name for them, but that's generally unlikely and something for a team to talk about.

Another thing I've seen used is data-* attributes for groups instead of classes, like...

<div 
  class="primary-name"
  data-js="js-hook-1 js-hook-2"
  data-utilities="padding-large"
>

You can still select and style based on attributes in both CSS and JavaScript, so it's functional, though slightly less convenient because of the awkward selectors like [data-js="js-hook-1"] and lack of convenient APIs like classList.

How about you? Do you have any other clever ideas for class name groups?

The post Could Grouping HTML Classes Make Them More Readable? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Free Illustrations: Trendy and Artistic Graphics that Tell Stories

This post is originally published on Designmodo: Free Illustrations: Trendy and Artistic Graphics that Tell Stories

Free Illustrations: Trendy and Artistic Graphics that Tell Stories

The new trend in graphic design and illustration for web, finally, is art meets illustrations. People love illustrations. Whether it is a designer, developer or regular user, hand-drawn pictures always please the eye. They bring authenticity and personality to digital …

For more information please contact Designmodo

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How to Tell Your Brand’s Story

Human-to-human connections are the heart and soul of business. At the end of the day, you’re dealing with people — your company is solving problems, alleviating pain points, and providing delightful customer experiences. Revenue is something that happens as a byproduct of a sound business model and a positive customer experience.

Storytelling is a powerful technique for building relationships. It’s an age-old concept that brings people together and keeps them engaged. It doesn’t matter where in the world you’re based or how much funding your startup has.

Good stories give big voices to small ventures. That’s why it’s mission-critical that companies take the time up front to fully develop their approaches to storytelling.

Storytelling and marketing go hand-in-hand. Just think about it. Whether you’re producing infographics, writing copy for a Facebook ad, or writing a free online guide (like this one), you need to capture your audience’s attention.

On a daily basis, consumers (yourself included) face advertising overload. Marketers are constantly competing for their prospects’ and customers’ attention. More likely than not, your brand will be buried under spammy advertising messages.

How can you make your brand stand out? Storytelling.

This guide is an all-inclusive guide that explains why your brand should prioritize storytelling and how your organization should get started. This is not fluffy stuff, either. Storytelling is a powerful and actionable marketing technique. Convinced? Let’s get to it.

What is Brand Storytelling?

Brand storytelling is:

  • The reason why your company came to be
  • What motivates your team to wake up and come to work everyday
  • How your product came to be
  • What types of customers find value in working with your brand and why
  • A transparent view into the people behind the company
  • A relationship-building tool
  • More subtle than you realize
  • A concept that underscores your entire web presence
  • Something that your entire team, at organizational levels, embraces
  • A look into who you are as a company
  • Direct

Brand storytelling is NOT:

  • A long-winded, 5-paragraph essay about your company
  • A blog post
  • Something isolated
  • A fragmented view into your company
  • Something reserved for the marketing team only
  • A PR stunt
  • A viral video
  • A tool to manipulate customers and prospects
  • Boring
  • Artsy

Contrary to popular belief, brand storytelling is not about your company. It’s about your customers and the value that they get when engaging with your product or service. The most powerful brand stories are the ones that prioritize customers as the stars. Think of your company as a supporting character.

It’s a critical component to your overall brand strategy.

Oftentimes, marketers get hung up on this concept. They’re stressed about communicating the perfect message and confused about where this initiative should be housed within your business.

Should you hire a consultant? Should you loop in your company’s EVP of corporate communications? And what if you’re an engineer? Does that mean you’re doomed?

Don’t overthink this process. Storytelling is something that we do naturally. More often than not, we don’t even realize that we’re doing it.

The problem is, online content is difficult to write. Stories become lost in translation. The human interest behind our brands will fall through the cracks.

And you feel stuck — at a loss for words to describe what you do and why you matter to your customers.

So why not let your customers tell your story for you?

That’s what Clarity did. The company provides a marketplace for advice seekers and experts to connect and share business advice. The company recently launched a series of stories from actual customers. If you’re wondering how Clarity can help grow your business, take a lesson from the leaders who actually use it.

Clarity User Stories

It’s not just startups that make use of this powerful approach. Enterprise CRM Salesforce hosts customer success videos on its Pinterest page.

Salesforce User Stories

Brand storytelling is more than what you write on your webpage to your customers. It’s more than your blog posts and about pages. It’s how you communicate your messaging. It’s your values. Your brand’s stories are values are infused in every piece of copy, customer service answer,

Okay, so you’re convinced. But what what the heck does it all mean? Storytelling still feels tough. Web copy and advertising messaging are still challenging to write. Here’s what you need to do.

Forget About Marketing

This may sound counterintuitive, but it’s the key to successful marketing. Stop thinking like a marketer. Stop trying to sell your product, and instead, focus on developing human interest. Answer the question of why people should care about what your company has to say.

That means being persuasive and appealing to emotion.

Whatever you do, don’t be boring. Do not let the words on your page hide the personalities behind your organization.

Share more than what you sell. Share your strengths, weaknesses, and how you arrived at where you are today. One way to do this is by participating in the storytelling ecosystem. Just as you’re looking for customer testimonials and case studies, make sure to pay it forward by offering to do case studies for other companies.

Be Conversational

Authenticity is crucial to copywriting. If you’re overly formal or on guard, you’ll lose trust with your audience. And that’s because consumers can sense disingenuous messaging from miles away. From awkward stock photos with fake customers to false promises, empty messaging can only hurt your brand.

Be real instead. Be human.

Pretend that you’re talking to a new friend over drinks or coffee — not giving an academic presentation in 1862. If you talk down your customers and prospects (or show any indication of lack of respect), they’re going to stop listening immediately.

Don’t dwell over whether or not you’re using perfect grammar. You can always hire a copywriter for that. Stop worrying about the occasional misplaced commas. Focus on developing your messaging instead.

Conversational writing also means keeping it short. Write what you want to say. Get it all on paper. Then cut it. And cut it again. Stop trapping yourself into the mentality that you need a minimum word count to convey information effectively.

Write what you feel like writing — with the exception that you can’t let your stories get too long and unwieldy. Too much writing on a blog post or webpage will make your readers feel distracted or lost. Say what you need to say in as few words as possible. There’s no need to try to sound smart. If you build a great product, your customers and prospects will perceive your company as incredibly smart.

Craft Your Message Architecture

Brand storytelling is more subtle than what your company is saying. As we mentioned earlier, the ‘how’ matters just as much. Take a lesson from Pinterest’s lead content strategist, Tiffani Jones Brown. She and her five-person team are responsible for the voice, tone, user interface copy, grammar conventions, and pinner education on the site.

That’s right. It takes five people to get Pinterest’s public-facing messaging just right. This fact may seem surprising, given that some companies have zero resources devoted to getting their messaging just right.

Your company’s message architecture is far from coincidental. It takes careful strategic planning to position your strategic planning.

Don’t expect good stories to appear out of thin air. You need to focus on getting your messaging just right. You need to craft your company’s message architecture to underscore all of your brand communications. Yes, this is a real thing. And it looks a little something like this:

Brand Persona Template

This table represents the steps that Speak2Leads has taken, conceptually, to connect with the company’s core audience — sales team leaders and small business owners who are looking to increase the speed of connecting to new leads. The concept is simple — when you wait too long to connect with an interested prospect, your company risks losing his or her business.

But here’s the problem. When sales teams are too aggressive, they risk driving customers away. That’s why Speak2Leads has positioned its company and product as one that boosts human-to-human connections. Selling is not about annoying your customers and prospects. It’s about being the first to respond and building a superior connection.

Before articulating your company’s brand persona, you need a thorough outline of your message architecture.

So what does that mean?

A message architecture, according to Bloomstein, is a way to transform vague goals into substantive concepts with context and priority. Your company’s message architecture will look a little something like this:

Message Architecture Example

Speak2Leads incorporates these values in all of the company’s written material from help center documentation to email marketing initiatives and blog posts. The goal is to keep communication standard across its entire team and to maintain that consistency as the organization begins to scale. That’s why the company defined its message architecture as early on as possible.

The company’s story as a technology, partnerships, and customer-service minded organization comes through in absolutely everything on the website. Even though the company’s blog and help center, for instance, are managed by two different people — a customer service lead and marketing consultant, the same brand story will always shine through. Speak2Leads is a company that prioritizes human interest and is committed to solving a real problem in sales.

The company’s blog:

Speak2Leads Blog

The company’s customer-facing knowledge center:

Speak2Leads Knowledge Center

So how do you get started in choosing the keywords to place in your message architecture?

Brand strategists leverage a technique called a card sorting exercise.

  1. Create a list of keywords relevant to your brand. These could be keywords that you customers have said about your company as well as descriptions chosen by your own employees.
  2. Transcribe these keywords onto note cards.
  3. As a group, sort through the note cards to determine which words are most applicable to your band. Separate these words from the rest.
  4. Go through what’s left and rank the keywords in order of priority to your brand. Which are most relevant and which aren’t?
    Assemble these words into sentences that describe your brand.
  5. Piece together your message architecture.

Is possible, try to get your customers involved in this process. One way is to interview them for customer case studies. What words and expressions are they using to describe your brand? The more interviews and service reviews you conduct, the more patterns you’ll start to see.

Let your customers determine your brand messaging. Let them define the voice behind your company.

Unify Your On-site and Off-site Presence

Your company’s story, message architecture, and brand identity should follow your team members everywhere from on-site blog posts to PR opportunities in major media channels. You need to keep your company’s identity as unified and consistent as possible. As we mentioned earlier, the image you share with the world should be a genuine, authentic, and transparent view into your organization.

Choose Your Words Wisely

What you say is just as important as how you say it. Make sure you’re using the tone, voice, and communication style that your audiences value most.

How do you know what this should be and what words you should choose?

Jump back to chapter 1, where we walk through the art meets science of knowing your audience.

If you’re speaking to an audience of millennials, for instance, they tend to embrace a casual, conversational tone and style — more so than an audience of baby boomers would.

Again, unless you were a college English major (like Ritika was), the concepts of voice, tone, and style are really vague. How the heck do you put it all on paper?

What you need is a styleguide to provide instructions for all of your on-site and off-site brand communications. Get started by completing the following template:

  1. Website goal: Jot some notes about what your website visitors should hope to accomplish when visiting your website.
  2. Audience: Who do you expect to be engaging with these specific website sections?
  3. Core concepts to be reinforced: What do you want your audiences to feel after visiting this section of your website or piece of writing?
  4. Tone: What emotions should come across after somebody reads this story or section of your website?
  5. Perspective: Do you want your writers to communicate in the first, second, or third person? Who is telling the story?
  6. Voice: Should the language be conversational, formal, or somewhere in between?

Your brand styleguide and message architecture can be custom-tailored to any form of multimedia, beyond writing. Whether you’re producing infographics, brand videos, e-books, or blog posts, your plans will ensure that your messaging is consistent across mediums. Writing is only one form of online communication. Make sure that you invest the time in energy in creating structure behind everything that you produce online.

When All Else Fails, Hire Someone to Help You Out

Telling a captivating brand story isn’t a walk in the park – it’s incredibly hard. There’s a reason entire agencies exist to help businesses uncover their brand, visualize it, and share it with the world.

Branding experts bring the know-how and imagination needed to spin a gripping brand story that reels in customers and sparks emotional bonds.

They specialize in getting up close and personal to really understand what makes your business tick. They dive deep into your values, mission, and unique strengths to uncover your unique position in the market. With this insight, they can whip up an authentic, heart-tugging story that showcases your one-of-a-kind identity and gets your audience itching to join the adventure.

Branding agencies are pros at marrying the magic of storytelling with the nitty-gritty of marketing techniques – it really is both an art and a science. They keep an eye on market trends, size up the competition, and get to know your target audience’s likes and dislikes. Then weave that into your brand.

This way, your story clicks with the folks it’s meant to impress.

On top of shaping the narrative, branding agencies apply your brand story into every nook and cranny of your presence. They make sure your message is bold and consistent across the board, from websites and social media to packaging and ads.

Unity like this strengthens your brand story, turning it into a core part of the entire customer experience.

In short, they’re experts at what they do. Letting them take over means you can focus on running your business rather than trying to learn what these folks have perfected over years or decades. If you’re interested, check out our favorite branding agencies to help you get started.

Key Takeways

  1. Human-to-human connections are the heart of marketing. Brand storytelling is a technique that can reinforce these bonds.
  2. Stories can give your brand a powerful voice, regardless of whether you’re running an enterprise organization, small business, or startup.
  3. Storytelling is medium-agnostic. Tell your story through blog posts, customer help centers, about pages, videos, or infographics.
  4. You need to formalize your brand story to build connections both on and off your site, especially if your company is actively building a PR strategy.
  5. Storytelling is more than what you say explicitly. It’s how you communicate your message and how you connect with your target audiences.
  6. Storytelling concepts are vague, abstract, and tough to plan. Rely on card sorting exercises, message architecture maps, and brand styleguides to articulate your strategy and scale it across teams.
  7. Brand stories are cross-functional commitments that should guide your entire organization. Your sales team, engineers, product managers, executives, and entry-level professionals should all have a hand in articulating your brand’s messaging.
  8. Who defines your brand? Your customers. Study and truly understand what they’re saying about you. Identify patterns, and hold these concepts as close to your heart as possible.
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Drive Sales With Affiliate Marketing

Connections are the heart of online marketing. Affiliate programs take that concept to the next level.

Let’s say that you’re running a company that specializes in shoes. Your customer base knows that you’re a shoe expert but also values your input on other high quality products — like handbags. Maybe your customers have asked you about handbags, and you find yourself recommending the same options over and over again. As a shoe vendor, you’re acting as a marketer for the handbag company.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could finalize the deal?

With affiliate marketing, you can.

Company A directs Customer to Company B where the transaction occurs.

Company A then earns a commission from the transaction on Company B.

Affiliate Marketing Quick Facts

The earliest days of affiliate marketing stem back to the 1990s, around the time that Amazon launched its Associates Program (which still exists).

Affiliate marketing as grown quickly since its inception. One report points out that the worldwide affiliate marketing industry is worth $6.5 billion across sectors including retail, personal finance, gaming, gambling, travel, telecom, education, publishing, and forms of lead generation.

Affiliate programs are both consumer-based and business-to-business oriented.

Most affiliate programs follow a revenue sharing or pay per sale model. A small proportion follow cost-per-action. CPC and CPM payment methods are much more rare. Typically, commissions are fixed up-front, as part of a standard program.

Participants in the affiliate marketing ecosystem are typically known as “publishers” or “advertisers/merchants.” An advertiser/merchant is the provider of the offer. A publisher promotes the offer. A publisher can also be an advertiser — they are not mutually exclusive roles.

Here is an example of affiliate offers on a mom blog. Here, Amazon is the advertiser/merchant, and 3boysandadog.com is the publisher:

Affiliate Example

Some advertisers offer programs in tiers. Once publishers reach certain thresholds, they can begin to earn higher commission rates.

Affiliate programs are appealing to advertisers because there is no loss involved. It’s entirely based on “pay per performance.” In other words, advertisers pay for incremental sales, only.

What businesses cannot do is rely on its affiliate program to replace its sales stream. Advertisers need to actively build their own sales and marketing arms. Publishers are typically third parties and are independent entities.

Advertisers have limited ability to control publishers. If they don’t sell? Tough. Publishers might be open to hearing an advertiser’s suggestions, but ultimately, the two entities are independent from one another.

The Most Popular Affiliate Programs

Merchants can host their own affiliate programs or distribute offers through one or more established networks. An affiliate network is, essentially, a matchmaking service between merchants and publishers. Affiliate networks monetize by taking a portion of the commission.

The most popular programs are:

  • Amazon Associates: Bloggers, large content sites, or large networks can choose products to market directly to their customers.
  • Commission Junction: This affiliate network works primarily with large consumer brands to distribute their offers.Publishers who wish to join the network can choose from pay-per-call, lead generation, and even international solutions.
  • ShareASale: This affiliate network features opportunities for B2B.

Does Affiliate Marketing Work for B2B?

ffiliate marketing can be a challenge for the B2B landscape, but success is entirely possible. For a publisher to succeed in driving sales, web traffic is key — typically, a publisher will need to generate significant traffic to generate any significant return.

If you’re a high-traffic publisher, it can be worthwhile to feature B2B offers, and revenue potential tends to be much higher, even though there are fewer sales (there are higher dollar-value transactions).

B2B advertisers may find success in working with publishers who run B2B blogs. Conversely, merchants may find success in promoting complementary products and services that are of interest to its customer base.

Check out some of Heidi Cohen’s offers, for instance. She runs a blog about marketing, so she’s promoting offers that her audience would care about — links to free guide and whitepaper downloads as well as the opportunity to sign up for a conference.

Affiliate B2B Example

If you run a B2B blog, and you want to promote affiliate deals (but you don’t want to sell), check out RevResponse. This affiliate network will pay you to promote free resources to your readers. You’ll be paid between $1.50 and $20 per download. The value to the advertiser is that they will be able to connect with your audience. If you run a content marketing program, you can use this platform to reach audiences outside of your existing visitors.

Is Affiliate Marketing Right for You as an Advertiser?

The first step is not to go out and research potential affiliate networks.

To answer this question, you need to think about the following questions:

  1. What products or services would you advertise on an affiliate network?
  2. Who would be potential publishers?
  3. What would you expect the yield from these services + publishers to be?

These questions will help you forecast your revenue potential. Is the market big enough for you to pursue? If not, you should invest your limited time and resources into higher yield marketing opportunities.

An important step is to get out and talk to prospective publishers and business partners. Do they participate in affiliate programs already? What has the yield been in terms of performance? What are the typical revshares that ad networks are taking? What are typical conversion rates? What would be the incentive for publishers and business partners to promote your products and services?

Real data and partner insights can help you better understand the role of affiliate marketing in helping you meet your market demand.

After completing the exercises above, you will have determined whether affiliate marketing is right for you. Once you’ve come to an answer of “yes,” you need to make the following decision:

Should you join an existing affiliate network or create your own?

The answer to that question will stem from a simple cost/benefit analysis.

  1. Is there an existing affiliate network that aligns with your company’s products and services?
  2. What is this affiliate marketing company’s track record? Do you feel confident in the company’s ability to deliver results?
  3. How much time would it realistically take for you to build an affiliate network from scratch? Do you have someone on your team to oversee this initiative by forming relationships with publishers, handling disputes, troubleshooting technical problems, and making sure that payments are sent on time? Do the anticipated returns justify the invested time?

If an affiliate network doesn’t exist for what you need and you think that the ROI is worth it, you should definitely go and launch your own. But keep in mind that you’ll need to devote resources to get this up, running, and profitable.

Is Affiliate Marketing Right for You as a Publisher?

If your organization is looking to promote affiliate deals, you need to ask yourself these key questions:

  1. Is this a viable revenue opportunity?
  2. Does promoting affiliate offers align with user experience goals?

If the benefits outweigh the costs, the first step is to run a small test on a (random and representative) cross-section of your web traffic. Do your users convert? Are affiliate deals complementing or creating a distraction from your core business lines?

If you see a tangible return on your affiliate deals, you can gradually scale up your test by increasing the percent of your web traffic that sees it.

You have a range of options for hosting affiliate deals on your website. You might want to run these on the sidebar of your blog (like Heidi Cohen) or at the bottom of a piece of content (if you’re a mom blogger like 3 Boys and a Dog. If you’re running a B2B organization, you could have a portion of your site devoted to partner offers).Test different placements of your affiliate offers rather than confining them to one area of your website.

Be Generous

Treat your affiliates are your most valuable partners, and they’ll jump to do business with you.

Around 2007, entrepreneur Mike Geary from The Truth about Abs joined Clickbank’s affiliate program. He noticed that most merchants in the network were paying between 35% and 50% to their affiliates. Because he was selling a digital product, he had leeway to be more flexible with payouts — he didn’t have much overhead.

This sounds crazy and over-the-top generous. It was. But here’s what happened.

Hundreds of affiliates noticed Geary’s payout and switched their traffic to point to his website. Out of more than 10,000 products being sold on Clickbank, Mike’s product shot up to being the top sold, which drove even more attention to his company.

According to Mike, his revenue is around $1M per month.

Case Study: CrazyForBargains.com

Here is a great case study from Practical Ecommerce and CrazyForBargains, a family-owned retailer of high-quality sleepwear. The company has been around for more than 10 years — Melissa Canepa Murphy launched their e-business in 2002.

CrazyforBargains.com Affiliate Case Study

In 2004, Murphy launched an affiliate marketing program on the ShareASale platform with the goal of developing a diversified revenue stream for her business. At the time, the majority of her web traffic was coming in through search engines. As of 2012, the company still relies on search engines, but they have developed additional (healthy) revenue streams.

Murphy has grown the affiliate channel to represent 11 percent of her overall revenue. She hopes that she will be able to grow that number to 20 percent. What she likes most about the affiliate channel is that it is performance based — instead of paying for ad placements and hoping that they work, she pays a 12 percent commission on actual sales generated. The program tracks sales based on a 365-day cookie, which means that affiliates earn commissions on repeat purchases that occur within one year of the initial referral.

At the beginning, Murphy created her own affiliate program in house. She found that this process was a major time sink — she had to take the time to constantly monitor her program and remember to pay affiliates regularly. She made the jump on an affiliate network, where she could immediately access tracking, reporting, and payment systems (as well as instant access to affiliates who were more-than-ready to help sell her products).

In 2009, she also hired an outsourced program manager to run the affiliate program — she pays him between $2,500 and $5,000 per month. The variance depends on whether or not there are performance incentives in place and whether or not there is a need for additional services like design and development.

Maintain a Personal Touch

Interpersonal relationships have been crucial to the success of Murphy’s program. She frequently consults with top affiliates directly to keep communication open. She’ll also adjust her product mix and merchandising to increase conversion rates to drive mutual profitability and long-term value. CrazyForBargains takes these key steps to stay active in the affiliate community:

  • Participate in forums
  • Purchase PPC advertising
  • Attend marketing conferences
  • Actively recruit new affiliates

Remember that there’s a person on the other side of the computer screen. Form lasting, business-to-business relationships. Hop on the phone. Meet your top affiliates over the phone. Strategize together.

Case Study: Groupon

Until 2009, Groupon was considered to be a significant failure. But at the end of 2010, their traffic exploded. There was even speculation that Google would buy Groupon for $5 billion dollars.

Groupon Affiliate Case Study

Groupon eventually went on to float the largest IPO from a web company since Google.

What sparked this growth? Two words: affiliate marketing.

One important part of Groupon’s strategy was to cut out middlemen — affiliate networks that took huge cuts from the revenues generated. Instead, Groupon focused on creating direct relationships with affiliates.

Groupon would then sync up with influential publishers. Keep in mind that thanks to social media, you don’t need to be a publisher to have a following — you can promote affiliate deals to your social media network.

Groupon knew that they needed to make life easy for affiliates, so they pre-made banner ads for partners to use. Each day, affiliates would automatically receive new deals — all tied to a single affiliate ID. This strategy fueled Groupon’s growth.

Groupon went out and built affiliate relationships from the ground up. Here’s what you should learn about building your own.

Lessons learned from Groupon:

  1. Reach out to bloggers: Approach individual bloggers who are aligned with your product and industry and ask if they would be interested in being an affiliate. Don’t just target big-name bloggers. Find influencers who support your brand and have a strong connection with your audience.
  2. Connect with social media influencers: Hunt down mid-to-small range social media enthusiasts who may be interested in joining your program.
  3. Partner with publishers: Ask key publishers and media outlets if they would be interested in reviewing your products and services. Keep in mind that most big sites won’t want to write about your affiliate program or deal. You’ll likely find better luck with smaller publishers.

How to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

Here are the steps that you need to take to launch your own affiliate program:

1. Look at your current audience
The key to getting your affiliate program off the ground is to find the right affiliate for your company. Start by looking at your blog readers, email subscribers, and social media followers. Some of these folks are current, previous, or future customers.

2. Define how you will market your affiliate program
If you want a successful affiliate program, you will need to market it outside of your existing user base. Affiliates won’t just randomly find you.

  • You need to actively recruit them by hunting down bloggers and website owners who could promote your product or service. Also look for publishers with email lists.
  • Another option is to go through networks and have them recruit affiliates for you.
  • There’s no reason why you can’t start your own affiliate network while participating in a third party’s. When you’re getting started, do a bit of both.

3. Focus on acquiring traffic
Traffic acquisition is critical to the success of your affiliate program. Help your affiliates drive more traffic, and most importantly diversify your traffic so that you’re not relying on a single affiliate for your business. Use paid traffic sources and build relationships with bloggers.

4. Announce the program
Take the time to make sure that your community knows about your affiliate program. Publicize your affiliate program on directories like OfferVault, PointClickTrack or 5 Star Affiliate Programs and relevant forums.

5. Measure results
If you want to grow something, you need to measure it. Use your analytics tools to figure out what is and isn’t working.

Key Takeaways on Affiliate Marketing

  1. Unlike most marketing channels, you only pay per transaction with affiliate marketing. In other words, you only spend money when you make money. This strategy is important for small businesses that have limited resources to spend on advertising.
  2. It’s easy for anyone to be an affiliate — even if you don’t have a website. You can rely on your social media channels, entirely.
  3. If you make things hard for your affiliates, no one will want to work with you. Make the process as seamless as possible.
  4. Treat your affiliates as trusted business partners and advisors. Work with them towards a common goal — to amplify sales for your product.
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Collective #510

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What is a Design System?

Varun Vachhar and Catherine Maritan take the conversation of Design Systems past style guides and component libraries and get into breaking down silos between development and design.

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Scott O’Hara highlights the methods of hiding content that are most appropriate for modern web development, and notes the accessibility impacts of each.

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Collective #510 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.

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So, You Wanna Submit a Proposal to Speak at an Event

You’ve been scouring the web for upcoming events. You’ve subscribed to Developer Avocados and you’ve bookmarked conferences.css-tricks.com. And now you’ve found a call for proposals (CFP) that you can’t wait to enter. You quickly fill out the online form and your pinky races towards the Enter button...

Stop. Take a deep breath. And move slowly away from the keyboard.

As a conference organizer, I’ve gone through hundreds — if not thousands — of speaking proposals. While many are excellent, there are always a bunch that show a profound misunderstanding of the event, audience, and duties of a speaker. These are the ones that immediately get dumped onto the "No Thanks" list on my Trello board. And, as a regular speaker, I’ve learned more than a few things about getting proposals accepted.

While there’s no magic bullet for fast tracking your talk, there are a number of habits you can develop and questions you can ask yourself before hitting "submit" to improve your chances of getting invited to events. If you’re a fan of checklists, I’ve put one together to guide you through the process of submitting a proposal.

It’s even available on CodePen. 😉

See the Pen
The CFP Checklist by Jason Rodriguez (@rodriguezcommaj)
on CodePen.

Start with some research

The first thing before submitting a proposal is to research the heck out of the event.

There are a ton of events out there, each with its own unique audience and vibe. Some are big, some are small; some have huge budgets and some are bootstrapped and brand new. Your first task as a potential speaker is to learn as much as you can about the event to make sure that you’re a good fit for it and the audience. There are a few ways to do this.

First, check out the website to get a feel for the event. See when and where it is, check out past years (if there are any), and read every last bit of copy on the site. A few things to keep an eye out for: an FAQ page, a CFP page, info about sponsorships or speaking opportunities, lists of past speakers, and a hashtag. The event hashtag is important, as that will allow you to check out hype and past attendee experiences on Twitter, as well to as get a sense of excitement about the upcoming event. If there isn’t a hashtag, or all of the comments about the event are terrible, then perhaps it’s time to move on to the next CFP.

Next, do a search on YouTube, Speaker Deck, SlideShare, and Notist for past talks and slide decks. These will give you a great idea of what to expect at the event and what kinds of talks go over well with the audience.

After you’ve completed a first pass of research, it’s time to answer some key questions:

  • When and where is the event?
  • Who’s organizing it?
  • Do they have a code of conduct?
  • Do they value diversity and inclusion?
  • Are they looking for specific topics or proposals?
  • Do they cover travel/hotel?
  • Do they pay speakers?
  • Most importantly: who is their audience?

You may not be able to find an answer to all of these, but try your hardest. Feel free to reach out to organizers — most are happy to answer questions for potential speakers, and the more you know, the better you’ll be able to determine whether or not you’re a good fit for their event.

Add focus your idea

After you’ve done your research, it’s time to focus in on your proposal idea. Chances are good that you’re hunting around for events with a talk idea already in mind, but even so, you should take a few steps to make it’s as compelling for organizers as possible.

The main question you want to answer when developing a talk idea is, "What will attendees get out of my session?" This is where knowing about the audience and event — all of that research — pays off.

Far too many would-be speakers submit proposals for the wrong reasons. Many think of events as marketing and sales opportunities for their business. Others are looking to make a name for themselves so they can start charging on the speakers circuit. But the best talks come from sharing personal experiences, challenges, and solutions to problems you’ve experienced in your own work.

By researching the audience, you can determine what’s likely to be important to them. You get a feel for their challenges and interests, and you can think more deeply about how your experiences and skills can best serve them. Try to forget about the actual organizers and making a pitch to them, and instead focus all of your energy on clearly communicating how attendees’ lives and work will be improved after they sit in on your session.

A great exercise is to list out the key things attendees would take away from your talk. Try to focus on 3-5 things that people can put to work when they get back home. Making them as actionable as possible is a fantastic idea. While some proposals are all about inspiration, wrapping practical advice into inspirational examples is an excellent way to make that inspiration stick in people’s minds.

Another suggestion is to run your idea by colleagues, friends, or your partner. Put together a two-minute summary, stand up in front of them, and give them the ol’ elevator pitch. Not only will this force you to add a clear focus to your idea, but it’ll let you know if you’re ready to get up on stage in front of strangers. If you can’t give a short talk in a few minutes now, then you should probably sit back down and prepare some more before answering that call for proposals.

Craft your proposal into something worth reading

Finally, it’s time to craft your proposal and get it ready to submit.

Most CFPs consist of an online form. They can range from a few questions to multiple pages of inputs, but you’ll be filling something out for organizers to review. Although some speakers are able to fly through the forms and quickly hit "Submit," I’d recommend prepping your CFPs outside of the form first.

Open up a text file or make a note in your app of choice on one side of your screen and the CFP form on the other. Go through each field in the form and write down your response in your notes. Putting together a rough draft outside of the form gives you the opportunity to think through your answers and edit them until they clearly reflect your focused idea and the value for attendees. What’s better is that you can take that note and share it with someone you trust and respect. Gather feedback from them and use it to further refine your proposal.

A lot of CFP ask for supporting materials. These can be videos showing that you are a clear communicator, links to your website or social media accounts showing your personal interests, or even slides from previous talks. Instead of fumbling around and potentially timing out the CFPs form (and having to start all over), collect all of those materials in your note or a folder on your computer. If you’re a seasoned speaker, make sure you curate your materials to show your best and most recent talks.

Submit and wait

OK. You’ve done the research. You’ve focused your idea. You’ve even drafted the answers to the CFP, pitched the idea to your partner in the kitchen, and collected feedback from a co-worker or two. It’s time to scratch that itch and submit your proposal.

Go back to the CFP form, open up your notes and resources, and start copying and pasting. Take your time to work through the form and triple-check that you’ve filled everything out. Attach any supporting materials (seriously, how many times have we all sent an email that says "See attached file" without actually attaching anything?) and take a deep breath. Scroll to the top and read through every response as many times as you need to before you feel comfortable submitting.

Now, press "Submit." Do a little celebration, take another deep breath, and move on with your life.

It can take a long time for organizers to process submissions and figure out an agenda. Try to be patient. It’s tempting to email organizers and ask about the status of your proposal, but resist the urge. Organizers are extraordinarily busy — with the conference and their full-time jobs — and should be left to review proposals instead of fielding emails from impatient potential speakers.

A good organizer will get back to you when they’re ready and let you know the status of your submission — good or bad. If they don’t, chances are the event wasn’t that great to begin with. The key thing is to try to forget about your submission as much as possible (while still keeping the event on your calendar, just in case) and focus on more important things. Not only will this ease your anxiety but you’ll be in for a wonderful surprise when your proposal is accepted.

Speaking at events can be incredibly rewarding. Sure, it’s massively time-consuming and, depending on your disposition, extremely stressful, but it’s an excellent way to build connections and help others in the industry. While you could start spamming every event with proposals, your chances of being invited to speak all hinge on the amount of preparation you put into your submission. Taking the time to make sure you’re a good fit for an event, that you understand the audience, and that you have a focus and are able to clearly communicate your idea will up the odds of you standing onstage, clicking through slides, and (hopefully) solving some problems for the folks that paid to be there.

I’m definitely not the first person to write about answering CFPs. There are a ton of good tips out there for crafting the perfect proposal. Here are a few of my favorites:

Finally, if you have any hesitation about not being "good enough" to speak at conferences, read this excellent post from Sara Wachter-Boettcher. Then start crafting that perfect proposal.

The post So, You Wanna Submit a Proposal to Speak at an Event appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Hyperledger vs. Ethereum: Which Will Benefit Your Business?

Initially, cryptocurrency markets started out on a slow incline, but this year, in the first week of April, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum demonstrated new momentum with a 20 percent gain in investment ratio.

“This is a time of great opportunity” for enterprises. How? The new changes and growth will facilitate greater adoption of Hyperledger and Ethereum among the leading enterprises and communities of respective organizations.

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How to Fix Image Upload Issue in WordPress (Step by Step)

Are you facing image upload issues on your WordPress website? For most beginners, image upload errors can be quite confusing because they can appear without you doing anything different.

Failure to upload images is one of the most common image issues in WordPress. Luckily, it is quite easy to fix, and you can do it yourself.

In this article, we will show you how to easily fix the image upload issue in WordPress. We will also explain what causes this issue, and how you can prevent it in the future.

Fixing image upload issues in WordPress

What Causes The Image Upload Issue in WordPress

The image upload issue in WordPress is typically caused by incorrect file permissions. Your WordPress files are stored on your web hosting server and need specific file and directory permissions to work.

Wrong file permissions prevent WordPress from reading or uploading file on the hosting server. You may get the following error when uploading image file:

‘Unable to create directory wp-content/uploads/2019/04. Is its parent directory writable by the server?’

Unable to create directory error

Another sign of this issue is that your images may disappear from the media library.

Missing images in media library

My site was working fine before? Who changed the file permissions?

This could happen due to a number of reasons. A misconfiguration on your shared hosting server can sometimes change those permissions without you doing anything.

For example, your web hosting provider ran an upgrade which unexpectedly changed file permissions.

If everything else is working fine on your website, then you can simply apply the correct file permissions to fix the image upload issue.

That being said, let’s take a look at how to set correct file permissions to fix image upload issues in WordPress.

Fixing Image Upload Issue in WordPress

You will need to use an FTP client to change file permissions.

First, connect to your website via FTP and then go to /wp-content/ folder. Inside, you’ll find the uploads folder, which is where WordPress stores all your media uploads including images.

Now right click on the uploads directory and then select File Permissions.

Opening file permissions dialog box for uploads folder

This will bring up the file permissions dialog box.

First, you will need to set file permissions for the uploads directory and all the subdirectories inside it to 744.

Change folder permissions

To do that, enter 744 in the numeric value box, and then check the box next to Recurse into subdirectories option. Now click on the ‘Apply to directories only’ radio button.

Click on the OK button to apply these changes. Your FTP client will now start applying file permissions to the directories.

Note: If setting directory permissions to 744 does not seem to solve your problem, then try 755.

In the next step, you will need to set file permissions for all the files in the uploads directory.

To do that, right click on uploads directory and select file permissions. In the file permissions dialog box, change the numeric value to 644.

Check the box next to Recurse into subdirectories. Lastly, you need to click on ‘Apply to files only’ radio button. Click on the OK button to apply these changes.

File permissions

The FTP client will now change the permissions for all files inside the uploads folder. Once it is done, you can go back to your WordPress admin area and try uploading images again.

Note: if you don’t know how to use a FTP client, then you can also use the file manager provided by your WordPress hosting company. Since the screenshots will vary from each host, you will need to talk to their support to find instructions.

We hope this article helped you fix the image upload issue in WordPress. You may also want to see our article on how to optimize image SEO to get more organic traffic to your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Fix Image Upload Issue in WordPress (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.

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New Research Shows Continous Testing Separates Agile + DevOps Leaders from Laggards

Want further evidence that Continuous Testing has evolved from buzzword to business imperative? New Forrester research found that Continuous Testing, done properly, is a key differentiator between DevOps + Agile leaders and DevOps + Agile laggards. Here are the key findings and recommendations from that research project.

Key Continuous Testing Findings

1. Five Core Continuous Testing Practices Separate Successful Dev Ops + Agile Leaders from Laggards

Firms that are more mature in Agile + DevOps do five key things differently:

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Find Your Own Purpose – the Easy Way

Yet another article on purpose. I know. But maybe this one should be the one you should read if you're still not convinced by the importance of a purpose. 

Purpose of A Company 

When I ask people what the purpose of a company is, I generally get the same answer: to earn money. Unfortunately, that's an accurate statement. The very first purpose of a company is to survive. Ask Jeff Bezos, who told to his employees, "One day, Amazon will fail." Money is just a way to avoid death, or in a company's case, bankruptcy. For some companies, like Amazon and Tesla, have not always been profitable, so clearly, earning money is not the purpose. 

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Scalable Select of Random Rows in SQL

If you’re new to the big data world and also migrating from tools like Google Analytics or Mixpanel for your web analytics, you probably noticed performance differences. Google Analytics can show you predefined reports in seconds, while the same query for the same data in your data warehouse can take several minutes or even more.

Such performance boosts are achieved by selecting random rows or the sampling technique. We see this technique is used quite frequently during deployments of Cube.js related to massive amounts of data. Let’s learn how to select random rows in SQL.