#this is all like google search results and knowledge from the degree i have yet to receive | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

a-long-walk-in-the-forest · 3 years

Text

Degrees of Taurus and Naruto characters (namely Sasuke, Itachi and Naruto)

I’ve recently started reading about the meaning and significants of each degree in the birth chart and have decided to utilize my new found knowledge for the purpose of drawing a more accurate chart for Naruto characters.

In this part I’ve focused on the third decan of taurus. I’ve mentioned before that I’m certain Naruto has something in Taurus and Itachi apparently has more than one planet in taurus. We’ve also established that Sasuke has his moon in taurus.

I’ve got these descriptions from the first document that pops up in google when you search taurus degrees meaning.

I’ve only guessed two of Itachi’s taurus degrees, the other probably isn’t in the third decan. Also I have 2 guesses for Sasuke and I’m not sure which one is more accurate.

If you happen to have the same placement as the one I guessed for Itachi (28-29 degrees taurus) don’t take this to heart.

20-21: maybe Itachi

related to poison

It indicates a silent, watchful disposition, inclined to caution, method, and thrift, but liable to assaults from unexpected sources, which will overthrow many carefully designed plans. It is a degree of ANTICIPATION.

A frugal, cautious, watchful, silent and close character bearing the hallmark of individuality, a deep mind, a pitiless logic, a precise and methodic intelligence, more suited for analysis than synthesis. The native will rely but on himself, yet destiny will baffle him with gleeful spite and take a cruel delight in hitting him just where rational logic would rule out failure or even danger. The collapse of his most accurately prearranged plans will tell on the native’s temper, whose guardedness may drift into suspiciousness, and misanthropy into wickedness.

Strategic, self-directed but perhaps egotistical Aries-Scorpio degree - certainly never content to sit, always having a plan, project or alternative waiting in the wings. Can build great accomplishments and find success if temper and lusts are kept under control, and if it can avoid “yes men” and opportunists. Desired to be admired. Sexual attractions often include great sacrifices. Infighter or revolutionary - anarchistic and opinionated. Must develop Libran traits.

A very resourceful sportsman. One whose judgment can be relied upon in estimating values.

Witnessing dispassionately the flow of time. Standing outside of all linear progression and knowing what is likely to happen here. Supremely disengaged from surface affairs, even lightly dismissive of all secondary considerations, but tuned right in to the thread of prophecy and inner vision. Granted a certain grace to follow the inner track. And serving a larger function as part shaman, part seer, and part commonsensical advisor. Salty wit, earthy and pithy, no nonsense. You know where the bones are buried. Penetrating insight. A throwback to simpler worlds. One who warns of dangers ahead, and is not amused by factions and fragments and phantoms of common assumption.

Highly intelligent. Quick, analytical, objective mind. Clear thinking. Strives to understand the larger context, philosophical view, and underlying assumptions of any idea or concept. Interested in economics

Silent, methodical, and clear-sighted character. Sly enemies abound and conceal their real nature while waiting for the moment when they can successfully grab what does not belong to them, be it money or an already married person. Fortunately enough, one displays vigilance and providence, and therefore one is able to avoid the most dangerous traps. If in the natal chart, Saturn is powerful, prudence and concentration capacities are strengthened. With Mars, energy is increased, and with a Venus, kindness is enhanced. In some cases, this degree indicates gifts for occultism or, at least, above-average perceptiveness.

22-23: Sasuke (I personally think this is more likely than the other one)

can lead and inspire but can fail

It signifies one who will suffer misfortune in the height of his career and whose fall will be dangerous in proportion to the height he has attained. The native will be too apt to depend on his own powers and will essay feats which will be beyond his natural powers. Ambition will lead him into dangerous positions, and at a weak moment he will fall. Let this be taken as equally affecting his physical, moral, and social welfare. It is a degree of COLLAPSE.

A great spiritual force, a generous, passionate character whose mind, compared to a large heart, may appear limited. Faith in one’s power is excessive, hence a tendency to overreach oneself by a display of arrogance, weakness, light-headedness and foolhardiness which may head the native for a dangerous fall. This may be taken in the literal sense of bodily falls, as well as in the metaphorical one (financial, social, moral, or spiritual).

Imaginative, irascible: a symbol of individual freedom in motion - Sagittarian wanderings brought down to earth long enough to establish turf and be noticed. Master of human and animal nature. Desire for self-expression and talent to do so. Humorous, optimistic, spiritual, passionate character, which might lead to light mindedness and dangerous risks at times. May make bad choice of partners, but generally fortunate in career.

Great strength of will and if character is also indicated by other testimonies in the chart, one capable of great works. Cruelty in undeveloped types.

Nothing to say, everything to do. The self cannot be articulated because it is far too busily pressed out into emergency mobilization twenty-four hours a day. No personal life, no personal world, no personal self. Just fantastic availability to the call, the collective vigil, entered upon willingly and selflessly. The demands and rigors of this position and stance are punishing and extreme. You are so hard-pressed, so rabidly attentive that nothing else exists. The assignment is clear, brutally so. Be on the spot at every level, maintain order, keep everything going and stay tuned to everything unusual and strange. Follow it out, keep it in your sights and make absolutely sure that you stay sober, integrity sworn and minutely diligent to hold the center and uphold the law with a steadfastness that is beyond belief, and simply true.

first half : A deep sense of his own individuality and nobility. Devoted to family. Searches for a mature, objective, broad understanding of life.

second half: A deep sense of his own individuality and nobility. Vital and energetic, perhaps a reforming or revolutionary spirit. Innovative.

This degree describes a reversal of fortune at the pinnacle of the career. The fall is commensurate with the social status and indicates a risk of dishonour and all kinds of losses. One relies too blindly on one's own strength and undertakes projects without having carefully assessed its assets and weaknesses. The danger of fall also applies to physical accidents, as well as moral and social matters.

23-24: Sasuke

A man, yet one greater than a man! His mission is a world mission, but present conditions will scarcely admit of such a development.

It signifies one who will take his course through useless tracks, and by too much trust in others will suffer depletion. Yea, though all has life long he may minister to the wants of others, yet, in his advancing years, he will be abandoned to the mercy of wayfaring and deceitful men. This illustrates virtue misapplied. It as a degree of DECLINE.

Assuming as we did that no degree of the zodiac can convey any meaning if not looked at in the light of the horoscope as a whole, this rule does not fit any degree so thoroughly as this fifty-fourth degree which has something mysterious, or transcendent, in itself. Should the rest of the pattern be of a spiritual nature, an intense but hidden inner life would be the result. If the other features concur into a majestic picture, the native may have been assigned a mission reaching beyond his country and his age. “At the limit,” to borrow a mathematical expression; that is, in such a cosmically vast and sublime horoscope as can be drawn in the heavens only once in mankind’s history, this degree becomes one among many other components from which, written in star characters; the announcement of the Redemptor’s birth was given.

Daring Leo degree may have a mission from God, or a self-appointed one - or some karmic feeling it must follow. Guilt or ecclesiastical upbringing may create humility or piety, appearing naive, but faithful and a Samaritan - and not likely to do much to insure its own protection or growth. Self- conscious, nervous, superstitious, but goodhearted and blissful-usually. Dedicated and warm, but must not be over-loving ruthless or over-protective.

One who serves and is inclined to be servile. A patient worker who should free himself from the thralldom of others and develop his latent ability.

Thematic worlds coming round again just as before, just like always. The highest and the best, maintained and sustained beautifully, impeccably, superlatively. Knowing inside that what counts, what is essential, is to abide, to be. You are a vast world unto yourself, an extraordinary network of intersecting dynamics. But the witness consciousness is blissfully sitting back in a restful perch, letting everything go by. And in the very center of this dispassion and wakeful scrutinizing, one indwells a Buddha realization attained by hard work in many lives and now being your innermost identity in an identity less way.

Very particular and precise. May be easily irritated when things are not just right. Creative intelligence, capable of original ideas and novel projects.

Generous, helpful, and gullible character. Misplaced confidence results in sufferings and disappointments. One generously shares everything one possesses with less fortunate people. However, on must spare enough resources for oneself, otherwise, one is in danger of falling into the dire poverty which one has helped other people out of. In such a case, no one will come up to lend a helping hand. This degree indicates ingratitude and unrewarded qualities. There may also be eye problems.

24-25: Naruto

This denotes a very mysterious character. Whilst living among men, a stranger to men. He has a life of his own, a world of his own, he is content to live and die unknown (never showing his true self).

It indicates a powerful and haughty nature; one who is disposed to justify himself by force of arms rather than by intrinsic merit. Such a person will make many his servants but few his friends and in the end his state will be a pitiable as that of a dying lion. It is a degree of PRIDE.

The subject’s inner world will stay closed and unknown to all. Yet this is no cowardly nature, rather an arrogant one; the native is innerly proud, haughty, overbearing, but not vain. As he is spiritually isolated among his fellow beings, he will have justice done to himself, if necessary, by having recourse to arms. As he is misunderstood, he will endeavor to have his own way even by resorting to violence; as long as his strength does not fail him, he will see subdued servants around himself, never friends.

Stately Leo and serious-natured Capricorn furnish this degree with cold spirituality, pride, perhaps haughtiness. Arrogant, but with a firm desire to achieve goals and dominate its sphere, hopefully with justice and mercy. Helped by earthly features and mannerisms. Bound by family ties and genealogy; may take up arms of face violence, or may be mean and cruel. Religious dogma- dictatorial. Should be aware of the practical welfare of all people.

One with great mental strength but whose power and ability will be acknowledged only by few. Too advanced for popular acceptance.

The inward image and the outward reflection are worlds apart. Building up inside to a state of being that carries immense challenges. You see your own personal nature as an objective universal force to be reckoned with, and persist in seeing egocentrically. Preferring massively your own company, contained within yourself, imaginatively self-enchanted. Yet also capable of radical turnabouts and rebirths. Awakenings false and true, great and small. Knowing yourself to be somebody special. Self-consciousness enshrined. A dead-end or a path, oblivious or realizing the way of things, getting out of the way or being squarely in the way. Self-importance and its overcoming.

Good sense of balance, tact, sophistication, and harmony in his work and life generally. Progressive, enterprising, active. A good worker in any business or organization.

Assertive, combative, and haughty character endowed with leadership abilities. One prefers forceful means to dialogue and arouses much hatred. One makes the difference between one's few genuine friends and all the numerous flatterers. This degree indicates a risk of violent death or suicide, especially if in the natal chart, it is in conjunction with the Ascendant, the Sun or the Moon, or the ruler of the 8th House. In conjunction with the Part of Fortune, there may be seizure or confiscation of assets."

28-29: Itachi

associated with eye problems

It signifies a tyrant, who takes delight in power apart from its uses, and whose opinions are bigoted and selfish. To rule, without regard to qualifications, is the passing ambition of one born under this degree. Death, which frees the slave, will bind the hands of a tyrant in irons forged from his own heart. It is a degree of DESPOTISM.

Commercial, Venusian, fashion and possession flaunting degree due to Libra here better for females - causes grief for males. Gifted with beauty, believed more than it should - can pick and choose partners and mate who are subjects and followers. Always “right” in its own world, and therefore an unconscious danger to others, apt to take them down paths best left for the foolish, Danger of addictions, Magnetic and proud; good organizer and able administrator.

Too many divergent interest brings a life of confusion. The development of the will is necessary and will bring success in property ownership and development.

Tyrannical, selfish, and fanatic character. There is a strong propensity for debauchery and sexual perversions. One imposes one's narrow-minded ideas to members of the family, friends, and employees, which arouses much hatred. Sooner or later, slaves are freed, and the despot is overthrown. If in the natal chart, the Moon is waxing and in conjunction with this degree, the constellation of the Pleiades promises high social status, fame, and honours, but it also warns against accidents affecting the face, impaired sight, or violent death.

Crystallized imagination. The inside of the inside remembered and evoked whimsically. There is no form, no pattern, no binding reality. Dreaming the world into being from a greatly bemused stance-- other. Twinkling observer-witness consciousness. Off on tangents that call, a life, a cycle, a realm set aside for inventive play without boundaries. You feel exultant in the freedom. Swept away beautifully. Answerable to nobody and nothing except the muse.

Intelligent, original, energetic, self-reliant. Honest and straightforward, sometimes tactless and blunt.

#sasuke #sasuke uchiha #naruto #itachi #naruto astrology #degree exploration #n-astro

8 notes · View notes

timerwolf01 · 3 years

Text

Leading Electronic Advertising And Marketing Firms In London

In his leisure Seb suches as to dabble in quantum physics and his two buddies are succeed and python. Dom guarantees every client receives an extraordinary degree of solution. He has previously held CMO settings and built a start-up accelerator in the Future Movement Technology industry. Dom also has an Instagram following of 120k+, where he showcases his interest for supercars and also digital photography. digital content agency london is cost-free to participate in as well as features a lot of talks covering every little thing from digital patterns to technical Search Engine Optimization and also exactly how to enhance organic website traffic. A complete digital advertising and marketing firm manages, displays and also regulates all elements of a business or organization's on the internet existence. It includes different professional segments like website advancement, design, web content writing, Search Engine Optimization, social networks administration, SEM divisions as well as others. A complete electronic advertising agency efficiently implements all the online-based digital advertising and marketing approaches of a firm. Next, we have actually addmustard, which is an electronic advertising firm for entrepreneurs specifically. The firm offers solutions like performance optimisation, branding, UX internet and also app design, social media sites advertising, paid media, and SEO-- a great mix for increased web traffic and also ranking very in Google searches. The company makes use of the current innovation to develop wonderful businesses and also brand names. They have knowledge across an extremely wide extent of sectors, consisting of collaborating with automobile businesses, in addition to those in building and construction and also the health care field. Several of the much more renowned clients they have worked with consist of British Airways, Wall surface's, Carat weight, Panasonic, The Bakey, Alexandra Royal Residence, as well as Deloitte. With over 13 years of experience, Website traffic helps organizations toenail their niche and range items to their complete capacity. With 10+ years of market experience and numerous successful projects under their belts, our in-house elderly management group devote their complete focus to helping you be successful. Whenever we gave them a tough difficulty, they always located a clever way to overcome it. I was extremely satisfied with the high quality of the imaginative work provided by Abacus, and I appreciated the planning process also-- it made me feel great they recognized what they were doing. They are really simple people to manage, transformed things about promptly, and constantly bent over backwards to accommodate our demands. We valued the effort they put into the project-- they went means past the extent laid out in the short to demonstrate their tactical thinking as well as creative panache. Welcome to Enthusiasm Digital, a digital advertising and marketing firm based in Clapham, London and also Spain. Our straightforward and clear electronic advertising work represents itself. We provide a personal, enthusiastic as well as customized solution per and also each of our customers, large or small, based in London or abroad. Paid Browse Advertising - Paid Search Marketing is a sort of publicising where organisations pay a cost for every time that a customer faucets on an ad. Paid search advertising includes establishing Pay Per Click ads on web spiders like Google. With paid quest promos, organisations proposal on the advertisement to turn up as a sustained connection on the internet spider results page. When internet search device clients look for vital catchphrases related to business, the Pay Per Click promotion will show up at the acme of the web page in their hunt inquiry. Not only do we aid you to develop your on the internet visibility, yet likewise your brand name.

#digital marketing agency

1 note · View note

klbloodx · 5 years

Text

HLS Chapter 5 - 2027.2.12 Niansi

(Source: Google search result)

In front of Xiao Nanzhu were two labour contracts.

A4 paper in black and white with 365 red fingerprints under the employees’ side, while the employer’s side was still empty.

Ever since Niansi crawled out of the fridge, Xiao Nanzhu had a very complicated and twisted expression sprawled on his face.

Perhaps he had indeed run out of ideas on how to comment on this series of supernatural occurrences. He frowned and lifted the totally unguarded Niansi up.

Poor Niansi was only just a frail and feeble scholar. He couldn’t even budge a single bit and instead yelled and made weird noises as he was carried to the wall on Xiao Nanzhu’s shoulder.

Xiao Nanzhu sneered as he hung the old Huangli properly back onto the wall, and then without minding Niansi’s unceasing objection, he proceeds to shove poor soul Niansi back into the Huangli.

“AHHHH! Xiao Nanzhu! Are you crazy?! This young man’s head! AHH! This young man’s hairstyle! This young man’s face hnnn!”

Niansi’s wailing really sounded disgraceful and embarrassing.

Xiao Nanzhu was annoyed too, as he saw that this weirdo could not be forcefully stuffed back in. But Niansi was really frightened by this hooligan act of Xiao Nanzhu, and he quickly took out the labour contract from within in his sleeves.

As Xiao Nanzhu suppressed his anger and looked over it, he was left speechless. Numerous employment terms were printed on an eight-page contract, from wage benefits to the specifics of the job. The main gist of it was about how to become a Huangli Shi.

Huangli Shi…

Legend has it that it refers to a Fangshi who can alter the effects of seasonal solstices, solar terms, and festivals and predict each day’s fortune. Up until the modern era, due to the increase in new international holidays and memorial days, what was once in the old Huangli had new blood steadily infused in.

(Source: Screenshot from PV)

Being the working partner of all calendar gods in the Huangli, the interests of both the Huangli Shi and the calendar gods were protected by this labour contract, so inevitably more details were added to the list.

For example: the individual functions and origins of all of the traditional festivals; the responsibilities of season and changes in time shouldered by the solstices; even specific arrangements for calendar gods in case they needed sick days, maternity leave, or even marital leave were listed looking legit.

Since it was already A.C 2027 now, things were more organised and well-regulated.

The modern calendar has a mix of traditional festivals and holidays of the Gregorian calendar. Although this means that there would be an erosion of traditional and cultural values to a certain degree, some deviations were to be expected because of the way the solar calendar operates.

As such, the contemporary Huangli Shi is responsible for all calendar gods in the new civil calendar and the various traditional festivals and solstices of the past. But what was more important to Xiao Nanzhu lay at the bottom of the list of all former Huangli Shi: he saw his grandmother’s name, Xiao Ruhua, written there.

Xiao Nanzhu’s grandmother had signed such a labour contract when she was alive, and she had concealed this from everyone. Even her own grandson had no knowledge of this.

(Source: Baidu search result)

In Xiao Nanzhu’s memories, his grandmother never failed in foretelling any of her customers’ fortunes. Every wedding and funeral predicted by her were sure to go smoothly. There was even one time where she was able to accurately predict that a pregnant mother living in the nearby alley would have quintuplets①.

It should be known that even hospitals can’t detect such things at the start of a pregnancy. It doesn’t make sense that an old lady who didn’t know any science could tell from a glance.

Xiao Nanzhu also thought that she probably made a wild guess and got lucky.

But as he recalled, he started to feel that his old lady who never liked to dance Guangchangwu②, yet could chase him down two streets at her age to beat him up, really deserved her reputation as Xiao Shenpo③.

If it wasn’t because of how unreliable Niansi looked crawling out of the fridge telling him all this, Xiao Nanzhu would’ve seriously considered the feasibility of taking on such a job.

However, all things aside, he was in dire need of a proper job.

Considering the situation he was presently in, he would rather take on this strange job than to involve himself in Situ Zhang bro’s Pyramid scam pitch. Though, this job didn’t seem to be any more reliable either. Exorcising evil spirits, praying to gods, deciphering dreams, and altering fortunes——there isn’t even a scientific basis for any of those…

Youths nowadays aren’t like those of the past. Only the elderly would still possess the heart to fear and revere the supernatural.

Medicine and technology have advanced greatly in the modern era. It is different from when people relied on prayer for blessings and healings a thousand years ago. Everyone eventually became contemptuous towards those insensible and foolish ways that handled people’s lives like jokes. And that also led to those traditional professions that can’t be explained by science to be deemed as feudalism dross.

Fortune telling and astrology, once golden industries that could stir up the world, became the most lambasted.

On a second thought, this kind of thinking may have been too biased. Especially now that Xiao Nanzhu has seen the occult with his very own eyes, he could no longer bring himself to say these antagonistic words again.

Yet this change in mindset hadn’t managed to convince him to accept the calendar gods’ offer, because he immediately realised that…

The Huangli Shi has to work for all 365 days! Not even a single! day! off!

“Well, there are breaks in between work for sure, and the job isn’t that intense——it’s quite a leisure most of the time… Moreover, the contract only starts next year. Everyone is still resting right now and will start work after New Years. The one you met last night was Xiaonian. He is one of the 22 traditional festivals and is in charge of fire… If you have the time, you can also let Chuyi(1st) and Chuer(2nd) help you get accustomed to the workflow as well…”

Niansi stammered as he took out a comb to tidy up his hair. Xiao Nanzhu silently listened but didn’t show any signs of affirmation. That arrogant attitude of his made it seem as if he was looking for a fight.

He flipped through the contract with his eyes half-opened. His laidback manner of sitting on the sofa with crossed legs as he smoked effectively concealed his thoughts. Xiao Nanzhu’s jawline gave off a cold feeling. It’s no wonder that people find him hard to get along with if they’re unfamiliar with him. However, reality has proven that Xiao Nanzhu’s personality may be even more difficult to get along with than his appearance let on.

Niansi sat down with him but didn’t know how to start the topic.

After all, he’s kind of familiar with Xiao Nanzhu’s temper. He couldn’t do anything about this untamed, wild horse since when he was still young. If he really didn’t want to take on this job, then their work would have to be delayed even further.

By the time Xiao Nanzhu noticed Niansi secretly observing him from the corner of his eyes, he took out a cigarette, nipped it in between his fingers, and slowly began.

“Sorry for just now, well… How do I address you?”

Fiddling with a fan in his hand, Niansi in his green robes paused as he heard Xiao Nanzhu talking to him. He covered his mouth and awkwardly coughed. he then cupped his hands④ and bowed as he spoke courteously.

(Source: Baidu search result)

“I am Niansi. I was in a panic when I came out of the fridge just now. Please pardon my bad manners…”

Niansi spoke in a pleasant tone as if he was about to sing opera. Nevertheless, with how clean and studious he looked, it was hard to dislike him for his pedantic manners…

Xiao Nanzhu nodded with an “oh” and couldn’t help but glance at the old Huangli that was hung back on the wall. Right now, the Huangli was flipped to the page of Niansi, which looked about the same as any other day. The only difference was that the person that should have stayed in the painting was here before him.

Xiao Nanzhu suddenly felt absurd.

He never have thought he would walk on such a bizarre path when he first came back home, but he guessed he had no better choice left for him anyway. It’s just that… why does this Huangli Shi thing sound so stupid…?

Xiao Nanzhu detested the name in his heart for awhile but didn’t let it show on his face. He continued to elicit information from Niansi in front of him. Niansi was obviously a naive one as he let loose everything he knew upon hearing Xiao Nanzhu’s questions.

“Hmm… Calendar gods would stay in the human world when they’re at work for one day and night as part of the cycle, and after that we’d return back to the Huangli and rest for a year… What we usually do is eliminate the evil spirits and disasters that linger in the human world and bring blessings to mankind. But people have since stopped believing in such things… So the scope of our customers has become gradually smaller. We could only depend on foretelling suitable dates for weddings and childbirths to feed ourselves. Of course, us calendar gods can come out even if we’re not working; it just depends on whether we’re willing to… Your grandmother used to call out Yuanxiao and the others every New Years if she couldn’t find any mahjong friends to play with all night, but I guess you wouldn’t have remembered… You were still young at that time—— only about four or five…”

Niansi seemed excited talking about the past. Xiao Nanzhu listened quietly and found it rather interesting.

He was actually inclined to take up the job now, but he also wanted to know more about the profession before he gave Niansi a definite answer. Thus, he didn’t interrupt Niansi and declined Situ Zhang’s calls to drink a few times.

It’s imaginable how Situ Zhang must’ve been hopping around anxiously on the other side of the phone. Xiao Nanzhu smirked to himself for a bit and turned off his phone altogether.

After all, this is something crucial for his future career. He wanted to be prepared and let Niansi continue to talk more about the workflow.

It’s no wonder people say that scholarly people have great charisma: they can make everything they say to sound intelligent by simply talking. Truth is, what Niansi knew were nothing more than trivial matters and gossip about the other calendar gods; no proper business came out of his mouth. Actually, Xiao Nanzhu was very serious coming into this, but he unintentionally got lured in by all the gossip.

“Let me tell you this secret, don’t you tell anybody else, alright?… Actually, Qixi Festival and the one on the 24th of February are on really bad terms with each other, you know the reasons right? It’s all because of their similar names… So don’t mention about Qixi during Valentine’s in two days, or else he will surely turn crazy…”

Niansi’s advice made Xiao Nanzhu snicker. From there, Niansi introduced to him every single calendar god from Nianwu(5th) until the upcoming Valentine’s Day. However, when it comes to Chuxi, the last day of the year, Niansi skipped it.

“What about Chuxi? Is he special?”

Xiao Nanzhu became interested as he saw Niansi hesitate. Niansi quickly put a finger on his lips “shh!”, and snuck up to Xiao Nanzhu’s ear and whispered.

“Chuxi is different from all of us, I shouldn’t tell you anymore, mn. You’ll know it when you see him, en en……”

Xiao Nanzhu didn’t bother to ask further seeing Niansi being so stealthy.

In any case, he’ll meet him in a few days. No matter how difficult he was to get along with, it’ll only just be for a day. Up until this point, Xiao Nanzhu was convinced to try working as the glorious Huangli Shi for awhile. Niansi also mentioned that he could quit whenever he likes——he just needed to help them find a new boss if he left.

Because a portion of the Huangli Shi’s income goes to the calendar gods, the quality of the Huangli Shi’s life would directly affect theirs. The few days before the end of the year would be his probationary period. After New Years, they would continue discussing this.

Night arrived unknowingly after the long talk. Xiao Nanzhu didn’t seem to invite Niansi to stay for dinner, while Niansi knowingly said “I’m going home for dinner. Your grandmother also didn’t provide meals for us last time.”

He tidied up the contract signed by Xiao Nanzhu before he left But as soon as he was about to go, Xiao Nanzhu suddenly thought of something and called him back, then handed him a tortoise⑤ from the kitchen.

(Source: Baidu search result, soft-shell turtles bite really hard and can dash across the road at very fast speed.)

“This…?”

Niansi was rather dumbfounded holding this big tortoise. Xiao Nanzhu looked and grinned as he pointed at the Huangli on the wall.

“Help me give this to Xiaonian and say this is my compensation, so don’t cry anymore. Aren’t turtles much more long-lived than carps? Whaddya say?”

1. I did my research and apparently, twins can only be detected around 5-6 weeks, provided that the mother did an early scan. I assume the pregnancy was less than 5-6 weeks in, but I’m not sure about quintuplets, that’s amazing!

2. Guangchangwu 广场舞：It also means open-air fitness dancing, it’s a popular hobby among the middle-aged and onwards women (mostly) in China to dance together in the evening or at night in an open space to stay fit and make friends.

3. Shenpo 神婆：Something similar to witch or sorceress.

4. To cup one’s hand 拱手：This is an important form of etiquette in ancient China. This kind of salutation was formed during the Zhou Dynasty, it has transformed throughout history and there’re different forms of salutations when meeting different kinds of people.

5. Wangba 王八：This can both mean tortoise or bastard. Usually refers to Chinese soft-shell turtles (鳖) which are really different from the harmless and slow tortoise which can be kept as pets, as seen from calling someone a wangba is a vulgarity suggests how hated and aggressive this animal is.

This chapter is edited by Noxeru.

Chuxi is finally mentioned by Xiao Nanzhu in this chapter!! Although he still hasn’t made an appearance yet, let me know what you guys think? :))

#cnovel #huanglishi #黄历师 #chinese almanac master #huang li shi #idonghua #chinese animation #hls

39 notes · View notes

ionasadventures · 5 years

Text

Interrail Day 9

Oh Lordy y’all today has been a DAY. aight so our train from Prague was at 2pm, whereas checkout was 11am, so we sauntered around Prague a bit and took a different route to the train station. We saw this absolutely beautiful Synagogue, with an adorable dog outside it which was so cute. We waited in the station, saw our train appear on the board... and then immediatley disappear. When I went to the train-search things they have at the station, it still showed up, but when we checked again on the board it was a different destination showing. Googling, going through the rail network websites etc. Yielded the same results so I went to the information desk. The lady at the desk told me that we needed to change at České Budějovice to the train we actually were meant to get on. Simple, right? WRONG. So we go on the train, and it says via it’s announcements and on all the display boards that it DOES in fact go to Linz, our destination station for this first leg of our journey. Whilst on board, the very nice conductor informed us that actually we were getting off at the next stop to get a bus. Yikes ok, so off we get to get on the replacement bus. But none of them had anything resembling our destination, and we had stopped at a tiny little station in the countryside so nobody there spoke English. We found one of our fellow passengers and luckily he did speak English, and he explained to us that there had been an accident on the track so they couldn’t use it. We got on the bus, which was so stuffy because it was 29 degrees outside and all buses seem to be shite ((to be fair this did look like a very very old bus)). We got off at a different station, had to get the train one stop to České Budějovice, then get off and get the train to Linz. Except by the time we arrived at České Budějovice, we had missed the previous train to Linz and had to wait two hours for the next one. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but this meant we only had 8 minutes to get from one platform to another at Linz and we didn’t even yet know which platform that was. The train was late in leaving, but very very quickly made up time and we actually ended up being early. But we still had to full on sprint to the other side to get our train. But guess what, this train was also running late! Meaning that for our final transfer, from Wels to Grünau, we had only 6 minutes to get from Platform 1 to platform 11 ((but hey, at least we knew the platform number!)). We arrived in Wels, which is a big station, and full on sped aff to get to the other side. I don’t think I’ve ever ran as fast in my life. We ran down 3 flights of stairs and navigated a very confusing set of directions to reach the station juuuuust as the train doors closed. I nearly cried, but luckily this train was ALSO running late, so we were able to open the doors again and get on it. Ye gads, the gods fairley like to keep us on our toes! The train from Wels to Grünau ((also spelt Gruenau im Almtal)) was this super small, single carriage thing that was more like a bus than a train. Sure it ran on the train tracks, but you had to press a button to get it to stop and most of the stops seemed to be people’s houses in the middle of nowhere. We FINALLY arrived at our destination, which luckily was the terminus stop so we didn’t actually have to figure out how to stop the train, and the people who owned the hostel very kindly came and picked us up (with their dog!!!!). We checked in, and are going to sleep. But we made it!! For a while I didn’t think we would. I ran so much today and sweated more than I ever have in my life BUT I know when push comes to shove I can run for 8 minutes with a heavy backpack so that’s useful knowledge at least!

#ionasadventures #interrail 2019 #day9 #prague #czechia #Gruenau im Almtal #Austria #Grünau

1 note · View note

yogaadvise · 5 years

Text

The benefits of a beginner`s mind

Whether you consider yourself a 'newbie' practitioner or a knowledgeable yogi, our understandings of just how much we 'know' and just how much we don't can have an extensive impact both on the mat and in day-to-day live. Keep reading to learn how taking on a 'beginner's mindset' can really unlock to getting a globe of knowledge and experience we never recognized existed.

The experienced yogi

As a yoga exercise instructor myself, I are among the initial individuals to confess that one of the most tough people to 'teach' can sometimes be the trainees that do not think they need to be instructed - the 'knowledgeable yogi'. The one that feels they don't require to pay attention since they already know.

There's an ancient Zen story to illustrate this point, and it encourages us to understand that the minute we claim 'I recognize', we stopped our ability to know more.

A lengthy time ago, there was a wise Zen master. Individuals from far and near would seek his guidance and also request for his wisdom. Lots of would come and also ask him to educate them as well as enlighten them in the way of Zen.

One day an important man concerned go to the master. 'I have actually come today to ask you to instruct me about Zen. Open my mind to enlightenment.' The tone of the vital male's voice was one made use of to getting his very own way. The Zen master smiled and also claimed they ought to discuss the matter over a mug of tea. Whilst preparing the tea, the vital man started discussing what he found out about Zen, and why he was worthwhile of enlightenment.

When the tea was served, the master poured his visitor a mug. He put and also he poured as well as the tea increased to the edge and also began to overflow the table as well as onto the robes of the man. Finally the site visitor shouted, 'Enough. You are spilling the tea around me. Can't you see the mug is complete?' The master stopped pouring as well as grinned at his guest. 'You resemble this tea cup, so complete that nothing more can be added. Return to me when the mug is empty. Come back to me with an empty mind prepared for loading.'

The idea of having an 'em pty mind' is one discovered throughout yoga exercise and meditation practices, and additionally an element a lot of people find hard to practice and also obtain. Yet what happens if we considered having an 'em pty mind' not so much as having a totally empty brain, but having a mind that had not been currently full, one that had area for discovering, experience, personal growth as well as life's numerous lessons?

In the newbie's mind there are several opportunities, in the professional's there are few - Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

The beginner

Children have the ability to find out a vast amount whilst they're still young, and also this isn't only due to the fact that the brain is developing and also mapping neural links as well as pathways at a rapid price, however due to the attitude of the kids themselves. For those that have youngsters, how frequently have they repetitively asked 'why?'. 'Why is the skies blue?' 'Where do children originate from?' 'Just how do aeroplanes fly?' 'That made the sun and also the moon?' 'What occurs when we go to rest?' All inquiries we could reject with 'It just is', or 'Since that's exactly how it is', yet all genuine concerns that offer the chance for development and also exploration. Children are imbued with the state of mind of endless possibility, inquisitiveness and also possibility, as well as these are 3 points we start to shed as adults, specifically if we already feel we 'recognize' enough.

For the novice yoga exercise practitioner, there's a world of possibility and also prospective simply waiting to be explored, and also there's also the capacity to genuinely pay attention. Once we assume we 'know', we stop really listening.

For the newbie yoga expert, there's a world of possibility as well as potential simply waiting to be discovered, and there's additionally the capability to genuinely pay attention. As soon as we assume we 'know', we quit really paying attention. Rather, we remove the parts we wish to listen to as well as those we agree with, and merely disregard the aspects that don't resonate or port into what we 'recognize' and also as a result think to be true.

Perhaps it's due to the fact that we reside in a modern age in which we're anticipated to understand points immediately, to have the responses as well as 'get things done'. With routines so firmly packed and also everyday tension so high that there's no space left for wondering, fantasizing, researching, making errors as well as gaining from them, and talking about why, who, what, where, if and also just how? Hitting 'search' on Google has actually taken the location of exploring and also exploring limitless possibilities as well as also made our mental ability and interest span a fraction of what it could be.

It's okay not to know

Not understanding something is an element of ourselves most of us have actually been conditioned right into fearing since youth. When asked a concern in institution, knowing the response was praised and not knowing it was penalized - either in the type of a reduced quality or humiliation in front of peers. Our whole academic lives we're taught to think that success is everything about 'getting it appropriate', recognizing the solutions, ticking boxes as well as moving onto the following as well as much more difficult subject. Also when the subject seems to have no relevance to every-day life and living. There's no pause, no reflecting, and also those who risked to claim they didn't recognize were regarded much less intelligent and also less 'able' than others.

If we're revealed to this means of reasoning as well as being throughout our whole childhood - whilst our brains are developing, viewpoints as well as vanities developing - it's not surprising that we discover ourselves in adult life frightened of not understanding. Even if it's something as easy as having a discussion with a buddy, we seldom sit patiently and really absorb what the various other person is claiming, instead we're already developing sentences and half-hearted responses as they talk, eager to inform them what we understand instead of hearing something we could find out if we just took the time as well as energy to listen.

Emptying the cup

A technique of un-doing years of conditioning, of training course, takes commitment and time (something we continually tell ourselves we apparently do not have sufficient of), yet if we can slowly open ourselves up to discovering as well as receiving - clearing our cup just a little so there's room to fill it with something fresh - we give ourselves the gift of possibility. We give ourselves the ability to increase, we literally provide ourselves the gift of expanding new neural connections and also a much healthier brain, and we additionally provide ourselves the present of self-acceptance and also openness, once again able to ask the globe, 'why?'

Practise in class

Not knowing what's mosting likely to happen is a really advantageous technique due to the fact that it keeps us attached to our body and the present minute. It's in fact this attitude that keeps us fresh and active, regardless of what takes place in our every day life. Grow this attitude in Sandra Carson's class Caring Uncertainty - Hatha/ Degree 1/2/ 60 mins

#hatha #meditation #pilates #yoga

0 notes

clevelandahmed99-blog · 5 years

Text

Topical Online Forums On HubPages.

Bringing some sort of lead generation to your sales organisation is an outright have to nowadays. I am looking to supply brings about aroun 50 sales people who are nationwide. This metric consider the participation in between the advertising group and the sales team. Those evaluated provided F's (fewer than 20% stating yes) to their firms for real-time distribution of sales intelligence, client information precision and depth, and frontline access to the appropriate degree of consumer knowledge. You rack up leads based on the passion they display in your service, their existing in the purchasing cycle, and their suit concerns to your company. 3) Link in every electronic way possible: Share terrific content on social media sites. local lead generation generated from LinkedIn have greater conversion price. Too many backlinks from websites that are unrelated to your very own might bring about a Google Fine To avoid this, take into consideration varying your support messages and using no-follow web links, ensuring that you are only leaving your name on released websites as a way to market to prospective customers, not to improve your SEO. We have built a set of specialist marketing experts and also miners that focus on generating leads for business teams. Citizen Services ads show up on Google Search results page, so interested consumers in your area can locate you right away. Among the most common online lead generating strategies, white papers can develop reliability as well as produce qualified leads. To have massive success you require a genuine advertising system that not just trains you on the most up to date internet marketing techniques yet offers you a lead creating system that will crush your in firm competition. Utilizing the three-part conversion course explained in pointer # 2 over, email each person their downloaded and install resource, adhering to up with them with a kickback e-mail that maintains each lead's interest in the material you've offered them. If there is a duty on the advertising and marketing group that bewilders people most, it's possibly demand generation and also lead generation. Taking these steps can make sure you get one of the most out of your NETWORK MARKETING genealogy leads. Comprehending who your customers are and, in turn, what they such as, will most certainly enable you to raise sales and conversions. Often it functions, yet in most cases it can take months to generate leads as well as transform them with the assistance of just content. When on Linked In or any kind of other social networks network try to share a minimum of as much material from your links as you do for on your own. The factor behind this is that each company has its very own terms, services and products. However, getting marketing certified leads - anothers most likely to transform - is an even more difficult task that needs a great deal of research as well as complicated funnel growth. B2B is a particular company version that requires a specific approach to list building. Not all leads are similarly important from a sales point of view. Lead scoring helps firms recognize whether leads require to be fast-tracked to sales or created with lead nurturing. Outgoing list building is still relevant, despite having the growths of digital marketing. A sales intelligence system that generates qualified leads from public web. But we don't recognize where totalitarian advertising and marketing leads. Rather than telling clients what a firm can do for them or what their company return to appear like, companies are demonstrating their know-how and also structure connections through making use of material. Through this price per lead method of outsourcing, industrial cleansing local business owner can get a lot in return for their resources at a reduced first rate for the outsourced solutions. The factor I ask is due to the fact that when you create remarkable content, you can utilize it as a cost-free, downloadable deal. To obtain a better understanding regarding how lead generation firms can help business established top quality appointments, allow us look at a few of their processes on what they do to accomplish these results. Landing Page and also Site Optimization: One of one of the most efficient ways to produce leads is from your company website.

1 note · View note

mana-burns · 6 years

Text

You Can’t Go Home Again: An Analysis of Resident Evil VII

I'm comin' home, I've done my time Now I've got to know what is and isn't mine If you received my letter telling you I'd soon be free Then you'll know just what to do If you still want me

Introduction

Resident Evil VII is deceptive. Resident Evil, as a series, is deceptive. Numerous spinoffs and unnumbered entries turned the franchise into a tangled mess of intersecting characters, monsters, and conspiracies.

From the original trek through the Spencer mansion to the bombastic high-stakes setpiece-fest that is RE6, Resident Evil, after three console generations, had descended into itself, becoming bloated and seemingly incorrigible, impossible to nail down and define.

REVII was positioned as a return to form. Like the original Resident Evil, it is a straightforward story set in a spooky house, starring an inexperienced protagonist, Ethan, there with a simple but sympathetic and relatable mission: Rescue his girlfriend and get out. But REVII can’t help but dip into massive conspiracy as it navigates through what should be a relatively easy-to-digest story.

As Ethan searches for the missing Mia, who was away on a, get this, babysitting job, he encounters the deranged and inhuman Baker family, who have been granted a twisted immortality. There’s a pervasive black goo simply referred to as the Mold that seems to be infecting the family and their estate, spawning undead creatures and giving the Bakers supernatural powers. It’s not long before Ethan himself is infected, too.

The game then becomes a series of fetch-quests and races to various Macguffins as Ethan hurries to assemble a cure for himself, Mia, and their newfound ally, the Bakers’ daughter Zoe.

Resident Evil VII is a game running from its own past. As a linear narrative, it works fine, but it works better as a mood piece, a love letter to American horror films. It is meant to emulate a series of tropes and conventions. It's the product of two cultures—East and West— colliding head-on, and as a result it feels disjointed, dissonant, and yet wholly unique, fascinating, and, ultimately, compelling.

Resident Evil VII is an allegory for itself. It is a battle for the series’ soul.

Aesthetics

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Resident Evil 7 is not concerned with realism. It’s about simulating a horror movie; recreating their grit, visuals, and mood. In this way, it is a simulation of a simulation, and it leans heavily on the history and conventions of the American horror film without ever fully understanding them. You see this in direct, 1-for-1 tributes, such as the chainsaw fight with Jack that evokes Evil Dead 2, or the Saw-like machinations of Lucas Baker’s deathtraps, or the body found in the basement corner in the Derelict House Footage tape, positioned just like the victim in Blair Witch Project. And practically the entire front-half of Resident Evil 7 is pulled straight from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

This is par for the course for the Resident Evil series. The first game was a pretty standard take on haunted mansion horror, with some limited ventures into ‘80s action films, casting STARS as the badass special forces team in way over their heads a la Predator or even Aliens.

Resident Evil has always been about taking American horror and action tropes and sort of sifting them through Japanese culture. It is a imitation of American conventions, and it works precisely because it is so imperfect. Its dissonance happens to work perfectly for the mood of the genre. There’s something unsettling about how the details are just off; Louisiana looks like a still frame from an episode of True Detective, but it’s still evocative of how Americans perceive the swampland. Little mistakes regarding the area’s history and culture—the strange references to football, the inaccurate Civil War uniform—make things uncomfortable and strange. It’s like taking an English sentence, running it through Google translate into Japanese, and then translating it back into English again. Some general meanings are there and you may even be able to gleam some sense out of it, but it has lost all context and syntax and turned into something that isn’t quite English and isn’t quite Japanese—something that occupies the space between, something that has become a totally unique method of communication, with its own new signifiers and meaning. That’s Resident Evil. And that may explain a bit of the franchise’s ongoing identity crisis, too.

On a more surface-level reading, the aesthetics of REVII are vastly different from those of its predecessors, an approach to horror that’s a bit brighter but no less terrifying than previous entries. Remember, VII tells us, sunlight casts deeper shadows than darkness. This approach to horror is largely possible due to the wonderful lighting and particle effects at Capcom’s disposal, and though their tech struggles with faces, the uncanny valley works in their favor for this particular title, elevating that otherworldly feeling of imperfect simulation.

The Baker mansion and its surrounding area are dirty, grimy, grotesque. It’s southern gothic. The word “squalor” comes to mind. They choose to live in filth. Is there something ableist and maybe even contempful towards poverty about this dehumanizing of the Bakers? Maybe, but any sort of prejudice that the designers might be preying on here comes from a degree of separation, in that their only knowledge of that context, as mentioned before, is through American horror films, through simulacra. It is seperated by multiple layers, and so I find it hard to condemn their visions of the impoverished American South as anything but pulpy horror. Whatever the case, the true antagonists of the story betray any idea of prejudice against the lower class.

Perspective

Resident Evil 7’s protagonist is a camera. The series shifts to a first-person perspective for the first time, placing the player behind the eyes and within the mind of the game’s lead, Ethan. Despite this, the game has no qualms separating the avatar from the controller; there’s a sense that Ethan is his own character, with his own motivations not necessarily in line with the player’s.

I’ve heard the argument that what Ethan sees within the first half hour of the game would be enough to make anyone turn back. Why does he choose to go in alone? Why doesn’t he get help, or at least arm himself before he starts literally wading through corpses? No justifiable motivation could explain that.

Ethan is ostensibly motivated to look for his lost love, Mia. We’ll talk more about Mia later, but first I want to challenge the idea that this surface motivation is all that is propelling Ethan forward. Of course, you and I, and the developers, know that Ethan’s true motivation has nothing to do with Mia, and in fact nothing to do with Ethan himself, as he has no autonomy in the story. No, the motivating action propelling Resident Evil VII forward lies in the hands of the player. In a horror movie, the sort of films REVII is explicitly invoking, we can feel smarter than the protagonists. We know not to take a shower, we know not to look behind the curtain. In a horror game, we must specifically put ourselves in dangerous situations, and we do it because it’s fun. Without doing that, we can’t participate in the game. In REVII, since there is a degree of separation between player and avatar, our attention is specifically brought to Ethan’s flimsy-seeming motivation. In fact he moves forward because we push him forward, we keep him fighting. There’s a sadistic, manipulative relationship between Ethan and the player, but it’s also more complicated than that.

We sympathize with Ethan because of his love for Mia. Still, in some of Ethan’s barks and challenges to the Bakers, he expresses confusion, true ingenuity, sincerity, and a surprising and inspiring amount of courage and mettle. These motivations are enough for us to bind with Ethan, more so than in any other game in the series. Ethan is dumb, and we love him for that.

Mechanically speaking, first-person allows for some admittedly cheap but still fun jump scares, but it more importantly creates room for and necessitates an extreme amount of detail. Players can inspect drawers, cabinets, and cracks in the floorboards, unlike ever before. Monsters have a more threatening sense of scale, and so Resident Evil VII frequently plays with perspective and height, making its signature footsoldiers, the Molded, lumbering, giant masses of black knots, while also making its primary villain surprisingly pint-sized.

The first-person perspective also gives way to an effective new move, the block, crucial on the higher difficulties. The block gives Ethan a defensive verb and sort of grants the player a satisfying “cower” button. It doesn’t always make sense (how could an arm block a chainsaw?) but it paces out the game quite well against melee enemies, and it lends a visceral clutter to an already elegantly messy game screen.

Speaking of visceral—the new perspective’s greatest strength is probably the way it facilitates body horror. In RE7, you’ll have limbs chopped off, knives driven into your ribcage, and horrible masses of crawling grubs shoved down your throat. It’s a very personal, intimate horror, one that wants to gross you out while it makes your controller shudder and vibrate in resistance. It brings the player deeper into the shell of Ethan, and it creates a atmosphere of trapped, hopeless dread.

In a way, Resident Evil has been grasping at this perspective since its inception; think of the first encounter with a zombie in the first title, how the game shifts to Jill or Chris’s eyes, how the undead slowly turns to face you, its rotted mouth stuffed with human brain. This moment of body horror was essentially our introduction to Resident Evil’s mood. The perspective in Resident Evil VII, and our mouth being stuffed full of rotten flesh as we watch on, helplessly, brings the whole thing to a complete circle.

Kinetics

The movement in Resident Evil VII is deliberately slow, almost plodding. There’s a sense of weight to Ethan and his actions, necessitating such things as the aforementioned block button as well as a dedicated turn, a verb that is becoming more and more common in triple-A games, it seems. There is a sprint button, but there’s no real way to get Ethan to break out into an actual full-on run, ironic considering the urgency of the situation he’s in.

You could hand-wave away his plodding speed by saying it has something to do with his recent infection, but the Resident Evil series has always inhibited its protagonists in order to simulate the physical ramifications that fear has on the body. Despite arming the player to their proviberial teeth, early RE games aren’t about player empowerment; they still want to be a struggle to survive. So the series balances its arsenal of weapons by inhibiting the avatar’s movement. This is of course subverted in Resident Evil 4, further dismantled in 5, and completely out the window by the time 6 rolls around, but 7 is, again, intended as a return to form, and so we see a slower pace to all of Ethan’s movement. It makes up for the increased precision in aiming that the first person perspective allows.

REVII’s movement and control schemes are nowhere near as innovative and revolutionary as RE4’s over-the-shoulder controls or even RE1’s tank controls. But they still work remarkably well, and this is largely due to how the environments are designed to accommodate them. RE7 is filled with little nooks and crannies that demand careful consideration. Most of the time, they’re empty, but they are so discomforting they feel like intrusive negative space. A quick-turn button means that you always have a way to quickly glance over your shoulder. It creates a paralyzing set of blindspots to the player’s immediate left and immediate right.

Some of the guns in RE7 feel flimsy to fire, unsatisfying and cardboard-thin. The pistol has little weight or feedback, and despite the fact that the submachine gun is one of the most effective weapon in the game, it never really feels great to pull the trigger. It’s all just a bit too high-tech and light, and it clashes with the game’s mood. The shotgun, on the other hand, is incredibly satisfying, with a wonderful kick and a beautiful cascade of gore and blood to compliment each round. Meanwhile, swipes with the knife feel weak and desperate, appropriate as the knife will be little more than a box-breaker or last-ditch effort for the player.

I want to note how well the sound design compliments the movement in Resi 7. Each creek of the floorboard that comes with each step enhances the mood. Everything works harmoniously towards a feeling and an atmosphere, even if it isn’t, by the strictest definition, realistic. Remember, Resident Evil VII doesn’t strive for realism. It strives for a different sort of immersion, one that engulfs the player in familiar iconography rather than relatable and recognizable situations.

The puzzles in Resident Evil VII include the lock-key affairs that are synonymous with the series, though some of them work in interesting or subversive ways. Take the shadow puppet puzzles, that ask the player to rotate a certain key until it casts a shadow that fits into a mold or image. It’s clever to ask the player to think about the game’s lighting; it weaves together the environment and the objective. It draws attention to light and shadow, it takes time and manipulation. What it doesn’t quite take is the lateral thinking necessary for most of what you’d call puzzles. No, the puzzles in REVII are slave to the game’s pace, not its challenge. They give you tasks to do, things to fetch, and moments of quiet discomfort to break up the sometimes bombastic noise of gameplay.

Doors

Doors play a significant role in the Resident Evil series. In the first title, they masked loading screens and acted as gateways for player progression—a lot of that game’s pacing is defined by finding and using keys. In REmake, some doors will shake and slam as you walk past them, implying that enemies are waiting for you on the other side.

But doors are also important tools for survival; each door in Resident Evil is a barrier to keep enemies at bay, because each room is treated as its own discrete environment. Zombies (mostly) can’t get through doors. If you can’t deal with an enemy or enemies, you flee towards the door and use it to place a divide between you and them. Doors are powerful mechanically and thematically in Resident Evil and REmake.

In RE7, they work in a different way. You press a button to initially crack them open, but the game makes you physically push them open as a separate action. In this way you must commit actual movement to the action of entering a room to open a door. You need to make a serious mental and physical investment in order to progress.

This is nothing short of brilliant. You can’t back away from a room after opening the door and survey it for safety before plunging in. You have to go in headfirst, and this gives the game control over moment-to-moment player progression. The doors in Resident Evil VII area synecdoche for the game’s entire design; a mindfulness in mood, movement and control that services a feeling rather than a sense of realism or accuracy.

Videotapes

Resident Evil 7’s obsession with horror films extends beyond the game’s aesthetics and into its mechanics. It is fascinated with the concept of video tapes, beyond simply using these tapes as a way to evoke the mood of found footage horror. Rather, it finds a mechanical purpose for the tapes, turning them into puzzle pieces that help Ethan escape.

When we are first introduced to the videotape mechanic, it’s in the initial shack area, part of the demo that was released before the full game. The tape belongs to an unlucky film crew, working for some imaginary (but wholly believable) reality show about plumbing the depths of abandoned houses. In what is RE7’s most obvious expression of its main purpose—placing the player in a horror movie—the player takes control of the cameraman, and indeed the camera itself, and by proxy—through the method by which Ethan diegetically experiences this scene—the tape. We are the footage, and though it supposedly happened in the past, we are now controlling it in real time.

Disturbingly, the crew goes through almost exactly the same paces that Ethan went through just moments ago, and since we see how it ended up for them, it suggests that he is probably in a great deal of danger.

But the tape shows that there is a secret passage in the fireplace, one that the player could have totally missed without its aid. This establishes a pattern; the player will encounter three more tapes during their journey, and each one will convey a little more information and context to not only the player, but to their avatar, Ethan, as well. Not all of the tapes are mandatory for progression, but they are a wonderful way to present missing pieces of the puzzle to the player, through methods that are thematically appropriate and never wrestle control away from the protagonist. The tapes are essentially keys, but they are infinitely more interesting than a simple progression lock.

The most effective and interesting tape is perhaps the most well-hidden one. “Happy Birthday” is buried in a cupboard in the attic, and it is disturbing footage kept safe and secret by the Bakers’ son, Lucas.

The footage is of an elaborate deathtrap set up by Lucas, who’s positioned as a sort of genius psychopath as an in-universe explanation for some of the game’s puzzles. Lucas has captured one of the poor erstwhile documentarians, and the player takes on this victim’s perspective. Interestingly, all semblance of artifice—a camera recording the footage—drips away in favor of this perspective. Through the magic of movies, we become this character, one-step removed from our hero Ethan, yet still somehow viewing it through his eyes. If the intro tape had us jump back in time to where Ethan has been, this tape foreshadows where he will go.

Since we already know that the victim of the trap doesn’t survive, it’s not a failure to participate in Lucas’s machinations. Instead, it’s presented as the scripted, linear path that we must follow. The lethal puzzle culminates with a task that requires the victim to uncork a barrel of oil, leading to the explosion that ultimately kills the victim in the tape. But the action that springs this trap just yields a password. If one were to go into the trap with some prior knowledge of that password, one would be fine. And that’s exactly the position the tape leaves Ethan in. Since he, by way of the player and the tape, already knows the password, he’s able to escape Lucas’s trap unharmed.

This means the tape isn’t necessary for success. If the player somehow fails to find the tape, they just have to play the death trap twice. Once they continue the game and run through the puzzle a second time, they’ll realize they can just skip over the deathtrap, since they already know the password. It’s a puzzle that is proofed against stumping a stumbling player.

It also extends the horror movie motif pulsing at the heart of Resident Evil VII. It’s an attempt at creating something that the series has sometimes dabbled with, but never fully explored–the idea of elaborate, claustrophobic death traps. You’ll see spiked walls and bottomless pits in other Resi games, but never something quite so sinister and unique, not to mention devoid of enemies or threats beyond the traps themselves. It is a quiet, challenging horror, one that pits the player against themselves, and I think it’s more than strong enough to stand on its own as a full game.

The video tapes in Resident Evil VII stand hand-in-hand with the tape recorder save points and evoke a certain era of technology, a halted progress that crystallizes the Baker mansion at a moment in time, and suggests that they’ve paused their evolution. It also subtly reminds players of a time and a place, the same crucible of factors that led to the creation of the horror films that inspired Resident Evil VII. It’s a horror born out of grime and dust rather than shadows and moonlight.

Jack

Jack is the first member of the family you encounter; you catch a glimpse of his form plodding through the woods, and he eventually kidnaps you and brings you to the centerpiece of REVII’s introduction, the family dinner, where he makes himself known as an intimidating and controlling presence.

After Jack’s pulled away by the arrival of a deputy, you escape from your binds and start to move through the mansion, but of course he quickly catches on to your plan. What follows is the most compelling, proof-of-concept sequence in all of RE7; a game of cat-and-mouse through a tightly wound series of narrow corridors, with the slow-moving but ultra-powerful Jack following you close behind.

The wing of the house that Jack chases you through is a well-thought out arena, with a few hidden escape hatches and multiple ways to double-back. It makes movement and navigation feel clever and fun, while still keeping a sense of looming dread. You’ll double-back multiple times, and you’ll always have the plan b of escaping back into the safe room on the opposite end of the hallway, as far from your objective as possible.

This scene is marked, most notably, by a few scripted scenarios designed to catch the player off-guard; one, Jack can burst through a wall and surprise the player, but only if both characters are positioned just right—some players will never even see this sequence.

It takes courage to develop entire sequences that some players will never see. It’s difficult and resource-intensive to design and place such moments in a game. But it pays off in REVII; these moments are some of the most memorable in the entire game, and you can tell a lot of care and time went into making Jack’s sequence pitch-perfect. It’s truly the highlight of the game and a Capcom more willing to take a huge gamble might have used it as the entire framework for the game. As it is, it’s the stand-out chapter in the game.

After a bit of exploration and a few confrontations, you’ll encounter the now most certainly undead Jack Baker, during an otherwise slow-paced hunt for a few statues. He catches you off-guard and the game challenges you to once again play cat-and-mouse. As a result, the entire Jack encounter sort of plays like a three-act structure in its own right; you encounter him once, run away, quiet exploration, encounter him again, more puzzles and exploration, and a final, bombastic, Evil-Dead-as-hell encounter in an enclosed space.

The fight challenges how well players have learned to navigate tight corners and small spaces while evading a slow-moving Jack. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to present them with a cat-and-mouse challenge, one that added new wrinkles in order to act as a sort of final exam for the Jack chapter. But it’s hard to argue that this fight isn’t a trippy power fantasy for the player, and the way it flips the player’s relationship with Jack works.

Ethan has now escaped the mansion, but finds himself in the Baker grounds writ-large. The game doesn’t open up or become less linear, but it does explore some novel new locations. Unfortunately, that variance comes at the cost of some consistency. Before moving on to the next location, the player encounters a trailer belonging to Zoe, who ostensibly sets herself up as a mysterious ally. We first encountered Zoe through a phone call in the Baker house, where she warned us we were in grave danger. Zoe is not that interesting as a character, and mainly serves to complicate the game’s narrative, which starts out simply and becomes more and more complicated, to its weakness. Zoe is an element of that. She’s not well fleshed-out in the main game, and she’ll later be part of an arbitrary and superfluous player choice that feels tacked on. Here, however, she’ll play the role of mysterious sherpa for a while.

After a short break to resupply and catch their bearings, the player will soon enter the second house, the old house, and the domain of Mrs. Marguerite Baker.

Marguerite

Pacing-wise, Marguerite’s domain is when RE7 really starts to slip in its footing. It’s not exactly bad gameplay, but it does sag a bit, and a few fetch-quests lead to the previously mentioned flamethrower and a pretty frightening if rhetorically uninteresting tape starring Mia.

Marguerite’s gimmick is insects, cockroach-like bugs that swarm Ethan, fly around the damp wooden shack, and build nests that the player must flush out using the burner. The bugs create some variance in the enemies that RE7 will throw at the player, but they aren’t terribly fun to fight. What’s more, the old house doesn’t feel quite as well-thought-out as the larger Baker Mansion, and though it also follows a somewhat circular layout, its hallways and doors are less distinct, and its rooms are less geometrically interesting.

Jack is horrifying because he feels threatening and powerful. Marguerite is horrifying because she’s unpleasant to see or hear. It’s a skin-deep horror that relies on physical reactions rather than mental ones. Marguerite is repulsive, not necessarily terrifying.

Perhaps most disappointingly, we don’t learn very much about Marguerite at all, before or after her infection. Jack gets a moment of redemption later in the game, and Lucas and Zoe are fleshed out in conversation and flavor text around the Baker estate. Marguerite, on the other hand, only gets bits and pieces of story—she’s really more about an image than a fleshed-out idea. The DLC supposedly characterizes her out a little better, and gives hints to what she was like pre-infection. There are glimpses here and there that suggest she had an affinity for religious iconography; she has a habit of creating small shrines to Eve’s “gift.” This was a potentially rich vein that Capcom could have explored in more detail to make Marguerite feel like more than just a wife and mother.

The highlight of Marguerite’s section, by far, is her boss encounter. Set in a small two-story greenhouse, the boss fight begins when she startles you by popping through a window and grabbing your legs. At this point, she has mutated into a Junji Ito-style horror, with long arms mimicking spider limbs.

Her boss arena is a work of art. While Jack’s pit is somewhat simplistic, Marguerite’s stage has a layout simple enough to grok but complicated enough to provide ambush points and blind spots. There are doors that are blocked from one side, but give the player a route to double-back. There are ceilings and walls and windows for Marguerite to crawl on and climb through. There’s ammo hidden in cabinets, but there’s a risk-reward of wasting burner ammo to open these cabinets—though the burner is the most effective weapon against the matriarch. And, echoing the gameplay in her larger domain, the boss fight is dampened by moments of quiet stalking, though here the line is blurred between cat and mouse; you’re fighting back, and if you can control the tempo of the fight you’re frequently on the offense.

There is some sexual imagery to Marguerite’s final transformation, as her weak point is a hive-womb, and she crawls around on all fours while stalking you. It’s RE taking a page out of Silent Hill’s book, and it might feel a little cheap and grotesque if it wasn’t executed with the grimy style of a western grindhouse horror flick. No, REVII has little reservations about what it is by this point; it fully accepts that it is campy gross-out horror, but never to the level of shtick. It still takes its scares seriously, and this level of sincerity lends it a lot of heart. It makes no apologies for being disgusting, and in that way it’s lovable, just like the shlock it’s based on.

After a grueling fight, Marguerite calcifies and crumbles to dust, leaving behind a lantern for Ethan, who is free to move on to the next chapter of the game.

Eveline (Part 1)

But before Ethan moves on, he makes a detour to the attic and the kid’s bedroom.. Demonic children are nothing new, horror-wise, but REVII sows the seeds of its main antagonist achingly slowly, placing her quite literally right under the player’s nose while still breadcrumbing morbid story details to keep the hook. It’s not a deep story, or even all that unpredictable, but it is compelling enough to push Ethan forward.

You’ll notice I’m not paying much mind to the grand details of the plot, and that’s precisely because the story is secondary to a mood. This is why so many of its characters are so tropey. They don’t need to be real people, they need to serve a purpose.

If this is all sounding a bit harsh, let me assure you; I fully believe anything other than REVII’s broad strokes narrative would probably feel a little too fiddly and intrusive to serve what the game is trying to be. There’s just enough dressings of a compelling story to keep players interested in what’s going on, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

The Baker’s son, Lucas, plans to make you work hard to reach his lair, and as a result there’s a quick and gruesome return to the main mansion to fetch a key out of a corpse and battle some extra molded. This largely feels like filler and fluff, but it goes a long way to building Lucas up as a bit different from his parents. He’s more sinister, more cunning, more self-aware and human. You’ll also encounter Grandma a few more times, placed within the critical path, always watching and always silent.

RE has always been noteworthy for its clockwork puzzles, and the series has frequently lampshaded these puzzles in cute if unbelievable and ultimately unnecessary ways. The police station in RE2, for example, was supposedly a decommissioned art museum, as if that makes any sense.

In REVII, though, it’s the machinations of a character, the inventive, sociopathic Lucas, who, as it turns out, is a major antagonistic force behind the game’s entire plot. His reveal as the true antagonist of the game is brought on with little fanfare. It’s mostly revealed in DLC and notes. But it’s similar to Wesker’s heel-turn in RE1. It doesn’t purporte him to be the main villain of the game, but it sets him up as a possible series-wide antagonist.

Your mileage may vary out of this twist. Some might like having a face to the horror, and the stories of Lucas as a child, spying on his sister and setting traps for neighborhood bullies, are chilling in a lasting way. But the game doesn’t do a great job of selling Lucas as a planner, and the whole thing feels a bit contrived in the face of REVII’s greater narrative.

Lucas

In the Videotape section, I discussed the happy birthday tape and how it uses the conventions and structure of a video game to set up REVII’s most interesting puzzle. I briefly glossed over how the tape and Lucas as a character invokes the found footage aesthetic so important to Resident Evil VII’s style, but in the Happy Birthday puzzle—and through the rest of Lucas’s death traps—we see another piece of horror movie inspiration come to life; the complicated, convoluted deathtraps of films like Saw and Cube.

This sort of claustrophobic psycho-horror came about out of budget constraints. The first Saw was hugely influential because it allowed for an inexpensive yet wholly effective reworking of the slasher flick. It was successful commercially, and it was appealing to producers because it had the built-in simplicity of a few simple sets and some inexpensive practical effects. It was a streamlined reworking of the genre for the 21st century.

If Jack stands in for the ‘70s-era slash-fests like Texas Chainsaw, and Marguerite is a melding of ‘80s and ‘90s body horror from the West and the East, then it’s temporally appropriate that Lucas is the representative for 21st century gore flicks. In a way, REVII is a tour of the genre’s modern history, an exploration of its tropes as they evolved. It’s a love letter to three eras of horror.

Mechanically, Lucas challenges the player to stop, move slowly and deliberately, and fully assess the environment. There are tripwire bombs and spike traps littering the hallways of his home, and though you will still fight standard molded, they’re sort of a trivial threat by this point. No, Lucas demands that you think about the game’s environment as hostile and unforgiving. This is something of a change when compared to the circular, narrow hallways in the Baker Mansion and the Old house, where the game’s architecture and hidden pathways were one of your only weapons against your pursers. Here, Lucas isn’t following you, but he’s attempting to anticipate your movement. You’re not being chased, you’re being funneled.

Lucas leads you into the Baker barn, which he’s set up like a gladiatorial arena. If you needed any further evidence that the game is now fully banking on Saw homages, the hanging pig-corpses should be proof enough. This environment is incredibly quiet at first, but its architecture betrays its true nature; the intersecting, stacked hallways are layed out too perfectly for it to not be some sort of combat arena. In most games, this discord can be laughable; in Resi VII, it builds tension and suspense, and therefore works a little better than it might in, say, a pure action game or a shooter.

Depending on your difficulty, you’ll face some number of a new type of enemy, the fat Molded. These are bulky, powerful enemies who spew bile, one of the few projectile attacks in the game. Overall, they’re more intimidating than actually threatening. By this point, you’re armed to the teeth, and the barn’s layout gives you plenty of ways to obscure line of sight and take cover. But this boss encounter most vitally introduces the fat molded into the ranks of foes you’ll encounter. Resident Evil has a history of introducing powerful minions with such fanfare; they bring around a new, tough enemy type, build them up as an intimidating, powerful force, and then later seed them into the ranks once the player is more capable. It’s a way of ramping up combat challenges and creating an interesting endgame.

Next up is the happy birthday puzzle. Once you beat Lucas’s escape room, he gets angry and tosses a bomb into the room, which you can use to blast the wall and escape. By the time you make it to his control room, Lucas has already fled. There’s a short trek to the boathouse, and a fully-loaded safe room is a pretty good indicator that a big fight is about to go down. There’s a sense of finality to the proceedings, considering that you’ve now worked your way through the main Baker family. Still, there’s something like a quarter of the game left, and it’s when most people say REVII really goes off the rails. The pace and mood of the game is about to undergo a major shift. But first, it’s the final battle with Jack.

Jack’s Return

Ethan’s final encounter in the Baker residence brings his time with the family full-circle. Jack has come back from the dead yet again, and he’s mutated beyond any recognition. This is the beginning of REVII’s slide fully into the conventions of the series, away from the new-age slasher flick pastiche and into the gamey, japanese bio-horror that defines the series.

The fight with Jack is a fairly standard boss battle that asks you to shoot the glowy parts when they start getting glowy. There’s a smart sense of player-enemy placement and blocking and a clever use of levels that keep the fight from feeling dull.

The barn burns over the course of the fight, and eventually it’s all but completely destroyed. Once the fight wraps up, Jack will grab you as a final deathrattle, and you’ll be forced to inject him with one of the two cures you’ve cooked up. This means you only have enough serum to cure one other person, and the game is going to make you choose—do you fulfill your promise to Zoe, or do you stay loyal to your original mission, and rescue Mia? It’s a dull, binary, choice that simply determines the ending of the game, as well as what amounts to an optional boss fight. It’s set up to either reward or punish the player, rather than challenging their conceptions of the game’s world and Ethan’s place in it. Put simply, there’s a right answer and a wrong answer, which makes it fundamentally uninteresting.

Whoever the player chooses, the pair will then make their escape down the river.

Mia and the Tanker

The boat crashes, and REVII plays its final third-act twist; a shift in perspective, moving the action behind the eyes of Mia, who is all-too-familiar with the washed-up tanker. The twist is that Mia is much more than she seemed and was hiding a few secrets from Ethan. She’s a mercenary, hired to escort a bioweapon on a commercial tanker in a covert operation. That weapon is Eveline, the main antagonist and the driving force behind the sentient Molded force that both corrupted the Bakers and created the monsters the player has battled this entire game.

This twist is nothing short of baffling. It is unexpected, but it is not a subversion of any player expectations; it’s a twist that devalues the previous rising action rather than usurping it, and it inflates the scale of the game’s conflict beyond ‘creepy house’ and into ‘international high-stakes bioterrorism.’ It’s disingenuous and exhausting, as Ethan is now relegated to a bit player in a bigger conspiracy.

All that being said—it’s Resident Evil sinking back into its traditional mold. Wesker’s heel-turn and the Umbrella conspiracy elevated the first game’s spooky mansion into a secret megascience lab. That twist set the pace for the series as a whole; a convoluted narrative rooted in a distinctly Japanese anxiety over superweapons.

Here’s the thing; I don’t think the twist is all bad, actually. I think there’s something charming about how RE feels it is so vital to create a wide, entangling conspiracy to tell such a tight and quick narrative. It’s an impulse that the series truly cannot escape, for whatever reason. It is never content to tell a story about horror on a small-scale. It needs to dip into some kind of worldwide threat in order to tie all its narrative strings together. Would REVII be stronger without the tanker chapters and the larger ramifications of its effect on the narrative? Probably. Would it really be Resident Evil without such a grand mega-conspiracy at its heart? I’m not so sure.

It’s a complicated issue, because it begs the question; how much can you mess with a series’ DNA before you have an entirely new product? Is a mood enough to connect a series, or does there need to be an underlying thread that connects all the titles to its past? Is there simply too much baggage attached to such a massive beast of a franchise for it to ever escape its own legacy?

Ostensibly, the theme of Resident Evil VII is family. It’s the driving force that causes Eveline to throw off her controllers and drive the game’s plot forward. It’s the bond that causes Ethan to go after Mia, and it's the question that Zoe struggles with as she turns against her mutated clan.

Conversely, then, it is appropriate that Resident Evil VII struggles against its predecessors and the legacy they have created. Like Zoe, it is fighting for its own identity while still maintaining a certain loyalty to its origins.

Eveline (Part 2)

The last location in the game is the salt mines, which act as a sort of final combat dungeon, overrun with Molded. Unlike the tanker, however, the salt mines afford the player a ton of firepower and ammunition. It’s all about player empowerment now, as the scales have been tipped in Ethan’s favor. Fighting the molded is now trivial.

The mine is also set up as a sort of ground zero for the Molded. There are secret labs and documents filled with research on the molded dotting offshoots and chambers.

There’s a thrilling race up a spiraling column and a few more fights with the fat Molded between Ethan and Eveline. She’s in the guest house, and this final confrontation acts as more of a cathartic emotional highpoint than a final gameplay challenge. The mines were the real final test, and though there are some small challenges to the encounter with Eveline, it’s more in position to wrap up REVII’s mood and story.

The player is now up against Eveline’s psychic powers, and it’s about as hokey as it sounds. However, the audiovisual presentation is strong enough to suck the player in, and it still feels emotionally resonant and threatening, even when dipping into the absurd.

After the player figures out how to guard against Eve’s blasts, they reach her decaying body. Like Lisa trevor in REmake, Eve is positioned as a victim of larger, sinister forces, a capitalist war machine that took a little girl and turned her into a weapon. This sympathy for the devil ultimately induces genuine pity for Eveline, and it, again, shifts the focus of the story onto a more worldwide conspiracy and less on its play actors.

Eve’s final form is massive and grotesque, but most poignantly, it is part of the house itself. The Baker estate has been Ethan’s sometimes-ally, sometimes-enemy, and it’s only appropriate that it takes a leading role for the final moments of REVII. The final set piece is one of a massive scale, and it brings attention to the sky above, where dawn is beginning to break through what has been a seemingly endless night. Evenline mutilates Ethan one more time as choppers begin to fly in overhead, and finally, a deus ex machina in the form of a massive handcannon lands next to Ethan’s head. He fires a few rounds and Eve crumbles to dust with a final deathknell.

Ethan is rescued by a man introducing himself as Redfield and working for the series’ signature villians, the Umbrella corporation, and REVII, despite itself, insists on teasing its place in the series’ overarching, complicated mythology. A brief epilogue showcases some more lovely, True detective-esque air shots of Louisiana over narration from an exhausted Ethan, before fading to credits.

Resident Evil 7 is a revisioning of the series that coined the term survival horror. It’s an invocation of a mood and aesthetic, brought into interactivity. It is a product of its technology and time, as such a detailed and intimate horror wasn’t possible even in the last console generation.

At the same time, it’s also a troubling return to form. Resident Evil can’t seem to escape the baggage of its prequels or the conventions of massive conspiracy that provides the framework for its otherwise small-scale horror. It is an antithesis to itself, as it attempts to invoke personal intimate horror through large-scale conflicts between massive capitalistic and militaristic conglomerates. A Resident Evil game will inevitably go off the rails at some point, but its mood and method determines if the player will be along for the ride. RE4 went from moody creepout to action-packed campfest, and it never missed a step. REVII stumbles a bit more, but it promises a strong return to what made RE great, especially after a few strange forays into action in RE5 and 6.

Yet REVII didn’t enjoy the commercial success of those two titles, though it did see a fair bit more critical acclaim. It’s a bold move to shift a tentpole franchise as dramatically as capcom did between RE6 and REVII, but the game is clearly a love letter to its inspirations. REVII is a celebration of Western conventions seen through a Japanese lens, It is a product of dissonance, and that’s what makes it so compelling.

Despite its flaws, Resident Evil VII is one of the best horror games of the latest generation. It provides genuine moments of horror and a piercing, inescapable atmosphere of tension and horror. It is cathartic and wild, moody and visionary, and awe-inspiring in its execution.

Maybe the next entry will lean further into the horror aspect of survival horror, and will have the courage to shake off a messy legacy of legions of the undead.

#resident evil #resident evil vii #criticism #games writing #games criticism #capcom #horror #horror games #survival horror

4 notes · View notes

calacadraws-blog · 6 years

Text

How can I work and get paid dollars on what I like

Should you be hunting to extend visibility for the possess website, you may need to begin building the investment now in commenting on other people's blogs. Whenever you post a site comment, it backlinks again in your possess site and may lead people today again on your personal web site. By commenting actively, not merely are your own private remarks boosting your on line profile, you're turning out to be additional engaged and inspiring other folks to try and do the exact same for you.

Retain the services of specialists to work with your web page. This might appear to be an unwanted expense, but take into consideration your own personal browsing routines: you should not you like skillfully performed web-sites? A professional web page allows you show up expert and instantaneously gains trust from potential shoppers and purchasers. Not just that, but experts ensure that your web site is useful, something that might choose you a lot of time to accomplish.

Pay attention listed here como fazer unhas curso de manicure

Your competition's web pages really should be a daily useful resource for you personally. Check out just what the opponents are carrying out and consolidate your ideas within the knowledge you acquire. Should you see your self being a opportunity client for their products and solutions then they are carrying out anything right and you simply really should locate a strategy to incorporate these ideas into your technique.

When it could not be your cup of tea, on line video clip is usually an incredible force within your traffic. In case your merchandise has a thing to state and even for those who have something to convey about this, a online video on line may give a personal edge in your shoppers. Every time a purchaser can relate a confront, and hopefully believe in, towards the vendor, they will be more possible to get and repeat.

To learn which procedures are productive, you should use a tracking software to view which of your blog site posts deliver one of the most site visitors. Rewrite these posts using the exact vital words and mention the items you happen to be providing. This should permit you to get to out to a much larger viewers.

Utilizing fake testimonials isn't a great plan though making use of world-wide-web promoting. It might seem like a very good notion with the time, yet when people catch on they usually will capture on, you can now not be viewed to be a trustworthy business. Be prepared to confirm that each one of your respective testimonials, appear from precise human beings, who've utilised your products and solutions or services. When internet marketing an item to the world-wide-web, it is actually important to overcome the all-natural skepticism within your viewers. Most consumers about the online are very nervous about anything they go through, and can not order something using a bank card except if they sense very safe and sound. A important part of marketing and advertising your product or service, then, is ensuring they feel that degree of protection.

To achieve success with web promoting, you may need to publish high-quality content that people need to examine. Several marketers make the mistake of churning out very poor high quality articles only to fulfill the search engines. On the other hand, never forget which the foundation within your company relies on people, not engines like google. Publishing top quality information might help you to definitely attain faithful visitors which, in turn, can boost your bottom line.

Should you have a big amount of textual content which ought to surface on each individual web site of the site, take into account inserting this content material within an iframe. If you don't make this happen, your web pages might not show up special to go looking engines plus your website page rank will likely be affected. Applying iframes with invisible boarders will be certain that your internet site is optimized for search engines like google and yahoo without the need of puzzling readers.

Maintaining a tally of your competition is an important element of world wide web advertising. Irrespective of what area of interest you happen to be functioning in, you'll usually have competitors. By traveling to your competitors' internet websites, monitoring their advertising campaigns and monitoring how they rank during the serps, you'll be able to regulate your very own marketing attempts to outperform them at every single switch.

When building your internet site to industry a company or solution, hold your buyer foundation in mind. You should design and style your internet site so perfectly that folks are drawn to keep to the actions you direct, without the need of even recognizing that they are getting pushed in that way. This may translate into additional product sales conversions.

Recall to try to check out your world wide web marketing and advertising prior to deciding to launch it. You could possibly consider it's amazing however most people may not answer effectively. Otherwise you may have made use of a phrase that market markets no longer take into account timely. Or you could have indirectly ignored major key phrases. Check with for feedback as a result of compensated crowd- sourcing or just question your pals if it is immediate and easy to understand. Will not above load your internet site with banners. If absolutely everyone who posted banners everywhere you go created dollars, there could be a lot more wealthy folks. Overloading your website with banners and commercials can make your website appear clumsy and unappealing. Hold your provides tasteful and that means you never mail your website visitors absent. While you are advertising on the Internet, make sure that you take away the uncertainties that men and women have about undertaking organization on line. Try and secure clients by leveraging off with the honesty and have faith in which you will instill in your business enterprise. This will likely help your clientele grow to be more comfortable with getting your product or service.

Catalog your site in several diverse listing websites. Each link in your site increases your quest engine visibility. The more spots that the internet site is joined, the greater common it is going to be. Endeavor to discover directories particular to your topic material to ensure your site will appear in queries connected to that subject.

When very first building a corporation internet site, it is actually essential to consider various queries. Who is your target audience, for instance? What consumers will you be wanting to appeal to? What would you prefer your website to obtain - higher revenue or perhaps greater manufacturer recognition? Answering simple thoughts like these will most correctly allow you to establish a prosperous on-line existence.

Give a shopper various tips on how to call you. Internet websites that don't let you speak to the location operator might be disheartening, in particular if anything goes wrong for your buyer. It is best to include an e mail deal with, telephone number, fax selection, and mailing deal with. Basically looking at that they are obtainable can ease a customer's intellect.

For additional data make sure you check out us curso de porcelanato liquido 3d

1 note · View note

pbacklinks · 3 years

Text

37 Reliable Ways To Make Money With Your Blog or Website as a Newbie

New Post has been published on https://pingbacklinks.com/37-reliable-ways-to-make-money-with-your-blog-or-website-as-a-newbie/

37 Reliable Ways To Make Money With Your Blog or Website as a Newbie

So, you have built a fully functional website or blog and you are trying to figure out how to monetize it. Well, there are tons of ways you can make it work for you. In this book, we have compiled a list of 37 methods of turning your website into a money maker without even making significant investments in it. Letâ€™s get started.

â€œPay Per Clickâ€ advertisements (Google Adsense)

Google operates two advertising programs: AdWords and Adsense. The former entails showing adverts on the results returned by Google search. As a website owner who needs to make money from your site, you donâ€™t need the former, but the latter â€“ Adsense, which lets you display adverts on your site instead, and youâ€™ll be paid for it!

The best part about Google Adsense is that it is incredibly easy to set up and the returns are quite motivating.

How does it work? After you sign up with the program, Google will attach a tiny block of code on your website to identify the kind of content you post there and the type of visitors you receive. This code is also used to uniquely target your visitors with relevant advertisements while considering the niche of your website. If your website is all about fashion and apparel, for example, Google will begin showing your audience adverts for fashion-related stuff: clothes, accessories, shoes, etc.

You earn money whenever a visitor clicks on the advert. (Itâ€™s that simple!)

The average pay per click is somewhere in the middle of $0.50 and $5. And when your site has robust traffic, you can comfortably earn hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars every month.

How do you apply for AdSense, you might ask? Before even applying, consider taking a glance at their Terms and Conditions (they update them quite often, and they are strict on those rules). Now open another tab on your browser and sign up with the program.

Benefits of joining AdSense

If you own more than one site, AdSense lets you manage all your ads from one place

You donâ€™t need to sell any specific product to earn money; you simply display other peopleâ€™s promotions on your site

You audience will only be showed ads that are relevant to them â€“ no annoying and irrelevant stuff

AdSense doesnâ€™t even require you to understand the technical part of the program, they will do the complicated part for you

Both you and your audience would love good web design. Well, Google AdSense gives you greater degree of customization concerning the adverts they supply

Did we mention it is free to join? Yes, it is. And joining it is incredibly easy

No initial investments are required, whether in term of money or time

Drawbacks

Limited language support

Minor mistakes can result to lifetime ban (as we earlier mentioned, Google AdSense are very strict with their rules)

Traffic exchanges and traffic from social networks are restricted

Invasive tracking brings privacy questions

You canâ€™t change country or the name of the payee

Sell your own stuff (can be eBooks or any other digital product)

You have a huge potential to make money by creating a â€œper saleâ€ service that letâ€™s your audience access your material at a fee. There is no middle man you can worry that they may slash some of your earnings.

Are you too good at something that you would like to pass the skills to someone else? Why not start an online course on your website? Alternatively, you can write eBooks about or create podcasts within your area of expertise and ask your audience to buy them based on whichever friendly plan you can formulate.

Besides selling digital products (eBooks, tutorials, and stuff), you can also sell physical products

This approach may look simple and straightforward because all you need is enough knowledge in something or possession of a product you can make yourself, so you can simply avail these items on your site and start making money immediately. Unfortunately, it is not as easy as it looks. Creating a quality product requires massive investment in terms of time and financial resources. Other resources like content and design may be required. Besides, you will need to set up a third-party payment gateway to complete such operations as shipping, payment, and even taxes â€“ you are almost assured of having problems in the initial phases.

When you get everything right, you will be an independent content creator or seller of an item with greater say on your cash inflows.

Here are some valuable resources I thought would be great for starters:

Guide to selling products from your site

How to create â€œBuy Nowâ€ button on your site with PayPal

Benefits of selling products on your site

As aforementioned, you have total control on things like price and output

You get to keep the lionâ€™s share of your earnings. No middle men, just the tax man.

It is a great way of getting the most out of your talent or skills. (Selling handcrafted products, for instance)

Accept donations from your visitors

If you are a beginner blogger or you’re just starting out with your website and you donâ€™t have many monthly visits, but your site has a sizable and engaged community, you can simply ask your followers to donate. It isnâ€™t the best paying way of monetizing your site but can help you meet the expenses as you work towards making your site more established. We know of some programs that have been sustained in their entirety by donations. A good example is the Videonlan project (the guys behind the ever-versatile VLC Media Player) although their case is a bit unique. Another good example are the operators of the web.acrchive.org who make a lot of money purely from donations.

Asking people to support your journey shouldnâ€™t be hard, and thatâ€™s why Paypal offers a tiny donation button you can add on your site to keep you going â€“ here is how to create one. There is a detailed guide about how to accept donations on wikiHow, check it out.

Benefits of accepting donations

It is easy to integrate

You can easily establish recurring payments (with Paypal)

Payments are almost always secure

It is a showoff gratitude from your audience

Drawbacks

There is always that discomfort you feel when asking people to donate, it feels like begging

It is both unreliable and unsustainable

Review products and other peopleâ€™s websites

This technique of monetizing your site is applicable if you are a leader in a specific niche. If your website or blog is popular among parents, for instance, you can review children toys. If you are into video games and youâ€™ve built a sizable following on social media, why not review the latest releases from the comfort of your website and let your social media followers flock there?

But even if you havenâ€™t established your site to be an authority in any niche yet, you can start off as a reviewer â€“ all popular reviewers began from somewhere.

How does product review pay? Manufacturers would normally pay you to review or test their products on your platform with hopes that someone in your audience will be impressed with the product and proceed to buy. You may as well review products without being asked by the manufacturer, but you will be aiming to boost traffic this time, which can help you build the reputation of your website or even increase your referrals if you are signed to an affiliate program.

The most assuring thing about reviewing products is that manufactures will eventually come to you once your website has gained root in a specific niche.

Benefits of reviewing products

You have the freedom to set your own prices

You can use review materials for marketing

One of the surest ways of becoming an authority site in a given niche

Doesnâ€™t require huge investments as you donâ€™t need to own the products you are reviewing

Drawbacks

Very difficult to make money if you are not an already established figure in the niche

Create an e-Commerce site (you need to work hard)

You can move away from the traditional approach of making content to be the center of your websiteâ€™s survival and instead base it on products or tools. A website that offers a certain product or tools is an online store or e-commerce site.

But this could be the hardest way of monetizing your website because there are tons of e-commerce sites on the web already and you must compete with a lot of them. The only way to stand out of the pack having a better strategy than anyone else and employing the most effective marketing techniques you can ever come across. Also, it is just as important to find a unique niche, preferably one that hasnâ€™t been overcrowded yet.

How much money do you stand to make from an online store? Letâ€™s say your store is one of the most successful in your niche, you can earn over $100,000 per month. The initial investments leading to such income can be significantly high. A yet-to-very-established online store can bring about $500 in a month.

How do you get started? We need a whole separate post to outline how to go about it. Here are two brief guides:

How to start a WooCommerce online shop (for WordPress)

How to start a Shopify e-Commerce shop (for Shopify)

Benefits of running an online shop

Access to global market 24/7

You can manage your shop from anywhere

Measured results through various online marketing strategies

You can sell almost anything

Setbacks

Initial investments can be very high

It is highly demanding. Unless you have a dedicated team to handle your clients and other aspects of the business, you will have a hard time running it alone

Flip your site (Build > Sell > Reinvest)

Well, you have probably never heard of this before, but you can sell your website to someone else, make some good money, and reinvest it in another new website. You just add everything that makes a good website: AdSense, search engine optimization, and even having sold some products on the site. There is always a buyer out there trying to avoid the hard labor of creating a functional website from scratch.

Honestly, I donâ€™t suggest that people should make sites and sell them and even make a business around that activity. I am a big fan of building something that you can use in a long time, or forever.

But you canâ€™t ignore how lucrative this business can be. Imagine a scenario where your site earns about $400 per month by selling ad space. If everything else is working perfectly, the price tag on such a website will be somewhere between $4000 and $10,000.

Better yet, you can opt to deal in ready-made sites. They are cheap, but you can make pretty decent money from it

Where can you sell your site?

Flippa â€“ the most well-known website market

WeBuyWebsites â€“ a marketplace strictly dedicated to buying websites

FEinternational â€“ if you have a high-end website, sell it here

Benefits of selling websites

Low set up and running costs

You enjoy higher margins and better cash flow

You can do it from anywhere

Scale-ability

There is always a market

Drawbacks

Establishing a fully functional website complete with SEO and other necessities is harder, especially when you must do it en masse

Create an affiliate program

Once you have established your online shop or put some content on offer (whatever you choose to sell on your website) you can establish an affiliate program and enlist affiliates to help you market your products out there for a commission.

The idea of having your own affiliates spreading the word about you on their platforms is one of the best ways of building the fame of your site and boosting the sales of you are running an e-commerce site. It is a win-win situation: you get a lot of traffic from the referred visitors and boost your sales while the affiliates get their commission plus recognition for identifying with your brand (if itâ€™s a brand of authority in your industry).

If you are using WordPress, there are plenty of plugins that you can utilize to achieve any affiliate marketing goal.

Benefits of having your own affiliate program

It cuts the marketing expenses because the affiliates will do most of the marketing

You are almost certain that every lead will end up making a sale

It is straightforward and dependable

Easy to manage and control

Drawbacks

You will always be pushed to offer higher commissions even when your earnings are low

Build an amazon store page

Ponder over this: Amazon, the largest e-Commerce company on the planet, sells almost everything your audience could ever want. Doesnâ€™t it make sense to add an Amazon page on your website instead of creating your own online store that you might have a hard time building?

If you think about it, you will quickly realize how cost effective and rewarding it is to have Amazon on your page. Also (to my surprise), many bloggers and website owners donâ€™t seem to be too much into this venture.

It is important to note that this approach works very much like Amazonâ€™s own affiliate program â€“ you get a commission when the member of your audience proceeds to Amazon to complete a purchase. The commission can be anything between 1 percent and 10 percent. It is still a great way of monetizing your site.

Now those were the top ways of monetizing your website. Letâ€™s look at other not-very-well-known ways of making money. They arenâ€™t minor ways. Rather, they are ways that deserve special mention:

Selling text-link ads

You can sell text-link ads to websites that need them most. We donâ€™t really recommend this, but it is worth trying out. The reason why we donâ€™t root for this way of making money is that Google Terms of Service are strongly against it. So, if you get involved in this kind of business, you risk being penalized, and it could be for life!

Set up â€œinfolinksâ€

If you are not a huge fan of Google AdSense, you can opt for infolinks. Infolinks is a handy online advertising platform enabling website owners and bloggers to display relevant ads on their sites and earn money. As you can see, it works very much like Google AdSense. Sounds interesting, Huh! Here is how to set up infolinks on your site. There is only one major drawback about infolinks: their payouts are remarkably small compared to Google AdSense, but itâ€™s worth trying out.

Use monetization widgets

A web widget can be in the form of an application or a web page. In this specific case, you will use web page-based widgets. Web widgets are normally independent from the host web page and have very limited interaction with the rest of the web page.

How do you make money from widgets? Well, they work in a way similar to Google AdSense â€“ they display relevant ads on your site in exchange of money. There is a guide to it, check it out.

Establish RSS feed ads

RSS feed ads work exactly the way they sound: you allow RSS feeds on your site along with ads. The best part about RSS feeds ads is that you can choose to use partial or full RSS feeds, whichever suits your needs. Another advantage is that they boost your page views while earning income. Which option you choose, RSS Feeds ads are split into two groups: pay-per-click (very much like Google AdSense) and traffic-based ads. There is a guide on how to get started at Blogging Basics.

Create a business page/paid directory.

Business directories keep popping up on the web like mushrooms and that could mean one thing: they are minting money for their owner. A business directly is any site with a list of businesses in a given niche depicting their location, size, and activity.

At the start, you comb sources to get information about these businesses and present them in a presentable way on your site. But as time goes on, and you build reputation, new business will seek your assistance in listing their information on your directory. Here is an example of some of the biggest business directories on the web (in no particular order):

BOTW (Best of the Web) â€“ BOTW has been here since 1994 and now has over 16 million businesses in its database

About Us â€“ About Us enjoys about 150,000 visits every month

Google My Business â€“ A business directory run by the owner of the most popular search engine on the planet is destined to be a monstrous directory.

Do you wish to venture into this line of business? Here is a step by step guide on how to get started.

Offer writing gigs

What about writing for other bloggers at a fee? Yes, many bloggers and site owners donâ€™t have a lot of time to spend on writing every article uploaded on their sites/blogs. So, if you are good in gaming, for example, and you run a website dedicated to posting gaming updates, you can start a content creation service which can benefit other time strapped bloggers.

There isnâ€™t a guide or set of tricks to help you make it in this method of monetizing your website.

Sell podcasts

It is easier to sell podcasts today than it has ever been, thanks to services like Appleâ€™s iTunes. But there is a better approach to it: Why not take full advantage of your website’s influence in a certain niche and start selling podcasts to your readers/listeners. If you have paid close attention to the activities of most political commentators in the United States, you might have noticed that most of them no longer include iTunesâ€™ links on their YouTube or social media pages. Rather, they direct you to their podcasts on their own websites. This approach can be employed by pretty anyone with podcasts to offer.

The benefits of selling podcasts on your website are numerous, including the fact that no one will deduct part of your pay for hosting them on their service for you.

Create videos for YouTube

Letâ€™s be honest, no one on the internet monetizes videos better than YouTube. The social network lets you earn money on views received by your videos. The minimum payout is $100. Before a channel qualifies for YouTube Partner Program, it must receive 10,000 views or more.

Things get a little complicated when you throw ads in the mix. If a video accumulates 1 million views, for instance, but no one clicks on any of the pay-per-click adverts displayed on that video, you earn nothing. Google has a rather intricate way of awarding content creators for videos they upload on the platform.

But youâ€™re trying to make money from your website, right? How does YouTube get involved? If you have been producing a lot of video content on your site lately, you might have noticed that it is hard to increase your audience from your website. You need to move those videos to YouTube â€“ which is the worldâ€™s largest video repository â€“ and include a link to your website. You would have killed two birds with one stone: you would have created a way of boosting traffic to your website while getting paid for your videos at the same time. We already know of a dozen ways web traffic can be monetized.

Be a consultant

Picture a situation where you are so good at Information Technology that your site is entirely based on providing information about the latest releases and emerging trends in the world of technology. How do you monetize such a website further? You can start offering consultancy services to your readers and visitors right on your website or blog.

The goal is to make the most out of your expertise in your field. If you are looking for inspiration, look at what Neil Patel is doing and how he has established his site not only to be a one-stop source of every bit of information you need about SEO (search engine optimization) but to be a reputable SEO consultancy platform as well. And there is a list of proven tricks to make it big in the world of web-based consultancy services, check the out.

Add a forum (membership-based forum)

If you are using a WordPress site, you can benefit from a range of plugins that can make the whole process as easy as ABC, bbPress is one of those Plugins. It doesnâ€™t mean creating a forum on regular websites is hard, Website Toolbox leads you through three simple steps to make one.

Use content lockers

Instead of creating great content and requiring your readers to subscribe to access it, you can choose to introduce content lockers where the reader will only pay for certain content by unlocking it with payments. The best part is that you can switch it around to take various forms. For instance, instead of paying to see the content, you can require the reader to view a certain advert.

There is a YouTube tutorial on how to set up content lockers. The approach may be a little different on a WordPress site, here is the guide.

Affiliate marketing

If you are new to this concept of spinning some cash, just know it entails promoting someone elseâ€™s stuff on your website and if, hopefully, someone sees your promotion and responds to it by buying the item, the guy youâ€™re promoting for will award you an agreed commission.

So, this is how it works: You begin by signing up with a third-party affiliate program (the likes of CJ Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate Program) or the affiliate program established by the entity (also known as the merchant) whose products you wish to promote. Either way, you will be given a referral link and/or banners which you will display somewhere on your website while promoting the merchantâ€™s products. The whole concept is built on whether someone in your audience will be pleased with your promotion or the product you are promoting and decide to give it a try.

When someone in your audience clicks on the banner or referral link, they are led to e a page where they can see the merchantâ€™s product and make a purchase. It doesnâ€™t always entail buying a product; it can be a download or completing registering for something. Whichever intent, you, as an affiliate marketer, will earn a commission if the person you referred completes the process as required.

Where can you find merchandise to promote? There are as many options as there is sand in the sea, but here are the three most popular affiliate programs:

Rakuten Linkshare

Rakuten Linkshare has been around for a long time. Its popularity is increasing every passing day. If you are an avid fan of football, youâ€™ve probably discovered that Rakuten is the jersey sponsor of Barcelona F.C, an indication of popularity. Rakuten has managed to ward off competition for many years it has been around by providing features that are distinctive and user-friendly. Such features include rotating different banner adverts for particular products, ease of administering and optimizing among others. But what makes Rakuten be one of the best affiliate marketing programs is its flexibility in promoting offers.

Clickbank

Clickbank is yet another remarkable affiliate marketing program. Its popularity has been fueled by its specialization in digital products. The program has been around for a long time as well, earning a great reputation in marketing eBooks and other digital products. One of the impressive things worth mentioning about Clickbank is the fact that you can gain unrestricted access to millions of eBooks immediately after finishing the sign-up process. No one else does that in the sphere of affiliate marketing. Marketers make a killing on Clickbank with its sumptuous commissions. The payment process is fast, marketers have the freedom to sell what they like and the site itself is stunningly easy to navigate and use.

Amazon associates

It has been dubbed the king of affiliate marketing due to its huge number of sellers (over 1.5 million sellers). This immense number of sellers makes this program the best place for beginners to start. It isnâ€™t entirely a newbie paradise. Experienced marketers are impressed with the atmosphere created by the program to develop custom tools and web pages that have APIs. Amazon Affiliates have a stunning one million partner merchants! No other program has ever come close to having such many partners. The program is also very flexible and easy to use.

Therefore, if you donâ€™t start well, you may end up messing up various things. There are resources you need to have while embarking on building affiliate marketing websites.

1. Training and inspirations

There is nothing wrong with creating an affiliate marketing website from scratch. However, you need sufficient training to create a really successful affiliate marketing website. Having the inspiration to push the idea is also an added advantage. Starting an affiliate marketing website is overwhelming.

2. Video Tutorials on Affiliate Marketing

Basic education about affiliate marketing isnâ€™t enough for building a successful affiliate marketing website. Video tutorials about affiliate marketing can be of great help especially when you have basic affiliate marketing knowledge but you need to improve it and kick-start affiliate marketing career. Affiliorama is the best place you can get affiliate marketing tutorials.

3. Email platform

Your website needs to be linked to a Google email platform. Although not every strategy in online marketing involves the use of email, having a reliable email strategy can have a remarkable impact on the sales. Some of the reputable email platforms to choose from include MailChimp, GetResponse, aWeber e.t.c

4. Backlinks

Backlinks are a valuable resource that should never miss on your affiliate marketing website. They serve to link your web page to other websites hence boosting the traffic and your websiteâ€™s outreach. Backlinks help popularize your website within the circles of a niche of your choice. For instance, if you are selling fish, you need backlinks linking to websites that sell or talk about fried chips, chili and anything else that can go together with fried fish.

Google Webmaster Tools

Search engines are a great source of traffic for blogs and websites. It is good to know how search engines view your affiliate marketing website. One tool to use is Google Webmaster. Actually, Google Webmaster is a group of tools that help users see how their websites are crawled, how the pages are indexed and the performance of keywords. Google Webmaster can also identify if there is a malfunction in your website.

Benefits of joining an affiliate program

If you are good at marketing, or if your site is sort of an authority in a given niche â€“ say, in golfing, fashion, or motor sports â€“ and you have a significant following, you stand to make an insane amount of money

It is based on performance, not the investments you commit

Affiliates can increase your reputation

Affiliates can also increase the traffic on your website while increasing sales

Drawbacks

You will find that some program offers meagre commissions that makes the whole thing to be unmotivating

You donâ€™t have any control on what the affiliate program chooses to do

You have no say on your competitors

Revenues are not guaranteed

Affiliate links can be hijacked

Link your site on craigslist and sell skills and possessions

If you canâ€™t design a website for an individual then probably you have an old toaster you need to sell on the craigslist. Many graduates are offering their skills online as consultants of almost anything you can mention depending on their expertise. Additionally, you can sell items you no longer use on the Craigslist and earn some quick bucks. Craigslist has over 40 million users. Better yet, every large city has a special section reserved for it. The website is highly convenient to anyone with a drive to make money.

Link your site to ebay and auction products

eBay is the best site you can use to auction stuff that you no longer use. Clothes, cars, electronicsâ€¦you name it, eBay can auction it. You can choose between the options of straight auction or flat rate. To compensate for the service, eBay takes a tiny amount of what you earn and thatâ€™s just Okay. You need to know that eBay thrives on an elaborate feedback system which requires you to build a great reputation as a trustworthy seller.

Selling homemade items

You can sell handmade items on your site. You can also collaborate with sites like Etsy to promote your homemade merchandise. Etsy is a platform where crafts and other homemade creations are availed for sale. It can be anything you made at home: beautiful candles, soap with your signature fragrance, hand knitted scarves, homemade jewelry, essential oils, postcards, art prints, crocheted small animals etc. To send sales in the roof, you need to charge your clients reasonable top keep them coming back for more knitted kitten clothes. Just like eBay, Etsy will ask for a small percentage of your earnings.

Publishing eBooks

Have you ever thought or offering your book for sale on your website or in conjunction with KDL (Kindle Direct Publishing) This is the best opportunity for men to capitalize on their previous writing works that have never been finished. If you have an unpublished book and you believe you are not in a so nice financial situation, quickly dash to Amazon, publish it, set the best price you can think of and put it up for sale. You need to promote your eBooks widely on social media to expose them to most people. Consider publishing a book within your area of expertise and not just a fictional story.

Taking online surveys

You can make your site to be part of crowds pooled by consumer companies to conduct online surveys and get consumer feedback. For just 6 hours, you can earn up to $50 which is channeled in your Paypal account. Some of the websites offering survey services include My Survey, iPoll, and Pinecone.

#Make Money #Make Money With Your Blog

0 notes

wickedbananas · 6 years

Text

Time to Act: Review Responses Just Evolved from "Extra" to "Expected"

Posted by MiriamEllis

I’ve advocated the use of Google’s owner response review feature since it first rolled out in 2010. This vital vehicle defends brand reputation and revenue, offering companies a means of transforming dissatisfied consumers into satisfied ones, supporting retention so that less has to be spent on new customer acquisition. I consider review responses to be a core customer service responsibility. Yet, eight years into the existence of this feature, marketing forums are still filled with entry-level questions like:

Should I respond to reviews?

Should I respond to positive reviews?

How should I respond to negative reviews?

Over the years, I’ve seen different local SEO consultants reply in differing degrees to these common threads, but as of May 11, 2018, both agencies and brands woke to a new day: the day on which Google announced it would be emailing notifications like this to consumers when a business responds to their reviews, prompting them to view the reply.

Surveys indicate that well over 50% of consumers already expect responses within days of reviewing a business. With Google’s rollout, we can assume that this numbers is about to rise.

Why is this noteworthy news? I’ll explain exactly that in this post, plus demo how Moz Local can be a significant help to owners and marketers in succeeding in this new environment.

When "extra" becomes "expected"

In the past, owner responses may have felt like something extra a business could do to improve management of its reputation. Perhaps a company you’re marketing has been making the effort to respond to negative reviews, at the very least, but you’ve let replying to positive reviews slide. Or maybe you respond to reviews when you can get around to it, with days or weeks transpiring between consumer feedback and brand reaction.

Google’s announcement is important for two key reasons:

1) It signals that Google is turning reviews into a truly interactive feature, in keeping with so much else they’ve rolled out to the Knowledge Panel in recent times. Like booking buttons and Google Questions & Answers, notifications of owner responses are Google’s latest step towards making Knowledge Panels transactional platforms instead of static data entities. Every new feature brings us that much closer to Google positioning itself between providers and patrons for as many transactional moments as possible.

2) It signals a major turning point in consumer expectations. In the past, reviewers have left responses from motives of “having their say,” whether that’s to praise a business, warn fellow consumers, or simply document their experiences.

Now, imagine a patron who writes a negative review of two different restaurants he dined at for Sunday lunch and dinner. On Monday, he opens his email to find a Google notification that Restaurant A has left an owner response sincerely apologizing and reasonably explaining why service was unusually slow that weekend, but that Restaurant B is meeting his complaint about a rude waiter with dead air.

“So, Restaurant A cares about me, and Restaurant B couldn’t care less,” the consumer is left to conclude, creating an emotional memory that could inform whether he’s ever willing to give either business a second chance in the future.

Just one experience of receiving an owner response notification will set the rules of the game from here on out, making all future businesses that fail to respond seem inaccessible, neglectful, and even uncaring. It’s the difference between reviewers narrating their experiences from random motives, and leaving feedback with the expectation of being heard and answered.

I will go so far as to predict that Google’s announcement ups the game for all review platforms, because it will make owner responses to consumer sentiment an expected, rather than extra, effort.

The burden is on brands

Because no intelligent business would believe it can succeed in modern commerce while appearing unreachable or unconcerned, Google’s announcement calls for a priority shift. For brands large and small, it may not be an easy one, but it should look something like this:

Negative reviews are now direct cries for help to our business; we will respond with whatever help we can give within X number of hours or days upon receipt

Positive reviews are now thank-you notes directly to our company; we will respond with gratitude within X number of hours or days upon receipt

Defining X is going to have to depend on the resources of your organization, but in an environment in which consumers expect your reply, the task of responding must now be moved from the back burner to a hotter spot on the stovetop. Statistics differ in past assessments of consumer expectations of response times:

In 2016, GetFiveStars found that 15.6% of consumers expected a reply with 1–3 hours, and 68.3% expected a reply within 1–3 days of leaving a review.

In 2017, RevLocal found that 52% of consumers expected responses within 7 days.

Overall, 30% of survey respondents told BrightLocal in 2017 that owner responses were a factor they looked at in judging a business.

My own expectation is that all of these numbers will now rise as a result of Google’s new function, meaning that the safest bet will be the fastest possible response. If resources are limited, I recommend prioritizing negative sentiment, aiming for a reply within hours rather than days as the best hope of winning back a customer. “Thank yous” for positive sentiment can likely wait for a couple of days, if absolutely necessary.

It’s inspiring to know that a recent Location3 study found that brands which do a good job of responding to reviews saw an average conversion rate of 13.9%, versus lackluster responders whose conversion rate was 10.4%. Depending on what you sell, those 3.5 points could be financially significant! But it’s not always easy to be optimally responsive.

If your business is small, accelerating response times can feel like a burden because of lack of people resources. If your business is a large, multi-location enterprise, the burden may lie in organizing awareness of hundreds of incoming reviews in a day, as well as keeping track of which reviews have been responded to and which haven’t.

The good news is…

Moz Local can help

The screenshot, above, is taken from the Moz Local dashboard. If you’re a customer, just log into your Moz Local account and go to your review section. From the “sources” section, choose “Google” — you’ll see the option to filter your reviews by “replied” and “not replied.” You’ll instantly be able to see which reviews you haven’t yet responded to. From there, simply use the in-dashboard feature that enables you to respond to your (or your clients’) reviews, without having to head over to your GMB dashboard or log into a variety of different clients’ GMB dashboards. So easy!

I highly recommend that all our awesome customers do this today and be sure you’ve responded to all of your most recent reviews. And, in the future, if you’re working your way through a stack of new, incoming Google reviews, this function should make it a great deal easier to keep organized about which ones you’ve checked off and which ones are still awaiting your response. I sincerely hope this function makes your work more efficient!

Need some help setting the right review response tone?

Please check out Mastering the Owner Response to the Quintet of Google My Business Reviews, which I published in 2016 to advocate responsiveness. It will walk you through these typical types of reviews you’ll be receiving:

“I love you!”

“I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

“There was hair in my taco...”

“I’m actually your competitor!”

“I’m citing illegal stuff.”

The one update I’d make to the advice in the above piece, given Google’s rollout of the new notification function, would be to increase the number of positive reviews to which you’re responding. In 2016, I suggested that enterprises managing hundreds of locations should aim to express gratitude for at least 10% of favorable reviews. In 2018, I’d say reply with thanks to as many of these as you possibly can. Why? Because reviews are now becoming more transactional than ever, and if a customer says, “I like you,” it’s only polite to say, “Thanks!”. As more customers begin to expect responsiveness, failure to acknowledge praise could feel uncaring.

I would also suggest that responses to negative reviews more strongly feature a plea to the customer to contact the business so that things can be “made right.” GetFiveStars co-founder, Mike Blumenthal, is hoping that Google might one day create a private channel for brands and consumers to resolve complaints, but until that happens, definitely keep in mind that:

The new email alerts will ensure that more customers realize you’ve responded to their negative sentiment.

If, while “making things right” in the public response, you also urge the unhappy customer to let you make things “more right” in person, you will enhance your chances of retaining him.

If you are able to publicly or privately resolve a complaint, the customer may feel inspired to amend his review and raise your star rating; over time, more customers doing this could significantly improve your conversions and, possibly, your local search rankings.

All potential customers who see your active responses to complaints will understand that your policies are consumer-friendly, which should increase the likelihood of them choosing your business for transactions.

Looking ahead

One of the most interesting aspects I’m considering as of the rollout of response notifications is whether it may ultimately impact the tone of reviews themselves. In the past, some reviewers have given way to excesses in their sentiment, writing about companies in the ugliest possible language… language I’ve always wanted to hope they wouldn’t use face-to-face with other human beings at the place of business. I’m wondering now if knowing there’s a very good chance that brands responding to feedback could lessen the instances of consumers taking wild, often anonymous potshots at brands and create a more real-world, conversational environment.

In other words, instead of: “You overcharged me $3 for a soda and I know it’s because you’re [expletive] scammers, liars, crooks!!! Everyone beware of this company!!!”

We might see: “Hey guys, I just noticed a $3 overcharge on my receipt. I’m not too happy about this.”

The former scenario is honestly embarrassing. Trying to make someone feel better when they’ve just called you a thief feels a bit ridiculous and depressing. But the latter scenario is, at least, situation-appropriate instead of blown out of all proportion, creating an opening for you and your company to respond well and foster loyalty.

I can’t guarantee that reviewers will tone it down a bit if they feel more certain of being heard, but I’m hoping it will go that way in more and more cases.

What do you think? How will Google’s new function impact the businesses you market and the reviewers you serve? Please share your take and your tips with our community!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

from The Moz Blog https://ift.tt/2IktMyl via IFTTT

#The Moz Blog #Moz #seo

5 notes · View notes

drummcarpentry · 3 years

Text

Are You Ready to Sell Like QVC?

A photo. Some text. A shopping cart button.

It’s the setup you’ve been used to since you were Internet-years-old.

Electronic commerce has existed since the 1970s, passing through a prescient experimental phase of telephone-based TV shopping in the 1980s, and setting the tone for the future with Stephan Schambach’s 1990s invention of the first standardized online shopping software. US consumers spent $861.12 billion with online merchants in 2020. By making the “add to cart” ritual so familiar, it may seem like we’ve seen it all when it comes to digital commerce.

But hold onto your hats, because signs are emerging that we’re on the verge of the next online sales phase, akin to the 19th century leap from still photos to moving pictures.

If I’m right, with its standard product shots, conventional e-commerce will soon start to seem dull and dated in many categories compared to products sold via interactive video and further supported with post-purchase video.

Now is the time to prep for a filmed future, and fortunately, the trail has already been blazed for us by home shopping leader QVC, which took over television and then digitally remastered itself for the web, perfecting the art of video-based sales. Today, we’re going to deconstruct what’s happening on QVC, and how and why you may need to learn to apply it as an SEO, local SEO, or business owner — sooner than you think.

Why video sales?

A series of developments and disruptions point to a future in which many product sales will be facilitated via video. Let’s have a look at them:

First, we all know that humans love video content so much, they’ve caused YouTube to be the #2 search engine.

Google has documented the growth of video searches for “which (product) should I buy”.

When we look beyond the US, we encounter the phenomenon that livestreaming e-commerce video has become in China, highly-monopolized by Alibaba’s Taobao and creating celebrities out of its hosts.

Meanwhile, within the US, the pandemic caused a 44% increase in digital shopping spend between 2019-2020. We moved online last year for both our basic needs and nonessentials like never before.

The pandemic has also caused physical local brands to implement digital shopping, blurring former online-to-offline (O2O) barriers to such a degree that Internet transactions are no longer the special property of virtual e-commerce companies. This weirdly-dubbed “phygital” phenomenon — which is making Google the nexus of Maps-based local product sales — can be seen as a boon to local brands that take advantage of the search engine’s famed user-to-business proximity bias to rank their inventory for nearby customers.

At least, Google hopes to be the nexus of all this. The truth is, Google is reacting strongly right now to consumers starting half of their product searches on Amazon instead of on Google. Are you seeing ads everywhere these days informing you that Google is the best place to shop? So am I. With that massive, lucrative local business index in their back pocket and with GMB listings long supporting video uploads, Google has recently:

Acquired Pointy to integrate with retail POS systems

Made product listings free

Amped up their nearby shopping filter

Attempted to insert themselves directly into consumers’ curbside pickup routines while integrating deeply into data partnerships with major grocery brands

Experienced massive growth in local business reviews, and just released an algorithmic update specific to product review content (look out, Amazon!)

Experimented with detecting products in YouTube videos amid rumors flying about product results appearing in YouTube

Been spotted experimenting beyond influencer cameo videos to product cameos in knowledge panels

Meanwhile, big brands everywhere are getting into video sales. Walmart leapt ahead in the shoppable video contest with their debut of Cookshop, in which celebrity chefs cook while consumers click on the interactive video cues to add ingredients to their shopping carts.

Crate & Barrel is tiptoeing into the pool with quick product romance videos that resemble perfume ads, in which models lounge about on lovely accent chairs, creating the aura of a lifestyle to be lived. Nordstrom is filming bite-sized home shopping channel-style product videos for their website and YouTube channel, complete with hosts.

And, smaller brands are experimenting with video-supported sales content, too. Check out Green Building Supply’s product videos for their eco-friendly home improvement inventory (with personable hosts). Absolute Domestics shows how SABs can use video to support sales of services rather than goods, as in this simple but nicely-produced video on what to expect from their cleaning service. Meanwhile, post-sales support videos are a persuasive value add from Purl Soho to help you master knitting techniques needed when you buy a pattern from them.

To sum up, at the deep end of the pool, live-streamed e-commerce and shoppable video are already in use by big brands, but smaller brands can wade in with basic static goods-and-services videos on their websites and social channels to support sales.

Now is the time to look for inspiration about what video sales could do for brands you market, and nobody — nobody — has more experience with all of this than QVC.

Why QVC?

“I didn’t even know QVC still existed,” more than one of my marketing colleagues has responded when I’ve pointed to the 35-year-old home shopping empire as the way of the future.

The truth is, I’d probably be sleeping on QVC, too, if it weren’t for my Irish ancestry having drawn me to their annual St. Patrick’s Day sales event for the past 30+ years to enjoy their made-in-Ireland product lineup.

About seven times more people with Irish roots live in the United States than on the actual island of Ireland, yet the shopping channel’s holiday broadcast is one of the few televised events tailored to our famous nostalgia for our old country home. My family tunes in every March for the craic of examining Aran Crafts sweaters, Nicholas Mosse pottery, Belleek china, and Solvar jewelry, while munching on cake made from my great-grandmother Cotter’s recipe. Sometimes we get so excited, we buy things, but for the past few years, I’ve mainly been actively studying how QVC sells these items with such stunning success.

“Stunning” is the word and the wakeup call

QVC, which is a subsidiary of Quarate Retail International, generated $11.47 billion in 2020 and as early as 2015, nearly half of those sales were taking place online — consistently placing the brand in the top 10 for e-commerce sales, including mobile sales. The company has 16.5 million consolidated customers worldwide, and marketers’ mouths will surely water to learn that 90% of QVC’s revenue comes from loyal repeat shoppers. The average QVC shopper makes between 22-25 purchases per year!

Figures like these, paired with QVC’s graceful pas de deux incorporating both TV remotes and mobile devices should command our attention long enough to study what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.

“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC!”

While supplies last, I want to invite you to spend the next 10 minutes watching this Internet rebroadcast of a televised segment selling an Aran Crafts sweater, with your marketer’s eye on the magic happening in it. Watch this while imagining how it might translate as a static product or service video for a brand you’re marketing.

TL;DW? Here’s the breakdown of how QVC sells:

Main host

QVC hosts are personalities, many of whom have devoted fan bases. They’re trained in the products they sell, often visiting manufacturing plants to school themselves. When on air, the host juggles promoting a product and interacting with models, guest hosts, callers, and off-screen analysts. The host physically interacts with the product, highlights its features in abundant detail, and makes their sales pitch.

For our purposes, digital marketers are fully aware of the phenomenon of social influencers taking on celebrity status and being sought after as sales reps. At a more modest scale, small e-commerce companies (or any local business) that’s adopted digital sales models should identify one or more staff members with the necessary talents to become a video host for the brand.

You’ll need a spot of luck to secure relatable hosts. Just keep in mind that QVC’s secret formula is to get the viewer to ask, “Is this me?”, and that should help you match a host to your audience. This example of a nicely-done, low-key, densely-detailed presentation of a camping chair by a plainspoken host shows how simple and effective a short product video can be.

Guest hosts

Many QVC segments feature a representative from the brand associated with the product being sold. In our example, the guest host from Aran Crafts is a member of her family’s business, signing in remotely (due to the pandemic) to share the company’s story and build romance around the product.

Depending on the model you’re marketing, having a rep from any brand you resell would be an extra trust signal to convey via video sales. Think of the back-and-forth chat in a podcast and you’re almost there. Small retailers just reselling big brands may face a challenge here, but if you have a good portion of inventory from smaller companies and specialty or local manufacturers, definitely invite them to step in front of the camera with your host, as higher sales will benefit you both.

Models

Frequently, sales presentations include one or more models further interacting with the product. In our example, models are wearing these Irish sweaters while strolling around Ashford Castle. More romance.

Other segments feature models as subjects of various cosmetic treatments or as demonstrators of how merchandise is to be used. Models and demonstrators used to be standard in major American department stores. QVC brilliantly televised this incredible form of persuasion at about the same time it disappeared from real-world shopping in the US. Their sales figures prove just how huge the desire still is to see merchandise worn and used before buying.

For our scenario of creating online sales videos, such models could be a convincing extra in selling certain types of products, and many products should be demonstrated by the host or guest host. One thing I’ve not seen QVC do that I think e-commerce and O2O local brands definitely could do is a UGC approach of making your customer your model, demoing how they use your products in their real-world lives. Almost everybody can film themselves these days.

Callers

There are no live callers in our example, but QVC traditionally increases interactivity with the public with on-air phone calls.

If your sales videos are static, you’re not quite to the point of having to learn the art of handling live calls, but your product support phone and SMS numbers and links should be featured in every video.

Method

“If you go up there with the intent to sell, it’s all going to come crashing down around you...The real goal of QVC.... was to feel like a conversation between the host, the product specialist (us), and ‘Her’ – the woman age 35 to 65 who is sitting at home watching television.” - I went on air at QVC and sold something to America

There’s an element of magic to how QVC vends such a massive volume of products, but it’s all data-based. They’ve invested so heavily in understanding customer demographics that they’ve mastered exactly how to sell to them. Your consumer base may be totally different, but the key is to know your customer so well that you understand the exact approach to take when offering them your inventory of goods and services.

Another excerpt from the article cited above really gets this point across when talking about guest hosts:

“Our experienced guests tend to focus on the product. But our best guests are focused on the viewer. Is this for the viewer? Everything goes through that filter. And if you do that, everything comes out more naturally.”

Here at Moz, there may be Whiteboard Friday hosts you especially enjoy learning from. As a business owner or marketer, your job will be to identify talented people who can blend your brand culture with consumer research and translate that into a form of vending infotainment that succeeds with your particular shoppers. Successful QVC hosts make upwards of $500,000 a year for being so good at what they do.

Being good, in the sweater sample, means pairing QVC’s customer-centric, conversational selling method with USPs and an aura of scarcity. I’ll paraphrase the cues I heard:

“These sweaters are made exclusively for QVC” — a USP regarding rarity.

“Enjoy visiting Ireland, but buy your sweaters on QVC” — this is a strong USP based on having better prices than a traveler would find if buying direct from the manufacturer.

“Reviews read like a love letter to this sweater” — incorporating persuasive UGC into the pitch.

“Half of our supply is already gone; don’t wait to order if you want one of these” —- this creates a sense of urgency to prompt customers to buy right away.

Analytics

The example presentation probably looked quite seamless and simple to you. But what’s actually going on “behind the scenes” of a QVC sales segment is that the host is receiving earpiece cues on exactly how to shape the pitch.

QVC’s analytics track what’s called a “feverline” of reaction to each word the host says and each movement they make. Producers can tell in real time which verbal signals and gestures are causing sales spikes, and communicate to the host to repeat them. One host, for example, dances repeatedly while demoing food products because more customers buy when he does so.

For most of the brands you market, you’re not likely to be called upon to deliver analytical data on par with QVC’s mission control-style setup, but you will want to learn about video analytics and do A/B testing to measure performance of product pages with video vs. those with static images. As you progress, analytics should be able to tell you which hosts, guests, and products are yielding the best ROI.

Three O2O advantages

In a large 2020 survey of local business owners and marketers, Moz found that more than half of respondents intend to maintain pandemic-era services of convenience beyond the hoped-for end of COVID-19. I’d expect this number to be even higher if we reran the survey in mid-2021. Online-to-offline shopping falls in this category and readers of my column know I’m always looking for advantages specific to local businesses.

I see three ways local brands have a leg up on their virtual e-commerce cousins, including behemoths like Amazon and even QVC:

1. Limited local competition = better SERP visibility

Virtual e-commerce brands have to compete against a whole country or the world for SERP visibility. Google Shopping’s “available nearby” filter cuts your market down to local map-size, making it easier to capture the attention of customers nearest your business. If you’re one of the only local brands supporting sales of your goods and services via videos on your website, you’re really going to stand out in the cities you serve.

2. Limited local inventory = more convincing authenticity

QVC is certainly an impressive enterprise, but one drawback of their methodology, at least in my eyes, is that their hosts have to be endlessly excited about millions of products. The same host who is exuding enthusiasm one minute over an electric toothbrush is breathless with admiration over a flameless candle the next. While QVC’s amazingly loyal customers are clearly not put off by the bottomless supply of energy over every single product sold, I find I don’t quite believe that the joy is continuously genuine. In my recognition of the sales pitch tactics, the company feels big and remote to me.

70% of Americans say they want to shop small. Your advantage in marketing a local business is that it will have limited inventory and an owner and staff who can realistically convey authenticity to the video viewer about products the business has hand-selected to sell. A big chain supermarket wants me to believe all of its apples are crisp, but my local farmer telling me in a product video that this year’s crop is crisper than last year’s makes a world of believable difference.

3. Even a small boost in conversions = a big difference for local brands

Backlinko recently compiled this list of exciting video marketing statistics that I hope you’ll read in full. I want to excerpt a few that really caught my eye:

84% of consumers cite video as the convincing factor in purchases

Product videos can help e-commerce stores increase sales by up to 144%

96% of people have watched an explainer video to better understand a product they’re evaluating

The Local Search Association found that 53% of people contact a business after watching one of their videos and 71% of people who made a purchase had watched an online video from that brand

Including filmed content on an e-commerce page can increase the average order value by 50+%

Video on a landing page can grow its conversion rate by up to 80%

If the company you’re promoting is one of the only ones in your local market to seize the opportunities hinted at by these statistics, think of what a difference it would make to see conversions (including leads and sales) rise by even a fraction of these numbers. Moreover, if the standout UX and helpfulness of the “v-commerce” environment you create makes you memorable to customers, you could grow local loyalty to new levels as the best resource in a community, generating a recipe for retention that, if not quite as astonishing as QVC’s, is pretty amazing for your region.

Go n-éirí leat — good luck!

Like you, I’m longing for the time when all customers can safely return to shopping locally in-person, but I do agree with fellow analysts predicting that the taste we’ve gotten for the convenience of shipping and local home delivery, curbside pickup, and tele-meetings is one that consumers won’t simply abandon.

Sales videos tackle one of digital marketing’s largest challenges by letting customers see people interacting with products when they can’t do it themselves, and 2021 is a good year to begin your investigation of this promising medium. My top tip is to spend some time this week watching QVC on TV and examining how they’ve parlayed live broadcasts into static

product videos that sell inventory like hotcakes on their website. I’m wishing you the luck and intrepidity of the Irish in your video ventures!

Ready to learn more about video marketing? Try these resources:

17 Best Ecommerce Product Video Examples

The ABCs of Video Content

8 Beginner Tips for Making Professional-Looking Videos

How to Film Creative Product Videos

YouTube Dominates Google Video in 2020

How to Track YouTube Videos in Google Analytics Using Google Tag Manager in 4 Steps

Need to learn more about local search marketing before you start filming yourself and your products? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide.

0 notes

lakelandseo · 3 years