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kyidyl · 3 years

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Kyidyl Explains Bones - Part 4.2

(These are all collected in the KyidylBones tag. Additionally, this is the second half of part four - please read the first half here, especially if you have questions or comments about the ethics of what I’m talking about here. I’m going to be leaving that out as this is a continuation of that post.)

Since I’m skipping the talking and ethical statements in this one, let’s just get right into the bones. As a reminder, this is about race determination in skeletal remains.

White/Caucasoid.

Female, front view. (Source)

Male, profile view (Source)

So let’s break this down in an orderly way (I will put the comparisons and stuff at the bottom in an orderly table for easy reference. Hell, this is partially for my own reference too bc I never remember this stuff off the top of my head.):

Eye shape and sharpness - This is easiest to see in the front view, obviously. White skulls that have stereotypically white features will have eye orbits that are technically called “square with rounded edges” (or as we call them in the nail world....sqoval.), but they sit at kind of an angle where they’re higher in the middle and lower at the lateral sides so most of us just refer to them as “aviator glasses” which I think is pretty funny of us. And although you obviously can’t feel it with your fingers, the borders of the eye sockets will be sharper.

Prognathism - As you can see from the bottom image, on a caucasian skull there is a low amount of prognathism. The chin is often behind the spine of the nose rather than protruding. European skulls have flatter faces, basically. Although this male has a bit of an overbite so the curve around his teeth is more severe than it otherwise might be. Generally speaking though, you’ll be able to draw a line from the nasal spine to the chin and not much will stick out past the line and the line will be straight. The “muzzle” area of the face is less pronounced.

Nasal Shape - This is actually mathematically determined by a measurement called the nasal index. It is the ratio of the height to the width multiplied by 100. European skulls have thin, tall noses, and you can see that illustrated pretty well in the woman above.

Nasal Sill - On caucasians, the nasal spine aka sticky-outy-bit at the bottom of the opening that you can see in profile is more pronounced. It sticks out further. This means that a caucasian skull will also have more guttering behind the edge of the sill. IE, if you stick your finger in its nose and run it along the bottom of the nasal passage, you will feel a distinct dip. Europeans have a distinct nasal sill.

Nasal Bridge - White have shorter nasal bones, and so the bridge of their nose is shorter in profile. It also usually has a more extreme curve in the area inferior to the browbone. This male actually isn’t a good example of that, because his nasal bones are long for a caucasian skull. Basically, our noses stick out further.

Unique skull features - None. Caucasian skulls are kinda boring TBH.

Next, we have black/African skulls. In the US especially this can be a lot harder to determine because of centuries of admixture with the white population:

This is a front and profile view of the same male, african individual. (Source)

Something you’ll start to notice as we go through this is that Black skulls and white skulls usually have opposite features and asian skulls are between these two extremes (Except for eye orbit shape. Here it’s Asian on one end and African on the other, with European inbetween.). If you think about geography here, it kinda makes sense. Anyway, the skull features:

Eye orbit shape and sharpness - African skulls tend to have eye orbits that are more square in shape, and often aren’t angled the way they are in whites. This individual’s are angled though so they’re not super stereotypical of what would be considered characteristic of African eye orbits. His are fairly square though. The edges of the orbits tend to be softer and less distinct.

Prognathism - African skulls are prognathic, meaning that they stick out the furthest. In this individual, you’ll notice that it isn’t just his teeth that stick out past the line because of an overbite, the entire upper part of the maxilla is curved outwards. African faces are much less flat than white ones. The “muzzle” area is more pronounced.

Nasal Shape - As you might expect, African nasal shapes are much wider and shorter than European ones. They appear a lot rounder, and this is something that’s fairly unique to them, especially if the individual has very stereotypically African features.

Nasal Sill - The nasal spine sticks out much less in an African skull - I’ve seen individuals who barely had one at all. Between that and the prognathism, the bone almost seems as if it stretches, and you see very little silling. So if you stick your finger up its nose you won’t have a sharp edge with a dip behind it in the nasal passage. Sometimes there won’t even be a sill at all. I actually found a really good image of this, but I don’t want to mess up tumblr’s list ordering, so I’ll stick it in below the list.

Nasal Bridge - Africans have flatter noses, and to accommodate this their nasal bones are longer and the curve that’s inferior to the browbones is much less acute. Their noses stick out less than that of Europeans’, and it’s something that is fairly consistent in their skeletal remains.

Unique racial features - Not many, but Africans do have something called a “bushman’s canine”. Now, I’m gonna be honest with you guys and tell you that I STILL have problems identifying this feature. This is despite the fact that I was taught dental anthropology by one of the dudes who basically came up with these guidelines. So on the bottom of the upper canines there is a bump of tooth enamel that is more pronounced on Africans than it is on other races. There’s a grading scale and stuff. You can read about it here. Now I found that by just googling Bushman’s canine, but one of the authors (Joel Irish) was my prof, lol. Here’s a picture of it, but actually the drawing in that paper above is better at illustrating the two opposite ends of the scale. I added the lines:

(Source)

In addition, here’s the image showing the nose shape:

(Source)

African skulls will also sometimes have stronger muscle attachment sites, but honestly there’s a lot of that part of anatomy that’s social so it’s not something you can use to ID them unless you know what they should be for the society you’re looking into.

Ok, so that’s African skulls done. Next up, Asian. As a reminder, Asian and Native American skulls are *extremely* similar. This is because they share common ancestors. This is also confirmed by their genetics (Native American genetics are super interesting, but that’s a whole other thing.).

(Source)

This is an Asian male.

Eye Shape/Sharpness - Asians and Natives have round eye sockets, and the edge of the socket is of middling sharpness. In addition, their cheekbones tend to be flatter and wider, so the combination of these things makes their skull shape pretty distinctive. Personally I find Asian and Native American skulls to be the easiest to ID, and a lot of these features persist through admixture, too.

Prognathism - Asian/NA skulls have a middling amount of protrusion. This individual has a distinct prognathism, but it’s honestly hit or miss. They can have it either way. Asian cheekbones tend to mitigate the visual effect though so it’s a bit harder to see without specifically looking for it in profile with a straightedge.

Nasal Shape - As you can see from this individual, the nasal opening is neither as tall as caucasians nor as wide as Africans. Again, this correlates to what you might expect given their phenotypes in life. Theirs are the most heart shaped, too.

Nasal Sill - This is another area where they fall between the “very pronounced” of whites and the “not at all pronounced” of Africans. This individual barely has a nasal spine at all, but does appear to have something of a sill that would be present if you felt inside the nasal passage for it.

Nasal Bridge - Same as above, it falls in between the two extremes in shape and length.

Unique Racial Features - This is why I think Asian and Native Skulls are the easiest to ID. They have some really interesting racial quirks i their skull anatomy. First off, they have what’s called a persistent metopic suture. When we’re all babies our forehead (frontal) bone is in two pieces, and then they fuse. The suture between the two is then obliterated, IE, completely healed and smoothed over. In Asians and Native Americans, this suture fuses but you can still see it:

(Source)

It’s a completely harmless genetic variant that runs in those racial groups. The second easy to identify feature is shoveling. On the back of the upper (Maxillary) incisors. It’s basically just a difference in shape; a border around the back of the tooth. It looks like this:

(Source)

And here is the scale we use to grade it:

(Source - heheh there’s Joel again.)

It’s found on the lower incisors as well, but it’s easiest to see on the maxillary ones.

The last easy indicator is found along the sutures along the top and back of the skull. The coronal (arc along the front like a crown), sagittal (top center) and lambdoid (where the parietals fuse to the occipital. It’s like a downward V on the back of your skull.) sutures can be what’s called simple or complex. In Africans and whites, the sutures are mostly simple. In Asians and Native Americans, it’s complex. What that means is that the wiggly line is so wiggly that it loops back on itself and forms extra small bones called wormian bones. Sometimes these bones can actually be very large and have names. Here’s what a skull with small wormian bones looks like:

(Source)

The bones with the star are the wormian bones, although there are other, smaller ones. Very large ones are called Inca Bones, after the population they were first identified in. They look like this:

(Source)

A and B are examples of Inca bones. They’re generally a harmless genetic variant.

Lastly, we’ll address aborigonal features:

(Source)

This is an aboriginal man. Aboriginal is a generalized term for any indigenous group, but in anthropology - and from what I can see most places - we use it to describe people indigenous to Australia and the surrounding islands. The reason why it is only sometimes considered a separate category is that it’s pretty localized, and the differences really come down to some special features. So here are the main differences you can look for to tell if a skull is aboriginal:

Large teeth. Aboriginal people have really big teeth. There’s no other way to put this, they just...they’re large.

Very pronounced browbone. As you can see above, the browbone is MUCH heavier on an aboriginal skull than on any other kind of skull. This is especially true for males.

Flatter chin. It’s called the mental protuberance, and on an aboriginal individual it is less prominent than on other individuals.

Large occipital bun. The occipital bun is the bit at the bottom back of your skull where your neck muscles attach. You can see it in the profile picture in the far right sticking out of the bottom of the skull. It’s especially pronounced in aboriginal people.

Ok, so there is one more important characteristic for judging race that I totally forgot to include yesterday, and that’s palatine shape. The dental arcade is the area of the maxilla that houses the teeth. Basically the top of your mouth. And as you, a human person, knows - it’s in the shape of an arch. But that arch varies in shape from race to race. And, what your probably don’t know from not seeing a bunch of skulls, is that there are sutures in there. Between 2-4, but even when you have two they bisect each other and look like 4. The shape of these sutures also varies from race to race. Again, it’s a harmless genetic variant that runs in various geographic areas. However, I’m going to elect to skip it because there’s already a LOT of info in this post and going into it with the depth it deserves would be a lot. Instead, I’m going to just summarize here for you all WRT the characteristics I’ve listed:

Eye sockets: White - Aviator glasses, rounded square, sharp edge. Black - square/rectangle, blunt edge. Asian & Native - Round, middling sharp edges.

Prognathism: White - little to no prognathism. Black - most pronounced prognathism. Asian & Native - varies between these two extremes.

Nasal Shape: White - tall and thin. Black - short and round. Asian & Native - in-between these two.

Nasal Sill: White - sharp nasal spine, deep well behind a sharp wall. Black - Little or no spine, smooth sill. Asian & Native - Varies between these two.

Nasal Bridge: White - short nasal bones, more extreme curve. Black - longer, flatter nasals, a much less extreme curve. Asian & Native - you guessed it...between these two extremes.

Unique racial features: White - None. Black - Bushman’s canine. Asian & Native - tooth shoveling, persistent metopic suture, wormian/Inca bones.

And that is it! The rest of this series shouldn’t be quite this sensitive with respect to the subject matter. Tomorrow is gonna be the archaeology of graves AKA how to dig up dead people. =D After that will be (in no specific order) age determination, height determination, and teeth. Maybe other things if I feel like it. If you have questions or requests, don’t hesitate to ask!

#KyidylBones #science #race #forensic anthropology #bioarchaeology #human remains #human anatomy #archaeology #anthropology #skeleton

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dailytechnologynews · 5 years

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Fuck Boomers: A Political Manifesto For The 2020s

NOTE: If you're confused about what generation you belong to, check this handy chart.

There is a dark force wreaking havoc on the American democratic system. This force has been in power for about 30 years. Its members elect our representatives, run our companies, and—soon—they plan to stretch our fragile social safety net to its breaking point.

You know these people by another name: Baby Boomers.

The best data available tells us that Boomers are different in many ways from the generations that came after them. For example: there's the fact that—unlike Millennials and Gen Xers—the majority of Boomers were against the right of gay people to marry until after the Supreme Court decision enshrining that right into law. Or that nearly half of Boomers are suspicious of immigrants. Or that Boomers are twice as likely as Millennials to be climate change skeptics. Perhaps most worryingly, Boomers seem to have significantly more trouble distinguishing lies from truth.

Much has been written about the qualitative differences between Boomers and younger Americans. But this thread isn't about that. The purpose of this thread is to convince you of two things:

1) The Boomers have had disproportionate power in the American democratic system for decades.

2) All the best data available tells us that 1) will continue to be true for at least the next ten years—unless Millennials decide they’ve had enough of Boomer rule.

Let's dig in.

WHO ARE THE BOOMERS

The Baby Boomers invaded planet Earth between the years 1946 and 1964. As their name implies, there were a lot of them. One way to visualize the sheer size of the Boomer cohort is to look directly at the birth rates.

U.S. Births Per Year (1909–2012) - Source: United States Census Bureau

https://i.imgur.com/lL4Ca2u.png

Interesting, right? Lots of people thought so at the time. But it got a lot more interesting in the late 80s and early 90s, when suddenly the Boomer cohort became—by far—the largest voting bloc in the United States. Take a look at how the Boomers compared to everyone else in the year 1990.

Boomers as a Percentage of the Population (1990) - Source: United States Census Bureau

Note: The Y axis represents age. The numbers on the X axis represent numbers of people, by millions

https://i.imgur.com/FZJdQve.png

That's a fat wad of Boomers. See how skinny the part of the graph above the Boomers is? That's the Silent Generation. Not so many of them. Now, based on this data, you could make some assumptions. You might think that given a couple of decades, the Boomer voting bloc would start to thin out a bit. Zoom forward to 2012 (22 years later), and you'd find something surprising.

Boomers as a Percentage of the Population (2012) - Source: United States Census Bureau

https://i.imgur.com/jPnvTbV.png

Nope. Still a ton of Boomers.

But most folks probably assume that the trend can't hold for much longer. Just look at that massive dropoff right above the Boomers on the chart.

Population projections shed more light on the situation—in 2019 Millennials finally became the largest cohort by population (skipping straight past the Gen Xers). And it's true that Boomers are now dying off at an accelerating rate.

Projected Population by Generation (2016–2050) - Source: Pew Research Center

https://i.imgur.com/11ZOEtZ.png

So that looks like the end of the story for Boomers, right? For 30 years, they've been the most powerful voting bloc in America, but soon, they'll go gently into the long dark.

Right?

Nah.

The reality is that Boomers are perfectly poised to hold onto their political power for another 10 years. The reason?

Boomers vote and Millennials don't.

The Pew Research Center gives us a ton of data in this article that allows us to do some comparative math.

In the 2016 presidential election, about 70 million Boomers were eligible to vote. Roughly 69% (~48.3 million) did so.

The same year, 62 million Millennials were eligible to vote. Only 51% (~31.6 million) did so.

We're working with rough numbers here, but the implications are staggering. In 2016, over 50% more Boomers than Millennials turned out to vote, despite the fact that Boomers had only 13% more eligible voters.

Now let's look forward to the 2028 presidential elections.

THE NEXT 10 YEARS

We saw above that, according to population projections, by 2028 there should be roughly 9 million fewer Boomers in the U.S. compared to 2016. Again, we're working with rough numbers here, but we can safely assume something like 61 million eligible Boomer voters in 2028.

Calculating the number of eligible Millennial voters in 2028 is a much more complicated task. Pew also thinks there'll be roughly 4 million MORE Millennials (presumably because of immigration) in the country by 2028, but many of those immigrants probably won't be eligible to vote. And, of course, some Millennials could get felonies or die off between now and 2028. But for the sake of the argument, let's assume that the number of eligible Millennial voters holds steady over the next 9 years. That means, again, roughly 62 million eligible Millennial voters in 2028.

Obviously, if our generations continue to vote at their current rates, Boomers will still be outvoting Millennials by huge margins in 2028. Yet it's pretty common knowledge that older people are more likely to vote than younger people. Any critical thinker reading this thread is probably thinking that as Millennials age, they should naturally begin voting more often.

And, in fact, it IS true that the ratio of young voters to older voters is more or less consistent, regardless of your generation.

Reported Voting Rates (1980–2016) - Source: U.S. Census Bureau

https://i.imgur.com/wJutj9q.png

From 1980–2016, we can see that the 45–64 year old demographic did become slightly less likely to vote relative to their older counterparts over time. But otherwise, the ratio is consistent enough for us to make some rough projections.

In 2028, Millennials will be between 32 and 47 years old. Boomers will be between 64 and 82 years old.

If historical trends hold, we can predict that roughly 58.7% of Millennials and 70.9% of Boomers will vote in the 2028 presidential elections.

Let's run the numbers.

~62 million Millennials eligible to vote * 58.7% (eligible voter turnout rate) = ~36.4 million Millennial votes ~61 million Boomers eligible to vote * 70.9% (eligible voter turnout rate) = ~43.2 million Boomer votes

If historical trends hold, and the best population projections we have are correct, then Boomers will still be outvoting Millennials by between 18–19% in the 2028 election.

So there you have it. If you're a Millennial or Gen Xer in the US, you've been living in a democracy controlled by Boomers for your entire life, and that's not changing any time soon.

If you ask me, there's only way way to fix this problem.

SEIZE POWER FROM THE BOOMERS.

P.S. Hey Gen Xers: you might want to join us. Half of you have zero retirement savings, after all.

Random Notes and Extra Resources:

This 16-page document produced by the Census Bureau has a lot of good additional data on Boomers.

"The Greatest Generation" is a term coined by NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. The Greatest Generation grew up during the Great Depression and fought—and won—World War II. They saved the planet from tyranny, rebuilt Europe, established incredible social services for the poor and elderly, and then built a space program that literally took humanity to the fucking moon.

Part of the reason there are more Boomers than, say, Millennials, is that the Boomer cohort spans ~19 years, while the Millennials cohort spans 16 years. Generations aren't standardized, and are frankly sort of abstract. All the above points still stand even accounting for this disparity, though.

#Futurology #Technology #Tech #Studies #Humanity #Development #New #Gadgets

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thecoroutfitters · 5 years

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Written by R. Ann Parris on The Prepper Journal.

Preppers can reap some big rewards by applying some of the habits of successful market gardeners and small farmers to our home gardens.

See, they have an eye on profit, which means an eye on efficiency. Most preppers aren’t looking at cash income from the garden, and scale matters even in for-profit growing, so there are some common practices we should actively avoid, but there are plenty that can save us time and resources.

That’s precious enough for now, and will be even more so any time our spending power is limited.

Establishing a Market

Before planting, successful market growers tend to have established their markets. It could be farmer’s markets, tailgate sales, roadside stands, restaurants, grocery outlets, or an ag professional who compiles orders for those latter from numerous local farms. Each market requires figuring total produce needed, and working backwards to planting dates so they can be served. The growers who wing it without either step tend to make less profit.

We want to emulate the first group.

We don’t have to worry about diversification or coolers of product that didn’t move because restaurants went under or weather kept the public from shopping, but it’s the same general concept.

We want to start out with an idea of our end goals in types of produce – how much we want for fresh eating and preserving – and from there work backwards to harvest goals, and have an idea of when we’ll be harvesting.

Covers

One thing almost all market growers do, from tiny backyard operations to folks cultivating in excess of 2-5 acres, is invest in row covers.

Usually, there are several in play – a mesh or cloth cover used to prevent insect access, which can also function as frost protection, and plastic sheeting used for cold protection.

Those covers add too much time to the period when a cultivated plot can remain in production for most professional growers to skip the investment. They may start small and add to it incrementally, but they get them.

In addition to plant covers, market gardeners also regularly cover their soil during dormant periods.

That patch we were just growing in is precious. We want to keep as many nutrients and soil amendments in place as possible, and prevent as many weed seeds as possible now that we’ve spent hours a day/week/month weeding and conditioning it. However long it will be between plantings, especially the smaller ag operations get it covered.

Pros are mostly going to go to poly silage tarps sooner or later.

For home growers, anything goes. Baby pools, straw, cardboard, a cover crops, salvaged wall paneling, leaves, heavy-duty curtains, thick blankets, wood chips, newspaper weighted with sticks – anything that doesn’t run away fast enough. Flip the wheelbarrow over a patch, park the mowers at the ends, whatever it takes to cover as much as we can, best as we can.

Really. Whatever it takes.

Hedge Seeding/Planting

Whether they’re direct sowing or transplanting, growers regularly start an extra set of seed to fill in any gaps that appear. It gives a uniform harvest and makes the best use of space.

This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyNacaaUWsI demonstrates market garden practices for beets that applies to preppers, to include extra seed sets. The indicator crop demo’d with radishes is also a biggie – and on most home scales can be harvested for spicy sprouts or spaced out more for the roots.

Exceptions also apply here.

For a super small gardens and those feeding even 5-8 people, the predictable, consistent yields and turns from a whole vegetable bed at once isn’t as vital. Having a 2’x3’ or even a 30”x25’ patch at different stages of development doesn’t affecting our harvest efficiency or totals that much.

There are also plants that will basically catch back up, especially if we have more than 100 days to our growing seasons. Indeterminate squash and pole or bush beans are examples where even if they don’t reach the same total yield, replacing a non-starter with seed with a 10-21 day gap instead of having same-age transplants doesn’t greatly affect our harvest or space use.

There are also cases where, due to stronger light and warmer soils, fill-in-the-gap direct-sown seeds will catch up to buddies that were started under cold frames or planted as soon as the soil was warm enough.

It’s typically the crops like salads and small tubers and roots, that are both densely planted and faster-growing (35-65-day harvest ranges), where we’ll want to have backups to transplant if there are holes. Otherwise, we’re potentially “losing” the yields that empty space would have produced.

Big-time commercial growers will accept losses – like expecting a certain ratio of blanks in a corn field. Smaller growers, even the professionals, can’t afford it.

Avoid Thinning

Now, there are absolutely exceptions and scale totally matters on this one, but… Thinning is wasteful. Market growers and preppers in a busy world or in a world with reduced or nonexistent outside resource and are in lockstep on waste – we want to minimize loss wherever we can.

Both daily hours and seed are finite resources. For most of us, so is both growing space and growing season.

If we’re thinning, we’ve spent time and resources planting unnecessary amounts. Then we spent more time (and possibly additional resources) pulling them out to avoid overcrowding.

We also “spent” soil fertility on them (we’re moving homemade compost or manure around, or are buying and spreading fertilizers, which those seedlings may have started sucking up). We may have pumped extra water for them. That’s additional time and resources used for something we’re pulling out at 1-12”.

Especially if the trimmings are laying in a field, hitting compost, or represent such a low fresh feed amount we’re not adjusting anything for livestock … that’s not making use of a byproduct. It’s just extra work and resource waste.

There are exceptions. Planting schemes that make it fast and easy to harvest edible seedlings for human or livestock consumption works for most small-scale growers. Gardeners with truly limited growing season and who are super-crunched on space but have the time and copious seed are also exceptions.

High seeding rates for plants with low germination is a given – that’s not waste at all. If they’re doing the job of a cover, where having denser plantings actually lets us save time and improves our harvest because it limits weed competition, that’s different, too.

Business Analysis

Any good organization tracks expenditures and results, sports teams to charities to production and services. It’s easier for us than market growers, here, too, though. We’re just going to cruise our pantry stocks and make notes (actual notes).

If we ran out of tomatoes, we want to plant more and-or trial some alternatives and-or increase types to avoid a big shortage if it’s a bad season. If we have more left from the previous season than we want when we start canning/drying again, we assess how many extras we have, and decrease.

(If I want to reduce pantry stock by 30% next year, I’d only decrease planting for a 20-25% reduction in case it’s a bad year. I’d rather decrease again the year after than run short.)

If we still have a few as we’re canning/drying more, we’re on the money and trials will be solely about increasing variety, efficiency, or productivity.

Professional growers must spend additional time tracking and crunching numbers on whether a crop type is worth growing or not, outlay in pest control and fertilizer and water, labor hours, and planning ahead for infrastructure maintenance.

Ideally we’d do the same there, as well. We just have a different baseline for profitability.

Seed is a cost they factor as well, especially since the pros aren’t keeping back their own seed. Yields by variety and finding the ideal seeding rate can hugely affect their business. That’s one we want to dial in, too, as much as possible.

We also both consider packing and packaging, just differently. Our other infrastructure and skills will affect where we most want to concentrate on post-harvest processing and storage.

Ask For Help

It’s a great time to be a market grower. Small urban and suburban farming is exploding right now. Those growers have a lot riding on their success. Since they can’t risk repeatedly failing, they ask for help.

And, the climate being what it is, usually they find it. Like us, they have to cull through a lot of information, find answers from people growing in the same environmental conditions and styles they are, but it’s largely a supportive community.

Small-Farm Market Grower Strategies

In this golden internet age, we can easily find blogs, Facebook groups, and YouTube channels produced by market gardeners. Some of them are especially useful for preppers with tight land limits as urban and suburban ag continue to enjoy increased attention.

Remember, though, that while many of the tricks of the trade apply to balconies and backyards, our bottom line is different – they need dollars and cents, and we’re trying to maximize food value. That means that especially what we grow, and how much of it, is going to be significantly different.

Also bear in mind there are also planting styles, medias, and schemes that can be very efficient and profitable at a small scale that wouldn’t work for market growers.

Mostly, though, we share a focus on making our efforts profitable. That makes professional-level strategies an excellent study while practicing our survival gardens.

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The post Market Garden Strategies for Survival Gardens appeared first on The Prepper Journal.

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#SHTF #TEOTWAWKI #MARTIALLAW #BUGOUT #PREPPERBAG #USAF #USSOCOM #ARMY #NAVY #SurvivalFirestarter #Sur

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nymphgirlsofskyrim · 5 years

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The Lore of the Skyrim Nymph

So what exactly is a Nymph in Elder Scrolls lore?

http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Nymph_(Creature)

A Nymph is a magical creature that looks like a beautiful naked female, and is essentially just a monster type in Daggerfall, much like Orcs were. They can't be hurt by mundane weapons (iron or steel), and can drain fatigue. They have their own language, and if you know how to communicate with them, they are less likely to be hostile.

A side-note and my explanation why I have not given any similar stamina draining powers to the Nymph Races: Fatigue is similar to stamina, but if you run out, you collapse. I can't help but wonder whether this was deliberate innuendo on the part of the developers: the other creature that drains fatigue on touch with the same spell is the Daedra seducer (equivalent to a succubus and also appearing as a naked woman). Think for a second, what activity with a naked woman would cause someone to use up a great deal of energy and then pass out?

Nevertheless, I have been quite surprised that in all the time Skyrim has been out and people have been modding it, no one has touched on this part of the lore that is so definitely full of potential, both for flavor and depth, and, let’s be honest, also for sexiness.

So here's where I come in. I have built up a foundation for "fleshing out" the Nymph as a playable race, and deliberately left some aspects unexplored in the hopes that other modders will eventually be interested in adding their own kinds of Nymph. Hopefully it will seem reasonable, both as a rational argument, and as a framework that fits with the overall Elder Scrolls Lore.

If you have no interest in the background lore or maintaining the cohesiveness of a "lore-friendly" world, feel free to skip over this. There aren’t any in-game details about the mod in this post.

What follows is a rational attempt to expand upon a part of the elder scrolls canon to introduce new possibilities relating to one particular creature only briefly appearing in Daggerfall, the Nymph

(sidenote: for the purposes of this mod we are defining the plural of Nymph as “Nymphii” similar to elven races, Aldmer -> Aldmeri, despite the real world plural being either the English “Nymphs” or Greek “Nymphoi”, to designate this specifically as an Elder Scrolls Race instead of the Greek mythological creature)

The argument is quite simple, but the supposition that follows can seem somewhat convoluted.

Based on the following four canon elder scrolls facts

1. Nymphii are naturally existing creatures rather than supernatural creatures created or controlled by some Divine or Daedric force 2. Nymphii are all female 3. Nymphii are very sexual creatures 4. Nymphii can be killed

It is therefore logical and reasonable to conclude: that since as a species

Nymphii were not willed into existence by oblivion, have a distinct female gender but no males, are sexual creatures, and can die

They must reproduce somehow, since there would be no reason for sexual behavior in a mono-gender species, and without reproduction or spontaneous generation through Daedric Will, there eventually will be none left.

a. Therefore, the theory this discussion is based upon presupposes that a Nymph will mate with a male of another species to produce offspring, though just like with any other species, this may not always be the explicit purpose for mating. b. Since there are no recorded instances of Nymph/Mortal half breeds of other races, and the fact that they possess a different material composition than mortal races, it is reasonable to assume that all resulting offspring of this mating must exclusively be Nymphii, given that the concept of “Demi-Gods” or half-immortals, is not present in the Elder Scrolls lore. c. Since Nymphii apparently mate with males of any sentient species and maintain long term relationships with these males, are highly selective in choosing mates, and ultimately exhibit the social concept of courtship behavior, they must have some purpose or reason for selective mating. d. Thus, it seems logical and reasonable to conclude that since there must be a reason to distinguish between mates, this reason would come in the form of traits or properties inherited, else selective mating is meaningless. Stated another way: If every Nymph that results from a mortal/Nymph pairing is an identical Nymph who does not inherit any traits or properties from the male, it does not matter who or what that mortal is, and the documented examples of courtship behavior and pair-bonding make very little sense.

e. Finally, despite every resulting offspring being a Nymph, they must differ from each other in relatively small ways based on the traits inherited from the male parent, and if these traits are consistent amongst specific groups of mortals, there will eventually emerge distinct categories of Nymph relative to the group of males she is descended from.

First, a couple disclaimers

I admit, this is an attempt to apply scientific reasoning to the fantastical and fictional, which is a concept some people naturally resist, so please keep an open mind and do not read this as any kind of gender/sexuality bias, purely as a rational conclusion driven by the principles underlying biology in our own world.

Additionally, while it is possible to propose alternative non-biology explanations to this conclusion, none of those allow for a similar expansion of the lore, which sort of defeats the purpose of exploring the subject at all. Stated another way: if any given Nymph can magically wish a new fully grown Nymph into existence, there's nothing new to add to the topic in this regard, so please keep that in mind.

Therefore we are presenting our "unofficial Nymphii lore" as follows:

1. Similar to the Asari from the Mass Effect series (another all female fictional species), Nymph/mortal pairings will produce a new Nymph that is phenotypically a Nymph but integrates some characteristic, trait, or essence, of the mortal race.

This characteristic may not be any kind of inherent property of the mortal race itself (ie it is not genetic inheritance), but is a trait that the Nymph acquires when integrating some part of that race into her magical being. Therefore, a Nymph with a Nord father may not necessarily inherit her father’s racial resistance to cold and frost.

This characteristic may even be seemingly totally unrelated to the male in question, but comes from some racial magical essence that influences the composition of the new Nymph. Therefore, a Nymph may inherit properties seemingly unrelated to her father, and a Nymph could in theory, inherit a property of “heat tolerance” or fire resistance from a male parent who possesses no such property.

Whatever it is or wherever the trait comes from, it is universally consistent amongst all Nymphii that result from this pairing of Nymph + Race of Male, thus, any given member of a race that produces “Heat tolerant” Nymphii should produce a similar Nymph.

Most, if not all, variations of this inheritance will be the result of mixing of different kinds of magical essences. So a Nymph who is composed of 50% of one race and 50% of another may have completely unique traits as a result of this mixing, but all Nymphii that are within a range of 80-90% of one race will inherit identical traits.

2. Unlike the Asari from Mass Effect, there is no such thing as a “pure-blooded” Nymph, as they presumably cannot reproduce with each other, nor have they developed in isolation from other species, thus all Nymphii MUST be the result of Nymph + non-Nymph mating

The sole canon scholar writing on this subject does mention the lack of any other writers reporting a Nymph seeking out "him or her," at the very least suggesting that Nymphii may form relationships with female mortals, and we are not implying that this be ruled out as it may manifest through social behavior.

Simply, if they could reproduce with each other through conventional anatomical sexual intercourse (in whatever way that may occur), as opposed to a direct genetic exchange, it would make very little sense for Nymphii, as a mono-gendered species, to mate with males at all.

3. Given the centralized distribution of indigenous racial populations in Tamriel, distinct subtypes will exist based upon the region they live in and what race or species of males they have access to

for example, after mating with males from hammerfall for many generations eventually there will be few Nymphii in this area that are not essentially Redguard-Nymphii

the proposal elaborates on this distinction by declaring this a full subtype of Nymph, the Desert Nymph

comparatively, Nymphii that have many generations of Nymph-bosmer pairings become the Wood Nymph

given the typical "fey" description of both mer and Nymph, we suggest the possibility that some fey traits (pointed ears, dainty features) are actually mer inherited traits, not specific to the Nymph herself

In terms of appearance, the ratio proposed for this subtyping would be something like 95% Nymph, 5% subtype race, although some traits may be highly exaggerated (long pointy fae ears on a Nymph vs. pointed humanoid ears on the woodelf source)

It is likely that the more “mono-racial” subtype of Nymph will display some sort of mild to moderate preference for males of her dominant race, and a Wood Nymph will accordingly prefer Bosmer males over others. This is not to suggest she will ONLY be interested in Bosmer males, merely that she would view a Bosmer man as being more her “preferred type” than an Orsimer male would be.

Sidenote: it also seems reasonable to assume that there may be a distinct difference in dunmer-Nymphii (dark Nymph?) and the rarer chimer-Nymphii (elder Nymph?), although as we have described under the Night Nymph race details, it does not make much sense for a Nymph to directly inherit Azura’s curse in terms of appearance.

4. Additionally, in the transition between one major subtype and another, there will exist hybrid Nymphii

These hybrids represent the blending of two major racial sub-types through successive generations of mating with males of different races or species

The phenotypic ratio proposed here is then 95% Nymph, 2.5% subtype A, 2.5% subtype B, making both subtypes very subtle individually, and she may favor one over the other in appearance, or even have a completely unique appearance as the result of this hybridization.

Consider - in Skyrim, both Bretons and Nords have co-existed for a long time. Nymphii in this region will have established a medium between the Nordic Nymphii (for now, let's call her a tundra Nymph) and the Bretonic Nymphii (high rock is the only region with established in-game Nymph appearances so for now we will call her a "common" Nymph) the result will be what may be termed the "Sky Nymph."

other examples may be Cyrodillic/Dunmeric Nymphii in Morrowind (which we term the Night Nymph, rather than using the awkward sounding "Morrow" Nymph)

These hybrid Nymphii will essentially be indigenous to these multiple race regions, unlikely to exist elsewhere except as migrating individuals.

Sky Nymphii would thus not be commonly found outside Skyrim since each successive generation that is not a Nord or Breton pairing alters the evenly split balance

thus, they should only exist in regions that have maintained multiple population bases for hundreds of generations, long enough to produce precise 50/50 traits

A. so while skyrim has had both bretons and nords since before the first era and would have Nymphii hybrids B. The Summerset isles has only had any significant non-Altmer presence living there for a few hundred years, brief in the lifespan of a Mer, let alone a Nymph, and would likely not have hybrids. C. One must keep in mind that given the unlimited lifespan of the Nymph, and the tendency for solitary habitation (ie although they have a shared language, they don’t form Nymph societies or build Nymph cities), it is entirely possible to encounter an individual Nymph in a region that would not support her, but encounters should be limited to these unique individuals.

5. Finally, there should exist points of diffuse characteristics such that the Nymph resembles none specifically, or all of them blended together (the following contains the largest logical jump of this "lore", so pardon my suppositions)

These "blended" Nymphii are probably indigenous to metropolitan regions such as Cyrodiil that has many races/species living together

We are also suggesting the idea that due to the very similar appearance and behavior these Blended Nymphii would have to mortal races, it is therefore conceivable that some of these “Blended” Nymph girls may not know that they are a Nymph

These Nymphii ignorant of their own backgrounds may have been separated from child rearing mothers, but given the great lengths the Nymph species goes through to select a mate, it is highly unlikely that these mothers would ever abandon their offspring in normal situations.

Additionally, given the “supernatural” properties of the Nymph species, this ignorance seems unlikely unless the Nymph believes herself to be a member of a particularly long lived race and/or is still young enough that she would not be aware of her immortality. Put another way: although the Mer have far longer lifespans relative to Humans, they still go through visible stages of aging, whereas the Nymph does not, and once fully matured she will stay youthful in appearance indefinitely.

These unaware Nymphii would also require some way to explain the magical nature of their background. Possibly as divine favor, or Daedric Curse, or simply a belief that they are "special" or "different" in some way. The longer they live the more difficult this belief may be to maintain, so it seems reasonable to conclude that this state of being unaware of what they are will not exist perpetually.

To conclude, we are attempting to establish with a "lore-friendly" background the concept of types of Nymphii that are not heretofore known in elder scrolls canon as well as the possibility of both "secret" Nymphii living amongst mortals, and of women who are Nymphii but do not know it.

The extent of this mod's exploration of this topic is to introduce the framework and define the subtypes relevant to the characters present in the mod itself, not to produce a comprehensive list of everything related to the Nymph, this includes

the Wood Nymph (Bosmer-Nymph)

the Night Nymph (Imperial/Dunmer Nymph Hybrid)

the Desert Nymph (Redguard-Nymph)

the Beast Nymph (Beast Race Nymph)

and the Blended Nymph (the mixed or all-race Nymph)

***This, the exploration of the Elder Scrolls Nymph, was never meant to be a project of which I am the Sole Author, nor do I intend to be the Authority on all things Nymph, I am only interested in creating a starting point to inspire the modding community to explore the topic more fully using the groundwork that has been laid out.***

We will invite other members of the modding community to eventually take it upon themselves to flesh out other unexplored subtypes of Nymph so long as it makes sense within the argument presented here and the overall elder scrolls lore.

Truly, I hope you find this concept and the framework described here to be engaging enough that you might want to design your own Nymph Race, and I will encourage you to do so! This, to me, is the most important part of this project.

The discussion was fairly lengthy, but hopefully it seemed reasonable.

Ultimately what this boils down to is a way that lets you add Nymphii of all sorts to your game that still fits within the game.

If you're like me, you may have a hard time adding supposedly "lore-friendly" content to a cohesive world that takes an idea based in lore but then turns it into something that requires a Deific/"extreme magical" explanation (you are the chosen of Dibella or Mara or Sanguine or Molag Bal, ad naseum), excessive suspension of disbelief (it’s magic so it just happens), or simply makes no sense.

Thanks for reading!

#Skyrim #Skyrim Mod #Skyrim Race #Custom Race #Racemod #Skyrim Follower #Lore-Friendly #Balanced #Classic Elder Scrolls #Sexy Followers #Nymph Followers #nymph race #Nymph Girls of Skyrim

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jam-surveymirror-blog · 6 years

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Survey Results (mirror)

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to fill this out. There were 886 responses in all, much more than I expected.

A disclaimer: I'm pretty ignorant about statistics, so take my analysis with a grain of salt. This is all just armchair BS and I'm probably doing tons of stuff wrong. Any actual data scientists who might happen to read this, feel free to rip me a new one in the comments.

When I talk about correlations, that means statistically significant at the 0.01 level according to automatic calculations done in SPSS. I didn't bother to control for any variables except where explicitly stated.

For fellow stats-illiterate people: Occasionally I'll mention a number called "r," or the correlation coefficient. The farther from 0 and closer to 1 or -1 this number is, the more closely related two things are. For example, submissiveness is strongly correlated with how much you like to be tied up (r=.730).

OK, on to the results!

PART I: Basic Info

Basic demographic info, presented mostly without comment. Overall, not much really stands out in this section apart from a couple of things:

1. Lots of trans women; ~6% of respondents, which is huge compared to the <1% in the general population. Is there something about my stuff that appeals to trans women in particular? Or are trans women just kinkier than most people? Anyway, hi.

2. Disproportionately few black respondents; this is consistent with data showing that black people seem to shy away from weird niches in general.

Average 24.5, median 23. (The small handful of people who put implausibly high or low numbers weren't counted.)

A quick note here: When I break down responses to a question by gender, I'll only be looking at cis men, cis women, and trans women, just since the sample sizes for trans men and others are kinda small.

PART II: Kinks and Sexuality

This is the Kinsey scale. From here on, when I mention “Kinsey score,” I'm talking about results on this item.

66.6% of respondents identified as straight, but only 35.6% put 0 ("exclusively straight") here. Seems like most of you guys experience at least some same-sex attraction. Interesting!

Much more even spread here than I expected. For some reason, I always assumed you guys leaned mostly on the D side. Men are more dom-oriented than women, but even the men are pretty switchy:

Cis men: 3.57 Cis women: 1.86 Trans women: 1.66 Overall average: 3.31

Submissiveness correlates with Kinsey score among men (r=.356). Doesn't appear to for women, but it's kinda hard to tell since female respondents skew so heavily to the submissive side.

People unsure about their BDSM orientation scored themselves 3.31, exactly the same as the overall average. People who said they have no BDSM orientation scored themselves 3.84. Both groups are slightly more dom-ish than self-identified switches, who rate a 2.81.

Looking ahead to Part 3: Seems like subs are generally at least sorta open to dominating, while Ds are more rigid, rating submissive items harshly.

I ask mainly because so much bondage porn (my own included) is so conspicuously tame in terms of actual sex stuff. Why is that the case? I'm really not sure. If you guys have any theories, lay them on me.

For whatever my POV is worth, I don't consider myself asexual. I think my taste in porn is generally pretty mild, but I'm sexually active IRL, I like hardcore from time to time, and I've got a lot of old sketches and some random half-finished personal drawings that are pretty raunchy. So why doesn't my public-facing art reflect this?

For one, the bulk of my audience is on DA, which has a rule against depicting sex acts. Second, I've always assumed (perhaps wrongly) that too many of you guys just wouldn't like it.

"But Jam!" you say. "Most of us aren't into futa, and you post that all the time." Well, with the futa pics, I can just make a non-futa version and everyone's happy. A full-on blowjob is a lot harder to subtract than a dick bulge.

Anyhow, while it's unclear exactly how many people in the world are asexual, it does look like there's a lot of asexuals in this bunch. Maybe there's a link?

Asexuals didn't differ from other respondents on most items in Part 3. They did rate nudity and hardcore lower than average, though not by as much as you might think: 5.22 vs 6.90 and 4.91 vs 5.52, respectively.

Full-size image here: http://fav.me/d9plxzq

This was mostly just supposed to be a proxy for BDSM orientation, but it looks like a lot more people went for the dominant option here. Maybe people just like Hotaru more than Saya? 🤔

Average and median both 10, though numbers are all over the place. No difference between men and women.

This figure correlates inversely with interest in gags (r=-.223), heavy gags (r=-.163), and heavy bondage (r=-.133); in other words, the younger you were when you became interested in bondage, the more into gags and heavy bondage you probably are.

Average 3.04, median 3. I'd probably put myself down as a 2 for this one.

Correlates with Kinsey score (r=.245) and age (r=.124).

Difficulty getting turned on without kink correlates with Kinsey score (r=.126) and inversely with how much you like nudity (r=-.219). Also correlates weakly with a few of the items in part 3, though I guess it goes without saying that if you're kinkier, you're probably going to want kink more.

Full size image: https://sta.sh/0zntgtassf8

Average is 3.61. People like them big, just not as fuckhuge as I usually draw them.

Correlates with preferred waist-to-hip ratio (r=.503) and less strongly with interest in futa (r=.135).

The science doesn't lie: people really dig that 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio. 3 was by far the most popular choice, and pretty close to the average (3.22). Also interesting: Virtually no one picked option 1. Even lolicons want some curves, I guess.

Median is 1, average about 2. Women reported more partners than men, but not by a whole lot. Many people declined to answer this question.

Number of partners correlates with age (makes sense) as well as openness about kinks (also makes sense), though less strongly.

Lifestyle people rate every item in Part 3 higher than non-lifestyle people by around 1 point except nudity, which they rate the same. They also have slightly higher Kinsey scores (1.66).

Roughly matches up with people's stated preferences. There were somehow 341 responses to this despite only 260 people putting an orientation other than straight or gay. 🤔

I was unsure whether to include this question since this typology of trans women is kind of controversial. Figured it can't hurt too much to just ask and see what shakes out of the tree, though.

Like the previous question, this got significantly more responses than it should have. Lifehack: You can skip survey questions that don't apply to you!

Once we filter out people who put down a gender other than MTF, we're left with 42 responses to this question, with 22 picking the blue option and 20 picking the red. Trans women with an erotic component to their gender ID were more submissive (1.32 vs 2.15), had lower Kinsey scores (3.32 vs 4.30), and rated heavy bondage, heavy gags, lolicon, futa, crossdressers, DDLG and hardcore all significantly higher (around 1-2 points). The sample size here is pretty small, though, so IDK how much is safe to assume. Still, interesting.

PART 3: Hot or Not

You guys were asked to rate a series of items on a scale of 1 to 9. Most of these are things that I've drawn at least once, though I threw in a couple of others I was wondering about for other reasons.

The breakdown:

8.66 Women 8.31 Gags 7.66 Light bondage 7.60 Heavy bondage 7.10 Heavy gags 7.08 Dominating 6.90 Nudity 5.90 Being dominated 5.79 Being bound 5.78 Being gagged 5.74 Humiliation 5.51 Hardcore 4.86 Breathplay 4.65 Feet 4.30 Crossdressing 4.18 Crossdressers 4.06 Futa 3.42 DDLG 3.32 Men 3.17 Lolicon

Foot fetish seems to be linked to sex, with cis women rating it somewhat lower than men and trans women. There were a few cis women who rated it a 9, though, FWIW. Foot fetish is also weakly correlated with lolicon.

I put in lolicon for one reason: Of the people I've met who've professed an interest in it, all except one were bi gals. Because of that, I've always sorta wondered if maybe bi women and lesbians make up a disproportionate slice of the pie.

Cis men: 3.22 Cis women: 2.43 Trans women: 3.05

Hmm... Looks like men are more into it than women, if anything. Guess my friends are just weird.

Dickgirls: you either love 'em or hate 'em. (But mostly you hate them.)

Futa correlates with Kinsey score (r=.419). It makes sense that bi people would be more open to it, but the correlation is stronger than I expected, especially since I’ve heard T-porn is supposedly super popular with straight men. If the results of this survey are anything to go by, it's actually not very popular with straight guys at all and is really more a thing for bisexuals. It's not just that straight-ish people who like futa are simply more willing to ID as bi, either; interest in futa correlates with Kinsey score even among bi folks (r=.174).

Another point against the "straight guys love dickgirls" thing: Trans women like futa more than men do even when controlling for orientation. Cis women also rate it more positively (or at least less negatively) than men.

12.6% of those who put a full 9 for futa reported a Kinsey score of 0 ("exclusively straight"). Is futa gay? IDK. I'm agnostic on this stupid question. Take it to Internet Court, I guess.

Futa lovers like bigger tits than average (4.13 vs 3.62).

Correlates strongly with Kinsey score among men (r=.682). Still, a full 21%(!!) of men who put a 9 for this one ID as straight. No judgment, but I find that really interesting.

Crossdressers and futa are one of the more strongly correlated pairs in the dataset (r=.592). If you like one, you probably like the other. Makes sense, I guess, but I didn't expect the correlation to be quite so strong.

DDLG isn't my cuppa tea at all, but I included it because a lot of people liking and reblogging my stuff on Tumblr seemed to be into it. I was curious whether there's some connection that I wasn't seeing, or if it's just a BDSM Tumblr thing. Seems like the latter; Tumblr refs score this one 4.35, while the overall average is 3.27.

PART 4: Misc.

My art often features characters from obscure, nerdy video games and anime. How many people here share my interest in that stuff, and how many are just here for the kink? That's what I was trying to get a feel for with this question.

Otaku rated feet and lolicon higher than non-otaku (5.49 vs 4.26 and 3.93 vs 2.87, respectively).

I've always had a secret hunch that dudes who always play female characters are perverts.

Looks like I'm not wrong: Guys who play as girls rate nearly everything in part 3 higher than average, especially crossdressing (5.03 vs 3.98).

HYPOTHESIS: CONFIRMED.

There's some research testing for links between handedness and various gender and sexuality-related things, including fetishes. I don't really see anything here, though. Shrug.

A lot of people puzzled by this one. The 2D:4D ratio is used by scientists to measure prenatal androgen exposure and seems to be linked with all kinds of weird stuff.

Unfortunately, the survey results didn’t turn up much other than very weak inverse correlation with liking feet (r=-.089) -- in other words, people reporting feminine ratios like feet slightly less. It's consistent with the apparent link between foot fetish and male sex I mentioned earlier, but like I said, hella small. I'm guessing the results for this question are mostly too crude to be useful since I basically just asked you guys to eyeball it without any precise standard for measuring.

This was to help ensure you were reading instructions and answering questions sincerely. If you picked anything other than the third option, all of your answers were excluded from analysis. I did still read your comments at the end, though, so thanks to those of you who said nice things.

The group leans leftish on the whole, though a big chunk are apolitical. Lefty people are generally gayer and more sub-oriented; Conservatives are generally straighter and more dom-oriented.

Kinda interesting: The apolitical group had the highest score for lolicon by a fair margin (3.63), while partisans on both sides rated it the lowest (far left 2.30, conservative 2.86). What's the connection there?

Virtually no far right respondents. I'm okay with that, though I wonder what those guys do jack off to. Marble busts?

There's some research showing higher rates of fetishism in people with autism, so I was curious to see what shakes out of the tree here. 16.4%! That's freaking huge! Way higher rate than the general population.

So what else does the data show? Actually, if you compare autistic respondents to non-autistic respondents, they come out looking pretty much the same. The only thing I see is that both autistic people and relatives of autistic people were slightly more into crossdressing:

Autistic respondents: 4.84 Autistic family members: 4.54 No autism: 4.18

Other than that, though, nothing seems to stand out. Hmm.

I have an autistic person in my immediate family, so the topic of autism in general is something I'm extra curious about and has a lot of personal significance to me. If you're ever looking for a relevant org to give to, I recommend OAR.

The DA group is less into futa, breathplay, and nudity than the rest. The Twitter group has a huge proportion of trans women (16.7%). Tumblr people are more into DDLG and hardcore. Contrary to what I expected, Patreon people had the same spread of incomes as everyone else.

Any other comments?

At the end of the survey, I put a long answer section for anything else people might want to say. Many more people wrote something here than I expected, so thanks to those of you who did. On the whole, the comments were extremely kind. Some were very personal and a few even included contact info, so I won't post them.

In case anyone wants to know more about me:

I'm a 26yo white male from NY. I consider myself bi. I'm a switch. I've had two partners, both women, one of whom I've been in a monogamous relationship with for most of my adult life. There's a few vids of her here. She's pretty cute, no? Here's her survey response, if you wanna know.

We're not really BDSM lifestyle people (though if you are, more power to you). Outside the bedroom we're pretty boring. We like movies. We eat fried chicken. We have a cat. All our friends know I draw some kind of weird spank material for money, but the details are mostly kept secret.

Regardless, I feel lucky to have this be such a significant part of my life. Maybe this sounds smarmy coming from the guy who just draws weird big titty anime bondage porn, but I really can't thank you guys enough for all your kindness and enthusiasm. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be able to do what I do and share this side of me with so many awesome people. Thanks guys! ✌️

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ketoconnect · 3 years

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Keto Scones

Strawberry Keto Scones

Scones are one of the best keto breakfast options because Keto Scones taste just as good as the high carb alternative. The fact that they are a dense pastry makes them well suited to being made with keto friendly flours and ingredients. Throw in some strawberries and a few simple techniques and you will come out with the perfect recipe for a lazy Sunday at home!

What is a Scone?

A scone is a baked good usually made of wheat or another type of grain and flavored with sugar and spices. This was a tasty way to eat wheat and oats, which were staples of European diets in the early 1500’s. Fast forward 500 years and scones have been completely transformed, often using berries, chocolate chips and a variety of other additions to make them a sweet compliment to any breakfast or lunch. The signature quality of a good scone is that it should be dense and satisfying. It is not like other breakfast pastries in that they are fluffy, and soft. This is perfect because baked goods made with almond flour tend to be on the denser side.

Are Scones Keto Friendly?

Scones are definitely not keto friendly. They traditionally use refined flour, refined sugar and a host of other ingredients you’re probably trying to avoid. This recipe uses almond flour and keto friendly sweeteners to turn scones into a perfect breakfast for a low carb diet. This recipe is gluten free, sugar free, and is very easy to make. Coming in at just 5g of net carbs per scone it is a great alternative to your typical 60+ grams of carb scone.

Most recipes can be made keto friendly through substituting flour for low carb keto flours such as almond flour and coconut flour. For the sugar we use a combination of low carb sweeteners to replace the sweetness.

How to Make Low Carb Keto Scones

If you want to make keto scones just follow the steps below. This is one of the easier recipes you’ll see and is great for a newcomer to keto baking that isn’t used to working with almond flour.

Mix the Dry Ingredients

For the best result it is a good idea to separate the wet and dry ingredients before combining them to form the final dough. The dry ingredients in this case are almond flour, coconut flour, erythritol (a low carb sugar alternative), baking powder and salt. Make sure you get rid of any clumps in your dry ingredients by mixing them with a whisk or fork.

Mix the Wet Ingredients

Next we will mix together the melted coconut oil, heavy cream, vanilla extract, stevia and 1 large egg. Be sure that the mixture is not too warm when you add the egg or you run the risk of the egg cooking before it is mixed in. You may notice that the wet ingredients are very small in comparison to the dry ingredients. This is because the dough for keto scones is very firm and loosely held together. It is not a wet batter and is more of the consistency of a pasta dough.

Combine Wet and Dry

Now comes the fun part. Add the wet to the dry and begin mixing together. I like to use a firm spatula for this step. The dough will be very dry and have a sandy consistency. It WILL NOT combine easily and you will need to use some force when you form the scones to get the dough to come together. This is necessary to get that signature scone texture. If you are struggling with this step watch the video for an example of what the texture of the dough should be before you form it into keto scones.

Add in Berries

We’re using strawberries for this recipe but any berry will work great with this recipe. We’ve made this exact recipe with blueberries, and raspberries and they both came out great. You could also add in some nuts, like pecans or walnuts, as well as some low carb keto chocolate chips. Whichever route you decide to go they will come out great. Once you add in your berries lightly mix them into the dough until they are evenly distributed.

Form the Keto Scones

Once you’ve got your completed mixture it is time to form the keto scones. The easiest way to do this is first to form the dough into a tightly packed ball using your hands. The dough should not be every sticky and should be easy to shape with your hands. Once you have a ball place the dough into your cooking vessel. Either a skillet or a baking sheet will do. Flatten your ball of dough into a disk that is about 1 inch thick.

Next you will cut the dough into 8 equal sized triangles and separate them from one another slightly. Separating the keto scones from one another will allow for the entire exterior of each scone to brown and harden.

Bake and Top With Glaze

The keto scones will bake at 350 degrees for about 20-25 minutes depending on your oven. The easiest way to know they are done is once the scones become browned slightly on the outside and they are firm to the tough. Despite the baking powder in this keto scones recipe, they do not rise very much. Allow the keto scones to cool on a baking rack for 20 minutes before topping with the homemade glaze.

To make the glaze you will just need two ingredients – erythritol and heavy cream. Erythritol is a sweetener we commonly use in our keto recipes. You can learn more about what your best options are when it comes to keto sweeteners by reading our comprehensive keto sweetener guide. To the erythritol we just add a splash of heavy cream and whisk together. Add more or less heavy cream depending on how thick you want the glaze to be. Reference the recipe video for a visual guide of what to look for.

If you want an even thinner glaze you can use almond milk or coconut milk in place of the cream.

If you decide to skip the glaze you may want to add additional sweetener to the scone recipe. This recipe is designed to include the glaze to achieve the correct level of sweetness so the keto scones themselves may not be sweet enough for your liking without the addition of the glaze.

Making Scones With Almond Flour

When it comes to keto baking you usually have to decide between coconut flour and almond flour for your breads and pastries and making keto scones is no different. With scones the decision is quite easy. We use a 9 to 1 ratio of almond flour to coconut flour in this recipe in order to achieve the traditional texture and crumble of a scone. This is one of those recipe that cannot be made with only coconut flour because the texture will be off. Stick to our almond flour ratio and you’ll come out with a perfectly tasty scone recipe.

Can I Only Use Almond Flour?

Yes you can, but it isn’t recommended. Almond flour scones are good but that little bit of coconut flour is what provides the softness and slight crumble. If you want to go with a fully almond flour scones recipe then you should add about 3/4 cup of additional almond flour and remove the 1/4 cup of coconut flour. Scones made with almond flour are very good but the tiny bit of coconut flour really takes them to the next level.

Can I Make Nut Free Scones?

You probably could make a recipe using only coconut flour but it would be very difficult and would definitely not be the same as this almond flour version. Almond flour is very important to this recipe and should not be omitted. If you do want to avoid nuts in your baked goods you could try some of the other keto breakfast recipes on our site. While this recipe is not nut free it is sugar free and gluten free.

Can I Make Dairy Free Scones?

Yes you can! The dairy in the recipe cones in the form of cream in both the dough and the glaze. To make scones that are dairy free you can simply use water, almond milk, or coconut milk in place of the cream in both instances. One thing to remember is that you will likely need a bit less of your substitute liquid because it will be thinner than cream is.

Tips for Making Low Carb Keto Scones

Here is a few tips to keep in mind to make sure your low carb scones come out as good as ours do.

# Use finely ground almond flour. In just about every low carb recipe you’re better off using flours that are finely ground. With almond flour you will often see “almond meal”, “almond flour”, and “finely ground almond flour”. We always choose the most finely ground version we can.

# Grease your knife before cutting the scones. Using coconut oil to coat the knife prior to cutting the scones will ensure they do not stick to the knife. This makes for an easier cutting process and guarantees your scones will come out nice and pretty.

# Allow the scones to fully cool before adding the glaze. If the scones are still warm when you add the glaze it will become thin and run off of the scones. If you want the scones to hold onto the glaze let them fully cool and a cooling rack for 20-30 minutes prior to adding the glaze.

More From Our Keto Bakery

If low carb scones aren’t your thing you should take a look at all of the other recipes we have to offer on our site. We have a long list of baked goods that would be perfect for a family gathering or a lazy weekend brunch before a big day of watching football. Here’s some of our personal favorites.

Diner Style Keto Pancakes – The best keto pancake recipe on the internet. This will take you back to your childhood days of enjoying pancakes at the local diner.

Keto Egg Loaf – This one might sound a little crazy but it is a super easy recipe that only requires 3 ingredients and tastes exactly like French toast! Are you a waffle, pancake or French toast person? I’m pancakes all day.

The Best Keto Bread – Bread is the recipe everyone wants to recreate for a keto diet and we’ve done it for you. This recipe is the most popular on our site.

Keto Cinnamon Rolls – No recipe has taken us longer to perfect than this keto cinnamon roll recipe. There is nothing that brings me back to my childhood like a tray of freshly baked cinnamon rolls.

If you can’t find a keto recipe you’re looking for just leave us a comment below and we will try our best to come up with the recipe you’re looking for.

Storing Strawberry Scones

With most keto low carb recipes storing them can be a bit of a challenge. You can’t just keep these on the counter at room temperature like you can with traditional pastries. Scones made for a low carb diet will require refrigeration in order for them to stay good for up to a week. If you want them to last longer you can stick them in the freezer where they will last for up to a month.

The nice thing about scones is they taste just as good two weeks later as they did on the day you made them. I’ll pull one out of the freezer and microwave it for 60 seconds, or place it in the oven for about 10 minutes and enjoy it with a cup of coffee in the morning!

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#Keto Scones #Strawberry Scones #Strawberry Keto Scones #Keto Strawberry Scones #Low Carb Keto Scones #Easy Keto Scones Recipe #How To Make Keto Scones

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sdesignermagazine · 4 years

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Level Up Your CSS Skills with these 20 Pro CSS Tips

Front-end development is quickly becoming more and more focused on efficiency – faster loading and rendering through selector choice and minimizing code. Pre-processors like Less and SCSS go a long way in doing some of the work for us, but there are plenty of ways to write minimal, quick CSS the native way. This guide covers 20 Pro CSS Tips to help you cut down on duplicate rules and overrides, standardize the flow of styling across your layouts and will help you create a personal starting framework that is not only efficient, but solves many common problems.

1 – Use a CSS Reset

CSS reset libraries like normalize.css have been around for years, providing a clean slate for your site’s styles that help ensure better consistency across browsers. Most projects don’t really need all of the rules these libraries include, and can get by with one simple rule to remove all the margins and paddings applied to most elements in your layout by the browser’s default box-model:

* { box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0; padding: 0; }

Using the box-sizing declaration is optional – if you follow the Inherit box-sizing tip below, you can skip it.

2 – Inherit box-sizing

Let box-sizing be inherited from html:

html { box-sizing: border-box; } *, *:before, *:after { box-sizing: inherit; }

This makes it easier to change box-sizing when code is introduced through 3rd party plugins or applications that use different behavior.

3 – Get Rid of Margin Hacks With Flexbox

How many times have you tried designing a grid, such as a portfolio or image gallery, where you used floats and then had to clear them or reset margins to get the columns to break into the number of rows you want? Get rid of nth-, first-, and last-child hacks by using the space-between property value in flexbox:

.flex-container { display: flex; justify-content: space-between; } .flex-container .item { flex-basis: 23%; }

4 – Use :not() to Style Borders on Lists

A very common practice in web design has been to use :last-child or :nth-child selectors to undo a style previously declared on the parent selector. Think of a navigation menu that uses borders to create a separator between each link, and the second rule added to take that border off the end:

.nav li { border-right: 1px solid #666; } .nav li:last-child { border-right: none; }

This is quite messy as it not only forces the browser to render things one way, then undo it for a specific selector. Resetting styles this way is sometimes unavoidable, but for the most part, you can use the :not() pseudo-class to only apply a style to the elements you want in one single statement:

.nav li:not(:last-child) { border-right: 1px solid #666; }

This says, put a border on all the .nav list items except the last one. Simple!

Sure, you can also use .nav li + li or even .nav li:first-child ~ li, but :not() will always be more semantic and easy to understand.

5 – Add line-height to body

The one thing that leads to inefficient stylesheets is repeating declarations over and over again. The better you get at planning your project and combining rules, the more fluid your CSS will be. One way to do this is understanding the cascade and how the styles you write for general selectors can be inherited elsewhere. Line height is one property you can set for your entire project, not only to minimize lines of code but to enforce a standard look to your site’s typography.

Rather than add line-height to each <p>, <h*> and so on, add it to body:

body { line-height: 1.5; }

Note we don’t declare a unit here – we just tell it to make the line height one and a half times more than the font size for the rendered text.

6 – Vertically-Center Anything

Setting a global rule to vertically center your layout is a great way to set a foundation for elegantly set content layouts where you’re not ready to use CSS Grid.

html, body { height: 100%; margin: 0; } body { -webkit-align-items: center; -ms-flex-align: center; align-items: center; display: -webkit-flex; display: flex; }

7 – Use SVG for Icons

SVG scales well for all resolution types and is supported in all browsers. So ditch your .png, .jpg, or .gif-jif-whatev files. Even FontAwesome now offers SVG Icon Fonts in FontAwesome 5. Setting SVG works just like any other image type:

.logo { background: url("logo.svg"); }

Accessibility tip:If you use SVGs for interactable elements such as buttons, and the SVG fails to load, a rule like this one will help maintain accessibility (make sure it has the appropriate aria attributes set in the HTML):

.no-svg .icon-only:after { content: attr(aria-label); }

8 – Use the “Owl” Selector

Using the universal selector (*) with the adjacent sibling selector (+) provides a powerful CSS capability that allows us to set rules for all elements in the flow of the document that specifically follow other elements:

* + * { margin-top: 1.5rem; }

This is another great trick that can help you create more uniform type and spacing. In the example above, all elements that follow other elements, like an H4 that follows an H3, or a paragraph following another paragraph, will each have at least 1.5rems of space (equal to about 30px.)

9 – Consistent Vertical Rhythm

Consistent vertical rhythm provides a visual aesthetic that makes content far more readable. Where the owl selector may be too general, use a universal selector (*) within an element to create a consistent vertical rhythm for specific sections of your layout:

.intro > * { margin-bottom: 1.25rem; }

10 – Use box-decoration-break For Prettier Wrapped Text

Say you want to apply uniform spacing, margins, highlights or background colors to long lines of text that wrap to more than one line, but don’t want the whole paragraph or heading to look like one large block. The box-decoration-break property allows you to apply styles to just the text while keeping padding and margins intact. This is particularly useful if you want to apply highlights on hover, or style sub-text in a slider to have a highlighted look:

.p { display: inline-block; box-decoration-break: clone; -o-box-decoration-break: clone; -webkit-box-decoration-break: clone; }

The inline-block declaration allows the colors, backgrounds, margins and padding to be applied to each line of text rather than the entire element, and the clone declaration makes sure those styles are applied consistently to each line equally.

11 – Equal-Width Table Cells

Tables can be a pain to work with so try using table-layout: fixed to keep cells at equal width:

.calendar { table-layout: fixed; }

12 – Force Empty Links to Show with Attribute Selectors

This is especially useful for links that are inserted via a CMS, which don’t usually have a class attribute and helps you style them specifically without generically affecting the cascade. For example, the <a> element has no text value but the href attribute has a link:

a[href^="http"]:empty::before { content: attr(href); }

13 – Style “Default” Links

Speaking of link styling, you can find a generic a style in just about every stylesheet. This forces you to write additional overrides and style rules for any links in a child element, and when working with a CMS like WordPress can lead to problems with your king link style trumping a button text color, for example. Try this less-intrusive way to add a style for “default” links:

a[href]:not([class]) { color: #999; text-decoration: none; transition: all ease-in-out .3s; }

Now the style will only apply itself to links that otherwise have no other style rule.

14 – Intrinsic Ratio Boxes

To create a box with an intrinsic ratio, all you need to do is apply top or bottom padding to a div:

.container { height: 0; padding-bottom: 20%; position: relative; } .container div { border: 2px dashed #ddd; height: 100%; left: 0; position: absolute; top: 0; width: 100%; }

Using 20% for padding makes the height of the box equal to 20% of its width. No matter the width of the viewport, the child div will keep its aspect ratio (100% / 20% = 5:1).

15 – Style Broken Images

This tip is less about code reduction and more about refining the detail of your designs. Broken images happen for a number of reasons, and are either unsightly or lead to confusion (just an empty element). Create more aesthetically-pleasing with this little bit of CSS:

img { display: block; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-weight: 300; height: auto; line-height: 2; position: relative; text-align: center; width: 100%; } img:before { content: "We're sorry, the image below is missing :("; display: block; margin-bottom: 10px; } img:after { content: "(url: " attr(src) ")"; display: block; font-size: 12px; }

16 – Use rem for Global Sizing; Use em for Local Sizing

After setting the base font size at the root, for example html{font-size: 15px;}, you can set font-size for containing elements to rem:

article { font-size: 1.25rem; } aside { font-size: .9rem; }

Then set the font size for textual elements to em:

h2 { font-size: 2em; } p { font-size: 1em; }

Now each containing element becomes compartmentalized and easier to style, more maintainable, and flexible.

17 – Hide Autoplay Videos That Aren’t Muted

This is a great trick for a custom user stylesheet when working with content you can’t easily control from the source. This trick will help you avoid annoying your visitors with sound from an auto-playing video when the page is loaded, and again features the wonderful :not() pseudo-selector:

video[autoplay]:not([muted]) { display: none; }

18 – Use :root for Flexible Type

The font size in a responsive layout should be able to adjust to the viewport automatically, saving you the work of writing media-queries just to deal with font sizing. You can calculate the font size based on the viewport height and width using :root: and viewport units:

:root { font-size: calc(1vw + 1vh + .5vmin); }

Now you can utilize the root em unit based on the value calculated by :root:

body { font: 1rem/1.6 sans-serif; }

19 – Set font-size on Form Elements for a Better Mobile Experience

To avoid mobile browsers (iOS Safari, etc.) from zooming in on HTML form elements when a <select> drop-down is tapped, add font-size to the input styles:

input[type="text"], input[type="number"], select, textarea { font-size: 16px; }

20 – Use CSS Variables!

Last but not least, the most powerful CSS level-up comes from CSS variables, which allow you to declare a set of common property values that can be reused via a keyword anywhere in the stylesheet. Your brand may have a set of colors to be used across the project to keep things consistent. Repeating these color values over and over again in your CSS is not only a chore, but also error prone. If a color needs to be changed at some point, your forced to find-and-replace, which is not reliable or fast, and when building products for end-users, variables make customization that much easier. For example:

:root { --main-color: #06c; --accent-color: #999; } h1, h2, h3 { color: var(--main-color); } a[href]:not([class]), p, footer span{ color: var(--accent-color); }

#webdesign #tips & tricks

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condensed-theorem-shop · 7 years

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Here, let me take a break from ranting about cults to talk about something nice and uncontroversial (ha): homeschooling.

And by “talk about homeschooling,” I mean “copy/paste a comment from Ozy’s blog, because it got sufficiently long to be maybe worth sharing on my own.”

I was homeschooled much like this! And so have Many Thoughts. Apologies for the absurdly long comment.

(Well, my parents would never describe themselves as “unschoolers” in a million years — they’d say “classical/eclectic” if asked — but “classic homeschoolers who pay serious attention to the child’s interests” and “unschoolers who pay serious attention to the three R’s” probably converge at some point.)

I had a very very positive experience with homeschooling overall (and am happy to expound on it at length; my parents are very Into educational theory, and included me in the discussions as I got older).

(Braggy data on success thereof, which I blush to include, but: I ended up graduating at 16, attending a college in the top 20 in my field, and recently getting accepted to a good grad school with tuition waiver, TA position, and fellowship. On the non-math side, I double-majored in honors liberal arts, and was nationally competitive in fencing in high school. My 13-year-old sister is auditing her first college class (discrete math), regularly runs local 5- and 10Ks and places top in her age group, and wants to be a surgeon. The 10-year-old is on Suzuki book 3 for cello, and one of the top students in the local string project. All of us were reading at two, reading chapter books at three, and won various impressive things in lots of math competitions as well as the private-school-equivalent-of-UIL.)

So from that experience, some thoughts:

(1) The sleep thing is so so so true. Easily the #1 thing my non-homeschooled friends were jealous of. (#2 was not having to take the state’s standardized tests.) Possibly this is outdated science, but my understanding is that teenagers are actually just biologically wired to go to bed later and sleep in later than adults.

(2) Exercise, yes! Homeschooling and exercise and free-range kids all fit very nicely together. I did lots of biking and swimming and hiking and roller-blading and just running about wildly; it definitely contributed that by the time I was in double digits I was allowed to ride my bike anywhere within about a ten-block radius (the boundaries were defined by the nearest streets busy enough to be dangerous), so I got lots of exercise just getting around.

(3) Something of a follow-up on that last: if your kids are going to be running around unsupervised outdoors during school hours, you should probably make sure you’re clear on the local homeschooling laws, and then coach them on how to talk to a policeman. My parents did that for me, which was good, because it did in fact happen a few times that a policeman stopped me and asked some very pointed questions about whether I was playing hooky.

My instructions were: be polite; say “yes, officer, no, officer”; explain that I was homeschooled, and it was my recess [we didn’t have anything that formal, but easier to say that than explain your entire homeschooling philosophy]; if they insisted on taking me to the station, comply and then ask for my parents until they were provided.

The last stage of that never in fact came into play; the policemen always went “oh, okay. My sister homeschools! Do you like it?” and let me go (once with instructions to go get a better lock for my bike).

(4) I absolutely approve of homeschooling as “hey, let’s test out our kooky educational theories!” That’s exactly what my parents did. (My dad’s pet theory is that algebra should be introduced alongside arithmetic, and slopes alongside fractions. All three of us turned out super-math-y. Just saying…)

(5) One of the best things about homeschooling is a 1:1 (or close to it, if you have multiple kids) student:teacher ratio. Take full advantage of this.

(6) Yes, the math thing! A depressing number of homeschooled kids end up with poor math skills. It doesn’t help that it’s usually the mom homeschooling, and women seem to have even more of a tendency to go “oh, I can’t do math, it’s scary” than men. (Not claiming that women are inherently worse at math or anything; this seems to be pretty clearly a response to cultural pressure.)

Hiring grad students is a good idea; they’re interested in the subject, have some teaching experience, are usually lonely for their own families/younger siblings, and will work for dirt cheap. My family did a lot of that for me.

Beware of Khan Academy and various other “teach your kid math for you” services; these tend to prey on this phenomenon. Parents will pay ridiculous amounts of money for canned math curricula, because they’re so nervous about their own abilities; and while I know a lot of public-schooled people who used Khan Academy on their own after school and liked it, it really doesn’t substitute for an actual math teacher, especially for kids who aren’t inherently super-math-gifted. If you want a math curriculum, consider looking into Art of Problem Solving.

(7) A common unschooling failure method is: the kid spends twelve hours a day playing minecraft, the parent decides this is Probably Educational He’s Learning About Architecture Or Something, at eighteen he still can’t read or multiply. (My parents tend to refer to this as “nonschooling.”)

Making the three R’s less optional will probably help with that. Also, it seems like there’s something to be said for helping kids do things that they first-level don’t want to do but second-level do want to do. Plenty of adults use things like leechblock, or accountability to a friend, to serve the same function; a kid can’t reasonably be expected to have mastered using those tools, so a parent reminding them to turn off the computer and go work on their exhaustively detailed pyramid replica they love seems like a good thing.

C. S. Lewis actually brings something like this up in the Screwtape Letters (as part of an analogy for spiritual growth, but whatever). He points out that reading children’s versions of Greek myths is fun, and learning the first handful of Greek words is fun; and that being able to read Hesiod in the original is also fun; but in between, there’s a lot of drudgery with memorizing paradigms and struggling through translations. Even a kid who’s really passionate about Greek may need to be nagged a bit on a day-to-day basis to go review their verb tenses; it seems hard on a twelve-year-old to require them to have the intrinsic motivation to do that without any authority figure nudging them.

In my family, what this looked like on the day-to-day level was: my parents would tell me things like “no, go do your translations before you play” or “don’t forget you need to spend 30 minutes working on chemistry at some point this evening.” (Not very unschool-y, I admit.) But they’d be flexible about it, if I’d gotten really into researching the mathematics of swarming behavior or something.

And if some subject was consistently a cause of misery for me — not just “ugh, organic compounds, whyyy” but genuine “I hate this, it’s boring, I don’t want to do it,” every time over a period of days or weeks — they’d discuss with me whether I genuinely wanted to quit the subject. (It was really really clear that this was actually an option, and I wouldn’t be in trouble for choosing it or anything, which was crucial.)

I nearly always, given some space to think about it, decided that I wanted to keep working on the subject. Sometimes we’d decide to put it on the back burner for a while and come back to it next semester, or to skip to a different part of the subject and come back to that one another time, or try a different textbook, or find a tutor. Occasionally I did decide I was done with the subject, and they respected that.

I think this worked out really well. The only two subjects I can think of that I decided to totally quit were piano and Latin, and in retrospect both were absolutely the right call. Piano I quit after a year, and I recall absolutely none of it; I’m profoundly unmusical and was a disaster at it and hated it, and don’t wish in the least that I’d kept trying. Latin I quit after eight years and an audited university class; my parents and I had a serious discussion, and agreed that while I was glad to have studied Latin I wasn’t interested in pursuing it at a higher level, and that “took a class on the Aeneid in Latin” would be a good milestone for having mastered it to a casual-reading-of-Latin-texts level, and so I did that and then quit. I’m a little rusty, now, but given a dictionary and grammar can still read Latin texts fairly comfortably.

(8) I think you’re overestimating the difficulty of learning a foreign language. I had a friend growing up who was German/English bilingual, as was his mother; my mom tutored him in literature in exchange for his mother spending an hour or so a week talking with me in German. Afterwards my friend and I would hang out, and were encouraged to talk in German.

In addition, I did Rosetta Stone (pricey but effective, immersion-based) and later the Foreign Service Insitute’s course (free online if you can find it, or cheap to buy; immersion-based; meant for diplomats who are told ‘okay, you’re going to Germany in a month, be ready.’) (I also did another online course at one point, but it wasn’t very good.)

By the time I graduated high school, I was able to (with reference to a dictionary) read genuine literature in German; Goethe and Rilke were my favorites. My accent was apparently very good; I was asked more than once if my parents were native speakers (e.g. by the instructor in the not-so-good online course). I got a 4 on the German language AP test, which exempted me from all foreign language requirements in college (which I’m very grateful for; college language classes are super-intensive).

And — in some sense, the most important — when I spent a semester abroad, I was comfortably able to get around Vienna for a week or so speaking to people in German. (It helped in Hungary, too; Hungarian is hard and I learned very little, but nearly everyone spoke either English or German.)

I think key elements in that were: I started early (I was seven when I met my friend); I spent a good amount of time with a native speaker; and everything I did was immersion-based. The not-so-good course I took wasn’t mostly immersion-based, and I actually found that very frustrating, because I had to keep switching languages in my head; eventually I convinced the teacher to just talk to me in German all the time, which everyone else found very impressive but made it much easier for me.

(9) What you’ve said about the social issues all sounds right. I think the value of just escaping the social pressures of middle school isn’t to be underestimated; I know a surprising number of people whose parents homeschooled them /just for middle school/.

I got to spend my early teens dressing however I felt like (frequently ridiculously), wearing no makeup, hanging out with boys as friends, and not being at all self-conscious about any of it. My friends in public school were constantly worried about their appearance and their weight — and I don’t mean this as “I was a better person than them” or anything like that, I mean that other girls made nasty remarks to them constantly, and I escaped that. I’m very glad to see my sisters getting the same benefit.

(10) Also: bullying. Or, rather, not. The vast majority of my friends who were in public school were bullied, at least at some point; many of them still deal with ongoing trauma from that.

I encountered bullies — twice, total. The first time was in elementary school, in a homeschool group, and my mom promptly picked up on it and got the bully kicked out — she was able to both notice and do something about it, neither of which parents of kids in school can usually do. The second time was in middle school, in my fencing club; I took it to the instructor promptly, because I had spent my whole life with authority figures who listened to me and trusted me and acted productively on that. She had a very stern talk with the much older teenager in question, and he left me alone from then on.

Honestly, I’m pretty sure the bullying issue alone justifies homeschooling.

#homeschool alumna #homeschooling #amateur opinions about child rearing #bullying cw #school cw #mine #long

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bellmoregroup-blog · 7 years

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3 ways to invest like Warren Buffett

A cottage industry of asset managers, financial advisors and investment can give you their takes on how to be just like Warren Buffett.

You can skip the circus of wannabes and hear from the Oracle of Omaha directly in his annual letter to Berkshire Hathaway a shareholder, which was published Saturday.

In his most recent letter, Buffett praised the virtues of index funds, railed against the steep fees hedge fund managers charge and said "investors who avoid high and unnecessary costs and simply sit for an extended period with a collection of large, conservatively-financed American businesses will almost certainly do well."

You don't have to be a stock-picking whiz to benefit from his success. Buffett has already detailed three ways to emulate him in your retirement portfolio.

The two-fund portfolio

Buffett outlined an investing strategy for ordinary investors in his 2013 annual shareholder letter:

My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard's.) I believe the trust's long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained by most investors – whether pension funds, institutions or individuals – who employ high-fee managers.

You can buy U.S. Treasurys directly or invest in a low-cost government bond fund. (Vanguard's short-term government bond index fund charges 0.16 percent annually with a $3,000 minimum investment, or 0.07 percent for the exchange-traded fund version.)

Vanguard offers several S&P funds: a traditional mutual fund that charges 0.16 percent annually with a $3,000 minimum investment or one with a $10,000 minimum and a 0.05 percent annual fee.

You can also buy a Vanguard 500 ETF that has an expense ratio of 0.05 percent. If you want a rock-bottom price, iShares Core S&P 500 ETF charges 0.04 percent. With ETFs, and unlike with mutual funds, you may have to pay commissions when you trade them.

"Warren Buffett's investment strategy is a good one for investors and signals that he doesn't believe that most people, including professionals, can beat the market long-term, so just be the market and buy low-cost index funds," said Stephanie Genkin, a certified financial planner in Brooklyn.

Buffett put his money where his mouth is when it comes to indexing. He bet $1 million for charity that the Vanguard 500 Index Fund Admiral Shares would beat a basket of five hedge funds selected by Protégé Partners, a New York City asset management firm over 10 years starting in 2008.

The index fund has tripled the performance of the combined returns of five unnamed hedge funds as of the end of 2015. A likely Buffett victory will benefit Girls Inc. of Omaha while Protégé is playing for Ark, an international youth education charity based in the U.K.

Berkshire Hathaway stock

You can share in gains of one of the world's greatest capital allocators by owning stock in Berkshire Hathaway directly.

Buffett's holding company has beaten the total return of the S&P 500 over the past 10 years with an annualized return of 9.1 percent, compared to 7.3 percent for the index.

Berkshire stock has two share classes. The primary difference between the share classes is the price. Class A stock recently cost more than $255,000 per share while Class B is 1/1,500 of that sum, recently at $170 per share.

You can convert Class A stock into Baby Berkshire shares, but not the other way around. Class B shares, launched in 1996, also have slightly less voting rights.

Beyond the lower price, the big advantage of the Class B shares for investors is that they can give them to people without triggering the gift tax, which kicks in for gifts above $14,000 each year.

With any investment pool, the larger you get, the harder it is to produce outstanding results. Berkshire Hathaway is no different and Buffett addressed this issue in his shareholder letter:

As for Berkshire, our size precludes a brilliant result: Prospective returns fall as assets increase. Nonetheless, Berkshire's collection of good businesses, along with the company's impregnable financial strength and owner-oriented culture, should deliver decent results. We won't be satisfied with less.

The Warren Buffett way

For the adventurous (or foolish), you can try your hand at investing in stocks like the master of value investing himself.

You don't have to go it alone. Plenty of stock screeners, such as those from the American Association of Individual Investors, Morningstar and ValueWalk, strive to identify stocks of companies with positive free cash flows, good returns on capital and strong competitive advantages (what Buffett calls "moats" as in a castle with a moat). Automated investing service Motif lets you buy a basket of Buffett-like stocks for less than $10 per trade.

To be sure, it is extremely difficult to generate a record anything close to what Buffett has done just by stock-picking. Public companies represent only a part of Berkshire Hathaway's portfolio holdings, while the rest come from private deals ordinary investors can't access.

Where most investors lose their way in following in Buffett's legendary footsteps is consistency. Even Buffett stumbles from time to time.

"The problem that most people would have investing like Buffett is the time frame. Many of his investments can take years to pan out, and the average investor doesn't have that sort of patience," said George Gagliardi, a CFP and founder of Coromandel Wealth Management in Lexington, Massachusetts.

"Remember the derogatory comments about Buffett during the Internet stock boom years? He went from a pariah in 1998 to a genius in 2003," Gagliardi said.

The key to Buffett's stock-picking success has been his ability to buy when others are fearful.

"Many companies, of course, will fall behind, and some will fail. Winnowing of that sort is a product of market dynamism. Moreover, the years ahead will occasionally deliver major market declines – even panics – that will affect virtually all stocks. No one can tell you when these traumas will occur – not me, not Charlie [Munger], not economists, not the media," Buffett writes in his 2016 letter.

"During such scary periods, you should never forget two things: First, widespread fear is your friend as an investor, because it serves up bargain purchases. Second, personal fear is your enemy."

#Bellmore Group Management Services Tokyo Japan

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thomisaacs · 3 years

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The Passagio: Understanding Registers Within Laryngeal Vibratory Mechanisms

Preface

I've been studying singing for around 9 years now, and the concept of my passagio has always been something very nebulous to me. While I may have had a surface level understanding of the difference between registers, internally I still understood them in a very unnuanced way. Falsetto was just some magical upper setting that somehow felt different and allowed me to achieve higher pitches, for instance, but I never understood the process at a granular level.

When starting at university, something became very apparent very fast: I didn't know my way around my voice as well as I thought I did. Suddenly I was singing with an amplified band for the first time, and it felt like all those years of classical and musical theatre training went out the window as I was left uncertain of how to project my voice over the band. I couldn't hit high notes that under any other circumstances would have sat comfortably in my range, and so had to find workarounds like taking a lower harmony while a female vocalist covered what I was actually supposed to be singing.

This was, of course, treating the symptom rather than the cause. As a singer in the real world, an employer isn't going to accept you rearranging their music to suit your inabilities. In order to improve this, I spent several months researching what constitutes phonation, register, and passagio at the base level. The following is what I have discovered.

Introduction

A singer's "break" or "passagio" is a concrete phenomenon with a roster of very vague explanations. A singing teacher might refer to it as "moving between your chest voice and your head voice", but what's meant by this varies wildly depending on parameters such as the singer's age, sex, etc. These registers are defined solely by how they feel to the singer, which is by no means a consistent metric. In this essay I will attempt to explain the concept of a passagio within a consistent, measurable, scientific framework, with the intent of better understanding how to traverse it in a musical context.

Before we can understand what constitutes a passagio, however, we must first understand how the voice is produced.

Components of an Instrument

All instruments consist of at least three main components. A motor, a vibrator, and a resonator. The motor can be defined as any sort of external influence that powers the vibrator, which then oscillates at pitch, and is amplified by the instrument's resonator.

The dilemma that we singers inevitably face is that we have no convenient visual interface for how our instrument produces sound; everything is internal. While it's obvious to a guitarist, for instance, that their fingers power their strings, whose vibrations are amplified by the instrument's resonant body - we have to deal with a lot of very complicated and unintuitive language for a process that feels very intuitive and natural.

So what are the components of our instrument?

Our motor, obviously, is our lungs - which are supported by a large muscle in the abdomen called the diaphragm.

Our vibrator is our vocal folds - two flaps of flesh and mucous, located in our larynx, (colloquially known as our "voice box"). (Pictured below[1], in abducted and adducted postures respectively)

Our resonator essentially boils down to "everything", but more specific examples include our nasal cavities and chest.

And finally, our articulator consists of our mouth. Our lips, teeth, tongue, soft palate, etc. all contribute to our filtering of sound into language. The same carries over to singing.

Phonation

Phonation is the process of producing sound by way of the vocal folds. The cycle of sound production begins with the folds more or less closed, pressing against each other. As pressure is applied by airflow from the lungs, the folds are blown apart for a moment, before returning to their closed setting. This, fundamentally, is the process of phonation. This oscillation occurs hundreds of times a second - producing a pitched sound.

For the purposes of this essay, we will consider the vocal folds to consist of three main components: the vocalis muscle, connective tissue, and mucosal layer.

Pitch

In any acoustic vibration, the pitch is dictated by the mass of the thing doing the vibrating. Since it takes more energy to move something of a higher mass, the more massive a medium is, the lower the frequency of its vibration will be.

Since we can't magically manipulate the mass of something without violating the laws of physics, we have to compromise. What we're able to do is manipulate how much mass is participating in the vibration. A guitarist, for instance, does this by pressing a string against a fret, changing the stopping point of the string and thus reducing how much mass is participating in the vibration.

The vocal folds operate under the same principle. The vocalis muscles (which make up the majority of the body of the vocal fold) and cricothyroid muscles pull against each other, thus providing tension and thinning and thickening the folds as required. Thin, tense folds will vibrate at a higher frequency than long, loose folds.

Laryngeal Vibratory Mechanisms

With all of that out of the way, let's discuss how this applies to one's Passagio.

As the frequency of the vibration goes up, the physical limits of the components of the vocal folds are reached in succession. We refer to these as Laryngeal Vibratory Mechanisms (LVMs) - four different settings of vocal fold vibration that encompass what we colloquially consider to be “registers”.

The LVMs are numbered 0-3. (The following images are intended to be animated GIFs. Direct links to the images are available in the bibliography if they do not appear correctly on your browser.)

Mechanism 0 can be referred to scientifically as "pulse phonation" and colloquially as "vocal fry". Essentially, what's happening here is the majority of the vocal folds are vibrating against each other at a low frequency.

Mechanism 1 is where our voices normally sit in day-to-day use: it covers the same ground as what would be referred to as “chest voice”. The full body of the folds are vibrating - it can be thought of as speech quality. (Pictured below [2a])

Mechanism 2 (pictured below[2b]) can be thought of as head voice, falsetto, etc. In this setting, the vocalis muscles (red) and connective tissue (yellow) are both rigid, and only the mucosal layer (orange) is vibrating. This is why we experience a break - we're literally shifting to a different mode of vibration all together.

Mechanism 3 relates to the whistle register, where even the mucosal layer is rigid, and the sound is produced under the same principle as whistling with our lips.

A more intuitive parallel for this would be to imagine this process in the context of drumming. If a drummer is playing a relatively low tempo pulse, they can get away with using their arm in the motion (M0), but as the tempo is raised it no longer becomes energy-efficient to do this. At this point, the arm becomes rigid and the motion is carried out via the wrist (M1). The same limit is reached here and it becomes too tiring to move so much mass for such a small motion, so the drummer switches to finger control (M2), allowing them to play much faster passages.

Below is a Sonogram of an ascending vocal glissando, showing the four natural “breaks” or transitions between mechanisms[3].

Registers Within the LVM Framework

The temptation here is to think that LVMs are a complete replacement to the idea of registers; they’re not, they’re just a standardised way of talking about the voice.

Registers definitely still have a place in our vocabulary, it’s just important to not conflate them with Mechanisms. For instance, it’s possible to switch register, while still remaining within the same LVM. Pictured below is a table of the four mechanisms and what registers fit within them[3].

Exercises

Interesting as it may be, the passagio is often an annoyance that we can only really cheat around. The only way to navigate it fluently is to have a developed understanding of how it works and where it sits in your range.

In my case, I found it helpful to learn how to cheat my way past the passagio by skipping past it using an unvoiced consonant (a consonant wherein the vocal folds aren’t vibrating). Doing octaves over the passagio on “sha”, “sa”, “tha”, “ti”, etc. is a very helpful way of developing this. The more consonants you practice with, the easier it will be to use this technique intuitively in a song.

If you must sing over your passagio, there are ways to make the process a little more forgiving. When the vocal folds vibrate, we can think of them as having what’s called an open and closed quotient. Essentially what these refer to is the ratio of how long the vocal folds are closed, vs how long they spend open during the phonation cycle (this is similar to the concept of a “duty cycle” in electrical oscillations). A high closed quotient sounds buzzy whereas a high open quotient sounds smooth and almost breathy at higher levels. What we want is to sing with a high open quotient and sing confidently through the passagio, which lessens the dramatic timbral shift of the transition (although it doesn’t eliminate it).

In Conclusion

Learning about LVMs has provided an invaluable boost to my singing ability. I’m much more confident in and aware of my technique, because I now understand the processes at the fundamental level. Going forward, I’d like to make more singers aware of this system of classification - as it’s not something we tend to learn about in music education. If nothing else, it’s just very, very interesting - and that’s as good a reason to learn about something as any.

Bibliography

[1] Voicedoctorla.com. (2018). Vocal Nodules / Nodes. [online] Available at: https://voicedoctorla.com/voice-disorders/vocal-nodules-nodes/ [Accessed 23 May 2018].

[2] En.wikipedia.org. (2018). Vocal folds. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_folds#Oscillation [Accessed 23 May 2018].

*note: I’m aware of the issues that come with citing Wikipedia as a source, but the two images in particular that I borrowed from them for use in this essay are a perfect visualisation of the point I’m trying to make, and I thought it a shame to die on the hill of not citing Wikipedia, rather than to produce a piece of work that A) I’m proud of and B) is readable/understandable. My main points come from other, more reliable sources.

[2a] M1 Oscillation - direct image link: https://i.imgur.com/B3Nc2xr.gif

[2b] M2 Oscillation - direct image link: https://i.imgur.com/2rMR67w.gif

[3] Roubeau, B., Henrich, N. and Castellengo, M. (2009). Laryngeal Vibratory Mechanisms: The Notion of Vocal Register Revisited. Journal of Voice, 23(4), pp.425-438.

[4] /u/GrafKarpador (2018). what happens physiologically when i change between two pitches? what should be changing, and what should not? • r/singing. [online] reddit. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/singing/comments/86i0tl/what_happens_physiologically_when_i_change/dw5d952/?context=0 [Accessed 23 May 2018].

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dantelaw21 · 4 years

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Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 303

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 303 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

All right, welcome everybody, the one where I’m totally prepared to get this started. So welcome to Hump Day Hangouts, Episode Number 303. Well, we are going to do our thing. We’re going to say hi to everybody. I got a couple of quick announcements and then we will dive into your questions. We got a ton on there. So if you’re joining us for the first time, just want to say that’s great, really appreciate it. If you have questions, you can always come here to Semantic Mastery comm slash HD questions. Ask your questions throughout the week, we understand that not everybody can be here live, that’s fine. Just ask your question. Try to limit it to one, not six, or seven if you can.

Head back to YouTube and you can always subscribe and that way you’ll get notified when the new Hump Day hangouts are is out and go check out your answer, put it to use, and boom. So with that said, I’m going to start at the bottom today. Let’s see we got Chris down at the bottom. Does it look like he’s got some new headphones What’s going on?

Well, I wish they were brand new. I mean, like

They’re still pretty sweet. But

yeah, they’ve been I think two years old.

All right, well, it’s new to Hump Day Hangouts. I’ve never seen it Yeah like there’s a bit of noise in the background so like, kind of trying to shield it up. Gotcha. All right. Yes, that goes otherwise here.

Interestingly, It’s getting colder here like summer is almost origins like fair enough and I know you and I don’t want to spoil anything but those who weren’t involved in some of the land mastery stuff last year may not have heard about this by now you and Marco were just talking about leads for something that came out of land mastery, right? Yeah, like Marco hit another home brand that says that way. And yeah, like he’s generating way more leads than we can handle at the moment. And so I’m, I’m one of the lucky ones who like gets first take on them. Now staying well looks very promising. Yeah, let’s move on.

them over to Marco. How are you doing, man?

I’m being pulled into the light.

Look, look, that’s how I keep I keep telling you. It’s Groundhog Day in Costa Rica. Next week, same thing week after the same thing. That’s how it is. Can you ever grow tired of something like this? Not one. This is what you choose and where you want to be. Why would you choose a place where there’s so much sunshine and rain? As a matter of fact, there is lots of rain. But why would you choose a place like this on this? This is my Fortress of Solitude guys. We define peaceful right as we do, what we want to do when we want to do it. Yes, there are things that we have to do. But it’s things that we enjoy doing because it’s part of our puzzle. So as part of mine, like, this is my fortress of solid my base, you get me.

So from here, like I can’t get tired of this. You guys might get tired of watching it.

Get to your postal code. Get some. That’s how it works. And as far as the leads that I’m getting to Chris, they’re different, something that doesn’t work. Yeah, just ours, our system doesn’t work systems in place, I’m getting leads. I mean, these are organic. It’s not what we do with the land. With the land mastery course that Bradley teaches. That’s another way to generate leads. These are generic leads and states other than the ones I’m directly targeting. Because of those, of course, those come to me, but I can’t take them all. And so what I did is in the lead mastery groups, since I know people they’re trained by Bradley, I went in there and offered first come first serve. Chris reached out to me the other Chris, Chris Greenhow. He reached out to me, and they’re the ones who got them and so whenever we get more needs with what we’re gonna offer him that way, and maybe it’s time to get another group in there, ready to give a crack at some of these leads. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately for those who say it doesn’t work.

For some reason I still get money in my bank like I don’t know I must be stupid and can’t figure it out the money gets into my bank accounts

I must be doing something or else I’m just like, throwing shit up against the wall and hoping that something sticks and hoping that somehow Lucky Charms magically delicious It appears in my bank account I guess that’s how I’m doing it. Everybody says it doesn’t work.

The reason why is you are not flushing the checks like everybody else. Okay? Yeah, I’m never gonna do that you’re not seeing my bank account.

Government my tea and my come after.

Oh, well. Sorry. Good. I’m gonna skip over her nine. How are you doing man? You look like you might be a little chilly today. Yeah, man. It’s raining. it’s really bad today, but you guys are warming up my heart and also excited. And also I’m excited about live man. Coming up. It’s coming out to be the gayest thing you’ve ever said, man.

For Argentinian summer, yeah, man, so it’s coming good it’s going it’s coming alive so that’s cool man outstanding well I got something to say about POFU Live in a minute but first Bradley How are you doing man? Doing well and yeah you know the market that’s a really good point with just to kind of piggyback off what you said but you know the land flipping business which I love it’s it’s just a side hustle for me now and for many months I thought about trying to go more into like making that full time but I don’t need to because I built systems and I’ve got VAs and stuff in place now to where it’s it’s almost on autopilot and you know, I only probably put about 10 hours a week into my real estate business anymore but it consistently generates a, you know, five-figure paychecks on a monthly basis like last month I did $16,000 in revenue just from in profit just from the real estate business. And you know, not all months are that good some months I might only make three grand another month. I make 20 grand, but you know, it’s somewhere in between, right? It’s all in every single month, month in and month out, that money comes in now because I’ve built the systems up for it. And, you know, doing what we do for marketing to generate the leads and some other methods. So what Marco was talking about is great, because that’s just using SEO and Semantic Mastery methods to generate leads. But you can also get more targeted leads by doing some other things too. So you can target specific areas, for example, and all that. So I don’t know if there was enough interest in that I might do a second round of what we called land mastery, which was essentially me training people how to set up a land flipping business, the mechanics of everything, how to do deals, some coaching throughout the deals, and that kind of stuff. So if you guys are interested in that, just comment, you know, let us know, reach out at support, if you want to say, Hey, I’m interested in that, where can I find out more and if we get, you know, five or six people that are wanting to do it, then I might, I might set up another group for that. So yeah, and I want to say to people if you’re interested in watching

This you can also leave a YouTube comment we get notified about that. And I want to say to that you know, you heard what Bradley’s making this isn’t you know made up you know, it’s not like we’re gonna go around and you know, waving checks and making an infomercial out of this but this is a potentially high-profit area and the training was done with a lot of personal involvement. So this isn’t a $100 course it’s no one-week training. This is you know, walking you through all the steps and the initial batch of people I believe went through several thousand dollars and now that you know, we’ve got to redo an update you know, it’s going to be in that ballpark to like you heard Bradley say the profit to cost ratio there it’s needed you would make that back in one month so but want to be realistic with people that the value is there we know it is this isn’t some info course where you just you know take PDF and run this as a real business. Yeah, it’s also not passive like that actually works. I mean, like Bradley’s Yeah, as he exists.

Thumbs down and so on. But like you got a call people and stuff. So it’s not like that you would just be like behind the keyboard. And yeah, if you like the idea of putting in the work up front, doing a couple of months of getting your hands dirty, set up the systems, and then like Bradley said, you do it about, you know, well, you can do whatever you want. But with Bradley, it’s taking about 10 hours a week, and he’s making five figures, then, you know, if that sounds good to you, then this is maybe somebody might be interested. Yeah, just a quick follow up. Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s between four and five figures every month. So like I said, on the low end, might make three grand in a month, but on the high end, as much as 20 I’ve not made over more than 20 in a month yet, from the real estate business. But, you know, I spent eight or nine months learning the business and then developing, you know, and like automation and in training VA, and stuff like that. So now I’ve got it to where I only need to work about 1010 hours per week, but it took several months of work and effort to do that. But, you know, because I’ve been able to do that I can, you know, shortcut somebody else from

Have to do all the learning and trial and error and all that kind of stuff. There’s still a learning curve, there’s no question and it does require work but you know, it’s good it’s good damn money and it’s what’s interesting is even that with all this COVID stuff, it’s actually my business is picked up because of that and I think it’s because most vacant land owners You know, that’s a liability. They just pay taxes on a yearly basis. It’s not generating any revenue and because of all this, you know, financial kind of insecurity because of the Coronavirus stuff. A lot of people that have been, you know, owning vacant land for years, sometimes decades. They’ve just decided now’s a good time to sell. So it’s been really it’s actually the last few months has been really, really busy. And it’s great because it’s just good money. So again, if you guys are interested in that, just make a comment, send us a support ticket, and let us know. And I might put something else together for that. And it’s not as if what we’re doing is hidden anywhere. I’ve been transparent about the land solutions network. Case Study. I’ve shared it in our free essay group I shared it in the heavy hitter club. I’ve shared it. In the Semantic Mastery mastermind, I’ve shared how it was approached, how it was done. Everything is everything is there. And like, I mean, come on, if I could do it like, on part-time, where I can’t dedicate enough time to it for it to rank the way that it should. And I still see four or five dozen keywords in the top 10.

I mean, think about it, it’s like it’s a no brainer, why wouldn’t you because if you put forth like the time and effort in your state to start with, and you rank something organically, and it will start producing leads that way while you’re also getting Bradley training, which is not organic, organically based, but you take both approaches, and you put them together and is going to almost double the number of leads that you can do per month, which then should double the amount of money that you could do per month. But guys, if working part-time, let’s say you dedicate 2030 hours a month on it, Bradley says it’s 10 so so let’s say 30 and it sounds good to make between 500 and $1,000 per hour from the effort that you’re putting into it like doesn’t make sense to do it.

For those of you who aren’t making 500 to 1000 an hour if you are then this obviously isn’t for you unless you want some just some a side hustle 510 k per month which just comes in and goes into wherever you want it they got me to come up. It’s like why would so thanks, Bradley. It’s fun. And I’m enjoying ranking I’m enjoying the lead the lead solutions case study I’m enjoying sharing it because it’s just working out so fantastically well. It’s awesome. Like it’s also sweet because I’m pretty sure Bradley and this well me like yeah, ranking in the land business for major keywords for our state. Like page one, like super easy, like, just gotta know what you’re doing. Yeah.

Before we turn this into the real estate Hangout, I wanted to share something here. So I’ve got this shiny belt buckle kind of proud of this one. Since we went virtual, you know, we couldn’t get out and do organized races. So this was for 1000 kilometer race. And it’s cool. It’s nice and shiny. It’s heavy, too, right? I mean, you can really dump somebody with that. But you know, it’s not as cool as this guy.

Anyway.

So what this is, if you’re not familiar with these coins, generally they’re referred to as challenge coins. Not going to go into the details of it, but every attendee at Boku live so far has gotten one of these. Alright, there’s a lot of reasoning behind it. I won’t go into but I just want to tell you that if you come and join, POFU Live 2020 you’re still going to get one. All right. We’ve had these manufactured and just got my hands on them not too long ago. And we’re going to be sending this to you directly because we want you to have this as a reminder, you heard Marco talking about what POFU is a little bit earlier. And we’re going to talk about it definitely some more during POFU Live. We’ve had some more people joining us over the past week, which probably I’m looking at it, go and update the page, because we have a little thing that’s, you know, says how many tickets are left, we are limiting it. And if you want to get in on the VIP seat, you should definitely do that. This is the week you want to grab that. Those are going to go away at some point I’m talking with companies helping us, we’re going to be doing kind of a virtual tour, and beer tasting and some food and we have a cut off for that. There’s some other stuff, you get the VIP ticket as well. You don’t have to pay for executive summaries. There are all sorts of good stuff. So head over to pofulive.com. Grab your ticket, you know, if you can grab the VIP ticket, I highly suggest it we priced it so that it should be very attainable for just about everyone to camp the main ticket is great to see can get access and then the VIP plus is a real killer deal. We’ve priced that too because we know that there are people out there who not only want to come and learn and talk to each other but also would like some time to sit down and talk to us and what that involves too is a call with all of us and you sitting down and talking and going through what your issues are whether it’s something to do with your ranking is something to do with your SEO as client work isn’t getting more clients isn’t getting better clients. Is it something entirely different, but we’ll sit down and do that. And I’m not even going to put $1 value on that? Because you would have to add up every single one of our consulting tables? No, let’s just say it’s a good value.

I want one last thing, sorry before we get to questions. So I have a slot open in my mini mastermind. I run it on Tuesday at 6 pm. Eastern time, I asked my group what we should do about bringing somebody in, and I got a fantastic suggestion and this is how I’m going to roll with it. Anybody who is a current or future member of the Semantic Mastery mastermind, and attends POFU Live 2020 is going to get that seat. So you have to be a mastermind member and you have to attend POFU Live and go into the free group. If you’re not a member of the Semantic Mastery mastermind and if you haven’t been default postponed aren’t planning and ask them what they would pay to be in my mini mastermind. Ask them what the price of admission into that mastermind should be asked, it’s free to go in and ask and I’ll ask the people in my mini mastermind to go in and comment to be open about it like I did not I think I put no punches, guys, I try to be as transparent as possible. I try to tell you guys everything within reason. Just so you know, I’m offering that seat. But it’s only going to be available to anyone at the post for 2020 and a Semantic Mastery mastermind member. That’s how you’re going to get into that one slot because people aren’t giving it up. We have people over in there for over a year, and they’re not giving up their seats.

So if you’re not a member of the mastermind, what he’s saying between the lines, you can go and join the mastermind and come to poker live and get your shout at that. So highly suggest it as just another honorable call icing on the cake, but maybe that’s a cake on top of the cake.

Sweet welcome, we get into it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Uh, I forgot which button to push. Hold on. There we go.

a bright yellow one. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. We can see your screen. Alright.

YouTube Caption Unavailable

It looks like the first one is from the user. Okay, number one is a high international user here. I don’t know what’s going on with YouTube. But recent videos and streams from everyone do not have captions. They’re all listed as unavailable. If they are available. Google uses AI to very well transcript scripted video which makes it much easier to watch it on higher speed and get a much better understanding of the words if you miss some of them due to pronunciation. That is a much more effective way of watching a video with captions on please find a way to enable that it would be very helpful not sure what changed captions were always available before something went wrong with YouTube and I think they disabled this by default. So I guess maybe they’re asking about having the captions turned on from Hump Day hangouts.

Well if it’s something in YouTube, if it’s just a setting that may have changed or been updated or something and maybe we need to go in and poke around in the channel settings and see if we can find it and turn it back on it that might have been it that it might be a bug in YouTube I don’t know I haven’t poked around but now that you brought it to my attention.

I got so many To-Do List somewhere on paper somewhere on a whiteboard somewhere on a computer app. So I’ve got to consolidate my to-do list because I got them all spread out all over the place but I’m gonna make a note of YouTube captions once you have our VA goal go poking around in there and seeing if she can come up with anything before you spent time in there. Yeah, well I mean it’s not a big deal for me to it this is something I should know anyways if it is something that’s changed

I know YouTube is going through some changes I got a notification I’m sure you guys have to an IFTTT that you have to go in and reconnect your YouTube channels. To IFTTT using username and password now, which is interesting because it used to be through like an OAuth. I haven’t actually done it yet, but I have received many notifications for that. So I’m assuming there’s probably some back end changes going on on YouTube.

Does The Press Release From MGYB Include An Organization Page On Press Advantage For Company With Schema On It?

So alright. Next, if I were to press release from the MGYB Store, would there be an organization page on press advantage for the company with schema on it? Or is this available only for press advantage members? Well, you get an organization page. I don’t know if we are allowing people to submit structured data for the organization page or not. Marco, can you clarify that or? I’m not sure I’d have to ask. Okay.

By the way, with a question like that, you could always ask some contacts, just contact [email protected] because that is a question that support would be able to answer for you. We don’t offer it or provide SEO consultation or recommendations through support because support is supposed to be account-related questions, access issues. If you have an issue with an order or things like that, but this is a question that should be answered by support as well, you’re certainly welcome to ask them here. I just don’t know the answer to that. So we can get that to you, though.

Would You Offer KnowEm Or Similar Service?

Next would be would you offer no or similar service? What about Syndwire type of software? I see it is no longer updated. What Syndwire? Yeah, I don’t know. I stopped using send wire many, many years ago. As far as are we going to be doing drive syndication network expansion services? Yes, that is actually coming because we’re, I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell this or not. But we’re updating Syndication Academy.

And part of what we’re thinking about doing is going to be offering expansion syndicates, like essentially footprint expansion services, because not most of the web tools that we can add that over the years through syndication Academy, we’ve found a lot of really good, other platforms that we could build profiles on, but they’re not really something that can be automatically syndicated to so are they really syndication network properties? Are they about branded profiles and that’s really what we’re talking about here? So as we have the Syndication Academy training, when we update that completely for the new version, then that is something that we’re going to be kind of trying to work into MGYB as kind of like there’s the be the base level syndication network, and then there will be the add on levels for different you know, a number of additional profiles that we can build out for you. Alright, so just to add a little bit to this into the previous question about schema and another add ons, for press advantage and, and the media page. The more that we have our people work, the higher the cost is to the person using the service. What we tried to do is to keep the cost as low as possible. So keep so people can take advantage of all of the power that’s available through the systems that we use.

So are we’re always faced with Okay, so we have to add whatever amount of work it involves to do it. Some of you might think, okay, so you just grabbed the script that you inserted. No, you don’t. We have to go. We have to train the VA on how it’s done. We have to train her. If it pulls any errors, how to correct them. There’s a lot of things involved. It’s not just you go and do it. Because nothing again, it’s not magically delicious. And that is that Lucky Charms it doesn’t disappear from anywhere. So there’s all of this, we have to add it to the store that takes time. It takes a developer it takes up it takes me It takes a whole lot of people to go in and get it done. until you see the final price and even then some people sometimes Oh, wait a minute, as a bit high for me. So so we have to kind of balance this. How much do we charge versus how much is the person willing to spend to get this extra benefit, which they might not need? So we’re always trying to see okay, so if they’re really going for something that’s high competition, maybe they need that extra push. So something that has to be determined and that’s something that we can just go out. Yeah, sure, let’s do it. And in the end, it ends up costing us more than what we’re charging. We never wanted to that.

Great. Okay, thanks, Marco.

What Kind Of Content Do You Put On A GMB Website?

But the next question from Ben Oh, he says, Hey, Bradley, and guys, I’m building the content. On the GMB website. What kind of content do you put there? Would it be FAQ type useful free content? Okay, so, yeah, I mean, I like to put long-form articles on GMB websites because there are not pages on GMB websites. Right. So those are the websites inside Google My Business profile, which

I’m not really gonna talk about much here. I’ve got a mastermind webinar tomorrow, but I’ve been working a lot on a couple of projects, tree service projects that are brands, right. So big brands that I’ve created that are for lead generation assets. I had completely transferred over about a year and a half ago from having a self well actually I had a whole bunch of multiple subdomain WordPress sites, so each location at its own WordPress site, but that became a nightmare when I got to like 18 or 20 locations for that particular brand. It was just a freakin nightmare to maintain all those WordPress sites. So, when we developed the local lease pro method, about two years ago now I guess I had switched everything over to just GMB assets like in other words, I hate even just redirected all the subdomain URLs over to the GMB website just got rid of all that shit because it made it so much easier to manage. And at that time, I went and took all the GMB websites and I would flesh those out with really good content because there are no pages, right? Yes, you can create GMB posts which can act as kind of pseudo pages, but they’re very limited part of your next question part a part of your question. The next part of your question I should say is you’re asking about the ideal length for GMB posts.

Well, GMB posts are limited to 1500 characters. Hmm. So because of that, you know, it’s 1500 characters, not 1500 words 1500 characters. So you can’t really like build full-on optimized pages out. You can build well-optimized posts, but they’re much shorter. So it’s not long-form content in the posts. That makes sense. So I like to use long-form content for the GMB websites themselves, which is just basically a one-page website. And I like to do that because then I can have section headers. For me, it’s tree services, right, so Tree Service be my primary keyword, tree trimming, secondary and tree removals, a secondary, those are both and those are pretty much the top three keywords that I ever really, I mean, there’s variations of those, but honestly, those are the three keywords that always generate traffic and generate leads. So I like to have content that is you know, about general Tree Service stuff, mentioned a whole bunch of the other and, you know, kind of ancillary services that go along with tree services like stump removal stump grinding, you know, tree pruning would be kind of a synonym of tree trimming. Anyways, kind of mentioned all that stuff in an opening couple of paragraphs or, you know, a handful of paragraphs, then we have a section for tree trimming, and then the one for tree removal, and then call to action basically at the bottom. And that works really, really well. And I like to use unique content for that. And I’ve said this many times people ask, you know, can’t you just swap out location modifiers in the content, reuse it over and over again? Yeah, you can. I mean, a lot of people do that kind of stuff. But I always get unique content, which means I’ll get an article written. I’m using a couple of different article sources right now guys for original content, which, let’s be honest, most of the time, it’s not ever original content. They just go scrape content from somewhere else and rewrite it so that it becomes original. But I’m using Word agents and crowd content. And I’m testing both of them right now. Word agents, you kind of really got to buy articles in bulk or words in bulk, essentially, but I’m testing both of them right now. So what I like to do is order one article like maybe 1500 word article or 2000 word article, which becomes my primary article for like a GMB website and then have that rewritten because it’s much cheaper, like if I’m buying, if I’m paying, you know, you know, 10 cents a word or 12 cents per word, and I’m buying a, you know, a 2000 word article, you’re talking about $240 for one article. So I pay for one really well written, a well-researched article that’s been optimized very, very well. And then I’ll have that rewritten, which is a hell of a lot cheaper. We’re talking 10s of dollars versus hundreds of dollars, to have that same article rewritten multiple times. Now, I’ve got multiple versions of that long-form article that was well written to begin with, that I can use for multiple lead gen assets if that makes sense. So and then here’s the thing, guys. You can create an internal linking structure with a GMB website by creating posts even though posts are much shorter content.

You can optimize a post, for example, in my case, like tree removal, or tree trimming, and then you can actually link to those posts, publish the posts, and then go back and edit the GMB website content. Right, so the homepage content to link to those posts so that you’re actually creating kind of an internal linking structure within the GMB website, you just got to get creative. Because you can’t really, you can’t build a silo. I mean, you can build a solid structure with GMB posts, but it’s not quite the same as building like category landing pages, for example, and then, you know, placing all the articles within the appropriate categories and that you know, supporting posts within the appropriate categories. So you just got to get creative. I like to use long-form content that’s well written well optimized on the homepage. Frequently Asked Questions, by the way, is something great to add to bad we can add FAQ schema to GMB websites but you can add you know, frequently asked questions which are also pretty powerful. And that’s also, by the way, just a quick side note on that.

One of the projects I built during the local lease pro-development time was some test sites lead gen sites for Tree Service stuff in Oklahoma City. And it one of them was in a very competitive area. But I did a post where all I did was pulled a frequently asked question right out of Google, right out of Google of FAQ about you know, like the cost of Tree Removal Service. You know, how much does Tree Removal cost or something like that? I literally copied and pasted the FAQ that the question and the answer and I made a GMB post on that GMB lead gen asset. And when you do it for that particular asset when you do a search for the name of the company that you know, lead gen name, there’s a position zero is the FAQ question from the GMB website. It was just that so essentially the GMB post guru, you can’t add schema to that right. We’re not able to mark that up. But Google made it position zero like a featured snippet, essentially, as an FAQ featured snippet.

Which was just caught, it was completely copied and pasted. But Google made its own GMB post a featured snippet which Mark I don’t know if you ever have seen that before.

No, no, actually, if it’s still there, I’ll show you and it could have just been Google testing stuff, but I’ll have to show that to you outside of here. But so So to answer your question, long-form content is what I prefer to use well optimized, well-organized content too, so that you’re basically creating silo structure on one page. In other words, you know, with proper headings and you know, all that kind of stuff and then also GMB posts is how you can start to add depth or additional relevancy for specific categories or topics within your within from your primary GMB website page. So that’s what I would recommend and FA Q’s are always good. That’s really good content to use anywhere guys, because, again, you could add several FA Q’s on the GMB website itself. But then you can extract each one each separate question and answer and make to separate GMB post networks, well to comments, yeah, I have a question. What determines if a question is answered?

Because he’s asking, doesn’t matter, as long as the question is answered, what determines if the question is answered? A, having an answer, I guess, I don’t know publishing an answer, right? It’s whether the user who is doing the search, who’s asking the question, finds it useful and clicks otherwise, right? That’s the final signal to Google. I got my question as to that, and I clicked on it. And I went in and got whatever it was that I needed to get. So length doesn’t matter if you can do it in three characters and get that person to push. That’s all you need. If it takes more than that’s what you need that we always say it depends. It always depends on how then the user the person doing the query is going to interact as far as what you should be writing. Well, Google tells you the insights. Google gives you the words that people are searching, they give you the query, they give you how many users, you can set up an actual silo just from what Google gives you back because they’re usually related.

So why wouldn’t you use all that information? It’s all that information that’s available to you that you can use to build everything inside the GMB wheat. That’s what we teach in local GMB Pro. It’s what we do.

And so, like, there’s no set rule other than answer the question and see if it’s helpful. If not, you’ll see the viewers and whether you get any clicks you’ll see it from cause you’ll see it from people giving you reviews and everything else. You get all kinds of sales that tell you whether you’re answering a question, or you’re not and whether they find the content interesting enough for them to interact with it.

Yeah, but here’s I mean, here’s the thing. And so when I was talking about the length of content, it wasn’t in Reeves tried to answer his question about Is that good? Is that enough to answer somebody’s question, what I was doing for it was for ranking purposes, right? I like to use long-form content online.

GMB websites because you can’t build a traditional like structure to that site like you can with a WordPress site. So that’s why I like to use long-form content for that. But for example, how much does Tree Removal cost? Right? So this is just an example, guys. So right here, these questions are really, really good questions to repurpose to use for your own content marketing needs guys, and for GMB posts. It works great. We did training on this in syndication Academy, but these are great GMB posts to cut types of questions because you can literally go in here and I’ve shown this before, but you can copy the question, copy the answer, and then you can link. here’s the thing you can give credit back to where that question and the answer were curated from. You can either do a hyperlink in the text body of the GMB post which is a nofollow link because the button link so like the call to action button. The GMB post is a do-follow link but the button the links within the text aren’t so that would be like you can still link over to it. Or you can just cite it like you would writing a research paper in college right or in high school, which is you can just cite the source by giving credit without an actual hyperlink. It’s perfectly fine to do that. And so these make great and but your GMB will get credit for that content, especially if somebody’s searching within local proximity to that particular GMB, your post will have a much greater chance of showing for that. So just keep that in mind. These are great. And every time you click through one of these guys, it adds it pulls more questions in. So you can curate Q and A’s and FAQs except essentially frequently asked questions directly from Google and that comes out to be a great content strategy. Okay.

Can Google Index Your Site Pages Through Site Structure/Directories Alone?

All right. Next, Kyle says can Google index your site pages through site structure or directories alone? I’m just wondering if it is completely necessary to include internal links.

If I have a solid physical silo structure, will there be an added benefit to include an internal linking structure on top of the physical silo? Yeah, absolutely. Because that’s how you can build PageRank and direct PageRank flow or link equity flow around your site. So from powerful pages to pages that you want to rank and all that kind of stuff that would happen, you could absolutely benefit. I don’t, I don’t know of anybody that would I don’t think I’ve ever seen a website that was built with a silo structure that didn’t have internal linking. So I’m not sure what it is that you were trying to do specifically, but you can do so much with internal linking within a site. I would absolutely suggest it, Marco, would you say?

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, internal interlink me, the foundation of the web is linked. That’s how the bug gets from one place to another, from server to server from page to page that follows links. So it makes complete sense to guide the bot.

Long the silo how you want it to follow the silo, not how the but the site is going to follow your silo. It’s a way to structure your unstructured data.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s pretty cool what you can do with it too. You know that there’s I’ve been doing a lot of research on some of my existing projects. And I found some interesting things that on one of my more recent tree service projects, I had been building a whole bunch of links to the blog posts, we started it was a brand new project. So brand new domain, brand new, you know, entity, everything. And we came out of the gate doing aggressive blogging and press release, publishing.

And I was having real trouble ranking that like, like, solidifying the entity and it was I’ve never experienced that before, not for years anyway, and I eventually, it was about, I don’t know, two weeks ago, maybe probably longer now three or four weeks ago, I was doing some backlink analysis, which I don’t usually do with our methods.

But I was trying to compare, you know, several existing tree service projects that I’ve, you know, that are are doing incredibly well, with this new project, it wasn’t I just wasn’t able to get the traction in the amount of time that I typically do. And so I was looking at backlink analysis to see if I could pinpoint something there. And I clearly identified that because it was a brand new project and we hadn’t done any like link building to the root domain of the project. We did very little other than from the syndication network properties and things like that there were very little backlinks to the root domain and within very in virtually none with branded anchor text, like it was mostly naked URLs to the root domain, and there was very few of them, to be honest with you. And so, you know, I ended up realizing that when I looked at several successful projects and looked at this one that’s been struggling and I was able that was very apparent when I looked at the backlink profile that there was that was what I was missing. So all I did was published a handful of press releases, and also changed one particular link in the NAP section of the press release organization for that, for that, that project to where now every time a press release gets picked up and distributed, there’s always an anchor text link back to the root domain with the company name as the anchor text. So the brand name, and it just took three weeks and all of a sudden, boom, that project just took off. Like I mean, like a rocket, like all of my internal pages are starting to climb rapidly. Now, I got number one now solidified the entity and all of that it was interesting to see why I’m telling you that is because from an internal linking structure when you have built a lot of authority to a particular page root domain could be it, then you can start to direct that link flow from and that that authority that power from those pages to other pages on the site with internal linking. And so I would recommend that you, you absolutely do that.

Do Site Navigation Links In The Header Bleed A Silo?

So the second question is, do you cite navigation links in the head bleed in a silo, would it be better to only have child page links for each parent page and the navbar so that you keep your links topically relevant. Okay, yes, there is a little tiny bit of bleed from, you know, navigation menu links, as well as from sidebar links or from footer links. However, those are not treated the same or weighted the same by Google as contextual links. So they are kind of a different class. As far as like if you were linking from, like, we always talk about keeping your links within this internal links within the same silo, it’s okay to link to another, you know, a post or a page that’s not part of the same silo, if you’re going to, you know, if it’s for navigation purposes for user experience, but in that in those cases, then we always recommend no following that link so that you’re not leading the silo. Those are contextual links, though. So there’s, you know, there’s a reason to do that. When it comes to navigation menu links, sidebar links, and photo links. They’re not weighted the same.

There is some bleed that can occur. So there are strategic ways that you know, using specific types of plugins like widget context or widget logic, or some silo builder type plugins. Seo ultimate Pro has a deep silo builder plugin or module that will create category type menus that will so that whenever you’re in a silo only, um, you know related pages and or posts from the same silo will show in the like the sidebar menu and that kind of stuff. So there’s a lot of things that you can do to kind of manipulate that a bit to take, get provide more control. But you know, think about it from a user standpoint, though, right? I think main navigation menu links are something that ours is, you know, it’s so standard, it’s so normal for people to go and expect to be able to navigate through the site from the navigation menu that I prefer us to always try to restrict that not like use drop-down menus, you know, for it for that kind of stuff, but now because it’s just so standard, I don’t try to not do that anymore. In other words, I don’t go out of my way to try to hyper optimize the navigation menu for silo structure anymore, because I found it, you know, it’s not as important as it is for the user to be able to find what they’re looking for in an efficient way. So there is a little bit of bleed, but I wouldn’t worry about it, especially from the main navigation bar as much What do you say, Marco?

There’s minimal bleed because the bot understands the difference between a menu and an internal link over to a related page or where that link is located on the page and what the value of the next link is, and so on. And so for the intrinsic, the intents and purposes of pushing, whatever you want to call it, my link, equity link power, however you want to call it, it’s minimal, and you don’t need really need to account for it.

Just need to account for other things. And I’m not going to get into that because that’s just for our paid groups. That’s it.

Okay, there’s that’s what I was looking for.

All right, so the next question is not really much of a question is more of a gotcha. I, it’s not what you guys said it was, but unless he’s changed it.

Oh, it looks like he did. Okay. Well, it used to be $1,000. So it is standard is 1000. Or honestly change it on his page. It looks like he changed it to 497. Okay, so maybe we need to talk to him and see, yep, you get a special for our users. Okay, so, uh, yeah, when it for the longest time, it was a 997 course and you could get it for 497 through our link. It looks like since at some point, Jeffrey Smith has changed it. And it’s now 497 and our link does not give a discount. But yeah, we can reach out to Jeffrey and find out since he lowered the price if I feel honor our affiliate link, you know, to be able to give our users a discount as well. So thank you for bringing that to our attention. But trust me when we told you that it was half price, it was I don’t know has changed. So.

Are You Using A Custom URL On A GSite?

Okay, a lot is up. Hi, guys. Thanks for the help. Last week. One more question for your money sites. Are you using a custom URL on a G site? Also, I know if use g sites as a buffer, or I also know you use g sites as a buffer, but if it’s a local site, do you also use the GMB business site? Okay, so on your first question, do you use a custom URL for G site I have but I typically don’t know, I’m, I’ve done it in the past though. And it’s kind of geeky setting it up. It might it may have changed maybe a little bit easier under the new platform the new g sites, but there is something interesting that occurs when you use a custom domain the original URLs, so you know, sites.google.com URL will, will stay live and published. And then you can map a custom domain to it. And the original g site will still read, you can still visit it on its own g sites, you know, URL, but it’ll be canonicalized to the domain that you mapped to the site. So you basically get two versions of it. So you can do some pretty sneaky stuff with that, by the way, and it gives you basically two versions of the site one canonicalize to the custom domain map. So but honestly, it was more work than because we were able to change results without it that I just I really haven’t done that in a while. So it’s not necessary you can, but you know, it’s not necessary.

Really quickly. The second part of that it says I know also know that use g sites is buffer, but if it’s a local site, you also use the GMB business site. Absolutely. It’s another Google property that they give you. And in fact, in all of our training like in our SEO shield, and you know, our RYS Academy and everything else, if it’s for local use, every single tool that Google gives you in GMB and GMB websites is one of them. There’s absolutely no reason why you should not use it if it’s given to you. And it’s one more Google property that you can take control of, and brand and throw a shit ton of backlinks or embeds at and there’s no reason you shouldn’t use it. Do you want to comment on that?

Yeah, I totally agree. It’s unnecessary. The custom URL, although it gives you like two link building targets, right. Yeah. instead of one. As far as the business site. Yeah, of course, as you said, another business, another Google property. And we use all of them that we can to draw power from and push over to whatever it is that we’re trying to act.

Would You Syndicate Content From Your Money Site To Your Tier 1 Web 2.0 Sites?

uh, okay. So Ilana says Jesus, I think I might be out doing maybe at this point.

No, I don’t think you’re that far along yet. Ilana? And here’s bb down here. So it’s funny. Just wondering for syndicating content, would you syndicate content from your money to your tier one Web 2.0s such as Blogger and WordPress, or do you use unique content to syndicate amongst all those properties just so they’re topically relevant to your niche now, Ilana?

Yeah, apparently, you’re not really familiar with Syndication Academy and like our methods for that. But yeah, we just, we connect the syndication network properties through the RSS feed to the money site, so that we can populate all of those profiles with the content on a regular basis from one location. So you only have to publish content one time, right from the blog itself, and it will automatically, you know, syndicator, and republish on all those locations. So that’s, that’s specifically why we do it. I, you know, if we had to go out and manually post on each one of the web 2.0s with unique or original content, it wouldn’t get done period. So that’s part of the reason. Remember, with a branded footprint, it’s okay to share your own content with your own branded profiles. That’s what people do, the right people write articles.

And then or companies or brands, you know, publish content and then they share it on all their social media profiles and you know everywhere that they can and so it’s okay to do that. It’s when you take the same content to republish it on multiple locations that it can create some issues, we’re not going to call it duplicate content. But when you’re republishing your own content to your own branded profiles, especially if you’re giving attribution back to the source, then it’s no problem at all and there’s be efficient You know, that’s part of the reason we developed the syndication Academy method was because it was very efficient and it worked really, really well and it still does this day.

comments. Yeah, they become topically relevant when you fill out the profile the proper way.

Is Syndwire Or OnlyWire Still Relevant For Linkbuilding In 2020?

Very good. Omar says, Is Syndwire or OnlyWire still relevant for link building? I mean, I don’t know. I guess it could be I just I don’t do it like honestly because you know, we just use syndicated networks and then we have the SEO shield and then we just do yeah, I mean Syndwire and OnlyWire I, if I remember correctly only wire was also a kind of like a web to Dotto type a link building, you know, platform, you could add a bunch of different profiles to it and things like that and I know send wire because I sure I still have an account somewhere. But, um, you know, those are like web two Dotto links. And that’s, that’s perfectly fine. I just don’t run link building programs anymore. I haven’t for many, many years, because we have a dedhia we, you know, our link building manager has been working for me since like, 2012 or something. So for a long, long time, to where anytime I need to build links to something I just, you know, ask him to do it and he does it for me, it’s the same services available on MGYB. If you have these tools, and you’ve got, you know, a bunch of accounts that you know, been set up already and you put all that money and work into building up building out those tools, then yeah, use them. You know, there’s no reason you can’t I wouldn’t link build directly to my money site with either any of those kinds of tools, period.

I just wouldn’t do it. If it’s a Google Site, GMB assets, SEO shield assets with your money site shielded, right your money site having an SEO firewall, the SEO shield around it perfectly fine use that kind of tools to build to your tier one entity assets but not directly to your money site. If you have them, you can certainly use them. Um, but I would use them specifically to tier-one assets not directly to my money site. Questions or comments?

No, I don’t use those. I can’t really comment.

What Co-Citation And Content Aggregation Sites Do You Recommend?

Gary says what are some ways we can use co-citation and content aggregation sites like RSS master to generate traffic in rankings without promoting potential competitor videos or content? Uh, well, I don’t know that’s kind of a good question. RSS Masher really good for you can create topics topically relevant or even locally relevant sites, one or the other. It’s coming difficult depending on what niche you’re in, it’s kind of difficult to create both topically and niche relevant, like combined type sites. But what I mean by that, so for example, again, Tree Service contractors, right would be my, my, the niche that I’m into. So maybe I would create some automated content blogs using something like RSS masher to publish content about landscaping and gardening and tree services and hardscaping. And, you know, lawn care. And all of those are closely related type services, right, so or topics. So if I had a blog about all that kind of stuff, it could even be a little bit more general, like home improvement, but I would want to keep it more theme relevant to keep it to like outdoor type services, but you could use that to end up generating traffic, you know, through calls to action and through banners and things like that, on that type of a site to push traffic back to your money site. Likewise, you could build locally relevant

Automated content sites right by pulling in newspaper feed like so newspaper website feed local blogs which in most, you know cities or bigger cities that are going to have people that are that blog locally events, calendars, local Facebook pages or Facebook, Facebook groups, you know, things like that you can actually pull content in and use to republish to create locally relevant sites, which could also be very, very powerful for backlink building. Like if you want to do it it’s kind of like create a blog network of these automated content sites that are topically relevant or locally relevant or both if you can do it and then use those just to build links back to your primary money sites, but they can also instead of just for link building purposes could be used for driving traffic so that you know for actually getting real traffic that would that’s relevant to your money site. But you could also do things like sell ad space on those and everything else RSS matches pretty powerful, it’s really geeky. Here there’s quite a learning curve for setting it up. But that’s one way to do it.

You just have to be careful on the without you Without promoting potential competitor videos or content, you just got to be really careful about the selection of your sources, your content sources, when you set those types of apps up like RSS master. Remember, you can also use like, I don’t know if this is still available, but you can do like even an IFTTT, for example, when you use RSS as a trigger, so if this right and your RSS would be your trigger, then you can actually have a filter that will only allow certain content to pass. I don’t know about see it looks like feed rinse was a really cool service that would allow you to add a bunch of an RSS master might even have this I haven’t been into it in quite some time. But they might have some sort of filtering process in there where you can add a like Like for example, Yahoo pipes, these tabs that right you could add an RSS feed but then you could set

Up filters to where it would only pass certain items from the RSS feed that contained particular keywords, for example, and so everything else wouldn’t get published. So that might be something you could do is add kind of like a negative keyword list and put competitor’s names in there and things like that. So in my opinion, it would be about just on the setup process being real careful. And on which feeds you’re using to create those automated content blogs and then setting up filters when necessary so that you can filter out any potential competitors. comments on that? Yeah, have the VA go through though those RSS feeds periodically to make sure that you’re not promoting anybody that’s not supposed to be promoted. Because you’re supposed to be promoting people with more trust and authority than you you go and find trusted, authoritative blogs in the niche right. So that that immediately should take your competitors out that you don’t want to promote their RSS feeds. So you take those out, and you shouldn’t be doing I keep telling people, man, that’s not this doesn’t mastery weight is very simple. You train apply, then go make money. Once you make money, you go hire a VA, so that you can train the VA to help you apply and make money. lather, lather, rinse repeat is exactly if you end up doing everything, you’re never going to make as much money as you should be making and you’re not you’re up your skin, you will actually cost yourself money.

I agree. So I just did a quick Google search RSS feed filters and look, I mean, guys use Google.

Use Google look at it. It can be your best friend. It can also be your worst enemy. But like sift RSS, I haven’t tested this but there you go. So I want to include items where the title contains and like, you know, description or length like so you could do that. Here’s another one on Zapier, you know, Zapier, you can create a brand new Hang on a second on that one. Could you exclude could you back because that looks really good. Yeah. So exclude by URL. There you go. that eliminates the competitor. title description link.

Hey, I think I saw a URL somewhere a link. Yeah, there you go. Yep. So contains does not contain exist does not exist. So right there sift rss.com. Also, as I was getting ready to say, Zapier, guys Zapier, you can create RSS feeds with Zapier and Zapier has a really good internal filtering process that you can add right into the zaps. So you can use Zapier filters to get to create custom super feeds basically. So, you know, again, I would check out either one of those Zapier is obviously paid. Well, there’s a free version of it, but it’s pretty much useless. So you got a sap here one bit? That’s super it? Yeah, there are some really cool options. If you need to get more complex with it. Just keep an eye out because you can quickly burn through your operations that feeds are updated really quickly. So just to be aware, yep. Yeah, that’s true, but this is definitely a good option.

All right, we’re gonna keep moving

You’re almost out of time.

Uh, okay.

Is It Okay To Insert A Line Or Sentence To Existing Post To Get Backlink To A Page?

Baby says hey guys. Oh, and by the way for those types of topically relevant or locally relevant sites, automated content sites, how can use co-citation? Well, you could always include your feed, publish content onto those sites as well. Does that make sense? So that’s how you get the CO citation because you are guilty by association, right? It kind of rubs off by associating your content with other super relevant content, especially if it’s higher authority type content sources. So BB, here you go. I was wondering where you were today. He says, Hey, guys, is it okay to insert a line or sentence to an existing post? In order to get a backlink to a page? We want to rank with the one anchor text or should we search only for posts that already have the text we want as anchor text? Um, that’s a good question. I mean, it’s, you know what? updating published content isn’t a bad thing. Because again, you can update it and make it you know,

That it can actually help to get the bots to crawl it again and everything else. So I don’t know, I don’t have a specific answer to that. What do you say, Marco?

Um, no, nothing specific. Okay, I think it would work either way.

You know, because I know I’ve gone in. Well, in fact, my blogger for the project I was talking about earlier that I was having some issues with the, you know, solidifying the entity and everything. She’s been aggressively blogging, but what I do is I go find optimization tweaks throughout the blog posts and each particular silo. So for example, and I go in and edit the content after it’s been published, which, by the way, if it’s been published and syndicated out to syndication network, and he edits I make the post aren’t going to get, you know, change or edit the posts on the syndication network properties. But on page is what I’m talking about, like so on-page SEO for the money site itself. I’ve gone in and done a lot of over the past month or so a lot of on-page tweaks, which includes editing existing posts or adding content to existing posts, that kind of stuff. And I’ve been able to move the needle considerably in the last month. So what I’m saying so I don’t think it really matters either way. I don’t have a definitive answer for you though BB. Sorry.

How Many Videos Should You Put In A YouTube Silo To Impact Rankings?

Next question. We’re almost out of time guys, when doing tube silos, okay, so YouTube silos, how many videos Should I put in a playlist silo to have an impact on my rankings, as many as it takes? Yeah, and I don’t mean that to be facetious. But I mean, that for real, like how many videos should you put in the playlist silo, it’s however many it takes to build that overall relevancy that you’re trying to build. So remember, the idea is to put your top-level keyword, just like you would be building a silo on the website at the top of the playlist. So you can optimize the playlist title itself for that primary keyword. And what I like to do is the primary keyword and then variations of it as well. So you get two or three keywords really in the playlist title, but then the primary keyword that you want to rank for becomes the top video in the playlist and then everything else below that is you just add that depth with supporting type keywords. So, longer tail LSI or synonyms, you know all those different types of keywords that support that particular keyword theme. And that you just add, you can even take the same video and spin it, which means you know, it’s different coded indifferently like or encoded differently, I should say things like that. And then you said that you’re just basically changing the SEO title or the YouTube title for the videos to add the longer tail keyword, the supporting keyword, and then you just do your internal linking structure up to that top-level video. You can always link back to the container itself to which is the playlist URL. Okay, but how many does it take as many as it takes, really, you have to add that route, you have to build the relevancy to a point to where it creates buoyancy, right, which is where all of the keywords will start to rise including your top-level keyword.

Okay. It’s better to have more in a single playlist or to do several playlists again, it depends. It depends is it like for example with building a silo structure on your website, do you have a simple silo structure, which is a category and supporting articles? Or do you have a complex structure which is a top-level category, then subcategories, and then supporting articles in each of the subcategories. So it’s the same thing when you’re building a YouTube silo, you want to structure it the same way. Is that a cat in my opinion, keep it simple. If you can do everything in one silo, do it in one silo, if it makes sense to have basically like subcategories where the more specific then you could do that as well. But again, I would recommend trying to keep things simple.

How Would You Establish A New GMB Location For HVAC Business In Dallas, Texas?

Okay, last question, and we’re going to wrap it up guys. It’s right at five o'clock anyways, Jedi marketer I like that he says hi, Marco, and Bradley seasoned SEO Pro here we handle will you handle to establish a new GMB location for the HVAC business in Dallas, Texas. My client already has week established GMB ranking is progressing Okay, um

How would you handle maybe it’s how would you handle establishing a new GMB location for HVAC business in Dallas, Texas? Uh, you know, honestly, the only thing I can suggest right now because I know we can’t even do it NIMS UID right now, is GMB verifications is if you if there’s an employee or something within the company that has another address in the town, hopefully not too adjacent, whatever, wherever you’re trying to get a GMB that use company employees or an executive or somebody that has an address could be a family member of an employee or something like that. If you can use that that’s the best. There’s no question. To register a GMB get the postcard, you know, the pin or whatever, and then verify it. That’s the best way to do it if you can, if you can’t, there are two other options you could suggest. Number one is the US post office use the street address option. We talked about that many times as far as I know it still works. I haven’t done that in about six months or so now. But as far as I know, it still works. Or another option would be to ask to advertise on Craigslist for somebody, you know, said tell them you’re paying 50 bucks to receive a GMB postcard and then send you the pin number, you know, once they received the postcard, and I’ve done that, and I’ve done that many times, guys, and what I found is that oftentimes it’s renters that will do that, which is perfect because you don’t want to be that, you know, Cookie runner won’t care as much as like a homeowner would like some random homeowner doesn’t want to get business-related email or mail to their, you know, to their address, but a renter oftentimes won’t care. So you could do that too. Those would be my two suggestions. Otherwise, you might be able to find some GMB verification services out there. I know ours is currently unavailable. So any comments on that? Nope.

Okay, well, there we go. Thanks, everybody, for being here. We will see you guys next week.

Thanks for sticking around, guys. Bye, everyone.

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 303 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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beyondvapepage · 4 years

Text

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 303

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 303 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Well, I wish they were brand new. I mean, like

They’re still pretty sweet. But

yeah, they’ve been I think two years old.

them over to Marco. How are you doing, man?

I’m being pulled into the light.

So from here, like I can’t get tired of this. You guys might get tired of watching it.

For some reason I still get money in my bank like I don’t know I must be stupid and can’t figure it out the money gets into my bank accounts

The reason why is you are not flushing the checks like everybody else. Okay? Yeah, I’m never gonna do that you’re not seeing my bank account.

Government my tea and my come after.

For those of you who aren��t making 500 to 1000 an hour if you are then this obviously isn’t for you unless you want some just some a side hustle 510 k per month which just comes in and goes into wherever you want it they got me to come up. It’s like why would so thanks, Bradley. It’s fun. And I’m enjoying ranking I’m enjoying the lead the lead solutions case study I’m enjoying sharing it because it’s just working out so fantastically well. It’s awesome. Like it’s also sweet because I’m pretty sure Bradley and this well me like yeah, ranking in the land business for major keywords for our state. Like page one, like super easy, like, just gotta know what you’re doing. Yeah.

Anyway.

Sweet welcome, we get into it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Uh, I forgot which button to push. Hold on. There we go.

a bright yellow one. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. We can see your screen. Alright.

YouTube Caption Unavailable

Does The Press Release From MGYB Include An Organization Page On Press Advantage For Company With Schema On It?

Would You Offer KnowEm Or Similar Service?

Great. Okay, thanks, Marco.

What Kind Of Content Do You Put On A GMB Website?

Which was just caught, it was completely copied and pasted. But Google made its own GMB post a featured snippet which Mark I don’t know if you ever have seen that before.

Can Google Index Your Site Pages Through Site Structure/Directories Alone?

All right. Next, Kyle says can Google index your site pages through site structure or directories alone? I’m just wondering if it is completely necessary to include internal links.

Long the silo how you want it to follow the silo, not how the but the site is going to follow your silo. It’s a way to structure your unstructured data.

Yeah.

Do Site Navigation Links In The Header Bleed A Silo?

Just need to account for other things. And I’m not going to get into that because that’s just for our paid groups. That’s it.

Okay, there’s that’s what I was looking for.

All right, so the next question is not really much of a question is more of a gotcha. I, it’s not what you guys said it was, but unless he’s changed it.

Are You Using A Custom URL On A GSite?

Would You Syndicate Content From Your Money Site To Your Tier 1 Web 2.0 Sites?

uh, okay. So Ilana says Jesus, I think I might be out doing maybe at this point.

comments. Yeah, they become topically relevant when you fill out the profile the proper way.

Is Syndwire Or OnlyWire Still Relevant For Linkbuilding In 2020?

No, I don’t use those. I can’t really comment.

What Co-Citation And Content Aggregation Sites Do You Recommend?

I agree. So I just did a quick Google search RSS feed filters and look, I mean, guys use Google.

All right, we’re gonna keep moving

You’re almost out of time.

Uh, okay.

Is It Okay To Insert A Line Or Sentence To Existing Post To Get Backlink To A Page?

That it can actually help to get the bots to crawl it again and everything else. So I don’t know, I don’t have a specific answer to that. What do you say, Marco?

Um, no, nothing specific. Okay, I think it would work either way.

How Many Videos Should You Put In A YouTube Silo To Impact Rankings?

How Would You Establish A New GMB Location For HVAC Business In Dallas, Texas?

Okay, well, there we go. Thanks, everybody, for being here. We will see you guys next week.

Thanks for sticking around, guys. Bye, everyone.

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 303 posted first on http://beyondvapepage.blogspot.com

0 notes

youngwinnertragedy · 4 years

Text

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 303

youtube

Click on the video above to watch Episode 303 of the Semantic Mastery Hump Day Hangouts.

Full timestamps with topics and times can be found at the link above.

The latest upcoming free SEO Q&A Hump Day Hangout can be found at http://semanticmastery.com/humpday.

Announcement

Well, I wish they were brand new. I mean, like

They’re still pretty sweet. But

yeah, they’ve been I think two years old.

them over to Marco. How are you doing, man?

I’m being pulled into the light.

So from here, like I can’t get tired of this. You guys might get tired of watching it.

For some reason I still get money in my bank like I don’t know I must be stupid and can’t figure it out the money gets into my bank accounts

The reason why is you are not flushing the checks like everybody else. Okay? Yeah, I’m never gonna do that you’re not seeing my bank account.

Government my tea and my come after.

Anyway.

Sweet welcome, we get into it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Uh, I forgot which button to push. Hold on. There we go.

a bright yellow one. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. We can see your screen. Alright.

YouTube Caption Unavailable

Does The Press Release From MGYB Include An Organization Page On Press Advantage For Company With Schema On It?

Would You Offer KnowEm Or Similar Service?

Great. Okay, thanks, Marco.

What Kind Of Content Do You Put On A GMB Website?

Which was just caught, it was completely copied and pasted. But Google made its own GMB post a featured snippet which Mark I don’t know if you ever have seen that before.

Can Google Index Your Site Pages Through Site Structure/Directories Alone?

All right. Next, Kyle says can Google index your site pages through site structure or directories alone? I’m just wondering if it is completely necessary to include internal links.

Long the silo how you want it to follow the silo, not how the but the site is going to follow your silo. It’s a way to structure your unstructured data.

Yeah.

Do Site Navigation Links In The Header Bleed A Silo?

Just need to account for other things. And I’m not going to get into that because that’s just for our paid groups. That’s it.

Okay, there’s that’s what I was looking for.

All right, so the next question is not really much of a question is more of a gotcha. I, it’s not what you guys said it was, but unless he’s changed it.

Are You Using A Custom URL On A GSite?

Would You Syndicate Content From Your Money Site To Your Tier 1 Web 2.0 Sites?

uh, okay. So Ilana says Jesus, I think I might be out doing maybe at this point.

comments. Yeah, they become topically relevant when you fill out the profile the proper way.

Is Syndwire Or OnlyWire Still Relevant For Linkbuilding In 2020?

No, I don’t use those. I can’t really comment.

What Co-Citation And Content Aggregation Sites Do You Recommend?

I agree. So I just did a quick Google search RSS feed filters and look, I mean, guys use Google.

All right, we’re gonna keep moving

You’re almost out of time.

Uh, okay.

Is It Okay To Insert A Line Or Sentence To Existing Post To Get Backlink To A Page?

That it can actually help to get the bots to crawl it again and everything else. So I don’t know, I don’t have a specific answer to that. What do you say, Marco?

Um, no, nothing specific. Okay, I think it would work either way.

How Many Videos Should You Put In A YouTube Silo To Impact Rankings?

How Would You Establish A New GMB Location For HVAC Business In Dallas, Texas?

Okay, well, there we go. Thanks, everybody, for being here. We will see you guys next week.

Thanks for sticking around, guys. Bye, everyone.

Weekly SEO Q&A – Hump Day Hangouts – Episode 303 published first on your-t1-blog-url

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