Thinking

There are 953 posts filed in Thinking (this is page 38 of 96).

Because Wix Acquired Deviant Art, I somehow ended up building a homepage I’d designed 7 years ago

This article https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/23/website-builder-wix-acquires-art-community-deviantart-for-36m/?ncid=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook helped give birth to the current homepage I have on florins.co

It made me remember all those amazing years of being a part of the Deviant Art community. I’ve created my first account 11 years ago.

#justimaginethat

People didn’t even use hashtags back then. #justsayin

Since then I’ve done a shitload of amazing things. Became an actual, paid and professional designer, managed an IT company, started my first startup, failed my first startup, founded and funded (with Angel Investment money) my second startup which is still growing strong (we’re in our 5th year), fell in love, like super in love, married that remarkable woman, became the parent of the most awesome boy in the Universe, became wiser, smarter, mentored lots of young entrepreneurs (and even some older than me). I won awards in the tech field. I won a national literature award.

So many things changed since then.

Today I’ve also realized that I’m still watching the same anime I started watching when I was a pre-teen. And then when I was a teen. And now when I’m a father. Because the series just keeps evolving, and believe it or not it’s getting new episodes. Yes, I’m looking at you Dragon Ball.

Anyway, so I was discussing with my best friend about this weird news. We are both deviants for 11 years now (who knew time flew so fast?). While discussing the news, I’ve checked my old webdesign sketches. And I found my favorite design of all times.

It was supposed to be my homepage back in 2010. Well, 7 years later it REALLY is my homepage.

Cheers! (and cheers to me for finally making it happen)

Here’s an idea from Forbes 2016 that I stated back in 2011

”

4. Traditional website power will decline.

Traditional websites are being robbed of their power in a few different ways. For starters, apps are becoming radically more popular as a means of acquiring information and tapping into online functionality; Google’s getting into the action here with more intensive features for app-based search visibility, accelerating what may be a natural course. Digital assistants are also closing in on traditional sites’ territory, providing immediate answers from their respective databases for common questions, and providing immediate functionality whenever possible. As digital assistants and apps in general become more popular, I expect demand and visibility for traditional websites to significantly decline.”

Yes, I have said this in 2011. That’s why in Cif2.net at that time a thriving new startup, we’ve implemented a digital assistant.

Your website was speaking directly to you and communicating with the other users and websites in the Cif2.net environment.

We called it “smart sites” back then. I guess the term now would be “intelligent sites”

Great day today! – Having happy customers is better than anything else

just finished a Skype call with a really cool content creator. I am super excited to learn all about how he manages content and how much he loves Squirrly and ContentLook.

For him it seems that Squirrly is perfect pre-publishing and ContentLook post-publishing. Did never think the products worked so well together.

And the best part is: he got to Squirrly because a friend of his said that’s what he should use if he wants to be visible on Google. Now he is a fan. I’ve learned a lot from him during the skype call.

#custdevrocks !!! (yes, Customer Development rocks)

Hacking together the Nomore.cards app

Had an idea during the weekend.

Actually this idea started during Startup Weekend Mures some years ago when me and one of Philipp’s friends discussed the idea of revolutionizing business cards. Disrupting Business Cards… by removing them altogether.

Me and a friend of mine (Voicu by his name hvm) thought about the app a couple of months after Startup Weekend. Came up with a complicated (but secure and awesome) model.

Because of the complexity, we decided not to do it. (didn’t have iOS skills. Tried getting someone, but that didn’t work out).

So this weekend, 29 and 30 Oct 2016, I drew a sketch and started doing it.

// story will get updated soon.

Boosting Twitter Shares

A fresh idea from Aladdin of Growth Hacking Idea.com (http://growthhackingidea.com/)

Thing is: few people (1 to 5 %) from your audience of readers will actually share your content.

If you invest a lot of time in making sure your content gets read by 1,000 people, you’ll get 10 to 50 shares maximum. Most probably just about 10.

So what can you do? -> Find the kinds of people who ACTUALLY share content and get them to share yours.

Aladdin’s method:

As you see, sharers are very rare – only 1 person per every 15-25.

Here comes a trick.
In order to boost shares by 15-25 times, you need to promote your content to people who belong to this rare group.

1. Write down links to content similar to yours.
2. Go to Twitter.com and search them one by one.
3. Switch to the “Live” tab.
4. Here they are – people who love to share your type of content.
5. Hit reply near each tweet and make everybody happy 😉

ranking idea

But the CRUCIAL step here is – SEO competitive analysis(page/domain authority, the # of backlinks, etc).
It’s next-to-impossible with a low budget to rank #1 on Google for highly competitive keywords.

Michael Karp found low competitive keywords and in 9 monthsgot multiple #1 rankings and 178,000 search engine visits.

Here’re the instructions on doing competitive analysis:
1. Go to Google KeywordPlanner and KeywordTool to find suitable in-demand keywords.
2. Install MozBar and SEOquake Chrome extensions.
3. Google each of your keywords.
4. When you see low page/domain authority, low # of backlinks on the first 5 results on Google – you are golden– this is your winning keyword that makes sense to focus on.

Recently, I released a case study where a person achieved #2 rank on Google for a keyword “Content Upgrade“. If you look at the results page through the lens of the SEO Chrome extensions, you will see why – because of the low competition.