Info Planet

Poultry body rejects 'promulgation' of Covid in chicken

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 12:35:00 +0000

LAHORE: The Pakistan Poultry Association has communicated worries over the gossipy tidbits about chicken conveying Covid, and named them bogus and outlandish. It denounced the "unmerited purposeful publicity", expressing that individuals should keep devouring chicken and other poultry items with no dread.

"Covid has not been accounted for in any chicken item in any piece of the country. Also, poultry has not been accounted for to be connected with the transmission of the infection to people in any piece of the world. Every one of the tales being spread or coursed via web-based media in such a manner are totally off-base and outlandish," the affiliation's northern locale bad habit administrator, Chaudhry Farhan, told columnists during a public interview here on Wednesday.

Flanked by the affiliation's office-carriers, Mr. Fargham said the Ministry of National Food Security and Research (Livestock Wing) and Poultry Research Institute Punjab had likewise disproved this "ridiculous purposeful publicity" through true notices, which have been distributed in the media. He called attention to that the poultry area was perhaps the most coordinated area of the agro-based industry.

The poultry area has been serving the country since 1962 and giving reasonable poultry items to individuals to satisfy the prerequisites of creature protein. It contributes 40% of the all-out meat utilization and creates business and pay for thousands.

"In this way, chicken meat is solid, nutritious, and alright for shoppers," he guaranteed.

In the meantime, the Lahore poultry merchants affiliation president, Tariq Javaid, on Wednesday asked the chicken wholesalers and retailers to plan for another round of strike in the several days after Chief Minister Usman Buzdar looked for an offer of chicken meat at Rs260 per kilogram.

"A day prior, in a gathering with Lahore Commissioner, Rs300 per kg rate concurred commonly. However, presently after the CM's declaration, it appears to be that we will have no choice except to notice a strike on the off chance that we don't get alleviation from the court on Thursday (today). All of you should be prepared for another round of strike since we can't follow the public authority rates due to covering of the costs and captures of wholesalers and retailers," Javaid said in an articulation.

LDA: The Lahore Development Authority on Wednesday annihilated different designs fabricated unlawfully on locales implied for the development of schools, sewerage removals, dispensaries, and so forth in different private lodging plans.

The destruction was completed at Punjab University Housing Scheme (Phase-2), Govt Superior Service Housing Scheme, and New Lahore City Scheme, as per a representative.

Ahrefs vs SEMrush (2020) - The Ultimate Comparison Guide

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 25 Jun 2020 06:39:00 +0000

In the present internet-enabled world, search engine optimization or SEO has much importance to companies, individuals and others compete with their website. All of them wants to see their website on the first page of any search engines. When it comes to search engines, Google is most sought than Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and AOL. Here the website owners search for the best SEO tools to optimize their website on search engines. The leading software developers for this tool are Ahrefs and SEMrush. Here, we have done a comparison of Ahrefs vs SEMrush. This Ahrefs vs SEMrush 2020 will help you to buy the best SEO tool. According to complete research Semrush is the winner is all aspects as it is the best Seo tool.

Ahref VS Semrush which tool is the best

Ahrefs vs SEMrush In 2020

Both the companies are serving as software as a service or SaaS. They serve global companies, individuals and others who own their website to promote information, product, or services. Their site type is in to digital market intelligence. Their SEO tool helps advertising and information technology industries. They serve international from the respective official websites Ahrefs and Semrush. You can also find them in trusted links online. The SEO tool users can try them as freemium products. Before buying this tool, it is advisable to read Ahrefs vs SEMrush.

Ahrefs vs SEMrush Comparison

Ahrefs Features

Keyword research features

Keyword competitor analysis

Technical SEO tools

SEMrush Features

Well SEMrush is better than Ahrefs

Optimize your content for SEO

Keyword magic tool

On page SEO checker

Analyze competitor PPC campaigns

Reverse engineer a site’s top traffic sources

Analyze log files

Both the tools are good in Keyword research features, Back link analysis, and Technical SEO tools. They are adding new features. It is advisable to buy the latest version. Their premium package is inclusive of tons of features. It is the best for business, SEO experts, and individuals who earns money through their informative websites. Therefore, the SEO tool price depends of the features they provide. It will be better to buy SEMrush, which is value for money. They offer more features than Ahrefs Features.

User friendly Tool

SEMrush is more user-friendly than Ahrefs. A service provider can easily handle the SEMrush SEO tool. Yet, a website owner and its QC team and SEO team can handle independently with the Ahrefs SEO tool. SEMrush has a wider output result and easy to read and understand those statics. Anyone new to this tool can learn by himself. Yet, one has to go through tutorials or need help from a developer to confidently work on Ahrefs SEO tool. Winner is Semrush

PPC

Pay-per-click or PPC is one of the advertising campaigns in SEO services. Here, SEMrush has more PPC camping tools than Ahrefs PPC. You can see real-time PPC statics. This will help to lead your campaign by doing the necessary things at the earliest. This will spool from SERP’s. Therefore, the PPC keyword tool will help your advertising campaign by competing with your competitors.

Generating Reports

We need statics or reports of domains. By this, only we can do better SEO and bring the desired result in digital marketing. Here, Ahrefs vs SEMrush reports per day is most often searched before availing an SEO tool. The value for money is with SEMrush. They offer 10,000 reports for the plan of $ 399. Yet, Ahrefs offer only 250 reports per day. Here, SEMrush is the best to use, when you have to check more domains or thousands of domains per day.

Keyword Search

A keyword-optimized website will come on the top of any search engine. Ahrefs and SEMrush have these features. Yet, SEMrush has more keyword optimization than the Ahrefs SEO tool. They have keyword analytic and keyword magic tools to do a better insight on organic searches. This will help a new and existing website to reach the desired SERP levels. This tool is SEO analyst-friendly

Backlinks

Both Ahrefs and SEMrush have a backlink analysis tool. The former was popular since its launch as one of the best tools for doing backlinks analytics. However, SEMrush is much trusted due to the way backlink analytic works. Today, SEO analysts do a better job with the SEMrush backlink analysis tool. The SEO feature and SEO tools have helped many website owners to improve or boost their websites with using proper backlinks.

Projects

The number of project creation is what you must check with SEO suits. Here, Ahrefs vs. SEMrush is what most sought due to most preferred SEO tools as SaaS. Ahrefs and SEMrush premium products allow you to do a number of projects as per the product pricing. Ahrefs allows you to create a maximum of 10 projects only. Here, you cannot create a project slot, if there are more websites with you. SEMrush allows you to create up to 25 projects. Here, you can create a project slot.

Add-On

The site owners must check the competition’s with your competitors. Here you need to apply competitive intelligence’ add-on. Here, SEMrush is providing much competitive intelligence than Ahrefs tools. This helps any digital marketers. The add-on may cost an additional $ 200 or more. They are as follows.

Market Explorer

Traffic Analytics

Competitor Benchmarking

Bulk Traffic Analysis

Top Pages

These tools will help in intelligence. You can analyze and compete in this digital marketing world. Hence add on will add value only for paying a price monthly.

Support

Customer support is most important when you pay for SEO tools. If they do not give or provide one or two support options, it will be very glad to take assistance when we have any doubts. SEMrush offers phone support, chat support, and e-mail support. Whereas Ahrefs provides only chat support. When you buy this product as SaaS, you must check for the phone number and it is a valid one. Here, SEMrush seems to be a trusted SaaS provider.

The key takeaways from SEMrush's data:

The fastest-growing educational resources in April were Brainpop, Coursera, EdX, Khan Academy, and Socratic, traffic of all these is up by more than 50%.

The search "free online courses" saw 809% increase in searches in April, Googled more than 1 million times.

Online courses by Harvard, Yale, Tesda, and Coursera skyrocketed more than 1,000% in a search on courses during quarantine.

Tech courses for Excel, computer science, Python, coding, and programming were all up by 100% in search. Other popular variants include data science, web development, and cybersecurity.

Surprising trend skepticism

But the trend was met with some cynicism: "Honestly, it looks like businesses took advantage of people having lots of spare time and started overwhelming them with lots of ads, newsjacking COVID-19 trends, promoting free courses and content," said Oleg Shchegolev, CEO and co-founder of SEMrush. "In truth, most of this was pure trash; just businesses trying so hard to ride the lockdown wave. And only a few businesses dealt with all that responsibly."

SEE: Top 100+ tips for telecommuters and managers (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Despite what Shchegolev said, his company is not without associations to free online courses and training. On Oct. 29-30, 2020, to celebrate Global Marketing Day, SEMrush will offer a 24-hour online conference streamed live, "Around the marketing world in 24 hours." It expects 150 speakers ("savvy CMOs" and "the brightest" in-house marketers), from three continents participating in sessions throughout the day. Speakers are from IBM, Roku, Adobe, LinkedIn, Unicef, Hitachi, Microsoft, Legal Zoom, Pfizer, and more. It will be live-streamed from studios in New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, and London.

The company also has SEMrush blog and webinars designed for varying levels of expertise, from novice to seasoned expert, and the SEMrush Academy, a free source and course, with an official certificate when the course ends. More than 200,000 students have graduated from the academy and more than 10,000 received certificates in April.

Ecom Income Blueprint Updates: Builderall and SEMRush Reviews, and Alternatives to Amazon Associate Program

Founded by Nick Tsai, Ecom Income Blueprint is bringing the best of the affiliate and online marketing world at one place. Nick Tsai has discovered the AAA Formula to make the regular job redundant by building diverse channels of revenue, upwards of $10K per month. In the latest updates, Nick has shared some insightful reviews on Builderall, SEMRush, top affiliate programs and the Amazon Associate program.

How does Builderall, the popular one-stop place for building an online business, look in 2018? How does it compare with Clickfunnels? Apart from answering these common questions, this latest review does in-depth into every aspect of using the platform, which covers every element of online businesses, from web pages, blogs and sales funnels, to landing pages, real time purchase, auto-responders, analytics and more. Nick also compares Builderall with Aweber, ConvertKit and Sumo.

Anothe popular tool is SEMRush, which makes it easy to find valuable keywords. SEMRush is used by both old and new bloggers to discover keywords and optimize their sites and target their audience. Nick goes into the nitty gritty of using this platform to its maximum, and the SEMRush review also compares its three versions, SEMRush Guru, Pro and Business.

Shopify is an immensely popular and powerful tool for building e-commerce websites the world over. A cloud-based solution that easily allows anyone to start an online selling business with a shopping cart, Shopify also has its competitors. This Shopify review does the hard work of comparing the pros and cons of Shopify and its pricing with other popular platforms such as 3dcart, WooCommerce, Ecwid, Zoey, Volusion, Pinnacle Cart, Big Cartel and Magento.

Every blogger wants to know which affiliate programs are the best. The latest affiliate programs for bloggers are discussed here in detail, and there are 50 of them to choose from! These are the best tools for new and old bloggers and influencers to check out.

Finally, does Amazon Associate still makes financial sense in 2018 for building long-term income? That's the question uppermost on everyone's mind, and the answer can be found in this post on Amazon Affiliate Marketing. The article discusses the challenges and shortcomings of the program, and presents an attractive alternative in the form of list building, while introducing other affiliate programs as well.

Ecom Income Blueprint was founded in 2016 by Nick Tsai as a place to help small businesses and people to thrive online. Nick began as a struggling digital marketer, and finally stumbled upon the AAA formula for online success. He is today a successful Amazon seller, blogger, super affiliate, author and team builder for helping more people start their home based business.

SEO tools pricing

You can try the Ahrefs SEO tool for a 7-day trial by spending $7. Yet, the SEMrush SEO tool is free for 7-days. You can get a 14-days trial by using trusted links. You can find them in digital marketing related websites. Ahrefs offers four pricing policies. You can buy them at USD 99, USD 179, USD 399, and USD 999 per month. They do give up to 20% discounts for any upfront payments. SEMrush SEO tool comes as a monthly subscription with varied prices. They are SEMrush Pro for $99.95, SEMrush Guru for $199.95, and SEMrush Business f hior $399.95. They do give your full plans or annual plans. For this, you have to contact their customer care team to get them with some offers and discounts. It is advisable to compare the SEO tool price by Ahrefs vs. SEMrush 2020.

Want to make your startup journey smooth?

Here is the link click on the link and start your journey: Try SEMrush today and start your 7 day free trial and make your website SEO friendly , make money online through a part time job at home in about a hour

Amazon

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Jun 2020 08:44:00 +0000

Buy this thing now this will protect you from this deadly coronavirus
STAY HOME STAY SAFE

This a gift card that you can use on Amazon and save money

Online herbal treatment

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 07:39:00 +0000

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Google Adsense

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 10:03:00 +0000

Well, I'm understandably curious. What was your "case"? How did you get a human to respond to you? In my situation, I emailed them immediately, asking what clicks were fraudulent, could they be filtered out, etc. The response was vfhdgg auto-reply basically Well, i am understandably curious. What was your "case"? How did you get a human to respond to you? In my state of affairs, I emailed them right away, asking what clicks have been fraudulent, should they be filtered out, and so on. The reaction turned into an car-reply basically telling me to go away and in no way trouble them again. So, another electronic mail, explaining what I idea passed off (quite lots what I wrote upstream in the thread),with another shape e-mail reaction, similarly shutting me down.

Again, i am cynical, however I must believe you bought a favorable reaction because of your growth charge. Google is a business, and you make them a whole lot of cash, I imagine. Someone noticed that ability and decided to intrude and overrule their vaunted, wonderful, mystery algorithm.

I also find fault with the fact that they shut me out of my account, and yet by hook or by crook they don't have the era to prevent serving the advertisements. I had to manually take away the AdSense code, because even though i used to be come what may responsible of producing fraudulent clicks, they endured to serve ads to my web site. It turned into alright for them to keep to make cash from my site, but now not for me to do so.

The system is seriously mistaken. That said, even though, i am a hypocrite - given a listening to ear and a reinstatement, i would host them again.

So my advice is, use it. See what occurs. However do not be surprised if 2 days before the check is cut you get an accusatory e mail...

How to make money online

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 10:00:00 +0000

online

Contrary to popular belief, there’s no “easy” way to make money online. However, with just a few essentials like the internet, your computer or laptop and a bit of knowledge, you can make it happen even without much experience in the matter. Whether you’re just hoping to legally make some extra cash on the side or looking to make money online while working from home full-time, we’re here to help.

If you’re only hoping to sell old vinyl on eBay or flogging knackered paperbacks on Amazon, you might want to look elsewhere. We've done our research and trawled the web to put together this list of new, exciting and innovative ways in which technology can help you make money. We'll also explore topics such as human intelligence tasks – jobs that computers and software can't do, but are vital to the functioning of an electronic business.

So find that perfect spot at home where you’re most productive, take a look at these ideas and get ready to make money online.

Computers have removed lots of boring and repetitive tasks from the workplace, but they've created a fair few, too, which gives us an opportunity to make money online quickly and reasonably easily.

For example there's Amazon's Mechanical Turk comes in. Small tasks that can't be performed by software are farmed out to its subscribers, who turn the job around for a few cents at a time.

That name? It's from an 18th century sideshow attraction. A chess-playing robot was toured around Europe, amazing audiences with its apparent skill. It was, however, controlled by a human hidden from view.

The micro-jobs that are tendered at Mechanical Turk (called HITs or human intelligence tasks) could be any quick, computer-related duty.

In a typical session, a user might do a bit of data entry or fill in a questionnaire. The more HITs you complete in the allotted time, the more you earn. With many HITs offered at just a few cents a task, it requires dedication to earn a crust – but there are advantages, too.

You can work from home doing as much or as little as you want, at any time of day you want. And tasks that require more thought and effort pay more.

If Mechanical Turk's rewards seem too paltry, there are similar, more specialised services to choose from.

MicroWorkers offers higher rates, but the tasks are in the grey marketing category, with HITs requiring that you sign up for dating sites and blogs, or review items on Amazon.

Meanwhile CloudCrowd is an unusual-looking enterprise. You sign up through Facebook and much of the work on offer is proofreading and translation-based.

Human intelligence tasks pay up to $3, though many of the jobs on offer are less. Payment is through PayPal and support is offered through Get Satisfaction.

Finally, there's Just Answer. The model here is a little different, but still nestles in the same broad category as other HIT sites. Here, you get to use your expertise to answer live queries from users.

Of course, you need some qualifications in the field you choose and your credentials are displayed to users. The system works on a bidding basis. As a provider, you scan the listings for live questions you can answer.

If you can help, you set a price. It's up to the user whether they agree to pay that price or continue looking for a better deal. New providers take 25% of the fee, while more seasoned experts get a 50% cut.

1. Advertise on your website

The easiest way to start serving ads from your site, and earning money, is Google's AdSense. A chunk of code is provided for you to paste into your site when you sign up.

People browsing your site see adverts that fit its content and keywords. The cash-per-click model means that every time a visitor clicks on a link, you get a share of the fee the advertiser paid.

Google doesn't publicise the exact percentage of the pie that you'll get, but some keywords offer a bigger slice than others.

Don't already have a website? Check out our guide on how to build a website.

Some AdSense users have seen earnings over £1,000 ($1,300, AU$1,700) a month. It's hard to track which keywords are the real winners, even though there are several blogs and websites that claim to list the highest paying AdSense keywords.

Is it worth shelling out for these lists? You can use Google's own AdWords tool to suggest related keywords for free. It'll help you optimise your content for more targeted ads.

Don't click ads on your own page, and don't think asking your friends to click on them will help you either. Google considers this click fraud, and employs sophisticated tracking mechanisms to protect its revenue. You're more likely to get a swift, permanent ban than any extra income.

If you want to make money with AdSense, just make good, consistent content aimed at a small audience.

For more control over ads, try affiliate linking. You either take a percentage of all the sales you refer to the service provider, or you get simple cash for clicks.

Amazon Associates is a highly visible example. Sign up for access to tools that let you create banners, badges and text links to any item on the site – just make sure the products you choose are relevant to the content you already carry.

When someone clicks an Amazon affiliate link on your site, you'll get nine per cent of the cash they spend. Easy money.

2. Upload videos

Technically, with one of the best webcams and a couple of other crucial PC accessories, anyone can make a home video for publication online. You can upload video at HD resolutions on YouTube, for example – and the service takes care of the compression at various resolutions for you.

YouTube also accepts video in QuickTime, MPEG, Windows Media format or as an AVI file. Keep in mind that HD resolution is 1920 x 1080, so there's no point going over that. Once you've clicked the 'Upload' button, it's really straightforward.

The tough part isn't making videos – it's growing an audience. You'll need that audience to make money. It's easy to see which are YouTube's most popular videos. Go to YouTube's Charts webpage, where you can pick the most viewed videos.

There are several common threads. First, cuteness. Cute kids and cute animals. If it's funny as well as cute, it's YouTube gold. The number one video of all time is the infamous 'Charlie bit my finger'.

One way to hedge your bets is to ride the slipstream. For a short time, Rebecca Black parodies and mashups were nearly as popular on YouTube as the original video. Catch the next viral smash at the beginning of its ascent, then make a video that rides its coat-tails and your efforts will benefit from the reflected glory.

It's tricky to time correctly but pays dividends if you do. Instructional videos do well, too, but that subject really deserves a separate discussion because there's an entire secondary market in tutorial videos.

Get the video views and those eyeballs on your work can be translated into cash. The YouTube Partner Program enables you to place advertising on your clips and earn money for every viewing.

Be aware, though, that it's really tough to get in. What's more, YouTube doesn't reveal hard figures but it does publish testimonials.

There are alternatives to YouTube that let you earn revenue from adverts without having to build a following first. Try sites like blip.tv and vimeo.com.

For more information on getting started, check out our YouTube tips and tricks for beginners guide.

3. Sell your photos

Digital photography enjoys a brilliant synergy with PCs and the web. Millions of us enjoy uploading pictures to photo sites such as Flickr, or sharing images with friends on Facebook and Twitter.

That's not all you can do, though – with a little extra work, you could be earning cash with your camera taking stock photographs and selling them online.

There are two markets in stock photography. At the high end are images produced by professionals. These include shots of news events, celebrities and difficult setups. Usage rights for these sell for hundreds.

Your entry point is through microstock – where royalty-free images are licensed for commercial use at very low prices, from which you take a percentage cut.

Like many other online enterprises, this is a volume business, with pennies per sale rather than pounds. The key is to create popular images that lots of people will want to use.

Handily, several microstock sites publish guidelines revealing exactly what kinds of image they're after and what they don't want. iStockPhoto for example, reveals that seasonal themes and corporate imagery are big sellers, while shots of fruit on white backgrounds are passé.

However, the main requirement is that your shots should be well composed, at a sufficiently high resolution, well lit and in focus. Basic photography skills will serve you well here.

Other potential markets include Shutterpoint. This is a community-orientated stock repository, with a 'stack 'em high, sell it low' ethos that works well if you can produce popular images that will sell in volume.

Another particularly good bet is Shutterstock, a more formal and established presence that enables you to make up to $30 for each image sold – and images can be sold for use multiple times.

If you'd rather go straight for the higher end of the market, you can sell your photography direct to users from your own site. PhotoShelter offers a set of tools that enable you to do so, taking care of digital photo storage and payment systems, while you have control over what you sell. The catch is a fixed fee, from $9.99 a month.

We've got loads of photography how to articles which can help you improve your photos for a better chance of making money out of them.

4. Publish an ebook

Self-published ebooks are an ideal format for niche ideas and a good way to make money online. Secrets of mind reading and make-up techniques of the stars are ideal topics. Arcane expertise could net you a profit, too.

Perhaps you rebuilt an old car from scratch. There are probably a few hundred other people who'd tackle the same project with your guidance.

Self-publishing with ebooks is easier than ever – especially with iTunes and Kindle publication now real options. You don't even have to create a special format for Kindle books.

The Kindle Direct Publishing program accepts digital manuscripts in plain text, HTML or Microsoft Word DOC formats. That's the older Word format, by the way, not DOCX.

You can use PDF, but Amazon book publishers have reported problems with formatting.

There's a form to fill in, enabling you to categorise the book, add an ISBN and add Digital Rights Management.

Authors report that making changes to the submission after the fact is laborious, so make sure every detail is correct and your text has been proofread. Next you set a price and keep 70% of the mark-up from every sale.

Formatting books for Apple iBooks – the free book store app for the iPad – is more involved. You need to output to the ePub protocol, supported in Apple's Pages application, Adobe InDesign.

Alternatively, you can convert to ePub using the open source tool Calibre. From there, the submission system is similar to KDP.

One final service that is more than worth a mention is Smashwords. It makes the process of publishing to multiple formats and outlets easier – and it accepts digital manuscripts in DOC format.

With one submission to Smashwords, you can have that all-important ISBN number sorted out and publish your book to the Nook and Sony's eReader store, as well as the Smashwords site. It even publishes to Apple iBooks.

5. Peer-to-peer lending

Peer-to-peer lending, or social banking, uses the principle of crowd-sourcing. Let's say you want to borrow a couple of grand to start an online T-shirt business.

The money comes from a network of lenders, not a bank, and it pays to be a lender, too. At Zopa, for example, the average return at the time of writing is 5.0%, which is actually a lot better than most short-term savings accounts.

What if a borrower can't pay back the money? So far, Zopa has done pretty well on that front, with a paltry 0.28 per cent default rate. But your investment doesn't go to one person – it's seeded throughout the community at no more than £10 per borrower.

If one person defaults, it'll have little impact on your return as a lender. Zopa is the frontrunner in this area, but other sites offer a similar service.

You may get a better return from Funding Circle, for example. The main difference for borrowers is that there's no flat fee. Instead, a portion of the loan is paid to the service.

Funding Circle prefers business customers, while Zopa is open to anyone who has a good credit rating.

You can get a better return if you're willing to take a higher risk. That's how it works at FundingKnight.

Borrowers post loan requests and you can choose who you want to lend money to. You put in a bid for that loan, setting your own interest rate. The return on investments averages at 10.8 per cent, but although all borrowers are screened, it's somewhat riskier than lending to the crowd.

If a borrower defaults, a debt collector may called in to pursue your investment.

Column: How a science magazine from Charles Darwin’s era found new life online amid the coronavirus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 09:57:00 +0000

The 1870s was the decade that gave us the telephone, the light bulb and phonograph, Vaseline, PVC and Darwin’s book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” And it also gave us Popular Science, a magazine that has been published for 147 years — and for the last 21 years, has offered all sorts of science delights on its website.

Corinne Iozzio became its editor in chief just as the coronavirus crisis was starting. Since then, the website has delivered user-friendly and inventive takes on the practices and practicalities of COVID-19, like a step-by-step guide to cleaning your groceries, how to clean your face mask and how to tell allergy symptoms from COVID-19. That’s in addition to regular sprightly and engaging science and tech stories with headlines such as: “We are eating large animals to extinction,” “What avocados and clownfish have in common, sexually speaking,” and a personal favorite, “Why two by fours don’t really measure two inches by four.”

In an age when science is right there on your phone, Iozzio wants to help make you make science work for you.

*****

How is Popular Science covering coronavirus? What’s your response and responsibilities?

This is one of those moments where the word “popular” in our name is absolutely the most important thing that we have to keep as a watchword, to not necessarily get too deep into the science and the lab work of what’s going on in the face of a global pandemic, but to really just take that breath and take that step back and think about what are the things that our readers want to know. What are the measured answers to the really important questions? And how do we deliver them to them in a way that’s accessible and approachable and just doesn’t really talk down to anybody in any real way?

And what do they want to know?

They just want to know practical things: I have symptoms that I would normally just think are a cold. When should I be worried? What’s the threshold for when I should be really pressing to get a test. What’s the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] say? I’m out of hand sanitizer. What the heck do I do? Really practical things that I think of when we talk about what we need to be covering, what we need to be sharing with our readers, is what is life in the time of COVID.

I saw one article about how to stop touching your face. I can’t imagine anything more practical.

Even taking that step back and taking a breath and thinking, how do I become more conscious of all of the things that I do without thinking? All of the things that I take for granted? And how does every iota of that need to evolve?

Or even, just what are the things that make me want to touch my face? Is this a nervous tic? Do I have allergies, therefore, I have itchy skin?

Once you identify your triggers and you think, what do I do to stop those? How do I change that habit? Do I twiddle my thumbs? Do we need to bring back fidget spinners just to keep our hands busy? These sorts of very practical day-to-day things that can have a really big impact on people’s lives.

A lot of our job is translating. cutting through all of the jargon. And frankly, when the news is so saturated right now, all of the noise — what are the facts and figures? What are the things that we can trust and put forward and really use that authority?

This is a brand that’s 147 years old. And that’s not something that we take lightly. We take that authority that we have, and we wield it in a very strategic and methodical way.

Are you there as a fact checker to debunk some of the mythology that’s out there?

I think we do serve that sort of role as gatekeepers and as people who push our proverbial glasses up our nose and say, here’s what’s really happening. We’re going to talk about this for a second. Now, you heard that you can distill vodka into hand sanitizer. Can we just have a reality check on this for a second, please?

Have those been some of the most popular pieces on your site?

Obviously, in the last few weeks, all of our COVID coverage has been extremely popular, but stories like that, stories about how all of the stores are completely out of hand sanitizer — OK, well, let’s talk about aloe vera gel. Let’s talk about rubbing alcohol and then let’s do the math for you to figure out the right proportions to put those together, so that you will have something that’s just as effective as if you went to the market and bought some sanitizer.

Popular Science is a quarterly publication, but you can’t wait that long to cover something like this.

The magazine serves a very different function than the website. The magazine we think of as a keepsake. They’re all single topic cover to cover. We just dig our teeth into something that’s super-duper fun and interesting and can touch on every facet of science, something that can really sit on the shelf and you can come back to it time and time again like you would a nice hefty coffee table book.

The website, popsci.com, is actually our largest platform, and that’s where we do the type of work serving the day-to-day needs and curiosities of our audience.

What’s the difference between the quarterly magazine’s readership and the people who read you online?

The magazine readership skews a little older generally and it skews more male, which is something that we have been slowly changing over the last several years. The digital audience is very different. It’s younger. Both of our audiences are very geographically diverse. Our audience is spread not just on the coasts, which is more typical of science and technology magazines. We have a very large concentration of readers in the middle of the country. And that’s true for both print and digital.

What’s remarkable about our digitals, about popsci.com, is that our readership there is close to a 50-50 split, men and women. And that’s something that we worked really hard to change over the last three or four years.

It used to be much more heavily skewed male and we’ve pulled it center, which is something that we’re really proud of. I think it’s not a matter of, we came in and suddenly started covering women’s issues. What our science desk found was that women’s magazines were covering issues of women’s health and science that were more traditionally relevant to women, but they weren’t covering it with the real scientific authority that Pop Sci could have.

So then we took this notion that there is this underserved thing: Let’s take our scientific authority and apply it to things that a more heavily female audience would be interested in. And once we started to do that, the change happened very quickly.

What are a couple of examples of those stories?

I’ll name a couple of my favorites. One of our younger editors became very enamored with a particular brand of tights, this brand called Heist. They’re the most comfortable tights. They didn’t run. They didn’t bunch. They didn’t roll down at the waistband. And she just became completely enamored.

What is the innovation? What is the engineering marvel that has allowed these tights to come into existence? So she called up the company, she talked to their heads of product. And what she found was that it wasn’t that the technology to make better tights wasn’t out there. It’s just that somebody bothered to try. And that’s true of so many things pertaining to issues that predominantly impact women.

More women than men, for example, suffer from chronic migraines. And only in the last two or three years have you seen real advancement in the types of drugs that can not only treat migraines, but help prevent them.

How has the mission of Popular Science changed over nearly 150 years?

Even if you look 10 or 15 years ago at Popular Science, you would have looked at it and you might have thought it to be an enthusiast magazine, for somebody who’s really, really, seriously interested in science, somebody who is an early adopter in terms of gadgets and audio video equipment.

And that’s changed so much, just in terms of the pervasiveness of technology in our day-to-day life, the amount of time that we spend interacting with it. And also just this notion that our entire world is science, this sort of awakening to everything that’s happening around us,

Science is part of everyday conversation in a way that it hasn’t been before. And we’re seeing that made manifest. Scientists aren’t the geeks and the nerds hanging out on the fringes. They’re part of the national conversation. We’re the cool kids now. And that’s a really great place to be.

There’s entrenched feeling that science is difficult, that it’s hard to be a scientist, or even engage in science just as an interested amateur.

It’s both worlds, right? Science is hard and it does require a tremendous amount of education and discipline and reading and knowing everything that came before you in order to figure out how you move forward.

But it’s also participatory. We’re each one of us, a source of data, and more data makes better information. If you look back at predictions of the future, we had flying cars by now and we were living in “Jetsons” condos in the sky, but nobody saw the smartphone coming.

Now it’s like we use Waze as a mapping tool. And each one of us is helping to map and catalog traffic on a day-to-day basis. And that’s something that nobody ever saw coming.

If you even bring it back to what’s happening right now with coronavirus and COVID testing, testing is important because it’s a mechanism by which people can get the treatment that they need. But testing is also important because it helps us get the data that we need to really understand what’s happening. And in that way, science is a very community thing and it’s incredibly participatory.

If science hasn’t always been political, then it certainly can be now. Is that something you have to deal with every day?

It’s something that we’re aware of every day, and it’s something that we take a lot of care in how we touch on politics, when we cover things and when we talk about things.

We’re very sensitive to something that might get very easily construed as what we just think is like some sort of offhanded joke, or some tiny little word choice can be very off-putting to someone who you’re trying to get to understand what’s happening.

We want to bring science to people’s doorsteps and help them understand how it impacts their day-to-day life.

Like the Green New Deal, for example. Giant, nebulous, hard to wrap your arms around. We say, OK, let’s look at this state by state. If we had a Green New Deal, what does that mean for you in Colorado? What does that mean for you in Delaware? Or California needs to do a lot of work retrofitting its buildings.

It’s just a matter of really drilling down like that. And that’s how you take the politics out of it. You just say, OK, I’m not going to talk to you about Republican or Democrat or independent or whatever. I want to talk about how this hits you where you live. Science is about facts, not opinions, and politics is grossly often on the opposite side of that.

Have you been surprised at how broadly science can be defined — internet freedom, pantyhose; it seems pretty wide.

I always say you could hand me a mechanical pencil and I could find you three science stories in that pencil without breaking a sweat. Let’s talk about the guy who made the clicky thing. Let’s talk about the synthetic rubber in the not-rubber eraser on the tip of it. It could go on and on and on. It’s everywhere.

How did you get into science journalism?

I got into science journalism through tech journalism. I was always the kid working with my dad running speaker wires under the living room floor, drilling holes in the floor, then running across beneath in the basement so that he could hook up his Bose floor speakers.

And then early in my career, I worked in tech journalism right around when the first iPhone came out. So it was kind of the best moment to become a gadget reporter.

With the coronavirus crisis, we see people turning to science and saying, ‘Science! Save us!’ It seems that every 10 years, something comes along and science has to come in in the last reel and be the hero in the white hat. Or the white lab coat.

It’s absolutely true. We want the undercurrent of science to not only be something that becomes part of the public conversation in an emergency. This is always something that’s happening in the background. And all of these wheels and mechanisms and research is always moving forward so that when something like this does happen, we’re hopefully at a stronger position every single time.

Bellevue science professor adapts to changing times

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 09:54:00 +0000

One professor at Bellevue University has turned to science to educate his students on the novel coronavirus outbreak.

Since the university has gone fully online to prevent the spreading on COVID-19, Tyler Moore, assistant professor of biology, is showing the importance of science.

Moore said he’s trying to make his courses as simple as possible, while also covering the most important concepts.

“We’re trying to reduce content to only get the really important things and I’m also trying to make sure we have more open-ended, engaging things,” he said.

“So what we’re trying to do, instead of having a bunch of little assignments, we’re trying to do one bigger project.”

Moore and his students have been using Zoom for sessions, and though he said it’s worked well, students are missing out on the hands-on element labs provide.

“We want to make sure people are getting the most and still getting techniques and the ability to analyze data,” he said. “So we’re trying to do as much as we can with spreading people out a little bit, allowing people to come in if they want to and do some lab activities and Zooming in.”

With many things changing every day due to the coronavirus, Moore said he wants to create an environment where the students can sit back and relax.

“I think they’ve got a lot of things going on, everyone has different challenges and they have all sorts of concerns, so what I’m trying to do is just take the pressure off and let’s try to just have fun and learn stuff,” he said.

“I want to have people view it as we’re just hanging out, pass the time and learn genetics. People are naturally excited about what we’re doing, you can’t put too much pressure but I think it’s a good distraction.

Moore said the current situation allows for good teaching material.

“You can see the value of having a good education in science, to have the capacity to solve these problems when they come up and to be able to communicate them as they come up,” he said. “It’s important to know what you’re doing. Getting everything out of your education right now is really valuable.”

In his courses, Moore has been discussing the immune system and how genetics play a role in the virus.

“We’re talking about how the current test works, and you have to understand quite a bit of genetics to understand how that test works,” he said.

“To be able to design new tests and new ways to doing things more quickly, you have to understand the basic science better.”

Yahoo Equivalent to AdSense

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 09:51:00 +0000

AdSense

Yahoo returned to the ad publishing business with two partners, Bing and Media.net.

George Doyle/Stockbyte/Getty Images

Yahoo got out of the publisher's advertising network business in 2010 when it discontinued its competitive product to Google's AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network Online. Yahoo got back in the business in 2012, but this time with Bing and Media.net as partners. The new program, Yahoo Bing Contextual Ads, is by invitation based on a number of criteria that publishers must meet to join the network. Small websites, bloggers and webmasters are usually not eligible. Yahoo recommends that publishers who don't qualify for the new service join the Chitika network.

Yahoo Publisher Network Online

In March 2010, Yahoo closed its self-service ad platform, Yahoo Publisher Network Online, which was similar to Google's AdSense. At the time the change was announced, Yahoo recommended that small and mid-size publishers join the Chitika online advertising network. Yahoo is one of many advertising partners in the network, which provides search-targeted, local and mobile ads through approximately 250,000 publishers, from large companies to bloggers and webmasters.

Yahoo Bing Network

Yahoo created an advertising partnership with Bing in conjunction with its search engine partnership. The Yahoo Bing Network is a network for advertisers, not ad publishers, and in that sense is similar to Google's AdWords. It allows advertisers to bid on ads that appear with search results in both the Yahoo and Bing search engines. The network is open to small and large advertisers alike. Larger advertisers have the opportunity to become preferred partners on the network and gain access to additional analytical tools to help them manage their advertising campaigns.

Yahoo Bing Network Contextual Ads

In September 2012, Yahoo Media.net announced the Yahoo Bing Network Contextual Ads program for Web publishers. The program is similar in concept to the Yahoo Publisher Network discontinued in 2010 but executed with partner Media.net and by invitation only. Media.net maintains relationships with publishers and supplies a self-service platform similar to AdSense. Yahoo maintains relationships and technology for advertisers, and Bing syndicates ads from small advertisers across the network. According to Yahoo, the program is entirely unrelated to the former Yahoo Publisher Network Online and is not intended to be a replacement for it.

Membership in Yahoo Bing Network Contextual Ads

The Yahoo Bing Network Contextual Ads program restricts membership to websites that receive most of their traffic from North America and Great Britain, are in English and already have high-quality, premium content and a significant volume of website visitors. To join the network, you must request an invitation. Someone at the program reviews your site and determines whether you can participate. Websites with primarily user-generated content are usually not eligible to participate as publishers.

About the Author

Steve McDonnell's experience running businesses and launching companies complements his technical expertise in information, technology and human resources. He earned a degree in computer science from Dartmouth College, served on the WorldatWork editorial board, blogged for the Spotfire Business Intelligence blog and has published books and book chapters for International Human Resource Information Management and Westlaw.

This Is How You Actually Make Money on YouTube

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 09:48:00 +0000

Think back to the mid-2000s, when Myspace was all the rage. Around that time, a little online-dating website popped up based on the idea that users could upload videos introducing themselves.

Things didn’t exactly go as planned — and now YouTube is the second most popular site on the internet, with 2 billion people logging in every month.

YouTube is projected to make $5.5 billion in ad revenue this year alone in the U.S. — and you can get a slice of the pie. Some people are making millions uploading videos of what they love to do.

If you're out of work because of a coronavirus shutdown and are looking for an opportunity, be warned that earning money on YouTube isn’t quick or easy. But with persistence and a well thought-out strategy, you can fatten your bank account. Here’s what you need to know.

How to build an audience

Jacob Lund / Shutterstock

Nothing you do matters if people aren’t watching. You won’t need a million subscribers to see returns, but a sufficiently large or sufficiently dedicated audience is key. Depending on whom you attract, some revenue streams will work out better than others.

When designing your channel, you need to find a niche that you enjoy and others will find valuable. You’ll get the best results if your content can be made quickly but is still worth following on a regular or even daily basis.

To get more hits, try using descriptive titles that include popular keywords. That will give people and search engines a clear idea of what your video is about. Adding tags will also help. For example, if your video is about baking, use specific words that relate to your video, such as chocolate chips.

Invite guest YouTubers on your channel — or appear on someone else’s — because you can get a huge boost either way. Other YouTubers have their own followers who will now know about you and the content you provide.

Lastly, pay for YouTube ads. It can get costly but will allow you to directly target prospective viewers. If you target the topic of “house pets,” your video will appear before all those people watching cat videos.

Once you have a growing audience, you can look into one or more of the following monetization methods. None of them is especially stable, so if you're hoping to make YouTube a career, you may want to seek the advice of a certified financial planner. You can find plans specifically designed for millennials.

How to earn money through advertising

GaudiLab / Shutterstock

Story continues

When most people think about monetizing YouTube, they imagine themselves creating good content and watching the ad dollars pour in. While that is a viable path, there's a bit more to it than that.

First you’ll need to sign up for a Google AdSense account, connect it to your channel and enable monetization. Once you have enough viewers watching and clicking on ads, a few pennies will start to trickle into your account.

Then you’ll want to join the YouTube Partner Program. You don’t need to join to use AdSense, but the program offers access to other income streams, like YouTube Premium’s subscription fees and Super Chat.

To apply for the YouTube Partner Program, you’ll need a minimum of 4,000 “valid public watch hours” in the last 12 months, more than 1,000 subscribers and a linked AdSense account.

How to maximize your advertising dollars

pathdoc / Shutterstock

While it’s easy enough to get set up, the challenge is building a channel that pulls valuable ads while sustaining enough viewers to engage with those ads.

Not all ads pay the same amount. A lot of factors can affect the dollar value, including the topic of your videos. Before you begin creating, research the value of different AdSense niches and see whether your content aligns. Insurance and online education are among the most valuable.

AdSense also favors videos it considers “safe.” That means avoiding content that can be sexually suggestive, contains violence or profanity or drugs or covers controversial and sensitive subjects. Otherwise, Google can exclude you from revenue.

For example, a channel focusing on environmental politics might not make bank, but tips on how to live green (buying an electric vehicle, cutting down on waste or making your home energy efficient) might do better.

Since greater authority and popularity mean more ad revenue, this method for monetizing your YouTube channel is a longer-term play. However, you have other options for scoring returns sooner.

How to make money without ads

Whether they want to be more independent or are put off by the restrictive nature of what Google considers “safe,” YouTubers employ multiple ways to make money. Here are some popular alternatives to running ads:

SuperChat donations

This method is available to creators who are willing and able to perform live. While watching your stream, viewers can donate to pin a comment to the top of the chat window.

SuperChat works well with Q&A sessions, interviews and gaming — anything that gives your audience a chance to participate and hear back from you.

YouTube Premium

Viewers who pay to sign up for YouTube Premium get to watch videos ad-free, along with other perks.

That doesn’t mean content creators get cheated; instead of getting a cut of ad revenue, you’ll get a cut of the subscription fee from any premium users watching your videos.

Keep in mind, this is not a big income source.

Affiliate and influencer marketing

Even moderately popular YouTubers can make good money by talking up products. You might get paid purely for the act of promoting a product, or you might provide your viewers a link to an online store that will net you a commission from each sale.

The best salespeople will weave offers into their usual content in ways that feel natural and benefit their viewers. For example, someone who lost 50 pounds in three months could talk about the vitamin supplements they took during the process. A good product review or comparison could also lead to strong affiliate revenue.

The key here is not the size of your audience but an authentic relationship with viewers who trust your authority. Just remember to disclose that your video is #sponsored.

Selling merchandise

Working with affiliates might not be your thing, but don’t sweat it. You might have a penchant for selling your own products instead, whether that’s T-shirts, mugs, artwork or something else entirely.

Selling merchandise works for creators with a recognizable brand or at least a style their viewers will readily identify with. It’s an extra challenge on top of making content that will constantly drive new traffic to see your merchandise.

If you’re not crafty, you’re in luck. It’s a lot easier for individuals to do merchandising in the modern age. You can work together with freelancers on marketplace websites like Fiverr to design and produce products, then use services like Oberlo to handle shipping.

Crowdfunding

If your viewers find your content especially valuable, you can simply ask them for support. It’s a simple exchange, really: They get to enjoy the videos they love, and you get paid to make more.

That said, it’s easier to entice people to support you if you offer extra bonuses like private Q&A sessions or exclusive videos.

Some crowdfunding sites like Patreon ask people to set up a subscription that charges them every month or every time you post a video. Other sites, like Tipeee, offer one-time donations as well.

10 Modern-Day Cars Worthy of a Car Poster on Your Wall

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 09:44:00 +0000

One easy way for enthusiasts of all ages to show their love for cars is to plaster a picture of a vehicle on your wall. For younger enthusiasts, or those just looking to take up some real estate on an empty space, now’s a great time as any to put up a picture of a car because automakers are coming out with some of the most radical designs we’ve ever seen.

From old-school supercars that continue to survive in modern times to cutting-edge electric cars that are leading the way forward for future generations, there’s more variety in today’s market than ever before. So, whether you’re all about the electric revolution or are still clinging on to the internal combustion engine, there’s something for everyone. That’s the thing with poster cars – specs don’t really matter. It’s all about aesthetics, which is mostly personal.

Here are our 10 modern cars that we would be more than happy to put on our walls today.

Lamborghini Aventador SVJ

If you’re talking about poster cars, there’s really only one automaker that steals the spotlight: Lamborghini. The thing that makes Lamborghinis, like the Aventador SVJ, such great poster cars are because of their underlying wedge shape – the quintessential design feature on any supercar. Lamborghini, unlike a lot of other automakers, refuses to use any smooth curves. You’ll only find sharp edges here.

If we’re being honest, any Lamborghini would make for a great poster car. Yes, even the Urus. But we chose the Aventador SVJ because it’s a dinosaur compared to other supercars. It has a naturally-aspirated V12 engine, one of the few vehicles in the world to have one, it’s nearly as wide as a full-size SUV, and has enough wings to make a fighter jet shy. Who knows if Lamborghini will continue to make supercars like the Aventador in the future, making this the perfect poster car for enthusiasts that don’t want to forget about how good an old recipe can be.

Bugatti Chiron

The Bugatti Chiron is the automaker’s replacement for the Veyron. While the Veyron made for an excellent poster car, the Chiron is an even better option because it has a more striking design – it’s also faster. It has that aggressive flair that the Veyron was missing thanks to larger vents, a striking C-line around the doors, and a racecar-like rear end. Pair the Chiron’s hawkish design with available two-tone paint jobs and you have one of the best-looking hypercars on the road.

Aston Martin Valkyrie

Aston Martin is known for making beautiful cars. Seriously, take a look at the British marque’s past and you would be better off picking ugly cars. From the DBR1 and DB5 to the more modern DB9 and Vantage, Aston holds the candle for manufacturing some of the prettiest sports cars and supercars. While any one of Aston Martin’s cars will look great on a wall, the one that makes the most sense as the best modern choice has to be the Valkyrie.

Astons of old were excellent cruisers. That’s changed recently, as Aston has started to come out with track-focused vehicles. Take the Valkyrie as an example. It’s certainly not the prettiest car, but it’s one of Aston’s most striking with a design that’s all about aerodynamics. It’s also the automaker’s first attempt – second if you group the Vulcan in the same category as the Valkyrie – at a track-focused hypercar. That alone makes it worthy of being put up on your wall.

McLaren Speedtail

Not a lot of automakers are chasing top speed times anymore. Instead, they’re more concerned with lap times around the Nurburgring. That’s not the case with the McLaren Speedtail, which is the British automaker’s latest hypercar. It also happens to be McLaren’s fastest vehicle ever with a top speed of 250 mph.

While those details make the Speedtail special, the hypercar’s design is what really makes it a great poster car. More streamlined than a Marlin in the water, the Speedtail’s design is unlike anything else on the market. The hypercar is long, aerodynamic, and overly smooth. The Jetsons future that everyone promised us is finally here.

Ford GT

For everything Ford’s getting wrong at the moment, the automaker absolutely nailed the new GT. From an aesthetic standpoint, the GT looks so close to being a racecar that some may confuse it for being just that. The scoops, flying buttresses, and massive rear wing are just exquisite.

Every one of us would love to have a GT on our walls, but if there’s one thing we’re not so sure about, it’s which one we would actually place on the drywall. The Liquid Carbon paint job, which is unpainted carbon fiber underneath a clear coat, or the historic blue-and-orange Gulf Racing livery? Seeing as how most walls are plain white and need some color, we’re leaning toward the Gulf Racing livery.

Porsche Taycan

Tesla may have beat everyone to the punch to come out with an electric car with a useable amount of range with the Model S, but Porsche was the first to show the world that going electric didn’t mean making a sacrifice in design. Quintessentially a Porsche, but with a futuristic flair, we wish all electric cars looked as good as the Taycan.

We’re especially smitten with the rear end, which doesn’t have the same bulbous design as other electrics. Instead, it’s more graceful and shapelier with a flowing look that we’re fond of. The wide fenders and low stance just put it over the top. If all EVs looked this good, making the switch from a gas-powered car would be much easier.

Ferrari SF90 Stradale

We wouldn’t call the Ferrari SF90 Stradale beautiful. We’re also pretty confident that a lot of people would agree, because Ferrari’s latest hypercar has a face that only a mother could love. That’s because, like a lot of other cars on this list, the SF90 Stradale puts performance first, and when you do that, there’s little time to worry about how cohesive something is.

What makes the hypercar worthy of being put on your wall is just how similar it looks to a spaceship. This Ferrari isn’t pretty, but it sure is shocking. The face of the car looks like it belongs to an alien leader’s war machine, while the back looks like it wouldn’t be out of place on a flying saucer. Sometimes, poster cars are meant to inspire with awe. That’s what the SF90 Stradale does.

Toyota Supra

Few cars enter the market with as much controversy as the 2020 Toyota Supra did. Sharing a lot of components with BMW’s Z4 and being a radically different vehicle to the previous-gen sports car that gained fame in “The Fast and the Furious” films. Regardless of how it came to life, the Supra is such a bewildering sports car that it makes for a great poster car.

We’ll be the first to admit that the Supra doesn’t look quite right in pictures. Something about its proportions doesn’t come off as being pretty in pictures. But in person, this thing grabs just as much attention as a Ferrari. If you find yourself behind the wheel of one, people will stare, people will take photos, people will ask questions, that’s the power of dramatic styling, which is exactly what the Supra has.

Koenigsegg Jesko

If there’s one automaker that’s managed to steal Lamborghini’s poster car throne it’s Koenigsegg. The brand’s latest hypercar, the Jesko, is its wonkiest car yet. The hypercar has numbers that don’t seem possible thanks to cutting-edge engineering and a design that makes it look like a Hot Wheels and not an actual vehicle.

The Jesko looks so unusual because it is. Nothing could ever match this Koenigsegg and we’re not quite sure where the company goes from here. Get a poster of this hypercar and put it on your wall as a way of always being able to look at what the craziest thing to be made in the automotive world in 2020 was.

Pagani Huyara Roadster BC

No other automaker in the world puts as much effort and time into the small stuff like Pagani. It’s that level of attention that makes all of Pagani’s cars so great. To make the Huyara Roadster BC, which looks awfully similar to the regular Huyara, Pagani built an all-new car. The body’s new, the aero components aren’t shared, there’s new suspension, and even the engine is new. That’s crazy, but it resulted in one of the prettiest convertibles ever.

The exotic lines, the way metal coexists with carbon fiber, the hard edges that blend immediately into smooth ones, the Gatling gun-like exhaust pipes, there’s a sense of theater with the Huayra Roadster BC that you won’t find with any other car. While a lot the cars on this list make it here because of the exterior design, you could put a picture of the Huayra Roadster BC’s interior on your wall, because it’s just as artfully crafted if not more exquisite than the outside.

A word of warning. If you have a Huayra on your wall, there’s a chance that you might just want to stare at it all day.

Editors' Recommendations

SUBARU RECEIVES FOUR HONORS FROM PARENTS BEST FAMILY CARS OF 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 09:33:00 +0000

Ascent named "Best for Big Families"

Crosstrek Hybrid chosen as "Best Eco Pick"

Forester named "Best for Road Trips"

Legacy awarded "Best All Weather" accolade

Testing criteria include NHTSA 5-Star overall crash test rating, child seat installation ease, onboard tech and driving performance

Subaru of America, Inc. announced today that the 2020 Ascent, Crosstrek Hybrid, Forester and Legacy earned spots on PARENTS 20 Best Family Cars of 2020. PARENTS awards the accolade based on NHTSA crash-test results, as well as the magazine's own evaluations from a certified child passenger safety technician and road tester.

In evaluating vehicles for its 2020 awards, PARENTS considered passenger cars, SUVs, crossovers and minivans that received a 5-star overall safety rating from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

PARENTS used a certified child-passenger safety technician, Abbie Patterson, owner of the consulting company Super Car Seat Geek, to test the installation of an average-size infant seat, convertible seat, harnessed booster, and backless booster in more than 50 contenders. PARENTS' auto reporter road-tested vehicles that passed the seat check, sometimes with his 9-year-old child in the back seat, to evaluate braking, steering, acceleration, user tech and more.

With safety as a top priority, the 2020 Ascent, Crosstrek Hybrid, Forester and Legacy come standard with Subaru EyeSight® Driver Assist Technology that includes Automatic Pre-Collision Braking and Throttle Management, Adaptive Cruise Control, and Lane Departure and Sway Warning.

For 2020, Subaru tied for most IIHS awards earned by an individual brand which includes 2020 Ascent, Crosstrek Hybrid, Forester and Legacy.

The four models also come standard with Subaru's legendary Symmetrical All-Wheel Drive and a high-resolution touchscreen multimedia system with smartphone integration featuring Apple CarPlay™, Android ™ Auto and Bluetooth® hands-free phone connectivity and audio streaming.

2020 Subaru Ascent The Ascent shined through all the publication's evaluations and earned the title "Best for Big Families." With a starting price of $31,995, the 3-row SUV is available in base, Premium, Limited and Touring trim levels.

"The entry-level Ascent comes with features—including all-wheel drive—that you'll pay extra for on other SUVs," the magazine noted. "The new Rear Seat Reminder will help keep kids from being left in a hot car. On a lighter note, it boasts 19 cupholders."

The family-focused SUV is equipped with five LATCH points in the second row for greater flexibility for child seat installation. PARENTS observed, "The Ascent's cushions are minimally contoured, which may make installing car seats easier. You can fit three narrow seats across the second row and two in the third."

The Ascent is powered by a 260-hp 2.4-liter turbocharged BOXER engine paired with a high-torque Lineartronic CVT featuring an 8-speed manual mode function with steering wheel paddle shifters. This powertrain allows up to 5,000-lb. towing capacity and offers Trailer Stability Assist to help maintain vehicle stability while towing.

The SUV achieves outstanding performance and offers exemplary fuel economy with more than a 500-mile range on a single tank.

Available in-vehicle Wi-Fi connectivity provides smooth internet access via high-speed 4G LTE communications, broadening the range of entertainment options available to occupants using smart devices.

The Ascent is the most versatile Subaru ever with up to nine unique seating configurations and two rows of 60/40 split flat-folding seats offering up to 86.5 cubic feet of cargo space. The Ascent comes standard with a second-row bench seat, providing room for up to eight passengers. The Limited trim as well as available option packages for the Premium trim offer a choice of second-row captain chairs at no additional charge to provide occupants with easier access to the third row (standard on Touring).

2020 Subaru Crosstrek Hybrid The Crosstrek Hybrid was named "Best Eco Pick" for offering up to a 480-mile range on a single tank. The plug-in SUV was also recognized for its quiet and comfortable ride.

Priced at $35,145 and offered in a single standard trim, the 2020 Crosstrek Hybrid provides all-wheel drive capability in a plug-in hybrid package. It is the most fuel-efficient Subaru SUV ever with an EPA-rated 35 MPG and 90 MPGe combined. As a bonus for making family trips smoother, the Crosstrek Hybrid also qualifies for High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) permits in several states, including CA, MD and NY.

"You can travel 480 miles on a tank!" the magazine mentioned, also pointing out that "its suspension makes driving comfy and quiet" and the Crosstrek Hybrid is eligible for a $4,500 federal tax credit."

The Crosstrek Hybrid passed PARENTS' child seat criteria easily and impressed with its ability to accommodate three in the back seat when using a convertible seat behind the passenger, infant seat behind the driver and a narrow booster in the middle position.

The compact SUV comes with a 10-year complimentary subscription to the SUBARU STARLINK™ Safety and Security Plus package, which includes SOS emergency assistance, enhanced roadside assistance, automatic collision notification, maintenance notifications, monthly vehicle health report and diagnostic alerts.

Exclusive to the Croostrek Hybrid, STARLINK Connected Services include Remote Climate Control and Remote Battery Charging Timer. The vehicle's climate control can function without starting the engine, so the cabin can be warmed or cooled even while parked or garaged. The Remote Battery Charging Timer allows a user to manage the vehicle charging schedule and monitor its status.

2020 Subaru ForesterThe 2020 Forester was recognized as "Best for Road Trips" on PARENTS' list. Starting at $24,495, the fifth-generation SUV is available in base, Premium, Sport, Limited and Touring trims.

"It seems tailor-made for a national-park vacay," the renowned parenting magazine noted. "All-wheel drive comes standard, making it easier to navigate uneven terrain and bad weather. Its high ground clearance allows it to handle off-the-beaten-path, bumpy terrain. The Premium ($27,395) will make a road trip more seamless thanks to raised roof rails for surfboards or other gear."

The legendary SUV debuted Subaru's DriverFocus Distraction Mitigation System. Using a dedicated infrared camera and facial recognition technology to identify signs of driver fatigue or distraction, the new technology provides audio and visual warnings to alert the driver and passengers.

New for 2020, all Forester trim levels include Rear Seat Reminder. Designed to help prevent child and/or pet entrapment, the system will alert the driver to check the rear seat before exiting the vehicle.

The roomy, versatile 2020 Forester offers up to 76.1 cu. ft. of cargo space with the 60/40 split rear seatbacks lowered. The compact SUV also has 8.7 inches of ground clearance for off-pavement capability while still providing a comfortably low step-in height for front and rear passenger entry, as well as easy cargo loading.

2020 Subaru LegacyThe 2020 Subaru Legacy, named "Best All-Weather", is the only car in its segment to feature all-wheel drive as standard equipment. The mid-size sedan starts at $22,745 and is available in base, Premium, Sport, Limited and Touring trims.

"Every Legacy comes with all-wheel drive, giving you more traction in rain and snow," noted PARENTS in awarding Legacy the title.

The Limited XT and Touring XT models feature the 260-hp 2.4-liter turbocharged BOXER engine and achieve up to 32 highway MPG. All other Legacy models are powered by a 182-hp 2.5-liter BOXER engine that delivers up to 35 highway MPG. Standard on Legacy, Lineartronic® CVT (continuously variable transmission) has an 8-speed manual shift mode and steering wheel paddle shift control switches.

The Legacy Premium, Sport, Limited and Touring trims come standard with the SUBARU STARLINK 11.6-inch Multimedia Plus system (XT models include navigation). The all-new system features an 11.6-inch high-resolution touchscreen with smartphone integration that includes Apple CarPlay™, Android ™ Auto and STARLINK apps; Bluetooth® hands-free phone connectivity and audio streaming; and over-the-air updates. The integrated center information display offers on-screen controls for audio, HVAC and vehicle features.

All 2020 Subaru Legacy models are equipped with an EyeSight Assist Monitor that provides a head-up display with EyeSight warnings and system status on the windshield. LED headlights (low and high beam) with High Beam Assist are also standard.

"We are thrilled that four of our models made PARENTS 20 Best Family Cars of 2020," said Thomas J. Doll, President and CEO, Subaru of America, Inc. "These accolades underscore our commitment to providing customers with vehicles made to the highest standards of safety, technology, versatility and value."

About Subaru of America, Inc. Subaru of America, Inc. (SOA) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Subaru Corporation of Japan. Headquartered at a zero-landfill office in Camden, N.J., the company markets and distributes Subaru vehicles, parts and accessories through a network of more than 630 retailers across the United States. All Subaru products are manufactured in zero-landfill production plants and Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Inc. is the only U.S. automobile production plant to be designated a backyard wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation. SOA is guided by the Subaru Love Promise, which is the company's vision to show love and respect to everyone, and to support its communities and customers nationwide. Over the past 20 years, SOA has donated more than $190 million to causes the Subaru family cares about, and its employees have logged more than 40,000 volunteer hours. As a company, Subaru believes it is important to do its part in making a positive impact in the world because it is the right thing to do. For additional information visit media.subaru.com. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Dominick InfanteDirector, Corporate Communications 856.488-8615 dinfante@subaru.com

Jessica TullmanProduct Communications 310.352.4400 jtullman@subaru.com

Charles BallardProduct & Technology Communications 856.488.8759 cballard@subaru.com

Why the rent is due for rich people in the time of coronavirus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 06:12:00 +0000

If you were a billionaire, how much money would you give to fight COVID-19?

For 600 or so Americans that’s a real question.

Last week I wrote about what CEOs and other business leaders were doing, and should be doing during the coronavirus crisis. This week I’m turning my attention to the richest Americans.

What are the wealthy doing? What should they be doing?

First of all a word about that F. Scott Fitzgerald line, “let me tell you about the very rich, they are different from you and me…” Sorry Scotty but that’s wrong. I know a fair number of very rich people and in fact they’re very much like you and me; some good, some bad, some boastful, others quite modest.

So when it comes to pitching in during the pandemic, there’s a range of behavior and responses by the wealthy, just like with you, your family and your friends. For every Dolly Parton giving $1 million to Vanderbilt to fight coronavirus, there’s a Leona Helmsley type—the late miserly hotelier and convicted tax cheat who upon her death left $12 million to her Maltese dog, Trouble.

Happily right now there are more Dollys than Leonas.

“We see reports of extremely wealthy people making really substantial dollar commitments to this problem and that’s exciting, heartwarming and really important,” says Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation—which has a $6.4 billion endowment. (Gordon Moore was the co-founder of Intel who conceived Moore's law.)

“I think every citizen needs to help out,” Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, whose firm has donated $15 million to fight coronavirus, told me. “If you have more resources, then you help out more.”

Looking out across the country, I see a few predictables hunkered down in their million-dollar yachts and bunkers, but also shining examples of altruism.

In fact some billionaires have been out front. First and foremost is Bill Gates, who famously warned about pandemics in a TED Talk in 2015 (29 million views), and has given more money—through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with its $46 billion endowment—to fight infectious diseases than all of his billionaire brethren combined. On top of that, Gates recently pledged $125 million specifically to fight the coronavirus.

It’s natural to look at other tech billionaires too, as that’s where the money is these days and because medicine and science are adjacent or a part of the Silicon Valley mindset. Gates’ old Microsoft running mate, Steve Ballmer, is ponying up ($25 million), so too is Michael Dell ($100 million.)

Bill Gates at The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Goalkeepers Conference 2017 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City. (NYC) [Reuters]

But as for the Google guys, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, crickets. And Larry Ellison? The billionaire Oracle founder, who recently held a fundraiser for President Trump, has been busy selling the president on chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, malaria drugs unproven to be effective against coronavirus. Maybe these folks are contributing, maybe not (more on that below.)

Meanwhile, the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, has been writing checks too—though not to President Trump of course. Bezos has donated $100 million to Feeding America—the largest single gift in the history of the organization. And Bezos’s Blue Origin space company is making face masks. Amazon is benefiting, unintentionally of course, from the crisis, as more and more shelter-at-homers shop there. And the company has faced criticism for how it treats some of its workers during all this.

So is Bezos just practicing high-priced PR? To a degree sure, but does that even matter?

“I would caution people in criticizing motivation for giving at a time like this,” says Alexandra Graddy-Reed, assistant professor of public policy at the University of Southern California who focuses on philanthropy. “People who don’t traditionally give are giving big donations. With wealthy people, we’re seeing large donations and hopefully they’re making a difference to the economy and health system. This is a capitalist society and it’s wealthy people’s money to decide what to do with. If we want that money, we should tax it rather than criticize what they do with it.”

Story continues

‘Unprecedented times which call for extraordinary action’

Maybe the most-eye catching move not just in Silicon Valley, but in all of businessdom is Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey’s $1 billion pledge to fight coronavirus. That billion, a grant of Dorsey’s Square stock, constitutes some 28% of his net worth. Graddy-Reed says that’s an almost unheard of proportion of wealth given and notes that Dorsey hasn’t been particularly philanthropic until now. Yahoo Finance’s Melody Hahm notes that “after the pandemic subsides, [Dorsey’s gift] will prioritize girl’s health and education and [universal basic income.]” So as Graddy-Reed says, perhaps this crisis has in fact “motivated some to come onto the stage.”

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey arrives at the Elysee Palace to meet French President Emmanuel Macron Friday, June 7, 2019 in Paris. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Laurene Powell Jobs, along with Leonardo DiCaprio, Apple and the Ford Foundation have launched a fundraising page to raise $15 million for World Central Kitchen and Feeding America. The founders put in $12 million. “We are in the midst of a national emergency, and it is vital we prioritize the most urgent needs,” says Powell Jobs in a statement.

It’s not clear how much Powell Jobs is personally donating, which reminds me of a conversation I had with her late husband Steve Jobs. I asked Steve why he wasn’t more philanthropic. “How do you know I’m not,” he asked me back. “I haven’t seen anything to suggest you are,” I told him. “How do you know I’m not doing it anonymously,” he asked. “Are you,” I asked him? “I’m not going to tell you,” he replied.

And that’s the thing. It’s always tricky to get a perfect picture of philanthropy. Just because there’s no press release doesn’t mean a billionaire isn’t giving. Having said that, most people want credit for their largess. You need only look at any nonprofit donation list of donors to see how many choose to remain anonymous. It’s almost always less than 10%.

So I don’t really know about Warren Buffett. I didn’t hear back from his office on this one, though remember the third richest man in America has pledged to give away nearly all his $75 billion to the Gates Foundation. Plus, Buffett and the Gates have convinced 209 of the richest people on the planet to join the Giving Pledge, a commitment to give away most of their money to philanthropy.

And I don’t really know about America’s richest family either. The Walton’s, whose patriarch Sam founded Walmart, sent us this statement: “At the Walton Family Foundation, our priority is our grantees. We are working to address immediate needs along with the impacts on their work in K-12 education, the environment and in our Home Region.”

Still, we can look to countless other tangible and joyful actions.

There’s Tyler Perry buying groceries for thousands of seniors in Atlanta and New Orleans. Basketball players Kevin Love and rookie Zion Williamson supporting arena workers who’ve lost their jobs or hours by the NBA season being canceled.

And who doesn’t love Robert Kraft sending the Patriots Boeing 767 to China to bring back 1.2 million N95 masks, some of which he even donated to Boston’s archrival, New York City. Truly awesome Robert. (The only thing better for New Yorkers would be if Bill Belichick himself handed out the masks.)

And then there’s the normally tight-lipped private equity billionaire Leon Black, rightfully downright chatty about his $20 million contribution to launch a program called “NYC Healthcare Heroes,” which will provide food, cleaning supplies, and personal care products for over 100,000 healthcare workers in New York City.

“Debra [Black’s wife] and I have long been committed to philanthropy and support a number of medical institutions in New York and across the U.S.,” Black told us. “On an even more personal note, a family member tested positive for COVID and has been on a ventilator for the last two weeks receiving magnificent care from the great team at Weill Cornell. And one of my children’s closest friends is a doctor on the front lines at Elmhurst Hospital. We are New Yorkers, we see what is happening, and we are in awe of the heroic health care professionals among us.”

What does he think of recent philanthropic efforts made by other wealthy people like Jack Dorsey and Bill Gates?

“Great! Terrific!,” Black said. “We’re certainly in unprecedented times which call for extraordinary action. It’s wonderful to see how people across the country are stepping up and doing what they can to support others. That comes in a number of forms – by cheering publicly for health care heroes on a daily basis, caring for sick family or friends, grocery shopping for people in their communities who are at-risk or by donating any sum of money to a worthy cause.”

That’s lovely Leon.

“There’s a lot of good will and people being committed to being flexible,” says Amir Pasic, dean of the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. “Whether it’s enough, I think time will tell. Right now we’re seeing nimbleness that is impressive.”

For now, most of the giving has gone to health care and health care workers etc. Already though there are huge new needs where the wealthy can help; police, firefighters, restaurant, hotel and airline workers, summer program camps, and on and on. There’s much more to do.

For those of you reading this who’re rich—and maybe even not so rich—and haven’t seen fit to contribute, billionaire John Paul DeJoria, co-founder of Paul Mitchell Products and Patrón Spirits has a word for you:

“Don't be a tightwad,” he says. “If you've got something, give back. Pay a little bit of rent for being on this planet Earth and all the good fortune that God sent your way because you have extra money.”

That’s about right JP. The rent is due.

Clarification: A prior version of this story included $200 million in grants provided by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a roundup of donations made in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Amazon later told us the grants, totaling $197 million given by the Bezos Day One Fund, predate the outbreak — as half were distributed in 2018 and the other half in 2019. Amazon included the donations in a list provided to Yahoo Finance of philanthropic endeavors undertaken by Bezos, since the grants went to organizations fighting homelessness and hunger, two issues exacerbated by the coronavirus outbreak.

This article was featured in a Saturday edition of the Morning Brief on April 11, 2020. Get the Morning Brief sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Friday by 6:30 a.m. ET. Subscribe

Andy Serwer is editor-in-chief of Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter: @serwer.

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance

The 10 richest billionaires in the world in 2020, despite coronavirus

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 06:08:00 +0000

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The coronavirus has hit the global economy hard -- and that includes even the richest people in the world.

Forbes recently published its annual list of billionaires and found that the number of billionaires has dropped significantly because of the pandemic -- and even among those still on the list, more than half saw their wealth decrease.

There were 2,095 billionaires on the list when it was finalized on March 18, according to the business website. That was 58 fewer billionaires than last year and 226 fewer than at the beginning of the month, Forbes reported.

CORONAVIRUS LEADS JEFF BEZOS TO DONATE $100M TO FEED HUNGRY AMERICANS

All 2,095 billionaires are worth about $8 trillion, which is $700 billion less than they did in 2019, according to Forbes.

Of course, with the markets in flux because of the coronavirus, each billionaire’s net worth also fluctuates depending on the day. To see how each of the 2,095 billionaires are faring each day, Forbes also created a real-time net worth tracker.

In its overall report, the website also found that the country with the most billionaires was the U.S., with 614. China (which includes Hong Kong and Macao) followed in second place, with 456 billionaires.

BILL GATES: UNTIL CORONAVIRUS VACCINE, WORLD WON’T BE ‘TRULY NORMAL’

It also reported that 267 people who were billionaires last year are no longer billionaires and 178 new people have reached billionaire status this year.

To see which individual billionaires were at the top of the list, here are the 10 richest people in the world and where they're from, according to Forbes' list of "The Richest in 2020."

10. Rob Walton - U.S.

Rob Walton, 75, was worth about $54.1 billion on March 18, according to Forbes. Walton is the eldest son of the founder of Walmart, Sam Walton, and served as the chairman of the company from 1992 until 2015.

9. Alice Walton - U.S.

Members of the Walton family are pictured in 2018. From left to right: Jim Walton, Alice Walton, Jim's wife Lynne McNabb Walton, Rob Walton's wife Melani Lowman Walton and Rob Walton. (Photo by Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images)

Alice Walton, 70, was worth $54.4 billion on March 18. She is Sam Walton's only daughter and is also the richest woman on Forbes' 2020 list.

8. Jim Walton - U.S.

Jim Walton, 71, was the richest Walton on March 18 with a net worth of $54.6 billion. According to Forbes, Jim Walton gave away $1.2 billion in Walmart in June last year, but kept his wealth because of a 44 percent stake in Arvest Bank.

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7. Mark Zuckerberg - U.S.

Mark Zuckerberg, 35, was worth $54.7 billion on March 18. Zuckerberg founded social media site Facebook in 2004.

6. Amancio Ortega - Spain

Amancio Ortega, 84, was the wealthiest clothing retailer in the world on March 18, with a net worth of $55.1 billion, according to Forbes. In 1975 he and his ex-wife Rosalia Mera founded Inditex, which is best known for the fashion chain Zara, Forbes reported.

5. Larry Ellison - U.S.

Larry Ellison, 75, was worth $59 billion on March 18. In 1977, he founded Oracle, a software company and today he serves as the chairman of the board and the chief technology officer, according to Forbes.

4. Warren Buffett - U.S.

Warren Buffett, 89, was worth $67.5 billion on March 18. Buffett is one of the most successful investors of all time, according to Forbes. He also runs Berkshire Hathaway, which owns more than 60 companies.

Previously, Buffett was the third-wealthiest person in the world before Bernard Arnault took his spot this year.

3. Bernard Arnault & Family - France

Bernard Arnault was worth $76 billion on March 18, according to Forbes. (Photo by Michel SETBOUN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)

Bernard Arnault, 71, and his family were worth $76 billion on March 18. Arnault is the CEO of luxury goods company LVMH, which includes Louis Vuitton and Sephora brands. Last year, the company bought Tiffany & Co. for $16.2 billion, which could be the largest luxury brand acquisition, Forbes reported.

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2. Bill Gates - U.S.

Bill Gates is pictured in 2017. He was worth $98 billion on March 18, according to Forbes. (REUTERS/Pierre Albouy)

Bill Gates, 64, was worth $98 billion on March 18, according to Forbes. Gates and his wife Melinda chair the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is the largest private charitable foundation in the world, Forbes reported.

1. Jeff Bezos - U.S.

CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos was worth $113 on March 18, according to Forbes. (Photo by SAJJAD HUSSAIN/AFP via Getty Images)

Jeff Bezos, 56, is the richest man in the world, despite transferring a quarter of his Amazon stake to his ex-wife MacKenzie last summer, according to Forbes. He was worth $113 billion on March 18.

Bezos founded ecommerce giant Amazon in 1994 and is still the CEO of the company.

TickerSecurityLastChangeChange %FBFACEBOOK INC.178.17+3.38+1.93%AMZNAMAZON.COM INC.2,283.32+114.45+5.28%WMTWALMART INC.129.00+3.70+2.95%LVMUYLVMH MOËT HENNESSY LOUIS VUITTON SE77.58+1.68+2.21%IDEXYINDUSTRIA DE DISENO TEXTIL S.A.14.62+1.08+7.98%ORCLORACLECORPORATION54.00+1.03+1.94%

Top Hollywood movies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 13 Apr 2020 12:23:00 +0000

Boxed In: Is Hoosiers A Good Movie?

Hoosiers. Oscar-nominated. Immortalized by the Library of Congress. AFI's fourth best sports movie ever made.

Also completely despised.

To put it plainly, the 1986 classic about the little basketball team that could and the coach that maybe should have cooled off a little bit is a divisive picture.

On today's Boxed In, Yahoo Sports baseball columnist Hannah Keyser is joined by national columnist Dan Wetzel and fantasy writer Andy Behrens to break down, debate, contextualize and judge Hoosiers. Is it a good movie or is it deserving of the hate?

Watch or listen to Boxed In by Yahoo Sports Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on Yahoo Sports, YouTube or on your podcast platform of choice.

Not All Netflix Movie Suggestions Are Created Equal. Here’s How To Spot The Bad Ones.

Bad. Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad.

Wildly problematic premise aside, “The Assignment” lacked all of the redeeming qualities that make even God-awful movies entertaining in a “but the costumes!” sort of way. The plot wasn’t just off the rails; it was a train wreck. The acting wasn’t just cheesy; it was unpalatable. Case in point? Rodriguez’s parting lines: “I used to be a guy. A real bad guy. Then things changed.” This was no “Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby.” Netflix had gotten it so very wrong.

All across America, countless couch potatoes are feeling that cramp you get from zooming past sleek thumbnails promising two hours of escapism — let’s call it Netflix wrist — because the very thought of clicking on the wrong choice can be crippling. The fear is real. And no one should have to suffer through Rodriguez’s stupid beard and Weaver’s straitjacket without warning.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of movies on Netflix (and other streaming services) masquerading as time well spent. A completely unofficial poll turned up “Kings,” “Aftermath,” “6 Underground” and, of course, “The Assignment,” among them. Here’s what they have in common.

Never heard of it? There’s a reason for that.

Turns out “The Assignment” is old bad news. It came out in 2017 to reviews that didn’t hold back. The New York Times called it “ridiculous even by its own nonsensical standards.” The Los Angeles Times wrote, “There’s howlingly awful and then there’s ‘The Assignment.’ ” Uncovered cinematic gems are certainly a thing, but a truly amazing Shalhoub vehicle that somehow flew under your radar? Unlikely.

A former A-lister climbs into a serious vehicle.

In “Aftermath,” Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Roman, a construction worker built like a boulder trying to cope with the loss of his wife and pregnant daughter in a plane crash. Loosely based on a true story, the film toggles between Roman’s saga and the equally depressing tale of the air traffic controller whose mistake caused the midair collision. The plot just keeps getting slower and sadder and darker until the final scene, when two people joined by tragedy have nothing for each other or the viewer. Basically the whole thing is like if over-steamed Brussels sprouts were a movie.

And in hops Daniel Craig.

“Kings” is such a sleeper bomb. With Halle Berry playing a put-upon mother of eight foster kids living in’90s-era South Los Angeles and Daniel Craig as her cantankerous neighbor-turned-lover, the movie looks at first glance like it could be bad-good. Nope. “Kings” uses the tragedy of Latasha Harlins’s senseless slaying and Rodney King’s savage beating to establish itself as a serious take on the cultural unrest that lead to the L.A. Riots. Berry and Craig team up to find some of her kids during the first night of unrest, and the pair inexplicably spend a good chunk of the film falling in love while chained to a streetlight. Halfway through the film, a co-sufferer remarked, “This is insulting.” Save yourselves.

Adam Sandler is in it, and it’s not “Uncut Gems.”

As one friend put it when asked about which bad movies to avoid: “Adam Sandler Netflix vehicles numbers one through N.” No other explanation necessary.

It looks an awful lot like another good movie you saw, but something’s off.

For weeks, Netflix has been trying to convince viewers that “6 Underground” is worth their time. Don’t fall for it. With Ryan Reynolds at its helm, the movie is a two-hour-long trailer for the half-dozen better films it steals from. It takes the best of “Fast & Furious,” “Ocean’s Eleven,” “The Italian Job,” “Mission Impossible” and basically every other “let’s get the gang back together” movie and throws it into a blender. It took multiple personal attempts to watch Reynolds and co. Boom and bang across the globe in expensive cars trying to save. . . Something. It’s impossible to follow, so don’t.

The premise looks dumb.

“Why would an actual assassin write a book about being an assassin? It’s beyond stupid,” a character prophetically remarks in the Kevin James clunker “True Memoirs of an International Assassin.” In it, the former “King of Queens” star plays a cubicle jockey with visions of Tom Clancy dancing in his head. He writes a low-budget spy novel that is marketed as “nonfiction,” and instead of canceling him, the global bad guy community falls for it. It’s beyond stupid. If “6 Underground” is stroke-inducingly fast, “The True Memoirs” is comatose-level slow, with James playing a limp fish out of water. Fellow Post colleague Travis Andrews called it possibly “the worst thing on Netflix.”

Forest Whitaker is in it. (We kid. Sorta.)

These days, you may be tempted to watch a disaster movie because why not lean into, you know? There are fine offerings out there for all your apocalyptic pandemic cinema needs, but “How it Ends” ain’t it. It’s a twist on the buddy movie starring Forest Whitaker as the overbearing dad and that one guy from “Divergent” (Theo James) as the hated future son-in-law. There’s an “event” on the West Coast (earthquake? War? Aliens?), and Whitaker and James team up to save the day. The banter is bad, the action is predictable and the actual ending of a movie called “How it Ends” is so ambiguous and lazy you will yell at the screen. Cathartic, this chaos-movie is not.

'Trolls World Tour'— The First Major Studio Movie To Skip Theaters — Tops ITunes, But Doesn't Signal Doom For Movie Theaters

Details: "Trolls World Tour" is scheduled for release on April 10 and was the only major release standing between now and "Black Widow" in May. But with theaters closing across the US, the Universal is releasing the movie on VOD on the same day.

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: N/A

What critics said: N/A

Universal's "Trolls World Tour" debuted on premium video-on-demand platforms on Friday and was the No. 1 movie on iTunes on Sunday.

The movie is the first from a major studio to skip its planned theatrical release and head straight to digital or streaming platforms during the coronavirus pandemic.

While it won't be last (Disney is debuting "Artemis Fowl" on Disney Plus), experts say the rise of digital releases right now is just a short-term solution to the current situation as movie theaters across the US remain closed.

Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

"Trolls World Tour" has made a splash with its debut on digital platforms, but that's not necessarily bad news for movie theaters.

CONSTELLATION BRANDS, INC.

The animated sequel from Universal Pictures and DreamWorks was the No. 1 movie on iTunes on Sunday. It premiered on premium video-on-demand platforms on Friday as a $20 digital rental, the same day that it was slated to hit theaters. With theaters closed across the US due to the coronavirus pandemic, "Trolls World Tour" is the first movie from a major studio to skip theaters and head straight to digital release.

It won't be the last.

Disney announced earlier this month that "Artemis Fowl," based on the book series by Eoin Colfer, would premiere on its streaming service Disney Plus on an undisclosed date. The movie was originally slated for release to theaters on May 29. Former Disney CEO Bob Iger, who is transitioning into an executive chairman role to focus on Disney's creative endeavors, told Barrons last week that "there may be a few more [movies] that we end up putting directly onto Disney Plus."

But Iger also noted that Disney will wait for release slots for its big tentpole movies and its this sentiment that suggests that the current popularity of digital releases won't have long-term consequences for movie theaters.

Other movies that were released to digital platforms after a short stint in theaters, like "The Invisible Man" and "Bloodshot," were also popular on iTunes and Fandango Now (though they have already dropped out of the top 10 on iTunes). But experts say this is because it's the only option at the moment.

"The measures being taken right now are because of the unforeseen circumstances," Paul Dergarabedian, the Comscore senior media analyst, told Business Insider. "And consumers have an appetite for new content. We are literally stuck at home."

Technology and media research firm Lightshed Partners pointed out in a recent report that for studios to replace the profits they make with high-grossing movies through premium video-on-demand services, tens of millions of units would have to be sold.

"You quickly realize just how big the PVOD transactions need to be for the math to work for a studio," the report said.

In another report, Lightshed Partners did credit Universal for dropping "Trolls World Tour" on digital but said that it's a low-risk experiment for families stuck at home. Long term, PVOD could struggle once theaters reopen, especially given that audiences can watch movies on Netflix at no extra cost, the firm said.

Roundup of Google updates from March 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 11:24:00 +0000

March will certainly be a memorable month for a number of reasons – particularly here in the UK where the global coronavirus pandemic began to have huge impacts on the everyday lives of people up and down the country.

It was also a busy month in the SEO world – notably how businesses with an online presence were going to respond to the drastic changes in how things are run. This has been helped somewhat with tweaks Google have made in how information is displayed and specific measures they have taken to help support customer communication.

We delve into these issues and many more, in detail below.

Stay on top of the constant Google updates and get help with your SEO today.

Emily Kemp, Marketing Executive at MintTwist4th Mar – What to do about SSL certificates when merging domains

On 4th March, an inquisitive SEO on Twitter was seeking clarification from Google’s top employees with regards to the importance of an SSL certificate on your old website once you have migrated it to a new domain.

After a brief back and forth between a few individuals, the ever reliable John Mueller stepped in to confirm that it is best to maintain an SSL certificate for your old website, even if this is just to ward off any would-be spammers.

With regards to the length of time that the SSL certificate for the old website should be kept, he had this to say:

4th Mar –Should I be using a sitemap?

John Mueller was certainly busy on 4th March as he also made an appearance in an episode of Google’s Search Console training series on YouTube. He asked the question “If I don’t have a sitemap, will Google find all of my pages?”.

Daniel Waisberg, who was running this particular episode replied with some helpful advice. Essentially, if your website is fairly small and the pages are well linked, then Googlebot can easily discover all of the relevant content. However, a sitemap may be of use if your website meets any of the following criteria:

Your website is large

Your website has isolated pages

Your website is new

Your website changes frequently

It is also important to note that Waisberg states a sitemap does not come with any guarantees – not every page in a sitemap will be crawled and on the other hand, URLs left out of the sitemap can still be found by Googlebot.

If you are unsure as to whether or not to use a sitemap, we suggest erring on the side of caution and implementing one anyway as it has no negative impact on SEO performance.

5th Mar – Google move 70% of websites to mobile-first indexing

Google confirmed that 70% of websites it has indexed have now made the switch to mobile-first indexing. The remaining 30% will be shifted across by September at the latest.

You can check in Google Search Console, in the settings page (as shown below) to see whether your website has a mobile-first indexing status, as well as in the URL inspection tool.

9th Mar – Photos and videos uploaded to Google My Business are now subject to review

Google has updated its content policy for Google My Business listings by stating that photos and videos will now be reviewed prior to publication.

It is unclear whether they will be reviewed by AI or a human team of reviewers – which may well lead to further delays in publication. However, we do know that this is only applicable for content uploaded by other users and not the business itself.

Google’s own publication criteria can be found here.

10th Mar – Google offer advice on Google My Business listings amid Coronavirus outbreak

Google provided its first piece of advice for local businesses who had been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and how they could utilise Google My Business to display relevant information to any would-be customers.

As this point, no new features had been added but Google did publish a new dedicated coronavirus support page that advises businesses on how to keep customers informed in light of the current situation using the tools currently on offer.

The main recommendations from the support page are as follows:

Keep contact information up to date

Update business hours if these have been affected

Use Google Posts to share timely updates of any news about your business

Update business description to reflect any changes to operations in the current pandemic. This includes if your business is operating as normal.

You might also be interested in:Ultimate list of 16 FREE digital marketing resources during the coronavirus outbreak

11th Mar – Google claim that paid external backlinks don’t work

John Mueller was asked the following question on 11th March and his reply will be of interest to many SEOs out there:

Are backlinks important in ranking factors? Because nowadays 80 to 90% of websites are buying backlinks which I think is very unethical.

But these websites are also ranking on the first page. Why?

John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

While Mueller confirmed that external links are indeed a ranking factor, he goes on to state that they are just one of many:

We do use links in our ranking algorithms. We use a ton of other factors as well. So it’s not the case that links is the one thing that will make your website show up in the search results, regardless of what other people do.

John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

This essentially confirms what we, as SEOs, already knew – what really matters is whether a webpage answers the users search intent. However, his next point was certainly of interest.

Mueller goes on to comment on how often he sees websites simply mimicking the SEO tactics of other competitors within their niche, regardless of whether this affects the rankings or not:

This is something where we also see that a lot of sites do things that aren’t really necessary for their website and web search. They’ll go off and buy a ton of links and then we ignore all of those links.

So just because you’re seeing people doing something that looks kind of weird doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re actually profiting from that in a sense that there are lots of reasons why sites can rank in the search results. And it doesn’t have to do with anything sneaky that they’re doing.

John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

In the wise words of Fleetwood Mac, “go your own way!”.

You might also be interested in:An actionable link acquisition strategy

11th Mar – Google creates NHS knowledge panel

Google announced that it will be rolling out a new style of knowledge panel, specifically built for pulling information directly from the NHS website.

This will be the same content available on the NHS website itself, but this change simply makes it easier for users to find information on over 250 different health conditions.

Google specifically mentions that this information is by no means a substitute for medical advice. Here is their announcement on the change:

Now, we’re making it even easier for people in the U.K. to find trusted information from the National Health Service (NHS). Beginning this week, when you search for health conditions like chickenpox, back pain, or the common cold, you can find Knowledge Panels with information from the NHS website that help you understand more about common causes, treatments and more.

Google 12th Mar – Focus on the quality of your content

During a recent Google Webmasters Hangout, John Mueller was asked an interesting question on the importance of quality content and what exactly represented ‘quality’ content in the eyes of Google.

Mueller responded by stating that you, the publisher, had a much clearer idea of what quality content looks like for your audience than Google’s algorithm.

Quality, in general, is of course a completely subjective term. Consequently, users should be focussing instead on how to provide the most useful answer to a particular search term and the resultant user intent. This means concentrating on relevance, rather than the abstract notion of quality.

The following statement from Mueller suggests that publishers should be centring on what user’s will respond to as high quality, rather than what Google’s algorithm would regard as high quality:

So that’s something where I wouldn’t worry too much about what Google thinks about quality content. But rather you need to show that you really have something that’s unique and compelling and of high quality.

So instead of trying to work back how Google’s algorithms might be working, I would recommend trying to figure out what your users are actually thinking and doing things like user studies, inviting a bunch of people to your office or virtually to show them something new that you’re providing on your website and ask them really hard questions where sometimes the answer might be we don’t like your website or we were confused by your website or we don’t like the color of your logo or something.

But kind of this is the hard feedback that’s really important to get and a lot of times these are things that you might not agree with but if all of your users are saying this then maybe that’s something you need to consider as well.

John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google

For example, you will often see cases where webmasters have collated reams of 5,000-word pages that aim to provide a more in-depth answer than their competitors in a bid to outrank them. However, users may be looking for a far more succinct answer and thus, competitors with shorter, but more relevant and useful, content, will in fact rank higher.

Essentially, content creation is not one size fits all and each piece of content should be individually tailored to helping solve a specific search query in the most user-friendly way. Simple!

You might also be interested in:Content marketing tactics to help your franchise grow in 2020

13th Mar – Brighton SEO is postponed until October

Sad news for anyone hoping to attend our favourite Search Marketing event of the year – Brighton SEO.

As a result of the current coronavirus pandemic, they have taken the wise decision to postpone the event, originally scheduled for 17th April, until 1st and 2nd October.

For further information on the plans for October’s event and to find out what will happen with your tickets, read the statement from Brighton SEO.

15th Mar – Google makes Premium version of Google Hangouts Meet free

As an unprecedented number of workers and students confine their daily lives to their homes for the foreseeable future, Google is waiving fees on the premium version of Hangouts Meet until 1st July in a bid to help ease the transition somewhat.

A few premium features that will no doubt benefit schools and businesses include:

Option to record meetings and save to Google Drive

Live streaming to an audience of up to 100,000

Increase in the limit of participants per call to 250

You can read Google’s statement in full here.

15th Mar – Annual BrightLocal survey reveals Google My Business optimisation as the most valuable local marketing service

BrightLocal’s latest local search industry survey has placed Google My Business optimisation as the most valuable local marketing service – one place ahead of onsite optimisation.

The annual survey looks at the business practices, pricing, salary and services offered by 475 local marketers. This revealed that the top 5 most valuable services are:

Google My Business optimization

On-site optimization

Reputation management

Citation management

Website design

Despite not being considered the most valuable service, local marketers still claim that SEO is the best online tactic for attracting new clients.

The survey also looks into which marketing metrics are held inn the highest esteem by local businesses. The clear winner here was Google rankings – which even outranked new customers and new leads.

You can read the incredibly insightful survey in full here.

Emily Kemp, Marketing Executive at MintTwist16th Mar – Mueller provides clarification on Google’s Page Lauyour algorithm

For context, in 2012, Google released its Page Layout algorithm that penalised websites that showed too many ads above the fold. This was a response to complaints received by Google that content was often difficult to find when they clicked on the result and were faced with an influx of ads, rather than the content they were expecting.

Google stated at the time that a ‘normal degree’ of ads was acceptable but, as expected, many SEOs wanted exact figures to clarify what a ‘normal degree’ was.

Google’s John Mueller was asked this question on Twitter recently and his response was as follows:

Mueller’s response confirms that there is no affirmative number to abide by when it comes to the acceptable number of ads displayed above the fold. Instead, it is about focussing on whether the content is easy for users to find. This is what webmasters should concentrate on moving forward.

16th Mar – Google Assistant can now read entire web pages

Google Assistant now has the ability to read entire web pages on Android, akin to an audiobook or podcast, with the simple command “Hey Google, read this page”. This feature is available on any Android phone running on Lollipop or above.

This will be read out loud in a natural, expressive fashion (with a choice of several different voices) and users can even adjust the reading speed to suit their own requirements. Furthermore, the feature is available in 42 languages via the translation menu.

While there is no work required for webmasters to enable this feature, you are able to reject it through the implementation of a nopagereadaloud tag.

16th – Google releases new event schema in light of COVID-19 pandemic

As events of all sizes are cancelled or moved online across the entire globe, Google has released new event schema to help communicate these details more clearly in the SERPs.

The most significant of these is the addition of the ‘eventStatus’ property. This allows webmasters to highlight whether their event has been cancelled, postponed or rescheduled, rather than removing it from the SERPs entirely. Here are a few features it can help with:

Cancelled event: Set eventStatus property to EventCancelled, keeping the original date under startDate.

Rescheduled event (new date known): Update startDate and endDate with the new dates. Can also mark eventRescheduled to include the previousStartDate.

Postponed event (new date unknown) – Leave the original date, but change eventStatus to EventPostponed.

Event changed to virtual: Update the eventStatus to EventMovedOnline.

You can read the full list of changes from Google here.

20th Mar – Temporary removal of Google My Business features due to COVID-19

On March 20, Google released the following statement in relation to certain Google My Business features:

During the unprecedented COVID-19 situation, we are taking steps to protect the health of our team members and reduce the need for people to come into our offices. As a result, there may be some temporary limitations and delays in support as we prioritize critical services.

No new reviews will be published in the reviews section, although presumably any left within the current window will be retrospectively published once the pandemic has calmed. Existing reviews, will however, remain visible. This also extends to Q&A content.

New listings, claims and verifications for critical health-related businesses will be prioritised during this timeframe. Consequently, other businesses that do not fall into this category may experience a delay in the publication of new listings, claims and verifications.

Google Posts functionality remains untouched for now, so you are still able to share any updates with customers through your Google My Business listing. While this may change as the situation develops, we recommend taking advantage of this clear channel of communication while it lasts.

21st Mar – Google launches Coronavirus information site and new search experience for specific COVID-19 queries

As they had previously touched upon, Google released a dedicated COVID-19 site with resources and information.

The new site delivers a combination of education, prevention information and local resources. It consists of these sections:

Health information

Safety and prevention advice

Data and insights

Resources to help

Links to donate to relief efforts

Top SEO Tools Library (Free & Paid)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 11:23:00 +0000

SEO is becoming an increasingly fragmented strategy. Between the queries and crawling, link building and optimizing, you’ll need to arm yourself with the right set of SEO tools to help you streamline your strategy. But, because SEO spans a wide array of activities from keyword research to technical audits, to backlink and competitive analysis tools, there are an awful lot of options to sort through in order to settle on the right stack. To make things easier, I’m going to go over a list of my favorite SEO tools–both free and paid–across several categories.

What You’ll Learn: Backlink Tools

Price: Majestic offers two pricing tiers–a $49.99 Lite plan and a more robust Pro plan for $99.99 a month.

An SEO tool that covers several bases, Majestic bills itself as a backlink checker and link building suite. The platforms bread-and-butter is backlink tracking–after all, they’ve crawled over 1.3 trillion links since 2004–and they’re pros at distilling backlink data into usable metrics.

The platform allows you to compare top-level metrics for every website’s top backlinks, search competitor websites for backlinking opportunities, and filter backlinks by topic, quality, or language.

While this is a really great tool, it’s worth pointing out that Majestic relies on its own set of metrics to measure a link’s trust and influence, which some users might consider a strike against it.

Ahrefs

Price: Free–limited backlink checking, $99/month for Lite to $999/month for Agency

Ahrefs is a professional-grade suite of SEO tools that cover everything from keyword research to competitive analysis, as well as some excellent backlink tools.

Ahrefs’ free Backlink Checker does allow you to get some good research in, allowing users to check the top 100 backlinks to any website without investing in a plan, which may be a solid resource for smaller businesses or freelancers dealing in relatively low link volumes.

The free tool also reveals key data like the platform’s Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR) scores, most common anchor texts, most linked-to pages, and referring domains.

The platform promises to fill your dashboard with new data every 15 minutes or so, allowing users to swoop in and take advantage of emerging backlink opportunities. That said, the paid plan offers detailed breakdowns of all outbound links, reveals broken and lost links, tracks internal backlinks, growth, and more.

Though I’ve listed the platform under “backlink tools,” Ahrefs provides more keyword insights than just about any other platform out there–you’ll dig up intel on everything from SERP features to click data and parent topics.

SERanking

Price: $39-189 per month

SE Ranking is one of my favorite backlink tools as it allows you to track incoming links to your website based on data pulled from Google Search Console. While it’s a paid tool, it starts at $39 a month, making this a relatively affordable addition to your SEO stack.

The platform comes with a link-monitoring tool that makes it easy to manage your backlink profile. Segment and analyze links based on Domain Authority, Google index, Alexa Rank, how often links are shared on social media, etc.

Other features include an online marketing plan, which is a checklist of things to do to optimize your website. There’s also a competitive analysis tool that allows you to see which terms your competitors are ranking for and who’s linking to their site. You can also use SE Ranking for keyword research, lead generation, and more.

Price: $100-400 per month

SEMrush is another of of my favorites, and I put it toward the end of the backlink tool list because SEMrush does so much more than that. SEMrush will monitor and audit your link, making it much easier to track new inbound links, their likely toxicity, and their anchor text. If that wasn’t enough, you can also connect your Google Search Console to SEMrush or upload your disavow file manually, allowing you to align your backlink auditing work across both platforms.

The software also includes a Backlink Analytics and a Backlink Gap tool, so you can see exactly which backlinks your competitors have that you don’t (and vice versa). Finally, to help you build new links, SEMrush’s Link Building Tools helps to keep track of your outreach, by organizing prospects, emails sent, and follow-ups sent.

SEMrush spills into the next category of SEO tools: keyword research tools. I love their Keyword Magic Tool, which can help you discover new keywords and keyword variations through broad and phrase match options. Another tool, their Keyword Gap Tool, works a lot like the Backlink Gap tool and tells you exactly what your competitors rank for that you don’t (and the other way around). Similarly, their Organic Research tool helps you discover what existing content is ranking well for and what it’s ranking poorly for, helping you analyze whether you need to re-optimize or consider new pieces of content.

Overall, I can’t recommend SEMrush enough.

Keyword Research Tools Google Keyword Planner

Price: Free (though it works best if you’ve spent some $$ on PPC ads)

Google’s Keyword Planner remains one of the best tools for collecting keyword insights provided you’re an active Google Ads user. If that’s the case, you’ll benefit big-time from digging into your campaign data to look for keywords worth bringing into your organic content strategy. Use it to ID competitive keywords, get hyper-local keyword data, and find keywords related by topic.

That said, the Keyword Planner isn’t without its flaws. The platform now merges search volumes for similar keywords. In the past, search every variation would display its own search (for example “grocery store near me” and “nearest grocery store”) and some users feel that this shift has lessened the planner’s overall utility.

Answer the Public

Price: Free

Answer the Public is another free SEO tool I call out a lot on this site for its ease of use and ability to spit out a long list of questions that can be used to inform blog content, FAQ pages, or target snippet opportunities.

For the uninitiated, Answer the Public is a keyword research tool that pulls Google autosuggest data by using a question scraper. This tool is best used for uncovering the questions your target audience enters into Google, then presenting a whole range of search terms in a series of appealing visualizations.

While anyone can use the basic search function for free, there’s also a paid plan available to users that allows them to

Price: Free, $159 for Pro Plan

Okay, sure, Keyword Tool doesn’t have the most creative name. However, this is one of the best keyword research tools in the mix. The platform pulls keyword suggestions from autocomplete results and organizes them into a keyword, question, and preposition categories to help you uncover the terms you want to target depending on what you’re trying to do—be it aim for the snippets or build a blog post with really great information.

Additionally, you can use the platform to perform research for YouTube, Instagram, Bing, Twitter, Amazon, eBay, and the Play Store. While you can uncover some search terms for free, you’ll need to subscribe to see the keyword volumes, CPC rates, and competition stats.

Price: Free

Exploding Topics falls slightly outside of the realm of some of the other options on this list, as it doesn’t offer a list of keywords with search volume, etc.

However, this is a free tool that can quickly identify trending topics by category. The tool analyzes millions of search queries, mentions, and conversations across the web to surface trending topics right before they hit it big.

If you sign up for the Exploding Topics newsletter, you’ll receive weekly updates on emerging topics in your niche, allowing you to get ahead of the curve.

Content Optimization Tools

While there are plenty of free SEO tools for finding keywords, content optimization platforms tend to be more expensive than some of the other solutions I’ve mentioned.

ClearScope

Price: $350 per month for 3 users, custom pricing for agencies

ClearScope is the perfect tool for optimizing your content so that it’s relevant to what searchers are actively looking for. The platform brings SEO and content together in a way that goes beyond the standard approach to SEO. You know–targeting one primary keyword and a couple of supporting search terms and including them X amount of times throughout the content.

Instead, you’ll type your target keyword into the platform and ClearScope serves up a list of terms to include in your content

The example they use on the site is, let’s say you’re targeting the keyword “best credit cards.” In that situation, repeating “best credit cards” several times won’t cut it. Instead, the platform will recommend mentioning related terms that searchers expect to find post-click. So, rewards programs, balance transfers, credit scores, etc. should all make an appearance in order to create a relevant blog post.

BuzzSumo

Price: $99/month for the Pro Plan, $179/month for Plus, $299/month for Large, $499+/month for Enterprise

BuzzSumo is another platform I recommend quite a bit. It’s a social listening platform that offers content insights that help publishers generate ideas, identify which content is shared most often on social media platforms, find influencers to partner with and more.

It’s a super effective tool for gathering information ahead of writing a blog post, as you can search existing content by keyword.

The benefit here is, you can see what’s already out there, and what types of content get the most play. That intel can then be used help you explore a topic from a new angle, fill in the gaps left by top creators, and more. You can also use the platform to analyze your existing content, tracking engagement across various platforms. Here, you can learn your best times to post, which topics get the best results and more.

Additionally, the platform can also be used for building backlinks, identifying influencers, and understanding audience search queries. In all, BuzzSumo is one of the best when it comes to helping marketers create content that their audience really responds to.

Price: Free for Text Analysis, $60/month for Pro Plan

Text Optimizer is a super easy tool you can use to identify keywords and questions to use in your content.

How it works is, you’ll enter your target keyword, then paste the content you’re working on. The platform extracts data from Google’s intent table based on the target keyword and analyzes your content against that data using neural network technology.

From there, the platform will assign you a score and make recommendations for which keywords to add or remove to better focus on providing relevant content to your audience. According to the website, content creators should shoot for a score of 80% or higher for the best results.

While TextOptimizer doesn’t have the same level of polish you’ll find in ClearScope, it offers a similar approach to optimizing your content for relevance at a much more reasonable price point.

Technical SEO Tools Google Search Console

Price: Free

Formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console’s new and improved interface serves up a wealth of information to website owners and SEO pros that help them identify performance issues, structured data fails, and even test your rich results.

GSC covers a lot of ground and it’s completely understandable that digging into the free SEO tool might be a bit intimidating. For technical SEO issues, the Index Coverage report is a good place to start–here, you’ll find server errors, crawl errors, redirect errors and can learn whether your webpages are blocked, indexed, or otherwise not on the same page as Google’s crawlers.

The Performance report reveals things like rankings, CTRs, and average ranking position, as well as new additions like the ability to drill down into your AMP pages. What’s more, your performance report will reveal all keywords that your site is currently ranking for and allows you to make changes to page titles and meta data for a better shot at the snippets.

Sanity Check is a technical SEO tool designed to pull data from the Google Search Console and turn it into actionable tasks that help you improve your website. Users can view the top 1,000 queries and pages each day, improve CTRs, and run automated tests to check your performance.

Ultimately, Sanity Check is a really useful solution for those who feel overwhelmed by GSC or don’t have the time to comb through every report to extract the right insights. Instead, you’ll received automated notifications that tells you exactly what you need to do to improve your SERP rankings.

Google Mobile-Friendly Test

Now that mobile-friendliness is a ranking factor, you’ll need to make sure that your site is optimized for users—on any device.

The mobile-friendly test tool is a simple way to gauge whether or not your site has serious usability issues—then presents an option for diving deeper using Google’s site-wide mobile usability report.

Price: $72 per month, billed annually

DeepCrawl is one of my top picks when it comes to crawlers. It’s one of the most comprehensive tools for catching technical issues and presenting them in easy-to-understand reports.The main dashboard offers a breakdown of all pending technical issues, serving as a jumping-off point for digging into specific instances of thin content, broken links, and other page errors keeping you from dominating the SERPs.

The platform is designed to crawl the web just like Googlebot and replicates its settings to present an accurate picture of your site’s crawlability and indexability. DeepCrawl also helps users understand how internal links flow through their website, analyzes the quality of every page, and offers reporting tools designed to help users optimize website tags, topics, and categories.

Price: Free, Paid £149.00 per year.

Screaming Frog is another SEO tool that comes up both on the Ignite blog and elsewhere. One of the primary benefits of using Screaming Frog is how quickly the platform can serve up insights.

While the reporting capabilities are less intuitive than DeepCrawl, this platform provides one of the most comprehensive site audits around–with a free option that allows you to check 500 pages a day.

The free SEO Spider can check for duplicate content, errors, broken links, redirects, and reviews robots and directives. The platform also allows you to quickly generate XML sitemaps, review metadata and page titles, and audit hreflang attributes.

Upgrade to the Paid plan (still a decent deal at £149.00 per year) and you’ll unlock access to Google Analytics and GSC integrations, structured data and AMP validation, and the ability to schedule and save crawls.

Price: Free or $89 per year for the Premium Plugin

Yoast is a WordPress plug-in that makes it easy to optimize blog posts, SEO pages, and automatically generate XML sitemaps.

The platform analyzes your site’s readability, helps you optimize for keywords (including related terms and synonyms) and now allows you to easily add schema.org data to your pages to help Google identify what your site is all about. Other notable features include the platform’s readability check, automated technical optimization, and built-in reminders to refresh your content every six months.

Final Thoughts

While there’s a lot more where that came from, I hope this list of SEO tools helps you get a sense of how to build out your stack. Ultimately, you’ll want to invest in the tools that target the strategies that take up most of your time.

For example, if you’re writing a ton of content, something like ClearScope or BuzzSumo might be your initial starting point. You might then opt to lean on a free tool like ScreamingFrog or Google Search Console for the technical stuff.

If you’re after an all-around tool, something like Ahrefs may be your best bet.

In any case, it depends on your budget and your top priorities.

Best WordPress plugins of 2020

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Apr 2020 11:21:00 +0000

WordPress is a fantastic platform for building your own blog, portfolio, or ecommerce site. It's packed with tools to help you create a professional-looking site and monitor its performance, and you can make it even better by installing WordPress plugins to add new features.

Some WordPress plugins are free, while others are premium products with a price tag to match. You can find free plugins using WordPress's own Plugin Directory, which is accessible from your dashboard. Paid-for plugins can be uploaded using the Add New option from the plugins menu,

You can only install third-party plugins if you're hosting your site yourself using the software from WordPress.org. If your site is hosted on WordPress.com, you won't have a plugins menu.

If you’re serious about search optimization, use Yoast to reach the next level

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that offers real-time page analysis to help you optimize your pages’ content, images, titles, meta descriptions, and keywords. You can also use the plugin to tell Google not to index a page, or set of pages. And it even analyses the readability of your copy; checking the length of your sentences and paragraphs, whether you use transition words or subheadings, if you use passive voice too often, and so on.

You can also use Yoast SEO to generate URLs automatically (so you don’t get penalized by Google for duplicate content), create readable XML sitemaps, and get finer control over breadcrumbs. The premium version of Yoast SEO offers more advanced features, but even the free plugin can help you make a real difference to your site's ranking. Yoast SEO is constantly updated with new releases which you can check here.

Download here: Yoast SEO

Want to speed up your site? Caching plugin WP Rocket could be your friend

WP Rocket begins at US$49 (about £37, AU$69) for an annual license for a single site. That might sound like a lot – especially when there are other caching plugins available free – but this really is a premium product where you get what you pay for.

It’s very easy to set up, and can be installed and configured in just a few minutes. And that’s it – a real case of set it and forget it. Page caching is activated straight away and you should get an immediate speed boost to your site as a result. Plus, because this WordPress plugin's crawler simulates a visit to preload the cache, the indexing of your website by search engines is instantly improved.

WP Rocket, which has been used on more than 990,000 WordPress websites, also makes sure the images on your site are loaded only as your visitor scrolls down the page, and reduces the weight of your HTML, JavaScript and CSS files through minification, both of which should improve your load times further. Furthermore, being a premium product means you’ll receive regular updates and excellent customer support.

Download here: WP Rocket

If you need a contact form for your WordPress site, Gravity Forms is ideal

Currently in use by more than one million sites, Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin that allows you to build complex, contact forms quickly and with ease, with no technical knowledge required.

A user-friendly editor prompts you to select the fields you want to include, configure your options, and then embed the forms on your WordPress site. If you wish, you can also break up your form into multiple pages, and show a progress bar that lets users know how far they’ve got in the process. Also, there is a HubSpot add-on integration.

You can also schedule forms to appear and disappear at certain times; create order forms with pricing fields; and even build a form that creates user-generated WordPress posts on your site. All in all, well worth the US$59 (about £45, AU$83) price tag.

Download here: Gravity Forms

Use this plugin to find out how many people are visiting your site, where they’re from, and how long they're staying on each page

This powerful, free WordPress plugin enables you to track your site’s visitors using Google Analytics’ tracking code, and view key statistics within your WordPress installation. You can use Google Analytics Dashboard for WP to generate a set of performance reports about the site’s performance as a whole, as well as that of individual pages and posts, and the information you get back is fully customizable.

This WordPress plugin is fully compatible with multisite network installs, integrates with Google AdWords so you can keep track of how well your ads are converting, and supports AdSense, so you can work out which posts or pages are generating the most income. Note that you need to open a (free) Google Analytics account before you can use this plugin.

Download here: Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

A free WordPress plugin that's the world’s most popular for ecommerce sites

The WooCommerce WordPress plugin currently powers more than 30% of online stores. First launched in 2011, it was acquired by Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) in 2015, so its future development is clearly in safe hands.

The standard, free version of WooCommerce can calculate the costs of shipping and taxes and offers the ability to accept major credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers and cash on delivery. There are also some very capable stock management tools to help you keep track of your inventory.

The premium version of WooCommerce comes with more advanced tools, such as a one-page checkout, and an add-on for cart abandonment emails. There are also hundreds of add-ons and themes to extend WooCommerce’s functionality further.

Download here: WooCommerce

Integrate hundreds of top quality fonts for your WordPress site

If you want to make your WordPress site look beautiful, you need to move beyond standard fonts and start investigating a wider range of typography. Typekit (now known as Adobe Fonts) is an Adobe service that gives you access to high quality custom fonts, and the free Typekit Fonts for WordPress allows you to use it within your site with the minimum of effort on your part.

The fonts are applied to your website using the font-face standard, so you can be sure they’re web standards-compliant, fully licensed and accessible. You just need to create a free account with Typekit to get started.

Download here: Typekit Fonts for WordPress

Help readers find the content they want with a plugin that's a huge improvement on WordPress's own built-in search tool

Unfortunately, the search functionality provided by WordPress isn’t so great. But if you want to give your own visitors a decent in-site search experience (and let’s face it, who doesn’t), there’s a great free WordPress plugin that can help you out.

SearchWP offers a list of advanced search features including the indexing of post titles, descriptions and keywords, as well as PDF, Office and text document content. You can also create multiple search engines, each with their own settings; so you could, for example, create a search box solely for product searches.

SearchWP lets you to give users better results by using keyword stems instead of exact term matches, so, for example, the search term ‘sing’ would return related words like ‘song’ and ‘singing’. You can even customize how results are ranked using SearchWP's weighting system. Prices start at $99 for one site for one year.

Download here: SearchWP

Make and manage tables on your site, and even import them from Excel

If you need to present a lot of data in table form, it can be quite a pain coding it all by hand. TablePress is a Wordpress plugin that makes it easy to create and manage tables on your site without any knowledge of HTML. And best of all, it’s totally free.

With TablePress, your tables can contain any type of data, even formulas, plus an additional JavaScript library can be used to add features such as sorting, pagination and filtering to help your visitors make sense of all the info.

You can include tables in posts, pages and text widgets, and tables can be imported from Excel (XLS and XLSX), CSV, and HTML files, as well as being exported.

Download here: TablePress

Disasters and security breaches happen, so be cautious and protect your site

In the Wild West world of the internet, nothing lasts forever and you never know when catastrophe may strike. So it’s important to make regular backups of anything you put online.

BackUpWordPress lets you back up your entire WordPress site, including your database and all your files, on a schedule and timeframe that suits you.

The WordPress plugin, which boasts more than 200,000 active users, works in low memory 'shared host' environments, lets you manage multiple schedules, and gives you the option to have each backup file emailed to you.

You can send your backups to a wide variety of destinations, including remote FTP servers, Google Drive, DropBox, Amazon S3, Dreamhost DreamObjects, Rackspace Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It's free to download from WordPress website but due to the change in ownership, backups to Dropbox, Google Drive and others won't be supported anymore. Alternatively, you can check out UpdraftPlus Wordpress Backups.

Download here: BackUpWordPress

The quick and easy way to manage and eliminate spam comments

If you allow comments on your WordPress site, you’ll know what a headache comment spam can cause. One way to deal with this is to enable comment moderation, but once the volume of spam reaches a certain level, there often aren’t enough hours in the day to deal with it.

Created by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, Akismet is a WordPress plugin that automatically checks all comments and filters out the ones that look like spam for you. It works in the background and there are no settings to configure, so it’s extremely easy to pick up and run with.

Of course, you can’t rely on Askimet capturing every single piece of spam, and there’s also the possibility of false positives. But by telling it when it has missed spam or identified false positives, it can learn and get better over time.

Akismet is free to download but you’ll need an Akismet.com API key to use it. Keys are free for personal blogs; paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

Download here: Askimet

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 08:12:00 +0000

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Coronavirus world updates

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 05:34:00 +0000

There are now nearly 1.4 million confirmed cases of coronavirus in 184 countries and more than 75,000 people have died.

The United States has more than twice as many confirmed cases as any other single country and more than half of all the cases have been in Europe, with Spain and Italy worst affected.

This series of maps and charts tracks the spread of the virus since it emerged in China in December last year.

The virus is spreading rapidly in many countries and the death toll is still climbing - but the majority of people are recovering from the infection.

Coronavirus Cases:

1,363,099

Deaths:

76,370

Recovered:

293,743

ACTIVE CASES	CLOSED CASES
992,986 Currently Infected Patients 945,284 (95%) in Mild Condition 47,702 (5%) Serious or critcal DATE: 7/4/2020	370,113 Cases which had an outcome: 293,743 (79%) Recovered / Discharged 76,370 (21%) Deaths DATE:7/4/2020

Pakistani movies

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 09:47:00 +0000

Parvaz ha junoon

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super star

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Best 5 movies for you

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 06 Apr 2020 15:02:00 +0000

Avengers: end game

Contagion

Fast and Furious 9

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker

IT : Chapter 2

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