How Helpful Are Nutrition Labels on Food?

(MedPage Today) -- Labeling may change, but eating habits don't

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Forget about unique content. Try actually BEING local!

Columnist Greg Gifford notes that when all your competitors have unique content, then that alone won't be enough to help you stand out from the crowd. The post Forget about unique content. Try actually BEING local! appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

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How to Get Prepared for Google’s “Intrusive Interstitials” Update

A couple of weeks ago, Google has announced that exactly on January, 10, it will hit pages with “intrusive interstitials”. What does it mean? Let’s find out!

What are interstitials?

Interstitials are the web pages that show up before or after expected content page, usually as a popup or full-screen ad. They usually display ads or optin forms. Interstitials are considered a form of interruption marketing.

Which search results will be effected?

The update will affect mobile search results which are getting increasingly important.

Which popups will be affected?

As Google defines interstitial ads,

Interstitial ads are full screen ads that cover the interface of their host application.

However the update is announced to affect more types of interstitials:

• Popups covering the main content, either immediately after the user navigates to a page from the search results, or while they are looking through the page.
• Standalone interstitial that the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content.
• Layout where the above-the-fold portion of the page appears similar to a standalone interstitial, but the original content has been inlined underneath the fold.

Which popups won’t be affected?

Generally, an interstitials that have a good reason to be there, as well as those that are easy to dismiss

• Interstitials that appear to be in response to a legal obligation (Examples: cookie usage or for age verification)
• Login dialogs on sites where content is not publicly indexable. (Examples: private content such as email or unindexable content that is behind a paywall)
• Banners that use a reasonable amount of screen space and are easily dismissible.

I seem to have obtrusive interstitials on my site and they work GREAT for my conversion rate. What should I do?

Don’t forget that this update effects only mobile search results. So if you are really worried about your CTR and don’t want to part with your interstitials, one possible workaround is to disable them for mobile devices or use different sign-up forms for mobile experience.

Another way is to experiment with different ways to design your optin forms or calls-to-action. For example, HelloBar offers an easy to put your optin form across the screen without it taking too much space.

Remember, Google mostly cares about the user’s immediate experience. This update will affect pages users navigate to directly from Google search results (and generally pages users land on from external sources, like Google Plus, for example). Whatever you do with those users after that is your business, so if they navigate further into the site, you can serve them more ads.

It will not touch vignette ads which appear when users navigate between pages on the same website, so you can keep your ads there. So in your optin form settings, add a rule to never show it on pages users land from external sources.

The good thing is, the update is scheduled for January, so you have time to experiment with different ways to design your calls-to-action to avoid suffering lower conversions.

Whatever you do, don’t forget to test your site on mobile devices as well as desktop to ensure your new forms look good. Remember, that is exactly how much mobile screen real estate Google allows to cover with an interstitial:

The post How to Get Prepared for Google’s “Intrusive Interstitials” Update appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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Applying the Pareto Principle to Increase Your Productivity

From ProBlogger expert Nicole Avery of Planning With Kids.

The 80/20 principle, or the Pareto principle, is widely known and accepted in business. The principle asserts that a minority of causes or effort lead to a majority of the results,

In business it can be easily seen in many areas:

• 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of its customers
• 80% of a company’s sales come from 20% of its products
• 80% of customer complaints come from 20% of customers

The 80/20 principle is not an exact formula but the principle’s key truth is that the distribution is not even. It as about understanding there is an imbalance for effort and result. The split will not always be exactly 80/20, it might be 90/10, 99/1 for example, however it will not be 50/50.

Understanding how the 80/20 principle applies to blogging can increase your productivity and therefore your success.

Where are you spending your time?

The first step in applying the 80/20 principle is to analyse where you are spending your time in relation to blogging activities. There are many tools out there you can use to help you do this but I use Rescue Time.

RescueTime is an app you install on your computer and it focuses on measuring active computer time. (It has both free and paid versions, but I find the free version perfect for what I need.) It only measures which application is in focus or “on top”. When RescueTime detects that your computer is idle, that is you haven’t made an action after a certain time period, it stops attributing time to that application.

You can then either login to your dashboard to analyse your time use or wait for the weekly email to come through and see how productive you have been. Rescue Time with your help, with classify sites and applications as productive or distracting and generate a weekly productivity score.

Regardless of the tool you use, the most important thing is that you have a reliable data on how you are using your time. Humans are terrible at estimating our time use and how long we do things for as a recent study highlighted:

The typical person who reported having worked 40 hours, for example, actually worked closer to 37. The report found that “The greater the estimate, the greater the overestimate”; people who said they worked 75 hours actually worked closer to 50 hours. (That’s an overestimate of 25 hours, or 50 percent!) At the other end of the spectrum, people who worked relatively few hours (under around 25) actually ended to underestimate their hours. {source}

A tool like Rescue Time takes the guesswork out of it and you are left with the stats to analyse.

As bloggers, we work in an environment full of distractions. We are building audiences on social media platforms like facebook, twitter and instagram who have large paid teams working on solely how to gain and hold our attention. It is easy for a five-minute check of our facebook page to slide out to 35 minutes before we tear ourselves away from the latest viral meme. As hard as the truth maybe, we need to be honest with ourselves in how much time we are spending on these platforms and the value they are returning.

Through your time analysis you will discover where your effort is giving you the greatest return and where perhaps you are wasting your time.

If you are spending your time on the wrong activities, no matter how well you manage your time; you will not achieve the productivity you are after. Tasks that add little value are often referred to as the trivial many and those that contribute real results as the vital few.

Make changes

Armed with your data, it is then time to make changes. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What tasks are returning the biggest results?
• What tasks should I be spending more time on?
• Am I spending time on tasks that are working towards my goal?
• What tasks can I eliminate?
• What tasks can I automate?
• What tasks can I batch?

The hard part now comes once you know the answers. To increase your productivity you cannot simply make changes to how you work but you need to make changes to what you are working on.

The trivial tasks you are spending your time on are often easier to do than the vital few tasks. The vital few activities like creating killer content, creating e-books, creating courses are cognitively demanding and they require your brain to work hard. Doing hard work requires concentration through single tasking and it takes practice.

It is a practice that will pay dividends, not only with increased productivity through the quality and quantity of your blogging output, but also through the sense of achievement you feel when you have tackled a hard task and nailed it!

Do you know where you are spending your time?  

Nicole Avery is a Melbourne mum to five beautiful kids aged seven to 17. She is the master organiser behind the popular parenting blog Planning With Kids and the creator of the Planned & Present e-course, a step-by-step guide for mums on how to organise the chaos of family life while still leaving space to enjoy it.

 

 

The post Applying the Pareto Principle to Increase Your Productivity appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

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Bagels, Pretzels and the Nobel Prize in Physics

If you're baffled by the phrase “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter,” we're here to help

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

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Bagels, Pretzels and the Nobel Prize in Physics

If you're baffled by the phrase “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter,” we're here to help

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

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