What's up y'all! I don't know if it's just me, but this week felt like the longest week ever.

This week, I stopped dragging my feet and finally took the plunge into NFTs and the wild world of web3. I wanted to get involved earlier this year, but we were building a house and buying furniture seemed like a better idea than buying .jpgs 🤣

Outside of artist work, what I’ve found interesting from a marketing perspective is how companies with collectible go about their marketing. They really are at the forefront of community building (almost 100% on Discord), and are also masters of getting their audience to make memes and market for them.

I might start adding in a bit of those types of stories into the newsletter. Let’s get into this week’s news first though!

Social & The Creator Economy

• There’s no bigger story for this week than Facebook having their worst week, pretty much ever. This week, they had an outage of all FB-owned properties for the better part of a day. Here’s the detailed story of the company’s scramble to fix the outage. And a very simplified Twitter thread breakdown, to boot.
• Hot on the heels of The Facebook Files, Whistleblower Frances Haugen came forward and subsequently testified for Congress. Then, Facebook attempted to refute her claims with their press run, to no avail.
• Lexus isn’t waiting for younger drivers to get older and get money to market to them with TV and other traditional advertising channels. Instead, they’re using TikTok to reach younger drivers where they are.
• We’ve written before about Discord as the default place for creators to build a community. Even Kanye West is onboard now, soliciting feedback for his latest album Donda on Discord, instead of Twitter.
• This is the first year that college athletes have been able to use their likeness to get sponsorships (now they can make the money their schools should have been paying them the whole time). Here are the current top 10 college athlete influencers, ranked by cost for a sponsored post.
• At this point, Instagram is trying to squeeze every ounce of engagement out of us they can. The latest test to add to this: a like button for your stories.
• Audio is so hot right now. Which is why YouTube is getting into the podcast game. They kind of already are, when you consider that the top podcasters often upload the video versions of the podcast to YouTube. Now, it’s on YouTube to maximize that with a new strategy.
• They certainly have the money to try new things. This week, YouTube reported that it contributed $20.5 billion to the U.S. GDP in 2020. That’s more than many small countries. Wild.
• Instagram is getting rid of IGTV (sort of). That particular part of IG will now be known as Instagram TV. IGTV was notably slow to grow, especially when you compare it to the growth rate of newer features like Reels. Rest in Peace, we (literally) barely knew you.
• “F you, Pay Me” is an interesting community that lets influencers secretly share how much brands pay them. Brands can’t join the community, making it pretty one-sided, but also makes sure that creators get paid fairly for their influence.
• Last in creator economy news: it was also a rough week for Twitch. A hacker made off with a mother lode of their data. This could be the raid of the century, though because it’s the entirety of Twitch. Including the source code, user payouts, and plans for an upcoming Steam competitor. Oof. Perhaps the biggest thing to come out of the leak was the list of millionaire streamers, which of course caused many of them to react to their earnings being public knowledge now.

SEO & Content & Analytics

• When you’re writing copy and messaging for your businesses, it’s important to remind yourself of the “curse of knowledge.” Things you take for granted could be things your potential buyer never thought about. This breakdown from Why We Buy quickly illustrates the problem and offers potential solutions.
• Here are 12 outdated SEO practices to avoid going forward. The biggest takeaway from this list is: you can’t get away with low-quality content. Which I think we all know, but hey I’m going to point it out anyway because we (me) all need a good reminder now and then.
• Google Analytics 4 might be a big pile of poop, but they did just release an interesting update. You can now get data-driven attribution features, conversion modeling, and more. This is part of a larger move away from last-click attribution.
• Choosing a freelancer or agency to work with can be a hard job. You don’t know if you’re going to get what you pay for when you start. Here’s an interesting twitter thread from @AaronOrendorff on some red flags to look out for when working with a content writer or content agency.
• Ever wonder how credit card review sites make money? Here’s a good breakdown on how SEO and affiliate marketing combine to make review sites lots of cash.

Email Marketing

• Ok, so… Home Depot has a crazy 12 ft (3.66 m) tall Skeleton decoration that is really popular for Halloween decorations. People even resell these things. This year they sold out via a single email back in July! This proves two things: 1) email is still great for e-commerce marketing, and 2) you can sell literally anything and humans will buy it.
• We’ve featured Amanda Natividad’s content before, and this week she published another super useful piece: the ultimate guide to effective cold outreach. She has an 80% response rate for cold outreach, which is insane. Most reps I know pray for 3%. The secret is doing a bunch of research on the people you’re emailing upfront so that you can craft relatable emails.
• Staying on the topic of email outreach. This story of a 17-year-old’s email outreach was super inspiring. There are some good tips in the article for how to write your next outreach email. Same secret here: do your research and cater to the recipient’s ego. After all, you are trying to get a human to respond.
• If you’re not optimizing your emails for conversions, what are you even doing? Says the man that only has his conversions at the bottom of this newsletter — Here are 10 tips to drive conversions in 2021.

Branding & Advertising

• Arby’s, not to be outdone by other food brands-turned-merch-peddlers, created meat-scented joggers. Arby’s Smoked Sweats, anyone? I’m interested, but not quite enough to click a buy button.
• Advertising on LinkedIn can be tricky. It’s more costly than other ad platforms, but it’s a great place to for B2B marketers to get their message across to buyers. Here are 10 examples of great LinkedIn ads.
• Firefox is adding advertising to its browser. They’ll show up in your searches as “suggestions from parters” aka paid placements. This is a weird move for a company so focused on privacy, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out and how successful it becomes.

Fun

• What happens on the internet every minute? TikTok's users watch 167 million clips, Zoom hosts 856 minutes of video, and a lot more stuff. Check out this infographic to see everything that happens in a single internet minute in 2021.

Woo! You made it to the end! Thank you so much for reading along this week. If you’re enjoying the newsletter, you can help me grow it by:

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Thank you again for being here, and see you all next week!

Forge