Sunday, February 13, 2022

Email automation tool

 

31 Best Email Automation Tools to Transform Your Business


What Is Email Automation?

Email automation is a process where you send targeted email campaigns to your customers through a pre-built and self-operating system.

Usually, this is done with the help of email marketing tools. We’ll give you an entire list of these tools in just a minute.

For now, it’s important to understand the process of email automation.

When you’re using the right tools, you can automatically capture new leads. Then have those leads sent to your mailing list.

And finally, you’ll create and send your automated email campaigns to your leads to transform them into paying customers.

With just a few minutes of your time, you can have this entire email automation system up and running for YOUR site.

But why would you take those few minutes to do so? Here are just a few of the MAJOR benefits of email automation:

  • Save Time: Once you’ve built your email automation system, just sit back and watch your customer base grow.
  • Improve UX: No more forgetting to follow up with leads as ALL of your leads will get timely follow-up emails.
  • Drive MORE Sales: Watch more email subscribers turn into paying customers automagically.

At the end of the day, there’s literally NO reason NOT to use email automation. Especially since most modern tools make the process EASY.

With these benefits in mind, let’s look at our top email automation tools. And since this is such an in-depth guide, you can use the following table of contents to navigate to the sections that interest you most:

Email Automation Tools

In this section, we share the best email automation tools you can use for everything: list building, email automation, tracking and monitoring, and testing.

Let’s jump right in!

Email Automation Tools for List Building

1. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is a premium WordPress plugin that gives you the power to automatically collect and segment email addresses. These can be segmented based on the user’s activity, inactivity, cookies, geographical location, and more.

OptinMonster lets you build stunning lead generation forms that are proven to grow your email list.

With its easy-to-use drag and drop builder, 50+ lead generation form templates, and 6 different campaign types, your forms will both work and look great.

It also offers seamless integration with many of the leading email service providers. That means you can exponentially grow your email list with OptinMonster and then send personalized automated emails via your email service provider.

Email Marketing Automation with OptinMonster

OptinMonster also offers a Real-Time Behavior Automation engine. This powerful engine identifies what users are looking for and shows the perfect optin campaign that’s more likely to convert them into customers.

For example, you can:

  • Detect when your visitors are actively leaving leave your site to show relevant campaigns to convert
  • Show targeted campaigns to visitors based on the area of the site they are visiting
  • Recognize how visitors interact with other offers and follow up with new targeted campaigns
  • And much more…

Friday, February 11, 2022

Victor visited Vancouver: Shanghai Jiaotong university 84 class get-together

Feb. 11, 2022

Introduction

上海交通大学84级温哥华校友聚会, 我们聚会地点是在靠近鹿湖的最高价餐厅, 叫Hart House restaurant。 

讨论话题

  1. 校友工作曾经单位: Motorola, Sierrawireless, Netgear, Intuit, MP Lighting
  2. 读过大学和研究生院: UBC MBA Finance, Stanford 硕士, FAU, etc
  3. 疫情北京来的校友, 疫苗打了四针, 中国二次, 美国二次。 加拿大我周六打第三针加强针。鼓励没有打疫苗校友放心去打疫苗。
  4. Hart house餐馆特点就是特别舒适, 灯光很柔和, 服务都是加拿大年轻人, 所以我们也很自豪,一起度过美好时光。服务还是很不错。非常适合大家聚在一起聊天。
  5. 聊天话题可多了, 慢慢记下来;我们有的二三个人交流,大家可能错过了参与。

  6. 晚餐结束,我们一起散步, 然后一起步行送Victor到停车场。 Victor 分享开车旅游经验。  
  7. Victor 租了一辆大车, 耗油但是更安全和舒适;Victor 从加州开车来温哥华, 分享沿途美景。 有的地方我没有去过,十二年前我开车从加州到温哥华,沿海开车好几天。

How to Migrate a WordPress Site with WP-CLI and rsync

Feb. 11, 2022

Here is the link. 

There are lots of ways to migrate a WordPress site. Lots of plugins can do it. You can do it over simple (S)FTP. But the quickest way I know of is via rsync and WP-CLI. But that does come with an important proviso: you need to have access to a shell (via a simple local terminal or SSH) to both ends of the migration. And that’s often harder to do than the plugin or SFTP route. But if you’ve got that, this way is a great deal faster.

There are a lot of prerequisites if you’re trying to find this method safe and easy. Mostly, you need to be comfortable with a command line enough that you already have at least a little understanding of what SSH, rsync, and WP-CLI are. And you need those installed and working on both ends of your migration. If you’ve not aleady got that, unfortunately this Quick Guide is too quick to detail those for you.

The DreamHost Control Panel Keeps Getting Better

Feb. 11, 2022

Here is the article. 

Free WordPress Migrations have been a game changer for anyone with an existing website who wants to move it to a new home here at DreamHost. Migrating WordPress sites across web hosts can be tricky, with multiple opportunities for things to go sideways.

The decision to switch hosting providers is a big one and is often easier said than done!  Our new custom migration plugin eliminates any pain and confusion from the transfer process and frees you up to focus on what matters.  You won’t even have to think about futzing with hosts files and database entries, and you won’t have to hold your breath wondering if everything will work after DNS finishes propagating!

Simply install the DreamHost Automated WordPress Migration plugin, grab the migration token from your DreamHost control panel, and paste that token into the plugin. Our migration robots then go to work while you sit back, relax, and binge Ted Lasso.  Once your site’s data is moved over, update your domain to use DreamHost’s nameservers, and you’re live!

Dreamhost:

 VPS Hosting | Fully Managed Virtual Private Servers - DreamHost


Managed VPS Hosting

Virtual private servers

Expect more from your website or APP

  • Managed performance, security, & updates
  • Unhindered performance with your own server resources
  • Quick & easy to use custom control panel
  • Unlimited bandwidth & traffic
  • Expandable RAM & storage
  • SSDs, email, SSL, & unlimited domains included
  • US-Based VPS

Wednesday, February 9, 2022

Algorithms: Time to learn new algorithms

Feb. 9, 2022

Introduction

It is time for me to learn a few new algorithms. I like to spend time to think and also code some algorithms as well. 

Algorithms | Leetcode | Google, Microsoft interview algorithms

  1. Leetcode 1655 Distribute Repeating Integers (hard)
  2. Leetcode 473 Matchsticks to Square
  3. Leetcode 827 algorithm Makeing a large island (hard)


Monday, February 7, 2022

WordPress: WPBakery Page Builder: #1 WordPress Page Builder Plugin

 Feb. 7, 2022

Here is the link. 

CONTENT ELEMENTS

Content Elements, Templates and Addons

With WPBakery Page Builder you instantly have access to 50+ built-in content elements available out of the box. Each of content element has been carefully crafted by web design professionals and offers multiple options which are enough to build any layout you can think of. Literally, within minutes you can build complex layouts on the basis of our content elements and without touching a single line of code. And if you think that it’s not enough you should check WPBakery Page Builder add-ons to discover 250+ add-ons with hundreds of content elements available. All you have to do is just drag the element into your page or post and you are ready to launch your WordPress website.

Saturday, February 5, 2022

How to Effectively Prepare for LeetCode | Software Engineer

Feb. 5, 2022

Here is the link. 

THE LEETCODE PREPARATION STRATEGY I USED TO GET INTO MICROSOFT AND AMAZON!! ALL YOU NEED!? JUST 3 MONTHS!! An alternative option: a curated list of questions at AlgoMonster 👉 https://bit.ly/3cEENaz ⭐ Get 10% off by using code PIRATE at checkout for 10% off lifetime access How to Effectively Prepare for LeetCode PIRATE KING | Software Engineer | Entertainment | Tech Life | Industry Mentor | Career Advice | SWE Consultation - Fun, educational, informative, yet entertaining contents on a Software Engineer's life - Tips and tricks on how to land a successful career in tech - Join my Discord for **FREE** career advice / guide / consultation



Timeline 0:00 Intro 0:55 Step 1 - Get Premium Subscription 1:39 Step 2 - Start with LeetCode 100 Liked Questions 2:35 Step 3 - Focus on Topic by Topic 4:32 Step 4 - Practice with a Plan 6:20 Step 5 - Solve Company Specific Questions 7:20 Summary & Closing #LeetCodePlan #LeetCodePrep #HowToLeetCode #Microsoft #SoftwareEngineer Don't just solve random questions. LeetCoding isn't easy. You'll need guide in order to be successful at it. Watch through the video to learn more about the very strategy I've used to land the job at Microsoft! Top 100 Liked Questions: https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/?... seanprashad Leetcode Patterns: https://seanprashad.com/leetcode-patt... Find the Left-Most Occurrence of an Element using Binary Search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_... Blind 75 Curated List: https://www.teamblind.com/post/New-Ye... Welcome to Pirate King. I'm a Software Engineer at Microsoft, ex-Software Engineer at Amazon and ebay. Apart from my full-time job, I also provide consultation and career mentoring to prospective Software Engineers. Here, we talk about tips and tricks on how to land a successful career in tech. If you are interested, make sure to hit that subscribe button! Filmed with iPhone SE 2 Music by Yeri PIRATE KING Software Engineer + Career Mentor in Tech

Friday, February 4, 2022

FB stock: Learn more about FB business

 Its shares fell 26.4% after quarterly figures disappointed investors.

Meta also said that Facebook's daily active users (DAUs) had dropped for the first time in its 18-year history.

The company's share price slide saw chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's net worth fall by $31bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

The drop in Mr Zuckerberg's personal fortune was equivalent to the annual gross domestic product of Estonia.

Even after that drop, Mr Zuckerberg has an estimated net worth of almost $90bn, which means he is still one of the richest people in the world.


That came after Meta revealed that Facebook's DAUs fell to 1.929bn in the three months to the end of December, compared to 1.930bn in the previous quarter.

It was the first time ever that this measure of activity on the world's biggest social network had gone into reverse.

Meta's stock market slump came on the eve of the 18th anniversary of the founding of Facebook.


Meta also warned of slowing revenue growth in the face of competition from rival platforms including TikTok and YouTube, while advertisers were also cutting spending.

Mr Zuckerberg said the firm's sales growth had been hurt as audiences, especially younger users, had left for rivals.

The firm forecast revenues of between $27bn and $29bn for the first quarter of this year, which was lower than analysts had expected.

Although the company has been making investments in video services to compete with TikTok, owned by Chinese technology giant ByteDance, it makes less money from those offerings than its traditional Facebook and Instagram feeds.


It's clear that Meta is facing a whirlwind of different problems.

Last year Apple brought in its App Tracking Transparency policy.

It lets people choose whether or not they want to be tracked around the internet by companies, like Meta, who can then sell that information to advertisers.

That is a major problem for Facebook, because finding information out about you and selling it to advertisers is exactly how it makes money.

Its quarterly results showed advertising income falling, partly for this reason.

Meta's rivals, like TikTok, are also attracting younger audiences. And user growth has stagnated around the world.

There are bigger longer term issues too.

Meta makes money from advertising. Yet the company's name has been changed to mark a concept - the Metaverse - a thing that doesn't exist yet and won't do for years.

Mark Zuckerberg is committed to spending tens of billions of dollars on the project, even though evidence that people actually want to live their lives in virtual reality is scant.


It all means many investors are unfriending.


Meta, which owns the world's second largest digital advertising platform after Google, also said it had been hit by privacy changes on Apple's operating system.

The changes, which make it harder for brands to target and measure their advertising on Facebook and Instagram, could have an impact "in the order of $10bn" for this year, the firm said.

"Clearly Meta got more impacted compared to its rivals as other social media like Snap posted healthy results," said Sachin Mittal, head of telecom and internet sector research at DBS Bank.

"While there has been a broad negative impact on the whole tech sector, we reckon players with lower reliance on targeted ads or better algorithms to cope with Apple's changes would still do well."

Meta's share price slump also dragged on other social media platforms, including Twitter, Snap and Pinterest during Thursday's regular trading session.

However, Snap's shares jumped by almost 60% in after-hours trade as it reported its first ever quarterly profit.


----------------------------------



FB stock:

 

Mark Zuckerberg’s Disaster Is Taking Silicon Valley With It


This story has been updated to include more details on Snap’s and Amazon’s earnings and an interview with Wharton Professor Ron Berman.

With a single earnings report and a disastrous conference call, Mark Zuckerberg wiped out $240 billion in value from his company. Meta’s was the largest one-day loss by a U.S. company ever, and the ripple effects were closer to tsunamis throughout Silicon Valley. The list of tech losers reeling from the Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) reckoning is long and full of familiar names: Spotify was 16 percent lower; Twitter was down about 6 percent; and even companies that were relatively safe, such as Apple and Microsoft, saw hundreds of billions of dollars erased from their market value. Every percentage point here is a huge sum of money gone, at least for shareholders. Why did this happen? Who is responsible? Has the bell tolled for Big Tech?

To answer that last question first, yes and no. Many of Facebook’s problems are of Zuckerberg’s own making. It wasn’t even six months ago that the billionaire tech developer decided not only to change the company’s name but to go even further — to hijack its reason for existing and create a whole new digital reality, the metaverse, amid one of the most damaging, long-lasting scandals of the company’s existence right here on planet Earth. (More on that later.) Meta spent more than $9 billion to build this metaverse last year, it was revealed in securities filings. This is an astronomical sum, especially since Zuckerberg has tried to warn investors that it could be as late as 2031 before he really gets it right. It’s the kind of leap of faith that, ironically, tends to get a more sympathetic hearing from smaller, scrappier companies, such as Magic Leap, that have far less money and resources at their disposal — except that the money comes from venture capitalists who can handle companies going bust, not the public stock markets that fuel people’s retirements.

But there are other, structural reasons for Meta’s rout, and the weight of those changes has suddenly registered with the rest of the world. The first is Tim Cook, the head of Apple, the largest company in the world. Last year, Apple allowed its users to opt out of getting followed around the internet by advertisers, kneecapping Facebook’s whole business model. Facebook is one of the avatars of surveillance capitalism, an economy that diminishes privacy in order to make a company more money. By last summer, consumers had decided they didn’t want to be tracked, with only 25 percent saying, Yeah, sure, follow me around. Now not only does Facebook get almost all of its money from advertising, but people who have iPhones — and Apple products more generally — are a much more appealing audience for advertisers since they tend to have more money than Android users. During the last three months of 2021, when inflation picked up and advertisers started to pull back on spending, Apple’s move hit Facebook hard and signaled to the rest of the world that online advertising will be going through a hard time.

How hard is anyone’s guess, but it won’t be overnight. As a result of Apple’s ad-tracker-blocking feature “and other privacy initiatives that are imminent,” Eric Benjamin Seufert wrote on the tech blog Mobile Dev Memo, “Meta’s advertising infrastructure must be replaced completely.” Basically, Seufert argued, Meta executives have to change their entire advertising system — the whole reason the company was considered so bulletproof just a few years ago. But it’s not as if advertising or surveillance capitalism are going away: Other Silicon Valley giants such as Google and Amazon have reported big-bang earnings because advertising was actually so good.

In order to get a better understanding of how online advertising works, I talked about it with Ron Berman, a professor of marketing at Wharton, the University of Pennsylvania’s elite business school. He said the online-advertising business is essentially split into two camps: those like Google and Amazon, whose sites you visit to tell them what you want, and places like Facebook and Instagram, where people visit to be entertained and the companies use the data they have on you to inform advertisers. For “the advertisers selling on Amazon, everything is inside the platform,” Berman said. “If Facebook was able to have a lot of people sell through Facebook on the Facebook app, a lot of this problem would be a nonissue.” So when Cook allowed Apple users to block ad tracking, he was essentially siding with the Googles of the world, at least as far as advertising is concerned. This is why Snap, which was closer to Facebook’s advertising model, lost a quarter of its market value before it reported its fourth-quarter earnings — and then rocketed up more than 50 percent after hours when its earnings were released. Why? The company’s top financial officer said Snap’s ads business “began to recover from the impact of the iOS platform changes quicker than we anticipated,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Essentially, it became less like Facebook. How Zuckerberg plans on doing that is still a major unknown.

Amid all this turmoil, there’s still the competition. Those massive, damning leaks by whistleblower Frances Haugen detailed how Instagram was harming the mental health of girls just as Zuckerberg’s company was pushing to roll out a version of its photo app for children. The reason for this focus is Facebook’s users were skewing older and older. Kids didn’t really use Facebook and were leaving Instagram for Snapchat and TikTok. Facebook needed an in with the next generation, and this was it. The strategy continues. Zuckerberg told his employees Thursday that they should focus on short-form video products — I’m assuming he means TikTok clones — and that they face “unprecedented levels of competition,” according to a Bloomberg report. Berman sees other problems too. Since Facebook’s demographics are skewing older and people are venturing out more as the Omicron wave starts to subside, he thinks it might be harder to lure people back — which will make it even harder to get advertisers to spend more money there. “I’m a skeptic because their customers are spending less and less time there and providing less and less useful information to Facebook,” he said.

The problem for Zuckerberg is his style as a CEO is not about coming up with brilliant or creative new things. It’s about doing those things better than his competitors, at least from a business perspective. He bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012; two years later, he purchased WhatsApp for $16 billion. Along the way, his properties have copied TikTok (“Reels”) and Clubhouse (“Live Audio Rooms”) and set up a version of Craigslist (“Facebook Marketplace”). The success has varied, but clearly the playbook is no longer working. Even if Facebook could buy its way out — and with $39 billion in revenue last year, Lord knows that wouldn’t be an issue — it’s facing an impasse in Washington, D.C., where one of the few bipartisan positions is regulating Big Tech. The companies’ lobbyists are getting no traction, and the Federal Trade Commission has been giving them no quarter — in fact, it’s a very real possibility that Meta could be forcibly broken up. (This has already started in small ways outside the U.S., as when the U.K. blocked an acquisition of Giphy, though that’s on appeal). Does this all mean it’s the end of days for Facebook? Probably not. Even if Zuckerberg fails spectacularly in getting people to go along with his metaverse and never recovers the revenue levels from online advertising, he has already ingrained his company deeply into the internet. After all, there are still people who use AOL, right?


Thursday, February 3, 2022

FB stock: 26% plunge | Feb. 3, 2022 | Metaverse | My study of social media company

Here is the link. 


Meta’s historic share price drop shakes world tech stocks

 

Shares of Facebook owner Meta

FB-Q -26.67%decrease
fell 26% on Thursday in what could be the worst single-day wipeout in market value for a U.S. company, after the social media giant issued a dismal forecast, blaming Apple Inc’s privacy changes and increased competition.

The huge drop, erasing over $200 billion from Meta’s market capitalization, spilled over to the broader technology sector and dragged the Nasdaq Composite Index lower.

If losses hold, it would mark the company’s worst one-day loss since its Wall Street debut in 2012.

“Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg may be keen to coax the world into an alternate reality, but disappointing fourth-quarter results were quick to burst his metaverse bubble,” said Laura Hoy, an equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown.

Big U.S. tech-focused companies have come under mounting pressure in 2022 as investors expect policy tightening at the U.S. Federal Reserve to erode the industry’s rich valuations following years of ultra-low interest rates. The Nasdaq, which is dominated by tech and growth stocks, fell more than 9% in January, its worst monthly drop since the coronavirus-induced market crash in March 2020.

“The downgrade in the earnings outlook by Meta and other companies took markets by surprise,” said Kenneth Broux, a strategist at Societe Generale in London.

“The tech selloff spilled over to broader equity markets this morning and with the Fed preparing to raise interest rates, we could see more volatility going forward,” he said.

The stock’s drop was a boon for investors betting on a decline in the company’s shares. Short sellers in Meta were poised to increase their potential 2022 gains to more than $2 billion with Thursday’s plunge, according to S3.

With Big Tech firms like Apple and Microsoft ballooning in valuations in the past few years, they have also become more susceptible to investor whiplash, often resulting in losses worth tens of billions of dollars in a single day of trade.

Apple shed nearly $180 billion on Sep. 3, 2020, while Microsoft lost $177 billion on March 16 in the same year. However, Meta’s massive selloff is set to eclipse those if losses hold.

Meta reported a decline in daily active users from the previous quarter for the first time as competition with rivals like TikTok, the video sharing platform owned by China’s ByteDance, heats up.

Meta said about 3% of worldwide monthly active users in the fourth quarter consisted solely of violating accounts while duplicate accounts may have represented about 11% of usage.

The disappointment over Meta’s earnings and the subsequent stock fall raised memories of the bursting tech bubble in 2000.

Investors seem to be becoming highly selective after the sector’s record-breaking run in recent months.

According to research firm Vanda, purchases from retail investors in late 2020 and early 2021 were focused on expensive tech, EVs and so-called “meme” stocks. In the past week purchases of large-cap tech have skyrocketed while speculative assets have seen very little demand.

At the same time, several hedge funds including Wellington Management Group, Sanders Capital and Tiger Global Management were among the funds that declared positions in Meta Platforms at the end of September, and could potentially have been hurt by the wipe-out in shares.

The so-called FAANG group of Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google’s Alphabet has seen around $400 billion in market capitalization wiped off in the opening weeks of 2022 as cheaper segments of the markets become more attractive while central banks taper stimulus.

Other social media stocks were also hit hard on Thursday, including Twitter, Pinterest and Spotify. Spotify has been beset by a row over COVID-19 vaccination misinformation and also released disappointing results.


Tuesday, February 1, 2022

UTEP Commencement speech 2019

 Feb. 1 2022

Here is the link. 

Diego Rejtman delivers the University of Texas El Paso Commencement address to the School of Engineering in May of 2019.