What’s good, home slice?*

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I’ve been puzzling over how to use punctuation and emojis in the newsletter.

Cause it’s one thing to just use emojis and whatever kind of punctuation I feel like in texts or social posts. But everything feels different when I use emojis in an article with paragraphs and stuff.

I’ve been going between three different punctuation options when I end a sentence with an emoji.

1. Help me 😅. I don’t know what to do. (period after emoji)

2. Help me 😅 I don’t know what to do. (just forget the period)

3. Help me. 😅 I don’t know what to do. (period before emoji)

So I asked for advice on our Instagram, and the general consensus is option 3—period before emoji. So that’s what I’ll be sticking with. But I still don’t really like any of them. 😅

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Hayley

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This week’s most important Marketing News

 ​AHREFS CREATED A NEW SEARCH ENGINE, YEP ​

Three years ago, Ahrefs said they were building a search engine to compete with Google. And now, it’s here. Ahrefs hopes their focus on profit-sharing (giving creators more ad money) and searcher privacy will set them apart.

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​LINKEDIN LAUNCHED A BUSINESS MANAGER AND ADDED A BOOST OPTION TO EVENT PAGES​

Business Manager will make day-to-day LN work easier for enterprise companies and agency employees. With this update, you can “view and manage your team, ad accounts, Pages, and business partners from a centralized dashboard.”

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​THERE ARE 8 UPDATES TO GOOGLE AD MANAGER​

These updates include a default setting to increase your auction floor prices to match your inventory’s value and an increase in the Publisher Provided Identifier’s (PPID) Time-to-Live (TTL) from 90 to 180 days. Wow, we’re really speaking ad here.

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​LINKS WITHIN TWITTER POSTS MAY NOW CARRY SEO POWER​

Some backlink backstory.

Links are an extremely important piece of the SEO puzzle, because Google uses links as a way to establish a site’s credibility. If a bunch of cooking sites link to your “How to make the perfect PB&J” article, then Google recognizes that you’re probably a true PB&J expert. So when people search for “how to make PB&J,” they’re more likely to bump your article toward the top of that search.

The real story.

Until now Twitter had no-follow links, which do NOT have that credibility-building power that other links do. So if a tweet included a link to your site’s PB&J article, it’s not going to help your SEO prospects. This link strategy on Twitter was done to prevent spammy tweets created only to build backlinks to content.

But, our sources tell us that there are now follow links with potential SEO-juice on Twitter. There’s a chance this is a new thing, worthy of our attention. And there’s a chance that it was just a mistake that will revert soon. Or that there are just different ways that Google is using negate those links’ power.

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​GOOGLE ADS IS BETA TESTING A FEATURE TO AUTOMATICALLY BUILD CREATIVE ASSETS ​

The feature creates “headlines, descriptions, and other assets” for you, “using your content from your landing page, domain, and ads.” Many of us are not willing to be the guinea pig for it. But if any of you want to try it out, we’d all love to hear how it goes. 😉

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​YOUTUBE MASTHEAD ADS OPENING TO PREVIOUSLY BANNED INDUSTRIES​

Sports betting is now open to purchasing masthead ads in the US. The alcohol industry is also now permitted—where it’s legal. And, prescription drug companies can also advertise, in certain countries and states.

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​ELON MUSK IS MAKING AN EFFORT TO EXIT HIS TWITTER DEAL​

Musk’s team wrote to Twitter to say that Twitter breached the terms of their contract because they refused to provide more details on their report on the number of fake profiles on the platform. In that report, Twitter said that 5% of its users were fake, but some people believe that’s a surprisingly small number.

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RESOURCES

The Mailmodo Bulletin – This monthly newsletter covers the happenings of the email marketing world – including common problems, insights, hot Twitter takes, and newly-minted resources (and of course, memes). Subscribe to them to never miss out on fun nuggets from the email verse!

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​13 features to improve your Google Docs experience. Our favorite tips were:

1. Type doc.new as a URL and it will automatically pull up a new Google doc
2. Set up substitutions. Say you don’t want to always write out your email address in docs, then you can go to Tools > Preferences > Substitutions and type out whatever shortcut you want to automatically correct to something else, like myemail to become trendyunicorn284@hotmail.com.

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You can create your free account here to start generating more leads.

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SARIKA KANABAR INTERVIEW

This week we spoke with Sarika Kanabar, a product management leader who’s worked with iconic brands like Apple, Visa, Toyota, and Ford, as well as startups. We learned about her journey in finding the perfect career path and identifying ways to improve products. 

Finding your place

It’s important to explore different career paths to find the role that’s best suited for you. Sarika first started as a software engineer, and she was part of a team at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Toronto that built an app for NHL hockey. At the time, she had no clue about hockey. Her job was retrieving third-party information and transforming it in real-time for app users. Everything was so technical the project manager asked for her support to communicate the technical updates to the sponsors. This was the first time she realized she not only liked being an engineer, but also enjoyed communicating with everyone. The app was number one on the AppStore for 3-weeks in a row. She said, “I realized that I like collaborating with teams, working with technology, and most importantly building products that make a difference. So that was my signal to move into product management.” 

Prioritize based on the business goal 

Before Sarika gets into building a new product or feature, she goes into a process called discovery. First, she figures out who the customer is, whether it’s an internal stakeholder or an external customer. By identifying the customer, you can understand their pain points. There are different ways to understand their pain points by talking to them directly or gathering complaints from the customer support team. She said, “looking at that list, you will have a sense of the current pain points, then you talk to them in-depth one pain point at a time.  This helps you understand what the problem is.” You shouldn’t start making solutions but create questions for the users. She said, “Once you have that feedback from the users, you need to prioritize based on the customer impact, business goal, and value. Examples could be the growth of a product that may need to acquire more customers and increase revenue by 15%. If that is the goal, you need to prioritize whatever you have found with that lens because it’s important to the business.” 

Familiarize yourself with the product

You can’t market a product if you don’t know your product. Sarika said, “Having familiarity with the product is important, in my opinion. The ones who are interested or who familiarize themselves with the product have done better. And it also helps to know your customers very well.” So, get familiar with the product to be able to communicate in a very accurate manner that resonates with the users.

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INTERESTING STUFF

 🔑 Apple Just Killed the Password — Wired

🍎 Apple Announces Plans to Launch a Buy Now, Pay Later Service Within Apple Pay — Investopedia

🛍 Polygon partners with NFTically to launch ecommerce metaverse —VentureBeat

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LET’S GET VISUAL