Episode 1597 Scott Adams: My Conversation With a Chinese Operative, and Some Persuasion Lessons
Content:
Ted Cruz & Eric Swalwell nominations dustup
Chinese operative, Chen Weihua
Things we’ve learned during the pandemic
Does your reality serve a purpose?
Ghislaine Maxwell developments
Biden’s Omicron speech Tuesday
If you would like to enjoy this same content plus bonus content from Scott Adams, including micro-lessons on lots of useful topicsto build your talent stack, please see scottadams.locals.com for full access to that secret treasure.
Saying goodbye is never easy. We’re still recovering from when Geri AKA Ginger Spice left the Spice Girls. And when Instagram retired its swipe-up function at the end of summer 2021, people were sad to see it go. But the good news is they’ve brought in a replacement feature (the new Instagram link sticker) that’s just as easy and efficient with some added benefits.
With the popularity of Instagram Stories only continuing to grow, an option to drive followers to your brand’s website is to add a sticker link directly to your story and we’ll show you how.
Like the late swipe-up function, the sticker link used to only be for the verified or elite accounts with more than 10,000 followers. But as of a few days ago, it’s now available to everyone!
That means you don’t have to be a top tier Instagrammer to be able to share links directly in your Stories. Vive la Revolution!
But Instagram has warned that if people misuse this new found power (spreading misinformation or violating any of the community guidelines), you could lose your link privileges. So, with great power comes great responsibility.
So embrace some change and find out how stickers can help drive traffic to your website, improve your overall marketing strategy, and connect you more seamlessly with your audience without them ever having to leave the App.
What was the Instagram swipe up feature?
The Instagram swipe up feature (RIP) was a tool that allowed brands and influencers to reach their audiences by adding links directly to their Instagram Stories via an arrow at the bottom of their screen that usually said “Swipe up”. It was only accessible to verified users or accounts with over 10K followers. But for those lucky few, it meant no more “link in bio” messages in captions.
In August 2021 Instagram did away with the swipe-up feature and replaced it with the Link Sticker for reasons still unknown. But they did release it to everyone, no matter your follower count.
What is the Instagram link sticker?
You may already be familiar with Instagram stickers for music, questions, locations and polls. Now, there’s also a sticker that lets you add an external link directly to your IG story, without having to direct people to your bio or description.
The Instagram link sticker has a couple of key advantages over the older ‘swipe-up’ link.
MSP software simplifies client management for managed service providers.
The software allows MSPs to monitor client networks, manage SLAs, monitor assets, streamline IT support, and more—all of which is extremely challenging without a centralized solution. MSP software improves operational efficiencies, reduces overhead costs, and helps providers make data-driven decisions.
This in-depth guide will help you find the best MSP software for your managed service operation.
The Top 6 Best MSP Software
Ninja RMM — Best Remote Monitoring Software For MSPs
Atera — Best Software For Professional Services Automation (PSA)
After extensive research and testing, we’ve narrowed down the top six solutions in the MSP software category. The reviews below highlight the features, benefits, and use cases for each tool on our list.
#1 – Ninja RMM — Best Remote Monitoring Software for MSPs
Ninja RMM is an all-in-one solution for remote monitoring and management. It enables IT teams to be more efficient and provide a better experience for clients. The software is powerful, easy to use, and delivers noticeable results for MSPs.
More than 5,000+ organizations across the globe rely on Ninja RMM. It’s an ideal solution for common issue remediation and helps automate lower-tier tasks. This allows your IT technicians to focus on more value-added responsibilities.
The software comes with a multi-endpoint management system. It’s built to quickly resolve IT issues and reduce downtime rates. You’ll…
Deadline for eligibility is 1/15/2022. International winners will receive electronic version.
Are you struggling with busyness, distractions, complexity, and any number of other challenges? Join the club! Leaders around the world are literally battling for their lives – trying to maintain their influence, improve their quality of life, and increase their impact. The impediments are too numerous to count!
I’ve chosen to label this toxic mix… quicksand.
Choices:
When we find ourselves in quicksand, we have only three options:
Sink:
This is what happens when we give up. Our hopes, dreams, aspirations, and influence are extinguished.
Swim:
The fundamental problem with swimming in quicksand is that it is not an effective nor sustainable strategy.
Escape:
This is the strategy of Smart Leaders. These women and men have figured out how to move to higher, solid ground.
Our team spent the last couple of years trying to figure out how Smart Leaders orchestrated their escape. The good news for all of us: the path to increased impact is paved with four simple choices.
Smart Leaders:
Confront Reality to stay grounded in truth and lead from a position of strength.
Grow Capacity to meet the demands of the moment and the challenges of the future.
Fuel Curiosity to maintain relevance and vitality in a changing world.
Create Change today to ensure a better tomorrow.
Imagine:
What specific tactics do Smart Leaders employ? This question is beyond the scope of this post. However, I encourage you to use your imagination!
If you make these choices and commit to freeing yourself from the quicksand limiting your influence, you will discover ample tangible ways to bring your choices to life. Start by confronting reality regarding your leadership.
Virtuous Cycle:
These four choices create a virtuous cycle, each choice enabling and propelling the next. These choices, made consistently, unleash tremendous power… the power to change your world.
Be smart!
What is your current reality? What is your quicksand?
Note: All Mark’s books are great reads. “Smart Leaders,” is my personal favorite!
Watch my interview with Mark Miller. We discuss a leader’s trajectory, the four choices, and much more. (If you would like to connect with Mark, he gives his cell number in the video.)
Mark Miller is a business leader, best-selling author, and communicator. He is currently serving as the Vice President of High Performance Leadership for Chick-fil-A, Inc. Beyond chicken, Mark’s global influence continues to grow. Today, there are over a million copies of his books in print, in twenty-five languages. Smart Leadership is his tenth title with more…
The foods and drink that lower blood pressure and prevent heart disease.
Eating berries, nuts, cocoa products, apples, and drinking tea have been found to improve blood circulation and vascular health.
These foods and drink are rich in flavanols, a type of polyphenol that has powerful antioxidant effects.
A diet high in flavanols is an effective way to reduce blood pressure and prevent cardio-vascular diseases.
A UK study of more than 25,000 people examined the link between flavanols as bioactive compounds and human health.
They found that people with high blood pressure have lower flavanol levels than those with normal blood pressure.
Between the lowest and highest levels of flavanol intake there was a 4 mmHg difference in blood pressure.
This means a diet rich in flavanols has the same effect in reducing blood pressure as a Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet or a Mediterranean diet.
Professor Gunter Kuhnle, the study’s senior author, said:
“What this study gives us is an objective finding about the association between flavanols — found in tea and some fruits — and blood pressure.
This research confirms the results from previous dietary intervention studies and shows that the same results can be achieved with a habitual diet rich in flavanols.
In the British diet, the main sources are tea, cocoa, apples and berries.”
The beneficial effect of flavanols on vascular function was even higher for those with the highest blood pressure.
These findings suggest that the incidence of cardiovascular disease will reduce if people increase their intake of flavanol-rich foods and drinks.
Flavanols are a class of flavonoids able to reduce blood pressure and arterial stiffness, which decreases heart disease risk.
A study by Johnson et al., found that participants who ate a daily intake of one cup of blueberries after 8 weeks had a 7 mm/Hg reduction in their systolic blood pressure and 5 mm/Hg reduction in their diastolic blood pressure.
The effect of lowering blood pressure and arterial stiffness may be due to a rise in nitric oxide production in the blood vessels.
These antioxidants have an anti-inflammatory effect as well as increasing the production of nitric oxide in the body.
Dr Hagen Schroeter, study co-author, said:
“This study adds key insights to a growing body of evidence supporting the benefits of dietary flavanols in health and nutrition.
But, perhaps even more exciting was the opportunity to apply objective biomarkers of flavanol intake at a large scale.
This enabled the team to avoid the significant limitations that come with past approaches which rely on estimating intake based on self-reported food consumption data and the shortcomings of current food composition databases.”
Content is considered to be the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.
What exactly does that mean?
Why is content so important for search engine optimization?
First Things First: What’s “Content Marketing?”
Content marketing is creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content in order to drive brand awareness, traffic and sales.
Please note if your content isn’t valuable, relevant and consistent, it’s not content marketing. If it’s not driving profitable customer action, it’s not marketing.
Gone are the days when you could have just used your target keyword a certain number a times across your document to convince the algorithm that your content is relevant to that search query.
Google has come a long way since then.
Its innovative algorithm is implementing artificial intelligence to teach the algorithm to think like a human being. It is using a variety of signals to evaluate how useful any search result turned out to be.
There’s no faking true value any more.
Authentic value always comes first.
Why Content is So Important for SEO?
Content is traditionally fundamental to SEO because Google needs words and text to understand relevancy.
Even decades after Google algorithm was born and now that Google can now read visual and video content, Google still admits relying on text for the most part:
With that in mind, how exactly does Google understand quality and relevancy, when it comes to textual content?
What is High Quality Content?
Truly Useful Content
Number one, just be awesome at what you do. Google is getting better and better at being able to differentiate what people are really asking for.
Be very clear about who you are and what you do. It’s not guaranteed that you won’t run into those problems, but Google is getting better at figuring out the intent of a query and really finding what the best result should be.
Authenticity and transparency go a long way. It is not about faking relevance and quality signals. It’s about really solving the problems behind search queries.
As a result, it’s getting harder for affiliates and resellers to suck traffic away from brands in branded search queries, without the brand having to do much SEO improvement on their part.
Content and Link Building
There’s another distinct benefit of creating content for your business site: Content attracts links, and without links, there are no rankings.
Content-driven link building is the only safe link building out there: You generate links via creating linkable content. There are multiple formats and tactics behind creating linkable content, and you will need to experiment with all of them to find what works in your niche:
To help your content drive links, reach out to bloggers and journalists in your niche and invite them to read your content and link to it. This is a slightly overused but still perfectly legit and effective way to get backlinks. Use
With proven systems, frameworks, and guidance, you can join other successful business owners as you scale your business, reap the fruits of high-performance, and spend more time on the things that really matter.
These are not the only psychological symptoms that have been linked to vitamin B12 deficiency.
Depression and memory problems have also been linked to a deficiency in this vital vitamin.
Among older adults, up to one-quarter of people may have a vitamin B12 deficiency.
However, the level of deficiency among the general population is probably closer to one-in-ten.
Along with seniors, other people who may have difficulty getting enough vitamin B12 include vegetarians and those with some digestive disorders, such as Crohn’s disease.
Vitamin B12 deficiency is easy to rectify with supplements or by dietary changes.
The body uses vitamin B12 to make red blood cells and to keep the nervous system healthy.
Vitamin B12 levels can be boosted through supplementation or by eating foods such as dairy, liver, salmon and eggs.
Fortified breakfast cereals also contain vitamin B12.
The conclusions come from a study of 1,079 seniors in Germany.
The researchers found that 27 percent had a vitamin B12 deficiency.
It also found that more than half were deficient in vitamin D.
Dr. Barbara Thorand, study co-author, said:
“Our study also shows that regular intake of vitamin-containing supplements goes along with improved levels of the respective vitamins.
However, vitamin-containing supplements are not a universal remedy, and particularly older people should watch out for maintaining a healthy and nutritious diet.”
Your content is valuable. And so is your team’s time.
If you could squeeze more juice out of the lemon, wouldn’t you take the opportunity? By splintering your long-form articles and videos into content for your other marketing channels, you squeeze all the juice possible out of every article or video you publish.
You also build an omnichannel presence…without needing a huge content team.
And if we wanted, we could keep going! Our article can turn into a YouTube video published as an IGTV video and cut down into a TikTok and Instagram Reel.
But, you don’t need all of that. You just need to cover your main content basis: Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And luckily, you’re sitting on a mound of content, ready to be splintered.
You just need to know the template for squeezing all the juice out of your long-form content.
Here are 5 templates for turning your articles and videos into Instagram feed posts and Stories, tweets and Twitter threads, and a LinkedIn post.
Instagram:
On Instagram, you can create feed posts, Stories, Reels, and IGTV videos. IGTV videos are similar to YouTube videos, and you can repurpose your long-form content directly to Instagram as an IGTV video. Turning long-form content like articles or videos into feed posts, Stories, and Reels requires a bit more work, with a worthy ROI.
Instagram Feed Post:
To turn an article or video into a feed post, follow these steps:
Take your introduction and use it as your caption.
For articles: Use the points of your article (H2 and H3 headers) or video as individual carousel graphics.
For videos: Cut your video into segments sharing each of your points, and post each as its own carousel video.
As your last carousel graphic or video, write either a summary or a call to action if you want the viewer to take a specific action (“Click the link in bio to read our article” or “Click the link in bio to watch the full video”).
Here’s how to turn an article or video into an Instagram Story:
For articles: Film 1-2 stories introducing your topic by using the introduction of your article.
Film 1-3 Stories per point of your article.
End with a conclusion of 1-2 Stories based on the conclusion of your article.
Add a call to action to your Story and add a link if necessary (“Click here to read the article”).
Twitter
There are two types of content to create on Twitter, tweets, and threads. Tweets are 280 characters long (one single tweet). Threads are several tweets ‘threaded’ together to create a longer-form piece…
