The Complete Social Media Image Size Guide: With Awesome Design Tips [Infographic]

t’s a lot of pressure to stay active across every social media platform, and it can be hard to keep up with the latest trends and techniques.

But like it or not, social media is here to stay. And entrepreneurs, business people, marketers, and others with a message to get out are taking notice.

Why? Social media can be an enormously useful tool in the business world. You can boost brand recognition and loyalty, connect with potential or current customers, advertise products and promotions, share helpful or inspiring content, and more. Best of all, getting started on these platforms is free and just requires an investment of some time and creativity — which can pay off in big ways.

It’s worth noting that sharing visual content on social media can be particularly effective for increasing engagement with your audience. According to HubSpot:

• Facebook posts that feature photos account for 87% of interactions on the site. (Source: eMarketer)
• Tweets with images receive 18% more clicks, 89% more favorites, and 150% more retweets than those without. (Source: Buffer)
• Even tweets that only have a link to a photo or video receive a boost in retweets averaging 35% and 28%, respectively. (Source: Twitter)
• In 2014, 70% of marketers planned to increase their use of original visual assets like infographics and memes. Visual content also ranked first among content types marketers want to learn more about. (Source: Social Media Examiner)

Plus, image-centric networks like Instagram and Pinterest have been growing by leaps and bounds. So there’s no better time to start creating your own social media images and graphics. With Canva, creating social graphics is a snap, with templates already sized to fit Facebook covers and posts, Twitter headers and posts, Instagram posts, Pinterest pins, Google+ covers, Tumblr banners and graphics, and YouTube channel art.

Above all – your first concern should be that your visual content is being seen how you intend it to — that the dimensions are right, so nothing gets cut off or stretched out of proportion.

But don’t strain your brain trying to remember how many pixels go where or scour each site’s help section for the information — instead, bookmark this page and use the infographic below as a cheat sheet for creating all your social media images.

Kids search engine

How is Kiddle designed specifically for kids?

1) Safe search: sites appearing in Kiddle search results satisfy family friendly requirements, as we filter sites with explicit or deceptive content. Please read more on kids safe search on Kiddle here.

2) Kids-oriented results: the boxes below illustrate how Kiddle returns results for each query (in the order shown):

Safe sites and pages written specifically for kids. Handpicked and checked by Kiddle editors.
Typically, results 1-3.

Safe, trusted sites that are not written specifically for kids, but have content written in a simple way, easy for kids to understand. Handpicked and checked by Kiddle editors.
Typically, results 4-7.

Safe, famous sites that are written for adults, providing expert content, but are harder for kids to understand. Filtered by Google safe search.
Typically, results 8 onwards.

3) Big thumbnails: most Kiddle search results are illustrated with big thumbnails, which makes it easier to scan the results, differentiate between them, and click the most appropriate results to your query. Thumbnails serve as visual clues and are especially beneficial to kids as they don’t read as fast as adults.

4) Large Arial font in Kiddle search results provides better readability for kids.

5) Privacy: we don’t collect any personally identifiable information, and our logs are deleted every 24 hours. Please read our full privacy statement here.

Why does Kiddle use a .co instead of a .com domain?: In Kiddle’s case “co” stands for “children only” – our focus and vision for Kiddle.

Kiddle is powered by Google Safe Search but is not affiliated with Google Inc.

The Ultimate Guide to Affiliate Marketing

So you have heard about Affiliate Marketing before and wondered how (and how much probably) can you earn from it, all from the comforts of your home? It looks shiny from the outside but trust me, it is as easy as slicing a cake neatly.

In this article, I am going to tell you what is Affiliate Marketing and how it works, what are the existing programs that you can benefit from and how to go about it like a pro. I will also take you through my personal affiliate accounts and show you my real earnings in order to give you some inspiration to get you started (not boasting here).

Let’s begin by understanding What is Affiliate Marketing all about and how it actually works.

What is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is a commission based revenue system where a third party (an affiliate) brings leads/sales to a product owner/company website.

It is a process of earning commission by promoting other people’s / company’s products.

In simpler terms –

• You find a product you like,
• You promote it to your audience and,
• For every sale that is made because of you within your audience, you earn a profit commission from the product owner.

According to Wikipedia,

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate’s own marketing efforts. The industry has four core players: the merchant (also known as ‘retailer’ or ‘brand’), the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments), the publisher (also known as ‘the affiliate’), and the customer.

Lets understand these four core players better:

Merchant

The one who owns the product / the creator of the product. The product can be anything ranging from SaaS applications to physical products (like shoes), it can also be a digital product (like ebooks). So basically, a merchant is someone who is selling a product online. In order to increase his sales online, a merchant is most likely open to get affiliates on his website.

Publisher/Affiliate

The one who takes up the product links from the merchant and promotes it within his own audience to send traffic to the merchant’s property (website). He uses different Digital Marketing campaigns and tactics to sell more of the merchant’s product and earns commission for doing the same.

Network

A platform or a place where both Merchants and Affiliates co exist, Merchants sign up to list their products in the affiliate program, and Affiliates sign up to find the products they like and enroll in the affiliate program. This network (platform) also settles the payments between merchants and the affiliates in a structured manner.

Customer

The one who makes the purchase on the merchant’s property (website) and completes a sale. This is the end customer who doesn’t know the relationship between an affiliate and merchant in most of the cases (though it is recommended for affiliates to disclose that they are promoting).

How Does Affiliate Marketing Work?

Let’s say you have a website. You are driving traffic from various sources like Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Organic Traffic because of branding, and there could be many other sources like social media marketing, community engagement, etc.

Now there will be a time when you will exhaust the sources to gain more traffic or sales on your websites. More often than not, a digital marketer alone cannot drive all the possible sources of traffic to the website.

This could be due to:

• Running out of marketing campaign ideas.
• Exhausting different traffic sources to source from.

In this case, what should you do? This is when companies/websites rely on Affiliates to outsource more traffic. You could do revenue sharing with others who have traffic with them and benefit out of that. Now how will you do that?

Usually the format for affiliate links looks like this:

http://www.website.com?affiliate=1 (for say Affiliate #1) and http://www.website.com?affiliate=2 (for Affiliate #2).

The part after “?” in the URL is called tagging the URL so that the website owner can understand which Affiliate sends him the traffic/sale. Based on this knowledge, the website owner will give commission to the respective affiliate.

Now lets see an example:

Affiliate 1 and Affiliate 2 both sends traffic to the website http://www.website.com but the sale was made through Affiliate 1.

The website owner comes to know about this through the link with tag http://www.website.com?affiliate=1.

So, the affiliate commission is sent to Affiliate 1 because his traffic converted into a sale. It’s that simple.

Note that in most cases, Affiliate programs are not based on earnings per click. It is based on earnings per Lead or a Sale.

You will get a clearer idea when I show you the affiliate programs.

How to become an Affiliate? (Affiliate Networks and Programs)

There are four different ways to become an affiliate and start earning from them on a regular basis.

1. Look for Affiliate Links in Homepages

In many SaaS company websites or Product company websites, within the homepage (mostly in footer or Top Navigation Bar in some cases), find the link saying affiliate and click on it to learn more about their internal affiliate program. When you know the products you want to promote, this method makes more sense.

2. Join Affiliate Networks (Commission Junction, Impact Radius, etc)

Affiliate Networks are those platforms who have a lot of merchants and affiliates both registered with them. I have personally had better success with Affiliate Networks because their process is better than individual programs. Within Network, it is easy to manage the affiliate program than have individual affiliate accounts because in affiliate networks, all your payments are consolidated according to different commissions from different merchants.

3. Apply to become an affiliate with companies (some have hidden programs)

Some companies have a hidden affiliate program which they do not reveal on their website. But are open to new and qualified affiliates – because who does not want an increased revenue in the end? In this case, just send them an email inquiring about the affiliate program and if not in place, would they be interested to have one in place with you. Opportunities are endless here.

4. Have a well known blog and let people reach out to you (my personal method)

Since DigitalDeepak has become a well known brand among Digital Marketers, a lot of affiliate program owners reach out to me to ask if I can promote their product on my website. This helps me select the right products to promote as an affiliate and saves me time from reaching out to various other websites. Again, this is also what I am planning to use for my SaaS product company OptinChat. I am going to reach out to popular blogs and give them an affiliate link to grow my revenues and share it with them.

TOP Affiliate Networks where you can earn from

There are a lot of networks available online these days but I suggest these networks to be the best 5:

1. Commission junction (CJ)
2. Amazon Associates
3. Impact Radius
4. ClickBank
5. ShareAsale

If you want an India-specific affiliate network, vCommision is a good affiliate network.

There are a lot of affiliate networks that you can search on google and find. When you have narrowed down your list of affiliate networks, go ahead and sign up and complete the process of on-boarding with them including payment info and basic details. Once you get started, you will start seeing your affiliate commissions grow as your audience starts making sales.

The first time I ever got an affiliate commission was through Commission Junction in 2008 – and it was the first time I ever made money using the internet. It was a cheque worth $25. Now a days, these companies send you money directly to your bank account if it is in India. There are a few technical documentations required to get paid in your bank account.

You have to submit a form called W8 BEN Form (so that you can receive money from US to your Indian bank account and comply with tax regulations. All this you will be able to figure out once you sign up for these affiliate programs.

Some Inspiration

Passive income is the best. Every morning when you wake up, you want to see how much you are making passively with just a little effort online.

I am not boasting but I am going to share my real screenshots with you to actually show you the commissions I made using Affiliate in different affiliate programs so that it inspires you to start earning your own commissions.

How I made $2,128 USD (1.37 Lakhs INR) in April 2017 from Commission Junction (CJ)

I have been advertising a few products on CJ and the results have been really decent. Just to add here, I really love CJ’s dashboard. I can just click on Advertisers in the top navigation and get a list of products I am promoting.

Clicking on Links gives me a list of links I created and I can create more links there. Anyway, this should be a part of another blog post where I tell you how CJ functions for affiliate marketing.

For this post, let me just click on Reports and show you the numbers:

As you can see, the payments issued to me for the last month was $2,128 which has come to my bank account. Also, there is $3058.70 more as balance amount which I will get in next settlement.

Here is the screenshot of amount I received from CJ:

You can see how CJ pays directly to Indian Bank account. This is about it for CJ.

How I made more commissions from Impact Radius and Amazon Associates

Let me show you my Impact Radius Account now:

I am relatively new to Impact Radius and yet to get my affiliate balances, but you can see I have made Rs. 211,174 from Impact Radius alone by promoting advertisers there.

Let me now take you inside my Amazon associates account:

I am not really active on Amazon associates but I have definitely put some links in a few blog posts here and there to earn a little amount from Amazon associates (Amazon’s affiliate program).

As you can see in the screenshot, I have earned Rs. 899 last month from Amazon associates India. This is not really good but better than nothing at least. Back in 2010-2011, I was earning close to $12K-13K from Amazon Associates Global as you can see in the screenshot below:

So, you can see how there lies a huge potential in earning commissions from affiliate programs – not just in India but globally.

Internal Affiliate Program: How a review of Drip led to $400+ in affiliate commissions.

Do one thing: go to google.com and search for “Drip.co review”.

You will see that my article (review of Drip.co) is ranking on top for this keyword. And when you click on this post and read the article, you will notice that I have placed affiliate link of Drip.co all over the blog article.

So, whenever people search for Drip.co review and land on my article, they click on Sign Up link on my blog (which is an affiliate link) and I earn commission for every sign up that goes from my blog to Drip.co. Note that I get 30% commission whenever someone becomes a Paid Customer of Drip.co from my blog post.

As you can see in the screenshot, Drip uses an affiliate program management software called Get Ambassador which is helpful to manage internal affiliate programs for the product owners. I am planning to use this for OptinChat as well.

Moving ahead, you can see I have earned $429.60 last month and $110 is yet to be processed.

Last month, I was paid out $319.80 from Drip.co in their internal affiliate program. To do this yourself, you have to reach out to websites as inquire about their internal affiliate programs and then get approved for the same.

Next Action Steps for you:

1. Look for the top affiliate programs and networks and join them

This requires a process of Signing up and adhering to some technical policies by uploading some forms. The approval process might be tricky and will be based on how good your online record is. If you are a well known blogger, this will be a piece of cake. Make sure you are being compliant to all the steps required in the signing up process by the network.

2. Start a niche website to get approvals in place (email a request for approval)

Most of the times affiliate networks do not give approval because of a lot of fraudulent activities happening these days. People try to sign up using their own affiliate links and sometimes send fraudulent orders as well. So, to get approval, you need to have a good reputation and following.

Otherwise you can email them explaining:

• How are you going to promote their products, and
• What are the channels you are going to use to promote, etc.

This will make them gain trust in you and your approval will be easy.

It is better to have a niche website (like I have digitaldeepak.com) and show them the funnel for your website to get approval easily.

3. Make your first sale!

After you are approved for a few affiliate programs, go ahead and use all the Digital Marketing efforts to promote your links.

You can learn about Digital Marketing Basics in my free course. 🙂

5 Mistakes to Avoid in Affiliate Marketing

1. Over Selling: Too much promotion is a bummer, it distracts and irritates your audience. You should rather help people with useful products that is relevant to them and let them buy as per their need.
2. Sugar Coating: Don’t sugar coat around the product too much – be genuine about the products you are promoting. If your customer do not find the product useful as described by you, you can lose your own audience. So, be aware of the words you use.
3. Too many Products: Avoid selling too many products – choose only those products that will be relevant to your target audience. It takes time to set up a regularly paying affiliate system for yourself but it is fruitful when started small.
4. No Product Comparisons and Reviews: Make use of your promotion space by including comparison between 2-3 other similar products also in your reviews/promotions. Coming out with product reviews and comparisons and updating them with time will make sense for your audience and will make them buy more of those products from your affiliate link.
5. No Testing and Tracking of Links: Not testing the flow of your promotions is a bad idea. You don’t want a broken flow. Also, never miss out on tracking your affiliate links. It is easy to get separate affiliate links for different pages (or different channels), this will help you in knowing which channel is working the best for you.

Source : http://digitaldeepak.com/affiliate-marketing

CV vs. Resume: The Difference and When to Use Which

Ever wondered why a Brit applies with a CV and an American with a resume? And why does an Aussie apply with both? There are a few differences between the two types of application documents and this article will straighten out your queries as well as tell you where in the world you are likely to use which document. Let me kick off the bonanza by introducing the contender in the blue corner…

CV:

A CV (Curriculum Vitæ, which means course of life in Latin) is an in-depth document that can be laid out over two or more pages and it contains a high level of detail about your achievements, a great deal more than just a career biography. The CV covers your education as well as any other accomplishments like publications, awards, honours etc.

The document tends to be organised chronologically and should make it easy to get an overview of an individual’s full working career. A CV is static and doesn’t change for different positions, the difference would be in the cover letter.

RELATED:What Recruiters Really Want to See on Your CV

Resume:

A resume, or résumé, is a concise document typically not longer than one page as the intended the reader will not dwell on your document for very long. The goal of a resume is to make an individual stand out from the competition.

The job seeker should adapt the resume to every position they apply for. It is in the applicant’s interest to change the resume from one job application to another and to tailor it to the needs of the specific post. A resume doesn’t have to be ordered chronologically, doesn’t have to cover your whole career like and is a highly customisable document.

RELATED:7 Resume Mistakes You Probably Didn’t Realize

Differences:

As stated, three major differences between CVs and resumes are the length, the purpose and the layout. A resume is a brief summary of your skills and experience over one or two pages, a CV is more detailed and can stretch well beyond two pages. The resume will be tailored to each position whereas the CV will stay put and any changes will be in the cover letter.

A CV has a clear chronological order listing the whole career of the individual whereas a resume’s information can be shuffled around to best suit the applicant. I would say the main difference between a resume and a CV is that a CV is intended to be a full record of your career history and a resume is a brief, targeted list of skills and achievements.

Let’s revise:

CV – long, covers your entire career, static
Resume – short, no particular format rule, highly customisable

Usage around the world:

A resume is the preferred application document in the US and Canada. Americans and Canadians would only use a CV when applying for a job abroad or if searching for an academic or research oriented position.

In the UK, Ireland and New Zealand, a CV is used in all contexts and resumes aren’t used at all. The CV prevails in mainland Europe and there is even a European Union CV format available for download.

In Germany, the CV is more commonly known as a Lebenslauf (true to the latin origins) and is only one of many application document the poor German job seekers must produce to get an interview.

In Australia, India and South Africa, the terms resume and CV are used interchangeably. The term resume is used more for jobs in the private sector and CV is more commonplace when applying for public service positions.

source:http://theundercoverrecruiter.com/cv-vs-resume-difference-and-when-use-which/

Inside the worst ransomware outbreak in history, and how to protect yourself

Over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of computers were infected with the “WannaCry” ransomware, in what Interpol is calling the largest ransomware outbreak in history.

People who are unlucky enough to get infected will see a threat on their computer that looks like the image above.

Here’s how ransomware works:

1. Someone accidentally runs malicious code on their computer (perhaps from an email attachment)
2. This code (called “ransomware”) encrypts many of the files on their hard drive (or does something else malicious).
3. The code then demands a ransom. It notifies the person that if they don’t do something (in WannaCry’s case, send the attackers $300 worth of Bitcoin), the software won’t unencrypt those files.

In WannaCry’s case, after 3 days, it escalates the demand to $600. Then after a week, it claims the data will be lost forever. This said, 7 days haven’t yet passed, so we don’t yet know whether the attackers will carry through on this threat.

As far as we know, only computers that are running Windows are vulnerable to WannaCry. But it’s a particularly nasty piece of ransomware in that only one person on a network needs to download it. From there, it can spread through local networks automatically, using ports normally reserved for network file sharing.

WannaCry is able to do this thanks to an exploit called EternalBlue that may have been developed by America’s own National Security Agency (NSA), then leaked last month by hacker group The Shadow Brokers (2 minute read).

Due its particularly virulent nature, WannaCry shut down several organizations over the weekend, including much of Britain’s National Health Service — preventing doctors from being able to use MRI machines, and even turning off the storage refrigerators that kept donated blood cool.

This morning, I went on ABC’s Good Morning America. They interviewed me about ransomware, and asked me what ordinary people can do to protect themselves (2 minute watch).

Here are my basic tips:

1. If you’re concerned about your files, back them up. Windows and MacOS both have built-in backup tools.
2. Keep your software up-to-date. Don’t disable auto-update. Developers are constantly fixing security vulnerabilities. Even though it seems like a pain, install their recommended updates.
3. Don’t open suspicious email attachments.
4. Don’t rely on tools like anti-virus alone to protect you from these sorts of attacks. You personally need to be vigilant. Security isn’t a product — it’s a process.

If your computer gets infected with ransomware, and you don’t have backups of your files, you may want to go ahead and pay the ransom. While this rewards the criminals, it’s a small price to pay for saving irreplaceable files, such as family photos.

Remember that without the cryptographic key, even the most powerful governments in the world have no way of helping you unlock your files.

Microsoft discovered the vulnerability that WannaCry exploits back in March, and they’ve released patches for all recent operating systems. In the case of WannaCry, if you have a version of Windows from the past five years, and auto-update is turned on, your computer shouldn’t be at risk.

But if you’re still using older versions of Windows, like the 16-year-old Windows XP, you should definitely go download the patch. Here are the directions for this: (2 minute read)

WannaCry hit Russia the hardest. Cybersecurity consultancy Comaeestimates that nearly half of infections occurred there.

Yesterday, new variants of WannaCry started cropping up: (4 minute read).

The NSA, CIA, and other government agencies currently devote about 90% of their cybersecurity resources to offensive cyber attacks: (4 minute read).

Many developers are outraged that government agencies have been stockpiling these vulnerabilities, instead of alerting software publishers about them, so that they can quickly patch these bugs.

As the saying goes, sometimes the best offense is a good defense. And that’s precisely the strategy that many developers hope governments will adopt.

Either way, the ransomware situation will get much worse before it gets better. So stay safe out there!

Here are three other links worth your time (also about ransomware):

1. Read the story of how one developer discovered a backdoor in WannaCry’s code, and was able to temporarily halt its spread: (7 minute read)
2. Security researcher Troy Hunt has written an in-depth analysis of the WannaCry outbreak: (12 minute read)
3. Watch as these bitcoin wallets receive ransomware payments from the ongoing global cyberattack, through a Twitter bot (2 minute read)

Thought of the day:

“Security is a process, not a product.” — Bruce Schneier

Funny of the day:

Webcomic by lunarbaboon.com