insights from a blockchain developer, researcher & investor
exploring emerging opportunities in decentralized finance
3 DIFFERENT WAYS I CAN HELP
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Lead Magnets, Autoresponders & Tripwires | The Modern Sales Funnel
This article is part of a free online course where you can learn digital marketing. Lead magnets, autoresponders and tripwires form key components of a very popular sales funnel. Traffic is pushed into the funnel from traffic sources such as paid ads, content marketing and social media outreach. The visitor is directed to a landing…
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Types of Business Model
This article explores the different types of business model as well as looking at what makes a good business model and some common online business models. The 10 Business Model Categories The 10 Types Of Business Model Explained [Video] Breakdown of a Business Model What Makes a Great Business Model? Types of Online Business Model…
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Advertising & Marketing Statistics 2020
These advertising and marketing statistics are derived from raw data on advertising and marketing trends in the UK, US and globally. Feel free to use any of the stats and/or images in 3rd party content but include a link back to this blog at https://jamesbachini.com Advertising Spend & Market Size Stats Performance Marketing Stats E-Commerce…
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What is Online Marketing? | A Definitive Guide
This article is part of a free online course where you can learn digital marketing. Introduction In this document I explain how online marketing works, provide online marketing tips and show how online marketers make money. There is a deep dive into building web properties, which traffic sources are being used and how to scale…
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ReasonLIGO | Building Smart Contracts & Dapps On Tezos
Tezos smart contracts are compiled from a custom low level language called Michelson. For web developers however learning a new low level programming language is a barrier to entry… Enter LIGO and specifically ReasonLigo. ReasonLIGO is the most accessible way to develop smart contracts for web developers. ReasonLIGO is based on ReasonML which is based…
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How do you turn a website into an app in 7 steps
This is a step by step guide to using a open-source package called Cordova to turn a website into mobile app on Android and iOS. I’ll be using a windows device for this but all the packages are also available for a Mac. To publish an app to the iOS app store you need to…
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Essentialism Notes | Less But Better
The following are my notes on the Book Essentialism – the disciplined pursuit of less. The underlying principle of this book is “less but better”. The author Greg Mckeown starts with a personal story of how he left his wife and new born baby in hospital to attend a client meeting to try and keep…
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CoronaVirus | The Most Socially & Economically Disruptive Event Of The Century
The coronavirus pandemic is the most socially and economically disruptive event of the 21st century. What will the world look like once we come out of lockdown and can we return to some level of normality? The lockdown period is expected to last 2-6 months in western economies. There is going to be political pressure…
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How To Calculate EV (Expected Value) By Analysing Risk & Reward
Expected value or EV is a term used in finance and gambling to define the estimated return of a given situation based on enough iterations. James On YouTube For example if you bet $1 on a coin toss your EV would be 0 because you would win/lose 50% of the time and your loss would…
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Micro Conversions | Complete Guide To Optimising & Scaling With Micro Conversions
What are micro conversions? Micro conversions are minor events such as clicks and scrolls that we can use to track visitor behaviour and optimise advertising and landing pages faster. They are generally not directly linked to key performance indicators for an advertising campaign but can be used to scale (increase traffic volumes) more effectively. James…
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8 Tips For The Perfect Blog Post
This is the revised 2020 complete guide to the best practices when creating content for your blog. You can use this framework to create a “perfect blog post” and move your site up the search engine rankings. James On YouTube The Title The title or headline of a blog post should be a close match…
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What does Affiliate Marketing mean?
Affiliate marketing is when an “advertiser”, normally a brand or company, offers a 3rd party “affiliate” a financial incentive to promote their products and services.
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How to encrypt text file in Visual Studio Code (VSCode)
I wanted a way to quickly encrypt and decrypt text files in VSCode using a memorised pass phrase so I created an easy to use plugin to encrypt text in Visual Studio Code. VSC has become the text editor of choice for most developers and it is relatively simple to create and publish a plugin…
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Prevent Mobile Browsers From Turning Off
The following code has been published to prevent mobile browsers from turning off and going into sleep mode. This was affecting setTimeout functions as the javascript code in the browser is effectively paused preventing the event loop from processing once sleep mode is activated. I originally looked at nosleep.js but ended up simplifying the code…
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Search For Satoshi
In 2008 an anonymous user with the alias Satoshi Nakamoto posted the original Bitcoin whitepaper to the Cryptography mailing list. Satoshi mined a lot of the early Bitcoin blocks and the rewards that are held in bitcoin wallets associated are estimated to be around 1 million BTC or 10 Billion USD. If Bitcoin eventually reaches…
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Setting up HTTPS (SSL) with Cloudflare and WordPress
If you are just running a wordpress blog or simple website you can setup Cloudflare to manage SSL for you. Cloudflare acts as a proxy between your website and the user. I recently setup Cloudflare which provides a SSL certificate with their free account plan. Step 1. Setup Cloudflare Register for an account. Then select…
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Cryptocurrency During The Next Recession
I learnt the hard (and expensive way) not to try and predict stock market timings so I wont guess when the next recession will occur. Like a knock on the door from someone wanting to talk about Jehovah, you know it’s going to happen but it’s normally at the most inopportune time when you don’t…
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Book Review: It doesn’t have to be crazy at work – Jason Fried and David Hansson
Amazon Link: It doesn’t have to be crazy at work This is a short book about efficiency and calm in the workplace. I read it six months or so ago and some of the concepts are really useful if you are used to working in high pressure environments. Chapter Breakdown Curb your ambition – don’t…
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Progressive Optimisation
When looking at conversion rate statistics for a new traffic source it is important to use progressive optimisation to block non-converting sources as early and efficiently as possible. The first step is to work out what conversion rate is required and then put a progressive funnel in place to build up to it. So if…
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Book: Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance review
Amazon Link: Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance This is a modern classic. To be honest I only found out it was written 40 odd years ago when I got to the end. It is a brilliantly written piece by Robert Pirsig that tells the story of a father and son on a journey…
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Example Media Buy Letter
Here is an example media buy proposal letter that can be used as a cold email, contact form or social media message. Response rates for media buy proposals are low so anything you can do to connect with the person responsible for monetising a website first is going to be beneficial. Check the whois information,…
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Book: How to Be an Imperfectionist Review
Link: How to be an imperfectionist review I think there must be quite a few affiliates, digital marketers and high performers who are on the OCD scale. This book is about perfectionism which is very closely related or part of that scale. OCD is obsessive compulsive disorder. I’m terrible for it. I can’t sit at…
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Pop Under Code 2020
Updated September 2020 This pop under code is used for running pop under traffic on your own site. It adds an onclick function to every link on the page which opens a new tab with the clicked link and changes the existing window (underneath) to a popped ad URL. Opening links in new tabs isn’t…
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Capitalisation of Links (www.MySite.com) CRO Test
I thought an interesting split test would be to test if text links on a landing page that are capitalised get more clicks than ones that don’t. For example: https://www.jamesbachini.com/ – standard (control) https://www.JamesBachini.com/ – Capitalised This was for a site that wasn’t a personal name and contained a full directory and page like http://www.MyGreatWebSite.com/example/page.htm…
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How to Sell Anything
I found this “How to Sell Anything” infographic and thought it was a really good example to show what happens on the other side of the sales marketing divide. For most online marketers the thought of having to make a phone call or actually talk to someone probably seems a bit alien. We just buy…
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PHP Redirect with Parameters | Passing GET variables in a Redirect
Update March 2023 To do a 301 PHP redirect with parameters to another page we can use the following code: The entire query parameter string is stored in the following variable. Everything after the question mark. So for the URL: server.com/index.php?test=123&hi=hellothe $_SERVER[‘QUERY_STRING’] will contain this string “test=123&hi=hello” We can then pass this out when redirecting…
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Publisher Side Ad Platform Statistics
This really shows the dominance of Google for display advertising, especially for smaller sites with their Adsense platform. I’ve thought for a while that Facebook should be able to enter this market and using their vast amount of user data increase CPM’s for small publishers. As of yet this hasn’t been widely adopted and Adsense…
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Instagram Add Call To Action Button
Instagram call to action buttons can be found on profile pages and advertisements. This article will show you how to Add a call to action button to your Instagram Profile Add a call to action button to your Instagram Ad Add a call to action button to your Instagram Profile Follow these steps to add…
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Wasabi AB Testing Platform
Update July 2020 – Wasabi is no longer maintained or supported. Check this article for more information on conversion rate optimisation. Wasabi AB Testing Platform Intuit have opensourced a enterprise grade A/B testing platform called Wasabi. This runs as an API on a separate server from your site/landers. It isn’t the easiest thing to setup…
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Book Review: How To Get Rich – Felix Dennis
Amazon Link: How To Get Rich This book was recommended on someones most life changing books list. Despite the guru title “How To Get Rich” it’s actually quite a bit different to the standard Tony Robbins spin-offs. The writer Felix Dennis isn’t selling anything, there’s no upsells or hidden agenda. He’s an older guy that…
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List of websites with the most links
I was doing some SEO research using the cloud compute engine and ended up analysing tens of millions of URL’s using a link checking tool I built. The following list of websites with the most links is a collection of the most linked to domains online. It will have a UK bias and isn’t in…
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Online Marketing Predictions For 2017
Here are my online marketing predictions for 2017. I reviewed this in 2020 (ticks/crosses) to see what I got right. 1. Native will go mainstream and start attracting big brand spenders Native advertising has been affiliate marketers little secret for a couple of years now. The volume is now at a stage where brand advertisers…
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How to display different banners for mobile
I had a situation where I wanted to use different ad banners depending on the screen size of the visitor. To display different banners for mobile and desktop traffic. What I wanted was a dynamic ad block that displayed different ads depending on the width of the browser window so it wouldn’t mess up the…
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Beautiful Email Template [Download]
Here is a beautiful email template layout which you can download from here: http://jamesbachini.com/misc/email.zip View the HTML page: http://jamesbachini.com/misc/email.htm Update all the images and links before you send out. The background skyline is in the zip file, you could modify to suit your niche just keep the color the same.
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robots.txt Disallow All | Block Bots
In this article we are going to look at how to block bot traffic using the robots.txt disallow all feature, then some of the more advanced uses of the robots.txt file. How To Disallow All in robots.txt Custom robots.txt for Specific Bots and Directories Complete List of Bots – robots.txt How To Disallow All in…
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Vibrate Phone with Javascript
The following javascript uses the Vibrate API to make a phone vibrate when a page is loaded. You can time it with setTimeouts or onclick/onscroll if required. There’s more information available at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/vibrate This can be used to draw a users attention to the landing page or to create message effects etc.
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Ben Horowitz Hard things about hard things review
Andreeson Horowitz is Silicon Valleys leading venture capital firm. Their portfolio itself is worth a flick through at: http://a16z.com/portfolio/ It’s incredible how many of the tech startup success stories they have been involved in. Ben Horowitz is one of the cofounders and in his book the Hard things about hard things he talks about his…
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Node.js client for Moz API (MozScape)
Update 2020: This is outdated now and not maintained. I’d recommend using one of these packages: https://www.npmjs.com/package/moz-api https://www.npmjs.com/package/moz-api-wrapper Original Post: I was doing some work with SEO domains and realised there wasn’t a node.js client for the MozScape API… so after Googling and not finding what I was looking for I built one. What this…
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REGEX | A Complete Guide With Examples
Regexes are a powerful way to do search queries on a text string. They can be used to replace text, sanitize user inputs and much more. Contents Introduction to REGEX REGEX Cheatsheet REGEX Examples REGEX Javascript Code An Introduction to REGEX A REGEX or regular expression is used to match text strings in many programming…
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All the Facebook ads targeting options [infographic]
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Book Review: Delivering Happiness – Tony Hsieh
To get through this you are going to need to read a hundred or so pages of why Zappos is such an amazing company how how they are changing the world. That said Tony does make some interesting points throughout the book. His story of how he got started in the tech industry first with…
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A simple floating feedback/support button
Updated for 2020 with a cleaner design. This uses the mail command in PHP to send the email but if this is disabled on your server you can connect it to Sendgrid/Mailchimp/AWS etc for the sending of email queries. There is a working example at: https://jamesbachini.com/misc/feedbackexample.html The code for this is really easy to implement…
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New Page Level Ads – Adsense
These new ads are now available in the Adsense platform: They can be added to your adsense site and will only pop on mobile when Google thinks it’s a good time to launch an overlay. I’m not sure how they calculate this but it is described as displaying at “optimal times”. Most importantly you can…
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Book Review: Will it fly – Pat Flynn
This book is about testing an idea before you go all out and build a business around it. Pat goes through some interesting thought experiments based on what you want personally and how your business idea will fit in to that. There is some good information about market research in there. I particularly like the…
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CTA Conf 2016 Notes (PDF Download )
The CTA Conference was put on by Unbounce in June and they also produced this really good notes PDF which is worth reading for anyone in the digital marketing space. You can download it here: http://calltoactionconference.unbounce.com/docs/CTAConf%202016%20Notes.pdf
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Setting Up Facebook & Google Adwords Conversion & Retargeting Pixels
Conversion tracking is important because it will show you how much each lead or purchase is costing you in advertising costs. For most marketers this is their key performance indicator as it has a direct influence on their profits. Retargeting (or remarketing) tracking is important because by building an audience we can launch cost-effective marketing…
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Jim.am has moved to JamesBachini.com
Welcome to the new blog. I have updated the design with a new theme and some pretty pictures. I changed the domain name too as I wasn’t doing anything with the last one and wanted to keep a personal blog anyway so this will suit me more. I still plan to talk, rant and go…
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Microsoft to buy Linkedin
News this morning is that Microsoft is going to buy Linkedin for $26 Billion USD. Now I’m not saying we are in a new .com tech bubble but… Linkedin has 433 million users. That would give a cost per user of $60usd. Now my first thought is that if Microsoft spent that money on advertising…
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New: Facebook interest targeting brainstorm tool
This is more for my use but others might find it helpful when trying to come up with targeting ideas for interests on Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads Targeting Tool
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Facebook changes ad text guidelines
Facebook has changed it’s policy on disallowing ads with more than 20% text. There are now 4 bands in which your ad will be placed. OK, Low Text, Medium Text, High Text. The higher band your ad comes in the lower your quality score and less traffic you will get or higher you will have…
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