Learn How to Make Beats With Software

Posted on March 31, 2023 by schatzi

If you are a budding musician without a large budget and need to make music without backup musicians, then you can learn how to make beats with software. The rhythm of rap and hip-hop come alive with beat maker software and you can do your own recording with ease.

Even better, with good beat maker software you can create hot free rap beats that could be the next big thing in the industry. You’ll need to shop around and find software that is right for you because there is a lot from which to choose and that suit many different budgets.

To make beats with software your software choice will play an important role. You need to consider how much you can spend and you need to shop around. There is good free software available, although you may want to invest money in some if you are really serious about making beats.

In the beginning you can use a free one to familiarize yourself with how to make beats with software. The software will have a database of instrument sounds from which to choose and you will be able to mix and match to create the sounds you want.

The first thing to do is to become familiar with the voice you are working with. If it’s your own voice, then that should be easy, but if you are recording someone else, then you need to listen and get used to that person’s sound.

Next you can have the song recorded and then add the beats in the background. Start with the drums, as they are such an important part of the recording, the part of it that will make the best free hot rap beats.

Once you have your chest-thumping drum beats, you can start adding the chords with various instrument sounds, such as guitar, piano, and horns. This is where you can create sounds that are original and unique to this particular soundtrack.

The key is to get really creative. Play around with it to get the sounds you want and don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and really shake things up. This is how new free hot rap beats get made and noticed.

In order to create good beats you will need at least a basic knowledge of music. If you have this and you have good software, then you will be able to create some incredible sounds that are sure to be a hit.

Modern technology is amazing and with it you can make beats with software that will rival the professionals out there. If you are a professional or planning to be one, then this is a way to get your name out there and become well-known for your creations.

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Social Media Marketing – Why You Need to Get Your Followers Onto Your Own Site

Posted on March 30, 2023 by schatzi

One Tuesday in spring 2008, Twitter users logged into their accounts to discover all their followers were gone. So were the people they were following. Instead of being part of one big Twitter party, everyone was alone in the virtual Twitterverse.

What happened?   Twitter’s server crashed and deleted everyone’s followers.   For Twitter addicts this was a shock. Twitter without followers and people to follow is kind of like walking down the street talking to yourself.  

For people you knew well, it was easy to refollow them. And because many people were without a twitter tribe, in the days immediately following the crash, many people were quick to follow anyone who started to follow them. But for a small business using Twitter as a marketing tool, this should have been a serious wake-up call. When you lose your followers, you lose your biggest marketing asset.  

Yes, your raving fans will seek you out and refollow, but what about people just getting to know you? Maybe they ran across you by accident or by referral and are following you out of curiosity but haven’t had the time to get to know you well enough to hunt you down? They’re lost to you, maybe forever.  

And it’s not just technology errors you need to worry about. Remember both Facebook and LinkedIn will freeze or cancel your account for breaking their written and unwritten rules around invitations and promoting your business.  

But that’s not all.  

While Facebook and LinkedIn are selling advertising and other business services as a revenue generating model, both are closed mouthed about how their revenue stream is going. And Twitter doesn’t appear to have any revenue generating model yet.  

So the question is, if one or more of these services were to disappear, what would that do to your marketing efforts? I think this is an important question for any marketing strategy, not just for social media. What it really comes down to, is you shouldn’t be dependent on only one marketing tool – you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. You need to have a comprehensive marketing plan that uses a variety of tools. This way if one disappears or stops working, you don’t lose all your momentum.  

Does this mean you should scale back on your social media marketing? No! If you are getting results, don’t give up on social media out of fear. Particularly in this economic climate, you don’t want to slow down on any marketing strategy that is working. What I’m suggesting is that while your number one goal with social media should be to build relationships with people, you need to have a secondary goal in mind. And that goal is to get people off the social media site and onto your own site, onto your own mailing list – a list you control. 

With LinkedIn, you can download your list of contacts as a CSV file which can be imported into Excel and many contact management software programs. However, you can’t do that with Facebook and Twitter. Therefore you need to find ways to get people to visit your site and give you their contact information.  

Getting people to move from social media to your own sites is not something that can happen over night. But if you give people time to get to know you, like you and trust you, eventually you can persuade them to join your own list. And it will be a much more valuable list because they’ve already been pre sold.  

To do this, think of ways to get your followers to interact with you and your website. If you have a blog, Tweet new about articles on your site that add to the conversation or answer people’s questions. If you are truly adding value and not just shamelessly social spamming you’ll get new traffic as a result.  

Offer free bonuses in exchange for joining your mailing list. I’ve had great success with free teleseminars where I interview an expert and promote the event on social media. The key is to make sure you’re promoting the freebee in such a way as to not break the rules of the site and making sure this free offer is of value to your audience.  

For example, posting a promotion to the Answers section on LinkedIn may get you flagged and have your post removed. However, asking for help coming up with questions to ask your expert on the next teleseminar will be more likely to be perceived as playing by the rules.  

Your number one goal on social media should still be getting to know people and giving them a chance to get to know you. Just keep in the back of your mind that your secondary goal should always be to get people to visit your own site.

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Retail Marketing Planning: How to Get Started With Marketing Planning

Posted on March 29, 2023 by schatzi

Marketers struggle with marketing campaign planning for different reasons: incomplete or inaccessible historical data, new marketing channels with no obvious comparables, lack of expertise or understanding of what really matters. We’ll explore how to address more of these issues in upcoming blog posts.

Understand Your Channels – Differentiate between Marketing and Order Channels

Even the most sophisticated marketers create confusion by using the word “channel” interchangeably between Marketing and Order Channels.

Marketing Channels are those that you spend your marketing efforts in: direct mail, email, display/retargeting, natural and paid search, affiliate, social media, etc. Order Channels are ones in which a customer places an order: call center, ecommerce/internet, and retail. Mobile is unique in that it can be categorized either way – for example, if a company has a mobile app which serves as a marketing tool, and a customer can also order through, the channel can be classified as either a Marketing or Order Channel. Keep in mind that the categorization should be consistent.

Plan Marketing Channels, then Forecast by Order Channel

Since you have much more control over marketing campaigns than where a customer will choose to place an order, start by planning your marketing campaigns. Each company has its own set of terminology, but there are typically three levels of marketing planning, depending on the complexity and depth of each channel. I’ll define my definitions for clarity:

Campaign – Overall theme that the marketing supports. This can be a season (Winter, Summer, Holiday), event (webinar, concert), membership drive (wine club, subscription-based purchase), promotion (semi-annual sale, clearance). Crosses between Marketing Channel and Communication since both are instrumental in supporting the campaign.

Marketing Channel – direct mail, email, search, display, affiliate, social media (same as above)

Communication – individual marketing treatments such as an email, postcard, Facebook ad, mobile ad, SEM ad.

For some marketing channels, such as direct mail, marketers typically plan at the Communication level. Direct mail requires more advance planning since print orders need to be placed, customer lists modeled and hygiened, list rentals ordered, and postage costs calculated.

Other marketing channels need less rigor and can be planned at the channel level. For example, if your affiliate program is fairly even and predictable, it probably makes sense to plan at the channel level rather than have individual plans for each publisher.

Depending on your business, you may also plan by Campaign. An example of this is a large semi-annual sale promotion – you would plan communications in each of your channels to support the promotion. You may send a catalog or direct mail piece, a series of emails, a social media contest, and targeted display ads to reinforce your message.

Increases in Circulation: Need to Account for Growth and Lower Performance

The next step is to take historic data as the plan starting point. Response rates, average order, click through rates, and other relevant metrics are helpful for planning for communications targeted at similar audiences.

Two common mistakes that marketers make are:

  1. Not adjusting for audience growth/shrinkage (if the same quality audience has grown, you can assume a similar response rate even though your circulation size has changed).
  2. Increasing/decreasing the audience of a different quality without accounting for a difference in performance. This is important – by increasing circulation, the quality of the audience will decrease and the expected revenue per person for the incremental circulation will be lower.

One way to determine the revenue increase/decrease per person for different quality circulation is based on a loose rule of thumb (divide the % increase by three so that the larger the increase in circulation, the greater the drop-off in revenue per person).

Using historical data and trend, you can then forecast your sales curves by order channel. Most large companies that have multiple order channels typically forecast by fiscal week for both call center staffing and managing the revenue/inventory predictions. Smaller and more internet-based companies may choose to forecast on a monthly basis.

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Better Gaming Technique – Batteries Included

Posted on March 28, 2023 by schatzi

As a gamer I am on a constant lookout for the road to better gaming. After all, the whole idea behind my website is all about finding better games whether it’s funny games, flash games, cool games or simply the best games, but every once in a while I come across some crazy things. This study is pretty nuts (pun intended), and I have to say if my gaming isn’t as good as it can be – this will never become an option in my better gaming endeavour.

In 2010 a group of people was gathered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as volunteers in a study which involved having a 9-volt battery strapped to their right temple while playing DARWARS Ambush!, a video game US Army had developed for training their soldiers before going to warzones. Although this may sound painful, the faint electric tickle delivered by the battery was only a few milliamps at most. As the volunteers played the game with virtual landscapes strewn with dilapidated buildings and car wrecks on every corner – the whole time looking for signs of concern; rooftop snipers or improvised explosive devices carefully hidden in sand close to the sidewalk or behind a rubbish bin, most of the volunteers weren’t even aware of the battery-equipped wet sponge strapped to their heads.

According to neuroscientist Vincent Clark, a member of the University of New Mexico’s staff, claims that this technique called tDCS, or transcranial direct-current stimulation, could improve learning. The aforementioned study was conducted in order to determine if this technique would help soldier’s alertness while in battle and was funded in full by the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the conclusion of the study is definite: it actually seems to work.

While the amount of received milliamps to the volunteers heads was only about one-five-hundredth the amount drawn by a 100-watt light bulb (2 milliamps), they showed twice as much improvement in the game after a short amount of training as the group who received only 0.1 milliamps. Clark says they learn quicker without having a good intuitive or introspective sense about why they learn more quickly.

This sort of research dates back more than two centuries and neuroscientists like Clark think of tDCS as a way to learn more about the learning and cognition mechanisms. If refined, researchers could, with the flick of a switch, mute or amplify activity in several areas of the brain using this technique, and see how the behaviour of the recipient changes accordingly. In Clark’s opinion this field is going to give us all sorts of information and subsequently raise new questions as research on the subject progresses.

For a simple quest like mine, for better gaming, this just seems too much. Simply put.

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