The East Family

It’s tempting for many young professionals to assume that because they’ve spent most of their lives posting links to Facebook or pushing selfies to Instagram that they have the skills needed to be a digital marketer.

Creating compelling content is certainly important, but if you’re not up to speed on search engine optimization (SEO), how to understand YouTube metrics, or the importance of on-point tagging, you’re a long way from ready to assemble your own digital plan.

But with the training in The Complete Digital Marketing Growth Hacking Certification Bundle, you’ll get a full overview of what it really takes to succeed across the web from social postings to paid ads to basic sales tactics that can make all the difference in how your product plays online.

The nine-course collection with more than 40 hours of marketing dos and don’ts can start getting you conversant in all the varied platforms available across the web for driving sales, what the impact of each means, and how to determine what’s working and what isn’t in your online efforts.

It all starts with The 2020 Complete Growth Hacking and Conversion Course, a 130-lecture collection that offers the inside tricks of the trade for successfully building your brand. The training includes ways to charge your growth and conversion rates up to 5 times higher, cultivate subscribers, generate solid business leads, and craft winning copy to perfectly execute your product message.

Speaking of your product message, the 30 Actionable Branding Strategies That Will Triple Your Profit are just the well-defined, easy-to-follow steps you can use today to help carve out a smart and successful identity for your brand. Read the rest

With everybody working from home now, it’s natural to start thinking about careers where not going into the office is more the norm than the exception. Better yet, many are looking to start careers as freelancers, professionals who build their livelihoods around the scope of their talent and not the fortunes of one all-encompassing employer.

Web developers can cultivate that gun for hire mentality, roaming freely from shop to shop as they ply their trade on projects that best fit their skill sets and what they want to accomplish. It’s a level of professional freedom we all envy — and with the average freelance web developer making a comfortable salary these days, it’s a path you can emulate with the help of training like The 2020 Ultimate Web Developer and Design Bootcamp Bundle.

This package includes 11 courses packed with nearly 70 hours of instruction, aimed at bringing first-time coders all the basic training and starter opportunities they need to ultimately hang their own shingle as a freelance development or design pro.

As the cornerstone of all webpage structure and layout on the web, HTML and CSS knowledge is fundamental, which is why nearly half of this training package centers in a solid understanding of these digital building blocks.

Across courses like Modern Web Design Complete HTML & CSS, The Complete 2020 HTML5 CSS3 Course with Flexbox, Grid & SASS, The Ultimate HTML Developer, and Build Responsive Real-World Websites with CSS3 v2.0, you’ll learn how HTML serves as the skeleton of any web experience, while CSS provides the visual flair that elevates top work.  Read the rest

“The way to have power is to take it.” -- Boss Tweed.

We think an 18th-century political power broker probably had a different definition of power in mind when he made that statement, yet the sentiment still applies.

We’ve all got devices all but falling out of our pockets and the need for power to keep them all happy is almost insatiable. But with the following list of 40 of the absolute best power banks, changers, and other charging accessories to be found, you can stock up and make sure your needs are covered, no matter where you are.

And at savings of up to more than $100 per item, you can even save a mighty buck or two while you power up. So while you won’t actually be just taking power, it’ll kinda feel that way.

It’s wireless charging the best? Just drop the RAVPower charger on your favorite Qi-enabled iOS or Android device and watch up to 10 watts of power start flowing to your device without a cord in sight.

It’s got a perfectly sized indentation where your Airpods case should sit as it delivers all of its wireless charging power. Of course, it also handles charging for all the rest of your Qi-enabled devices as well.

This power splitter should satisfy those who need to charge two Lightning devices plus an Apple Watch all at once.  Read the rest

My friend and former colleague James Gaines, who previously explained how capsaicin works while eating a handful of chili peppers, worked on this SciShow video about tear gas. James is a great science writer who knows how to break down complicated science into bite-sized tidbits, and that skill is on display here — even if the subject matter is pretty harrowing. Read the rest

Charles Darwin

Survival of the "friendliest"? Charles Darwin's famous phrase may have been misinterpreted, a new book suggests. Duke University scientists Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods argue in Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity that factors like friendliness, partnership and communication are key to evolutionary success, not being big, strong, and/or mean.

Here's an excerpt adapted from the book (via Popular Science):

Arguably, no folk theory of human nature has done more harm—or is more mistaken—than the “survival of the fittest.” The idea that the strong and ruthless will survive while the weak perish became cemented in the collective consciousness around the publication of the fifth edition of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1869, in which he wrote that, as a proxy for the term natural selection, “Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient.”

But somewhere along the way, “fitness” became synonymous with physical fitness. In the wild, the logic goes, the bigger you are, and the more willing you are to fight, the less others will mess with you and the more successful you will become. You can monopolize the best food, find the most attractive mates, and have the most babies.

Over the past century and a half, this mistaken version of “fitness” has been the basis for social movements, corporate restructuring, and extreme views of the free market. It has been used to argue for the abolition of government, to judge groups of people as inferior, and to justify the cruelty that results.