What is Reddit and Why Should You Care About It?

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Every once in a while, a new internet site or technology becomes all the rage.

It’s like striking gold. Initially, it’s kept a secret and supported by the local community, but as soon as it becomes known, everyone wants a piece of it.

Reddit has become the latest internet marketing gold mine.

Marketers are trying to leverage the massive platform to build brand awareness and drive traffic to their websites. For example, Ryan Luedecke was able to use Reddit to make $2,200 in revenue for his new beef jerky company. But for every Ryan, there are many more who don’t understand how to harness the power of Reddit.

What Reddit is and why you should care about it

Reddit.com is a website that was started in June of 2005. Despite the fact that it’s just 10 years old, it is one of the biggest sites on the internet. It’s global Alexa rank is 24. This means that it gets the 24th most traffic of all the millions of websites. To give you some perspective, Google, Facebook, and YouTube take the first three spots. Amazon is 7th. Amazon China is 73rd. The New York Times is 99th place.

Reddit is an aggregator site. Users submit links to other websites, which can then be voted and commented on. Reddit has almost 20 million unique visitors and about 150 million page views per month.

The most interesting part of Reddit is that it’s different from the majority of large sites. Most other sites are strictly controlled by a team of moderators or editors. Reddit, on the other hand, is controlled by its users.

How does Reddit Work?

The first time you visit Reddit, you’ll probably have no clue what’s going on. It looks complicated, ugly, and chaotic, but its functionality is great.

I’m going to break down some of the most important concepts that you’ll need to know to successfully market your business on Reddit.

Concept 1: Karma

Everything on Reddit is driven by “karma,” which is the individual positive and negative points (called upvotes and downvotes) given and received by each member of the site.

reddit-karma

Everyone can vote on every link or discussion posted on the site. Everyone’s vote counts for the same amount, so it’s essentially a democratic process. An upvote means that you believe it’s a good post, while a downvote means the opposite.

Submissions with the highest score (upvotes minus downvotes) rise to the top. However, there’s one more factor that controls the flow of submissions: timing. Newer posts don’t need as high of a score as older posts to rise up in the rankings. This keeps the content from growing stale. 

Concept 2: Subreddits

The way Reddit works is that it’s divided into thousands of different categories called subreddits.

The URL structure looks like this: 

           “http://www.reddit.com/r/[subreddit name]”

For example, if you were interested in nutrition, you would go to:

           “http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/” 

In the worldnews subreddit, you will see submissions only about worldnews.

As a user, you have two main options. You can either visit each subreddit you’re interested in individually, or you can subscribe and unsubscribe from subreddits that you are and aren’t interested in.

Concept 3: Groupthink

Strange things happen when you pool many similar people together. There is a very distinct average type of Reddit user:

  • 20-30 years old
  • Male
  • Liberal
  • Likes technology/gaming
  • Values intelligence (hates seeing “old news” on Facebook/Tumblr, etc.)

Upvotes and downvotes are supposed to identify good and bad posts. However, they are often used to express opinions. For example, someone who is politically liberal might downvote a submission that is pro Fox news.

Since the content is entirely controlled by users, they shape Reddit by their opinions and beliefs. This naturally attracts more like-minded people and fewer that are different.e. 

Why does this matter to you? When a large number of people get together, groupthink is inevitable. The same topics are discussed over and over again with little else because people don’t want to go against the grain. If you do, you get downvoted.

Concept 4: Reddit for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Reddit can be useful for link building, but building links should not be your primary goal.

First off, Reddit is a highly authoritative site. It’s has over 702 million backlinks. Another good thing about Reddit is that it’s set up to prevent spammers, which is good for marketers like me and you, who actually try to create valuable content. 

To prevent people from just mass-posting links across the site, not all links on Reddit are made dofollow. All links are automatically nofollow on Reddit until they get a certain number of upvotes.

Since spam posts will either get downvoted or won’t get any upvotes, they never become dofollow and therefore have zero or very little value. 

Submissions to most subreddits can be either a text submission (html) or a direct link to a page. The same rules apply to both text submissions and links. If the overall submission receives a few upvotes, all the links in the text will also become dofollow. 

Now you understand quite a bit about how Reddit has the potential to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website and how it works. 

The trick to Reddit is that there is no trick. You have to genuinely contribute and become a member if you want any results from your time.

Master Google Photos

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To put it simply, Google Photos – even with its quirks – is a revelation. Within minutes of playing with the free product, I knew I was going to cancel my SmugMug account. I also knew that I would probably never look at Amazon Photos again. If you use the free version, Google will compress your photos (down to 16 megapixel – still quite large). The paid version is inexpensive (100 GB is $1.99/month. 1 TB is $9.99/month).

The appealing features include unlimited storage for photos and videos, some neat user-interface tricks that make the thousands of photos that we all now take easier to navigate, and, perhaps most importantly, smart image recognition technology that makes your library of photos almost endlessly searchable. Google Photos promises to turn the haphazard collection of images you generate daily into sortable batches of meaningful photos.

We still have a lot of exploration to do, and some pain points are already evident. For example, migrating 50GB of my photos from SmugMug to Google Photos was a headache. I had to download in increments from SmugMug (55 zipped files in all) and then unzip and upload folder by folder to Google Photos. It took about 4 hours.

It’s also worth noting that all of this has been done before in some form or another. Facebook has great facial recognition. Flickr can identify content in your photos and place them in broad categories. Google’s real accomplishment here is stringing everything together more or less seamlessly. Plus, you’ve already got a Google account. No new accounts! Just sync everything you take on your phone and this stuff all works like magic.

IMG_3362-ANIMATION

Twelve Steps to Make Yourself a Google Photos Master

Step 1 – Share and Unshare

One of the best features introduced by Google Photos is the ease with which you can share an image or group of images through a link. Anyone with the link can see the selected pictures though, so you might want to review them regularly and delete the ones that are no longer required—choose Shared links on the web menu to do this.

Step 2 – Test Out the Search Capabilities

This is one of the most amazing things about Google Photos. Google Photos’ intelligent search function is more intelligent than you might think. As soon as you click inside the search box in Google Photos on the web you’ll be given some suggestions, but you can look for almost anything: Try “truck”, “wine”, “ice”, “dog” or even “selfie”, for example, or a photo type like “panorama” in your queries. It doesn’t get it right every time, but it looks like it learns from its mistakes. Because the search capability is so powerful, you no longer have to organize your photos in folders.

Step 3 – Send Videos to YouTube

Google Photos handles your videos too—it will store an unlimited number of them if you’re happy with a maximum quality of 1080p. If you have the paid version of Google Photos, the quality isn’t restricted but there’s a maximum video size of 10GB. Head to the YouTube upload page and there’s a new option to import clips straight from Google Photos into your YouTube channel, where you can title, tag, and share them as required.

Step 4 – Backing up Photos from Other Apps

This is where Google Photos really earns its chops and, in my experience, is much smoother than Apple’s icloud. Google Photos does a quick and clean job of sending pictures you snap on your smartphone or tablet to the cloud, but you can also do the same for apps like Instagram and WhatsApp on Android. From the Android app, open the app menu then tap Device folders to choose which folders to include or exclude from the back-up process.

Step 5 – Select Multiple Pictures at Once

Most of us will have a ton of digital images on our devices and Google Photos offers a few tricks to make managing them more straightforward. For example, inside the mobile app you can press and hold and then swipe to select multiple pictures—it’s almost as easy as using a mouse and a keyboard to drag across a bunch of photos.

Step 6 – Make Stories from Your Photos

Stories in Google Photos are like guided albums with captions and a particular flow to the pictures, but you need to go through the mobile apps to create them. Tap the Create icon (a plus symbol) then choose Story—from there you can select the relevant pictures, add captions and locations, and change the cover photo.

Step 7 – Remove Geolocation Data

The location data stored with your pictures helps Google link pictures together based on where they were taken, but you don’t necessarily want to include this data when you share photos with others. Head into Photos settings on the web and enable Remove geo-location in items shared by link to do exactly that.

Step 8 – Import Photos from Computers and Cameras

The mobile app for iOS and Android have been getting most of the attention—that’s where we take most of our photos after all—but you can upload photos from the desktop and memory cards too. Download the client for Windows or Mac, specify the folders you want to back up to the cloud, and Google takes care of the rest.

Step 9 – View Photos and Videos in Google Drive

Go into the Google Photos settings on your computer and you can choose to view photos and videos stored in Google Drive through the Photos interface: This doesn’t actually move them over, so if you disable the feature the images disappear from view in Photos. This is only really useful if you already have a lot of your content stored in Google Drive.

Step 10 – Download Photos to your Desktop

In Google Drive’s settings on your computer, you can create a folder showing your Google Photos and then install the Google Drive desktop client as well—everything uploaded from mobile and stored in Photos then gets saved to your local Google Drive folder. (If you also have the desktop uploader installed, you may end up with some duplicates.)

Step 11 – Check Out the Assistant

Google knows some of us take a ton of pictures of the same thing from slightly different angles or in slightly different lighting just to be sure we got it. Most of those repeat photos land in the dusty corners of our hard drives, never to be seen again. Assistant finds those repeat photos and puts them to use by automatically creating photosets, collages, and animations.

Even better: It detects images that are similar and, when possible, stitches them together to create panoramas. While you may not have had the presence of mind to snap a panorama, Assistant will pick up on those overlapping images and create the panorama you never thought to take.

DSC_6152-PANO

Step 12 – Create a Video with Music and Share it in Minutes

This is perhaps the most powerful feature of Google Photos. What used to require a special photo or video editing program and at least an hour of your time now takes minutes to create. The Google Assistant actually created this one for me – https://goo.gl/photos/9bJtewdmj9wEz6yK8

 

Must Have Google Chrome Extensions

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I have been a diehard Google Chrome user since its inception. The ability to sync bookmarks, passwords, and web history across all my devices made the switch from Firefox a no-brainer, but what I find really interesting is the amount of extensions available for Chrome. Extensions are tiny programs that run inside Chrome. There are more than 50,000 extensions and you have to be careful because not all are friendly and not all play friendly with others. A 2014 study found several hundred malicious extensions.

That said, you can trust me that the following extensions are safe and useful if you’re part of the 64.9% of internet users who use Google Chrome as your browser.

Must Have Google Chrome Extensions

1. Limit Your Time on Distracting Sites

With social media, it is way too easy to waste time surfing instead of getting things done. To help save you from yourself, use the StayFocused extension, which prevents you from connecting to any time-wasting sites for a set period of time.

The list of blocked sites can be customized from the options menu if you do not like the stock blacklist. Keep in mind that once the timer is set, it cannot be stopped, so be sure that you don’t overstate just how long you need it to run.

stay-focused-extension

 

2. Reduce Chrome’s RAM Usage

Google Chrome uses lots of memory, so this extension reduces RAM usage by stopping inactive tabs from eating up even more resources, try out The Great Suspender.

This extension makes a tab inactive if you don’t interact with it for a period of time. The inactivity limit can be changed from the extension’s option menu. Once you return to an inactive tab, all you have to do is reload it to start using it again.

tab-suspender-extension

 

How to Make Google Chrome Run Faster

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Google Chrome is by far the best internet browser. It is the most secure and has the most features and, as of May 2015, is used by approximately 64.9% of all people browsing the internet from a desktop or laptop computer. Apple’s Safari accounts for just 3.1% of the market.

As great as Google Chrome is, there are ways to make Google Chrome run faster.

Step 1 – Access Google Chrome’s Secret Settings

Google Chrome allows you to use unofficial “beta” browser features called “flags” while they are being tested. These features are strictly experimental and may break or disappear while you are using them. To access these settings, simply type chrome://flags in your browser bar. Hit Enter and you will be taken to the flags page and shown a warning:

chrome-flags-screen

Step 2 – Use Find to Make Things Simple

The Chrome flags page is not presented in a user-friendly format – probably because it is not intended for mainstream users. To make things much easier for you, type Ctrl+F to open the search bar in the right-hand corner. Then, in future steps on this post, just type the search term into the search bar and let search find the content on the page.

Step 3 – Set Maximum Tiles to 512

Basically this feature will increase the amount of RAM (memory) that Chrome is allowed to use and this should immediately speed up your browsing. By default Chrome uses 128MB of RAM. In the search bar that you just opened in Step 2, type Maximum Tiles and hit Enter. Once you’re brought to the Maximum Tiles row, click the drop-down menu and change Default to 512.

max-tiles-512

Step 4 – Change the Number of Raster Threads to 4

This modification will change the rendering speed of images in Chrome. Search for Number of Raster, and change the number of raster threads to 4.

raster threads

Step 5 – Relaunch Chrome to Make Chrome Run Faster

In order for these changes to take place, you need to relaunch Chrome. At the bottom of the chrome://flags page, you will notice a “Relaunch Now” button—click it, and you will quickly see how Google Chrome is faster.

make-chrome-run-faster

How to Export Email From Outlook 2010 to Excel

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Outlook, like most Microsoft programs, is full of hidden features that stay hidden and out of touch most of the time. A client recently asked how to export email from Outlook 2010 to Excel. This seems like a lot of steps, but if you follow them you’ll see that the entire process is quick and easy.

How to Export Email From Outlook 2010 to Excel

1. First, you need to move or copy all the emails you are interested in into their own folder.

2. Now go to the Outlook File tab.

3. Click “Options” in the left hand menu.

4. Outlook 2010 file menu

5. An Options dialog will pop up. From the left hand menu, Choose “Advanced” .

6. Advanced menu in Outlook 2010

7. Scroll down to the Export section on the right and hit the button marked “Export”.

8. Outlook 2010 Export Option

9. In the dialog that pops up, select “Export to a file” and click Next.

10. Choose file format “Comma Separated Values (Windows)” and click Next.

11. Select the folder all your emails are in and click Next.

12. Pick a location and name for the new spreadsheet you want to create and click Next.

13. Click the “Map custom fields” button.

14. Decide which fields you want to export or just leave it as the default (everything).

15. Click finish and your file of exported email addresses will be created.

16. The file format will be CSV (“xxx.csv”) which is readable by Excel and can be saved as an Excel spreadsheet inside Excel.

LastPass Hacked, Change Your Master Password Now

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LastPass – my favorite password manager – has been hacked. This is the bad news. It’s time to change your master password. If you have LastPass, do this right now before you finish reading this post. The good news is that passwords you have saved for other sites should be safe.

LastPass announced on their company blog that they detected a server intrusion. While encrypted user data (your stored passwords for other sites) was not stolen, the hackers did take LastPass account email addresses, password reminders, server per user salts, and authentication hashes. The latter is what’s used to tell LastPass that you have permission to access your account.

According to LastPass, the authentication hashes should be sufficiently encrypted to prevent anyone from using them to access your account. However, the company is still prompting all users to update their master password that they use to log in to their LastPass account. If you use LastPass, you should do this immediately. If you share that master password with any other services, you should change it there, too. Finally, if you haven’t enabled two-factor authentication you should do that immediately here.

LastPass Security Notice – Updated June 16, 2105:

Was my master password exposed?
No, LastPass never has access to your master password. We use encryption and hashing algorithms of the highest standard to protect user data. We hash both the username and master password on the user’s computer with 5,000 rounds of PBKDF2-SHA256, a password strengthening algorithm. That creates a key, on which we perform another round of hashing, to generate the master password authentication hash. That is sent to the LastPass server so that we can perform an authentication check as the user is logging in. We then take that value, and use a salt (a random string per user) and do another 100,000 rounds of hashing, and compare that to what is in our database. In layman’s terms: Cracking our algorithms is extremely difficult, even for the strongest of computers.

Am I at risk if I have a weak master password?
An attacker could try to guess your master password, then use your per-user-salt and authentication hash to determine if their guess was correct. Typically, an attacker would try a list of commonly-used passwords or dictionary words (such as 12345678, password1, mustang, robert42, iloveyou). They would have to do this for you specifically, since your “per-user” salt is unique to your account . Because your password is hashed thousands of times locally, and this hashed value is again hashed 100,000 times before being stored server-side, guesses will be very slow. If your master password is weak or if your password reminder makes it easy-to-guess, then the attacker could significantly reduce the number of attempts needed to guess it correctly. Then the attacker would have your master password, but not your data, since your data vault was not exposed. If the attacker attempted to get access to your data by using these credentials to log into your LastPass account, they’d be stopped by a notification asking them to first verify their email address.  We require this security measure for any attempt to access your vault from a new device/location, unless you have multifactor authentication enabled.

Were passwords or other data stored in my vault exposed?
No, your data is safe. Encrypted user vaults were not compromised, so no data stored in your vault is at risk (including form fill profiles, secure notes, site usernames and passwords). However if you used your master password for any other website, we do advise changing it – on LastPass as well as on the other websites. Note that you should never reuse passwords – especially your LastPass master password!

What should I do now?
Our security and processes worked as designed, and customer data was, and is, protected. Because we are requiring verification for any new IP address or device, your account is secure. You will be prompted to update your master password when you login. Not all users will see the prompt immediately, but your account is safe and you can update when prompted. For added security going forward, we recommend enabling multifactor authentication. Also, be wary of phishing emails asking you to disclose your master password, payment information, or any other personal information. Never, ever disclose your master password or any confidential information, even to someone claiming to work for LastPass.

Why did I hear about this in the media first?
Emails have been sent to all users regarding the security incident. Notifying millions of users via email takes time. Therefore, we also announced the security alert to our blog and our social accounts in real-time, and the media quickly picked up the story.

I reset my master password, but now I can’t get in!
If you forgot or mis-typed your new master password, please revert your change: https://lastpass.com/revert.php and login again with the previous master password. Then you can try another change (and be careful of typos!).

I don’t remember my old master password.
Please try password recovery: https://lastpass.com/recover.php on a browser where you’ve used LastPass before. For more information about account recovery, see: https://helpdesk.lastpass.com/account-recovery/