Pinterest debuts "try on" AR technology for the home interior space. 

Users will be able to virtually place items from retailers like West Elm into their own homes using the Pinterest camera. This is fantastic from a consumer point of view because you can actually "see" how the product will look in conjunction with the rest of your space. 

Shopping decisions are never a linear process. Having these technologies in place all adds up to persuading the customer to purchase. 

In this week's issue: 

• What does Love Island and The Advertising Standards Authority Have In Common?
• If you fail to plan, you plan to fail…
• Which pages should you disallow from Google's Crawlers?
• Long-term goals Vs. Short-term gains. 
• The price of everything, but the value of nothing…
• Last Week's Best Bits.

💎 Join Furlough on Discord 💎

What does Love Island and The Advertising Standards Authority Have In Common?

Answer: Influencers. 

Six rule breaking Love Island influencers have been flagged by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the growing campaign to snuff out misleading and non disclosed Ads. 

The ASA have released a page where you can see exactly who has been breaking the rules. 

Is this a good thing?

We say yes!

Influencers get a bad enough rap without having to be tarnished with the same brush as those who don't disclose Ads. It is a business after all and many influencers work hard for years, cultivating an authentic relationships with their followers. Regulating the industry will help influencers be taken more seriously, because even though haters hate, it is a real job! 

Speaking of regulation.

A fantastic platform has been launched to help influencers make informed decisions as to who they work with. 

It's basically Glass Door for influencers: Enabling creators to anonymously review brands. 

Check out Influent Gen here.

This incentivises business transactions and collaborations between brands and influencers to be as professional as possible. This is only a good thing for the industry.  

If you found this useful head over to our Kick Off session today at 2pm EST on Youtube for more gems. 
 

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail…

Have you ever had to deal with unprepared individuals?

Only to realize that your entire workflow has been disrupted, and an entire group of busy individuals has their time essentially wasted?

Unfortunately this became our Startup Booster session last week…

But as a team we were honestly surprised it's taken this long to experience an inconvenience like this.

We've been doing Startup Booster sessions for months now…

Each and every single session has been packed with value in one form or another.

It was only inevitable there would be a session that didn't go as planned.

But in classic Furlough fashion, "if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail".

So we decided it was appropriate to set the guidelines for these upcoming sessions (that way we can minimize the chance of this happening again).

These are the basic guidelines for every founder applying to our Startup Booster session:

1. Must have an existing & tangible concept (proof of work, existing assets, pitch deck).
2. Must be prepared with Audio + Video 10 minutes prior to the session (out of respect for everyone's time).
3. Must have an actual business model (with a Go-to-Market strategy, channels of monetization).

These guidelines aren't meant to victimize any business that doesn't meet them.

We've just simply gotten to a point where this program is becoming extremely valuable with the level of experts readily available to help your business be the best it can be.

And since we're all digital entrepreneurs here...

It's important that we set a standard early on to make the most of everybody's time.

Whether you're a viewer, a panelist, a speaker, or a startup founder…

Your time is extremely valuable because you can't get it back.

But that's why we've been secretly forming the Avengers of the startup world to build our Accelerator program.

So stay tuned as we finalize a few things on our end! 

If you have any suggestions or want to be a part of this elite group of individuals, our #startups channel is a great place to ask questions.

If you're a founder looking to get your startup boosted, then send a message to one of the community managers in the Furlough discord to join the waitlist (Spots are LIMITED).

Which pages should you disallow from Google's Crawlers? 

Session Highlights: 

A question in this week's SEO session was, which pages should you disallow from Google’s crawlers?

• A robots. txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests in addition to preventing the creation of thin or duplicated content.
   
• You want to disallow pages you do not want to be indexed, for example, the checkout page on your website, any back end, or admin pages.
   
• Other examples depending on the content of your site would be pagination pages, filters for t-shirt size or colour, filter to sort alphabetically, or anything that can be appended to the URL. 

TIP #1: If you don’t want a page to be indexed or crawled you can limit the robots which enter them by placing the code to turn them away on the top header of your page. The bots will read this first and then ignore the page. 

Say you have a blog post written, what are the steps to optimize it for SEO?

• You want to start off by testing each individual variable. By selecting one of the main SEO factors for the page at a time and changing it you are able to keep track of what changes lead to positive or negative outcomes. 
   
• The reason you don’t do multiple things at once is because then you have no way to tell which change is responsible for the outcome. Additionally, if something were to go wrong it is easier to fix with one change vs many. 
   
• This can be time consuming as it is a progressive process and you must take your time in order to wait for Google to pick up the changes

TIP #2: You can batch optimize! Say you have a product with many variations, for example, a t-shirt with different sizes and colours, you can batch them all together and then optimize the header, and wait, then the content, and wait, and so on…

TIP #3: If you’re having a hard time figuring out what your keywords are for SEO you can check out your competitors and see what Google is ranking them on. What kind of keywords are being clustered by Google? Pick out what makes sense to you, emulate it, and things will build over time. 

What can you do to create backlinks for your site?

• Backlinks are links from one webpage to another, also known as incoming links or one way links, and are considered by Google to be “votes” for a specific page. If you have a high number of backlinks you may tend to have higher organic search engine ratings. 
   
• The traditional way to create them is to find websites in the same niche industry, find out who owns it, and pitch them content like an article with a backlink. However, the conversion on this is low and you would have to send hundreds of pitches. 
   
• Alternatively, you can approach PR agencies or people with large and well connected networks and pay them like an advertising effort. 

Are content silos beneficial?

• A SEO silo structure groups content as a hierarchy and is important for not only search engine bots but the user as well. It involves dividing all the information on your website into clear categories and ensuring that each page in each category is thoroughly linked to the other pages in the category. 

• You have to think about how your content and pages relate to one another. Google can only understand nouns, every noun has an entity card, and each card has relations. The more relations you build on a topic cluster level the closer you are to emulating the way Google reads it, so the bots will pick it up faster.

If Google only picks up nouns, should we be thinking more about noun count vs word count?

• Short answer is no.
   
• Google’s ultimate purpose is to provide the most useful information to the people who seek it. Your content still needs to provide value vs jamming a bunch of random nouns into your content. 
   
• The nouns are key to how you structure your content to show the value you provide. Content (your words and the value they provide) are more important than the nouns. 

Do you have SEO questions? We have answers! Join us at our weekly SEO workshop where we have a panel of experts available for the entire hour to provide answers to your questions!

Long-term goals Vs. Short-term gains. 

What are the growth opportunities for Furlough members?

Without Furlough’s members, the server would not be where it is today. We are consistently gaining new projects, clients, ideas, and expanding so the ability to grow is available to all members.   

This week’s highlights:

We explored Furlough’s projects spearheaded by community members. We highlighted member accomplishments and delved into the growth potential for Furlough. 

• Community member Eli, now manages a client account in the cryptocurrency space. He also teaches a free weekly SEO workshop for community members.
   
• Shaggy has been heading an Alpha Research project. The research will be dedicated to identifying and analyzing new NFT projects.
   
• Gensen has been heavily involved in Business Development and is gaining new clients left and right. He has been setting up meetings and getting the word out about Furlough.
   
• Roslyn has led the email marketing team. A major accomplishment was she surpassed her revenue goal of $20,782 for one email campaign!
   
• Sajad has been helping the community in various areas such as web design, SEO, and content writing.
   
• Ophir is warming his network of business associates. He has been leading Business Development and bringing new leads to sustain the Furlough community.
  
  By the way. this is just a small drop in the bucket in terms of community member achievements...

We expect the Furlough server, client list, and skillset of its members to keep increasing in the coming months:

•  Furlough has been helping companies grow their marketing channels through SEO, email marketing, branding, and more. One Furlough client reached $350,000 in sales in the month of January! 
   
•  We are focused on long term growth over short term gains. Businesses are about relationships. 
   
• Furlough has brainstormed a way for influencers to obtain the public figure badge on Instagram. Gaining the badge will help influencers grow their following and increase their business.
   
•  We will be rolling out a referral fee structure within the community. We want to help small businesses and professionals grow but must monetize services in order to keep providing a space, leads and support for members.
   
•  We are looking forward to the Phi DAO roll out this summer. The DAO will provide community funding which will allow us to expand our services and network to a larger range of individuals.

Server Changes:

•  The server created an “Elite” role for its members. This is the hardest role to achieve and reserved for industry leaders. This is a space for venture capitalists and founders to congregate and connect.
• A “challenges” channel was created for members. This is an area for members to share and support one another on their daily struggles.

The price of everything, but the value of nothing…

How often do you learn something new?

Are you constantly trying to grow your knowledge base on new topics?

What do you do to keep improving your current skill set?

Learning new strategies that will improve your skill set as a digital marketer almost comes as a second nature to most of us.

But for those individuals that come from a different industry, or have a different set of skills, learning these strategies and getting results can feel impossible.

We saw what hard work and the willingness to learn looked like first hand during our brand audit with Body & Botany last week.

Body & Botany is a personal care brand specialized in creating products using traditional Eastern & Western medicines.

When we spoke with Lacey (the founder) it was clear that she was trying to do everything herself.

With everything she was doing right, there was a TON of room for improvement:

• from understanding which marketing channels to really go all in on
• from understanding where her strengths in the business are
• from having a clear plan of action to execute on

It's always an exciting time to speak with these brands that are doing something different.

As marketers, it's important to understand the wants and needs of different markets as well as understanding the different phases a business goes through to find success.

As brand owners, it's important to really understand where your strengths lie as a founder so you can delegate your time where it's going to have the biggest impact.

That's why these brand audit sessions have been so powerful.

Not only have we been able to help these businesses thrive…

But we also get a chance to help these founders become the best version of themselves.

If you've got any suggestions in terms of effective strategies for time management, let us know in the #growth-hacking channel we would love to hear them!

Until then, come check out this week's Brand Audit session featuring The Stampede Network (a fitness & supplement company disrupting the Tik Tok industry).

Join us in the #Furlounge this Thursday @ 2 pm to listen in on some high-value insights!

If you're a brand looking to get your 2022 action plan, then send a message to one of the community managers in the Furlough discord to join the waitlist (Spots are LIMITED).

Last Weeks Best Bits

Get ready to experience this weeks best bits from our community:

UI-UX: Learn Figma tips by tips.
MINDSET: Stop sharing your million-dollar dreams with hundred-dollar people.
MEMES: Stop posting lazy content.

Have a great week and we hope to see you in our Kick Off today at 2PM EST!