Content By Melanie

Note: Covering the New York Knicks this season has once again brought me into close contact with a lot of bandwagon fans, prompting this piece.    Is there anything more annoying than a bandwagon fan? You know what I'm talking about. Who hasn't encountered the 'fan' who tries to justify supporting Alabama, the Brooklyn Nets, the Houston Astros, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers all at the same time? And all of a sudden, you're a New York Knicks fan again, after hating on them for a decade? Please, just stop. True sports fandom entails sticking with one team through thick and thin, in times of triumph and heartbreak. It's a slippery slope once you start rooting for a different team. Suddenly, you're rooting for one championship team after another, and before you know it, you're a fan of half the league's franchises. These are some of the most telling signs that you're a bandwagon sports fan. If any of these describe any of your fandom tendencies, it...

  What is Growth Hacking?   Growth hacking. It might sound a little like it's another throwaway buzzword that marketers use that's trendy but has no real meaning. While there are lots of terms like that - terms I try to avoid - growth hacking isn't one of them. Growth hacking is simply a broad, umbrella term for strategies that focus solely on growth. Almost any business can benefit from it, but it's especially effective, and important, for young start-ups who need to generate great growth fast but also don't have huge budgets to devote to it. The basic goals behind growth hacking are simple. To acquire as many customers, clients or users as fast as possible on a smaller budget. That's it. Well, there's more to it than that, as you'll discover, but it's a real, viable practice, not just another bit of made-up marketing shtick. What is a Growth Hacker? A growth hacker is the person - or people - who brainstorm and execute the lower-cost strategies tha...

    Spam WordPress comment come with the territory, especially for a successful blog. Once upon a time these spam comments helped those who left them (once upon a time being about 15 years ago) but now sensible blog owners moderate and hold these comments, so they have little purpose.  Most spam comments are a simple string of linked URLs, or, if a spammer is trying to be clever, a very generic "Nice read, mate!" Not that genuine blog commenting cannot still be good for SEO, it can, but in the age of social media most WordPress comments are little more than varying levels of spam.  Recently, when doing an audit of the spam comments caught by the Askimet plugin on a client's real estate site I came across a spam comment that, before it was consigned to the trash forever, deserved to see the light of day, just because it was so weird. And ridiculously long. So, I give you what is apparently the story of Steven. And the Romans. And Patton. Crazy, as I said:   ...