Dealing with dishonest manipulators

http://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/manipulation-coercion-personality-disorder-0322137

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http://www.bandbacktogether.com/psychological-manipulation-resources/

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http://www.cassiopaea.com/cassiopaea/emotional_manipulation.htm

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http://www.abuseandrelationships.org/Content/Behaviors/subtle_control.html

20 Oct howto start a company with guerrilla marketing

https://medium.com/swlh/how-i-got-50-851-views-on-slideshare-and-706-email-subscribers-for-less-than-350-9138a23d18b5

Step 1: Create your pre-launch site

I won’t go into detail on this step because I want to keep the post focused on marketing, but you can use something like LaunchRock or Squarespace to get a one-page site up.

I’d also recommend looking at the one-page sites on Betalist and doing something similar. Ideally your pre-launch page should include:

A screenshot of your product

A short, simple, compelling headline

A paragraph explaining what your product is

An email sign up box to get notified when you launch

Slack’s pre-launch web site is worth studying too.

Step 2: Create a compelling presentation for Slideshare

You can do everything below yourself (highly recommended), or you can outsource to a freelancer for $100 or so.

Choose a topic that your potential future customers are interested in that’s in some way related to your product

Read 5–10 great articles about that topic on Medium, Quora, etc

Summarize them in to 20 bullet points around a common theme

Create a presentation in Powerpoint which includes a title slide, one slide for each of the bullet points and 2 “call to action” slides — one in the middle of the presentation (around slide 10) and one at the very end

Search Flickr for interesting images you can use as the background of your title slide — find an image that stands out and avoid images that look like stock photos

On the call to action slides, include a compelling hook about the product you’re launching soon, a screenshot and a link to your web site or blog to join your pre-launch email list which you set up using Mailchimp — also include links to your social profiles (a scrappy-looking design is OK — focus on great content over great design)

On the other 20 slides, include one bullet point per slide and optionally a bit more text explaining that bullet point

Give your presentation an interesting title that will get attention — look at the most popular presentations on Slideshare for the last 30 days in a particular topic such as business and copy the format of the titles that grab your attention and/or have the most views

Upload your presentation to Slideshare — spend some time writing a good description and choose some related tags

View your presentation on Slideshare and check that your links work and take viewers to your email signup page as expected (links on the first 2 pages of a presentation in Slideshare don’t work, so don’t link from those pages)

Step 3: Seed views for your presentation via promoted tweets

Every presentation I’ve created (7 in total) has hit the front page of Slideshare because I sent traffic there via promoted tweets which signaled interest and thus helped boost the presentation to Slideshare’s home page within 24 hours.

Remember that 99% of content submitted to Slideshare is extremely rough and/or low quality and gets literally zero views, so by 1) creating a great presentation and 2) signaling to Slideshare that people want to read it, you’re going to stand out immediately.

I stumbled upon this part of the technique completely by accident, but was surprised to figure out that it worked.

Here’s how to seed views with $50 and one promoted tweet:

Go to http://ads.twitter.com which is where you can create promoted tweets

Create a simple promoted tweet with a $50 budget that targets followers of influencers who are related to the product you’re going to sell — for example, if you’re building a small business CRM, target followers of Marc Benioff (Salesforce founder), Insightly, RelateIQ, Hubspot, etc

Keep your tweet short and simple — and link directly to your presentation on Slideshare. Example: “13 strategies to improve the productivity of your sales reps: http://www.slideshare.net/your/presentation.”

On Twitter, your Slideshare will appear inline as part of the tweet automatically, which counts as a view on Slideshare — even without anyone interacting with it (clicking, expanding, etc, which is counted as an engagement on Twitter, which you pay for) Within 24 hours you’ll have a few dozen/hundred views, a few likes on Slideshare, etc — if you presentation is good, you’ll get a bunch of retweets as well, thus driving more views and retweets

In 95% of cases, if your presentation is actually good, you’ll either end up on Slideshare’s home page (it’s the 150th most popular site in the world) or in the featured section for one of the topics your presentation is related to, such as Real Estate, Business, Marketing, etc

If you have an existing following on Twitter, LinkedIn, etc, tweet the link to your presentation 2–3 times over the next day to get more views

Step 4: Email subscribers for priority access

If you can genuinely offer early/priority access to you product for 20/50/100 people before everyone else, then this works really, really well.

After publishing 5–10 presentations on Slideshare and building up a few hundred subscribers, you want to offer them a chance to try your product before anyone else

Send a simple emailing letting them know the first 50 people to Tweet about your product will be moved to the top of the wait list/VIP list.

Here’s the email you can use:

Hi there, Thanks for joining our email list. We currently have 705 people on the list and will be opening access to our product in groups of 20 people at a time, so we can best serve everyone. We’re giving you a chance to move to the top of our wait list, which will guarantee you get to try the product before anyone else. If you’re interested, we just ask that you tweet out the following: I’m on the wait list to try [your product]. Check it out: [link]

Once you’ve sent the tweet, just hit “Reply” above and let me know — I’ll move you to the top of our wait list.

About 10% of your subscribers will tweet it out, which will of course help drive even more subscribers to your email list.

That’s it. No rocket science or trickery, just a bit of time to create some content and some smart use of promoted tweets and Mailchimp.

Our Slideshare page: 50,854 views from 7 presentations

Note: I’ve blurred the thumbnails and presentation names in the screenshot of our Slideshare page above because they are part of the Slideshare channel for our first product, which we haven’t launched yet. It’s currently in stealth with beta users and I’m not ready to announce it just yet.

I did the same thing for Bigcommerce back in 2007/2008, just using a blog instead of Slideshare (which I don’t think existed back then).

As we were building the product, I launched TheStoreSuiteBlog.com (see an archived version here — StoreSuite was the internal name for what became Bigcommerce) where I blogged about features as we were building them.

We built an email list of over 10,000 people in 6 months from that single blog with $0 spent on promoting it. We also pre-sold the product and generated over $1M worth of sales before we launched — all via email.

How "Whiteness" Was Invented

https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/spl/thandekawhiting.html

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The War Nerd says:

What’s confusing for a lot of Americans is that unlike our seemingly simple notion of “race” as a matter of skin color, the South African riots aren’t about black vs. white. Most of the small shopkeepers being terrorized into fleeing are black Africans, and the rest are brown immigrants from South Asia. The difference isn’t white/black, but then that’s a specifically American way of seeing “race,” and a very rare one in world history. Most of the “race” disputes in history have been about which language you speak, which god you grovel to, and how you make a living rather than what shade you are.

https://pando.com/2015/04/19/the-war-nerd-the-art-of-turf-war/

With apologies to T. S. Eliot - Roosh is the Hollow Chad

We are the hollow chads

We are the stuffed chads

Sarging together

Peacocking with hats. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We spit pick-up game

Are quiet and meaningless

As smoke from dank grass

Or sluts' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Rants without form, ebooks without value,

Paralysed self-promotion, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

Remember us—if at all—not as lost

pick-up artists, but only

As the hollow chads

The stuffed chads

Who never got laid in Ukraine

and lied about it

and got called out on TV.

https://omegavirginrevolt.wordpress.com/2015/08/30/roosh-never-got-laid-in-ukraine/

Context:

http://www.isegoria.net/2015/10/my-education-was-a-complete-waste-of-time/

Awesome gun history website

an Englishman's obligation to serve in a citizen army is an old proposition. Coupled with this obligation to defend the realm was the obligation to provide oneself with weapons for this purpose.[13] King Henry II formalized his subjects' duties in 1181 by issuing the Assize of Arms.[14] The arms required varied depending on the subjects' wealth, with the poorest freemen obligated to provide the least--an iron helmet and a lance.[15] The Assize required not only arms to be possessed, but precluded the possessor from selling, pledging, or in any other way alienating the weapons.[16] In 1253, the armed population was expanded beyond freemen to include serfs, individuals bound to the land and the land's owner.[17] Serfs were required to procure a spear and dagger.[18]

http://www.guncite.com/journals/vandhist.html