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I had an online store. After a year of running the company alongside my 9-to-5, I made enough to resign.

That day was amazing.

This Instagram marketing plan helped the store succeed.

How did I increase my sales to five figures a month without using any paid advertising?

I used customer event marketing.

I'm not sure this term exists. I invented it to describe what I was doing.

Instagram word-of-mouth, fan engagement, and interaction drove sales.

If a customer liked or disliked a product, the buzz would drive attention to the store.

I used customer-based events to increase engagement and store sales.

Success!

Here are the weekly Instagram customer events I coordinated while running my business:

• Be the Buyer Days

• Flash sales

• Mystery boxes

Be the Buyer Days: How do they work?

Be the Buyer Days are exactly that.

You choose a day to share stock selections with social media followers.

This is an easy approach to engaging customers and getting fans enthusiastic about new releases.

First, pick a handful of items you’re considering ordering. I’d usually pick around 3 for Be the Buyer Day.

Then I'd poll the crowd on Instagram to vote on their favorites.

This was before Instagram stories, polls, and all the other cool features Instagram offers today. I think using these tools now would make this event even better.

I'd ask customers their favorite back then.

The growing comments excited customers.

Then I'd declare the winner, acquire the products, and start selling it.

How do flash sales work?

I mostly ran flash sales.

You choose a limited number of itemsdd for a few-hour sale.

We wanted most sales to result in sold-out items.

When an item sells out, it contributes to the sensation of scarcity and can inspire customers to visit your store to buy a comparable product, join your email list, become a fan, etc.

We hoped they'd act quickly.

I'd hold flash deals twice a week, which generated scarcity and boosted sales.

The store had a few thousand Instagram followers when I started flash deals.

Each flash sale item would make $400 to $600.

$400 x 3= $1,200

That's $1,200 on social media!

Twice a week, you'll make roughly $10K a month from Instagram.

$1,200/day x 8 events/month=$9,600

Flash sales did great.

We held weekly flash deals and sent social media and email reminders. That’s about it!

How are mystery boxes put together?

All you do is package a box of store products and sell it as a mystery box on TikTok or retail websites.

A $100 mystery box would cost $30.

You're discounting high-value boxes.

This is a clever approach to get rid of excess inventory and makes customers happy.

It worked!

Be the Buyer Days, flash deals, and mystery boxes helped build my company without paid advertisements.

All companies can use customer event marketing. Involving customers and providing an engaging environment can boost sales.

Try it!

No wonder brands use Twitter to reach their audience. 53% of Twitter users buy new products first. 

Twitter growth does more than make your brand look popular. It helps clients trust your business. It boosts your industry standing. It shows clients, prospects, and even competitors you mean business.

How can you naturally gain Twitter followers?

• Share useful information

• Post visual content

• Tweet consistently

• Socialize

• Spread your @name everywhere.

• Use existing customers

• Promote followers

Share useful information

Twitter users join conversations and consume material. To build your followers, make sure your material appeals to them and gives value, whether it's sales, product lessons, or current events.

Use Twitter Analytics to learn what your audience likes.

Explore popular topics by utilizing relevant keywords and hashtags. Check out this post on how to use Twitter trends.

Post visual content

97% of Twitter users focus on images, so incorporating media can help your Tweets stand out. Visuals and videos make content more engaging and memorable.

Tweet often

Your audience should expect regular content updates. Plan your ideas and tweet during crucial seasons and events with a content calendar.

Socialize

Twitter connects people. Do more than tweet. Follow industry leaders. Retweet influencers, engage with thought leaders, and reply to mentions and customers to boost engagement.

Micro-influencers can promote your brand or items. They can help you gain new audiences' trust.

Spread your @name everywhere.

Maximize brand exposure. Add a follow button on your website, link to it in your email signature and newsletters, and promote it on business cards or menus.

Use existing customers

Emails can be used to find existing Twitter clients. Upload your email contacts and follow your customers on Twitter to start a dialogue.

Promote followers

Run a followers campaign to boost your organic growth. Followers campaigns promote your account to a particular demographic, and you only pay when someone follows you.

Consider short campaigns to enhance momentum or an always-on campaign to gain new followers.

Increasing your brand's Twitter followers takes effort and experimentation, but the payback is huge.

👋 Follow me on twitter

This resulted to obimy's new audience.

Hi! obimy's official account. Here, we'll teach app developers and marketers. In 2022, our downloads increased dramatically, so we'll share what we learned.

obimy is what we call a ‘senseger’. It's a new method to communicate digitally. Instead of text, obimy users connect through senses and moods. Feeling playful? Flirt with your partner, pat a pal, or dump water on a classmate. Each feeling is an interactive animation with vibration. It's a wordless app. App Store and Google Play have obimy.

We had 20,000 users in 2022. Two to five thousand of them opened the app monthly. Our DAU metric was 500.

We have 6 million users after 6 months. 500,000 individuals use obimy daily. obimy was the top lifestyle app this week in the U.S.

And TikTok helped.

TikTok fuels obimys' growth. It's why our app exploded. How and what did we learn? Our Head of Marketing, Anastasia Avramenko, knows.

our actions prior to TikTok

We wanted to achieve product-market fit through organic expansion. Quora, Reddit, Facebook Groups, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Apple Search Ads, and social media activity were tested. Nothing worked. Our CPI was sometimes $4, so unit economics didn't work.

We studied our markets and made audience hypotheses. We promoted our goods and studied our audience through social media quizzes. Our target demographic was Americans in long-distance relationships. I designed quizzes like Test the Strength of Your Relationship to better understand the user base. After each quiz, we encouraged users to download the app to enhance their connection and bridge the distance.

We got 1,000 responses for $50. This helped us comprehend the audience's grief and coping strategies (aka our rivals). I based action items on answers given. If you can't embrace a loved one, use obimy.

We also tried Facebook and Google ads. From the start, we knew it wouldn't work.

We were desperate to discover a free way to get more users.

Our journey to TikTok

TikTok is a great venue for emerging creators. It also helped reach people. Before obimy, my TikTok videos garnered 12 million views without sponsored promotion.

We had to act. TikTok was required.

I wasn't a TikTok user before obimy. Initially, I uploaded promotional content. Call-to-actions appear strange next to dancing challenges and my money don't jiggle jiggle. I learned TikTok. Watch TikTok for an hour was on my to-do list. What a dream job!

Our most popular movies presented the app alongside text outlining what it does. We started promoting them in Europe and the U.S. and got a 16% CTR and $1 CPI, an improvement over our previous efforts.

Somehow, we were expanding. So we came up with new hypotheses, calls to action, and content.

Four months passed, yet we saw no organic growth.

Russia attacked Ukraine.

Our app aimed to be helpful. For now, we're focusing on our Ukrainian audience. I posted sloppy TikToks illustrating how obimy can help during shelling or air raids.

In two hours, Kostia sent me our visitor count. Our servers crashed.

Initially, we had several thousand daily users. Over 200,000 users joined obimy in a week. They posted obimy videos on TikTok, drawing additional users. We've also resumed U.S. video promotion.

We gained 2,000,000 new members with less than $100 in ads, primarily in the U.S. and U.K.

TikTok helped.

The figures

We were confident we'd chosen the ideal tool for organic growth.

• Over 45 million people have viewed our own videos plus a ton of user-generated content with the hashtag #obimy.

• About 375 thousand people have liked all of our individual videos.

• The number of downloads and the virality of videos are directly correlated.

Where are we now?

TikTok fuels our organic growth. We post 56 videos every week and pay to promote viral content.

We use UGC and influencers. We worked with Universal Music Italy on Eurovision. They offered to promote us through their million-follower TikTok influencers. We thought their followers would improve our audience, but it didn't matter. Integration didn't help us. Users that share obimy videos with their followers can reach several million views, which affects our download rate.

After the dust settled, we determined our key audience was 13-18-year-olds. They want to express themselves, but it's sometimes difficult. We're searching for methods to better engage with our users. We opened a Discord server to discuss anime and video games and gather app and content feedback.

TikTok helps us test product updates and hypotheses. Example: I once thought we might raise MAU by prompting users to add strangers as friends. Instead of asking our team to construct it, I made a TikTok urging users to share invite URLs. Users share links under every video we upload, embracing people worldwide.

Key lessons

Don't direct-sell. TikTok isn't for Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube promo videos. Conventional advertisements don't fit. Most users will swipe up and watch humorous doggos.

More product videos are better. Finally. So what?

Encourage interaction. Tagging friends in comments or making videos with the app promotes it more than any marketing spend.

Be odd and risqué. A user mistakenly sent a French kiss to their mom in one of our most popular videos.

TikTok helps test hypotheses and build your user base. It also helps develop apps. In our upcoming blog, we'll guide you through obimy's design revisions based on TikTok. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.

Dark Web activity? Is it as horrible as they say?

We peruse our phones for hours. Internet has improved our worldview.

However, the world's harshest realities remain buried on the internet and unattainable by everyone.

Browsers cannot access the Dark Web. Browse it with high-security authentication and exclusive access. There are compelling reasons to avoid the dark web at all costs.

1. The Dark Web and I

Darius wrote My Dark Web Story on reddit two years ago. The user claimed to have shared his dark web experience. DaRealEddyYT wanted to surf the dark web after hearing several stories.

He curiously downloaded Tor Browser, which provides anonymity and security.

In the Dark Room, bound

As Darius logged in, a text popped up: “Want a surprise? Click on this link.”

The link opened to a room with a chair. Only one light source illuminated the room. The chair held a female tied.

As the screen read "Let the game begin," a man entered the room and was paid in bitcoins to torment the girl.

The man dragged and tortured the woman.

A danger to safety

Leaving so soon, Darius, disgusted Darius tried to leave the stream. The anonymous user then sent Darius his personal information, including his address, which frightened him because he didn't know Tor was insecure.

After deleting the app, his phone camera was compromised.

He also stated that he left his residence and returned to find it unlocked and a letter saying, Thought we wouldn't find you? Reddit never updated the story.

The story may have been a fake, but a much scarier true story about the dark side of the internet exists.

2. The Silk Road Market

The dark web is restricted for a reason. The dark web has everything illicit imaginable. It's awful central.

The dark web has everything, from organ sales to drug trafficking to money laundering to human trafficking. Illegal drugs, pirated software, credit card, bank, and personal information can be found in seconds.

The dark web has reserved websites like Google. The Silk Road Website, which operated from 2011 to 2013, was a leading digital black market.

The FBI grew obsessed with site founder and processor Ross William Ulbricht.

The site became a criminal organization as money laundering and black enterprises increased. Bitcoin was utilized for credit card payment.

The FBI was close to arresting the site's administrator. Ross was detained after the agency closed Silk Road in 2013.

Two years later, in 2015, he was convicted and sentenced to two consecutive life terms and forty years. He appealed in 2016 but was denied, thus he is currently serving time.

The hefty sentence was for more than running a black marketing site. He was also convicted of murder-for-hire, earning about $730,000 in a short time.

3. Person-buying auctions

Bidding on individuals is another weird internet activity. After a Milan photo shoot, 20-year-old British model Chloe Ayling was kidnapped.

An ad agency in Milan made a bogus offer to shoot with the mother of a two-year-old boy. Four men gave her anesthetic and put her in a duffel bag when she arrived.

She was held captive for several days, and her images and $300,000 price were posted on the dark web. Black Death Trafficking Group kidnapped her to sell her for sex.

She was told two black death foot warriors abducted her. The captors released her when they found she was a mother because mothers were less desirable to sex slave buyers.

In July 2018, Lukasz Pawel Herba was arrested and sentenced to 16 years and nine months in prison. Being a young mother saved Chloe from creepy bidding.

However, it exceeds expectations of how many more would be in such danger daily without their knowledge.

4. Organ sales

Many are unaware of dark web organ sales. Patients who cannot acquire organs often turn to dark web brokers.

Brokers handle all transactions between donors and customers.

Bitcoins are used for dark web transactions, and the Tor server permits personal data on the web.

The WHO reports approximately 10,000 unlawful organ transplants annually. The black web sells kidneys, hearts, even eyes.

To protect our lives and privacy, we should manage our curiosity and never look up dangerous stuff.

While it's fascinating and appealing to know what's going on in the world we don't know about, it's best to prioritize our well-being because one never knows how bad it might get.

Sources

Reddit.com

The Daily Beast

PYMNTS

Commons.erau.edu

The Sun

Investopedia

Startup Talky

They depend heavily on open source..

Discord users send billions of messages daily. Users wish to search these messages. How do we index these to search by message keywords?

Let’s find out.

1. Discord utilizes Elasticsearch. Elasticsearch is a free, open search engine for textual, numerical, geographical, structured, and unstructured data. Apache Lucene powers Elasticsearch.
   

2. How does elastic search store data? It stores it as numerous key-value pairs in JSON documents.
   

3. How does elastic search index? Elastic search's index is inverted. An inverted index lists every unique word in every page and where it appears.

4. Elasticsearch indexes documents and generates an inverted index to make data searchable in near real-time. The index API adds or updates JSON documents in a given index.

1. Let's examine how discord uses Elastic Search. Elasticsearch prefers bulk indexing. Discord couldn't index real-time messages. You can't search posted messages. You want outdated messages.

6. Let's check what bulk indexing requires.
1. A temporary queue for incoming communications.
2. Indexer workers that index messages into elastic search.

1. Discord's queue is Celery. The queue is open-source. Elastic search won't run on a single server. It's clustered. Where should a message go? Where?

8. A shard allocator decides where to put the message. Nevertheless. Shattered? A shard combines elastic search and index on. So, these two form a shard which is used as a unit by discord. The elastic search itself has some shards. But this is different, so don’t get confused.

1. Now, the final part is service discovery — to discover the elastic search clusters and the hosts within that cluster. This, they do with the help of etcd another open source tool.
   

A great thing to notice here is that discord relies heavily on open source systems and their base implementations which is very different from a lot of other products.

Its not a fuc*ing fad.

It's not about boring monkeys or photos as nfts; that's just what's been pushed up and made a lot of money. The technology underlying those ridiculous nft photos will one day prove your house and automobile ownership and tell you where your banana came from. Are you ready for web3? Soar!

People don't realize that absolutely anything can and will be part of the blockchain and smart contracts, making them even better. I'll tell you a secret: it will and is happening.

Why?

Why is something blockchain-based a good idea? So let’s speak about cars!

So a new Tesla car is manufactured, and when you buy it, it is bound to an NFT on the blockchain that proves current ownership. The NFT in the smart contract can contain some data about the current owner of the car and some data about the car's status, such as the number of miles driven, the car's overall quality, and so on, as well as a reference to a digital document bound to the NFT that has more information.

Now, 40 years from now, if you want to buy a used automobile, you can scan the car's serial number to view its NFT and see all of its history, each owner, how long they owned it, if it had damages, and more. Since it's on the blockchain, it can't be tampered with.

When you're ready to buy it, the owner posts it for sale, you buy it, and it's sent to your wallet. 5 seconds to change owner, 100% safe and verifiable.

Incorporate insurance logic into the car contract. If you crashed, your car's smart contract would take money from your insurance contract and deposit it in an insurance company wallet.

It's limitless. Your funds may be used by investors to provide insurance as they profit from everyone's investments.

Or suppose all car owners in a country deposit a fixed amount of money into an insurance smart contract that promises if something happens, we'll take care of it. It could be as little as $100-$500 per year, and in a country with 10 million people, maybe 3 million would do that, which would be $500 000 000 in that smart contract and it would be used by the insurance company to invest in assets or take a cut, literally endless possibilities.

Instead of $300 per month, you may pay $300 per year to be covered if something goes wrong, and that may include multiple insurances.

What about your grocery store banana, though?

Yes that too.

You can scan a banana to learn its complete history. You'll be able to see where it was cultivated, every middleman in the supply chain, and hopefully the banana's quality, farm, and ingredients used.

If you want locally decent bananas, you can only buy them, offering you transparency and options. I believe it will be an online marketplace where farmers publish their farms and products for trust and transparency. You might also buy bananas from the farmer.

And? Food security to finish the article. If an order of bananas included a toxin, you could easily track down every banana from the same origin and supply chain and uncover the root cause. This is a tremendous thing that will save lives and have a big impact; did you realize that 1 in 6 Americans gets poisoned by food every year? This could lower the number.

To summarize:

Smart contracts can issue nfts as proof of ownership and include functionality.