Software To Prune Inactive Instagram Followers?

It’s a problem many Instagram marketers get into. You build up a clients account and you get to 10,000 followers, but the problem is, you’re only getting a couple hundred likes. Your engagement is way down now due to Instagram’s new newsfeed algorithm that tries to determine the more relevant media to show. Now your account just looks silly due to the low engagement. Even though your 10,000 followers are real people, few of them ever like and some of them don’t even use Instagram anymore.

Additionally, some people purchase Instagram followers and regret it down the road.

The question is, how do I delete Instagram followers?

So I’ve decided there must be some sort of option out there that does the following:

  • Goes through your past dozen or two dozen photos and gets the usernames of the likers. How far you scrape depends on the activity of your account. Personally, I post about 3 times monthly, so a dozen of my most recent photos would be enough.
  • Then, it merges the usernames into a file, removes the duplicates and then you add in all of your followings (friends, famly, etc) which would be another couple hundred people. We will call this, our whitelist.
  • Next we build a second list by scraping all of our followers.
  • Then, we take the list of followers, subtract the whitelist and now we have a list of people to unfollow.
  • Lastly, we simply block and then unblock the people in that list, which will remove them as a follower.

For the time being, I’m going to code a script to do this, but if anyone runs into a similar problem where they want to get rid of inactive Instagram followers, don’t hesitate to reach out in case I make a commercial version or service.

For Those Of You Still Not Using Rank Trackers

There are many of you who are using rank trackers already, so this post isn’t really for you. However, there are a few who have not yet jumped onto a tracking service.

I’m not going to recommend a service in this post, just because this is not supposed to be an affiliate or promotional post, but rather an informational post.

You have so many keywords, URLs and days. Multiply all these out and you have thousands of data points and it’s hard to visualize what works and what doesn’t without a rank tracker.

With a rank tracker, you can see which keywords are improving, which are not, which are steady and how long they’ve been like this. Day to day, it feels like some of my keywords never move, but then I realize I’m at #3, when I was #120 for a highly competitive term just 12 months ago.

If you don’t have a rank tracker yet, you’re causing yourself stress and disorganization and you should jump on one immediately. There are many affordable options on the market and some even have a free tier, or trial.

4 Viral YouTube Channels That Explain Living In Canada

While this isn’t a marketing blog post, this is a post that heavily describes what it’s like in Canada, for the many of those who ask me. Here are 3 viral YouTube channels that explain where I grew up in Canada.

1. Letterkenny

Letterkenny Problems: "Hockey Players"

Their small YouTube channel was eventually picked up by CraveTV and here’s one of the scenes:

Letterkenny | Cold Open

2. Ray From Rodney

better than evil knievel! it's ray!

3. b richmond

OUT FOR A RIP - OFFICIAL VIDEO

4. Larry Enticer

LARRY ENTICER SENDS IT

What SEO Metrics Really Matter?

I get the question all the time.

“Okay Josh, so what metrics do you really care about?”

None. Metrics are an automated solution to something that cannot be automated. It tries to detect the link “value” of a domain, without a human actually having to check it.

Domain authority is very similar to citation flow. This can be inflated by hitting your tier 1 links with a big amount of backlinks, in a “buffer” strategy.

Trust flow is based on a graph system which depends on 2 major factors, from what I can see. Those factors are, how close in the “web graph” you are to an authority website. From what I’ve researched and read, Majestic set a high trust flow value manually to some high authority websites, like ~50 domains. The trust flow trickles from those ~50 domains and somehow reached you. If you’re not in that graph, then you won’t get much of a trust flow. It’s a good system but it has it’s flaws. The second factor is simply the outbound links. If a page has 25 outbound links, then the trust flow will be diluted, which is exactly how link juice works over at Google. If it’s just 1 link, then it will push a lot through, which is why I based my domain services around authority links. It’s not proportionally divided in a linear distribution, but there is correlation.

Ahrefs also has a metric, and the distribution for that is often quite high in the lower part of the distribution. A domain with a domain authority of 20 might have a rating of 40+ on Ahrefs.

“So, when should I use metrics?”

When you’re sorting through massive amounts of domains and cannot justify manually checking all the domains. If you have 10 domains to check, you’re much better doing a manual inspection. If you’re sorting through 75,000 domains, then you will need metrics of some sort to help you get through them.

At the end of the day, metrics are an automated solution to an analysis that shouldn’t be automated, but rather checked manually.

What Time Of Day Do Domains Expire?

I’ve been pondering what time of day domains actually drop. So I decided to run a study against 10,000 expiring domains. I set the program up the day before, loaded a list of 10,000 domains that were set to expire the next day. The script kept “breaking.” I dug into why it stopped/crashed shortly after 2 hours after I went to bed. So then I realized the insane restrictions on domain APIs. So I scaled down to check 1,000 domains, and again, another day of mixed and inaccurate results because of API issues.

So I just got impatient and tried about 35 domains to see if I could get a result. I then realized that wasn’t enough, so I did it yet again, on 75 days. About a week later after starting, I finally have some data. All domains were checked within every 70 seconds, so this is correct almost to the minute. There were 3 extensions I primarily checked. Those being com, net and org. I also checked one or two from cc and tv that I’ll also show.

While there’s not much data here, I think there’s enough to draw some conclusions. If there’s interest, I’ll try again with a larger data set. If you’re interested in that, please write in the comments.

The time stamps below are EST (-5), not EDT (-4), even though as I write this article we are in daylight savings time. My server was in EST.

com domains

Expiry times for .com domains.

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I Donated My Hair And Raised $2,955 For The Canadian Cancer Society

josh-macdonald-charity-donation

Before and after I chopped my hair off.

I didn’t do much promotion by any means, but for those of you that haven’t heard, I’ve been growing my hair for 14 months to donate to the Canadian Cancer Society to help develop programs that help those living with cancer.

My hair will now be used to make a wig for a cancer patient.

Here is/was the online donation page: http://convio.cancer.ca/site/TR/Thirdpartyevent/IFE_ON_CommunityPartnerships_?px=6953816&pg=personal&fr_id=22113

Donation 100% progress

I collected $1,725 online, plus $210 in cash donations and then I had some family match $1000 in donations.

I’d like to thank everyone who donated.

Lastly, since this is a business blog, I should mention my professional experience with long hair. It wasn’t an easy past few months working with long hair. Many people discriminate and think I’m unprofessional with long hair. So much so, that I decided to hold the photoshoot for my new book off until I cut my hair. It’s unfortunate but at least it was all for a good cause!

How Finding Expired Domains Works In 2016

For all the noob search engine marketers out there who think the following cold, hard truth is a lie because other domain sellers say it is, I really hope they rip you off and teach you a lesson. There are way too many noobs out there that don’t know what they’re buying.

Back in 2014, you could simply run a crawl and find a bunch of domains that have been expired months or years ago with great links pointing to them. However, everyone has picked up on the power of PBNs and the hunt is becoming competitive. Any domain that has been dropped for over 6 hours is generally going to be of lower quality because there’s reasons the rest of us didn’t take it. All the good stuff is recently dropped, as in just minutes or hours ago. We’ve already checked the stuff that dropped years ago by now.

In 2016, we face the power of automation. Many big “vacuums” are sucking up all the good domain names and you’ll know the if you’ve ever picked through who owns large groups of ICANN registrars.

The large majority of expired domains available are either not powerful enough or have been used in spam before, like a Chinese or pharmaceutical archive history.

If you’re hunting for a specific niche, you have to understand that there is probably nothing available in your niche at the time. You have to catch them as you see them come available, when the drop each day.

I personally keep an eye on about 1,200,000 amazing domains, and when they drop, which about 45,000 have in the past 2 years, I get my buyers to register them. If I were to register all 45,000 so I can cover every niche, I’d have an annual cost of $450,000 which is just not worth it when the average buyer hardly has a couple hundred dollars to spend.

Instead, when people want to get their own domains, or when they want to buy them, they have to watch for them to drop. It’s a running process. There is no money in keeping a running “stock” unless you’re in the $300+ per domain bracket.

How The Integrator and Visionary Combination Has Helped Me Succeed Further

Photo by Amazon.com

Rocket Fuel is a book wrote by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters, and was recommended to me by my friend, Thomas Smale. While the book seems to target medium sized business owners and larger, I was able to apply what was taught in it to my own business doings.

As some of you know, I generally build niche software that sell in the 5 to 6 ARR range. What I learned in this book helped me solidify why some of my past businesses have thrived and others have failed.

The book explains how visionaries are generally the creative type. They are generally the founder of the company and they have their pros and their cons. Integrators are the guys that make it happen. They work directly with the leadership team in a medium sized business or larger. They have different tasks and are each an important asset to the company. The book also says that visionaries are 4x more common than integrators. I recommend you pick up this book to learn more, but first, let me explain how I interpreted the book and used it in my life.

As I said earlier, I build niche software. I’m a programmer, but I’m also a sales man. I can do both, quite well, but this book helped me realize that it’s almost impossible to wear both hats in the same company.

My take on the book is, although I am capable of doing either job, it works best if I choose 1 role, and hire the other role out. I call this hired role, my integrator. Although this book teaches in a way that your integrator has to always have someone under it, in my lean products, there isn’t. This recently has worked fantastic for me with my latest software, SerpClix. I hired a programmer, and instead of writing the code, which I could, I decided to work purely on vision and sales, and paid a programmer to do it. Occasionally, I even take on freelance programming gigs, where I’m paid 3x that of what I pay my programmer that works under me.

This is working quite well. I’m fully focused on marketing the software, using the customer feedback for vision and I simply report bugs and features to the programmer, almost like someone who doesn’t know how to code would. I’m able to make educated technical decisions on directions for the software, when needed, but I generally don’t get too involved in development.

This strategy has given me more time, made it easier to bring my product goals to life, gave me more pressure to never put this project on the “back burner” aka give up and allows me to focus on bringing in the sales. Being as young as I am, it’s hard to stay concentrated as there’s always another “shiny object” that looks more fun to execute however the method outlined in this book has opened my eyes to my strengths and weaknesses as a visionary and make me realize that I need an integrator on my projects.

Josh MacDonald Certified Content Writers

I’ve worked with dozens of content providers. I have freelancers on Upwork who are each paid ~$75 per week to keep my sites up to date, and I have freelancers from Warrior Forum, Black Hat World, and Digital Point who do the rest of all of my content needs.

I generally break down my content into 3 tiers.

The first tier is the $5+ per 100 words price-point. This involves sales copy, viral content, and anything you know will be read by thousands of people in a specific industry. This content is where your brand is on the line and you need everything to be perfect and highly researched. These writers are generally full-time writers and can write whatever you need. They’ll give WSJ’s writers a run for their money.

The second tier is around the $3 per 100 words price-point. This involves money site content, but it’s not necessarily something you would find a huge amount of reader value in. You might get a few shares on the article, and the content is highly readable because they’re native English, but these writers are generally part-time writer who don’t have any education on writing.

The third tier is around the $1 per 100 words price-point. This content is readable and can be used as filler content. This content often appears on private blog networks and should only ever be used on money sites where this content won’t be read.

This is my list of writers I’ve used. I will be updating this list regularly. If you’re a writer and would like to get on this list, you must have a sales thread on Black Hat world or Warrior Forum.

Tier 1:

Jared255/Boston Hype: Jared has been my go-to provider in the $5+ per 100 words range. If you need content for your homepage of your money site or you need a guest post that is well researched and carefully crafted around a target website, Jared is your go to guy.

Tier 2:

Lemon: I’ve fired a lot of my writers in this range recently, and so I tried a couple new providers to replace this tier. Fortunately, I tried out Lemon’s service. He’s been around the forum for a while, but just started offering his services. If you are looking for a writer in the EST timezone, and you want a TAT with just a few hours, get ahold of him!

Tier 3:

redstone.1337: At $3 per 500 words, I really didn’t expect much. However, they followed my lengthy instructions to build the PBN content that I need. It’s decent PBN content for a dirt-cheap price. I am using this for some client sites, to rank for some really long tail, high OCI keywords. So technically this is on the money site, but on a deep inner page, where the user will be prompted to exit to a landing page.

Services I’ve tried and won’t use again:

These services are not bad. Some are just services that I have used and just won’t use again, neutrally. 

TextBoss: Okay service all around, but we got into some heated arguments in the past, so I’m avoiding this service for now. I’ve also been told a similar story from friends who ordered from him.

flc735: I have zero patience for long response times and ignored emails. He delivered an article after ignoring 2 emails, by then I already had a new writer. It was a big argument, and he then threatened to shit list me if I don’t pay for the late article that I no longer need. So I paid. Won’t be using again.

iPresence Business Solutions: Working with these guys is like working with the government. It’s marked up, so you don’t get what you pay for. They don’t have a BST thread, so they are not accountable to their work. A number of people such as him and him have had nasty experiences with him.

FuryKyle: I ordered an article back near the start of the year. It took 7 days or so to fulfill. I just can’t deal with these long TATs.

Blue World/MartysW0RLD: Probably some of the worst customer service. I paid for 24 TAT, their order form broke and they have no interest in fixing the problem. Screenshot of conversation here. More info on page 9 of the thread.

priyankanx: I tried this service for my tier 3 content and it was okay. Few mistakes but he offered to correct them and went offline.

keywordspot: This guy just can’t get the content right and follow the instructions. He messed up the first article, and offered to replacement, to only have the replacement article have the exact same issues reported in the first article. Waste of time.

Long, Keyword Injected Titles Still Work In 2016

Now, I’m thinking of doing a big data case study on this, just to confirm my claims here at scale. Tonight I was browsing some local SEO competition and what I found interesting was how many local businesses rank with low domain authority and link juice, purely due to stuffed keywords.

There’s a point where backlinks and link profile can only do so much, then it comes down to onsite factors. The results with the heavier backlink profile and the white hat on site SEO were sitting on page 2-4, while the keyword stuffers sit high on page 1.

Take a look at these search results. Notice the results that are local businesses, and then check the length of their titles. You’ll notice that out of 6 local businesses, 4 of them have titles that are too long because they inject their titles with keywords.

search engine results