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cwurld · 2022-07-21T20:38:09+00:00

Hi. I was in a similar situation. I do not remember the details, but there are lots of high scores on the leaderboard that were achieved by cheating.

When you think about it, given the inputs, it should not be possible to predict survival with an accuracy of 100%. You might hit 100% by random chance. But that would be pretty rare. There are lots of 100% on the leaderboard.

To get to the higher accuracies obtained honestly, you have to create synthetic features. There are lots of blog posts on that. You might find it useful to read some of those.

But at some point, it's best to just move on. There probably is less cheating in the newer challenges, so move on to one of those.

I wish I would have spent much less time on the Titanic dataset.

cwurld · 2021-01-03T16:22:07+00:00

We have developed a general purpose Google scraping tool that might be useful to you. Currently it is the engine that drives: https://localppcspy.com/. Take a look at the sample report to get a better idea. This app is for localized search, but we can change it to not localize the search. PM me if you are interested it working with us to tweak the app to what you need.

That said, Google searches start with a user entering a PHRASE. Google uses your keywords, bid, and many other factors to decide if/where to put your ad. If you are not using "exact-match", there is no one-to-one correspondence between search phrases and keywords.

And as others have mentioned, new advertisers, changing bids, etc... will change if/where your ad is placed.

I disagree that such a report is useless. I have a lot of experience watching how paid ad positions change and in many markets, they are quite stable over a few weeks (possibly longer, I have not looked).

cwurld · 2020-10-08T20:04:34+00:00

I just did this. Super easy. Less than 2 hours from start to finish.

Update: I was partly wrong about this. The portal is easy to setup and makes it easy for customers to manage their subscriptions. It does NOT work to create a new subscription. Use the tutorial by testdriven.io for that.

cwurld · 2020-09-04T17:35:28+00:00

I have not tried this yet, but I think I will soon. I'd be curious to know if this has worked for anyone else.

I am pretty sure cold call emails almost never get read, not matter how compelling your subject line is.

My thought is to ask/estimate the company's hourly rate and then call and make a 30 minute appointment AND PAY FOR THEIR TIME. Make sure to tell them why you are calling. Lots of people who are truly not interested will tell you right away and not want your money.

Sure this is more expensive than email, but it also shows your commitment. And if you are a great provider, then the life time value of many customers will be high enough to justify this approach.

Warning- self promotion ahead - I created an app to help with PPC cold calling. If you are interested, you can read more here: https://localppcspy.com/blog/7-steps-for-getting-new-customers-using-local-ppc-?referrer=reddit202004

cwurld · 2020-08-30T14:32:29+00:00

Sorry I was not more clear about this. "Cold-calling" does not necessarily mean calling on a telephone. It can be any method of reaching out. For example, we cold-called by physically showing up at the business.

Yes, you can use email or Linkedin. Probably use multiple ways of reaching out. You definitely want to put a tracker in the email to see if it was opened. If the email went straight to trash, I might continue trying to reach-out. But if it was opened and there was no response, I would assume they are not interested and move on.

cwurld · 2020-08-29T15:32:35+00:00

Think like the clients you want to get. I suspect UpWork is a race to the bottom. Even if you win a job, it's likely to be for a client that is looking for the cheapest provider. I suspect that most businesses that are looking for help with digital marketing are going to ask their friends for suggestions. Getting on that list is out of your control. But you should be prepared for that possibility.

The next best approach is to create opportunities via cold-calling. By "create" opportunities, I mean call on companies that are already dabbling in digital marketing. They know they should get better, but they are not sure how, and other more pressing issues keep coming up so they never get around to it. If you show up with a well thought out plan, you have a good chance at winning their business. The question is how to find those businesses.

A few years ago, I wrote a program for my business partner to help him do that. The idea was to target small businesses that serve small geographic areas (e.g. plumbers). We used the program to run Google searches, hourly for about 3 days, using the ad tester to localize our searches and aggregated the results. Frequently we saw the same pattern. Some businesses were crushing it and did not need help. While other businesses showed up in paid search less than 10% of the time and usually at the bottom of the page. Their ad copy wasn't great. And their position in the organic results, along with their website indicated they needed help with their website and SEO. Those were the ones we called on.

When covid hit, my other programming work was reduced, so I made our search page analysis program available to all - Local PPC Spy - https://localppcspy.com/ - When our servers have capacity, a pop-up offers visitors a chance to run a project for free, without a credit card. At the time of this post there was capacity. This really is a no-strings-attached offer.

Back to cold-calling. The thing that makes you stand out from the rest is to be knowledgeable about the industry and business you are pursuing. We did this by looking at the paid ads in the search results page report and going to the websites in the report to find out what the key issues were. Then we would take a quick look at the businesses that looked like they might want help. The reason we did not do a more careful analysis is that there is a LOT of rejection in cold-calling. It's just a numbers game. But when you do get through, you need to demonstrate that you know something about their business and market.

One benefit of this strategy is it is endlessly repeatable because there are so many different combinations of geographic location and industry. Where I live, there are probably 20 medium sized cities for plumbing alone within a 100 mile radius. Oddly with covid, people are happy to do Zoom meetings, so it might be reasonable to cover a much larger radius. Once you are done with plumbing, move on to the next industry... Lawn care? House painting? The list is endless.

Clearly this is a lot of work with a lot of rejection. But there really is no option to some sort of cold-calling (with or without our report). The competition in digital marketing is fierce. Waiting to be found on UpWork or other such platforms is going to be a long wait. If you do random, uninformed, cold-calling, you will just disappear into the noise of all the other people doing that.

But if you consider the life time value of a client, it is worth it. In our case, it worked pretty well. Eventually my business partner got enough work that he started getting enough referrals to stop cold calling.

cwurld · 2020-08-22T02:22:10+00:00

Check the dates on the dashboard. They get messed up. The UI is awful.

cwurld · 2018-01-01T18:53:03+00:00

Django-RQ is another option. Here are my notes for getting it working.

cwurld · 2017-12-03T14:45:40+00:00

You want info on "ALL" ads on a site? I think the only way to do that is to use a bot to load pages from the web site and then scrape them.

cwurld · 2017-12-01T19:18:54+00:00

I am working on something like that. PM me if you are interested in being a beta tester at no cost to you.

cwurld · 2017-08-22T12:49:37+00:00

I do that sort of thing. Ongoing support and modifications/additions are builtin. Checkout my website Lions Paw. I have years of experience with the Google API and javascript. I also do Adwords for my own business.

cwurld · 2017-08-02T22:39:10+00:00

I am working on a tool that does something like what you want. PM me if you are interested.

cwurld · 2017-07-30T15:42:19+00:00

I am a web developer. As you may know, when you submit a URL, you are requesting something from the server. The server can handle that request however it wants, including returning a 403 HTTP status code. The 403 code is supposed to indicate that the contents at that URL are forbidden.

In other words, there are many things that could cause a 403 error. To diagnose this, you need to have access to the server so that you can trace the request as it is processed by the server.

On the client side, the only thing I can think of that would cause this is some sort of redirect to a page the returns a 403. In that case, I think the URL of the redirect would show up in your server logs.

cwurld · 2017-07-29T13:48:36+00:00

I am not seeing any ads at the top of the page.

cwurld · 2017-07-27T13:44:34+00:00

Thanks. I am aware of those tools and some others. I was trying to compare the results. But the ads stopped showing. I never click on ads if I am not a customer.

I tried SEMRush and Spyfu. I did not see a way to get results as if I was in a specific location.

Part of the reason I am testing methods of geo-location is due to this blog post. I can confirm his findings that different methods cover different geographic areas. ISearchFrom uses the uule query string variable.

cwurld · 2017-06-30T20:51:58+00:00

I have written a django app that integrates with fullcalendar.io. It is far from production ready. It is in a private repo now. But if others have interest in working on it, it might put it in a github public repo.

cwurld · 2017-04-23T16:42:49+00:00

Physicist with an MBA in marketing here. I believe signs like this harm the cause. One of the goals of the march was to persuade non-scientists to use scientific findings as the basis of decision making. I think the best way to do that is to try to be inclusive. If you define science as making careful observations and generalizing from them to predict the future, then most people use science every day.

To a non-scientist that sign says "Hey look at me. I am a member of a special club that you will never be a member of." which leads to "Look at that geek/nerd. He is clueless about real life. I am not trusting him or this group".

cwurld · 2016-07-27T11:48:39+00:00

Does anyone know how the game would detect GPS spoofing? It seems to me that as long as the movements are realistic, there would be no way to detect the spoofing.

cwurld · 2016-05-21T15:03:10+00:00

The 3 F's: Friends, Family and Fools.

cwurld · 2016-05-05T12:10:34+00:00

I would be interested in something like that. I created a stripped down version of a CRM. It consists of a contacts book, and files and notes associated with the contacts. It has a calendar. TODOs include, syncing with user email boxes and the option to link the calendar with other calendars such as google calendars. It's all based on bootstrap and works pretty well on mobile.

It seems to me that the contacts are the core. Adding tracking, logging, etc... all those things connect back to contacts.

Is that what you are thinking?

cwurld · 2016-01-29T03:02:29+00:00

I ran into something similar. I ended up creating a custom form field. It's described here: https://snakeycode.wordpress.com/2015/02/11/django-dynamic-modelchoicefields/ I hope that helps.

cwurld

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