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Recently several students asked me about the best free photo stocks and online editing tools. Here you can see my short list of the best free photo stock sites. Take into account, however, that sometimes you may be asked to mention the author and that there are different permissions in different sites. 1. Unsplash Great photo tool, thousands of pictures and really good search options!  2. Pexels Pexels is an aggregator of free photo stocks, so it has a really good database and will bring you many different results.  3. StockSnap Another great resource. Cons: some of the photos you can easily find elsewhere. They are under Creative Commons though!  4. Burst (by Shopify) This site was created by Shopify and they have both CC pictures and those licensed by Shopify. A big pro is that you can find some gems there that are not available anywhere else!  5. Pixabay One of the biggest sites for sharing pictures! You can find tons of free photos in there.  When you are looking for a specific picture, your safest best is to go to all 5 of them, review the licences, choose the image you like the most with the licence you need and voilá, you can enjoy your free photo!
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The cliche phrase of "Picture speaks louder than words" had long ago become a well known fact, backed up by metrics, in terms of marketing results. While we got used to the use of pictures to grab attention, connect and get remembered, a video has been slowly entering the market, widely rejected by many as being connected to higher costs, complexity and low revenue. Well, if you keep thinking that way due to television commercials, Youtube competition (300 hours of video being uploaded per minute) or others, it's time to abandon the prejudice and get the most of video marketing. 
 Don't expect your video to have thousands of views. It will keep gaining impact even if it doesn't go "viral" - as long as you haven't made a mistake of designing it to do so, which is when it may become completely disconnected from your brand and have the opposite effect.
There is an important Google Analytics feature that helps us understand how multiple channels often work together to drive the macro conversions, in the process of collecting and going through multiple micro conversions, or little steps in the customer journey. Now, more about default attribution: in Analytics there are many different ways to assign this: 1) Last interaction: attributes 100% of the value of given conversion in the last channel. Imagine that the user first clicked a search ad, than a display one but finally converted from another one in mobile. In this model all the value will be attributed for the last channel. 2) Last non-direct click: only good if your funnel is NOT a multi-channel one. 3) Last Adwords click: will attribute the conversion, as you may expect, on the last ad in Adwords. Can be an option if you are evaluating different campaigns and want to chose the most effective one, since it ignores the additional data in the journey. 4) First interation: you will see that 100% is attributed on the very first click. I personally don't recommend this setup, unless you're new to Adwords (to give an example) and need some quick and potentially useful insights. 5) Linear: will take into account each and every channel in the cycle. 6) Time decay: Good one with timely offers. This is based on exponential decay (sounds tough, but you'll soon realise that is not like that at all) - the model has a lifetime of 30 days and will measure in a way the touchpoints closest to conversion giving them different credit (1/2 if less than 7 days, 1/4 if less than 14, etc.). 7) Positions: which is a mix of last and first interaction. Helps you to split the percentage of credit between them. Although the most common one is 40-40-20, I recommend setting it up to 30-30-40. I will explain later on why. Once we set up the attibution models, we can compare them in GA in Model Comparison Tool. Awesome, isn't it? It's as easy as setting up a model (let's say, first interaction first) to see the Conversion Value and then set up other models to compare the results. The key is in experiments, and those are going to depend completely on your business. Think about it: if what you sell is a Master Degree or MBA, for example, for a top tier business school, your goal is to generate leads. The path towards quality leads is long and complicated though, since you need to hit the right user (with a high probability of having all the requirements met in order to be admitted) and those are going to go through a long journey in order to verify what school they want and what's worth their money. Attributing 100% to first click in this case would be unwise, since the average visits and navigation not only though your site but also different channels is going to be much longer. What is an average then in time and clicks? It depends, but the users may spend as much as 6 months and as many as 250 hours navigating in order to make this decisions. You want to know which blog entry is the strongest one towards the conversion and which are the sites the users visit before it (if its Finantial Times, you may want to boost your rankings ;)).  The thing is going to be different if you have an e-commerce that sells cards or small presents. The average time spend on a decision making process in which card to use is going to me much shorter (VERY much) and you can easily attribute 50% on your last interaction towards the conversion.
The best thing you can do once you have insights and tested your business is a custom attribution model. This is a specific model for your and only your business (how great is this?). To do this quicly in your GA, you Create a new custom model, enter the name, use the baseline as a starting point (don't worry, this is only a starting point based on which the rules will be applied), save an apply. That's it! Few days ago I ran out into this wonderful ebook Gregory Ciotti wrote on 10 Ways to Convert Customers Using Psychology, and I not only found it insightful, bus was also able to remember, almost at once, successful campaigns that were run by well known companies using these principles. Since not all of them are described in the book, I will give you an essence here, although I strongly recommend reading it when you have a bit of free time. It is totally worth it. 1) Set the minimum: "Would you like to donate?" vs "Would you like to donate? Every little will help". Apparently no difference, right? Wrong! According to the research, people were twice more likely to donate when the minimum was set. How can we apply it for online marketing? Easily: by setting the minimum or just "Every little helps". Wikipedia knows something about it.  2) Label: Or maybe I should say - label well. Research has shown that, generally speaking, people not only like being labeled but also are more likely to take action if they feel grouped and connected. So in the research the group randomly chosen was told that they were "politically active" - their turnout was 15% superior to the control group. Why? Well, it is the question of being consistent. People will tend to it even if it is artificial. Remember about it when setting up Gold and Platinum customers. Especially if it is a reward. Or is it not?  3) Understand how your customer buys: from neurological point of view, we buy till it hurts. There are different types of customers that are having their hurting point in different ranges. So we have the three types:  How to sell to all of them? For example, by reframing the value of the product. 1200 EUR is a huge amount, but 99EUR/month is much better. Looks better. Converts better. Actually, a "For as little as 3.3EUR/day" will do the job as well. Also, the life expectancy of the product shall be highlighted in order to sell effectively to the tightwads. 99/month yearly for something that will last 10 years for sure? Why not? Reducing the number of individual purchases helps with the "pain" as well. We would rather buy a pack than multiple products, each with the individual price, cause the latter will multiply the pain. We can see how it works online with the plans versus micropayments (technically, micropayment for each service you might want seems better, yet somehow it is always in a pac with others...). 4) Admit your faults: The results of research on Predicting Stock Prices from Organizational Attributions has shown that investors were more likely to trust companies that admitted they made some bad strategis decisions (and they can do better) than these that prefered to state that there were external forces responsible for the bad output (not our fault). There is a potential in highlighting the strengths in this one which I would not miss. 5) Use urgency the smart way: If you would think that creating urgency is old and obsolete... well, you would be wrong. Scarcity is still the best influence, but it is important to give clear follow up instructions. Groupon in Spain knows how to deal with this one perfectly:  6) Know the power of instant gratification, and use it: apparently instant gratification is so powerful that being able to deal with it is considered as one of the keys to success. Customers need to be rewarded for doing business with you and fast. Actually, according to MRI studies, apparently the cortex is very active when waiting for something, and mid-brain lights up when receives something at once. So put the "instantly" into your selling dictionary instead of "free" and be rewarded. 7) If you want to make a cult, have an enemy: Associating with certain ideas while distancing from others is a good way of creating the feeling. Studies have shown that grouped people tend to have stronger feelings toward the aim and also, towards the "others". By saying what your brand is and what isn't, identifying the public and the outsiders, creating the scheme. So...wait a minute..are all these ones vs anothers commercials done on purpose? Well...  8) Include the ideals: People have to think that your brand stands for something, something they can relate to and feel connected with. People are not as loyal to companies as to what they stand for. So, communicate clearly what are the core values and philosophy of the company.
9) Be an advocate of the devil: Explain people why the product is not what someone may think before they even ask. When people have their decisions questioned, they tend to stand up for them even more. 10) Surprise them: Have you ever found 10 cents on the street? What about 1 EUR? Or 10? It is not the actual amount, but the surprise factor that works here. Having people on their toes and keep them surprised is a great deal. It is not about the value itself, but the fact that something positive happened to you. Received a sample of perfume in a local store? Bet you shall come back there when willing to buy.  What is the basic, main difference between growth hacker and a marketer? Well, the principal aim of the first one is growth. At the early stage of a startup you don't need a team leader to manager big marketing team or a professional for successful business communication. You need a specialist whose main focus is going to be on growth: user acquisition and optimization. Growth hackers see only, and only, this. Sometimes it can be tricky, but on the early stage, this is what companies are looking for. Not a product any more? Internet has changed the way we see the product. It came from strictly physical good to pieces of software the customer can’t hold. It is the product itself that plays the main role in its adoption, and understanding this fact requires a completely new way of thinking implemented in managing these strategies. In Linkedin, the user wants to have all his contacts in one place, wants to make the networks as huge as possible to get recommendations and aptitude validations. He can get additional storage upon inviting a friend in Dropbox, and 10 EUR off the next dinner if recommends Just-Eat to a friend. Product placement The exact time and place is important. The product needs to be placed where can be potentially seen as best. Mastering SEO can help, a lot, in being widely seen in a XXI century highways: the search engines (I will be writing a lot about good SEO strategies). New online infrastructures are creating incredible potential for product placement and distribution, Internet has changed the way we see the product. It came from strictly physical good to pieces of software the customer can’t hold. It is the product itself that plays the main role in its adoption, and understanding this fact requires a completely new way of thinking implemented in managing these strategies. In Linkedin, the user wants to have all his contacts in one place, wants to make the networks as huge as possible to get recommendations and aptitude validations. He can get additional storage upon inviting a friend in Dropbox, and 10 EUR off the next dinner if recommends Just-Eat to a friend.  Who is growth hacker then? If I had to make a profile of growth hacker it would be an awesome hybrid of tech awareness, analytics and marketing capabilities in one professional who is creative, innovative, always up to dated and focused on growth. I would also say that it is someone who observes a lot, but then innovates in applied solutions that might, or might not, work. The top example for Growth Hacking is AirBnB’s use of Craigslist in order to automatically post AirBnb’s listings to Craigslist. It was clever and ingenious, since Craigslist provided no API and there had to be some tough reverse engineering applied in order to execute it. The move brought massive traffic and recognition, and although Craig surely wasn’t particularly happy about it and now the integration is no longer possible, it was a great advantage that brought many users to the site. Worked well.  How to do that?
By observation, action and a bit of wit! You don’t have to be a programmer to be a growth hacker, but the understanding of technology is important in the process of envisioning and implementing strategies. Know what good funnel is, how to get customers and analyse every single step in terms of costs and revenue (we’re all StartUps here, we don’t want to spend thousands daily on Adwords. Well, maybe we do want it, but we can’t), know how to generate and try new ideas and has a big support of all the company behind them. This is quite important, since it is not the 1st, nor 2nd, nor 9th idea that will probably work, but rather the 99th. The guts to write ridiculous (or not) ideas, like:
My UX centered soul is shaking, but then again, why not? Not all of these are good and some are very bad, but being in between brilliant and evil is something every growth hacker should have. This is also why it is so important to have similar vision within the company on certain issues. Cutting the wings in here is cutting the potential for growth. And also, as Neil teaches us, many paper cuts can kill the competition, so it is not about one massive attack, but small battles being constantly won and summing up.  I can't believe that there are still Digital Specialists that haven't read Steve Krug's classic "Don't Make me think". Personally I think that if you are to have one, and one only, book on UX, it should be this very one. However, if you don't feel like buying this piece, in this post I gather for you the essence of the book.
"Don't make me think" is Steve Krug's first law of usability. The user is not supposed to think on what to do, where to go or where he was (feeling lost on your site? She is likely to abandon it shorty...). All design should be self-explanatory, focused on a user who scans (yes, we don't think, we scan). People, or, users, also don't make optimal choices, they satisfice. Good design is taking advantage of conventions. This was especially my favourite one, since I remember the times when I thought I could think of the best, innovative and completely awesome design no one has ever seen before (was so proud of it!) with no concerns on how that would influence other people, or, in this case, how would they know what to do on the site.
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