TL;DR: Looking for landlord apps/software/processes that will save time and money (particularly time) and that will reduce the irritations associated with being a landlord. Interested in hearing tips, tricks, and suggestions for improvements from other experienced landlords. Have been a landlord for 17 years in the MidWest. ———

Background:

I’m a full-time software engineer in the Midwest. My wife works full time as an executive. We own eight local condos that we rent out, and have been landlords for about 17 years. I’m looking for new ways to streamline/simplify/automate/offload/improve processes we use for rentals.
The average cap rate of our properties based on purchase price is 6%. We can probably expect about 2.5%/year long-term appreciation. Our units are all about 17 years old and located in A-/B+ neighborhoods. Net cash flow is about $55K/yr.
Currently we self-manage pretty much everything. Tools we already use include: - Quicken for income/expense tracking (considering a move to QuickBooks—thoughts?) - TurboTax for tax prep (no accountant) - Apple Pay, Venmo, Cash App for rent collection. Any paper checks are deposited via mobile banking apps. - Zillow Rental manager and RentLinx for advertising and rental applications (considering a move from RentLinx to Postlets. Rentlinx doesn’t always post pictures and prices correctly to the Zillow Suite or Apartments.com-—thoughts?) - Will soon set up Docusign for Lease and HOA form signing and reminders. - Automatic bill pay and ACH payments for as much stuff as possible.
Things we essentially do manually, or that are facilitated only via manual texts/emails: - Schedule showings with prospective and current tenants - Track paper receipts in shoeboxes. At tax time we tabulate these in a spreadsheet and then enter expense totals into Turbotax. - Schedule maintenance with contractor and tenants, and often show up to meet contractors at rentals. - Pay property taxes on units lacking mortgages - Schedule and attend inspections per local Township regulations.
Areas where we could perhaps make some improvements: - Hiring an accountant to do our taxes? I’m skeptical as to whether this will save us any time, but it might save us money. One accountant’s website asks customers to fill out a tax planning form that looks more difficult than just doing taxes myself. I have an MBA so am comfortable with accounting. However, tax accountants surely know tricks that I don’t. Those of you who have done your own accounting and then switched to an accountant, has it been worthwhile?

• Hiring a realtor to show properties and vet tenants? Those of you who do this, are the tradeoffs worth it? We’ve never had an eviction, so I like to think I’m decent at choosing tenants. But setting up showings and vetting tenants can be an irritating distraction from my software development job.
  
• Better to-do and reminder system. Some landlords like google calendar for scheduling appointments and cc-ing tenants about various things. Our problems generally arise when we see a reminder but aren’t able to immediately complete a task (e.g., because we’re in a telecon for work). Then the reminder goes away, and the task gets forgotten. An ideal system could periodically text or email us and/or our tenants until relevant to-do items are completed. Any suggestions?
  
• Better way to share amongst ourselves login/password info for the many web sites we use. Our passwords are currently hidden away in quicken, word docs, and in our heads. In a perfect world we’d be able to access passwords from anywhere, but storing passwords in the cloud could be asking for trouble. At work we use Passbolt on an internal web server for this. Other ideas for safely sharing login credentials?
  
• Better document management. Ideally, we’d be able to get to anything over the Web but I wouldn’t want to store any sensitive data that way (e.g., credit reports, tax docs). My wife mentioned DropBox as a possibility for non-sensitive documents and Microsoft OneNote as an option for sharing vendor and contractor information and tenant contact info. Have any other landlords found or developed streamlined filing systems via software or online tools?
  
• Keeping leases up to date with changes in the law. I periodically check the local University’s tenant support web site to check for legal changes. They list all the local lease clauses that are required by law. But I don’t check it for every new lease. How do others keep up with changes in the law? We could consult with a lawyer every year but still might miss a new law between meetings. Zillow rental manager offers standard, localized leases for some areas but not yet for ours.
  
• There might be rental property management software with broad capabilities that would take care of many of our issues. Kind of hate to put all my eggs in one basket though. I’ve had enough software crap out or disappear that it seems safer to avoid a monolithic solution that tries to do everything.
  
• Could use better ways to find/vet contractors. Used to subscribe to Angie’s List but kind of drifted away from it over time.
  

As a software engineer I gravitate toward messing with details—-probably to a fault. I probably have other blind spots. If you see some in what I’ve written above, feel free to offer constructive criticism. Just hoping to make landlording as smooth and easy as possible.
Happy New Year to all you other landlords out there. May the new year bring you good health, pleasant tenants, reliable appliances, and abundant cash flow.

There are two methods to bring it back to your current setup :
- you can automatically start a VirtualBox virtual machine when Windows starts, by right-clicking your virtual machine, send to desktop (make a shortcut), and copy your shortcut to the startup folder with win + R (or Run) and type shell:startup. Your virtual machine will start with the last configuration used before shutting it down.
- Or you can theme your setup and use old software still working.
If you want to theme your setup :
First you need the UltraUXThemePatcher to allow custom theming, when it's installed just run it and patch what it says to. Reboot.
​

• Window Style

Install a XP theme for your Windows version (I'll add more links later but you can find a fitting one too)
Windows 7 Luna Blue Theme
Some themes doesn't theme the taskbar so here's a skin to use with Classic Shell (see under), check "Show all settings" then add this to Taskbar tab > click on texture > [...] and select the skin.
​

• Taskbar and Start Menu

Set your taskbar icons to small, by right-clicking the taskbar and going to properties. Also set never combine taskbar buttons.
Install Classic Shell to theme the taskbar and change the start menu, open Classic Start Menu Settings and under Start Menu style choose the middle one (classic with two columns) then change the start button by one of these (or by this one for french people) . Under Theme choose Windows XP Luna and your color variant (Blue, Olive, Silver). Disable the fade animation by ticking "Show all settings" and in Menu style tab.
After that you can edit what's shown in start menu with the Start Menu Personalization tab : drag any item to move or add it, use Del to delete item which is useful to disable the shutdown option list (we will use something else, don't worry, but DON'T delete the logoff/change uselock options if you need them) and double click on any item to rename it or change the icon.
You can show less softwares when opening the menu by going to Main menu tab with the recent softwares option.
For the shutdown button, download XPShutdown by TuxiePuffy (read the readme), put it somewhere where it won't ever move; to change the language just make a new txt and copy the text from TuxiePuffy's sample then edit it, save it, and change the .txt to .ini
Open again Classic Start Menu settings, go to the Start Menu Personalization tab and double-click the shutdown button, then click on [...] next to command and select the XPShutdown exe
Here are some XP icons that can be used for almost every icon.
For the quick launch next to the start button, go to C:\Users\"Yourself"\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch put your shortcuts here, right-click the taskbar and unlock it then drag the | next to the language shortcut all to the left, until the language goes back to the right.
​

• Sounds

Set these sounds by right-cliking the sound icon in the taskbar > sounds (you can save your sound setup by clicking on Save as, you can update an existing by giving it the same name).
To replace the startup sound (not the login) use Startup Sound Changer or Winaero Tweaker
​

• Cursors

Just open mouse settings and select the blank cursor (the first on the list). Or if you want all of those included when installing XP, here.
​

• Wallpapers

Here are the original ones, you can also find them online in HD.
​

• User Accounts Pictures

Here are the original ones, again they're also available online in HD.
​

• Screensavers

Here, put them anywhere then right-click on any screensaver and install it, it will add all of them.
​

• Windows Media Player

Use this skin to have Windows Media Player 9 and this skin to have Windows Media Player 11. (9 skin is more complete than 11 but it works a bit too)
Copy them in WMP directory > skins by right-clicking the shortcut in the start menu and locating the file. Open Windows Media Player, go to the skin selector and select the skin.
​

• Icons

Right-click on the desktop > personalize, then click on Change desktop icons.
Use FileTypesMan or an alternative to generally edit .txt .ini and other systemwide used icons.
THE FILE EXTENSION ICON CHANGES WILL BE PERMANENT except if you can restore/repair your pc with a command line
Use a compatible with your system version icon changer to set the remaining icons, this is reversible.
​

• Games

Here is a link to the original files. You can put them in the start menu by right-clicking any folder and going to it's location. Make shortcuts for your games, make a new folder and put the shortcuts here.
​

• Accessories

Calculator
Paint
Command Prompt (Added it because the OS version isn't updated inside, displaying "Windows XP Version" but it's working and it's universal except for the window title which is in french)
For wordpad and others I suggest installing XP in a virtual machine, it only needs four-five gigabytes, and take out the files manually.
You can find the Windows Movie Maker files online but it's too useless, too broken, you can't save any video or preview it.
​

• Logon Screen

Use LogonStudio or any compatible alternative with your version and I suggest to use this background.
​

• Microsoft Office

It will be better with office 2000/2003, you can view and edit files up to latest office versions thanks to a compatibility pack. No link for this one
For Windows 7 you'll maybe need to install a hotfix (32 bits / 64 bits) for MicroSoft Agents to fix stuff like the assistant (Clippy, the dog, the cat, ...). To enable the assistant, it's under the ? menu for Office 2003 and Help menu for Office 2000.
​

• Outlook / Thunderbird

Outlook 2000/2003 versions are not so easy/intuitive to set with an existing e-mail account. I suggest using Mozilla Thunderbird 5 (which was compatible up to release 52 with XP but it doesn't give the XP era feeling), Thunderbird is much more automated and is quicker to set up.
Add the desktop shortcut to the startup folder (win + R / Run and type shell:startup). It will then start when starting Windows.
Add this extension/add-on to enable minimizing it to tray; if you start it with Windows and you want it directly in the tray, right-click on the shortcut, go to the properties, under the shortcut tab you have an execute (or run) option, change normal window to minimized, click ok, it's done.
​

• Microsoft Plus! For XP

Here, it only works on 32-bit Windows versions.
​

• MSN Messenger / Windows Live Messenger

MSN Messenger (or Windows Live Messenger) is still alive thanks to Escargot MSN ! You can download any pre-patched version between MSN 5.0 to WLM 8.5 or you can dowload and patch any MSN between 3.6 to 5.0.
It's already translated in many different languages.
​
That's almost complete, I can't complete it more, thank you for reading, have a good day and most of all, have fun !

Keywords- Customer Relationship Management, cloud, Automation, system, services Customer relationship management (CRM) is a mixture of methods, strategies, and technologies that improve customer interaction and data through companies to enhance customer relationships and retain customers and get more sales—used for analysis. The CRM system gathers user data above several networks or points of contact between customers and the company, including user websites, phones, live chat, direct mail, marketing materials. And social media. The CRM system can provide customer-focused staff with detailed information about the customer's personal information, purchase history, purchase preferences, and concerns.
CRM component
The most basic CRM software gathers customer data and documents in a CRM database so that salespeople can easily access and manage them. There are many additional features that have been added over time to make the CRM system more efficient. Some of these events record user interactions via email, phone, social media, or other channels. Automate processes that automate various workflows, such as tasks, calendars, and alerts, depending on system features. It also gives managers the ability to monitor performance and productivity based on information available in the system.
• Marketing automation: CRM tools with marketing automation features can automate repetitive tasks to increase marketing efforts in different areas of life. For example, when sales are expected to enter the system, it can automatically send expected marketing content, usually via email or social media, to ensure top-notch sales. Replaceable.
• Force sales automation: Salesforce automation tools track customer interactions and automate the specific business cycle operations required to attract and retain new customers.
• Central Contact Center Automation: Designed to minimize the job injury aspects of Contact Center representatives, Contact Center Automation may include pre-configured audio to Help users troubleshoot and disseminate information. A large number of software tools integrated with reseller desktop tools can meet customers' needs to reduce talk time and simplify customer service processes.
• Geographical location technology or location-based services: Some CRM systems have technologies that can create geo-marketing campaigns based on a customer's actual location and sometimes a universal GPS application. Out. Geographical location technology can also be used as a network or communications management tool to explore sales potential based on combined locations.
• Workflow automation: CRM systems help improve business processes by making workloads comfortable and allowing employees to focus on creative and high-level tasks.
• Managing leads: Sales candidates can be tracked via CRM and enable sales teams to enter, track, and analyze leads.
• Human Resource Management (HRM): a CRM system that tracks employee information, such as contact information, evaluates the organization's performance and benefits. This allows the HR department to manage internal staff more effectively.
• Analytics: CRM analysis analyzes user data and helps create targeted marketing campaigns to increase customer satisfaction.
• IAI: Artificial intelligence (AI) technology, such as sales, automate Einstein's repetitive tasks, identify customer purchasing patterns, predict customer behavior in the future, and more. Built on the M platform
Types of CRM technology
The four leading suppliers of CRM systems are Outlets, Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle. Other vendors are top-rated among small and medium companies but are the choice of four large companies. Types of CRM technology are provided as follows.
• On-site CRM: This system is responsible for managing, managing, securing, and monitoring login information and company files using CRM software. With this model, the company buys prepaid licenses instead of the year-end product from a CRM provider on the cloud platform. The software is based on the company's server, and users have to pay for each upgrade. It also requires a long process to integrate all the companies. Companies with CRM needs can benefit from home distribution.
• Cloud-based CRM: With cloud-based CRM, also known as SaaS (program-based service) or selectable CRM, data is stored in remote, external networks with which employees can interact. Internet communication anywhere, anytime, sometimes with a third-party wizard who manages the configuration and monitoring. Enter The pure, continuous light from the cloud enables companies to gain experience with artificial intelligence or technology. Companies can see CRM Cloud as a more cost-effective option. Providers like Salesforce are paid by prepaid users and have monthly or annual payments. Data security is a significant concern for cloud-based companies because it does not control data storage and monitoring. If the cloud provider is not discontinued or created by another company, its data could be compromised or lost. Complications can also occur when a company's internal cloud system replaces old data. Ultimately, the costs may be alarming that software for the job costs more time than traditional models.
• Open Source CRM: The open-source CRM system provides a public process that allows companies to make changes to the company using the method. Open source CRM technology also helps companies trying to build CRM applications, allowing more and more sophisticated data transfer on social media websites. Open source CRM platforms like OroCRM, SuiteCRM, and SugarCRM offer options for the markets of Salesforce, Microsoft, and other vendors. The implementation of each CRM implementation depends on the needs, capabilities, and business objectives, as each method has different costs.

Before we spout forth a fountain of fabulous terms such as "cloud infrastructure" and "virtual machine," let's try to explain what this AWS thing does, in terms even a CEO could understand.
Up until the mid-2000s, software was a thing you installed on your hard drive. It was intellectual property that you were granted the license to use, and either the entirety of that license was paid for up front, or it was subscribed to on an annual "per-seat" basis. A corporate network (a LAN) introduced the astounding technical innovation of moving that hard drive into a room full of other hard drives; otherwise, the principal idea was not much different. (Microsoft thrived in this market.)
The first truly brilliant idea that ever happened in corporate LANs was this: An entire computer, including its processor and installed devices, could be rendered as software. Sure, this software would still run on hardware, but being rendered as software made it expendable if something went irreparably wrong. You simply restored a backup copy of the software, and resumed. This was the first virtual machine (VM).
Now you could install the applications you needed to run on the virtual machine rather than a physical machine. Being virtual meant it could run anywhere, and soon, it became possible to relocate a VM between processors without noticeably affecting how the application on the VM was running.
If a business could install a web server on a virtual machine, it could attain the freedom to run those web servers anywhere it was practical to do so, rather than from the headquarters basement. The first great cloud service providers — Amazon among them — built their business models around hosting the virtual machines that ran their web servers, and selling that hosting for a time-based fee rather than an expensive license. Customers only paid for what they used, thus making high-quality service feasible for small and medium-sized businesses for the first time.
WHAT "INFRASTRUCTURE" AND "SERVICE" MEAN IN THE PUBLIC CLOUD CONTEXT
In any global economic system, the term infrastructure refers to the layers of services and support systems upon which the more visible components of the economy are based. Amazon Web Services, as was evident from the division's original name, enables websites to be hosted remotely. Since its inception, though, AWS has grown into the world's principal provider of virtual infrastructure -- the operating systems, hypervisors, service orchestrators, monitoring functions, and support systems upon which the economy of the public cloud is based.
The Future of Everything as a Service
The Future of Everything as a Service
Software as a Service has set off a revolution in the way companies consume services on-demand. We look at how it's spreading to other IT services and transforming IT jobs.
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We use the word "service" quite a bit in this article, though it's important that we use it intentionally rather than a word that just means "stuff" or "things", or the way "content" is used to refer to what you read on a website. AWS provides the following principal services:
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS). AWS sells access to VMs that are configured like real computers, only rendered as software. You manage them through the web, and you can see what their displays would produce if they were real computers with monitors attached. But web servers don't really need monitors. They can send the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code that web browsers need to assemble webpages, and to reproduce programs that you run from browsers (for example, Google Docs). Besides flexibility, what makes IaaS a lucrative, marketable service is that customers only pay for the resources (bandwidth, storage, processing) that they use, when they use it — like commodities.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). On your PC, your web browser has become a rendering vehicle for applications delivered to you from a cloud provider. On your smartphone, its operating system can perform that same role, and the result can be an app whose core functionality exists in the cloud, rather than being installed on the device. In both of these cases, the software is run on the server and delivered to your device (the client). Portions of this application are executed in both places, with the internet serving as the delivery medium.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). When your intention is to deliver software to your customers through the cloud, it becomes more practical to use tools that are located in the cloud to build that software effectively on-site ("cloud-native applications"). It also becomes feasible to optimize the billing model for that software -- for instance, by charging only for the customers' use of specific functions built on the cloud platform.
Object data storage. Although it's fair to say Amazon did not create the cloud, it's equally fair to say it did create the market for bulk data storage and delivery. By this, we mean not just files but the mountains of structured and unstructured data that may constitute a database, or may not yet have coalesced into a database. The impetus for this part of the cloud revolution was AWS charging for the space that data actually consumed, rather than the volumes or hard drives that contain it. Now, AWS offers a variety of data service options best suited for the different ways that customers intend to use cloud-based data.
Let's first be very clear about what a cloud platform is. You've already read more definitions of "cloud" than there are clouds (in the sky), but here, we're talking about the operating system that reformulates multiple servers into a cohesive unit. For a group of computers anywhere in the world to be one cloud, the following things have to be made feasible:
They must be able to utilize virtualization (the ability for software to perform like hardware) to pool together the computing capability of multiple processors and multiple storage devices, along with those components' network connectivity, into single, contiguous units. In other words, they must collect their resources so they can be perceived as one big computer rather than several little ones.
The workloads that run on these resource pools must not be rooted to any physical location. That is to say, their memory, databases, and processes -- however they may be contained -- must be completely portable throughout the cloud.
The resource pools that run these workloads must be capable of being provisioned through a self-service portal. This way, any customer who needs to run a process on a server may provision the virtual infrastructure (the pooled resources for processing and other functions) needed to host and support that process, by ordering it through the web.
All services must be made available on a per-use basis, usually in intervals of time consumed in the actual functioning of the service, as opposed to a one-time or renewable license.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) declared that any cloud service provider (CSP) to which the US Government would subscribe, must at a minimum provide these four capabilities.
If NIST had the opportunity to add a fifth component, given the vast amount of history that has taken place in the few short years of the public cloud's prominence, it would probably be support. AWS may be a public cloud, but it is also a managed service. That means it's administered to deliver particular service levels which are explicitly spelled out in the company's service-level agreements (SLA).
It surprises some to learn that an AWS account is not an Amazon account with extra privileges. It's a security account that centralizes the access you're given to AWS services, and associates that access with a billable address. Not a shipping address, like a destination for goods ordered from Amazon.com, but rather a login like the one you may use for Windows.
There are ways you can use this AWS account to launch yourself into the AWS space without much, or quite likely without any, monetary investment. For the first year of each account, AWS sets aside 750 hours of free usage per month (also known as "the entire month") of a Linux- or Windows-based t2.micro virtual machine instance, which is configured like a single-CPU PC with 1 GB of RAM. Using that instance as a virtual server, you're free to set up an instance of an Amazon RDS relational database with up to 20 GB of storage, plus another 5 GB of standard S3 object storage. (You'll see more about these basic services momentarily.)
WHERE CAN YOU LEARN HOW TO USE AWS?
From time to time, AWS convenes an online, half-day streaming conference to teach newcomers about how these services work. At the time of this writing, the next edition of the company's "AWSome Day" was scheduled for April 9, 2019, from 12:00 noon to 4:30 pm Eastern Time.
That online conference may give you a shove in the general direction of what you think you might need to know. If you have a particular business goal in mind, and you're looking for professional instruction, AWS sponsors instructional courses worldwide that are conducted in training centers with professional instructors, and streamed to registered students. For example:
Migrating to AWS teaches the principles that organizations would need to know to develop a staged migration from its existing business applications and software, to their cloud-based counterparts.
AWS Security Fundamentals introduces the best practices, methodologies, and protocols that AWS uses to secure its services, in order that organizations that may be following specific security regimens can incorporate those practices into their own methods.
AWS Technical Essentials gives an IT professional within an organization a more thorough introduction to Amazon services, and the security practices around them, with the goal being to help that admin or IT manager build and deploy those services that are best suited to achieving business objectives.
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But unlike a regular expense such as electricity or insurance, public cloud services tend to spawn more public cloud services. Although AWS clearly divides expenses into categories pertaining to storage, bandwidth usage, and compute cycle time, these categories are not the services themselves. Rather, they are the product of the services you choose, and by choosing more and incorporating more of these components into the cloud-based assets you build on the AWS platform, you "consume" these commodities at a more rapid rate.
AWS has a clear plan in mind: It draws you into an account with a tier of no-cost service with which you can comfortably experiment with building a web server, or launching a database, prior to taking those services live. Ironically, it's through this strategy of starting small and building gradually that many organizations are discovering they hadn't accounted for just how great an operational expense the public cloud could become -- particularly with respect to data consumption.
Cost control is feasible, however, if you take the time to thoroughly train yourself on the proper and strategic use of the components of the AWS platform, before you begin provisioning services on that platform. And the resources for that cost control training do exist, even on the platform itself.
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Cloud cost control becoming a leading issue for businesses
Cloud cost control also a challenge for small businesses and freelancers
What do Amazon's Web services do?
Selling the services that a computer performs is nearly as old a business as selling computers themselves. Certainly Amazon did not invent that either. The time-sharing systems of the 1960s made it possible for universities and institutions to recoup the enormous costs of acquiring systems, at a time before tuition revenues could have accomplished that by themselves. But at just the right time, Amazon very keenly spotted the one type of service that almost every business could utilize: the ability to run a virtual server that runs websites.
ELASTIC COMPUTE CLOUD
The product name for the first automated service that AWS performs for customers is Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This is the place where AWS pools its virtual resources into instances of virtual machines, and stages those instances in locations chosen by the customer to best suit its applications.
Originally, the configurations of EC2 instances mimicked those of real-world, physical servers. You chose an instance that best suited the characteristics of the server that you'd normally have purchased, installed, and maintained on your own corporate premises, to run the application you intended for it. Today, an EC2 instance can be almost fanciful, configured like no server ever manufactured anywhere in the world. Since virtual servers comprise essentially the entire web services industry now, it doesn't matter that there's no correspondence with reality. You peruse AWS' very extensive catalog, and choose the number of processors, local storage, local memory, connectivity, and bandwidth that your applications require. And if that's more than in any real server ever manufactured, so what?
You then pay for the resources that instance uses, literally on a per-second basis. If the application you've planned is very extensive, like a multi-player game, then you can reasonably estimate what your AWS costs would be for delivering that game to each player, and calculate a subscription fee you can charge that player that earns you a respectable profit.
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AWS rolls out new EC2 high memory instances, tailored for SAP HANA
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ELASTIC CONTAINER SERVICE
Virtual machines gave organizations a way to deliver functionality through the internet without having to change the way their applications were architected. They still "believe" they're running in a manufactured server.
In recent years, a new vehicle for packaging functionality has come about that is far better suited to cloud-based delivery. It was called the "Docker container," after the company that first developed an automated mechanism for deploying it on a cloud platform (even though its name at the time was dotCloud). Today, since so many parties have a vested interest in its success, and also because the English language has run out of words, this package is just called a container.
AWS' way to deliver applications through containers rather than virtual machines is Elastic Container Service (ECS). Here, the business model can be completely different than for EC2.
Because a containerized application (sorry, there's no other term for it) may use a variable amount of resources at any particular time, you may opt to pay only for the resources that application does use, at the time it requests them. As an analogy, think of it like this: Instead of renting a car, you lease the road, pay for the gasoline consumed with each engine revolution, the oxygen burned with each ignition of a cylinder, and the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the catalytic converter. With ECS, you're renting the bandwidth and paying for the precise volume of data consumed and the cycles required for processing, for each second of your application's operation. Amazon calls this pricing model Fargate, referring to the furthest possible point in the delivery chain where the "turnstile" is rotated and where charges may be incurred.
One very important service that emerges from the system that makes ECS possible is called Lambda, and for many classes of industry and academia, it's already significantly changing the way applications are being conceived. Lambda advances a principle called the serverless model, in which the cloud server delivers the functions that an application may require on a per-use basis only, without the need for pre-provisioning.
For instance, if you have a function that analyzes a photograph and isolates the portion of it that's likely to contain the image of a human face, you can stage that function in Amazon's cloud using the serverless model. You're not being charged for the VM or the container hosting the function, or any of the resources it requires; rather, AWS places its "turnstile" at the point where the function renders its result and terminates. So you're charged a flat fee for the transaction.
Although Amazon may not have had the idea for the serverless model, Lambda has advanced that model considerably. Now developers are reconsidering the very nature of application architecture, with the end result being that an entirely new economy may emerge around fluid components of functionality, as opposed to rigid, undecipherable monoliths.
As we mentioned before, one of Amazon's true breakthroughs was the establishment of S3, its Simple Storage Service (the word "Cloud" has since been wedged into the middle of its name). For this business model, Amazon places "turnstiles," if you will, at two points of the data exchange process: when data is uploaded, and when it's transacted by means of a retrieval call or a database query. So both input and output incur charges.
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AWS does not charge customers by the storage volume, or in any fraction of a physical device consumed by data. Instead, it creates a virtual construct called a bucket, and assigns that to an account. Essentially, this bucket is bottomless; it provides database tools and other services with a means to address the data contained within it. By default, each account may operate up to 100 buckets, though that limit may be increased upon request.
Once data is stored in one of these buckets, the way AWS monetizes its output from the bucket depends upon how that data is used. If a small amount of data is stored and retrieved not very often, AWS is happy not to charge anything at all. But if you've already deployed a web app that has multiple users, and in the course of using this app, these users all access data stored in an S3 bucket, that's likely to incur some charges. Database queries, such as retrieving billing information or statistics, will be charged very differently from downloading a video or media file.
If AWS were to charge one flat fee for data retrieval -- say, per megabyte downloaded -- then with the huge difference in scale between a spreadsheet's worth of tabular data and a 1080p video, no one would want to use AWS for media. So S3 assumes that the types of objects that you'll store in buckets will determine the way those objects will be used ("consumed") by others, and AWS establishes a fee for the method of use.
Here's where Amazon adds a third turnstile to the data model: by offering database engines capable of utilizing the data stored in S3 buckets. An AWS database engine is a specialized instance type: a VM image in which the database management system is already installed.
For relational data -- the kind that's stored in tables and queried using SQL language -- AWS offers MariaDB (open source), Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL (open source), Oracle DB, PostgreSQL (open source), and Amazon's own Aurora. Any application that can interface with a database in one of these formats, even if it wasn't written for the cloud to begin with, can be made to run with one of these services. Alternately, AWS offers DynamoDB for use with less structured key/value stores, DocumentDB for working with long-form text data such as in a content management system, and ElastiCache for dealing with high volumes of data in-memory.
Standing up a "big data" system, such as one based on the Apache Hadoop or Apache Spark framework, is typically a concentrated effort on the part of any organization. Though they both refrain from invoking the phrase, both Spark and Hadoop are operating systems, enabling servers to support clusters of coordinated data providers as their core functionality. So any effort to leverage the cloud for a big data platform must involve configuring the applications running on these platforms to recognize the cloud as their storage center.
AWS approaches this issue by enabling S3 to serve as what Hadoop and Spark engineers call a data lake -- a massive pool of not-necessarily-structured, unprocessed, unrefined data. Originally, data lakes were "formatted," to borrow an old phrase, using Hadoop's HDFS file system. Some engineers have since found S3 actually preferable to HDFS, and some go so far as to argue S3 is more cost-effective. Apache Hadoop now ships with its own S3 connector, enabling organizations that run Hadoop on-premises to leverage cloud-based S3 instead of their own on-premises storage.
In a big data framework, the operating system clusters together servers, with both their processing and local storage, as single units. So scaling out processor power means increasing storage; likewise, tending to the need for more space for data means adding CPUs. AWS' approach to stationing the entire big data framework in the cloud is not to correlate Spark or Hadoop nodes as unaltered virtual machines, but instead deploy a somewhat different framework that manages Hadoop or Spark applications, but enable S3-based data lakes to become scalable independently. AWS calls this system EMR, and it's made considerable inroads, capitalizing on Amazon's success in substituting for HDFS.
Kinesis leverages AWS' data lake components to stand up an analytics service -- one that evaluates the underlying patterns within a data stream or a time series, make respectable forecasts, and draw apparent correlations as close to real-time as possible. So if you have a data source such as a server log, machines on a manufacturing or assembly line, a financial trading system, or in the most extensive example, a video stream, Kinesis can be programmed to generate alerts and analytical messages in response to conditions that you specify.
The word "programmed" is meant rather intentionally here. Using components such as Kinesis Streams, you do write custom logic code to specify those conditions that are worthy of attention or examination. By contrast, Kinesis Data Firehose can be set up with easier-to-explain filters that can divert certain data from the main stream, based on conditions or parameters, into a location such as another S3 bucket for later analysis.
In founding the market for virtualization, VMware set about to relocate the seat of power in the data center kingdom to the hypervisor. And in drawing most of the map for the public cloud market, Amazon tried to relocate it to the EC2 instance. Both efforts have yielded success. But Kubernetes, as an open source orchestrator of container-based applications, sought to plant a bomb beneath that seat of power, by effectively democratizing the way new classes of applications were created and deployed. It was Google's idea, though with just the right dosage of benevolence, Docker would step aside, bowing graciously, and even Microsoft would contribute to the plan.
AWS' managed Kubernetes service, called EKS and launched in July 2018, represents Amazon's concession to the tides of history, at least for this round. The previous July, Amazon joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation -- the arm of the Linux Foundation that oversees development of the Kubernetes orchestrator.
This way, EKS can provide management services over the infrastructure supporting a customer's Kubernetes deployment, comparable to what Google Cloud and Azure offer. The provisioning of clusters can happen automatically. That last sentence doesn't have much meaning unless you've read tens of thousands of pages of Kubernetes documentation, the most important sentence from which is this: You can pick a containerized application, tell EKS to run it, then EKS will configure the resources that application requires, you sign off on them, and it runs the app.
So if you have, say, an open source content management system compiled to run in containers, you just point EKS to the repository where those containers are located and say "Go." If all the world's applications could be automated in exactly this way, we would be living in a very different world.
The way VMware manages virtualized infrastructure for its vSphere customers, and the way Amazon manages its cloud infrastructure for AWS, are fundamentally different. However, the beauty of virtualization is that it's possible to configure a platform to run another platform (like the way Windows 10 runs Linux apps).
It took engineers from Amazon and VMware working together several years before they could emerge with a system allowing its NSX network virtualization layer (which enables the underlying resources of all servers in an enterprise network to be perceived as a single infrastructure) to be supported in AWS' proprietary cloud infrastructure. We don't exactly know how this works, but for now, it appears that it does work after all.
So with a product that VMware calls VMware Cloud on AWS, an existing vSphere environment may provision resources from the Amazon public cloud as necessary, including under policy-based automation rules. This way, compute power, storage, and to some extent database functionality may be brought into an enterprise network like fluids being trucked in to save an organization in crisis. And these dynamic resources may then be de-provisioned when they're no longer needed.
In recent months, Amazon has expanded its working relationship with VMware, enabling AWS for the first time to offer deploying its own server hardware on customers' premises. Certainly that's one way to bring the cloud closer to the enterprise.
AWS needed a means to compete against Microsoft's Azure Stack, which gives Azure customers the means to run Microsoft services in their own data centers the same way Azure would. That's easy enough for Microsoft, since much of Azure Stack is based on Windows Server already. Amazon's servers, by contrast, are clustered by a very unique beast entirely. AWS Outposts, as Amazon calls it, gives large enterprises a way to let that beast in through their back door, at least part-way, leasing them Amazon servers exclusively for their own use.[Source]-https://www.zdnet.com/article/amazon-aws-everything-you-should-know-about-the-largest-cloud-provide
AWS Certification Course Courses in Mumbai. 30 hours practical training program on all avenues of Amazon Web Services. Learn under AWS Expert

Full list with details can be found here.
I have tried to organize the 88 project submissions (from 249 participants) into categories, so that it'd be easy for one to check some new interesting tools depending on one's interest. This post contains the final outcome of that attempt.
​
EDIT (August 27th 2019):
Added list of libp2p Bounties, provided by mariapaulafn. Please message me (or comment below) if you have found that the info posted is not accurate.

Lending / Borrowing

Tornado Lend

Put funds locked in smart contract to work.

LSDai

Earn Compound interest with your rDai collateral, while providing liquidity for hedges against variable Compound interest. Get high on interest!

Cherry Swap

Cherry Swap is an autonomous, open-source platform for interest rate swaps on Compound Finance markets.

Bearrowing

Tokenization layer for positions in lending/borrowing platforms with interoperability of debts.

RateLock

Fixed interest rate term loans via Compound Finance and powered by an on chain interest rate swap order book system.

DAI Insured

Incentivized bots prevent CDP liquidation – no trust required

Savings

Squirrel Goals

Have you ever dreamt of saving money like a squirrel? Squirrel Goals makes that possible. Save up your Eth for next Cryptowinter by making contributions or loose all your moneys.

Trading

Tannatci

Automated conditional ]DEX trading is now possible!

Unisaur.cz

Short #Web2, Long #Web3, #REKT Buffett/Trump/Roubini and prove that you are the #GreatestTraderOFALLTIME

set.diy

Create your own ETF

GramEth

First DEX ETH to GRAM and back.

Privacy / Authentication

MyPrivacy

Login button for privacy

You.

You are the password.

PrivETHy

To educate users about how much information they leave behind on-chain with their addresses, we show them significant data collected from relevant smart contracts.

ENS Login

Login throughout the Ethereum ecosystem with just your ENS name

ĐOor

ĐOor opens doors at events that are anchored on the Ethereum blockchain. Bouncers scan your dynamic QR code to verify that you're a registered ticket owner.

Wallets

D-OST Wallet

UNI / Layer Swap + 6 digit pin recovery

wallet@Mitch_Kosowski

#GreatestWalletOFALLTIME

Evryt

The only not-only-crypto wallet app an average user will ever need.

YAW

Finally a wallet which will take care of your gas

DAOs

VotezUp

Get DAO proposal notifications and vote while chatting

virtue-dao

Virtuous swarms on a mission with a continuous EnDAOment. No proposals.

Aragon Voting Widget

POC widget to vote on an Aragon DAO from outside the DAO itself

The Humble Potato

Thought Leader Dividend

The TAO (Tokenized Autonomous Organisation)

A true form of open governance that uses a unique reputation based token dependent on commitment.

SelloutDAO

Sell your MolochDAO (or other DAO) voting power to the highest bidder! Vote buying on the blockchain!

VollgasDAO - Gas Futures on Ethereum

Enable users to mint 30 day Gas Futures that can redeemed for the actual off-chain gas price, financed by an investment pool created via mismatched bonding curves that earns dividends for investors

DAOHaus

Discover and Pledge to existing Moloch DAOs, or Summon your own.

My-DAO-Dashboard

An user-centric dashboard to manage all DAO's that you're participating in.

Offset Dao

Offset the risk of DAO with RDai compound interest

CoinComposter

Compost illiquid ERC20s; Harvest farm fresh ETH.

Conviction Voting Aragon App

Continuous decision making

WordDao

A DAO for Words: funding public infrastructure via decentralized contributions.

cybaca

The framework for self-organized events based on Ethereum smart contract with the integrated economic game. The framework provides to set up zero-funded events excluding any sponsors and investor

Payments

Veriyfit

A concept of decentralized platform for proceeding payments with verifying each payment with Machine Learning

paydai

Amazon payments with DAI

ppm - Pay-Per-Minute

Every minute send small donation to the site that you are currently viewing

SplitNetwork

Split the bill or request a crypto payment directly from your contacts.

Vero - the Ethereum Credit System

Vero provides an Ethereum Credit Score to customers who can use the score to start tabs w/ Vendors. Vendors can quickly accept payments offline then easily reconcile on-chain at a later date.

Transit - Pension Plan

Transit is a mutual, cooperatively owned Pension Plan on the blockchain

Social

CollectorHub

A Decentralized Social Network for Non-fungible Token Collectors.

Ciao

Like Facebook groups but based on token membership

3chan

3chan is anonymous uncensorable truly decentralized image board. No gas needed to post, no owner of the server, completely running on IPFS.

ShoutBox

Decentralized peer-to-peer chat

dat

Never fear about someone snooping in your private conversation

UX

B33n there, done dapp

A user-friendly burner type wallet for events

MetaStamp

We make non-crypto users onboarding to DApps fast and easy with our pattern of usage of meta transactions. We have designed protocol and built SDK for DApp developers and Mobile wallet for users.

Mapcovery

Recover your wallet simply and securely with 5 locations that you remember

Maglev - Ethereum Tx Station

Batch multiple smart contract executions into a single transaction and reduce your gas usage;

Clovers Gas Station

On-chain gas prices every ~20 seconds

Re\u1F4A9tation

Repootation (repootation) is a react component that can be embedded anywhere on the Internet and stores reactions and ratings of content in a decentralized and verifiable way.

Happy BauHaus Cat

Be informed of the latest MolochDAO and Cryptokitty news in a friendly way, with true full-colour out of band communication for true decentralization.

Atra LiteUI <> 3Box Chat Integration

Create Chat Elements in Atra LiteUI that use 3Box Profiles, Spaces and Threads

Flora Sidechain | Discount Transactions

Hold tokens instead of paying transactions fees

Fry the DeFi

one-stop shop for newcomers to DeFi ecosystem with fiat on-ramp

Supercharger Network

A new blockchain protocol enabling meta-transactions and removing the cost of fees from the end user.

Environment

Terra6

A collective intelligence to repopulate the Earth with 6 trillion trees.

GreenBerlin

Strengthen sustainable behaviour through gamification and financial incentives within a city. Or short: Make Berlin green again!

Art

dot.gallery

a digital gallery that hosts time-bound art exhibitions

Mobility

Shared Mobility Protocol

An open-source, multi-modal ridesharing network, where anyone can activate their own vehicles on the network -- bicycles, scooters, cars, and more -- and share them with the community.

Identity

sol.tty

The scripting layer Ethereum was missing. A Solidity implementation of the EVM deployed as an Identity contract so you can run any Solidity code just like you could if you had a REPL.

Decentralized ticket management

There is a big focus on Wallet implementations, but what if we would extend it to Digital Identity which might drive mass adoption of de-centralization.

Browsers

BoB (Browser of Browsers)

BoB is an internet browser application with a DNS-based peer-to-peer content delivery

Collectibles

badgable

Version Control for the educational certificates

stikkit

badges for anyone and anything...

Staking

dms-staking

Building a distributed dead man's switch protocol

Archipel

high avaliability solution for Proof-of-Stake validators

File Hosting

'catbox' like encrypted dropbox for Ethereum & IPFS, OSI lib

A open source library+boilerplate, for everyone who wants to share data encrypted with (multiple) Ethereum users via decentralised file storage (e.g. IPFS) GDPR-compliant. Save your cat pics!

EtherFlare

Unlike the classic Anti-DDoS services, that charge fixed monthly fee for their services with possible moneyback in case of fail. We provide you DDoS protection with Uptime Insurance as incentive.

Voting

Excalibur-voting

Decentralized voting on the Ethereum blockchain

Quantum Cryptography

Qwood

Quantum blockchain whatever it takes

Oracles

Chainlink & Augur

We broke Chainlink and then fixed it by building a secondary dispute layer on top of Chainlink to utilize Augur's resolution mechanics, thus securing Chainlink via Augur.

Developer Tools

Berlin GossipSub profiling

Learn libp2p and profile GossipSub to find bottlenecks and potentially speed up Ethereum 2.0

Meshsim (libp2p gossipsub visualisation)

Visualise how messages flow in the libp2p gossip network with the ability to tweak the network topology

go-libp2p-noise

A new secure transport option for Eth2.0, Polkadot, Cosmos, and web3

colonySubgraph

A TheGraph subgraph for the colonyNetwork

Insulin

Flexible, universal and fast Smart Contract testing framework

The Graph Oracle

Supercharge your smart contract by creating graphql queries to the Graph

Gaming

Eazy-cheezy

Eazy-breezy parsing of Cheeze Wizard presale contract with the Graph!

Playtime at waves platform

A two user bet game using ride programming language at waves platform

S.U.D.Z.

We've created a browser based burner game to incentivise participation in the Tornado Cash ETH privacy pool

Law

DeLAMP

Decentralized Legal Agreement Marketplace Protocol

Accessibility

Hotspot me!

Get internet access from a hotspot nearby, anonymously through micro payments.

Extensions

Tennagraph Extension

tennagraph extension ethereum governance coinvoting gasvoting eip

Speech-to-text

ethberlinzwei-babelfish_3_0

A decentralized verifiable speech-to-text service powered by deep learning and Ocean Protocol.

Streaming

EthMotionPictures

Video chat streaming through Ethereum smart contracts

Algorithms

Laika Testnet

Ethereum's current PoW is very energy inefficient. We try to improve on it while maintaining ASIC resistance by using disk space for a "proof-of-capacity".

​

List of Bounties

(some are still in progress and the full bounty will be paid upon completion)
libp2p Noise handshake Golang and JavaScript implementations

1500 EUR via the Community Improvement Bounties fund.
1500 EUR via the Interchain Foundation.
500 EUR via Protocol Labs.

​
libp2p - gossipsub visualizations: fork and adapt meshsim

750 EUR via Protocol Labs.
750 EUR via the Ethereum Foundation.
500 EUR via Community Improvement Bounties fund.

​
libp2p - TypeScript bindings for js-libp2p-*

500 EUR via the Community Improvement Bounties fund.
500 EUR via Protocol Labs.

​
libp2p - Wireshark libp2p Lua dissectors

1000 EUR via Community Improvement Bounties fund.
1000 EUR via Protocol Labs.
750 EUR via the Ethereum Foundation.

​
libp2p - mDNS discovery in go

500 EUR via the Community Improvement Bounties fund.
500 EUR via Protocol Labs.

​
libp2p - Golang gossipsub profiling and optimization

1000 EUR via the Community Improvement Bounties fund.
500 EUR via the Ethereum Foundation.
250 EUR via Protocol Labs.

​
libp2p - Conformance Test Kit

1000 EUR via the Community Improvement Bounties fund.
1000 EUR via Protocol Labs.
1000 EUR via the Ethereum Foundation.

Note: This is a chapter out of my Growth Hacking Book called Secret Sauce: The Ultimate Growth Hacking Guide. This is only one of the 17 chapters that read just like this.
Also, the links I posted here are broken, but you can view the whole thing beautifully formatted on Medium here
After my post about making money from an affiliate site was at the top of this sub for a couple days, I've received more than 50 PMs asking for more info on how SEO works and how to get authority sites ranking. I have a chapter about that in my book, so I'm just going to publish it for free.
For what it's worth, I drive millions of dollars of traffic in the most competitive key terms online, including with new sites, so if you come in here to comment "this won't work" you're wrong. It's hard work, but it's not unreasonably hard. So much so that I decided to call it "SEO is not hard."
Formatting on reddit is hard, so it's also on Medium here.
It's also one of the several chapters of a book I wrote, which you can purchase here

SEO is Not Hard — A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time

SEO In One Day

SEO is simply not as hard as people pretend like it is; you can get 95% of the effort with 5% of the work, and you absolutely do not need to hire a professional SEO to do it, nor will it be hard to start ranking for well-picked key terms.
Of all the channels we’ll be discussing, SEO is the one that there is the most misinformation about. Some of it is subtle, but some of it is widely spread and believed by so-called SEO consultants who actually don’t know what they’re doing.
SEO is very simple, and unless you’re a very large company it’s probably not worth hiring somebody else to do. It’s also something that has a lot of faux veneer around it. Consultants want to make it seem incredibly difficult so that they can charge you a lot, but I'll show you exactly how to do it, step by step, and you'll win.
How Google Works In order to understand what we need to do for SEO let’s look back at how Google started, how it’s evolving today, and develop a groundwork from which we can understand how to get ranked on Google.
First, we're going to reverse engineer what Google is doing, and then simply follow their rules, picking the right keywords, and get your sites ranked.

The Early Days of Google

The idea for PageRank — Google’s early ranking algorithm — stemmed from Einstein. Larry Page and Sergei Brin were students at Stanford, and they noticed how often scientific studies referred to famous papers, such as the theory of relativity. These references acted almost like a vote — the more your work was referenced the more important it must be. If they downloaded every scientific paper and looked at the references, they could theoretically decide which papers were the most important, and rank them.
They realized that because of links, the Internet could be analyzed and ranked in a similar way, except instead of using references they could use links. So they set about attempting to “download” (or crawl) the entire Internet, figuring out which sites were linked to the most. The sites with the most links were, theoretically, the best sites. And if you did a search for “university,” they could look at the pages that talked about “university” and rank them.

Google Today

Google works largely the same way today, although with much more sophistication and nuance. For example, not all links carry the same weight. A link from an authoritative site (as seen by how many links a site has pointing at it) is much more valuable than a link from a non-authoritative site. A link from Wikipedia is probably worth about 10,000 links from sites that don’t have much authority.
At the end of the day the purpose of Google is to find the “best” (or most popular) web page for the words you type into the search bar.
All this means is we need to make it clear to google what our page is about, and then make it clear that we’re popular. If we do that we win. In order to do that, we’ll follow a very simple process that works every single time with less effort than you probably think is required.

Gaming the System

Google is a very smart company. The sophistication of the algorithms they write is incredible; bear in mind that there are currently cars driving themselves around Silicon Valley powered by Google’s algorithms.
If you get too far into the SEO rabbit hole you’ll start stumbling upon spammy ways to attempt to speed up this process. Automated software like RankerX, GSA SER, and Scraperbox, instructions to create spam or spin content, linkwheels, PBNs, hacking domains, etc.
Some of that stuff works very short term, but Google is smart and it is getting smarter. It gets harder to beat Google every day, and Google gets faster at shutting down spammy sites every day. Most don’t even last a week before everything you’ve done disappears and your work evaporates. That’s not the way you should do things.
Instead of Internet-based churn and burn we’ll be focusing on building equity in the Internet. So if you see some highly-paid SEO consultant telling you to use software and spun content to generate links, or when you see some blackhatter beating the system, just know that it’s not worth it. We’re going to build authority and get traffic fast, but we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t disappear or cripple your site in the future.

On-Page SEO

The first step in getting our site ready to rank is making it clear to Google what our site is about.
For now we’re going to focus our home page (our landing page) on ranking for one keyword that isn’t our brand or company name. Once we do that and get that ranking we can branch out into other keywords and start to dominate the search landscape, but for now we’ll stay laser focused.
Keyword Research The first thing we need to do is to figure out what that keyword is. Depending on how popular our site is and how long it’s been around, the level of traffic and difficulty we’ll get from this effort may vary.

The Long Tail

There’s a concept we need to be familiar with known as the “long tail.”
If we were to graph “popularity” of most things with “popularity” being the Y axis and the rank order being the Y axis, we’d get something like a power law graph:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BJTF2S1LVXK5ig75
There are some big hits that get the majority of attention, and after a few hits the graph falls sharply. The long-tail theory says that as we become more diverse as a society the yellow end of the above graph will stretch forever and get taller.
Think of Amazon. They probably have a few best-selling products, but the majority of their retail revenue comes from a wide variety of things that aren’t bought anywhere nearly as often as their best-selling products. Similarly, if we were to rank the popularity of the songs played in the last 10 years, there would be a few hits that would garner the majority of plays, and an enormous number of songs that have only a few plays. Those less popular products and songs are what we call the long tail.
In SEO this matters because, at least in the beginning, we’re going to go after long tail keywords — very exact, intention-driven keywords with lower competition that we know can win, then gradually we’ll work our way to the left.
Our site isn’t going to outrank ultra-competitive keywords in the beginning, but by being more specific we can start winning very targeted traffic with much less effort.
The keywords we’re looking for we will refer to as “long-tail keywords.”

Finding the Long Tail

In order to find our perfect long-tail keywords, we’re going to use a combination of four tools, all of which are free.
The process looks like this:

1. Use UberSuggest, KeywordShitter and a little bit of brainstorming to come up with some keywords
   
2. Export those keywords to the Google Keyword Planner to estimate traffic level
   
3. Search for those keywords with the SEOQuake chrome extension installed to analyze the true keyword difficulty
   

Don’t be intimidated — it’s actually very simple. For this example we’ll pretend like we were finding a keyword for this book (and we’ll probably have to build out a site so you see if we’re ranked there in a few months).

Step 1: Brainstorming and Keyword Generating

In this step we’re simply going to identify a few keywords that seem like they might work. Don’t concentrate too much on culling the list at this point, as most bad keywords will be automatically eliminated as a part of the process.
So since this is a book about growth hacking, I’m going to list out a few keywords that would be a good fit:

• Growth hacking
  
• Growth marketing
  
• Internet marketing
  
• Growth hacking guide
  
• Growth hacking book
  
• Book about growth hacking
  
• What is growth hacking
  
• Growth hacking instructions
  

That’s a good enough list to start. If you start running out of ideas go ahead and check out keywordshitter.com. If you plug in one keyword it will start spitting out thousands of variations in just a few minutes. Try to get a solid list of 5–10 to start with.
Now we’ll plug each keyword into UberSuggest. When I plug the first one — “growth hacking” — in, I get 246 results.
Clicking “view as text” will let us copy and paste all of our keywords into a text editor and create an enormous list.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*BkT8uUYV3p2hsXCI.
Go through that process with each keyword you came up with.
Now we’ll assume you have 500+ keywords. If you don’t, try to start with something more generic and broad as a keyword, and you’ll have that many quickly. Ideally you’ll have over 1500.

Step 2: Traffic Estimating

Now that we have a pretty good list of keywords. Our next step is to figure out if they have enough search volume to be worth our while.
You’ll likely notice that some are so far down the long tail they wouldn’t do much for us. For example, my growth hacking list came up with “5 internet marketing techniques.” We probably won’t go after that one, but instead of guessing we can let Google do the work for us. This will be our weeding out step.

Google Keyword Planner

The Google Keyword Planner is a tool meant for advertisers, but it does give us some rough idea of traffic levels.
Google doesn’t make any promise of accuracy, so these numbers are likely only directionally correct, but they’re enough to get us on the right track.
You’ll have to have an AdWords account to be able to use the tool, but you can create one for free if you haven’t use AdWords in the past.
Once you’ve logged in, select “Get search volume data and trends.”
Paste in your enormous list of keywords, and click “Get search volume.” Once you’ve done so, you’ll see a lot of graphs and data.
Unfortunately the Keyword Planner interface is a little bit of a nightmare to work within, so instead we’re going to export our data to excel with the “download” button and play with it there.
Now what we’re going to do is decide what traffic we want to go after.
This varies a bit based on how much authority your site has. So let’s try to determine how easy it will be for you to rank.
Go to SEMrush.com and enter your URL, looking at the total backlinks in the third column:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*aV3sF59d8Bt3Aqqw.
As a general rule (this may vary based on how old your site is, who the links are from, etc.), based on the number of links you have, this is the maximum level of “difficulty” you should go after.
Number of Backlinks:Maximum Difficulty
<30:40
<100:40–50
<1000:50–70
1000+:70+
Go ahead and sort the data by difficulty, and eliminate all of the stuff that is too high for your site (don’t worry, we’ll get those keywords later). For now you can simply delete those rows.

Exact Match

One important thing to note is that Google gives us this volume as “exact match” volume. This means that if there is a slight variation of a keyword we will see it if the words are synonyms, but not if they are used in a phrase, so the traffic will be underestimated from what you would expect overall.
Now with that disclaimer sort the traffic volume highest to lowest, and from this data pick out five keywords that seem like a good fit.
Here are mine:

• growth hacking strategies
  
• growth hacking techniques
  
• growth hacking 101
  
• growth hacking instagram
  
• growth hacking twitter
  

Mine all look the same, but that may not necessarily be the case.

Keyword Trends

Unfortunately the “keyword difficulty” that Google gives us is based on paid search traffic, not on natural search traffic.
First, let’s use Google Trends to view the keyword volume and trajectory simultaneously. You can enter all of the keywords at the same time and see them graphed against each other. For my keywords it looks like this:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*10BiNkXI3C3mEvYb.
The ones I’m most excited about are purple and red, which are “Growth hacking techniques” and “Growth hacking Twitter.”
Now we’ll take a deeper look at what the competition is like for those two keywords.

Manual Keyword Difficulty Analysis

In order to analyze how difficult it will be to rank for a certain keyword, we’re going to have to look at the keywords manually, one by one. That’s why we started by finding some long-tail keywords and narrowing the list.
This process gets a lot easier if you download the SEOQuake Chrome extension. Once you’ve done that, do a Google search and you’ll notice a few changes.
With SEOQuake turned on the relevant SEO data of each site is displayed below each search result.
We’re going to alter what is displayed, so in the left-hand sidebar click “parameters” and set them to the following:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*qVN8Re6-d0RqvJ07.
Now when you search, you’ll see something like this:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*9c46odS5ItXx3F5X.
SEOQuake adds a ranking number, and the following at the bottom:
The Google Index: This is how many pages from this base URL Google has indexed
Page Links: The number of pages linking to the exact domain that is ranking according to SEMrush’s index (usually very low compared to reality, but since we’ll be using this number to compare it wil be somewhat apples to apples)
URL Links: The number of pages pointing to any page on the base URL
Age: The first time the page was indexed by the Internet Archive
Traffic: A very rough monthly traffic number for the base URL
Looking at these we can try to determine approximately what it would take to overtake the sites in these positions.
You’ll notice that the weight of the indicators change. Not all links are from as good of sources, direct page links matter much more than URL links, etc., but if you google around and play with it for a while you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it takes.
If you have a brand new site it will take a month or two to start generating the number of links to get to page one. If you have an older site with more links it may just be a matter of getting your on-page SEO in place. Generally it will be a mixture of both.
Keep in mind that we’re going to optimize our page for this exact keyword, so we have a bit of an advantage. That said, if you start to see pages from sites like Wikipedia, you will know it’s an uphill battle.
Here are a couple of examples so you can see how you should think through these things, starting with “Growth hacking techniques.”
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*YErpxe0guQCv8f2E.
Entrepreneur.com is definitely a big name, and “growth hacking techniques” is in the title explicitly. This will be difficult to beat, but there are no links in the SEMRush index that point direct to the page.
(By the way, I wonder how hard it would be to write an article for entrepreneur.com — I could probably do that and build a few links to that easily, even linking to my site in the article).
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*hJxs4ukw38FD_rzA.
Yongfook.com, have never heard of that site. 206 total links, not much traffic, this one I could pass up. It does have quite a bit of age and “Growth hacking tactics” in the title explicitly, so that would make it tough, but this one is doable to pass up after a while.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*FXNrc-YR8rEbVY90.
Alright, so quicksprout is relatively popular, a lot of links, good age, lots of traffic, a few links direct to the page but not a ton.
But the word “tactics” doesn’t even appear here. This page isn’t optimized for this keyword, so I could probably knock it out by being optimized specifically for “growth hacking tactics.”
Let’s jump down a ways to see how hard it would be to get on the front page.
17 total pages indexed? Created in 2014? No links in the index, even to the root URL? This one’s mine. I should be able to front-page easily.
So this looks like a good keyword. Now we just have to get the on-page SEO in place and start building a few links.
(Note: After doing this a few more times I learned that I could probably get austenallred.com toward the top of "growth hacking press," so I changed the on-page optimization of one of those pages to focus on that keyword, and we'll see how it goes.

On-Page SEO

Now that we have our keyword selected, we need to make sure Google knows what our site is about. This is as simple as making sure the right keywords are in the right places. Most of this has to do with html tags, which make up the structure of a webpage. If you don’t know html or understand how it works, just pass this list to a developer and they should be able to help you.
Here is a simple checklist you can follow to see if your content is optimized.

On-Page SEO Checklist

☐ Your keyword is in the