Many websites that relied on weak content found that their search ranking plummeted with the Google Panda update. To rescue their online presence, these businesses had to discard their initial content and begin again. Fresh, unique, well written website content is essential for any website that wants to secure a high search engine ranking or hold the attention of potential customers.

Too Busy To Write

When you are building up a business, your time is precious. You will be sourcing materials, designing products, searching out new markets, and developing a viable business strategy. The majority of online business owners are too busy building their business to find the time required to write fresh, compelling website content on a regular basis. Professional content writers can fill that gap by devoting the time necessary to construct interesting and innovative product descriptions, articles and blog entries.

Is Your Content Unconvincing?

You may think that customers will excuse poor grammar and patchy spelling. However, content that is riddled with errors can give your website an unprofessional look and feel. When potential customers consider dealing with you for the first time, they will be wary of the possibility of fraud or shoddy service. They are likely to be put off if your website content appears sloppy or poorly written. Low-cost content writers may lack the language skills required to write well. By outsourcing your website content to professional content writers, you can be confident that you will develop and maintain a credible online presence.

Dull Content Is Not Sticky

Website visitors are likely to hit the back button pretty quickly if your SEO content is uninteresting or unreadable. This has the potential to affect your search engine ranking, because the recent update to Google’s search algorithm gives credit for the length of time visitors spend on a web page. Professional content writers can give an interesting and unique twist to your website content that engages visitors and holds their attention.

The Perils of Mass Production

Search engine algorithms penalize websites that publish duplicate content. When you purchase content at very low cost, you run the risk that it has been copied, repurposed or spun in order to make it more profitable for the content writer, who can then sell the same website content several times over. Before purchasing website content, you should take steps to ensure that it is unique and has not previously been published.

By purchasing your website content from Constant Content, you can be sure that your articles, blog entries and product descriptions will be unique, engaging, and professionally-written. Quality website content is an investment that will pay dividends.

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Writing to a looming deadline can be a creativity killer. If you feel that the constant need for new ideas is putting you under pressure, take time out to plan ahead. Getting a schedule in place for your 2012 website content will relieve your stress while keeping your online presence up-to-date and interesting.

Scheduling website content for the year ahead is not as daunting as it may sound. With the aid of a calendar and access to Constant Content’s team of content writers, you can pull together your 2012 website content schedule in under an hour.

The Importance of Seasonality:

The changing seasons have an impact on many online businesses. Jewelry businesses will typically see sales peaks around Valentine’s Day and Christmas, while travel agencies are likely to experience a spike in January. A quick look at website activity over previous years will reveal the seasons that matter most to your business. Use the changing seasons to plan website content that will appeal to your customers.

Find a Unique Approach:

As your competitors will also target these seasonal peaks, your next challenge is to find a unique angle that will appeal to website visitors. You can secure innovative ideas by working with a team of content writers. Constant Content allows customers to receive submissions to public requests from a number of talented content writers, increasing the chance of a quirky, distinctive approach to your chosen topic.

Encourage Visitors to Return:

Once you have a schedule for the coming months, you can entice visitors back by trailing future website content. Publishing a teaser, such as “Next week we will reveal the secret to five-star travel on a two-star budget”, will prompt visitors to return to your website to read the new article.

Handle the Unexpected with Ease:

Planning ahead and having website content ready ahead of time will give you some breathing space if life throws some challenges your way. Illness or a staff shortage may throw you off track. However, it will have less impact if your schedule has been planned and developed in advance.

Allow for Flexibility:

Bear in mind that your website content schedule is a tool to help you plan. It should not be set in stone. If one of your content writers produces an intriguing idea, you are free to adjust your schedule and run with it. Don’t let a unique or creative piece of website content escape just because it was not on your original plan.

By planning ahead, you can satisfy the demand from regular visitors for valuable new website content, while securing a high ranking in the search engine results.

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The holiday season, the time from Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving) through New Year’s Eve, is one of the busiest times of the year for everyone, consumers and businesses alike. Spikes in traffic are almost guaranteed due to the flurry of parties, gift exchanges, and other special events that occur during the holiday season.

Getting Your Ducks in a Row for the Holiday Season

This holiday season is the perfect time to channel your creative forces into a marketing plan that directs traffic to your virtual doorstep continually and consistently. How can you make this happen? You need a plan that focuses on a variety of angles, taking advantage of the persuasive power of the type of original content that article writers can produce for the Web.

A Fresh Email Campaign Gives a Company Renewed Vigor

An email campaign is one of the least expensive, but most effective, strategies to use when trying to attract new customers. Using the creative forces of a freelance writer, you can easily incorporate an email campaign that tempts, tantalizes, and draws customers to make a purchase during the holiday season. Freelance writers are skillful at what they do, so creating original content that produces real results is a viable marketing strategy.

Are Your Blog Posts Lined Up and Programmed to Post?

Line up your blog posts before the holiday rush by hiring a freelance writer with the savvy to compose interesting, original content for your blog posts. Procrastination may be a choice, but it happens to be one that many people fall victim to choosing. Instead of getting into the “I’ll do it later” phase of business, get into the “I’ll hire a couple of seasoned article writers to create my blogs” stage of preparing for the holiday rush.

Tap into the Power of Social Media Websites

The amount of time that many consumers spend online each week increases considerably once the weather cools down. If you haven’t already begun to take advantage of this avenue of generating traffic, you are losing potential customers. Consider hiring professional article writers who understand the intricacies of presenting original content on social media websites including Facebook and Twitter and increase your company’s profit margin.

Offer a Promotion

Offer coupons, free products, or free shipping that customers can use online or download onto their phones for redemption in your place of business.

Snail Mail Wins Every Time

While some people pooh-pooh the value of snail mail, it is affordable, convenient, and re-readable. Why not ask a freelance writer to come up with exceptional sales copy for a postcard mailing to potential customers in the area? Advertise a special discount or free gift. You never know who your recipient might pass the postcard to when they are done with it.

Posters, Billboards, Flyers, and Radio Blurbs

If it’s in your budget, come up with a few unique concepts and turn them over to experienced article writers for use on a poster, billboard, or flyer to attract new business.

Sharpen and Revitalize Content for Your Website

If you want to attract some of Internet users to your site, you should replace old text with original content for website use to revitalize your image. Tap into the exceptional skills of experienced article writers who have the magic in their fingertips to create enchanting content for websites. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but quality content is one of the most valuable assets business owners can use to generate new click-through traffic.

Using Article Writers Who Get Excited Over Your Products or Services

While most freelance writers can compose content for websites on a variety of topics, finding article writers who are enthusiastic about writing for you is the difference between a few new customers and lots of them. While original content attracts search engine spiders, you need reliable article writers to attract consumers.

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By Celeste Stewart

As most of us know, content is king. While we peddle Web content like website home pages, product descriptions, press releases, unique articles, and blog posts, we recently heard from a customer who sells a different type of content: data sets. We were fascinated with Oddity Software's approach. We recently spent some time chatting with Will, the Chief Technical Officer of Oddity Software, and learning more about database content.

CC: Both Constant-Content and Oddity Software are in the Web content business, though with different angles. Can you briefly describe your database content?

OS: Our database collection contains over five thousand different maintained data sets, and focuses on three distinct areas. The first area includes website content and utility databases for sticky SEO content. For example, these data sets include information such as recipe lists, routing numbers, game cheats, baby names, and so on.

The second area focuses on LBS (location based services) and business data. These databases contain location-specific information such as ATM locations, restaurant locations, and local bars and clubs. We also offer full state- and country-specific data sets. These are fully geocoded collections that are employed for Web apps such as Google Map-type services and directory websites. They have become increasingly important to mobile application developers.

The third category of data is tailored to marketing professionals that utilize data for snail-mail, email, and telephone/fax marketing.

CC: How do you supplement your own websites with outsourced content?

OS: For our core site, we use Constant-Content's writers for product descriptions, service explications, and even for editing of content that we have written. After all, we're geeks at heart and tend to write that way as well. So having someone to follow us up and rephrase our text for a less technical audience is very beneficial.

Beyond that, we develop many sites utilizing our own content databases. An example would be a restaurant locator website. While we have many details and sticky content in the restaurant locations database, having a writer do a review or a description of each restaurant is really what pushes the site over the edge in terms of providing that additional information to the end user, as well as from an SEO standpoint. Between the database and custom descriptions it's common to start ranking for related key phrases on page one or two in search engines within the first month of rolling a site out.

CC: You've worked with Constant-Content writers on a number of occasions. How did you go about finding a writer that met your needs?

OS: When we have a firm idea or audience in mind for the content we tend to browse writer profiles and existing articles on your site. From there, we select a content writer based on our understanding of the writer's writing style and experience with the given subject matter. And when we're stuck, given the broad range of our writing needs, we will convey our requirements to your support staff and they will identify a writer best suited for our exact needs. Based on that recommendation, we will then file the writing request.

CC: How has outsourcing content benefited your company?

OS: The largest benefit for us is diversification. Our Web ventures and data collections are vast and broad. Being able to draw from a pool of experienced writers that have expertise in different areas allows for truly tailoring content that is well written and specific to the subject matter.

But going further than that, I think that the process of outsourcing content helps us diversify our thinking in regards to our own products and services. Often, especially as it relates to say a product description, we will not give the writer a tremendous amount of direction. This allows us to see how an unbiased, undirected writer interprets our products. This gives us a fresh perspective that has helped us discover many new directions and implementations that we never thought of before.

CC: Our readers are familiar with purchasing content such as unique articles, product descriptions, and blog posts, but they may not be as well acquainted with using content from databases. Can you tell us some of the benefits of your services?

OS: There are two main reasons that a developer or webmaster will use database content. The first being return on investment. The written content that you mentioned, such as blogs and product descriptions, are very much open to interpretation and require a unique take on a given subject. With a content list such as our music lyrics database, there is no ‘interpretation’ needed. It is a data set of transcribed lyrics and album information for 140,000 songs. Given the amount of time, energy, and cost that goes into compiling such a resource, the ROI in purchasing a pre-compiled database with this information is a huge benefit. The work has already been done and you can start integrating the data into a website right away.

But the biggest benefit is often just sheer volume. Let’s say you have an affiliate website about dentistry. That site probably has articles and blog posts that provide plenty of keyword-rich spider food and valuable user content. If you write one blog post each week for a year, you have 52 pages of content that can be crawled by the search engines. Now if you add a database directory of dentist locations to your site, not only are you giving your users a nice resource and a reason for them to return, you can literally add hundreds of thousands of new pages to your site that can be indexed by search engines. This has the potential to give you millions of different key phrase combinations that can bring new traffic to your site. Pair that with written descriptions from Constant-Content's writers and those millions of pages can start ranking very high.

The brilliance of having those listings in a database means you can simply create a couple of PHP files that interface with the data to generate the output. This can cut the development time for creating all of those pages down to just a day or two.

Constant-Content would like to thank Will from Oddity Software for sharing these insights and strategies with us.

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What is killer web page content? While quite a few definitions exist for the phrase “killer content,” many of them agree that it is informative, compelling, and unique. In essence, killer content is the opposite of filler content. It offers quality information that site visitors want to read.

Since good quality content is written for your audience rather than at them, your content engages your visitors with the message rather than annoying them with the lack of a message. Through killer content, you provide exactly what your target audience is looking to find or needs to find. In some cases, killer content may not be exactly what your targeted audience is looking for, but it is so compelling and provides such a unique slant on the topic that your website visitors keep reading and coming back for more.

1) Gives Your Site Credibility

Your presentation of content needs to portray a sense of expertise and trustworthiness in order to create strongly perceived web credibility. The quality of your content provides this credibility with its factual presentation and the validity of the information it contains.

You want your readers to be able to believe what is written on your site. Therefore, the content must be seen as having been written by a knowledgeable individual in order to promote the value of visiting your website. Due to the huge amount of information currently available on the Web, a site with content that offers a positive credibility image draws a greater number of visitors, increases conversions, and raises page ranking.

2) Engages Your Visitors and Keeps Them on the Site

Composing content that focuses on your targeted audience or ideal customer keeps them engaged and clicking through additional pages on your website. Engaging content encourages your visitors to click through multiple pages and has them wanting to come back again for more. If there’s nothing worthwhile to read, your visitors are going to leave within seconds of landing on a webpage.

3) Encourages Visitors to Share Your Site with Their Friends

A website that features killer content is going to attract new visitors simply because it leads to word-of-mouth sharing. If your website consistently offers good content that is worthwhile to read, your visitors are going to share that information. Whether your visitors tell one person or they tell many about the benefits of visiting your website, the overall effect is to increase traffic to your site. This is one kind of chain reaction that you want to encourage – people praising your website and the value of visiting it one after the other.

4) Improves Search Rankings Naturally if You Write About Areas Your Business Is Focused in

Improving your search engine ranking is the best way to get your site noticed, while drawing more traffic to it. Including quality content on your website is one of the techniques that you can use to enhance your ranking naturally. Writing about areas that your business is focused in drives the right kind of traffic to your website – the kind that stays awhile clicking through to additional pages of content. All of this improves the chances of your website appearing on the first page of search engine results – the page that the majority of people actually look at when searching for a particular topic or product. It also increases the quality of the interaction with an increase in page views per visitor.

5) Powers Your Social Media Efforts with Content That Is Reusable on Most Social Media Platforms and Drives People Back to Your Site

While you are building your reputation with timely and up-to-date content, you increase the number of unique visitors, returning visitors, enquiring visitors. Not only do people know that you offer killer content, but they also know that the content is available there when they need it. Both of these factors is going to drive more people to your site as your content appears all over the Internet via social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google Plus One, Reddit, Digg, and Stumbleupon. If you know how people are searching, then you can figure out how they are thinking, tailoring your content to attract new and repeat visitors, especially via social media platforms.

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Doing PR Online with Press Releases

Online PR allows you to: spread the word about your business, drive traffic to your website, and give your website an SEO boost thanks to the backlinks coming from high PageRank sites. Yes, the humble press release can do all of this!

Sites such as PRWeb.com, eReleases.com, and PRNewswire.com allow you to upload and distribute press releases to the masses. It's not unusual for press releases to be picked up by news distribution channels like Google News. Not only can you quickly spread the word about your business's latest news, you'll build valuable backlinks from authority websites.

You'll need compelling content for your press releases. Check out Constant Content's new pool of press release writers and have your press releases quickly and professionally written by online press release writing professionals.

Connecting with Customers with Social Networking

While the Web is now 20 years old, social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are mere babies. It's not too late to get on the social networking bandwagon. Share your press releases, tips, fun facts, discounts, and other interesting tidbits with your customers and start interacting. It's fun, rewarding, and traffic-generating.

Continuing to Connect with Opt-in Lists

Newsletters may seem old-fashioned compared to social networking, but they remain one of the best ways to build relationships and stay in touch with your customers. First-time visitors to your website may never return, despite their good intentions. However, if you can get those visitors to sign up for your newsletter, you can continue to communicate and prompt them to visit your site time and time again.

Again, you'll need compelling content. In this case, you'll need content such as a free special report or eBook to entice visitors to subscribe as well as content for your future newsletters. Constant-Content is ready to serve once again with thousands of qualified writers skilled in writing everything from unique articles and blog posts to sales copy, white papers, and eBooks.

If you've been thinking of doing online PR, now's the perfect time to get started and begin reaping the benefits of increased traffic. Order a press release, article, white paper, or eBook today!

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Making Contact

Of course, before you can guest post you need to find a blog which will accept your posts. Simply using a search engine is a good place to start. Google your niche and browser through the first few pages of results. Send out an email to the the owner or editor of each blog letting them know you're interested in guest posting. Be polite, be concise, and make absolutely sure that your email is grammatically correct. Don't expect a response from every blog you contact, but a few should get back to you.

You can also benefit from thinking outside the box when contacting blogs. For example, let's say you have a blog about cell phones. Contacting other cell phone blogs is a no-brainer, but what about contacting blogs about cars? Many cars now communicate with cell phones, but automotive writers don't always know a lot about the subject and would be happy to have content written by an expert on the subject. This is just one example, of course. There are many ways in which creative thinking can result in surprising alliances.

Making the Post

Once you've reached an agreement with a blog for a guest post you need to actually write the post. Generally speaking, your guest post should be a substantial and informative piece of content, not a simple news post.

How-to articles are always a good bet because they provide useful, concise information which positions your blog as a place to visit for practical information. They also position you as an expert and let readers know that your information is trustworthy. General technical articles or in-depth commentary on a recent news item can also achieve this.

Avoid “rant” posts. These posts are not a bad idea on your own blog because, if well written, they can give your blog character. However, this guest post is your introduction to an audience. They don't know you, and don't trust you, and so they probably won't be receptive to a post which rocks the boat too much.

Bringing in the Traffic

Even an excellent guest post will not bring in traffic if it was not properly credited. Ideally there should be a header to your post which states that your post is a guest post and includes your name and a link to your website. Try to negotiate this before writing your post. A guest post won't be of much use to you if you are only credited by a sentence in small font at the bottom of the post.

If possible, try to work in a link to one of your own articles in the text of the blog post of all. You should of course discuss this with the blog you are writing the guest post for. These links make excellent backlinks and readers are likely to click on them during the course of reading the post.

Keep it Up

These are the basics of guest posting, but don't be satisfied once you have accomplished your first guest post. Keep it up. Find new blogs to post on and continue to guest post for blogs which you have worked with before. This will give you many quality backlinks and will boost your rankings in search engines over time.

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One Page, One Keyword Idea

Though perhaps a little basic, try this: Decide that your goal for each page is to gain a ranking for one keyword idea, which boils down to 2 or 3 tightly focused keyword phrases. When you are building links to a page, both internal and external links,  and know exactly which phrases you're targeting for the page, the result is an clear vision that makes it easier to complete the necessary work. This focus makes creating a bookmark for the page in Delicious, or fashioning a tweet to get the news about your new page into the Internet’s collective consciousness, intuitive. By no means is this a call to stuff repeated keywords into each page, but having the target keyword phrase (or phrases) in mind can help keep the desired outcome of the page more clearly defined - and search engines appreciate clarity.

Some people argue that one keyword phrase is a good place to start. Others argue that restricting yourself to a single keyword phrase will lead to unnatural writing (see the comments at the other end of this link), and because that writing isn't enjoyable to read, it will cause prospective customers to bounce from the site. As is often the case, the best policy is to find a compromise between the two ideas. Keep each page tightly focused around one particular keyword idea while you maintain a natural and easily readable content-writing style.

 

Tight Focus Simplifies Promoting and Optimizing Content

When your pages are tightly focused in their goals, the actions required to promote and optimize the page become less daunting.  If you can create a site map that outlines every page that your site has (or you plan to add) and list the keyword idea for that page and the 2-3 keyword phrases that you're targeting, you've created a firm understanding of what the goals are for each page.  While the search engines may send your visitors from any number of keyword phrases, having a solidified plan for what you're aiming to rank for is putting the foundation in place to build your organic search marketing upon.

Looking at this from another angle: If you know what keyword phrases you hope to rank for, lining up the writing projects becomes easier. Have you been trying to rank for too many keywords on the same page? We can help with that. Log in, submit a request for custom content and purchase articles you need to start ranking for some of your keywords ideas.

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Don't Suck

The IMC Conference really brought in some great speakers this year. A couple of the talks today were really spot on. The first presentation was by Avinash Kaushik, who spoke about the topic of analytics and understanding your users. His Number 1 Rule? "Don't Suck." Such relevant and a happily irreverant advice set the tone for what was to follow. He exhibited pages related to High Speed Internet PPC Campaigns, which highlighted how many local high speed providers are shooting themselves in the foot by not helping people find what they need.

Hurray for Data

People who market online have a great advantage over offline marketers, who must use expensive means to gather data. Online marketers are just swimming in low-cost data. Anyone who wants to can add analytics tracking to their site and, in no time, have a wealth of data at their disposal. Unfortunately, using the data effectively is still pretty tricky.

Segmentation: Making Sense of Mountains of Data

Segmentation is the act of breaking your analytics down into groups that you can better understand. One of the segments that Avinash discussed were the loyalists (people who visit more than 3 of your pages, i.e., they are really exploring your site). Limiting your analytics results to only this group helps you to see where the interested people are going within your site. In addition to using segmentation, you can examine the top ten pages that are visited on your site and calculate at the bounce rates for those pages. The pages with the highest bounce rates are prime candidates for redesign. People are bouncing for a reason. Maybe that reason is fixable!

You're Probably Wrong

One of the great benefits of working in the online world is the ability to find out quickly when you are wrong. Knowing where you can make improvements is great - it lets you hypothesize what problems those people who come to your site are encountering and how you might be able to fix those problems. Avinash has a great example in point five (cinco) of this behemoth blog post of just how inportant the testing part of this process is. Getting inside the human mind is no easy feat and, try though we might, our plans to divine what kind of page and content will help sites make sales seem almost sure to fail. Testing is the only way to be sure our hypotheses are correct!

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Keyword Research

Keyword Research is a difficult task. Anyone who has tried to drive eyeballs to their website can vouch for this fact. It's also well known that increasing traffic is not necessarily going to benefit your site, but increasing well-targeted traffic - people who are qualified to be interested in your product or service - will almost certainly benefit the bottom line. With this in mind there is little point in adding content to a site without making sure that you have defined your keywords clearly and are working to include them in your content, internal and external linking, and PPC campaigns. To fail to do this would simply dilute the effectiveness of this type of business development.

 

Local Words - Fresh Traffic

One of the essential components to good keyword development is knowing the local parlance and phrasing that surrounds your topic. For those immersed in their subject matter, it can be difficult to see their subject from different angles, but to develop a great keyword campaign, tapping into markets other than the market that you're familiar with can be a big help. People in different countries use different word patterning and their languages exhibit specific linguistic nuances. This can present an opportunity to unlock traffic from new parts of the world as your keyword understanding expands. In the same way that much of the fun of traveling can center around experiencing cultural differences, engaging a multi-cultural business model will inevitably illuminate differences. One favorite example of local languages conveying the same meaning with different words include the greeting equivalents, "How you going?" for Australians and, "How you doing?" for Canadians and Americans. Another example can be seen in the the grand 'biscuits' vs 'cookies' confusion. This suggests that to pick one or the other is to err; incorporating multiple voices into your keyword strategy will allow your campaign to include potential clients from other locations.

Online marketers know that this difference in language can mean the difference between catching the eye of your target market and missing it. People often search the internet using spoken English, so understanding the way that a product is spoken about across a broad spectrum will allow for a larger and still well-targeted sales campaign. Finding how keywords are used in common vernacular in other regions or languages is difficult, but it is possible to get help.

 

Listening for Keywords

To help us develop more sophisticated methods for creating keyword lists, Gab Goldenberg of SEO ROI Services, spoke to the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle about embracing some new techniques. One main thrust of his presentation was the idea that listening can be used as a form of keyword discovery. Rather than simply letting Google/Wordtracker/Fill-in-your-keyword-discovery-tool-here recommend keywords based on your understanding of a topic, he recommended visiting places that people gather to talk about your subject - forums, blogs and Twitter - to "put an ear to the ground" and learn the language of people in your subject. Sifting through these conversations, you can learn the words people are using to describe the products and services that you provide from their own mouths and start to build keyword phrases that highlight the local vernacular of people already active in the subject area. This technique expands beyond just gaining a better understanding for the search terms in a field that you're not familiar with. A great first step to building a keyword list to focus on in a new niche is to find out what the experts and influencers are calling your products and services. Find the experts and influential publishers in your niche and consider their publications as fertile ground for finding relevant keywords for topics in your niche. This will give you access to a nicely refined set of keyword phrases to focus on. As Gab made clear, with highly targeted keyword phrases, the competition decreases, and whether you're doing PPC or organic search marketing, less competition is good.

With over a billion people on the Internet there’s a whole lot of searching going on. Sometimes it's easy to think that we’re all searching for the same things using the same words. We’re not. We’ve all got our own brands of English and our own ways of describing things that might be unique to us, our town, our country, our group of friends. It’s both mind boggling and exciting.

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