How to generate more qualified leads and turn them into customers

• Get found
  online by more (and more qualified!) visitors
• Convert
  more visitors into leads
• Nurture
  leads with discipline and consistency guiding them down the sales funnel
• Close
  leads efficiently
• Make smart marketing investments
  guided by analytics and ROI

The V2 Marketing Communications inbound marketing strategies combine social media marketing, content development, and search marketing (SEO)  into integrated and measurable marketing campaigns for our clients. By nurturing the potential client with worthwhile, inspiring, relevant information and compelling benefits, when they decide to buy, the consumer with whom you have created a relationship will choose you over your competitor. As an internet marketing consultant, our approach focuses on increasing awareness for your brand, generating qualified leads and building customer loyalty. Our job as your marketing agency is to produce results that impact your bottom line.

V2 Marketing Communications Inbound Marketing strategies include:

Overall marketing strategy & content strategy

• HubSpot website design and integration
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content creation and promotion
• Social media marketing
• Lead conversion and analysis

How does our Inbound Marketing Consulting team help you attract visitors and turn them into customers?

• We help you create valuable content
• We create or optimize web pages, blogs, e-books, videos, PR and social media accounts so that they’re attractive to search crawlers
• We help promote your content through social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
• We provide expertise on effective lead nurturing and conversion
• We help evaluate and continuously update your website (keywords, tags, landing pages, etc.) using the analytical data provided by the HubSpot software
• We help you become an expert with inbound marketing services, using tools like HubSpot, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other social media

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about –Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Inbound vs Outbound Marketing:
What's Better for Your Business?

The emergence of inbound marketing

in the last decade has created a heated debate in the marketing world – inbound versus outbound marketing; which is better? While we are experts and practitioners of inbound marketing and we have an obvious preference for inbound, we also recognize that outbound still serves an important role in marketing. For some organizations, outbound alone might be the best strategy, and in other cases it might be best to combine inbound and outbound. What we’re here to dive into today, however, is what’s best for your business.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing approach adapted to the modern buyer who, on average, does 70% of their research on a product on their own before contacting the company they are researching. Inbound is designed to bring potential customers to your business who are actively in the market. It’s about getting found when they’re looking, rather than forcing your message on people who may or may not be interested. Another way of looking at it is that inbound marketing is designed to better align your organization with the Buyer’s Journey, the natural process a modern buyer goes through when searching for a solution online.

The Buyer’s Journey

1. Awareness Stage –
   Prospect has a problem they want to solve or an opportunity they want to seize.
2. Consideration Stage –
   Prospect has researched their problem, understands it, and is aware of potential solutions.
3. Decision Stage –
   Prospect has narrowed down the products/services and must decide which one to purchase.

As an example, let’s talk about Mary.  Mary owns a company that sells fancy dress socks. Cool, right? Mary is looking understand how she can use different marketing strategies to drive sales for her growing sock business. After reading several marketing blogs on the topic, Mary decides that inbound marketing is the best strategy because she’s looking to invest in long-term revenue growth. In her research, she found several agencies who can help her implement inbound marketing and reached out to a few whose service offering aligned with her needs. Sound familiar? 😉 Typical inbound marketing tactics that help take someone through the buyer’s journey

include:

• Blogging
• Social media
• Email marketing
• Content creation
• Lead magnets
• SEO

Inbound marketing tactics like these are designed to help prospects discover your business in the early stages of the Buyer’s Journey and to educate them on the benefits of your solution, all while building trust throughout the process.

What is Outbound Marketing?

As opposed to marketing to people who are already looking for a solution like yours, outbound marketing aims at trying to reach as many people as possible, whether or not they are active buyers. In general, outbound marketing tends to market to a larger volume of less-targeted people,

using tactics like:

• Commercials
• Pay Per Click ads
• Print ads
• Billboards
• Cold-calling
• Direct mail

Unlike inbound marketing, outbound normally doesn’t take the Buyer’s Journey into consideration.

Choosing Between Inbound and Outbound

Anyone who says that either inbound or outbound is always superior is giving you a biased answer. To determine which one is best, you have to consider your specific business, audience, and your marketing objectives.

What Makes Inbound the Best?

One of the biggest strengths of inbound marketing is that it is focused on providing value to your prospects. It’s educational and often non-promotional. Since inbound marketing aligns with the Buyer’s Journey, it builds a relationship between your prospects and your brand. This also attracts prospects to your brand at the right time, as opposed to interrupting them at a time when they are NOT in the market for what you offer. For this reason, buyers prefer inbound marketing over outbound marketing. Instead of being annoying, it helps them. The other major strength of inbound marketing is the long-term ROI.

Generally speaking, inbound marketing requires a higher upfront investment and brings slower results for the first several months. However, those initial stages are necessary to build your digital marketing assets, increase your presence online, and rank higher in search engines. Over time, the value of those assets increases at a higher rate than they cost to maintain or improve. Digital assets like blog posts and premium offers can continue to generate leads years after they were originally created without costing an additional penny.

What Makes Outbound the Best?

The biggest strength of outbound marketing is its ability to get in front of a large number of people quickly and build awareness. If done correctly, you can launch an outbound marketing campaign, get seen by millions, and have new customers within a few weeks, however, the results are more dependent on the money you invest. Usually have to spend more to see more results and when you stop spending money, the benefits stop. Unlike inbound, you don’t get many tangible, long-term assets that continue to generate leads with outbound marketing.

Also, outbound marketing tends to be more disliked.  

In fact, entire businesses have been built on the premise of regaining the control that buyers have lost to outbound marketing. Take, for example, Netflix’s attractiveness over TV's advertisement laden programming or the incredible success of AdBlock on the web.  

Determining the Best Fit for Your Business

There are businesses that have found tremendous success by exclusively using inbound marketing or outbound marketing. There are also plenty who have done well by using both. Ultimately, you have to figure out what’s right for your company by considering the following:

Your Market

First, you have to consider who your ideal buyers are and how they normally shop for what you offer. Where do they go to learn more about the types solutions you offer? To get a better idea, take a look at your industry as a whole and your direct competitors. What marketing tactics are most common and seem to be most effective?

Your Goals

What are you trying to achieve? Do you want to build brand awareness? Drive traffic? How many customers are you aiming to get and what’s your timeline for that goal? Inbound marketing is the best long-term strategy, but it’s probably not going to dramatically increase business in the first few months. Outbound marketing, on other hand, can help you get customers in the door quickly, but it comes with diminishing returns. More often than not, the best strategy is to combine a little of both, while taking an inbound approach to both – meaning you are measuring results accurately and you’re aiming for long-term brand-building alongside short-term growth.

Your Brand

Finally, you should consider how the marketing tactics you deploy will affect your brand’s image. Launching an aggressive cold-calling might get some sales upfront, but how will it affect your reputation long-term? You only want to use marketing tactics that your brand can be proud of and that your customers would approve of if they knew how you executed them. More often than not, the truth comes out and it’s incredibly difficult to overcome a bad reputation.

Being More Inbound About Going Outbound

We believe in an inbound-focused approach that also uses outbound marketing when appropriate. This means using outbound tactics to get your company in front of potential buyers, while focusing more on helping than selling upfront. For example, if you sold fancy mens socks, you could run a PPC (pay per click) advertising campaign that promotes a free guide on matching fancy socks to your business attire, instead of promoting the product directly. This works because people are more likely to engage in a brand that helps them understand the buying process, instead of asking simply asking for their money. Or let’s say you were purchasing a booth at a local conference. You could use inbound tactics to gather leads and promote your presence leading up to the event.

Is Inbound or Outbound Better?

Inbound and outbound marketing are two separate approaches that can be used effectively on their own or even together. Each one has its unique set of advantages and disadvantages. Outbound is a better short-term solution with higher long-term costs, while inbound marketing tends to be the better long-term solution with slightly higher short-term costs. The strategy most businesses find most effective is to use both inbound and outbound marketing, while maintaining an inbound approach.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about –Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

How To Use Funnels For Your Inbound Marketing Strategy

    

I de-mystify SEO and online marketing for business owners.

Funnels have been a focal sales strategy for decades, serving as a general model for anyone looking to get the most out of a given lead pool. By breaking down the sales process into a series of steps, starting at the wide end of the funnel and working to the narrower end, salespeople can more effectively target their potential customers and see higher sales growth as a result.

Today, inbound marketing has replaced many businesses’ sales efforts altogether. Instead of hiring a dedicated sales force to sort through leads and juggle them through the stages of a sales funnel, companies are dedicating their resources to building and preserving a highway system that can accommodate multiple inbound streams of web traffic and put them in the best position to eventually convert. Part of that conversion-optimization process depends on a funnel system that can ultimately produce the most qualified pool of potential leads.

The Mouth of the Funnel: Capturing the Most Attention

The widest part of the funnel demands the greatest amount of possible leads to work with, and as a result, you should step up your efforts to appeal to the greatest number of people. Gaining visibility on the web is a somewhat straightforward process, but it does take a significant amount of time—usually on the order of months just to break into the scene.

Most inbound marketers are already using a large-scale strategy to produce this volume of visitors and potential leads. Through content marketing, you’ll build a name for yourself and increase your authority with major search engines, through SEO, you’ll optimize your website for a series of industry- and topic-specific keywords, and through social media, you’ll build and grow a network of followers who read your content and visit your site regularly. The more users you have coming in through the mouth of the funnel, the more users you’ll eventually have coming out the more relevant, narrow end. Pay attention to your key demographics at this stage, but don’t try to sort your leads; let your automated funneling tactics do that work for you.

The Middle of the Funnel: Filtering the Most Relevant Audience

The middle of the funnel is responsible for sorting through the first stream of leads and filtering out some of the less-relevant audience members. For example, if a pet supplier is looking to sell cat-specific products, it might want to filter out all exclusive dog owners and instead focus on the cat owning portions of its inbound audience.

This stage of the funnel requires attention and setup, but once in place it should be fairly effective at filtering out your inbound leads. Traditional means of middle-funnel sorting might require individual contact, lead by lead, while the automated means creates a situation that naturally predisposes your different audience segments to behave in specific ways. Here, you won’t necessarily be focused on volume. The success of the middle portion of your funnel is dependent on how successful it is at filtering out the audience segment you have intended to filter out. You’ll need to run occasional diagnostics to ensure its effectiveness and make tweaks if necessary.

The End of the Funnel: Appealing to the Most Interested Leads

At the end of the funnel, you’ll introduce your now highly-qualified leads to a purchase (or simply a conversion opportunity) they may be interested in. At this point, your lead pool should consist exclusively of your specific target demographics, and as a result, your potential to achieve conversion should be much higher than through an ordinary system. In order to be successful, the end of your funnel must be compelling. Even the most qualified leads won’t convert if they’re not interested in what your selling. That means you’ll need to step up your efforts in terms of design, copy, and value if you want your audience to have the highest propensity to convert.

Using Content as a Funnel

Content is going to serve as the best and easiest funneling system for your campaign. It provides an excellent introductory mouth, since it will generate large volumes of traffic from increased search engine rankings and returning readers, but more importantly it will give you the opportunity to easily filter your audience through topics and suggestions. For example, if you’re a pet supplier and you’re looking to focus on cat owners for a specific campaign, you can use cat-related content as an introductory means to filter your audience. Exclusive dog owners likely wouldn’t click on your cat-focused article, so you can be assured that your primary reading audience for these articles falls within your demographic specifications. Your demographic needs may be more complicated than this, but you can use the same principles to write appropriate content for each segment of your audience.

Once you’ve got your topics in place, you can use helpful leads in the middle or near the end of your articles to guide your leads to relevant places. For example, if you’re trying to appeal to cat owners who are concerned about the dental hygiene of their cat, you can link to cat dental health articles, resources where people can learn more about feline dental health, or if you’re ready to end the funnel, your feline dental health product directly.

Using Landing Pages as Funnels

You can also set up landing pages to do the funneling work on your behalf. Rather than simply producing a line of content to be syndicated and eventually discovered, you’ll be pouring leads to your landing pages and letting the rest take care of itself. For example, you could set up four separate landing pages (each intended for a different segment of your audience), and use careful wording to syndicate appropriate links to those landing pages on social media or through a paid advertising program. Your landing pages could ask your users for some basic information—such as name and age—if you wanted to funnel your leads further, but the fewer steps your leads have to go through, the better. Instead, try to use your landing pages to qualify your inbound leads on their own, and then direct them to the appropriate funnel ending.

Make an Offer

Once you’ve got your highly-qualified lead pool confronted with an opportunity for conversion, you’ll need to finalize the deal. The best way to do this, especially for B2B companies, is to make a valuable offer. Most people won’t hand over their personal information voluntarily, so you can offer something worthwhile—such as a whitepaper or a research report—in exchange for that information. If you’re offering something more tangible, like a product, you can use testimonials or persuasive copy to increase the perceived value of the item you’re selling. The point is to make the deal as valuable to the user as possible—this will ensure that the greatest number of filtered leads end up converting at the end of your funnel.

Creating a funnel that can complement and enhance your current inbound marketing efforts should increase your total number of eventual conversions and thus, your total ROI. By using automated funnels instead of a manual step-by-step sales procedure, you’ll save yourself the time and stress of the procedural formality, and your potential leads will

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about –Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Stages of an Effective Inbound
Marketing Strategy

                                              Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing has been proven to be one of the most effective ways to promote and do business online. In fact, a survey revealed that 93% of companies who used inbound marketing experienced an increase in traffic and lead generation! The beauty about this strategy is its ability to draw quality prospects to your content. Its centers on providing valuable content that your ideal customers are naturally interested in. No more chasing or using antiquated methods like buying email lists. Inbound marketing is win-win for both parties involved as you offer solutions to your niche while your prospects glean value from your content.

The major component of inbound marketing is the process of nurturing a “stranger” to an eventual promoter of your business. In other words, your target market starts off not knowing anything about your company. They visit your content, become interested enough to subscribe to your list (become a lead), are cultivated through your email messages that they purchase your product, then are so enamored by your ongoing life-changing value that they essentially promote you and your brand from their customer experience! This is achieved through tactics such as your content marketing, social media, SEO techniques, and email content, just to name a few.

Each of these elements play a huge role in your overall inbound marketing success. You can’t just focus on generating leads and sales if you want a long-term sustainable business. If you do it right, inbound marketing will position you to create lots of loyal, happy customers. The following are the four marketing actions you must consider to generate desired results in your business.

Attract Visitors

The prerequisite to driving quality traffic to your sites is being clear about your target audience is and what interests them. Knowing the pains, problems, needs, and questions of your buyer personas prepares you to create a content marketing strategy that resonates with them by solving their problems. This is how you attract visitors by sharing information that speaks to your ideal customer.

Here are some of the most common ways to draw visitors to your content online:

• Social Media
  Learn the networks where your target market “hangs out” to focus your marketing efforts there.
• Blogging
  This an important facet to inbound marketing and the best way to attract visitors to your content. Your blog also positions you as the expert and authority in your niche. No business should be without a blog!
• Video Marketing
  It’s predicted that by 2017, 74% of content viewed online will be from video; a compelling stat to motivate any business to boost their video strategy.
• Email
  Even when visitors become leads, continue to send them to your content by sharing recent posts in email messages. This keeps them coming back to your brand and improves your search engine rankings.

Convert Visitors into Leads

Now that you’re attracting visitors, it’s time to convert them into leads and capture their contact information. The best way is through an exchange; you offer something valuable and enticing where they are compelled to give you the goods. This freebie could be a checklist, eBook, how-to video, guide, bootcamp series, webinar, discount/coupon…anything that would be deemed valuable to your audience.

This works great when the freebie is congruent to the message they’re viewing. Therefore, if you’re sharing content on how to lose 10 pounds in 14 days, a good offer would be a daily checklist that helps them to do just that! Align the offer to get better results. Finally, (and this is very important), to capture leads from your content, you must leave a call to action (CTA) or tell the visitor what to do next. This can be as simple as telling them to click on the link directly below a video, or to leave a comment for feedback, or even to share your content with their network. The key is to give them directions to take your desired action.

Close Sales & Gain New Customers

The next key element is converting your leads into sales. The good news is that your leads are qualified and have expressed interest in your company. Moving forward, using tools like your CRM system to help you enrich your list that brings them closer to the buying decision is essential.

Below are some ways to increase sales conversions within your list:

• Use social proof, customer testimonials, case studies and tests findings to illustrate that people are getting results from your product/business. Testimonials are excellent because your lead now believes it will work for them too!
• Create deeper levels of target marketing by segmenting your email list. By separating your list even further based on certain criteria like interest, age, etc., you can increasingly personalize your messages to speak specifically to someone. It is one of the most overlooked features in email marketing software.
• Reduce or remove risk. Most businesses have a 30-day money back guarantee that gives consumers some comfort prior to purchasing. Make sure that your list is aware of your risk-free policies.

Engage & Delight with Value

This is where you build raving, loyal fans who gloat about your business to their networks. How does this happen? By continuing to give value that relates to your audience. You want to be so well in-tune with your audience that you can provide fresh, relevant content that keeps them in the know. Surveys work fine because you can directly ask what your customers want. Use social media feedback as way to improve your customer initiatives and create great experiences.

Studying and staying abreast with your buyer personas positions you to upsell and create new products centered around them. You are literally giving the people what they want…and they will love you for it! The key to your inbound marketing success lies in focusing on these four key elements and getting really good at them. Hubspot offers invaluable training, tools and resources that will shorten your learning curve and give you the action plans to excel. As you start to implement this strategy into your marketing, undoubtedly will you see an increase in traffic, leads and sales.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about –Inbound Marketing.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

2X ROI:
Double-Dip Your Content
Marketing Efforts

    

There's lots more you can get out of your content marketing efforts.

The term “content marketing” is a little bit of misnomer. The service that’s designed to brand and market your company can actually provide many other business functions beyond “just marketing.” In name alone “content marketing” prevents many companies from looking beyond the assumed marketing-only benefits. But companies who delve into content marketing slowly discover that their company-branded media is starting to support other business efforts such as reducing operating expenses, attracting new employees, or even being a source of revenue. With the help of other content marketing experts, I’ve compiled the following video and article highlighting the non-marketing benefits of content marketing.

Recruiting

How often have you heard a company tell you they have a great corporate culture? Company culture can mean so many different things. Without actually seeing it in action, it means absolutely nothing.You can actually show corporate culture by allowing each employee to shoot a video explaining how they do their job. Shoot interview videos of company events, or maybe create video profiles of each employee. “A strong talent brand established through content can help you recruit faster and attract people who are a better culture fit, both of which reduce the overall cost of hiring,” said Kerry O’Shea Gorgone, host of the Marketing Smarts podcast and director of product strategy, training at MarketingProfs.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

DAO Casino wants to use cryptocurrency to disrupt online gambling

Imagine an online gambling ecosystem that is decentralized, meaning that it cuts out the typical middleman between a game-maker or betting operator and the player or bettor. That’s the pitch of Russian company DAO.Casino, a decentralized platform for online gambling operators that runs on
the Ethereum blockchain.

                  In its white paper on the developer site Github, DAO.Casino
says it can solve common headaches of online gambling that afflict both game developers and game players, such as: fraud risk; hidden fees; high cost of entry for game developers; operational overhead; player access to funds; player withdrawal delays; and general lack of trust. If that sounds like a mouthful, let’s take a step back. In the cryptocurrency world, much of the press and attention right now is around bitcoin, since the price of bitcoin is flying: it’s up 200% in 2017 so far. But the price of a rival cryptocurrency, ether, has seen a bump as well: it’s up 174% in the past month, to $263. Ether is the currency of the Ethereum network, which is a blockchain for smart contracts.

Thereum smart contracts

While bitcoin runs on the bitcoin blockchain, a decentralized, permissionless ledger—and blockchain technology originated with bitcoin in 2009—Ethereum runs on its own blockchain specifically designed for smart contracts. Smart contracts are coded agreements that live in a permanent address on the Ethereum chain. These agreements can interact with other contracts to automatically enact functions. In other words, “smart contracts” is a fancy way of saying “computer programs.” For example: on Ethereum, we could exchange the title deed to a car, directly from seller to buyer. In a recent Cognizant survey of 578 financial service firms, 78% of respondents said their firm is exploring multiple blockchain platforms—of those, 49% listed the bitcoin blockchain, 42% said Ethereum.

While bitcoin is soaring as a speculative investment, there aren’t yet obvious mainstream uses for the currency beyond trading and holding it; many in the industry await the “killer app” for bitcoin. There is arguably more excitement right now around the uses of Ethereum, since it was created specifically for smart contracts (not for the currency, which is just an incentive token for developers). TechCrunch writes that Ethereum is “poised to overhaul open-source development.” And Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin (just 23 years old) met with Vladimir Putin this week, who praised Ethereum.

DAO.Casino and initial coin offering

That brings us to DAO.Casino, one of the many startups that believes it can solve a problem using Ethereum. On June 29, DAO.Casino will launch an ICO (initial coin offering), a popular new way of raising money for cryptocurrency startups in which investors buy up the startup’s own coin and pay for it with a more established coin. Ethereum did its own ICO in 2014, in which investors bought ether using bitcoin. An ICO typically lasts for a month. Think of an ICO as the equivalent of a VC round for cryptocurrency startups. In DAO.Casino’s ICO, it will sell BET, its own token, in exchange for ether.

Just don’t associate DAO.Casino with The DAO, a leaderless, decentralized network that launched in May 2016 (via an ICO that exchanged tokens for ether) as a platform for Ethereum-based projects and was quickly hacked, one month later, to the tune of $50 million. The entire Ethereum blockchain had to perform a split known as a “fork” in order to restore all the funds stolen in The DAO hack.

DAO.Casino is not an actual casino itself, but an open protocol for online gambling companies (like an online casino, blackjack game operator, or sports betting site) to build on. (DAO.Casino will also build its own branded games.) It isn’t aimed at the end user—if an online betting site were to use it, the bettor wouldn’t have to know or see that they’re using a system built on Ethereum. (I could even develop my own gambling site on top of DAO.Casino’s protocol and pay out users in BET tokens, but rename them Dancoins.) The company’s hope is that online betting sites will integrate with its network to offer games without the casino, a middleman that takes a big cut and may not always be trustworthy.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Rise of Ethereum:
Why this cryptocurrency skyrocketed 3000% in 2017

Like bitcoin, ether is a blockchain based asset (similar to a security, like a bond, issued in physical form) which acts as a fuel operating the distributed application platform Ethereum.

Sidhartha Shukla – Moneycontrol News

Overshadowed by the more illustrious bitcoin,  altcoins —  alternative cryptocurrencies launched after the success of Bitcoin — traded in a narrow range for a long time. But that changed in 2017 when investors  decided that they needed to have a diversified portfolio of digital currencies, sparking a rush for altcoins. The most noticeable rally has been for ether, which has appreciated over 3000 percent year-to-date (YTD) from levels of USD 8 to USD 268, as per the CoinDesk price index.

Trading at all-time highs, ether is creating a new price record every other day. Like bitcoin, ether is a blockchain based asset (similar to a security, like a bond, issued in physical form) which acts as a fuel operating the distributed application platform Ethereum. As per Coinmarketcap, ether at present has the second largest share in the cryptocurrency market space only after bitcoin and many believe that it can overtake its senior in the coming days.

While it is known that only a finite amount of bitcoins — 21 million —  will be mined, people tend to think of it as virtual gold, a safe haven investment, and hence its price movement resonates with the characteristics of a limited commodity. Such an intrinsic characteristic is not available for ether which can explain the price movement. However there are a few factors experts says may have influenced this rally. Here is a list of developments which can explain this price movement.

Rise of the Ethereum Alliance

The recently formed Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) to connect large companies to technology vendors in order to work on projects using the blockchain is believed to be one of the major influencers on the ether price up move, as per a survey done by CoinDesk. Under this alliance global giants like JPMorgan, Microsoft and Intel have come together to explore the benefits of enterprise blockchain technology.

Bitcoin civil war

Many believe that it was the bitcoin scaling debate which led to this rally. As a consensus was not being reached on how to update the bitcoin blockchain to accommodate the increasing volume of transactions, many shifted their money to the second most popular option — ether.

ICOs

Initial coin offerings (ICOs), a new way to raise capital for cryptocurrency ventures, have picked up pace since the start of the year and many of these crypto-ventures are based on the ethereum blockchain, which means this will lead to more utilization of ether tokens, helping in the price uptick.

All aboard the hype train!

But the major reason  which can be attributed to the sudden spike in interest for buying ether could be a result of a herd mentality. Clearly visible from the graph below, a comparison of ethereum price and the rise in its search interest run directly proportional to each other. The rise in bitcoin's price since 2016 sparked a global interest in cryptocurrencies in general, experts believe that the sudden rally in altcoins like ether can be a result of that as people who missed the bus with bitcoin are rushing to get onboard the altcoin hype-train.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Linux Malware Mines for Cryptocurrency Using Raspberry Pi Devices

A Linux trojan detected under the generic name of
Linux.MulDrop.14 is infecting Raspberry Pi

devices with the purpose of mining cryptocurrency. According to Russian antivirus maker Dr.Web, the malware was first spotted online in the second half of May in the form of a script that contains a compressed and encrypted application. Experts say the initial infection takes place when Raspberry Pi operators leave their devices' SSH ports open to external connections. Once a Raspberry Pi device is infected, the malware changes the password for the "pi" account to:

$6$U1Nu9qCp$FhPuo8s5PsQlH6lwUdTwFcAUPNzmr0pWCdNJj.p6l4Mzi8S867YLmc7BspmEH95POvxPQ3PzP029yT1L3yi6K1

Malware targets only Raspberry Pi devices

After this, Linux.MulDrop.14 shuts down several processes and installs libraries required for its operation, including ZMap and sshpass. The malware then launches its cryptocurrency mining process and uses ZMap to continuously scan the Internet for other devices with an open SSH port. Once it finds one, the malware uses sshpass to attempt to log in using the username "pi" and the password "raspberry." Only this user/password combo is used, meaning the malware only targets Raspberry Pi single-board computers. This is somewhat out of the ordinary since most malware tries to target as many platforms as it can. Nonetheless, this version of the malware may be still under development, and other username & password combos may be added at a later date.

Still better than Mirai

Most users would dismiss the idea of using Raspberry Pi devices to mine for cryptocurrency, which is a very computational-heavy operation. While Raspberry Pi single-board computers do have some hardware resources at their disposal for the task the malware is attempting to perform, they are not as powerful as classic desktop or laptop computers, and nowhere near the efficiency of dedicated mining equipment. Nevertheless, people have used Raspberry Pi devices to mine for cryptocurrency in the past, with moderate success.

Either way, Linux.MulDrop.14 is certainly more equipped for the task at hand compared to a version of the Mirai IoT malware spotted in mid-April, which also tried to mine for cryptocurrency for a short period of time. At the time, Errata Security researcher Robert Graham estimated that if a Mirai botnet of 2.5 million bots mined for cryptocurrency, it would be earning only $0.25 per day because of the low computational power of the devices Mirai is capable of infecting (usually security cameras, DVRs, routers, and other IoT equipment).

Linux malware used to create a proxy network

Last but not least, Dr.Web researchers also said they discovered a second Linux malware strain, which they named Linux.ProxyM. As this malware's name implies, this Linux trojan is used to start a SOCKS proxy server on infected devices, which the trojan's author then uses to relay malicious traffic, disguising his real identity and location. No other details are available at this time about Linux.ProxyM, but researchers said the number of devices infected with this strain has grown to 10,000 systems after being first spotted in February 2017.

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
Please click either Link to Learn more about – TCC-Bitcoin.

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

What is happening to cryptocurrency valuations?

    
The total market cap for all cryptocurrencies just surpassed $100 billion.

The vast majority of these gains have come in just the last few months — on April 1st the total market cap was just over $25 billion — representing a 300 percent increase in value in just over 60 days. While some of these gains are from bitcoin itself (BTC is up ~160 percent in the same two-month time frame), other digital currencies like Ethereum are also responsible for the increase, which on its own has increased ~439 percent over the last two months. There’s perhaps no better way to show this diversity in gains than by looking at a chart of bitcoin’s “dominance” — i.e. what percent of the entire cryptocurrency market cap is represented by bitcoin. For years this had always hovered around 80 percent, but in the last few months has fallen to below 50 percent — with currencies like Ethereum and Ripple taking its place.

Bubble talk? 

It’s hard to be an experienced investor, or even an at-home part-time trader, and not think of a massive bubble when you see that some asset has increased more than 400 percent in just a few months. It’s just how history works — when an asset rises that fast it’s a near certainty that it will come back down. Markets are irrational, after all. So don’t be surprised if there’s at least some type of correction. There already was, a few weeks ago — bitcoin pulled back from a high of $2,700 to around $2,000, but, as of today, has slowly climbed back up to a new all-time high of ~$2,850.

Latest Crunch Report

That being said, we may look back in 12 months and realize that this two-month period of insane growth was less of a bubble and more of a rebirth of cryptocurrencies as a whole. The fact that these gains have come from currencies other than bitcoin are a good sign that this is less of a bubble and more of a resurgence of interest in crypto. It makes sense that Ethereum is on a tear — the cryptocurrency has technological improvements over bitcoin, including the ability to code smart contracts directly into the blockchain, which in turn allow for things like the ability to build totally new tokens and even host ICOs

(initial coin offerings).

And similarly, Ripple, a cryptocurrency based on inter-bank settlements, has signed up more than 100 banks worldwide. Even if this takes a while to implement (which anyone who works in the old-school banking industry will confirm), it’s still tangible news and a reason for people to get excited about the currency. These recent developments certainly don’t justify increases of 400 percent in 60 days. Both Ethereum and Ripple have been around for a lot longer than a few months. So if these were publicly traded companies, there would be (almost) no reason for drastic rise in value. But cryptocurrencies are new — most of the world has no idea what bitcoin is, let alone Ethereum and Ripple and other currencies. The public has never been able to put their money directly into a technology that has so much potential but is still developing.

For example, a technology enthusiast in the 1990s may have foreseen the rise of the internet, but had no way to directly take a stake in the technology. The idea of applying cryptography to the storage and transmission of data is still very new. And the fact that anyone can directly buy the currency that powers these cryptographically secured blockchains is much like the public actually getting a chance to invest in the internet during its infancy.

Impossible to value?

There is one rational explanation that, if true, would totally justify this rapid increase in price across some of the major cryptocurrencies. And that is, maybe these currencies are actually worth these high prices, and maybe even worth many times more than that at which they are currently trading. But the problem is we have no way to figure out their value. Cryptocurrencies aren’t public companies with earnings and expenses and EPS. For example, we can look at Apple’s financials and determine its book value — what the company’s assets would be worth if hypothetically liquidated today. Of course, stocks trade at a premium to this, because people are enthusiastic that Apple will continue to perform well and this book value will continue to rise.

But we can’t do this with cryptocurrencies. We could guess — and compare it to things like the total money or gold supply in the U.S. For example, if you’re someone who thinks of cryptocurrencies as a store of value, the total estimated value of all gold in the world is more than $8 trillion dollars… meaning if bitcoin would ever replace or supplant gold, its current value is pennies on the dollar. If you’re someone who thinks of cryptocurrencies as a genuine currency, you could compare the market cap to M2, which is the total money supply in the U.S. — cash and checking accounts, as well as “near-money” accounts like savings, mutual funds and money-market securities. The total value of M2 is about $13.5 trillion, also meaning cryptocurrencies are just a small fraction of that.

Be an informed “investor”

I’ve long cautioned readers (and friends) from buying cryptocurrencies because they have seen it rise and just want to make a quick buck. The past two months have led to a tremendous surge in public interest, with mainstream news like CNBC and CNN explaining how to “invest” in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Just make sure you’re doing it for the right reasons. Buy cryptocurrency to learn about it and transact with it. Or buy it because you are betting that this new technology will change the world by:

• Supplanting gold as the main store of value in the world
• Transforming inter-bank settlements
• Making international remittance affordable
• Revolutionizing the fundraising and IPO process

These are just a few options, and if you’re in tune with the cryptocurrency world, you’ll know the opportunities are endless. So if you’re going to buy cryptocurrency, do it because you see the long-term vision (and sure, ostensibly the financial gains that may come from them), not because you think it will blindly appreciate and give you a good return on your “investment.”

Chuck Reynolds
Contributor
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Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member