Your privacy is compromised.
A new tracking admission from Google, one that hasn’t yet made headlines, should be a serious warning to Chrome’s 2.6 billion users. If you’re one of them, this nasty new surprise should be a genuine reason to quit.
By: R. Michael Brown, Freelance Writer [Follow on Facebook: @RMichaelBrownLLC]
📸: Let Ideas Compete is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
After joining a bunch of Facebook cycling groups I started to receive ads for CyclingDiet. You may be getting them too because you are part of the Facebook groups or post about cycling.
As a former US Olympic Cycling Coach and professional freelance writer, I thought I would take a look at their plan and write a review to be helpful to other cyclists.
The bottom line, BUYER BEWARE!
According to their Facebook ads and their Facebook page [@cyclingdietforweightloss] they say, “Fun, easy, and safe way to lose weight! Find what will work for you with 60-sec quiz approved by cycling coaches and experts and get your personalized plan & diet!”
So I purchased the program to check it out and it cost $66… not including the international charges because the company is based in Lithuania (Didn’t know that when I registered).
In addition I paid an extra, $4.99, to get the “rush” evaluation on the quiz I took. They say the personal evaluation is done by cycling coaches and experts.
I signed up as a beginner to see what they were teaching new cyclists. When I received my plan it included some generic daily workouts for before and after stretching, calisthenics, and bicycle training. You could easily come up with these on your own via the web for free.
But when I got to the diet part, and you are led to believe with a name like CyclingDiet this is the robust part of their offering, all it had was a Cycling Recipe book in a PDF showing calorie amounts for the few dozen recipes they provided. No daily plan, no meals to sync with the daily cycling and off-day workouts, no technology to track your calories… Just two mentions above the recipe “book” that showed total daily calories you should stay within to maintain weight and total calories you should target to lose weight.
Honestly, you could buy a paperback weight loss cookbook for under $10 and get more information.
What they sent me is what their “cycling coaches and experts” came up with?
After working with Olympic cycling sports nutritionists and many nutritionists over the years on my own diet and my daughter’s because she has Type 1 Diabetes, the CyclingDiet isn’t a diet or diet plan by any stretch of the imagination.
The whole plan is basically – stay under 1,500 calories a day and you add it up on your own. Oh, and exercise a lot. Not worth $5 let alone $66.
If you’re used to MyFitnessPal, Fitbit, WeightWatchers, or the many other online programs, CyclingDiet looks like a bad joke.
Plus, when I attempted to get a refund after telling them the deficiencies in their product, they gave me some back and forth customer support static and said they would refund only half ($33) and it may take 2 weeks to process.
So just to check on them by doing a Google search, turns out the company for CyclingDiet, UAB Kilo Grupė, in the first few Google results, are about “unauthorized charges” and scam alerts.
Now I’m going to have to watch my PayPal and bank accounts to see what happens.
They buy a lot of online ads. They’re everywhere. I blocked them.
As you can imagine, I won’t recommend this product. Far from it.
In fact this is the best $33, hopefully, I’ve ever spent if it helps you not fall for this waste of your time and money.
If you need a diet, talk to your medical doctor or a licensed nutritionist. They work with you and legitimate online programs for you to evaluate, plan, and track your diet. That’s the safest and will get you the best results.
Happy cycling!
For more free reviews and stories go to BrownieBytes.net
By R. Michael Brown
Sound ON!
Congratulations for topping 8,000 members today in the #BrandStorytelling #LinkedIn Group I founded.
Brand Storytelling and Journalism in a hot topic now for public relations and marketing.
Join us! [LinkedIn Group: Brand Storytelling & Journalism]
BrandJournalism #CorporateCommunications #PublicRelations #marketing #MarketingCommunication
If your #app or #website forces your #customers to become an IT analyst to get logged in, you have #failed. Do you realize what that does to your #brand?
For businesses new to digital marketing, these steps may feel huge to begin with, but once you get the hang of it, it will seem as natural as wearing a seatbelt in a car.
Now is the time, more than ever, to master your digital marketing strategy to get your business in front of more eyes. But strap yourself in for a journey rather than a two-stop trip—digital marketing is not a one-off effort, but rather an ongoing objective that needs daily monitoring.
When you empower under-performing toxic people because they are loyal to you, you erode the respect of your team, disempower your healthy high performers (who will leave) and undermined the mission.
Making a purchase is 85% emotional and 15% logical – this article breaks down how you can use content marketing to tap into your customers’ emotions.
Emotions are an integral part of our everyday life. So if you have chosen the work as a content marketer you need to know how to discover these emotions, and uncover their raw ingredients. Embrace them, dig deeper and offer a way out the other side.
We are always trying to understand why some content goes viral and rises to the top – and some flops. Up until now we have focused on the content itself – optimizing it for search and sharing, then desperately hoping it will get some attention.
But what about your readers’ emotional needs? The sense of belonging, ego, self-expression and obligation. There are ways to “tap” into these emotions and they should be a part of every content marketing strategy.
You have about 2 seconds to get people’s attention – that’s your first couple of sentences. My hope, for example, is that you were drawn in by my first sentence and lured down the page. Now, the rest of my job is to engage you, to continue to feed your emotions, and move you along in two ways:
— Read on www.jeffbullas.com/tap-emotions-boost-content-marketing/
By Rebekah Dunne
You may have read about the social media platform built for good recently; well, how do you feel about a search engine created for privacy?
Sure, you have the likes of DuckDuckGo that offers additional privacy protections, and Mozilla Firefox, which has built-in cookie jars to prevent third parties from sharing your information, but this particular search engine is offering something that no other platform does.
Neeva is dedicated and extremely strict about operating its platform without ads.
“Search is the gateway to the world’s information, and with Neeva, we want to help you experience the Internet in a new way—free of distractions, prying eyes and frustration.”
BrownieBytes has a Question: Are you willing to pay $5-$10 a month for a subscription?
R. Michael Brown
The brand wants its users to see search results that aren’t dictated by advertisers.
So, if Neeva has ditched the ads, how is the search engine made available? The platform will operate on a subscription basis, costing users between $5-10 per month.
See More [SEJ Search Engine Journal
Neeva isn’t available yet but you can check it out.
Explore Neeva and join their waitlist
Let BrownieBytes know what you think in the comments!
Subscribe to BrownieBytes for the latest in interesting and informative topics by going to the sidebar on the right and click Follow Brownie Bytes or Subscribe by Email.
By Jade Scipioni
At 73, James Patterson has sold more than 425 million copies of his 200 novels globally, making him one of the highest paid authors in the world.
Patterson had annual earnings topping more than $80 million between June 2019 to June 2020 and sold nearly 5 million in books in the U.S. during that time, according to Forbes.
In July, Patterson signed a multi-project deal with Amazon’s Audible for an undisclosed amount, with his first Audible Original, “The Coldest Case” out Thursday.
“I do not work for a living, I play for a living. I love doing it,” Patterson tells CNBC Make It.
But Patterson’s road to success didn’t happen overnight. He started writing as a side hustle and he faced a lot of rejection before getting his first book published.
Brownie Bytes 