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The rise in the popularity of video content isn’t set to decline anytime soon, and with 2.6 billion YouTube users around the world, content creators are reaching limits with videos that written content could never accomplish. But how can you reach more global audiences with your videos? The answer isn’t as simple as creating great content. In fact, the success of your videos relies heavily on whether they’re optimized for a global audience!

Although English is considered one of the most widely-spoken languages on earth, only 1.35 billion out of the estimated 8 billion people on earth are English-speaking. That means that if you produce your videos in just the English language, you’re missing out on the opportunity to target millions of viewers worldwide.

You might think that video script translation is the quick solution here. But optimizing your video to engage global viewers revolves around more than just language. You also need to consider viewers with hearing disabilities.

This post explores the fundamentals of optimizing your videos for a global audience to make them accessible to anyone.

Why Video Content is the Best Way to Reach a Global Audience

More people watch videos today than ever before. And there’s no sign of the trend declining any time soon. In 2020, more than 80% of global internet usage was driven by video content. On YouTube alone, 1.2 billion videos are watched every single day. The effectiveness of video has been shown to increase consumer trust, increase conversion rates, and keep audiences engaged for longer. 

Videos are one of the best ways organizations can maintain consistent global branding, even if they target multiple languages across multiple channels. Pairing video and written content can be a great way to improve the ROI of global campaigns that target specific local markets. 

How to Optimize Your Videos for a Global Audience 

Step 1: Perform In-Depth Research

To start creating videos that engage a global audience, you must determine where the majority of your viewers are based. Most YouTube users are generally based in Latin America and Asia, which rules out the idea of only using English content when creating video ads. Once you’ve researched the demographics of your target audience, it’s time to focus on cultural preferences across multiple channels, which have a massive impact on the type of audience you’ll have to cater to with your content.

After establishing which cultures you’ll cater to, creating content with a specific persona is important. This will help you create content that aligns with your viewers’ expectations. When you deeply understand who’s listening to you, you’ll have a much better opportunity to discuss the type of content they’re willing to listen to.

Step 2: Focus on Titles, Descriptions, and Captions

Audio-visual content intended for the international market must be delivered in a way that sparks global interest. This doesn’t necessarily only relate to the kind of content you produce but revolves around improving the accessibility of your content with video metadata as well.

You’ll need to optimize your video titles, descriptions, and captions according to the preferences of the local audience. For example, if more than 35% of your viewers are native Spanish speakers, it’s important to translate your original audio content into the Spanish language.

Using translated captions is a great way to improve the accessibility of your audio-visual content, as it ensures that you’re also catering to individuals that cannot listen to the audio of the video. It’s preferable to use professional language service providers when it comes to translating your captions, as machine translation often neglects to capture cultural nuances that are deeply engrained in language.

Step 3: Consider Subtitles

Adding subtitles to your videos is a great way to reach more global audiences if you’re sharing videos outside of YouTube, where auto-captioning isn’t standard practice. Subtitles can be very handy to help viewers understand you better and ensure that viewers that cannot listen to the audio still understand the content of your video. Since subtitles force viewers to engage with the video, it might help drive engagement with your videos as well.

Step 4: Time the Length Perfectly

A major aspect of creating high-impact videos is their length. The perfect video length is important to the product’s effectiveness in reaching a global audience. If your video is intended for international audiences, be brief enough to keep people interested. Dragging the video out for too long can have a negative effect and might lead to increased bounce rates. To maximize viewership, it’s important to do proper market research and balance out the timing to ensure you’re producing videos that are just long enough to deliver a meaningful message. 

Step 5: Create Localized Videos to Reach Specific Audiences

Localized video clips can address specific problems people face in specialized regions. Developing local video campaigns is important. You can start by creating a simple video that engages the audience. After this, you can develop a series of short films tailored to specific countries or cultural areas. A good example of localized videos is the content created by the National Institute for Health. Their videos are intended for American English speakers. However, the voice-out and the scripting are all Spanish to demonstrate that NIH has resources available for the languages their target audience understands best.

Ready to Reach More Global Audience Members with Your Videos?

Optimizing your videos to reach more global audience members isn’t rocket science, but there are some basic principles that you must keep in mind to appeal to and engage viewers across the world. When you translate your videos and their text elements, you’re giving your video the best shot at reaching as many viewers as possible, but translation is not the end-all and be-all of building a global reach.

By implementing certain tactics to make your videos easily accessible through search engines and localizing your keywords, titles, and captions, you’ll be catering to a global market and expanding your reach with ease.

Featured Image by Sam McGhee on Unsplash

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Gone are the days when employees spent their entire careers working for the same company. While ‘jobs for life’ have obvious upsides, an increasing number of workers are discovering the benefits of well-timed job hopping.

It’s not hard to see why many Gen Z and millennial employees have decided the time is now to vote with their feet and move to a job providing a better work-life balance or an enhanced salary or benefits package. 2022 saw over 135,000 tech industry layoffs, with no sign of abatement moving into 2023. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic created the perfect storm of conditions for the Great Resignation, as many workers began reassessing their priorities in the face of an uncertain future.

Purposeful job-hopping may appear to fly in the face of everything you’ve heard about showing tenacity and commitment with longer tenures. However, the conditions created by the pandemic have forced many employers to work harder to attract talent, often leading to significant financial rewards for job switchers. In fact, ADP’s 2021 Workplace Vitality Report found that job switchers enjoyed an average yearly wage growth of 5.83%, compared to just 3.08% for people remaining in their existing roles.

Thanks to the growing normalization of job hopping, there’s a strong case for using strategic switches to your advantage. However, understanding when job hopping can help your career — and when it can be harmful — is essential.

The benefits of job hopping

Well-planned, intentional job hopping can give you the range of experience you need to progress along your chosen career path more quickly. Having multiple roles under your belt could benefit your career in the following ways:

Developing skills and job knowledge

No two jobs are the same, even within a niche industry. The broader your job history, the more opportunities you have to learn new skills, processes, and methods that could give you the edge when it’s time for your next career move. Experiencing working with different colleagues and client groups can also help you develop the soft skills many employers value, such as communication, adaptability, and teamwork.

Varied work experience can also hone your ability to recognize good employment opportunities. Working for multiple companies allows you to evaluate workplace standards in your industry and appreciate both good and poor practices. Therefore, you’ll be more likely to identify employers offering the best benefits, compensation, and conditions while weeding out companies that don’t meet the mark.

Career advancement

If you’ve ever been missold the dream of fast progression by an employer, you’ll already know that getting promoted within your existing company isn’t always a given. Depending on retention within your company, you could be waiting years for a senior colleague to move on before you can advance. Job hopping can help prevent a stagnating career by taking advantage of more senior vacancies at other companies instead of waiting around for opportunities in your current job.

Exposure to new industries

Working across multiple industries can be particularly advantageous for young or recently-qualified employees. It allows you to gain valuable experience in different sectors while finding the career path that best suits your preferences and aspirations. As a candidate with a diverse employment history, you can offer employers a fresh perspective while bringing valuable transferable skills to your new workplace.

Increased earning potential

The ADP workforce report demonstrates how lucrative a job move can be in the right circumstances, and the current hot job market allows jobseekers to benefit from increased competition for the best talent. You may find a new company is happy to offer you a better salary and benefits package than you could negotiate with your existing employer.

While the outlook for job hoppers is rosy in most professions, it’s essential to consider the climate in your particular industry. For example, a career move could be an excellent option if you work in resources or manufacturing, with job switchers enjoying 11.81% wage growth in 2021 compared to 6.06% for job holders. However, leisure and hospitality workers were generally better off staying put. Wages in this industry showed negative growth, with job holders taking a smaller hit than those changing employers.

Experiencing different workplace cultures and methodologies

Exposure to a range of cultures and management styles can be attractive to potential employers, provided your time at each company was long enough to give you a thorough grounding in its methodologies. A diverse job history can make you a more well-rounded employee compared to experiencing just one way of doing things during a single, longer tenure.

Experience with multiple working styles and practices can also make you a valuable knowledge source to a new employer, especially if you have experience working for an industry leader and then switch to a smaller company or start-up. Your industry insights could help your new employer discover new, more effective ways of operating and even save them a significant amount on consultancy fees.

When does job hopping go too far?

Fortunately, there’s now significantly less stigma attached to reasonable job hopping, and many employers expect applications from candidates with broad experience. So, when does job hopping turn into a red flag?

There’s no hard-and-fast rule about how often you can change jobs without harming your prospects, and what’s acceptable will vary from employer to employer. However, multiple tenures lasting less than a year could indicate a lack of commitment, leaving employers questioning how soon you’ll quit. Furthermore, spending at least a year at each company allows you to grow into the role and acquire new skills and knowledge — in other words, you need depth as well as breadth.

Another factor to consider is the number of short tenures on your resume. Many employers are fine with an applicant having one or two year-long stints on their resume, but may be spooked by applicants with exclusively brief tenures.

Perhaps the simplest way to establish what’s normal (and what isn’t) is to look at average employment lengths. According to research by CareerBuilder, Gen Z workers (aged 24 or younger) stay in each job for two years and three months on average. Millennials (aged 25 to 40) typically stick around for an extra six months, with an average employment length of two years and nine months.

How to explain job hopping in an interview

While job hopping shouldn’t be a barrier for many roles, some hiring managers still prefer candidates that show commitment to one company. If you sense that a potential employer has a negative view of job hopping, there are a few ways to positively frame your changes in employment to help you succeed in an interview.

First, provide context for why you left your old job and explain how you managed the transition to minimize any impact on the company so hiring managers know that you won’t leave them high and dry. 

Then, communicate how you can help a prospective employer meet their goals and express why you want to work for them specifically so they know you’re committed. Focus on the aspects of the company and role that excite you and offer examples of how your previous experience makes you the best candidate.

Finally, when asked about short-term goals, emphasize your intention to grow in the role. Hiring managers are much more interested in a candidate that’s worth the effort to train, so let them know where you see yourself in the role down the road. 

Featured Image by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

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In order to build great SaaS products, development teams need to work efficiently and with minimal delays. In today’s development environment, a lot of complexity is involved like scope creep and miscommunications on requirements. DevOps is an efficient set of software development and deployment processes that facilitate communication and collaboration between software developers and IT operation teams. According to the 2022 Gitlab survey among 5 000 DevOps specialists, 70 percent of DevOps teams manage to regularly and continuously release their code thanks to robust DevOps infrastructure.

Organizations that want to achieve high availability and low latency in their software are actively adopting DevOps strategies along with next-gen development solutions, like Rust programming. In this article, we’re going to explore how DevOps can enhance SaaS development.

Why is DevOps essential for a SaaS project?

The SaaS model has been around for more than a decade. The market has evolved over time and so have the challenges associated with managing SaaS applications.

The DevOps approach is the best way to efficiently run a SaaS application. It allows organizations to scale up their development and operations teams while ensuring that developers can get access to the infrastructure and tools they need to build quality software quickly.

One of the standout DevOps sample projects is a widely known SaaS product Salesforce. The company not only uses DevOps practices for their internal development but also makes a step forward and offers their customers a full set of DevOps tools to efficiently build and deploy apps with Salesforce.

There are diverse ways to build a DevOps-SaaS interconnection. You can even follow Saleforce’s example and create a completely unique DevOps as a service product. In the next section, let’s explore the benefits of DevOps for SaaS.

Benefits of applying DevOps practices during SaaS development

There are many benefits of applying DevOps practices during SaaS development. To begin with, it allows you to create a “culture of continuous improvement” that’s essential for your success as a software business. Here are some of the main benefits of adopting DevOps:

Increased speed of software delivery. When you adopt DevOps, you can release your product much quicker thanks to continuous integration and delivery practices, which gives your customers greater value and helps you keep up with changes in the market.

Improved quality of code. Diverse DevOps strategies like GitOps, for instance, help developers to identify bugs early on in the development process and timely fix them before releasing the product into production. This also helps in reducing costs associated with bug fixing after deployment (which can be quite expensive).

Enhanced communication among team members. When everyone is working off the same version control repository, it’s easy for developers to keep each other up-to-date on the progress being made on various projects or tasks within an individual SaaS project. This makes it much easier for everyone involved with a specific feature or component to stay in sync with each other throughout the development process — whether they’re working from different offices or on different continents.

Reduced risk. Automated testing and continuous integration help reduce the risk of releasing faulty code by providing frequent feedback on code quality.

Let’s sum it all up then. If you start developing your SaaS project with DevOps practices, you can quickly launch your product to the market, have better guarantees that the application code will have a required quality level, and as a cherry on top, you’ll face much fewer risks when deploying your solution in production. Sounds like a perfect scenario. Let’s learn then what you need to efficiently start with your SaaS project backed up with DevOps techniques.

How to implement DevOps in a SaaS project

Below are a few things to consider to successfully implement DevOps practices.

Define your goals and objectives.

The first step is to determine what you want from your DevOps initiative in terms of your SaaS project. For example, do you want to improve collaboration between development and operations? Do you want more frequent releases? Or do you need more stability in production? These questions will help you decide which practices will be most effective for your particular situation.

Choose a toolchain for automation.

There are many different tools available for automating tasks such as configuration management, deployment, and monitoring — including Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, and Docker containers. Pick one that works best for your team’s needs based on factors such as ease of use, cost, and integration with other tools in your stack (for example, if you’re already using Docker containers).

Set up the environment for testing and development.

Once you have selected the right set of tools for automation, it is time to set up an environment where tests can be executed automatically after every code change pushed into the repository by developers or testers. Once this environment is ready with all test cases and configurations needed you’re good to go with using DevOps best practices in your SaaS project.

Make sure to also regularly evaluate to what extent DevOps techniques are helping your SaaS project to run more efficiently. In the next section, we give you a few tips that can help you start the development process with much more confidence.

Tips on developing a winning SaaS solution using DevOps techniques

As you may have guessed already, DevOps is a universal method that can elevate many projects and SaaS is one of the use cases. We’d like to share with you a few tips that can help you improve the development and deployment as of your SaaS project so of any other project as well.

The team is your everything. In order to build a successful SaaS product, you need a team that is experienced in building SaaS applications and has solid experience with DevOps. You’ll need people who understand both development and operations well enough to build something worthwhile for your business. If you don’t have these resources available internally, consider outsourcing some of these tasks so that you can focus on what matters most — getting results from your application.

Start small, but start now. Don’t wait until your product is ready for prime time. Start with a minimum viable product (MVP) right away, even before you have all the features that you want to offer in the final product. This will allow you to get feedback from potential customers and improve your product continuously.

Use agile development processes like Scrum or Kanban to manage your development team(s), instead of the waterfall model or other traditional approaches that lead to huge time delays between when requirements are defined and when they’re delivered into production environments. In combination with DevOps, these practices will help you deliver value more quickly.

Any SaaS business that wishes to ensure a successful product launch is likely to benefit from implementing the principles of DevOps. Equipping a development team with the right tools, infrastructure, and training necessary to effectively implement new features can ensure a more streamlined and efficient process. By empowering developers with the ability to make their own decisions, along with assessing the outcomes of those decisions in real time, a team can work as efficiently as possible. This may also result in fewer bugs being released into production, helping you release a SaaS solution with a smooth customer experience.

Featured Image by Safar Safarov on Unsplash

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An eye-catching and beautiful website is more likely to entice web visitors to stick around, find out about your products and services, and, most importantly, encourage them to convert. If you manage a Squarespace site, you might be wondering how you can enhance your images, add vivid fonts, and improve your overall web design to boost your traffic.

We’ve put together a list of ten simple tweaks you can use to optimize your website, including some stunning Squarespace animations that will make your pages really pop!

1. Add a button

If you want to encourage web users to sign up for your newsletter, buy a product, or send you an email, a big bright call-to-action button is the perfect way to do this.

You can create an easy button on Squarespace by adding a button block. Move to the section you want to add your button to, click the blue + icon and choose Button. Here you can add your text and select the page you want your button to take your web users to.

You can style the buttons on your website by going to the home menu, choosing Design and clicking Buttons.

Don’t forget to keep your button text short and sweet to encourage conversions – 25 characters or less!

2. Implement an accordion block

An accordion block is ideal if you have a lot of content but would like to keep your page short and scrollable. For example, if you want to include a lengthy FAQ on a page for search engine optimization purposes.

To add this feature go to the page you want to add the accordion block to and click the blue + sign. Choose Accordion from the menu to add your block to your page. Next, click the pencil icon and go to the Content tab to add and edit individual parts of the accordion.

If you want to style the accordion, click on the Design tab where you can change the background color, how the expand icon looks, and the divider style.

3. Animate your background photos

You don’t have to settle for a dull and boring static background image with Squarespace. With seven background animations on offer, you can make your background stand out and entice your web visitors to scroll!

Click the pencil icon on the image you want to tweak, go to Background, and Image effects. Choose the animation you want to implement, and you’re good to go.

If you’re using a Brine template, you can enable parallax scrolling on your pages – this makes your background image move more slowly than the content in the foreground for a cool effect! Go to the Site styles panel (the paintbrush at the top right-hand side of the page), scroll down to the Main: overlay section, and check Enable Parallax.

5. Get social with social media icons

Social media is essential for building engagement and finding new customers. If you have social media profiles, you can promote them anywhere on your Squarespace website in just a few clicks.

If you want to add your icons to a page, click the blue + icon, choose Social Links and add your links in. Looking to add social media icons to your header? Hover over it and click Edit site header. Then, click Elements, toggle Social Links and add them in.

6. Introduce some background art

Not got a photo to use as a background image? No problem! You can create some cool animated background art to make your website more engaging.

Click the pencil icon and go to Background. You’ll find six different background effects to try. You can change the color by going to the Colors menu. Why not mix and match animations and colors until you find a combination you love?

7. Add a dropdown menu

Usability is essential for your website – you want your visitors to find the information they need as quickly and easily as possible. A dropdown menu is excellent for displaying your pages in a user-friendly way.

Click Pages, then click the + icon. Then select Folder. Give your new folder a name and drag your existing pages into the folder to build your dropdown menu. You can drag and drop your pages so they appear in the precise order you want.

8. Change the fonts

When you select a specific Squarespace theme, it will come with pre-designated fonts. The good news is that you can change these fonts to suit your own personal branding requirements.

When you’re editing a page, click the Site styles icon at the top right-hand side of the page, which looks like a paintbrush. Choose Fonts, and you can choose a new font pack to replace your existing fonts. The bonus is that this font pack is applied to the whole of your website, so you don’t have to painstakingly change the font on individual pages.

9. Enable comments

If you have a blog, enabling comments is a fantastic way to engage with readers and build a strong sense of community around your site. Squarespace has built-in commenting functionality which means you can keep track of comments and likes, while quickly blocking spammy messages.

To enable comments, go to the home menu and click Blogging. Click Comment settings and select Enable Comments Globally. If you want to toggle comments off and on for a particular post, go to the blog post, open the Post Editor and choose Comments on or Comments off.

10. Make your header transparent

If you want to make your Squarespace website feel more modern and streamlined, you can make your navigation bar transparent. This blends your header in with the colors and imagery already used on your page.

Click Edit site header, go to Style and choose Dynamic from the dropdown menu.

And there you have it! Ten simple code-free changes you can make directly in Squarespace. Why not give them a try today?

Featured Image by Ewan Robertson on Unsplash

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The practice of medicine is a profound responsibility. It’s a sacred trust between clinicians, patients, and the people who love them.

But medicine is also a business, and if you want to be able to continue serving patients and their families, then you must strive to make that business profitable. Marketing, not surprisingly, is a critical component of that effort.

However, the ascendency of the internet in general and social media, in particular, has transformed the ways that healthcare facilities endeavor to reach their target audiences. Medical practices today depend largely on a multifaceted approach that not only combines traditional and new media but that also leverages the myriad forms of digital media marketing.

This article examines the various ways that physicians are incorporating multimedia marketing into their campaigns and explores the pros and cons of each.

Marketing in Medical Practice

Some clinicians may feel a bit wary in marketing their practices. They may feel leery about the prospect of “advertising” as traditional for-profit businesses do.

The reality, though, is that in an increasingly crowded and competitive industry notorious for its shrinking profit margins, practices must grow in order to survive. Marketing, then, isn’t about greed or selfishness. It’s about being able to endure and serve in a challenging market. 

When you’re marketing your medical practice, it’s helpful to remember that your conceptualization of “marketing” is probably going to need to change. Marketing in healthcare is far less about advertising products and services and far more about building relationships with prospective and established patients and their loved ones.

And because relationship-building lies at the heart of medical marketing, you’re going to need a proactive and comprehensive approach to make it work. This includes availing yourself of the various digital channels through which to connect with your target audience. 

In most cases, this will mean cultivating a robust online presence that includes a dedicated website with a blog and discussion forum, as well as an array of social media accounts. 

In addition to the use of new media, though, it’s also important to capitalize on traditional channels — from print, television, and radio promotions to billboards and direct mailers. This will help you reach a broader audience, including those who may not have reliable internet access.

The Pros and Cons of Multimedia

As suggested above, one of the greatest advantages of a multimedia marketing approach is that it enables you to reach a broad and diverse target audience using their preferred media. If your practice seeks to serve all age groups and income levels, then combining the enormous power of digital marketing with the proven techniques of traditional marketing is the way to go.

When you deploy a multimedia approach, it’s vital to be strategic and deliberate. One of the most significant downsides of this sort of saturation technique is that your strategy may lack coherence.

For instance, you will want to create a consistent brand style that will inform all of your campaigns, regardless of where and in what form they appear. The goal is to ensure, ultimately, that no matter where your target audience receives your content, they will be able to instantly recognize it as your brand. 

When you’re using such a multi-pronged approach, it’s also important to ensure that you have a clear, cohesive, and utilitarian communications strategy driving it. In other words, you need to have a reason behind every message you create, every content and design choice you make, and every decision concerning the timing and placement of your content. 

This means understanding exactly who the content is intended for and what needs the content is designed to meet for that audience. Likewise, you will need to be clear on why a chosen platform, time, and style will be the best for reaching and engaging your intended audience.

Using Video as a Digital Marketing Tool

In addition to using multimedia to build brand awareness and support business growth, you can also tap into the tremendous power of video marketing. For example, health consumers are increasingly turning to social media to learn more about health and health products. 

In an era in which medical technologies are often outpacing patient education, you may capitalize on your audience’s social media habits to educate them on services and products. You may, for instance, create explainer videos that introduce patients to new IoT medical devices, explore their benefits and drawbacks, and demonstrate how to use them safely and securely. 

This is an ideal way to engage your target audience while building trust and showcasing your professional expertise. The most significant disadvantage, though, is the potential to appear as if you are hawking these products or seeking only to profit from the provision of services. 

Remaining objective, measured, and forthcoming about the product or service, as well as any gain you may derive from them, is vital if you don’t want to come off as a snake oil salesperson.

Remote Events in Real Time

If these pandemic years have taught us anything, it’s that it’s not always feasible or desirable to meet patients in person. For this reason, clinicians are increasingly creating opportunities for patients and their loved ones to engage with their practice in virtual settings. Virtual healthcare is an ideal way to ensure that patients can access the medical care they need through real-time video and chat without exposing themselves to undue risk. 

Further, healthcare apps can also be used to help educate patients, monitor their health status, and promote self-care. Especially among vulnerable patient populations, health apps and virtual platforms can be a lifeline to patients’ physical, mental, and emotional well-being. 

But these tools do more than expand the scope, quality, and accessibility of care. They also serve as a form of interactive marketing insofar as they enable healthcare providers, patients, and families to safely come together in virtual environments. 

For this reason, clinicians are using not only one-on-one, private consultations in the virtual space but also live group events. This might include anything from a weekly course on nutrition to a daily exercise live stream. Clinicians may offer audiences the opportunity to participate in online health fairs, health education seminars, or online support groups. 

Such live events can be highly beneficial in nurturing patient relationships while also increasing brand awareness and driving the growth of the practice.

One potential downside, however, is that those in need of in-person care may neglect to get it. They may develop the misperception that virtual consults and online seminars are an adequate substitute in all cases. And this may end up doing some patients far more harm than good.

The Takeaway

In an increasingly challenging market environment, multimedia marketing can be an ideal way for physicians and health systems to achieve significant long-term growth. The effectiveness of the approach, though, depends on the ability to overcome the potential downsides of the myriad forms of traditional and new media marketing while maximizing their many advantages.

Featured Image by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

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