How To Earn Wealth And Respect From a Twitter Account

Posted on March 27, 2019April 2, 2019by Geek0

The e-mail inbox is still the most important point of communication for entrepreneurs trying to close sales and is a fundamental tool in any business consulting course. Everyone knows and agrees about the value of an inbox but are entrepreneurs underestimating the power of Twitter? Can you build a funnel with Twitter?

On the surface, you might overlook Twitter for being yet another social media platform to vent your thoughts and comment on your friends Tweet; woohoo, how does this help my business? Twitter is an ongoing conversation with the most important people inside of any niche. If you haven’t found the value in Twitter, you haven’t found your community inside of it. This article will help you understand how to leverage Twitter for your business and increase sales.

Identifying your Twitter community

Before we go any further, we are going to assume that you’re building a Twitter account within a niche or category and are not looking to build a personal Twitter account. A personal Twitter account would function much like your Facebook wall and consist of random posts. For the purpose of this article we are focusing on building accounts within a small niche for business.

Which Twitter accounts do I follow first?

Your first step is going to be identifying the leaders inside the niche you’re looking to integrate yourself in. When you first start prospecting Twitter accounts to follow, it’s going to be a fairly surface level quest. For example, if you wanted to integrate with the basketball community on Twitter you would start following ESPN, Michael Jordan, Nike, Lebron James. These accounts are most likely going to be verified celebrities or businesses.

The first accounts aren’t very important in themselves, it’s the clues that they present is where you will find value. As time goes on, you’re going to want to pay attention to the comments left on these accounts Tweets. Start identifying Twitter users who are consistently getting their tweets liked or up-voted. These are the most valuable accounts inside of your community.

Identifying Niche Twitter Influencers

On first look, you’d think an influence inside your niche are the same type of accounts we listed above; verified accounts for celebrities and large corporations. In the big picture, they are at the forest, but you want to focus on the trees instead.

Image result for wex adidas — John Wexler (@wex), Adidas executive and sneaker Twitter Star

In every Twitter community there is people who hold high credibility inside of the niche you’re focusing on. They may not be verified (the blue check mark beside their @) or have a lot of followers but you will find these people being quoted quite often. We can’t specifically tell you what to look for when identifying these accounts in your niche, but keep your eyes open and start following people you think will be important down the road.

Rising Twitter Stars

Once you have started to identify the key figures inside of your community and what sort of traits come with that, start scouting for rising stars. These are accounts that are new to the scene but you see something special in them. These people are the most likely to respond to messages, Tweets and inquiries. These accounts are also the first people you’re going to bring into your “Inner Twitter Circle”.

Again, we can’t advise you on what these personalities will look like but it should be pretty clear who is finding their way into important Twitter conversations even though they’re new to the community. Most new accounts will get ignored in Tweet threads or be overlooked due to the infancy of the account, but some will rise above this trend and those are your new friends.

Creating a Twitter Army

So how do you make the transition from commenting on a Tweet to building a relationship with someone. Bonding with key accounts is make or break for your success in the Twitter realm. Again, this will depend on what niche you’re focused on but we do have a few tips on how to strengthen that relationship.

Becoming a Twitter Community Star

Now that you’ve started to identify who the leaders of your niche community are, you can now start to rise through the ranks and become on yourself. This is no easy task and takes a considerable amount of time to achieve. If you try and force your way into a community, you will be rejected surely because you’re not speaking their jargon or you’ll eventually overstep a boundary you didn’t know existed. This is a task you cannot force and if you’re not gaining any traction, reevaluate your tactics.

Comment on a Tweet and elaborate your point inside their direct message inbox. This is important because once someone has accepted your message once, you will always rise to the top of their inbox when sending a message in the future. So when you’re ready to ask for something, you already have rapport.
Create personalized content for the people you’re trying to bond with. Don’t under estimate the power of a custom made meme or emoji because this feeds on their ego. People can’t resist being complimented and targeted content is a tactful way to do so.
Use animated gifs as replies with clever quotes. Animated gifs are a very easy to make one of your Tweets go viral. It’s all about timing and if you can get the first animated gif on a potentially viral Tweet, you’ll be soaking up likes and retweets.
Tag people in things you think they would be interested in. Many spam accounts do this and tag 10-20 accounts at a time which is a mistake. Take your time and only tag people in things you truly think they’d be interested in. Don’t forget to include a message with something along the lines of “@geek0, this is totally a recipe you’d enjoy since you’re Italian”.
Take chances with your Tweets (within reason). It’s okay to have a failed Tweet, but take chances and don’t be afraid of failing. Twitter communities forget bad Tweets overnight, but remember good ones for years.

How do I covert my Twitter followers into customers?

Again, this will be case to case depending on what niche you’ve integrated yourself in however there is some static rules that will apply to all business models. When you’re selling to someone you already have rapport with, the barriers are going to be lower and your conversion will be higher. If you’ve followed our tips in the article above and are becoming a rising star in your Twitter community, start reaching out to some of the other influential users you’ve networked with. Get these users on your side and get them helping to promote or buy your product.

Assuming you’re doing honest business, your friends are going to be happy to promote your product and if they have credibility in the community, your product is suddenly validated. Another benefit to having a supportive community behind you is you can get honest feedback from your community so you know where to tighten up details before a mass marketing campaign. The final point is members inside of your community are going to be easier to covert to to customers because you are a trusted member of the community at this point and they will be more likely to trust you.

Moving your community off Twitter

If you’re looking to further grow your community outside of Twitter, check out our guide on community building for your business.

Social Media Software

Jarvee – A Complete Guide To Instagram Automation

Posted on March 25, 2019March 26, 2019by Geek0

Building your Instagram account is a very easy and successful way to create a niche sales funnel. It only becomes difficult when you’re left on the outside and the tools of the trade are foreign to you. Most successful Instagram accounts are using automation of some kind, unless by a stroke of luck they hit a viral niche and gained notoriety naturally.

However, be cautious with using automation software because it is a violation of Instagram’s terms of service and you will have your account banned instantly if they find out. Luckily for you, this guide will help to explain how to automate your Instagram with a program called Jarvee and how to avoid getting banned.

How do I start using Jarvee to build my Instagram account?

The first step to Jarvee, is to not use Jarvee right away. This might sound silly, but using automation software right away will put up a red flag on your account and increases your chances of being banned.

So, for your first month or so for the best chance of longevity on your account you want to just post from your phone and treat it like a normal Instagram account. Slowly build your following naturally and post original content. The idea is to make your account look as natural as possible, so once you do introduce automation you’ve already passed a handful of Instagram’s security filters.

The longer you naturally grow your account, the more effective automation is going to be down the road.

If you have already created 3 accounts with your phone number, you are going to need to use an external phone number verification service to activate your account. You can create an account without a phone number, however they eventually ask you to SMS verify and you will not be able to access your account until it’s verified.

Proxies for Instagram

Proxies is a way to route your connection through a separate IP to spoof your location or bypass Instagrams security that monitors usage from one IP address. Essentially, you don’t want Instgram to see that you’re running more than one or two accounts from a single IP; this is a dead giveaway that you’re using automation software. If you’re unfamiliar with proxies, this article helps explain the differences.

Where to buy proxies for Instagram is a common question you will see in your research about automation. We have been using proxies from the same website listed about (Resell Cartel Proxies) however there is many places you can purchase high quality proxies from. Most proxy providers will allow you to choose the location where the server is hosted. Ideally, you’d want to find one that is close to where you originally created the account. This is important because you may still log into the account with your home IP, so you want the proxy to be relatively close so it doesn’t look suspicious. For example. if you live in Texas and your proxy is located in California, Instagram will see you switching between those locations as suspicious behavior and your account will be flagged.

Outside of the provider we mentioned, you’re on your own when it comes to proxy research. You can technically get away with automating a handful accounts without proxies, but do so at your own risk because it could all come crashing down in a moments notice.

Jarvee – a brief overview

Jarvee is currently one of the best Instagram automation tools. It gives you a large suite of tools and flexibility to grow your instagram account. You can have your account completely hands off once you’ve optimized your Jarvee setup. You can automatically follow/unfollow users, repost pictures, like pictures, comment, direct message users and so much more. It replicates normal human interaction styles which is the secret to success when using Jarvee. For this article, we won’t be going into technical details about how to set Jarvee up, instead we will focus on best practices for Jarvee and some hacks we have come across in our usage.

Jarvee has a few different tiers that you can purchase, but they do offer a free trial so you can familiarize yourself with tool before jumping in. Their pricing can be seen here. With their base package you can run 10 Instagram accounts at once cor $29.99 a month which what we recommend when you’re getting started. Unfortunately Jarvee is only available for Windows at the moment so you’ll need to have Windows installed or use a Windows based server. Amazon AWS has a free tier option that would allow you to run Jarvee no problem.

We usually start the bot by posting 9 pictures from our phones so that the profiles looks active, then start the bot with minimum settings (~ 50 likes and ~50 follows per day). Slowly increase this number until you’re at 400 likes / 400 follows per day. We will explain these limits further down in the article and why it’s important to follow.

Where can I find Jarvee tutorials?

If you’re looking for some basic tutorials on Jarvee, their website is full of useful articles that will get you going in no time. You can access those links here . Jarvee also offers an online course that helps you understand the basic aspect of Instagram and gives you a simple recipe for success. That course can be found here and we recommend going through it.

Here is a few simple rules that we follow to grow our accounts to epic levels with Jarvee:

Set the bot to do 400 likes per day in your niche (start with only 50 in the beginning and than increase)

50 comments on posts in your niche (10 to start)

DO NOT follow/unfollow until you reach 1000 followers, than bring the number of people you follow down between 0 and 15. In the beginning the number of new followers per day will decrease but this is a necessary step! Instagram doesn’t ban people who follow/unfollow but will limit their reach. So this technique may bring you results in the early stages but will limit your growth in the long run.

Once your account gets to 1000 followers join an ENGAGEMENT GROUP! This step is what will make your profile grow very very fast if you have good content. We won’t point you towards where to find a good engagement group, you’ll need to figure that out on your own. Our best advice is just find fan pages that have some influence (perhaps at least 30-50k followers) that are in your niche and ask if they’re in an engagement group. Then ask that account to join their engagement group, or ask to form one with them. You just want bigger accounts liking and commenting on your posts.

Make contact with pages in your niche with similar amount of followers as you and ask to exchange shoutouts. You can also pay some shoutouts but be always careful, some pages have a lot of followers but their engagement rates are horrible and you will and up paying $10 for a useless shoutout. Always check how many likes their picture have (good over 5% of their followers), if the shoutout is in their stories ask always a screenshot of their current stories to see how many people have seen it, some times their engagement rate is good but no one watched their stories!

Instagram banned me for using Jarvee

This will happen to you a number of times before you find the formula that works for growing instagram accounts. In saying that, you should be okay with losing a couple of accounts because it’s nearly unavoidable. Being banned and deactivated is just a cost of being an Instagram Manager. You can get your account back if you’re lucky, but do not mention using any software in your claim or you will have zero chance at account recovery.

In most cases, Instagram will ask you to send a picture of yourself holding a piece of paper with the account name and a code they will provide to you; this doesn’t mean you’ll get the account back but it is likely.

Can I repost other users content or pictures?

Absolutely you can. Jarvee has excellent reposting tools integrated into the bot, however you will have a higher chance of success if you’re modifying the image and hash inside of Jarvee and giving credit to the original poster.

Reposting is the easiest way to get banned and flagged for botting Instagram, so do everything within your ability to keep the content natural and honest. Most large accounts aren’t creating their own content so the sky is the limit if you’re careful.

Should I buy likes ?

Previously, if you were trying to rank for a hashtag on the explore page of Instagram you could buy likes to artificially boost your posts, however this has changed in 2019. You will see much more success if your follower engagement is high when you post a picture. For example, if you’re trying to rank for #baseball and your account is already in the niche, then your own followers are the most valuable asset. Don’t ever try and create false engagement by buying likes or followers, this adds absolutely NO VALUE to your account. People who buy followers and likes are simply inflating their own egos because they don’t fool anyone else.

Other

What happened to Future Shop?

Posted on March 22, 2019by Geek0

At one point, Future Shop was a household name for Canadians and the go to place when you wanted to acquire the latest tech. These stores were everywhere in Canada and featured a full commission sales team to assist you with your purchases. The commission aspect of Future Shop was a turnoff to some customers but it also meant that if you were going to survive as an employee of Future Shop, you needed to be educated about the products. However, the year is 2019 and Future Shop is a distant memory for Canadians as it was bought out by Best Buy in 2015, laying off all Future Shop employees in the process.

Why did Future Shop close and what lead to the demise of this iconic Canadian brand. This article will help to explain the culture of Future Shop and why Best Buy Canada eventually took over.

What was Future Shop?

Future Shop was the most popular Canadian electronics store from 2001-2015. With locations in every province, it was a national business that paid commission to it’s employees. During the early to mid millennium commission pay structures were much more common compared to a store in 2019 which has to compete with an educated customer and vast online competition.

Future Shop started to feel the pressure of the E-Commerce world as they introduced a price match policy that allowed customers to match any price of a product that was in stock online and sold in Canada. This was fantastic for the end customer as they were able to scrape the web for the lowest price, but this was a huge pay cut for the commission based work force. Employees were paid based on an algorithm that factored in margin, product cost and services added to calculate commission payouts. Once the prices were being slashed and matched so aggressively, this cut deeply into the pockets of the employees and their customer service suffered.

The beginning of the end.

Once the commission started to suffer, so did the customer service provided by the employees. Outside companies such as Samsung or Apple offered vendor backed promotions that would give a kickback on certain products sold. This kick back was a separate payout from the Future Shop commission structure, so employees were happy to sell these products at any cost. However, this ideology that price matching would benefit the customer in a commission based shark tank was false. Future Shop employees started to only target customers who were interested in buying these vendor funded kickbacks and would ignore what they deemed lower tier customers. A customer who once was treated with a fulfilling customer experience no matter what their buying habits was now ignored. This was just the climate of the market and commission sales jobs weren’t viable at this scale anymore; things needed to change or big box electronic stores might have folded in Canada. This is when Best Buy came into the picture and took over.

Best Buy vs Future Shop

The battle of big box retail had begun, however it was a false battle. Best Buy had actually acquired Future Shop long before they re-branded it to Best Buy Canada but they were split testing business models to see if Future Shop was worth keeping around. They began opening up Best Buy Canada stores within a block of Future Shop locations which appeared to be an attempt to directly test the customers response to both styles of big box retail. The results quickly spoke for themselves – the non commission, low pressure style at Best Buy was actually outperforming the seasoned crew of sales people at Future Shop. Best Buy Canada employees were selling warranty, higher margin products and in house service that the commission team couldn’t beat.

It appeared that Future Shops time had come and death was just around the corner. In 2015 Best Buy Canada officially converted all Future Shop locations into Best Buy stores. All previous Future Shop employees were laid off and new management was brought in. The end of an era had come and another iconic Canadian business was added to the graveyard.

Software

How Street Wear Companies Are Getting Rich From Free Fonts

Posted on March 20, 2019by Geek0

The fashion world is ripe with arrogance and elitism however there is a dirty secret the industry has been hiding for a long time. Brands like Supreme, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent and Off-White have become wildly popular for their simple designs with short slogans. Clean shirts with simple text across the chest is a hallmark t-shirt design style for top end fashion designers. These shirts are often printed on cheap cotton blanks and sold for 800% margin or more. Most surprisingly to us, the cheap shirts they’re touting as designer is the least egregious step in their design process, it’s the free fonts they’re using for design. Yes, that is correct – your favorite fashion house isn’t even designing their own fonts to print slogans and brand names across that white Gildan shirt. After reading this article, you too might be able to make millions of dollars from a collection of free fonts. We will include free download links for all the fonts listed that the fashion houses use so you can start your street wear brand.

Free streetwear fonts for all !

Supreme Font

Supreme is a skateboarding company that started in New York City. They were relatively low key and only popular within the skateboarding community until 15 years ago or so. The hype behind Supreme became larger in life as their celebrity endorsements started to grow. Supreme is infamous for their box logo sweatshirts which simply display the Supreme logo with a red box. So really, it’s a free font with a free box behind it. The popular brand name is using a font called Futura Heavy Oblique . You can download the Supreme font for free at the link we provided. Now that armed with this powerful font, you too can create your own Supreme Box Logo.

Anti Social Social Club Font

Anti Social Social club was started in 2015 by Stussy creative designers Neek Lurk in LA. Anti Social Social Club, or more commonly known as ASSC is a print on demand brand that changed the entire street wear industry. Neek Lurk was one of the first to scale a print on demand style of production to the masses. Celebrity endorsements and proper timing in the market caused his brand to explode with popularity.

Technically it takes a little more than the Anti Social Social Club font to create their graphic. You need to take the ASSC font into Photoshop and apply a couple of distortion effects to get the correct look, but this is a good starting point. Click here to download the ASSC Font

Comme des Garçons Font

(CDG Play Font)

COMME Des Garcon is based in Tokyo and also in the Place Vendôme in Paris, the city in which they show their main collections during Paris Fashion Week and Paris Men’s Fashion Week Their most popular graphic design is from their CDG Play collection which features the heart logo with two eyes on it; quite cute. Once again though, Comme des Garcons is guilty like the other brands we have mentioned so far of using a free front.

The font that COMME des Garcons (CDG Play) uses is Helvetica Neue 75 Bold. Helvetica and Futura are actually quite common as you start to explore the world of street wear fonts; the workhorses of the industry if you will. If you’d like to download the Comme des Garcons font click here.

GUCCI Font

There has been some debate as to what font GUCCI is using on their iconic clothing. We are going to provide a download for what we think is the best example of the GUCCI Font. You can click here to download it here. If you have a better example of the GUCCI font, please reach out or comment on this post to let us know!

Social Media Software

5 free apps every hustler needs.

Posted on March 19, 2019March 19, 2019by Geek0

You’ve taken the leap of faith and have decided to start your own business; congratulations ! This article will help to outline five of the best tools to use when you’re getting started with your small business. However, when you enter the market you’re overwhelmed with information being thrown at you from every direction; what makes this article different? How do you decide where to start and what tools you need to get started? These are questions with answers that will vary from person to person but there is a few essential tools that almost every entrepreneur will use in their life time.

This article will keep it dead simple and won’t attempt to cram any paid solutions down your throat. When you’re embracing the hustle and starting your own venture try and keep it simple. You will have time to grow into advanced software solutions and other scaling options, but it’s best to start on a path of low friction so you can get the ball rolling.

This article also assumes you’ve chosen a hosting provider and are ready to get your website launched (If you’re not interested in E-Commerce, this probably isn’t the article for you)

WordPress

WordPress is the most versatile and low cost platform to build your website on. It has all the functionality and ease of use when compared to other platforms such as Square Space or Wix, however the plugin store is massive in comparison. You can download thousands of plugins to your site easily without cost.

Another huge benefit to using WordPress is the ability to integrate WooCommerce as your E-Commerce platform. WooCommerce is free unlike Shopify or other store platforms so you can start your website without any fees or initial costs. WooCommerce also integrates with most popular plugins and payment processors such as Stripe and PayPal. If you’re a Cryptocurrency fiend like us at Geek0, you can also install custom plugins that will allow you to accept Bitcoin and other coins as payment. As we said before, it’s all about low friction when you’re starting out and you can have a full website ready to take sales done within hours if you decide to choose WordPress (Did we mention it’s free too?)

2. Google Suite

Did you think we weren’t going to include the amazing suite of tools that Google offers? If you didn’t think we were going to, you probably don’t realize the value it offers.

In our mastermind group, we often joke about all of our businesses being started inside of a Google Spreadsheet. The reality is that most of our businesses did start inside of Google Sheets and some are still functioning as that. Google Sheets offers all the great features as a program like Microsoft Excel, but is stored in the Google cloud. You can integrate a vast number of plugins as well for most advanced usage if you desire so. Don’t waste money on expensive products when Google offers everything you need for free.

Aside from their suite of office tools, we have to mention Google Analytics as well. Google Analytics allows you to track your customer traffic and how they behave on your website. With this information you can optimize your website with the data GA reports to you. Getting to your customers and how they interact is essential to a successful e-commerce business.

3. YouTube

This one might be something you haven’t thought of, but YouTube is a brilliant platform for creating a strong customer funnel. This isn’t a requirement and might be a step outside your comfort zone, but creating evergreen content for your niche is a free way to get in front of your target audience for not cost. Depending on your product or service, this path is going to vary widely but no matter what you decide, make the content engaging for the community. If you’re going to live stream, answers questions. If you’re posting videos, make sure it generates a conversation in the comments. YouTube can take some time to marinate before they start showing your content in the search results, so plan ahead with this content as it will be a slow burn.

4. Twitter

If you’re not already on Twitter, we will assume that you’ve been turned off by how it appears on the surface. On the surface is might appear to be random thoughts posted on a wall with no cohesive focus on what you should write, however this couldn’t be more opposite. As you grow your followers/following you’ll start to find yourself involved in a community and the Tweets become one giant dialogue surrounding your niche and the various topics. Information about major events or any business decision is usually announced first via Tweet.

Twitter is also one of the few places left that you can actually reach the person you want to speak to. The barrier between you and a top level CEO is minimal when you’re on Twitter. Some people have their accounts managed by a social media team, but for the most part everyone is accessible. In a way, Twitter is the modern version of an E-Mail inbox which used to be the only way to reach someone without going through a gatekeeper.

5. Reddit

A strong community a solid foundation for success because if you have a loyal audience and do right by them, the pay off is massive. Reddit is host to every niche community you can possibly think of. We encourage all our readers to sign up on Reddit and get to the sub-Reddit most applicable to their niche or business. You will get a raw sample set of potential customers and people who know your product or business inside out. For example, if you were going to start selling Skateboard Wheels online, you would want to find a sub-Reddit of skateboarders who can speak to everything surrounding the culture. The value in this is perhaps something like plastic wheels versus rubber wheels is a make or break for some potential customers and knowing that preference could be huge for your new Skateboard store. This is a silly example of course, but you should get the idea of why Reddit is valuable.

Honorable Mention: PayPal

Everyone hates PayPal in the world of small business and so do we. However, we can’t forget where we made out first sale and that was inside PayPal which most entrepreneurs in 2019 would probably say is the home of their first sale too. PayPal integrates with every platform around the world and only requires a bank account to sign up with. They’re not technically free since they will rake you over the coals with fees, but PayPal is still the most simple option to getting paid.

Social Media

Facebook crashes for hours on march 13th 2019

Posted on March 14, 2019March 14, 2019by Geek0

When many people woke up today to check their social media feeds, they may have been confused as nothing was loading in the longest unscheduled downtime in Facebook’s history. The most searched website on www.isitdownrightnow.com was probably a tie between Facebook and Instagram as both services suffered an extensive outage that is still ongoing at this moment. The reason for the downtime is unknown and Facebook has offered very little insight into why Whatsapp, Facebook and Instagram are all unavailable for normal usage. The only info that has been confirmed by Facebook at this time is it is not a DDOS attack on the Facebook servers. Their Twitter account only Tweeted twice about the issue today and they were cryptic to say the least.

Facebook Twitter March 13th 2019 — **twitter.com/facebook/status/1105888649676111877**

When social media sites stop working, we are suddenly faced with the reality of how much we rely on these external services. Many people make a living off social media platforms in many different niches and because of that Facebook is considering offering a full refund to their advertisers during this downtime. This means if you are currently using Facebook or Instagram for marketing purposes you may be credited back for the time Facebook was unavailable. This only seems like the right thing to do in an instant like this, but this rumor has not been confirmed as of yet.

Seeing these services down for such an extended period of time also makes us question how reliable these assets are and how they will respond under pressure in times like these. The stock market seemed to find this downtime quite unfavorable as well as the stock settled at $173.37 , a bearish signal compared to the earlier highs found during the day.

Facebook stock price March 13th 2019 close — *Facebook Stock Price March 13th 2019 Close*

Other sites that were less covered by the mainstream media were also down today such as Etsy, Yahoo Mail and Google drive. This raises the question of whether there is a large scale cyber attack taking place or if the internet needs to decentralize and move away from Amazon AWS. Amazon AWS currently has a 35% share in the computing market with most social media juggernauts in their client list as well. This hardly makes for a decentralized experience and makes our infrastructure susceptible to large scale cyber attacks .

Image result for amazon aws server room — Does Amazon AWS have too much digital real estate?

Hardware Video Games

Apex Legends Budget PC Build

Posted on February 28, 2019March 1, 2019by Geek0

What is Apex Legends?

Apex Legends was announced late January 2019 and has taken the gaming world by storm. Available for free on Xbox, Playstation and PC without any extra cost to the user. However, if you’re a PC gamer and your old rig just isn’t cutting it anymore, we put together this guide to figure out what the lowest cost PC we can build that runs Apex Legends on high settings. We are going to assume the user reading this guide already has an HDMI enabled computer monitor, keyboard, mouse and of course headphones. By the end of this article, you will have some great options for building your budget Apex Legends gaming PC !

(We will be pricing our parts from NewEgg for this build)

What are the minimum requirements to run Apex Legends on PC?

According to the EA website, the minimum specs for Apex Legend are quite low. We suspect that these parts will give you a near unplayable experience , but we wanted to show what the absolute rock bottom requirements for Apex Legends is.

Apex Legends Minimum System Requirements

As you can see, 6GB of ram and a video card with such little ram isn’t going to cut it; if you were to run Apex Legends on a build with these specifications you would most likely be capped below 30 FPS. Although this is technically “running the game” , it’s not running at an ideal rate for most gamers. If you were to play on a PC of this calibre, you are most likely better off sticking to console as the performance would be better.

Now let’s take a look at what EA calls the “recommended specs for running Apex Legends” as this is closer to what we will be trying to achieve for our Apex Legends budget build.

Apex Legends Recommended System Requirements

In the recommended specs they step up their requirements to an 8GB video card and an intel i5 CPU. This would most likely deliver 60 FPS or higher in Apex Legends and provide an optimal gaming experience. The parts they recommend are a little on the older side, so we should be able to achieve similar results with newer parts at a lower cost. (For example the Geforce 2060 RTX is a much more powerful card than a 970 GTX and can be found for a much lower price).

The Apex Legends Gaming PC Build:

Lowest Cost Rig:

For this PC, we are going to piece together the absolute lowest possible amount you could spend and still enjoy Apex Legends on PC. This is for people on a tight budget who just want to run Apex Legends on medium to high settings and are casual gamers. Perhaps this is a build that a parent would build for their kids entering the gaming world.

CPU:

Intel – Core i3-8100 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor

$118

We decided to stick with intel and go to their lower i3 model. This CPU is fast enough for most games and day to day activities, so to keep the price low we opted for the i3. You can see some comparable results in the AMD CPU’s around this price range, but we would still prefer the Intel i3-8100

Motherboard:

ASRock – B360M Pro4 Micro ATX LGA1151

$72 (after mail in rebate)

The price point is the most attractive feature of this motherboard of course, but there is also a lot of other benefits to this Apex Legends ready motherboard. ASRock has a great BIos that is very stable an easy to set up which is hard to find in this price range. A nice little bonus feature of this motherboard is an extra x16 slot on the bottom in case you want to add some storage upgrades in the future.

RAM:

GeIL – EVO SPEAR 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR4-2400

$48

There is many options for RAM in this price point but we decided to pick the Evo Spear 2 x 4 GB sticks. These have been reviewed in a number of builds and seem to perform quite well for the price point. If we were looking to push the budget a little higher, we might recommend some ram with a higher clock speed, but this RAM will do just fine in Apex Legends.

Hard Drive:

Samsung 860 EVO 250 GB

$57

We must confess this was not the cheapest hard drive we could find, but when it comes to storage we don’t think it’s worth cheaping out. Samsung EVO drives have been solid in our testing and 250 GB of storage is more than enough space to install Apex Legends on your new budget build. If you’d like to skip this part and find something more inexpensive or perhaps you have an old HDD you can use, go ahead!

Video Card (GPU):

Gigabyte Radeon RX 570 4 GB Gaming 4G Video Card

$129 (after $40 mail in rebate)

With the recent cryptocurrency boom, top tier video cards are over inflated well above their value. This makes sense to a cryptocurrency miner because they need top tier hardware to make the most of their operation, but for the average gamer a midt tier card will go far. For this budget Apex Legends build we added a Radeon RX 570 by Gigabyte which ran surprisingly well. Check out the YouTube video below on how this card performs on Apex Legends.

Apex Legends running on a Radeon RX 570

Case:

Cougar – MX330-G ATX Mid Tower Case

$49

It was an easy pick with the MX330 because aesthetically, it doesn’t get much better than this in the $50 price range. Cougar has a strong reputation for building quality PC cases and this one should be great for your Apex Legends budget build since it has great cooling options and a robust front panel.

Power Supply:

Corsair – CXM (2015) 450 W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply

$54

This power supply is great value for the price because they offer modular cables. If you haven’t used modular cables, you’re in for an absolute treat when doing wire concealment. A modular power supply allows you to remove the cables you don’t use so there isn’t any loose wires hanging around the inside of your PC case. If you were looking for something a little more power efficient, you could look into a Gold rated version of this PSU. In saying that, we think this power supply is just fine due to the low consumption of this Apex Legends budget buil

TOTAL PRICE: $527

Wow, for only $527 you can build yourself a solid gaming PC that will run Apex Legends quite smoothly. You could shave a few more dollars off this price if you wanted to or you could spend a little more on the upgrades we mentioned above. Thanks for reading this article and good luck building your low cost Apex Legends PC!

Apple

2018 MacBook pro – IS IT worth the price?

Posted on February 26, 2019March 1, 2019by Geek0

THE MACHINE

I love it. It’s well built, much lighter than my 2013 15″, and a lot easier to carry around as well. On account of it’s size and weight, finding a spot to plonk it down and begin working isn’t that huge of an issue, in fact it’s quite comfortable. From working on my desk, to shows on Hulu in my bed is really easy too.

The keyboard feels fantastic to type on and are definitely much softer. The Trackpad’s HUGE but it hasn’t caused any accidental clicks/scrolls/swipes so far, and still retains Apple’s high end trackpad quality.

The Touch Bar .. While working with Adobe apps, not having a physical Escape key took some time to get used to (I’ve accidentally loaded a command on the Touch Bar a few times while trying to press the delete key).However, I don’t feel it’s going bother me in the long run, but it was quite irritating the first couple days.

Now lets talk audio because the sound on this thing is great. I was initially really surprised by it’s volume, comparing it to my previous MacBook, and it’s definitely a lot more full sound which is awesome for Spotify and movies.

I do miss the MagSafe though.

THE MACBOOK TOUCH BAR

I was initially quite skeptical of the Touch Bar, but have now fallen in love with it. It functions quite well with apps that support Touch Bar features, however there seems to an overall lack of app support for it which is disappointing

Overall, I like it, and don’t miss my function keys.

A SNAPSHOT OF MY DAY

Startups/Restarts, opening/closing apps, and switching between desktops are fast without any lag. Such a great upgrade, I must say it again.

I carry my laptop to work and back home everyday and the weight is no problem. It’s a little heavier than other laptops but feels balanced inside of a backpack or laptop case.

The cooling system inside of the 2018 MacBook pro seems to work just fine as my temperatures stayed cool and quiet.

WORK STUFF (ADOBE SUITE)

As I said before, Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign are the applications I use for work and it’s definitely a step-up from my old laptop. As an example, I have a file which took 3-4 minutes to open up on the old MacBook Pro, and dragging items around the art-boards would heavily lag the machine. Some times Photoshop would crash when I try to click on an object; not fun!

Working on intense projects would trigger the fans, but it’s definitely much quieter than any previous computer I have owned.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In contrast to my 2013 15″ MacBook Pro, it’s a lot lighter and feels much thinner. The portability is a awesome, the battery life is fantastic and the screen looks sharp.

As a standalone device, it runs great for my workflow and basic internet-needs.