Google recently announced a set of changes to its ranking algorithm which are designed to downgrade search rankings of mobile pages with sluggish loading times. This is vastly different from the way Google’s conducted business in the past.

Previously, all rankings were done according to desktop sites — not based on mobile optimizations or lack thereof. The search engine giant has however made a sensible move in changing its approach to mobile optimization, as it alone drives 96 percent of mobile search traffic.

There are a couple of additional reasons Google has chosen to go this route. First, is the nearly 60 percent of searches that now occur on mobile devices, the second, is to create an overall better user experience. In this respect, Google’s update is also quite fair.

Deemed the ‘Speed Update’ after all, it will only affect pages that deliver the slowest user experience and only affect a small chunk of searches. The same standard is applied to all pages, no matter what. This means a slow-loading page has the same chances of a ranking if it provides quality and relevant content.

This move will undoubtedly force small businesses to adapt to Google’s ever-changing ranking algorithm, with one upside, marketers and small business owners have until March 2018 to prepare. With this in mind, I want to provide you with three tools and tips that will help you optimize your site for mobile users and be compliant in the eyes of Google.

Mobile Optimized Templates

The decision to build your small business website using a website builder, or to use a traditional programmer may seem like a difficult one but it’s not. In fact, I want to simplify it for you — which requires weighing a few things:

• If there is a mobile editor
• If the overall price will be lower
• If the builder has mobile-optimized templates
• If the builder will provide a seamless user experience
• If the builder does not have mobile optimized templates
• If there are SEO-related tools built in or available through an app/integration

If any number of the above elements are true, choosing a website builder is easily the best option for your small business. So, when choosing a website builder, you should ensure that it has mobile-optimized templates.

A mobile-optimized template alone could lead to a massive reduction in time spent building a new site, or when updating existing content. This will certainly ensure you do not have to make optimizations twice, once for desktop, and the second time for mobile.

If a template is mobile-optimized, changes made on your desktop version will automatically be mirrored on the mobile site.

Reduce Redirects

Every time a web page is redirected to another, visitors have to wait for longer periods of time. Although it may be only a few seconds, that amount of time in the digital age is priceless. It could also lead to frustration and to a potential sale wandering off to another site searching for the same product, and for faster loading times.

You might be asking yourself why someone would redirect a page or multiple pages.

Truthfully, there are a plethora of valid reasons someone would redirect a page. Your company may build a new website with a new web address, but the process of ensuring everyone who has the old address can still reach your site is quite laborious and near-impossible.

In this case, a simple redirect can make all the difference in retaining website visitors and losing traffic as a result of having a new and unfamiliar web address.

It is to your advantage to reduce or eliminate this level of complexity for site goers by totally getting rid or reducing redirects on your website. One solution is to simply run an amazing marketing campaign based on the migration of your site. Site owners can also take two helpful tips from Google:

1. “Never link to a page that you know has a redirect on it. This happens when you have manually created a redirect, but never changed the text link in your HTML to point to the new resource location.”
2. “Never require more than one redirect to get to any of your resources.”

Test the User Experience

Chances are, if you’re having a bad user experience, full of slow-loading mobile pages, those visiting your site are as well. For this reason, it is imperative to test the user experience using a multitude of devices, browsers, etc.

And it is important to do it often.
What it comes down to it — SEO best practices are your best friend, there’s also the element of how well your company implements SEO best practices and keeps up-to-date with Google’s fickle algorithms.

Something as simple as eliminating custom fonts and replacing them with traditional, SEO-friendly fonts, could help shave off unnecessary time potential customers spend waiting on your website to load.

Once you test the user experience enough, you’ll begin to know what users are looking for and how they want their content delivered. You can then apply SEO best practices.

Lastly, you should check the speed of your web pages on all devices using Google’s PageSpeed Tool. Google PageSpeed analyzes and gives your site a score out of 100 and offers optimization suggestions such as reducing server response time and leveraging browser caching.

Guest article written by: Marc Dane is the SEO & Content Manager at WebCreate.io – a knowledge hub for small business owners looking to build a presence online. The site offers website builder reviews and comparisons, guides for building a website and resources on related tools, platforms and more.

If you could always accurately predict the future, your business would be the most successful in the world. But you can’t so that, so you are left with the next best option – using data to put together a predictive analysis. Even though this isn’t always 100% accurate, it will put you ahead of most other small business since the majority of entrepreneurs still rely on intuition.

While intuition has led to huge success in business, those instances happened long before we had the technology that is available today. Now we are able to use computers to learn from past experience in order to create business processes that function much more efficiently. Small businesses must learn how to pull actionable data from the troves of information that we collect every day.

It all starts with data quality. Data quality is the most important part of predictive analytics. After all, basing important decisions on faulty data can have devastating consequences. With that said, predictive analytics will allow you to mine data that shows you exactly what clients are searching for.

Predictive Analytics Helps you Set the Right Prices

Correctly pricing products and services is an area where a lot of small businesses have problems. In many cases, they undervalue themselves and end up charging less than they should. Predictive analytics can help you learn exactly what prices will convert the best in your market while also ensuring that you are not undervaluing yourself.

For example, ecommerce stores will gather data pertaining to the behaviour of customers in order to adjust their prices in a way that matches their competitors.

Plus, you can use analytics to compare technology to make sure that you’re up-to-par with the competition. Competitors will sometimes be able to set prices lower than you because they have invested in better technology. So if you have to charge more, then you know that you’ll need to add something unique to the mix to set your business apart.

Decrease Risk Through Analytics

Risk management is essential to the growth and sustainability of small businesses so predictive analytics can serve as a huge advantage. Data breaches are a great example here. All online-based businesses have the risk of data breaches. Gathering information based on past cyber-attacks helps you prepare for possible scenarios. It also allows you to discover ways for those breaches to be mitigated.

Naturally, predictive analytics will not save you from every risk but it shows you possible outcomes based on the past experiences of other businesses. Therefore, you can better prepare for the times when adversity strikes.

In fact, you can even use big data to help discover potential risks that might have never happened before. This is how large corporations are able to quickly respond to new threats while everyone else is still standing around scratching their heads in confusion.

Big data is a powerful asset. It’s important that small businesses leverage data so that they are prepared for all possible scenarios. Thankfully, data is no longer limited to large businesses. Cloud solutions have created a level playing field.

How to Implement Predictive Analytics

It’s one thing to talk about predictive analytics but you will need to actually put it into practice. Here are some easy tips to get started. Make sure that you take all of the following items into consideration.

• If leadership is plagued by poor decisions, the who will be held accountable?
• What type of decisions does your business need to make on a consistent basis?
• What resources do you need to invest in to be able to start putting predictive analytics into practice?

Remember that the cost of making bad decisions far outweighs any potential investments that you might have to make.

Guest article written by: Jacob Haney is a content marketer presently working with Research Optimus, a business research outsourcing company. A writer by day and a reader by night, he is loathed to discuss himself in the third person but can be persuaded to do so from time to time.

If you’re in a line of business that allows you or any of your team to work remotely, you’ve probably already heard of virtual offices. Maybe you’ve utilised one before or you’re working from one of these facilities right now.

Maximum productivity is normally the main goal for any business. It’s been said that people who work from home or who can create their own schedule are often more productive as they have greater job satisfaction. Virtual offices can serve as an extremely useful tool for those working remotely. But, do you know how to utilise your virtual office so that you’re getting the maximum value from your virtual presence?

Read on to find out how you can make the most out of your virtual presence with a virtual office.

Try Every Service on Offer

It’s easy to make the most of virtual offices if your service provider offers unlimited access to top class resources. Visit www.servcorp.com/en/virtual-offices/ to explore all the services that premium virtual office providers have to offer.

You should experiment with all the features that are available. You’re free to drop services that you don’t find useful or indeed, upgrade to extra services you might need. Is a dedicated local telephone number something that may give you a greater presence? Have you considered a fax to email service? Or maybe a mailing address with postal management is more important in your line of work. If you don’t experiment with all the services on offer, you’ll never know.

Communication is Key

If you are working remotely while leading a team or liaising with other colleagues, communication will be your number one priority. This will ensure that everything runs seamlessly. Email and other communications software, voicemail and cloud services will, of course, be utilised but you should be clear about which resources are going to be used on a day to day basis so employees know to check in with them.

The same goes for communicating with clients. Your customers and clients should be able to contact you with ease. Premium service providers offer communications packages which include services like a local business telephone number with a dedicated receptionist who will answer calls in your company name, then transfer them to you anywhere in the world. You’ll never miss another business call again.

Enjoy the Freedom Gained

While it’s true that working remotely isn’t for everyone, if it suits your business and you are disciplined enough to work under your own initiative you should definitely make the most out of your new found freedom. You don’t have to make daily commute so you can save valuable time and instantly be more productive.

You can choose to work from wherever you want to be it from home or your favourite coffee shop. You can even go on a trip and work from the beach, pool or even a mountaintop (if there’s a signal!). With a virtual office, job freedom and flexibility are open to you. Embrace this freedom to its maximum potential!

Make Time to Network

When working remotely in your own blissful bubble, it can be easy to overlook networking and fail to make connections in your field or industry. Luckily, Virtual office service providers often host meetups, get-togethers and social networking events.

Definitely seize the chance to take advantage of these events because, as is often is the case in business, if you want to get ahead, it’s about making the right connections. Don’t get left behind because you work virtually – make opportunities a reality.

Make the Most out of Your Virtual Office

If you’re willing to give all the services on offer a go, maintain clear lines of communication with clients and team members, keep up productivity while enjoying your freedom and still make business connections, then there’s no reason why a virtual office can’t be utilised effectively.

If your business is one where technology can truly afford you the luxury of working from anywhere, then a virtual office is an excellent alternative to a traditional office space.

The number of internet users globally has seen exponential growth over the past couple of decades. An increasing number of people have access to the internet, and there are no geographical barriers in terms of access to content online in most instances. As a blogger, this can make it increasingly difficult for your blog to stand out. You’re therefore fighting for visibility with millions of other bloggers online which means you need a competitive edge. There are a number of ways which you can separate yourself from the masses, some of which might require a little financial investment. In this article, you’ll find a few ways that you can consider trying in order to make your mark in the blogging world.

Have a Clear Objective

When you start a blog, similar to a business, you should have a clear objective regarding what the purpose of the blog is. You can either choose to create a blog that is a niche, or you could choose to focus on something that’s already being done and find your unique edge. Whatever you decide, it should be clear what exactly your blog is about as soon as people land on your site. It is also important that you’ve been able to clearly define who your audience is so that you can create content that caters to their needs. If, for instance, your blog is about luxury cars, then you should be targeting people who share a similar interest and find out what kind of information regarding cars interests them. By doing this, you can avoid cluttering your blog with content that isn’t related to your theme and instead give people what they want.

If you already have a blog and it doesn’t seem to be generating traffic, you should go back and check if your objectives are clear. If not, do some market research and see if you actually have a wide enough audience for your blog’s theme. If you do, see how you can revise your blog and do more market research to better meet your audience’s needs.

Strategic Partnerships

Partnering with other bloggers who already have authority in their niche can prove to be effective. As nothing in life comes free, you could decide to give them content through the means of guest posts and in return, they could give you visibility. This could trigger an increase in traffic if your content is engaging and stirs conversation. It is also important that you don’t forget to include links back to your website in the body of the content or in your bio. By doing this, you will direct traffic back to your site and hopefully, have acquired a new set of loyal viewers in the process.

Another way you could partner to increase your blog’s visibility is by using influencers. You would need to start by attempting to develop authentic relationships with them via social media. You should then think about creating content that is worth retweeting, and that will be relevant to the influencer’s audience. In order to achieve this, try and tailor the content you want your influencers to promote around their areas of interest so that they’re more likely to engage with it. You can then try sharing your content with them and asking for a retweet or repost. Always bear in mind that it’s easier to ask favors from someone you have previously helped or developed a relationship with already.

Invest in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing can prove to be an effective way of gaining visibility as a blog. You can choose to go about doing it organically or fast-track the process by using paid media. Some forms of paid media you can consider include Instagram ads, Facebook ads, and Twitter ads. You can choose how many days you want your campaign to go on for, but the more days you opt for, the more expensive the ad becomes. You should also put careful thought into the sort of content that you want to advertise to ensure it reaches your target audience and grabs their attention. If not, you may be disappointed when you don’t get good results and fail to get a return on your investment. You may want to get advice from an expert regarding the right copy and images to use. Alternatively, consider starting with a minimal financial investment while you figure out what brings results in terms of traffic and what doesn’t.

Create an App

The number of blogs that are taking advantage of apps is steadily increasing. There are several reasons for creating an app for your blog, and one is to create a greater level of engagement. Some other reasons include its ability to be present where mobile users are, and push messaging which can send notifications about any new posts or updates directly to user’s mobile phones. If you do decide to utilize this opportunity, you could start by getting an app developer to create the app for you. Once it’s done, you could use a Tinder clone to deploy your customized app to Apple or Google Play stores. The final leg would be pouring extensive work into actually marketing the app. You can market on your actual blog within your content and ad spaces as well as by using paid media and influencers as mentioned above. You may find that you have a wider reach and you’re able to create a more intimate community by creating an app for your blog.

Blogging can be an exciting career path to take or hobby to engage yourself in. It gives you the chance to pick a niche that you have an interest in and create content for people who share that same interest. There are no limits to what you can do as it’s your own space and platform. One of the major keys, however, to becoming a successful blogger is to create a clear purpose for your blog and meeting people’s needs through entertaining, informing, or educating. With a clear vision, hard work and the right formula, your blog should stand out from the crowd eventually.

Your website is the portal to your bottom line: period. Unfortunately, so many people focus on making a website beautiful that they lose sight of other factors, like user experience and SEO. After all, a website is about much more than a pretty design: it’s about what’s happening behind the scenes to manipulate a seamless visitor journey on the front-end. If you’re in the process of building your website, here are five important things to keep in mind:

Develop An Intuitive Navigation

Your navigation could hinder your user experience if not executed correctly. This is your website’s version of a road map. Your roadmap can be easy to follow, or cause confusion for your visitors. One of the best ways to create a seamless experience is by making everything as simple as possible, so as not to overwhelm anyone. This means combining elements of your pages to enforce the “less is more” mantra. This is the premise behind the best-selling web usability book “Don’t Make Me Think.”

It also helps to have each section clearly labeled. For example, some industries prefer not to use terms like “Blog” because it doesn’t sound as professional as terms like “Resources” and “Articles.” But studies have shown that “Blog” is the simplest way to reach a consumer without confusing them. You should also pay attention to what’s happening at the bottom of your page. More and more people are scrolling immediately to the footer of a website to access specific areas, such as the Careers, Public Relations/Media, and Contact pages.

It also helps to take a look at great website menu design for some much-needed inspiration. After all, when you’re close to an idea or concept, it can be difficult to think of ways to simplify it from an outsider perspective.

Make Sure It’s Responsive

There have been countless studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of responsive design, and the results are conclusive: you absolutely need it. Simply put, responsive design makes your website easily viewed and navigated across any type of device. Between 2013 and 2015 alone, tablet Internet consumption grew by 30%, while mobile consumption spiked to 78%, according to a comScore study.

Google has also officially acknowledged that there are more mobile searches than desktop searches in the United States and several other countries. They also stated that responsive design does affect your search engine ranking status. Fortunately, there are thousands of responsive designs out there, and regardless of your industry or mission, there’s a design that will cater to you.

Choose The Right Hosting

Not all hosting is created equal. Choosing the right type of hosting isn’t the same as choosing the cheapest option. Shared hosting, for example, is a cost-value choice for those who are just starting out and don’t have an audience. This might mean the launch of a new blog site or small ecommerce shop. If you already have a following an anticipate a large amount of traffic, private virtual server hosting might be the better option. This ensures that you’ll have dedicated resources and increased reliability; after all, a website that crashes could easily cost you thousands in lost sales and a bad reputation.

Enforce SEO Best Practices

Search engine optimization is a huge, multifaceted game in its own right, but the most basic of SEO best practices can be utilized long before you even launch. Setting your website up for SEO is crucial to ensure it has the proper foundation with which to build upon. This means that before you start creating copy for your pages, you’ll need to conduct thorough keyword research. You’ll abide by this list of coveted words as you continue building out your site. Here are a few ways to optimize your site before you launch, based on your research:

• Create a “Coming Soon” page infused with keywords, and connect it to your social profiles
• Create keyword-rich page titles
• Use meta description tags to influence clickthroughs
• Strategically place search phrases on your page copy
• Create XML and HTML sitemaps to make it easier for Google search engines to crawl
• List your website in directories––especially influential, niche directories

Make It Easy To Reach You

Your contact page is one of the simplest you can have, which means most people don’t put too much thought into their contact pages, but it can be a very powerful way to get customers or connect with potentially loyal readers. This is especially true when you take this fact into consideration: for many sites, the page that gets the most traffic is the contact page.

It might be helpful for you to have multiple methods of contacting the business, giving the visitor options to choose from. JetBlue’s Contact Page features a variety of help topics, but also makes it clear that there are three methods of communication: phone, email, and receipt request.

If you have a contact form, understand that too many fields can only cause confusion for both your Help Center and your visitor. This can quickly become frustrating. Consider this scenario: a customer returns a product for store credit, and accidentally sends the wrong item to your warehouse. The customer wants to fill out a contact form to explain the situation, but runs into pre-populated topics to choose from––none of which cover this particular situation. This could easily anger the customer to the point of complaining online and leaving a horrible review. You could also lose a customer, and most people in the business world understand it’s that new customers are harder to get than keeping those you have.

Don’t be afraid to show your personality on your contact page, either. It should reflect your personality, and make the visitor feel as though they can genuinely connect with the people behind the page.

Today no business or organization can do without the Internet. With the internet even small businesses stand an equal chance to succeed or compete against major corporations and organizations that have their footprints worldwide. For businesses, internet provides not only increased visibility, but a subsequent increase in revenue to reach your potential customers like never before. These are just some of the benefits that can boost the potential of your business or organization.

Cox Internet is a major part of the internet service providers industry. Serving more than six million customers Cox is one of U.S’s largest broadband companies at the moment. While that may be so, Cox plans to expand into more areas to offer its customers unmatched service that they deserve. As a company, Cox Communications is a constant innovator in the internet service industry with the ability and vision to expand given its current infrastructure.

With speeds and features unmatched by other internet service providers Cox offers not just speed but also great service. Offering blazing-fast speeds Cox’s internet service comes with speeds of 15 Mbps to 300 Mbps. Providing excellent speeds for its customers Cox Internet comes with several packages to choose including plans to suit everyone and every household.

Great service doesn’t have to come at a great price. If you’re connection is always breaking down and quitting on you regularly, it’s time you switched to Cox for their unparalleled internet service. Offering extremely fast speeds for their ever-growing customers, and with so many packages that are sure to suit your needs for all your online activities, Cox offers deals that will appeal to each and every household. With speeds up to 100 times faster than dial-up, you can check your emails, surf, stream, send and receive your videos and photos on the fastest in-home Wi-Fi you can imagine. Get Cox and get the right stuff!

High Speed Internet in San Diego

Cox in San Diego offers high-speed internet service in a variety of different packages designed to fit your household needs. Packages vary by speed, features and location. Cox High Speed Internet service, upon usage allowances, pricing and fees, and additional network services information, which is updated from time to time as the services, features, price and allowances change.

Whether you use the Internet to send an occasional email or an all-night binge-watcher, Cox has an Internet service plan that’s just right for you. These simply priced high speed internet plans are perfect for keeping your household connected to all your favorite devices anywhere in your house. Plus add the Panoramic Wi-Fi Modem in checkout to ensure our fastest Wi-Fi coverage in every nook and cranny of your home. With speeds of 15 Mbps to 300 Mbps, the service is ideal for email and simple web surfing, offering downloads up to 100 times faster than dial-up. Save time and enjoy the power of Essential Internet.

Extremely Fast Internet

Keep yourself connected with the best internet on offer with faster speeds and huge savings. You’ve probably had a busy day and the last thing you want to do is wait for your files and documents to load. Cox’s Preferred Internet is optimized to handle your broadband needs like online shopping, banking or downloading music and photos. And PowerBoost gives you that extra speed when you need it the most.

Stream videos, watch movies, playing online games, and listen to your favorite music. With Cox’s Internet Essential offering download speeds of 15 Mbps, 100 times faster than dial-up. Connect all your computers, TVs, tablets and phones to the Internet at the same time in all the rooms. Cox Internet Home Wi-Fi lets you surf, stream, download music and videos, movies and photos anytime, anywhere, all at your convenience.

With download speeds of 300 Mbps, Cox Internet is perfect for gamers, streaming videos and movies. Connect all your devices to the Internet all at once and enjoy upload speeds with reduced load time for a much more enjoyable Internet experience.

Go With the Winner

More and more customers are choosing Cox Internet nationwide over other providers that dial-up service just can’t beat. How fast is fast, you ask? Try this. Now download in seconds and not minutes any file, video, movie or music. Not only that, PowerBoost gives you a temporary boost of speed when transferring large files.

Get the Right Stuff

Go with Cox in San Diego and get the right stuff. Offering unmatched service for all your online needs, Cox is increasing its customer base all over the United States with more and more households opting for their Internet service over other providers. Get Cox and choose a service that’s 100 times faster than dial-up. Now download in mere seconds, not minutes. Download and upload large files and if you get stuck during the process PowerBoost gives you a temporary boost when you need it the most. Give yourself peace of mind with Cox Security Suite Plus, which protects up to 5 PCs by McAfee, the biggest name in PC protection. Get added protection for all your emails and instant messaging. And protect all your email software like Outlook and others with Cox’s AntiSpam. Moreover, with up to 10 email addresses and plenty of space for your attachments, photos, videos, music and documents you can’t go wrong.

Summary

If you’re sick of your connection quitting on you every day, it’s time you switched to Cox Internet. Cox offers fast, reliable, consistent and always-on connectivity. And more and more customers are choosing Cox for the best internet service in San Diego over other providers. Why shouldn’t you?

Whether you are running a small enterprise or a large company with different remote locations, VMware vSphere technology and virtualization is important for you. Virtualization will save you cash in terms of hardware purchases and it will enable your IT staff to easily track your network. Virtualization through VMware is a fully developed technology that will positively and immediately impact your business. Here is what to look for in a VMware vSphere consulting company.

Experienced technicians

You need to find a company that has technicians who are experienced in handling VMware vSphere. The best company will always send experienced consultants who will take care of everything for you. They should be able to handle the different versions and upgrades of this virtualization software. A good company will allocate you a team that can help you achieve your objectives depending on your company needs and budget.

Track record

When choosing a VMware vSphere consultant, you need to know the businesses that they have worked with in the past and how successful the projects were. This is why you need to talk about the prior experience that the company has with VMware vSphere technology. A good company will have lots of clients talking positively about the services they offer. Actual client references will assist you in determining which consulting company can handle your virtualization needs more efficiently.

Understanding of your business needs

A good company should understand that the virtualization needs of different companies will vary. They should take time to learn your company scope and needs to be able to provide the right services. You need to know how the consulting firm will deliver viable solutions for your business. Launch Consulting VMware vSphere solutions will articulate potential problems with your current scope and give trusted solutions for your business.

Reasonable cost

Companies should hire consultants that offer reasonable prices. A good company will tailor their prices to suit the needs of different companies because their needs will vary. You need a consulting company that provides you with adequate services at a realistic cost. Irrespective of the experience level of the consulting company, you should always keep your budget in mind when talking to different companies.

Additional value

It may seem wise to hire a specialist who offers virtualization services to companies similar to yours. However, you should aim at working with a consultant who has provided VMware vSphere services to companies across different industries. Such companies can easily come up with solutions that your business may never have achieved internally. You need a consulting company that offers additional value and skill to your company

VMware vSphere virtualization services will dramatically improve availability and efficiency of applications and resources in your organization. This is important because internal resources are usually underutilized timeworn “one server and one application” model that IT admins spend lots of time managing instead of innovating. With an automated datacenter that is built on VMware virtualization platform, you can respond to market dynamics more efficiently and faster. This is why you need to find the best VMware vSphere consulting company to ensure that you reap maximum benefits of this platform.

Every year the number of U.S. patent applications increases. This means that each year there are substantially more inventors creating new technology than the year before. These inventions are made to improve every aspect of our lives, including our health, jobs, and interactions. Chances are, the number of new devices will continue to climb this year and make changes to our lifestyles. The following are just a few examples of amazing technology coming out this year to keep an eye out for.

Samsung’s The Wall

At CES in January, Samsung unveiled their newest TV to watch out for, appropriately named The Wall. The Wall is a 146-inch modular TV that uses MicroLEDs, which is similar to the technology in scoreboards and jumbo screens. Although this technology is not new, Samsung is the first to create a TV with it. Samsung has not yet disclosed a price on this humongous TV, but it’s set to be released later this spring.

Frigondas

Frigondas is an entirely new microwave concept that not only heats food up, it cools it down, as well. This appliance is bringing flash freezing to everyday households for a much lower price than other flash freezers go for. While professional flash freezers used in restaurants go for as much as $50,000, the Frigondas is set to be sold for only around $1,000. Along with the typical functions of a microwave, it can also freeze food in just six minutes. Clearly, most homeowners don’t own blast freezers, likely because of their large size, so the Frigondas was created to fix this problem. It’s just slightly larger than the typical microwave, so it will fit easily in the common household. A release date for the appliance has not yet been revealed, but it’s expected sometime this year.

NeoMano Robotic Glove

The NeoMano Robotic Glove is a device that assists those who have suffered a spinal injury to perform daily tasks such as eating with a spoon or drinking out of a cup. Spinal cord injuries have lasting effects that range from numbness to paralysis. This technology allows those that have previously struggled with day-to-day tasks to be able to have more autonomy. The leather glove is controlled by remote and covers the thumb, index finger, and middle finger with titanium wires that move each digit to either a gripped or released position. Check out the glove on Kickstarter later this year for less than $1,000 each.

Kuri

The Kuri Home Robot is one of the most fun technology introductions of 2018. Kuri has some incredible features such as the ability to record video, make gestures, and move around your home on its own. This personal robot was created to enhance your family member’s lives by taking care of tasks for you. It’s meant to be a companion to inspire creativity, capture moments, provide entertainment, and more. Preorders are currently being taken for the $899 robot to be shipped out this summer. If you’re interested in taking the next step from Alexa and Siri, Kuri is definitely something you should look into this year.

Every beginning trader prefers to invest in top 5 – 10 cryptocurrencies. The more globally widespread a currency is, the higher its liquidity and the lower its volatility. Nevertheless, there are quite a few altcoins whose target audience is deliberately limited. These are cryptocurrencies with regional branding created to solve specific local tasks.

Even now in the 21st century, some countries need complementary currencies due to a banal lack of cash and the necessity to stimulate depressive local economies. MazaCoin proposed by the Oglala Sioux Tribe makes a good example. The Native American enthusiasts were planning to relaunch their internal economy this way. Natives do not pay income taxes, so Sioux people were hoping this privilege would attract real businesses to their land. Unfortunately, most tribe members failed to get the hang of the new technology, and the coin has become an object of speculative interest for the most part.

Some local cryptocurrencies aren’t so targeted and cover entire countries, including quite prosperous ones where people are dissatisfied with the traditional banking system. For instance, AuroraCoin introduced in Iceland has become successful due to a combo of the citizens’ high political activity and tech-savviness. The idea was to provide every resident with the privilege of owning a certain part of the virtual public property. This model was supposed to give momentum to local businesses by eliminating dollar dependency and allowing the local community to control their resources more efficiently.

Releases of that sort are usually accompanied by what’s called an airdrop, a pre-mining practice with the subsequent free distribution of coins among residents according to digital ledgers. The above-mentioned AuroraCoin pioneered in adopting this approach, having conducted a pre-mine of 50% of the entire AUR pool and giving equal shares to all citizens of Iceland.

The Greek cryptocurrency called GreekCoin, the Polish PLNCoin, the Spanish SpainCoin and quite a few other altcoins followed suit. Some of these emerged in the aftermath of economic crises in some of these countries and sought to prop more stable alternative economies.

Pesobit is one of the latest cryptocurrencies featuring regional branding. This Filipino project has even gone through a successful crowd sale. Although the state’s economy showed a significant growth last year, the need for an altcoin grew as well due to a fusion of the large freelance sector and lack of confidence in the stability of the national currency in light of President Duterte’s policy.

Another coin with national flavor appeared in Venezuela in February 2018. The state’s government has developed a cryptocurrency called the Petro. Its value is pegged to Venezuelan oil and mineral reserves. President Nicolas Maduro has reportedly instructed some state-owned companies to convert part of their assets into the cryptocurrency. The government is reportedly planning to go even further and launch the Petro Gold, a spinoff of the Petro that will be backed by gold.

Inspired by these initiatives, the authorities of Iran are planning to develop their own “cloud-based digital currency” as well. Its name is unknown at this point, but the motivation is quite clear. Both Iran and Venezuela are most likely elaborating a workaround to evade potential U.S. sanctions this way.

While facing no financial penalties or pressure, the Turkish government has recently announced its plans to develop Turkcoin, which they dub the “national Bitcoin”. This move allegedly pursues the goal of keeping up with the world’s new digital paradigm.

It’s noteworthy that the very nature of complementary currencies poses an obstacle to achieving their goals. The problem is, these currencies aren’t really local. They are easily accessible with VPN and thus can be traded from any part of the world, being therefore susceptible to speculative volatility. In theory, these coins can even serve as a payment means in ransomware scenarios. Some communities simply cannot afford to invest in such unstable assets.

The obvious conclusion is that such coins probably shouldn’t be traded on exchanges. Their price should be determined by the economic condition of communities where they circulate rather than by trade speculations.

The political facet

Some local cryptocurrencies emphasize national identity and reflect a certain political statement rather than reach purely economic goals. An altcoin can serve as a surrogate of sovereign currency for territories that are actively struggling for independence by political means. For example, ScotCoin and Catalonian Coin were introduced in Scotland and Catalonia, respectively, in the wake of growing separatist sentiments.

It’s fair to say that these types of coins do have economic implications alongside political ones. However, their mission mainly boils down to symbolic separation from the metropole rather than stimulation of local economies.

Ukraine has got an emblematic coin of its own. It’s called Karbo, which is short for Karbovanets, a unit of fiat currency circulating in the country in the 20th century. Karbo was released with no pre-mine, airdrop or distinct plans for the future. It exemplifies cryptocurrency promoted within a society due to spontaneous interest and nostalgic motives.

The wave of Euroscepticism following the recent economic crisis in Europe gave rise to a number of national altcoins, including the Netherlands’ GuldenCoin, Germany’s eMark, Ireland’s GaelCoin, and Spain’s PesetaCoin. These cryptocurrencies reflect the residents’ reaction to economic instability and nostalgia for sovereignty and national currencies.

What does the future hold?

The influx of altcoins has been the talk of the town for several years. It seems local coins have the potential to occupy their own standalone niche in the global cryptocurrency ecosystem, but most people aren’t fully prepared for this new reality.

Meanwhile, a decentralized currency that can be released and sustained by a small community without emission expenditures and legal issues opens up big opportunities for controlling and distributing their internal resources efficiently. Local cryptocurrencies bear a resemblance to altcoins of various DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) as they are backed by real, though small, economies and have a maximum liquidity inside their economic structure. Perhaps that’s going to be the blockchain’s next step towards revolutionizing the global economy.

Guest article written by: David Balaban is a computer security researcher with over 15 years of experience in malware analysis and antivirus software evaluation. David runs the Privacy-PC.com project which presents expert opinions on the contemporary information security matters, including social engineering, penetration testing, threat intelligence, online privacy and white hat hacking. As part of his work at Privacy-PC, Mr. Balaban has interviewed such security celebrities as Dave Kennedy, Jay Jacobs and Robert David Steele to get firsthand perspectives on hot InfoSec issues. David has a strong malware troubleshooting background, with the recent focus on ransomware countermeasures. Contact: Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn.

When you’ve made the investment on both a financial and an emotional level to start an ecommerce store, then you want to know that it will end up as a success for you. Making sure that customers see you and choose your company over the competition can be one of the biggest challenges that a new ecommerce store can face. Fortunately, there are a number of strategies you can use in order to help your business get started the right way.

Here are some ways you can help your business stand out from the rest of the crowd.

Have active social media pages

Social media has become an integral part of marketing correctly and attracting new buyers to your business. Not only does it give a very clear picture of your branding and what you want to accomplish as a company, but it also makes it easy to interact with your ecommerce store and decide if it happens to be a good fit for customers. You’ll want to make sure that you are around on social media to answer any questions, to respond in a timely manner, and post frequently.

Have great customer service

How responsive you are to customers’ needs can be a big factor in whether or not your business succeeds or not. When you have quality customer service in place, clients are more likely to feel valued and as though their concerns are being addressed when they have someone they can be in touch with. Make sure that you have the option for them to reach out to a contact in your company if they have any questions or need to make a return. This personal attention can really make a difference when you want to distinguish yourself as a new business.

Know your branding

Having a slightly different angle from your competition is actually one of the best things you can do as a business. It’s likely that there is a demographic out there that is looking for exactly what you have to offer. Knowing how to reach those people specifically and let them know that your ecommerce store is what they are looking for takes knowing your brand really well and having an idea of who exactly you need to market to. You’ll want to feel as though you really have an understanding of your buyer.

Create incentives for checking out your business

Deals and promotions aren’t just for brick-and-mortar stores. In fact, they can almost be better for ecommerce stores looking to establish a client base. You might want to craft some deals that are likely to attract clients who might be curious in your business but have been hesitant to make the leap and to buy. By giving them a reason to make the leap, you’re encouraging them to give you a try and to come back to your store on a frequent basis to see what is new.

Starting an ecommerce store can be intimidating, especially when you have some big names as your competition. However, if you take the time to develop positive interactions with potential customers, you’re already going a long way toward making your ecommerce store a success.

Guest article written by: Alex Schnee

In today’s world, even brick and mortar businesses have an online presence. After all, the Internet is one of the best ways of broadening market reach. While having an active website undoubtedly helps business, many people are faced with the challenge of integrating a reliable customer support system within their website to support all the traffic coming in.

The more that customers and inquiring web-surfers reach your website, the more questions and feedback you will have coming in. That is why it’s critical to have a customer support system in place to easily manage feedback, concerns and queries. Fortunately, with the Wix Answers help desk software you have an available, easy-to-implement solution running in no time.

In just a few easy steps, you can set up the customizable platform which allows you to monitor and respond to all of your customer support needs in one area. Integrate a knowledge base, ticketing system, and/or call center that will allow your team to communicate with customers in an efficient and manageable way, without losing the look and feel of your brand. Through Wix Answers, providing support to your customers has been made easier.

Wix Anwers was originally created by Wix.com to run and manage their own customer support center. As a result, they have designed a help desk that will allow its users to create a stunning help center, embedded with features that a support team, and its users, actually need. With Wix Answers, you can choose from different templates and customize images, fonts and colors to fit your brand. Through the help center, your customers can ask questions, browse articles, and find helpful videos. You can customize the help center’s design, set up categories, display specific articles, and add trending topics. Within your help center, you can set up a knowledge base that allows you to create and manage FAQs, create step-by-step guides, stream videos, feature requests, write articles that provide solutions to known issues, and so much more.

For any customer support system to work effectively, customers must also be able to communicate with someone from the given business’s team, someone who can handle issues from simple inquiries and concerns, to payment problems and product issues. This is why at the core of any customer support is a ticketing system. Having an effective ticketing system means that you will be able to communicate and address any issues that your customer may have, and get a better understanding of reoccurring problems. Through the Wix Answers ticketing system, not only can you stream incoming tickets from different channels, such as email, Facebook business page and your website ticket form, but you can also use the platform to internally create teams to efficiently and effectively manage ticket workflow. In addition, the system allows you to create saved replies so you can save time when answering tickets by enabling agents to re-use common responses.

Another great feature that Wix Answers embeds into your website’s help center is the optional Call Center. A call center is great for customers who prefer to speak to someone on the phone. With Wix Answers, you can set up a customizable 1-800 number for your customers to reach you in real time or request a call back at specific hours, decreasing the wait time that most business call centers struggle with. Through the platform, agents will be able to make note of which customers are calling and what their needs are, as well as transferring them to specific representatives. Alongside Wix Answers Knowledge Base and Ticketing System, the Call Center can be managed and maintained straight from the help desk software.

In order to provide your users with quick solutions while making sure they stay on your website, you can utilize the Help Widget. With the Wix Answers Help Widget, users can not only access your knowledge base articles, but they will also be able to submit a ticket based on the fields you request, without ever leaving the page. You can embed the Help Widget anywhere on your site, within the page or displayed as a popup. This feature helps your users easily access help guides, FAQs and articles in the most efficient way.

Using Wix Answers as a solution to your customer support needs is a no-brainer. Not only is it intuitive, reliable and effective, but you can also assign agent and admin roles to team members, each with varying degree of permission and system access. This is a great way to ensure that the critical parts of your help center are managed only by those you fully trust. Monitor the status and progress of all calls and tickets, and get insights on your customers’ needs, struggles, and feedback, all in the Wix Answers platform.

Your business isn’t going to reach new heights all on its own. It’ll require you learning and going above and beyond to figure out what you need to do to advance it in the right direction. Listening is so important when you’re a business owner looking for tips and tricks for doing a better job professionally.

It’s not possible to know it all or understand what others are doing that’s working unless you’re open to educating yourself. There are several pieces of advice that will help you improve your business and motivate you not to give up and keep going strong.

Use Video Marketing

You have to be willing to branch out with your marketing efforts, and one way to do this is through video marketing. Get together with your team and come up with a game plan for making engaging videos that capture your audience’s attention right away. One idea is to launch weekly teach pieces where you’re adding value to the viewer’s life and making the time they’re spending watching the video well worth it. There’s a lot you can do with videos when you get creative and start sharing them when and where you know they’ll get a lot of views.

Protect your Business Online

You can’t forget about protecting your business when immersing yourself in all the new technologies and the digital world. Being online means you’re putting yourself out there and susceptible to hackers and trolls looking to mess with your operation. One way to avoid this is to implement a solution like Driz Group’s anti DDoS protection cybersecurity measures that will allow you to go about your daily tasks without having to worry about losing your data or coming under attack. If you’re going to be online, then you can’t risk the dangers that come with being in this space.

Listen to your Customers

One mistake a lot of businesses make is that they fail to listen to their customers and what they truly want. It’s best to talk less and lend an ear to hearing what your client’s desire from you. A good way to collect important data and information from them is to send out a survey, meet in person or pick up the phone. Stop worrying about what’s happening so much internally and connect better with the people who matter the most, your customers. Not only should you listen to what they’re saying in person and through your customer service department, but scan the conversations that are occurring online as well.

Use Social Media & Influencers to Share your Content

One tool you need to get behind if you’re going to make a name for yourself is social media. Open accounts on the platforms where your customers are hanging out and start engaging with them on a regular basis. Share your blog posts, run contests and build brand awareness through your social media pages. Another idea is to seek out and create relationships with key influencers who can reach new audiences for you by sharing your product with their followers. This comes off as a more authentic advertisement than your business doing the talking. Put your product in their hands and see how quickly you’re able to bring in new customers and draw attention to your brand.

Involve your Employees

Don’t forget about how much talent you have in-house and what your own employees can bring to the table. Hold brainstorming meetings, ask for their opinions and recognize individuals when they’re doing an outstanding job. Create a culture that’s welcoming of new ideas and respects thoughts the employees want to share. You never know what helpful suggestions they’ll come up with that you may never have thought of. They’re the ones who are engrossed in the daily operations of the business and interacting with customers, so it’s likely they’ll be able to offer you some good insight and propose what the company could be doing better.

Launch A Website & Blog

One way to increase your online presence quickly and efficiently is to launch a company website and blog. Make it easy for customers to find you by showing up in their searches. Don’t think of this is a project you’ll be able to complete overnight, but a long-term solution for gaining new customers and becoming a resource for others to turn to when they’re looking for solutions your product can provide. Take your time and come up with an attractive design for your website and blog. Also, determine what topics you’re going to write about and focus on most. Remember that these marketing tools are representing your company and people are going to be judging you based on what they see when they’re searching online.

Invest in Technology & Encourage Innovation

You can’t be a cheapskate and expect your business to thrive. You have to be willing to invest money into the important aspects that will help you grow and succeed. Technology and innovation are critical to your future and what you’ll require if you want to get ahead of your competition. You need to give your employees room to be creative and come up with new products that are going to impress your customers and keep them coming back for more. Businesses that don’t take risks or step outside their comfort zone get left behind and eventually fall off the radar. Make this the year you see what the great minds in your company have to offer and let them explore their ideas through updated technology.

Conclusion

Hopefully you feel a little more comfortable now, knowing what you will do going forward to improve your business. What you can’t do is stay where you are and expect different results. Take any lessons learned from your past and tips from those who are currently succeeding and start getting ahead yourselves. Learning and growing is always time well spent, so never be afraid to take a step back and re-evaluate if what you’re doing isn’t panning out.

Customer care is all about caring your customers and giving them best support, as and when they need it. One of the most vital operations of any customer care center is getting support request and working on that to resolve the query. Generally, the customer care centers use, online ticketing solution or they give a support number to customers. The customer needs to either raise a ticket or call on the support number to raise the issue. These traditional methods sometime frustrate customers who are already facing some malfunctions. Thus, a better approach would be to give them a convenient mode of communication such as texting. The most viable mode of communication would be “Landline Texting.”

If you are wondering, how it is helpful to a customer care center, let me share top 5 benefits of it.

Landline Texting

Before delving benefits of landline texting for support centers, let’s first define what landline texting is! The landline texting text-enables your landline number for two way communication. Once text-enabled, you can use it for sending and receiving SMS and MMS. Furthermore, it has many features which would benefit your support center. The landline texting is also known as text-to-landline, texting to landline and SMS to Landline. The service providers like Text My Main Number offers the landline texting services at an affordable monthly fee.

Key benefits of landline texting for customer care:

1. A Simplified way for raising ticket

The texting to the landline can simplify process of raising support ticket for both, customer care center and client. As we all know the ticketing solution requires technical knowledge and access to high speed internet. On the other hand, calling on support number and raising ticket can be irritating because often customer needs to interact with an IVR. Instead of all these bothering solutions, the landline texting can be used, which will follow below mentioned process for raising and resolving support tickets.

1. A Customer will send an SMS “Support” to the customer care center. The customer can also send a text briefing the issues.
2. The Text-to-landline solution will generate automated response to the customer about receipt of issue. On the other hand, web notification of the solution will notify support executive about the raised issue.
3. The support executives can resolve the issue. Once it is resolved, the update SMS can be sent to the customer.

The customer and support executive can interact with each other via texting, if required.

2. Easy management

The customer doesn’t need to manage a lot of different numbers to communicate with the support center. A single support number can be used for both, calling and texting. Likewise, the customer care center will respond to clients using their public support number. They don’t need to share private mobile number(s) of their staff. All messages will come to/from the same number. The SMS to landline solution has report section, which keeps logs of all messages. These reports can be exported in the system as well. Thus, management can be easier because the number used for communication will be the landline or toll-free number of the support center.

3. Cost Effective

The landline texting solution comes with thousands of SMS balance on monthly subscription. Some packages also offer unlimited texting. Thus, the support centers can send as many messages as it needs. The landline texting packages start at 9 USD/month, which is less that a pizza. The texting will reduce the expense of telecommunication because most of the customers will send a text because it is easy and convenient. Thus, it will save a lot of money otherwise spent on calling customers.

4. Keep customers informed

The landline texting comes with many features, which can be used about keeping customers informed. For an instance, if there is a scheduled system update during which system can be down, you can use bulk messaging or Group texting feature of the texting-to-landline solution to send an SMS related to it to all your customers with a single click! As we all know SMS gets read faster than email, it will make sure that your all customers are informed about the maintenance schedule. You can use this feature to keep customers up-to-date about all system updates, holidays, next invoice date, etc. The texting to landline also has a feature called, time based texting. It means for certain dates and hours, it will send a predefined text as a response to customers. For example, if a customer sends a text for support in off working hours, the system will send a text such as, “Sorry! You have sent the support request in off office hours. The office hours are 9am to 5pm EST. Our executive will get back to you. If it is urgent please call on 1-800-xxx-xxxx”. This way the customers will stay informed.

5. Improve Productivity

The landline texting will make more than 50% of communication automated and short. Thus, the support team executives will get required time to resolve issues instead of spending time on responding calls. This will help in resolving issues at a faster rate. Furthermore, all communication will happen via the public support number of customer care center, which will bestow work life balance for your support team. This will keep them energized, which will reflect on their work as well. The features like bulk texting will save a lot of time of your employees. In a nutshell, the various features of the landline texting solution for customer care center will improve productivity of your staff.

The landline texting solution comes with many features such as ITR (Integrated Text Response), Auto Appointment Scheduling, Mobile to Mobile, Mobile to Email, Message Templates, So on and So forth. All these will help you to delight customers and staff, both. The landline texting is cheaper than telecommunication solution. This will help in increasing the profit of the business along with the customer satisfaction. The text to landline will create an image of a tech-savvy company, which will bestow many branding benefits to the customer care centers using this landline texting service for their customer support centers. In a nutshell, this SMS to Landline solution can empower the customer care center.

Whether you are a large corporation or an individual blogger, guest blogging is one of the most effective forms of building your brand. One of the major reasons why guest blogging is highly effective is the quality of traffic it drives to your website. You can develop high-quality, strong relationships with guest blogging that help you in various ways, including building business relationships and professional contacts, developing brand value, and acquiring link juice. It is a chance to improve interaction and your interpersonal skills.

There is no doubt that guest blogging is one of the most powerful tactics for building your brand and increase conversion rates. But, few people are misusing it just for the sake of building links by submitting low quality content to websites that accept this kind of content for various reasons thus polluting the entire web. Google stated that their webspam team will take stronger action against the sites which accept low quality content.

So, the people who are starting out on the guest blogging journey must remember that they give preference to writing a quality article and submit it on a good website. There are several things you should keep in mind while doing guest blogging. In this article, I will let you know few major tactics for writing a successful blog post.

Choosing a Site

The first step in your guest blogging journey is to choose a site you want to pitch to. While selecting a site, you should keep in mind the kind of article you want to submit. If the article is on social media, you must choose sites with good domain authority, page authority, traffic, and others in that particular niche. Your article gains more traction if you submit to a niche website as the people who are interested in reading your article will be more in number when compared with other websites.

Generating Article Ideas

Before you pick a topic to write an article for a particular website, you should do some research on the kind of articles published in that website. Firstly, check for the kind of articles that mostly get published in that website. Are they list articles or news & analysis articles or “How to” articles? Later, check for the topics they are writing on and which articles are trending. Also, check out the articles receiving high amount of social shares and on what topics they are written. This will give you can idea about what topic you must choose for writing the article.

Then, determine the type of audience they are writing for such as whether they are writing beginners or intermediate or only advanced level readers. Later, check for the topics. Are they general or specific? So, keeping all these things in mind, you have to develop an article for publishing on a particular website.

Mentioning Big Bloggers

In your article, mentioning people who are big names in that particular industry where your guest blog is about may be a huge advantage. When you mention their names, you can actually reach out to them and let them know that you have mentioned their name in your article. In this way, you can develop an association with them. They may also share your article with their followers and this could be a huge bonus for you as your article gets more exposure.

Linking Back

One of the major advantages you get from guest blogging is the backlinks to your website. The ranking of your site in search engines depends on the quality backlinks you acquire from high authority websites. So, ensure you include only relevant links in your article that link back to your website. Remember carefully that only relevant links to your website must be included and any irrelevant links will not provide any value. Instead, they provide bad reputation to you and lowers your website’s value. So, you must be extra cautious while giving hyperlinks to your website pages.

Crafting a Bio

This is one of the most important parts of guest blogging as the readers will know about you by reading this. In this section, you can usually include the link to your website, your own blog, your services or products. You can also include something about how you help your clients or your job role. It would be better if you include the links to your social media accounts as people can start following you if they like your content.

Final Thoughts

As you have known the significance of guest blogging and acquired an idea on how to start with the process, you can go ahead with approaching websites and make guest blogging work for you. You should also remember that it will take time for you to reap the benefits of guest blogging. So, don’t expect immediate results. But, remember this is worth waiting for.

Guest article written by: Savaram Ravindra was born and raised in Hyderabad, popularly known as the ‘City of Pearls’. He is presently working as a Content Contributor at Tekslate.com. His previous professional experience includes Programmer Analyst at Cognizant Technology Solutions. He holds a Masters degree in Nanotechnology from VIT University. He can be contacted at savaramravindra4@gmail.com. Connect with him also on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Digitalization, full or partial, did deeply influence human lives and is extending its influence over different spheres of modern life. In pre-digital world people used to purchase things in direct manner, i.e., personal communication was vital during that time period. But today, with the use of technology the marketing, purchasing is becoming indirect without any personal communication. At the same time, technological innovation and its usage in marketing transformed marketing into an easier process. In a nutshell, marketing depending upon digitalization is useful for those who are familiar with latest trends. Worthy to mention, as far as marketing is concerned, digital world is more competitive. It is very risk in the field of marketing if we are not changing according to the technology. Those who indulge in marketing can expect many changes in the future days in the field of marketing related to digitalization.

In a close view, there are several changes happens in the field of social media from pre digital world to post digital world. In the coming world, social media will become one of the best strategies in the field of marketing. Video is an emerging tactic which included in social media for the use of marketing. One can see that videos will provide basic information about the product or services, especially by watching videos, rather than reading text. It will provide the customer with more interest for the product to be marketed. It is a tremendous way to make brand name popular in a creative and effective way. To attract more consumers, it is important to add live video streaming clips on Facebook, business websites, etc.

Content marketing is one of the best marketing trends in the business world right now. The quality of content is vital in marketing but it is not possible to increase the amount of customers only with the content. There is a need to add something with the content to attract the visitors. Voice search is an upcoming trend in the area of content marketing. With the use of voice search people can avoid typing. Typing key word consumes time; by the use of voice search the customers can search things very easily. It is also a way to promote brand. The future of marketing also includes schema markups. It helps to understand the relevance of website and only display in suitable target group.

Because of that the marketers can set up their site for better rank. The combination of schema markup and artificial intelligence is a new trend expecting to dominate the scenario of marketing in future years. Chat bots are going to become main ingredients to capture success in digital marketing success. They have the ability to grab algorithms and when chat bots play their role in marketing to deal with the customers we can notice the chat bots are dealing with FAQ’s and provide 24 hour service.

So, traditional mode of marketing is history and new trends are becoming popular. Within this scenario, future of marketing is in the hands of digitalization, ways to decrease digital divide among international citizens from world nations can accelerate the future success of marketing as a whole. The current trends in marketing, ie the usage of modern technological innovation, is enough to predict the possibility and scope of future trends like social media marketing, content marketing, etc.

Guest article written by: Hello there, I am serving as a senior writer at a custom essay writing service providing firm. I like to write about different topics because my aim is to unleash my potential to write to those who are in need of essays. Today, I submit an essay named as “The future of marketing: thriving in a digital world”. 

It’s easy to see why people might get confused about the difference between steam rooms and traditional saunas, particularly when they are often both lumped together as “heat baths”, actually there are fairly significant differences between them even though they both offer compelling health benefits.

Steam rooms

As their name suggests, steam rooms are all about steam. Although steam has been used throughout history for its health-promoting properties, steam rooms as we understand them are a relatively modern concept because they require the use of steam generators, which are powered by electricity. Steam rooms are built to be almost airtight so the humidity builds up to almost 100% and when the steam touches the walls of the steam room, the reduction in temperature (as compared to the air), causes it to turn into condensation. This level of humidity means that steam rooms have to be kept at lower temperatures than saunas (typically around 40C to 50C) because the humidity stops your sweat from evaporating off your body as it normally would and so you feel a whole lot hotter than the thermometer suggests you should.
Another reason why steam rooms are a modern invention is that they need to be built out of material which can resist high levels of moisture. Wood is therefore totally unsuitable. Tile and stone are suitable but expensive and therefore generally kept for commercial facilities, while home steam rooms typically have plastic seating (although the plastic used can look very like wood).

Traditional saunas

Traditional saunas do use steam, but while it’s important, it’s not the be-all-and-end-all of the experience. Quite simply traditional saunas date back to a time long before electric-powered steam generators and therefore are designed to be effective with much lower levels of steam. For the sake of completeness, we should probably mention that the traditional method of providing steam in a sauna was to heat rocks and then toss cold water over them. Modern implementations of traditional saunas sometimes use this method and sometimes use a steam generator (some have both so users can choose which one they prefer), but when a steam generator is used, it is used at a much lower level than in a steam room. It has to be because traditional saunas run at around 70C to 90C and at that sort of temperature a high level of humidity would be dangerous, in fact it could easily be fatal, which is why well-designed saunas are built with temperature control in mind. This sort of temperature, of course, makes you sweat and unlike with steam rooms, your sweat will come off your body, thus cooling you. Saunas are typically built out of wood for the simple reason that it remains at a comfortable temperature in spite of the searing heat of the sauna, whereas coming into contact with tiling would probably leave you with a nasty burn and while plastic wasn’t around when traditional saunas were first invented, it’s unlikely to be used for their modern counterparts any time soon, since it is easily damaged by heat.

So which is better?

As always it depends on your own needs and wants. Here are three questions to help you decide.

How do you really feel about steam?

Steam has all kinds of benefits but for some people the experience of being in a steam room comes under the heading of “too much of a good thing”. If you have a respiratory condition, there may be an argument for going down the steam room route, even if you don’t really like it, because steam is just so beneficial for respiratory conditions, otherwise you might want to opt for traditional saunas which have much lower humidity. In fact, if you really don’t want steam at all and are prepared to accept the fact that you’re missing out on its health benefits, then you could even use a traditional sauna simply as a dry heat treatment or even go one step further and opt for an infrared sauna, which bypasses the steam element completely.

What’s your boredom threshold?

Basically when you are in a steam room, you have the use of your ears but not your eyes, at least not to any significant extent, the steam acts like a thick fog so visibility is very limited. This is why the best modern steam generators offer Bluetooth connectivity so you can partner up a device (at a safe distance from all the moisture) and listen to your favourite tunes (or whatever else takes your fancy). If you have someone in the steam room with you, you can also talk to them. You can, however, forget about reading or watching TV (obviously one designed to be waterproof) or, in short, doing anything which involves using your eyes). In a sauna, however, you can most certainly read (on paper, ereaders are best kept elsewhere) in fact you could say that the peaceful, gadget-free environment of a sauna is the perfect place to catch up on some reading.

Do you have any conditions which might be aggravated by high humidity?

Saunas have long been used as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis and famous crime author Martina Cole had one installed in her house to help her manage her condition and continue her work. Now science is finally validating the use of saunas for this purpose however it would appear that the benefits come from the heat rather than the steam, as shown by the fact that infrared saunas are just as good at treating rheumatoid arthritis as their traditional counterparts, in fact they may even be slightly better as humidity is a known trigger for rheumatoid arthritis.
Because of this, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, or even if you simply have a family history of it and believe you could be vulnerable to it in the future, an infrared sauna or a traditional sauna would almost certainly be a far better option than a steam room. If you went for the infrared option, you might be able to benefit from steam for localized treatments such as steam face masks.

When you run a business, there is a danger that you can spend all day putting out fires and never get any real work done. Streamlining your business can stop those fires from starting (for the main part) and allow you to concentrate on the more important aspects of running – and growing – your online business. If you want tips on how to streamline your business, read on.

Use A Good Server

IT will hold many of the answers when it comes to streamlining your business and making it easier for you to stay in control. A server is a digital filing cabinet – it’s where you can store the documents that your business will be producing. These documents will, dependent on what they are, need to be kept for a certain amount of years. To prevent your office from piling up with papers, keeping them in a safe and secure online, the cloud-based server is a much better option. You will be able to retrieve them quickly and easily, but they will also be kept safe until that time.

Access Issues

The old saying that too many cooks spoil the broth is never truer than in business. If everyone within your company can access every part of it, you can never be sure of what is happening, how it is happening, and who is doing it. Employing Simeio IAM consulting will ensure that only those who need access have it. Each employee can have their own specific identities, and they will be able to log in to only the parts of the business that they need to work on. This streamlines productivity and reduces worry on your part that too many people are trying to do one thing.

All In One

If you are paying many different companies for something that you could pay one company for, try to merge all your accounts into one. This could work for insurances, for example. Look at all of your business insurance costs and find a company that will take care of all your needs for one monthly payment instead of several. Ideally, it should be less expensive too. You can do the same for your utility bills too, combining them under one payment. This will help you to stay in control of your spending.

Hire Well

Taking the time to list out exactly what you need from an employee before you start the hiring process will help you to waste less time and to find exactly the right person for the job. If you have a specially created application form, you can eliminate some candidates straight away. Place the form on your website and ensure that anyone who applies for a role that you might have available completes it. This will save you more time so that you only bring the very best candidates in for an interview.

Outsource Where You Can

If you are spending a lot of time on jobs that can be outsourced, then it may be time to consider doing just that. It can often be less expensive than hiring someone on a full or even part-time basis to complete the work, and much more efficient than if you were to try to do everything yourself.

It’s 2018, and the concept of a total smart home is becoming more realistic. The connectivity of our lives is similar to something we would have seen in an eighties science fiction film. Technology has granted us otherworldly capabilities, and homes are running safer and more efficiently than ever. You can control locks, lights, music, cameras, and your thermostat all from your phone. The advancements made in the smart home industry over the last couple of years have been nothing short of jaw-dropping. While there are many popular smart devices, there are also some that would surprise people. Here’s a list of ten smart devices that you probably haven’t heard of:

1) Smart Microwave – Whirlpool Over the Range Microwave with Scan-To-Cook Technology
Your smartphone can control this incredible microwave. It will send you a notification when your food is ready, even if you aren’t near it. It connects to WiFi, and you can control the time, power, and cooking type. It also has a feature that lets you scan the barcode on the food and send cooking instructions directly to your microwave for that specific food. The microwave will set it to the exact settings that it requires to cook correctly.

2) Smart Outlet – WeMo Mini Smart Plug
These outlets help the forgetful homeowner control their plug-in devices from afar. Forget to turn something off? Do it from your phone. Leave your curling iron plugged in? Ease your mind with your phone. It will also save you money. Nobody likes to go all around their house to unplug all of their cords before they leave their home, just to save money. Now if you have these outlets installed, you can cut off the power to all of your electrical equipment with just a few taps on your phone.

3) Smart Barbecue – Traeger Timberline Wood Pellet Barbecue
Traeger joined in on the smart home trend by introducing a WiFi enabled barbecue. With their WiFire technology, a person can control their grill from inside their house. You can change the temperature, the smoke levels, and even set timers. They created an app that has thousands of apps that contain settings. You can automatically send those settings to your Traeger so you can grill to your exact specifications.

4) Smart Litter Box – Litter Robot III Open Air with Connect
One of the most commonly hated tasks is cleaning the litter box. This WiFi compatible litter box keeps you updated with notifications. You can even keep track of your cat’s health with statistics about how often your cat is using the litter box. It automatically cleans itself after a cat uses it, making sure there isn’t any unwanted odor. All you have to do is empty the box when it gets full, and it even notifies you when that happens.

5) Smart Trashcan – Genican Trash Can Scanner
Update your trash list in real time as you throw away items. The Genican scans barcodes you throw away and adds them to a grocery list that you can access from your phone. If the item doesn’t have a barcode, you can tell it what you’re throwing away with your voice.

6) Smart Air Quality Monitor – Awair
Awair is a device that can be useful for everyone. If you suffer from allergies or care about the air you are breathing, a smart air quality monitor can benefit you. Awair allows you to get readings of your air from an app. You can monitor temperature, humidity, CO2, chemicals, and dust. Rest assured knowing that the air you are breathing is healthy. You can even connect it to other standard smart home devices like thermostats, fans, and humidifiers.

7) Smart Toothbrush – Kolibree
The Kolibree smart toothbrush is pretty impressive. It tracks your brushing progress as you go. It takes note of how well you brush and any places you might miss. It also reminds you to brush your teeth twice a day, so you never forget. You can turn toothbrushing into a competition with your significant other. They even offer a toothbrush for kids that attempts to make brushing fun.

8) Smart Shower – Evadrop
Now you can start your shower from anywhere. The Evadrop smart shower allows you to set temperature preferences, set timers, and track your water usage. Monitoring usage and trends help the user adjust their habits, so they are getting the most out of their shower. By regulating water flow and setting timers, it saves water and money. This smart shower can even automatically adjust the water flow by sensing what you are doing in the shower. It will raise the water pressure if you are rinsing, and lower it if you are shaving. Just another way to save water.

9) Smart Water Pitcher – Brita Infinity
Believe it or not, there is a water pitcher that connects to WiFi. Yes, you read that right. The pitcher automatically orders a new filter when the old one needs replacing. Welcome to the Internet of Things.

10) Smart Toilet – Kohler Numi
The Kohler Kumi is the revolutionary device that every home needs. This toilet is capable of many different settings that are customizable for specific people. The lid automatically opens, and the seat is always warm. It has automatic flushing, deodorization, and UV cleansing. The bidet has adjustable water pressure and temperature settings. Not to mention it has ambient light and Bluetooth music capability. It even has a foot warmer. I doubt anyone will want to leave this toilet.

We are moving toward an age where everything in our homes will be connected. All working together to create the most efficient version of themselves.

Guest article written by: Josh Matteson is a writer for Lula, an on-demand home services company based in Kansas City.

The world of medicine and the way we use medicine these days has changed in a drastic way. It is something that is one of the cardinal unit of life. Its importance is felt when you are sick or having some acute issues with your health. The history of medicine is as old as the history of human beings itself. When in an emergency, the first thing you seek is medicine that you may find in your first aid kit or the medicine box. In case it is not there, you have to go to the pharmacy or ask for help which at times can be lethal or not possible for you to have access to it. Here are a few ways to make it easy for you and more affordable for you to get access to medicine in the digital age:

Ask The Price Of Your Medicine If You Pay By Cash Or Insurance:

Ask them out if the price of your medicine is more affordable if you pay through your insurance or pay for it via cash. Many medicines that include medicine for different Allergies and complications like Heart Burn are more likely to get within your budget and easy for you to buy.

Look For Prices On Discount Cards:

If you are paying for your medicine using a discount card, this might be something wise to do. There are medicines that don’t cost much if you are paying for them using cash only. There are medicines that might have higher costs or don’t seem to be a wise option if you are willing to avail a discount card that you have. You can also negotiate the price of your medicine if you are at a store or a pharmacy and pay the price that you can agree upon. Ordering medicine using a specific app that can help you order medicine might also get you a discounted price. This is something that becomes a convenience for the elderly and patients who can’t move on their own.

Buying Medicine From An Overseas Supplier:

Sometimes you come across medicines that are not available or are prohibited within a country. One can get quality stuff from a supplier residing in a foreign country. People either look for online sources or have to travel to that country and get that particular medicine. But a lot of effort has been put where there are ways that you can use to treat your ailment or a deficiency. Make sure that when you are selecting a supplier, review their quality and testimonials by other customers.

In today’s world there is a dire need of having prescribed medicine for yourself and your family. This factor has been improved in the current digital age. Now you can order medicine from your home using your smart devices and an internet connection. You can get the latest details and even get a health consultant who can help you out getting information on medicine and medical equipment that suits your needs.

So you have embarked on your search for the perfect support solution for your organization. There are many options out there and the search can be a long and tiring. You will have many products to evaluate before you figure out which solution works for your organization. You will also need to get all stakeholders, both internal and external, involved in the implementation process to ensure success. Well you sure do have your task cut out for you, but if you have just started I am sure you would have come across two terms Call Center and Contact center and must be wondering which solution is best for you.

In this blog I will try to clearly state what both solutions are and list out the differences between the two solution. So let’s get started!

Call center vs contact center which one to choose?

First things first, you need to choose the right channels for communicating with your customers and then research on the best practices of setting them up. Regardless of which channel you are going after you need to make sure that the solution works both for your customers and internal stakeholders. Any solution that is geared only towards one of these parties is bound to fail for you in the long run.

What is a call center?

A call center refers to a group of people, often referred to as agents, who are responsible for handling all the telephonic conversations for your business.
Many organizations choose to outsource the team of phone operators required to handle your calls, especially if they provide round the clock or 24/7 support.
Call centers, also referred to as phone teams, can manage all contacts obtained through voice conversations and save all the conversations for future reference. This type of data can be very valuable especially while renegotiating contracts or when handling dissatisfied customers. Call centers have been the preferred way of communication for most customers till the late 90s(when email support became the next thing) and in many cases it still is.

What is a contact center?

A contact center on the other hand is a hub for all customer conversations across phone, email, chat or social media. Think of it like a call center on steroids. The main advantage of a contact center revolves around the fact that you can handle all forms of customer communication from one single tool.
The contact center team is usually centrally located and responsible for managing all the contacts that you have acquired through your conversations irrespective of the channel.

What is the difference between a call center and a contact center?

Source: Freshcaller

When to choose a Call Center?

• If phones are your primary or secondary medium of business communication with your customers and prospects you need a Call Center
• If your contacts are acquired mainly through phone or phone and email you need a Call Center
• If your customer base is broad and very comfortable using phones for conversations compared to social media channels or live chat you need a Call Center

When to choose a Contact Center?

• If live chat, social media channels, emails are your main channels with phones being a tertiary medium of communication you should consider a Contact Center
• If contacts are acquired through chat, social media, email, and phones you should consider a Contact Center
• If your customer base is tech savvy and wants to interact with you using your live chat, social media channels etc. you should consider a Contact Center.

So, now that you have all the facts on call centers and contact centers and when you need one and not the other let me give you a some quick picks of the top players for both to help you with your selection process.

Top Call Center Software (in particular order)

• Grasshopper
• Ringcentral
• Freshcaller
• Aircall
• Zendesk Talk

Top Contact Center Software

• Zendesk
• Freshdesk
• Desk.com
• Team Support
• Happy Fox

Conclusion

Regardless of which you choose a call center or a contact center. No matter the size of your business, you will reap benefits by investing in a support software. In your initial days having a call center with which you can have personal conversations with your customers could make all the difference between happy, satisfied customers and customers who are ready to look at your competitors. If phones are one of the or primary channel of communication for your intended target audience, you will definitely need to setup a call center. One work of advice make sure that the call center software you chooses can easily integrate with a contact center software for when you need to provide support over email, chat and social forums. This will make all the difference!