At last! A get-rich-quick scheme that involves nothing more than dropping an ‘e’ – all that’s needed is a gap in the market

I NEED TO raise a lot of money fast, so it’s great to discover that social networks are the answer to all my dreams of avarice. I can raise a fortune not by joining a network, but by setting one up. I have analysed all the money-spinning social networks, and discovered they have one thing in common when it comes to financial success: their names. If I want money for old rope, then what I need to do is follow their naming protocols, and give my network a twosyllable name that ends in ‘er’. But here’s the clever bit; after I name my creation I must delete the ‘e’. And that’s the secret of how to become an instant millionaire.

Take Flickr, for example. Flickr is a social network where people bore the pants off one another with as many bad photographs as they can upload. There’s a 1TB storage limit, which translates to the equivalent of ‘a lifetime’s worth of crap in exchange for force-fed adverts and surrendered data’. Pro photographers are welcome to join in the fun for five hundred bucks, and get the alternative deal of ‘a lifetime’s worth of professional crap without the adverts’. More than 50 million crapmongers have already signed up, but it wouldn’t work at all if Flickr was named Flicker.

Then there’s Tumblr, which does for words and pictures what Flickr does for pictures alone. Tumblr has harnessed over a quarter of a billion willing members. If it had been called something stupid like Tumbler it would never have been valued at a billion dollars and flogged off.

So that’s where all my money is going to come from, at four US dollars per soul. I need to select a little noun ending in ‘er’, drop the vowel, and rake in the cash. Raptr does it for video gamers. The now-defunct Dopplr did it for people who can walk. Everyone’s at it, and revenue generation pulls the same trick every time: I will either get paid by advertising or get paid by subscribers not to view advertising. Brilliant.

The only thing missing from my scheme for instant wealth is to spot a popular activity and do the name thing. I was going for Tossr, but I’ve been beaten to the erectile gristle market by something called Grindr. Which is a pity, seeing as Grindr has more than six million members. I wanted to include a Satyr joke here, but I don’t speak Greek or have a permanent erection. Then I considered catering for the millions of us who regularly pass wind, by setting up Fartr. But it seems the flatulence social network has been running since it was successfully crowdfunded last year. In fact every market sector I’ve tried to bag has already been exploited. Except one. And it’s going to be more popular than Flickr bad photography. Bigger than Tumblr blogs. More universal than sex or even farting. I am going to set up a social network for the dead. Latr.

Kids today, eh? Staring at a screen for hours on end before they can barely walk. Don’t mention anything to the parents, though

I RECENTLY HAD a holiday in Vietnam, which meant getting to play the role of ‘cool uncle’ to my niece and nephew, aged 3¾ and 2½ respectively. Whenever an opportunity to see them crops up I’m sure to take along an age-appropriate gift, but I also get requests from my sister for things to take over from the UK.

This time, I was asked to bring a tablet. Not for my sister, but for the kids. This was something I objected to. Quite vehemently. Not just because it suddenly made my gifts of a children’s pop-up tent, some soft toys, a basketball complete with hoop and some Lego Duplo suddenly look a bit rubbish, but because I don’t believe children this young should be using tablet computers.

Not to sound too much like an old grouch, but at their age I would have been happy with an empty cardboard box and my imagination. In my (non-parental) opinion, kids already spend far too much time with technology instead of playing outside or socialising with their peers. And this is coming from someone who started using a computer from an early age

Maybe I’m out of touch. Look around and you see children as young as my niece and nephew playing on parents’ tablets and smartphones. I’m sure when I was a toddler I wouldn’t have been trusted with anything costing hundreds of pounds, but now the likes of Amazon produces rugged tablets aimed specifically at children, there’s nothing to stop you handing your child a screen.

So now we’ve got our kids staring at an LCD all day, where do we go? A tablet at three, a laptop at five, a drone at eight, a driverless car at 10? There’s no room for wooden blocks or a cup and ball any more.

I did learn an important lesson from this whole experience, though. You should never question someone’s parenting unless you’re prepared for a heated debate. I ended up buying the tablet.

We’re getting a horrible nagging feeling this month, from Microsoft in one ear and a tech-savvy three-year-old in the other. Still, at least we’ll all soon be loaded

Not everybody wants Windows 10, but if you’re not careful you could find it taking up a huge chunk of your hard disk space

I LIKE WINDOWS 10. I think it’s a strong operating system that is improving all the time. However, I fully support those who, for whatever reason, don’t want to make the jump. For example, I have one AMD-based system that, with Windows 10, is incredibly slow in games. Nothing I do with graphics drivers will fix the problem, so I’ve just resigned myself to the fact that Windows 10 hates my motherboard and, on that machine at least, I’ll stick with Windows 8.1.

decent operating system, and can be vastly improved by installing an alternative program interface such as Classic Shell. Once you have a proper Start menu installed, you’ll have a fast, stable operating system, and the only thing you’ll have to worry about is in which one of the 47 Settings menus (spread across two different Control Panels) you’ll find the option to change your password.

Unfortunately, Microsoft is determined to drag me, and other Windows 10 refuseniks, kicking and screaming into double digits.

There you are, happily minding your Windows 8.1 business, when after a certain Windows update up pops the Get Windows 10 application. This has two boxes: Upgrade now and Upgrade later. You’d think that clicking Upgrade later would just close the window, leaving you free to decide when you want to take the upgrade leap. Not so. The Get Windows 10 application takes you at your word, and downloads 3GB of Windows 10 in the background, presumably so it can nag you with even greater intensity later

The only way not to grab several GB of unwanted files over your 2Mbit/s metered broadband connection is to click the X in the top-right of the window. However, you’re not out of the woods yet. Even if you’ve remained disciplined and calm and have managed to find the secret to dismissing the popup with no adverse effects, the Get Windows 10 icon will stay staring at you from your notification area, daring you to slip up and click one of the big, inviting Upgrade now or Upgrade later buttons and have your operating system destiny whisked out from under your feet. Even if your mouse control is so refined that you avoid clicking on the Icon of Evil, the upgrade application will still pop up to nag you when you first boot to the desktop.

Microsoft has pledged to support Windows 7 until 2020 and Windows 8.1 until 2023. These are still current products, and you shouldn’t be forced to dump them, or at least download gigabytes of data you don’t want, through sleight of hand. Thank heavens, then, that there are bright sparks out there who also find this behaviour irritating. The GWX Control Panel from ultimateoutsider.com/downloads, in just a couple of clicks, will kill the nagging forever

Bit of bother Cybercriminals are coining it in thanks to a new type of malware that enables them to harvest bitcoins – at your expense

THE SUBJECT OF this month’s column came about as a result of a conversation with a friend who works in cyber intelligence for a large global corporate. We often discuss the latest methods used by the bad guys as they attempt to breach his networks, but when he mentioned “bitcoin-mining malware” I will admit to being a little taken aback. This method of conning you out of your cash was certainly new to me.

We’ve long seen compromised networks turned into botnets to run spam email campaigns, but using the computing power you’ve stolen to generate cash directly seems a logical step, and so the bad guys have forced compromised machines to labour in the bitcoin mines to enrich themselves at your expense.

This type of compromise has the potential to be even more annoying to those infected than having your machine used as a spam server. The reason for this is the way bitcoin mining works; the malware could make your whole network slow to a crawl and lead to some terrifying bills.

To explain why this type of malware is so nasty, it’s worth explaining what bitcoin is. It’s one of a number of so-called cryptocurrencies, and its use is becoming more and more mainstream, with everyone from hairdressers to restaurants accepting the virtual currency.

The bad guys can attempt to generate bitcoins from their infected botnets, and then spend them in normal shops: it’s a direct way to generate cash from malware without having to jump through any hoops. The malware writers are helped by the fact that, while bitcoin transactions between bitcoin addresses are

publicly accessible, each bitcoin address isn’t necessarily linked to a real human, making it less likely they’ll be caught when spending their ill-gotten gains. So the baddies love bitcoin. However, we still need to explain why it’s so bad for a home user to contract a bitcoin malware infection.

CHAIN REACTION

At the heart of bitcoin is blockchain technology. A blockchain is the public ledger of all bitcoin transactions that have ever been made. The blockchain consists of blocks that can be thought of as individual ledger or page entries that record each transaction during a certain time period. When that time is up, the block is added to the blockchain.

Each computer (or node) connected to the bitcoin network that is running mining software is tasked with validating and relaying transactions. To do this, it sometimes needs to download a copy of the bitcoin blockchain. It follows that the blockchain is constantly growing as blocks are added to it; at the time of writing, the size of the blockchain is about 50GB. If you’re being taken for a ride by the virus writers, this will take a big chunk out of your hard disk space and bung up your broadband; if you’re on a limited broadband connection, it may also cause you to be hit with a bill from your ISP. More recent bitcoin versions let you mine without the entire blockchain, and this is more likely the approach to be taken by malware writers; most people would notice a 50GB chunk being taken out of their hard disk space.

Mining bitcoins is a very CPU (and GPU)-intensive process. Bitcoin miners constantly process and record transactions as they take place and are competing in a type of race to ‘complete the current block’ in order to win a stash of bitcoins. Each block is sealed off with a hash that is created from all the data in the block. If you were to change anything in that block, it would also change the block’s hash, so anyone verifying transactions would be able to tell that the block had been tampered with.

This verification process is not in itself processor-intensive. However, the total number of bitcoins ever to be produced is set at 21 million, and computers are good at creating hashes. In order that today’s powerful PCs don’t just mine all the bitcoins in a hurry, a degree of complexity is added to the hashing process

BLOCK PARTY

It is the difficulty of the maths problem that regulates the creation of new bitcoins, since new blocks can’t be submitted to the network without the answer. The reward for completing a block is currently 25 bitcoins, and at present exchange rates and electricity prices the power consumed would cost more than the bitcoin reward. If you were to start your own bitcoin-mining operation, and don’t happen to have your own wind farm, it wouldn’t be worth the effort. However, if you’re running a botnet using other people’s PCs and electricity, that isn’t your problem: free bitcoins for you!

Bitcoin and the technology behind it has enormous potential. It provides a way of verifying financial transactions without a central authority; the integrity of each transaction as well as the ledger as a whole is maintained by the network’s users. It’s this feature, together with minimal transaction costs and the fact that the register is decentralised, that has captured the attention of the financial industry.

But no matter how useful the technology appears, the bad guys seem to have found a way to use it to their own advantage. All we can wish for is that the researchers prioritise system security during their endeavours. Here’s hoping

The ageing process As Lenny the laptop starts to slow down after reaching the ripe old age of three,

IT’S JUST THREE months since I wished my Lenovo IdeaPad a happy birthday. In laptop years, the trusty IdeaPad is probably already over the hill.

This observation is based on some simple maths. I change my laptop about every three years, provided Microsoft’s updates don’t kill it first. Humans in the UK live on average 81.5 years; extrapolating that to the laptop’s average lifespan puts it in its mid-thirties. That doesn’t sound so bad, were it not for the fact that on a recent Match of the Day, Messrs Lineker and Shearer were discussing the performance of one well-regarded footballer and saying that, at the age of 34, he wouldn’t last much longer.

That would explain why Lenny the Lenovo has been on a go-slow: it’s all down to age. By the way, anthropomorphising the computer in this way is easier than constantly giving the model number – I’m not really into giving objects pet names.

I gave ‘him’ a medical check to make sure the cause wasn’t anything obvious. Hard disk fragmented – negative. All four CPU cores maxed out? Negative. Running out of memory?

Possibly. The IdeaPad comes with 8GB which, you’d think, should be enough for anything. Firing up Task Manager showed there was 2GB free which you’d think would be plenty but, on being told that figure, Keef and Garry went through a teeth-sucking routine worthy of a professional plumber. But here’s a thing. Windows Task Manager says I’m using 75% of the available memory, and lists every running process and the memory each is using. If I add up all the memory being used, the total is less than 1GB, leaving 5GB mysteriously unavailable. Then there’s the other 2GB that Task Manager says I’m not using, so how can I be short of RAM?

For a detailed, though not entirely illuminating, discussion on the topic, see tinyurl.com/ udevmem. Some comments suggest Windows is using the ‘spare’ memory for caching, but sometimes doesn’t release cached memory when it should. If this is true, it would explain why memory usage goes straight to 6GB even after a restart and with no applications running

CALL A MECHANIC

While considering this, I received an email from Serif, whose stuff I’ve used for years. The email was offering a great deal on a suite of utilities called System Mechanic Pro (SMP) for the measly sum of £23. SMP promised to speed up my computer by a variety of means, including cleaning up the Registry and, on the fly, optimising memory management, disk writes and CPU usage. What’s to lose? Especially as Serif offers a no-questions-asked 30-day money-back guarantee.

SMP turned up on a DVD by old-fashioned snail mail, and the packaging revealed it had been developed not by Serif but by an outfit called Iolo. Installation was easy and SMP immediately set about analysing the system. It got rid of 100GB of disk rubbish and offered to tweak the internet settings to improve speed. It also backed up then cleaned and defragged the Registry.

So far, so good. SMP also comes with its own anti-malware features. This turned out to be not so good, at least from a performance point of view. System speed was worse than when Lenny was running the pre-installed McAfee software, which I’d uninstalled after two weeks of frustration. So the anti-malware was disabled and I reverted to Defender, which resulted in a partial improvement.

SMP comes with real-time monitoring and optimisation features. One aims to improve memory usage, while another manages disk writes in a way that prevents fragmentation, as well as timing the writing process to occur when the impact on system speed will be lowest. In desperation I turned those features off too. Guess what? With the speed optimisations off everything ran much more quickly. That rather defeats the purpose of the program, so I asked Serif for a refund. True to its word, Serif made a prompt and full refund to my credit card.

PAGE TURNER

Following up on the ‘memory use doesn’t tally’ problem, several forum posts indicated this could be down to problems with the pagefile(s) not being cleared properly of old entries. I followed the instructions at tinyurl.com/ udevpagefile to force clearing these out on a full restart and then rebooted, hoping to see a fall in memory use. The shutdown took a full 10 minutes and, on restarting, I went straight into Task Manager, which duly reported memory use of 70%. With no applications running! Back to the drawing board, then

On a more cheerful note, the swap from the BlackBerry to the Samsung Galaxy A3 (Under Development, Shopper 335) has gone well. The new phone has been anthropomorphised to ‘Sammy’, and I can vouch that it fully lives up to the five-star rating given in Shopper 331.

Sadly I think the lifecycle of a smartphone is even shorter than it is for laptops. In phone years Sammy’s already a teenager and, by the time you read this, will be heading for 30. At that rate it won’t be long before he’s joining me getting email adverts for care homes and funeral plans. Life is short – don’t waste it!

7 Free Email Marketing Plugins For Wordpress

If you have a Wordpress based website, then try these great email marketing plug-ins to promote your content

Every online business today requires email marketing. It’s an effective method to directly reach out to your prospective customers to solicit sales, donations, etc. If done right, email marketing can result in good response, something that every online business needs today. Here are a few email marketing plug-ins for Wordpress to start with.

MailPoet Newsletters

A popular free email marketing WordPress plugin to create newsletters, automated emails, posts notifications and autoresponders. It also provides a signup widget to capture subscribers. You can create newsletter by dropping your posts, images, social icons in your newsletter. The free version is available if you have up to 2,000 subscribers.

Features:

• Drag & drop newsletter editor

• Autoresponders

• Send emails to your WordPress users

• Start collecting subscribers in 2-clicks with our sign up widget

• Single or double opt-in, your choice

• Get stats for your newsletter: opens, clicks, unsubscribes

• Drag and drop subscription form designer

• Sending newsletters in the free version is limited to 2000 subscribers and more

MailPress

Mailpress is very popular newsletter plugin and welldeveloped newsletter plugin. You can style your HTML and plain text emails with dedicated themes and templates. It provides full control on your newsletters.

Features

• Style your HTML and plain text emails with dedicated themes and templates.

• Double opt-in subscription.

• Subscriptions to Comments, Newsletters/Post notifications and even to Mailing lists.

• Newsletters/Post notifications on a per post, daily, weekly, monthly basis.

Easy Sign Up

This plugin generates a customizable HTML thanks message that is sent to the visitor, the visitor’s email and name are sent to an email address of your choosing. A possible use is collecting email address for a newsletter or leads for your sales force before redirecting to a brochure.

Features:

• Email address collection

• User redirection

• Auto-responder

• Lead collection

• Squeeze Page

ALO EasyMail Newsletter

ALO EasyMail Newsletter is a plugin for WordPress that allows to write and send newsletters, and to gather and manage the subscribers. It supports internationalization and Multilanguage formats.

Features:

• Collect subscriber details

• Import/export subscribers from CSV file

• Create and manage mailing lists

• Newsletter themes

• Allow to search, delete, edit subscription to mailing lists

• Choose the roles that can send newsletter, manage subscribers and settings

• View sending a report

• Bounce management

• Multilanguage

SendPress

It is an easy newsletter WordPress plugin easy to use and does not require a third party system. Create newsletter templates with your style and edit content just like you would a post in WordPress. You can easily import post content from your site and schedule newsletters to be sent at the right time.

Features

• Unlimited Subscribers

• Unlimited Responsive Newsletters with tracking

• Customizable subscription widget, page or custom form

• Sync WordPress roles to newsletter subscriber lists

• Html and Text versions of Newsletters

• Customizable Newsletter Templates

• Stat tracking for each email: clicks, opens and unsubscribes.

• Scheduled Sending of newsletters

Sendit Newsletter

Sendit enables you to send newsletters and collect

subscribers from your blog. You can manage one or more lists and put the subscription form via a shortcode in post/pages or use the Sendit widget. You can extract content from post or pages or create your own content to send to subscribers, now also with featured images. Furthermore, you can edit template for each mailing lists by just writing some HTML and CSS code on header and footer.

Features

• Add a subscription widget form in your sidebar or pages

• Mailing list and subscribers management ajax powered

• Double opt-in subscription widget

• Custom post type integration

• Send your posts to your readers with featured image

• Build and send newsletter within WordPress

• SMTP integration (works great with external SMTP services)

Contact Form 7 Newsletter

Contact Form 7 is a very popular plugin and you can easily integrate email marketing with it by using this plugin. When users contact you, they get added to your newsletter. It has an option to send HTML mail to registered user as well as to comment posted user.

Features

• Add contacts to multiple lists at once

• Sync form fields to Constant Contact fields, including your Custom Fields

• Add a newsletter opt-in checkbox to your form

Nine Freemium Visual Online Marketing Tools

If you are looking to create Photo collages, infographics, business cards, or email headers, then these tools will help you

There are plenty of online options available for creating compelling graphics, images or memes for your website, blog or social media promotion. Here we have identified nine great online tools that offer free and premium options for creating high-quality designs

PiktoChart

It helps you to create Infographics to visualize important information on social media and blogs. PiktoChart offers a free account for creating some quick infographics but if you want more in-depth features than it’d be worth to upgrade your account to utilize all that Piktochart features it offer. It helps you to create infographics, reports, banners and presentations also you can Embed videos from Youtube and Vimeo in your design

easel.ly

Easel.ly is a website that offers free infographic templates and design objects which users can customize to create and share their visual ideas online. It offers dragging and dropping design elements, and users can either choose a template from their library, or they can upload their own background image and start from scratch

HubSpot’s Free Infographic Templates

It offers 15 free infographic templates in powerpoint to create great visual content. With this pack of free infographic templates, you can create professionallooking infographics and save hours of time in the process. You can easily customize these templates them to fit your company’s branding

FotoJet

It is a great tool that lets you create classic collages by uploading photos from your computer or from Facebook. You can choose your design from hundreds of their collection.

Visme

Visme allows you to create interactive presentations, infographics, and other engaging content. With tons of templates and a huge library of free shapes and icons allows you to creates infographics, presentation, animations, ad banners, and custom layouts.

Canva

Canva is a kind of place where you can fulfill all your marketing needs from Facebook posts, and cover to A4 documents and printable cards. There are predefined templates available on this website, simply choose them and select the type of document you want to create. It is easy to learn and has tons of free and paid images as well as templates for users’ convenience.

Fotor

This App is available online via browser as well as on mobile devices such as Android or iOS. It is a comprehensive editor, designer, and photo enhancer tool. Simply upload your images and create your design by using tools it provides such as editor, cropping and exposure, curves and more including layout, text, shapes, and stickers.

BeFunky

This platform allows you to design different graphics elements for online events, small business websites, blogs, and social media platforms. It also offers quick tutorials which give a brief of all the features it provides. The app offers templates for a range of applications including business cards, letterhead, and more

PicMonkey

It is a free online photo editor that offers features such as editing and touching up images, making collages, and tools for creating designs from scratch.

6 Free Point Of Sale Software For Small Businesses

customer or retailer, then there are some good free Point of Sale Software with good graphical interfaces, support for touch screens & ticket printers, barcode scanners, etc available. We discuss the six popular ones.

uniCenta oPOS

It is a multi-lingual POS (Point-Of-Sale) application designed for Touchscreens. It supports industry standard hardware and is capable of running on display sizes from as little as 800x600 upwards.

Installing uniCenta oPOS is simple and fast and it comes packaged with its own built-in Apache Derby Embedded database. It’s also multi-terminal, multilocation and supports a range of proven commercialgrades databases such as Apache Derby Client/Server, MySQL, HSQLDB, PostgreSQL and Oracle 11g.

ProffittCenter Proffittcenter is an Electronics at the Point of Sale program with a good sales screen and intelligent adaptive ordering system. ProffittCenter EPOS is another completely free POS system and is like a cash register – it takes money, runs discounts etc. Also, it has capabilities of reports and some inventory management. ProffittCenter is actually a great solution for merchants who are new to POS software. It’s got a great user interface, and it has the basic functionality to allow a new user to learn how to operate and set up POS software.

Floreant

It is an enterprise Grade Open Source Restaurant Point of Sale portable application. It can run from Pen drive, Linux distros, Mac 10.4+ and Windows XP to 8.1.(Requires Java 7+). It cab be used as single cash terminal with embedded database or multiple terminals in a client-server model. It supports a wide range of Databases and is ready to connect with Oracle and MSSQL. Supports Commercial free plugins for Inventory Control, Transactions including Purchase, Move, Wastage, restocking levels, Warehouse for Raw material and Finished items

Openbravo Java POS

Openbravo Java POS is a point of sale application designed for touch screens, supports ticket printers, customer displays and barcode scanners, supports different type of hardware, cash drawer and has inventory. 

system written in the PHP language and suitable for small and medium stores. It uses MySQL as the data storage back-end and has a simple user interface. It has a master database for customer, sales, supply, employee and provides flexible reporting. However, being a web based POS it has limited support for POS printer and cash drawer.

POSper

POSper is a Point Of Sale (POS) System designed for small businesses. It supports a wide range of hardware and databases. It offers Intuitive touch screen operation and user-oriented design for retail and restaurants. Also, it supports multiple devices such as printers, scales, cash drawers, scanners and card readers

Before You Invest In Erp6 Things To Know Before Starting An Online Business

Did you know online sales are snowballing at a faster pace than traditional offline retail sales, gathering $190 billion in revenues? For about 206 million shoppers, this was the money spent online last year and the figures are mounting every day

How interesting the stats are! Because of all these facts and figures, it’s no surprise that the burgeoning tycoons and the prevailing small businesses are whirling to do business online.

But don’t get carried away by these numbers if you want to take your business online. Maybe you are ready for the funding, have planned everything about the cash flow, even your inventories are managed, and most of all, your marketing campaign is all set to get launched, but still there is a lot more that you must know before proceeding.

Here are 6 things you all must know before starting a small business online. Let’s begin

Effective Marketing Tactics Help Increasing Sales

According to the recent studies 49% small business owners are not even certain of the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, and 14% are aware that they’re not.

It’s strange, but true that only a minority of small business marketers use marketing tactics that are effective. It is very important for all beginners to efficiently promote brands, build preference as well as increase sales using various digital marketing techniques thereby correctly reaching to potential customers.

Remember!

You can make use of marketing channels like word of mouth, SEO and Online Local Directions, which are effective in attracting new leads by 28%, 20% and 15% respectively.

Ignoring Lead Generation will Affect Customer Acquisition

Did you know in 2016, 1 in 2 online small business owners will care about driving sales, but only 1 in 3 will pay great attention to the lead generation?

There is no denying that sales are the topmost concern for any business online and small businesses are no exception. Just like revenue and profits are important for the growth of the small businesses, collecting and tracking leads are equally significant. This is all because online leads generation is beneficial for creating customer acquisition programs and for list building.

Remember! You can make use of online lead generation techniques such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay per Click (PPC) Advertisement, Networking, and Social Media Marketing, and Solo Ads to name a few keeping an eye on their effectiveness for your business.

Use Predictive Analysis To Kick The Financial Barriers

As per the recent reports, 30% of high-performing small business service teams are already using predictive analytics. No one can deny that not every product is sell-able on the internet. So, it’s important for you to analyze everything and so start with recognizing the success rate of your product and the location so as to easily grab customers online. Above all, it is important to research about the magnetism for your customers and keep an eye on what all your competitors are up to. The reason why predictive analysis is significant is that this can avert the financial impediments, dreadful crusades and crying patrons.

Remember! Also, even if you are having a reliable hosting and a website to put your business out there, keeping an eye on your online presence is a must. So, it’s important to be consistent with your updates. Since you are aware of everything that’s happening, your business will be many steps ahead of others

Social Media Marketing Increases Exposure According to the stats, 60% of small business marketers say that social media advertising is very effective.

Moreover, as per the recent studies, 96% of surveyed applicants make use of social media marketing and 92% of them unwaveringly agree that it is important for their business. So, how can you skip on this? It’s imperative for you to know that social media aids in offering “increased exposure.” Along with this, it helps in building brand for your small business and cuts on the marketing expenses due to which your sales upsurge over time.

Remember! Go out and become friends with platforms like Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Twitter and others. Start with a social strategy, recognize your goals (increasing site traffic, building conversions, etc.), plan accordingly and don’t ever forget to gauge your growth towards your specific goals.

Website Design Aids Marketing and Branding Efforts

Did you know 31% of the online small businesses revealed that they don’t have a responsive website design?

It is very significant to bear in mind that as a small business, the website is a vigorous part of the marketing and branding efforts. It’s important that your website is not only selling the product or services but is also answering the questions visitors are coming with. And in case, you designed a wrong website, at first, you will easily drop thousands of dollars and then eventually, you will mislay even more money in potential revenue, which you would have earned from a well-designed, properly functioning website.

Remember! Make sure that you don’t go overboard with the design of the site. Plus, also, keep an eye on offering a clear call to action. Don’t ever incorporate stale content. In addition to this, your website must not lack the mobile compatibility and make sure that your social media buttons are not broken.

Pick The Right Payment Gateway To Reach Greater Audience

You will agree with my point that an online payment gateway can offer your small business an amazing exposure to even a greater audience, but only the time you have opted for the right one. More and more users are happy enjoying online shopping since it is easier. With an easy payment gateway, you will be capable of gaining more customers exposing your products to a completely new foundation of patrons independent of the geographical boundaries of your store. Instead of relying blindly on just the conventionally used payment gateways that may give you a hard time dealing in thousands of dollars, give a try to gateways like InstaMojo, Citrus Pay, CCAvenue, PayZippy, and others to close the deal.

Remember!

The major things that you need to take into account before deciding on what payment gateway options to opt for are first, the transaction fee; secondly, the type of cards and thirdly, you must be clear of the on-form payments.

The Final Take!

Ample of information keeps on spurting all sorts of statistics and breakthrough marketing updates, which sometimes are way too perplexing. Stop scratching your head now, look no further, grab a cup of tea or coffee and start working on the discussed six things - trust me your small business online will do wonders! With this, I take your leave hoping that this post has helped you.