Archive for the ‘General’ Category
Tuesday, March 12th, 2013
When WordPress was launched, it was hardly considered competition amongst other media publishing giants. Although it had a slow beginning, WordPress now powers over 22 percent of the Internet, making it one of the most significant blogging tools. Several updates have improved the program over the past few years, version 3.5 being the most current. Existing features, such as the media library and theme previewer, were primarily focused on in WordPress 3.5. Here are some of the new and improved features in this new version:
1. Media Uploader and Manager Improvements
The new media manager is one of the biggest developments in WordPress history. Instead of searching through the messy icons of the editing area, an obvious “Add Media” button has been implemented. Upon clicking Add Media, a large display box appears where users can drag and drop files into. While this feature has been in previous versions of WordPress, version 3.5 is smoother and provides a better interface. Media uploading has also been consolidated. Organizing galleries is as simple as copying and pasting. Overall, the workflow of the entire media library is logical, simple, and easy to use.
2. Tumblr Importer Support
Tumblr, one of the most popular blogs of the past few years, has finally been integrated into version 3.5. Previously, there was no way to include Tumblr content into WordPress, but 3.5 can import Tumblr blogs. However, it can be a little slow due to Tumblr’s systems. To activate the Tumblr import Support, go to Settings Import page and follow the resulting instructions. The process can be time consuming, but the effort is well worth it.
3. Modified Dashboard
New users on WordPress can find the dashboard to be somewhat overwhelming. Unfortunately, this information is not entirely condensed in 3.5, although WordPress does make it easier for users to learn about setting up pages, themes, and other topics. Other user interface changes have been made as well, including the merging of the Privacy page into Reading Settings. Obviously, an intense effort was put into designing a clean, simple user experience.
4. Favorite Plugins
For developers, setting up WordPress installs is a regular and hefty process. However, with the addition of the new “Favorite” button on every plugin page, installs become easier. Users can install their favorite plugins in one click. Also, in Plugins > Add New admin page, “Quick Link”, ”Upload”, and “Popular” buttons will be found in a simplified menu.
5. Removing the Links Manager
In previous versions, WordPress had a feature called “Blogroll.” However, users quickly realized that WordPress was not only a blogging tool, but also a Content Management System. Due to its inappropriate nickname, it was renamed “Links,” but the feature remained largely unused. In 3.5, Links has been erased, although older WordPress installs still include this feature. For those who may need the Links Manager, it can be installed as a plugin.
Obviously, WordPress 3.5 provides major improvements for developers and new users. While development tools received excellent improvements, the user interface was more drastically modified. Not only is the update important for security purposes, but also the system performs smoother and is condensed into new menus. New themes such as Twenty Twelve were also introduced, further emphasizing the fresh, user-friendly experience of version 3.5.
Derrick Cruz is a freelance tech and home improvement blogger. He finds inspiration for his Word Press blogging from myraid influences, ranging from nature to architectural roofing designs.
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Tags: blogging, wordpress
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Tuesday, January 29th, 2013
In 2012, five successful tech startups made it to the forefront and captured the attention of pundits. These five startups significantly changed the way business is conducted on a daily basis. Consider these five most successful tech startups of 2012:
1. Square
Square makes it possible to accept credit cards at any location where your smartphone can get a signal. The portable credit card reader plugs into the iPhone and allows people to accept credit cards from any location. This device is popular at festivals when artists are selling their paintings to patrons. Taxi cab drivers also love the device. The company is headquartered in San Francisco. Jack Dorsey is the Chief Executive Officer and Keith Rabois is the Chief Operating Officer of Square. The company raised $168 million from investors such as Marissa Mayer, Richard Branson, Dennis Crowley, Kleiner Perkins, Visa, Shawn Fanning and Ron Conway.
2. Evolv on Demand
San Francisco, California is the headquarters of this company. This company helps with high turnover in the work place. Call centers experience significant turn-over and this company strives to eliminate it. Advanced algorithms can determine whether an applicant will stay with the job or leave a job. The company’s Chief Executive Officer is Max Simkoff and the Chief Marketing Officer is Dan Enthoven. Evolv has raised $27.5 million from GGV Capital and Khosla Ventures.
3. Ooyala, Inc.
This company is headquartered in Mountain View, California and led by Chief Executive Officer Jay Fulcher. Sean Knapp and Bismarck Lepe are the former Chief Executive Officers of this company. This web video platform allows customers to analyze user behavior in real time.
Ron Conway contributed a significant amount to this company in 2007. Since 2007, they have raised $44 million. Most of the money has come from Sierra Ventures.
4. Simple
This Portland, Oregon tech startup, Simple is a personal banking platform. This platform eliminates certain cumbersome interfaces. Customer’s saving habits, spending habits and bill payment habits can all be included in this platform. Alex Payne is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of this organization. The company is growing and hired people in 2012. First Round Capital contributed $13.1 million. This same company has already funded Turntable FM and UberMedia.
5. LiveIntent
This New York based company helps marketers with personalization of email advertisements. The tool uses the recipient’s device, location and time of day for personalization. An example of this personalization includes 40 percent off dinner if the coupon is opened in the afternoon and 40 percent off of lunch if it is opened in the morning. The Chief Executive Officer is Matt Keiser. He is also the founder and is a master of advertising technology. The company raised $12.6 million from Shasta Ventures and First Round Capital.
Check Out These Five Most Successful Tech Startups
These five successful startups are impressive and are expected to grow in the future. Keep an eye out for future developments with this company.
Written by Beth Gadd
Beth runs a small business in IT related field. She operates at home while also has her virtual serviced offices set up recently. She believes having an executive office in central business area for meeting clients definitely helps to build the creditability of her business. Click here to check out how you can have your own virtual office set up in your area.
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Monday, December 3rd, 2012
It’s always been true that companies that can successfully align product with demand will succeed. In today’s market, big data and predictive analytics can give the ability to track, store, analyze, and predict customer behavior. This article will examine four models of using big data analytics to predict customer behavior:
- Collaborative Filtering
- Clustering Algorithms
- Propensity Models
- Uplift Models
Collaborative filtering functions as a means for a retailer to engage in direct targeted action with any customer. In practice, this often translates to product recommendations during online checkouts. It identifies the relationships between customers and their selections and makes projections about behavior by drawing correlations between customers with one or more identical characteristics. As such, collaborative filtering almost universally analyzes transactions. The limitation of collaborative filtering rests in its inability to model purchases with a wide range of variables. These limitations include seasonal purchase patterns, public records, and third-party marketing information, among many others.
Businesses wanting more broad analysis like those suggested above will favor clustering algorithms because they are optimized to use very large structured or unstructured data sets. These algorithms can be used to guide promotions, website design, and other costly operations before committing to such drastic investments. While helpful statistics can include purchase frequency and monetary value, queries can include up to hundreds of customer attributes. When combined with some input from the business user, a retailer can quickly experiment with a wide range of alternative groupings and gain insight into purchasing trends.
Propensity models target the behaviors of individual customers. These models excel at dissecting very large data sets, so much so that they can fine-tune the relevance of promotional offers to individual customers’ needs. This type of model examines relationships between various attributes by observing how one variable’s change impacts another. As an example of propensity modeling, a retailer might track and analyze the millions of mouse clicks of thousands of customers researching a desire item, combine them with data about each customer’s characteristics, and time a promotional offer accordingly.
Uplift models are often used together with propensity models to foresee how much a customer’s behavior will change after a given retailer action. The goal here is to avoid sending discounts to customers who will likely buy the retailer’s product without one. The uplift model can also measure the relative merit between incremental discounts. For example, if a 15 percent discount will not offer more return than free shipping, the retailer can avoid granting free shipping.
As businesses become more proficient with big data analytics, they become more akin to successfully targeting customers with well-timed offers that maximize ROI. Once an enterprise understands the different possible methods of processing big data, it can select the approach that best suits its purposes.
cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by || UggBoy♥UggGirl || PHOTO || WORLD || TRAVEL ||
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Jake Gavins works as an custom applications developer and has several years of business intelligence software solution experience. During his spare time, he likes to go golfing, hiking and to keep up with the latest in technology.
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Thursday, October 11th, 2012
This guide is written for customers who have just launched a new website. As good as your website might look, it is unlikely to bring you new business unless you promote it, or have it promoted for you.
Firstly, let’s look at the two online methods of bringing visitors to your site;
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
2. Online Marketing
For the purpose of this document we are going to discuss the latter, Online Marketing. This is something which anyone can do, with even basic knowledge of using the internet. However, some of the topics below will also aid SEO, and improve the respect Google has for your website.
The important thing is to think about YOUR potential customers. Think about how you can reach them online, and think about where they might search if they go online looking for a business such as yours.
Google
Clearly the most obviously place people search is Google. Getting ranked on page one of Google is not a simple task, nor is it cheap or fast. Depending on your target market, it can take many months and many thousands of pounds investment. However, there are some things you can do to hugely increase your chances of appearing in the search results, especially if you are targeting local customers.
Google Places For Business
Google Places for Business is Google’s version of Thomson Local or Yell. But, it is free, and best of all once listed you massively increase your chances of appearing on page one of Google when local people search. Take for example a search for “Kendal Plumber”. Amongst the search results I will see this;
These are all local businesses that have created a free Google local listing. To create you’re listing visit the URL below;
www.google.com/placesforbusiness
The process involves verifying that you are the owner of the business either by Google sending you a postcard in the post, or by verifying over the phone. Once done you can have a listing just like in the example above. However, it isn’t guaranteed, and Google will look at lots of other factors before deciding if you should be listed for a particular search phrase.
Online Directories
There are some great free UK based directories you can get listed on. These might or might not bring direct traffic, but what they will do is improve the exposure of your website in Google’s eyes, and give you a much better chance of appearing in search results. Some great free UK based directories you can join are below. Just make sure that when you join you create a link back to your own website.
Being listed on the directories below will give you a much better chances of a Google Places page one listing. www.freeindex.co.uk www.ukdirectory.co.uk
www.yell.com
www.scoot.co.uk
www.192.com
www.linkedin.com
www.yelp.co.uk
www.bizwiki.co.uk
Social Media
There are some social sites you absolutely must be on and must configure properly.
Facebook (via a facebook page)
Twitter
LinkedIn
There are many more, but the above list is absolutely critical. Make sure that you setup accounts on the above and that they link back to your own website.
Please see this post regarding LinkedIn, as this has some specific benefits;
http://www.makeusawebsite.com/articles/optimise-your-linkedin-profile-for-seo/
Being setup on the above is not enough however. You need to be actively getting new followers/likes/connections. If you have the right people following you, whenever you post an update you know that you are reaching a good potential market. For example, if all your followers on Facebook are previous customers, you know that when you post a special offer it is likely they will be interested.
A Blog On Your Website
One of the most important things which Google now considers when ranking websites is how often your site is updated with relevant content. Fact: Dynamic ever-changing websites rank better than websites that are never updated. One great way to achieve this is to install a blog onto your website.
It is important that the blog is hosted on YOUR site. i.e not a blog at blogger.com or wordpress.com Once you have a blog installed, try to post an article every week, or every two weeks related to your profession, and which your customers may find of interest. You can also link your blog to your social sites. So that the content is also sent to Facebook and Twitter, which will increase the potential reach of each article.
The article you are reading now for example will bring visitors to this website, and each one of those is a potential customer.
In Summary
The only thing you need to think about is potential customers. You want to be found by the people who do not already know your name. Follow the above rules and you will increase your chances of being found, and of keeping those people coming back. When it comes to social media, do not be too overactive to disengage people and have them unlike/unfollow you.
Ask family and friends to follow you and take their advice if your tweets or Facebook posts are become a bit too frequent or non-interesting. Look at your competitors. Try to engage with the same people, and encourage their fans & followers to follow you.
Remember that people prefer images to text. So if you are posting on Facebook use an image. You can also tweet images, and of course post images onto your blog. Encourage people to like your posts by having special offers or competitions for those that do.
If you need any help with your online marketing, please call us on 0808 189 0914 for a competitive quote.
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Tags: facebook, linkedin, online marketing, seo, twitter
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Wednesday, September 26th, 2012
Keyword research and keyword can be a bit of a complex affair when you are dealing with SEO and PPC. Though both of these follow the same old logic and needs quite a lot of experience in the field of work, yet there are some major differences in the tactics and the strategies, which are formulated and later implemented to attain the desired objective.
The Objective
Though the idea of search engine optimization hover around the goal of attaining more traffic by using proper keyword in addition to accurate keyword placement, keyword density, topic heading selection and adding quality meta data tags, PPC is focused on earning money on a per click basis. The keyword research techniques used in PPC or pay per click is concentrated around selecting the one that would be generate a purchase for your product.
The uses
Keyword research and keyword placement in SEO or search engine optimization begins with understanding the ways to use the keywords in your website. The relation between the keyword or a group of keywords used in every page of your website should be such that they might build a definite correlation between the content of the other pages. The keywords should be placed to solve a particular purpose and target particular search engine users who want information similar to that provided in your website. In addition to that, you need to use appropriate titles, quality and informative content related to the keyword and correlated meta tags for solving your purpose of search engine optimization.
When it comes to PPC, in order to maintain a potentially high Quality Score you need to think smart and generate keywords so that the respective keyword/keywords in your campaigns, Ad groups, Ad copy and Landing pages should have a tight coupling and a high correlation.
Errors in research and the effect on your business
Seo keyword research has a high margin of errors and you can take up a watch and act strategy. Choose your keywords and see if it is working in the manner, you had wanted it to. Supply your website with a constant flow of new information and keyword and keep updated with the latest techniques of searches, latest products, and competitions available in the market. You always have a chance to rectify your mistakes and plan something totally different. Experimentation is always welcome in SEO. However, when it comes to PPC, using a wrong keyword, which might not be, yielding potent results would cost you a hell lot of monetary funds.
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Thursday, September 20th, 2012
If you want to market your product in an amazing manner, a social marketing site would work out wonderfully towards marketing our website. But you need to build your brand up in the right way on the social networking platform if you want to get somewhere. Getting more viewers, gaining a wider range of audience is all that’s necessary.
It’s not only the initial stage that you need to take care about, if you want the best of social media marketing onto your site, you must ensure that you work right from the beginning to the end. Your relationship with your viewers and clients matters a lot and you need to ensure that you maintain a good relationship with them from the beginning to the end, instead of just before the sale of your products.
Just because you have a whole lot of friends or likes, that doesn’t mean you have an amazing marketing strategy, what you need is involvement of your customers on the page, and that can happen only when your customers are satisfied with you. By opening a store, not only in reality, but also on your facebook page, you can start reaching out to a wider range if audience.
On one platform, you can bring your audience closer to your products! If you do so, you can increase the sales onto your website to a really great extent. It can be ascertained that your customers will return again, because they will definitely be impressed by you. Customer loyalty is something you can definitely expect. When your customers are satisfied, they will engage more on your facebook page, they will let others know about you, and that’s a whole marketing campaign by itself.
What you need to gain customer support is a kind of love potion, a marketplace so that the number of likes onto your page will be increased, stories to reach out to not only your fans, but also the friends of your fans, ads to engage your customers in the best possible way and a whole lot more. It all starts with actually identifying who your audience is, and once you know that, you can build up your company depending on what your customers are looking for.
All this can be done with the facebook magic, only if you know how to do it in the right manner. Then, you can take your company places!
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Tags: facebook magic
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