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Why GPS Tracking Devices Are Getting More Popular Among Parents

Posted on 05/11/202105/11/2021 by Tushar

GPS tracking services has been into existence for quite some time now. The technology has been helping a lot of sectors with its advanced features. For example, GPS tracking technologies help military in their operations, the drivers while they are driving, businesses while managing their fleet, and parents to monitor their children round the clock.As GPS tracking devices have become quite popular in recent times a large number of parents have started using it to track their children 24*7.In fact, these devices have become quite popular among the parents. One of the first reason as to why GPS tracking devices have become popular among parents is that it is a reliable and easy-to-use technology. Consequently, even the ones who are new to the technology can conveniently use the device.

Secondly, these new age GPS tracking devices are compact ones. Hence, they can be conveniently used along with the children. It can either be put in their pocket or backpack as it is light weight. The best thing is that parents can check the whereabouts of their children just by logging in either through their smart phone or computers.

Moreover, there are numerous additional features in these GPS tracking devices that make them real popular among parents. For example, there are features like Safe Zone that sends alert to the parents through text messages or emails that the child has moved to the pre-determined safe zone. The benefit is that parents get a peace of mind when it comes to the safety of their children. With the help of these advanced features parents right from the comfort of their home get to know if the child has arrived or departed from their school premises or amusement parks, and so on and so forth.

Nevertheless, it is quite normal for parents to worry about the safety of their children. For example, if you are at office and your child is left at the day care you constantly worry about his or her safety. But if you have the GPS tracking device fitted with the child you will have a personal tracking system at your disposal. It will help your child stay away from potential dangers while they are in the safe zone. Another advantage of these devices is that when your children grow up and get a driver’s license even then you will be able to track their whereabouts and ensure their safety.

Why Parents And Children Need GPS Tracking Systems

The GPS Tracker App uses the latest Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to get the precise location of people within your network. Satellites send triangulated positions to the GPS Tracker Apps providing the most accurate location. This process continually updates to provide very accurate, real-time GPS tracking.

7 Ultimate ideas to skyrocket your Online Business

Posted on 05/11/2021 by Tushar

Starting an online business is challenging enough but after putting in all that work to get launched, the last thing you need is your venture to fail just because people do not know about it. Luckily, there are quite a few things you can do to spread the word and reach out to your target market and in this post, we’ll look at seven of them, most of which won’t cost you a penny.

1. List your business with the major search engines

If people are going to look for a business like yours, chances are they’ll start their search on the internet and do so using Google or Bing. These search engines have free business listings services that enable your business to be found much easier online and let you add relevant information about your business for potential customers to see. This can include physical and internet addresses, phone numbers, map locations, opening times and customer ratings. You can even upload images. The listings services are Google My Business, Bing Places for Business and Yahoo! Local.

2. Reach out on social media

Setting up business pages and accounts on social media platforms is now more or less a necessity for online businesses. With billions of worldwide users, it is the ideal channel to reach out and grow an audience of followers.

You can use social media for advertising, brand development, showcasing products and services, customer service, promoting events, sending offers and much more.

The challenge is to choose the most appropriate social media platforms on which to communicate. There are now so many about, it is impractical to devote time to all of them. You need to discover the places where your target market is most active and engage with them there â€“ whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat. If you are a B2B business, LinkedIn is definitely a place to promote yourself.

3. Start a blog

Many businesses misunderstand blogging and tend to think that a blog is some kind of diary or journal that an individual writes. In reality, a business blog is a content marketing vehicle. The aim is to create posts that solve your customers’ problems. Doing so provides a raft of benefits, such as:

Improved SEO and search engine rankings
Increased traffic to your website (both new and returning visitors)
Customers perceive the company/brand as an expert in its field
Growth of blog subscribers enables targeted, free, email marketing
Improved conversion rates and increased sales

For a blog to be successful, new content needs to be posted regularly and it can take time before it has an impact. Once it does, however, it has massive marketing potential.

4. Outreach

If your website is new, it is sometimes beneficial to write posts to publish on other relevant websites or blogs which already have established audiences. Doing this helps spread the word to these new audiences and often you are allowed to provide a link that they can use to find your website. You’ll need to find the most relevant websites to do this and contact them to see if they accept guest posts.

Alternatively, you could send your products to influential bloggers and they may write a review which their audience can read.

5. Create a YouTube channel

An alternative to writing blog posts is to create videos. Indeed, in some circumstances, videos are more helpful than written posts, for example, when showing people how to carry out practical tasks, such as putting a new hard drive in a computer.

Creating a helpful YouTube channel can help you amass a substantial online audience, many of whom will subscribe to your future posts and even share them to a wider audience on your behalf. If you mention your products in your videos and add a link to your website, there’s huge potential to improve your sales.

6. Optimise your website

While search engine optimisation (SEO) isn’t a promotional tool in itself, its value in helping bring new customers to your website should never be overlooked. SEO is a multi-faceted task that involves making your website easier for search engines to index and making it more user-friendly and valuable for searchers. It can include everything from speeding up your site’s loading times and installing a mobile-friendly theme to having a well-structured site and the use of effective keywords in your content.

Essentially, a website that is optimised has a better chance of ranking well in search engine results. The better your site ranks, the more you will be seen in search results and the more visitors you will get.

7. Online advertising

Paid advertising is used by millions of companies and for many, it is a major source of traffic. The main form of advertising is known as pay per click (PPC), which basically means you pay a fee every time someone clicks on one of your ads. The benefits of such advertising schemes are that you have excellent control over who sees your adverts and when. You can choose people in specific demographic groups and locations and choose the times when the ads are displayed. This means you can use your advertising budget very effectively to ensure the right people are clicking through to your site.

The downside of PPC is that it can be expensive. Ad spaces are often given to the highest bidders and competition means you may have to pay quite a lot for each click. The problem arises when you have poor conversion rates â€“ in other words, if only one percent of people who click go on to buy your product, advertising might not provide the return on investment you need. There are many places you can advertise; Google and Bing are key players, as are many social media platforms.

Conclusion

Getting the message out about your online business is essential if you want to attract visitors that will buy your products or services. The sooner you can do this after launch, the better. Hopefully, the seven methods shown here will help find the right marketing solutions for your online venture. If you are looking for hosting for your online business, visit our homepage to see our range of hosting solutions.

7 Benefits of Artificial Intelligence for Business

Posted on 05/11/202105/11/2021 by Tushar

One of the newest benefits of cloud computing is that it enables businesses to take advantage of artificial intelligence (AI). This rapidly developing technology offers significant development opportunities that many companies have already been quick to seize upon. In this post, we’ll look at some of the ways your company can benefit from cloud-based Artificial Intelligence.

1. Improving personalized shopping experiences

Providing customers with personalised marketing increases engagement, helps generate customer loyalty and improves sales. This is why companies are putting so much effort into it. One of the advantages of using AI is that it is able to identify patterns in customersâ€™ browsing habits and purchasing behaviour. Using the millions of transactions stored and analysed in the cloud, AI is able to provide highly accurate offers to individual customers.

2. Automating customer interactions

Most customer interactions, such as emails, online chat, social media conversations and telephone calls, currently require human involvement.Artificial Intelligence, however, is enabling companies to automate these communications. By analysing data collected from previous communications it is possible to program computers to respond accurately to customers and deal with their enquiries. Whatâ€™s more, when AI is combined with machine learning, the more the AI platforms interact, the better they become.

One example of this is AI Chatbots which, unlike humans, can interact with unlimited customers at the same time and can both respond and initiate communication â€“ whether on a website or an app.

It is estimated, that by 2020, 85 percent of all customer interactions will be taken care of by intelligent machines that are able to replicate human functions. The days of using a call centre look like they are coming to a close.

3. Real-time Assistance

Artificial Intelligence is also useful for businesses that need to constantly communicate with high volumes of customers throughout each day. For example, in the transport industry, bus, train and airlines companies, which can have millions of passengers a day, can use AI to interact, in real-time, to send personalised travel information, such as notice of delays. Some bus companies, for example, are already tracking the location of their buses and using AI to provide travellers with real-time updates about where the bus is along its route and its estimated time of arrival. Customers receive this information on the bus company app.

4. Data mining

One of the biggest advantages of using cloud-based AI is that artificial intelligence apps are able to quickly discover important and relevant findings during the processing of big data. This can provide businesses with previously undiscovered insights that can help give it an advantage in the marketplace.

5.Operational automation

AI is able to operate other technologies that increase automation in business. For example, AI can be used to control robots in factories or maintain ideal temperatures through intelligent heating. In Japan, human-looking robots now serve as receptionists in some of the countriesâ€™ hotels automating check-ins, booking services and dealing (in four languages) with customer enquiries. In retail, Artificial Intelligence is also being linked with RFID and cloud technology to track inventory. In China, police forces use AI to catch criminals. The country has a vast CCTV network and AI uses facial recognition to spot and track suspects so that they can be apprehended.

6.Predicting outcomes

Another advantage of AI is that it is able to predict outcomes based on data analysis. For example, it sees patterns in customer data that can show whether the products currently on sale are likely to sell and in what volumes. It will also predict when the demand will tail off. This can be very useful in helping a company purchase the correct stock and in the correct volumes. It is predicted that, within 10 years, the days of seasonal sales will be over as AI will mean there is too little leftover stock to sell off.

This ability to predict is not just useful in retail. Artificial Intelligence is also being used in many other areas, for example, in banking where it can predict currency and stock price fluctuations or in healthcare where, remarkably, it can predict outbreaks of infections by analysing social media posts.

7.Improve the recruitment process

It may be bad news for recruitment companies, but AI is now helping businesses automate the recruitment of new employees. It is able to quickly sift through applications, automatically rejecting those which do not meet the companyâ€™s personal specification. This not only saves time (or money spent on a recruitment agency), but it also ensures that there is no discrimination or bias in the shortlisting process. The AI programs available can even take care of the many administrative tasks of recruitment.

Conclusion

As you can see, AI systems provide businesses with a wide range of benefits, including personalised marketing, customer service, operational automation, inventory management and recruitment. And these are just a few of the many ways AI can be used. Whatâ€™s remarkable, however, is that many of the AI apps, which are designed specifically for cloud-based systems, are quickly and easily deployable. Companies whose systems are in the cloud can be benefitting from them in no time at all.

Content Marketing Strategies To Drive Traffic To Your Website

Posted on 04/11/202113/11/2021 by Tushar

Websites that have focused on content marketing have done really well for themselves. We are not the only ones saying it. Kapost statistics show that website conversion rate is 6 times more for those who have invested in content marketing as a strategy. According to content marketing statistics for the UK in 2018, provided by the Content Marketing Institute, 86 % of respondents are using content marketing but only 7 % of the respondents said that they are doing content marketing at the optimum levels and getting results from it. This means that there is a lot of scope for creating great content, doing content promotion and increasing your overall business.

There is no doubt that demand for content is huge but only consistent implementation of best practices can result in long-term success in the form of traffic generation.

Here are 5 ways in which you can convert your content into returning traffic and long-term customers.

Blend content that educates and content that sells

Most business owners do one of the two things very well â€“ They either create content that is great at educating customers or they create content that is great in selling to customers. The key is to create content that does both the things well. Doing one at the cost of the other is not an option. Too much of selling or information without any sales pitch will affect the content strategy in the long run and fail to serve any purpose.

A good example of creating content that mixes both educations and sales would be a blog that for example talks about weight loss exercises and at the same time points the prospective customers towards weight loss supplements to buy. The key here is to provide content that appeals to people who are looking for solutions to the problem of weight loss. It has to be content that appeals emotionally as well as logically to prospective customers. Make sure that none of the content looks forced and planted as if youâ€™re trying to advertise your product.

Different types and forms of content lead to more traffic

Your content strategy should be such that you are open to publishing different forms of content and different types of content. Diversity in the type and forms of content will help you to fulfill all your online marketing needs and convert the content into serious traffic.

Here are six different types of content that you should try and publish. This will also help you find out which type works best.

Content Type 1: Blogs

Blogs are probably the most common and one of the most effective means of expressing yourself on the internet. If the quality of your blog is good and you follow different strategies of getting people to your blog such as sharing content on different platforms, optimizing load time of your pages and placing related links inside the posts you can get a lot of high quality traffic to your blog. WordPress is one of the best platforms to set up a blog for your business.

Content Type 2: Infographics

As the name suggests, data presented in a graphical format with illustrations is visually very appealing compared to just bland numbers. You donâ€™t need any technical expertise to make an infographic. You can ask a professional graphic designer to make one for you or simply use online services such as piktochart, Visual.ly and easel.ly which have free as well as premium versions available.

Content Type 3: Videos

Short videos of 2-3 minutes are a great way to speak to your audience and move them to take actions. The videos can be about your products and services or they can be also â€˜take a tourâ€™ kind of videos. Apart from putting the video on your site, you can also publish the video to platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo.

Content Type 4: Case study

Case studies help your customers to understand how your product or service has helped previous customers. A case study starts with an overview of your client, the challenges faced by the client and how your service or product helped the client in getting over his problems. The case study ends with a conclusion and a call to action.

Content Type 5: Meme

A meme is a humorous graphic that usually has a tagline written on the top or bottom of an image. Memes are popular on social media platforms. While memes can be created for almost anything, in marketing, you can use it to create a brand message that will communicate your brandâ€™s humorous message. Memes can be created using online tools such as Meme generator and quick meme.

Content Type 6: Press releases/News

Publishing press releases on online PR sites about the latest updates at your end is a great way to keep your customers informed about the goings on in your business and to get out word about yourself in the market. Remember that unlike most other forms of content, a press release needs to be very to-the-point and has to provide something newsworthy. The content has to be in the form of news.

Know where you’re headed with regular content audits

A content audit is something that you do on a website to find out how far your content strategy and your content has been successful with your audience. Simply putting content out there is not enough. You also need to know which of your content is converting to traffic and which is hitting a chord with your audience. A content audit should be conducted at least weekly, quarterly or monthly so that you know if the content is succeeding in converting visitors into leads. The audit will give you an idea about how to improve your strategy and improve your content. This is also one of the best ways to improve your content marketing.

Create adaptive content for millennials

Millennials can be defined as people who were born in the 1980s to 1996 and reached young adulthood in the 21st century. Millennials constitute a huge section of anything that is technology or web related. This translates to them being a huge chunk of your audience.

Adaptive content is the way to attract them to your content. Adaptive content simply means content that lets people interact with it across different platforms. Just as water takes the shape of any vessel it is put into, similarly adaptive content adapts itself to the screen of the device it is being displayed on. The device could be a mobile phone, a PC screen or a laptop screen.

So for example if a reader started viewing your content on his home PC, he or she should be able to continue the same on their mobile phone and even complete their purchase through another device without being restricted to a particular device or platform.

Consistently Run A/B Tests

A/B testing or split testing is simply testing which you perform to see which content namely content A or content B performs better and converts more. Focus

Irrespective of whether youâ€™re into marketing or a small business owner, conducting A/B split tests will help you ascertain which headlines, call-to-actions and type of content works best for your readers. Once you understand what works best for you, you can fine-tune your marketing strategies and understand what exactly needs to go on your website.

These are the top ways to convert your content into serious traffic. Keep experimenting with different methods and keep yourself up-to-date with the latest trends in content marketing so that you can stay one step ahead of competitors.

If you are looking for high-performance hosting to help your site load faster on mobile devices, take a look at our VPS packages.

Introduction to Functional Programming

Posted on 03/11/202113/11/2021 by Anteelo Master

What is functional programming?

In short, functional programming is a catch-all term for a way of writing code that is focused on composing pure functions, actually using the innovations in type systems made in the last few decades, and overall being awesome.

So what’s the point? All of these things help to better understand what actually happens in our code.

And, once we do that, we gain:

better maintainability for the codebase;
more safe, reliable, composable code;
the ability to manage complexity with abstractions that are borderline wizardry.

You’re a functional programmer, Harry.

As it is, functional programming is ideal for developing code for distributed systems and complex backends, but that isn’t all it can do. At Anteelo, we use it for most of our industry projects. Whether you need frontend or backend, it doesn’t matter, there is an FP language for everything nowadays.

Now that you are stoked about learning more about functional programming and have already ordered your copies of Programming Haskell on Amazon, let’s delve deeper into the details.

From lambda calculus to lambda logo in 90 years

At the heart of functional programming is lambda calculus.

What Is Lambda Calculus and Should You Care? | Rebel

Introduced by the mathematician Alonzo Church in the 1930s, lambda calculus is just a way of expressing how we compute something. If you understand this one, you will gain a lot of intuition on how functional programming looks in practice.

There are only three elements in lambda calculus: variables, functions, and applying functions to variables. Here we have to think about function as a pure/mathematical function: a way of mapping members of a set of inputs to members of a set of outputs.

Even though it is a very simple tool, we can actually compose different functions and, in that way, encode any computation possible with a regular computer. (It would get unwieldy fast for anything non-trivial though, and that’s why we don’t program in it.

To further illustrate the concept, I refer you to this video of an absolute madman implementing lambda calculus in Python.

In 1950-60s, people began to encode this notion into programming languages. A good example is LISP, a kind of functional language designed by John McCarthy that keeps the overall incomprehensibility of lambda calculus while actually enabling you to do some things.

Example implementation of A* search algorithm in Racket (a dialect of LISP).

But that was only the beginning. One thing led to another, and, as we introduced such languages as ML and Miranda, the numerous permutations explored adding readability and a great type system. As a result, the 1980s saw the arrival of something beautiful – Haskell, a programming language so great that it was destined to evade mainstream for the next 30 years.

The same A* algorithm in Haskell.

We’ll return to Haskell later.

What else?

Ok, I hope I gave the intuition about how pure functions and chaining pure functions would look. What else is there?

Immutability. This follows from pure functions. If the function has an input and gives an output, and doesn’t maintain any state, there can be no mutable data structures. Forget i++. This is for the better. Mutable data structures are a sword that looms over the developer’s head, waiting to fall at any moment. Immutability also helps when the underlying code needs to be thread-safe and therefore is a huge boon in writing concurrent/parallel code.
All kinds of ways to handle functions. Anonymous functions, partially applied functions, and higher-order functions – these you can get in all modern programming languages. The main benefit is when we go higher up the abstraction ladder. We can introduce various kinds of design patterns such as functors, monads, and whatever-kinds-of-morphisms that we port right from category theory, one of the most powerful tools of mathematics, because… get it? Our code is a composition of mathematical functions.

There is a chance you stopped at immutability and thought: how can we accomplish anything without maintaining a global state? Isn’t it extremely awkward? Nope. We just pass the relevant state through the functions.

While it may seem unwieldy at first (and that is more because it is a new style of programming, not because of inherent complexity), functional programming abstractions help us to do it easily, For example, we can use special constructions such as state monad to pass state from function to function.

As you can see, functional programming concepts synergize well with each other. In the end, we have a self-consistent paradigm that is wonderful for anything where you would want to include an element of it.

Functional programming languages will make your business rich beyond belief

I’ve been holding back on the greatest thing, though.

Did you know that a lot of smart people are doing Haskell & Co nowadays? Functional programming is a great way to gather/meet unappreciated talent that hasn’t yet been devoured by the corporate clutches of FAANG.

We know this from experience. Our engineers are badass, and not only on our team page.

So if there is a project you want to kick off, and you want to kick it off with a team that will rock your socks off, I will list a few functional programming languages with which to attract next-level developers.

Haskell

Haskell was developed back in times far, far away when the FP community faced the situation of there being too many goddamn functional programming languages with similar properties. Turns out when you bring a lot of smart people together, something can happen. But more about that in our Haskell history post.

Since then, Haskell has established itself in certain fields, such as:

Finance
Biotech
Blockchain
Compilers & DSLs

Many large companies have projects of various sizes that use Haskell.

Haskell is a combination of various ideas that, brought together, have created a being of utter (expressive) power:

Purity. There’s a clear boundary between pure code (composed of pure functions) and impure code (input/output).
Static typing. Types are checked at compile-time, not at run-time. This prevents a lot of run-time crashes in exchange for having to actually deal with types, which some find difficult.
Laziness. Expressions are evaluated only when the value of the expression is needed in contrast to strict evaluation where the expression is evaluated when it is bound to the variable.
Immutability. The data structures are immutable.

It’s one of our favourite languages, and for a reason. Haskell, when used correctly, delivers. And what it delivers is precise and effective code that is easy to maintain.

Want to go functional, but would love to spoil it with a couple of classes here and there?

Scala is the right choice for that. For some reason favoured by people that wrote Apache Spark, it can be useful for big data processing, services, and other places where functional programming is amazing.

An additional bonus of Scala is that it compiles to JVM. If that is something you need as a manager to introduce functional programming to a Java codebase, go you!

Once you start writing purely functional Scala that does not interact with JVM, there are not a lot of reasons to just switch to Haskell though as the support is much better.

OCaml

If Haskell is a bit niche, OCaml is super niche with one of the main things holding it above water being local developer support in France.

But perhaps not anymore. For example, similarly to other programming languages listed, it has seen use in blockchain, particularly, Tezos. And they have their reasons.

OCaml is one of those languages that blurs the boundary between functional programming and object-oriented languages. Therefore, using OCaml over Haskell might be more intuitive for a newly functional programmer. OCaml is less obsessed with purity, and the people who write in it are a bit more practical: you might survive the attack of your fellow developers if you just try to wing it in OCaml.

Elixir

Did you know that the world’s best web framework is written in a functional programming language? Productive. Reliable. Fast. Yeah.

Elixir is a functional, general-purpose programming language that runs on BEAM, the Erlang VM. It is known for its role in creating low-latency and fault-tolerant distributed systems. Furthermore, it is great at creating stuff that scales according to the needs of the network. Elixir is extremely well used at companies like WhatsApp and Netflix that handle a lot of data and need to do it fast. You can’t miss this one if you are doing something similar.

Anteelo for your projects

You know, I cannot end without a pitch. Functional programming is excellent for extensive systems and structures. However, not every business can devote enough resources to execute such complicated work. Anteelo understands the struggle and aims to deliver the best service possible to ensure smooth and reliable programming projects for your company.

Our developer team provides development services in different languages. We not only write code but also carry out projects from their starting ideas to their last stages. This means that we can also do research, design, and other connected services for you. Although we offer a versatile coding language scope, I have to warn that we mainly use Haskell.

6 Social Proof Tips for Boosting Online Sales

Posted on 02/11/202113/11/2021 by Tushar

We use the term â€˜conversionâ€™ all the time when referring to online sales. And itâ€™s a word whose religious meaning is at the very heart of what businesses need to do: to convert consumers to believe in your brand. That, however, is easier said than done. Weâ€™re a society of sceptics, we donâ€™t take advertising rhetoric at face value. We need independent evidence that backs up what businesses say about their products and services. That evidence, today, comes in the form of social proof â€“ and those businesses that use it, are the ones making the most progress.

Social proof, therefore, is a way of saying, â€˜Donâ€™t just take our word for it.â€™ It’s a very effective marketing technique that gives potential buyers the confidence to purchase from you. Here are some of the ways you can use social proof to grow your business.

1. Display your reviews and testimonials

Reviews are the most powerful of all social proof as they provide would-be consumers with honest, independent feedback about products and services. Indeed, reading reviews is now an integral part of the purchasing process with over 70% of consumers doing so before making a decision.

It doesnâ€™t matter if you are an eCommerce store giving reviews of the products you sell or a garage showing reviews about the quality of your services, as long as you have them, customers are more inclined to trust you. If you have no reviews, you are an unknown quantity. For many online consumers, that can be too much of a gamble.

The same applies to customer testimonials, however, to make them believable, make sure that you include the customerâ€™s name, a photograph, and if they are a business customer, the company they work for.

2. Use the power of statistics

People have a tendency to believe statistics because they are based on evidence that has been measured and verified. This makes them highly persuasive things to use in your advertising and website content. Used effectively, they can be a great way to convince people that you are a successful business they can trust.

Some examples of how you can use statistics include:

* Highlighting customer numbers â€“ â€˜Over 500 learners passed their driving test last yearâ€™

* Showing how many customers recommend you â€“ â€˜8 out of 10 cats preferredâ€¦â€™

* How much customers can save â€“ â€˜Average customer saved Â£264â€™

* Show how popular you are â€“ â€˜Sign up and join our growing network of 10,000 subscribersâ€™

3. Promote social endorsements

The power of social endorsements should never be overlooked. When Kensington Palace released a photo of Princess Charlotte for her 2^nd birthday, the John Lewis cardigan she was wearing sold out the same day.

Itâ€™s not just royalty that has this effect, anyone who is socially well-known can do the same â€“ whether itâ€™s a local celebrity, an online influencer, someone who is highly regarded within a specific field or even a prominent organisation. Endorsements give your brand greater credibility and increase the likelihood of sales.

4. Show off your prominent clients and partners

Companies that provide services to the royal family can show off their prominent clients by displaying the various Royal Warrants of Appointment. It says to customers, â€˜If they use us, we must be good.â€™ Today, lots of businesses follow this example by showcasing the logos of their major clients on their websites. Not only does this give your brand a social kudos, it also lets other companies know about the type of clients you are able to cater for and the quality of service they are likely to expect.

Besides clients, also let customers know if you work in partnership with any high-profile businesses or, if you are an eCommerce company, whether you sell high-end brands. Again, this can be done by placing logos in prominent places on your website.

5. Use real-time trending information

As consumers, we tend to follow fashion and like to keep up with what other people think is hot. You can provide this information easily on your website using a range of different plugins or widgets. These can tell your visitors which the most popular products or the most visited pages are.

These real-time statuses persuade inquisitive consumers to visit the pages to find out why these products are so popular. Of course, the popularity is a sign that other people think these products are good, which further incentivises people to buy.

6. Make the most of your credentials

Legitimacy can go a long way to securing new businesses, so if your company has credentials which prove you meet recognised standards, have required qualifications or are members of professional bodies, make sure they are clearly displayed on your site. These are irrefutable social proof that makes customers feel confident about using your services.

For example, if you were a travel agency, people would want you to be a member of ABTA or have ATOL certification, or if you were an accountant, they would want to see that you were a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants.

Conclusion

If you want to convert sceptical visitors into faithful customers, you will need to convince them that the promises you make about your products and services are true. For that, they’ll look beyond your landing page content and seek reassurance from others. That reassurance comes in the form of social proof. We hope the advice given in this post can help you to convince your customers.

30 Ideas For Engaging Newsletter Content

Posted on 30/10/202113/11/2021 by Tushar

Newsletters are a core element of email marketing and one of the most effective ways of generating new business. They also do wonders for maintaining brand loyalty and for bringing existing customers back to your website. It’s no surprise, then, that more than half of all businesses send out newsletters to their subscribers. However, finding constant things to include in weekly postings can be a challenge, especially if you want to cover a range of topics that keep readers engaged. With this in mind, here’s a list of ideas for engaging content.

30 ideas for newsletter content:

1) As with this post, send out a list of helpful tips to help solve a particular problem your customers might face.

2) Share thoughts about things you are looking forward to, such as the launch of a new product or an event you are attending.

3) Give advice to customers on areas you have expertise in, e.g., â€˜How to build a garden shed in easy stepsâ€™.

4) Promote social proof â€“ great customer testimonials, 1000 5-star reviews, positive social media comments, etc.

5) Make a video showcasing a product or service and include the link in the newsletter.

6) Publish an engaging post by a guest writer that is relevant to your audience.

7) Create a questionnaire or a poll. Follow this up the following week with the results. This is also helpful for market research.

8) Publish a humorous alternative to a yearly report, replacing boring financials with a more personal insight into the company. For example, the number of babies born, how many boxes of biscuits eaten, money raised from the swear box, etc.

9) Take some of the most frequently asked questions you get on social media and write them up as an interview or an FAQ

10)Celebrate company achievements: an award, a million followers, 10 years in business, etc.

11) Write a recommendation for something industry related â€“ a book, an exhibition, a new tool.

12)Create a series of Top 10 posts covering what your customers and website visitors find most popular: e.g., top 10 Instagram pics, most wished for products, most watched YouTube videos, most liked blog posts.

13) Create a video or slideshow showing what happens behind the scenes in your company. A great way to show off hi-tech facilities, traditional crafts and the human side of your team.

14) Share an eye-opening infographic about your business or sector that would engage your audience. Alternatively, create your own.

15) If you sell products, send out present ideas for special days like mothersâ€™ day, fathersâ€™ day and Christmas.

16) Celebrate achievements of employees when they pass exams, get new qualifications, win awards or get promoted.

17) Start generating interest in yet to be launched products and services by giving users a pre-release peek at whatâ€™s on offer. You can do this when upgrading existing products and services too. Great for generating feedback before things go live.

18) Make your subscribers feel special by sending them advanced notice of an upcoming sale â€“ or even better, give them access to the sale before anyone else.

19)Promote the faces behind the brand by creating snapshot biographies of people within the company. Try to get a good balance between the person and the job they do.

20) Write posts about your existing customers which shows how you help them. Even better with images of them with your products or staff.

21) Set up a competition or a giveaway. These always generate a lot of interest. You can follow this up with another post announcing the winner.

22) Write a fun April Fools post about a spoof new product or discovery.

23) Create a post about useful things related to your business. If youâ€™re a hairdresser, write about hair products, if youâ€™re a joiner, recommend the best wood oils, paints and varnishes. You can then start selling them.

24)Been in the news? Share your fame with a wider audience by mentioning it in the newsletter. Remember to add a link if it’s online so your subscribers can see it too.

25)Promote any charities you support. If you are doing a spot of charity fundraising or helping a community project, you can create written posts, videos and photo-journals of what you do. This helps promote the charity and improves your brandâ€™s reputation.

26)Help customers by passing on important industry-relatedÂ news. For example, website developers can send out information about new hacking threats or accountants can talk about the impact of the chancellorâ€™s budget.

27) Share greetings on important days, such as Christmas, Eid, Diwali and Hanukkah. There are plenty of others to celebrate too: Halloween, New Yearsâ€™ Day, etc. If you have customers abroad, donâ€™t forget their celebrations, too.

28)Make the most of the many special awareness days and weeks by posting appropriate images. Some, like National Chip Week, National Bed Week and National Doodle Day are great opportunities for fun posts.

29) Create a fun but relevant quiz to challenge your subscribers. There are plenty of free tools to make these on the internet. They are also great for getting an understanding of your customers.

30) Send out links to free, downloadable resources such as eBooks and â€˜how-toâ€™ guides that readers will find useful. For example, food retailers can provide recipe books.

Conclusion

Hopefully, the ideas here will provide you with plenty of inspiration to keep your newsletters varied, engaging and fun for your subscribers.

Why Managed Hosting is the Best Choice for Legacy Applications

Posted on 28/10/202113/11/2021 by Tushar

Although the cloud has become a popular choice for businesses, one challenge many companies face is how to deal with legacy apps that won’t work in a cloud environment. Essentially, these businesses are left with three choices: to continue running the apps in-house, to redesign the apps to work in the cloud or to migrate them to a managed hosting service. Which choice a company chooses depends on its budget and on its long-term needs. In this post, we‘ll look at the advantages and disadvantages of each option.

In-house hosting

Hosting legacy apps in-house can offer advantages over cloud and managed hosting. Maintaining your own datacentre gives you greater control over your system and provides easy accessibility which can be important if you run bespoke applications. Private networks can also be beneficial for those that need to comply with strict data protection and security regulations.

However, a significant disadvantage of in-house hosting is the cost. When running your own data centre, there are three types of costs which you need to bear in mind. Firstly, there is the capital expenditure needed for hardware, software licensing, network infrastructure, data storage and for the backup infrastructure. In addition, there are operational expenses, such as support for hardware, software and network infrastructure, costs for datacentre facilities and power, and ongoing staffing and training costs. Finally, there are indirect costs resulting from planned and unplanned downtime.

Redesigning apps for the cloud

If you need to host legacy apps which are not cloud compatible, there is the option to convert them for the cloud. Whilst doing this can bring all the benefits that the cloud has to offer, it can be very expensive and take a lot of time. Doing so also means overcoming quite a few technical challenges. Refactoring an application to work in the cloud can be risky as there is the potential for things to go wrong during the conversion process. If the application is not thoroughly tested in development before going live, there is the potential that you could end up in a disaster situation.

Managed hosting

An easier solution for legacy applications is managed hosting. This service comes with servers, OS, SSD or HDD storage and networking, and can include features such as cloud connectivity, managed security and bespoke technical support. You are able to build the server to a specification that is ideal for your needs and choose an operating system that is compatible with your legacy application. In addition, the hosting provider will take care of the administration, management, security and support.

One of the main benefits of managed hosting is that resources are dedicated entirely to your company. This means that you enjoy the full capabilities of all the infrastructure that you lease. Should you need more capacity, you can scale up by leasing additional servers.

Cost is another benefit. As you’ll no longer need to operate your own datacentre on-site, the savings you make will easily cover the costs of a managed hosting solution.

Besides hosting legacy applications, managed hosting is ideal for a wide number of other purposes. These include hosting web apps, analytics, big data processing, data storage and backups, disaster recovery and development ops. This means, that you do not need to lease a managed server solely for the legacy app but can move other services over too.

Managed hosting provides the performance, scalability and high availability companies need, together with built-in security that helps them comply with regulations such as GDPR and PCI DSS.

Additional advantages of managed hosting

With the increased threat of cyberattacks, the advanced security that managed hosting provides helps companies keep their systems secure at an affordable price. Cybercriminals are employing ever more sophisticated techniques to target businesses and it is crucial that companies maintain robust defences. In-house security can be costly; measures such as creating a defensive infrastructure, managing vulnerability, maintaining up to date threat intelligence and keeping data protected and applications secure donâ€™t come cheaply â€“ especially when you have to staff a 24-hour security team. With managed hosting, this can all be done on your behalf by your service provider. A consequence of this is that in-house IT teams are freed up to concentrate their efforts on more business-focused operations that can improve the companyâ€™s products and services.

For companies wanting to benefit from the cloud whilst still continuing to use legacy applications, managed hosting offers the benefit of cloud connectivity, giving them the ability to connect their managed servers to the public cloud or, if desired, to other datacentre locations.

Conclusion

Working with legacy apps can be a challenge. If you want to migrate to the cloud, youâ€™ll need to go through the expensive and potentially risky route of refactoring your app, if you prefer to keep your app running in-house, youâ€™ll continue to need costly hardware and pay for the associated maintenance, IT staff and training. Using a managed hosting solution offers a better alternative, it is less expensive, highly secure and the managed aspect of the service means your IT staff can concentrate on more important matters.

8 Critical Website Mistakes You Should Never Make

Posted on 27/10/202113/11/2021 by Tushar

Youâ€™ll know from your own browsing that some websites are so badly designed that, even if the content is good, youâ€™ll never go back. Giving a visitor a poor experience can kill a website and destroy an online business. Here are 8 of the most critical website mistakes you need to avoid.

1. Poor navigation

A good user experience is all about doing things quickly and easily. So, when a visitor lands on your site, they donâ€™t want the hassle of having to spend too much time looking for things or having to constantly press the back button to get to the homepage. A site which doesnâ€™t offer great navigation can be frustrating to users, leading them to abandon it.

To achieve great navigation for your visitors, you need a menu in your header or at the top of your sidebar, a content search bar, breadcrumbs to make it easy to retrace steps, and links to important pages in your footer. The links in the footer should also include a link to a sitemap so that those who are really stuck have a better chance of finding what they want.

2. Invisible contact details

Some online businesses want all communication with their visitors and customers to be electronic. Theyâ€™d prefer not to have to deal with telephone calls and letters. However, as a legitimate business, you should put these details clearly on your website. If you are a limited company, you are obliged to show them. These companies lose out because the lack of a physical address or a business number makes customers suspicious and this can have a drastic impact on sales.

There are other companies who want their address and phone number to be seen but donâ€™t make it easy for customers to find them. The easiest solution is to put them in two places. Firstly, they should go in the footer. This way, they will appear at the bottom of every page. Secondly, you should create a contact page which has the details clearly displayed. A link to the contact page should be in the main menu or in the footer.

3. A headache inducing design

Great website design should be easy on the eye. The design on each page and across pages should be consistent, attractive to look at, easy to read on all devices, have plenty of white space and match your brand.

Unfortunately, some people who build their own websites can often get carried away with the wide choice of fonts and colours at their disposal. What results is a website that is too busy. There are clashing colours, an array of badly chosen fonts (some of which are not supported by every browser) and so little space that the userâ€™s eye cannot take all the information in.

Many users will simply hit the back button, not just because it is chaotic but also because it looks unprofessional. Those that persist will end up with eyestrain and a headache.

4. Breaking the back button

As a ploy to keep visitors on their website for longer, some webmasters have configured their site so that when a user clicks the back button they find it has been disabled or it takes them to another landing page. This essentially traps a user and prevents them from going back to Google to find a different site.

This form of tactic offers one of the worst forms of user experience. No visitor expects a browser button not to work and this can cause frustration, anxiety and anger. The only solution is to close down the browser tab.Â After that, youâ€™ll have zero chance of that user ever coming back to visit you.

5. Opening up a new browsing window

When creating links on your website you are giving the option to open the page in the same tab, a new tab or a new window. The general rule is that if the link is to a page on your own site, it should open in the same tab. If the link is to a different site, open it in a new tab so that the user can still go back to your site easily if needed.

There is no need, however, to open any page in a different window. Doing this essentially opens up two versions of the browser at the same time. Not only does this make for a complex browsing experience, it also uses up much more of the resources on the userâ€™s device, slowing down how well it performs.

6. Leaving broken hyperlinks on your site

Putting links to pages on your own or otherâ€™s sites is extremely helpful to visitors. However, when the pages you have linked to have been removed, what you are left with are links to nowhere. When a visitor clicks on them, all they see is a 404 error page. This can be very frustrating for users, especially if your site has lots of broken links.

The easiest way to prevent them is to use a broken link checker plugin. These will regularly check all the links on your site and notify you if any are broken. For links on your own site, you can choose to redirect them so that customers are sent to newer, more relevant pages. For external links, you can opt to remove them or find alternative URLs to link to.

7. Obsolete content

Google and visitors like content that is up-to-date and relevant. Websites should be checked regularly to ensure that the information provided is accurate and fit for purpose. For example, if you have a team page on your site and one of your team members moves on, you will need to update that information in case potential customers still try to contact them. If you donâ€™t, you may lose that customer. The same goes for things like addresses, opening hours, product inventory, shipping details, pricing, etc.

8. Slow loading times

If there is one thing that will force a customer to abandon your site before they even start to read it, itâ€™s a slow loading time. With superfast broadband and 4G networks, internet users expect websites to load more or less instantly. If youâ€™re not fully loaded in a second or so, theyâ€™ll be gone. The business will go elsewhere.

There are many things that can cause websites to load slowly and for a detailed understanding, you should always check your site using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. Key to faster loading, however, is the quality of your web hosting. A great web hosting solution can have a big impact on the speed at which a site loads and, consequently, on the number of sales your website makes. A one secondâ€™s delay is estimated to reduce conversion rates by as much as 7%.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are some website management and design errors that can have a very negative effect on your website. These need to be addressed both during the design phase of your site and in its regular maintenance. Hopefully, the information provided here will help prevent you making these critical mistakes.

HDD vs. SSD Hosting and Why the Difference Matters

Posted on 26/10/202113/11/2021 by Tushar

Many hosting packages available today offer customers the option of either an HDD or an SSD hard drive. Most people opt for HDD for the simple reason that it’s the cheaper of the two. However, what many users don’t realise is that SSDs bring significant benefits to your website. In this post, we’ll look at the differences between two types of hard drive and explain why SSD is the best option.

What’s the difference between HDD and SSD hard drives?

A hard drive is the place where all a serverals data is stored. This includes the operating system, your website software and all your website data and content. Any software updates or website changes are written to that drive and when someone visits your site, the information on the drive needs to be read and processed.

On traditional HDD drives, that information is stored on thin, metal disks that spin at around 7,200 RPM. Using similar technology to a CD or DVD, information is written to it or read from it using a read/write head that hovers close to the disks surface.

The Achilles heel of the HDD drive is that it is built using moving parts. At 7200 RPM, a disk will spin almost 3.8 billion times in a year. Over time, this will eventually lead to wear and tear and, at some point, its mechanical parts will start to fail. Its other problem is that the speed at which data can be written and read is limited by how fast it can spin. Again, this is a limitation caused by it using mechanical technology that, in many respects, we first saw with the gramophone.

An SSD (solid state drive) works in a completely different way. It has dispensed with moving parts completely and, instead, stores data on interconnected flash memory chips. It can do everything that an HDD drive can do, however, as it is not reliant on how fast a disk can spin, it performs much quicker and without the risk of mechanical failure.

It is the speed and reliability of SSDs that make them more advantageous for hosting. In the next section we’ll explain the benefits these bring to website owners.

How SSD hosted websites benefit from increased speed

When you use an SSD hard drive, you increase the speed at which data can be written to and read from your server. This means that your website will be able to load faster on your users browsers.

The first benefit of this is higher ranking in search engine results. Since 2010, Google and other search engines have included website loading speeds as a factor in their search algorithms. In their pursuit of offering users ever better search results, they are rewarding faster websites because they offer a better user experience. The reward for higher ranking, of course, is more traffic.

As slower websites are being weeded out, you can check out how well Google thinks your website is performing by using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. This might give you an indication of whether SSD might be worth considering.

In addition to higher ranking, the faster loading also gives your visitors a better user experience. Today’s internet users expect instantly loading websites and have no patience with slow performance. If your site doesn’t load quickly, they’ll hit the back button and go elsewhere. A one-second delay can cost a business up to 7% of online turnover.

Whilst the speed of your hard drive may not be the only cause of a sluggish website, upgrading from HDD to SSD is one effective way to make it faster and reap the benefits.

How SSDs improve uptime

As HDDs contain moving mechanical parts, they are more at risk of failure than an SSD. Although HDDs are robustly manufactured, if yours fails, your site can go offline until a new drive is installed on the server and the data restored. If you don’t have your website backed up, you could lose all your data and put your entire online operations at risk. HDD failures are costly. If your business sells online, the longer you are offline the more custom you are losing. Your company’s reputation may also be damaged if no-one can access your site.

The lack of moving parts in an SSD means it is far less susceptible to failure. This makes it a far more reliable storage device. Indeed, it is estimated that an SSD can maintain data integrity for over two centuries.

Of course, if you want the best protection from downtime, your choice of web host is just as important as the type of hard disk you choose. You should look for a host that offers an uptime guarantee of 99.95% or higher, has backup (failover) servers available in case yours fails and protects you from hacking and malware infection.

HDDs Vs SSD cost vs benefits

Newer, better technology always costs more. The price reflects the fact that the companies which developed SSD technology are still clawing back their R & D costs. However, the price differentials are not enormous. At eUKhost, for example, you can get shared, cloud-based WordPress hosting on SSD for as little as Â£3.99 a month. Our VPS starter packages start at Â£12.99 for both SSD and HDD.

What’s important is whether you consider the small increase in price to be worth the benefits that SSD brings. Its speed and reliability are ideally suited to help websites rank higher and improve customer engagement, two crucial features of a successful website.

You also need to take into consideration that SSDs are taking over from HDDs. They are now used not just in web servers but in laptops, phones and many other devices. Eventually, HDDs will become obsolete.

Conclusion

At present, most web hosting packages offer you a choice between HDD and SSD drives. However, SSDs are superseding HDDs because they are a faster and more liable technology. Because of this, those who update to SSD hosting can benefit from higher search engine ranking, increased traffic, better user engagement and increased sales.

Why Parents And Children Need GPS Tracking Systems

1. List your business with the major search engines

2. Reach out on social media

3. Start a blog

4. Outreach

5. Create a YouTube channel

6. Optimise your website

7. Online advertising

Conclusion

1. Improving personalized shopping experiences

2. Automating customer interactions

3. Real-time Assistance

4. Data mining

5.Operational automation

6.Predicting outcomes

7.Improve the recruitment process

Conclusion

Blend content that educates and content that sells

Different types and forms of content lead to more traffic

Content Type 1: Blogs

Content Type 2: Infographics

Content Type 3: Videos

Content Type 4: Case study

Content Type 5: Meme

Content Type 6: Press releases/News

Know where you’re headed with regular content audits

Create adaptive content for millennials

Consistently Run A/B Tests

1. Display your reviews and testimonials

2. Use the power of statistics

3. Promote social endorsements

4. Show off your prominent clients and partners

5. Use real-time trending information

6. Make the most of your credentials

Conclusion

30 ideas for newsletter content:

Conclusion

In-house hosting

Redesigning apps for the cloud

Managed hosting

Additional advantages of managed hosting

Conclusion

1. Poor navigation

2. Invisible contact details

3. A headache inducing design

4. Breaking the back button

5. Opening up a new browsing window

6. Leaving broken hyperlinks on your site

7. Obsolete content

8. Slow loading times

Conclusion

What’s the difference between HDD and SSD hard drives?

How SSD hosted websites benefit from increased speed

Conclusion

Delivering excellence, collaborating across time zones.

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