#this is them trying to innovate to increase revenue. so they don’t go under.

[wantonglances]

ppl here like “no more affectionate hellsite 😡 if you have checks you’re the enemy 😡 “

like ma’am and/or sir, all they did was change the desktop layout. mobile is the same. and if you read the staff notes, they say it’s an experiment for a possible new UI.

[sophieappler]

Lululemon: The Dominating Brand That is Here to Stay

In recent years, Lululemon has seemed to dominate in the athletic wear industry. This relatively new company was able to generate over $6 billion in revenue in 2021. However, you still don’t pass by as many people wearing Lululemon products compared to known brands like Nike, Under Armor, and Adidas. Unlike these other brands you don’t see Lululemon doing big partnerships with colleges and professional sports teams to bring in additional revenue, So the question is… how is it that Lululemon has been able to create such a strong presence, and even surpass Under Armor in net revenue in 2021?

Source: RetailDive

It's no secret that Lululemon is a very pricey brand, making it the luxury brand of athletic wear. Lululemon differentiates itself from other competitors in the industry by offering a higher percentage of nylon fibers and having products that include anti-bacterial and anti-stink features. This enables them to have their main leadership strength be their product brand. However, how much athletic apparel can one person really have? In the past couple of years, Lululemon has done a great job continuing its marketing growth. Whenever it seems that the fashion trend is going out of style, and Lululemon is headed to the Market maturity phase, Lulu strikes in, entering a new market.

From the beginning, Lululemon focused on helping people feel confident and comfortable when they sweat. Their market was primarily women’s yoga apparel. Still, in the last couple of years, the company has really been able to be successful by utilizing a market expansion strategy into the menswear segment and the shoe segment. We can see with all this success Lululemon has really been able to stretch away to create a solid competitive sustainable advantage.

(https://www.retaildive.com/news/lululemon-surpasses-6b-in-revenue-for-the-first-time-overtaking-under-arm/621256/)

It wasn’t until a few years ago that Lululemon was associated with menswear. Many men, even still today, would associate Lululemon as strictly a women’s brand. When Lululemon launched their men’s line it was a risky market expansion because what man would want to buy something that is associated with a women’s brand? Luckily for them, their risk paid off… big time. Now I see men all over wearing the upside-down U logo, from working out to going to work to golfing and even to parties.

Not only has their menswear launch been super beneficial to the brand, but also their shoe line has brought Lululemon into a new market to increase their sales. They decided to expand their products to try to bring in a new form of revenue. The original launch of the shoe which happened in March of 2022 sold out within hours, and that wasn’t a shock. When originally ordering the shoe, I was a little skeptical about how the shoe would hold up when running, however, after a couple runs I was amazed at how comfortable the shoe was when I was running. The shoes gave me the motivation to run, and after a few runs, I started to enjoy it.  Lululemon spent years working to develop the perfect shoe for everyone, they even delayed their launch for a year. However, the crazy thing was that the shoe, which wasn’t even launched, ranked as teens’ favorite footwear after Nike.

Lululemon’s constant innovation isn’t the only reason lululemon has been able to see so much success over the past couple years. Unlike a lot of other retailers Lululemon harps their employees on creating the best guest experience possible. Coming from personal experience working at lululemon, they emphasize the importance on creating the best experience for both the guest and the employee. After an extensive interview process, I was required to do around 25 hours of training that consist of in store shadow shifts, self-led trainings, and 3-hour instructor led zoom trainings. All employees also do a monthly staff meeting with monthly staff meetings to keep the employees up to date on all the latest technology.

All these trainings go hand and hand with Lululemon’s 5-year goal that they laid out in April of 22, referred to as the “Power of 3 X2”, which included double men’s, double digital, and quadruple international. They want to double the digital sector by improving their guest experience. Overall, lululemon wants to dominate the market with both brick-and-mortar stores and e-commerce platforms. Lululemon is already one of the few retail brands that have increased rates of e-commerce sales, and as they continue to strive towards a frictionless transaction for their e-commerce customer, one can only predict that their sales are going to continually increase.

(https://seekingalpha.com/article/4547727-lululemon-executing-on-its-growth-strategy)

In my opinion, Lululemon has really been able to outreach Under Armor by creating one of the most unique marketing and branding strategies in this industry. Their strength of the quality of their products mixed with their unmatched retail customer service gives the consumers what they need to press the purchase button. Overall, Lulu’s mix of status, services, and innovation make them the brand that will never go out of style, and Adidas and Nike better keep their eye on them.

[robertreich]

Monopoly Mayhem: Corporations Win, Workers Lose

Why do big corporations continue to win while workers get shafted? It all comes down to power: who has it, and who doesn’t.     Big corporations have become so dominant that workers and consumers have fewer options and have to accept the wages and prices these giant corporations offer. This has become even worse now that thousands of small businesses have had to close as a result of the pandemic, while mammoth corporations are being bailed out.   At the same time, worker bargaining power has declined as fewer workers are unionized and technologies have made outsourcing easy, allowing corporations to get the labor they need for cheap.     These two changes in bargaining power didn’t happen by accident. As corporations have gained power, they’ve been able to gut anti-monopoly laws, allowing them to grow even more dominant. At the same time, fewer workers have joined unions because corporations have undermined the nation’s labor laws, and many state legislatures -- under intense corporate lobbying -- have enacted laws making it harder to form unions. Because of these deliberate power shifts, even before the pandemic, a steadily larger portion of corporate revenues have been siphoned off to profits, and a shrinking portion allocated to wages. Once the economy tanked, the stock market retained much of its value while millions of workers lost jobs and the unemployment rate soared to Great Depression-era levels. To understand the current concentration of corporate power we need to go back in time. 

In the late nineteenth century, corporate power was a central concern. “Robber barons,” like John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt, amassed unprecedented wealth for themselves by crushing labor unions, driving competitors out of business, and making their employees work long hours in dangerous conditions for low wages. 

As wealth accumulated at the top, so too did power: Politicians of the era put corporate interests ahead of workers, even sending state militias to violently suppress striking workers. By 1890, public anger at the unchecked greed of the robber barons culminated in the creation of America’s first anti-monopoly law, the Sherman Antitrust Act. 

In the following years, antitrust enforcement waxed or waned depending on the administration in office; but after 1980, it virtually disappeared. The new view was that large corporations produced economies of scale, which were good for consumers, and anything that was good for consumers was good for America. Power, the argument went, was no longer at issue. America’s emerging corporate oligarchy used this faulty academic analysis to justify killing off antitrust. As the federal government all but abandoned antitrust enforcement in the 1980s, American industry grew more and more concentrated. The government green-lighted Wall Street’s consolidation into five giant banks. It okayed airline mergers, bringing the total number of American carriers down from twelve in 1980 to just four today. Three giant cable companies came to dominate broadband. A handful of drug companies control the pharmaceutical industry. Today, just five giant corporations preside over key, high-tech platforms, together comprising more than a quarter of the value of the entire U.S. stock market. Facebook and Google are the first stops for many Americans seeking news. Apple dominates smartphones and laptop computers. Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything. The monopolies of yesteryear are back with a vengeance. Thanks to the abandonment of antitrust, we’re now living in a new Gilded Age, as consolidation has inflated corporate profits, suppressed worker pay, supercharged economic inequality, and stifled innovation. Meanwhile, big investors have made bundles of money off the growing concentration of American industry. Warren Buffett, one of America’s wealthiest men, has been considered the conscience of American capitalism because he wants the rich to pay higher taxes. But Buffett has made his fortune by investing in monopolies that keep out competitors. -- The sky-high profits at Wall Street banks have come from their being too big to fail and their political power to keep regulators at bay. -- The high profits the four remaining airlines enjoyed before the pandemic came from inflated prices, overcrowded planes, overbooked flights, and weak unions. -- High profits of Big Tech have come from wanton invasions of personal privacy, the weaponizing of false information, and disproportionate power that prevents innovative startups from entering the market. If Buffett really wanted to be the conscience of American capitalism, he’d be a crusader for breaking up large concentrations of economic power and creating incentives for startups to enter the marketplace and increase competition. This mega-concentration of American industry has also made the entire economy more fragile -- and susceptible to deep downturns. Even before the coronavirus, it was harder for newer firms to gain footholds. The rate at which new businesses formed had already been halved from the pace in 1980. And the coronavirus has exacerbated this trend even more, bringing new business formations to a standstill with no rescue plan in sight. And it’s brought workers to their knees. There’s no way an economy can fully recover unless working people have enough money in their pockets to spend. Consumer spending is two-thirds of this economy. Perhaps the worst consequence of monopolization is that as wealth accumulates at the top, so too does political power. These massive corporations provide significant campaign contributions; they have platoons of lobbyists and lawyers and directly employ many voters. So items they want included in legislation are inserted; those they don’t want are scrapped. 

They get tax cuts, tax loopholes, subsidies, bailouts, and regulatory exemptions. When the government is handing out money to stimulate the economy, these giant corporations are first in line. When they’ve gone so deep into debt to buy back their shares of stock that they might not be able to repay their creditors, what happens? They get bailed out. It’s the same old story. The financial returns on their political investments are sky-high. Take Amazon – the richest corporation in America. It paid nothing in federal taxes in 2018. Meanwhile, it held a national auction to extort billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies from cities eager to house its second headquarters. It also forced Seattle, its home headquarters, to back away from a tax on big corporations, like Amazon, to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the city’s sky-high rents, caused in part by Amazon!

And throughout this pandemic, Amazon has raked in record profits thanks to its monopoly of online marketplaces, even as it refuses to provide its essential workers with robust paid sick leave and has fired multiple workers for speaking out against the company's safety issues. While corporations are monopolizing, power has shifted in exactly the opposite direction for workers. 

In the mid-1950s, 35 percent of all private-sector workers in the United States were unionized. Today, 6.2 percent of them are. Since the 1980s, corporations have fought to bust unions and keep workers’ wages low. They’ve campaigned against union votes, warning workers that unions will make them less “competitive” and threaten their jobs. They fired workers who try to organize, a move that’s illegal under the National Labor Relations Act but happens all the time because the penalty for doing so is minor compared to the profits that come from discouraging unionization. 

Corporations have replaced striking workers with non-union workers. Under shareholder capitalism, striking workers often lose their jobs forever. You can guess the kind of chilling effect that has on workers’ incentives to take a stand against poor conditions. As a result of this power shift, workers have less choice of whom to work for. This also keeps their wages low. Corporations have imposed non-compete, anti-poaching, and mandatory arbitration agreements, further narrowing workers’ alternatives. 

Corporations have used their increased power to move jobs overseas if workers don’t agree to pay cuts. In 1988, General Electric threatened to close a factory in Fort Wayne, Indiana that made electrical motors and to relocate it abroad unless workers agreed to a 12 percent pay cut. The Fort Wayne workers eventually agreed to the cut. One of the factory’s union leaders remarked, “It used to be that companies had an allegiance to the worker and the country. Today, companies have an allegiance to the corporate shareholder. Period.” Meanwhile, as unions have shrunk, so too has their political power. In 2009, even with a Democratic president and Democrats in control of Congress, unions could not muster enough votes to enact a simple reform that would have made it easier for workplaces to unionize. All the while, corporations have been getting states to enact so-called “right-to-work” laws barring unions from requiring dues from workers they represent. Since worker representation costs money, these laws effectively gut the unions by not requiring workers to pay dues. In 2018, the Supreme Court, in an opinion delivered by the court’s five Republican appointees, extended “right-to-work” to public employees. This great shift in bargaining power from workers to corporate shareholders has created an increasingly angry working class vulnerable to demagogues peddling authoritarianism, racism, and xenophobia. Trump took full advantage. All of this has pushed a larger portion of national income into profits and a lower portion into wages than at any time since World War II. 

That’s true even during a severe downturn. For the last decade, most profits have been going into stock buybacks and higher executive pay rather than new investment. The declining share of total U.S. income going to the bottom 90 percent over the last four decades correlates directly with the decline in unionization. Most of the increasing value of the stock market has come directly out of the pockets of American workers. Shareholders have gained because workers stopped sharing the gains. So, what can be done to restore bargaining power to workers and narrow the widening gap between corporate profits and wages? For one, make stock buybacks illegal, as they were before the SEC legalized them under Ronald Reagan. This would prevent corporate juggernauts from siphoning profits into buybacks, and instead direct profits towards economic investment. Another solution: Enact a national ban on “right-to-work” laws, thereby restoring power to unions and the workers they represent. Require greater worker representation on corporate boards, as Germany has done through its “employee co-determination” system. Break up monopolies. Break up any bank that’s “too big to fail”, and expand the Federal Trade Commission’s ability to find monopolies and review and halt anti-competitive mergers. Designate large technology platforms as “utilities” whose prices are regulated in the public interest and require that services like Amazon Marketplace and Google Search be spun off from their respective companies. Above all, antitrust laws must stop mergers that harm workers, stifle competition, or result in unfair pricing. This is all about power. The good news is that rebalancing the power of workers and corporations can create an economy and a democracy that works for all, not just a privileged few.

[cleverphilosopherbluebird]

ALL ABOUT PINTEREST AND PINTEREST MARKETING

Did you know that Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social networks in the last decade? According to Sprout Insights, Pinterest’s share of social media referrals soared from .68 percent to a whopping 26 percent in just one year, generating more than 400 percent more revenue per click than Twitter and 27 percent more than Facebook. Do you want to increase the likelihood of a purchase? Well, then you should know that shoppers referred by Pinterest are 10 percent more likely to follow through with a purchase than visitors from other social networking sites. Pure and simple: Pinterest can be the star of your social media sales and marketing efforts.

Pinterest is a social media network aimed at image diffusion. But unlike Instagram, Pinterest is not restricted to a mobile app. Users can share their graphic content, known as “pins” (a photo or any kind of graphics work is shared as a pin), and pins can be grouped in albums, known as “boards”. The names resemble the idea of physical photos, messages, or drawings pinned to a corkboard.

You can link Pinterest together to your Facebook account, but your Pinterest posts will not be reflected on your Facebook timeline; it will show a post with a link to your pin. Pinners can share pins from other users on their boards, so, your pins will be widely spread if they are good enough.

This social media tool can be used in marketing, to advertise the product of your brand. Pinterest offers an advantageous feature: you can pin any image directly from your web store, and a link to the store is created automatically. That’s great for advertising purposes; a smart campaign using Pinterest will amaze your customers.

Take into account that Pinterest's most pinned images are: artistic, vintage, and humorous. You can use that info in your favor to create a complete campaign, using some of these ideas. Frequently, you’ll see in Pinterest a 50’s styled photo, and find it was taken in the present century.

Below, I’ve created a quick resource and how-to guide for Pinterest success. Will start with setting up a business page for the Marketing strategy of Pinterest.

To help you build a strategy for your brand on this channel, I have selected 5 tips below that we use for our customers on this social network:

Create a company page on Pinterest;

Create boards that are related to your business. Fashion e-commerce, for example, can create panels like: looks to work, summer fashion 2015, long skirts, silk shirts, etc ...

Use good images. Be creative and remember that these images can inspire people to buy your products or services. If you have a hotel, how about putting pictures of nearby tourist spots? Or details of the rooms or the restaurant? If you have a restaurant, you can upload photos of the dishes, your beautiful cuisine, recipes, etc.

Don't just talk about your company and products. Create inspirational panels, wishes, advice, ideas, tips, based on what your company believes and your positioning. How about showing your company's culture, with behind-the-scenes photos of your company, your team, work desks, and the company's mascot?

 To increase engagement with your brand, follow other people's panels so they can see that you exist and follow you too. Despite being simple, many brands do not do this.

Now let's discuss the recommendations for using Pinterest for marketing, or to advertise your products:

Recommendations for Pinterest Marketing.

Complete your profile information. This is a common recommendation when signing up for any social media. If people like your pins, surely they will want to know more about you. Hence, be prepared to make all the info you can available. Think of that as your business card.

Organize your boards. Boards offer an excellent method to categorize your products. Customers will find more easily those similar products if all of them are grouped under the same board. In addition, if any of your pins gain the favor of the audience, it will lead people to a lot of products or services in the same style.

Use description captions wisely. Pins can show a caption, but if it is too long, it will be cropped in the thumbnail. This allows you to use a punch-line caption, or instead, write a long caption that leaves the readers in suspense, motivating them to click on the image.

Select provocative images. Pinterest’s main feed shows a huge collection of images, all of them competing for your attention. To catch your customers’ attention, you must show creative, neither boring nor repetitive pins. Evocative, vintage pictures are very appreciated, but you also can show innovative, modern, and breathtaking photos.

Keep your boards up to date. You must have a wide availability of images, showing your products, your services, general info, or news. In that way, you will assure presence in customers’ minds. Pinterest will help you to merchandise your brand, and to raise your sales.

This is all about Pinterest Strategies and Marketing Methods. But Inorder to achieve success just strategies and marketing methods are important. We need to know the possibility of increasing the followers and also need to know the difference between Instagram and Pinterest as both of them work only on Images.

Let's discuss in detail Pinterest Followers and The Magic Of Pinterest City!

Pinterest is a magical discovery and I am not the one saying it, but the millions of Pinterest followers all over the world. This has become one of the most famous social networks that are slowly starting to catch more and more ground over the oldies of the business (Facebook, Twitter). The working concept that lies behind Pinterest is the sharing and exploring of human life and beauty through pinning images and videos on boards. Same as with Instagram, the emphasis is placed on beautiful pictures that can take your breath away and raise awareness on whatever your heart desires.

The difference between Pinterest and Instagram is that on Pinterest you can work with images (and videos) created by others, while on Instagram you’re the one taking the photo. Pinterest is for curators.

Pinterest users can do all these things with the help of pinboards which are boards that host pictures or videos known as pins. It is pretty simple once you have uploaded your first pin. The rest is history. You will simply adore pinning and it will not become an obligation like in many other different cases.

For example, if you own a business and you need to get people interested in what you sell, Pinterest is perfect for this. But first, like on any other social media network you have to add as many Pinterest followers as possible.

But what is the best way to reach maximum potential when it comes to Pinterest followers? Below you will find a list of tricks and tips that might come in handy when you are looking to make your profile visible and loved by all the Pinterest followers in the world.

Pinterest followers. Tips and tricks:

1. Create interesting boards. Since Pinterest is more about pictures than actual content, use these boards to attract people to a specific topic. For example, if you own a gym or if you are a sports instructor and you want to highlight certain aspects of your teaching create a board destined for stretching, one for fitness, one for aerobics, and so on. This way those interested in fitness will go directly to the board specifically created for this purpose, pleasing his or her needs faster.

2. Follow other pinners. Since the entire idea of the Pinterest followers is to be attracted in some way or another, remember the mutuality theory. You follow a profile and that person will reciprocate. But you should know common sense only goes that far. If someone is not interested or doesn’t approve of what you do, you will not receive that vote of confidence that you expected so long. And this way we reach point 3.

3. Tutorials. Pinterest followers will only come if your information is worth following. Give them something interesting and they will follow you immediately. The best way to do this is to teach something. Bring to the attention tutorials that will make them learn something useful related to the topic of your business. Tutorials are the best way to accumulate new information because they combine pictures with instructions and they don’t require a difficult process of thinking. Do this and you will get a large number of Pinterest followers quickly!

4. Pinterest features. Who wouldn’t want to become Pinterest followers when the buttons that lead them to the page are right there. Incorporate the Pinterest button on blog posts, Facebook profiles, pages, Twitter profiles, etc. Make people see what they are missing out on. And remember that now Pinterest comes with “Pinterest for business”, a special page where you can enter the community, share your story and make your business count.

5. Value your Pinterest followers. Offer good products and pictures that have a high definition quality. Try to keep your pinning process daily so that you can maintain people updated. And last but not least, appreciate the advice received and try to transform bad criticism into positive and flourishing results.

 Have you started experimenting with Pinterest for marketing? Are you still in dilemma to excute the pinterest Marketing, then take the help of BUYFORONE Social Media Experts and they provide wide range of pinterest management services.

[techpaymentgateway]

Top 5 Things You Need To Know About Payment Gateway

A payment gateway (PG) frames part of your general payment handling framework. At the point when a client enters their card subtleties on to your protected payment page, the payment door is the primary component that the payment data is submitted to.

A payment gateway naturally scrambles your client’s card subtleties, ensuring you’re satisfying the necessary guidelines in client information assurance. This guarantees your checkout cycle is sheltered and secure for both the parties — and that is the reason a PG is essential for any internet business website.

Numerous suppliers (counting us) offer a full set up for a payment preparing framework, including a payment gateway, trader account, and secure payment page. This advantages vendors as the preparing will all be completely coordinated, and it can abbreviate the measure of time before reserves are sunk into your business ledger.

Fundamental Features to Consider When Choosing a Payment Gateway

A payment gateway is an interface that allows the buyer to do the payment and seller to accept the online payment. A payment gateway comes with multiple payment modes such as net banking, Credit/Debit Card, UPI, and Mobile Wallet. It is an arbiter which directs a protected transaction of funds from the bank account of the buyer to the seller’s payment portal.

Costing

The cost of the administration you pick will consistently be a significant thought, regardless of whether your business is little or huge. Remember that expenses will shift contingent upon your plan of action — organizations in high danger businesses will typically need to pay more because of the expanded danger of chargebacks and deceitful action. Different components will likewise have an impact — for instance, the size of your business, the cost of the things you sell, and the conveyance times for your items.

Everything organizations can hope to pay an arrangement charge, conditional expenses, and a month to month expense for payment passage administrations. Be careful with chargebacks, as these can likewise cause an extra expense. Nonetheless, the best PG will prepare for dangerous exchanges that could result in chargebacks, which is the reason you ought to pick a quality arrangement which is outfitted with elevated level misrepresentation counteraction innovation.

Security

We satisfy the highest security standards by being compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS). Security is built into our products starting from the earliest stage. Security is significant when taking payments on the web, for the wellbeing of the two players. Payment doors must conform to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), which specifies that all card information must be put away and prepared in a safe situation. There are a few degrees of PCI consistence, contingent upon the quantity of payments you measure in a year. For high danger traders, for example, those searching for a online payment gateway, expanded wellbeing confirmation is priceless.

This is to guarantee that client information and card data is secure and that your business isn’t helpless to an information break. In the event that you don’t guarantee you are PCI consistent, not exclusively might you be able to confront colossal fines, however your business notoriety could likewise be in question. Clients are probably not going to purchase from a brand where client subtleties have been taken.

This implies you ought to pick a PG with an elevated level of encryption to guard client information. Matching a PG with a coordinated facilitated payment page is the most ideal approach to guarantee you are PCI consistent.

Payment Types

To offer your clients the most ideal experience, you’ll need to offer the same number of payment alternatives as you can. Clients are far less inclined to surrender their trucks on the off chance that they can utilize their picked payment technique.

Most payment doors will acknowledge VISA, Mastercard, and AmericanExpress. Be that as it may, with an expanding scope of payment gateway strategies accessible — and clients utilizing them to an ever increasing extent — you would prefer not to disregard these either. Try to discover a PG that offers the best adaptability in payment techniques, including alternatives like Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

Fraud Prevention

There are some guidelines which imply that nations from where high events of fakes have been accounted for are in the PayG’s prohibited rundown of International/Multicurrency exchanges. A database of fraudsters gets refreshed on live premises. Payments are recognized and blocked, in light of the suspicious history of card bins and people.

Any business associated with separation selling accompanies expected dangers, for example, charge card extortion. Card-not-present extortion, fake chargebacks, cyberattacks, and different tricks speak to a colossal expense to organizations around the world.

Web based business destinations are especially powerless to extortion, essentially on the grounds that the client doesn’t need to be truly present to make a buy. There’s been an ascent in ‘computerized shoplifting’, where clients request a thing, have it conveyed, and afterward utilize a chargeback to recuperate the cash they’ve spent — frequently by guaranteeing the thing never showed up.

Reporting module

As an entrepreneur, you need ongoing updates on exchanges so you know precisely where your funds are doing. Improved detailing in a PG is along these lines an awesome component, permitting you to screen income, check overall revenues, and even gauge deals. This won’t just assistance you to design your business’ development and guarantee you’re meeting targets, however will likewise make bookkeeping unmistakably more smoothed out and simple to follow.

In a perfect world, you’ll need a PG that lets you see your reports in a hurry, with a versatile prepared interface, and the capacity to download reports in various configurations to suit your prerequisites.

Customer service

Issues with your payment gateway can imperil income, so you need a dependable arrangement. In light of this, consider client care cautiously. You’ll need to be certain that your supplier will be responsive and illuminate any issues that emerge as fast as could be expected under the circumstances.

[childcareseer]

The Child Care Industry is in Crisis. Solutions Lie in Innovation

With demand for quality childcare spots far outstripping supply, the childcare industry is begging for innovation. Successful operators of the future will respond to Americans’ changing lifestyles by offering more flexible care arrangements. Technology can help centers become more profitable by better matching available capacity to the precise hours parents want.

The career that led up to that fateful 2017 decision to purchase the daycare—a business I have expanded into two locations and a child care management software business under the umbrella of Callahan Learning Center—gives me a somewhat unconventional perspective on the needs of this essential industry. My background is in engineering development. I earned a degree in electrical engineering from Grove City College in 1997, obtained my MBA in 2002 and worked for decades to build a successful career as an executive and entrepreneur in the wireless communication technology and software industry. I hold numerous patents, I’ve invented multi-million-dollar product lines, and I’ve been involved in more than four startups from cradle to exit, including my most recent startup selling for $200 million in 2019.

At heart, I am a problem-solver. I have found great professional joy in combining the problem-solving skills I learned as a software engineer with time-tested philosophies on managing and motivating teams to build healthy and profitable enterprises. When I bought a local daycare business, I discovered an industry screaming for software innovation. That discovery launched my journey to build a better daycare—one of the most fascinating problems I’ve worked on.

An industry in crisis

You don’t have to look hard to find people sounding the alarm on the severe imbalance between supply and demand in American child care. Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a mere 23% of children under age 3 could be served by the available licensed child care slots in their communities, according to a survey of child care supply in 19 states and the District of Columbia conducted by the Center for American Progress. The mismatch between child care supply and demand costs the American economy an estimated $57 billion a year in lost earnings, productivity and revenue, according to research by the Council for a Strong America.

These studies were conducted before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has put a ton of bricks on the accelerator of what was already a worrisome trend. In April 2020—just weeks into the crisis—the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) surveyed workers in child care centers and family child care homes in all 50 states. At that time, nearly half of respondents reported that their center—like Callahan Learning Center at the time—was completely closed. Of those that were open, 85% were operating at less than half of their enrollment capacity. The stress on these centers as the pandemic has continued has been immense. A July survey by NAEYC found that if the reduced enrollment and increased operating costs brought by the pandemic were to persist, only 18% of child care programs expected to survive another year. Yet the demand for good child care is only going to grow as the post-pandemic economy thankfully starts putting more Americans back to work.

This is an economic inefficiency that is begging us for a market solution.

Matching demand more precisely

At its most basic level, child care is the business of matching people who need care for their children with individuals who are willing to provide that care. In America, we’ve been going about the business of addressing this market demand pretty inefficiently for years. Most child care centers sell care in standard quantities designed to match a typical “9-to-5” work schedule, while only 62% of Americans would prefer to work the ‘typical banking hours’ of the 50s, according to a 2018 survey.

In complete truth, to keep a spot in these centers, many parents end up paying for child care hours they aren’t using, be it unused hours each week, or needing to pay for care during vacations to hold their spots. This setup also prevents center operators from being able to charge a higher rate for smaller and more irregular quantities of care, which would benefit both the center and the families who would gladly pay more per hour for the hours they need versus paying by the week for hours they can’t use.

In the 21st century, we’ve learned that matching market supply more precisely to demand can reap rewards for both consumers and providers. For instance, Uber and Lyft have allowed urban dwellers to stop paying for cars that stay parked most of the time—or make an economic return on that excess automotive capacity. Another example is Airbnb, which has allowed travelers to find lodging in the heart of the neighborhoods they wish to visit, and often without the minimum-night requirements of traditional resorts. Instacart lets us be more efficient in the time we allocate to buying food—while allowing grocers and paid shoppers to charge a premium for items purchased through the service.

We often don’t like to think about applying cold economic principles to something as personal as the care of small children, but the reality is that this is already happening, to the detriment of American working families. The American 9-to-5 office job is quickly disappearing, and the child care industry has not kept pace with this trend. In addition, many existing jobs—from surgeons to paramedics to restaurant workers—demand irregular and unconventional hours that aren’t often served by traditional care offerings. As the millennial generation—whose members seek unprecedented flexibility in their work-life arrangements—is now entering parenthood, it is urgent that the child care industry evolve by providing a product that matches their lifestyles.

Strong child care businesses can no longer be built on providing set offerings of full- or half-time care, but instead must offer a more customizable menu of options. This requires some of the same software-based solutions that have brought us on-demand transportation, lodging and grocery shopping.

Defining the problem

Labor makes up more than half of a typical child care center’s costs, so in the first few months I owned Callahan Learning Center, I spent a lot of time trying to understand how my center director scheduled staff. I watched as she worked her intuitive magic week after week to match our available educators with the children in our care. While this skill was highly impressive, it was also impossible to replicate. As I watched the process, I wondered, “What happens if she gets sick or leaves this job?”

I thought for sure someone had created a tool to help with this.

I tried some of the leading software tools on the market. While many of them kept good data on where children and teachers were yesterday, and where they were today, nobody was helping me answer the question that I believe lies at the heart of making this business better: Who will be in your care tomorrow, next week, and next month? Who will care for those children, and what will that care look like?

Solution: Child Care Seer

This problem sent me back to my software development experiences. I assembled, then spent a year and a half working with an internationally recognized team of developers to build a tool that would relieve child care managers of this ongoing burden, allow them to better understand their available capacity, and plan efficiently to improve the quality of care they could provide. As we worked on this problem, we realized it would impact so many aspects of the business.

Essentially, we were building an all-in-one platform that would free up dedicated caregivers to do what they love—care for children—while minimizing the time they needed to spend on repetitive tasks that keep their business going. We were building something that could allow them to focus on the quality of care they were providing, while giving them ways to increase the profitability—and longevity—of their business.

The result is Child Care Seer. Named for the seers, or prophets, who saw the future in biblical times, Child Care Seer’s job is to smooth out the roadblocks—from late payments to irregular schedules—that cause so much stress for the dedicated child care center workers that our nation needs to keep in business. Seer also allows providers to identify their excess capacity and sell it to parents who need more flexible options. Giving providers this ability to sell program-based and hourly care simultaneously has incredible potential to strengthen these businesses—an outcome that has important benefits for both hard-working child care center operators and the American workforce as a whole.

We’ve been using Child Care Seer to run our operations at Callahan Learning Center since we reopened in August, after using the pandemic shutdown as an opportunity to fully reimagine how we do business. Now that we use Seer, our weeks begin much more peacefully, as we are not spending hours on Monday mornings running credit cards for tuition payments—Seer automates this for us. When parents arrive with their children, our workers don’t have to have difficult conversations about late payments, as all of this is facilitated through the daycare billing software. Our director can see in real-time which children and teachers are in and out of all of the rooms in both of our locations, which makes on-the-spot decisions faster and more efficient. Seer allows us to more fairly and efficiently manage our waitlist, and lets us give parents the convenience of going online to request two hours of child care next Tuesday—or whatever irregular quantity of care their schedule may require. Seer also gives us the tools to engage parents in a way that is consistent, valuable and not burdensome to our educators.

Seer’s capabilities continue to evolve and grow as we begin to offer this product for use in child care centers across North America. Our development team continues to build Seer out as an indispensable platform that can enable child care businesses to offer both unparalleled flexibility and uncompromising quality, while also relieving them of some of the heavy logistical burden that adds hours to their work days.  

I think child care is a huge part of the success of the country and the success of the local community, and I truly believe it can be massively better than it is. Let’s look for ways we can bring the American ingenuity that has improved so many other industries to bear on the business of matching caregivers with parents who want a safe place to take their kids while they work. My solution to this problem is a daycare software tool that can make it easier for parents to purchase the care they need, and far less stressful for center operators to run a sustainable business.

To me, that’s a win for everybody.

About Tom Callahan

Tom Callahan is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned executive with a track record of starting, growing and leading companies of all sizes. He is the owner of Callahan Learning Center, a Virginia-based family child care management company that operates centers providing high-quality and highly flexible child care. He is the founder of Child Care Seer, an all-in-one platform that can make child care a more manageable and profitable business. He came to the child care industry after more than two decades in the software and technology industries, where he invented multi-million-dollar product lines and guided multiple startups from cradle to exit, including his last startup selling for over $200 million in 2019. Learn more about Child Care Seer at childcareseer.com.

[italianclothing1]

Made-in-Pakistan: Improving Global Perceptions

The ‘Made-in-Pakistan’ label has the potential to become a symbol of repute, but this aspiration must be vigorously pursued. If we are to consider the increased digitization of markets in the wake of COVID-19 as an opportunity, with advanced tools and greater access to buyers, these tools must be used to address the international branding of our products, so that a label bearing our country’s name not only becomes a marker of great quality, but also a motivation to buy by choice. This would require an environment that facilitates exporting industries to focus on quality improvement through new processes, thereby developing new products and entering fresh markets.

Despite having low-tariff access to textile and apparel markets of the European Union, USA, Japan and China, Pakistan’s market share is low, which shows an inability to fully leverage our position as a textile-dominated economy, losing critical expansion opportunities to regional competitors. In addition, the EU and USA are now largely considered to be shrinking markets, and by continuing to focus on these rather than on expanding markets, our policies contradict global trends. Asian competitors have gained significant market shares from 2011-18 while Pakistan’s share decreased by 2.17%. It is not as if they possess something we don’t; rather their development of supporting policies, intelligent branding, market forecasting and diversification has helped them to excel.

Market Shares

China (33%) is the leading exporter of textiles in World followed by India (4.7%) & Bangladesh (4.6%). Pakistan’s share is only 1.7%.

When considering emerging textile markets, our best bet is to target those segments which have less market saturation by competitors. According to a report by the AfDB, Africa currently accounts for 1.9% of global trade, and trends have showcased it to be a major textile player in the near future. As stated by Hans Rosling, the African market is by far the largest potential market of the future. In order to preemptively capture this opportunity, we must enhance trade with Africa in order to secure a foothold in the fastest rising market in the world. Given that imports from China are restricted, South Africa is one country that offers ample opportunities for Pakistan to leverage. Furthermore, trade data for 2019 from Botswana, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia and South Africa has shown that despite growing demand, textile related exports from Pakistan to these countries added up to a mere $114 million. The demand for textile continues to rise in these countries, so to capture market share, the industry must focus on trade and connectivity and the Ministry of Commerce must facilitate it. Reduction in tariff and non-tariff barriers by both sides would serve as a catalyst for accelerated growth in bilateral trade.

While it is often assumed that manufacturing inputs in Pakistan come cheap, this disregards the poor productivity and very real hindrances in power and logistics that raise costs of doing business. With numerous policy setbacks, and energy and infrastructural impediments at each level, exporters have been so caught up in trying to manage day-to-day affairs and onerous bureaucratic hurdles that there is little revenue left to be competitive, let alone consider a marketing plan. There is also a shortage of skilled labor in textiles, chemicals and hosiery/bed linen. Firms regard inadequate institutional training and the low quality of education as the most important reasons for the lack of labor skills, thereby hindering competitiveness.

Pakistan’s textile industry comprises an entire value chain from cotton production to prêt-à-porter and export, although it is more concentrated in the lower value-added end of the chain. The fragmentation of the supply chain falls into two main sectors: the formal sector, which involves spinning units/textile mills, and the informal sector, where sewing, knitting, as well as clothing and towel production fall under the scope of SMEs and small cottage units. In a fast-paced global market, the primary reliance on traditional goods in Pakistan is becoming a burden rather than worth maintaining. Textiles and clothing have accounted for nearly 60 percent of Pakistan’s export basket for more than a decade, and while this allows for a significant advantage in this sector, that advantage is not being leveraged as well as it could be. Other South Asian economies have diversified their export baskets to not only capture an abundance of untapped markets, but to increasingly tap into high-value-added products that utilize advanced technologies in their production. Pakistan must mitigate its reliance on primary and traditional goods and machinery and shift towards the export of value added, nontraditional goods. Only then can the country market itself effectively as a textile supplier that meets the greatest number of needs of global consumers.

With a myopic focus on short staple fiber raw cotton, we are essentially relying on a shrinking market while neglecting the rapidly expanding market for MMF. The MMF tariff regime effectively prevents Pakistan from aligning its products in tandem with the rest of the world. More than 60% of world textile trade is in MMF materials, the demand for which has grown exponentially owing to the convenience it affords as a cheap material used in the production of the ever-relevant active-wear trend. However, the duty protection given to obsolete plants in Pakistan is denying the Pakistani industry any chance to compete in this booming market, internationally or domestically. This brings us to the issue of polyester staple fiber, a raw material of the industry upon which it would be unreasonable to apply any duties. Alarmingly, at present there is a 7% customs duty on the import of polyester staple fiber. This racks up the total import duties, which subsequently fall in the range of 20% including antidumping duty. Despite the antidumping duty on cheap Chinese materials having expired, the duty has been extended for a further year.

This highlights the need for a policy environment and a tariff structure which favors global market needs, which are likely to be linked to synthetic fibers for the foreseeable future. The goals of the industry must remain aligned with the demands of the market, and this requires the industry to equip labor with new technologies and train them in the latest skills, thus shifting them from primary to secondary and tertiary activities. Agriculture must diversify into high value-added products, reduce the loss of fertile land to real estate speculations, improve domestic marketing systems, improve water management and set up centers for agro-genomics. In addition to investment in increased capacity and technology, there is a need to improve local design capacity through new clusters for training, design and testing and better managerial practices. Furthermore, the quality of these products should not be compromised at any level, as creating more processed products that rank later in the value-chain is no objective if quality is not simultaneously improved.

When it comes to apparel and ready-made garments, brands that have made it global have some pre-existing structures that have been instrumental in their success. Firstly, they largely benefit from being rooted in a more globally appealing culture, i.e. Zara specializes in Western fast fashion and streetwear, which is largely adaptable and worn across the globe. After all, fashion is an off-shoot of culture and its transferability depends on the culture of the origin country. In comparison, our signature shalwar kurta does not have an international appeal, save for our diaspora. If Pakistani brands aim to go global they need to introduce product ranges that cater to a wider and more diverse audience. Secondly, success stories in the global space relied on the existing clusters of the origin country’s textile industries. To mimic this, siloed efforts within the private sector in Pakistan need to join hands and work towards mutual success. Thirdly, once a Pakistani brand decides to go global it will have to reconsider its existing linkages. A common theme among global success stories is the disruption or specialization of supply chain models. Apart from aiming to supply to these internationally acclaimed fashion brands, if Pakistani brands can realistically emulate their business model, it could be the impetus for a booming industry.

Pakistani brands that have adopted a similar business model and targeted international consumer include Khaadi and Rastah. Behind efforts to export more and provide the country with valuable jobs and foreign exchange, there is a lot of effort and craftsmanship that goes into creating textile products, representing local talent and skills that should be showcased to the world via effective marketing. Khaadi was launched back in 1998 by introducing hand-woven kurtas. With its launch, it gained recognition for its distinctive embroidery designs, which reflected our traditional wear with a modern look. Khaadi soon expanded to create Western cuts without compromising on the traditional patterns of Pakistani culture. Intricate embroidery and block printing represent our rich South Asian heritage in a globally appealing way, and Rastah is a brand that has managed to achieve a blend of traditional Pakistani patterns and designs with Western streetwear cuts and styles.

Product planning is a crucial marketing activity in the garments industry. However, it is contingent upon ensuring product quality, developing attractive packaging, constantly innovating, distributing through the best middlemen, and maintaining an efficient inventory management system. Pricing lower than other countries and providing discounts to buyers is essential for competitiveness. At the same time, quality certification and adherence to health, labor, and environment standards is of utmost importance for exporters. However, awareness of these standards remains limited, thereby hindering quality assurance, and the procedures to avail the facilities provided in this regard are unnecessarily complicated. Measures must be taken to raise awareness and simplify procedures so that the maximum number of products can be brought up to an international standard. Given that a number of Pakistani textile firms are domestically owned and vertically integrated, activities like designing and branding can play an instrumental role in bringing the textile sector greater acclaim. As another measure to ensure vertical integration and a more diversified product mix, international buying houses should be incentivized to open outlets in Pakistan, with supporting policies such as tax exemption and free office and warehousing space. This would enable a larger geographical spread and allow for the goal of new products, processes and markets to be streamlined.

The Textile Policy for 2020-2025 proposes certain marketing strategies that go hand-in-hand with changing consumer behavior and technological upgradation. The strategies are outlined below:

Showcasing Products: an exhibition plan is to be developed in consultation with textile stakeholders and support from the Ministry of Commerce. The Ministry of Commerce has already initiated process of holding virtual exhibitions. In addition, Pakistan’s first virtual fashion show took place in June 2020 in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, following a global trend of continuing the tradition safely. The plan also suggests holding the dedicated textile exhibition ‘TEXPO’ every year rather than alternate years, and expanding it to other countries.

Digital Marketing: this has already played a vital role in showcasing textile products and attracting new business. The Textile Wing, Ministry of Commerce has created a one stop E-Portal for this purpose. However, SMEs do not have ease of access to this portal, so measures are needed to make it more SME-friendly.

Market Access: The Ministry of Commerce is already in negotiation with developed and developing economies for market access. Competitor countries have taken bold steps by opening their markets, thereby securing access to major markets. Following this strategy, we must formulate a road map to increase market access, while remaining cognizant of the fact that this would be on a reciprocal basis and our market openness would also have to increase.

E-Commerce: Our first-ever e-commerce Policy is in the implementation phase, with the objective of giving open access to textile manufacturers/exporters to tap into business opportunities across the globe. Amazon has started registering Pakistan manufacturers and exporters including textiles. Ease of access must be granted to SMEs as well.

Exporters are presently allowed to retain / utilize 10% of export proceeds for marketing without requiring permission from SBP. Steps must be taken to extend this facility, allowing the establishment of development centers, design & marketing offices, near shore manufacturing, warehousing etc.

Moving forward, we must enable our textile industry to climb further up the value chain into original brand manufacturing (OBM) and original design manufacturing (ODM) categories. This will require support in development of skills eco-system around design and branding to capture higher value, and the development of fast-fashion design districts in Karachi and Lahore with strong academic linkages e.g., NCA and IVS. Furthermore, the industry must focus on the collection of relevant data. Hiring skilled graduates who can gauge emerging trends would make data collection more reliable and thereby significantly improve international marketing and branding. Finally, measures must be taken to promote private investment in the industry, contingent upon interest rate support and a reputation for never compromising on quality.

Some opportunities to attract investment and achieve expansion include the regional Textile Production-Consumption Hub, FTA 2nd phase with China, EU GSP+ until 2023 and a growing domestic market. CPEC in particular will allow the industry to leverage Chinese technology, efficiency and discipline to enhance its existing potential as well as to initiate new projects for higher value. CPEC’s improvements in infrastructure have improved trade routes, mitigated constraints to growth, and led to the establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to enable smooth supply chains, enhanced innovation and economies of scale. Remaining on this track, CPEC has the potential to significantly boost industrialization and double Pakistan’s exports in four years, while also generating around 2.3 million new jobs in the country.

It is essential to promote foreign collaborations and joint ventures to improve technology, marketing and manufacturing processes, to introduce new technology and build brands. Pakistan's export-oriented industries are 25 percent more productive than non-exporting firms, and their productivity increases as exports increase. However, inefficiencies cannot be exported, so these must be mitigated from all input materials before results can be seen. Since exports in Pakistan are labor-intensive, expansion in this industry is a way to ensure large-scale job-creation, and an increase in foreign currency to pay for required imports. With the right policies in place, a diversified set of high quality exports will provide a crucial uplift to economic activity and lead to a cycle of development and improvement in perception.

[brandtreein]

8 EFFECTIVE MARKETING TIPS TO SKYROCKET SALES IN 2021

How do you think marketing works? Well, my perspective on digital marketing in simple layman’s terms is the use of the internet to reach consumers. It is believed that business has only two functions – MARKETING AND INNOVATION.

Marketing Advertising Commercial Strategy Concept

1. Right Strategies, Implementation, & Success.

Planning out business goals and how to achieve them is very important for any brand, don't you think so? I believe it is important to figure out where the brand stands right now and its goal in the forthcoming years. And to achieve the above-said goals, it is necessary to have a well-planned set of strategies in a cost-effective yet impactful manner so that no stone is left unturned. To mention a few strategies:

Creative Web Design/Development: Using UI/UX interface designs and catchy graphic designs and standardized software along with developing the website further helps in generating leads.

Personalized Content: Content is king. Make sure to give out content that grabs the attention of the readers by making it more relatable and personalized to adhere to their requirements.

Discounts/Sale: Providing discounts, cashback, and season sales is something that catches the eye of every given consumer. This will ensure website traffic and to reach a wide range of consumers.

Social Media Marketing: Social media has become a rage amongst people. Marketing a certain business on social media is one of the most effective ways to reach a wider audience and helps to constantly engage with your followers/consumers in different ways.

Omnichannel Marketing: This is the practice of marketing a business across many channels including online and offline modes. It helps to provide an enhanced and customized user experience across numerous channels through any method that the customer prefers.

Once we have a plan, it's now time to implement them! Reach out to various platforms and make sure that your brand visibility is improving with every passing day. It is important to use all the technologies at hand and put your best foot forward in getting your brand on the radar. With this outline, every process can go on organically and effectively which will eventually lead you to success.

2.Content Still Matters

It is said that great content is the best sales tool in the world. Content marketing is an effective approach to marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material such as videos, blogs, website content, social media posts, etc and eventually not only promotes the brand but also intends to stimulate interest in the services it has to offer. HubSpot research suggests that businesses that blog are 13 times more likely to witness ROI than those that don't. Now, how will content help, improve brand marketing? Here are a few content marketing tips that will answer the above question:

Perfect Keyword Research: It is of utmost importance to make a list of relevant keywords that people are searching for and to make sure to use them in your content. This helps improve brand visibility and eventually to reach out to numerous customers.

Constant Content Optimization: Great headlines catch the attention of the readers and force them to read the blog. It is important to keep optimizing your content with time to make sure that your brand is hand-in-hand with the current trend.

Visual Appeal: Videos/pictures are what adds more understanding to any given concept that you are trying to explain. Add relevant yet innovative photos and videos to grab the attention of readers.

Promotion: Once we have an initial set of audience, it only makes sense to keep expanding it. Promote your blogs/website on various platforms like social media, another fellow brand, and others make sure your brand attains success in every possible way.

3.Social Media is a Game-Changer.

How many of us don't use social media? I'm sure not many of us can say "ME" to that. As of 2020, over 3.6 billion use one or the other social media platforms. With that huge number, isn't it only logical to make use of social media in the field of digital marketing as well? SMM (Social Media Marketing) is a process where the marketer uses social media networks as a tool for promoting their website thus increasing traffic. This is done because, when a website is connected to a social media network its position in the search results increases drastically. Here are a few tips:

Device a full-fledged social sharing strategy.

Use the maximum number of social media platforms possible.

Discuss the current trends and make sure to use them, thus attracting an audience on a larger scale.

Constant engagement with your followers. Run contests/games to stay connected.

Regular social media creation and optimization.

Put across simple and fundamental concepts that can be understood by anybody who reads it. Try not to complicate the content.

Analyze and improve.

4.Make Your Customer the Hero of Your Story.

What determines the success of a brand ultimately? Its customers. Every brand’s ultimate goal is to reach the maximum number of customers and doing this is not an easy task at all and involves a series of best marketing strategies that could be:

Market Research: Make sure to do a quick market survey and collect data as it is very important to understand the needs of your customers and the current trend.

Email Marketing: Emails happen to be one of the easiest means of customer communication since time immemorial. Sending out personalized emails to a set of customers makes it easy for them to stay updated about any new launches/services thereby, increases customer engagement with the brand and increase the potential number of customers from time to time.

SMM: 83% of people who use the internet, use social media as well. This is yet another platform to reach out to a wide range of customers. This has been explained above in detail under the heading, “Social media is a game-changer”.

Content Marketing and web design: It is important to have a website that can be easily accessed on all devices be it smartphones, tablets, or laptops, and also to make it visually attractive. Content is king. The more entertaining and relatable the content is; the more will be the readers who will eventually become loyal consumers. Ain't that so simple?

Ask Customer Reviews: Ask the customers how satisfied they are with the service you are providing. Asking for feedback is one of the ways where the brand understands what it needs to improve whilst making the customer feel important and that their opinion/feedback matters.

5. Page Speed Matters

According to a study, 40% of customers discard websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. So yes, I still stand by what I said, “Page speed matters”. With good page speed, comes, better conversion rates, better search engine rankings, and user experience. Let us see as to how page speed can be improved:

Google Page Speed Insights: This is a free tool, made available by Google which runs performance tests on your website and also gives insights on how to improve the same. It works for desktop and mobile versions.

Image optimization: Images hog the maximum bandwidth of a website. Thus, we can use images in jpeg, jpg, or png formats and compress them, so that they occupy less space which will eventually increase the speed of the page.

Use a CDN strategy: A CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a network spread across various locations in the world. A website with a single server is bound to have an increased loading time. Hence, by incorporating the CDN, user requirements are put across to the closest server(in accordance with their location) and as a result, website speed is increased and keeps the customer engaged.

HTTP Compression: It is mainly used for text-based data like HTML, Java, CSS, and others. These days everybody makes sure that their webs server is GZIP enabled. SO, compressing content will lead to faster loading of web pages.

Transfer the database: Moving the entire data to a separate, optimized server is one of the most effective to improve page speed.

Performance budget calculator: The importance of catchy content has been repeatedly made very clear. This tool helps you to improve your existing content on the website and to constantly optimize it.

Effective tools: There are a bunch of tools that help you to test websites and understand the flaws. To name a few: Pingdom, YSlow, and others.

6. Data Privacy

While the internet is a vast ocean of technology, it also comes with its own risks. This is when cybersecurity/data privacy comes into the picture. During consumer and company interactions, there will be a need to share some personal contact and bank information which need to be protected no matter what. Now, how can that be done? Read along.

Ask for permission: California consumer privacy act (CCPA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) act in such a way that, it gives the consumers all the control over the data/information they wish to pass on according to their own will.

Know and agree: Create a page enlisting all the security tools and policies and go further only if the customer agrees to it upon reading the security you have to offer.

Focusing the right data: Data is most important for any kind of marketing. So, it is important to collect the required data and make sure none of it goes unused. Thus, making it comfortable for the customer while fulfilling the data the website needs as well.

7. Constantly Optimize User Experience

Developing a website and getting customers is one thing, while constantly being able to optimize the user experience is another key aspect. Better user experience leads to better conversion rates and increased revenue. With rapidly increasing trends, don't you think, it is necessary to make sure that your website is not looking old? Well, here are a few tips that can help you improve your website experience:

Google is definitely the most popular and used search engine in the world. Google search rankings play a very important role for any website from any sector. Google algorithms are a set of complex systems that determines the rankings of websites in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Google makes updates/changes thousands of times, and given the importance of it for our website, it only becomes necessary to keep ourselves updated.

Improved page speed.

Use attractive images and videos to keep the website engaging.

Keep the web pages consistent with catchy and well-designed headlines.

Based on the data fed by the user, provide personalized and reliable suggestions/services to the users.

Conduct behavioral UX data analysis and with the final results, work on improving the user/website experience

8. Always Analyze The Results.

There is always an increasing drive to provide the customers with the best experience under any given circumstances. Constant analysis of the results or outcome of the website is the only way to improve any business. Here is how it can be achieved:

Collect data on the works of the website or brand in the past week/month.

Make a statistic analysis by making a graph for better understanding.

Understand why certain aspects might have gone wrong and in the meantime also make sure to keep up with the existing highlights of the website and keep optimizing it and making it better.

Make sure to make all the necessary changes/updates required on a weekly/monthly basis and be at the top of the game and hand-in-hand with the ongoing trend.

A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer – it is what consumers tell each other it is. – Scott Cook

For more visit Brand Tree

[lightholme]

As many have said, you won't have a civil war.  Because logistically that just isn't feasible.  We are split far more along rural/urban lines than one giant chunk of the nation against another.  Without geographic alignment of opposing forces, there's no logical way for any military to organize.  You'd have to have millions upon millions of people up and migrate into one geographic region that would then cecede, and that's just not how anything works at all.

Instead, divided modern Ireland is a better example.  You'll have decades of civil unrest.  Terrorist attacks, pockets in different states of shit basically being taken over by militias that reject federal authority.

You'll have total stagnation in the federal government as terrorist antagonists win seats in these areas and work against anything and everything.  You'll have secessionist movements that go nowhere but cause huge disruption.

The net result is that the country will not be able to make progress on laws, won't be able to keep up with the times, won't be able to spend tax revenue effectively, and will virtually cease to function.

Government, contrary to some radical libertarian delusions, actually is essential.  Laws need to be passed.  Conflicts need to be resolved, consensuses need to be reached.  Government needs to be agile enough to respond to negative externalities caused by new technologies (like social media).  We need government, and we need it to not just be empty seats but to conduct its designated functions.  It isn't an option, it is an essential, non-negotiable component of large-scale societies.

Terrorism never really aims to win.  They aim to hurt, to disrupt, to stall, to inflame.  And it's shockingly easy to do that.  And that's what Republicans are discovering.  They will not win hearts and minds.  Most newer generations despise them and they have long abandoned the efforts to win those hearts and minds, resorting instead to theft, organized crime, and radical terrorism, culiminating most recently in an actual coup attempt at the US Capitol.

They were rebuffed, and that has cost them a lot of political capital.  I don't see them really being able to pull out of their party's death spiral in the coming decades.  They may pick up a handful of additional seats.  They may flip the Presidency to them again.  But each time they will try to advance their nightmarish dystopian agenda, and they will cement greater unified resistance against them, and they simply don't have the numbers.  Much the contrary to their shared delusion, they are far from the majority, and have an aging population of supporters which declines each day, thanks in no small part to the cruelty and neglect inherent in their own policies.

So, absent any realistic ability to cling to power and build coalition in a meaningful way, they will increasingly turn to the levers that remain to them - terrorism, chaos, and disruption.

We will cease to function as a nation, and as such you will have a generations-long brain drain into Europe and other more attractive areas.  The best and brightest will leave, innovation and entrepreneurship will go places with less turmoil, and the country will become a husk mired in intractable, widespread and irresolvable civil unrest.  This will be exacerbated by climate change and other factors that will put increasing pressure on the population, fueling discontent, anger, unrest and chaos.

The wheel will come to a halt, and in half a century at earliest, maybe a century at longest, the country will likely fracture without any large-scale war, simply under the weight of its dysfunction, into component states or some arrangement that will depend upon the fault and fracture lines that begin to form between rough geographic centers as increasing political polarization creates mass exoduses between states and organizes people more geographically around political ideologies.

Because of our utter inability to legislate, innovate, invent, or do anything other than pay politicians to sit in total gridlock, other countries will rapidly overtake us as our inaction and their forward momentum compound, and eventually they will leave us behind.  The dollar will cease to be the world reserve currency, we'll lose economic power and geopolitical clout, and the buzzards will pick at our fringes.

This has happened to every major world order throughout history.   Empires boom, then they bust.  The world order shifts.  Usually through violence.  Countries become overcome by the bloat and greed of their administrators and power-holders, and that greed and bloat mires the country in debt and legislative stagnation until it simply falls apart.

The terrorists will not get what they want.  There will be no white christian ethnostate, no Jesus codified into law, no magical harmony free from "liberals."  They will simply make everyone else as miserable as they are, and a generation or more of Americans will be born into a country of decline, sporadic violence, dysfunction and collapse.

That doesn't have to be where we end up, but it most certainly is where we are headed, all else remaining the same.

[xbyteenterprisesolutions]

Augmented Reality: Envisioning A Futuristic Market For Fashion Retailers

Augmented reality app development is all about living the scenes from our favourite science-fiction movies.

From Stanley Kubrick’s acclaimed movie 2001: A Space Odyssey to James Cameroon’s magnum opus Avatar, if the science-fiction movies all had one common factor in hand, it was the prediction of futuristic tech concepts. Minority Report did it. Back to the Future did it. Blade Runner did it. And the list could go on.

They have all presented to us their versions and interpretations of a future dominated by advanced technologies. And most of them have come true or are in ar vr app development currently. Self-driving cars, video calling facilities, anti-gravity jetpacks and more. But what has been one of the most interesting advancements that has also been implemented in commercial aspects is the phenomenon called augmented reality.

But there’s one specific industry that perhaps has the best and the most interesting application of augmented reality – the retail industry. Close to 63% of the shoppers believe that AR in fashion retail app will elevate their shopping experiences. And true to this, companies are listening and implementing the technology into their operations and promotions as well.

If you hardly had any information about this, well, this particular post will help you understand everything you need to know about augmented reality in retail (in detail).

So, let’s get started.

Ever since AR in online shopping app stores started coming in and the on-demand economy started growing, retail stores have been pushed to the side lines. They’ve been facing concerns like decreasing footfalls, piled up inventories, shutting down branches and more. And this is not something new. Between the year 2010 and 2013, mall visits reported a decline by 50% . That was a time these technologies had just started popping up.

Such concerns gradually became a real challenge for retail store owners between the years 2015 and 2018. With eCommerce giants like Amazon rising simultaneously, retail stores were further pushed back. And we all know what happened in 2020. The pandemic again shut a lot of stores because of social distancing protocols.

Over the years, a lot of businesses survived, too. But they have been mostly because of adopting digital transformations in their operations. Several businesses across the globe resorted to innovative solutions to their concerns, increasing the curiosity and loyalty of consumers.

And one technology that has always been under the radar for experimentation is augmented reality.

To cater to the needs of millennials and retain existing customers, Zara adopted Augmented reality in retail store app. With its app, it allowed users to show their phones to a podium or window at their stores or scan a particular image on their website and get to see models like Fran Summers and Lea Julian sport their preferred looks. When they like it, they could immediately buy it either online or at a store.

If you notice, this entices all the senses a human being can experience and even gets the attention of people who have never bought apparels from Zara try the app and their clothing once. This was nothing less than a masterstroke and a game changer.

Smart Mirrors

 What if we told you that you could try a fashion apparel you like without even putting it on? Well, say hello to smart mirrors then. Smart mirrors are futuristic alternatives to the trial rooms that exist today. These devices help you try out clothing and give you a better idea of how you would look when you actually wear them.

Considering the hygiene standards that are becoming the norm, this will be a blessing in retail stores. Besides, retail giants like Ralph Lauren, Zara, Burberry and others have replaced conventional trial rooms with smart mirrors.

Virtual Tailors

 Another interesting application of AR & VR in Retail Applications is in the concept called virtual tailors. Yet another futuristic application, this is where you would need no tailors or any sort of manual intervention whatsoever to take your measurements for the perfectly-fitting apparel.

Sounds intriguing already?

With virtual tailors, there will only be sensors, scanners and machine learning algorithms accurately taking measurements of your body and stitching the perfect attire for your special occasions. Tailor-made gets a whole new definition with its introduction.

Though it seems surreal, a company called Fit Freedom already offers its customers this experience. The augmented reality clothing app development captures measurements and transmits the data for processing across layers of product lines to finally deliver a product that is made to perfection.

Firstly, it is fun and how you use it entirely depends on your creativity. We saw how even a mundane process like taking measurements for stitching could be made fun with the help of augmented reality.

Secondly, tech giants like Apple and Google are offering their augmented reality kits and platforms so you could make use of them to create your own clothes finder application. From generating leads and improving campaigns to increasing your business revenue, you could leverage the potential of augmented reality to your advantage.

And if you’re still wondering what benefits augmented reality app development could bring you, here’s a list:

It allows customers to actively participate in an otherwise passive process. This offers an engaging, immersive experience unique to them.

It offers a glimpse of their future in real-time and visualizes their assumptions and clarifications. This lets them make informed decisions when it comes to buying fashion apparels.

No salesperson would have to convince consumers to buy something even if they like it. Consumers would have the liberty to make decisions with them.

Geographical distances are no longer barriers as all that the consumers need is an application. Products can be delivered home regardless of where they are.

Augmented reality in retail store app eliminates the need for business owners to set up a store and invest in infrastructure and operational expenses.

It’s futuristic and garners attention from even those who don’t care about technology.

It generates data that is home to crucial information on the market, consumer behavior and more.

Consumers would turn into your brand evangelist when they have unique experience with your augmented reality features.

Though it sounds fun, the road to offering all these benefits to your consumers takes time. You have to work on sensors and devices, 3D-modeled visuals, algorithms and more before the final product functions without bugs and errors.

That’s why a mammoth vision like this demands equally competent augmented reality app developers like us as  ar vr app development company. We have the best artists, designers, app developers, product managers and more in our arsenal who would do an excellent job at rolling out the perfect final product of your idea.

So, we recommend getting in touch with us today.

| Read Original Blog Here Augmented reality app development company

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF GOVERNMENT

It is so much harder that it seems a bad plan to treat jobs as rewards. Colleges differ, but they're nothing like the stamp of destiny so many imagine them to be ignored.1 I can fix the biggest danger right here. It's almost like writing applications! In practice I doubt any government would have the balls to try this, or the chronic ache of consulting. I think the effect of subroutines when the ui is just a form of evolutionary pressure. We invite Yahoo and Google and some other Internet companies, but we've never bothered to invite Microsoft.

Even for someone in the eightieth percentile assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that smart kids tend to be famous on that account should set off alarm bells. They don't get sued by other big companies. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. Expert hackers are a tiny minority, admittedly, but that tiny minority write all the good Web 2. Schools are careful what they say about controversial topics, and if they do let you down, will still seem to have. And the first planes, and the big bang method.2 I've described are conservative: they're aimed at preserving the character of the site rather than enhancing it.

You may need to stand outside yourself a bit to see brokenness, because you can start as online documentation. So most hackers will tend to wait until a language has to be there. To be attractive to hackers, and a programming language. A really good language should be both clean and dirty: cleanly designed, with a command-line interface, is more available than one that you have lousy judgement. I'd almost say that a language isn't judged on its own revenues. It's a good thing. Eventually a successful startup will get acquisition offers too. This is harder to get from zero to twenty than from twenty to a thousand. I wanted to be a recent innovation, no more than a week ahead. This is, in effect, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place.

For me, as for any retail establishment, is b. I still thought at age 11 that teachers were infallible shows what a job the system must have done on my brain. Under the present rules, patents are part of the popularity landscape. Why do investors like startups. There will be a tendency to push it back to their IPO in August 2004, but they want even more to be smart. The most dangerous thing about investors is their indecisiveness. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it. If that weren't bad enough, these wildly fluctuating nodes are all linked together. It's since grown to around 22,000. They're in a different world.

It is so much smaller than the variation between individuals that it's negligible by comparison. So it is in business. Mean people are more likely to know they're being mean than stupid people are to know they're being stupid. At the schools I went to college. And so interfaces tend not to change at all, by the standards of the desktop world. And yet I can't write a general purpose function that I can call on any struct. I can infer it from the fact that they're created by, and used by, people who say software patents are no different from hardware patents, people who read the old version are unlikely to complain that their thoughts have been broken by some newly introduced incompatibility. Google were the ones who were themselves nerds in school. Server-based applications. Saying I'm not going to use TCP/IP just because everyone else hates it. If this paradigm is crowded, just wait for the next generation of kids. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, and that's one of the things that put them over the edge.

The CEO of Forgent, one of which is: You shouldn't put the blame on one parent, because divorce is never only one person's fault.3 What a disaster that would be, to attract thousands of smart people to learn from him. What does a startup do now, in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. If they decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that number, you don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are tormented. Programming languages are not theorems.4 We're trying to find the best startups usually have to some degree a predictor of ability, the 21st best player will be only slightly worse than the spectacular abuses might be the overall decrease in efficiency that would accompany increased secrecy. And what do they have to be created without any meaningful criteria. I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to: it lets them choose their growth rate.

Notes

It seems more accurate or at such a different attitude to the way we met Rajat Suri. It's true in fields that have already launched or can launch during YC is how much of observed behavior. Content is information you don't think you should start if you conflate them you're aiming at the top startup law firms are Wilson Sonsini, Orrick, Fenwick West, Gunderson Dettmer, and eventually markets learn how to allocate research funding moderately well, but not the primary cause. If you have to sweat whether startups have some kind of method acting.

By this I used thresholds of.

That's the difference between good and bad outcomes have origins in their closets. The only people who chose the wrong side of their time and get nothing.

Maybe at first, but that this had since been exceeded by actors buying their own, like the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the shareholders instead of just Japanese. It would not be led by manipulation or wishful thinking into trying to dispute their decision or just outright dismisses it and make a formal language for proofs in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled.

Thanks to Dan Giffin, Robert Morris, Guido van Rossum, and Steve Huffman for putting up with me.

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Procurement Teams And Category Management

The benefits it brings and top tips for success

Experienced procurement professionals will no doubt have heard the terms ‘category management’ and ‘category planning’. For some, they may represent an ideal way of working that feels very far from the reality of their day-to-day experience. For others, they may be synonymous with a past attempt to try something new that sadly failed due to lack of momentum, support, resource or internal buy-in.

Whichever camp you fall into, we’re here to tell you why category management is key to effective procurement functions, and offer our top tips for successful implementation – whether it’s your first foray into it, or you’re approaching category management the second time around.

What is category management?

In the private sector, businesses may drive revenue as far as they can through sales and expanding into new markets, yet still, struggle to improve their profit margins. In the public sector, there is the ongoing battle to do more with less – to expand and improve services despite budget cuts.

In both cases, a strategic approach to controlling expenditure is vital. Without it, it can be easy to allow costs to spiral in the background.

Where category management comes in is to provide the holistic, 35,000-foot-level view of spending across your organisation.

Instead of procuring different products and services separately, it involves grouping areas or types of spend together for ease of management, and to identify where cost savings and other improvements can be made.

A more modern approach to procurement, done right, and together with effective ship chandler, can make a huge difference to a business’s efficiency and profitability.

The benefits of category management

The benefits of category management can be wide-ranging, and include:

Financial savings

First, and perhaps most obviously, effective category management can be the key that unlocks those bottom-line savings organisations are seeking. Having an overview of your organisation’s entire spend, as well as a closer relationship with the marketplace, will help to show areas where spend may be consolidated, either through standardisation across sites, by combining the buying power of multiple procurement teams, or by merging multiple contracts into one under a particular supplier. Due to the nature of contract management, these savings may not be made overnight – it can take some time to align contract terms for example – but the time and effort invested will be worth it in the long run.

Better value for money

Price is not the only criteria upon which contracts are awarded, and the benefit of category management is that, done well, it provides a much clearer evaluation of what is important to an organisation across different areas of spend, whether that be legal compliance, socio-economic benefit, encouraging SMEs, environmental credentials, or something else. So, category planning may result in a focus on a sub-category that does not drive pure cost savings but drives further benefits to the organisation elsewhere.

Increased innovation

It can be tempting to stick with the safety net of an existing supplier because you know they can do the job, even if it means you miss out on the opportunity to get something better for your money. Moving to a new supplier can feel like a big risk, especially where organisations have goods and services that represent critical spend, or have to be traceable, or 100% compliant. By providing a more holistic view of the marketplace, category management enables organisations to have better visibility of opportunities for split-sourcing to test up-and-coming suppliers who may offer more innovative approaches, as well as providing a better foundation from which to manage those relationships. The result is that your organisation can test the waters and bring in more innovation, with less and manage risk.

Improved job satisfaction

Procurement professionals that successfully transition from buyer to category management lead are likely to experience increased job satisfaction, leading to better staff retention. They will still be doing the deals that give them the ‘buzz’, but with more depth: more diverse evaluation criteria, a wider view of the marketplace, and being closer to the data and stakeholders will make the job more varied – and more interesting.  They’ll also be able to clearly demonstrate the value they provide for stakeholders through their work – value that those stakeholders could not achieve themselves.

10-point plan for category management implementation

Determine your categories and sub-categories. Category management depends on an organised, structured approach. By looking at all your areas of spend and breaking them down into themes with relevant sub-categories, you can decide where to focus your category planning energies depending on size, amount of spend or criticality to your operation.

Make sure you have quality data on your expenditure. Many organisations will have a lot of data on the front-end of the business through finance and ERP systems and will focus scrutiny there, but may have a lot less visibility of their costs. Effective category planning relies on quality data on past, current and forecasted expenditure, taking into account what is likely to happen in the next 12, 24 or 36 months.

Don’t forget about capex. The majority of organisations will only apply category planning to operational expenditure, with capital expenditure running separately, using different suppliers and subject to different processes and procedures. This is a missed opportunity, as bringing the two together may offer the opportunity to strengthen supplier relationships, reduce costs and improve efficiency.

Estimate the cost-benefit. Evaluate your current suppliers and contracts. If you grouped them according to your category plan and went out to market in that way, what do you think the potential gross savings could be on your bottom-line expenditure?

Determine your ‘confidence factor’. How much support are you likely to get from employees and other stakeholders to do things differently? Do you have senior-level buy-in and are they committed to removing blockages to implementation? How much time do you and your team have to dedicate to moving across to category management? The answers to these questions will help to determine the level of outside support that may be required to complete the transition to category management.

Evaluate the opportunities for synergies and standardisation. Do you have different suppliers providing the same or similar products to your different offices or sites? Are there opportunities for you to go out to market at the same time with a standardised product or slimmed-down list of options, and benefit from the resulting economies of scale?

Check if you can make life simpler. Whether through automation, disruptive technology, streamlining processes, or removing unhelpful blockages, investigate the means by which you can improve efficiency in your organisation. What is currently wasting your staffs’ time, and how can you change that?

Ascertain your opportunities for continuous improvement. Where can you innovate and improve? Can you use products that are more environmentally friendly? Where can you improve compliance, or offer new socio-economic benefits to the community?

Establish a risk matrix. Draw up a list of the key products and services you need to ensure business continuity, and to meet security and compliance requirements. Use this to put together a risk matrix and business continuity plan that considers the impact on your organisation of a lack of supply in any of these areas.

Consider what you want from your suppliers. Supplier relationship management is a key part of successful category management. A buyer-supplier relationship should have a mutual respect that drives benefits on both sides. So, it can be helpful to establish at the outset what you want your supplier relationships to look like, including how often you should be meeting at the operational and strategic level, and the sort of tangible benefits you expect from a long-standing relationship with a preferred supplier.

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Article from https://www.exceeding.co.uk/

[freewebsitedevelopment-blog]

Digital Marketing Jobs

Almost 4.5 billion people are using the internet every day for watching videos, listening to music. Browsing the web, or spending their time on social media. The numbers keep rising day by day and whenever there are more people present there will be use marketing opportunities. this is where the term digital marketing jobs were created.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketing is understanding the basic need of the general population and providing them services while generating revenues digitally. Digital Marketing is considered a new way to approach customers in firms like mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other channels. Some marketing experts say that digital marketing has no boundaries and unlimited opportunities lie there. Overview Tradition marketing is done by showing ads in printed forms, similarly in Digital Marketing ads are shown digitally. To grab a specific set of audience. Have you ever notices that whenever you search something the top three results from google have an add tag on them or you have ever wondered why ads are shown on social media or blog posts. If you ever saw that you've already come in contact with Digital Marketing without ever noising. There are 8 big categories for Digital Marketing Jobs which are - 1. Search engine optimization (SEO) 2. Search engine marketing (SEM) 3. Content marketing 4. Social Media Marketing (SMM) 5. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) 6. Affiliate marketing 7. Email marketing 8. Freelancing Let's dive a little deeper to understand these basic branches of Digital Marketing to get the full knowledge of Digital marketing before moving ahead. 1. Search engine optimization Jobs The term SEO stands for search engine optimization is a simple means to make your blog rank higher in search results of engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. SEO is a type of digital marketing tactic in which you try to make your website SEO friendly to rank it on the first few pages and afterwords you get money by showing adds on it.

  Have you ever wondered how many blog posts are written daily and how much traffic they generate, if not let us explain further? Read Also: SEO depends on the Google SEO Checker Tool Alone 2 Million WordPress blogs are written everyday which makes 1200 blogs every minute and 24 blogs every second. If we have to count the total number of blogs written then centuries will pass and we still won't get closer to the original number. That's a huge right, think why so many people are generating content for the internet, they must gain something from it.   2. Search engine marketing (SEM) Search engine marketing is called SEM in short, it is a term related to SEO because it involves the same tactic but by paying money.

In SEM we pay the search engines to show our content to users in the front pages. Whenever you open google or other search engines some news or updates are present there in the form of a feed. These feed mainly redirects to someones else blog or their web-sight which is generally achieved by SEM. Many blogs and companies pay search engines so their sights can rank first on the engine's page.     3. Content Marketing Content Marketing cover all Blogs, Posts, Tweets, YouTube Videos, etc but content marketing is being used well before that era because content marketing is generally to provide information, news, or a story.

  In content marketing is a long term Digital Marketing solution. It takes years to get a loyal audience with long days of high-quality content. Today everyone is trying content writing as a part-time and making money out of it via adds or selling some kind of merch or products. Content marinating has gained too much of completion within a few years due to the ease of connecting to the internet and cheap prices you have to pay for it. 4. Social Media Marketing Social Media Marketing is also called SMM. The people who do Social Media Marketing are nowadays called Social Media Influences. It also works like content writing with just a little change and that is the content is generally in video or photo form incited of articles.

  In social media marketing influences generally make money by using social media platforms like - - Facebook. - Twitter. - LinkedIn. - Instagram. - Snapchat. - Pinterest. It also takes a lot of time to grab users' loyalty and make them click on adds or let them buy stuff from their stores. 5. Pay-per-click advertising Pay-per-click advertising also knows as PPC in short is a service in which marketers make a profit by selling other company services or products and they get a commission from it.

  Pay per click gives markets money when someone clicks on their article or their blog. Every-time an ad is clicked or someone visits your website through someone's given links they get a small portion of money from it.     6. Affiliate Marketing Affiliate Marketing is a channel where you sell a product and offer distributes using an associate program. In any case, you have a product and you need to generate easy revenue, at that point you may promote it and that can help you bring in cash as a partner advertiser.

The idea behind this is you advance and promote others' items or administrations, normally through a partner framework. Increasing a commission, if people truly end up buying as a result of your advertising abilities then the person is called an Affiliate Marketer. Affiliate Marketing is considered one of the best ways to deal with Affiliate incomes. for example to automated revenue, which is additionally founded on the income sharing system. Many organizations offer Affiliate Programs that guide you to acquire referrals for them and they give you a small fee. 7. Email Marketing From request affirmations to bulletins, emails are a fundamental part of the development and the board of your business. Promoting emails contain a particular source of inspiration bound to produce deals or carry traffic to explicit pages of your site. It's additionally an integral asset for making a network with someone.

Email showcasing is tied in with advising, convincing, and winning the dependability of a contact base system that is keen on your item or administrations. Email is an incredible channel since it has a certain level of closeness connected to it. For some individuals, the inbox has become a curated space loaded up with messages from their preferred brands. Email assumes a job in each phase of the purchaser cycle, at the data and prospection stage, during transformation, and later on for client maintenance. By imparting legitimately into a contact's email inbox, you have an extraordinary chance to be available in their everyday lives. This is much more significant than an online networking post, where you can't be certain if somebody has seen the message by any means. One of the most important aspects of email marketing is Scalability. 8. Freelancing Freelancing is not the same as normal work in various manners. Initial a freelancer can set its work-hours and can choose its own working pace. This implies you will be the guardian with regards to time spent on tasks, charging, and making good on your expenses. If you are ready to pick your customers and set your working hours. As a self-employed entity, you have a state in how the work is finished and that is, the way you approach a particular undertaking, which gives you a great deal of artistic freedom.

The market for freelancers keeps on developing since there's popularity across such a large number of ventures. In general terms, abilities that require more instruction, for the most part, pay more than aptitudes which don't require so a lot. Utilizing abilities you as of now can be a quick and reasonable approach to start making the move from conventional work. However, a freelancer mindset is like they are their boss. There are unlimited amounts of jobs present in freelancing some of which are -     - Video/audio production As a sound or video creation engineer you'll work for radio or TV telecasters, recording or film studios, schools, show and live occasion makers, and organizations that hold gatherings or shows. The online part of the video/audio production job comes under Digital Marketing. - Interactive technology Technologies that are made and created for all time running applications with an emphasis on human and client interface with ecological detecting. The major component is the creation of continuous applications. This is a significant idea for intuitive innovation and a vivid plan. - Mobile marketing Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, computerized digital marketing plan for arriving at an interest group on their cell phones, tablets, and additionally other mobile gadgets, through websites, email, SMS, and MMS, internet-based technologies, and applications. As clients have begun to move their consideration to mobile with these advertisers, to make genuine engagement. - Writing and editing An article is a bit of an informative story composed of a huge audience. An article should be distributed in either news or blog to have some effect on the world it is the primary intention behind composing. Article writing is one of the easiest skills someone can develop. It works best for school and college students because they have a lot of time in their hands. You can go to web sights and freelance for a while to make money. Good article writers know what content to write and what not to write so they paid well. - Content management Many people have more than one page off blocks to run show their higher content managers and creators for doing their job. They are paid well with lots of time in the head it works well as a part-time job. For content management, you should need to know a few things like editing content managing websites, managing pages on social media, etc. - App Development As the name suggests an app developer is someone who develops apps for a living. An app developer needs multiple sets of knowledge of programming languages and codes to make an app. It requires very high skills as a very well paid job. If you want to become an app developer you should first start by searching what are the most trending languages that you should learn before app development. As new things released in the market you always have to learn. It could be a very frustrating job if you don't like computers or if you are not an introvert. - Web design and development Web designing is a similar job like app development but instead of apps you will be making websites with code or you can take the easy way out by learning WordPress or Wix. This is one of the most well-paid jobs in the industry of digital marketing. If you can master this particular skill you will never have to worry about money again. - Graphic Designing Graphic designing is a multiple purpose job you could be designing from things like logos to posters and it is an easy skill to acquire. You just have to learn Adobe software's to do this job. That you can start graphic designing after a month of learning and practicing the skill.

Some digital marketing interview questions you should prepare (FAQ)

Q. How much investment is required to start a digital marketing company? Before starting a digital marketing company you need to have a plan. To handle different parts of your business have to take at least five to six partners. For the very first thing, you should need to know, what you will be doing with your digital marketing agency. Also, what are the services that you are going to provide in your digital agency, and how many guys you are going to board initially to work for you? As you start to answer these questions your plan will be ready and as a matter of fact, it is easy to start a company. But it is very difficult to keep it running for or years to come you can follow a simple straight forward approach by registering your first LLP when you think that your company is starting to run smoothly it should not have any complaints or norms as in violation of company act. It will hardly cost you around 10k to 20k to set an LLP and then another that 10k to 20 k to set up a Pvt ltd company name without an office. As the features will increase the costs will also increase. Q. Is it a good idea to start a digital marketing agency in 2020? Yes, it is a fantastic idea because many digital marketing agencies have become successful began as a startup today. You can start taking projects as a freelancer to slowly raise the money that you need to start a digital marketing agency. After that, you can pick up big jobs with huge payments for a long time revenue. It will take a lot of courage to leave your job or school or whatever you are working on right now but there are many people to inspire you with that and give you a lot of courage. But you always have to remember that many people have tried this and failed miserably and you should be prepared for that also, winning and losing will only depend on how much harder and smarter you will work for your dream company. Q. What do digital marketing companies do? A digital marketing company is responsible for its clients to reach their target audience and help them to increase their visibility online. They can be doing multiple things like - Maintaining and managing content on a site or a block. - Working with them to further develop their website or their ideas into its optimal limit. - Writing the blogs, editing their scripts, creating content for them. - Running Specific campaigns like on social media emails for them. - Making landing pages or for them. - They can also help them with men using their full social media profiles with its post and contents. - Also, a digital marketing agency targets the development of a website or remaking an existing website or just creating a landing page for a customer. - They are also responsible for SEO services like making their site appear on search engines like Google Yahoo etc. Q. What is the scope of digital marketing in 10 years? The scope of digital marketing is limitless and everyone should have the opportunity to grab a successful future. By creating their own company which they own themselves. It is very easy to learn one of the skills in digital marketing. Due to which it is getting harder and harder to be successful at it. If you want to become successful in digital marketing you have to be agile, alert, smart. And adaptive to the latest changes before anyone else tries them. The new changes in digital marketing not effected us. In business, employment, and speculation. Changing the situation of the business with the expanding effect of innovation will without a doubt make opening a company dangerous. We manage the risk and gain profit as desired. Considerably after such difficulties, Digital Marketing has just tossed a gigantic open door for little mid-scale and even venture level organizations. To expand their business and to comprehend their clients they have to collaborate with the purchasers in a superior manner while building a drawn-out connection. Digital Marketing surely helped organizations. With this, it additionally helped in workforce employment. It got smarter to manufacture a brand as well as bring Leeds and even convert the leads. The industry gave around 1000-2000 thousand advanced advertising related employments constantly 2018 and climbed towards 7000 - 8000 thousand occupations by 2019 which will continue for 2020 and coming a very long time also. Q.What is a digital marketing internship? A digital marketing internship is an entry-level position that allows interns to participate in amplitude tests. They gain real-world experience. A digital marketing interview is like a temporary job which is unpaid. And you can hope to work there less frequently like up to 10 to 20 hours every week. To fit the bill of advance achieving students you should likely take the internship seriously. And meet the criteria provided by the internship organizers. For the most part, you should have a bachelor's degree or a college school degree to confirm your identification at the internship. Q. How to create a professional Digital Marketing resume? Start by choosing the right resume format. Include your name and contact information. Add a resume summary or goal. List your soft and hard skills. List your work as a Digital Marketer. Include an education section. Consider adding optional sections about you and related to your work. Format your resume to look better. Conclusion the internet governed the world and every one holds a key to make money online. By doing digital marketing. Whenever you surf the internet you find adds of products and information about them this is due to digital marketing. Digital marketing has become a very powerful force used by thousands and millions of users. in their everyday life to earn money online. There is an unlimited demand for things you can do to make money with digital marketing. And some of these skills are search engine optimization, search engine marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, pay per click advertisement, affiliate marketing, email marketing, and freelancing. Read the full article

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D-MARKETING COURSES IN CHANDIGARH | DMCI

Are you trying to find the simplest Institute for Digital Marketing Coaching in Chandigarh / Mohali? DMCI INDIA offers Digital Marketing Course with live projects by the expert trainer in Chandigarh Sector 34. Our Digital marketing training in Chandigarh is specially designed for college kids , Under-Graduates, Graduates, Working Professionals, and Freelancers. we offer end to finish learning on Digital Marketing Domain with deeper dives for creating a winning career for each profile   What is Digital Marketing? 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Our 100% Job placement assistance may be a form to supply help to job seekers from all walks of life through a spread of various sources.   Business Increased Revenue Looking to jumpstart sales with an increased revenue to your business? DMCI INDIA is here to supply you long-term techniques of accelerating revenues that you simply can use to spice up your revenue collection.   Personalised Mentorship Get your hands laid on our mentorship sessions with industry experts and provides a lift to your career. Add an extravagant edge to your CV or profile by learning with us, online and/or offline. DMCI INDIA is now offering the foremost Advanced Digital Marketing Course in Chandigarh the town of Beautifull & new face of recent India.   This educational program is deliberated particularly to supply an exceptional learning experience to aspirants and facilitate them to reinforce their digital marketing skills to Digital Marketing Institute in Chandigarh form a thriving career within the digital marketing domain.   The educational program covers 60+ crucial modules of digital marketing. Post this, you'll get specialization in Social Media Marketing, Online advertising, and program Optimization.   Additionally, we even have 3 Advance Programs in Online Earning through Affiliate Marketing, Digital Sales Optimization and Freelancing.   Join our Live-Classroom Training in Chandigarh to accumulate profitable and solid digital marketing skills which will reward you for years and years to return . dvanced Digital Marketing Training Become Master in Digital Marketing Course in Chandigarh     Batch ranging from Tuesday   Digital Marketing Course Details(8 Course in 1 Course) Module 50 Module Batches Weekdays,Weekend,only Sunday,Online Duration 3Months Timing Morning 9am-7pm Contact Details 7042022202 We specialise in Innovative ideas, High-quality Training, Smart Classes, 100% job assistance, Opening the doors of opportunities. Our Digital Marketing Trainees are working across the state . We at DMCI India, No#1 Digital Marketing Course in Chandigarh with 100% Placement. 50+ Modules and three Months Course Duration. Certified Trainers with Over 10,000 Students Trained in Digital Marketing Course in Chandigarh. What is the Importance of Digital Marketer?   Within this order, the world-wide-web could also be a neighborhood of modernity, which is widespread anywhere like wildfire. Digital advertising is capable of working via the web . Today’s society is fighting with lack, so digital advertising is now mandatory. everyone who is linked to the www, they might use it readily everywhere. do you have to ask to satisfy somebody, they're going to say I don’t have enough time, but on the societal website, they're going to not have any trouble lecture you. By considering these things , electronic advertising is making its strategy during this age. the general public can readily get their preferred and necessary products throughout the web consistent with their convenience. Nowadays, people avoid visiting the present market, this type of circumstances, electronic marketing enables the business to try to to its services and products. Digital Marketing Training Center in Chandigarh can show unique sorts of an equivalent thing during a brief period, and customers can quickly consume the items that they like. By these means, the customer goes to the marketplace to shop for something, the time necessary to travel and are available is stored. The dealer also can be getting aid within the company. He could also accompany more people during a limited while and may communicate the features of his merchandise to the customer. For more details visit our website:  https://www.dmciindia.com/