Work around international shipping restrictions

When making purchases online or if you wish to have a parcel delivered to your home, sometimes your region might be subject to international shipping restrictions. Similarly, if you are a seller, you might be faced with a situation where you cannot deliver your packages to your client due to international shipping restrictions. A solution to this issue would be to opt for mail forwarding services.

As an individual or as a company, the mail forwarding service provider might offer you the possibility of having a US address. Then you would be able to link the mail forwarding service to this address. The international mail forwarding company would then handle the remailing of your packages to you at your home address. This would allow you to order products from US-only companies even if you are not in the USA. Some companies tend to offer only domestic shipping. Therefore having a US address would help you solve this issue and enable you to have access to different products.

These mail forwarding companies often allow you to view the volume of mails and packages received through an online interface and offer you the possibility to choose the most convenient moment to have the packages delivered to you. This is convenient for people who tend to travel a lot or are not often home.

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Ashley Madison was Hacked: Don’t Panic and Read This

Written by Reputation Stars.

Ashley_MadisonAshley Madison bills itself as the discreet place to have an affair online, but hackers have taken any discretion out of the site entirely after releasing 9.7 gigabytes of data on the website’s user base. This data includes everything from addresses to credit card numbers, with some information about personal preferences mixed in. If you are concerned your information was leaked, here are the facts you need to know.

You Can Check if Your Info Was Leaked

Whether you knew you joined Ashley Madison or someone plugged your email address into the field without your knowledge, there is a good chance that your email address was leaked if it was in the Ashley Madison database. There are two methods you can use to check if your address was included:

  1. Google your name and your email address. This will bring up any URLs hosting your information.
  2. Use a website like Trustify to search for your email address. These forms check your email address against the database.

Know the Risks

If your email was included in the list, it’s too late to turn back. That doesn’t mean you should ignore the potential risks you face. If your spouse finds out, your marriage could crumble. If your work found out, you could lose your job. In fact, that may be reality for the 15,000 or so email addresses belonging to .gov or .mil organizations.

There are also problems that can come with your identifiable information becoming public. Most people who signed up for Ashley Madison did so with faked credentials, but those who paid the website to remove their profiles also had their information leaked in this breach.

If this happened to you, don’t waste time. Hire a reputation management company to minimize the damage.

For more coverage on this hack, click here. If you are looking to get your data removed from Ashley Madison click here.

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The Risks of Today’s Modern Business Environment

Running your own company has never been easy. However, if you speak to people who have had their own business for decades now, they’ll tell you a tough truth: it’s harder now than ever before. Despite all the technology available to you and the potential for a greater market than in decades past, modern companies have to put up with all kinds of challenges.

Much of this comes from our own government in the form of various regulations and laws. Sadly, they were passed with the best of intentions, but just don’t have this effect. What most business owners have found is that they are constantly trying to get by but are instead held up by bureaucracy.

You probably know this if you’re familiar with workers’ compensation in Santa Ana. If an employee gets hurt while working for you, your company could have a very large lawsuit it needs to handle. The laws are written in such a way, though, that you’ll almost certainly be paying out.

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Tips on Dealing With “.Sucks” Domains for your Reputation Management

Article written by Pierre Zarokian of Reputation Stars.

dot sucks 3Today’s business needs to manage both its PR and marketing efforts, and likely has to contract out if the resources aren’t available in house. That’s completely different from the past, when companies learned about their consumer through product testing and market research groups. Today’s type of consumer brings his frustrations to social sites like Facebook or personal blogs. She may tweet about it or join a hash tag conversation. Even that public outlet was mostly harmless. It made consumers feel better, but did little damage to a company’s reputation. Even so, the .sucks URL suffix threatens to completely alter the business of reputation management.

Now that the .sucks domain names are on their way officially, companies and businesses will need to determine if owning potentially harmful Web properties is worth the cost, or if they want to leave their brand to fate. There’s a small time frame approaching wherein well-known brands and a-listers are able to invest in their .sucks Web property, after which availability is going to be available for everyone else. Of course, these businesses posses much more ambitious marketing plans and a lot more data on these problems.

However, the significant cost, in addition to slowed entry into the program for the general public, will mean that smaller sized companies and groups can expect to be out of luck when they cannot cover the harsh expenses in order to keep a website functioning. We are headed for an entirely different kind of trolling. Patent trolls that stifle innovation, comment trolls that derail conversation and soon “domain trolls” will manipulate results and slander the names of businesses and individuals.

Will you shell out money for ICANN protection?

Does your business have a backup plan if consumers open a “.sucks” name about you?

Article was submitted by Pierre Zarokian of Reputation Stars. They provided reputation management services.

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An Introduction to Time Tracking Software for Online Businesses

If you employ people for your business, there’s a lot to take into consideration. If you pay them by the hour, one of your main points of interest is probably how many hours they spend working for you. This is when the right kind of time machine can come in handy.

Of course, in today’s work, it’s often the case that you never see your actual employees. If you run an online business, they could be working for you on the other side of the world. But with online time tracking, you can be rest assured that you know when they’re clocking in, clocking out and how long they’re working.

While this is often helpful when it comes to assessing the qualities of your employees, it’s essential when it comes time to pay them. You need a tracking application that is reliable and makes the actual payment process a breeze.

There’s no shortage of what online resources can do in terms of tracking your employee’s hours. Therefore, you should only consider software that also makes it easy to see, at a glance, when your employees missed work, clocked in late, left early, etc. Hopefully, these aren’t issues you deal with often, but this is still a nice benefit to have.

Just because you have employees who aren’t working right in front of you doesn’t mean you can’t keep an eye on their time. Utilize the right online option for time-tracking and the process is no problem.

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Management Support

If you’re part of an organization and the boss doesn’t advance your ideas up the management ladder, you might be wondering how one can change that.
You can find people complaining about this everywhere in organizations, in project teams, frontline departments and every group that needs someone from upper management to approve their ideas. All in all, almost everyone has this problem.

People are frustrated when they think that they’re not listened to. This can be an issue because plenty of people think that respect is the same with listening. There is a good chance that the listening skill is good enough. The problem is usually that they don’t want to implement that idea or they don’t agree with it.
Below you can find some suggestions in case you want to get an improved response to the proposals you make.

Find out what the needs are. The proposal might be great, but the management might not be interested to improve that area of the company. Even if the problem that you solved is important, the bosses might not be aware of that, and their focus might be another one. Wondering how can you use the creative energy to solve the problems that actually interest the company leaders?

Make a business case. You probably know that if you want to get someone’s attention to your ideas, making a business case gives you a much better chance at success. It’s not always something easy to do though. For example, if your idea has a $20,000 price tag attached to it, even if the employee satisfaction is dramatically improved, you can’t be sure that they will accept it. What a manager really wants to know is how much money will the company make if they invest those $20,000. Learn to put a price on employee satisfaction and the increase in profits that it can bring. Don’t invent stuff, make sure it’s realistic.

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How to Protect Your Business from Theft

Theft in your business can affect you even when you’re not around to see it happen. Those are the times where it’s most likely to occur, and there is little you can do to protect yourself if you don’t take the necessary precautions. If you want to avoid a huge source of loss for your company, take these precautions to make sure your business can defend from theft.

Purchase Roll-Up Doors

Most storefronts in big cities use roll up doors to provide some protection from thieves looking to get into a building over night. The doors protect windows from breaking, something that simple accordion metal doors will not do. Roll up doors are easy to deploy each night before you leave the premises, and they are fitted with a simple padlock to keep them protected over night. Plus, they have the added advantage of being loud. Even if someone broke into your door, bystanders would certainly here it slide up during the theft.

Reinforce Doors

Reinforcing doors without windows can help you defend against intruders looking to gain entry through brute force. Entry doors at the rear of the building, for instance, rarely have glass and are easy to reinforce. Strike plates can also be installed, so that users cannot kick a door from the frame.

Motion Activated Lighting

If you replace some of the lighting in your main floor with motion-activated lighting, you’re bound to catch some thieves unprepared if they enter your store. The lighting should trigger the moment they are inside, instead of as they enter. This makes it easy to catch thieves in the act, especially if your store is rigged with a camera system to record their movements.

– ETO Doors is a customer door manufacturer with a showroom presence in Los Angeles and New York. ETO Doors reviews are available online, as well as the entire ETO Doors catalogue.

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Traditional Vs. New Age Marketing

As a business owner, marketing is one of the most valuable and expensive tools that can be utilized to help grow a business. Marketing contains many different branches and opportunities, from newspaper articles to street advertisements to television commercials.

These all differ in the people they reach, how they market to them, and in price.

With the advent and consumerism of the Internet, a new field has evolved, and it has changed the scope of marketing. From marketing a television commercial that reaches millions of people to only reaching a few thousand, how marketing is produced and consumed has dramatically shifted. It has thus created a problem for business owners- where should my money go- into traditional marketing or into new age marketing?

The answer to this question is dependent on the business and their customers. If the product is generic, and can work for many different people or is in need by many different customer profiles, then traditional marketing might work best for the company. However, if the product is specific and narrowed down to a very definitive type of customer, for example, wealthy, middle aged, woman who is healthy and interested in beauty products and care- this would require a more direct marketing plan to be effective.

Here are some details and pros and cons on each of these marketing paths:

Traditional:

This includes newspapers, television, radio announcements, or any other type of media that broadcasts to large numbers of people. Here, the quantity of viewers outweighs the specificity of the ad, because the product can appeal to most people.

Pros:

-Reaches the largest audience it can

-Focus is on the product

-Can be affordable enough to fit the business’ marketing budget

Cons:

-Unable to get customer/viewer feedback

-Is difficult to stay current with constant changing trends

-Repetitive- could bore potential clients

New Media:

This includes interactive advertisements online that entice the customer to view the ad in another window or allow the client to be redirected to the business’ website. This ranges from banner ads at the top of an internet page to display advertisements on the side bar of a webpage.

Pros:

-Developed with a specific target audience in mind, and only shown to that audience, which greatly increases ROI

-Able to be changed and replaced with a new ad very quickly

-Interacts with the audience, and allows the business to get immediate feedback from potential customers

Cons:

-Multiple ads are needed for different sites

-Research and time is needed to develop proper ads

-Usually more expensive than traditional advertising

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Upgrade your merchant account

Article by How Merchant Accounts Work.

In this modern age, nothing facilitates strengthened e-commerce and online sales volume the way online credit card merchant accounts can. With secure online credit card facilities, you and your business will see increased business revenues brought about by fast, reliable, and hassle-free payment systems that allow you to accept credit cards from all over the world. Use the power of secure online servers to help increase the speed and reliability of credit card payments and allow your customers to shop quicker, safer, and easier than ever before. With a reliable system enabling your business to accept payments as easily as swiping a card – or receiving card information – your customers will enjoy this newfound convenience in payment.

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Effective Tactics for Inbound Marketing

Display advertising has become crucial to business, and is one of the fastest growing channels in Internet marketing. It’s one of the most effective methods to increase leads from inbound marketing efforts, offering marketers a plethora of tools to track and test their offers. Having an understand of how inbound marketing works, including the most beneficial methods to use it, will help you find new channels to advertise and draw in more leads.

Optimization

Optimization can refer to either your website or your display advertising. It’s the practice of improving your website’s ability to engage the user, and includes many elements. For instance, optimization is used in search marketing to highlight certain key terms. In CPM advertising, it is used to improve the chances for a conversion to occur. Usually, you would optimize content above the fold (the halfway point of a Web page). You might also consider optimizing the headline, which is typically the first thing a user sees.

Optimization can also refer to the speed with which elements load on a website. This is crucial to banner advertising as you will be charged when the tracking pixel fires, regardless of whether the user sees your content. Faster page load times decrease the chances of poorly reported click data.

Content

The content of a website is what influences the user and the ad. Content reflects user intent, but it also determines what ads are relevant. Sites are usually organized by a particular theme, which is broad and over reaching like “tech” or “politics.” From there, the site usually has a specialty, like mobile tech or liberal news.

When you buy traffic from a buy-side platform, and you designate demographic targeting, the platform may use the content of the Web page (along with some backend statistical data) to determine whether your ad and the audience would be a good fit. Of course, bidding also plays a role, but it becomes easier to bid on a particular demographic once you understand more about what its audience is doing.

Final Thoughts

Understanding more about how the elements of marketing work together will impact your bottom line. Once you know the kind of content your audience reads, and how to optimize your ads to reach them, you will see an increase in conversions.

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