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Social Distancing has forced people to spend their time online and come up with creative digital experiments. Which is all good news for businesses since they now know where to get the eyeballs!

Zoom social meetups, Skype book clubs, Online bridge games, Periscope jam sessions, Online shopping spree, Cloud clubbing with DJs, Virtual yoga classes, Netflix streaming binges, Instagram Live Gym sessions – are now a way of life. Getting breaking news on Twitter, Facebook and Insta and mobile apps are the new normal.

FaceTime and VPN calls from friends and relatives who are trying to stave off loneliness are at a record high. It is reintroducing people to their families. The COVID-19 crisis is making people more grounded. It helps you reappreciate the wealth we have in a place like home.

If there is a silver lining in this crisis, it may be that the virus is forcing us to use the internet as it was always meant to be used, to connect with one another, share information and resources, and brainstorm collective solutions to common problems.

On average, people spend a staggering 6 hours and 42 minutes online each day. (My screen time is 8 hours 36 minutes!) In addition, more than four million blog posts and 500 million tweets are published every day. Research shows that people who consume social media actively by sending messages, leaving comments or participating in group chats, are happier people compared to couch potatoes who sit and watch TV all day.

As the real world continues to crumble before our eyes, all of us will be forced to embrace the virtual world. What seemed to be a distant reality is suddenly upon us. If you are looking to find solace on the internet, lurking alone won’t cut it, you need to contribute. Be a lead actor in the story or you will just be a character in the story!

Businesses now have an opportunity to deep dive into the web and reimagine their digital strategy. Ensure that you are offering your portfolio of products and services online with complete CRM and payment integration. Aggressive online and social media campaigns are just a few obvious options to consider.

We can either adapt and join the new mainstream of the virtual world or remain passive and left behind in loneliness. The choice is ours!

#StaySafe and #WFM

Sharad Agarwal is CEO of Cyber Gear

If COVID 19 has forced you to work from home, now is a good time to invest in your website audit. You can either do it yourself or hire a professional company to help you rank well in search results. Whether it’s Google, Bing or Yahoo, outsmarting their algorithm takes work.

It is also important to ensure that your website gets quality traffic from authority sites. The metric in off-site SEO that really moves the needle is referring domains.

This metric measures how many sites and domains point to your site. Backlinks let search engines know that other websites actually trust the content on your site.  In turn, they see it as a valuable, relevant website and rank it accordingly. If one site is sending 1,000 backlinks to you, it is still only one referring domain. Referring domains are a stronger signal than backlinks because it’s easier to manipulate a site to give you thousands of links, but it’s much harder to get 1,000 different domains to point to you.

It is clearly wise to secure backlinks from multiple domains. GuestPosts.biz can help you in writing quality articles and then publish them on your niche blogs. They will imbed ‘do-follow’ links which will drive traffic to your website. These backlinks will help your content to start to gain organic visibility within the Google search engine.

It is important to check the links that your competitors have developed and then approach similar domains to build traffic for your business. Not all backlinks and referring domains are the same, so domain rating/authority are good supplementary metrics to add context.

Websites are ranked by their Domain Authority or DA. Domain Authority is a ranking factor used by search engines to help them determine a website’s relevance to a specific subject or industry. So when you are building your backlink profile, you should obtain backlinks from websites that have higher DA scores than your own. In turn, this tells search engines that these high-DA websites trust the content on your website.

There are approximately 3.5 billion searches on Google every day. It is imperative that your web presence stands out from the crowd and helps your business accelerate sales, drive targeted audience, create a brand name among people and become the most trusted and authentic service.

According to Sharad Agarwal, CEO of Cyber Gear, “Digital reputation is important. Invest in it!”

As a writer, you’re bound to use the internet a lot. You need to learn how to secure yourself from malicious activities within the internet. The internet is a source of unlimited information, but it also exposes you to infected ads, sneaky computer viruses, and rogue links.

Due to advancements in technology, computer viruses are more aggressive than ever before. Identity theft and financial fraud are quite rampant because hackers have all they need to hack whomever they want. As a student, work with legit writing services like Ewritingservice.com to avoid dealing with frauds.

Every time you encounter a suspicious website, hit the back button before cybercriminals get the opportunity to take advantage of you. Also, be careful where you provide your personal information because it could easily be a case of identity theft.

1. Have Strong Passwords Everywhere
When you use strong passwords, you prevent cybercriminals from hijacking your accounts. Avoid using generic passwords like your date of birth or the name of your pet because this makes your accounts easily hackable.
Ensure your password is at least 12 characters long because the more the characters, the harder it is for hackers to guess the password. The password should include both upper and lower case alphabets as well as numbers and symbols.

2. Avoid Using Open Networks to Access the Internet
If you’re a writer who likes working from cafés and coffee shops, avoid using their Wi-Fi networks to access the internet. There is nothing as cybercriminals-ridden as open networks. Use your own source of internet to protect yourself from hijacks.
Aside from cyberattacks, you never know the kind of virus that might be lurking in such networks. Protect your information by avoiding public Wi-Fi networks.

3. Use Viral Protection Network
If you have a computer you use to access the internet, use a VPN to protect your information. This way, you use a private channel to access the internet. Viral Protection Networks lock cybercriminals out. They cannot record any unencrypted information and use it to their advantage.

Conclusion
Writers are among the people who use the internet the most. Each time you browse the internet, ensure you’re safe from cyberattacks. Cybercriminals can use the smallest loophole to steal your personal information.

Almost every other day I am asked, “Do I have to invest in SEO?” The not so smart ones tell me, “I don’t need SEO”.

Here is the truth. Getting professional SEO is the best investment you will make to get the maximum ROI from your web presence. In fact it costs more to drive traffic to your site than to establish a web presence. Seriously!

Investing in growing your business is always a good idea. At Cyber Gear, we never hired a single salesperson in 23 years! We invested in SEO and digital marketing. Maybe, the number one reason why we are growing exponentially. Talk about walking the talk!

For the non-tech savvy people (do they even exist?) SEO, or search engine optimization, is an approach to marketing that helps your business show up at the top of search engine results pages when potential customers are looking for you online.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Google is the single largest traffic driver to websites. Google receives over 63,000 searches per second on any given day. That’s the average figure of how many people use Google a day, which translates into at least 2 trillion searches per year, 3.8 million searches per minute, 228 million searches per hour, and 5.6 billion searches per day.

Bottomline. Google accounts for 57.8% of total referral traffic for the average site (10x the traffic that Facebook drives to the average site).

Here is the no brainer – if you’re going to invest in one online marketing activity, you should invest in SEO.

For those on the fence, consider these facts:

• 72% of online marketers describe content marketing as their most effective SEO tactic.

• 81% of people do some type of online research before making a large purchase.

• 47% of consumers read 3 to 5 pieces of content created by a company before talking to a salesman from that company.

• Leads from search engines have a 14.6% close rate, while outbound leads (ex. cold-calling, direct mail, etc.) have a 1.7% close rate.

• 78% of location-centric mobile searches result in an offline purchase.

To calculate the ROI on SEO, it is worth noting that ranking 1st in organic search results for an important search query will drive x number of qualified visitors to your website every month. Based on a 5-10% conversion rate, it will more than pay for itself. While it’s easier and more accurate to track conversions for e-commerce, it certainly is possible for lead-based businesses.

Based on our 23 years of experience in digital business, I can safely vouch that investing in SEO in the long term leads to exponential growth (and much more affordable customer acquisition).

Finally, a note of caution, there is no magic bullet to activate the magic of SEO. It is a long and painstaking process – SEO often takes 3-6 months to gain traction. Use Google Analytics to measure the ROI of your SEO campaigns.

Microless is one of the leading online computer and electronics stores in the middle east. The company has been established in 2011 to transform the way people buy computers and electronics. Microless has set goals to expand rapidly in 2020 to become the leader in electronics and computer retail online.

Microless has announced that it’s partnering with IT Plus — one of the leading web and mobile app development agency in UAE, to integrate AI / Machine Learning techniques to optimize and automate their business processes. Apart from automation, and increasing the efficiency of existing processes in the company, the partnership is promising to bring new features, such as a smart chatbot that will handle part of the load on the customer service agents. The chatbot will be able to resolve customer inquiries and help customers with their purchases on the platform. The bot will be smart enough to understand your question and help you with the status of your order, item availability and pricing, as well as other queries.

Another interesting aspect of the mutual work will be the smart pricing bot that will adjust the prices on the products several times a day based on the market prices and customer demand. Customers will certainly benefit from this as they will have access to even better prices and unbeatable deals.

Once the work proves to be successful, the companies are planning to work on other important aspects such as intelligent delivery routing, using AI in stock predictions and even workplace gamification, which is a new trend that increases the employees’ productivity, by letting them see their work progress in realtime, get rewarded for achieving targets and compete with their peers.

Nowadays, as the competition is extremely high, the leading companies look for ways to cut the costs by optimizing and automating their business processes. Not only that reduces the costs in the long run, but it also allows the company to process much higher volumes of workload and it decreases the error rate and generates more streamlined results in the end. Machine learning is often used to achieve just that.

Machine learning or AI is the new trend in business. With the latest advancements in technology and new algorithms, computers are now able to recognize speech, detect objects and analyze what is happening in images and videos in real-time, predict sales and demand for products, and much more.

The name TikTok is onomatopoeia for the sound of a ticking clock and represents the short format of the videos

TikTok is an iOS and Android social media video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. The app was launched in 2017 by ByteDance, for markets outside of China. ByteDance has previously launched Douyin for the China market in September 2016. Douyin was developed in 200 days, and within a year got 100 million users, with more than 1 billion videos viewed every day.
The application allows users to create short music and lip-sync videos of 3 to 15 seconds and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds. It is a leading short video platform in Asia, the United States, and other parts of the world. TikTok is not available in China and its servers are based in countries where the app is available.

The TikTok mobile app allows users to create a short video of themselves which often feature music in the background, can be sped up, slowed down or edited with a filter. To create a music video with the app, users can choose background music from a wide variety of music genres, edit with a filter and record a 15-second video with speed adjustments before uploading it to share with others on TikTok or other social platforms. Its tunes are varied pop, rap, R&B, electro, and DJ tracks serve as backing for its 15-second video clips.

The app allows users to set their accounts as “private”. Such accounts’ content remains visible to TikTok but is blocked from TikTok users who the account holder has not authorised to view their content. Users can choose whether any other user, or only their “friends”, may interact with them through the app via comments, messages, or “react” or “duet” videos. Users also can set specific videos to either “public”, “friends only”, or “private” regardless if the account is private or not.

The videos are tall, not square, like on Snapchat or Instagram’s stories, but you navigate through videos by scrolling up and down, like a feed, not by tapping or swiping side to side.

The platform is said to have an addictive quality and high levels of engagement with its personalized feeds of quirky and creative short videos.

TikTok was downloaded more than 104 million times on Apple’s App store during the full first half of 2018, according to data provided to CNBC by Sensor Tower, an app analytics platform based in San Francisco. It surpassed Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram to become the world’s most downloaded iOS app for that time period.

TikTok recently began testing ads and also makes money on in-app purchases. Users can buy coins to tip their favorite creators on the platform. It has grossed $80 million from in-app purchases globally, according to an April report from Sensor Tower. In Q1 2019, user spending reaching an estimated $18.9 million globally, which was 222% more than the app grossed during the same period last year.

Tiktok is available in over 150 markets, and in 75 languages worldwide.

Source: Hashtag Social

The rapid growth of technology has become a force to reckon with such that we cannot exist without it. You and I depend on every form of technology to go about our regular lives. However, it is good to note that technology has impacted the society both positively and negatively. Let us dive more into it.

The Top Positive Impact of Technology

Whether it be playing online games with a Resorts casino bonus code, or going out with your GoPro, there is a lot that you can do. Here is how technology has improved our life.

#1. Has improved agriculture
Food is vital in our lives, but the current human population cannot be sustained with limited resources. However, technology has given farmers a chance to grow large quantities of good even in small tracts of land. Also, they can access fertilizers and other tools which boost crop productivity.

#2. It has improved the transport sector
Transportation has evolved in a great fold with time. People can move quickly from one continent to the next. Technology has revamped the transport sector and improved it such that mobility is more accessible. For instance, there are electric trains which can move almost at the speed of light. We have gone further to explore space and even landed on the moon and Mars.

#3. Technology has revamped communication
Communication is the only way that we can pass information. There are various forms of mediums we use to communicate that have been impacted by technology. For instance, the rise of social media has made it easy for people to know each other and talk despite the distance. The Internet, radio, TV, and others are acting as tools where they inform the rest of the world what is happening.

The Negative Impact of Technology

#1. Technology is straining natural resources.
Natural resources have depleted a significant lot that there is a rising concern. Yes, we are glad that technology is rising rapidly, but it is harming our earth. For instance, natural metals need to be mined continuously so that we can develop gadgets such as phones and computers.

#2. There is a rise in population.
In 2017 the World Population clocked to 7.7 billion. Advanced technology has improved the health sector, thus reducing the mortality rate. This is good news, but there is also a downside. It is becoming hard to sustain the current population with limited resources.

Data from Salesforce (a cloud computing platform managing your interactions with current and potential customers) could be a saving grace for anyone working in the sales or marketing industries, since it provides insights that few other platforms can provide. However, knowing how to read this data is just as vital as finding it in the first place.

Using cloud-based data warehouses alongside your general Salesforce usage can help with integrating it into your other data sets. A data management and warehousing platform can allow you to review data collected by Salesforce, and integrate it into your other company-related data.

Here are some perks of integrating salesforce data into your everyday business work:

Find the right warehouse platform

First and foremost, you’ll want to find the right data warehouse platform to integrate Salesforce with. This is important because, even though Salesforce is compatible with many different platforms, only some will provide you the tools and integration you need to be a successful, well-run business.

Blendo Salesforce integration gets all of your data into your warehouse and can help find answers to data and sales-related questions. With platforms like this, you can also assess leads and deals and pursue whatever’s most promising.

Create a unified view of customers

Another perk of integrating Salesforce is the fact that it you get a more unified view of customers for your employees. It’ll paint a more complete picture of your customer and aid in finding the most promising leads.

Virtualize and manage data

By integrating Salesforce, you also can virtualize and better manage any data that comes to your business. Virtualization, for one, brings agility to the use of data, and this virtualized data can be more readily accessible and proactively managed.

Likewise, the management of data is made easier because platforms which integrate Salesforce use open application programming interface (API) to allow applications integrated into one another to communicate better. This makes managing the data sets coming from multiple platforms to be easier.

Consider integrating more

Lastly, if using Salesforce proves successful for your business, consider some other ways you can make use of this gold mine of a data platform. Data integration is merely the first step of all of the possibilities you can have using Salesforce.

There’s also process, security, and user interface integration to implement in your office. Here are a few key differences between all four:

Data integration: Mere data integration, though incredibly helpful, just means that the unified data platforms communicate with one another. By having these platforms communicate and work together comprehensively, it promotes employee efficiency and ensures quality, consistent data sets. It can also deliver one data set to another for comparison and analyses.

Process integration: Next, process integration takes what data integration does and goes a step further. Process integration throws applications designed for workflow into the mix so that business processes exist end-to-end. This creates a more cohesive working system.

Security integration: Security integration makes accessing information both on the employee and customer side of things easier and less administrative in nature. By combining authentication systems with these platforms, data and information can be accessed appropriately by the individual.

User interface integration: And last but not least, user interface (UI) integration just makes the overall experience of using the platform easier for users by integrating systems to create one entry-way for multiple different applications. It streamlines the platforms by bringing them into one place and enhances the overall user experience.

How to maintain accurate listings information in a world that has moved way beyond the yellow pages!

Being found when consumers are ready to connect is critical. In today’s digital marketplace it is imperative that location data is managed in the local marketplace and across key business discovery platforms. People might constantly be online, they might be sharing details of their lives with personalities across the world, but ultimately people are local. They shop local. They eat local. They live local. That means that no matter how big or small our world becomes, local will continue to be the operative word when it comes to local online presence.

Here are the ‘Top 10’ most popular navigation platforms:

1. Google Maps
2. Apple Maps
3. Factual
4. TomTom Maps
5. OpenStreetMap
6. Facebook Local
7. Here Maps
8. Foursquare
9. What3words ID
10. 2GIS.ae

For starters, every self-respecting business needs to claim their business listing on Google. The following information should be submitted for listings:

• Business Name
• Detailed Address
• Exact Map Pin (geocode)
• Phone Number
• Website URL
• Operating Hours
• Category of Business
• Photos and logo
• Business information

Location intelligence can help businesses reduce their operating costs, increase asset utilization, optimize margins and improve customer service.

Here are a few distinct benefits of mapping your business online:

• Increased brand recognition
• Increased customer footfall
• Increased sales per location
• Increased local search rank
• Data insights & reporting
• Keep your digital presence fresh with real-time updates
• Track the performance of your listings

Most online experiences between a customer and a business begin with a search engine. People who search on their mobile phones for your business have a high intent of making a purchase. According to research, 76% of people say to visit a store after looking up information and 28% make a purchase afterwards. Location proximity is a decisive factor for customers who are looking for nearby places to dine and shop.

For more information on location mapping, brand reputation management, sentiment analysis, customer reviews, and local SEO services, contact Cyber Gear at info@cyber-gear.com