The Online Imperative: Why Your Business Can’t Afford to Stay Offline

The Online Imperative: Why Your Business Can’t Afford to Stay Offline

In the ever-evolving landscape of commerce, the transition to an online presence has become not just beneficial but imperative for businesses. The digital era has ushered in a paradigm shift in consumer behavior, and businesses that resist going online risk being left behind. In this article, we’ll explore the reasons why your business can’t afford to stay offline in the current market.

1. Global Reach and Market Expansion

An online presence breaks down geographical barriers, allowing your business to reach a global audience. The internet provides a platform to showcase your products or services to potential customers worldwide, exponentially expanding your market reach beyond the limitations of a physical storefront.

2. 24/7 Accessibility

Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar stores with fixed operating hours, an online presence ensures that your business is accessible 24/7. This convenience accommodates customers from different time zones and those with varying schedules, contributing to increased sales opportunities and customer satisfaction.

3. Consumer Behavior Shift

Modern consumers increasingly turn to the internet for product research, reviews, and purchases. Ignoring this shift in behavior means missing out on a substantial portion of your target audience. Establishing an online presence aligns your business with the way customers prefer to discover and engage with brands.

4. Cost-Effective Marketing

Digital marketing offers cost-effective strategies compared to traditional advertising channels. Social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and online advertising platforms provide targeted marketing opportunities that can be customized to fit your budget, ensuring efficient use of resources for maximum impact.

5. Competitive Edge

In a competitive market, having an online presence is a crucial differentiator. Consumers often compare products and services online before making a purchase decision. If your competitors have a strong online presence and you don’t, you risk losing potential customers who are actively seeking information and options on the internet.

6. Data-Driven Decision-Making

The digital landscape provides valuable data on customer behavior, preferences, and trends. Utilizing analytics tools allows businesses to gather insights, track performance, and make data-driven decisions. This information is invaluable for refining marketing strategies, optimizing user experiences, and adapting to changing market demands.

7. Customer Engagement and Interaction

An online presence facilitates direct communication with customers through various channels, including social media, email, and live chat. Engaging with your audience builds a sense of community and loyalty. It allows you to address customer inquiries, gather feedback, and create personalized experiences that strengthen your brand-consumer relationships.

8. E-commerce Opportunities

The rise of e-commerce has transformed how consumers make purchases. An online store provides a convenient platform for customers to browse, compare, and buy products or services from the comfort of their homes. Implementing e-commerce capabilities opens up new revenue streams and enhances the overall customer shopping experience.

9. Adaptation to Trends and Innovations

The digital landscape is dynamic, with constant technological advancements and changing consumer preferences. An online presence allows your business to adapt to these trends, stay relevant, and incorporate innovations that cater to the evolving needs of your target audience.

10. Crisis Resilience

Recent global events have highlighted the importance of online resilience. Businesses with a strong online presence were better equipped to navigate disruptions, reach customers during lockdowns, and adapt their operations to changing circumstances. Being online provides a layer of resilience that is increasingly essential in today’s unpredictable business environment.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the online imperative is not just a trend; it’s a fundamental shift in the way business is conducted. A robust online presence is essential for reaching a global audience, staying competitive, and adapting to the ever-changing landscape of commerce. Whether you operate a small local business or a multinational corporation, embracing the digital era is not just advantageous—it’s a necessity for sustained success.

PayPal expands payment services to Nigeria, 9 other markets

PayPal is entering 10 new countries this week, including Nigeria, providing online payment alternatives for consumers via mobile phones or PCs in markets often blighted by financial fraud.

Rupert Keeley, the executive in charge of the EMEA region of PayPal, the payments unit of eBay Inc, said in an interview on Monday the expansion would bring the number of countries it serves to 203.
Starting on Tuesday, consumers in Nigeria, which has 60 million users and has Africa’s largest population, along with nine other markets in sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America will be able to make payments through PayPal.

“PayPal has been going through a period of reinvention, refreshing many of its services to make them easier to use on mobile (phones), allowing us to expand into fast-developing markets,” Keeley said.

Once the services go live, customers in the 10 countries with access to the Web and a bank card authorized for Internet transactions will be able to register for a PayPal account and make payments to millions of sites worldwide.

Initially, PayPal is only offering “send money” services for consumers to pay for goods and services at PayPal-enabled merchant sites while safeguarding their financial details. This is free to consumers and covered by fees it charges merchants.

“We think we can give our sellers selling into this market a great deal of reassurance,” said Keeley, a former regional banking executive with Standard Chartered Plc and senior executive with payment card company Visa Inc.

PayPal does not yet cover peer-to-peer transactions, which allow consumers to send money to other consumers. It has not yet enabled local merchants in the new markets to receive payments, nor is it offering other forms of banking services, he said.

A 2013 survey of 200 UK ecommerce sites by Visa’s CyberSource unit estimated that 1.26 percent of online orders are fraudulent and that 85 percent of merchants expected fraud to increase or remain static last year.

CyberSource also estimated that suspicion of fraudulent transactions result in 8.2 percent of online orders in Latin America being rejected by merchants, compared with 5.5 percent in Europe and 2.7 percent in the United States and Canada.

Such fraud can include ID theft, social engineering, phishing and automated harvesting of customer financial data via botnets, or networks of computers controlled by hackers.

A total of 80 million Internet users stand to gain access to PayPal global services this week, including those in five European markets – Belarus, Macedonia, Moldova, Monaco and Montenegro, four in the African nations of Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, and Zimbabwe, as well as Paraguay. Internet usage figures are based on research by Euromonitor International.

PayPal counts 148 million active accounts worldwide. Last week, MasterCard Inc, the world’s second-largest debit and credit card company, and a PayPal rival in payment processing, said it was working with the Nigerian government on a pilot to overlay payment technology on a new national identity card.

PayPal has operated in 190 markets since 2007 and added three countries – Egypt, Georgia and Serbia last year. Roughly a quarter of the $52 billion in payment volumes PayPal reported in the first quarter of 2014 were for cross-border transactions. PayPal reported $1.8 billion in revenue during the period.

(Reporting by Eric Auchard; editing by Jason Neely)

www.olutaller.com

WORDPRESS: Global Attack

There is an on going and highly distributed,
global attack on wordpress installations to crack open admin accounts
and inject various malicious scripts.
To give you a little history, the company that is managing my hosting servers was contacted by a major law
enforcement agency about a massive attack on US financial institutions
originating from their servers.
They did a detailed analysis of the attack pattern and found out that
most of the attack was originating from CMSs (mostly wordpress). Further
analysis revealed that the admin accounts had been compromised (in one
form or the other) and malicious scripts were uploaded into the
directories.

Today, this attack is happening at a global level and wordpress
installations across hosting providers are being targeted. Since the attack
is highly distributed in nature (most of the IP’s used are spoofed), it
is making it difficult to block all malicious data.
To ensure that your websites are secure and safeguarded from this attack, I recommend the following steps:
  1. Update and upgrade your wordpress installation and all installed plugins
  2. Install the security plugin listed here
  3. Ensure that your admin password is secure and preferably randomly generated
  4. Other ways of Hardening a WordPress installation are shared at http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress
These additional steps can be taken to further secure wordpress websites:
  • Disable DROP command for the DB_USER .This is never commonly needed for any purpose in a wordpress setup
  • Remove README and license files (important) since this exposes version information
  • Move wp-config.php to one directory level up, and change its permission to 400
  • Prevent world reading of the htaccess file
  • Restrict access to wp-admin only to specific IPs
  • A few more plugins – wp-security-scan, wordpress-firewall,
    ms-user-management, wp-maintenance-mode, ultimate-security-scanner,
    wordfence, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/better-wp-security/. These may help in several occasions.
www.olutaller.com

Avenues to Wealth

Avenues to wealth is a company that works leveraging the internet using e-commerce, uses people networks to create discount opportunities and pays for referrals, it is a 21st Century, Network Marketing company. This means rather than spend their advertising and distributorship budgets on big companies and plenty of employees, they have decided to run lean, and spend the money on you! The company calls it’s members distributors and provides a whole range of products and services that have one principal intention… to create more Avenues to Wealth for you!

1 – Free complimentary holiday with locations in the US, Asia and Mexico, this can be used by you or used to package a deal for your friends while you charge creatively.

2 – Best deals on travel ( hotels, short cruises, taxis etc), this can be used by you, or you can use this to package a deal for others and make money. People have made money from this, it’s real! The margins are sometimes breathtaking. There is an opportunity going on per time.

3 – Free download and some resell rights to e-books worth over $3000 on various topics. You can read these to add value to yourself, and you can resell to friends and make good income. People have made money from this as well, quite some thousands of dollars as you can sell one book to 1,000 people if you want.

4 – Discounts on Healthcare – A2W has partnered with a group of hospitals in Asia to provide hugely discounted Healthcare service to A2W distributors. You can arrange this opportunity for others profitably, and you can use them for your family. The company also has discounted health insurance packages for some countries like Nigeria. This way you can fix the budget for your health per year.

5 – Discounts on the purchase of other products and services – A2W partners with companies in each country who are able to offer their distributors discounts on their products and services. This can help you make savings on your expenses, or can translate directly income when you resell to friends at win-win prices.

6 – You get access to investment opportunities – both locally and Internationally. We have the person who won the award for best managed foreign fund in 2011 investing for us, we have one of the best Real Estate Experts in the world advising for our Global Property Alliance, and we have a local escrow account in the guise of a cooperative where we can grow our smaller funds. You can grow your money!

7 – Free advertisement of your products and services to ALL A2W distributors worldwide, as long as you offer your products/services at a discounted rate. This is a market opportunity you can plug into and earn well from.

8. You also get an opportunity to build a team of friends and family you have introduced into this amazing opportunity and earn in return not just points, but dollars. You can earn this weekly on Monday mornings as your team develops. This is real, and by far the fairest model in town! This is not a reward of the company, it’s a reward for smart work, if you do what it takes, you’ll get what is promised. It’s totally optional!

9 – ALL Expense paid luxurious vacations for top performers in the company – flight, accommodation, feeding, taxis.etc…all paid for. This is not a product of the company, it’s a reward you can win if you do what it takes!

You get access to ALL the above for JUST $330/£220/N55,000. There are no monthly fees to pay and nothing else to pay again for the next 1 year! The next time to pay anything will be 1 year from when you joined to renew your privilege pack, and consequently your membership. You also don’t need to carry around bags or stock products in your house, you have access to all you own via a website with exclusive password access.

You can decide to refer others to A2W and this is where you start building a business for yourself. The company pays you handsomely when you do this…working with only 4 people, who also refer 4 each, who also teach those 4 to refer 4 each will earn you $17,000,000 in the next 10 months or in the next 10 years depending on if you want to build your 4 in 1 month or in 1yr!.

To join, you will need to click on start now from here , fill the form and for more information on the business.

BUT, make sure you get their commitment to support you BEFORE you make ANY payment. This business works only when you take responsibility, and we all learn by example. Anyone not ready to work with you and teach you to teach others, does not deserve you.

There is also a lot of support available for you to help build your team, so you are really never alone. Online and offline, meetings go on daily, weekly, morning and night. You only need to plug-in into any support structure you are comfortable with, and the sky… is a starting point!

Olutaller
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Monetizing Your Blog

You have been working hard to produce good-quality, original content on your blog and you have attracted a decent amount of traffic by doing so. However, money is not going to appear out of thin air just because you have traffic. You have to turn your traffic into money.


There are several ways to generate profits from the visitors of your blog, and Google’s Adsense programme allows you to do so with ultimate ease. First, visit their website at http://adsense.google.com/. You’ll find out more about their advertising programme there, but here are some extra bits I’d like to tell you.


First, Google’s Adsense programme is a really useful way to monetize your blog because when users finish reading your newest post, chances are they want to leave your blog because they have nothing else to do on your blog. If your Adsense advertisement block is visible on your blog, they might see advertisements relevant to them and click on them to exit your blog. Ka-ching! You’ve just cashed in on your first virtual cents!


But yes, your profits will only be cents if you don’t “do it right”. This involves placing your Google ads in the right places and ensuring they blend in to your site so that they appear more like links rather than advertisements to your visitors. Consult the page https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to see the “heat map” of your blog. The “hotter” a certain area, the greater the chances of someone looking at your blog.


Once you get a Google Adsense account, you can change the colour of your advertisement text and links. You will want them to match the colours on your blog. If your blog’s text is black and the links are red, do the same for the ad blocks too! It’s that simple.


Another way to earn profits from your blog is to recommend products to your readers. When your visitors buy from the merchants you recommend, you get to keep a little commission too. This is known as affiliate marketing and it is very easy to start because you don’t have to create your own products or services.


Anyway, let’s refer back to our technological gadgets blog example. Let’s say you discover this Gadget X on a merchant’s website, and they offer an affilliate programme. What you would do is to create a post in your blog and do a mini-review on this Gadget X. Rip it apart and point out its benefits and bad points, if any, and include a link (which is given by the merchant) for the visitor to purchase the Gadget X online.


If your visitor clicks and purchases the gadget, the merchant will track from the link that the purchase is referred by you, so they will send you your share of the profits. Imagine if 1 out of every 100 visitors you get purchases this product, and you earn $27.00 commission from each purchase! If you get 10,000 visitors in a month that would be a $2,700.00 paycheque for you just for writing about ONE product.


Now, affiliate programmes are very nice ways to generate profit, but how do you find affiliate programmes that are related to your blog’s theme? Easy, just go to Google and search for affiliate programme in your niche. Another slightly better way is to go to http://www.associateprograms.com/search to look for affiliate programmes in your niche.

The two ways mentioned above are basic ways to generate profits from your blog. We’ll be discussing other great, profitable ways, so keep your eyes peeled!

Yours,

Olutaller

www.olutaller.com

More Traffic Sources

Getting links from other websites is not the only way to attract visitors to visit your blog. This time, we are going to explore alternative methods to attract high quality traffic with both free and paid methods.


The first thing you can do to generate traffic is to recycle all the content you have written on your blog. What I really mean is to turn your blog posts into little “manuals” or articles that help people solve their problems or offer valuable information and submit them to article directories. These article directories are like aggregators that collect articles of similar themes together in one place, so they receive thousands and thousands of qualified visitors every day.


When you submit your articles to these directories, you are exposing your name to the thousands of pairs of eyes visiting them for free! On most article directories, you are also permitted to include a “resource box” where you can include your contact details, a simple biography and so on. This is where you can truly leverage the traffic of the said article directories.


Some good article directories to get you started:

www.eZineArticles.com

www.ultimatearticledirectory.com

www.submityourarticle.com


Another excellent way to gain traffic is to join internet forums that is based on your niche. To find these kind of forums, just go to any search engine and enter your “<> +forum”, without the quotes. You would want the most focused forum with a substantial number of active members, and preferably always bustling with activity. Just check the dates of the threads posted on the forum.


When you join active forums that focus on your field of discussion and post very useful and valuable posts, your peers will start noticing you and paying attention to what you have to say. In most forums, you are also allowed to append a link to your site in the signature line, which is under every post you make on the forums. People will click and visit your blog if they find your posts helpful and informative. This way, your credibility is built even before they land on your blog, so traffic from the forums would be easier to turn into profits if your blog is selling your own products or recommending others’ as an affilliate since they are already convinced you’re an “expert” in the field.


The strategy we’ll discuss is word of mouth. Let’s say you already have a daily visitor count of 100. What if you compiled a small report or gift and posted it on your blog, saying that if a certain visitor can refer three of his/her friends to visit your blog the gift will be his/hers for free? If your small report or gift is lucrative enough, it will generate a small buzz among your blog readers and they will surely refer their friends to this blog that they frequent!


You can also utilize the “blog and ping” technique that everyone’s talking about. Basically, when you update your blog, you can let blog portals such as www.technorati.com know by pinging them. You can ping a lot of portals at once by using the free www.pingomatic.com.


Besides the techniques described here, there are also paid methods like buying links from high-ranking pages or buying banner advertisement space. A thing to keep in mind when buying paid traffic is to always weigh your profits generated from the paid ads. If your profits do no offset the expense, you will end up losing money, so choose wisely.

Yours,

Olutaller

www.olutaller.com