How You Know It’s Time To Think Different!

On Sept 27th, 2015 I have attended a conference in Canada hosted by SOHO, and the conference topic was "how to improve your business in Canada". People were talking about hiring skilled candidates, promote your services and  apply a tool such as benchamrking and market research to measure business performance in the market. From my perspective I have another plan and opinion which has a positive impact on business improvement whether in Canada market or other market. 

Nowadays, a website is a necessity for entrepreneurs, small businesses, home-based businesses, and anybody selling products or services. Regardless of your other marketing methods, enabling potential customers to either find you through a Google search or learn more about you after they’ve seen your other marketing material is key to creating and developing new customers.

A well structured website is required to make a business online. As Internet is becomes more important for users. It offers many benefits to make user's life more convenient and easy. For the promotion of business it is needed that you should have a website from where users could browse and purchase products that your business is offering.

Nowadays, people are using apps for different purposes. For every business apps are important to communicate with users on a secure network. They also delegate their tasks with the help of these programs. From exchange of resources to implementation of solutions for an extensive, each procedure needs web programs.

This process was activated due to some customers who were regularly challenging customized sites which can provide their objective. Furthermore, progression in technology has persuaded designers to discover unknown areas of web development. They can utilize the new update in their projects for better performance and adaptability.

A wide range of programs are available to business owners, using which they can make their companies even more effective and thus generate more benefit. The area of web design and development has gone through a technical trend, customized web database integration services have collected the attention of customers and clients.

They can now personalize web programs as per their specifications and requirements.

Web design and development services have become very essential among organizations working in different sectors. Furthermore, customized web programs allow incorporation of several features such as tracking analysis, database, content writing, marketing etc.

It has also been noticed that these programs fulfill business needs, regardless of the products engaged in those, Hence, they help to handle work procedures and information in a manageable way.

Benefits of Web Development Services

A market for personalized web application solutions, has been designed out by a huge number of software companies. Following are some main benefits of employing customized web development services:

1. Web surfing around can be assisted. 
2. Transactions, including loads of information can be handled quickly 
3. The volume of visitors to a website can be improved.

Stages in Web Development Process

Development of a web application includes the following phases:

1. Determining the characteristics of the venture and its objectives 
2. Devising a Specific Strategy depending on the goals of the venture 
3. Developing the Project as per the program 
4. Testing the venture for protection at every level of development

Creating a website for your business more than just a website isn't about a fancy or flashy design. Rather, a smarter design that makes a site more user-friendly with high-quality content worth returning for is all that is needed to make a business or brand stand out among the rest.

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Do You Have A Smart Move Plan For Disaster Recovery?

Many financial directors think of IT Disaster Recovery as something that never really happens to them and even if it did the business would be able to get back to business as usual inside a day or so. Assets are safeguarded, backups taken (usually), and unless you are forced to, having a plan and some good intentions are equally as good as having DR equipment sitting around doing nothing utilizing the earth's resources at great expense. This philosophy is green too!!!

Planning for a disaster is a smart move. You never know when disaster will strike, so it pays to be prepared for the worst. Your organization or business must put a disaster plan in place before a real disaster happens. Failure to do so will put your business in peril in the aftermath of disasters such as fire, floods, earthquakes, Data gets stolen, hardware fails or power outage for a long time. Moreover, it will be difficult to get your business back on its feet following a disaster.

The key to business continuity even in the face of disaster is to make sure that you design disaster plan that is useful and effective. So the first step in designing your disaster recovery system is to analyze the risks that you will most likely encounter. Make sure that you have conducted a thorough analysis on all your computer systems and jot down all the risks that could possibly injure system up time. You will then have to appraise how imminent these risks might be in particular to your company. 

To create a full-fledged program for disaster recovery, we need to build up a proper road map for resources that should be pulled at the right time, and for the right purpose.

From my perspective, DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) team is considered as key role in creating Disaster Recovery plan, build up the structure and workflow, and ensuring that all essential planning bases are covered for referred purpose

What's the Purpose of a DRP Team?

A "team approach" to disaster recovery planning provides three (3) primary advantages:

+ It takes a team to identify comprehensive disaster recovery requirements, sufficiently diverse and relevant to all key needs and operational perspectives.

+ It takes a team to create an actionable disaster recovery program, considering all operational capabilities and constraints.

+ It takes a team to put all the plans and programs into action and keep current with changing needs.

Building your plan

The 3 major issues in building a disaster recovery plan are recovery point, time to recovery, and budget.

Recovery Point

How much data can you lose? Is some data more important than other data? What data is absolutely critical for the business to survive? Maybe some email can be lost, but the blue prints or accounting information is invaluable. Your recovery point is the definition of what the system needs to look like once everything has been fixed.

Time to recovery

How long can the business be down? Can some parts of the business be down longer than others? When does everything need to be back to normal? Each business will answer this question differently, and this standard will heavily influence the type of solution chosen.

Budget

If money were not object, every business would want their IT up and running immediately and to the fullest extent possible after a disaster. Of course, that probably isn't the case.

Budget falls into two categories. First, there is some cost for preparing for the disaster. Developing a disaster recovery plan, setting up the backup solution, and perhaps even buying redundant hardware all contribute to this expense.

The second cost comes after the disaster has struck. This might include the cost to buy new hardware, set up the network, and restore from backup. Estimates for this cost should also be included in the plan. Having a plan is worthless if the plan is too expensive to implement.

Whatever your disaster recovery plan looks like, remember to print it out. If you only have an electronic copy and your server crashes, you'll be starting from scratch.

IT Systems and Disaster Recovery 

Because I already came from IT background so I would like to focus in this part only as it has become very important for the smooth functioning of the organization so it is very important that organization IT infrastructure should be updated and running all the time. 

As I mentioned above about the types of disasters, so there are many things which can be lose during or after the disaster. This can be anything which hinders the business process. This can be assets, records, employees and suppliers etc. The loss of the information includes customer's details and other internal data etc. There can be loss of access, use of premises, computers etc can be happen at any time.

By considering the following steps a good plan can be made:

() By identifying the core elements of the company and assigning values to the assets.

() By prioritize each area of work to the appropriate person.

() By defining and considering a plan according to the customer's expectations.

() By communicating the strategy in the whole organization and check whether the resources are prepared accordingly or not.

As the plan is ready and it has been tested and reviewed by the committee, then management should approve it. The plan is like an insurance confirming that the business can be run if a disaster happens. The effectiveness and success of the plan depends on the way it is written, implemented and how one can understands it. The plan should be reviewed periodically and updated according to the need of the business process.

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Nobody Would Want To Pay Twice! My Advice For Websites Revenue

There are a lot of articles on the internet right now that showcase predictions for the next year and the trends that will dominate web marketing.  I would say websites have increasingly become the primary channel for sales of goods and services. Many small and medium enterprises (SME) rely heavily on their websites for their revenue. However, it is surprising how little attention is paid to analysis and measurement of this vital sales channel.

In my previous articles, I have discussed the role of content and keywords as a tool to promote the service or product you offer in your website and then the way of evaluating a website performance based on many factors. Online advertising is one of these factors that could help to let people interact with your site and increase engagement, but at the end you should learn to hammer the nails, and if what you build is sturdy and serviceable, take satisfaction in its plain strength.

Therefore, without tracking your profits on any Ads you spend, that means you don’t know if you’re making money or not, this in turn will lead to only one fact; you’re not going to be in business very long!

In this article I’ll give you simple formulas to calculate your ROI and show you how to measure KPI’s for the top three advertising goals.

Measuring your Return on Investment (ROI)

For instance, when you have a small business, I believe you likely don’t have a big accounting department to track and analyze your ad budget spends. Which is true!

But as I mentioned above you still need to learn how to hammer the nails. Perhaps this still seems like a paradox. How can you think carefully about not losing your customers and still be carefree about their options? I assure you that they are separate process. 

It is too simple when you adopt the ROI technique, if you’re spending money and you’re not getting back more money than you’re spending - you’re wasting your hard earned cash and means you are losing customers (Audiences).  You’ve got to stop the leak. You also should know if one Ad is generating more profits than another - so you can put more money into the profitable one.

Measuring your ROI doesn’t have to be overly complicated. You do need to do a bit of math, but, hey, that’s part of business. Let’s take a look at how to calculate your ROI.

A Simple Calculation for your website ROI 

As you likely know, your Return on Investment is basically a ratio of your net profit over the costs you spend to get the profit.  To put it in an equation, your ROI looks something like this:

Your ROI is your revenue less your cost of the thing you sold divided by the cost of the goods sold.

So, for example, let’s say you sell necklace. The cost to produce one necklace is $10, and you sell them for $20. You sell 100 of them from advertising them for example on Google. Your revenue (as you can see) is $2,000. Your cost to produce them was $1,000. And you spent, let’s say, $500 in advertising.

Your ROI is:  2,000 - (1,000 + 500)/ (1,000 + 500).

Do the math. Your ROI ratio is .33, which is 33%.

Measuring your Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

Key performance indicators (or KPI) are metrics that measure the performance of a task against the objective that it was set out to do. In other words, it is finding out how you are doing to attain your business objectives. While KPIs can be applied in just about any working environment, in can be an effective method to measure the performance of your online business.

What I would like to say, you will never make your mark in your online business, unless you develop a respect for your content and quality of the service you offer. This is what I have pointed out in my previous articles

 

So, metrics can either be represented as a ratio or a number to measure certain tasks in relation to the objectives of your business. In the SEO field, Revenue, Visits and Page Views are measured through numbers while Conversion Rate, Bounce Rate and Average Sales are measured by ratios. These two forms of metric generally make up KPIs.

To find an effective KPI, you must first understand the objectives of your online business very well because this will be the basis for setting up your KPI. Outline your objectives into specific measurable goals. Then select a Key Performance Indicator for each goal.

To set an example as I gave you for ROI, let’s define a conversion as a completed sales transaction. To calculate a conversion, the basic formula can be: 

Conversion Rate= (Total Transactions/Total Number of Visits) * 100.

That is (6 transactions/50 visits) * 100 = 12% Conversion Rate. And so 12% is your Key Performance Indicator for your Sales Conversion Rate. In this example, it is obvious that having a score of 12% is below the expected performance of your goal for sales conversion. Having this sort of information will allow you to target which area to focus on as you try to improve the performance of your conversion rate. In this case you can try to optimize the functionality of your website.

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