Streamline Trade Finance With Blockchain Technology

For the past few years, the buzz around blockchain has grown to apogee. With a long standing as a technological novelty, blockchain is quickly evolving and may soon become a viable financial tool on a global scale. The most interesting areas that blockchain is seeking to address are Trade Finance and Global Trade. So, what is blockchain? Most simply, it’s a technology that is essentially an unimpeachable digital ledger of transactions- not just monetary transactions, but any transaction of value in a system.

Before investing time and money in this technological tool, it is good to know basics of it. So, scroll down to read more!

Trade Finance?

Trade financing comprises credit facilities provided by financial institutions to guarantee the exchange of goods. It includes lending, issuing letters of credit, factoring, export credit and insurance for both- domestic and international trade. One of the difficulties involved with trade finance is the large volume of paperwork. Blockchain technology seeks to reduce costs and enhance efficiency by superseding the flow of paper for trade finance with the digital data flow.

Blockchain: Endless Applications

It’s a promise of blockchain to streamline the trade finance process. The blockchain is a data structure that creates a digital ledger of transactions. With the help of cryptography, these transactions can be distributed amongst a digital network. This way, it allows each participant on the network to amend the ledger without the need for a central authority. So, if implemented, it will omit the role of middleman in financial transactions.

Blockchain removes the need of multiple copies of the same document including numerous entities as it undertakes quick updates made by each participant and reflects the most recent transactions. Among the best of blockchain’s advantages are the speeding up of transaction settlement time that currently takes a few days, increasing transparency among the investors, and unlocking capital that would otherwise be tied up waiting to be transferred between parties involved in the transaction. The blockchain is creating new ways for people to make transactions. It is used for maintaining records of transactions, verifying identity and establishing contracts.

The Society For Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is exploring the use of blockchain in trade finance. It is worth keeping an eye on the rapid developments occurring in the space of blockchain technology. It is poised to effect positive change in trade finance, and if it does, it could affect every industry involved in cross-border business or trade.

Sources: 

• https://www.americanexpress.com/us/content/foreign-exchange/articles/blockchain-technology-to-streamline-trade-finance/
• https://blogs.adb.org/blog/how-blockchain-can-revolutionize-access-finance
• https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Documents/grid/trade-finance-placemat.pdf

Best Ways To Choose A Good SEO Company For Your Business Or Website

Getting high rankings in search engine results is not that easy as it seems. Ever since the inception of the internet, everyone is participating in the race of getting high ranks in this virtual world. And, when it comes to organic search results, nothing can work better than SEO techniques. Therefore, it is good to hire a reliable and trustworthy SEO company that can help your business grow by developing your digital brand and ensuring that you have a top-notch web presence. So, scroll down to get more information about DO’s and DON’ts while selecting SEO professionals, tools, etc.

The first thing that you have to measure is your SEO requirements. If you own a small-scale enterprise, you can go for freelance SEO professionals; for a middle-scale firm, you can outsource your SEO requirements and for blue-chip Company, you can have in-house SEO team.

Points To Ponder

Few points to keep in mind while selecting SEO consultants:

• SEO strategies they use to get high search result rankings
• Make sure they will provide you regular reports. The most common frequency is once /month, but some may share weekly reports. SEO reports should include a summary of activities, search traffic, search rankings and conversions.
• Do some homework and know about their clientele and results. If you failed to find, then you can assume that either they weren't able to serve big clients, or they don't have that level of competency.
• Google Algorithms play a vital role in SEO. These are crucial for long-term traffic growth. Google applies approx 500 algorithm updates/year to provide finer results for searchers. Thus, make sure that your consultants work in compliance with these golden rules.
• In order to save a ton of time and money, several tools are available. If your SEO company mention tools like Xrumer, SE Nuke or Bookmarking Demon, it is advised you to stay away.
• Determine, what types of SEO work they will prefer to do i.e. technical, on-page, off-page.
• If your consultant promises you #1 ranking every single time, beware! Because No SEO knows the exact Google algos and No one knows how Google Algos change.
• Different SEOs have different payment structure such as monthly, weekly or hourly. It is good to clarify how much and when you need to pay so that you can accordingly factor it into your budget.
• If you are hiring consultants or freelancers, find out which mode of communication they prefer and tell them yours.
• Make sure that your SEO stays tuned up with SEO news, they should be active in forums and other SEO communities.  
• “Which metrics do you track?” This is a really easy way to differentiate between experienced, successful SEOs and the rest.

SEO is a long-term investment. It’s going to take months before results. The aforementioned points will help you weed out dependable SEO companies and individuals. These points will help you decide if a particular SEO is worth hiring for your business as hiring SEO help can make or break your company. Setting future goals, getting multiple bids and examining predictors of the future are few things to ensure that you hire the right SEO.

Top Six Ways To Use Visual Content To Increase Conversion Rates In 2017

With this increasing competition, one has to remain au courant with industry trends and constantly optimize the customer experience to lower abandonment rates and amplify conversion rates. And, for doing this, you have to adopt modern and interactive mediums. One of the simplest ways to engage with your target audience directly and economically is using images and videos. Researchers have shown that adding an image to a Facebook brings 2.3 times more engagement. Statistics show that 74% of marketers use visual content for their marketing campaigns.

In the current scenario, visual content is in trend and widely utilized medium to impress audiences. It is proven that visual content draws more people and it is engaging. Analysts say that the use of visual content on web has sharply increased since 2007. From 2011-2015, the average time spent watching videos has increased from 21 minutes to 60 minutes. Snapchat and Instagram that are visual centric social networks, have seen massive growth in the same span. For marketers, visual content brings lots of opportunities to grab more traffic and turn visitors into their potential patrons.

Need Of Visual Content

Now a days, your audience don’t have time to read anymore; they would love to watch short video instead of reading long article. As it is scientifically proven that human being are visual learners and their brain process visuals faster. Visual content is the perfect medium for conveying your brand value and principles.

Followings are few major ways that were adopted to increase conversion rate in 2017:

1. Create A Visual Hierarchy On Your Website

Creating hierarchy will dictate users what to focus on first. For example, on New York Times website, you can easily find the most important news stories having larger font sizes or are accompanied by a picture.

Use pictures, colors and larger fonts to emphasize important part of your content.

2. Convey Emotions Through Visual Content

Human beings are empathetic and their subconscious mind feels accordingly to what their eyes see. Seeing a picture of happy person brings smile to our face and a sad image can ruin our mood.

For example: A person selling massage chairs that are used to relieve stress. To emphasize this, use an image of a person feeling bliss sitting on the chair.

3. The Key To Conversions Is Short Video

 Try to make your video short, simple and engaging. Users will not come back to your website only to see that lengthy and boring videos.

4. Use Video Testimonials

Visual Testimony of your brilliance is a smart way to tell users what you are. This tactic will bring an instant trust among your visitors.

5. Info Graphics

A combination of graph and data, an Inographics is the best way to convey a big amount of information in a precise manner.

6. Use Images And Show That There Are Real People Behind Your Business

Studies say that there are certain areas in the brain that are dedicated to respond to faces. Study done by Nielsen concludes that web surfers focus on human photos instead of text.

Ex. A website that deals in Brazilian and Caribbean art, increased conversion rate by 95% by adding the image of artisans along with their artwork.

So, these were the effective ways that were utilized to get benefits of visual content for increasing conversion rates in the year 2017. 

Leverage Social Media For Lead Generation

If you are in a need to generate buzz for your business, then social media will be your best companion. With increasing features and out-of-the-box technology, it’s not groundbreaking anymore to brand your business using social media. Now, it is increasingly used for lead generation. Before, we go in depth, it’s good to find out some basic definitions. To know more, scroll down!

What Is Lead?

A lead is nothing but interest shown by your potential customers towards your products or services or both. It is the next big thing for businesses after they have their setup ready. Lead generation covers up everything including:

• It starts from attracting the visitors to the landing page
• Followed by nurturing the leads to make the sales
• Converting them into repeated customers

What Is Social Media?

A platform that facilitates the development of online social networks enabling users to connect with individuals or groups. Now a days, businesses and marketers are adopting social media channels as an integral part of the marketing mix.

Social Media acts as a traffic generator thus its great for Lead Generation. Each tweet, update or post can drive people back to your website and lead capture forms. Make sure that updates are meaningful, easy to grasp and not self-serving.

In order to fill sales funnel through leveraging social media, you have to invest in a tool that will help your business target influencers & potential patrons and filter content. Before investing in any tool, make sure that you’re doing the basics when it comes to your business’s social media profile and content generation.

#1. Your brand image and message should be clear

#2. Keep your message conversational and its content should be consistent to nurture your audience

#3. Use right strategy to showcase your expertise

#4. Choose the right media for your business

Always keep your social media channels with creation, quality and informative content. When you do this, you will start effectively leveraging social media for lead generation. 

Angular Js: best Practices

Experts say the key to get desired results from any system/ equipment or application program is to learn it best. To keep pace with the rapidly growing competition, one should keep himself/ herself abreast with the new technological updates. And, if you are really keen to know more about Angular Java and its best implementation practices, then scroll down!

What Is It?

AngularJS is a java script based open-source front-end web application framework widely used for encountering many challenges in developing single-page applications(SPAs). AngularJS extends HTML with new attributes. It is easy to learn and requires basic understanding of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Micko hevery (Google’s employee) started working on AngularJS in 2009, the idea turned out very well and the project is now officially supported by Google. AngularJS version 1.0 was released in 2009.

How does It work?

AngularJS is a library written in JavaScript. It extends HTML attributes with directives and binds data to HTML with expressions. The framework works by first reading the HTML page that is embedded into additional custom tag attributes. AngularJS interprets those attributes as directives to bind input and output parts of the page to a model representing standard JavaScript variables. And, the values of these JavaScript variables can be manually set within the code or can be retrieved from static & dynamic resources.           

Why Learn AngularJS?

AngularJS is a full-featured framework that is incredibly popular among developers. Thus, it’s a need of time to keep yourself aware of new frameworks on a regular basis. AngularJS creates interactive features for the real-time experience. Products built with AngularJS include YouTube Video Manager, The Weather Channel site, several Google products, and Tinder.

The Best Practices Of AngularJS?

AngularJS requires the developer to do things in an “angular” way. It is necessary to use some best practices to avoid common pitfalls during the development process. Some of them are as follows:

• Keep Reading Existing Software Source Code—it’s boring but beneficial
• Complete your documents before next step
• Work on predefined standards
• Review your work
• No matter how experienced you are, test what you do
• Keep backup of your work
• Keep your tools and techniques handy to ignore time wastage
• Learn new things

As you grow at your position, your responsibilities increase multiple times of your salary and all this brings stress for free. Not any fat book or training program can help you is managing your stress. So, just chill and make a habit of open communication, learning from others and keeping yourself updated with new work methods as this would lead to expressive, readable, and quick to develop environment.

Basics Of Content Marketing

Without marketing, it’s like someone is winking at a girl in the night. If content is fire, marketing is gasoline. And, Content Marketing is one of those tools that are in demand in the current scenario. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the basics of content marketing.
Content marketing is all about creating / sharing/publishing media and content. It is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing quality and consistent content to acquire and retain audience – with an aim of driving profitable customer action.

Types Of Content Marketing

There are many types of content marketing as types of content. Some of them are:

• InfoGraphics: Combines information, data, graphs & charts that are represented in a graphical visual form to present information in a precise manner.
• Webpage: It is a document, well-written in hypertext markup language and accessible through the internet using an internet browser. Ex: the page you are reading now is a web page.
• Podcast : Any digital audio or video file available on the internet in the form of episodic series. All new instalments are automatically downloaded via web syndication to the user’s computer or portable media player.
• Video: A perfect combination of moving visual images that can be recorded, copied, playback, broadcast and display. The video is the future of content marketing and accounts 69 % of all consumers’ internet traffic, according to Cisco.
• Books: savvy marketers don’t sell books just to sell books, they sell books as marketing tools.

Tools Required For Content Marketing

As content marketing has grown to a powerful tool for doing business and connecting with a targeted audience, many B2B and B2C marketers are planning to increase their content marketing spend this year. Businesses from various industry niches rely on different kinds of content thus, approaches to different content marketing tools. Few of them are mentioned here:

• BuzzSumo: This tool helps in finding what works in your niche and whom to promote your content for optimal exposure.
• CovertPlug : It can help you get subscribers for your newsletter, whitepapers or other content.
• MailChimp : A Famous tool for e-mail marketing, it can help you automate your emails and send them to different audiences.    
• CoSchedule : With its help, you can keep your content fresh, consistent and engaging. Besides, it features management of Google Docs content, Evernote content, converts Google Docs & Evernote content to Wordpres, etc. It is used by organizations.
• Buffer : Sets up your own social media updating schedule for managing multiple Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.

            Furthermore, Google Analytics is widely used for tracking traffic, Content Marketer is used for increasing footfall to your site, Facebook Ads empowers you to put your content in front of those who are most likely to respond.

It is advisable to find your or organizational needs and acquire the suitable package of content marketing tools.

Benefits Of Content Marketing:

Content marketing provides several benefits that one could not simply ignore. Following are few benefits that business can gain with content marketing:

• Content establishes you as a thought leader
• It is cheaper them traditional form of marketing
• Increases visibility of your brand & sales
• Improves brand awareness and recognition
• Creates loyalty and trust, with both your current customers and prospects
• Helps you to build authority and credibility
• Positions your business as an expert in your industry
• Generates traffic to your site to improve lead generation
• Opens a channel of communication through social shares and comments
• Helps your customer move through the purchase decision more quickly
• Provides value with no strings attached

When you have a magnetic content for marketing, the audience will come automatically and there will be no need to engage in any high-pressure sales tactics to retain them. Businesses who would like to get ahead should use this powerful tool to strategize and execute carefully planned content marketing campaigns and reap the benefits. 

Sources:

1. http://www.business2community.com/infographics/8-hard-ignore-content-marketing-benefits-infographic-01038290#JvjyxOAtWwHMmiDj.97
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing
3. http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2015/06/content-marketing-tools-success/
4. http://www.jeffbullas.com/2016/05/28/7-content-marketing-tools-need-successful/

Pre-Wedding Photo Shoot Poses That Every Couple Should Try

People meet, date each other, love and finally turn into life partners. Marriage is the most auspicious part of life and to make it memorable, couples are now willing to go an extra mile for selecting things right from their marriage venue to color-coordinating dresses and card-theme to honeymoon destination, etc. Now-a-days, the pre-wedding shoot has become a primary and essential concern for couples to capture their moments before they get hitched. It is advisable to be unique, natural and let your crazy side out to make your pre-wedding shoot full of fun and absolutely memorable. It's once in a lifetime shoot so, must do work over selecting attires, theme, location and photographer. Take a look at these few poses that are must for every loving couple:

1. Save The Date Idea

This idea has become very popular as couples choose to send invites over social media. Pick few dates that are closer to your love story and re-enact an iconic movie scene.

2. Tie-up In Each Others Love

It's right time to show that you guys are booked for each other. Go crazy because this time and feeling of your pre-wedding shoot won’t come back; choose some loving props and capture the moment in the lens.

3. Capture The Reflection Of Your Love

No matter what’s the location, just pour your heart and soul in every picture of your pre-wedding shoot to make it a memorable one. Try this pose to show your love for each other.

4. Show Your Power To Each Other

Men might think that they will always have an upper hand in the relationship so it’s right time to break their myth and make them realize who is the real boss. Take a clue from these out of the box pictures and get clicked in.

5. Capture The Fun Time

Do you love sports, adventure or games? If yes, then try something like this that can make you smile, laugh, scream and cry even after many years.

6. Say Your True Feeling

All set to enter the nuptial bond? If yes, then scout & plan the location and tell your partner what you truly feel for him; and pour this moment in the lens, you guys will really have fun.

The wedding is a lifetime affair and to make it unique start with a pre-wedding shoot and capture those precious moments that you’ve earned together or you’re planning to have. Shoot at different venues and mesmerize others with your love-story. This fun-filled couple photography is an inseparable part of wedding photography and has equal importance as the wedding pictures. So, just go crazy and click those poses that describe your love story the best.