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E-Commerce News: M-Commerce: Tech Leaders See Smartphones Replacing Credit Cards, Cash
By 2020, the majority of U.S. consumers will use smartphones to pay for goods and services, concluded a new study from Pew and Elon University.
The survey is unusual in that Pew queried tech stakeholders and leaders about the subject, as opposed to a random sample of the general population. Executives from such companies as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) were included in the mix, as well as professors and other thought leaders.
Whether that makes the study more or less predictive remains to be seen. What is clear, however, is that these industry insiders fully believe that smartphones will be a major form of transmitting payments within eight years.
See on www.ecommercetimes.com
8 Tips to Build Your Online Brand Presence for Your Small Business
If you want to increase your online business brand and visibility, there are many creative ways to do it. You can start small and build from there but make a goal of covering all the areas listed below in order to establish business credibility online.
- Pictures — Post a good headshot of yourself on all your social media, websites, blogs, and Internet collateral. Let people know who you are and don’t hide yourself. People want to see your face and your eyes so they can see you for themselves and whether or not they should trust you.
- Write Articles — Writing articles for article marketing sites, newspapers, and other venues will help to establish your credibility by demonstrating your knowledge. If other people are willing to print your information outside of your own websites and blogs then you must know what you’re talking about.
- Blog About It — Establish your expertise by blogging about what you know. Giving your readers free information can never go wrong in helping to increase your online business credibility. Each blog should be micro focused on very small aspects of the information that you have to share, which can wet your visitor’s appetite for more information.
- Create an Ezine — Having an established ezine or newsletter can go far in increasing your business credibility if you do it right. Don’t have a sign up for an e-newsletter then never send out a newsletter. Ideally you should have a few preloaded newsletters in your autoresponder before you start asking for sign-ups to your ezine then you can be ahead of the game providing informative and useful newsletters to all your subscribers.
- Publish an eBook — Creating and publishing an eBook isn’t very difficult today. All you need to do is repurpose the rest of your content into one eBook. You can make a compilation of a year’s worth of blog posts, rearrange the order, add a few bullets, some great formatting, pictures, and turn it into a PDF or even make it into a PUB file and sell it on Kindle.
- Create Tutorials — If you have knowledge that you want to share with others a great way to do this is to create short informative and useful tutorials. You can use a screen capturing software, or film what you’re doing with a flip cam, video camera, or webcam then post on your blog, on YouTube.com and in other places so that as many of your target market as possible can view it.
- Get Interviews — There are a lot of Internet radio stations (check out blogtalkradio.com) today as well as other people out there who need content for their websites and blogs. If you can find people who run complementary businesses to yours, and are not your direct competition you can agree to interview each other via video, podcast, or even just print and cross post on each other’s blogs.
- Participate — If you’re involved with social media, forums, and groups online or off the only way you can truly get something out of it is to participate. Participating will establish your credibility in many ways. If you volunteer for an organization that you enjoy being involved in, you can establish good relationships with people who may refer you to others who are ready to pay for your products and / or services.
Building your brand online is important. You need to be deliberate about. These ways are great ways to go about building a great, solid foundation of a brand online.
Amazon Leaps Into High End of the Fashion Pool
Amazon is taking on the high-end clothing business in its typical way: go big and spare no expense.
See on www.nytimes.com
Be in it to win it
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