Vital Ways to Improve the Internal Security of Your Business

Internal security is one of those things that businesses can easily neglect something that should be avoided because neglecting things like security only leads to unnecessary problems. There are many very real security threats that can originate from within your business, as well as from outside of it. That’s why it’s so important to get this stuff right. Here are some of the ways in which you can improve your approach.

Image Source – CC0 License

Ensure Your Wifi is Password Protected

How to Keep Your Startup Unique

Image credit – Pixabay CC0 License

A unique startup idea is what every entrepreneur yearns to discover. The market place is full of identical businesses, all shouting for attention in a desperate bid to catch the attention of potential customers. The great thing about a startup based on a unique idea is that you should be able to cut straight through this noise and get your brand recognized pretty quickly.

The issue that many business owners suffer with, is that in order to make their startup a success, they take themselves off into different directions than they originally planned to. Over time, wandering away from the original business idea can take away that uniqueness that launched the startup in the first place.

Five Tips for Starting Your Hotel’s Marketing Efforts on Social Media

Every business needs a viable set of marketing strategies in order to attract customers and clients, increase sales and achieve adequate brand visibility. For ages, the hospitality sector has been relegated to using traditional marketing methods for reaching audiences, including the use of hoardings, newspaper ads and direct mail campaigns.

With the advent of the internet, a seemingly limitless number of marketing options are now available to hotels both large and small. In particular, social media marketing presents an effective, affordable and flexible digital marketing solution that hotels can use to their advantage.

What About Print Marketing?

https://www.pexels.com/photo/working-in-a-group-6224/

It goes without saying that an effective marketing campaign is crucial for any business. Because of the current state of the economy people have less money to spend. Thus, the money they do have they are being a lot more cautious with. This obviously makes it a lot more difficult for businesses to survive let alone progress.

Nevertheless, there are people out there who are still spending their money. It is simply a case of finding an effective way to market towards these people. A lot of individuals tend to overlook the efficiency of more traditional marketing outlets because of the progression of digital marketing nowadays. However, mediums such as commercial print prove to be extremely effective.

Server and Infrastructure Monitoring

Each year, cyber-security attacks and IT mishaps cost business owners in the United States over $2.2 million dollars. Rather than being just another statistic, you need to find a way to keep your company’s servers and IT infrastructure in good working order.

One of the best ways to quickly detect problems with these vital parts of your business is by investing in comprehensive monitoring software. Most of the server and infrastructure monitoring programs on the market today are cloud-based. This means you will not have to worry about remembering to update them on your own.

Why Good Design Is Vital For Startups

If you have an idea for a new business, you may well be thinking of creating an online presence for it. There are not many businesses that do not have a website and those that do not are far less likely to succeed. The Internet is a brilliant platform for getting your brand known, providing you use it to its best advantage.

Make It Visually Appealing

Your website could be the first time a viewer sees your brand and it needs to be visually appealing or they will just move on to another site without stopping to look closer. Don’t have a fussy cluttered page, as that will just make it look complicated. Images and videos can be very good, but you do need some written content about your products as well.

What Hosting Plan Does a Startup Require?

There are different kinds of startups. Some are affiliates sites that review products and sell them via retailers, taking a commission for their referral. Other startups are dot-coms, app-based, or web app ones that have different needs to an internet marketer with their affiliate site.

Let’s consider what hosting plans are suitable for different types of startups.

Web App

Web apps are typically Software-as-a-Server (SaaS) business models where customers visit their website, sign up, log in, and then begin using their software. The software isn’t installed. Rather, it is the website. Try to imagine a world where the cloud storage provider Dropbox only has a website and no mobile apps. You’d log into your Dropbox account and then transfer files back and forth; that’s a web app.

4 Top Marketing Tips for StartUps

We all know that the statistics for startup businesses succeeding are not great. The odds are very much against you when you take the big plunge and venture into your own startup adventure. So what can you do to try and improve your chances of succeeding? Having a well-developed marketing strategy is a good starting point as your marketing strategy can certainly define whether your business goes the distance. A good marketing strategy can boost your sales and/or lead generations significantly, so it is not an area that you will want to take lightly.

A. FREE WEBSITE + LOGO + HOSTING + INVOICING

• HTML5 UP: Responsive HTML5 and CSS3 site templates.
• Bootswatch: Free themes for Bootstrap.
• Templated: A collection of 845 free CSS & HTML5 site templates.
• WordPress.org | WordPress.com: Create your new website for free.
• Strikingly.com Domain: One free website for strikingly.com domains.
• Withoomph: Beautiful logos designed instantly.
• Turbologo: a state-of-the-art AI-based logo generator
• Squarespace Free Logo: You can download free low-res version for free.
• Hive: First free unlimited cloud service in the world.
• Invoice to me: Free Invoice Generator.
• Free Invoice Generator: Alternative free invoice generator.
• Slimvoice: Insanely simple invoices.

B. FREE BUSINESS / PROJECT NAME GENERATORS

• The Name App: Find an available name for your brilliant idea.
• Naminum: Discover a perfect company name.
• Short Domain Search: Find short, available single-word domain names.
• Wordoid: Pick a short and catchy name for your business.
• Hipster Business Name: Hipster business name generator.
• Impossibility: The best domain name generator ever.
• Lean Domain Search: Find a domain name for your website in seconds.
• Domainr: Fast, free, domain name search, short URLs.

C. WRITING / BLOGGING

• Hemingway: Hemingway App makes your writing bold and clear.
• Grammarly: Finds & corrects mistakes of your writing.
• Medium: Everyone’s stories and ideas.
• ZenPen: The minimal writing tool of web.
• Liberio: Simple eBook creation and publishing right from Google Drive.
• Editorial Calendar: See all your posts, drag & drop to manage your blog.
• Story Wars: Writing stories together.
• Headline Analyzer: Emotional marketing value headline analyzer.
• WP Hide Post: Control the visibility of items on your blog.
• Social Locker: Ask visitors “to pay” for your content with a tweet, etc.
• Egg Timer: Set a time and bookmark it for repeated use.

D. FIND (TRENDING) CONTENT (IDEAS)

• Portent: Content idea generator.
• Google Trends: A new way of displaying trending searches.
• Buzzsumo: Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.
• Hubspot Blog Topic Generator: Custom blog ideas.
• Swayy: Discover the most engaging content. Free for 1 dashboard user.
• Others: Google+ What’s Hot | Twitter Trending | Quora | Reddit

E. FREE SEO + WEBSITE ANALYZERS

• Open Site Explorer: A comprehensive tool for link analysis.
• Ahrefs: Site explorer & backlink checker.
• Quick Sprout: Complete analysis of your website.
• WordPress SEO by Yoast: Have a fully optimized WordPress site.
• SEO Site Checkup: Check your website’s SEO problems for free.
• Hubspot Marketing Grader: Grade your marketing.
• SimilarWeb: Analyze website statistics for any domain.
• Alexa Ranking: Analytical insights to analyze any site’s rank.
• SERPs Rank Checker: Free keyword rank & SERP checker.
• OpenLinkProfiler: The freshest backlinks, for free.
• Keywordtool.io: Free alternative to Google Keyword Planner.
• Google: Analytics | Keyword Planner | Webmaster Tools | Trends
• Nibbler: Test any website.
• Browseo: How search engines see your website.
• Broken Links: Find broken links, redirects & more.
• Copyscape: Search for copies of your page on the web.
• Woorank: Website review and SEO tool.
• Google Pagespeed Insights: Check the performance of your site.
• Pingdom Website Speed Test: Test & the load time of a site.
• GTMetrics: Analyze your page’s speed performance.
• Moz Local: Check your local listings on Google, Bing, and others.
• XML Sitemaps: Sitemap generator that creates XML & HTML variants.
• W3C validator: Easy-to-use markup validation service.
• Shopify E-commerce Report: Get your free Ecommerce report.

F. FREE IMAGE OPTIMIZERS

• TinyJPG | TinyPNG Compress images.
• Compressor.io: Optimize and compress your images online.
• Kraken: Optimize your images & accelerate your websites.
• ImageOptimizer: Resize, compress and optimize your image files.
• ImageOptim: Makes images take up less disk space & load faster.
• Smush.it: Image optimizer WordPress plugin.

G. FREE IMAGE EDITORS

• Canva: Amazingly simple graphic design for bloggers.
• Pixlr: Pixlr Editor is a robust browser photo editor.
• Skitch: Get your point across with fewer words.
• Easel.ly: Empowers anyone to create & share powerful visuals.
• Social Image Resizer Tool: Create optimized images for social media.
• Placeit: Free product mockups & templates.
• Recite: Turn a quote into a visual masterpiece.
• Meme Generator: The first online meme generator.

H. COLLECT & SEND EMAILS FOR FREE

• Contact form 7: Famous WordPress plugin to collect email addresses.
• Mailchimp: Send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free.
• ManyContactsBar: Free contact form sits on top of your website.
• Hello Bar: Get more email subscribers.
• Sumome List Builder: Collect email addresses with light box popover.
• Scroll Triggered Box: Boost your conversion rates — Wordpress only.
• Sumome Scroll Box: Capture more email addresses, politely.

I. FREE SOCIAL MEDIA + COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT + SURVEYS

• WriteRack: The easiest way to blog/tweetstorm on twitter.
• Spruce: Make Twitter ready images in seconds.
• Click To Tweet: Get more shares on your content.
• MyTweetLinks: Increases Twitter traffic.
• Latergram: Easily plan & schedule your Instagram posts.
• WordPress Pin it Button for Images: Add a “Pin It” button.
• SharedCount: Track URL shares, likes, tweets, and more.
• Justunfollow: Follow / unfollow people on Twitter & Instagram.
• SocialRank: Identify, organize, and manage your followers on Twitter.
• Klout: Social media influence score on browser extension.
• Ritetag: Instant hashtag analysis.
• Social Analytics: Interactions for a URL on most social platforms.
• Riffle: Full profile and info on any Twitter user.
• Buffer Free Plan: Schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+.
• Bitly: Create, share, and track shortened links.
• Flament: A free beautiful and customizable sharing bar.
• Addthis: Get more shares, follows and conversions.
• Sumome Share: Auto-optimizes your share buttons for max traffic.
• Digg Digg: Your all in one share buttons plugin.
• Disqus: Build a community of active readers & commenters.
• Typeform: Free beautiful online survey & form builder.
• Tally: Create polls in no time.

J. A/B TESTS & GROWTH HACKING

• Petit Hacks: Acquisition, retention, & revenue hacks used by companies.
• Optimizely: One optimization platform for websites and mobile apps.
• Hello Bar: Tool for A/B testing different CTAs & power words.
• GrowthHackers: Unlocking growth. Together.

→ Design + Code ←

A. FREE DESIGN RESOURCES

• Freebbble: High-quality design freebies from Dribbble.
• Dribbble: Dribbble search results for “freebie”. An absolute freebie treasure.
• Graphic Burger: Tasty design resources made with care for each pixel.
• Pixel Buddha: Free and premium resources for professional community.
• Premium Pixels: Free Stuff for Creative Folk.
• Fribbble: Free PSD resources by Dribbblers curated by Gilbert Pellegrom.
• Freebiesbug: Latest free PSDs & other resources for designers.
• 365 Psd: Download a free psd every day.
• Dbf: Dribbble & Behance best design freebies.
• Marvel: Free resources from designers we love.
• UI Space: High quality hand-crafted Freebies for awesome people.
• Free Section of Pixeden: Free design resources.
• Free Section of Creative Market: Freebies coming out every monday.
• Teehan+Lax: DiOS 8 GUI PSD (iPhone 6).
• Teehan+Lax: iPad GUI PSD.
• Freepik: iFree graphic resources for everyone.
• Tech&All: PSD, Tech News, and other resources for free.
• Tethr: The most beautiful IOS design KIT ever.

B. COLOR PICKERS

• Material Palette: Generate & export your Material Design color palette.
• New Flat UI Color Picker: Best flat colors for UI design.
• Flat UI Colors: Beautiful flat colors.
• Coolors: Super fast color schemes generator for cool designers.
• Skala Color: An extraordinary color picker for designers and developers.
• Couleurs: Simple app for grabbing & tweaking colors you see on screen.
• Material UI Colors: Material ui color palette for Android, Web & iOS.
• Colorful Gradients: Gradients automatically created by a computer.
• Adaptive Backgrounds: Extract dominant colours from images.
• Brand Colors: Colors used by famous brands.
• Paletton: The color scheme designer.
• 0 to 255: A simple tool that helps web designers find variations of any color.
• Colour Lovers: Create & share colors, palettes, and patterns.
• Adobe Color CC: Color combinations from the Kuler community.
• Bootflat: Perfect colors for flat designs.
• Hex Colorrrs: Hex to RGB converter.
• Get UI Colors: Get awesome UI colors.
• Coleure: Smart color picker.
• Colllor: Color palette generator.
• Palette for Chrome: Creates a color palette from any image.

C. INSPIRATION

• MaterialUp: Daily material design inspiration.
• FLTDSGN: Daily showcase of the best flat UI design websites and apps.
• Site Inspire: Web design inspiration.
• UI Cloud: The largest user interface design database in the world.
• Moodboard: Build a beautiful moodboard and share the result.
• Crayon: The most comprehensive collection of marketing designs.
• Land-Book: Product landing pages gallery.
• Ocean: A community of designers sharing feedback.
• Dribbble: Show and tell for designers.
• Behance: Showcase & discover creative work.
• Pttrns: Mobile user interface patterns.
• Flat UI Design: Useful board I discovered thanks to Erik.
• Awwwards: The awards for design, creativity and innovation.
• The Starter Kit: Curated resources for developers and designers.
• One Page Love: Resource for one page website inspiration.
• UI Parade: User interface design tools and design inspiration.
• The Best Designs: The best of web design.
• Agile Designers: Best resources for designers & developers.
• Niice: A search engine with taste.

D. FREE STOCK PHOTOGRAPHY

• Stock Up: Best free stock photo websites in one place.
• Pexels: Best free photos in one place.
• All The Free Stock: Free stock images, icons, and videos.
• Unsplash: Free (do whatever you want) high-resolution photos.
• Splashbase: Search & discover free, hi res photos & videos.
• Startup Stock Photos: Go. Make something.
• Jay Mantri: Free pics. do anything (CC0). Make magic.
• Moveast: This is a journey of a portuguese guy moving east.
• Travel Coffee Book: Sharing beautiful travel moments.
• Designers Pics: Free photographs for your personal & commercial use.
• Death to the Stock Photo: Free photos sent to you every month.
• Foodie’s Feed: Free food pictures in hi-res.
• Mazwai: Free creative commons HD video clips & footages.
• Jéshoots: New modern free photos.
• Super Famous: Photos by Dutch interaction designer Folkert Gorter.
• Picography: Free hi-resolution photos.
• Pixabay: Free high quality images.
• Magdeleine: A free high-resolution photo every day.
• Snapographic: Free stock photos for personal & commercial use.
• Little Visuals: 7 hi-res images in your inbox every 7 days.
• Splitshire: Delicious free stock photos.
• New Old Stock: Vintage photos from the public archives.
• Picjumbo: Totally free photos.
• Life of Pix: Free high-resolution photos.
• Gratisography: Free high-resolution photos.
• Getrefe: Free photos.
• IM Free: A curated collection of free resources.
• Cupcake: A photographer’s treat by Jonas Nilsson Lee.
• The Pattern Library: Free patterns for your projects.
• Public Domain Archive: New 100% free stock photos.
• ISO Republic: High-quality, free photos for creatives.
• Stokpic: Totally free photos.
• Kaboompics: The best way to get free photos.
• Function: Free photo packs.
• MMT: Free stock photos by Jeffrey Betts.
• Paul Jarvis: Free high-resolution photos.
• Lock & Stock Photos: Free stock photos for you.
• Raumrot: Free high-resolution picture.
• Bucketlistly: A free creative common collection of travel photos.
• Some more websites: Free Digital Photos |Morguefile | Public Domain Pictures | Stockvault | ImageFree | Rgbstock |Dreamstime | Free Images | Free Range Stock | Free Photos Bank.
• Some hand-picked some free photo packs:
• → from Free Goodies for Designers: (here | here | here | here | here | here| here | here |here | and here.),
• → from Deal Jumbo: (here | here | here | here | here | here | here | here|here | and here.),
• → from Dribbble: (here | here | here | here | here | here | here |here | and here.),
• → from Graphic Burger: (here | here | here | here | here | here | and here.)

E. FREE TYPOGRAPHY

• TypeGenius: Find the perfect font combo for your next project.
• Font Squirrel: 100% free commercial fonts.
• FontFaceNinja: Browser extension to find the web fonts a site uses.
• Google Fonts: Free, open-source fonts optimized for the web.
• Beautiful Web Type: Best typefaces from the Google web fonts directory.
• DaFont: Archive of freely downloadable fonts.
• 1001 Free Fonts: A huge selection of free fonts.
• FontPark: The web’s largest archive of free fonts.
• Font-to-width: Fit pieces of text snugly within their containers.

F. FREE ICONS

• Fontello: Icon fonts generator.
• Flat Icon: A search engine for 16000+ glyph vector icons.
• Material Design Icons: 750 Free open-source glyphs by Google.
• Font Awesome: The iconic font and CSS toolkit.
• Glyphsearch: Search for icons from other icon databases.
• MakeAppIcon: Generate App Icons of all sizes with a click.
• Endless Icons: Free flat icons and creative stuff.
• Ico Moon: 4000+ free vector icons, icon generator.
• The Noun Project: Thousands of glyph icons from different artists.
• Perfect Icons: A social icon creation tool.
• Material Design Icons: 750 Free open-source glyphs by Google.
• Icon Finder: Free icon section of the website.
• Free Round Icons: Doodle Set | Flat Set | Vector Line Set
• Icon Sweets: 60 free vector Photoshop icons.

G. FREE USEFUL STUFF

• UI Names: Generate random names for use in designs and mockups.
• UI Faces: Find and generate sample avatars for user interfaces.
• UI Blurbs: Quick user bios for your mockups.
• Copy Paste Character: Click to copy.
• Window Resizer: See how it looks on various screen resolutions.

→ Work & Productivity ←

A. BACKGROUND SOUND TO FOCUS