The Best Resources for SMEs Grappling with Big Data
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Big data represents one of the most valuable assets any business can hope to gain. It offers a map to your market’s behaviour, and the insights you need to be able to predict the direction in which your target market – and, by extension, your business – is heading.
One of the toughest problems for SMEs, however, lies in properly gathering and utilizing these massive stores of data. Everything you do online, from making sales to interacting with internet users via digital marketing campaigns, will yield significant insights into the heart of your industry, but finding the time to gather, sort, analyze and utilize that data keeps many from realizing its full potential.
Read more about some excellent resources for dealing with big data, below.

Email Marketing Software
Email marketing boasts an enviable list of benefits. While not the most labour-intensive or costly tool for digital marketing, it targets one of the most valuable userbases to which you have readymade access: your existing customers and subscribers. By maintaining an open line of communication with this userbase, and opening up new dialogues during seminal moments in the growth and development of your business, will prove invaluable – provided you can grapple with the data your campaigns gather overtime.
The same goes for affiliate marketing, which enables the same line of communication while also bringing a financial benefit to you. Utilising software in this ongoing process will ensure that each step is streamlined and targeted towards the right users. You can easily check out how it could help your business to stay on top of this platform, and to curate – and, more importantly, utilise – the data your efforts will yield.
Google Analytics
Your site is your storefront, but, in the real world, it is much easier to monitor and interpret customer behaviour than it is when you are simply staring at your home screen and witnessing the rise and fall of digital sales throughout the day.
Google Analytics is a free tool that can offer significant insights into the behaviours of your site’s visitors – for instance, where they came from, what devices they are using (mobile or PC) and what your bounce rate is. This offers the opportunity for significant progress, both in terms of increasing site traffic and honing your external marketing campaigns.
Surveys
While surveys are not able to rival the sheer quantity of information housed under the term ‘Big Data’, there exists a growing body of research expounding the value surveys hold when utilised in tandem with it.
In this view, big data can be seen as what is gathered organically – for instance, the ratio of subscribers who open your emails, vs those who ignore them or unsubscribe as a result of receiving them. Survey data is manually gathered – it does not hold the same raw organicity – but it can be used as a tool for contextualising big data and broadening your understanding further. It can also be guided by big data, which means that your ability to communicate directly with your users is enhanced, and words are not wasted on questions to which you already know the answers.
Big data is invaluable to all businesses, but knowing how to understand it – and, more importantly still, to put it to use – is an art form in and of itself. Like any specialty, it demands a whole host of resources that will ensure that nothing is wasted, and that every element of your online activity is put to use in order to further your efforts, and gain access to the very heart of your digital audience.
CrazyEgg
Google Analytics is a wonderful web analytics tool for any business with an online presence. However, it can’t solve every possible online analytics need. You may need to use more specialized web analytics tools for things like UX optimization.
CrazyEgg is a very impressive web analytics tool that was developed by Neil Patel. This tool is great for monitoring user behavior, which can be incredibly important for improving conversion rates.
There are a lot of ways that you can benefit from using CrazyEgg. One option is to look at different elements on your website landing pages, such as images and CTA buttons. With CrazyEgg, you can see how your visitors respond to them. You can change elements and remove any that seem to be too distracting.
Here is an example of an insight that some companies have found with CrazyEgg. They would put an image on their landing pages to make it look more engaging. With this web analytics tool, they would find that visitors were unexpectedly trying to click on the image more than the button. They would add a hyperlink to the image, so that it would accomplish the same function as the button itself. Other companies would simply remove the image altogether or reduce its size to make the CTA stand out more.
ActiveData
ActiveData is a very important ad-on for Microsoft Excel. This tool can be very useful for tracking conversions, but the same purposes can be applicable for other issues as well.
One benefit of using ActiveData is that you can help fight fraud more easily. In particular, this add-on is useful for tracking internal theft. This is a benefit that you can’t afford to ignore, because employee pilfering accounts for almost 30% of all business failures.
Sage Accounting
Accounting is one of the least favorite parts of running a business for most entrepreneurs. Few people want to spend a considerable amount of time crunching numbers and tracking the amount of transactions that affect their cash flow.
Unfortunately, you can’t afford to ignore the importance of sound bookkeeping. You either will need to do it yourself or pay a large amount of money to hire a professional bookkeeper. The latter may not be an option if you are running a new business with limited resources, so you need to find a way to manage your own bookkeeping without taking up too much of your time.
New advances in data analytics have made it a lot easier. A number of new accounting tools have reached the market, which can simplify your bookkeeping and save you a tremendous amount of time.
Sage Accounting is one of the best big data accounting tools for small businesses. It is an excellent option for entrepreneurs that don’t have any employees. This tool does everything from income documentation to reconciliation of bank documents. You can get all of the great features for just $10 a month. You will have access to even more valuable features if you plan to upgrade to the $25 a month plan, which is still a lot cheaper than hiring a professional. These other features include forecasting cash flow and generating financial statements.
Sage Accounting is a major breakthrough in accounting analytics for small businesses. It is a great option that you probably should not overlook.

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Starting a Blog in 2021: What You Need to Know
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Blogging can be quite fun and lucrative if done correctly. While some people blog for fun, others have taken it as a career. Some people blog full-time while others blog part-time. All these are ways on how to make an extra buck out of blogging. But what is blogging? You might ask. In layman’s terms, blogging can be described as a web-based journey where bloggers share their thoughts on various issues or topics, be it financial, family, law, or entertainment.
Interestingly, there are so many people who’ve made blogging their main source of income and are enjoying the fruits of their labor this way. All it takes is time to find relatable topics you can engage your audience with and you are good to go. But there’s more to blogging than meets the eye. These might have to do with the logistics that come with it as well as the other nitty gritties that will be discussed below. Here’s what you need to know if you are looking to start blogging in 2021.

Learn SEO
Before you even start your blog, you should have the basic knowledge of how SEO (search engine optimization) will affect your blog site. Not so many bloggers realize this but SEO is the bread and butter of most if not all blogs. This is among the ways you can improve and boost your online presence without much of a sweat.
Today, and as it turns out, content is still king! There are so many people who are after quality content and if you have not invested in the right SEO practices for your blog, then you might as well quit. Sadaf, the blog owner at https://massilah.com, provides good blogging tips and insights as well as the best SEO practices to utilize if you are to generate more traffic from the known search engines. Among such practices include:
- Ensure that your URLs are specific, meaningful, and relevant
- Include post titles that are eye-catching and compelling
- Keyword placement is also a major area of concern as those placed within the first paragraphs help to rank your posts higher on search engines
- Ensure that your content is top-notch stuff
- When using images, be sure that the images are optimized for search engines
- Do not compromise on your blog’s loading speeds
Identify Your Niche
To start a blog, you need to identify a niche, which means coming up with relative topics that you’ll be good at. Your blog posts should have a theme and to find one, you need to address issues that affect you or topics that your audience can relate with. Think of it as a marketing platform. Most bloggers will concentrate their posts on their passions, talents, or hobbies. However, it would be best if you started with an area you are passionate about because come to think about it, you can not go wrong with following your dreams. This helps to ensure consistency and originality.
When it comes to choosing your niche, choose your niche based on the audience revenue potential. Your niche should enable you to solve most of the problems your audience encounters. The challenges you solve also need to be too dire that your audience can be willing to spend some money and time on.
Most people have gone into affiliate marketing as a result of blogging. Affiliate marketers will recommend consumers to businesses, products, and services. This means that at the end of the day, they’ll be making commissions on every sale made through them. You could also maximize your professional leverage by having a deeper understanding of your clients’ needs. By this, it means researching the most competitive keywords.
Write Down The Goals Of Your Blog
Starting a new blog requires a lot of discipline and consistency. Once you’ve identified your niche, you need to keep track of everything including your motivations, content, goals, and ideas. Set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals. Build the profile of your blog through unique value propositions. Write down your blog’s headline and subheadings. Create your blog’s elevator pitch on how you would market your blog to an audience in a few seconds. Consider your clients’ needs and how you are going to categorize your blog.
Come Up With A Domain Name

You’ll, of course, want to be associated with your blog and this is mainly the identifying factor when creating a blog. A blog extension name will be key to your audience identifying with your content. This will be your brand and it’s of utmost importance that you invest heavily in it to ensure that it will resonate in the minds of your audience for time to come. Your domain name should be catchy, short to the point, must include specific keywords, and should be easy to type.
Create A Budget
There will be costs to be met when starting a blog. You’ll most definitely need hosting services from the best web hosting companies if you are to get the most out of your blogging. Needless to mention is the fact that it costs to create an effective and efficient domain name. Other costs to factor in include:
- Hardware costs
- Marketing tools
- Content creation
- Creating a website
- Plugin development
- Managing your blogging team
Launching Your First Blog Post
It will cost you time and money to see your first blog post go online. It will cost you even more if you are to see your blog posts attract more traffic. But with advancements in technology and the various paid blogging services, this shouldn’t take time. As a newbie, you might consider utilizing the WordPress blog option. But then again, it would still be meaningless if you’ll not have invested the time to create a great domain name, marketing yourself, or creating quality content.
You might, while at it, consider enlisting a blogging company to help provide you with the services you need in consistently supplying your audience with quality content, in social engagement, and in meeting your objectives and goals.
To start a blog, you need to have a profitable niche where you can use your passion, professional experience, and skills to fill. Having measurable goals is key to helping you achieve the focus of your blog. The audience, marketability, and knowledge should guide your choice of a blog.
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