The Wax Blog

Thanks to Gareth Boyd, Beth and Brandy for their wonderful guest posts this week, allowing me to take my first real vacation in 10 years.

The key to making money online is the ability to convert your traffic into sales. Contrary to popular belief, traffic is the easy part of internet business. The ability to convert that traffic into money is what sets the pros apart from everyone else. The following is a list of seven tips to analyse your traffic and increase conversions.

1- Use a heatmap program for your website. There are a variety of options, but a heatmap will show you where your clients are moving looking and where they’re clicking. (more…)

Thanks to Brandy Olson for this guest post on something I had never heard of. But then again, I’m not as smart as my phone these days. 

Very soon Near Field Communication (NFC) technology will be widely available on smartphones and in the hands of consumers. Devices equipped with this technology will be able to communicate with other smartphones, tags, and stations using the same. Communicating with vendors, retail store, and other people can become as simple as swiping your phone over another device. Many smart phones already come equipped with an NFC device, which many experts believe will become the standard tool for making payments to readers at cash registers.  (more…)

By Thomas Douane

As Steve Jobs steps down from his position at Apple, he leaves behind a legacy that doesn’t seem to be lost on anyone considering how many retrospective pieces have been published. However, this media storm is unsurprising. Jobs’ roller coaster career with the company and ultimate redemption borders on a fairytale and has led to a consumer base that identifies with Apple tech at an almost genetic level. One undeniable element Jobs brought back to the ailing company was a design philosophy based on things humans recognize as objectively beautiful. Apple designs appeal to something deep within us, far past the aesthetic surface. There are things we mechanically recognize as beautiful, things we immediately if subconsciously find comforting or soothing.

It’s an important lesson for any industry: How can you get in tune with the most basic functions of your audience? Bloggers often publish list pieces due to the cursory nature of reading on the Internet. Media content providers calibrate the length of their video production to the attention span of their target demographic.

Here are the top three ways Apple has effectively tapped into our biological attraction, making their products more appealing to our deeper sensibilities. (more…)

Thanks to Lauren Bailey for being our own Emily Post of the social media world. I think I’m breaking nearly all her rules on a regular basis.

Find these icons at www.hongkiat.com

Those wanting to self-market their new business, book or product with a limited amount of funds typically turn to free resources in order to get the promotion they want. One of the more popular choices is utilizing one of the leading social media networking sites— Twitter. And it’s a great avenue to pursue too. Just about everyone has one including high-profile bloggers, celebrities, powerful industry executives and most importantly tons and tons of prospective customers and clients. It’s a great way to reach potentially hundreds of thousands of people at no cost. Using the site may seem simple. After all who can botch a 140 character long sentence? But the truth of the matter is that a lot of people do so on a regular basis. So many in fact that instead of building a strong clientele base, some entrepreneurs and business owners actually turn-off their customers via tweets instead. To make sure you don’t use the site incorrectly, brush up on some common “tweetiquette” by learning a few simple rules: (more…)

In my last post, we looked at some of the different ways of defining original content that you may not have considered when writing your blogs. I introduced the idea of using Copyscape to ensure that there is no duplication within your posts, and this week we’ll look exactly at how you can use that tool to your advantage.

Copyscape is designed primarily to prevent plagiarism.  Often, websites use it to ensure that no one else has stolen their original content.  It is also a great tool to use as a writer. When I’ve discussed this with other writers in the past,  I’ve received looks like I’m crazy using Copyscape on my own writing – because it should be pretty clear to me whether or not I’ve plagiarized the content.

That may be true, but as we covered last time, there are other definitions of ‘original content’ and if I want to ensure that I meet the criteria for one of those – ensuring there is  ZERO duplication within the content – Copyscape is the best option.

Want to know more about using Copyscape to ensure your content is original ? (more…)

A program on American Public Media’s Marketplace on Saturday morning caught my attention as APM’s Heidi Moore presented the pros and cons of using the GDP and consumerism as a means of measuring how “well” we’re doing. I’ve always thought it was a bit of a conundrum that as we try to reuse as much as we can (right now to the current obsession with vintage clothing) we’re still measuring ourselves on how much we’re consuming. It’s the same when I hear that unemployment is high, but the number of startups is rapidly increasing. Does anyone not see the correlations between these things? I can’t tell you how many of my friends have started their businesses while on unemployment. (Frankly I don’t see anything wrong with that and I’m happy to pay taxes to fund my friends’ and others’ dreams.)

I don’t agree with a lot of what happens in the UK but I was intrigued by the new Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index. It’s an index of how well UK residents are doing in terms of their health and well-being. The reporter went on to talk about “why don’t we have one here” and so I looked it up. We’ve had a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index in the US since 2008. (Shame on you, Heidi Moore that was super easy to find.)
Basically, here’s what it does: (more…)