All posts by Kris Price

Using “SMART” Goals to Evaluate your Website – Part II

March 22, 2017 Kris Price

In Part I, we discussed how to evaluate the success of your website using the SMART technique. In this series, we will further discuss the principles of SMART when measuring your marketing goals.

If a website doesn’t get traffic, then it will eventually get out of business. Growing your traffic will require you to create some kind of performance targets.

SEO

A website that is not found when Googled is bound to fail. This means, you must invest in SEOs. Keywords can be found from other high ranking competitive websites. SEO is not a one-time job, rather, you must continue to work on you SEO at all times.

Subscriber

Once visitors find your website, your goal is for a quick conversion if possible or at least for them to come back again. This an be accomplished by creating a subscriber list. List building is much easier if the signup page is placed at a visible location with in the website, and an incentive is given to the visitor to opt-in.

Inbound Link Building

Inbound link building definitely helps you to be SMART. Backlinks boost your SEO and increase traffic while creating great brand awareness. Achieving a huge number of backlinks might be very challenging, but if you put your efforts, you will be able to succeed.

Content Publishing

Search engines love fresh contents as do humans. Even though it might take up to 90 days or more for search engines to fully index your website, publishing high-quality contents and blogs on a regular basis will bring huge benefits. In addition to blogs, you can also publish some additional contents like ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, and surveys.

Measuring Your Marketing Goals

Not everything needs to be measured. In fact, collecting all kinds of information might lead to complications when you evaluate the results. Having said that, here are some of the key metrics that you can focus on:

Total Visits: The total number of website visits is a direct representation of how well it’s performing.

Page Views: Page views help you understand which specific pages of your website are more popular than others.

Unique Visitors: Repeat visitors are not half as contributing to your business as the unique visitors. After all, every unique visitor is a potential customer.

Traffic Sources: It is important to check where most of your traffic is coming from. Are your visitors using desktops or smartphones? Where are they based in? These factors can help you in improving the marketing campaign.

Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is defined by the number of visitors that leave your website almost instantly. If you observe a high bounce rate, then you may want to check your website to see what’s causing it.

Backup Technology Limited (BTL) is always available to help its partners and resellers with their marketing needs. Please contact BTL at https://www.backup-technolo gy.com/about-btl/contact

Using “SMART” Goals to Evaluate your Website – Part I

March 22, 2017 Kris Price

So, you have set up a beautiful website that has powerful and informative content for your prospects and other relevant visitors. You have added contact forms, explained your services clearly, and added important links. This should do just fine, right? Unfortunately, the answer is “no”.

Your marketing efforts must not stop at merely creating and hosting a quality website. The Internet is a big platform where a number of IT companies are vying for the same spot that you are after. Thus, traffic gets distributed unevenly, and if you want more of that to reach your website, then you must establish concrete IT marketing goals, and measure them for evaluation.

An ideal website for an IT business must have SMART goals, which are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

Creating the SMART goals

With SMART goals you can cover all the major aspects of your marketing campaign, and make sure you are on the right track.

Specific

Goals that are vague have no value. Thus, if your marketing team needs to focus on creating a “good” website, and drive “excellent” results, then you must revise the entire strategy altogether. “Good” results don’t mean anything. Even if you want “good results”, you must be able to put it into numbers that define how “good” it is. Will you consider a 1,000 unique visitors per day good? Or do you need higher numbers to qualify as “good”.

Measurable

Borrowing the previous example, you must be able to measure your goals. This allows you to track your progress, and take actions accordingly. So, if it was your goal to convert at least 10 leads per week through your website forms, and if you are getting 5-6 leads conversions, you can make adjustments in your marketing campaign for improvement.

Attainable

It goes without saying that the marketing goals that you have set must be realistic and attainable. Goals that are not practical will not only waste time and resources, but also hurt the morale of the marketing team.

Relevant

A lot of thought and planning must go into creating the goals so that the team’s efforts are not in vain. For example, while a huge amount of brochure downloads might be good for business, but if the majority of these downloads are through bots, then you might need to revise the assets you have uploaded for downloads.

Timely

Each goal must have a fixed timeline. It doesn’t matter if a goal is to be attained within a month, a year, or more, a deadline is a must. This helps in keeping your team focused, and also increases the overall productivity.

To be continued in Part II.

Using File Versioning to Recover Lost Files

January 20, 2017 Kris Price

When it comes to making sure that your company’s data remains safe and secure, there is no better solution than cloud data backup. Thanks to this increasingly popular and important IT service, businesses of all sizes can now enjoy the peace of mind of knowing that their data is constantly being backed up and preserved for later retrieval whenever the need should arise.

However, the simple backing up of saved files is just the beginning of the myriad advantages that cloud data storage has to offer, with many cloud backup service providers now granting enterprises the amazing ability to go virtually “back in time” in order to retrieve and recover previously saved versions of files that have long ago been deleted from their local systems! Indeed, through a process called “file versioning”, cloud storage providers are now commonly implementing yet another crucial layer of data security, protecting their clients from incorrectly saved files.

With our fast-paced work environments and present-day fondness for digital multi-tasking, accidentally “saving over” a previous version of a file that one may have needed is, unfortunately, is far from a completely rare occurrence. And, in the not-so-distant past, accidentally “saving over” a file meant that you were stuck with the newer version, no matter what. However, by taking advantage of cloud backup and storage services with file versioning feature capability, businesses can now retrieve these lost files from their service provider’s servers with ease!

Through the use of advanced versioning methods, massive amounts of previous file history information is compressed so that disk space on the cloud backup server can be conserved and backup and restore data transmission times minimised. Under this system, each file that is transferred to the cloud backup company’s servers is given a unique name and time stamp, with the first version of the file that is backed up being called (not surprisingly) the “primary file”. Then, the cloud backup company’s software automatically scans to see if this file exists in exactly the same state at any other location on your company’s backup cache and, if so, replaces these duplicate files with a “pointer” toward the original, effectively making it so that one file can virtually exist in two or more places at the same time.

In addition to this, every time a new version of a file with the same name is saved to the cloud backup cache, it is compared to the original, and if they differ in any way, the older one is retained and the newer one is also, of course, saved and given a version name and corresponding time stamp. However, using special algorithms, this newer version of the file only contains the information that has been changed in comparison to the older version, and embedded digital pointers reference the older version for all the information that has not been changed. Although versioned files like these are technically split up in order to save storage space and enable previously saved versions of files to be retrieved when being accessed remotely by the end user, the referenced sections of the files are automatically replaced by the actual information from the original so that all files are intact.

Sound complicated? Well, one of the biggest advantages of leaving your backup and IT concerns to an online cloud storage service provider is that they will keep track of all these details so that you don’t have to, and we here at Backup Technology Limited (BTL) take pride in lifting this burden from the shoulders of all the enterprises whose data we make it our duty to protect. We’ve integrated a robust file versioning system into all of our data storage and recovery solutions, and our powerful backup service, powered by Asigra, constantly monitors your company’s computers for changes made to files and automatically saves these changes for you! In addition to this, BTL uses its latest technology to backup incrementally all unsaved files that are left open for longer periods of time.

BTL believes that file versioning is here to stay for a long-term. Therefore, BTL has assembled the most cutting edge suite of cloud computing tools in its cloud services. With top of the line data protection practises like bank-grade encryption, FIPS, de-depulication, and advanced password security protocols, clients never have to worry about anyone accessing their data, except authorised users on the account.

By backing up your company’s data with BTL, you’ll never have to worry about incorrectly saving a file again. Please stop by our website today to download our free, no-obligation trial software, and see what the BTL advantage is all about! Remember that file versioning is just one of the myriads of advantages that BTL can bring to your SMB. So, speaking of not having to take any risks on the file versioning; why not visit BTL’s website and test-drive today? www.backup-technology.com/cloud-backup

Controlling your Cloud Data in the Face of Outages

November 29, 2016 Kris Price

It’s hard to imagine that one quick lightning strike could disrupt the business of several companies across Europe, but this is exactly what happened in the summer of 2011 in Dublin.

After a lightning bolt struck a utility pole, causing an explosion and fire, power supply was cut to several businesses and data centres in the surrounding area. According to Amazon and Microsoft — the two companies whose data centres were worst affected — the bolt disrupted power supply to their massive data centres. While Microsoft was able to kick start its services after a few hours, Amazon’s services weren’t resumed until a good 48 hours later. Amazon’s customers spent several frustrating hours waiting for Amazon to report on the status, as the company struggled to set things right and quickly restore their services.

You might say, this is an old news that happened more than five years ago, but this very instance shows how unplanned disasters can strike at any time. With this in mind, Backup Technology Limited (BTL) believes there are several lessons to be learnt from this and many other data centre outages.

Complete dependency on the service provider’s ability to maintain uninterrupted service is foolhardy, to say the least. Customers signing up for cloud services must ensure that they maintain control over their data by making local backups of their data in addition to riding the cloud for all the benefits that accrue from it. BTL urges its customers to take advantage of its Asigra powered software, a hybrid cloud backup solution that ensures full-proof data availability.

BTL is equipped with local and remote management features, which allow users to seamlessly perform local backups to their private cloud infrastructure or offsite backups to a public cloud. Even more beneficial, they can do so even while they’re away from the office. A web-based management console allows one to control and manage all backups and restores via an Internet connection.

To ensure full business continuity, BTL stresses the importance of performing both local and offsite, cloud backup. If backing up data to the cloud, BTL recommends that customers add disaster recovery and business continuity to their list of services.

Unlike larger cloud customers such as Amazon’s public cloud users, BTL users who backup data locally to their private cloud infrastructure, in addition to a cloud service powered by BTL, will not have to wait endlessly for reports about the restoration of services in the event of an offsite data centre disaster. They can connect their network to the local copy of the data and resume their business activities almost instantaneously.

When handling business data backup plans, smart IT admins look at all their options and will not hesitate to implement local backup AND offsite cloud backup with an MSP to ensure security and business continuity at all times. BTL recognises the ground realities surrounding data management by large third parties. This is why BTL focuses its attention on customer needs and urge its customers to build in an extra resilience and maintain data redundancy.

Tips to Follow Before Transferring Data to the Cloud – Part II

September 8, 2016 Kris Price

In Part I of our series, we did list some tips to follow before transferring data to the cloud. Below, in Part II, we will further discuss additional points:

5 – Move First and then Renovate

It is critical to test the migration first and then make a thorough plan. Cloud users are capable of controlling the economies of scale of the cloud, reduce capital spending and save time through selecting cloud just like an application design centre, instead of re-architecting the existing applications and to make it suitable for the cloud. Therefore, it is recommended to refine and improve cloud applications after developing the necessary basic constituents of the cloud.

6 – Crunch the Numbers to Understand Costs

The primary reason to transfer data to the cloud is to save money. It is quite simple to get costs of infrastructure by calculating the used money on vendor support, servers and licenses. However, it is challenging to get an estimate of time spent by the most expensive members of the team. How much time does it take to carry on the legacy systems, solving problems, deleting HR records manually, double entering payroll information, troubleshooting and fixing the application errors on various desktops, and restoring data from backups? If a company has a clear sense of all these types of associated costs, then it is possible to make an assessment of SaaS and hosted solutions; and as a result, the path to the cloud will be very clear.

7 – Security Should be Considered

Security is a huge concern while considering a move to the cloud. In order to stay compliant, you need to look into industry standards. Use third-party sources, such as the Cloud Security Alliance Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire [1] to guide you through the process of understanding potential security pitfalls.

In addition, you need to select cloud storage services that are certified by standards, such as FIPS-140. These solutions offer multiple layers of security and are impossible to hack. Choose a service provider that is well known and respected in the industry, that enforces audit policies on apps and all data stored in its cloud.

8 – Secure your Management Console

The cloud computing console is the life-line of your entire data centre. This means, the management console must always be protected at all times, or else it could be hacked for ransom, as in the case of Code Spaces, which was forced to close after the hackers deleted all of its data when the ransom was not paid.

Tips to Follow Before Transferring Data to the Cloud – Part I

September 7, 2016 Kris Price

Have you been thinking to transfer your digital works to the cloud? Recent study confirms that only one-third of businesses who have planned to migrate to the cloud have devised a strategy for transferring information and applications. This means, two-third of the businesses do not have any strategic plan. To avoid extra cost and complexity while transferring workloads to the selected cloud, check out the following suggestions:

1 – Motive Behind Migration

First of all, it is important to have a motive behind transferring the data to the cloud. There must be key milestones to show improved ability of an organisation to adjust to changes. Businesses need to have good reason for moving workloads or changing the existing cloud. Companies must have a clear point and concrete metrics for what they have and how they will achieve success.

A skilled CIO take calculated risks so that the organisation can move forward. He/she understands that moving to the cloud is not related to data transfer from one server to another. In reality, it is associated with real demonstration of progress.

2 – Assess the Cloud Service Provider

The cloud is a collection of storage, compute and network infrastructure that is supervised through APIs. Before selecting a service, make certain that the cloud provider offers valuable set of APIs to manage the infrastructure for cost efficient and elastic solutions. Companies need centrally managed, integrated and secure environments, along with clearly spelled out SLAs on performance, security, and availability (including during peak hours).

3 – Perform Cloud Impact Analysis

It is natural that each application has some links with other systems and applications. Before transferring to cloud services, therefore, it is better to assess the end result of the cloud migration on connected systems and applications. Make certain that workloads are properly reviewed, which helps in identifying the applications that are required to be updated before and during cloud execution.

4 – Basic Test Requirements

All applications have some workload profiles, security measures, performance, transitions, elasticity, bandwidth, technology compatibility and availability requirements. Moreover, the chances to improve revenue and flourish business by controlling the distinguishing cloud capabilities also differ by applications. It is suggested to develop a cloud pilot, which targets particular workloads that can be migrated into the cloud environment. This pilot includes identity management and security, and additional functions, which will be required later on.