Mohit Tater's Blog, page 628

Secrets to Having a Successful Ridesharing Side Business

Ridesharing is growing in popularity as a side hustle, and for some people it is a big part of their income. Whether you prefer Uber, Lyft or another company, this type of on-demand transportation helps connect eager drivers with people who need a lift. Although the ability to make money from driving your car and having a flexible schedule is appealing, there are several things you need to have a successful ridesharing side business.

Get the Right Insurance

If you are driving strangers to different destinations every day and getting paid, having regular car insurance is not enough. Keep in mind that even if you sign up with Uber or Lyft, you are still considered an independent contractor and responsible for paying your own insurance. You will need rideshare insurance that extends your coverage.

If you do not get rideshare coverage, you run the risk of the insurance company canceling your personal policy or denying any claims you make because you are using the vehicle for commercial purposes. Uber and Lyft also offer additional liability insurance, but you still need rideshare coverage for your car.

Pay Attention to Timing

Understanding the busiest times for rideshares is crucial. If you can predict when and where people will need a lift, you will make more money. In general, weekends and holidays tend to be the busiest for drivers, and airport runs can be very profitable. But you do not have to guess the schedule or live at the airport. Consider using a free app like FlightStats to see when flights are arriving or departing, so you can plan.

Many drivers share that they make most of their money during evening or weekend hours. Depending on your location, you may have long periods without any ride requests during the day. Make sure you think ahead and consider how much you can realistically make from ridesharing. Consider doing it part-time at first to evaluate the local market.

Understand Tax Obligations

When you drive for Uber, Lyft or another company, you are self-employed and must pay taxes. Since you do not get taxes taken out of your payments as an independent contractor, it is your responsibility to track the income and pay them. You may owe both federal and state income taxes, depending on your location. Some rideshare drivers have to make estimated tax payments every quarter, so make sure you talk to an accountant.

Fortunately, the hours you spend driving for your side hustle may count as a deductible expense. However, you need to keep careful records of your mileage. The SherpaShare app works for Uber or Lyft to track your miles and expenses, so you can export the data. In addition, you need to pay attention to fuel costs, insurance and other payments associated with your rideshare business. All of these items may need to be tracked for your expenses.

Consider Signing Up With Multiple Companies

Many drivers increase their rideshare earnings by signing up with multiple companies. In addition to Uber and Lyft, you may be able to sign up for Sidecar, Fasten, Gett, Juno and others. However, juggling multiple companies can be a challenge, so consider using an app like Mystro to switch between driving platforms. It lets you filter fares, auto-accept trips and switch apps.

Another option is to sign up to deliver things with your car. Many rideshare drivers fill in their work schedules by delivering items for companies such as Instacart, DoorDash or Postmates. For example, Caviar lets you bring food from local restaurants to customers.

Focus on Customer Experience

Your passengers are customers and providing them with the right experience is important. This means going beyond being on time, friendly and polite. Consider letting the passenger choose the music and giving them multiple options. In addition, make sure you have bottled water for each passenger. Some drivers make small snacks, gum and other refreshments available. Others like to provide multiple charging cables and stations for customers. If you do this, make sure you have ones compatible for iPhones and Androids.

You can have a successful ridesharing side business. For many people, it is an important source of supplemental income. Follow these tips to make this side hustle profitable and fun.

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Cutting Down the Costs: Identity Verification is Essential for Online Businesses

Online business owners awake to new problems daily. Among others, if they don’t have face to face customer relationships, they give up some tools to verify customer identity.

Honest customers prefer online merchants with the least resistance to shopping and buying. If the process is lengthy or convoluted, they will move on. You need their business, but they have no patience.

In an economy dependent on credit card traffic and electronic fund transfers, good customers forget what risks merchants take. Merchants must verify identity, but you must do it in fast, low-anxiety, easy way.

E-commerce is open to fraud.

Matt D’Angelo at Business News Daily says, “As more buyers turn online to make purchases, fraudsters have even more opportunity to expose both consumers and merchants.”

Good customers understand a verification process is good for the business and for them. It reduces cost and time to owners who can then manage their business better. But, in an era of cyber-crime and aggressive hacking, online business owners are tasked with protecting themselves and their customers.

There is no single, monitored, or managed universal verification method standard for businesses to adopt. To stay ahead of their need, e-commerce owners need a trusted provider like https://www.jumio.com/trusted-identity/netverify created by Jumio the 2017 Frost & Sullivan’s “Entrepreneurial Company of the Year for the Biometrics Security Industry.”

What’s an owner to do?

In the past, e-commerce replicated the pattern of in-person verification. They read a presented document and link that to some reinforcing link like a secret question or a mother’s maiden name. Securing, storing, and using this data remains vulnerable to access and abuse.

That data actually offers little in terms of information vital to the business needs or financial dealings. Confirming your mother’s maiden name through a single or double-click verification tells you nothing about the person’s ability to pay.

You need a scalable system that is dynamic, flexible, and customized. And, you need it at a cost that makes sense to you and allows business growth. As Investopedia notes, “it must rely on the most up-to-date and high-quality database possible.” So, real-time access, speed, and reporting are vital.

Admit your weakness. This technology is so sophisticated, you will eventually commit to a provider requiring your complete trust. Give it time. You have to give this some thought. The decision will be with for some time. More important, it will present an image and message to your customer base.
Price it well. The cost will stay with you, too. While you won’t benefit from a cost-driven decision alone, you should comparison shop on the same performance criteria.
Talk it over. You want to drill down on recommendations. You can’t ignore or trust online reviews, but you should talk at length with other users, preferably in similar e-commerce lines.

Online business owners have little choice here. You have a business to protect as well as its prospective and current customers. Though the decision is pressing, it requires prudence, caution, and a look into the best options.

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How to Start Out as a Successful Entrepreneur

Deciding to go it alone in business, shirking the usual employment nine to five routine in favor of your own homespun company that you’re in complete control of and in complete charge of, is as exciting as it is uniquely challenging and stressful. It takes a certain amount of risk to invest time and money in a business project on your own, and a good deal of confidence, know-how, charisma and – sometimes – luck, to get you where you want to be. Here is a list of characteristics that make for excellent, well-prepared and responsible entrepreneurs that’ll ensure you’re well-equipped to start out and start up a business.

Know Your Strengths & Weaknesses

Your starting position when looking to become an entrepreneur is to be brutally honest with yourself about what you’re lacking at the same time as bolstering your confidence with a review of all your strongest suits. This dual evaluation is important in many respects but is chiefly a case of knowing the places in which you’ll excel working alone, and the places in which you may struggle without the assistance found in an established company or a business partnership. If you happen to discover some significant shortcomings, it can do you little harm to bring a complementary partner on board to your project.

When it comes to your strengths, though, these will dictate the strategy you perform to make the most out of your start-up business. In business and especially when conducting your business alone, it’s important to draw confidence from the knowledge that you’re possessing of some well-honed fundamental business skills with which to really crack on with building a business portfolio, so don’t feel it’s an exercise in hubris to focus on what you have to offer. In any case, a strong communicator will get business done this way, whereas a numbers person will work the figures more – recognize your own strengths so you can work with them.

Be Digitally Savvy

We’re well into the twenty-first century now,and it is incredible that many businesses – including start-ups by knowledgeable entrepreneurs – still do not have a functioning website or a well-managed social media presence. It is no exaggeration to say that such steps are fundamental in business success in the modern era, and to not be searchable online can seriously harm your business prospects, whether your idea is destined to sink like a lead balloon or sky-rocket on the jet fuel of market forces.

As soon as you have refined your product, your brand identity and your business name to the extent that you are able to, it’s imperative you make a website, even if it is simply two or three pages that detail your business’ work, some contact details, and some pictures or descriptions of your product, including reviews and extra useful information. Being ‘findable’ on the web insinuates trustworthiness, which means big bucks for startups. Moreover, social media is a savvy form of marketing in the digital age; find a young gun to man your social media platforms – students may even do it unpaid – so that you have a presence there, too, exposing you to huge and wealthy markets.

Have Support Available

Going it alone is thrilling and rewarding when everything’s going well for you and your project, but is downright demoralizing, isolating and lonely when things go wrong. This isn’t to say you should take on a partner or some staff as an insurance policy against failure, but it does mean you should have some friends, family, acquaintances,and contacts to fall back on in the many eventualities that could lead to your needing some support – be it financial, legal, emotional or simply the delivery of useful advice.

Contact the likes of legal experts and your local bank branch to get them up to speed with your venture and to have them as solid contacts to turn to if you need them for advice or services. Talk with friends who are knowledgeable in business about your own ideas, and talk with family when the psychological stress begins to get the better of you so that you don’t have to cope with the stress of starting up a business totally on your own. The stats regarding start-up failure and entrepreneur depression and mental health can’t be ignored, so bolster yourself against these with the right support at the right times.

Plan Financial Back-ups

The most important part of growing a business is managing the money correctly, and for this, you’ll need experience, assistance, and a little bit of guile to get you through the more difficult times. You should have an array of backups for your business finances, including the type of loans offered by Bonsai Finance which will keep you from bottoming out with no cash at all when you’ve invested a lot in your company. Short-term loans can, if played right, keep your finances smooth despite the inevitable fluctuation in the performance of a new business, so ensure you have routes to delve down if need be.

In another sense, sometimes in business – and especially with start-ups that can tend to grow at an exponential rate – having the capital to push on and invest in enlarging your company is a primary concern in order for you to upscale in such a way as to take advantage of all you additional traffic running through your company. You’ll not only waste business if you don’t have this cash available, but you’ll also drive business away when they see you’re an amateur outfit. Have large-scale loans or investment options at your fingertips when your business takes off so that you’re never caught out in such a way as to avoid an upturn in sales.

Everything is a Learning Curve

As you’re just starting out, you ought not to be too hard on yourself as every single action you perform as your own boss will be on a steep learning curve that will provide potentially crucial experience for your later entrepreneurial endeavors. While so many businesses can end up on the scrapheap within one or two years of their inception, your own business mind will not, and it will learn lessons the hard way if necessary. Don’t chastise yourself for every mistake you make or every error of judgment that on reflection cost your business – simply learn from it.

Another inevitability when starting out on this learning curve is that you will have to over-sell yourself and your project in order to seem like the real deal to clients and customers. This might involve some fairly expert lagging on your part, or simply confidence and bravado that’ll carry you the distance where genuine experience cannot. Although averting from the truth is not advised, having serious self-confidence in what you can achieve can help you establish a network quickly so that your lack of business experience will not put punters off whatever it is you’re selling.

Have Fun; Be Creative

All entrepreneurs are motivated in part by the fact that they have total creative and administrative control over the direction of their project or projects. This can lead to perfectionism in both productive and counterproductive ways; it’s up to you to know where to draw the line on this one. However, overall it would have to be said that having a high level of control over the future of your company means you are free to try out whatever creative business strategy or solution that comes to mind – it won’t be lost in the fog of a business meeting, it’ll be actionable from the moment you run it through your mind.

It’s in this sense that being a starting-out entrepreneur can be so exciting and rewarding for those willing to think outside of the box on the future of their business. If you’ve quit a well-paid job to put your skills to the use of you and you only, then this is a particularly important point to remember, as you’ll never want to lose sight of the fact that you’re no longer forced to operate  to the status quo. Be experimental and creative, and have fun with your ideas and motivations – you’ll find it a terrifically exhilarating experience and one that gets you out of bed in the morning with an optimistic bound.

Know When to Call it a Day

The last small point, and hopefully one that needn’t be overstated, is to have in the back of your mind a kill switch to your project, ensuring that you don’t end up wasting time and money on a doomed endeavor that’s never going to resurrect itself.

Sometimes you will find yourself forced to swallow a little pride, cut your losses, and start again with a fresh idea and all the experience you built up with your old one. Pride comes before a fall as they say; make sure you’re not bankrupted by an inability to see when you should really be calling it a day.

Starting out in business on your own as an entrepreneur is exciting and rewarding; follow this handy guide for those new to the game that’ll hopefully stand you in good stead to achieve great things with your business talents.

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The Main Ingredient to Create the Best ecommerce Website for Your Retail Client

The most demanding job of all is to create an ecommerce website and then build it, so that it becomes successful. This entire task involves so many steps, so many elements to consider and so many decisions to make – everything has to be done in the right manner, in the most efficiently way, so that the company doesn’t lose out on precious time and money.

What all does it take to build a good ecommerce website – talented professionals, good technology tools, UX design experts, and so many more things. Without a proper framework or plan in place, it is difficult to deliver as per your clients’ expectations.

Most companies just do an average job, but an average job cannot get you more business. Only the ones which thrive to meet the client’s expectation or even outdo them are the ones which do well in the market. Mediocre efforts and inefficient tools won’t get you anywhere. This just reflects the personality of your brand.

So, what do the customers usually expect? All they want is that the results they get are worth the money they’ve spent. For example, if you spend about $20 on buying an umbrella, you would expect it to protect you from rain and too much sunlight, and most importantly you would expect it to last for a long time, since you’ve spent a lot on its purchase. You would also expect that in case the umbrella breaks down, the people from the store cooperate completely and replace it. Good quality product and proper customer service is what you’ll expect.

Your clients look for a timely, friendly and knowledgeable interaction. Apart from that they expect the product to be delivered on time and a good post purchase service. It is important you let your customers know what you can provide them with on the whole. It is very basic to meet the demands that are put in front of you, what is really a challenger is to exceed their expectations.

When you are creating a ecommerce website for your client, you need to aim at increasing your client’s business in every possible way. The ecommerce website should be completely customized and high-performing. It should be an online store that adds to their sales. The store should match the latest technologies and trend in the market to fit and perform better than the rest.

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How Leaders can Increase their Emotional Intelligence

In the Future of Jobs report from The World Economic Forum, emotional intelligence is ranked six in the top ten key skills that will be needed for work in 2020. Emotional intelligence has been shown to be related to job success, leadership effectiveness, sales, customer satisfaction, and general well-being, among other performance dimensions. Many practitioners now understand that a person’s emotional intelligence can be as much if not more important than cognitive ability to one’s success in the workplace.

Emotional intelligence can be broken down into five different concepts:

– Self-awareness. The tendency to recognize and understand your own moods and emotions, know what drives you, and how your moods, emotions, and drives impact other people.  Self-aware individuals may be more confident, have a more accurate self-assessment, and do not take themselves too seriously. They are good self-monitors of their own emotional state and can identify and name the emotions they are feeling, including those that arise during emotionally charged situations.

– Self-regulation. The tendency to control or redirect disruptive impulses and moods, to think before acting, and suspend judgment. Individuals high on self-regulation tend to show trustworthiness and integrity. They are also comfortable with ambiguity and open to change.

– Motivation. The tendency to have a passion to work for internal reasons that go beyond money and status. They may have a vision of what is important in life, a joy in being utilized, having a mastery orientation, and can move easily into a flow state of mind when doing their work. They likely have a strong achievement drive and show optimism even during the most difficult of times. This is also referred to as having grit.

– Empathy. The tendency to understand the emotional needs of other people, and being flexible in the treatment of others to match their emotional states. Indicators of high empathy include the ability to attract and keep talent, an appreciation for diversity, and service to clients and customers. There is an ability to understand the feelings of others, and use that to improve interpersonal relationships

– Social skills. The tendency to build effective relationships with others, one-on-one, on a team, or as a leader. Indicators of social skill include the ability to find common ground and build rapport with new people. The outcomes of having social skills as a leader include effectiveness in leading change, political savvy, and expertise building and leading teams.

Is emotional intelligence immutable, similar to IQ?

While IQ is relatively fixed during one’s lifetime, emotional intelligence is more malleable. Make no mistake, it does require some work, and it’s not easy. Usually it requires some self-insight, focused attention on self-improvement, and feedback throughout the process. Many leaders have found emotional intelligence training modules to be effective because they last over a series of weeks or months, and they become a part of daily work life rather than something to be crammed over the weekend. You can improve your emotional intelligence. Not only will benefit your work life, but also that of your team. Emotional intelligence can be learned, and in fact, it is best seen as a lifelong process.

In the bookPrimal Leadership, Daniel Goleman describes ways that a leader can build their emotional intelligence. Leadership consulting can help leaders learn a more flexible leadership style that is designed to draw in and motivate employees by helping leaders focus on enhancing a key set of managerial skills that include creating a vision, using an effective coaching style, practicing affiliative behavior, and learning how to approach problems using a democratic (as opposed to autocratic) style. What’s likely more important than simply improving emotional intelligence is what relationship it has with leadership effectiveness. A combination of emotional competence and a high-quality coaching relationship improves the effectiveness of leaders, with emotional competence positively impacting performance and career satisfaction, and coaching leading to increased levels of work engagement, career satisfaction and expression of a personal vision.

How to increase your emotional intelligence

Below are eight strategies that can help you boost your emotional intelligence.

1. Reflect on your own emotions. Here are some scenarios to think about. How do you typically respond when:

You receive an email that suggests you didn’t follow through on a commitment?

You are unfairly blamed by a significant other for something outside your control?

Someone cuts in line in front of you at the airport?

The table next to you gets their order taken before you, even though you were sat first?

By knowing your own emotions and feelings about difficult situations, you can be more objective and not let your own feelings cloud your judgement and make you lose control.

2. Think about how you react to other people who you find difficult to work with. Do you assume that they have an agenda and make assumptions about their motives, or do you try to hear them out before reacting? Spend some time just listening and seeing things from their perspective. You may find your mind is changed about them, which could be beneficial for your relationship.

3. Do you seek admiration for the things you’ve accomplished? If someone shares with you a personal or professional achievement, do you take time to show your appreciation of the things they are proud of, or do you feel compelled to respond by sharing all the wonderful things you’ve done? Being humble is a very attractive quality in a person that can help let down the guard of others, inviting more genuine conversations. It also helps you grow as a person if are focusing more on others and less on receiving praise for the things you’ve done.

4. Many writers stress the importance of understanding your own weaknesses through one of the various EQ assessments on the market. Make sure it provides a robust feedback report that can help you gain insight into your strengths and weaknesses. You can also pair that with a trained coach who can help you process through your results and created a personalized development plan. A coach will also help you by setting goals and checking in on your progress with you periodically at a cadence that works best for you.

5. Ask others for to share with you what they think about you. It’s very enlightening to learn that the things you tell yourself repeatedly, often unconsciously (“I am not empathetic enough,” or “Others find me unimaginative”), may not in fact be perceptions that others share. It’s not that they are more correct than you are – as we are often more in tune with how we feel than how we appear – but they can offer some helpful insight into your behavior that you can’t see yourself. If it helps, you can ask those around you – friends, a significant other, parents, children, colleagues – to fill out a 360-degre instrument on you. It’s one thing to get feedback from one person, but another to hear it from multiple people in different spheres of your life.

6. Take inventory of those around you and how you approach the relationships. According to by Hsuan-hua Chang, an executive coach writing for Forbes, there are four different types of strategies we tend to take in relationships based on the situation. First strategy revolves around high trust in ourselves and others, which is the hallmark of effective collaboration. The second strategy is deciding to trust only ourselves, either in response to being let down by others, or as a general strategy we take in all relationships. The third is following the lead of others by letting them drive the way forward, and the fourth is withdrawing from the situation completely. Paying attention to which strategy you are currently using can help you understand whether it is the right strategy given what you hope to accomplish. If it isn’t, time to make a correction. This is particularly helpful if you yourself overusing the same strategy across different situations.

7. Every once in a while when working on a larger project, ask those who worked with you for candid feedback on how you’re doing. Be open to receiving the feedback – see it as an opportunity for self-improvement rather than judgment on your character. You can always change, but it has to start with a realistic assessment of where you are at. Often you can only get that through asking others (i.e., self-reflection is important, but can only go so far). Be accountable for taking in the feedback and deciding what to do with it. You can not only develop more positive and supportive relationships by asking for feedback early and often, these are like nuggets of gold you can use to grow personally and professionally.

8. Embrace a growth mindset and immerse yourself in learning something new. As soon as you stop learning and growing, you become stagnant, making you vulnerable to health and mental well-being issues. As humans, we are meant to continue growing through adulthood and into old age. Education doesn’t have to be in a school or university – it could be an online course, taking community education classes, or reading books in a new subject you’ve always wanted to learn more about.

Leaders who can manage their emotions, work well with diverse groups of people, and have a greater tolerance for ambiguity and invite change, are those that will be able to meet the rising pressures in the workplace. Having the ability to infer what motivates others and build strong ties with others in the organization is what makes people with higher emotional intelligence better leaders. An effective leader can recognize and meet the needs of their people in order to help them achieve greater performance, satisfaction and career growth.

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5 Reasons Most Startups Fail

Most new companies go out of business in the first few years. This sad but true fact has been widely examined in the past, and recent studies confirm that the situation has not changed for better.

While there can be numerous reasons why startups don’t get past their first year and why established businesses go bankrupt, in this article we want you to take a look at the top five in order to have a better outlook on what pitfalls you should avoid when starting a new business.

The Idea Doesn’t Solve a Problem

The modern entrepreneurship culture mistakenly puts a strong emphasis on creative thinking and the ability to generate ideas as the end-all-be-all for business success, but the truth is that no matter how bright the idea is, it doesn’t guarantee that it can be successfully commercialized. Many bright ideas vanish because they don’t satisfy a need of the audience large enough to provide a scalable growth for the business. Unfortunately for most entrepreneurs, they get too obsessed with their ideas rather than their validation. Simply put, they don’t bother examining whether their ideas are solving existing problems and make their judgment on what appeals to potential customers rather than what these customers need. This distinction between a mere appeal of a new product and its ability to solve an existing problem is where business failure and success part their ways.

Source:Statista

Insufficient Competition Research

The most common pitch among new entrepreneurs is that they are the first to introduce their product or service to the market and that nobody has ever tried to this before. However, very few newbie entrepreneurs consider that hundreds and even thousands of start-ups are popping up in every niche with the same or similar ideas every year. They also might not even realize that these ideas can be attractive to larger companies that have all the necessary resources to scale up their market presence and manufacturing volumes.Failing to conduct a competitive analysis and find out who else might be trying to enter the same niche can seriously undermine the survival of the future business.

Reducing Costs of Prototyping and Quality Assurance

Failing to perform proper testing and quality assurance for new products is another popular reason for startup failure. Saving on prototyping and quality assurance costs at the earlier stages of the entrepreneurial process will only come with more expenses down the road in the form of refunds, market recalls and customer complaints. A customer dissatisfied with the quality of the product or service is a nightmare for every business, and nothing can be worse than a poor reputation and negative reviews for a newly established enterprise.

Insufficient Team Expertise

Most startup teams exude a genuine passion for their new ventures. And, while the emotional drive can make a significant contribution to future success, it can’t beat the importance of industry- or business-specific knowledge and experience. The team’s technical knowledge and management skills oftentimes step in as vastly crucial to get an enterprise through the first years of its existence. Hiring employees can be one way to compensate for the lack of knowledge and skills, but this is more appropriate at the later stages of growth.Business success is usually a result of scaling up the founder’s talents and expertise, and it rarely comes from mere excitement or desire to run an independent business. Knowledge and the ability to manage others are not the only factors that determine business success or the lack thereof. Every industry, and particularly a new one, has its learning curve that very often can be a steep one and includes running into many pitfalls if you are not familiar enough with the underlying technology or the specifics of consumer behavior. Joe French of ExpressBadging.com, a company providing cloud-based employee badging solutions, describes the situation in his industry as a combination of low barriers to entry with high failure rate. Joe relates the failure of most competing companies to not being able to quickly build knowledge and skills that took his employees years to acquire.

Not Aligning Funding With Growth Requirements

If you were to ask hundreds of failed entrepreneurs why they failed without digging deeper into the root cause, perhaps most of them would point out insufficient funding as one of the biggest reasons. Oftentimes, you will hear this even from those whose ideas were doomed to fail due to other causes and where additional funding wouldn’t made a difference. But even if this biased thinking didn’t exist, the problem with funding insufficiency is not so far out of the entrepreneur’s control as many try to say it is. The proper way to put it is that funds are not available to those who are not able to attract them. Building future investor relationships and being able to successfully pitch your project to potential investors is a skill set that is not only important at the very beginning of the entrepreneur’s journey, but it also helps to sustain growth of the business in later stages.

Successes and failures are hard to predict with 100-percent certainty. Keeping in mind the main reasons why most startups fail should help you create a more successful blueprint for your future business success.

About the Author:

Dennis Rukosuev is an entrepreneur and business consultant from Austin, TX who is helping startups and established companies scale up their businesses and meet the demands of strategic growth and change.

LinkedIn Profile:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-rukosuev-86844941/

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What Small Businesses Can Learn from Online Casinos about Customer Retention

No one seeks online casino websites looking for business advice. Yet strangely enough, the endurance of most of these websites in the face of massive competition shows remarkable business savvy. If you do a quick web search for playing slots or poker, you will get thousands of casino websites. Not all the sites are successful or even legal, of course. But the top ranking sites have mastered the art of customer retention. There are lessons here that other, non-gambling e-retail businesses can learn from.

So how do the top ranking online gaming casinos beat the competition and prevent customers from fleeing to numerous other similar websites? Here’s how:

Unbeatable Loyalty Programs

One standout feature of the best casino websites is that each execute its own loyalty program. Some sites are built entirely around loyalty programs. The loyalty programs reward customers who stay on and keep playing. These programs are designed with the potential to win big bonuses and similar perks, but only as long as the customers keep playing.

Casino loyalty programs are highly popular because these offer smaller rewards to loyal customers frequently. It’s not much different from playing a game. Customers are often entitled to cash bonuses upon signing up for a loyalty program. Afterwards, there are plenty of opportunities for customers to easily win smaller rewards. Bigger rewards are also available for those who really commit.

There’s a big difference between online casino loyalty programs and others you get at regular stores. Participating in the program is an experience in itself. With regular loyalty programs, customers may not even be aware of the reward points they are acquiring. That’s not the case with online casino programs. In this sense, these programs are similar to gathering air miles.

Many, Many Bonuses

Customer retention is highest at online casinos that give out various bonuses. Often, these bonuses are cash rewards, but there could be other rewards such as coupons. Bonuses are such a deciding factor for casino players, these majorly feature in advertising for these sites.

Nearly all big players in the online casino field now offer lucrative welcome bonuses when customers sign up. That allows new players free cash to start betting with. And later, more bonuses are made available for special events, different games, and so on.

Small businesses often offer bonuses in conjunction with special holidays or shopping seasons. However, with online casinos, the bonus system is tied to how ardently a player remains attached to a website.

Top-Notch Customer Service

It’s inevitable that customers who engage with a web-based product run into technical difficulties. Online casinos face many other customer inquiries as well, particularly pertaining to withdrawals and legal issues. Customers stick with sites that offer the most reliable troubleshooting service. Therefore, the best-rated online casinos also have the best customer service programs.

Sites offer customer service in many ways, including via phone, email, live chat, and online contact form. The more options there are, the more likely customers are to stick with a site. Online casinos have made good customer service and essential component of customer retention programs.

What can small businesses learn from out of all this?

First of all, prioritize customer retention. Don’t treat customer retention efforts as a secondary method of marketing. According to market research, it can cost as much as five times to find new customers than to retain existing ones.

Therefore, small businesses should invest in designing great loyalty programs that customers are willing to actively participate in return for rewards that are actually useful. Make rewards easy to cash in or enjoy, such as a free product for certain reward points. Rewards that are intangible may not be perceived as good.

As online casinos show us, excellent customer service is crucial to retaining customers. Focusing on just these two aspects, a small business can jump ahead of the competition in customer retention rates, just like the best online casinos.

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Guidelines for Effectively Polling a Group

Every person holds innumerable insights and opinions within them. Organizations stand to benefit big time if they can communicate with groups of people in such a way that participants feel compelled to offer up honest ideas and bits of feedback. But getting to that point is not as simple as it appears at first glance.

Why not? Well, first of all, humans are social creatures. Large-group dynamics affect individual choices and modes of expression. Furthermore, polling is a two-way conversation more than it is a one-way flow of information. If you’re in the position to poll a group, people are looking to you for cues on how to proceed. Even the seemingly most minute choices can contribute to the type and quality of feedback you receive on a given day. For instance, let’s say you’re surveying employees on their engagement level. The ramifications for skewed results could be steep; it’s highly important to capture how your workforce really feels about their jobs so you can make adjustments as necessary.

Consider these guidelines for effectively polling a group next time you’re tasked with doing so. After all, you may not get a second chance to elicit honest answers—making the initial Q&A session is paramount.

Offer the Option of Anonymity

The best thing you can do to promote honest is to offer the option of anonymity in your polling process. Sure, some people will always be willing to stand behind their ideas publicly. But others will not, electing instead to say nothing. For presenters and leaders, the “show of hands” method is less than efficient, as is calling on individual volunteers.

Another benefit of anonymous polling using audience response technology, besides making people more comfortable, is improving response rates. This tactic allows you to garner anonymous feedback on the spot rather than relying on post-event means like an email survey. Higher response rates help ensure you’ve collected statistically valid, useful information from most—if not all—participants, which will aid in decision-making moving forward.

Consider Your Framing

The way you frame your questions has a huge impact on the answers you’ll receive. Understanding how to ask bias-free questions is key to eliciting honest, accurate feedback. Here are a few guidelines to consider as you craft your questions:

Avoid “shaping” the conversation with yes-or-no questions; instead, leave questions open-ended.
Avoid providing a finite number of concrete options when participants’ experience may fall outside of these choices; again, leave room for subjective answers.
Avoid making assumptions about your audience, their experiences or their answers; instead, let participants share their perspective.
Avoid combining multiple questions into one query; instead, let each question stand on its own for maximum impact and clarity.

Provide All Relevant Information

An effective survey provides participants with all the information they need to confidently answer its questions. By the time you’re polling your audience, there should be no head scratching or frustration. As one University of Wisconsin Survey Fundamentals guide notes, “An effective survey question provides the respondent with a context for the question by announcing the topic and defining the timeframe for events or behaviors that are to be included in the response.”

Asking respondents to make assumptions is a risky proposition that could skew results. When in doubt, always provide more than enough context for people to answer confidently. If you’re asking for feedback on a specific corporate event, training session or meeting, explicitly state these parameters up front.

The primary guidelines for effectively polling a group are: clarity, bias-free questions, plentiful context and anonymity when appropriate.

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Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies for Online Sports Betting

Bitcoin has lost 40% of its value since the start of 2018 and it is reeling from its worst ever Q1 performance. Rival cryptocurrencies have suffered a similar fate amid regulatory fears, investor sell-offs and panic in the markets, leading to plenty of negative coverage following the highs of 2017. But in recent weeks the volatility has largely been stripped out of Bitcoin and that represents good news for sports bettors that wish to use cryptocurrency for wagering purposes. The huge daily fluctuations that defined the start of 2018 have largely fallen by the wayside, and recently Bitcoin has been remarkably stable.

You might ask why anybody would wish to use Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies for online sports betting. Well, in many ways it represents a return to the golden days of the online sportsbook world, thanks to the speed, anonymity and ease of use it offers. It eradicates many of the concerns that sports fans find most frustrating about online betting, because it drastically shortens the tedious process of sending and receiving money to and from online sportsbooks. When you use Bitcoin blockchain deposits are rapid and withdrawals are pretty much instant. There is no more waiting days or weeks on end to receive the money you won fair and square. You should get paid in hours or less.

Bitcoin transcends nations and boundaries, so it is a truly global currency that is perfect for sports betting. It eliminates the need for banks and other middlemen that take a cut of your earnings. There are specific Bitcoin sportsbooks that take either no fee or only a tiny fee, so you do not have to contend with the usual blend of hidden charges, handling and conversion fees and transaction charges. Cryptocurrencies are designed specifically for online transactions, so you will not see any payments blocked by banks.

Its anonymity offers several advantages, particularly for US sports bettors that have previously lived in fear of authorities busting off-shore sites and seeing their balance withheld. By using cryptocurrency, you can bet without fear of discrimination – which is important for profitable gamblers that do not want to be penalised with sanctions for their success – and identity theft. All the betting site will see is a transaction code, so you do not have to give out your personal details and credit card details on unsecured website forms, which are at the mercy of hackers. This also frees you from the tyranny of annoying ads from third party companies that get hold of your email address.

The blockchains associated with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies involve no fees or tiny fees, so bookmakers are able to earn better margins and can afford to offer more attractive odds. Some online bookmakers now only accept cryptocurrencies, while the world’s most celebrated and reliable sportsbooks are making it integral to their businesses. Bookmaker is one of the sportsbooks that accepts bitcoin, check their review and you can see what a positive experience betting in cryptocurrencies can be.

So you get speed, ease, convenience, anonymity and security when betting in cryptocurrencies rather than fiat currencies like dollars and euros. But the downside is the vast fluctuations in Bitcoin’s value, which can quickly erode your margin if it suffers a heavy fall on the day you are betting. That is why is has always paid to bet in Bitcoin and quickly convert your winnings back into dollars before suffering a hit. But that is becoming less of a worry now as Bitcoin moves into a period of relative flatness, free of the wild swings we saw earlier this year. People are now looking at cryptocurrency as a long-term investment, rather than a way to make a quick buck, while increased regulatory measures can actually increase the sense of stability, so it seems that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will only become more widespread and attractive to sports bettors going forwards.

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The Real Impact of Various ULIP Charges on your Investments – Compared to MFs

ULIPs are insurance products that offer both investment and insurance feature under a single integrated plan. In a ULIP plan, a small portion of your premium goes towards the insurance cover,and the rest, you invest in a fund of your choice (which is managed by a fund manager). Moreover, ULIPs allow you to make use of the top-up facilities like, switching between funds, reducing or increasing the level of protection, option to surrender and getting additional riders.

Mutual funds, on the other hand,are pure investment vehicles which pool savings of many investors and investing them in diversified instruments. As the investment risk spreads across the different holdings, you can diversify your holdings with a small amount of money.

However, there is this misconception that- ULIPs have many hidden charges which can eat up your returns as compared to mutual funds. People are often worried that their ULIP returns in 10 years or so will be affected by these charges. The truth is- ULIPs have no hidden charges, in fact, the best plans in the market today have become the true low-cost plans which cater to investor’s needs.

To clarify this, lets first understand the charges associated with a ULIP plan.

Mortality Charge:

When you buy a ULIP plan, the insurance company levies a charge for the insurance protection upon death, which is commonly known as mortality charge. Mortality charge is thus the actual cost of insurance and is usually deducted from other charges in the ULIP plan, before investing your money. However, the good news is that some of the best ULIP plans, charge very low mortality charges and are striving it hard to keep it to a minimum.

Fund Management Charge:

These charges are levied for fund management, and deduction happens before arriving at the Net Asset Value (NAV). IRDA has capped these charges saying that insurance companies cannot charge fund management fees more than 1.35% per annum. You will find that some ULIP plans have fund management charge as low as 1.25%, thus making a huge difference in your returns.

Policy Administration Charge:

These are the charges relates to the cost of administration. Again, you will find that insurers are making efforts to make the ULIP journey as affordable for you. Yes, these charges are ‘NIL’ if you go for the best and affordableULIP plan available in the market.

Premium Allocation Charge:

These charges are levied to recover the initial expense incurred towards issuing the ULIP plan and includes the cost of underwriting and the distributor fee. However, considering the growing need for cost-friendly ULIP plans by investors, these charges are ‘NIL’ for some of the best plans available.

How Charges differ in ULIPS and Mutual Funds?

Although ULIPs and mutual funds may seem similar upfront, they invest in different assets and are structured differently, which is why their charges differ too. There are three types of charges in mutual funds- recurring charges, entry load, and exit load.

The recurring charges in mutual funds include fund management charges, cost of marketing and administration, and are around 2.5 percent where as the entry and exit load are onetime expenses ranging from 1 to 3 percent.

Although, ULIPs levy charges under more heads like premium allocation charge, administration charge and, charges for managing the fund, the best ULIP plans do not charge anything concerning policy administration and premium allocation charges (as we have mentioned above).

Not to forget, the fund management charges for ULIPs (1.35 percent), are lower than that of mutual funds (2.5 percent). Furthermore, IRDA mandates that the total valid charges on ULIPs should not exceed 2.25 percent. This means the total charges on ULIPs cannot exceed what a mutual fund charges.

You need to make an informed comparison and arrive at the ULIP plan that is cost-friendly and also caters to all your needs.

As you know, often high charges tend to eat into your returns. So, returns from a ULIP are likely to be equal or higher than in the case of mutual funds, in the long run.

Conclusion:

Overall,a ULIP plan can be an ideal investment option for your long-term financial goals.However, it is imperative that you check the performance of funds while investing in a ULIP plan.

To summarize, you should look up to investing in ULIPs if you belong to any of these categories:

If you are looking for investments that have life cover linked to it
If you have tax savings to do under 80C
If you plan to invest longer than ten years, i.e. ULIP returns in 10 years or more

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