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6 Great Hobbies to Keep Your Stress Under Control

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article |Keep your stress under control|6 Great Hobbies to Keep Your Stress Under ControlStress is an incredibly dangerous thing and if left uncontrolled it can cause absolute havoc on your mental and physical health. This means that any activity that you enjoy that helps you to mitigate and control your stress is a major boon to your health and wellbeing. To that end, this article aims to suggest a number of potential hobbies that could help you to control your stress and keep it at manageable levels.

1. Archery

One of the most relaxing and meditative sports out there, archery is all about careful control and accuracy, making it one of the best sports you could possibly engage with for stress relief. The enjoyment and engagement that you can get from taking your time, controlling your mind, and hitting your target in archery is second to none, and overall, that makes the sport an incredibly relaxing and soothing experience.

2. Reading

Reading is incredibly healthy for your mind. It boosts relaxation and mental acuity, allowing your mind to engage entirely in another world and releasing you, for a time, from the stresses and pressures of the world around you. By doing so, reading allows you to engage with an incredibly relaxing and meditative process that keeps your mind as clear and entertained as you could ever want.

3. Art

Drawing, painting, sculpting, modelling, and every other form of art are incredibly involved and meditative processes that allow the artist to throw themselves entirely into the process of creating something beautiful. By doing so the artist allows themselves to relax their fixations on the trials and pressures of their daily lives and to truly relax. This process is hugely meditative and wonderfully beneficial to their stress levels, allowing them to banish huge amounts of stress while simultaneously creating a beautiful work of art.

4. Football

As with most other forms of stress-relieving hobby, playing football allows you to escape, at least temporarily, from the stresses and pressures of your everyday life and simply enjoy the sport itself. Playing with friends and family helps to double down on the relaxing effect of the sport and, it so happens, that playing football is not the only way that the sport can allow you to relax your stresses.

Another way for you to relieve stress through football is through watching it with your friends and family. Watch parties are wonderful ways for you and your loved ones to get together and engage with the most important sporting competitions such as the Euro 2020 (Euro 2021 group tables). Watching these games together with your loved ones is a brilliant way to further reduce stress.

5. Model Building

Building models is a slow and delicate process and one that you can throw yourself into entirely. The experience of watching the model come together slowly, piece by piece, is hugely enjoyable and a brilliant way to mitigate and control your stress levels.

6. Writing Poetry

Finally, writing poetry is a wonderful way to allow you to bleed the stress from your mind. Poetry is all about transferring your emotion to the page and by doing so, you can find release from it yourself.

What Makes A Great SEO Campaign?

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SEO is one of the single most important elements of marketing a website. Rather than having to pay for adverts for years on end, SEO enables you to gain organic hits online. Of course, this process can take a lot of work and investment, but it can also save you a small fortune if you handle it correctly or hire an expert SEO agency like Australian Web Experts. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring some of the key elements that make a great SEO campaign.

Good Research

Research is key to every part of the SEO campaign you build. Not only do you need to research keywords, but you also need to learn about the specific market that you are working in. This can involve looking up information about your customers, though many companies will also want to know as much as possible about their competitors as they go through this.

A Specialized Approach

Every business is different, and this means that the approach that you take to your SEO should be based on the market you work in. Just like any marketing campaign, understanding what your customers will respond to is crucial during this process. Stellar SEO’s guide to SEO for lawyers is a great option for those working in the field of law, but you can find resources like this for just about every field on the market.

Gaining growing and sustainable traffic implies you are a company that can be trusted and a valued partner. A b2b seo agency can assist you with building your reputation and trust within vendor relationships. Effective SEO is a massive part of this process and can be invaluable when implemented correctly.

Regular Content

Google and other search engines like to see websites that are actively posting content all the time. This helps to raise your reputation, while also giving you the chance to target loads of keywords. Most successful websites will produce one or two blog posts each week, giving them the chance to rake in new hits on search engines without having to spend loads of money on adverts.

No Plagiarism

Search engines are very good at reading written content, and this means that they are able to tell when websites share the same wording. This can be very bad, especially if you published your content after the other instances of it that can be found on the web. You should avoid plagiarism at all costs, even if you are running an eCommerce website and have been given product descriptions from other companies.

Constant Monitoring

While many companies stop working on SEO when they get the results that they want, keeping your engagement up is going to require constant monitoring and changes. Your new blog posts and other content can help with this, but you can also change the content you have when you notice keyword preferences changing across the web. There are loads of tools that can help with this.

SEO can be one of the hardest parts of marketing for many companies. While this area is well-documented online, there are a lot of secrets that you will only be able to learn through experience. The more time you spend working on this, the easier it will become, but you will still need to put effort into it for the lifespan of your website.

How to Make Your Website Safe With CAPTCHA!

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Keep your website safe|Guide to Keep Your Website Safe With CAPTCHAIf you’re an e-commerce or online business owner, then you are perhaps by now already well aware of the issues brought about by bots and annoying spams. If ignored, they can bring down the value of your website by harming your comments section, hijack your site with unwanted ads and even attack your contact forms which could lead to a catastrophic data breach. You might have in the past multiple have been asked to prove if you’re not a ROBOT or perhaps times when you have been asked to click certain images or click the images containing traffic signals or such. Maybe enter the ambiguous hard-to-read collection of letters and or numbers that warrant you are a real person and not a bot or an algorithm that is illegally trying to gain access to the system. These tests, though annoying, help protect your website. They’re called “Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart” or CAPTCHA for short since it is such a mouthful to say. CAPTCHAs are to date one of the most effective and efficient ways to stop bots, software and program from spamming your website. Even though they seem complicated, they are rather easy to implement, and they provide a firm line of defence.

So let’s learn more about this defence mechanism and how it can prove beneficial for your website.

So what is CAPTCHA?

As mentioned above, CAPTCHA is short for Completely Automated Public Turing Tests To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. It is a process used to clarify and ascertain whether the action was requested by a human or a bot, or a machine. The user is asked a question to carry out certain actions which are not possible for a non-human entity. The user may proceed to the page if and only if this question is retorted correctly. CAPTCHAs provide difficult tests for computers, program or bots to perform but are relatively easy for humans to solve. Don’t worry; these tests are not some complicated puzzles, rather simple and basic tasks like identifying objects or typing out a series of numbers or alphabets that are displayed. These tests are easy for humans, but a bot or a machine would not crack them as they are not programmed to solve these tests. In some cases, the test may include identifying what is distorted, and some users might find it difficult to identify them. In such cases, users are typically given the option to request a new test and are presented with a new image or a combination of alphabets and numbers.

But why use CAPTCHA?

Now that you know what CAPTCHA is let’s see why exactly you should use it. Simply put, CAPTCHA stops and prevents spam on your website. Several spammers attack the website’s comment sections with hyperlinks and click baits to increase search engine rankings. With the help of this test, you can make sure only humans comment on your site and are not bombarded by useless ads and comments left by bots.  The main aim of spammers is often to flood your inbox or your comment section with links to whatever they would like to push. The CAPTCHA test is specifically premeditated to ensure only humans can sign in and a bot or a machine doesn’t leave spam. Think of it as a layer of safety to screen out real humans from spambots by providing added resistance from spammers and scammers. These spammers or hackers usually want to gain access in search of your users’ email addresses and data. With CAPTCHA in place, you can stay protected against these unwanted entities. 

Currently, bots, program, algorithms and computer systems do not have the level of reasoning abilities that humans have which is required to process and evaluate pictorial information or data. Therefore, CAPTCHAs are very important to secure your website.

 When should you use CAPTCHA?

The question is not when but how soon should you use CAPTCHA? Well, if you find your website flooded with spams and irrelevant ads, it is a sign that you should put CAPTCHA in place to filter out your users from the bots. CAPTCHAs help protect your website by stopping spam from computerized programs or bots programmed to shoot emails, advertisements and spam comments on your website. The tests also help prevent spam signups and processes on your website. Many users know what CAPTCHAs are, and hence these people with by default, understand what they’re supposed to do since the directions and instructions of the tests are very simple.  

How did CAPTCHAs come about?

The internet is a great tool, but it is also a playground for fraud and spam. As the usage increased, so did the cases of spamming and data breaches. These spams are not only a menace for the users but the website owners as well. Therefore, there was a growing need for a system to filter out the real users from the automated bots that usually hijack the website and spam. This is where CAPTCHAs started to come into play. CAPTCHAs help protect your website by stopping spam from computerized programs or bots programmed to shoot emails, advertisements and spam comments on your website. The tests also help prevent scam signups and processes on your website. Many users know what CAPTCHAs are, and hence these people with by default, understand what they’re supposed to do since the directions and instructions of the tests are very simple. CAPTCHA was formed at Carnegie Mellon University in the year 2000 to help websites keep the bots outside whilst allowing entrance to only real users. The puzzles and tests work because computers, bots and machines are not as good as humans at reading distorted text or identifying basic objects as it is not in their program. As time progressed, these bots and programs got smarter but so have the difficulty level of CAPTCHAs.

What makes CAPCTHAs so popular today?

The simple answer is security. With so many threats looming over the internet today, it becomes important for website owners to employ security features like this one to help keep their websites secured from external frauds, bots and spammers. Wondering about why to make website secure with CAPTCHA code? CAPTCHAs help secure the website but also aids in filtering out authentic users from the spamming bots. In addition, CAPTCHAs also stop sites from being affected by brute-force hacking and attacks, which is a huge bonus. A brute force attack is a hacking technique where the attacker uses a trial-and-error method to predict passwords to gain access. CAPTCHAs are designed to recognize such attempts which are illegal and hence block access to the attacker.

 Other tactics and techniques to secure your website

Apart from CAPTCHA, you can use several other techniques and tools to secure your website from external threats and attacks. 

HTTPS is always better than HTTP

One technique you can use to secure your website is to use HTTPS or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure, a more secure form of conventional HTTP. HTTPS amplifies the security of your website since it is encrypted and scrambled. Websites that are not HTTPS are at a higher risk of giving free access to Internet Service Providers, allowing them to fit their content or spam your webpages. HTTPS encryption, however, does have some limitations, but you reinforce this by using an authenticator. An authenticator oversees any communication between you and the server and ensures that it’s secure, thereby assisting HTTPS to secure your website. SSL certificates or secure socket layer is one such authenticator. We suggest that you purchase SSL certificate from reliable SSL providers such as ClickSSL to make your website more secure by providing a safe and secure transfer-layer. This shields your personal and precious data from going into the attacker’s hands.

Keep updating your passwords.

Another trick to keeping your data secure is to make sure you regularly keep updating and changing your password as it becomes much more difficult to crack. But always make sure that your passwords should not be similar to your previous passwords and should be long, complex and have some special characters in them. Doing so makes your password unpredictable and much more difficult to guess and crack.

Updating your website software regularly.

There is a reason why the software comes with regular updates and patches. However, just as the security is constantly updated, the hackers are also constantly trying to find loopholes to exploit. This is the reason why you should frequently update your website software with the latest version. In addition, you need to be constantly aware of the security patches that the website software developer sends out and apply them without any further delay. If you do not do this, your website will be vulnerable to new techniques of hacking and attacks. 

Always have a backup of your data.

Data is precious in the digital world, be it yours or your users’. It’s important to take all the steps to ensure that the data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. But it’s equally important to back up the content and data of your website. In a worst-case scenario, if a hacker manages to get into your system and your website, you can always recover your data. On the other hand, if your website data is safely stored, the odds are you can recover it.

 In conclusion, CAPTCHAs are your safest bet when it comes to securing your website online. But do not just employ CAPTCHA and think that your website is secured. Instead, invest in other security measures like SSL certificates that reinforce your website security.

Smart Ways To Enhance the Efficiency of Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Business efficiency|Smart Ways To Enhance the Efficiency of Your BusinessEvery entrepreneur and business manager is constantly working to improve the efficiency of their business. Business efficiency entails maximizing your outputs from your input and making the most out of your resources.

Failure to notice stagnation or regression in your business can ultimately lead to a decrease in profits or the eventual closure of your business. It is, therefore, essential to apply smart tactics to improve the efficiency of your business. They include the following;

Delegate Duties

While delegating duties might seem obvious for business owners, it is often quite difficult to practice. Many entrepreneurs hold their business close to their heart, and they prefer to have a direct hand in everything involved with it. While prioritizing the quality of your products or services is quite okay, checking on every small detail rather than delegating can lead to wastage of everyone’s valuable time.

Instead, consider delegating responsibilities to the most qualified employees and entrust them with performing the task well. Doing this gives your employees the chance to learn new skills and gain leadership experience, which are ultimate benefits for your company.

Assign Tasks According to Skills

Knowing the behavioral styles and skills of your employees is vital for maximizing efficiency. For instance, a creative and extroverted person who thinks out of the box will probably be the best at pitching proposals to potential clients. However, they may not show the same excellence when it comes to a more detail-oriented and rule-intensive task.

Efficiency doesn’t call for expecting your employees to be great at everything. Instead, it requires that you determine that an employee is suited to perform a specific task before you assign it to them. If they cannot perform the task as expected, it means you might have to find someone else whose styles and skills match your needs.

Outsource Intelligently

Intelligent outsourcing can make your business run efficiently without alienating your employees and customers. The best way to do this is by outsourcing the non-core activities of your business. For instance, you can find a company specializing in human resource management and payroll or outsource for QuickBooks bookkeeping services if no one in your team is savvy with accounting.

Outsourcing also allows you to focus on the core activities that make up your business. You can also put the money you saved up from outsourcing into marketing, innovation, and any other aspects that are vital for the smooth running of your business. It also allows you to focus your attention exactly where it belongs and see a quick boost in the productivity and efficiency of your business.

Automate

While some entrepreneurs are reluctant about automating their business, it is also likely that their businesses are incredibly inefficient. Technology is a vital tool for improving the efficiency of your business, and you should consider incorporating it as soon as possible if you haven’t already done it.

Automation doesn’t mean that you have to replace your employees with robots and software. It only requires that you incorporate such technology to increase the efficiency of your workforce. You can also use software to host meetings, which saves a lot of time and money used for travel to the meeting venue.

Incentivize Your Employees

One of the best ways to encourage your employees to continue performing exceptionally is by giving them a reason to do so. You can achieve this by recognizing them whenever they do a good job, making them feel appreciated, therefore increasing their productivity.

Ensure that you take every individual’s preferences and needs when rewarding your employees. In addition to simple words of gratitude and appreciation, you can give them incentives like a handwritten note, taking them out for a meal, or implementing a workplace wellness program.

Make Communication Easy

Miscommunication or the lack of communication is another aspect of inefficiency. While a meeting can sometimes solve this problem quite easily, they are difficult to schedule, and you may end up wasting a lot of time.

Fortunately, all the available technology makes it easy to have streamlined communication at all times. Whether you opt to utilize a fast-paced chat system software or easy face-to-face conversation via webcam, you can ensure that your employees get the relevant information as fast as possible. Effective communication can also sidestep confusion and ensure that your employees can get to work and improve the productivity of your business.

While selecting the tactics that will help improve your business’s efficiency, you must first identify the issues present and then work to determine their solution. You should also keep in mind that working for your business efficiency is a continuous process that requires you to continually find loopholes and work towards implementing an effective solution.

5 of the Most Useful AI/Machine Learning Tools for Your Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |AI Machine Learning Tools|5 of the Most Useful AI/Machine Learning Tools for Your BusinessAt this point, pretty much everyone is familiar with artificial intelligence, or AI. Thanks to movies such as The Matrix, Terminator, and well, AI: Artificial Intelligence, most people are aware of the concept of intelligent machines. But although AI is a real and genuine technology, the potential and tangible applications of modern AI advancements are far from what Hollywood movies and novels by authors such as Philip K. Dick would have us believe.

AI is the future’s wave of adaptive learning, which involves utilizing programs to learn from data. As AI learns from the fed data, it advances and becomes more complex, reliable, accurate, and secure. Therefore, AI brings many adaptive learning benefits to education, businesses, and sectors of society. AI paves the way for more machine learning and other AI-related opportunities to drive industries to rapid digital transformation.

In fact, real AI is mostly applied to business development and science projects where data-driven derivatives and goals are the primary focus of a given strategy. In simple terms, AI applications are primarily focused on gathering, analyzing, and sorting data, much like any other computer program. However, where AI is different is in its machine learning capabilities.

What is Machine Learning?

What is machine learning? Well, machine learning is the concept of an AI developing its own repeatable output based on the data analysis from repeated input. For example, Facebook’s machine learning algorithm, DeepText, analyses posts and displays the ones that it thinks you might find interesting based upon your previous post-browsing history.

DeepText isn’t the only machine learning tool that you are exposed to on a daily basis. Netflix’s video suggestions, email spam filters, and even certain video games are all examples of machine learning that you probably use on a daily basis and don’t even realize.

Over the past few years, the power of machine learning and AI has become a viable tool in business development because of the analytical and data processing capabilities of modern hardware and accompanying software tools.

Benefits of AI and Machine Learning

Machine learning algorithms attempt to understand all data, applying learned concepts to new data sets to enhance performance and accuracy. Just imagine the functions and capabilities computer programs can do with these technologies. 

Here are the benefits of AI and machine learning:

  • Businesses can provide excellent customer service
  • Eliminate manual errors because of precision and accuracy 
  • Automation reduces manual tasks, such as data entry and computation
  • Improve decision-making with forecasting and real-time reporting
  • Reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and threats 
  • Improve productivity and time management

Companies utilize AI and machine learning to stay competitive. Having the right AI/ML tools in place can help a business reap the above benefits, making an edge to attain goals and objectives for long-term success. But what AI and machine learning tools do you need for your business?

Common AI and Machine Learning Tools

Large corporations such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google apply their own machine learning tools to their own business and have developed consumer-level AI suites for use by other businesses that don’t require knowledge of complicated AI programming and can be used for specific data analysis and modeling.

Some of the most useful AI suites include:

  • Google Cloud AI
  • Amazon SageMaker
  • Microsoft Azure AI
  • MonkeyLearn
  • Obviously AI

One of the most robust and technological machine learning tools available, Google AI powers the company’s own algorithms and provides multiple data-driven features while Amazon SageMaker comes as part of the extensive Web Services suite with an ability to perform custom ML datasets, and Azure AI from Microsoft is an impressive suite with many real-world applications as well as analysis.

Two AI tools that aren’t from huge corporations are MonkeyLearn and Obviously AI. MonkeyLearn is a very user-friendly text analysis MLAI and Obviously AI provides natural language analysis for forming predictions based on specific input.

Google Cloud AI

Launched in 2008, Google Cloud AI is mainly a compounding structure for integrating the useful features of cloud computing into a single, manageable platform with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) options for secure cloud services. However, the system also provides feature-rich machine learning tools as standard that can be utilized in a variety of ways.

One of the most powerful AI and ML systems available, Google AI prides itself on being able to take under-researched problems and find solid, scientific solutions that advance the state-of-the-art in the field. Google also has a mission to make its AI system available to everyone and apply the technology to solve some of the world’s most pressing humanitarian and environmental issues.

The suite comes with many impressive AI applications that you can integrate directly into your deployment and productivity pipeline almost immediately:

  1. Contact Center AI; allows you to automate your call center interactions with customers.
  2. Documents AI: can read and extract data from your documents with algorithms that can look for fraud, data entry errors or receipt mistakes.
  3. Recommendations AI: can deliver personalized recommendations for each of your customers based on their previous interactions.

Amazon SageMaker

Part of Amazon Web Services, SageMaker provides multiple machine learning bindings for some of the most widely used and powerful programming languages available such as Python, Ruby, and Java which allows the creation of custom datasets and algorithms in addition to an impressive collection of preexisting ML systems that can also be incorporated into cloud computing.

One of the most impressive features of SageMaker is its support for other ML platforms with which it can integrate for even more productivity and increased workflow. Google Brain’s open-source platform TensorFlow is compatible with SageMaker as is Tableau. Both of these are focused on business intelligence and deep learning with traditional ML at their core.

SageMaker is one of the most powerful, scalable ML platforms available with many useful features:

  1. Clarify; reduces bias in ML that could help you find suitable employee candidates or customers.
  2. FeatureStore; allows you to select from multiple pre-existing feature groups that can be applied to your specific requirement model.
  3. Data Wrangler; this allows you to manipulate and convert data from one type to another, useful for such things as data modeling, calculation, and visualization.

Microsoft Azure AI

As the world’s leading software manufacturer, Microsoft is no stranger to complex data and advanced programming such as AI and ML. Also a cloud compounding service, Azure AI provides SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS capabilities with support for many of the best and most flexible programming languages available, along with their frameworks, with the suite’s emphasis being on software development by utilizing data sets, storage, and management features.

The business applications of Azure are impressive and the platform has been built from the ground up to accommodate business processes that accelerate development and rapid deployment in scalable, automated, and reproducible ML scenarios using specific data, models, and processes.

While most other ML platforms can be used for a broad range of applications, Azure AI is laser-focused on business development strategy:

  1. Video Analyzer; allows you to obtain real-time analytics from played and streamed videos.
  2. Azure Cognitive Search; add feature-rich data sets to your search functions such as autocomplete, geospatial filtering, and keyphrase extraction.
  3. Adaptive Machine Learning; user friendly interface with advanced features allows you to develop ML scenarios with either beginner or expert knowledge.

MonkeyLearn

One of the best Software-as-a-Service machine learning tools around, MonkeyLearn provides a feature-rich set of machine learning capabilities at a low cost that can provide useful insights for any business, but is especially popular with small to medium-sized businesses as one of its best features is that no coding is required.

Using MonkeyLearn’s user-friendly interface, you can develop topic-specific models for ML datasets such as keyword extraction, text to tag conversion and text classification features such as sentiment analysis, topic labeling and intent detection; true machine learning that can boost the productivity of any data-dependent business.

Some of the most useful features of MonkeyLearn include:

  1. Text Extraction; analyzes data so you can pick out features, keywords, or entities such as “14” screen size”, “free delivery”, or “Disney”, respectively, for example.
  2. Text Classifiers; analyses data so you can classify text according to a topic, intent, or sentiment.
  3. Integration; MonkeyLearn can further increase your ML capabilities by integrating with other popular programs such as ZenDesk, Google and MS Office, and Rapidminer.

Obviously AI

Another excellent machine learning application, Obviously AI uses natural language processing as a means of producing prediction models based upon specific input datasets. The platform requires no programming and operates via a user-friendly point and click interface in order to upload data and model a scenario for prediction with naturally written questions.

The MLAI then works to predict a specific outcome based upon the questions input and a predefined prediction column, then it can accurately model such things as revenue forecasts, lead conversions, and loan repayment probabilities in minutes, saving both time and money.

Basic on the surface, but extremely complex at the core, Obviously AI’s best features include:

  1. Complex Models; the app comes with built-in models that you can use right away for predictions.
  2. Ease of Use; the intuitive and user-friendly UI facilitates high-level machine learning with no expert knowledge of coding.
  3. Business-Boosting ROI; predictions with the app allow you to make informed decisions that can increase sales, detect fraud, or estimate paywalls and customer willingness to pay.

A Binary Decision?

It is pretty clear that machine learning and AI are driving the future of many industries, with large corporations at the wheel. Google, Amazon and Microsoft are empowering businesses of all sizes and across all sectors to advance their strategies with the inclusion of AI analytics, automation and prediction models.

The capabilities of AI and machine learning seem almost limitless and from a business perspective are able to extremely reduce the amount of man hours and, therefore, finances required to perform specific actions such as document analysis, categorizations and data extraction.

As AI and machine learning become more prevalent throughout all business sectors, one should ponder the questions; where does this leave the necessity of the human mind and what will be the human cost of such technological innovation?