Category "Blog"

How to Maximize Your Business with Digital Marketing

If you own a business, online marketing is very necessary to grow your customer base. In the current phase of the competition, many companies don’t give importance to digital marketing. If you want to make your business experience real-time growth, definitely explore and make use of the opportunities of digital marketing.

It is vital to have a digital marketing strategy in order to become successful. But many companies don’t even have their online marketing strategy or their online presence is very frail to make reasonable results.

Digital marketing keeps on progressing over time. The procedure of attracting your intended audience online spells out the difference between a successful and failed business.

Digital marketing is a combination of several platforms that allow you to carry out campaigns and connect with your audience efficiently. Let us have a look at how you can use the newest digital marketing tactics to grow your business:

1. Examine Your Current SEO Situation

If you have a fruitful website for your business, analyze its condition in terms of usability, search rankings. Amidst this noisy digital world, companies should work hard to achieve a higher rank in search results. SEO is a vital element of overall digital marketing strategy when it comes to obtaining your digital goals.

It takes around 6 months to a year to observe the act of SEO efforts you put forth. Well, a huge advertising budget is not necessary to optimize your website for search engines. So always ensure that you have a well-organized SEO strategy. Initiating highly-targeted traffic to your website is not simple without proper SEO.

Implement a long-term SEO strategy. Because ranking on high for a competitive keyword is a long-term scheme that needs a result-driven approach, time, and high-quality content. 

2. Generate valuable content

Content is the king and the vital fuel for your business to run marketing campaigns. Good and informative content is essential to stimulate businesses online. Creating content for web pages, off-site campaigns, ads, and blog posts will retain your growth scale intact. When outlining the content for various platforms, be crisp on delivering valuable and real-time solutions. Optimize content with properly targeted keywords without making it spam.

3. Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC is a kind of paid advertising technique that aids companies in boosting leads, sales. Google Ads is the most famous PPC platform. Google Ads allow the promoters to premiere ads and remit a small amount of money each time when somebody clicks on their advertisements. Proper experience and research are required to create a successful PPC campaign.

4. Build Your Presence on Social Media

Social media presence is handy for your clients to communicate or provide feedback through your website. It is a cost-effective way of accelerating business growth and creating brand awareness if it did in a proper way. Most of the small businesses and entrepreneurs expand their customer base solely by creating and managing accounts on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Allure and engage your audience on social media. Facebook is one effective channel that helps businesses run paid advertising campaigns to get speedy results.

It is recommended to have a proven professional digital advertising agency to handle all your online marketing-related affairs under a single roof. So, don’t hang back to go for professional assistance. Digital Arabia is the perfect option for you to choose for. Being one of the sought-after digital marketing companies in Dubai, Digital Arabia uses the latest technologies with creativity and expertise in the industry to help you seize your growth goals.

How Can Mobile Marketing Improve a Business?

From the challenges and opportunities of the emerging technology to the need for greater effectiveness, it’s impossible to survive without aggressive mobile marketing strategies for a business to get flourished in the market.

Today’s consumer landscape has shifted the way companies need to handle the difficulties of marketing which is one of the most necessary factors regarding a smartphone. As there is a significant increase in the number of users who use a smartphone, it is necessary to adopt mobile marketing as one of the most needed digital marketing services for every brand. There are so many benefits for start-ups or other organization if they take up effective marketing ideas to endeavors.

Even after knowing about the benefits, mobile marketing still requires a well-planned focused approach to put out a perfect check off everything on the list of your needs.

And to make things easier for you, here are a few ways by which a digital marketing company gets benefited with mobile marketing:

1) Efficacy

As things keep changing in his world, you need work on what’s changing, even in the case of marketing. Other marketing options like emailing don’t have much effect whereas sending SMSs is very effective and result oriented as it has proven that 98 percent of mobile phone users read SMS that they receive.

2) Reach the targeted audience

Each and every digital marketing agency is targeted on a specific group of people as a part of the marketing campaign. And to send such promotional material you need to get their numbers or details. Mobile marketing enables you to reach more potential users at a lower cost than other business marketing methods such as ads, radio, TV etc.

3) Immediate effect

Mobile marketing helps you yield immediate effects as people tend to check their phones in between short intervals, thus mobile marketing campaigns really work better for businesses.

4) Time Spend on smartphones is increasing

According to reports, an individual spends a minimum of 10 hours with their smartphones for various purposes. This provides an ample opportunity for mobile marketers to capture user attention and get them discussing your business on their device which is the main part of their daily life.

Advertising trends are also changing and it is estimated that by 2019, nearly 75% of marketing will be spent on developing apps and advertisements for mobile platforms.

6) Mobile Commerce

These days customers are more interested in online shopping and mobile has become the source. And according to reports, mobile commerce will command 24.5% of total e-commerce profit by the end of 2018. This is the reason why even social media platforms are incorporating online shopping icons in business pages. And at this kind of a marketing situation, the number of brands and companies are ready to capitalize on mobile-specific advertising, mobile-friendly pages, and search engine marketing to guide users 24/7.

7) Ranks higher in Search Engines

As per the new algorithm of Google, mobile-friendly sites rank are considered to rank high than any other non-optimized sites in terms of SEO. So, even this makes mobile marketing to be a reason to follow to stand high in every search of your user.

8) Cost Effective

Mobile marketing is the only strategy that does not require investments. This is a very cost-effective method to promote their business for both startups and other established organizations.

9) Build Relationship

As users always keep their mobile phone, it provides businesses the option reach their customers anytime and anywhere and thus builds a strong relationship for a longer term. This lets you update them with By new launches, latest sales offers new products arrivals etc. thus, making them feel special.

10) User-controlled marketing

Mobile marketing is user-controlled and it works on ‘consumer is the king of the market’ principle. That is, the customer has the complete control to accept or deny the marketing efforts to reach him/her. This, in turn, provides mobile friendliness and better user experience.

11) Create More Content

Quick and bite-sized information is the best content for mobile devices which can be easily consumed by users despite any sort of distractions. Quick, short content is easy to create and it can help you reach more audience

12) Easy to Do

Mobile marketing is simple to use, effective and can definitely help you to increase and improve brand engagements with your target audience.

13) Improve your Reach & Build Relationship

Ever businesses target to widen their reach to more customers and this is the main benefit of mobile marketing also. This way doesn’t have a limit to the audience and can reach anyone anytime anywhere. This can, in turn, build a relationship and thus reach, connect with them through mobile marketing.

14) Increasing Your Fanbase with Social Media

Social media channels including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest etc. are great methods for growing your business with mobile marketing. Setting up of official brand pages on social media sites and posting updates can although manage your presence. For every brand, this is a worthy investment these days. But in this case, the only thing you need to note is that businesses should understand that the purpose of social media is to be social, not to simply promote messages.

Key Takeaways

App-based marketing is ‘no more an option but a need’ and digital marketing companies and brands with the appropriate capabilities are in the development process already. Using the best app makers, businesses now start to build a mobile app quickly and affordably. No matter what size company is your, mobile marketing must be a part of your overall marketing strategy. If your company doesn’t have a mobile presence, you’re might be doing a disservice to your business.

All these mentioned ways can be effective if executed properly. The most important things to do before strategizing a digital marketing service is to plan and have the right resources. So, what are you waiting for, start by doing your own research and take things one step at a time.

But the downturn, the first since February 2017, was certainly an outlier, as Windows 10 has been on an upward climb since its mid-2015 debut. That trend has not been a straight line, however, but one showing 10’s increases by fits and starts.

By graphing Windows 10’s user share increases on a six-month trailing basis – each data point represents the total gain over the previous six months – it becomes clear that after a pair of adoption waves that crested in January 2015 and August 2106, the operating system fell into a trough that reached bottom in February 2017.

(The timelines of the crests were not coincidental; the first was fueled by early adopters switching to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and 8.1 using Microsoft’s free upgrade deal, and the second triggered by that free upgrade’s expiration in mid-2016.)

In the past year, Windows 10’s growth has, if not surged, then clawed its way out of the February 2017 hole. The six-month trailing numbers climbed, peaked, then slumped, three different times in the intervening 12 months. But each time the trough wasn’t as low as the one before, while the recovering peak always exceeded its predecessor.

For instance, January 2018’s six-month trailing number was 4.8 percentage points, the highest since November 2016.

Although it’s unclear what percentages of enterprise PCs contribute to Net Applications’ data – some corporate systems rarely if ever browse the wider web, instead remaining within a company’s intranet perimeter – the rebounding of Windows 10’s growth can safely be assigned to business machines migrating to the newer OS. (For one, consumer PC purchases continue their precipitous multi-year decline, and two, consumers who planned to upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1 did so while the free offer lasted.)

Because businesses have a deadline to meet – the retirement of Windows 7 on Jan. 14, 2020 – it’s no surprise that the switch to Windows 10 has picked up momentum. It would have been an incredible surprise if growth had notincreased, what with the pressure to flush Windows 7 from corporate networks.

But will those companies make the due date?

Using the 12-month average of Windows 7’s user share decline, Computerworld forecasts that the aging OS will still account for about 35% of all active Windows editions in January 2020. (At that time, Windows 10 should power approximately 63% of all Windows laptop and desktop PCs.)

The projected 35% would be a failure of sorts for Microsoft, because it would mean there were more PCs running Windows 7 than when Windows XP exited support in April 2014. That month, XP accounted for approximately 29% of all Windows editions.

Computerworld still forecasts the cross-over for Windows 10 – when it will power a larger percentage of all Windows PCs than Windows 7 – as August of this year. The 12-month trends for the two operating systems now indicate that at the end of that month, Windows 10 will run 45% of all Windows systems, while Windows 7 will be on 44.6%.

(Another analytics data provider, Ireland’s Stat Counter, pegged January 2018 as the moment when Windows 7 handed the baton to Windows 10.)

Elsewhere in Net Applications’ data, the user share for Apple’s macOS stayed stable at 9.9%, within spitting distance of a once-unthinkable 10% milestone for the company’s 34-year-old Macintosh line.

Top Digital Marketing Agencies Dubai

Are you in search of the top Digital Marketing companies in Dubai to outsource your brand or Business? As the options to find a Mobile/ Digital Marketing agency are over-flooded with reliable options, the task is quite complicating. If you think of relying on Google search results, then it might provide you with thousands of results with the best services tagline. But which one is the best for your business needs?

We know it’s quite minding confusing, but don’t worry because we have made it easier for you. With thorough research and analysis, we have listed out the top Digital Marketing agencies to help you find the right company for your business.

According to my research, the below-listed companies don’t just do Digital Marketing but also help them build and promote brands, boost online reputation with perfect Marketing strategies and marketing campaigns:

Here is the list of Top Digital Marketing Agencies in Dubai:

1) Digital Arabia

Established in 2016 DigitalArabia.ae is a full-service marketing agency with a vision of being the best digital service provider in UAE. With innovative, integrated marketing solutions, this company helps brands to establish businesses in their respective markets.
Their continued pursuit of professional knowledge and the best use of the latest tools and technology keeps us ahead of the competition. With the aim to clear vision and perfect strategy, planning, they focus on objectives to deliver the best digital outcomes for the clients internationally by crafting and collaborating best marketing ideas, digital products with tactile strategies that help clients promote their brand or business globally.

Services: Website development, mobile application development, SEO, Video Marketing, Search engine Marketing, Email Marketing, Facebook Marketing, YouTube Marketing, etc.

Clients: Al Habtoor, Danube Properties, Dp World, NajahiEvents, Swiss Business School, and many more.

2) AL Mana Media

A full solution forward-thinking mobile agency, offering development services that help clients recognize the use of deeper engagements in their respected target markets. Specializing in advanced analytics and digital media, this company is the perfect strategic partner for Marketing leaders to create more relevant experiences for their users. With years of experience, they provide solutions that bridge the gap between creative resolution and possibilities, while delivering effectiveness for their clients.

Services: Branding, Network and Audiences, Social Media, Mobile Applications

3) TBWA RAAD

TBWA RAAD has changed the conventions of communication and Digital Marketing across the regions in the field of mobile marketing. As they have made a name for themselves in the mobile and marketing industry, TBWA is considered to be one of the fastest-growing marketing firms in the UAE.

Services: Advertising, Relationship Marketing, Internet Web Design and Maintenance, Strategic Account Planning, Media and Research

4) In Logic Digital Marketing Agency Dubai:

They are one of the. They are top Marketing who deliver the best and reliable business planning to add to your sale and website traffic. With a dedicated team, they can generate all your expectations to achieve a significant competitive advantage through integrated SEO marketing strategies.

Services: Mobile app development, web design & development, e-commerce application, digital marketing & SEO, system integration, IT quality control, and much more.

5) Sunshine Digital Agency in Dubai:

This internationally renowned firm is well established in Dubai among its clients in providing valuable services to achieve their business goals in a limited period of time. With highly effective Digital Marketing Services, they are good at understanding your business/brand and offer customers the best digital strategy plan to boost business.

How to Branding a company through digital Marketing? – Digital Arabia Tips

Marketing and branding are not always cheap for small businesses. While it is very essential given the very early stage of a business, branding and marketing a new business is an effort that has to compete with several other efforts in the startup. Nonetheless, there’s no other way around running an effective marketing strategy for your business.

Whatever says a new business cannot take advantage of the exceptional possibilities that effective branding and marketing can attract to business? While you do not have to go overboard with your spending like an already established business would, there are strategies that you can implement with effective results.

Let’s look at the top branding and marketing strategies you can use to stimulate the growth of your new business.

Design with Your Audience in Mind

Logo

Your first step in branding, and indeed marketing your business is to create a logo. This is where you have the first opportunity to captivate the minds of your audience and quickly win your way into their hearts. A good looking logo that is able to captivate your audience will earn the trust of your customers better.

While larger companies with bigger branding budgets can afford to create different reiterations of their logo and not worry about the cost, for a small business it’s very important that you get it right on the very first attempt.

Portfolio

A good way to make this happen without having to break the bank is to partner with a designer who has great work portfolio. Another alternative is to use cheap freelance service like Fiverr to outsource your design tasks to highly talented graphic designers who are ready to work on the cheap.
To highlight the methods that will be most effective in helping you get a well-branded company logo that won’t cost you a fortune, try the following:

Partner with a designer: the idea is to offer them your services in exchange for theirs. And if the deal is huge such that it involves the total branding of your business, including your website design — then offering them part of your business in exchange might be considered.

Run a Contest: Running a contest is still one of the most effective ways to attract high-quality talents without having to spend so much.

Win on Social Media

The ultimate aim of branding and marketing your business is to attract customers. With social media expanding every day and users increasingly interacting with businesses and brands via various social media channels, there’s never a better time to take advantage of this huge opportunity than now.
An effective social media strategy can help to optimize almost every other aspects of your marketing efforts. According to Guy Sheetrit, founder of a digital marketing company, having an effective social media strategy will bridge the successful customer acquisition barrier that many small businesses face. “Not only does the inclusiveness that social media cultivates encourage small business growth, it’s also very cost effective to acquire customers,” he says.
While social media may be cost effective, it may require some form of expertise which you can achieve through study and practice.

Own Your Online Presence

The power of using the internet to reach new customers cannot be overlooked.
Many business owners only consider an internet marketing strategy as an afterthought and do not put much consideration into developing their marketing skills. This is why so many small businesses begin and end their internet marketing strategy with owning a website.

The following strategies should be considered in owning your online presence:

Get on Google places: Google places and local listings make it easy for your business to be found on the internet through local listings. This is a free advertisement for small business owners.

 Get a blog: Business blogging is now an effective customer retention and acquisition strategy. Does your new business have a blog? If not, you should reconsider your strategy.

 Search Engine Optimization: Ranking high on the top pages of Google for your best-selling keywords can help you attract ready-to-buy customers for almost free. All that may be required is your effort. There are many ways to fail with an SEO campaign but with a consistent approach, with the best SEO company in Dubai, your business can be wildly successful.

To brand your business Online, Email us: info@digitalarabia.ae

SEO Strategies 2021

To unlock the full potential of search engine optimization (SEO), businesses need to focus on the upcoming technologies to improve SEO performance and thus boost themselves on Google rankings. To keep up with evolving SEO tools and services now and into the future, businesses need an agile and flexible SEO strategy.

SEO, being one of the most powerful marketing options for businesses,  targets on users who are in need of a service/information. A holistic approach to search engine optimization can streamline the chance of dominating Google’s search results in 2018 and the focus of approach varies depending on the business or the websites.

And this article isn’t just about the predictions of SEO services but instead, it’s the tested SEO strategies that will work the best for you right now and even better in 2018.

So let’s dive right in and take a look at the top SEO strategies that top the place this year…

1) Optimize Search and Create Mobile Friendliness:

Mobile optimization has been an important SEO strategy for past few years. Before, Google crawled desktop version of a site for their primary search engine index but now, it uses mobile version for indexing. This means that you need to prioritize mobile and its content to create a mobile-friendly website for your users.

2)Website Speed is Important:

As technology has grown up so fast with better and faster internet options, no one is going to stay on a site that takes too much loading time, so this factor also tops the list. Cut down all unnecessary site content that is dumped on to site and create a better environment for anyone who visits your site with high speed loading pages.

3) Better Understanding of Website, Targets and the Actual Needs:

To have a successful SEO strategy development for your business its important to understand everything regarding your website. For this, go deep into every aspect you need concentrate like the type of the website you need to handle, its nature, the market to be targeted, the current ranking and situation, idea about the top competitors, the growth of the organic traffic, branding options etc.

3) Pay attention to voice search:

According to Internet Trends Report, voice search have seen more than a 35X increase since 2009 and is likely to get higher in coming years. While taking SEO services into consideration, voice search continues to shape SEO by adding a new layer to the search component and comprehend context. As the rise of voice assistants in various devices has dramatically affected brands to drive traffic, it definitely needs to be optimized for voice search results.

4) Google RankBrain:

RankBrain which is the 3^rd most important ranking signal of Google is a component of Google’s core algorithm which uses machine learning to determine search results or queries. So in case of following the SEO strategies, you definitely need to optimize RankBrain as it helps understand search queries & improve the algorithm. Depending on the keyword, RankBrain will increase or decrease the importance of content, backlinks, content length etc.

5) Use Shorter URLs:

Using descriptive, small keyword-relevant URLs has been an effective SEO strategy these days. Whenever and wherever possible, use primary keywords in the first few words of the URL which can in turn help in Google ranking much easily.

6) Backlinks becomes the Key Pillars:

As backlinks help you determine credibility and authority of a business or brand, its known to be the pillar of SEO performance. The presence of inbound back links indicates the importance of your website. Google gives more credit to websites that are endorsed by other sites. You can even make use of backlink builder tool to help you with your link building campaign.

7)  Take time to Track your progress:

Along with the input of hard work and research, give some time to evaluate your work. Tracking your progress will give you an idea of how much the SEO strategy, tools and marketing tactics are working for you and your site.

8) Whatever happens, Content is the Key:

At the end, whatever, SEO strategies or services come up , good, relevant and quality content is always the key factor of SEO. Without content and links, SEO is nothing because only from amazing content you get backlinks which in turn helps you to top the ranking list. According to the Google search results, the number of sites linking to a page correlated with rankings more. Therefore, content and links will still continue to be the foundation of SEO strategies in 2018.

9) Keyword stuffing:

Many of the SEO tools still use the strategy of keyword stuffing on the thought that keyword density is still an important SEO metric. Without stuffing words, use them intelligently and wisely with usability in mind. As it’s always better to earn one good editorial link from a source than just adding 10 instances of your keyword on a single page which makes no use

10) SEO & Social media marketing are tightly interwoven:

As both are organic and inbound strategies that focuses on building identity and attracting users, these two are always linked each other. As social media depends on strong branding and quality content, the efforts you take upon SEO strategies can improve your reach and can greatly increase search in Google rankings.

11) More focus on Video Content:

Nowadays, internet users mostly rely on more video content compared to images/blogs. You tube being the second largest search engine would surely benefit your website with having some interesting and quality video content.

Closing Thoughts:

This is not the end as this list is just our top priorities. You can also see several other strategies like use of embeddable images, use of podcasts, encouraging comments for users, switching websites to https, updating and republishing old content etc. Improvements don’t just happen overnight, so the sooner you start the better you’ll be able to plan the best SEO strategy. As evolutions and developments continue to happen this year, give this SEO checklist, a try…

Digital Arabia stands out against the rest of the digital marketing industry with our unique approach where we help businesses of all shapes to thrive and reach the top in the online world. With the span of wide range of creativity and skills in technical side we build highly responsive site which will help you cover every edges of digital marketing.

1. Change your power settings

If you’re using Windows 10’s Power saver plan, you’re slowing down your PC. That plan reduces your PC’s performance in order to save energy. (Even desktop PCs typically have a Power saver plan.) Changing your power plan from Power saver to High performance or Balanced will give you an instant performance boost.

To do it, launch Control Panel, then select Hardware and Sound > Power Options. You’ll typically see two options: Balanced (recommended) and Power saver. (Depending on your make and model, you might see other plans here as well, including some branded by the manufacturer.) To see the High performance setting, click the down arrow by Show additional plans.

To change your power setting, simply choose the one you want, then exit Control Panel. High performance gives you the most oomph, but uses the most power; Balanced finds a median between power use and better performance; and Power saver does everything it can to give you as much battery life as possible. Desktop users have no reason to choose Power saver, and even laptop users should consider the Balanced option when unplugged — and High performance when connected to a power source.

2. Disable programs that run on startup

One reason your Windows 10 PC may feel sluggish is you’ve got too many programs running in the background — programs that you may never use, or only rarely use. Stop them from running, and your PC will run more smoothly.

Start by launching the Task Manager: Press Ctrl-Shift-Esc or right-click the lower-right corner of your screen and select Task Manager. If the Task Manager launches as a compact app with no tabs, click “More details” at the bottom of your screen. The Task Manager will then appear in all of its full-tabbed glory. There’s plenty you can do with it, but we’re going to focus only on killing unnecessary programs that run at startup.

Click the Startup tab. You’ll see a list of the programs and services that launch when you start Windows. Included on the list is each program’s name as well as its publisher, whether it’s enabled to run on startup, and its “Startup impact,” which is how much it slows down Windows 10 when the system starts up.

To stop a program or service from launching at startup, right-click it and select “Disable.” This doesn’t disable the program entirely; it only prevents it from launching at startup — you can always run the application after launch. Also, if you later decide you want it to launch at startup, you can just return to this area of the Task Manager, right-click the application and select “Enable.”

Many of the programs and services that run on startup may be familiar to you, like OneDrive or Evernote Clipper. But you may not recognize many of them. (Anyone who immediately knows what “bzbui.exe” is, please raise your hand. No fair Googling it first.)

The Task Manager helps you get information about unfamiliar programs. Right-click an item and select Properties for more information about it, including its location on your hard disk, whether it has a digital signature, and other information such as the version number, the file size and the last time it was modified.

You can also right-click the item and select “Open file location.” That opens File Explorer and takes it to the folder where the file is located, which may give you another clue about the program’s purpose.

Finally, and most helpfully, you can select “Search online” after you right-click. Bing will then launch with links to sites with information about the program or service.

If you’re really nervous about one of the listed applications, you can go to a site run by Reason Software called Should I Block It? and search for the file name. You’ll usually find very solid information about the program or service.

Now that you’ve selected all the programs that you want to disable at startup, the next time you restart your computer, the system will be a lot less concerned with unnecessary program.

3. Turn off search indexing

Windows 10 indexes your hard disk in the background, allowing you – in theory – to search your PC more quickly than if no indexing were being done. But slower PCs that use indexing can see a performance hit, and you can give them a speed boost by turning off indexing. Even if you have an SSD disk, turning off indexing can improve your speed as well, because the constant writing to disk that indexing does can eventually slow down SSDs.

To get the maximum benefit in Windows 10, you need to turn indexing off completely. To do so, first type services.msc in the Start Menu search box, and click the Services result that come up. The Services app then appears. Scroll down to either Indexing Service or Windows Search in the list of services. Double-click it, and from the screen that appears, click Stop. Then reboot. Your searches may be slightly slower, although you may not notice the difference. But you should get an overall performance boost.

If you’d like, you can turn off indexing for only files in certain locations. To do this, first type index in the Start Menu search box, and click the Indexing Options result that appears. The Indexing Options page of Control Panel appears. Click the Modify button and you’ll see a list of locations that are being indexed, such as Microsoft Outlook, your personal files, and so on. Uncheck the boxes next to any location, and it will no longer be indexed.

4. Clean out your Registry

Under the Windows hood, the Registry tracks and controls just about everything about the way Windows works and looks. That includes information about where your programs are stored, which DLLs they use and share, what file types should be opened by which program or just about everything else.

But the Registry is a very messy thing. When you uninstall a program, for example, that program’s settings don’t always get cleaned up in the Registry. So over time, it can get filled with countless outdated settings of all types. And that can lead to system slowdowns.

Don’t even think of trying to clean any of this out yourself. It’s impossible. To do it, you need a Registry Cleaner. There are plenty available, some free and some paid. But there’s really no need to outright buy  one, because the free Auslogics Registry Cleaner does a solid job.

Before using Auslogics or any other Registry Cleaner, you should back up your Registry so you can restore it if anything goes wrong. (Auslogics Registry Cleaner does this for you as well, but it can’t hurt to have it backed up twice.) To do your own Registry backup, type regedit.ext in the search box, then press Enter. That runs the Registry editor.  From the File menu, select Export. From the screen that appears, make sure to choose the “All” option in the Export range section at the bottom of the screen. Then choose a file location and file name and click Save. To restore the Registry, open the Registry editor, select Import from the File menu, then open the file you saved.

Now download, install and run Auslogics Registry Cleaner. On the left-hand side of the screen you can select the kinds of Registry issues you want to clean up – for example, File Associations, Internet or Fonts. I generally select them all.

Next tell it to scan the Registry for problems. To do that, click “Scan Now” and from a drop-down menu that appears select Scan. That lets you first examine the Registry problems it finds. If you instead choose “Scan and Repair,” it makes the fixes without you checking them.

It now scans your Registry for errors, then shows you what it found. It ranks the errors according to their severity, to help you decide which to fix. Click Repair when you’ve made your decision, and make sure that “Back up Changes” is checked, so you can restore the Registry easily if something goes wrong.

5. Disable shadows, animations and visual effects

Windows 10 has some nice eye candy — shadows, animations and visual effects. On fast, newer PCs, these don’t usually affect system performance. But on slower and older PCs, they can exact a performance hit.

It’s easy to turn them off. In the Windows 10 search box type sysdm.cpl and press Enter. That launches the System Properties dialog box. Click the Advanced tab and click “Settings” in the Performance section. That brings you to the Performance Options dialog box. You’ll see a varied list of animations and special effects.

If you have time on your hands and love to tweak, you can turn individual ones on and off. These are the animations and special effects you’ll probably want to turn off, because they have the greatest effect on system performance:

• Animate controls and elements inside windows
• Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing
• Animations in the taskbar
• Fade or slide menus into view
• Fade or slide ToolTips into view
• Fade out menu items after clicking
• Show shadows under windows

However, it’s probably a lot easier to just select “Adjust for best performance” at the top of the screen and then click OK. Windows 10 will then turn off the effects that slow down your system.

6. Launch the Windows troubleshooter

Windows 10 has a very useful, little-known tool that can sniff out performance problems and solve them. To launch it, run Control Panel and select System and Security > Security and Maintenance > Troubleshooting > Run maintenance tasks. A screen titled “Troubleshoot and help prevent computer problems” will appear. Click Next.

The troubleshooter will find files and shortcuts you don’t use, identify any performance and other issues on your PC, report them to you and then fix them. Note that you may get a message that says, “Try troubleshooting as an administrator.” If you have administrative rights to the PC, click it and the troubleshooter will launch and do its work.

7. Get help from the Performance Monitor

There’s a great tool in Windows 10 called the Performance Monitor that can, among other things, create a detailed performance report about your PC, detail any system and performance issues, and suggest fixes.

To get the report, type perfmon /report into your search box and press Enter. (Make sure there’s a space between “perfmon” and the slash mark.) The Resource and Performance Monitor launches and gathers information about your system. It will say that it will take 60 seconds, but I’ve found that it takes several minutes. When the Monitor finishes, it will launch an interactive report.

You’ll find a lot of extremely detailed information in the report, and it can take a lot of time to go through. Your best bet is to first look at the Warnings section, which details the biggest issues (if any) it found on your PC, such as problems with Windows, with drivers and so on. It also tells you how to fix each problem — for example, how to turn on a device that has been disabled.

It is also worthwhile to scroll down to the Resource Overview section, where you’ll find an analysis of how well your CPU, network, disk and memory are performing. Each result is color-coded, with green meaning no problems, yellow meaning potential issues, and red showing a problem.

Beyond that, the Resource Overview also reports performance metrics and explanatory details. For example, for the CPU, it might show green and a utilization of 21%, with the details, “Normal CPU load.” Or for Memory, it might show yellow, with 62% utilization and the details, “1520 MB is available.” Based on what you get, you might want to do something about your hardware — for example, add more memory.

8. Kill bloatware

Sometimes the biggest factor slowing down your PC isn’t Windows 10 itself, but bloatware or adware that takes up CPU and system resources. Adware and bloatware are particularly insidious because they may have been installed by your computer’s manufacturer. You’d be amazed at how much more quickly your Windows 10 PC can run if you get rid of it.

First, run a system scan to find adware and malware. If you’ve already installed a security suite such as Norton Security or McAfee LiveSafe, you can use that. You can also use Windows 10’s built in anti-malware app — just type Windows Defender in the search box, press Enter, and then click Scan Now. Windows Defender will look for malware and remove any it finds.

How Social Media Marketing Works

The term “Social Media” has entered that rare stratosphere of fame and recognition normally reserved for rock stars and Presidents. Now, rock stars and Presidents bow to the power of social media.

But what does “social media marketing” truly mean, and how can we use it’s dominance on the world scene to grow our businesses?

Real social media marketing takes dedication

If you’re new to social media marketing you might believe that a few blog posts, daily, random status updates, and a healthy number of “followers” and “likes” are going to magically grow your business.

The truth is: this stuff takes real planning and dedication.

Serious online marketers know that in order to harness the power of social media you need to incorporate a deliberate mixture of:

• Listening to your audience
• Sharing your relevant message
• Enabling others to share your relevant message

And what do you share, and hope that others will? Content.

There is no such thing as effective social media marketing without content.

Your social media strategy originates from your solid content marketing strategy. Great content gets people to share, and that sharing widens your audience to a whole new world of potential fans, friends, and customers.

Whether you’re a large business or a lone entrepreneur, social media marketing can be the most inexpensive and powerful marketing tool in your arsenal to build the trust and authority that — in the best case — helps exponentially grow your business