5 WordPress FAQ Plugins For Your Online Business (2019 Edition)

6 Ideas on the Future of Advertising

What Does the Future Hold? Join Us As We Enter A New Time In Digital Advertising

Introduction

We are entering a time when mass personalization and protecting our privacy are becoming joined at the hip. No one can say for sure what the future holds. However, we have been given a little insight into the crystal ball. We might not be a true fortune teller, but you deserve to know what the future holds for digital marketing.

1) Amazon is going to become the new king. Online monopolies like Google and Facebook have ruled the kingdom for years now. In the immortal words of Elton John: The King Must Die!

Amazon is going to wear the crown now, at least for a while. The reason is that Amazon is the leader when it comes to searching for products online and buying, though eBay does come in at a close second.

2) Influencers in marketing are going to be holding more power in the King’s court than it ever did before. Part of these influencers includes something called a “paywall.” The Paywall service restricts your content from being viewed by others through a subscription. Restricting others from viewing content is a big deal for a lot of people. That is an influence people consider when they choose a service online. They ask “who can see what I am doing? We live in a time when everything is so easily accessible, even the most secure sites can be hacked. That is why an influencer like that reigns supreme. To find out more about this service and others like it visit the Paywall website.

3) Net neutrality is a big deal right now. You probably heard about it on the news. There has been a concern for a long time that it might be overturned. That would have meant that some sites would be slowed down and harder to access. That would have a huge impact on the digital marketing world.

Update: The good news is that the rules are not going to be overturned anytime soon. You still need to be concerned though. Net neutrality is safe for now. Right now we have a free and open internet. However, that could still change. That is one digital marketing strategy that consumers and businesses cannot live without.

4) The trend of being public is now moving to a more private landscape. A lot of people are seeing the consequences of posting their information out in the open, to the extent that they do. More people are gravitating towards a more private protocol when it comes to digitalizing their data. There are still people who like attention. Look at the social media posts sometimes. There are a lot of people who claim to be private when they are posting updates every 5 minutes. It gets harder to take some people seriously when they profess to be one thing and act in another way.

Either way, people are starting to see the light and looking to keep things more private. Look for more of that in the digital trends as this year winds to a close and a new year begins.

5) New digital trends are including the idea of being fun and funny. It is hard to post data on a private channel and not sound or look creepy while doing it. The answer: Be yourself and be funny. Humor is a great way to engage your audience and capture some new perspective. Do you know what Chatbots are? You might want to look them up because they are going to be part of the digital trends moving forward.

6) Ad blocks are a new trend that are capturing online gurus everywhere. Ad blocks give you the ability to block an ad that you do not like or deem inappropriate for any reason. Ads pop up everywhere whether you are on your desktop or phone. They can be annoying, to say the least. They are especially annoying when they advertise something you have no interest in. Ad blocks remove the irritant or irritating person and you go on about your day.

Is there anything you are excited about? Why not share it below in the comments section.

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7 Tips To Choosing WordPress Paywall Options

A WordPress paywall allows you to create more revenue streams on your site, sell common items, and produce as many possible profit increases as you can. Consider what you can do when you have a paywall that will help your customers step up to different levels of participation on your site. Also, consider that there are such things as a hard and soft paywall. You can make the decision about what people will pay, and you can use the software to create a website that produces a lot of extra income.

1. What Does The Software Do?

The purpose of paywall software is to ask people to pay for certain goods and services. The most common type is one where someone reaches a level of usage on a site that is stopped by the wall, and they have to pay to continue. This is common in games where the player can only play so many levels before continuing. The same could be true on your sports news site. You want to protect some of your articles, and that is how you get people to pay. You might offer free services up to a point, and the wall will step in to ask the customer to pay.

2. How Do You Set Prices?

You can set prices in any way that you like. You might choose to use the wall as a way to get a small in-program purchase of no more than a dollar, or you could set prices for varying subscription levels. It all depends on what you think is appropriate, and you must be flexible in pricing your items. Your website cannot function if you price everyone out of the things that you are selling, and you could offer sales or discounts where needed.

You are allowed to set prices for anything on the site from a music file to a video. You could create a wall for each item that is on sale on your site, or you could use that same software to create a shortcut that sends that item to the customer’s shopping cart.

3. Why Is The Wall Needed?

You will turn people away at the homepage if they are forced to pay just to use your site. You do not want to make your site a place that seems prohibitive, and you do not want to surprise customers with purchases that they did not see coming. The software can be used to create informative blurbs on your site that explain how purchases are handled. You could label everything that is for sale, and you can label everything that is free.

4. Free Trials

You can add free trials to accounts at any time. The customer can sign up through your portal, and they can get a free trial that expires in the amount of time you have chosen. You could use the software to send them reminders, or you could use the software to set up a program that will ask the customer to use financial information to secure their trial. You can charge the customer when their trial ends, or you can give them the option of renewing.

5. What Forms Of Payment Are Accepted?

This sort of software must take all forms of payment possible. You might want to have a discount and gift card program for your site, and you must use the software to accept these payments. You can take all major credit cards, and you can take payments through a simple ACH debit. You can set up payments that recur for subscriptions, and you can give the customers a dashboard where they can check their account status.

6. How Does The Software Benefit Customers?

Customers can use your site in an a la carte format that gives them complete control over how much they spend. They can buy anything they want, and they can avoid anything they want. The customer determines how much they are willing to spend, and they can take free trials if they are not sure. You are showing your customers that you want them to decide on their own experience, and you can continually upgrade to give customers more purchase options.

7. How Much Money Will You Make?

You will make passive income every day, and you can allow your site to run all by itself. Your customers decide when they want to make purchases, and they never need your help. You can see a record of all the transactions from the site, and you are given information about which parts of the wall have been effective. You can change prices or change your terms to meet the needs of the market so that more people will make tiny purchases on your site.

Conclusion

If you must put up a wall that asks customers to pay for certain items or experiences on your website. You are showing your customers that they have control over what they buy, and they can use your website up to a point for free. You can offer subscriptions, sell your products, or safeguard audio and video when this software puts up a payment wall.

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Why Paywalls are Coming, and it’s Nothing You Can Do About It

As technology grows, newspaper publishers are moving to websites to share their newfound stories and news highlights. This has been very convenient since posting on sites is cheaper and less complicated compared to printing out the newspapers. Currently, four out of ten households purchase printed publications while the rest access news stories from their mobile phones, tablets, laptops, or desktops. Printing fewer newspapers have reduced expenditure on the corporate’s end.

How do these Newspaper Companies make Money if they Publish Stories Online?

In case you are not aware of the online publishing and money making process, here is a brief outline. So, traditionally, newspaper companies made and still make money every time a reader purchases a print. The other form of making money is through advertisements posting in the newspaper. This happens when a company wants to market a certain service, product, or offer and buys space in the paper. This company has to pay the press for that space.

When it comes to publishing the same newspaper content online, the primary method of earning revenue is through advertising. Just like they sell space in newspapers, the same happens on their websites. Advertising can be either through ad services like Google Adsense or direct contacts with the corporate world. The traditional method and digital media both rely on a number of readers to get corporate’s to advertise on their platforms.

This is where the challenge comes in. Using ad services has become an irritant to readers of websites and blogs. With tech gurus creating ad blockers for sites, newspaper companies are losing big time. This is where they are supposed to get their revenue, but now, someone has created a plugin that users install on their browsers to help block advertisements when they access websites.

How Ad Blockers Work

First and foremost, ad blockers are browser extensions or plugins that remove advertising content on a website. An ad blocker is developed by setting a list of scripts that it should not allow during a site load. So, when a user activates the ad blocker and loads a web page, the plugin or extension peruses the page’s script to match them with the list of scripts or sites it was instructed to block. If it finds a match, it blocks. Common ad services are usually first on the block list, so using them has become a risky move for most online publishers.

The Introduction of Paywalls

With ad blockers reducing the chances of websites making good money, the Paywall service was introduced. This is a service that works like the traditional purchase to read method. Users have to pay a few Dollars to access the newspaper site content. Providers have a number of plugins that include the WordPress Paywall that protects websites and blogs made using the CMS. This was a good move since it helps publishers to earn. If we take the New York Times online publishing website as an example, we can see how they have been making roughly more than ten million dollars annually on paywall. This is a convenient way of making money compared to staying without advertising and hoping the ad scripts you use will not be in the ad blocker’s list.

Why Paywalls Did Not Work in The Past

Paywall was first introduced in the mid-2000s. During this period, it was not as successful as it should have been. This was due to several reasons. The main one was competition in the industry. A general topic publication like the New York Times got competition from newspapers like The Huffington Post. Note that these are both big and popular publications with the massive readership. However, as the New York Times implemented the Paywall system, Huffington Post maintained free readership. Comparing these two, some factors made the previous publication flop on Paywall.

• It features diverse content while the Huffington Post focuses on business posts. This means that if a reader wants business news, they will go for the free and quality posts on the Huffington Post website and ignore the New York Times’ paid content.
• With high traffic, websites like Huffington Post make more money with advertising compared to the New York Times’ paywall subscription. The ten million dollars per year that the New York Times made from Paywall was not enough to cover the amount spent on collecting news posts.
• Search engines were not able to access content on the New York Times site to rank it for readers to find them easily. Every website wants search engines to rank their content. This is one of the best ways to get new readers to your website without advertising your content.

The New York Times eventually took down their Paywall system and continued with the free content and advertising tradition. However, Paywall is now back, and more sites are incorporating the plugin in their websites.

The Purchasing of Content Evolution

Users are now familiar with and have gotten used to purchasing applications on the App store for $0.99. They will purchase such products if:

• They hear praises about the efficiency of the application
• They have used a free demo and found it worth purchasing
• They have used products for the same company before and trust their applications

This Purchase-to-use method should be introduced in websites and desktop apps as well. A good move will be if all the main publications start using the plugin. This way, instead of losing subscribers to free publications, they maintain their subscribers and get them to pay for content. You can sell your website content if you know that you get first-hand information easily and before other publishers, have high-quality content to give you the authority in the industry, and your images and videos are of quality and can be freely distributed under copyright, among other factors.

The Paywall Future and Blockchain Technology

As concluded, advertising on web pages is slowly diminishing due to the ad blocker existence. This means that the whole journalism industry is under siege. Using a paywall and blockchain technology can boost microtransactions for an online publisher.

Microtransactions are typically used to get revenue through purchasing products like applications. This revenue is used to cater for expenditure calculated during the development process and the workforce. When it comes to reporting news in the media industry, a lot is involved, including traveling to the news scene and paying journalists and the whole production team. Therefore, selling this content helps cover for the next field work and salaries for the media team. You can use blockchain technology to increase your chances of success with Paywall. This also ensures the security of payment details of the user and assures the reader makes a payment that is also received by the publication. After this, the user can access the website content.

Introducing a digital paywall results in a higher chance of succeeding with more prominent publications compared to smaller or newer ones since they already have traffic that is familiar with their quality and type of content. When it comes to spending money on content, readers will prefer a known publisher. New and small publications can try out free content until they gather wholesome traffic and get some industry authority or popularity. Then, they can introduce a Paywall slowly to their subscribers.

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How Micropayment Methods Provide Answers to Virtual Credit Systems?

The virtual credit system has been very popular amongst customers since quite some time now. These cards are not your actual physical cards and are also not physically issued by any credit card service provider. This is basically a kind of service provided free of cost to the customers who issue a card from the respective service providers in which a one-time-use virtual credit card number associated with the actual credit card is provided to be used for purchasing services and goods on merchant sites. These virtual credit card numbers are very secure and can never be traced back to identify the identity of the consumer hence providing security and privacy with ease of use. But it has various limitations too like there is a minimum and maximum credit limit for each transaction that is processed per day, there is a specific validity period, limitations on the number of transactions per virtual card, etc. Also, in case of purchasing products physically from a store, virtual cards are basically useless.

To answer all these issues with a virtual credit system, service providers came up with the solution of micropayment platforms. With such systems, as consumers, you get the capability to make financial transactions involving few dollars or even cents without the restriction of minimum or maximum transactional amount eventually giving you the flexibility to purchase low valued services very easily and quickly. At the same time for the merchants, micropayment platforms provide the opportunity to expand and enhance their range of products to include goods which may be priced very low as compared to other products. Also unlike virtual credit cards, micropayment platforms do not restrain customers from buying any services by defining limitations on the number of transactions, transactional amount, or an expiry period. They offer numerous benefits to the users like anonymity, privacy, high security, ease of usage, quicker transactions, flexibility, ease of integration in websites, etc. Also, now by using the blockchain protocol, the transactional amount on each of the microtransactions have been proved to get incredibly reduced eventually relieving customers from the overhead of paying a huge transaction fee for a micro transaction.

Micropayment platforms have been in the market since the year 1990 and have gained an astonishing amount of popularity since 2010. With the benefits it offers to the consumers as well as the merchants, it is high time for you to buckle up, integrate micropayment platforms easily by the plugins available online and start using them.

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Why a Micropayment Platform is the Best Payment Gateway for Bitcoin Transactions?

Making financial transactions and protecting consumers online when we talk about goods and services which are of low priced value has always been a hassle. Consumers and online users always resist making micro payments online because of the fear of huge transactional fees that may be involved in making that financial transaction successful. Well to resolve this issue and help merchants to expand their product base and eventually their customer base as well as to support customers in making successful microtransactions, came the incredible generation of micropayment platforms. These platforms not only help in making successful micro transactions possible without much hassle but also provide a great level of security, privacy, anonymity as well as speed and efficiency to the users.

Using micropayment platforms, you can also create and successfully offer virtual currency and virtual coins to your website users like Bitcoin. When we say Bitcoin transactions, we mean online transactions that are made in the form of Bitcoins. These transactions are broadcasted to a network and further collected into blocks. These transactions are not encrypted and so can be easily browsed via a block explorer to view each and every detail. All the transactions that are confirmed are then included in the blockchain (a shared public ledger).

How can a micropayment system be the best payment gateway for Bitcoin transactions?

Well, Bitcoin transactions utilize the benefits of the Blockchain protocol but suffer resistance again because of the huge transaction fees that get involved while making even small transactions. But with the advancement in technologies and the latest developments in the micropayment systems market, users of micropayment platforms can now efficiently purchase low priced goods and services without thinking twice about the transaction fee that may get involved. With the new API solutions offered by some organizations, micropayments can now be successfully made by using the Blockchain protocol.

The APIs have implemented an adaptive approach to calculate a minor fee with every transaction which increases the chances of transaction completion by consumers. Along with that to support the merchants, they have also included a predictive approach to calculate the confirmation probability of a micro transaction. This eventually then helps the merchants to get the exact amount as sent by the consumer. With the Blockchain protocol, the major issues being faced by consumers while making micropayments can be resolved to a great extent.

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5 Myths Uncovered About Micropayment Systems

The first generation of micropayment platforms were introduced during the 1990s but failed miserably to create the adequate impact. Since then there have been myths surrounding micropayments and micropayment platforms. The second generation got introduced during the 2010s with platforms like Flattr and successfully and efficiently helped consumers as well as merchants to process financial transactions involving micro payments easily as well as securely. Although Micropayment systems hold with them numerous advantages and benefits, still there are some myths revolving around their usage and efficiency which affects their popularity in the market eventually making consumers and merchants resistant to integrate them and widen their product base.

Some myths about micropayment systems that are certainly untrue are presented below:

1. Micropayment platforms are not user-friendly: A number of micropayment platforms have been introduced recently like PayPal, M-Coin, SatoshiPay, Swish, GNU Taler which along with holding the benefits of security, privacy, anonymity, etc. also are user-friendly and easy to use for consumers and merchants.

2. Micropayments do not focus on user preferences: This one is completely untrue because micropayments give you the choice to pay as you go, and micropayment systems offer you the choice to use virtual wallets and virtual currencies as well.

3. Transaction fees are very high: While true for some platforms, but with the latest blockchain methodology integration, a number of transactions can now be clubbed together to reduce the overall transaction fees of the online financial transaction which eventually supports the consumers by protecting them from paying high fees on low values products and services.

4. Integrating micropayment systems involves a lot of hassle and expertise: Well that may sound so as micropayment platforms have been in the cyber market successfully for about 8 years since the second generation got introduced but it is not true. With the introduction of plugins like micropayment.io, MediaPass, TinyPass, CM MicroPayment Plugins, LaterPay, etc., integrating micropayment platforms successfully has become quite easy, straightforward and quicker than ever.

5. Some transactions are so low valued to worry about: Well using micropayment systems is not at all a hassle and these platforms have the major purpose of making micropayments as small as a cent easily, efficiently and quickly with anonymity and privacy. So whatever your transaction is, whether a cent or a dollar, if the service that you are getting by making that payment is worth it then you should use micropayment platforms to make the transaction.

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