How Businesses Can Make Use Of BlockChain Technologies?


While Bitcoin captured the public imagination due to its meteoric rise and then a period of severe fluctuation and volatility, it’s actually the technology which makes the existence of Bitcoin possible that’s slated to play a major role and disrupt the business arena in the upcoming years.

Simply put, blockchain can be considered as a ledger that updates any alteration to information done on it on all points similarly. This groundbreaking concept ensures that no matter who views the information, it’s always witnessing the most updated version of that information.

That’s why Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies can be traded so easily without any single regulatory authority controlling them. Whenever a Bitcoin transaction takes place by anyone, the whole system gets updated and anyone can go on and view that information without being able to alter it.

But as the craze for cryptos tapers off and subsides, businesses have started looking at potentially advantageous way on how Blockchain can actually be useful to them in different situations.

Blockchain’s biggest potential lies in the fact that it can streamline things like no one can. Its implementation in a business scenario will bring in efficiency and effectiveness in how different transactions and information sharing exercises can be done without wasting too much time updating everything and ensuring that everyone arrives on the same conclusion.

This will especially benefit small to medium enterprises as they can really rely upon Blockchain to deliver the transparency, reduction in costs and faster transactions that will positively affect their bottom lines.

If you are an entrepreneur at the helm of such an enterprise, here’s how your business can make use of Blockchain technologies in the external as well as the internal environment:

Establishing and Implementing Contracts:

Contracts are agreements between two parties over the agreed course of action regarding a certain objective, but at most times, these very contracts need to be changed or altered. While doing this, there is a lot of back and forth going on to bring these changes into everyone’s knowledge and as contracts are essential before you can start off anything, eliminating such unnecessary delays will definitely be worthwhile and allow you to start things in time and with everyone’s due approval.

By integrating such contracts and liaisons via Blockchain, you are assured that all changes made are traceable by everyone. This “audit trail” will ensure the transfer of information faster and reduce approval times significantly.

Strategic Differentiator in Expediting a Better Customer Experience:

Businesses deal in delivery of product and services to consumers but tracking deliveries at each point in the chain is something that Blockchain can revolutionize.

Parcels often get lost meaning the customer didn’t receive them but they need to complain can be eliminated altogether when a customer can track the whole supply chain as things get updated in real-time. Similar models without Blockchain already operate but they have certain inherent flaws.

These systems still require customers and even companies to prove that delivery hasn’t been done, but if there is a GPS tracking device in each parcel that can generate a Blockchain entry at each point in the supply chain, such problems will never arise.

Also, companies wouldn’t need customer complaints to ascertain how well their supply chains are performing. Data will be present in its most precise form to withdraw conclusions from and improve bottlenecks and problem points substantially.

It will even be possible to authorize payments only when the product has been received, further making the buying process easier and facilitative for the customer.

Candidate Profiling and Payroll Authentication:

Companies need internal efficiencies on top of improving the customer experience if they want to do well. Blockchain could seriously effect on such internal issues and that is of streamlining human resource operations within any firm.

Keeping track of any employee’s progress record, its historical association and experience and even educational achievements could be done securely and in an optimized manner via Blockchain. The encryption will allow all such sensitive data to remain secure at endpoints with warded access intervals.

If a decentralized ledger is created of such data from potential candidates, a lot of companies can make vital business decisions. Even candidates could access data from companies like turnover rates and check whether a certain company is fit for applying or not.

Most companies now handle a diverse workforce consisting of people with varying titles and locations. If a firm depends upon freelancers from overseas to do a certain type of work, it can eliminate banks and other intermediaries while distributing invoices and payments thereby substantially reducing the cost as well as time that is wasted.

Will these Propositions Ever Become a Part of Reality?

These ideologies are now being effectively applied in many different forms and in many different industries. However, Blockchain require substantial investments to run power from computing and its detractors have argued that it firstly, it will never be feasible for small businesses to ever apply Blockchain-based solutions due to the high costs involved and secondly, no major cost-cutting has been witnessed in any such Blockchain-based initiative till now but Dr. Demetrios Zamboglou, who is currently the Chief Operating Officer of BABB and an entrepreneur with extensive experience in emerging markets, argues that although these concerns are right to a certain extent, they won’t remain so for long. He is also a published author who has completed multiple award-winning research projects during his career, including The European Commission Digital Champion, Microsoft Award, and the Amazon Grant, opinionates that business models will be upended via Blockchain as it brings in ease of information sharing and transactions within businesses and outside of them and because the success of Bitcoin and cryptos have shown that how a Blockchain-based system cannot just be sustained but also bring in incredible benefits to things that ride upon it, there’s good reason to believe that soon the business realm will start witnessing tangible improvements through Blockchain-based initiatives that will benefit all stakeholders involved.

Getting Started with Image SEO

Getting Started with Image SEO

SEO is a term that most marketers are aware of these days. And, getting to the top of Google is a core target for businesses all around. But, many people are unaware of how important it is to optimize the images you use as well as the text. SEO experts could literally spend days explaining the importance of image SEO. But, we have created this short guide that includes the fundamentals to help you get started.

SEO In a Nutshell

To put in simply, SEO is all about getting a website to appear at the top of the search engines, most importantly; Google. By ranking highly on the search engines will means that a website will get more visitors and potentially generate more money. SEO is an on-going process of optimizing the content on a website, generating referral links on external websites and fine-tuning the website’s code. By doing SEO correctly will see a website’s ranking increase and appear in the search engine results pages (otherwise known as SERPS). When a user makes a search query using a keyword or key phrase that matches the keywords built into a website, then it will appear in the SERPS. The ultimate goal for any business is to rank number 1 or even position 0 (otherwise known as the featured snippet).

The Ins and Outs of Image SEO

There is no denying that we are now living in not only a digital world, but also a visual one. With that being said, having attractive imagery on your website can make it look appealing. So, without effectively optimizing this imagery, you are missing out on a valuable asset to improve your overall SEO efforts.

Optimizing your images for SEO means that you can improve your page loading times, create a better user experience for your visitors and create extra search engine ranking opportunities. So, what are the different ways you can optimize your images for SEO? Keep reading to find out!

File Size

The images on your website can often be the cause of slow loading page times. If your website is suffering from slow loading times, then try to reduce the size of image files by compressing them. The size of your images does not actually need to be any larger than you need them to be. And, one of the easiest ways you can reduce your image file sizes is by using Photoshop’s Save for Web option.

Image Names

When it comes to optimizing images for SEO purposes, creating keyword rich file names is an absolute must. Image file names will alert the search engines of the image’s subject matter. For example, if you are using an image that you captured on a phone or tablet yourself then the file name would probably look like IMG_987654 or IMG_1234-6543 or something similar depending on the type of device and operating system. So, change the file name to a keyword that will improve your SEO and help the search engines understand the context of the image better.

Alt-Text

Alt-text (otherwise known as alt-tags) is used to describe the context of an image file. Alt-text is extremely important when it comes to SEO because it means that a browser can render the image.

It is also very beneficial to use alt-text when it comes to your on-page SEO. Adding the right alt-text to your images on a website can help it achieve better rankings in the search engine results pages by associating your keywords with the images.  It provides search engines with useful information about the context of an image. They basically use this information to help determine what images to return when a user makes a search query.

Create A Sitemap for Your Images

Creating and publishing a sitemap of all your images means that the search engines are more likely to discover your images, which can help increase SEO ranking. It also means that your images are more likely to appear in the image search results.

Don’t Use Open Source Images

It’s important to use original images as this can vastly improve your visitors when they visit your website. It also gives you a better chance of ranking for relevant search queries. It’s crucial to provide your website visitors a snapshot of your business through the use of high-quality imagery that they will respond to. Always try to avoid using open source or stock images as over the past few years these have become extremely popular and the same images as now appearing all over the internet. The key is to keep your visual content as original as possible.

There Must Be a Reason For Your Images

Don’t just use images just for the sake of it. Images should help with telling a story and complement the context of the text. We are living in an ever-increasing visual society, so images have a bigger emotional impact than text. With that being said, don’t force it. The ultimate reason for having images is to break up your text to help your website visitors better under the overall context of the content.

About The Author:

Lloyd Parkinson is a Content Marketing Executive at Revive.Digital. Lloyd has experience writing content for the purpose of marketing on behalf of B2B and B2C organizations ranging from legal services, insurance brokers,  financial services, all the way to the music and entertainment industry. He conducts research and writes about an extensive number of topics. Lloyd aims to educate his readers through his creative writing by providing them with informative and valuable content. He seeks to simplify complex topics for general readers as well as writing technical content for the well informed.