Business Articles Catalog

Business Articles Catalog

PayPal has launched a product aimed at helping small and medium businesses accept online payments securely and cost-effectively.

The Website Payments Pro product is the first non-hosted payment suite from PayPal, a subsidiary of online auction giant eBay. It includes Express Checkout, Direct Payment API and Virtual Terminal functions, so firms can let shoppers choose how to pay for their purchases.

The Direct Payment API lets businesses accept credit or debit card payments. Buyers enter card details directly on the business’s own website and payments are processed through PayPal.

Customers can also pay for their goods using PayPal’s Express Checkout, removing the need to re-enter billing or delivery information with every purchase. Buyers can use any major credit or debit card, Banka account or PayPal account balance.

The Virtual Terminal allows businesses to accept orders offline via phone, fax or mail and then enter the details online so the transaction is processed by PayPal.

Companies can include their own branding on the checkout process web pages and can direct buyers back to their websites to continue shopping after payments are completed.

Carl-Olav Scheible, general manager of merchant services at PayPal said the product was developed to meet the needs of businesses that wanted the benefits of PayPal combined with those of a merchant account and gateway.

PayPal processed ?4.2 billion (US$8.2 billion) of payments in Europe last year, and figures from Forrester Research show it is now a preferred payment method for 35 percent of online shoppers in the U.K.

But PayPal users have been heavily targeted by criminal phishing scams. In July, security firm Sophos revealed that 54 percent of the phishing emails received by its threat analysis centers were aimed at stealing log-in and other details from PayPal users.

Pricing for Website Payments Pro includes a monthly fee and a rate per transaction.

My Secret: A PostSecret Book

For Love and Money

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Online Personal Trainer Who Makes Over $70,000 A Month

Online Personal Trainer Who Makes Over $70,000 A Month

http://the-personal-trainer.com

Boyd Myers left home in Texas, and a solid job as a computer programmer with the Air Force, to become a personal trainer - and that's when his career really skyrocketed.

After joining the Air Force out of high school in 1994, Myers got stationed in Montgomery, Alabama in 1996. There, he spent so much time working out at Gold's Gym that the gym finally offered him a part-time job in exchange for a free membership.

Myers, now 30, said he was happy to help others with their workout, but soon, "people started asking me to train them on the side," he said, so he insisted he would help them free of charge.

Soon he was working with clients 25 hours a week while trying to balance personal training with his programming job in the Air Force. That's when he decided to get certified, Myers said, and start charging for the services he provided.

After being discharged in 2004 with an annual salary of around $42,000 and 10 years of experience under his belt, Myers decided to become a full-time personal trainer instead of pursuing a career in computers. "That's what I liked," he said.

But when General Dynamics offered him $350,000 to spend a year in Iraq as an independent contractor working on tracking program, Myers decided he couldn't turn down the opportunity. But he didn't want to put his budding career as a personal trainer on hold either.

Instead, he used his computer skills to build his business online. "I kept an online personal training journal," Myers explained. While in Iraq, He charged clients $300 to $400 a month to provide them with a full nutrition program as well as training tips and general advice via email and message boards.

And when the 12 months were up, Myers immediately returned to his wife, Kristen, and his personal training career.

With the money he made working for General Dynamics and the client base he had built up, he rented a studio in San Antonio, Texas for $2,500 a month and hired two full-time trainers.

That was "a big risk," Myers said, "I had never paid rent on a place or hired employees or anything before."

Again, he put his computer skills to work building a Web site and mastering key words and cues used by search engines. "When people search (online) for trainers in San Antonio, they find me."

"The first two months we were open, we grossed $70,000 a month." Now, Myers, who charges $75 to $90 an hour, says he brings in approximately $250,000 a year through his studio and plans to open another one in the area soon.

"My goal is to open 20 studios or franchise."
This Time It's Mine

Process on Optimizing your Site through Keywords

Process on Optimizing your Site through Keywords

There are a lot of things to analyze on your site before you start optimizing your site. Such things are your site overview, nature of business, home page, site dimension and number of pages, product/services categories, page rank and indexed pages for major search engines, link popularity, and a lot more. After that you will go to your onpage and offpage optimization.

Analyze your site and think of a generic word that best fits for your web site. Choosing the right keywords is a strategy for better search engine positioning http://www.searchengines.com/placement.html. Analyze your business carefully and think of all the words that relate to your company or product. Most techniques to improve your search engine rankings have one thing in common -- Keywords. Choosing appropriate keywords is very important. Keywords are what lead search engine users to your site.

That word will act as your major keyword for your site. Then find a keyword tool that will help you generate keywords for your site. There are lots of keyword tools like http://inventory.overture.com. Type in the major keyword that you had thought of and it’ll list all related keywords that you can use. On the tool you’ll see the number of counts your keyword has been searched. Person new on search engine optimization might use the keyword with a lot of counts (I, sure did that before) immediately but SEO experts says that Do NOT use it for a start as keyword searched as many times will just give you a lot of competition and give your site less probability in regards to your visitors. So it is best to start with keywords with a little rivalry. Get some traffic with those keywords and eventually focus on the major keywords.

Examine those sites ranked from 1-10 on the keywords you chose to use in optimizing your site. Check everything about the site that is ranked highly on the search engine. Its URL, see if it is the top level webpage or it is the index page of the site as if it is not you can have a great chance to improve your index page for the target keyword and have a better placement in the SERP’s. Sites page rank. Page rank is Google’s way of giving specific value to how popular your website is. It is based on the number of links you have pointing to your website. Then check their page source, see if their actually optimizing their site for some onpage optimization factors. Factors such as title tag, check if they use the keyword on their title tag which is one of the main reasons why a site is rank well on search engine. Header tags are used to separate topics and range from h1 being very large and bold and h6 which is very small and bold, it should contain your most important keyword or keyword phrases to assist you in ranking higher on Search Engines. Image alt tags are words that will be displayed in place of your image through an older browser or when your visitors have their image turned off, insert a readable keyword phrase within the alt tags of your image and it’ll help you on your rankings. And on the main content if they use the keyword on the beginning and at the end of the page, also whether or not they’ve bolded, underlined, or italicized the keywords on that page. By continuing this process on other keywords that you’ve chose you will have an improved ranking on SERPs.

Kristine Joy Francisco, SEO for ProAdultOutsourcing, the best choice for your professional web design and other web development needs, for more information visit http://www.proadultoutsourcing.com/.

PayPal Entices Small Business

PayPal Entices Small Business

PayPal has launched a product aimed at helping small and medium businesses accept online payments securely and cost-effectively.

The Website Payments Pro product is the first non-hosted payment suite from PayPal, a subsidiary of online auction giant eBay. It includes Express Checkout, Direct Payment API and Virtual Terminal functions, so firms can let shoppers choose how to pay for their purchases.

The Direct Payment API lets businesses accept credit or debit card payments. Buyers enter card details directly on the business’s own website and payments are processed through PayPal.

Customers can also pay for their goods using PayPal’s Express Checkout, removing the need to re-enter billing or delivery information with every purchase. Buyers can use any major credit or debit card, Banka account or PayPal account balance.

The Virtual Terminal allows businesses to accept orders offline via phone, fax or mail and then enter the details online so the transaction is processed by PayPal.

Companies can include their own branding on the checkout process web pages and can direct buyers back to their websites to continue shopping after payments are completed.

Carl-Olav Scheible, general manager of merchant services at PayPal said the product was developed to meet the needs of businesses that wanted the benefits of PayPal combined with those of a merchant account and gateway.

PayPal processed ?4.2 billion (US$8.2 billion) of payments in Europe last year, and figures from Forrester Research show it is now a preferred payment method for 35 percent of online shoppers in the U.K.

But PayPal users have been heavily targeted by criminal phishing scams. In July, security firm Sophos revealed that 54 percent of the phishing emails received by its threat analysis centers were aimed at stealing log-in and other details from PayPal users.

Pricing for Website Payments Pro includes a monthly fee and a rate per transaction.

Teens and media: a full-time job

Online: Video

Online: Video

As network news programs continue to struggle, the creators of one news show are trying a new strategy -- replacing the producer, the editor and even the news anchor with a computer.

The online show, called "News at Seven," uses an automated computer program to comb online news outlets for major stories of the day and to pair them with video and still photos culled from sites like Google Images and YouTube. The newscast is delivered by an avatar -- a digital representation of a person.

In the coming months, users will be able to enter their preferences to create a customized personal newscast based on topics that interest them, with an avatar and background of their choice.

The show is a project of two computer-science graduate students and a professor at Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory, and was funded with a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Still in its beta stage, the site hasn't begun offering customized options yet, but currently hosts a regular newscast by a virtual woman named "Alex" (pictured). Her voice is soothing, though her electronic delivery can be jerky and halting.

Go to source.
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