What You Need To Know About National Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Happy 6th Annual National Cybersecurity Awareness Month!

Sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security, the theme for this October's National Cybersecurity Awareness Month is “Our Shared Responsibility” to emphasize the need for all computer users to protect themselves at home, school and perhaps most importantly - at work.

So what does "Our Shared Responsibility" mean for your business?

Every business has a responsibility to protect the confidential information of its customers and employees. This means that as a businessowner, you must take a proactive approach by knowing where the threats to your security exist.

Conducting an information security assessment is a highly effective way of identifying and resolving your business' vulnerabilities before they are exploited. There are a number of information security assessments available to help you evaluate every aspect of business security. These include:

Application Security Assessments: To enhance the security of your software applications and protect any confidential information contained within them.

Penetration Testing: To examine your network’s level of vulnerability to an outside attack.

Internal Assessments: To identify the possibility of an attack originating from inside your business, including unauthorized network access and employee security breaches.

Social Information Security Assessments: To ensure your employees’ awareness of security threats.

Physical Security Assessments: To evaluate your entire physical facility including electrical systems, security alarms, surveillance systems, visitor procedures and access points.

Wireless Network Assessments: To evaluate the security of your wireless networks by testing signal range and power, attempting to obtain normally unauthorized access to your networks, and challenging encryption schemes.

It's time to get proactive about upholding your responsiblity to protect confidential business information. Talk to an information security professional about how an information security assessment can protect your business from the multitude of threats that exist today.

For more information on National Cybersecurity Month, please visit http://www.staysafeonline.org/.

Five Website Mistakes That May Be Hurting Your Sales

Could your website actually be hurting your sales?

Just because you have a website doesn’t mean that it is working to convert visitors into customers. In fact, certain website factors could be causing you to lose site visitors and revenue. Take a look at the following five website mistakes to make sure that you are not committing these common, but detrimental blunders.

5. Not Being Found by Customers
What good is a website if customers cannot find it? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help your site be easily located for relevant search engine queries, resulting in more website traffic and revenue.

4. Difficult Navigation
If your site navigation is disorganized, you risk frustrating your visitors and missing out on the opportunity to convert them into customers. Make it easy for visitors to find the products and services that they are seeking by organizing your site navigation in a straightforward and logical manner.

3. Long Path to Purchase
Don’t complicate the purchase process with unnecessary fields or registrations on your ecommerce website. The more pages that your customers have to navigate through in order to make a purchase, the more likely you are to experience a high rate of shopping cart abandonment.

2. Slow Load Time
It is crucial that your site loads quickly in order to avoid a high bounce rate. Test your site using a free web tool to ensure that it is loading before your customers decide to look elsewhere. There are a few opinions as to how quickly your site should load, but I recommend no more than four or five seconds in order to avoid losing sales. If you do find that your site is loading too slowly, you can help to decrease that time by optimizing your HTML code and CSS, eliminating unnecessary or redundant items, and compressing images.

1. Ineffective Elements
How can you be sure if your content, images, headings, and other site elements are effective? Eliminate the guesswork and conduct multivariate tests to figure out exactly what works for your customers. Multivariate testing allows you to test multiple website elements simultaneously in order to determine which combination results in the highest conversion rate. Once you have statistical information that tells you which combination of website content, product images, headings, and price points produce the most conversions, you can dramatically increase your website revenue.

Need help improving your website’s effectiveness for increased conversions? Give us a call at 800.496.8001 or visit http://milestechnologies.com/.

Should You Have Your Head In The Cloud?

You’ve probably heard a lot of recent buzz about cloud computing, but what exactly does it mean for you and your business?

In a nutshell, cloud computing delivers services or virtualized applications over the internet. The actual software and data used to deliver these applications are stored and managed by the service provider. This allows for you as the user to take advantage of existing resources without having to build your own applications or own the physical infrastructure to support those applications.

Why should you care? Because cloud computing can save you money.

Since cloud computing services are sold on an à la carte basis, you pay only for what you need, when you need it. By taking advantage of existing pay-as-you-go resources, you can significantly reduce the costs of installing and supporting your own applications. Besides saving you money, cloud computing gives you instant access to the services you need and offers scalable services that can grow with your business.

Basically, cloud computing can give you more for less. It’s a great way to capitalize on available applications and minimize your overhead. As with any technology, the exact value of cloud computing depends on your specific circumstances and requirements. So contact your technology consultant to see if cloud computing can help you to save money and advance your business.

The Key to Successful SEO

Wouldn’t it be great if you could mow your lawn once and have it stay freshly cut all summer long?

It’s a nice thought, but we know it’s just not possible. The grass is always growing, and sooner or later it will need to be cut again.

Mowing the lawn isn’t a “once and done” type of chore. If it’s going to be done right, then it must be done consistently. It is the same way with online marketing, in particular, search engine optimization.

Because the internet is constantly being updated with new information, the search engines are constantly being updated as well. Unless your business is keeping pace with these changing tides, then you are in danger of becoming invisible to potential customers who are using search engines to look for your products and services.

All too many businesses look at search engine optimization as a “fix it and forget it” task. They spend a great deal of time and money on SEO initially, only to drop off and lose the results that they worked so hard to achieve. They actually end up wasting their resources on efforts that have very little impact over the long term.

So how do you make sure that your business remains in the online limelight? One of the biggest things you can do is to make regular, frequent efforts to increase your search engine visibility. Here are just a few tactics that you can employ on an ongoing basis in order to maintain a strong online presence.

Link Building: Gain quality backlinks by submitting your website to relevant directories, distributing online press releases, participating in targeted forums, etc.

Article Distribution: Writing relevant, industry-specific articles for online distribution will help to improve your online branding and search engine optimization.

Blogging/Social Networking: Interact with your target audience through blogs and other social media outlets for increased search engine visibility with the added benefit of boosting your online reputation.

Of course, there are a number of other ways in which to keep SEO in the forefront of your business plan, but these will give you a head start in surpassing your competitors and remaining relevant in the virtual marketplace.

Don’t make the mistake of taking a one-time approach to SEO. Be consistent, and be successful.

Findmymenus.com: Your South Jersey Menu Solution

Why is it that the more options there are, the harder it is to choose? Take South Jersey, for instance. We have plenty of great places to eat, yet deciding on just one restaurant that everyone in your family will enjoy isn’t always as easy as driving down the block and stopping at the first place you see.

When our team designed and developed findmymenus.com, we wanted to create a free, useful menu directory for members of the South Jersey Community. The site has menus from some of our best restaurants, representing nearly every type of cuisine from all price ranges.

You can narrow your choices down by location, and then click on a restaurant to see its menu. This way, you can settle on a place that everyone will agree on before you leave the house.

The best part about the site is that it’s free for restaurants, too. Any South Jersey restaurant can have their menu posted at no charge just by calling us at 800-496-8001.

So check out findmymenus.com the next time you’re looking for a restaurant that delivers lunch to your office, a caterer for your business meeting, or the perfect place to celebrate a special occasion.

Driving the Future of Business Technology Solutions

In the twelve years since Miles Technologies has been in business, our technology consultants have traveled in their own vehicles to provide onsite support to customers of all industries. I am pleased to report that this is no longer the case. We're still traveling onsite, and we're still providing the same comprehensive support, but now we are doing so in our Miles Technologies branded vehicles.

With the arrival of our first fleet of automobiles just three weeks ago, our employees are now traveling onsite in customized Ford Focuses. The cars have been wrapped using a large scale digital formatting process and now display Miles Technologies’ logo and graphics, contact information, and business technology service offerings.

We chose Ford for several reasons. First, the Focus has an excellent reputation for fleet maintenance. As a company that is constantly striving to achieve efficiency, the time and money that is required to keep our vehicles running well is important to us. Most importantly, choosing Ford gave us the opportunity to stimulate our nation’s economy and specifically, one of our big three automakers.

It is our responsibility as a business to support the economy that we depend on everyday and to provide our customers with unparalleled responsiveness in our service offerings. The Miles Technologies fleet is helping us to do both. With our growing employee and customer base, there is a good chance that we will be adding to our fleet in the future.

So be sure to say hello if you see us out on the road, and give us a call for technology solutions that get your business up to speed.

Smart Technology: Predictable, Planned, Proactive

Failure to keep technology running smoothly is ultimately failure to keep a business running smoothly. The end result is lost data, lost productivity, and lost money spent on costly repairs that could have been prevented with regularly technology maintenance.

Here at Miles Technologies, we wanted to find a way to help our customers spend smarter by taking a proactive approach to their business technology needs. The solution? Monthly Budget Plans.

Here’s how it works: with a Monthly Budget Plan, a customer can receive a complete set of technology services for a predictable monthly rate. The plans are designed to be flexible, customizable, and free of obligation so that each customer can choose to continue or modify their plan on a month-to-month basis.

Included in the Monthly Budget Plans are IT infrastructure support and maintenance, website maintenance and updates, online marketing & PR activity, and custom or packaged business software support. The plans also include strategic consulting to focus on each business’ unique needs in order to make the best possible decisions for that business. There truly is no better solution for maintaining productive business operations within the unsteady economic conditions.

No one wants to waste money. So why do so many business owners do just that by waiting for their technology to fail before giving it the attention it deserves? With our Monthly Budget Plans, customers can take a predictable, planned, and proactive approach in order to keep their technology - and businesses - running smoothly.