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When you see the famous “swoosh” logo on running shoes, on sportswear, on a top player’s tennis bandana, or on a football boot then you know instinctively that it is Nike and it is very likely that the Nike brand conjures up in your mind many positive thoughts and feelings. People feel that when they wear Nike and sport the famous swoosh their chances of success are increased.

It may be difficult to believe, but that swoosh logo was created in 1971 by a graphic design student for a firm called Blue Ribbon Sports that was marketing football a new football boot called Nike. It is by the way that she was paid a meagre $35 for it, but it went on to be one of the more recognisable logos in the world. Although there have been subtle design changes in order to incorporate in the actual fabric of items of sportswear, and it originally appeared with the name Nike until it became a stand-alone image in 1995, it is one of the most consistent logos you are likely to come across. Does Nike have any plans to change it? You bet they don’t.

What exactly is a brand?

There have been many thousands of attempts to define exactly what a brand really is. You can view it as something external, an artefact that includes a name, a sign, a logo, a design, or any combination of these, that is used to identify a product or organisation and which differentiates it from the rest of the crowd. Alternatively you can view it as the impact that this combination has on the thoughts and the emotions of the customer; an internalisation of the corporate image that the external branding attempts to convey. When you wear the Nike swoosh it’s because you want to be a winner.

Brand consistency

Just consider the impact should Nike decide that their swoosh logo was getting a little old and tired and needed changing. We don’t mean a few adjustments round the edges; many companies have done that including Nike. For instance the Pepsi Cola logo has slowly evolved over the years and the Starbucks logo has progressively become more minimalist as has Apple’s apple; however they have all retained the essence of their corporate branding.

If Nike was to abandon the swoosh logo and replace it with something entirely different then it is likely that the vast majority of Nike customers would feel let down and betrayed. Many of them would feel angry and that anger would result in them walking away and ceasing to purchase their sportswear from the company. Rebranding can be accomplished with very careful management but it is difficult to accomplish successfully; for instance when Everton attempted to introduce a revised logo there was an outcry and a 20,000 signature petition; Gap received severe derision form its customers when it tried to change its logo and had to revert to the old one; the chances are that if Nike lost the swoosh the company would struggle to survive.

Sometimes it might be necessary to change a brand, but in the words of the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

A consistent brand engenders customer loyalty and makes your business and everything it does instantly recognisable. It provides your business with a real personality that your customers relate to emotionally. When you use a consistent brand your message is reinforced across the whole range of your products and services. It provides authority and trust in your business.

In a nutshell…

In a nutshell, being consistent means being recognised. Consistent branding breeds familiarity, trust and confidence. If your customers are to be confident in you then you need to be confident in yourself, and that confidence is demonstrated by being consistent in your branding.

Binary option trading is still a relatively new form of stock market investment. This type of trading has only been available to the masses since 2008 but since its inception, it has become very popular with both experienced and beginner traders alike.

What is Binary Option Trading?

Binary option trading allows you to profit from predicting price fluctuations on stock market instruments, such as commodities, stock options, indices and world currencies. The basic concept is simple, if you think that an asset will finish above a certain price you place a “Put Option”, if you think it will finish below a certain price then you place a “Call Option”. If your prediction is correct, you earn a fixed return, often in excess of 70% of your investment. However, if your prediction is incorrect you lose your investment!

Where can you trade options?

Option trading is conducted through online platforms or brokers. Such websites give you access to stock market assets and provide you with the tools and resources necessary to trade successfully. However, not all of these websites are the same and some are far from reputable, so it is important that you choose one that you can trust.

Binary options trading with anyoption.com or one of the other major online platforms or brokers is recommended as this gives you peace of mind that your investments are been handled by a well-known and trusted trading partner.

One of the main reasons why options trading is so popular is down to the trading platforms themselves, and a top platform will lay everything on for you; enabling anyone to trade regardless of experience or knowledge.

How to trade Binary Options successfully:

Not for the faint of heart, these high-risk/high-return stock market options offer quick cash gains to those who have the savvy and skills to anticipate stock market pricing patterns and trends. The best way to get great results while placing “puts” and “calls” is by educating yourself.

Those who take the time to analyze preferred assets over the short and long terms, while also educating themselves on the overall factors that affect the prices of assets – such as social and political events will have the most success. Luckily, getting educated requires no special skills.

You simply need to familiarize yourself with the hourly, daily and weekly price shifts of commodities or other stock market instruments. Many brokers and online stock market trading platforms provide their valued clientele with access to valuable learning tools, such as charts, articles, advice from experts, podcasts and webinars.

Is this just gambling?

There are those who say that binary option trading is nothing more than glorified gambling, and if done incorrectly then this is true. As I mentioned above to trade successful you have to educate yourself, and once you take the time to do this then you are no gambling but investing based on real knowledge and insight of markets and assets.

If you just trade blindly and take Call and Put options on a hunch then you only have a 50/50 chance of been correct – having knowledge gives you the inside lane, and greatly increases the odds of making successfully trades.

Binary option trading is not for everyone and there is risk associated with it, however, this is true for most forms of investment.

How to get started:

Getting started is easy, you simply sign-up to a trading platform or broker and make an initial deposit – this can vary from $20 to $200 depending on the company you choose to go with. Once you make a deposit, you can start trading! The more reputable companies will offer demo accounts or demo features that allow you to practice without investing real money – it is highly recommended that you spend time in a demo environment until you are confident that you know enough to trade for real.

Have you heard that it is possible to earn money online? Maybe you have heard that it is possible to make money on the internet with the skills that you have. This could be with photography, writing, creating jewellery or even making websites. Here are some ways to help utilise your skill and start earning money today.

1. Figure out Which Skills to Utilise : Not all skills are great for setting up businesses so make a list of all the skills that you have. Do you enjoy gardening? Maybe you’re an excellent baker but have never had the courage to work at a bakery. By making a list of your skills, you will be able to go through them and put a mark against those that you can utilise and sell online – that doesn’t mean the deliveries have to be done online, just that it gives you the place to sell!

Now that you have some ideas, it is time to move onto the next step.

2. Do Some Research into Your Skills : Find out how others are using the same skills to make money? This will help you determine whether it is a profitable business or whether there is just too much competition to get work. You will also get some ideas about marketing and how to show off your talents to start earning money. You may find a hidden niche that is extremely lucrative for you.

This research will help you narrow down your list and choose one to start earning money. You may find that you have a couple but start slow and build your way up.

3. Create a Website : All sellers need to have a website, whether you have a store or you are doing everything out of your own home. Without a website, there will be limited ways for people to contact you and it will be much harder to make the money you are dreaming about. You don’t have to spend a lot and there are free options available to help you get started – however, free domain names aren’t the most professional looking.

You may find that hiring a website developer is the best thing to do. However, you will be on short funds and there are content management systems to help you do it all yourself. Think about the type of functions you will need for your website to do to determine whether you need to hire a professional.

4. Market Your New Business Everywhere : Think all the hard work is done? That’s where you’re mistaken! Just because you have a website doesn’t mean that people will be able to find you. You will need to market yourself and make sure people know that you exist. The first part of this step is to set up a marketing plan. Who is your target audience and what marketing options do you have? Which forms of promotion will be better for your type of business.

The more marketing you do, the more you will become known. You can’t just stop when you’ve spent a week doing it. This is an ongoing thing. You will need to track your progress, determine if parts of your marketing plan are working better than others and then concentrate on those.

Earning money from your skills is possible but you need to do some work. This is like starting a business and you need to find the lucrative markets. Spend some time researching before you decide on this journey to make sure you have something valuable to offer.

The recent app explosion has transformed the world’s smart phones from over-powered toys into incredibly productive business accessories. However, if you’re not convinced of their worth, then you might want to consider that over 1 billion of the world’s 4 billion mobile phones are smartphones.

In addition, experts predict that by 2014, Internet usage is set to be overtaken by mobile Internet usage, and the majority of Internet activity will be conducted through mobile phones. Currently, over 50% of Internet activity is conducted through mobile phones and apps – so isn’t it time you thought about bringing these into play?

Integrate your systems

Apps offer the SME owner a chance to perform on a corporate level, streamlining the way your business performs and at a fraction of the cost of the technology that larger businesses spend. Perhaps the most important advantage that apps give you is the ability to work from anywhere and at any time. The days in which a business owner works from one computer that’s fixed in one geographical place are well and truly over. Not only does this mean you can conduct your business on the road or from a coffee shop, but you can also make on-the-spot decisions without having to worry about getting back to the office. Cloud apps allow you to access important data, quickly and efficiently.

Manage your money

The numbers game is an important aspect of business, no matter how large or small your company may be. Doubtless, larger companies will have dedicated teams of accountants to crunch the figures whilst the business takes care of itself, but SME owners won’t always have the time or the cash to spend on their accounts.

Intuit has a neat little app up its sleeve in the form of QuickBooks Mobile. Most people are aware of QuickBooks – it’s consistently voted as the best accounting software in the world. However, well aware of the app revolution, Intuit has crunched the program down into an app that offers all the same features, but you can manage your accounts on the go. Not only does this make accounting massively easier, but it also means that SME owners have access to expert accounting, for free.

Business on the go

There are even apps that turn your mobile phone or tablet into on-the-spot card readers. Often, opportunities pass business owners by, as there’s no way to facilitate payment. Using these apps, every in-the-flesh encounter is a possible sale. It works the same way as a traditional card reader; all the customer has to do is punch in their security details and the transaction is authorized. With so much onus being placed on online security, these apps use the latest encryption codings to ensure that any transactions are risk-free and a copy of the receipt can be sent to your accounting software; all the aspects of instant business are taken care of.

The side-benefit of all of these apps is that they can help you manage your time better. The problem for many start-up business owners is that getting a business off the ground can eat into personal time and disrupt your private life. Apps allow you to automate manual tasks and jump at opportunities as they arise – but they also allow greater freedom to choose just where and when you make your business decisions.

While all things seem to change at one point or another, the business world seems to be stuck in a state of constant transformation, with new businesses being spawned and old businesses either prospering or falling into failure. With such a huge wildcard being thrown up, if you want to survive contemporary business, then it is absolutely vital that you keep with the times, adapting to the ever-changing environment and taking advantage of new technology.

Speaking of technology, if you have not noticed, you see that more and more business is being conducted through mobile and virtual means; in other words—smartphones, computers, and tablets such as the iPad. These nifty devices are now home to a world of helpful resources and tools, but most people refer to these aspects as “apps,” short for applications. Whether you find yourself playing a few rounds of bingo over at www.partybingo.com during a long, boring business flight, or you simply need to use your iPad to give a brief presentation, as common media puts it, “there’s an app for that.”

However, as far as business-oriented apps are concerned, there are several out there that can make an array of tasks much more convenient for business owners. Three of these apps can be found below:

Keynote: If you are a business owner, as well as a Mac-user, then chances are good that you have a little (or a lot) of experience with the Keynote app. The techies over at Apple have been working hard though, now being able to offer Keynote for iPad users as well.

Keynote is a presentation app, and a rather powerful one at that. Using this app, users are able to do everything from full-color presentations equipped with transitions, to building a pie chart to show expenditures.

Numbers: Also debuting on a Mac, but being completely reworked to coordinate with iPad users, is the Numbers app. If there is one thing business owners probably see too much of, it is the dreaded spreadsheet. As dreaded as it can be sometimes, it is vital to create important financial reports and charts compiled from inputted data that has been collected.

Boasting more than 250 features and functions, the Numbers app offers users a variety of charts, tables, graphics, and photos, making any spreadsheet go from bland and boring, to sleek and edgy. Need to distribute a spreadsheet or two? Not a problem for the Numbers app as it allows user to export data to Excel, convert to PDF, or simply send it as an email.

Roambi Analytics: What is more important to a business owner, small and large alike, than the status of his or her business? Luckily, the Roambi Analytics app allows users to do just that. Even better, this app is not just for iPad, but it also works on the iPhone too, allowing one to become even more mobile.

The Roambi Analytics app is capable of converting important statistics and other data from Excel, Google Docs, and other financially-oriented program, into nifty little visual “presentations” for you to view on your iPad or iPhone. Pretty simple, eh?
There you have it folks! The three apps mentioned above are sublime at making the complicated, and broad, task of business, and making it much more convenient. Naturally, the three above are just a tiny portion of the literally thousands of apps available to business owners. Plus, should you find yourself with some free time, you could always play Angry Birds or some other game.