What is it that produces such devastating results? It’s their version of the “If you bought this, you may like this” recommendation utility as used by Amazon. They carry out the logic and customer analysis on their Saas database, which then allows your store to make targetted recommendations, and to monitor business trends.

It sounds almost too good to be true, particularly as you can try out their product on a free basis for one month, to see that it actually works. I don’t possess a web-store myself so I cannot vouch 100% for BrainSINS, no matter how good it seems. If anyone who has used this product and not found it as good as its publicity, please leave comments here. Otherwise, it seems like a quick and easy way to improve sales – I’m struggling to see a downside here!

Further Reading:

BrainSINS – Startups post

Why choose BrainSINS ?

1) Convert a phrase to a mnemonic. This is currently my favourite – it allows you to remember passwords for various sites, yet is easy to recall. There are two parts – the first involves choosing a mnemonic for a phrase (this is the bit you have to remember). So it could be a catchphrase “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life”. This converts to a mnemonic of “wamitolhitol”. In itself this is not a strong password, so I capitalise a couple of letters and change the ultimate ‘o’ to zero ie “wAmItolhit0l”. Then, to make it unique, I insert (perhaps at the end) a couple of letters from the site I am accessing to the password. So for example with Facebook I utilise ‘AC’ (making “wAmItolhit0lAC”) with Twitter I utilise ‘WI’ (making “wAmItolhit0lWI”etc. Not the prettiest of solutions, but the standard approach makes it easy to use for various sites. You may wish to alter the approach slightly (perhaps by changing “i” to “1″) and make sure to choose the initial phrase that you can easily remember, but that others would find hard to guess.

2) Password manager – this is preferred by many people, and there are various utilities out there that offer this service. It means you generally only need to remember one master password (and occasionally other security details). RoboForm  is very popular with many users, but there are others such as LastPass  and 1Password . You can also get password managers as a browser add-on. One thing you should ensure is that your id/password pairs are not stored away from your computer, as hackers can then access 1000s of ids/passwords if they can break the storage security. Luckily the likes of RoboForm now save your id/password locally, so a security breach on their site shouldn’t give the intruders to your passwords, which are protected by your local master password. One important thing you may not realise is that if you use Firefox to store and recall your passwords, then it’s easy for someone with a couple of seconds access to the computer to look at your passwords by selecting Security=>Saved Passwords within Tools=>Options.

3) Lastly there is another method, that some sites are now utilising. They ask you to log in using credentials from elsewhere – OpenID, Twitter or Facebook perhaps. I like this method as it means you only have to remember one password. I wouldn’t use it to access my bank account though.

Further reading

Lifehacker on password managers

PC World – best password managers

(for geeks) web passwords by coding horror.

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To date this new app covers hotels in various countries in Europe. Their web site  is available in English or Spanish, and you can read more on this at the Killerstartups site.

The author shows us how to automate repetitive and annoying tasks, using a utility called IFTT ( “If this then that..”). Well worth reading, if you ask me! And useful even if you don’t run an online business!

Automation with IFTT article

There are certain tasks that are repetitive and annoying to do but are necessary within an online business. What if you could automate a lot of those tasks. Those few seconds, minutes or hours per week it saves you add up over time don’t they.
Simply put ifttt means “If This Then That”. So if one thing happens then another is triggered. You can use “recipes” people have already put together like “If I favourite a tweet then I send it to a folder in Evernote” for example.

Sounds great! If you want to go straight to the site itself and start “putting the internet to work for you” then click here.

The LeechBlock Firefox extension allows you to block distraction sites during user-specified time slots. More here on Leechblock – LifehackerArticle and you can download Leechblock here Leechblock Download. Alternatively, if you use Google Chrome as your internet browser then Focusd is a  Chrome extension you can use to achieve a similar outcome. On a Mac you have possibly the best tool of all -  Mac_selfcontrol which even blocks incoming and/or outgoing mail-servers, so you can get on with productive activities.

Of course you may wish to ban access altogether to a site. This is generally done within a browser – for example in Internet explorer you can select Tools => Internet Options => Content and then select the Enable button, followed by Approved Sites, where you can select sites that are always or (in this case) never viewable. In Firefox there is an add-on extension called (appropriately) Blocksite that will achieve the same desired outcome.

There is a drawback to the above methods, especially if they are self-enforced. There is nothing to stop you taking off the restrictions and going back to the bad ways. They are no substitute for self-discipline I’m afraid. My solution? Put a total block on your main computer, but if absolutely necessary use your smart phone to check Twitter, Facebook etc. If you do waste too much time, your battery soon runs out and acts as a hint to get back to productive work.

Have a happy and effective New Year!

However, when you are faced with millions of results, many of which are duplicates, or worse, spam, how do you select the right response? Here I show you some ways to obtain the desired result quickly, and thus save yourself some valuable time.

1. Within Google. One thing I find annoying about search results within Google, is that they are not brought back in date order. You can force Google to show results from the last week, or month, by going into “Advanced Options” and clicking on the “Date/Usage Types” expander to signify the date of publication for that webpage.
There are other ways to modify your search within Google, so you quickly come to where you want to be. For instance suppose you knew the article on pandas was published on the BBC news site? You can specify your seach by entering “site:domain” as an operator, so in this case you could put into Google “site:bbc.co.uk/news/  pandas” There are a lot of other ways you can refine your search in Google, many on this site Improve Google Search skills

2. Google is not always your best option. For example, if you’re looking for extremely recent news articles, then Twitter can be your best bet. Take care to select the best search word though. If for example you are travelling to Spain and you’ve heard there has been a train strike in Madrid, then it may be a mistake searching just on “Madrid” – the chances are you will be snowed under with comments and links to Real Madrid articles. Better to search on “Madrid strike” or “Madrid train”. Twitter also can overwhelm with the number of results – so much so that various sites have sprung up, helping you put together a more accurate and extensive Tweeter search. Read more about it in the adjoining link: Twitter Search Utilities

3. Create bookmarks for specialised sites, and search on those for relevant topics. As a programmer I found that certain sites (eg StackOverflow and ServerFault) were far more useful to me when I needed a question resolving. There is even a site set up there for  WordPress. Another option could be Quora.com that now looks as if it will be an invaluable knowledge source as well.

4. Don’t rule out Message-boards and Forums. It depends on the site concerned, but often they contain a wealth of knowledge and have some very well-informed contributors. An example: try going to the adjoining site NotTheTalk (you’ll need to register) and post a query in the “Advice” or “Notes and Queries” folder. There’s a very good chance you’ll get your answer there, yet it’s a site you’ve probably never heard of.

5. Lastly, don’t rule out the old option of “asking a friend”. Even if they don’t know the answer, they may know the specific site to locate it.