How to Create a Free Infographic Online

Information graphics have made incredible advancement in sharing information or data through visual presentation.   Some hire an expert to perform this task.  However, the need to come up with interesting and skillfully designed visuals spawned new website ideas leading to the easier, often DIY creation of infographics.

To incorporate infographics in your site, you need to have a well-researched and creative idea.  Here are the tools that you need and their functions.

1.      Adobe Photoshop is the ultimate infographic software, but takes time to learn that platform.

2.      Allowing you to plan and create diagrams and to synchronize work is Creately.com.  A fundamental infographic can easily be created with this functional tool.

3.      Choose from a quantity of templates that is fitting to your site’s intention and objective from the Create.visual.ly.

4.      Build an infographic online with Infogr.am, a professional and well-accepted choice that can make your hard data.

5.      To produce a striking infographic online, use Piktochart.com.  This offers you plenty of customization selections.

6.      Share your ideas visually online with Easel.ly that has a ‘drag/drop ‘vheme’ task to present your themes visually. 

7.      Word clouds from the text you key in with the help of Wordle.net.  This will likewise assist you to have several keywords without being ‘spammy’.

8.      Edit photos and images online with Pixlr.com.  Images that you use with your infographic can be easily customized with this tool.

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Use of Words while writing content for your Website

Your website is the face of your business in this age and content is the means to communicate and pass your message to your customers. While writing content for your website you have to be very sure about the usage of the words in the content. There will be a lot of people who will advice you to go for power words like Strong Background, Innovative, Unique etc. But you have to see from the customer's perspective as how much does he like the words once he is on your website.

There have been instances where websites laden with such power words failed to hold the visitor's attention as it was not really comprehensible for the visitor what the website wanted to communicate. In communication the correct delivery of the message depends upon the person who is sending the message. Thus in such cases where the company failed to deliver its message through its website the company was at fault and not the customer.

Use of word like innovative may not be taken in spirit by the customer its better if you talk about the various innovations your organization had done in the past few years. Same goes for proven track record. The proven track record may be good or bad its better that you highlight your organization's achievements with a graph that proves to be a source to show how your track record in a particular arena has been progressing.

Sometimes we have seen websites using "Unique" in their content. Its better if you put your uniqueness on the site rather than the word unique which puts you a class apart from the other players in the industry. While putting outstanding customer service on your website you must be very sure what outstanding are you giving to your customers which your competitors are not.

Its always best to get your content written from a professional content writer who knows at least the basics of content writing and has a knowledge of the SEO techniques that are being used at that time to make your website customer friendly along with Search Engine Friendly.

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Is Social Technology killing Retail?

Walking through one of Queensland’s busiest shopping centre just last week, on a school holiday on ‘late night’ trade, I came to notice a trend that may scare traditional retailers (although they’re probably aware of it already).

What was noticed is that traditional retailers haven’t changed in years – but their customers have. Although there were plenty of people in the shopping centre, there was no one in the stores. In some once could find 10 staff members and maybe two or so ‘customers’, a trend that was repeated through 80% of shops that were observed.

Coincidence? Probably not. when the facts were checked with http://abs.gov.au for their retail figures this year, and for the most part, since 2009, retail is on the downward turn from a flatline.

As suspected, food retailers like supermarkets are experiencing growth (people have to eat), but health awareness has left cafes, takeaway and restaurants suffering a severe drop in popularity:

So what does this mean? Can you blame it on the floods like everyone is trying to? Or should you be looking at the trends of the online world, specifically social technologies.

Group buying is a relatively new phenomenon, but already is a $63 million industry in Australia alone, and is projected to grow to $242 million this year – a tremendous growth for a relatively new technology for Australians. Who wouldn’t want to save up to 90% on things?

eBay revenue stands at $9.1 billion per year and is growing at an average of 5% year on year – an already established online shopping behemoth.

With these tools and Google at everyone’s side, it’s not that people are buying less, it’s that they’re getting smarter. Researching, scanning barcodes with their iPhone Apps and finding the cheapest place to get the item – most of the time directly from the manufacturer or a global merchant.

Yes, it has become a global economy, where people rely on other people’s technology to source things a cheap as possible. Where a small-time online store, or app developer, can generate millions in revenues just for empowering the citizens.

It’s one of the main reasons why Amazon continues to grow, while Borders is bankrupt. Why Blockbuster is a dwindling giant of the last century, while Netflix owns the new release streaming market. Why Colorado group buckles under tremendous debt, while collective fashion trends spike astronomically online.

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Get Twitter to taste success in the Stock Market

There has been much talk about twitter changing and being the trendsetter for many trends. We have seen quite a few trends in the market which were affected and controlled by twitter. It can also be used by intelligent marketing gurus to sway the market in a direction that is most beneficial to them.

Predicting the Stock Market even 1-2 days in advance with precision will be a big success for stock traders and can be used to turn the tide towards their success. More and more people and organizations are turning towards social media to base their decisions on the trends that are the order of the day at that time. Twitter is the largest, most popular, widely accepted platform that has become a favorite with Top managers to base their decisions.

Just when you think Twitter is just people spewing their 140 characters in an effort to get ‘heard’, comes a new bombshell.

The study from the Technical University of Munich, which analyzed 250,000 tweets over a six-month period, found that an average return rate of 15% could be achieved by investors following stock market tweets.

Calling it a “legitimate source”, Timm Sprenger announced a “striking co-ordination” between what Tweeting investors were saying, and what market analysts were finding.

In a same manner many algorithms have been developed which can measure the trend and predict the market's position for the next 3-4 days. Social Media was initially sidelined by stock market observers but with these researches much stress is being put on the importance of these social networking sites to have an idea of the trend that would prevalent for a particular time period.

The reTweeting process put further weight on these stock-related tweets (which use the company stock symbols to differentiate them from standard tweets), showing others support certain predictions over others.

It is believed that people give a frank opinion on social media websites and have a tendency to give a true picture of the scenario present at that particular moment. Thus the credentials of this kind of information is far beyond doubt. Moreover the facts and figures are based on the updates that are there on the internet and can be checked and proven beyond doubt by anyone.

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Social Buying in Australia: What Works and What Doesn’t

The change is so devastating to traditional retail, that bankruptcy and severe backlash is now common-place in many of the brands we (used to) know and love.

So how is the Australian social buying market different to the rest of the world?

Our population is one of the main reasons why Groupon will leave our market till the end, and why they’ve opened their 11th location within Florida, USA alone (that is, they now have 11 locations within Florida!). Australia just doesn’t have the manpower to group buy.

So what has that left us with? Some of the biggest successes on the web are deals of the day style websites, the most popular being http://dealsdirect.com.au … this model has been used and loved by the Australian consumer for years.

The fundamental shift towards Social Buying though, has meant that everyone is having a go at some kind of ‘incentivised discount purchase’ website, but none have got it right so far – until now.

The first true website to cater exclusively to the Australian online buying habits is http://dealme.com.au (another product by the Deals Direct team). The main difference being that instead of using a population-based methodology for sales, the sales are determined by a time limit – meaning anyone and everyone can save.

This not only helps the consumer to get a deal when they want it, without having to worry about a supporting network of buyers to share the advantage, but it helps those companies that want to list and market to the Australian public – allowing them to maximise their profits and come away with a winning situation, no matter the public response.

Another major difference is the breakdown of locality-exclusion, another Groupon-defined mechanism. This is a monumental error in the Australian market, as segregating cities leads to a squeeze of potential customers, especially since Australians have an increasingly mobile culture.

DealMe.com.au is the first true Social experience that defines the difference of the Australian market to the rest of the world, including the US. Users can share the deal because they think it’s a good deal, not to simply boost their chances of actually receiving this deal when the timer runs out.

A lot of the time, startups are looking overseas to form the basis of how they should be targetting Australians, but the fundamental attribute to any business aiming at targetting Australians, is understanding just how different Australia is to the rest of the world.

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Technologies Your Business Will Be Using in the next Five Years

There is going to be a heavy demand for Social Media Experts over the couple of years as various technologies will be responsible for the success of an organization along with the core competencies.

Feeds and Streams:

This is where all “real-time” activity occurs. Each place that is considered “social” has a feed or stream and is the space where all engagement is taking place. As online business continues to adapt to the changing demands of the consumer, it will be important to interact more frequently using feeds or streams. Funny enough, it doesn’t take much to get involved. Just send out a post or a tweet and you’re already part of the conversation.

Multimedia:

A website just doesn’t cut it anymore. These days, and well into the future, our worth and value will be proved by the things we do outside of our own network. YouTube is the major player and will continue to dominate in both traffic and interest. As a result, TV and radio advertising spend will certainly drop as more and more businesses opt to produce content for YouTube. As iTunes’ popularity increases, podcasts will be another major tool businesses can utilize to tap into the right market.

Social Search:

Search Engine Optimization won’t be the dominant force in online marketing within a few years, but will evolve to embrace Social. Social Media is already taking its place on Google, with real-time results, blogs, YouTube and other interesting things appearing in our search results. Facebook’s partnership with

Bing allows Facebook users to search the web from within Facebook, and displays results that your friends are interested in. This in turn, makes search more relevant for the end consumer as they know what is hot and what is not.

Mobile Technology:

The fight to be in the palms of the consumer is already on. Apple’s iPhones took the market for awhile, but Google’s Android has quickly stepped up as a solid competitor. This means your customers are Socializing and Googling from their devices more and more. Your website should be useable from any device, no matter the size, and you should be enriching with the content that people love to use when they are on the run. To add fuel to the fire, both Facebook and Playstation are rumored to be entering the mobile device market, which should make for a very interesting device war.

Geolocation:

Perhaps the most interesting space to watch is geolocation, where many handheld devices can pinpoint their location. For awhile, Foursquare held the popularity fort here, but Facebook’s Places has quickly gained traction. This allows businesses to “claim” their geolocation and let consumers “check in” when they are visiting. This alerts all of their friends that they are spending money with you. The geolocation space is evolving at an incredibly fast rate and tools are being developed to allow users to do things like check for celebrities, check speed cameras, read up on history and even save lives.

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Social Media and Data Exchange

The rise of the Internet, Social Networking and Mobile Technology has advanced us past traditional ‘communication’ methods. You will no longer observe people sticking to their cellphones talking anymore. On the contrary what one is sure to observe these days is the use of cellphones to send out facebook or twitter updates.

So it seems, and it should come as no surprise, that the way in which we communicate more frequently is reliant on more data exchange than a telephone exchange. No wonder one of the most valuable commodities on the market is data. User information, trends, market research, and more are all data that get traded regularly. But where is this going to take us?

Telco’s are some of the undisputed giants of our world, in fact, the world’s wealthiest man is a Telco mogul – but what we’re seeing is a dramatic shift towards an emphasis of data, over calls.

In Japan, they’re already using data-only provisions to connect and communicate, with their Telco providers ahead of the shift towards a data-driven society. The Telco moguls have already understood the importance of data and have already started using its potential. Diversification from voice to data is like a homecoming but people exchange more than data over the networks these days thus the technology has to be revisited and made best so that users are glued like kids are to video games.

Data, as it seems, has become our most important resource. It is the link between us and the rest of the world, and VOIP services like Skype should gain strength over time – forcing us to be a “phoneless” society, and more a data-exchange society. It has already started phones are being used less for taking and making calls as the other applications and browsers available even in the very basic phones are quite captivating. Moreover the networks have reworked themselves to give their best to the customers even before they ask for it.

Starbucks completely embracing free Wifi as its source of entertainment for its customers, we expect a giant shift towards data becoming a competitive industry, as it becomes an absolute necessity for modern human life.

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The aftermaths of the Cablegate

There is an incredibly huge war going on, right now.

It involves Governments, Billion-dollar enterprises and hackers – and it all has to do with Wikileaks.

Here’s some of the things we’ve seen happen, just today:

• Amazon bans Wikileaks

• Original Swedish host bans Wikileaks

• Wikileaks considered a Terror organisation in the US

• Julia Gillard cannot explain why founder Julian Assange is a criminal

• China bans Wikileaks

• Wikileaks.org’s site down

• Wikileaks now hosted on hundreds of mirror sites

• Wanted for charges in Switzerland

• Handing himself over to UK Authorities

• Switzerland closing his bank account

• PayPal denies Wikileaks

• Mastercard denies Wikileaks

• Twitter accused of not showing #Wikileaks in trending topics

• Hackers attack websites that are anti-wikileaks

• Hackers succeed in a Denial of Service attack on PayPal

• Hackers succeed in a Denial of Service attack on banks that will not support Wikileaks

• Hackers plan to attack Twitter

• US trying to list WikiLeaks as a terrorist organisation

• Columbian University students threatened against mentioning WikiLeaks

• US Government warns of instant dismissal of any staff that mentions WikiLeaks in their Facebook or Twitter

• Julian Assange lading the TIME 2010 Person of the Year list

• WikiLeaks threatens to release a ‘poison pill’ of all documents, uncensored if Assange goes to jail

• Sarah Palin says Assange should be ‘hunted like Osama bin Laden’

• Anti-WikiLeaks Hackers begin to attack mirror sites after a DIY WikiLeaks mirror guide is released

• WikiLeaks now a ‘Stateless’ organisation

• Australia Post closes WikiLeaks PO Box

• Sites like Pirate Bay and 4Chan publicly supporting a WikiLeaks uprising, supporting a type of “shadow internet” to host WikiLeaks

• Canadian Govenment says if you read classified material without debriefing you lose your security clearance

• Scotland Yard have ‘paperwork to arrest Assange’

• Threats made against son of Assange

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Wiki Leaks the Freedom to Speech

Wiki leaks has been in the news for the past few days due to mounting pressure from the Indian Government on the issue of classified security leak issue and the subsequent apology offered by the US government.

Wiki leaks first appearance in public was in January 2007 and since then this website has acted as a whistle blower on many occasions. Most of the nations worldwide protect their information and classified documents in the most sophisticated way due to their nature and the results they could have on the public in general.

Not too many government organizations are fans of wikileaks.org, so it’s not surprising that Wiki Leaks have many powerful enemies. These enemies have stemmed from the whistle blowing nature of Wiki leaks which has put into dock many of the strong nations and their leaders in the past.

It could be that they published the largest source of incriminating leaked documents from the US-led Iraq invasion, or they are in the presence of something much more severe. It is estimated that wiki leaks has 1.2 million documents in their database.

Personally, we here at Strongman Digital thing that Wiki Leaks empowers and even glorifies leaked information. This could also be a good sign as the common man in almost all nations is not allowed access to this kind of information as he maybe directly affected by the contents of the document.

We also think this is extremely important for Freedom of Speech, for which without it, our news outlets, Twitter, Facebook and lives in general would be under the constant heavy hand of some governmental power.

So who is attacking Wiki Leaks? Many seem to think it is the government organizations themselves. Who would want to see Wiki Leaks go down? The general public certainly doesn’t. At the moment there is a need for more such websites to come up locally and globally who can provide people with insights into what is going on around them and what their governments are trying to show them. Sometimes there is a lot of difference.

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