Convinced you need an iPad to make your life complete? You’re not the only one! The latest estimates say that there are some 7.5 million iPads already being put to use by rabid consumers world-wide, and those numbers are bound to rise even further with each holiday season.

So if you want an iPad, what’s the next step? Here’s what you need to do:

Decide if you want to buy from Apple or from a reseller

I always recommend buying from Apple, because of the added confidence you’ll have in being able to get repairs or a refund if something were to go wrong. Also, if you purchase an Apple product elsewhere than the Apple Store, they will not replace it if there’s a problem. The lower price isn’t worth the hassle; go with Apple.

Decide if you want to buy online or from an Apple Store

With over 300 stores world-wide, there’s a good chance there’s an Apple Store near you. But if you don’t want to deal with parking, lines, and “the mall” (where most Apple Stores are located), you can buy your iPad online with free shipping. Just go to their website or copy and paste this link in your browser to see your choices:

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_ipad/family/ipad

Choose a 3G or a Wi-Fi model

There have been problems with the Wi-Fi model; our next door neighbors barely picks up the household signal, even when their iPhone and laptop are picking up a strong wireless signal. If you plan on using it outside your home at all, I recommend going with the 3G; the monthly data plan is very reasonable, and the ease of being able to pick up a signal anywhere is a huge convenience.

Choose your size

$200 for four times the storage space seems like a no-brainer to me, but I’m one who firmly believes that bigger is better, at least when it comes to hard drives! However, if you don’t plan on using your iPad to store videos or audios, you may find the smaller sizes perfectly adequate. Remember though; just as with closets and garages, if you have the space, you’ll use it. And the more space you have, the more you’ll use your iPad.

That’s it. The only other question you may have is what accessories you’ll want, and if you want to engrave a pithy saying on the backside of your iPad (think of it as an electronic tattoo). The process is painless, as it should be. And setting up your new baby will take even less time than buying it did.

It’s an unfortunate fact of life that if you do any part of your business on the internet (even if it’s just a simple website or blog), then you’re at risk of an attack from hackers. While we tend to read about the large corporate hacking targets most often in the news and think of hacking only in terms of big companies, in truth every business with an online component is a target.

Even if your website doesn’t collect any personal information from your customers, or have any financial assets that could be stolen, it might still have value to hackers. For example, a hacker that compromises your website could gain access to your web server and use that server to send spam, store illegal files or engage in other illicit online activities.

Stay Current on Security Updates

Hopefully you’re already in the habit of staying current on all the security updates for whatever web platform your website is based upon. For example, WordPress users who stay up to date on all of the underlying security updates are generally quite safe.

But the current trend in web business and web commerce (a trend that is continuing to accelerate) is using custom functionalities and custom applications along with the standard web platform. For WordPress users, one common type of custom web application is a “plug-in” that’s used to provide a new function on the website. These plug-ins can take many different forms, and are currently being used by many websites.

WordPress Plug-In Safety

Many WordPress websites use plug-ins that are available either on WordPress’ own plug-in directory, or through the plug-in author’s own website. One advantage of sticking with plug-ins that are available through the WordPress plug-in directory is that you’ll be able to read feedback from other users who have already tried the plug-in.

For this reason, you might want to avoid using any new plug-ins until there is enough feedback for you to feel comfortable that any security risks are minimal. Positive feedback is certainly no guarantee of a secure plug-in, but that feedback should be helpful to your decision-making process.

If your custom application is truly custom (in the sense that you retain a programmer to build the application to your specifications), then the best way to protect your business is to be confident that the programmer or company that’s making the application for you is highly qualified and has created other secure applications in the past.

Test and Verify

In addition, if your business is large then you may have the budget available to hire a computer security consulting firm to review and verify the security of the code that makes up your custom applications. If you’re unable to hire a security firm to test the security of your custom applications, then you can gain some level of comfort by using the various open source tools that are available, including those at w3af.sourceforge.net and www.websecurify.com.

Because your web presence is so valuable, it’s ultimately up to you to be confident that whatever custom applications you include on your website don’t compromise your overall site security.

Podcasting is one of the “hot” things on the bucket list for the solopreneur. Named after the Apple iPod MP3 player, podcasting refers to uploading MP3 recordings onto your website. Other people can download these into their MP3 players or listen via the internet.

A podcast is similar to a blog, or weblog. Instead of reading your words, however, with a podcast people can listen to them. Many podcasts have a format similar to a radio talk show, where the host gives their thoughts and opinions on a given topic; some also interview guests or include a roundtable discussion with others.

Podcasts are great for publicity. As stated before, they are the newest thing on the internet and people are hooked on them. You can integrate your podcast with iTunes. People can have your podcast automatically downloaded onto their Mp3 player. There are also RSS feeds that will do the same thing.

You can choose to have a general podcast that will serve as publicity for your website. You can also opt to have your podcast promote a single item, such as an information product you created.

You can monetize your podcast by selling ad space, or commercials, that will play during your podcast. You can also give out your affiliate links during your podcast. For instance, you can review a product that you are an affiliate for, and tell your listeners to check out the product at your affiliate link.

Some people may choose to have a member’s only podcast. This is a podcast that is only offered to people that have paid a membership fee to you. Usually, these types of podcasts are highly informative and at least an hour in length. You may interview experts or present the podcast as a mini information product.

You can promote your podcast in several ways. Of course, you will want to include information about your podcast on your website. You can give a sneak peek at upcoming topics or guests. You may also want to create a newsletter that reminds people when new podcasts are uploaded and provides links for more information.

If you interview someone, ask them to send out an email to their list letting them know they will be a guest on your podcast. If your interviewee has a large following, many people will subscribe to your podcast in order to hear the interview. You can also provide a press release template so they can alert the local media of their appearance, or you can also send out press releases to publicize your guests’ appearance.

To create a podcast, you can use a service such as Audio Acrobat. For a small monthly fee, you can record and upload audio files to your website. Audio Acrobat allows you to record via your telephone or computer microphone. They are also integrated with iTunes, so your podcast will have the potential to be accessed by millions of people. To edit your audio, you can use free shareware, such as Audacity.

Podcasting can be a fun and profitable way to market your business. Give it a try and see if you like it. Unlike traditional internet talk radio, you don’t have to put too much money into it. You really have nothing to lose.

Website analytics can tell you a lot. For a solopreneur, understanding web analytics is a crucial skill. Your analytics can tell you whether people understand what you’re offering, whether people like your brand and whether or not your website is helping you make money.

Here are some of the important numbers every small business should be watching in their web analytics.

How Many Visitors Are You Getting?

The first and most important number you should be watching is how many visitors you’re getting. In addition to the raw number, also pay attention to whether the visitor count is going up or down.

As your marketing efforts progress, you should see a direct boost to your visitor count. It might not happen right away, but within a couple months you should see a measurable increase.

How Many Hit a Goal?

Every website should have a very clear goal. For example, your website might be designed to get someone to fill out a form for a free sample. Or it might be designed to get someone to print out a coupon for a free appetizer and bring it into your restaurant.

Whatever the case, you should be carefully tracking the goal hit rate for your website.

Use the “Goals” feature in Google Analytics to track this.

Geographic Location

Are the people who’re landing on your website the right kinds of people? If you have a small local business, check to make sure the traffic you’re getting is actually from your area.

Where Does the Traffic Come From?

How do people end up on your website? Do they type something into the search engines and end up on your site? Or do they enter your URL manually? Is someone else sending people to your website?

Tracking your traffic sources and your referrer data can give you valuable information about what’s working and what’s not working when it comes to generating traffic.

The Bounce Rate

The bounce rate measures the percentage of people who land on your website and leave without visiting a second page on your website.

A high bounce rate usually means that visitors came to your site expecting one thing but didn’t find what they were looking for. If your bounce rate is above 60%, you might have some serious revamping to do. Of course, if you are looking at the stats on a one page sales letter, your bounce rate is irrelevant.

Are People Coming Back?

Finally, check to see whether or not people who visit your website come back again.

For some businesses, this is an irrelevant statistic. For example, a restaurant’s website doesn’t really expect to get repeat visitors. People just use the website to find the address or phone number so they can show up.

But for most solopreneurs, you do want people to keep coming back to your site. If people are coming back time and again, that probably means people are finding your website useful. Check your returning visitor rate to see how well you’re doing in this department.

These are some of the many things that your analytics system can tell you. Learning to understand analytics can really help you steer your small business in the right direction.

Today, there are more forms of memory than you can shake a stick at. Technically, memory can be anything used to store data, but today it is most commonly referred to as quickly accessed forms of storage. Just think about how slow your computer would be if it had to access the hard drive every time it needed to process a command. For this very reason, the computer selects a temporary memory device to store all of the commonly used commands so they can be pulled back up quickly. The different types of quick-pull memory include flash memory and various types of random access memory and read only memory. Let’s take a look at these different types of memory and see what sets them apart from each other.

Read Only Memory

ROM is a type of memory where information has been pre-recorded and is only available to be read. There is a slight variation, called PROM, or programmable read only memory, which is a set of memory devices, like a read only CD, that can be programmed, but then never changed. Once the memory is on the device and the session is closed, the memory cannot be added to or changed.

Random Access Memory

While read only memory can be accessed in a certain order, like a cassette tape, random access memory can be accessed from any point at any time, as long as you know the exact location of the cell the memory is stored in. Most of a computers’ quick access memory is stored in RAM, but there is an issue when the computer looses power; the memory is erased.

Flash Memory

Finally, the most notable type of memory today is flash memory. This memory comes in the form of flash drives, also known as thumb drives, and even the cards you insert into your digital camera. Flash memory is considered non-volatile, which means that it can be electronically erased and reprogrammed when deemed necessary. Today, each flash drive can be erased in pieces and parts, whereas, five years ago, if you wanted to erase a portion of data on the flash drive, the entire drive had to be wiped clean.

Flash memory is also more cost-effective than any other type of memory produced today. There are currently developments being tested in hopes of making hard drives only from flash memory. The reason this is the wave of the future, there are no moving parts in flash memory. No moving parts mean that there will be far fewer failures with the memory.

There are numerous types of memory. Each type has a certain purpose for which it was made. Computer memory is a basic storage device, just like your brain. The only difference between your memory and a computer’s memory is the way in which the information is recovered and the space available to store information. The next time you try to do something on an electronic device, see if you can identify what type of memory is being used.

Google has done it again. You can help people to find you faster with the use of Google Instant. Keep reading to find to all about it if you haven’t used it already.

What Is Google Instant?

Perhaps you have noticed that when you use Google to search for information on the internet, something different happens. As you type, words pop up under the search box that mimics what you are typing. As you continue to type, frequently used words or phrases are also displayed to help you formulate your subsequent search results.

This is Google Instant. While you are typing your search parameters, you are also given suggestions that can help you narrow your search. This technology is based on the fact that many of us don’t know what to search for in the way of keywords. Now, you are helped along with that so you don’t need to type your entire phrase in the search box.

Advantages of Google Instant

For searcher and business owner alike, the use of pertinent keywords can connect you both. You can benefit from someone finding your business and that person will have enjoyed the searching process, having been made easier with Google Instant.

Here are a few advantages of this search engine marvel.

Faster searches – People didn’t like to have to keep entering new keywords because the search results were unsatisfactory. With this, they save time. They can continue to choose from the possible keyword phrases offered by scrolling down and clicking on them. If they don’t find what they need in the search results, it only takes a few seconds to amend the search.

Intelligent suggestions – Based on just one keyword entered, Google Instant predicts what will be typed in next. By using Google consistently, predictions become more intelligent, tailored to the user.

Rapid results – Before, you may have typed many words into your search that don’t get recognized by the search engines. With Google Instant, at the first keyword, suggestions are offered. They eliminate unnecessary words that can slow down search results. This means that your possible results are returned much faster and with greater precision.

Customizable – If you don’t want suggestions to be shown, you can turn off Google Instant. Simply go to “Preferences” and change your options. When you want it back on, do the same.

Better for business websites – Using the right keywords can help target your traffic. As your keyword is typed in, phrases that include that word will pop up in the suggestions. Clicking on one of the options could result in your site being found on the front page of the rankings.

There are many advantages to using Google Instant for all of your internet searches. See how it can help you complete your tasks faster.

Twitter is a useful tool for both personal and business needs. If you are new to Twitter, it may be helpful to learn how to use it to your best advantage. Here are a few do’s and don’ts to get you started.

Twitter was revolutionary when it started. It’s a platform that uses short messages to communicate with others. It could be up-to-the-minute information about you or communication with clients and co-workers on projects and the like. And, you can follow others just like on other social networks.

With Twitter, there are very few established rules. Most of the advice given on how to use Twitter is about etiquette and using the service to connect with other business professionals, clients and the like.

Do’s on Twitter

So, let’s take a look at some of the positive things to do on Twitter.

Follow others – It is not just about you; it’s also about connecting with people. Get involved in what is going on in your area of expertise. Follow people with similar interests. This gives you a higher visibility and can help establish you in that niche on Twitter. If you see something interesting, retweet it so others can follow too.

Tweet – It’s just like posting on Facebook. Leave meaningful information for others. You can talk about yourself, but not too much. Intermingle some useful content with your conversational pieces.

Create a compelling biography – Use your bio to its utmost. You have just a few characters so use keywords that are searchable to describe yourself and help others to search for you and find you.

Be professional – This includes using proper grammar in your tweets. Abbreviations don’t lend themselves to professionalism.

Don’ts on Twitter

Don’t tweet every second – You often hear about people who tweet about eating dinner, inappropriate habits and every other thing they do all day. This is not what people want to hear from you. In fact, it is one way to lose your ranking and current audience. It just clogs up the works for those following you.

Be careful what you say – Once you have entered something on the internet, it will be there forever. Inflammatory tweets reflect negatively on you and can come back to haunt you later.

Don’t be too negative – People who are always looking on the downside crash the party. Misery loves company but you will lose yours if you persist.

Learn to use hashtags properly – Hashtags can help you and others to follow a conversation more easily. But, use them the right way. Don’t put a hashtag on each word in your tweet. And, don’t hashtag a run-on tweet.

Using Twitter doesn’t have to be complicated or hard. Be yourself and use the above advice to make the most of your time there.

Website traffic is always a priority for online solopreneurs – without some type of web traffic people won’t know your business exists. So just what is the right formula for more website traffic?

Here are our top tips:

1. Write and distribute articles. This may seem like a simple strategy on the surface but it can be very powerful. Just writing one or two articles a week will quickly add to a lot of incoming one-way links (the type of links the search engines love most) for your business.

Once you write the articles distribute them to a few top ranking directories, but don’t stop there. Think about distributing a few articles to large online traffic websites directly. Give them exclusive use of the article in exchange for the incoming link. This is a great strategy you can easily apply.

2. Make your pages search engine and reader friendly. Striking the balance between writing for your human visitors as well as the search engines is simple if you stick to this rule – write for the reader first and then naturally insert your keyword phrases into your copy.

It’s also a good idea to include all the appropriate SEO tags on all your pages. These tags help the search engines find you.

3. Set up a search-engine friendly navigation structure. For the search engines (and your human visitors) to find the content on your website, you need a clear navigation structure. This structure should consist of your top topics which are also your keywords and then for each of those main pages you’ll have sub pages including extensions of that main keyword.

By having the main keywords as your top topics on your navigation structure, your readers and the search engines will easily find your deeper pages of content. It’s also a good idea to include a back link to your home page on each page of your website. A clear and well-defined site map is a great addition as well.

These three key steps are the starting point to your traffic success. Apply them regularly and ensure that your content is fresh and up-to-date and you can’t help but to win over both the search engines and your human visitors too.

Today everyone is saying, “Take me to the cloud.” But what does that mean? And, is it a good thing for your business to get involved in?

What and Where Is the Cloud?

We are talking about cyberspace. You know it exists and you can see the results of it, but touching it is as elusive as putting your hands on a real cloud. Nevertheless, it is a revolutionary idea in network sharing and storage.

So, what is the cloud exactly? Well, if you are using the internet right now to read this article, you are a part of the cloud network. Companies used to set up IT networks on their own, installing, running and testing software applications. Whenever there was a problem, everyone turned to the IT expert to fix it. This took money and time which could cost the business money in man hours and lost productivity.

Cloud computing offers a break to companies both large and small with an easier way to store information. Instead of each company managing their own applications, third-party vendors offer access to a virtual network that they manage. Each company only pays for the amount of usage that they need.

This one area houses hundreds of apps that each company can customize for its own uses. It’s like having one central location for housing all business but with the ability to function according to the specific needs of each.

How Can Your Business Benefit?

Because the cloud is in cyberspace, you are not limited to one area when using it. In fact, the cloud was made for mobility. No matter where you or any of your associates are, you can upload information to the cloud that can then be viewed by others who also have access to the network. They can make changes to the document and then send it back to you in a flash.

Want to hold a meeting? You can do that too. Sharing ideas across the miles but within the same company has never been more accessible. What may have taken precious time through emails, faxes or phone calls can now be handled all at once via cloud computing.

And, your business can lower the cost of overheads by utilizing the cloud. With a third-party vendor managing the operation, they handle upgrades to software, technical questions and support for you. If there are problems, you will be up and running again as quickly as they can help. That also means that anyone accessing your applications is also back on the grid.

But, do your homework first. Make sure that the cloud is what your business needs and that it can meet your specific criteria for security and ease of operation. You decide if the cloud can move you forward.

Analytics are a business owner’s best friend. They can help you optimize your strategies and tactics. They help you get a better understanding of what your customer wants and needs. Website analytics can be the most valuable asset you have. However, choosing the right analytic tools can be overwhelming. There are many to choose from. Here’s a brief list of some of the more popular analytic tools, and advice on how to choose the right one for you.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free. You simply register with Google if you don’t already have an account. Sign up for the analytics tool by providing a bit of information about your website. Then it’s merely a matter of cutting and pasting the code into your website.

You can choose your settings and the data you track. Google tracks visits, average time on site, page views and the referral source. It also tracks geographic data and can be used to track split testing results. It’s a comprehensive analytics tool that provides just about everything a website owner could need.

Piwik

Piwik is an open source type of analytics. That means it’s free. It’s also open for development. This can be a big advantage if you want your analytics to accomplish something new. Piwik is designed to be the open source alternative to Google analytics so their offerings are similar. With Piwik your analytic data is on your server. You own your data. Additionally, you can customize your interface to suit your needs.

AWStats

AWStats is another popular analytics tool. Again, it provides much of the same data as most other analytics tools. However, it also provides some unique data. For example:

• Visits of robots
• Worm attacks
• HTTP errors
• Number of times your site is added to a visitor’s favorites

AWStats doesn’t work with all websites. You’ll need to double check before you install it. It can work with all web hosting providers which allow Perl, CGI and log access.

Site Meter

Site Meter offers two options. They offer a free version. They also offer a paid version that starts at $6.95 for 25,000 page views. The rate increases depending on your page views. Site Meter offers a vast amount of information including page views, bounce rate and time spent on your site. Site Meter also tracks the path your visitor takes when they arrive at your website. This is extremely valuable information. It can help you tighten your website content and copy to achieve a desired result.

Which Analytic Tool Do You Choose?

Decide which data points will be most useful. What do you need to know to optimize your website? Also consider who you trust with your data. If you utilize a service, then they have access to your website data. If you install the software on your server then you’re the only one that has access to your data. Also make sure you can easily read and understand the reports. All of the tools mentioned provide demo data and reporting.

Once you have a trusted source and the data you need to grow your business, it comes down to price and personal preference. Most analytics tools are free or very inexpensive. Choose your tool, install it and start taking advantage of the information website analytics provide.