Author Archives: Michael Pignataro

Michael Pignataro

About Michael Pignataro

Entrepreneur, family man and long-time magician, "Magic Man" Michael Pignataro is co-owner of 'corePHP' with his mirror-image twin brother, Steven. Michael is 'corePHP's Co-Chief Executive Officer - Operations. He's also got a wicked fast wrist at the foosball table.

5 Tips to Protect Your E-Commerce Business from Cyber security Threats

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'corePHP' E-Commerce Security Web Security
Cyber Security

As large corporations continue to harden their defenses against hackers, cyber criminals have turned their attention to businesses that are more vulnerable to attacks. In fact, in the last 12 months alone, hackers have breached half of all U.S. small businesses, according to a report by the Ponemon Institute.

Bombarding systems with ransomware is attractive for cyber thieves because the activity is easy to deploy and hard to trace to attackers. It’s also quite a lucrative venture, as ransomware is expected to cost victims a total of $5 billion this year in repair or new spending costs, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. Continue reading →

How Cloud-Based Predictive Analytics Can Up Your Marketing Game

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'corePHP' Digital Marketing Marketing Automation Tools
Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is not always easy to understand, despite being a relatively simple concept. In its most basic definition, predictive analytics mines data to find patterns and assess the probability of people’s actions. In business, your marketing team can use predictive analytics to better understand your target market and devise campaigns to better suit their needs.

However, there is no guarantee that your customers will act as predicted — no pun intended — or that the pattern will continue. The following are just a few ways you can better understand predictive analytics and how your marketing team can use it.

Prioritize Leads

One of the main ways marketing teams are using predictive analytics is to comb big data for patterns on leads and sales patterns. You can use your data to see who is buying your product or service. But, more importantly, you can finally determine why. You then can use this information to target other prospects, or upsell or cross-sell current customers with additional relevant products or services that fit their needs.

In an interview with PC Mag, Allison Snow, senior analyst of B2B marketing at Forrester, explains that predictive analytics enable marketers to use science and math to prioritize their leads through specific criteria and weightings. Snow explained how this helps companies identify productive accounts, target upsell campaigns, and spend less time on accounts that don’t have a good probability of buying.

Identify Similar Customers

Once you identify how your previous and current customers are buying, you can extrapolate that data out to reach new customers. While it’s not an exact science — and results can vary — recognizing patterns and customer behavior can help you predict how similar markets, audiences and industries will behave.

A good example of this type of data and campaign is Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences. With this tool, you’re able to upload data about your current customers or target audience and then find prospects who resemble that buyer persona. You also can track individuals who visit certain Web pages or who like your page and find similar audiences that way. Facebook uses your data to target people who behave in similar ways or fit into a specific pattern, all of which helps you more effectively grow your customer base.

Personalize Campaigns

Another way you can up your marketing game with predictive analytics is to create personalized campaigns for your target market. By understanding patterns in their buying behavior — and what they expect from your product — you can use that specific information in your campaigns to make sure every piece is relevant to them.

Companies can create a more relevant and informed content strategy for their advertising, email, social and content marketing campaigns when they have greater insight into what their customers are after. Become an expert in several areas that best target your various audiences and hit on the information they want to know.

Predictive analytics can be used in many other ways, both in your marketing department and in other areas of your business. With enough data and the tools to recognize patterns, you can better forecast sales, stocking needs and production costs. Even though you’re extrapolating data and can’t guarantee success, predictive analytics is a good starting point to improve your processes in understanding your past, current and future customers.

Generate Successful Leads for E-Commerce with Smart Designs

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'corePHP' Digital Experience E-Commerce Front-End Design SEO User Experience Web Design
Lead Generation

Everyone knows Google is the world’s most successful search engine, and companies around the world strive to achieve top Google rankings. But not everyone realizes that Google.com is also the world’s highest-ranking website. According to Alexa, Google’s own SEO performance outranks Google’s subsidiary YouTube, Facebook, top Chinese search engine Baidu and Wikipedia, which hold the next four top spots. Google’s SEO success is a byproduct of its design as a search engine, since web surfers typically visit Google in order to find other sites. This has helped turn Google into an e-commerce giant as well as a successful search engine. Here’s a look at some other web design approaches that successful e-commerce sites use to generate leads:

Amazon: Generating Organic Traffic with Keywords

Amazon is the world’s most successful e-commerce retail site, valued at nearly $100 billion at the end of 2016. Like Google, Amazon’s marketing strategy revolves heavily around its SEO-oriented design. Amazon draws traffic with keyword-rich product descriptions that use the exact phrases prospective buyers are likely to be searching for on Google and other leading search engines.

For instance, if someone goes to Google looking for the DVD release of the latest Star Wars movie, typing in “rogue one dvd” will produce search results that include an Amazon product page listing for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story [Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD].” The page’s full title tag includes other keywords naming the film’s top stars. The rest of the page includes supplementary product description information that mentions other relevant keywords.

Amway: Attracting Visitors with Content

Keywords work best for SEO when combined with relevant, valuable content that draws visitors interested in a particular topic, problem or question. In addition to doing SEO duty, such content can also be used for sharing on social media to attract followers and visitors.

An e-commerce site that uses this strategy effectively is Amway’s. Amway’s blog features practical tips on topics appealing to its target audience, such as tips on how to apply make-up, eat healthier, grow an organic garden or start a business. Blog posts are shared on Amway’s social media profiles, attracting followers, generating discussion, driving traffic to Amway’s site and ultimately turning visitors into customers.

Facebook: Capturing Contact Information

After you succeed in attracting visitors to your site, it’s vital to capture their contact information so you can pursue follow-up marketing efforts. It typically takes multiple contacts with a site visitor in order to convert them into a buyer.

Facebook’s web design exemplifies this approach. When a visitor lands on the home page of Facebook’s site, typically after installing Facebook’s app on their mobile phone, they see an invitation to sign up for a free account. The registration form requests information about the visitor’s name, mobile phone number or email address, birthday and gender. When the visitor fills this form out, they receive a free Facebook account, setting the stage for them to become buyers of products and services from Facebook and its advertisers.

YouTube: Leveraging Free Content

Requests for visitor contact information usually work best when some incentive is offered in return for the information. In Facebook’s case, the offer of using Facebook’s service functions as an incentive. In other cases, free content can be given away as an incentive. The content can be delivered in forms such as videos, emails and PDF files.

YouTube is the king of leveraging free content into business. As the second most-visited site on the internet after its own parent Google, YouTube gives away more free content than any other site. Visitors aren’t required to sign up for an account in order to watch YouTube videos, but registering confers visitors additional advantages, such as the ability to access more content, upload content and participate in discussions. Whether they sign up or not, YouTube receives revenue from advertisers who market to video viewers. YouTube also generates revenue by selling premium ad-free content to subscribers.

Expert Interview Series: Michael Pignataro of corePHP – Salesgenie

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'corePHP' 'corePHP' Products Digital Marketing Front-End Design Marketing Automation paGO Commerce Technology Advice Web Design
Salesgenie Blog Header

The amazing company Salesgenie asked me to be apart of their Expert Interview Series and I couldn’t be more excited.  We go inside the inner workings of ‘corePHP’, the digital world, where it’s going, and what inspires me to continue to grow ‘corePHP’. Click the link below to read the interview.

Expert Interview Series: Michael Pignataro of corePHP

Over the last several years we have seen massive change in the industry and here at ‘corePHP’ we are constantly staying on the cutting edge trend of technology to keep our clients current and ahead of their market. Hope you enjoy the interview as much as I enjoyed being part of it.

4 Ways to Boost Your Student Blog

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Better Blogging Digital Marketing

Student blogger blogging at home

Whether you’re studying for a degree in digital marketing, taking English as a major or even studying at home for your RN to MSN online degree, starting a student blog can be an amazing way to make some extra money. It also looks awesome on a graduate resume. But, with so many student blogs out there to compete against, ensuring that yours is a success will take some hard work and dedication. We’ve put together some top tips to help you boost your student blog.

Over the years building and maintaining WordPress for Joomla we have found this to be the right tool to help you drive your online blog business and have the power of Joomla for your CMS to grow to leaps and bounds you never imagine before. Now onward to the good stuff!

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6 Reasons Why Tech Startups are Still In Need of MBAs

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'corePHP'

Business man reading the paper

Throughout my career people keep asking what do tech/marketing companies look for when hiring. The employee base is getting competitive out in the market today. Here are things we look for in positions here at ‘corePHP’.

Most startups, including tech ones, can benefit greatly from either employing an MBA graduate or from the business owner/s getting their own MBA. Here are six reasons why it’s important for tech startups to have an MBA. Continue reading →

Best Way To Use Video In E-Commerce Web Design To Boost Conversion

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'corePHP' Digital Marketing E-Commerce

computer screen displaying e-commerce web design

As the current inbound and web marketing continues to hike in popularity, there is one thing, which remains quite clear. The video is likely to be the finest positive factor, for converting the rate lifts. As per some of the recent statistics involved, within 2020, the current IP traffic is likely to create nearly 82% of global consumer traffic. Now, that’s massive news, especially for online businessmen that run e-commerce websites.

Nowadays, site visitors are currently consuming more videos. Therefore, it is quite inevitable when you see web designers trying to incorporate video for enhancing the value of your website. They are currently working on the site conversion rate of clients, and even noting down user experience, as that helps in incorporating more video into the current design. Continue reading →

Why Web Security Is Important When Building a Gaming Website

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'corePHP' Security

Online network security concept with digital lock and media content icons

Take a step back and do a quick observation about your life on the internet. You will quickly notice that more than 70% of your life is actually stored digitally somewhere, whether it is your login info for an ecommerce site or the holiday photos you have backed up to the cloud. In today’s world, we convert more and more information into digital 1s and 0s.

As the amount of information we store digitally grows, the need for better information security grows with it. We now have multiple security measures in place to help protect sensitive personal information. SSL security prevents theft from sniffing data being transmitted to and from servers. Encryption and other technologies are safeguarding our files while they are being stored. We even have different PHP frameworks and modules designed to improve security of the apps and web services we develop.

Customers – including you and I – are more aware of the importance of information security, which means the web services developed for them must also be properly secured. There are a number of reasons why security is paramount when building a website, especially when you are developing a gaming website. Continue reading →

Another Idea How to Benefit from Web Design Niche

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'corePHP' Digital Marketing Graphic Design

header

If you decided to engage your life with web design, you certainly wondered how to benefit more in this niche. Fortunately internet gives us loads of opportunities of earning money. The means you choose depend only on your abilities and desires. You have a possibility to choose how much resources, time and efforts you want to put into it. You can work as an individual web developer, thus putting all you time and energy into the process. It is quite rewarding and well-paid though. If you want to spend less efforts you can choose affiliate marketing. This way has a long history and accounts for millions of adherents worldwide. Although it is extended far beyond web design niche, it is here where you have a good scope of work. All big template providers offer you an opportunity to become their partner, but on different terms. The commission rate and the terms of use may vary, but the idea of popularizing the product is the same. We won’t stop on different affiliate programs now. You will easily find tones of articles comparing pros and cons of different programs, if you put it as a goal.

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Top 20 Best Selling Templates with TemplateMonster

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'corePHP' Templates and Themes

Top 20 Best-Selling Templates. TemplateMonster Edition

For this chart we have hand-picked 20 best-selling TemplateMonster themes that will appeal to everyone who strives for perfection. Blogs, personal and business sites, eCommerce platforms – no matter what kind of project you run and what industry you belong to, we are certain that you will be able to find a theme that will meet your most demanding expectations.

So, what best sellers are we talking about? More and more often we can come across multipurpose designs. Theme providers try hard to impress the audience with the latest innovations. TemplateMonster is no exception. Their inventory of 60+ themes features a pre-designed option of any design, for any business niche and CMS possible. Recently, they have started launching fit-it-all solutions that combine sleek style and pro functionality under the hood. Drag-and-drop page builders are indispensable components of multipurpose themes, as well as child themes, ready-made layouts, custom modules and extensions, and a whole lot of other features.

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