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What Are Some Benefits of Shopping Online?

If you have never shopped online, you have missed out on one of the most convenient, and often affordable, ways to purchase items, whether for yourself or as gifts for someone else. There are many benefits to shopping online, including these:

Convenience

The most important benefit of online shopping is the convenience. When you shop online, you do not have to leave your home. You can do all of your holiday shopping, for instance, from the comfort of your easy chair with your laptop in hand. You can avoid the crowds, save gas, and eliminate the stress of visiting a store and finding that they were out of what you needed. Online shopping is, perhaps, the most convenient type of shopping.

Shop Whenever You Want

When shopping online, you do not have to worry about the time the store closes. After all, getting to the store before 9 is not always easy when you do not leave work until 6. You have to eat dinner and spend some time with the family before you can go to the store. When you are online shopping, Canada and U.S. merchants are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You do not have to stress about the clock when you are shopping on the Internet, because the stores are always open.

Compare Prices Easily

Saving money is always a good idea, but when you are shopping in a traditional way, you have to drive from store to store to compare prices. You may be able to compare prices when calling, but not all stores will share prices over the phone, and this presents quite a hassle, because you have to wait for the clerk to find the item, check the price, and then quote it to you.

When you shop online, you can compare prices from several merchants on one computer. Within minutes, you can know who has the best price, how much they will charge for shipping, and how quickly the item will be at your house. In this way, you can get the best possible price for your purchase.

Expand Your Shopping Range

When you shop at traditional retail locations, you are limited by your geographic area. Unless you plan to drive for hours to get to the next shopping mall, you must shop only at the retailers that are in your area. This may not give you the best selection.

When you shop online, you can shop from retailers in other parts of the country, or even the world. You are not limited by geographic area, with the exception of the cost of shipping, which may increase if you shop with a retailer that is quite far from you.

By increasing the number of retailers you can choose from, you do two things. First, you increase your selection. This is especially important if you are shopping for a unique or popular, hard-to-find item. Second, you give yourself the ability to find the item at the best possible price. By increasing the amount of competition for your business, you decrease the price of the item.

Find Online-Only Discounts

You can find discounts online that are not available in the store. Major department stores often circulate discount codes and free shipping offers that lower the price of your item even more. Before you make an online purchase, be sure to search for these coupon codes. Type the name of your merchant and “coupon code” in your favorite search engine, and you may find a discount that you did not know existed. When you combine a coupon code with an already low price found by shopping online, you will get great bargains.

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3 Marketing Strategies Every Artist Should Implement

Social MediaSocial media marketing is a strategy that is just that, social. It is typically done on an Internet platform that engages the public in your content via your computer, smartphone or tablet. Social media allows your target consumers to engage with you and your brand. Some of the most common social media platforms used in marketing today are Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Managing your Social Media Marketing can be very time-consuming. So, I recommend focusing your time and content on a few sites. Here are some recommendations:Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are visual platforms that will connect your art with customers. With Facebook you can create a business page this is separate from your personal page. The business page will allow you to create a community of followers that can like, comment, and share your images and content. Instagram has the same basic framework as Facebook in that you can create multiple profiles and navigate between them within the app on your phone. This similarity is nice if you have a personal and a business profile. Instagram is a social media outlet that focuses on images which are perfect for visual artists. Again, you can create a community of followers. For Instagram, the usage of the hashtag is vital in generating traffic to your profile, unlike Facebook that is better built on sending requests and calling for people to share your page.YouTube allows the public to take a step into your studio to see you working on your most current pieces. It may not seem like YouTube is a form of social media but in fact, by definition it is. Social media is any networking platform that allows users to communicate and connect in a social way. Due to the ability to like, share, and comment on videos on YouTube it is truly a social network. YouTube is actually a social media platform before it is a video marketing technique. In the next section, I will share a bit of information about how you can turn this social media platform into a video marketing tool!Video MarketingVideo marketing is meant to call your consumer or viewer to action. For a video, you create to be considered video marketing it should either generate interest back to your website or to something they will need to pay for in order to gain additional access. Videos are a great way to share your talent with the public and generate interest in your art. Videos also allow your followers and subscribers to get to know you. Viewers enjoy the feeling of developing a relationship with you. When you can create a sense of loyalty, your viewers can become some of your best marketing partners because they may share your videos with their friends.Since YouTube is free this is a great way to share videos that focus on your art technique or provide short free tutorials for a specific art medium. Don’t forget for this to be a marketing technique it needs to generate something the viewer will need to act upon or purchase. By running a link at the end of your video to send them to your website or offering more in-depth instructional videos for a price at the end, will qualify as a video marketing tool. With YouTube, you can create a channel that may focus on the techniques of your particular style of art or you can post instructional videos with step-by-step information to complete a unique piece of artwork. Free and low-cost video editing software, like Apple’s iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, is available to allow you to truly customize your videos before uploading to YouTube.Let’s use a watercolor artist who focuses on floral still life, as an example. The artist posts a 5-minute painting tutorial on the subject matter of roses on YouTube. The video was created through the iMovie software that comes standard on most Apple computers currently. At the end of the free 5-minute video, the artist then advertises a paid 30-minute video from their website that will walk the viewer through painting a floral still life with roses from start to finish. The webcam and software come standard with Apple products. The cost for creating this example of video marketing was free.Social Media and video marketing are both virtual ways to reach your target audience. A low-cost type of marketing that is more tactile and leaves a lasting impression on your audience is through guerrilla marketing.Guerilla MarketingGuerilla marketing is a grassroots, low-cost, fun, and in-your-face marketing strategy. Often guerrilla marketing takes the form of visual art like spray paint tags or unique posters and decals allowing it to seem like a natural fit for visual artists. This marketing strategy is meant to create interest and cause the bystander to be curious enough to investigate the advertisement. It takes more imagination and creativity than money to make guerrilla marketing work for you.Implementing guerrilla marketing can be a fun and exciting. Some ideas for guerrilla marketing might be to use vinyl stickers or paper posters; this is called wild posting. Walking billboards or quick pop up galleries of work in public places are another trending approach. It should also be stated that legal issues can arise in regard to how or where wild posting and pop-up galleries appear. Posting decals or posters can cause an issue especially if they are placed on paid advertising or local, state or federal fixtures. In most municipalities, there are permits that are required for setting up in public places. Don’t let the risk of legal infringement deter you from using this strategy. With the proper research and planning, guerrilla marketing can be a quick and fun way to create buzz about your art.Social media, video marketing, and guerrilla marketing are ways to increase awareness and create artist loyalty from the community near and far. Successful marketing will help you increase brand awareness and loyalty among art consumers.

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After Work Drinks, Everyone?

As the days get warmer and beautifully longer, there is always an increase in the amount of alcohol that office workers consume. The allure of a beer garden is just too hard to resist when the sun is beaming down. After all, you never know when it will be this sunny again so of course you must make the most of it.Problem being that a stark increase in drinking inevitably leads to a stark increase in hangovers, carryovers and many other ghastly things from the night before. Whilst prevention is better than the cure there’s not much you can to do to curb your workers drinking habits. In this situation it seems that pre-empting is the only cure.Whilst a few naughty workers will pull a sick day, plenty more will still come into work despite the fact that their productivity and general usefulness is at an all time low. Dig through your office supplies to see what things can help snap your workers out of their alcohol daze.Hydration is paramount to beating a hangover. Water coolers or water filters are ideal ways to make sure workers have as much access to the liquid gold as they need. Do not over look another key refreshment – coffee, the caffeine will surely give them a much needed kick start in the morning. A few emergency packets of biscuits should also be on hand for a sugar boost. Offices can be unbearably hot in the summer, especially when trying to recover from the night before. Invest in some good quality fans and instruct whoever arrives first to turn them all on, thus creating a cooling environment for when the stragglers arrive.The day after a heavy night drinking is probably not the best time for your workers to be on the phone. So use this opportunity to encourage them to catch up with filing and any other tasks that are usually ignored. By the end of summer you could have yourself the most impressive and organised files in the country. The glare from a computer screen can also be unbearable when you’ve got a headache. Treat your office to some anti-glare screens to help employers work to the best of their ability.This may seem like a lot of extra effort to attend to the hangovers of our workers. However when you consider that hangovers cost the economy around 2.8bn each year due to productivity loss, it seems a small price to pay.

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