Useful Writing Tools for Small Businesses

Posted on January 27, 2020 by Paul Bates

Effective communication can also help small businesses build relationships with customers as well as clients and potential partners. Writing is one of the most common and effective means of communication employed by businesses. Writing skills are paramount for anyone with a small business with goals of growing the business and building relationships. Estimates put 30% of business work being accomplished through the use of writing communications. This makes the need for tactful business writing very essential in the business world, and for achieving the goals set by the business. Be it report writing, proverbs and quotes writing, appointment confirmation emails, website publications, compare and contrast essays, SEO article writing or copywriting, business writing skills should be honed by the continued practice of writing skills. Small businesses can also outsource their writing needs, to professionals to write business communications for small businesses. Should the small business desire to keep all business writing in-house, there are writing tools that can be used to help tailor business writing to the desired language, the proper writing formats and make edits that will polish grammar and sentence structure to give the piece of writing a professional look and feel.

Grammarly

Grammarly is one of the most popular writing tools that exist and it’s a multipurpose tool meaning it offers you more than one solution for your writing needs. There are essentially two versions of Grammarly available for businesses; the free version which offers very basic writing solutions, and the premium version which has a variety of writing solutions that comes at a fee of about $140 per year. Grammarly is effective in assessing grammar and punctuation errors like comma splices, fragments, run-on sentences among others. It is also useful for checking every word in a piece of writing for spelling errors and offers what is considered “near-human” suggestions and tips on the writing style and sentence structure. It can also be used to scan a document and identify cases of plagiarism and similarities with other published works. Grammarly offers not more than just grammar and spelling mistake corrections, but also offers detailed writing enhancements that focus on the clarity, conciseness and the tone of the document and can be installed as an extension of web browsers and other writing tools like Microsoft Word free of charge. It is a very useful tool for small businesses that run a blog, for the business involved in content marketing and copywriting and for business tasks like drafting reports, narrative essays, presentations and business emails.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is essentially the most used office software that offers a variety of writing tools for all purposes of writing needs. It is a sophisticated word processing program that allows people to create documents with a variety of fonts and offers a lot of formatting options. Microsoft Word is very useful when one needs to write a long document with many sections. MS Word is part of suite software and tools that are used by businesses like PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets, with the full collection of the Microsoft software being inclusive of a lot of writing and editing tools. Modern MS Word is integrated with online features, which can allow for online storage of documents and increased versatility with other related programs. MS Word provides formatting options like APA outlines for creating automatically formatted documents. Other formatting options provided by MS Word include MLA and Chicago format outlines.

Canva

Canva is a useful tool for illustrating content pints, breaking up text walls and working as an image creation tool. Creating and placing images is important to business writing, especially for business blogs, copywriting and business presentations. Images help make business content attractive, and when someone looks at the content on a website, a wall of words without appealing images can be intimidating to readers. Canva allows you to select an image from a variety of options, and with hundreds of templates, presentation backgrounds, and icons, customize the image and the content to your liking.

Keyword Planner

The keyword planner allows you to choose and insert the most applicable keywords in a document. Keywords are important to content writing, especially for SEO writing, as without them search engines will not know how to categorize a website for SEO. If the business website or copywriting content is not indexed well by search engines, then finding it will be difficult among all the content that is available on the internet. Keyword Planner is a Google keyword research tool that is applicable for website content or content for social media campaigns. The tool allows you, as a business contracted to do social media campaigns, to enter a topic, industry or website which will give you a selection of keywords that are organized by subject, popularity, and level of competition, and the most appropriate keyword for the particular business writing needs to be chosen from the available selection.

Google Docs

Google Docs is an online document processor that works well as a writing tool for businesses. The tool has collaboration and organizational features that help you as a small business owner or copywriter to draft a copy of your intended content and share it with editors and friends for comments. The tool allows you to store the documents on Google Drive, which allows you to access the content anywhere for review and editing purposes. As a copywriter and small business owner who has to stay on top of business projects, Google Docs can help in this regard.

Creating a WordPress Website: Using Plugins to Increase Performance

Posted on November 30, 2019 by Justin Smith

Whether you want a website for personal or business purposes, WordPress is a great option. Using WordPress themes and plugins, even a novice can set up a stylish, high-performance website.

Before starting with WordPress, you need to choose a web host.

Finding the Right Hosting Provider

Before setting up a WordPress website, select a hosting provider. You must find a reputable company that offers a feature-rich plan within your budget. Before you check out potential hosting providers, think about what you need from hosting and make a list. It’ll make it easier to compare similar plans.

If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, here are a few essential features to consider:

A free domain name
An SSL certificate
Adequate data storage
One of the popular control panels
WordPress as a quick, or one-click, install

When you have your list, consult one or two popular web hosting review sites and see who they recommend. Below is a list of popular web hosts who have easy WordPress installation:

Cloudways
Bluehost
GoDaddy
HostGator
SiteGround
Hostinger

Check out web host websites before making a final decision. You don’t want any hidden surprises. It’s often difficult and costly getting out of a contract. Once you have hosting, it’s time to create your WordPress website. Begin by choosing a theme.

Selecting Your Ideal Website

Creating a website with WordPress is simple. Most of the tasks required are click-and-drag. There are thousands of website themes available from within WordPress (in the repository).

Many are free or low-cost. If you’re not comfortable doing this yourself or want a unique design, you may want to consider hiring a website designer to help build your website.

Whatever your requirements, there are themes for every situation. Your website has to look good, but there are other considerations. Ask yourself:

Is your theme regularly updated?
Will it work on mobile devices?
Is the template optimized for speed?

If you struggle to find a suitable theme in the repository, check out some websites that specialize in WordPress themes. Or you can hire somebody to create one (or design it yourself, if you have the skills). Below are some websites that offer WordPress themes:

elegantthemes.com
themeforest.net
templatemonster.com
athemes.com

After choosing a WordPress theme, it’s time to install it and set it up. WordPress makes this painless, even for someone unfamiliar with website development. Following this, it’s time to optimize your website. You can do this with some WordPress plugins.

Use Plugins to Enhance Your Website

Plugins enhance your WordPress website and add functionality. If you want to add a feature to your site, there will be a plugin. The easiest way to find and install a plugin is from the WordPress back-end (called the Dashboard). You will see a Plugin section, and that has a plugin search. Once you find what you want, it’s a simple matter of clicking the install button.

If you can’t find the right plugin in WordPress, you can find free and paid plugins on third-party websites, but these may need manual installation. Only select reputable plugins. WordPress should inform you if a plugin is affecting how your site performs. If you notice an issue and receive no warnings, disable one plugin at a time and see if you can diagnose the problem.

Ensure accessibility for people with disabilities. This enhances search traffic and user experience.

Here are a few plugins you may find interesting.

Contact Form 7 or WP Forms – Add forms to a web page
UpdraftPlus – perform WordPress back-ups
WooCommerce – set up an ecommerce store
Constant Contact and OptinMonster – help with email marketing
Spectra, Beaver Builder or Divi Plugin – add additional drag-and-drop functions to web design
MemberPress – create online communities and membership sites
Shared Counts – a social media plugin
WPML – make your site multilingual
ImageInject – adds free license images (from Flickr) to your content

Now let’s discuss the specifics of how to optimize WordPress with plugins.

Speed Up Your Website

Simple issues can hamper the page load speed of a website, such as image sizes or large data uploads. Search engines and visitors prefer websites that load without delay. There are on-site optimizations you can do, but why not use a handy plugin tailored to speed up your website?

Plugins to help with site speed:

WP Smush – compress images
WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, W3 Cache – improve page load speed

Search Engine Performance

If no one can find your website, it negates all the work you’ve done on design and performance. Search engines need to index your site and crawl its pages. A robots.txt file helps them to do so. WordPress creates one during install, but you can improve on that using a plugin.

Better Robots.txt or Virtual Robots.txt – give better control and help optimize a robots.txt file.

You can improve how search engines crawl your site by using a plugin to create an XML sitemap.

Google XML Sitemaps

When they crawl your website, search engines assess factors that will affect its placement on a search engine results page (SERP). You want your WordPress site to be high on page one. You can help by ensuring your website has good SEO(search engine optimization). Save yourself time and effort and use a plugin.

SEO plugins:

YoastSEO
PrePost SEO

Improve the Links

Links are an integral part of the online experience. Search engines and visitors use them to navigate to and through a website. You can improve how your website performs by monitoring your external and internal links.

Only link to relevant websites.
Your internal linking has to be logical and thorough.
Check your links work. Do they go where they point?
If you move a page, set up a redirect for the old URL.

These two plugins help to optimize link architecture.

Pretty Links Pro
SEO Internal Links

Tighten Up Security

Websites get hacked. WordPress sites are no exception. You have anti-virus on your home computer, so why not add one to your website? A web host will have security on their end, so should you. Add some additional defense with a plugin:

WordFence Security
Securi

If you’re using WordPress as a blog and have not disabled comments, you could get spam.

There are plugins to stop your comments from being abused.

Akismet Anti-Spam

Analyze Website Performance

When upgrading the speed and performance of a website, you must make sure the optimizations and enhancements are working. You can perform manual checks, such as opening your website from a search engine or clicking through its pages. An in-depth analysis of website performance is preferable, and for this, you need one of the analytic plugins.

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
MonsterInsights

Don’t Underestimate Content

We shouldn’t ignore the impact of content when discussing website performance. You can check and improve content, as with any other part of a website. Content is of immense importance to web users and search engines, and affects website reputation, popularity, and search rank

You can optimize the images and links within content, but how about actual written material? There are plugins to help improve the quality of textual content (in terms of readability and engagement). For example, the Word Stat plugin highlights:

Content that is too difficult for readers to understand
Posts that are too short
Too many keywords in a post
The 20 most used keywords on the website
Word count of different content

Keep Everything Up-To-Date

For your website to run smoothly and in sync with web browsers and devices, it’s crucial to use the latest version of WordPress and its plugins. Install updates, when available, to help your WordPress remain bug-free. If you find that a plugin becomes unsupported, stops working or develops issues after a WordPress update, search for an update. If none is available, remove the offending plugin and look for a substitute.

Don’t Go Overboard

Plugin fever is real. You go crazy and install every plugin you come across. Please show some restraint. Some plugins are more resource-hungry than others, and too many can slow your website to a crawl or cause unexpected glitches. First, install plugins that enhance website performance. Then add others one at a time. If there are no issues, install your next plugin

Give Your Website a Plugin Boost

Taking the time to choose the right web host and WordPress theme gives you a running start on developing a high-performance website. Smart plugin selection will help your WordPress sprint to the finish line. There are many great plugins available to help you build your perfect site. Do the research, then experiment, and analyze. Try to have fun!

6 Steps Every New B2B Venture Should Adopt for Success in 2020

Posted on November 28, 2019 by Harvey Edward

One of the most challenging factors of starting a new business is the high level of competition, limited budget and lack of experience. All three factors can lead your business to go down the line and eventually shut down before you actually hit the break-even point. However, we can help you change that with a few steps that we have saved in our playbook. All you have to do is utilize the following path and witness your B2B startup survive in this competitive modern B2B environment.

1. Finalize Your Product or Service

The first question that you should ask yourself while planning on starting your new B2B company is what you’re going to sell. There are millions of products and services you can choose to work on. However, your final decision should always be considering your current geo-location, budget and area of expertise. Once you have finalized the product or service you plan on selling, you can move forward with other factors of starting your new venture.

2. Come up With an Attractive Brand Name

Your goods and services will always be recognized by the brand name you choose to market. The name of your business or brand plays a significant role in your organization. You could go for something short and easy to remember, or if you are confident that your marketing strategies will help you survive, then you can even use your own name to launch your new business. However, considering the rising level of competition between B2B companies, we advise that you introduce a brand name that is both unique and catchy. If you can make your brand name to be remembered by all those that see your promotional activity, no one can stop you from reaching your next milestone.

3. Identify Your Target Audience

Though this may not seem like an important step, yet knowing your audience is essential to make sure your marketing efforts aren’t wasted. Once your brand name and products are identified, you have to determine which sector of the population you plan on reaching out to. If you are a toy manufacturer, you’ll be on the hunt for local and international wholesalers that sell toys. Or you can even attract leading supermarkets that have the potential to sell your products to the final consumer rapidly. On the other hand, if you are starting an organization that offers financial services and products like, insurance, bonds, or consultancy, then you’d have to look for both businessmen and individuals who are interested in investing their money.

Without knowing your audience, it might become a challenge for you to choose the right marketing technique and set the ideal budget for this purpose. Also, if you plan on focusing on social media marketing, then targeting an audience can save you both time and money in generating high-quality leads.

4. Manage Your Budget

Before initiating any sort of promotional activity, you have to determine the budget. Budgeting is a crucial step that all startups have to focus on. Once you are aware of how much and when you can spend what amount of money on promoting your brand and products, you can take better and smarter decisions.

5. Signup Your Business on an Online B2B Marketplace

One of the fastest and most reliable way of becoming a recognized business virtually is by merely joining a Chinese B2B platform or any reputable international marketplace for businesses. A B2B marketplace is an online platform that features international B2B companies that belong to various industries. Once you get listed on a B2B directory, you’ll eventually be seen by other buyers that belong to the same industry. Also, you can even use this directory to connect with your next lifetime client.

Apart from that, many leading B2B portals even offer additional digital services to help you become a competitive online brand. From creating your website to get it ranked and generating leads, all can be provided to you by such B2B marketplaces. Therefore, we believe such a platform is the perfect opportunity a B2B startup needs to survive in the B2B environment.

6. Choose the Best Marketing Strategy

Last but not least, you need to choose a marketing strategy that will help you generate leads and achieve business growth. This step is mentioned at the end, as without the above-mentioned plans; you can’t initiate your marketing campaign. Once you are done finalizing your product and brand, know your audience and budget, you can choose a relevant marketing strategy to kick start your promotional activity.

You can either go for traditional marketing or digital marketing strategies. Your choice will strongly depend on your product, audience and budget.

Wrap Up

Starting a B2B venture is no walk in the park. It can take years to eventually make enough to survive in this competitive market. However, with the right plan and resources, you can finally manage to succeed and set up a profit-making business. Follow all the steps mentioned above, so that you can prepare your venture to tackle all hurdles and survive this journey.

A Brief Guide on Optimizing your Product Page SEO on Amazon

Posted on October 31, 2019 by Parth

When users search for a specific product, listings don’t appear magically in a random manner with vendors hoping their product will be picked. You need to work hard on your product page and ensure that the SEO is fully optimized. Just like Google, Amazon is going to use an algorithm that will pick up on cues that are strengthened using SEO.

So before you spend money on an Amazon SEO consultant, you might want to follow some of the tips given below to see if it makes a difference. If nothing, this guide will help you reach the basic standard that any quality vendor would implement in their listings.

Keyword Research

Before listing your product, carry out some research on keywords depending on your target audience and the type of product you want to list. Focus on long-tailed keywords and keep your research consumer-focused rather than having a generalized viewpoint.

Even though your research will be focused on the viewpoint, you need to be as vast as possible with your coverage because even one missed keyword can make all the difference in the world. o streamline and enhance your keyword research process, consider using the best Amazon keyword research tools available in the market.

Be Smart with your Content

Now that you’ve got all your keywords figured out, you need to be smart when it comes to usage. First and foremost, make sure that you aren’t pasting all the relevant keywords wherever you can find some space. You need to be organic with their usage and keep the flow of information consistent and intact throughout the page. Even if you have every keyword possible included in your content, if the information doesn’t follow a format and comes off as forced, the search algorithms will ignore the content and your page’s ranking is going to suffer. Your keywords need to be integrated into the information of the product rather than the other way around.

When it comes to images, use high-resolution HD images with a zoom enhance function if possible. This improves the buyer usability experience on the page and by extension the Amazon website. The better the user experience, the better your page will rank as this is one aspect that the search engine algorithm also follows.

Be Consistent with the Formatting of your Text

Whatever font, size, and tone you might choose for the text on your page, you need to ensure that it remains consistent throughout its entirety. The inconsistency leads to bad overall user experience and is likely to impact your SEO rating.

Present information in an organized manner and use bullets for different aspects of information. Your font type and size should be the same throughout the description and you need to check on spelling and grammar as these small errors can also have a significant impact on your page rating.

Amazon Guidelines

It also helps if you read the Amazon guidelines. These aren’t just rules that vendors are supposed to follow, but rather a format which helps Amazon organize all its listings and makes it easier to display them to the buyer.

Trendiest Ways of Food Services Using Digital Marketing

Posted on October 31, 2019 by Lyle MacLeod

In this age of digitalization, being an owner of any foodservice, you must invest an amount of thought about an excellent online appearance of your business to reach more and more people, besides having an offline brick and mortar appearance.

It is particularly important for growing restaurants to stand out from the crowd and adapt to consumer trends and current events. Besides marketing great food, employers increasingly implement online food handler’s certification training to promote food health and safety at every step of the food preparation process. Knowing they are in for a delicious and responsible dining experience is a difference-maker in a dining industry that continues to bear the impact of COVID-19.

With the coming of social media networks, e-commerce websites, and mobile devices, getting your food service noticed depends a lot on the online recommendation, customer ratings, reviews, pictures of your restaurant with a pleasant ambiance, etc.

Nowadays, several successful bakeries and start-up food services use the modern platform of digital marketing very skillfully to grow faster by applying tactics like an online ordering system, amazing visual content, loyalty programs, geo-targeted ads, and other online branded business identities.

Here, in this article, we will be helping you with such enormous business ideas to land your food business strongly in an online platform.

1. Create a Food Blog:

Make an interesting food blog with lots of information, engaging stories, pictures of food, etc. You also need to update your page regularly and keep your page up to date show up in the desired place of the search engine results and drive a lot of traffic for your website.

Also updating interesting things regularly will turn your searchers into the regular visitor of your page and the visitors into constant customers. For example, Ceres PR is one of the best Food PR agencies in the UK who post amazing blogs over many intriguing topics on their page to stay in good attention of the search engines.

2. Share Engaging Posts on Social Media:

You should know the procedure of paid traffic driven to your blog by successfully using advertising campaigns through social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook. In this process, you need to invest a little bit of money, but it is definitely worth it. When considering the huge number of audiences you can be connected with, the amount of buzz you can create with your next food content launch.

3. Approach Other Bloggers to Promote Your Business:

Find out some other bloggers who provide food services like you or other services and ask them to promote your page. Before choosing any ensure that the audiences of those blogs are the consumers that you are trying to reach.

Today, one of the most widely used and successful strategies of digital marketing for food products is to collaborate with food bloggers and ask them to promote your food business.

4. Arrange Engaging Things like Live Videos, Online Contests, and Events:

To get more and more engaging audience for your page, you need to really interact with people through social media. You can host an open-house event, food tasting, or even a new dish launching at your restaurant.

The easiest and useful way to broaden your exposure to the viewers is by running contests that demand your audience to engage with your social media appearance also you can arrange some exciting gifts. Another useful idea would be to promote your service through videos made with the past reviews you have achieved.

Having a convenient online food ordering system for your customers allows you to customize orders so that they fit with your brand identity.

Conclusion

So, in this article, we have tried to write down some beneficial tips for you to stand out with your foodservice. We hope it will be helpful for you.

Steps Freelancers Should Take To Set Up Their Own Business

Posted on October 12, 2019 by John Bickley

In today’s hectic schedules people find it tough to maintain a perfect working job and look for easier alternatives. Setting up a freelancing business is a step that most such people take so that they get the flexibility of working at their own pace. However, doing so requires a lot of effort and patience in the initial years and here we share with you steps that freelancers should take to set up their own business.

Define the Goals

First and foremost you need to find out what goals you want to achieve by setting up this business. Is it that you want to make money or you are just starting the business to a network?

Once you have your goals in mind, it is important to research solopreneur ideas that would fit with them. There are a variety of solopreneur ideas.

For example, freelancing, blogging, copy writing, web design/development, graphic design, and virtual assistant services.

Whatever kind of goal-long term or short term you have to take care that you are clear enough about it. You would also need to find what niche you want to make your career in. Are you interested in writing, designing or software development? The choice of the stream would pave the way for your prospects.

Invoicing

Obviously, you would not be working for free and the payment needs to be prompt. If you are looking for a long term work then prepare an invoice format that you would want all your clients to fill. The invoice should have all the details of the work you have done along with the payment you should receive. Alongside you may also need to set clear payment terms about the frequency of payment and any late charges that you impose in case of a delay.

Finding the Right Clients

Next up you need to find out places where you can find clients which would be profitable for you. Normally there are many job boards that can give you a breakthrough. However, it is not necessary that all the job boards would have trustworthy clients pertaining to your field. You may have to look around and figure out which ones are the best places to invest your energy in. Don’t make the mistake of dabbling into all kinds of industries at one shot. Instead, keep it limited to just 2-3 niches where you feel you can derive the maximum benefit.

Price Setting

Next, you would have to set a particular price for the work you are offering. When such a situation arises you must first find out what the average rate for this kind of service is. If you charge more than what the existing rate is then you should have a solid reason behind doing so. Until you are set perfectly in the business you may have to compromise on your rate but later on, you need to maintain a fixed stand.

Conclusion

If you are deciding to foray into the freelancing field be prepared for disappointment and successes as well. By following the above tips though you should be able to make good money within a few months of starting. Expect some harsh work in the beginning though things should simplify in a year or two. Keep your horizons opened and set payment terms clear before any deal to avoid any confusion later.

How To Protect Your Laptop While Traveling

Posted on July 6, 2019 by Steve Jones

There are multiple aspects to keeping a laptop safe. It does you little good to encrypt your laptop against malware if you conduct actions which leave it wide open to thieves, and vice versa. Here are a few tips to help keep your device safe and your trip relaxed.

Your laptop is probably the most expensive thing on you when you are traveling, and yet it is incredibly fragile. Few things can ruin a vacation faster than losing your laptop to theft, viruses, or other threats, especially if you are in an area on the globe where you may be unable to easily obtain a new one.

Get a New, Padded Laptop Backpack

A good laptop backpack is a major first step towards protecting your laptop from bumps, falls, water, and other damaging things. PC Magazine has a list of good backpacks, though you can check Amazon or any office or electronics store in the area.

When you are selecting a backpack, prioritize checking its padding above anything else. The backpack should have a rigid frame, and if it does not you can add backpack armor to make it sturdy. Also look for multiple compartments so that you can store just the laptop in a single compartment instead of squishing it alongside clothes and wires and other things. Go for functionality over style, as the only people you will end up attracting with a cool backpack are thieves.

Note that you should try to get a backpack instead of a briefcase or messenger bag. A briefcase is a clear sign to unsavory individuals that something valuable is inside, and is easier to rip away from you than a properly secured backpack. It is also easy to carry a backpack on a long hike instead of awkwardly shifting a messenger bag from shoulder to shoulder.

Stay Alert

If you leave your laptop unattended in a public space for a minute or two to use the bathroom, you may as well kiss it goodbye. Laptops are prime candidates for thieves, whether it is for the value of the data in the laptop or for the device itself. And while you can lock your computer or even put a cable lock around it to deter thieves, your best weapon against them is constant vigilance.

Take your laptop with you wherever you go, instead of leaving it in the hotel. But also keep it out of sight when you can. Keep it in a backpack, or cover it with a jacket. The less people know where your laptop, the less likely anything bad will happen to it.

Backup your Data

You should be regularly backing up your data already, but it is important to do a full backup right before you go on a trip. Store all of your important data on an external hard drive or in the cloud so that you do not lose any critical data on top of losing your computer. Create a log of passwords outside the computer so that anyone who gains access cannot access personal records.

Also consider backing up your data while you are on the trip itself. If you have created any documents or files on the trip, store them on a CD or USB drive in your hotel at the end of the day and put those things in a secure place.

Use a VPN instead of public Wi-Fi

Sitting in a café in some foreign land and connecting to the Internet may seem like the epitome of how globalization brings us together, but doing anything on a public Wi-Fi can be extremely dangerous. The problem is that as CSO Online describes, hackers can easily position themselves between yourself and the connection point. This gives them access to any data you send out, such as your email passwords, business data, and credit card data. Even if you are just logging into some internet forum or checking sports scores, they can use any information to deduce personal information about you. Furthermore, hackers can also send data back and infect your computer with malware.

Consequently, you should be looking to connect online as little as possible. If you are in a situation where you absolutely must connect, use a trustworthy VPN which will encrypt your data. If you are not sure what a VPN is, cooltechzone has an excellent guide on what they are and how to set one up.

A VPN enables you to create a secure and safe pathway for you to send and also receive data. This is encrypted and allows you to unblock restricted sites such as Netflix, BBC iPlayer etc. The team at VPN Geeks has a nice article explaining exactly how a VPN works.

Note that a VPN will not make your data completely hackproof. But the hacker will likely not want to make the effort when there are other computers sending unencrypted data. Your company should provide you with a VPN you can use when traveling abroad. Also make sure to turn wi-fi off when not using it, as the computer is still transmitting data when it is on.

Should You Leave Your Laptop at Home?

Your laptop will face numerous threats when traveling that it will never have to deal with if you leave it at home. So maybe you should not take your laptop at all.

This is especially true if you are on vacation. You are traveling to see the world and explore new sights, not stay hooked to the Internet like you are on most days. And even if you want to stay connected to some degree, Trip Savvy points out that a tablet or phone can serve just as well for someone just on vacation. The only major reason to bring a laptop along is if you may have to work when traveling.

If you really, truly, absolutely must bring a computer along, consider bringing in a cheaper laptop. Do you still have that old, slow, dying laptop lying around which you replaced with your brand new device? Take the old one instead. You may be frustrated with longer loading times, but you will not have to be looking over your shoulder all the time out of fear of losing or damaging it.