SGX Hacks for Malaysian Investors

Hi, I’m Ian.

I’m a Malaysian who invest in stocks listed on the SGX where I’m receiving a steady flow of dividend income on a quarterly basis. Perhaps, you may ask:

‘Ian, are you a Singapore P.R.?’ Nope.

‘Ian, are you based in Singapore?’ Nope.

‘Ian, have you worked in Singapore before?’ Nope.

‘Ian, do you have a bank account in Singapore?’ Nope.

‘Ian, how do you invest in Singapore?’ I’ll answer it now.

In this article, I’ll share what I know and do so that you can start investing in SGX-listed stocks as a Malaysian investor based in Malaysia itself. Therefore, here are the 7 hacks that you need to know before investing in the SGX.

#1: An Overview of the SGX

As I write, the SGX offers a boutique of 700+ stocks to investors. The biggest 30 stocks are included as constituents of the Straits Times Index (STI). For a start, they include huge corporations which might have just ring a bell to you such as UOB, OCBC, SIA, Genting Singapore, and CapitaLand. Besides, SGX has a well-developed REIT market where investors can invest in a globalized portfolio of Billion-Dollar commercial real estate. Currently, the STI and the S-REIT markets are the main focuses for most investors who are investing in the SGX.

#2: CDS account vs. Trust account

Here, I’ll write from my perspective as a customer of Maybank Investment Bank (IB). I’m using Maybank IB for my investments in stocks listed on both Bursa Malaysia and the SGX.

Bursa

For Bursa-listed stocks, the buying process is straightforward. First, I deposit an amount into my stock account. Second, I place my order for the intended stock. Third, the money in my stock account would be debited and my stock with the amount of shares would be credited into my CDS account which is under my own name.

SGX

For SGX-listed stocks, the buying process is different. For my first purchase, I deposit an amount into a Global Trust Account. The amount deposited was a little more than the intended amount I wish to invest. Then, I place my order for the intended stock online. After the order, I would have to call my broker (Maybank IB’s staff) to inform him about my investment. From which, I wait for 1-2 working days for the contract note that states the exact amount of my investment in Ringgit. My money in the Global Trust Account would then be debited and my stock would be credited into my Trust (Custodian) Account where Maybank IB keeps my stock and collects dividends on behalf of me.

#3: Transaction Fees

For MayBank IB, the minimum brokerage fee is set to be S$ 30 a transaction. Inclusive of a few miscellaneous charges such as GST and stamp duty, every transaction, buy or sell, should cost a minimum of S$ 32. Here, I’ll calculate the ideal minimum amount of capital needed to make your venture into the SGX worthwhile. For instance, if you intend to limit the transaction costs at 1% of your capital, then, the minimum amount you need to invest is S$ 3,200 or RM 9,600 per investment.

The amount needed will obviously be lower if you choose to limit the cost at 2% of your capital. Ideally, it is best to keep it low and thus, I reckon that you should not invest if the transaction cost is above 2% of your capital.

#4: Invest or Trade

I think it’s expensive to trade SGX-listed stocks as every transaction, buy and sell, costs a minimum of S$ 32 as compared to RM 12 for Bursa-listed stocks if you use Maybank IB. Hence, it is more ideal for investors as stocks listed in the SGX, to me, are to be kept over the long-term. If you are a new investor, I reckon you to aim for dividend income so that you can quickly earn back the transaction costs after 3 – 6 months of holding onto your SGX-listed stock.

#5: How to Open my Stock Account?

If you choose Maybank IB (This is not a Sponsored Post), you can apply for both CDS account and Global Trade Account simultaneously. You just need to bring your NRIC, salary slip, and bank statements and walk-in directly to the nearest Maybank IB branch. I’ll provide the links below:

What to Bring:

Maybank IB Trading Account Application Details

Where to Go:

Where’s the Near Maybank IB branch from You?

#6: But, I want to Invest in the US Stock Market

The facilities provided by Maybank IB is not limited to the SGX. In fact, you can choose to invest in other markets such as NYSE, NASDAQ, and HKEx if you prefer to do so.

#7: Learn to Invest in the SGX

There are many tools and resources available to speed up your learning curve and to familiarize yourself with the Singapore market. Here, I’ll conclude my sharing by listing down some websites and blogs that I personally follow and read on a regular basis:

No.1 – The Fifth Person

The Fifth Person is Singapore’s leading site that focuses on value investing. It is founded by Rusmin Ang, Victor Ch’ng, Adam Wong and Kenji. It contains a lot of quality and very detailed reads on stocks listed in both Singapore and Malaysia (although I’m among the main contributors of Malaysian stocks).

No.2 – Value Invest Asia

Value Invest Asia is spearheaded by Stanley Lim, a CFA, a Johorian who has extensive working experiences in Singapore. It is also a site focusing on value investing and is building up fast-read materials, webinars and even a physical book ‘Value Investing in Asia’ for stock investors who intend to invest across Asia. (I’m also a regular contributor of the Malaysian articles of this site).

No.3 – Dr. Wealth

Formerly known as the BigFatPurse, Dr. Wealth started off as an investment blog and has evolved into a comprehensive financial education firm that has contents and courses on stock investing, REIT investing, angel investing, and even cryptocurrencies.

Ian Tai

Ian Tai is the founder of Bursaking.com.my, a platform that empowers retail investors to build wealth through ownership of fundamentally solid stocks. It is an essential tool that sifts out stocks that grow profits consistently from a database of over 900+ stocks listed mainly in Malaysia.

PlayStation 4 News

For the newbies in computer gaming, PlayStation 4 (PS4) is an eighth-generation home video game console developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, while Xbox One is a line of eighth generation home video game consoles developed by Microsoft. It was first released in Australia, parts of Europe, North America and South America way back in late 2013. However, PS4 is touted to be the future of gaming console when you compare ps4 vs xbox one. You can click on the link here and check out more information if you love computer gaming. Professional gamers are known to make thousands monthly just by playing computer games to earn weapons, rewards, etc in exchange for money. Some of the games even accept cryptocurrencies as tokens according to recent reports online and in the magazines.

How to Increase Your Online Earnings and Monitize Your Websites

In this post, we’ve gathered the most useful tips that’ll help you increase your income with MageNet. Which numbers are we talking about?

For now, here are the 21 steps on your way to successful monetization:

1. Add more websites to your MageNet account. The more websites you have, the more earnings you get from your websites. Add website and earn

2. Select the correct website category for your website in ‘Your Sites’ interface. Correctly selected website category is much more important than you can imagine. If your site is about Credit Cards and your selected category is ‘Business’, this will kill ad sales from your websites because of several reasons. When our managers are looking to buy ads on Business related websites for our customers, they will see your Credit Cards related website and will not buy any ads from you. Moreover, they’ll click “Don’t Show” button and won’t see your site in the future at all. This will also lower your MageNet publisher rating and decrease the possible number of ad sales from your sites in the whole system.

4. Keep ads active. Try to place every ad offer which you get. The more offers you place, the more ad sales you’ll be getting from MageNet in the future. Make sure that you’ve stopped all sales from the pages where you can’t place the ads.

5. The lower your fees are, the more ad sales you can get. However, lower fees are not always good. If you wish to sell little number of ads on your site, then better keep fees high.

6. Install and activate the Universal Plugin or the WordPress Monetization Plugin at your websites, which allow you to: Save your time by placing the new purchased ads on your website automaticallyWordPress Monetization Plugin Automatically change the ad if some corrections are required Automatically remove the ads that are cancelled by customer Save you from errors which occur during manual ads placement Moreover, you can still set your fees for the contextual ads, refuse placing some ads and forbid sales from certain pages.

7. We have analyzed our sales statistics and found out that you can earn 3 times more if you place sold contextual ad within your page content and surround such ad with relevant content instead of placing the ad in the footer or in the sidebar of your page. By placing sold ads within page content, you’ll earn 3 times more because of the following 3 reasons: Our advertisers prefer contextual ads, placed within page content and according to our statistics, they cancel such ads three times less often. Google likes contextual ads and it considers them as natural. That’s why such ads improve our clients’ sites rankings on Google much better. It means that if you place ads within page content, our clients will want to buy more ads from you! Contextual ads also look more natural for your website visitors since such ads are naturally inserted within the page content. In content link

8. Low quality looking website. If our clients visit your website and they don’t like how it looks like because of any reason, they just won’t buy from you. Low-quality content on some parts of a website can impact the whole site’s rankings, and thus removing low-quality pages, merging or improving the content of individual shallow pages into more useful pages, or moving low-quality pages to a different domain could eventually help the rankings of your higher-quality content.

9. Low amount of content. Websites with a lot of quality content get much more ad sales. Add more content to your websites. MageNet sells contextual ads to our clients for keywords, found within the content of your pages. So the more content you’ve got, the more ad sales you’ll get. Very often it’s not so easy to start writing, and you may need a little push. How about some extra money for content writing? Would it help get you inspired? “Who’s gonna pay me for content on my site?” – you ask. Well, there are some pretty good options. Our partners’ project – Adsy – allows you to cooperate with marketers willing to promote their businesses through guest posts. You can either place the content they provide you with, or create content by yourself and then place it on your site. At the end, you get more content (totally relevant to the topic of your site) and get paid for it. You can find out more about Adsy on the website, and we recommend you give it a try!

10. Interlinking. Internal links are links that go from one page on a domain to a different page on the same domain. Use interlinking to improve your website’s positions and website popularity. Interlinking means when you link one of your own pages to another internally within a website. Since you control your site you can control your blog’s entire internal linking structure. They are commonly used in main navigation. These type of links are useful for these 3 reasons: They allow users to navigate a website Internal linking They help establish information hierarchy for the given website

11. Low metrics of the website. A little number of pages, little amount of content.

12. Non-English website. 98% of ads purchases are made from websites with the English language. We’re very sorry if your sites are not in English, but there is nothing we can do about it right now. Most of our customers are from English speaking countries.

13. Too many ads on your web pages. Ad fee a customer is willing to pay directly depends on the number of ads on your pages and how they look like. That’s why if you’ve got too many unnecessary ads on your page, remove them in order to get a higher fee for each sold ad from MageNet.

14. Set up notifications. You can set up email or SMS notifications which will let you know about new ad offers, payments or critical errors at the convenient time.

15. Monitor your Domain Authority and Alexa Rank. The higher they are, the better since that’s the way how customers determine your website’s popularity.

16. Improve the design of your website. The better design of your website – the more ads you’ll get, the more you’ll earn. Learn 8 Ways to Improve Your Website Design

17. Make your website available on the web. Decide on hosting provider to avoid the cases when site visitors, Google bot and MageNet ads recognition crawler cannot reach the site due to server problems. In addition, we recommend that you set up the alerts or reminders that let you not forget to pay for hosting without a delay.

18. Use all chances to maximize the number of your site pages. Enrich your site with high-quality content. The more pages with content you have the more ads you can sell. One of those opportunities is, like we said, posting some sponsored content on your site. With every piece of content, you agree to place or to write on your site, you get one more page that will get indexed by Google. Adsy, the platform we were talking about earlier, can help you take website monetization to a whole new level. As you can expand your site immensely by taking tasks to create content or place some provided by the marketers.

19. Keep only unique content on your site. People don’t value pages with duplicate content. That means that some of your pages or even the whole site may become not available for sales.
1) Content is a king. Create it as much as you can. Combine different types of content: images, video, text etc.
2) Check your text for plagiarism using special tools (Copyscape)
3) Google Authorship is a great opportunity to protect your content from copying. It lets Google know that you are the unique author of your content.
4) If there are page duplicates on your website, prevent these pages from indexing. Use robots.txt or add the ‘link’ tag with rel=”canonical” attribute.
5) If you copy the content from another resource, make sure that you put a copyright there. Search engines can penalize your website if there’s a property owner claim.
6) The page text should contain more than 2000-5000 symbols. 7) If you use widgets, make sure they are different on every page of your website.

20. Set up the Robots.txt and .htaccess properly. The indexing of certain pages shouldn’t be forbidden for search crawlers. Check it out and make sure that files robots.txt and .htaccess do not prevent pages from indexing.

21. Build a sitemap for your site. Some pages of your site could be available only via JavaScript or flash-navigation. Search engines could not crawl that kind of pages. The sitemap lets Google know what pages your website consists of.

Source: http://www.magenet.com/increase-your-online-earning-monetize-your-websites-via-magenet/

67 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Ecommerce

Performance should inform business decisions, and KPIs should drive actions.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are like milestones on the road to online retail success. Monitoring them will help ecommerce entrepreneurs identify progress toward sales, marketing, and customer service goals.

KPIs should be chosen and monitored depending on your unique business goals. Certain KPIs support some goals while they’re irrelevant for others. With the idea that KPIs should differ based on the goal being measured, it’s possible to consider a set of common performance indicators for ecommerce.

Table of Contents

1) What is a performance indicator?

2) What is a key performance indicator?

3) Why are key performance indicators important?

4) What is the difference between a SLA and a KPI?

5) Types of key performance indicators

6) 67 key performance indicator examples for ecommerce

7) How do I create a KPI?

Here is the definition of key performance indicators, types of key performance indicators, and 67 examples of ecommerce key performance indicators.

What is a performance indicator?

A performance indicator is a quantifiable measurement or data point used to gauge performance relative to some goal. As an example, some online retailers may have a goal to increase site traffic 50% in the next year.

Relative to this goal, a performance indicator might be the number of unique visitors the site receives daily or which traffic sources send visitors (paid advertising, search engine optimization, brand or display advertising, a YouTube video, etc.)
What is a key performance indicator?

For most goals there could be many performance indicators — often too many — so often people narrow it down to just two or three impactful data points known as key performance indicators. KPIs are those measurements that most accurately and succinctly show whether or not a business in progressing toward its goal.
Why are key performance indicators important?

KPIs are important just like strategy and goal setting are important. Without KPIs, it’s difficult to gauge progress over time. You’d be making decisions based on gut instinct, personal preference or belief, or other unfounded hypotheses. KPIs tell you more information about your business and your customers, so you can make informed and strategic decisions.

But KPIs aren’t important on their own. The real value lies in the actionable insights you take away from analyzing the data. You’ll be able to more accurately devise strategies to drive more online sales, as well as understand where there may problems in your business.

Plus, the data related to KPIs can be distributed to the larger team. This can be used to educate your employees and come together for critical problem-solving.
What is the difference between a SLA and a KPI?

SLA stands for service level agreement, while a KPI is a key performance indicator. A service level agreement in ecommerce establishes the scope for the working relationship between an online retailer and a vendor. For example, you might have a SLA with your manufacturer or digital marketing agency. A KPI, as we know, is a metric or data point related to some business operation. These are often quantifiable, but KPIs may also be qualitative.
Types of key performance indicators

There are many types of key performance indicators. They may be qualitative, quantitative, predictive of the future, or revealing of the past. KPIs also touch on various business operations. When it comes to ecommerce, KPIs generally fall into one of the following five categories:

Sales
Marketing
Customer service
Manufacturing
Project management

67 key performance indicator examples for ecommerce

Note: The performance indicators listed below are in no way an exhaustive list. There are an almost infinite number of KPIs to consider for your ecommerce business.

What are key performance indicators for sales?
What are key performance indicators for marketing?
What are key performance indicators for customer service?
What are key performance indicators for manufacturing?
What are key performance indicators for project management?

What are key performance indicators for sales?

Sales key performance indicators are measures that tell you how your business is doing in terms of conversions and revenue. You can look at sales KPIs related to a specific channel, time period, team, employee, etc. to inform business decisions.

Examples of key performance indicators for sales include:

Sales: Ecommerce retailers can monitor total sales by the hour, day, week, month, quarter, or year.

Average order size: Sometimes called average market basket, the average order size tells you how much a customer typically spends on a single order.

Gross profit: Calculate this KPI by subtracting the total cost of goods sold from total sales.

Average margin: Average margin, or average profit margin, is a percentage that represents your profit margin over a period of time.

Number of transactions: This is the total number of transactions. Use this KPI in conjunction with average order size or total number of site visitors for deeper insights.

Conversion rate: The conversion rate, also a percetage, is the rate at which users on your ecommerce site are converting (or buying). This is calculated by dividing the total number of visitors (to a site, page, category, or selection of pages) by the total number of conversions.

Shopping cart abandonment rate: The shopping cart abandonment rate tells you how many users are adding products to their shopping cart but not checking out. The lower this number, the better. If your cart abandonment rate is high, there may be too much friction in the checkout process.

New customer orders vs. returning customer orders: This metric shows a comparison between new and repeat customers. Many business owners focus only on customer acquisition, but customer retention can also drive loyalty, word of mouth marketing, and higher order values.

Cost of goods sold (COGS): COGS tells you how much you’re spending to sell a product. This includes manufacturing, employee wages, and overhead costs.

Total available market relative to a retailer’s share of market: Tracking this KPI will tell you how much your business is growing compared to others within your industry.

Product affinity: This KPI tells you which products are purchased together. This can and should inform cross-promotion strategies.

Product relationship: This is which products are viewed consecutively. Again, use this KPI to formulate effective cross-selling tactics.

Inventory levels: This KPI could tell you how much stock is on hand, how long product is sitting, how quickly product is selling, etc.

Competitive pricing: It’s important to gauge your success and growth against yourself and against your competitors. Monitor your competitors’ pricing strategies and compare them to your own.

Customer lifetime value (CLV): The CLV tells you how much a customer is worth to your business over the course of their relationship with your brand. You want to increase this number over time through strengthening relationships and focusing on customer loyalty.

Revenue per visitor (RPV): RPV gives you an average of how much a person spends during a single visit to your site. If this KPI is low, you can view website analytics to see how you can drive more online sales.

Churn rate: For an online retailer, the churn rate tells you how quickly customers are leaving your brand or canceling/failing to renew a subscription with your brand.

Customer acquisition cost (CAC): CAC tells you how much your company spends on acquiring a new customer. This is measured by looking at your marketing spend and how it breaks down per individual customer.

What are key performance indicators for marketing?

Key performance indicators for marketing tell you how well you’re doing in relation to your marketing and advertising goals. These also impact your sales KPIs. Marketers use KPIs to understand which products are selling, who’s buying them, how they’re buying them, and why they’re buying them. This can help you market more strategically in the future and inform product development.

Examples of key performance indicators for marketing include:

Site traffic: Site traffic refers to the total number of visits to your ecommerce site. More site traffic means more users are hitting your store.

New visitors vs. returning visitors: New site visitors are first-time visitors to your site. Returning visitors, on the other hand, have been to your site before. While looking at this metric alone won’t reveal much, it can help ecommerce retailers gauge success of digital marketing campaigns. If you’re running a retargeted ad, for example, returning visitors should be higher.

Time on site: This KPI tells you how much time visitors are spending on your website. Generally, more time spent means they’ve had deeper engagements with your brand. Usually, you’ll want to see more time spent on blog content and landing pages and less time spent through the checkout process.

Bounce rate: The bounce rate tells you how many users exit your site after viewing only one page. If this number is high, you’ll want to investigate why visitors are leaving your site instead of exploring.

Pageviews per visit: Pageviews per visit refers to the average number of pages a user will view on your site during each visit. Again, more pages usually means more engagement. However, if it’s taking users too many clicks to find the products they’re looking for, you want to revisit your site design.

Average session duration: The average amount of time a person spends on your site during a single visit is called the average session duration.

Traffic source: The traffic source KPI tells you where visitors are coming from or how they found your site. This will provide information about which channels are driving the most traffic, such as: organic search, paid ads, or social media.

Mobile site traffic: Monitor the total number of users who use mobile devices to access your store and make sure your site is optimized for mobile.

Day part monitoring: Looking at when site visitors come can tell you which are peak traffic times.

Newsletter subscribers: The number of newsletter subscribers refers to how many users have opted into your email marketing list. If you have more subscribers, you can reach more consumers. However, you’ll also want to look at related data, such as the demographics of your newsletter subscribers, to make sure you’re reaching your target audience.

Texting subscribers: Newer to digital marketing than email, ecommerce brands can reach consumers through SMS-based marketing. Texting subscribers refers to the number of customers on your text message contact list. To get started with your own text-based marketing, browse these SMS Shopify apps.

Subscriber growth rate: This tells you how quickly your subscriber list is growing. Pairing this KPI with the total number of subscribers will give you good insight into this channel.

Email open rate: This KPI tells you the percentage of subscribers that open your email. If you have a low email open rate, you could test new subject lines, or try cleaning your list for inactive or irrelevant subscribers.

Email click-through rate (CTR): While the open rate tells you the percentage of subscribers who open the email, the click-through rate tells you the percentage of those who actually clicked on a link after opening. This is arguably more important than the open rate because without clicks, you won’t drive any traffic to your site.

Unsubscribes: You can look at both the total number and the rate of unsubscriptions for your email list.

Chat sessions initiated: If you have live chat functionality on your ecommerce store, the number of chat sessions initiated tells you how many users engaged with the tool to speak to a virtual aide.

Social followers and fans: Whether you’re on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or Snapchat (or a combination of a few), the number of followers or fans you have is a useful KPI to gauge customer loyalty and brand awareness. Many of those social media networks also have tools that ecommerce businesses can use to learn more about their social followers.

Social media engagement: Social media engagement tells you how actively your followers and fans are interacting with your brand on social media.

Clicks: The total number of clicks a link gets. You could measure this KPI almost anywhere: on your website, social media, email, display ads, PPC, etc.

Average CTR: The average click-through rate tells you the percentage of users on a page (or asset) who click on a link.

Average position: The average position KPI tells you about your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search performance. This demonstrates where you are on search engine results pages. Most online retailers have the goal of being number one for their targeted keywords.

Pay-per-click (PPC) traffic volume: If you’re running PPC campaigns, this tells you how much traffic you’re successfully driving to your site.

Blog traffic: You can find this KPI by simply creating a filtered view in your analytics tool. It’s also helpful to compare blog traffic to overall site traffic.

Number and quality of product reviews: Product reviews are great for a number of reasons: They provide social proof, they can help with SEO, and they give you valuable feedback for your business. The quantity and content of product reviews are important KPIs to track for your ecommerce business.

Banner or display advertising CTRs: The CTRs for your banner and display ads will tell you the percentage of viewers who have clicked on the ad. This KPI will give you insight into your copy, imagery, and offer performance.

Affiliate performance rates: If you engage in affiliate marketing, this KPI will help you understand which channels are most successful.

What are key performance indicators for customer service?

Customer service KPIs tell you how effective your customer service is and if you’re meeting expectations.You might be wondering: what should the KPIs be in our call center, for our email support team, for our social media support team, etc. Measuring and tracking these KPIs will help you ensure you’re providing a positive customer experience.

Key performance indicators for customer service include:

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: The CSAT KPI is typically measured by customer responses to a very common survey question: “How satisfied were you with your experience?” This is usually answered with a numbered scale.

Net promoter score (NPS): Your NPS KPI provides insight into your customer relationships and loyalty by telling you how likely customers are to recommend your brand to someone in their network.

Hit rate: Calculate your hit rate by taking the total number of sales of a single product and dividing it by the number of customers who have contacted your customer service team about said product.

Customer service email count: This is the number of emails your customer support team receives.

Customer service phone call count: Rather than email, this is how frequently your customer support team is reached via phone.

Customer service chat count: If you have live chat on your ecommerce site, you may have a customer service chat count.

First response time: First response time is the average amount of time it takes a customer to receive the first response to their query. Aim low!

Average resolution time: This is the amount of time it takes for a customer support issue to be resolved, starting from the point at which the customer reached out about the problem.

Active issues: The total number of active issues tells you how many queries are currently in progress.

Backlogs: Backlogs are when issues are getting backed up in your system. This could be caused by a number of factors.

Concern classification: Beyond the total number of customer support interactions, look at quantitative data around trends to see if you can be proactive and reduce customer support queries. You’ll classify the customer concerns which will help identify trends and your progress in solving issues.

Service escalation rate: The service escalation rate KPI tells you how many times a customer has asked a customer service representative to redirect them to a supervisor or other senior employee. You want to keep this number low.

What are key performance indicators for manufacturing?

Key performance indicators for manufacturing are, predictably, related to your supply chain and production processes. These may tell you where efficiencies and inefficiencies are, as well as help you understand productivity and expenses.

Key performance indicators for manufacturing in ecommerce include:

Cycle time: The cycle time manufacturing KPI tells you how long it takes to manufacture a single product from start to finish. Monitoring this KPI will give you insight into production efficiency.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE): The OEE KPI provides ecommerce businesses with insight into how well manufacturing equipment is performing.

Overall labor effectiveness (OLE): Just as you’ll want insight into your equipment, the OLE KPI will tell you how productive the staff operating the machines are.

Yield: Yield is a straightforward manufacturing KPI. It is the number of products you have manufactured. Consider analyzing the yield variance KPI in manufacturing, too, as that will tell you how much you deviate from your average.
First time yield (FTY) and first time through (FTT): FTY, also referred to as first pass yield, is a quality-based KPI. It tells you how wasteful your production processes are. To calculate FTY, divide the number of successfully manufactured units by the total number of units that started the process.

Number of non-compliance events or incidents: In manufacturing, there are several sets of regulations, licenses, and policies businesses must comply with. These are typically related to safety, working conditions, and quality. You’ll want to reduce this number to ensure you’re operating within the mandated guidelines.

What are key performance indicators for project management?

Key performance indicators for project management give you insight into how well your teams are performing and completing specific tasks. Each project or initiative within your ecommerce business has different goals, and must be managed with different processes and workflows. Project management KPIs tell you how well each team is working to achieve their respective goals and how well their processes are working to help them achieve those goals.

Key performance indicators for project management include:

Hours worked: The total hours worked tells you how much time a team put into a project. Project managers should also assess the variance in estimated vs. actual hours worked to better predict and resource future projects.

Budget: The budget indicates how much money you have allocated for the specific project. Project managers and ecommerce business owners will want to make sure that the budget is realistic; if you’re repeatedly over budget, some adjustments to your project planning need to be made.

Return on investment (ROI): The ROI KPI for project management tells you how much your efforts earned your business. The higher this number, the better. The ROI accounts for all of your expenses and earnings related to a project.

Cost variance: Just as it’s helpful to compare real vs. predicted timing and hours, you should examine the total cost against the predicted cost. This will help you understand where you need to reel it in and where you may want to invest more.

Cost performance index (CPI): The CPI for project management, like ROI, tells you how much your resource investment is worth. The CPI is calculated by dividing the earned value by the actual costs. If you come in under one, there’s room for improvement.

How do I create a KPI?

Selecting your KPIs begins with clearly stating your goals and understanding which areas of business impact those goals. Of course, KPIs for ecommerce can and should differ for each of your goals, whether they’re related to boosting sales, streamlining marketing, or improving customer service.
Key performance indicator templates

Here are a few key performance indicator templates, with examples of goals and the associated KPIs.

GOAL 1: Boost sales 10% in the next quarter.

KPI examples:

Daily sales.
Conversion rate.
Site traffic.

GOAL 2: Increase conversion rate 2% in the next year.

KPI examples:

Conversion rate.
Shopping cart abandonment rate.
Competitive pricing.

GOAL 3: Grow site traffic 20% in the next year.

KPI examples:

Site traffic.
Traffic sources.
Promotional click-through rates.
Social shares.
Bounce rates.

GOAL 4: Reduce customer service calls by half in the next 6 months.

KPI examples:

Service call classification.
Pages visited immediately before call.

There are many performance indicators and the value of those indicators is directly tied to the goal measured. Monitoring which page someone visited before initiating a customer service call makes sense as a KPI for GOAL 4 since it could help identify areas of confusion that, when corrected, would reduce customer service calls. But that same performance indicator would be useless for GOAL 3.

Once you have set goals and selected KPIs, monitoring those indicators should become an everyday exercise. Most importantly: Performance should inform business decisions and you should use KPIs to drive actions.

By Mark Hayes

Best cryptocurrency ICO investment for 2018 Washington Exchange

Washington Exchange (WASH) a decentralize trading platform, which knows the problem in crypto it’s unstable and underdeveloped 2018 has been very exciting with these massive price gains but there is a tons of technical development that needs to be completed before crypto become mainstream. One of our goals at Washington Exchange is to make the general population more informed about cryptocurrencies and their advantages and safety. Best cryptocurrency ICO investment for 2018 Washington Exchange.

There are various decentralized exchanges in the market that are being used, Washington Exchange Decentralization offers multiple benefits, making it the best ICO of 2018:

-Identity theft. In the centralized trading platform, we give out our identity, credit card information, bank information and more to everyone we do business with. Through the power of cryptography this is no longer necessary.

-Banking Cartels. Large organizations have no need to keep things private. The power of this technology allows everything to be out in the open without compromising any aspect of security. In the traditional centralized systems, security is used as an argument to keep all of their information and your information locked away

-Unbanked. There is no reason any longer to keep the poor and unbanked from participating in the global economy. Capitalist-minded financial services no longer play an overpowering part in their exclusion and freedoms.

Open and transparent. All transactions occurring on the network and all code used within the network are open source. This allows anybody to inspect, copy and improve upon it.

-Incorruptibly secure. The traditional financial systems are centralized, this can be infiltrated by hackers or robbers attempting to tamper with your funds. It also has the potential to become corrupted or coerced. With a decentralized system everyone keeps full control of their funds.

-24/7 System. A decentralized exchange is a global service without any borders, available to any member of the free internet. Servers operate on every corner of the globe at all times of the day. This also allows for minimal transactions costs.

Washington Coins (WASH) are very low in supply, and this will never change. They are 1000 times as scarce in comparison to other exchanges. As demand inevitably rises through the trading of our coins, the number of coins will remain the same and never be increased, there are 9,000,000 available, as oppose to the billions available in other forms. Washington Exchange is a unique exchange with no single institution, person or server, and as such it has no single point of failure. With our decentralized exchange there is no need to trust any single authority. We fully understand that exchange is a venture with its own risks. With this in mind we have fully invested in expertise and advisors who will continuously help in assessing the possible risks, as well as creating ways to address them. In our current climate of digitalization, online security is of our key concern. Best cryptocurrency ICO investment for 2018 Washington Exchange. Our systems at WASH are highly secured and always guaranteed no possibilities of hacking. Washington Exchange and Coins are undoubtedly the number one profitable alternative exchange and coin available on the market. Best cryptocurrency ICO investment for 2018 Washington Exchange.

Coin Details
Name: Washington Exchange
Symbol: WASH
Token Contract Address: 0x5b8c5c4835b2b5daef18079389fdaefe9f7a6063
Pre-sale starts in: April 20th and End in April 25th
Normal Sale Start: April 25th and End in May 25th

Official Link
Official Website – http://washingtonexchange.io
Official Telegram – https://t.me/washingtonexchangeofficial
Official Twitter – https://twitter.com/washingtonexoff
Official Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/washingtonexchangedex
Official Bitcointalk – https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3196451.0

Be the Head and Not the Tail

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” – Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer

This has been true since the beginning of time…

The automobile…
The mobile phone…
The Internet…

And so it goes with the quest to ‘work online’ or ‘work from home.’

It’s often the case when people hear you talk about creating an online business, or ‘working from home.’

Your friends and family think you’re crazy, then they try to stop you…then they’re jealous of the amazing lifestyle you find!

We know what that’s like…

We went from thinking it was ‘too good to be true,,,,’

… to joining those that had already escaped the rat race… fired their boss, and were living the life of their dreams in whatever slice of paradise they had discovered…

We have friends who have their ‘slice of paradise’ in the Swiss Alps, a beachfront house in Costa Rica, and a cliff-top home overlooking the Sea of Cortez in Mexico. Of course, it’s wonderful to have this network of friends who also work online – we spend a lot of time on ‘working holidays’ visiting each other!

In the future, this e-economy with be the norm rather than the exception, so why not be an early adopter, and beat the masses, and get established now.

Laptop Lifestyle System is an online system available to you to start your online business now!

From Entrepreneur to Millionaire – See the Difference!

“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”

~ Charlie Munger

Have you ever wondered what entrepreneurs did to become millionaires? and how they easily became multi-millionaires?
They became millionaires because of their dedication, patience and focus. They became multi-millionaires so easily because after reaching their first million, everything else falls into places.

However, they say it’s difficult to reach their first million. Why?

Because most entrepreneurs often hold themselves back from the following mentalities:

1. Not believing in yourself.
The biggest thing holding you back from becoming successful it’s the fact that you don’t believe in yourself. Instead of second-guessing every move you make, trust your gut and go with your intuition instead of waiting for insights from those around you.

As Dale Carnegie once said, “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”

2. Doing everything yourself.
Despite wearing multiple hats and being a jack of all trades, it’s impossible to do everything on your own. Let’s say that you just launched a startup. You need to hire talented individuals who enhance your strengths and pick up the slack in your weaker areas.

Learn how to outsource and delegate the tasks that you’re not familiar with or aren’t as strong in. This is one of the secrets that entrepreneurs rarely tell you, but it’s essential if you want your business to grow.

3. Spending everything you make.
It’s tempting to go out and buy a luxury car after receiving a six-figure check. The thing is, wealthy people know how to live below their means, as opposed to spending everything that they just made. Many wealthy people, such as Warren Buffett, live in modest homes and drive practical cars.

4. Setting unrealistic expectations.
While the wealthy definitely dream big, they also set realistic expectations. They’re well aware that they’re not going to become millionaires overnight. It takes a lot of hard work and patience to achieve their goals.

As any marathon runner will tell you, you can’t expect to run 26 miles without the proper training and conditioning. Review the progress you’ve already made and where you’re headed.

5. Spending time with the wrong people.
The rich don’t waste their time by associating with the wrong crowd. I’m talking about the naysayers and negative people who keep telling you that you can’t achieve your dreams, or the people who are using your success to their advantage.

Instead, the rich spend time with like-minded people who are driven, passionate and thinking about how amazing their future is going to be. They are always building their brand.

6. Relying too much on plastic.
Credit cards can be useful if you need to build your credit or invest in your business as long as you’re smart with how you use them. It’s incredibly easy to get yourself into credit card debt. That means that instead of making wise investments or putting money into your business, you’re busy paying off your credit card bills with those high interest rates.

7. Not planning for the long run.
The wealthy have a knack for always looking toward and planning for the future. They know where they want to go and what it will take for them to achieve success. This allows them to anticipate any obstacles and have a plan in place to handle those challenges.

If you are starting a new business venture, you need to have a long-term plan that addresses how to attract and retain clients and customers and outlines how you’re different from the competition.

If you have any or all of the above mentalities, don’t let it stand between you and your first million.

10 Habits of Self-Made Millionaires

These are the 10 nuggets of gold – Habits of Self-Made Millionaires. Statistics show that these are the common straits of such people, regardless of whether they are born rich or poor. What sets millionaires apart from the average people? Were they born into the right family? Did they strike the lottery? Research shows that they have these traits in common.

1) Thinking in Abundance

There is no shortage of money on this planet, only a shortage of people who think correctly. As you are reading this, there is $2.3 TRILLION dollars circulating around the globe everyday, and that amount is destined to grow throughout time!

2) Surround Yourself with Like-Minded Individuals

You are the sum of 5 people you spend the most of your time with. As the risk of being portrayed as arrogant, rich and successful people value their network of friends, because rich people build rich networks!

3) Shift Focus from Spending Money to Making Money

Instead of becoming a consumer, become a producer. Instead of buying more, sell more. Instead of attending seminars, host seminars. Instead of buying books, sell books. You get the idea. Not that there is anything wrong with consuming, it is simply that rich people produce more than they consume.

4) No TV

Did you know why you don’t see ads on Lamborghini on TV? It is because the people who can afford them don’t waste time sitting on the couch!

5) Multiple Streams of Income

The rich people have multiple streams of income and don’t just depend on one. Income streams could be from property rentals, investment in stocks, royalties from book authoring, full time jobs, side hustling, hosting webinars, etc.

6) Be Generous

The truly rich people think about serving others and giving back to the community. The currency of real networking is not greed but generosity.

7) Have an Exit Strategy

Everytime you hear someone become a success overnight, it is backed by effort and turmoil. Ultimately, all the multi-millionaires and billionaires get their break when they sell their business away – which is actually the ultimate exit strategy. Whatsapp was started in 2009 and sold for $19 BILLION in 2014!

8) Get into Properties

This is the most time tested vehicle to creating and protecting your wealth since centuries ago. If you really don’t know what to do with the excess of your money, you cannot go wrong putting them in properties.

9) Leaders are Readers

For the rich and successful, learning never stops even after graduation.

10) Always be Hustling

All the tips, tricks and trade secrets won’t amount to anything if you just sit around and do nothing. As you see, successful people are not necessarily smarter or more talented. They simply hustle or work more even when the going gets tough.