TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms out today. From trending dances to sketch comedies, social media influencers are really finding creative ways to make great content, brand themselves, and earn livable salaries. Still, the social media platform has not been without its challenges and controversy.

What Is TikTok and Why Is TikTok US In the Throes of Political Discourse

TikTok, in many ways, is like the popular Vine app we had a few years ago. Like Vine, TikTok is a video social media app where 'real short videos' take center-stage. The short-form video app has been the source of viral dances that have taken pop songs up the Billboard charts, as well as spearheaded viral political activism and satirical content. It is the virality of its content that has added to the app's popularity and rapid rise within the pop culture digital dynamic.

All things considered (including the shareability of its content to just about every other popular social media platform), all is good and well in the world of TikTok. Well, except for its owner, that is. The TikTok app is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. The concern is that user data can be handed over to the Chinese government if so required. The owners of TikTok has pointed to the fact that they are against such practices and would not hand over user data at the request of the Chinese or any other government. Still, the United States (US) government considers the app to be a national security threat and commands that the app owner meet the outlined requirements of risk being banned in the US.

The Ultimatum: The Only Solution the Trump Administration Will Accept

Even with the best efforts of the owners of TikTok to reassure the US government and other critics that the app does not use spy technologies nor is it a threat to national security, the Trump administration has laid down the gauntlet. The ultimatum is simply this, be banned in the US or be owned by a US company with user data being held and controlled on US soil - far from access by foreign governments and espionage. With the option to be US-owned, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

If you are a fan of Instagram then you already know you can find goods and services via this social networking website. Many business owners advertise their products here and they have excellent reasons to do this. With over 500 million visitors daily, Instagram has the potential to bring serious business to your site. It gets even better. According to reliable statistics, over 130 million Instagram users engage with shopping posts. These are some big numbers right there.

In the past, Instagram users had to leave the site then log on to the seller's website in order to buy goods and services online. Now, this is an inconvenience and a waste of valuable time. The good news is that customers can now buy goods and services directly from Instagram without leaving the site or navigating to the seller's website. BigCommerce has teamed up with Facebook to unlock checkout on Instagram. In simple English, this means that if you are just looking at Instagram pages and you see any product you like, you can buy it immediately without having to log out of Instagram and log on to the seller's website. Below are three advantages of this innovative development.

Meet Customers Where They Are

One of the best things about shopping online is that the seller offers goods and services to the customers in real time. You do not have to commute to some offline shop somewhere and waste valuable time in traffic. Now, checkout on Instagram offers online shoppers instant availability of products. For the 130 million shoppers on Instagram, this feature means that the seller meets the customer where they are. In effect, you have a safe, fast and convenient shopping alternative right here on Instagram.

Simple and Secure Platform

This innovation creates a wonderful social media shopping experience for Instagram users. You probably had some favorite products already but you could not access these products directly in the past. Now, BigCommerce has just given you the opportunity to shop for all your favorite brands directly from your Instagram page. You can even store payment credentials and make future purchases seamlessly on Instagram. This gives you fast, secure and simple transactions all the time. 

TikTok has rapidly gained popularity as a social networking app, especially among the young generation. As of 2020, the app has more than 500 million active users and was the most downloaded social media app in January. The number of users keeps rising steadily each day.

Just like in other social media platforms, Influencers are now making brand endorsements and earning good money from TikTok.

How Much Do Influencers Earn?

Generally, influencers earn between 200$ - 20,000$ per post depending on several factors such as product niche, audience country and brand affinity and engagement rate of the post.

Unfortunately, TikTok does not offer native ads options like its competitors. Settling on the advertising rate to pay influencers is, therefore, tricky for brands. It is usually a matter of negotiation with the influencer. Previously, a large following was deemed to translate to higher pay for influencers. However, the focus is now changing.

Brands have come to understand that a large following on social media can be bought. It is, therefore, not a decisive factor in deciding how much to pay influencers. Brands have now established that post social engagement is vital for a successful marketing campaign. These interactions between influencers and followers reveal the number of people interested in the brand or product.

Influencer Engagement and Earnings Calculator

As an influencer, knowing this social engagement rate gives you a clue of your account's value on the market. We understand this concern. Our Influencer Engagement and Earnings calculator will sort you out. It helps you understand your potential value as an influencer by approximating your TikTok's account social engagement rate.

The tiktok money calculator igface uses three factors to determine engagement rate; the number of likes, number of comments, and the number of followers. To decide on your social engagement rate, use the following formula;

(number of likes + number of comments/number of followers) × 100

The higher your engagement rate, the higher the chances of brands considering you for marketing deals.

Influencers must understand that this calculator is only for educational purposes and is in no way a tool by Tik Tok. It is just an opinion based on the popular view.

How to Make Money on TikTok in 2020

Joe Rogan is making over $100 million by taking his world famous podcast JRE (Joe Rogan Experience) to Spotify. The Newark NJ born comedian and host of the hottest podcast is taking it all to just one platform starting September 1st.

The Joe Rogan Experience was not even available on Spotify before this deal came through.

He will no longer be on Apple iTunes. So 100,000+ listeners will now have to jump to a different platform to listen. There could still be clips of the show on YouTube.

JRE Listeners Moving to Spotify

Experts feel that many will now join Spotify just to get access to JRE. Think when Howard Stern went to XM Sirius Radio. Anyone wanting the show will have to pay for Spotify but not for the show itself.

Rogan could take a hit in listenership, but the payday from Spotify should offset any losses.

And when users get Joe Rogan from Spotify they will start downloading all their podcasts from the same source, making Spotify the potential king of podcasting. This creates competition in the field where there really hasn’t been much with Apple dominating 90% of the market.

There could be a battle for exclusive podcast deals going forward with some of the big names being bid on like television content by the big carriers.

Joe Rogan Makes $100+ Million Exclusive Deal with Spotify

Over the past few years there has been an increasing concern about how private our data really is. And various scandals and leaks have made a lot of people start thinking of ways to better secure our data. Whenever you post something on social media or put information into a website, you are in most cases giving up control of that data for the platform or website you've given it to to be able to do what they want with it. A lot of the time we know this because we will get a popup requiring us to give permission and accept that our data is being used. But in many cases the tracking of our data is done a lot more discreetly. With the data gathered often sold to marketing and data analytics companies, with none of that profit returned to the user. That is why the Blockchain Cell Phone BOB has been created.

Blockchain Secure Calling

There has also been a shift recently to people doing a large amount of their internet activity on their mobile devices as apposed to personal computers or laptops. So it only makes sense that a blockchain powered cell phone would be developed, ensuring all calls, texts and internet activity are secure.

Function X

This is why FunctionX, part of the PundiX Foundation have developed the Blok On Blok or BOB blockchain smartphone. The phone operates on the FunctionX(FX) blockchain protocol. This allows for calling, texting and browsing without ever having to use a centralized service provider. With such a new operating system some people may be concerned about how they will get their favorite apps and use them to connect with their friends and family who don't have a blockchain phone. But BOB's operating system was built off of the latest Android operating system and allows for a unique dual mode where the user can seamlessly switch between blockchain mode and normal Android mode. This gives the user the comfort of knowing their data is completely secure when they want to use the blockchain mode, but they can also use their favorite apps in the normal Android mode. It should be noted however that even if the person you are talking to in blockchain mode doesn't have a blockchain phone, your data will still be secure as long as you are in blockchain mode.

What is a TikTok Money Calculator?

So what is a Tik Tok Money Calculator? It is a very helpful tool that helps people understand how much they can earn from doing Tik Toks. It calculates your estimated earnings from your Tik Tok account. It looks at your following and how much views you get and gives you a very good and accurate estimate of what you will earning from that account.

This means if you have a lot of loyal and active followers, you will make a lot of money in this app. A lot of followers leads to a lot of views, and a lot views leads to a lot money coming from all types of sources, for example sponsors. This tik tok calculator is not exact however its estimates are very, I mean very close to the real amount you will earn from Tik tok. It gives you good estimates of your account value.

I put in my very own personal account to test it out because I was skeptical at first. But, when I got my results of my estimate earning and matched it with my actual earning, I was shocked how close it was. I am not messing guys, it just missed out by one digit before the decimal in the estimate. It also tells you your monthly results and gives you a graph to show if your earnings increase or decrease.

What I have noticed also from these beautiful detailed graphs is that if you loose followers or don't have that much of an audience then you get less income from that account. If you have less followers this means you will get less views and less companies will sponsor you and that finally leads to less income. This leads us to our next point.

All human activities acquire an internet presentation or hosted website that will best describe fields of action, present a product or service that is on offer. Constant changes and improvements in web hosting form the basis for web presentations that are used for personal affirmation or presenting products and services

Amazon Web Services

Web hosting from Amazon offers many low cost services that help their users to make the best presentations with simple and easy to use tools that are designed to meet their needs. Amazon Web Services use cloud web hosting solutions. These can be used for simple web site hosting, single web page web app hosting, simple static web site hosting and enterprise web hosting. Depending on the complexity of web site structure they can be operated by IT team for enterprise web sites to personal handling by owners of less demanding sites. AWS give you a wide range of features that are necessary for quality, visibility, traffic, and presentation that are customary for today's standards.

Why is AWS superb?

Using web hosting from Amazon and AWS provides you with broad platform support. This means you can use different content management system (CMS) such as WordPress, Joomla, and similar programs. AWS provides SDKs (software development kit) for platforms that are widely used such as Java, Ruby, .Net. etc. They provide worldwide datacenters, which means that you can use a content delivery network (CDN) hosting to deliver your content worldwide and reach your customers anywhere in the world. AWS provides great scalability in terms that its infrastructure can grow and shrink depending on your website's traffic. And last, but not least, AWS web hosting can provide you with flexible pricing models that are made to meet everyone's needs.

On April 26, 2018, the company Square announced that they’ve reached an agreement to acquire Weebly for $365 million in cash and stock. The announcement seemed odd for a payment provider company to acquire a website builder company.

Other Square Acquisitions

If you never knew, Square has been exploring other areas such as Caviar which is a food delivery service and Zesty which is a food catering service. Both of these companies have also been acquired in 2014 and 2018.

When Weebly was acquired, its competitor Squarespace had raised $200 million at a $1.7 billion dollar valuation at the end of 2017.

Square believes that buying Weebly can create “one cohesive solution” for entrepreneurs looking to build an online and offline business. Weebly has 40 percent of its paid customers outside of the U.S. which helps Square expand its brand globally.

Square Weebly

With all of that said, how does this acquisition affect Weebly one year later? The website builder is still regarded as one of the easiest website builders to use. It’s not as flexible as Wix and it’s not as sophisticated as Squarespace, but Weebly might have an advantage over its competition when it comes to e-commerce features. This particular website builder can provide you many e-commerce features such as selling gift cards, adding customer accounts, deal with abandoned shopping cart details, and it has an in-store pickup feature. There are even more e-commerce features that can help your e-commerce business. Weebly is the only website builder that makes e-commerce easy to use. Weebly has been building its e-commerce features aggressively since being acquired from Square.

Looking to buy or sell a domain name? Head over to NameCheap Auctions!

Millions of domains have been registered over the past couple of decades - and many of them are now up for sale.

Are you in the market for a domain name? Are you looking to sell a NameCheap domain name you no longer need or want?

Check out NameCheap Auctions - THE place to buy and sell old or expired domains. Our searchable platform receives thousands of hits, every single day. And while .com domains are available, you'll also find other options including .net, .us and loads more. Scroll through the NameCheap Auctions marketplace and you might even find the perfect domain name you've been searching for!

Domains can be listed from as little as $1, right up to $1,000. The seller sets the price when listing the domain name and the purchaser can buy it for that price only - there is no option to haggle and potential purchasers cannot make direct contact with sellers. The transaction is complete in as little as a few hours and the money received by the seller can be transferred to a registered Paypal account within a few days (charges from Paypal may be incurred).

Our system is quick, easy and user-friendly. Buyers can filter their selection by category, price, content or length to find a domain name that meets their requirements.

For those looking to sell, using NameCheap Auctions makes it easy to promote your unwanted domain names to people who will be interested in buying them. Perhaps you registered an interesting domain a while ago, but haven't needed to use it. NameCheap Auctions is the ideal place to advertise it for sale AND potentially make a profit. You can choose up to five categories for each domain, for example business, advertising, technology and so on. This will help prospective buyers to filter their search and find the domain name they're looking for.

If you want to setup an online store and sell products over the Internet, you'll need an ecommerce platform like BigCommerce. The hosting service provides everything that you will need to setup your store and run it. You can design your store simply with a range of templates that are provided or dig in deeper with HTML and CSS customization. Like other hosted solutions, you are dependent on the platform for operation, so make sure you look at all options before making a final conclusion. Other options include Volusion, Jimdo, Squarespace and Shopify.

Long-Term Solution

Companies that currently use BigCommerce include Gibson Guitars, TravelPro and Toyota, so you know they will be around for the foreseeable future. The other option is build your own store on top of a free solution like WordPress. But that requires additional costs, time, and expertise to get everything running and to keep it current.

BigCommerce Plans Available

The Standard package is only $30 a month, while the Plus is $80 and the Pro plan runs $250 a month. The Plus plan comes with additional marketing tools and an abandoned cart tool to recapture sales. All plans come with 10 templates, payment option integration, account creation, SEO options, image optimization, email marketing services, coupon and voucher features, review of product functionality, blogging and reporting. In comparison to other eCommerce options on the market, the standard package is very good for the low introductory price.