Good news for merchants and small businesses. Now you can accept payments anywhere (at a flea market, for instance) with no merchant account required.

You just plug Square’s credit card device into your iPhone, iPad or Android phone (Square promises support for other devices soon).

Then you can start accepting card payments (you can also use Square to track your cash payments). There are no contracts, monthly fees or hidden costs. You pay a small fee per transaction: 2.75% + 15¢; card-present (swiped) rate or 3.5% + 15¢; card-not-present (keyed-in) rate.

An intuitive control lets your payers give you a tip (by percentage or as a dollar amount).

You can get your receipts sent instantly to your email or mobile phone and then access them online.

Instantly see how much you’ve earned for the day, broken out by tips, tax and payment method. You can then download your data into a standard format to work with your favorite program.

Is Square secure? Yes, it exceeds all industry standard security practices and compliance requirements, such as PCI Level 1 and PA-DSS

When you sign up for Square and submit your address, they will send you a free card reader and Square sticker that says “Pay with Square”

If you use an iPad, you can set up ‘shelves’ of all your items and services. Assign each one a name, price, picture, and description. Square will then automatically assemble your most popular items on the first page.

Cardholders can benefit by creating a Square account, too.

You can speed up and secure every payment. With photo verification, Square users can visually confirm you are the card holder.

If you are a loyal customer of a Square merchant, Square will alert them.

You can see all of your Square receipts in one simple view and browse photos of every item you purchased.

Visit Square’s website at squareup.com

Watch a video about Square

credit: Squareup.com

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This is an example of the importance of researching the elements used in promotions, whether it be a song or a person. This instance can’t possibly shine a good light on the marketer.

Rooms To Go is using a remake of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2″ to sell furniture in its ‘Buy The Room, Get The TV’ sales promotion currently airing on television and radio.

Glitter was convicted in Britain in 1999 for possessing child pornography and served half of a four-month jail term. He then traveled to Cambodia and in 2002 was expelled from that country, but Cambodian officials did not specify any crime or file charges.

In 2006, Glitter was convicted of molesting underage girls in Vietnam and sentenced to three years in prison, with the judge condemning him for “disgusting and sick” behavior, according to story by CBS News.

The conviction prompted the NFL to ban stadiums from playing the song at its games. Teams then scrambled to replace the song, which had been a popular ‘fight song.’

After serving his prison time in Vietnam, Glitter was deported to England, his homeland. In 2009, a British judge banned Glitter from traveling.

Rooms To Go, Inc., founded in 1991, operates as a furniture retailer in the United States with more than 150 locations in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Puerto Rico.

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Game testing is one of the roads less traveled for people who want to earn a living.

Although it sounds cool and fun, testing games is still a job that requires hard work. The job may all be about gaming, but like any other job, it has to be taken seriously.

Being one of the lucky ones to make a living out of passion, in this case the passion for gaming, it is not exactly paradise. There are sacrifices that you have to make. The truth is, if you are just starting in the industry, you will be paid less. But as you work your way up, the salary builds up.

For a beginner, it is recommended to start a career with the smaller companies. These lesser known companies are more likely to hire beginners and game testers with no or little experience. However, they also pay less.

You will get paid depending on the volume of the output you turn in. And this will depend on the volume of assignments you will be given. In consequence, your salary will depend on the rate you sign up for and the amount of work handed to you.

This is why you have to prove yourself so the higher-ups will trust you with more work. You have to turn in assigned work completed in full detail and on time.

You also need a keen attention to detail and must never lose your passion along the way. Money is hard-earned. But with the right attitude, the drive and the skills, you can succeed.

Sample websites for a video game tester and a women’s video game tester.

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Grouping and organizing your keyword data is the key to increasing exposure, clickthrough and conversions, leading to higher ROI from search engine marketing.

Now you can group keywords faster and discover new keyword niches with the help of WordStream’s full suite of free tools, including these two new free tools:

The Free Keyword Niche Finder – Enter a keyword to find your most valuable pockets of keyword opportunities. This tool returns structured keyword suggestions ready to use in profit-enhancing search marketing campaigns.

The Free Keyword Grouper – Drop in a list of keywords or analytic data and get back tightly related groupings to use in more relevant PPC ad groups and targeted SEO Web copy.

You can read more about these new keyword tools here.

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Custom USB accessories and peripherals have become the absolute rage these days. Why’s that? More and more individuals and small businesses have started to use these little personalized gadgets for a great many uses.

A custom USB peripheral such as a flash drive can go a very long way toward promoting a business, for example. Many companies have been getting on the customized USB bandwagon for some time, so don’t you think it’s about your time for your company to do that as well?

So, how good is a promotional USB accessory at increasing your marketing reach? It’s actually better than you might think.

Yes, it’s true that most companies who use this type of service for marketing purposes really just stick with flash drives. These flash drives are fairly cheap to create, and tend to be made to bear the company’s logo on them. That’s usually more than enough to get your business some attention, particularly if you give them away for free along with some sort of event to promote your main product.

When people use that personalized flash drive in their daily lives, your business’s name is going to be right there looking at them. When it comes time for them to buy the main product you’re selling, guess who they’re going to come to first? That’s right: The company who’s name they remember. It’s really that easy.

What can you expect to pay for one of these promotional flash drives? Per unit, probably not much more than a normal flash drive. However, most customization companies will expect you to buy a large lot of them to make them a profit on the customization process. Contact any one of those companies for a quote; most of the time you’re not going to be spending nearly as much as you’d think.

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Wonder what people who visit your website or landing page look at first? Or second? Or what they totally ignore?

Wonder no more. A new site, AttentionWizard.com, (now in beta) will show you—visually.

They do it by instantly creating an “attention heatmap” of your web page that predicts where people will look during the first few seconds of visiting.

By using advanced artificial intelligence algorithms, they can predict where the human eye will move during the first few seconds on a page and where the brain’s attention will focus.

No human subjects are required and it works with screen grabs of your actual pages or design mock-ups.

Less time-consuming and less costly than eye tracking and mouse tracking, it can help you identify landing page problems and increase your conversion rates. In a case study posted on their blog, the new page performed 84% better than the original.

That being said, in AttentionWizard’s own words:

AttentionWizard is not a substitute for landing page testing. It can not evaluate the effectiveness of your sales copy, the strength of your brand or value proposition, the pricing of your product or service, the professionalism of your landing page design, or the Web visitor’s psychological reactions to the specific color scheme you have chosen. But it can help you to improve the quality of your landing page, to make sure that the call-to-action is clear, and to make sure that other visual elements do not distract from the stated conversion goals.

Check out the AttentionWizard website or AttentionWizard blog here.

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