January 26, 2010

Top Social Media Channels to Optimize a Website

Search Engine Optimization is a hypercritical attempt to rank a website higher in the search engines so that with the help of relevant keywords, search engines like Google will find the website on the first page of Google. Further, the objective is to optimize so as to be found online as easily as possible.

You may look at some of the pointers below to optimize top most social media channels greatly in use.

Facebook
You can participate in Facebook by making your personal profile, groups and Pages. As you all are aware that you can promote and optimize your website using Facebook but how you can purpose it efficiently drive traffic to your website is of utmost significance.

To efficiently use Facebook, make a group or page profile for your business instead of personal since they are much more transparent to search engine crawlers. Choose a vanity URL that contains your keywords. When you post content, always include video or imagery because Facebook users like visuals more than plain text. Try to keep updates at least 2-3 times per week. And then using Analytical tools for insights, you may analyze the number of interactions and overall engagement with your page and posts.

Blogs
In order to showcase true commitment and passion via blogs and to stand out from a crowd, you must sustain over long periods of time with good frequency. The initial thing needed would be to buy your own domain name rather than renting one. Keep regular update with new unique new content and also promote your Blog on Twitter regularly since Google now has feature called real time search feed into Twitter API. You may include share buttons to other social media channels also so that visitors can add your blog and posts.

YouTube
The emerging facts and figures showcase the increasing impact of Social Media “Online Video”. Initially, create your own YouTube Channel and mention the link of your blog or website in the description section for your video to link back to your site. Do mention the category and the tags of your video in tags section. Now you may also promote your YouTube video on Twitter.

Twitter
Twitter is a great way to connect, communicate and promote your content from your blog or website. You should add your website’s URL in your profile info. Also, place a “retweet” button on your blog articles and integrate your Twitter URL within your site’s Global Footer appearing at the bottom of every page of your site. This helps to drive your Twitter URL up in the search engines. Do include “Follow me on Twitter” buttons on your emails and blog. Try to shorten your tweets to max. 120 characters so that it allows space for people to “Retweet” your “Tweet” with their comments like “Good post”

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the world’s largest professional networks which is growing rapidly and is considered to be one of the top social media channels. LinkedIn helps to connect to your trusted professional contacts so as to exchange knowledge, ideas, and opportunities with a broader network of professionals. You must optimize this platform to enhance you and your company’s brand. Initially create a public profile to build an on-line presence for yourself, use its questions and answers feature to start conversations, create community, and position yourself as an expert in that particular subject, start conversations, and answer questions to endorse your candidacy and expertise so that it can drive good traffic. Do activate Twitter and LinkedIn interfaces on the homepage of your website.

Following these top Social Media Channels definitely helps to optimize your website so as to rank higher on search engines.

January 18, 2010

Improvise Alexa Rank of Your Website

Alexa is one such website that provides traffic statistics for many websites. You can measure the number of visitors on your website via this ranking tool but to track visitors count using this tool it is necessary that this tool should be already installed on the visitors’ browser. Unfortunately, most of the visitors don’t have this toolbar pre-installed on their browsers. Due to which you can’t say that Alexa Rank gives true indication of visitors on your website, it’s only a subset of your visitors.

Keeping this in view, Alexa addresses some of these concerns as:
• Traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should not be regarded as authentic one.
• The closer a site gets to #1, the more trustable its traffic ranking becomes.

Looking at this we cannot say that Alexa ranking is an accurate ranking system, it is important only if you plan to monetize your website. But there are some way outs to improve the Alexa rank of your website. They are as:

1. Append An Alexa Rank Widget To Your Website
Setting up this widget on your website will help increase its rank. Using this widget, all the visitors of your website would be tracked. Loading of a page take time with a widget added on that page. In order to still retain its benefits, preferably place it at the very bottom of your website, or say at the end of your source code.

2. Do Install Alexa Toolbar In Your Browser
Set your website as your homepage. Doing this way, you can increase the rank of website’s traffic rank because your visits to your website will also be reflected in your rank.

3. Encourage everybody to Install the Alexa Toolbar
Try to make aware everybody, your visitors as well as your friends, that installing Alexa toolbar helps to give correct number of visitors to any website.

4. Use Alexa Auto-Surfing Websites
This approach is workable only if your Alexa rank is too poor, but these websites sends visitors to your website that have this toolbar installed for sure.

5. Hunt for Webmasters
Generally, web developers and tech-savvy people have installed the Alexa toolbar in their browsers. So, if you visit discussion groups, forums, tech blogs, etc., you can ask for feedback on your website, thereby increasing website visits.

Therefore, it’s crystal clear that Alexa traffic rank is not a true indicator of your website’s visitors. It can count near to real visitors, only if considered along with other performance metrics. Heretofore, using above mentioned tips, you can improve your rank, thence the value of your website could be enhanced in front of potential consumers.

Target your Potential Customers

The word “Marketing” refers to locate and connect with your ideal customers who are in need for your products and services and are fully willing to pay with open heart.

We approach the potential consumers following several strategies e.g. via social networking and all. To have good sales and constant increase in profits in your business, focus primarily to acquire and maintain long-lasting customer relationships. Build a group based on loyalty, your real fans who trust you enough to repeatedly buy from you and even refer others as well.

Follow a few steps before considering an ideal customer and also to make your business more profitable:

1. Try to cull out the standout features that make your product and services unique and special. Figure out why would one be interested to do business with you when so many others are present in competition. Mention your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) clearly.

2. Its human tendency to buy what they want to, or what they think or need. The whole decision revolves around the customer. They are least bothered what you think they need.

Always try to attract and approach “ideal customer" because it leads you to a different framework for your future actions. Try to dig into the specific dimensions and characteristics of the people who are best suited for your product so that you can communicate with them more strongly. Converse in their language about the things that mean the most to them.

There are two general approaches to factor in your ideal customer: demographic and psychographic.

Demographics provides you countable and measurable facts and figures about people
• Gender, age and their marital status, and disabilities, if any
• Parents, kids and their interests, challenges
• Cultural/educational background, health/wealth status
• Residence details-city, country
• Entrepreneur, job-part time/full time, small or large company or a government employee
• Which car do you owe, your Income?
• Hobbies, Favorite foods, restaurants, magazines, movies, TV shows
• Where do I go to spend vacation?
• And alike

Psychographics refers to beliefs, values, and aspirations
• Issues of passion like environment/health, child care
• What tribe/culture or life experience has made them to which they withstand today? To what "tribes" do they already belong that might be in synch with yours?
• State of mind like what frustrates or makes them angry, what keeps them awake whole night, what do they dream of, which issue dominates their life, what do they tried and failed number of times, etc.

Demographic approach gives you the black and white stats and Psychographics approach resonate the significant part of their life.

Keeping these two distinct approaches in mind, can help you in clarifying and attracting you potential customers who are loyal, whom you can trust and even appreciative fans who will become the core of your business.

January 12, 2010

Popular Online Marketing Tools

Every individual or a company has their own modes to market their product. Everyone prefers distinct modes and methods of marketing their product or services. Here I am collating some of the online marketing channels with high success rates viz. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Email Marketing, Pay-Per-Click, Mobile Marketing, and Video Marketing.

1. Search Engine Optimization
Most of the companies, big or small, focus on maximizing clicks and conversions from organic searches. With SEO, it is easy to increase rankings on search engines like Google and Bing. But with search ranking, it is only half won story. One should target the potential visitors from all the specific locations, simultaneously focusing on ranking. Examine the metrics of your online marketing campaigns to extract maximum results. Try and focus to resolve the questions like:
Are search results targeting yours potential customers? Work upon title tags and meta descriptions looking at the ones used by your competitors. Pay attention towards their offers of free case study, flattering product sample or discounts.
Does your live content address your target audience’s needs? Think from customer’s perspective e.g. whether your customer finds your content relevant or not. Customers prefer solution instead of surprises.
Besides optimizing titles and meta descriptions, organic search increases CTR, thereby influencing subsequent search rankings.

2. Social Media
No doubt social media is not that justifiable in terms of ROI when compared to other online marketing tools. To measure success, define certain goals. Social media participation definitely brings loyalty to your brand. To track and measure results, use certain online tools to gauge traffic from social media channels. You can check whether it meets its potential targets like:

• Increase brand awareness
• Relevant traffic
• Improvement in trust and confidence among customers
• Valuable feedback from potential customers
• Improve standard and social search engine visibility
• Build up database for email marketing
• Drive sales and increase matured leads

Focus on specific goals so that you can measure definite results of your social media efforts.

3. Email Marketing
Regardless of what the critics say, email marketing is not going to vanish in 2010 even. It’s as important as any other online marketing channels. Instead, integrating email with social media is going to be a popular thing for coming years.
Try to bring email marketing to the next level by encouraging email subscribers to not only forward content via mail, but also to get social with mail and share it via Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn and other social networking sites. Promote followers and readers to subscribe to your e-newsletter and tutorials for reaching defined results.

4. PPC
Generally companies get so busy with other online marketing activities that they simply forget to efficiently run PPC campaigns. PPC efforts could certainly increase conversion rate e.g. for betterment, you can try ideas like:
•Try several ad versions that provide different results of your product, service or company like one is cost-effective and other one emphasizes on convenience.
•Try different headlines on your landing page. Google Optimizer is a great tool for this.
•Try launching different ad campaigns all together like one with free case study and other with a product coupon.

5. Mobile Marketing
Make your website optimized for handheld devices too such as mobile phones.
Apart from net banking, purchasing commodities, downloading mobile ring tones, playing games, consumers are doing a lot more than this from their mobile devices. Now they have started their participation in social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, creating additional opportunities for engagements and traffic to the mobile version of your company web site. Consider few tips like:
•Keep basic font format
•Eliminate ads to conserve screen space
•Take out images unless they are necessary
•Remove Flash, Java or any plug-in content


6. Video Marketing
Google is pushing video as a larger component in search results. Properly formatted online video are getting more clicks than ever before. Do include closed captioning and alt tags in video formats. Live videos add value to business making your content and site more searchable.

These are the channels which I have seen committing approx. 80% assured results.
If you know any other online marketing channels that can increase success rates, do share with me.

January 6, 2010

Project Management made easy through Project Management software

In today’s technology driven world, you can collaborate with your employees, manage your project team and make your project a success. No project is too daunting when you have project management software to manage your business. Scrolling the net for top most Online Web-based Project Management Software, I have collated an useful list of such software with their basic standout features:



Tenrox-It facilitates resource management, project planning, scheduling & tracking, cost accounting, time & billing and expense tracking. It includes intuitive project planning tool that's easy to use;
project plans are interchangeable with Microsoft Project files; and outstanding time tracking, cost accounting and billing capabilities.


Basecamp-It is the leading web-based project collaboration tool to share files, meet deadlines, assign tasks, centralize feedback, and make clients smile. It works with a variety of iPhone apps, third-party invoicing and time tracking tools, graphic design review software, and widgets.



Wrike- It is a flexible online project management interface that comes with a plethora of features that includes easy management for 50+ projects in one workspace, solves the email inbox chaos problem, boosts team collaboration, save managers up to 25 hours a month and double team productivity.



ProofHub:-It lets you easily organize your projects and quickly create client/project extranets. It helps your internal team keep your conversations, ideas, schedules, files, to-do lists, milestones and more at a password-protected central location. It is an inbuilt proofing tool and also features Real-time chat.


Project KickStart-It is easy-to-use project management software for doing basic project planning and organization, especially in the areas of resource management and collaboration. It features six-step plan creation wizard; question and answer process and free sample projects.


Project Drive- It is an easy to implement web-based project management software that is fully customizable to your projects and your workflow. It offers better control and efficiency, ensuring the successful completion of your projects in time and within budget.



Celoxis:- It improve collaboration and streamline management of projects, time sheets, expenses and even business processes specific to you organization.


Vertabase-It is the easiest way to manage better. It provides advanced resource planning, easy-to-use project management, project tracking and comprehensive document management. It features portfolio views,    executive dashboards and, and automatic notification.

  Genius Project-Genius Inside is a multi-faceted and can be used by experienced computer users and beginners alike. It features easy to use interface, complex, informative charts, budget planning dashboard and automatic email notification.


ActiveCollab- It is a project management & collaboration tool that you can set up on your own server or local network. It help team members keep track of projects, assign tasks, highlight important deadlines and activities, see progress and discuss any issues or concerns.


Goplan-It lets you keep track of your projects and collaborate with your colleagues securely through an intuitive user interface. It features task management, issue tracking, manages multiple projects, high-grade encrypted connection and hosted, always-on application.


These are most well-known and majorly used online project and team management web-based services, but with attention and use comes criticism and complaint. Share the one that you used and found the BEST one.

January 5, 2010

Marketing of Products Through Website using 5 W’s and an H

In today’s technology driven world, one needs to be crystal clear with 5 W’s: Who, What, Where, When, & Why and an H. People make snap decisions everyday - to use products, services, and even software too. The focus should be whether you are giving your potential customers the information they need to make split second decisions about your products/services or not.
Who
- Who is this for? - Communicate clearly who your target market is and try not to be too subtle. The visitor to you website should know if you are talking to them or someone else.
- Who is using it? – Exemplify the target users if possible to make things more clear. People generally follow up things which are pretty tried and tested ones.
- Who created it? – Disclose your real identity, no need to hide behind an isolated corporation. Tell the potential users exactly who you are.
What
- What is this? – Make it clear whether it’s a website, a mobile app or an iPhone app. Come right out and say what it is. Instead of presenting an idea, communicate exactly what it is.
- What does this do? – Tell the real features of your product or services and spread the real picture giving its benefits to satisfy your potential customers. Say it clearly.
When
- When is the best time to use it? - Mention certain case scenarios to let the potential customers know when your services could benefit them.
Why
- Why use this at all? – Try to mention the advantages of your product/services in front of the product/services provided by your competitors. This would need a different angle to achieve their faith in you.
- Why is it better than other similar apps? – To help people in making educated decisions, outline the similarities and differences in the services provided by you and your competitors.
How
- How do I use this? – Lastly, never forget to give detailed description of using your product or service. You can take help of podcasts and videos to give an idea about your product/service and can outline the steps in text as well.

This is the way you can map the theory to practice to increase the success rate.

January 4, 2010

Inbound Marketing



Inbound Marketing is the type of marketing that is mainly focused on getting found by potential customers.

In traditional or outbound marketing, companies used to focus on searching for expected customers, using techniques with poor targets and most of times interrupting people. This type of marketing involves cold-calling, T.V. advertising, print advertising, junk mails, and trade shows. But these techniques are less effective and more expensive.

Today, Inbound Marketers flip outbound marketing completely. The most successful key components of an Inbound Marketing campaigns are:

a. Get Found

Create Content via Blogging – It mainly surrounds the content. The substantial content in any Inbound Marketing campaign is a tool that to attract potential customers to your website for your products or services. You must create web pages, write blogs, participate in the blogosphere and then publish this content to drive traffic to your website.

Optimize via Search Engine Optimization - SEO is the practice of building your website and the inbound links to your site to maximize its ranking in the search engines, where most of your customers generally begin their buying process. It eases the potential customers to find your content. You must do on-page as well as off-page SEO and use channels like Youtube, Twitter to optimize your remarkable content.

Promote via Social Media - Social media magnifies the impact of your content. When your content is distributed across and discussed over the network of personal relationships, it becomes more authentic, and is more likely to drive qualified and specific consumers to your website. You can even run PPC campaigns to promote the website.

b. Convert

Convert Visitors to Leads via Landing Pages - Convert a targeted stream of traffic into mature leads. Design a well-crafted offer on a landing page specifically for the audience you will be driving to the page.

Lead Tracking and Intelligence – After generating lots of traffic from myriad sources like Google, social media sites, the blogosphere, create a magnet that sucks in prospects from all over the web. Look into the conversion paths on your website. Use your intellect to gauge where might people land, and what paths through your content they might take. And then put right offers in front of a given visitor to maximize the chance of converting it into a lead.

Lead Management – Use the analytic traffic tracking tools to keep a track and then manage the matured leads. Identify the hot prospects to increase the total count of potential customers.

c. Analyze

Marketing Analytics – Regularly post and comment on articles, and check your traffic, leads and landing page conversion rates. Schedule properly to write, optimize, publish and promote your content.

Competitive Analysis – Keep a close eye on your competitor’s presence in the market. Analyze and identify their hot prospects closely.

Lead Scoring – You need to strategize for further gains. Generate marketing reports and make new offers and landing pages to enhance the substantial traffic on your website.

January 3, 2010

Are City Fountain and Vatika losing their charm?


Vatika is most popular, lively and frequently visited place of Panchkula. Every person loves to spend their weekend at this most prominent spot of the city. Over the weekends the parking lots are completely full. The residents from nearby cities like Chandigarh, Kalka and Pinjore have similar passion for this spot. The fountains at “City Fountain” area with colorful lightening enhance this perfect awesome scenery. People are commonly seen doing their evening walk here. Even kids have a jolly good time in its play section with toy train, swings along with the parents cheering them. In its vicinity it has one restaurant named “Wah Delhi” and a small “Dollar Shop” on one side and a big shopping complex “Vishal Mart” on the other. The famous chain of restaurants known as “Hot Millions” used to do a brisk business when they were running their fast food chain from ‘Vatika’.

Unfortunately, all these things are past now. Haryana Government had spent crores of rupees to develop this park. But suddenly it seems like government has lost all its interest. The garden nowadays has altogether deserted except some young couples sitting there at some place or other in the park. Even the restaurants “Hot Millions” and “Wah Delhi” have closed their outlets. Fountains are not in working condition most of the times. The stagnant water in the fountain makes it full of dirt and silt. This all implies that as if the Haryana Government as well as HUDA (Haryana Urban Development Authority) has lost their interests completely to take care of this city’s center beauty. Even no light of hope is seen from our Honorable Union Minister of Tourism Kum. Selija, also elected as MP from Panchkula. After winning the elections, she is also least bothered about the current situation of the city's beauty. In these situations, we can’t expect any new project from her side when old projects are given such a rude treatment.

Hopefully, government of Haryana, honorable tourism minister Kum Selija, and HUDA will do something in near time to maintain this center beauty of Panchkula.