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Archive for January 31, 2010

bikram | January 31, 2010
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Blog with a Friendly Face – Part 3

So far in the series we have discussed about the importance of having a catchy brand name, and writing on a unique topic or from unique point of view in giving your blog a friendly face. In this article, I will talk about the importance of knowing your audience, blog design, and in-depth articles.

Know thy audience

Audience is king, and its needs are supreme. If you do not believe in this then start believing in it from now because this is what will help you touch the peak of blogging success. You need to prepare a character sketch of your ideal visitor. It should include the following details:

  • Who he is
  • Where is he from?
  • What does he do?
  • How old is he?
  • What is his education background?
  • Where does he live?
  • What he thinks?
  • How he behaves?
  • What he likes and what he doesn’t?

Knowledge about these things will help you understand what your audience’s content needs are, and what you should serve him.

Blog design

Design of your blog is the first thing that a person visiting your blog notices. Therefore, you should make sure that your blog design is not cluttered, and the navigation is intuitive; none of the two shall confuse your audience. A confused audience will run away from your blog as soon as he can, and believe me when I say he can run away very quickly.

Articles with deep insight

Instead of writing many shallow articles, write only one article, but it should have depth. Research the topic before writing and cover every aspect of the topic (at least the important ones) you are writing. Your article should add value to the reader. If you think a topic is too lengthy or too complex to be dealt in one article then break it into several meaningful posts and make it a series.

A true friend adds value to your life. He does something, and s you become a better person. Your blog should aim for that; make your reader a more informed and more confident person, and people will flock around your blog.

Category: Business | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | January 28, 2010
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Blog with a Friendly Face – Part 2

I have started to write this series with a hope to tell my readers what does it mean to have a successful blog, and how one can make one’s own blog a success without any external help. To make your blog a success, you will need to portray your blog as a friend to your visitors. Let us find out what being friendly means, and eventually you will also learn how it helps your blog stand out in the crowd.

A catchy blog name

How successful do you think the blogs like theoatmeal, techcrunch, and lifehacker would have been, if they had longer and mundane name? Would you have cared for Gizmodo was gizomoloversguide.com? Well, you might have, but the pull had not been as much as the current name has. Having a catchy name is important. When I say so, I do not mean that you cannot have a good name with keywords in it; all I mean is it should be short, sweet, and simple.

Your topic should be unique too

It is not just the name that builds the perception; the perception is build by the subject matter as well. Find a need gap between what people wants and what they are served, and find which gap you can fill with your expertise; that is to say, find a unique topic to write about.

Treat the topic in a unique way

If it is not possible for you to find a unique topic that interests you then build a unique point of view. People love fresh perspective of things. I am sure you will be able to do so. Give a new voice to old cause, a new reason to do the old thing.

Why you need to do all these?

We make new friends because they have something new about themselves, they are not just the carbon copy of the friends we have. Indeed each one of our friends has something in common among themselves and with us, but we do not make someone our friend, if he has nothing new to offer. We do not want too much of a same thing. We want friends that are unique yet gel with us quite nicely. It holds true for blogs as well, and that is why we need to do this.

We will meet in the next part, until then try finding out your niche, unique name, and unique topic to blog about.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | January 27, 2010
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Blog with a Friendly Face – Part 1

It does not matter what Shake-spear or William Shakespeare has to say about name; a rose with any other name would not have sounded so sweet because names create perception, and believe it or not, so does face. I am talking about your blog’s name and face. Your blog needs to appear friendly to the visitors in order to succeed.

Does it sound scary?

Well, it shouldn’t. It may sound a lot of work, but it isn’t, at least not in one go; it is a process. My goal with this series is to help your blog get a friendliest of faces for you blog that will invite every viewer, and maybe, ask for a cup of steaming cup of tea or coffee, or even beer, if you need it to be that way.

Why does it matter?

In a nutshell, it matters because you want to succeed. I mean, you want to be famous, and earn make money along the way as well. And maybe because you want to help people solve their problem.

What I mean to say is that you may have many different reasons behind blogging and different measures for success, but if you want to achieve it then you will need to make your blog friendly to your visitors.

How you can do it?

This is what this series is about. I will share some tips and show you the way to make your blog friendly for your users. This post was a mere introduction for the series written with an aim to emphasize the importance of “blog friendliness”. In the posts to come, we will see how this goal can be achieved.

I will suggest you to subscribe to RSS feed to remain on top of the updates about this series. See you tomorrow.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | January 26, 2010
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3 Often overlooked Marketing Props

I called the items I am describing below marketing props not marketing items, or marketing stationary because that is what they are, as marketing is nothing but a big stage where all of us perform with a hope to make our customers happy and register sale in the process.

As with any stage, marketing also have some very important actors, some mediocre actors, and some overlooked actors. This holds true for marketing props as well. In this article, I will be talking about marketing props that are very important, but are overlooked.

Business card

Sharing business cards is the first and the most important level of communication a marketer can have with its clients. A business card also works as a reminder for your client, and an out-of-the-world business card works as a collectible as well. It plays its part in forming a client’s perception about you and your company.

Website

It may sound absurd, but not all the big brands are milking the power of websites to even half of its capacity. To put it in a layman’s term, a website is like an information desk of your office with one difference: it remains open 24 X 7, 365 days a week. If harnessed properly, this could be an amazing tool to build rapport with customers. You can also use it to cut the time spent by your employees on answering questions that can be handled by the FAQ section of your website.

Letter head and envelop

It is not just the content of the letter head that makes the day of your client, but it’s the design as well. And same holds true for your envelop. Get them designed by the best (or nearly the best) in the industry that you can afford. It will work magic. These items will tell your clients how much you care for the details, and it will reassure them about your adherence to quality.

There are several other actors and props that combine to make the play (marketing plan) a success, but as said, these three are the most overlooked props. What prop (s) your organization is overlooking?

Category: Marketing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | January 24, 2010
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YouTube Started Support for HTML5

Do you remember HTML 5? YouTube has become one of the first companies to adopt HTML 5. Recently, it has showed a sample demo of HTML5-based video player. Since then many casual viewer as well as webmasters and HTML experts has flocked around TestTube (YouTube’s idea incubator) to sample HTML5.

What do you need to see it?

You need an HTML5 supporting web browser: Opera, Chrome, or Chrome frame in Internet Explorer to sample YouTube HTML5 Video Player.

Why?

Once HTML5 becomes the standard, the video can be viewed without any Plug-ins (Adobe Flash), and it will remove our dependency on proprietary plug-ins like Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. HTML5 uses a simple code to render the video.

As written on the YouTube’s official blog, YouTube is launching it as an experiment with some limitation.

“Our support for HTML5 is an early experiment, and there are some limitations. HTML5 on YouTube doesn’t support videos with ads, captions, or annotations and it requires a browser that supports both the video tag and h.264 encoded video (currently that means Chrome, Safari, and ChromeFrame on Internet Explorer).”

HTML5 is going to change the way we access net and design pages. If you want to be part of this change then you can start with participating in YouTube experiment.

Category: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | January 24, 2010
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When Should You Change Your Blog Theme?

This is the question that baffles most of the newbie bloggers and some pro bloggers as well. They are not sure, until experienced enough in marketing and branding, when to change the theme of their respective blog, or should they change it at all?

Before I tell you what to do, let me put on table the pros and cons of changing the theme of your blog frequently.

Pros

  • It makes the blog look fresh.
  • You can stay up-to-date with the recent trend.
  • A new theme will add newness to your blog.
  • It will break the monotony.

Cons

  • A change in the blog theme may weaken your brand.
  • Your loyal readers may get alarmed (slight chance).
  • Your readers will have to re-acclimatize with the new design.
  • It may be perceived as a change in owner or deviation from the proven path.

Now, as we have the pros and cons of change in the blog theme in front of us, we should consider the scenario when the blog theme should be changed.

  • When making a big shift, content-wise, or strategy-wise. For example: you have decided to convert your one-author blog to multi-author blog, or you have decided to give it a magazine layout, or you may have decided to add video contents, which was not possible to do without changing the theme.
  • If your blog is as old as Uncle Sam. If you have been blogging since the age of Gutenberg then you need to change your blog theme to incorporate the inventions and developments ever since. The new theme will help you connect with the new audience.
  • When you want to shift your focus to another group of audience, demographic or psychographic shift.

In any case, you should not change your blog theme many times a year. Change your theme at max once a year. But, in special cases like your blog is not working well with the current theme or for the current group then you can reduce the frequency, but as soon as you find the theme that works well, stick with it.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | January 22, 2010
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Why Managing Brand Touchpoint is Important

In simple words, Brand Touchpoint refers to all the channels: physical, communication, and human interaction, that works as a link between a brand and customer.

It means a brand manager needs to look at every point where a customer interacts with a brand. It includes television channels, radio channels, magazines, newspaper, retail stores, shopping malls, games, etc. It may sound like too much work, but one has to take this toll to maintain the integrity of a brand.

Why it is important to manage Brand Touchpoint?

  • It is important for us to manage each of the Brand Touchpoint because customers use it to interact with the brands, and the experience he gets their will define his overall perception of the brand.
  • By delivering unified message on each touch point, a brand can cement a particular kind of belief in the customers about a brand, which in turn help the marketer create a strong brand.
  • If you are managing all the Brand Touchpoints then you are saving your customers the horror of confusion. No one wants a confuse customer, as a confuse customer will never purchase from you.
  • A well-managed network of Brand Touchpoints sends out a strong signal about the brand to its customers.
  • Your loyal customers will become your sincere follower, if his belief is strengthened by the unified message communicated by the brand across the touch points.
  • A network of well-managed touch points also helps a marketer a great deal, as it tells the marketer about the core essence of the brand, which stops them from deviating from the path.

It is important for a marketer to keep the brand message intact. Changing it often will push the customers away from the brand. Managing Brand Touchpoints is an important step in the direction of establishing credibility in the market.

Category: Marketing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | January 19, 2010
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Google Slap: How to Stop Google from Slapping You

In the last article, I told you about how Google slaps its customers (PPC advertisers), and how unfair this practice is. But as noted in the article, this is Google’s world and we have to live by the rule set by Google, so until some other forces come to our rescue, we have to comply and find way of not getting slapped by the search giant.

Google justifies its action of levying the maximum penalty (by charging the maximum possible rate) on advertisers that do not meet their guidelines by saying they are working for bettering the usage experience of average users.

In this article, I am going to share some of the industry’s secret that top marketers use to avoid Google Slap. After reading this article, you will also be on the same footing with online marketing big shots, at least in terms of avoiding Google Slap.

5 ways to avoid Google Slap

  1. Add content to your landing page. You can do this by replacing bullets that you have used in the page by paragraphs.
  2. Start a blog and write some content or get some articles from article directory. Add at least 2 links to your landing page in this blog.
  3. Add outgoing links on your landing page, possibly to a high ranking page. You can also add links to your blog. Add link at the bottom of the blog in footer, to avoid traffic leak. Make the size of the outgoing anchor text smaller.
  4. Add an XML sitemap. Also add an HTML sitemap in the footer.
  5. If you send out e-mail newsletters then add them as a content page to your landing page via sitemap.
  6. Make sure all on-page SEO techniques have been properly used. Anchor texts should also be SEO-friendly.

Use these tips, put your PPC campaign live, and wait for the visitors. Application of these tips will help you avoid Google Slap.

Category: Marketing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | January 17, 2010
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How to Purchase a Good Domain Name

If you talk to any old-school domain expert, he will tell you the obvious. He will talk about the inherent value of one-word domains, and will tell you how amazing they are. They will also tell you that the next best thing in domain industry is two-word domain names.

Well, they are not wrong because they are professing the wrong theory, but they are wrong because they are giving you outdated information. In 2010 they are talking as if it is 1997 when good quality one-word information. This blabbering about the value of one or two word domain name is not of much use to most domain entrepreneur as almost all the good domain names are taken.

In our time, three-word domain names and domain names with alternate extensions are the best bet. If I am asked which one will be better: three-word domain names with .com extension or two-word domain name with .info extension? My reply will always be in favor of the former as .info is not the extension much surfed by users, if it had been .net or .org than story would have been different.

4 Steps to buying a good domain name

If you are not launching a ground-breaking product like twitter, or Flickr then you should stick to the domain names made up of the keywords searched by people in your industry. Follow the following steps:

Step 1: Search for various one, two, and three-word keywords searched mostly in your industry. Make a list of it in notepad. Also include related LSI keywords.

Step 2: In notepad make another list containing descriptive and superlative adjectives. Adjectives like top, best, etc., would go in this list. This list should only contain three to four characters adjectives. You can use “five characters” adjective as well, but do not make it longer than this.

Step 3: Use domain name analyzing and building software to do the permutation using both the list. There are couples of free software available to help you out.

Step 4: Check domain names for availability using the same software and register the ones that are available and which meets your need.

This is how we need to walk down the domaining path in 2010. Old rules, and outdated “Gyan” will not work in 2010 and beyond.

Category: Domain Registration | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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