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Tag Archive for Handful

bikram | March 9, 2011
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Why You Need to Have a Keyword-Rich Domain Name?

Rose by any other name would not have smell so sweet, no matter what Mr. Shakespeare said. The time has changed and name holds a lot of importance in how much one is being recognized, and how many people will interact with the entity. Because of all the noises that we see around, we all have started taking shortcuts in making decisions, and judging the quality on the basis on some entity’s name is one such shortcut. This holds true for domain names as well.

But, why do we need a keyword-rich domain name?

Will not any other kind of name do the trick? The answer is resounding NO, with a possible exception of a handful of websites which worked may be because

  1. They were first in their kind of business
  2. They had too big a budget to educate people on the nature of their business, or
  3. They had innovative products that immediately caught people’s fancy.

If you do not have any of the above condition, you should think about getting a domain name that says something about your business. If you again repeat this question that why you need a keyword-rich domain name to make your business success then I would say because:

  1. A non keyword-rich domain may sound sexy, but it will tell nothing about your business to your prospective customers, and as their minds are already too crowded, none of them will bother to spend time in decoding your name.
  2. Not only human, even machines (read search engine bots) will have hard time to figure out the nature of your website. So they will not be able to rank your website properly.

I think these two reasons are good enough to take some time out to find keyword-rich domain names for your website.

In the article that will follow this one, I will talk about the ways in which you can find a killer domain names for your business. Till them try to wrap your mind around this fact, which might have made you uncomfortable. And a rose with a name bitter gourd would not have tasted that sweet.

Category: Business | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 12, 2010
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More Ways to Use Contest to Generate Traffic

Hosting a contest on your website to generate traffic is but one way to use contest for traffic building purposes. There are quite a handful of more ways to do so. In this article my focus is on exploring those ways.

Contest Sponsorship

For some reason, if you do not want to host a contest on your blog, or you do not have that kind of time at hand to host a contest then sponsoring a contest is a good idea. You will get the same mileage from contest sponsorship as you will get from running a contest. You will, rather, get more mileage from this as you will be seeding your name among non-readers. You can rope in your visitors as well by writing about the contest on your blog.

Blog carnival

It is a debate issue if blog carnival is a contest or not, but for our purpose let’s go with the group that consider it as a contest because there is a lot of similarity between a contest and a blog carnival. Blog carnival is used to define a phenomenon in which various bloggers group together and write on a particular topic for a predefined period of time. During the period of carnival, a blogger links to other blog posts written in the carnival. At the end of the organizer (host) will write a round-up post linking back to all the posts in the carnival. This is a good way to get backlinks and free traffic.

Contest in a forum

You can also run a contest in a forum that you regularly visit. You can offer your e-book, consultancy, or any other thing of value for free to the winner of the contest. Make sure you design your contest in such a way that it persuades people to join your mailing list.

You, indeed, will get more exposure and traffic by using a contest in the way I have suggested above, moreover, you will get numerous backlinks to your blog, which will boost your search engine ranking. This could be seen as a side benefit of using contest to build traffic.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 8, 2010
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3 Step to Decide What Prize to Give the Contest Winner

On one hand, a contest only appears cool to the blog’s visitors only if the prize is exciting enough, and on the other hand an exciting prize could be anything and it may cost you an arm and a leg for nothing. It is imperative, therefore, to careful weigh the importance of contest vis-à-vis the prize you are offering and your budget before you finalize which prize to offer. Before going ahead with any prize, you should think about the following things:

Your budget

No matter what your marketing objective is, and what the contest will deliver to you, you cannot offer something as a prize which you cannot afford as a business. You need to keep the complete picture in your mind before going with a prize.

Immediate Marketing leverage you are getting

You may afford to give an iPad in a retweet contest, but is it worth it? You need to ask this question before pulling your wallet out to pay for the prize. Will you get enough mileage from the contest you are hosting to justify the cost of prize you are giving?

Long-term benefit of running a contest

The end objective of your prize may not be to gain short-term benefit, or you may or may not get a substantial short-term benefit. The contest is still worth running if it gives you a long-term benefit. It is the long-term benefit that matters in the long run. You should focus on the long-term benefit of a contest as well, when deciding on the prize you are offering.

You need to run your prize idea through these before deciding on a prize to offer. You will not like to spend a handful of dollars for nothing. Do not get carried away by a excitement of running a contest and offering a cool prize while designing a contest. It will cost dearly.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Lisa Udy | August 19, 2010
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Five Reasons To Get Pre-Approved For A Loan Before Buying A Home Or Condo

Buying a home is a big decision and the search can be quite overwhelming. Understanding the benefits of getting pre-approved for a loan before buying a home can help cut down on the anxiety and worries often associated with the entire process.

Knowing how much home you qualify for ahead of time can help cut down on the number of home viewings. Depending on your price range, you may have many homes or just a handful. Regardless, it is easier to pick from a select group than jumping all over the place not knowing how much you will qualify for.

Having all of your financial information in order will help the process move along. The potential lender will require you to provide information about employment, tax information, as well as verification of the same. If you are self-employment, other criteria must be met to prove to the lender you can afford to make monthly payments.

There are great benefits to knowing how much home you can afford before house hunting. One of the greatest advantages of getting pre-approved is you can narrow down your house hunting search. One a price range is determined, your realtor can focus on finding the amenities you are a looking for within that price range.

Getting a home loan from the lender makes life easier for everyone. You, the buyer know what you can afford up front, the seller can be assured that you have been qualified by the bank so they are not wasting their time, and the realtor can focus on homes within your price range and look more closely for amenities that you desire.

Getting approved does not mean the deal is sealed. It must go to underwriting and all of your documentation will be checked for validity and accuracy. As long as everything is in order, chances are your loan will be approved. If you are self-employed you will be required to supply additional documentation since there is no employer to contact. The lender can still pre-qualify you, based on the information provided, for a specific amount.

Purchasing property is a big decision. You are making probably one of the biggest commitments in your life, agreeing to 30, 20, or 15 years of payments. The benefit of being a homeowner will prove to be worth all of the work and stress endured when it is all said and done.

Article written by Lisa Udy, who is an expert in her field. You can learn more by visiting Smithfield Utah Homes For Sale and Providence Utah Homes For Sale.

Category: Articles | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | May 15, 2010
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Where to Look for Your Killer Blog post Idea

Creating one exciting blog post after another and keep on doing so weeks after weeks is a challenge that not everyone can stands against. That is the reason why so many blogs start breaking at the seams just after couple of months, if not after couple of weeks. But there is a piece of good news, and the news is that you can now learn to create one killer blog post after another, and that too in a handful of simple steps.

Writing killer blog posts

What people need?

This is important. Finding what your blog readers want from the blogs they read will help you construct a blog post for your blog. You can use poll results, forum questions, and blog comments, etc., to find out the information need of your readers.

Who will read it?

Do you know who the ideal reader of your blog is? Where she lives, and what all she does in his life? Is she a teacher or a student? Is she old or young?

These are some of the questions you need to ask to define your target audience. Defining your ideal target audience is important in order to decide the tone of voice to use to write blog posts. It also helps in word selection.

Research

The process of writing a high-quality starts with researching the topic you have chosen. The more time you will spend doing the research the better will be the output, but it does not mean you should spend your lifetime researching the topic.

You need to study the topic from every point of view to get a complete picture, which is not possible unless you spend some time in researching about the topics.

Draft composition

Use the research data and create a first draft of the blog post keeping the above factors in the mind. If you want to create a blog post that pulls visitors then you have to get off the cycle of publishing anything that gets typed out by you, and start treating each blog post as important.

You should not consider your first draft as the final blog post. Instead, you should read the blog post and make the necessary changes before publishing it.

Pay attention to details, as the beauty lies in details. Rushing from one blog post to another will not get the desired result, but working painstakingly through each post will definitely drive your readers crazy.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | November 14, 2009
2 comments

Online Advertising Vs Offline Advertising

I was once a blue-eyed MBA guy who believed in the power of big companies, and those silky legs and sultry pouts of glamour models in glossy print ads. I also believed that skin-revealing outfits will make me sell insurances, adhesives, and god knows what not. But, this love affair with mass advertising ended sooner than later. I was disillusioned, disoriented, after all my education appeared to be based on false ground. And I later realize that the principles were right, and we messed it up in execution. Hence, I moved on to online advertising. It is more closely tied with the principles of advertising than is offline or the banner ads displayed on the Internet.

Some key difference in online and offline advertisings

  • Online advertising is measurable, but its older cousin (mass media advertising) is not.
  • Online advertising has many result-producing tools at its disposal, whereas, mass media offers just a handful of useless tools.
  • You cannot calculate your return on investment for the advertising dollars you spent in mass media, but you can easily calculate what you got for every single dollar you spent online.
  • With mass media advertising, you cannot say for sure who watched your advertisements, but with online advertisements, you know whom your ads are being served.
  • By large, online advertising is contextual, while mass media advertising cannot claim the same.
  • Online medium inspires communications, whereas, mass media just dictates.
  • Online medium offers an option to instigate two-way communication (interesting dialogue), whereas, mass media communication is always one-way (boring monologue).
  • Your audience can interact with this medium, and the only interactivity offered by mass media advertising is flipping the page of magazine or changing TV or radio channel.
  • When using online advertising, you pay only when you get result, and in mass media ads, you pay and pay and pay, regardless of what the result is.

What do you think about this issue? Do you agree or disagree?

Category: Marketing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | August 18, 2009
2 comments

SEO SIMPLIFIED: Top SEO Strategies

We have come a long way on our SEO journey, and learned many useful things along the way. I have made a list of the top 10 SEO activities that will get you the most results.  If you made a list of your own SEO efforts, what would it include? Let’s compare notes!

  1. A tightly-focused Keyword (niche keyword) is the foundation of any SEO activity.
  2. A Creative Headline is also very important for SEO and to make people stop by to read the article.
  3. A Powerful Meta Description tag has a positive impact on the click-through rate [from SERP].
  4. Keyword-rich (keyword density: 2-7 %), user-friendly content/article will ascertain that the reader keeps coming back.
  5. Anchor Text. It is the building block of any linking (interlinking, inbound links or outbound links) activity.
  6. Inbound Link (backlink) building.
  7. Interlinking of pages.
  8. Website submission to DMOZ open directory project as well as to Yahoo and Google directories.
  9. Article writing and publishing in article directories like ezinearticles.com, articlebase.com, etc.
  10. Forum posting with a link in signature line, and blog commenting with a keyword-rich anchor text.

I have left many things off of this SEO top 10 list which I feel are less important than the ones inluded. What do you think? Does your list look like this, or is it completely different?  Use the comment box and share what you think is most important when it comes to SEO, I’m looking forward to seeing what you post!

Category: SEO | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,