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Tag Archive for Niche

bikram | September 18, 2011
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Online Marketing Ideas for a Magazine

Media has always been in the centre of attention – shaping, enhancing, and controlling opinion. Magazines have been general, political, business magazines, travel magazine, beauty and health magazine, fitness magazine, educational magazine and of many other kinds. Magazines have not only nurtured human preferences and interests, but also shaped new thoughts, opinions and beliefs. But promoting a magazine online can altogether fetch a new class of prospective readers. If you have not tried it yet here are some tips for online promotion of magazine.

Advertise in your magazine’s niche related websites

It is always wise to advertise in your magazine’s niche related website. Suppose you have a travel related magazine, you may advertise in all leading travel portals and blogs. Finding niche is very important. Or you may simply buy advertisement space in a leading generic website which has a ‘travel’ tab under it. This way you will get visible to your exact target audience.

Each issue needs to be promoted

Each issue needs to be promoted, talked about, get seen and heard, shared and liked to build up the excitement. Cover page of next upcoming issue needs to be showcased everywhere – in your official site, in newsletters, blogs, forums you participate or advertisements or Facebook fan page. Talk about the core theme or central topic of the upcoming issue, display cover page and some alluring pictures which will be part of the magazine. It will be a nice way of drawing people.

Newsletters are must

Often people may not notice advertisements, so newsletter comes handy in such situation. Those who have already registered in your website, send out fortnightly or monthly newsletter to them in advance of its release to ensure people get to know about it, talk about it and wait for the issue to reach them.  Develop a nice newsletter by a graphic designer talking about the central theme and all attractions to be included in the magazine.

Special discounts to online fans

If you are not on Facebook, Twitter you are missing out a large chunk of people. Create a fan page of your magazine on Facebook and start promoting it. Frequent updates with status messages, polls, images, contests, questions, tips, videos can actually arrest many eyeballs. Whosoever ‘like’s your Facebook fan page or follows you on Twitter may be entitled to 10% discount on purchase of your magazine. Such information spreads really fast on web and you will soon witness growing fan numbers.

Get started. Shout, share, get liked on the web to witness rising sale of your magazine.

Category: Marketing | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | July 29, 2011
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3 Essential Tips for Effective Blog Writing

Are you new to blogging community? Blogging is a great pleasure. It can be a personal blog or a professional blog written for a company, a brand. A blog has no boundaries. It can be anything, it can be ‘you’, it can be your secret desires, and it can be your diary. A blog is typically updated regularly, and that’s how it’s also different from a website, with frequent new posts. You need not know any programming language. You can put blog title, write content, attach image and just click on ‘publish’ and show it to the world. How many of us know what makes good blog writing? Here are some tips for your help.

A nice title

Always remember, it is the title of a blog post that attracts readers to read the same. Even a regular follower of your blog may simply overlook your latest post, if it doesn’t have a catchy title. Title has to be creative, catchy and very interesting. Some really interesting blog titles I have come across are – ‘Is Politics a masturbation for own pleasure?’, ‘What is so big about Big Brother?’, ‘Drinking and driving – a deadly combo for suicide’, ‘Celebrities and their uncelebrated agony’ etc. Aren’t these titles really catchy and persuading? Yes, that’s the sole purpose. Take your time, think and think till you crack a lovely blog post title.

Find a niche

Often we want to do everything. Don’t do it. Don’t make a blog for all, every topic under the sun. If you want to write on multiple subjects, you can create separate blogs for each of them. As for example, if you are a social thinker and wish to have a blog on societal and political topics, you may simply dedicate a blog towards socio-political-cultural topics. If you wish to narrow it down further and wish to write only on social crimes and role of law, you may stick to that. But don’t make the mistake of putting all in one blog – like social issues, a poem of yours, your last vacation experience, and your opinion on the current educational trend in Europe etc. Make sure you find a niche for your blog. You may choose ‘travel’ as your blog niche. Write travel related topics only. If you put everything in one, search engine may not locate your blog. Finding a niche for your blog will help you to get a higher search engine rank.

Keep it short and simple

A blog is for regular followers, readers, not for one time or not so regular viewers who visit a website just for some information or buying purpose. Blog is read to know others’ views, experiences. Thus, make it as simple and conversational as possible. Language should be simple and free flowing. And remember, no one wants to read long paragraphs running pages after pages, keep blog posts short. You may continue a post in your next write up. On Internet people browse and can’t hold attention for very long. Thus keeping it short wins the game.

So what are you waiting for? Get started with you blog. Practice will make it perfect.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 29, 2011
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5 Designing Tips for a Professional Blog

Many of us are active bloggers, but very few of us own good professional looking blog. It’s your blog’s design besides the content, which discriminates a professional blog from an amateur one. Here are few designing tips, implement them and take your blog to a superior level.

Customize the template

There is nothing called 100% original design of template. All are variations of themes. So rather than worrying about owning a new template altogether, you should start customizing the template available to you as per your blog’s content. Start with the top banner first. Top banner draws first attention of the viewer. It should reflect what your blog is all about. Consider your blog’s niche and design the banner accordingly. If it’s a travel related blog, you may consider displaying some travel related images on the banner. Color has to be apt to your blog’s nature.

Make post titles clickable

Make the post titles clickable, so that when viewer clicks on the same reaches exclusive post page. Make sure it has space for comments below, like button and sharing facility at different social networking sites. Clickable posts score higher in SEO, besides reader’s convenience.

Keep an eye on the white space

Don’t forget white space is very important part of every design. Although it is referred as the negative space, but surprisingly this negative space has great contribution in making the surrounding designs much more. White space adds sense of refinement to the entire design. Space out all elements of your blog with the white space so that readers can read with an ease and also enjoy the process of scanning.

Keep it clutter free

Many young bloggers clutter the entire blog by installing widgets like – clocks, calendar, weather forecast, thought of the day etc. They are not only style statement and unnecessary, but also slow down the entire blog and takes long for it to get loaded. Many readers are impatient and won’t wait too long to read. So keep it simple, neat and reader friendly. If some elements have become outdated and are not found relevant anymore, remove them immediately.

Place key information rightly

Important information like – email address, RSS feed subscription link, sharing links and other ‘call to action’ buttons should be kept in a prominent place of the blog; preferably on the top half of your blog or at the bottom of each post.

Follow these useful tips and make a professional blog. Soon your traffic will rise, and popularity will score higher.

Category: Web Design | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 17, 2011
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How to Promote a Gift Portal?

Gift portals have taken a toll over our daily lives, making the most of every festival, occasion and special days. Gifting companies have successfully convinced people to bring about a new occasion, new celebration each day with greeting cards, cakes, flowers, chocolates, toys, and millions of gifting ideas. Today, people can’t think of celebrating birthday without gifts. With growing physical distance between family members and busy work schedule people hardly get time to go out and purchase gifts. So more and more people these days are buying gifts online, but not many of them know about good gift portals, ending up with searching in Google and Yahoo instead. Learn the tricks to promote your gift portal effectively and keep the brand name on top of their mind. Here are some promotional ideas for your gift website.

Find a unique proposition for your website

It’s very important to find a niche for your website. You can’t afford to be just another gif portal with no unique selling proposition. Suppose you guarantee delivery of gifts within 24 hours, in case of failure offering money back proposal.  It will definitely help people in finding you credible, responsible, honest and dedicated. You may specialize in an area of a particular gifting idea like – flowers and greeting cards or gifts for children or gifts for women only. Finding niche is very important to stand out in clutter of gift portals.

Enable secure financial transaction

While purchasing on Internet people may not readily settle down for a new portal unless it seems very trustworthy in terms of financial transaction. Since people purchase through online banking, PayPal or credit cards the entire financial transaction process needs to be smooth, hassle-free and displaying secure server of VeriSign certification.

Free shipping

In this age of tight competition if you think you can make some money from delivery or shipping too, you are wrong. Almost every portal offer free shipping, which doesn’t mean they are running business at loss. They manage that cost within the product price itself. But to attract customers display shipping cost as absolutely free.

Special discounts on special days

Birthday, anniversary dates are different for all. But some occasions and festivals are universal like – Mother’s day, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Christmas when people all across the world buy gifts for their dear ones. On such days, offer special discounts to make the most of these occasions and hike sales.

Remember customers’ special days

When a person registers with your website, ask his birthday and anniversary date. Send gifts to your customer on those special days to make him feel special and loved.  It can be a small token of love from your side – like a bouquet of flowers. Your customer will never go to any other portal.

Try these simple tips and see the difference.

Category: How-To Guides | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | June 12, 2011
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Why It Is Important to Have an E-mail List for a Web Hosting Reseller

List building is something every marketer involved himself with, but that is not the case with webhosting resellers. They simply cannot join the set of dots lying between email lists and the products they offer. They do not see any reason why they should invest in a list building exercise, and hence they prefer other form of marketing over this high-converting marketing tool.

3 main reasons why web hosting resellers should build email list

Customers remains in the loop, without much effort

As a web hosting services provider you often need to inform your customers (both actual and prospective) about all the minor as well as major changes you have made to your servers, security, or even to your offering. An email list will help you keep your customers in loop. To a list, all you need to do is to create a benefit-laid email and fire it up to inform your audience of what change you have made and how it is going to affect them.

Cross selling and up selling will be easy

Selling to people who already have bought from you in the past is rather easier than it is to sell to someone with whom you do not share any relationship. Once you have a list of your customers, you can relatively easily persuade them to buy a higher version of your product (up selling), and you can even push your products to them which they are not consuming (cross selling). For example to a web hosting customers you can push your domain names, security products, and SSL certificates, etc.

Build trust and demonstrating authority

The biggest challenge that a web hosting reseller faces is its ability to distinguish itself from competition. Often time, people fail to realize why you are better than others. You can demonstrate your leadership and build trust by sending educational mails to people in your list.

Helping your customers solve their problems is the best and the safest way to establish yourself as an authority in your niche.

The three reasons cited above are too important to be ignored. How you capitalize on them could be the key difference between making your reseller business grow big and keeping it the way it is now. The ball is in your court, and you have to decide how you want to play with it.

Category: Web Hosting | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | November 23, 2010
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Domain Flipping – Why Many Flipper Fails to Make Money

In the last article titled Domain Flipping 101, I talked about the two different strategies adopted by domain flippers, and the process I discussed may have made it look simple, but there are many potholes in the way, which hinders the growth of many domain flippers. The goal of this article is bring those hidden dragons in the broad light of knowledge, so that they cannot surprise you. This will increase your chances of success.

Choosing wrong domain

This is the biggest mistake a person makes when starting out in domain flipping business. Inspired by cool names like Facebook, twitter, flickr, and Yahoo!, a newbie domain flipper often buys out domains that sounds cool to them (but which is actually useless).

And when they find that the names are not getting picked by webmasters, they become worried. Too much worry for too long a time leads to frustration, which results in their pulling out of domain flipping business.

Choosing wrong extension

This is another mistake that people make when starting out in domain flipping business. In an attempt to get a “keyword rich” domain name, a newbie domain flipper end up buying domain extensions that are worth nothing.

Many people buy domains with extensions like INFO, BIZ, TK, IN, CN, etc., to flip it, but they are often left with no buyers, unless supported by some extraordinary content. This is a mistake. One should not buy a domain that does not have .COM, .NET, or .ORG extension. Others are valid too, but the commercial value of other extensions is not as much as of the above ones.

Wrong niche

Some niches are worth more than other niches. And there are quite many niches that do not have any commercial value. Buying a domain name in such niches is not a wise decision.

There are some more domain flipping monsters that have evaded our sight in this article, but they will not succeed in doing so in the next article.

Category: Business | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | November 18, 2010
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Domain Flipping 101

If you are in the making money online niche for long enough then you must have heard about domain flipping. You might have heard about this, even if you are not in this niche and all you have done is read couple of articles about domain flipping at some random blog.

If you got excited after reading in those articles about the kind of many X is making by flipping a domain, and you do not know how to do it yourself then this is the article for you. As the title suggested, this article is not for you if you are a pro in domain flipping. You may be interested in other stuff on this blog. We have good SEO tips here, you can read that. And for rest, let’s see what domain flipping is.

What is domain flipping?

I am not sure how many of you know that domain flipping refers to buying and selling of a domain. A typical domain flipping case involves 4 steps:

  1. Buying a new domain
  2. Developing a website on it
  3. Propagating it on the Internet, so that you can get some traffic and monthly income
  4. The last stage is to sell this domain.
  5. Rinse and repeat until you become next Bill Gates.

It sounds simple, isn’t it? It indeed is simple in periphery, but in details, it becomes difficult. It is in the details that people get stuck. We will talk about it in the next article. For now, let’s focus on what it is.

There is one more strategy that people use in this. The steps involved in that are as follow:

  1. They buy a already developed domain
  2. Polish it to make it look more attractive
  3. Sell it for profit.
  4. Rinse and repeat until you become next Bill Gates.

Neither of them is more or less complicated. Both of the ways are sufficiently difficult, but as you are just starting out, I will not suggest going to second strategy because a wrong purchase may mean a loss of money and a loss of opportunity to earn. You should, therefore, try your hand in this field for some time before going for buying existing websites to flip. Time will come when you will be able to do that, but not know.

This brings us to the end of this article, in the next one I will talk about the difficulties one face in flipping.

Category: Business | Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | November 13, 2010
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How to Brainstorm a Topic for Your Next Blog Post

What puts a wet blanket on the enthusiasm of most of the niche blogger is the sudden dearth of new topics to write on, which some of us call writer’s block — for bloggers, it should be termed blogger’s block. This syndrome refers to a situation when a blogger opens his or her word processor only to find that he has nothing to write about.

This could be addressed, and it is quite easy to do that. All you need to do is build a system for you, which you will follow every time you will start writing a post. Read this blog post to the end and you will know how to brainstorm for your blog topics.

Brainstorming tips for your blog

  1. To brainstorm on a topic, you need to have a rough idea of what you should write about. To this end, the first thing you need to do is to set Google and twitter alert on the topics you blog about. Skim through the alert, everyday, and jot down the ideas that come to you. You can refer to these idea snippets when writing a blog post.
  2. You can also get idea from the newsletter you have subscribed to.
  3. Once you have the idea, you can do a dipstick keyword research to make a tentative list of keyword to include in the blog post.
  4. The next step is to search Google for ideas that will combine to form a blog post.
  5. Read some blog posts and articles, and write down the important points that come to your mind.
  6. Create a rough structure of the blog post.
  7. See if you have all the information required to write the final blog post. If you do not have all the required information then hit the Google search button one more time.

Now you have everything that you need to know before writing a blog post. Start stroking the keyboard with a confidence that you are going to produce a captivating piece.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
bikram | September 19, 2010
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Have You Tried These Advanced Linkbaits for Your Blog?

In the previous article I talked about content types that suits perfectly for linkbaits, and towards the end, I told you that in the next article I will share some advanced linkbait techniques. And this is that article. By using these techniques, you will not only get more links, but you will be able to network with real people behind the websites or blogs linking to you.

Advanced linkbaits

Rank websites

Create a list of websites and rank them on the basis of their merit. You can, for example, create a list of top 25 dating websites. Once you are done with the ranking, sending each website with a badge announcing their rank. A website will definitely link back to your blog.

Rank people

This is a linkbait that very few blogger or webmaster will refuse being lured to. What you have to do is to create a list of 25 most influential people in a niche. Write a small bio about them — you can find this information on the about us page of their websites or blogs — and post it on your blog. Add a link to their websites as well.

The next step is to send them a mail informing them about their inclusion in top25 most influential list on your website. Send each one of them a rank badge. They cannot help, but give you a backlink.

As you can see, both the strategy has two parts: one, creating a list, and contacting the relevant parties with a badge explaining the honor they received. Err on any and you will miss the opportunity to get ranked.

Do not abuse this strategy. It will stop working, and do not add any non-deserving candidate in your list, just because you know him. It will take the credibility away from your ranking.

Category: blogging | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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