Never Ending Thoughts…

June 6, 2012: Over six million passwords stolen from Social Media Giant – LinkedIn.com. April 6, 2012: Hackers break down mac firewall on over 600,000 apple computers. April 4, 2012: A 23 year old British hacker steals eight million identities of UK residents. March 8, 2012: Anonymous leaks Symantec source code.

You probably already know that the above mentioned incidents are just a mere drop as compared to the ocean of Internet Security Hacks that have happened in the past five years. What’s the reason? Is it limitations in our current Internet Security Technology? Or is it our business process? What role does the C-suite needs to play in order to avoid such Security risks? Unfortunately, these questions can’t be simply answered by a “yes” or a “no”. John Lainhart, Steve Robinson and Marc van Zadelhoff from IBM have recently released a thought provoking white paper on this topic. It’s called “Managing threats in the digital age”. You can read it here: http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/gbs/thoughtleadership/ibv-security-managing-threats.html. Although their research is very thorough and convincing, I’d like you – the reader – to read it and challenge its viability based on your experience in dealing with Internet Security Risks.

Here’s my experience.

Is an “Optimized Security” (that is Proactive and Automated Security), the solution?

A structured, three-level approach to building security intelligence. Courtsey: IBM Global Business Services

John, Steve and Marc talk about how businesses typically implement security in “waves” starting from “Basic” to “Proficient” to “Optimized”. In my experience, while a “truly optimized” infrastructure does make security much harder to break, it does not completely solve the problem. The reason why even the most optimized security systems are still prone to vulnerabilities and intrusions is because the rules that make a system “intrusion aware” keep changing. Every time an intrusion detection rule is compromised, it must be updated and patched as soon as possible. For instance if logging in to a production environment over VPN network at around midnight, especially when there is no planned maintenance, is considered as intrusion, and if this rule becomes known to the hacker, he will simply avoid hacking into the system at that time. This raises the discussion of how to secure the security fabric itself!

As a company moves towards optimized security, the role of C-suite becomes more and more important. Stringent processes must be defined and ensure that they are followed without exceptions. How many times does it happen that a Level 3 support developer comes to know about the password to the production box because the Level 1 operations person was away from the computer and something serious had to be fixed urgently? How many times does it happen that since that Level 3 support developer doesn’t know the seriousness of him having that password, writes it on a Post-It note and sticks it on the corner of his monitor? You know what I mean.

Can the C-suite really help here?

John, Steve and Marc take the discussion further and discuss how the C-suite (the CEO, CFO, CMO, etc.) should be responsible for ensuring that incidents such as above don’t happen; and if they do, immediate remediation is taken to ensure the security fabric remains bullet proof. Personally I think their idea of the “three-point plan” is brilliant because in my experience the reason why things fall apart is because the C-suite is not kept well informed about the vulnerabilities in the company’s technology and processes and its implications on the company’s business. Once informed, it’s really the responsibility of the C-suite and the board to align their resources and priorities, and finally become smarter is analyzing and quantifying the risks.

For me, the key take-away from this paper is that making your business secure is a continuous and evolving process. It is not just the responsibility of the C-suite. It is not just the responsibility of the developer or the QA engineer. It is the responsibility of the society and the community as a whole. Although “responsibility of the community” is not mentioned in the white paper, I see it as a general progression to the “three-point plan”. Apart from involving customers, internal staff, partners, auditors, etc., the company must have appropriate processes and channels in place to accept feedback from the community at large.

What are your thoughts?

If you are responsible for generating new leads and managing leads pipe-line for your company, you know the importance of lead scoring. Lead Scoring not only helps quantifying quality of each lead in your CRM system, but also helps keeping track of all the leads in an effective and efficient manner.

But this post is not about what lead scoring is and how it works. There are tons of articles written by many experts in this area. In this post I will discuss some of the not so talked about aspects of lead scoring and the underlying reasons as to why it works so well.

By the way, if you are looking for a quick introductory lesson on what lead scoring is, here’s one great post by Ashley Furness: http://blog.softwareadvice.com/articles/crm/how-to-build-a-lead-scoring-program-1052512/. Ashley has shared her thoughts about lead scoring and has also included a great video from Laura Patterson, President at Vision Edge Marketing. The video not only explains what lead scoring is in very simple terms but also takes it further by showing some great techniques that you can use to build a powerful lead scoring system for your business. I highly recommend it.

Coming back to the topic of why after all lead scoring works so well; I think these are some of the reasons why:

Lead Scoring Helps Improving Your Lead Generation Methods and Your Marketing Strategy

Since Lead Scoring quantifies every lead in your CRM system, it acts as an ideal barometer to quantify-ably access your Lead Generation Methods. For example, if your Lead Generation Method is consistently generating low quality leads, you know that there’s something wrong with your Lead Generation Methods. May be you are focusing on the wrong market segment. May be your marketing message is not in line with your product or service offering. Whatever the reason could be, a constant generation of low quality leads is a sign that you need to go back and look at your lead generation method and your overall marketing strategy.

Lead Scoring makes Marketing Automation Easier to Implement

Another big benefit of lead scoring and the reason why it works so well is that it acts as a very good source of feedback to the Marketing Automation Engine. By giving clear, concise and measurable inputs to the Marketing Automation Engine (such as at what stage the current lead is, what are the chances for this lead to be able to push through the next phase and get converted into a customer, what kind of interaction has been successful with this lead, etc.), Lead Scoring can help orchestrate extremely effective Marketing Automation workflows.

Lead Scoring saves You Time!

Last, but not the least, a very important reason why I think Lead Scoring works so well, is because it saves companies lot of time in all aspects of their work. For instance, a good lead scoring system:

• Removes the ambiguity in qualifying at what stage a lead is, hence saves a lot of time that would otherwise go wasted in unfruitful sales follow-ups.
• Brings in more “loyal customers” and hence saves a lot of time that would otherwise go wasted in marketing follow ups in an effort to up-sell products or services. This is because a good lead scoring system helps improve the marketing automation engine, that very carefully, helps converting a lead to a customer who is more informed about the companies products and services.

There are many other hidden benefits of lead scoring that are often forgotten by many sales and marketing experts, perhaps not because of lack of awareness of these benefits, but because they are considered “implied”. However I believe that these benefits should still be brought up and discussed in great depth when coming up with a lead scoring method. No company can “magically” reap the real benefits of a lead scoring system unless these “implied benefits” are discussed, thought through, and put in plan during creation of such a system so that it’s well-integrated with the company’s marketing automation strategy and sales CRM systems.

What are your thoughts?

On my journey to entrepreneurship, one of the first and perhaps the most important hurdles that I have found in launching my product is to figure out where to draw the baseline. I am sure if you came up with an idea and were bold enough to take the plunge into converting that into reality, you know what I’m talking about. It’s that inner voice that somehow keeps pushing you to achieve perfection, or may be that fear of launching a product before it’s ready.

Today, I will talk about this first hurdle and how I am solving it. I call it “Where to draw the baseline”.

Are you focused towards your goal?

It’s very true – Success Comes To Those Who Persevere. Unfortunately it’s very hard to persevere for most innovative minds out there. One might have a brilliant or innovative idea and perhaps even a solution; but might not be able to convert it into a successful business. Remember we are talking about entrepreneurship, not just pure innovation. While every new day, and every new talk with your peers will instill a flood of ideas in your mind, think twice before you make changes to your goal. Think as many times it takes. Keep focused on the bare bones feature-set that you had planned for your “first launch”. Write that down clearly so that you can recall why you chose certain features and why you rejected certain in favor of time and effort.

Are You Listening to Your Prospective Customers?

One thing that will help you decide your baseline and make sure you stick on to it is involving a few prospective customers early on when you are designing or prototyping. No matter how much domain knowledge you have, try to get hold of a few prospective customers. Share your idea with them and take their help in figuring out what their specific pain points are. Try to find out what the gaps in their existing solutions are. What they’d absolutely love to see. Once you have figured out these goals and written them down on paper, start working on them one by one and keep your customers involved at every step. This way you are not only going to build a stronger product, but also a stronger relationship with your customers.

Don’t fear the “big guns”

Lastly, don’t fear your biggest competitors. Don’t be afraid of the “feature complete suite” that they have. The reason you started your journey is because you know their “feature complete suite” is not “actually” feature complete. Your prospective customers have been with you all along and have helped you define what’s missing in their product. Believe in your work and in your prospective customers. Very soon you’ll realize every market has competition. Every market has copy-cats. Every market has sharks. What will help you prevail out of all that is focus towards your goal and listening to your customers.

This has been my secret sauce so far. What’s yours?

In the article “Benefits of Traditional Advertising“, I touched upon some of the key benefits of Traditional Advertising. In this article, I will try to cover some simple ways you can use to measure effectiveness of your Traditional Advertising efforts. Although there are many parameters one could use to measure and analyze a marketing campaign’s effectiveness, one of the most widely used parameters are number of audience reached, conversion rate, and overall sales generated from the campaign. Let’s see how these parameters can be estimated (and if possible, measured accurately) in a Traditional Advertising Scenario.

Estimating Number of Audience Reached in a Traditional Advertising Scenario

One of the key challenges posed by Traditional Advertising is estimating number of audience the campaign was able to reach out to. Unlike online campaigns, there is no full-proof way to determine how many people actually saw the Ad in the news paper, or listened to the commercial on the radio, or opened that mail-in-coupon you sent them, and so forth. You can get circulation numbers of most major publishers in the United States from trusted authorities such as the Audit Bureau of Circulations, but then what about all those (still legitimate but smaller) publishers out there who haven’t been accredited by any such trusted authority? Furthermore, such trusted authorities would be able to provide you only basic circulation numbers based on past data and surveys. Hence, first off, the data will still be an “estimate”, and secondly, it would be still hard to find out how many people actually saw your Ad.

Audit Bureau of Circulations Website

There is no perfect way to solve this problem. Here’s what you can do though: Try as hard as possible to get the right circulation numbers from your publisher. But wait, these are just the “circulation numbers”. This won’t give you an idea of how many people actually saw your Ad. For example, if the daily circulation of a news paper is 100,000 per day, that doesn’t mean that all those 100,000 people would have viewed your Ad. So work with the publisher to get the circulation numbers of the sections in the news paper where your Ad was posted. For instance, most accredited news papers would not only tell you their overall circulation but also would be able to give some fair idea around the number of people who read the sports section or the job openings section, etc. If Circulation Analytics is not your forte, take help from some company who’s good at it and have them do the correct estimation for you. Keep in mind that having correct analytics is just as important as running the right campaign and coming up with the right marketing message. Otherwise you’d never know exactly which campaign really worked for you and which one didn’t.

Measuring Conversion Rate

The next important parameter in any Marketing Analytics is the conversion rate; in other words, from the number of audience to whom your campaign reached out to, or who actually viewed your campaign, how many actually initiated some sort of dialog with you. This could be as simple as going to your website, or giving you a phone call, or writing to you via email. Again, this is very simple to do in the online advertising space; Not so much in the offline and traditional advertising though. However, the good news is that unlike the problem of estimating number of audience (as mentioned above), this problem is much simpler to solve.

Here’s what you can do to measure Conversion Rate in your Traditional Advertising Effort: Make sure to tie all your Ad Creatives with some key code so that you can later collate the responses received from your campaign. For instance, if you are running an Ad in a news paper, make sure to add a key code that is not only specific to your campaign, but also to the news paper. For example, a Christmas Holiday Promotion to be listed in The Wall Street Journal could use a key code XMASWSJ, and say XMASSMN in the San Jose Mercury News. That way, when the visitors would use the key code (either by telling it to the sales representative they called, or by typing it as a coupon code on the website), and you’d be able to track the conversion rate. The same can be used as a parameter in the Redirect URL and tracked accordingly.

Accurately Finding Sales Generated From a Traditional Advertising Campaign

The challenges and implementation methods for this are similar to the Conversion Rate Problem as discussed in the section above. Since offline and traditional marketing campaigns typically rely on a call to action method instead of a click to action, the onus of keeping the Sales CRM up-to-date and accurately capture sales falls in the hands of sales representatives. This means that your sales representatives must be aware of the promotions that are running at any moment, they must know how to tie an incoming lead against the right campaign and the publisher (for instance perhaps by using the key code as discussed in the previous section), and they must understand the importance of adding the right information in the Sales CRM system. This might also mean investing in the right set of tools and technologies (perhaps the right set of Marketing Automation Tools).

In the US alone, businesses are estimated to spend around $120 Billion each Year on Traditional Advertising as compared to around $30 Billion a Year on Online Advertising methods. Of course Online Advertising methods are rapidly growing each year, and one of the main reasons of that is the fact that they can be tracked and measured much more easily, and hence “proven” to be better than Traditional Advertising methods. But is that really the case? If there were processes and methods to measure Traditional Advertising methods as effectively, would businesses continue using them? What do you think?

In the article “Smarketing – The Perfect Blend Of Sales And Marketing“, I briefly touched upon the concept of smarketing and took it further in the article “Top Three Things To Watch Out When Combining Your Sales And Marketing Efforts“. Lately the term Marketing Automation has started picking up some steam. Many marketing companies have started using this term extensively in their product and service offerings. And there’s a very valid reason why. Besides many benefits of marketing automation, one key reason that I can think of is that it’s one of the ways to solve the challenges posed in implementing an effective and an efficient Smarketing Solution. In this article, I’ll explain how.

There is a ton of material available on the Internet that explains what Marketing Automation is; If you’d like a simple, unbiased and a quick 5 minutes overview of Marketing Automation, I strongly suggest looking at these two videos posted by Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute.

What’s the Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Management?

How Marketing Automation Support Demand Generation & Lead Management

Thanks Lauren for sharing these great videos! Now let’s see how Marketing Automation can help in making your Smarketing Solution more efficient and effective.

Better Integration Between Marketing Campaigns and Sales CRM Systems

One of the main advantages of a good Marketing Automation Implementation is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales. For instance, good Marketing Automation can help you seamlessly push leads generated via a marketing campaign into your sales CRM system. It can help you set up more targeted campaigns by picking up data from your sales CRM and see which leads are at which step on the sales cycle and push relevant targeted marketing content to them.

Better And Holistic Monitoring of Marketing & Sales Efforts

Another big advantage of implementing Marketing Automation in your company would be that it will help you get a better and a holistic snapshot of your marketing and sales efforts. This means you’ll not only know exactly how much you are spending on each of your campaign, but also which campaign is generating how much sales, and how your campaigns are helping up-sell your products.

Better Marketing & Sales Process Change Management

Making any Marketing & Sales Process effective is a continuous activity that often involves making changes to existing processes, business rules and sometimes even the technology and core infrastructure of the company. Marketing Automation will help you streamline your marketing and sales processes so that they can be easily changed and made more in line with the the changing needs of both the marketing and the sales teams. For instance, imagine asking your sales team to run a campaign where-in you’d like to offer a deal to your existing customers if they gave you some referrals. Many times such campaigns are hard to implement and even harder to track without making significant changes in existing marketing and sales processes. Marketing Automation can help in aligning your existing marketing and sales processes so that such marketing, sales, and lead generation efforts would be easily implementable, track-able, and easily changed as needed.

And so, as you can see, marketing automation helps bringing marketing and sales team closer to each other in a much more efficient and scalable manner; something that’s one of the key goals of smarketing.

It’s not new to see Sex and Nudity in Marketing Campaigns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it works very well! But sometimes it just terribly fails because the audience felt that the company “crossed the line”. In this article I will share with you some practical scenarios that have worked in the the past in favor of companies and the ones that have terribly failed. In the end we will draw conclusion and try to find where to draw the line when it comes to using Sex and Nudity in Marketing.

Zappos – More Than Shoes!

Around six months back, Zappos, one of the leading online shoe retailers (now owned by Amazon), started this campaign that really turned every-body’s heads and eyebrows. They had their models wear tiny bikinis and thongs and took their pictures at various key locations in Manhattan. Later on the bikinis and thongs were digitally edited to be replaced by censor bars with the text “More Than Shoes!”.

Source: http://blogs.zappos.com

The pictures caught attention and went viral on the Internet. But the story doesn’t end there. The Ad was run both in print media and online. In the online version, when the viewer clicked on the picture (perhaps in the hope to see its larger version or read more about the Ad), he/she was taken to Zappos where the “actual picture” was shown in which the models were wearing bikinis and thongs. The print media also tried to give similar experience by using QR Codes. When the visitor liked the Ad and wanted to learn more, he/she could simply scan the QR Code using their smart phone and was instantly taken to Zappos’s mobile website where the actual picture with relevant deals and promotion message was shown.

Source: http://blogs.zappos.com

I believe Zappos did a great job by identifying how far they should go with sex and nudity in advertising. Their Ad Campaign caught instant attention, it didn’t spoil the company’s image, and helped change their overall image as just an online shoe retailer.

Calvin Klein – Secret Obsession Perfume Ad

Around two years back Calvin Klein launched a new steamy Ad showing actress Eva Mendes writhing topless in bed. While Calvin Klein’s aim was to promote their perfume, the Ad nearly killed their product as many viewers found the Ad too sexual and vulgar for the most audience. What did Calvin Klein do wrong? I think the biggest mistake that Calvin Klein did in that campaign is not being able to focus on their real goal – that is conveying to the audience why they should buy the Secret Obsession Perfume.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

The Conclusion

1. It’s OK to use Sex and Nudity in Marketing as long as you keep your focus on the message, not the model.
2. Understand your target audience before using Sex and Nudity when marketing your product.
3. Remember that many people would just know you by your advertisements. They might not ever buy anything from you, but they’ll create an image of your company based on the kind of Ads they see. That’s called “building a brand”. If you choose to use Sex and Nudity in your Marketing, make it absolutely sure that it wouldn’t in any way impact your brand.

Where to draw the line when using Sex and Nudity in Marketing

Before I start this section, let me be frank. If it were that easy, then there wouldn’t have been any marketing blunders related to usage of Sex and Nudity in Marketing. The reason this happens is because it’s really hard to find that fine line. Your best bet would be to focus on your audience and your brand; start with a small focus group and get feedback from your close customers before you run the campaign. That will give you and idea where to draw the line. What do you think?

Source: http://www.loc.gov/

Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday is the first holiday of the year in United States. It’s observed on the third Monday of January each year, which is around the time of King’s birthday, January 15. You can read more about it here. Being first holiday of the year, for many businesses it brings the chance to once again entice customers and keep their sales going on. In this article I will cover how small businesses can leverage Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday to generate more sales. This is just an introduction to a topic that can be discussed in much more detail and can be covered by taking lot of examples. So feel free to shoot me a mail or reply to this post and keep the conversation live!

Choose the Right Campaign on Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Weekend

Source: http://bargainbabe.com

Since this is not a major holiday, don’t expect people exchanging gifts. So you can leave the gift items out from your Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Promotion. You should rather focus on items that people would have missed buying during the holiday season.

This holiday comes after most people receive their first paycheck of the year. So many people would want to spend that money in things that are important or things they couldn’t buy during the holidays. So your best bet would be to run promotions on house hold items, perhaps giving away discounts on yearly maintenance subscriptions and so forth.

Choose the Right Time of the Day or Weekend

best-of-web.com

Keep in mind that Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday is mostly observed by US Federal employees. It’s not a mandatory holiday, so many businesses are actually open on that day! This means that many people would be actually working on that day and will only be able to come in the evening.

To get maximum results, start the sale on the day before the holiday (that is Sunday) and continue throughout the holiday.

Take logistics Very Seriously!

Source: http://openclipart.org

Why am I being so direct about it? That’s because as the well known saying goes “First Impression is the Last Impression”. This is probably going to be your first promotion of the year. If you fail to make your customers happy in this first promotion, perhaps due to delivery delays, misleading promotion message, or any other reason, this might become your last chance to promote anything successfully in the whole year! On the other hand, if you do a good job, you can pretty much consider yourself winning a jackpot! Now that the customer is happy he/she is definitely going to check back in on almost all (if not every) weekend/holiday promotion in the coming year. This is your chance to put your best foot in front of new customers, so take all the time to plan it right and make sure your logistics are in place.

By keeping these simple but very important points in mind, you can rest assured your Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Sale Campaign is going to be successful. But as they say “The Devil is in the Details.”; So feel free to share your thoughts!

Holiday Season is one of those times of the Year when you as a  Business Owner have an upper edge; the customer is in the mood to spend money! What can you do to take this rare opportunity and generate more sales? Of course we know it. Running holiday promotions and holiday discount deals are the most common methods. However, many businesses, specially the small and local businesses, still fail to generate outstanding sales during holiday season. The only ones that do generate good sales are the ones that have already built some reputation over the years and are able to take advantage of repeat business during holidays.

In this series of articles we will discuss some of the things that small and local businesses can do to generate more leads during holiday season and thereby increase their probability of generating more sales. Since every business is unique we can’t come up with a “one size fits all” solution. So in this article, I will cover some of the basic and common tactics and ideas that would apply to most (if not all) businesses, and in the next few articles I will touch upon specific businesses. I will try to cover as many local businesses as I can. If you can’t find ideas that are relevant to your business, please do write back and I’ll try to cover them!

Start Your Holiday Promotion At the Right Time

Start too late and you’d probably have very less time for the information to spread. Many people would have already bought what they were looking for. Start too early and either most people will forget about the deal (remember many people wait until the end to do their shopping), or you’ll fall into the risk of your competitors copying your promotion idea! Generally a good time to start a holiday promotion is one month before holidays. This gives the campaign enough time to spread and at the same time gives people just enough time to take advantage of the promotion.

Schedule a New Product Launch during Holiday Season

Many businesses launch products on their predefined time lines that sometimes don’t match with key holiday dates such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. And when the holiday season comes, the only approach they have is to reduce the price of their existing products. That is not the smartest of the moves.

Remember that customers are in the mood to spend. You should leverage this opportunity to release new products and if possible at bare bones discount price. Keep in mind that during holiday season people are in the mood to buy gifts, they want to buy something that’s new and has just arrived at the stores; and many are willing to pay a premium for that one gift that has just hit the market. Why not leverage this rare opportunity and introduce new products instead of reducing price of the old ones?

Give Special Deal to your Existing Customers

This one just makes sense. Getting repeat business from your existing customers is easiest during holiday season. If they are already happy with you, then it’s even more easy! All you have to do is come up with some deal that would make sense for your customer and offer them during holiday season.

This could be a contract renewal with some new added features for free for first three months, 5% extra shipment on the next order, free shipping, or anything that you can do to get repeat business.

Find Your Niche and Remain Focused

Even though there are more people ready to spend money during holidays, there is still more competition. Just like you, your competitors are going to try every single bit to attract attention. The fact is that in some cases your competition is going to outbid you and in some cases you are going to outbid your competition. The best thing to do in this case is to carefully identify your niche and remain focused. For example, you could be selling custom design apparel and as part of this holiday season, you might want to focus on what would work best in your favor instead of running promotions all across the board. For instance, if you have a new line of children clothing ready to hit the shops by around Christmas, then you should focus on running a promotion just for that. The idea is to carefully evaluate what type of promotion you’ll be able to run most successfully and keep focused on that. This will help you limit your competition and get the maximum out of your promotion.

Get Your Customers Involved at the right time and Reward Them for referrals

Holiday season is one of the best time to get new business based on referrals from existing customers. Again, for the same reason – there are many deals going on and customers are in the mood to spend. Your existing customers are the best sales team you can have. They not only pay for your product, they evaluate it for you, give you feedback and if rewarded appropriately they can bring lot of new business to you! However the trick is to get them involved early in the game. Discuss upcoming promotions with your key customers and get them involved. Give them enough time to promote your holiday deal and reward them nicely for their efforts.

So here are five basic things you can do irrespective of what kind of business you are in and generate more leads and sales during holiday season than you had been doing so far! In the next post I will pick up one local business and discuss ideas of how to grow sales during holidays. If you have some business in mind that you’d like to discuss please feel free to let me know!

Social Media Marketing has become an integral part of any web campaign. In fact it’s striking to see that it took over two decades for Social Media Marketing to catch on the Web. It has been there ever since, through conferences, meet-ups, focus groups, etc.

In this article I’d like to talk about two great technology tools that has changed the way Social Media Marketing started on the Web. These are the Twitter Sharing Button and Social Bookmarking Sites. Both these technologies started at almost the same time and greatly complement each other. If carefully used together, they can help you create a great viral campaign within minutes!

Social Bookmarking

The concept behind social bookmarking is really very simple. You probably are aware of bookmarks in FireFox, IE, and other browsers. People bookmark their favorite websites and pages in their browsers so that they can quickly come back and have a look. Social bookmarking gives a more “social” angle to it. Instead of bookmarking in your local browser, social bookmarking allows you to manage all your bookmarks from a single website. This way you can access your bookmarks from anywhere! In addition, you can follow other users and stories and share your bookmarks. This is an excellent way to spread some information, share a link with others, and gain knowledge in the topics you like!

Social bookmarking really became a “must have” in the Social Marketing space when companies realized how important it was for them to be discussed by various users on a bookmarking site. The more users on a bookmarking site were sharing and bookmarking a company’s news, the better it was to be able to reach out to more visitors. As companies realized this immense potential of social bookmarking, they started paying more attention and looking at trends of what gets shared and what quickly spreads, and what just dies out.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of social bookmarking sites. So you must first find out the bookmarking sites that are relevant to you; where your visitors go and would possibly share your posts or links with their friends. Once you have done that, you must closely monitor the activity and see how users react to the information you release, at what time are you able to create the maximum impact, what gets shared more, etc. Remember, Social Bookmarking is Not Web Directory Submission. If you will just add a link there it will get buried under the thousands of new links that get added to a social bookmarking site. So instead of wasting time adding links to hundreds of social bookmarking sites, simply pick the ones that are relevant to your business and post relevant content.

http://www.social-bookmarking.net/

I recommend looking at http://www.social-bookmarking.net/

Twitter Sharing Button

Twitter Sharing Button is another marvelous tool in the hands of a Social Media Marketer. Unlike bookmarking, the sharing button allows throwing a quick tweet on your twitter home wall. From there it further percolates to your twitter followers and to their followers (if they re-tweet it) and so on. The important difference here is that Twitter is Not a Social Bookmarking Site. It is only a medium to quickly share some information with others; something that you’d probably not go back and search for in your twitter account. It’s typical use is to spread some real time information quickly amongst your “Twitter followers”.

Business use Twitter Sharing Button in their blogs to allow readers to quickly share the blog or a post with their followers. This is an excellent way to quickly spread some information and has become a default tool in the hands of marketing managers.

Using Twitter Sharing Button along with Social Bookmarking

Using Twitter Sharing Button along with great Social Bookmarking can create a lot of marketing buzz for your business, sometimes even for free! Imagine this: You post a great blog and book mark it so that your friends view and like it and book mark it too. In addition you put a Twitter Sharing Button on your post. This way, the readers who like it quickly share it with their other Twitter Friends. When the friends read it, they book mark it on their preferred social bookmarking sites and that way your post not even spreads within hours, at the same time it’s gets persisted and bookmarked by more people than you could ever do with a limited budget. Think about it!

When people start a new business, one of the first common questions that come to their mind is “Should I create a website?”. The next common question that comes is “What should I name my website?”. And that’s where things start becoming fancy. People start worrying about how it will impact their SEO efforts, and all other things around it.

In this article, I will go over some of the common myths that are still lingering on the Internet (thanks to old and stale blogs) and help you come up with some great names for your new website!

Step 1: Name Your Website Close To The Name Of Your Business Name

Let’s forget about the Internet for a second. Let’s think about what came to your mind when you incorporated your business at your local county office. What name did you choose and why? It could be “Wendy’s Lemonade” or “Joe’s Rock Pub” or perhaps “Catchy Clips”. Whatever it be, I’m sure you had something in mind while coming up with that name. Of course, the name has to be unique and not registered before. In addition it has to be attractive and must be related to what you do so that people don’t get confused. For example “Joe’s Barber Shop” is probably not a right name for an automotive repair shop. This is just simple common sense.

And the same concepts apply in deciding the website name. Ideally your website name should be very close to your real/physical business name. However there are limitations for example as far as special characters go, websites only allow a hyphen. In addition, you can’t have a website with all numbers and so forth. Also you can’t have spaces. So come up with something close enough. For example “Catchy Clips” can have a website named www.catchyclips.com and so forth.

If the name becomes too long and hard to type, then perhaps you can shorten it. For example “Kelly and Jones Antenna Shop” can perhaps have a website named “kjantennashop.com”.

Look at the paypal example. The business name is PayPal. The logs clearly shows on the PayPal building. The same shows on the website and even on the favico.ico. the website name is the same too.

Step 2: Watch out for names that would easily get misspelled

The fact that you can’t have spaces in website names creates one very big problem – that is the problem of people easily misspelling the website name. For example if your business is “Lee Eve’s Evening Dresses” then naming the website as “leeeveseveningdresses.com” is probably not a good idea. One of the most common reasons of SEO not working for some people is just simply the fact that their website is hard to type or remember!

When coming up with a website name, pick at least three variations of the same name. Show the options to your close friends. Or better, talk with a SEO Expert and he/she will be able to help you out.

Step 3: Think of names that people would easily remember

Look around and you’ll notice the best and ever lasting businesses around the World have one thing in common. Their names are short, simple and easy to remember. Be it Ford, Disney, or even Google and Facebook. They all are easy to remember and write. And it’s not that because they have been there for quite some time.

Step 4: Don’t stick with only the “.com”

Many people think that if the website name they had in mind is already taken, then it’s the end of the World and the only alternative is to find some other domain name. That is not entirely true. For example, you might be able to find your website on the .ws or .net domain. However, it might not always make sense to go with an alternate TLD. For example, if you have a business in United States, having a domain of .in or .co.uk might confuse visitors. Moreover, some smart spywares might even label you as a hacker! So in reality you might really have less choice; but do look around. Spend plenty of time because this is going to be the domain name you are going to use on your next big effort – Search Engine Optimization (aka SEO). So better take the time and come up with a good website domain and stick with it.

Step 5: Try to keep the name close to the content you are going to put on the site

A website with domain name “freebeer.com” that talks about ladies purses will probably get low ranking and hence SEO efforts are going to cost much more time and effort. No one can stop “freebeer.com” to still pop up at high rank in the SERPs when it eventually gets indexed and starts showing up when people look for ladies purses. For example searching for “imac deals” might pop up “apple.com” because the content on apple’s website is related to imac deals, however the word “apple” itself is misleading. But then you are talking about a company that has been there for over 20 years now and is pretty much known by everyone. Until you reach to that level, or until you think you have an idea that is so revolutionary that the name doesn’t matter, go with what makes sense; that is, picking up a name that would match with the content. This philosophy will work for over 80% of the people out there.

Step 6: Website names still change. Then what?

No matter how hard you think, names still do change. Even if you have a great idea, chances are that you will need to change the name after few years (at least that’s what the normal trend has been). So in that case, what do you do? The answer is “301 redirect”. A “301 redirect” is a method that tells the Web Server to redirect a particular URL to another URL in addition to telling the client (in most cases your web browser) that the resource you are trying access has been permanently moved to another location. This is lot of benefits as compared to normal redirects. First off, this is much faster than putting a HTTP meta tag based redirect. Secondly, it is safer because the redirect logic lies on the server side, not in the browser. And most importantly, since it lies on the server side, it’s a more “respected way”; in other words, search engines won’t ding you for changing the name to something that doesn’t match your content. You will still have all your back-links and SEO efforts intact.

This is how a typical 301 redirect look like on your Web Server’s .htaccess file:

Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html

And Last but not the least: Stop worrying too much about it!

Think of your website as the “virtual representation” of your “real business”. You perhaps clean your store, make sure that the latest products are out on the Window. Make sure your staff comes on time and greats every one. The same philosophy holds true on websites. So stop worrying too much and stop trying to find and hire people who will claim that they know the secret recipe behind SEO; because that’s not what you should be looking out for. Instead focus on your core business and try to reflect that as much as you can on your website and in your domain name. And Wonders WILL HAPPEN.