Never Ending Thoughts…

OK. So we are now kind of used to of almost every online business on this planet to have a “blog site”. I should probably add “facebook fan page” and “twitter feed page” to that. But we’ll come to that later. Let’s focus on the blogs first. If you are running an online business, 100% chances are that you’ll fall into an urge to start a blog, whether it makes sense or not. Large and established businesses have marketing teams, blog editors and owners, who make every effort to maintain the blog. But what about hundreds of thousands of small businesses who can’t afford a marketing team and a full time blog editor?

In this article, I’d like to talk about the problem of blogging in small businesses and how to know when it’s time to hire a blogger.

When do you even need a blog?

This is more of like a “per-requisite” question. If you don’t have anything new and interesting to add to your focus market, you should probably not blog at all! Instead spend more time and money on direct marketing approaches. You should blog only and only if you are truly passionate about what you are doing and want to contribute to the community by sharing your knowledge. Blogging is all about guiding and helping people and not promoting products.

Start by joining forums related to your Industry and read about what others are talking about. Share your opinion on matters that you love to discuss or care about. This will help you find what’s really missing on the Internet and how you can contribute.

So you know what to say but can’t articulate it well.

Unfortunately most people don’t even know that they don’t know how to articulate well. The free nature of blogging (and now micro blogging) has made it even harder for people to realize how good or bad they are at clearly writing as to what they want to say. The best approach is to talk with a professional blogger. Simply shoot them an email asking to review your article. Very few people would do that for free. So your best bet would be to first build a rapport with few good bloggers; either perhaps sign up to their forums and engage in discussions. This will also help you figure out which blogger would be able to understand your particular business and hence give you the right kind of feedback.

While this approach would work most of the times, there could be a situation you might just end up realizing that yes you do know what it takes to write a good blog, but then you might be better off marketing or doing sales or perhaps designing and developing the product itself! If blogging is not your cup of tea, and you know you need a blog, then you know you need a blogger!

How do I identify a great blogger out of the good ones?

This is going to be an iterative process. There is no algorithm behind how to find a great blogger. Most often than not you’ll easily be able to tell which ones are good because you’ll know it when you’ll love reading their material. But then finding the few “great ones” is rather an evolutionary process. Keep in mind that just like your business is unique, so is each blogger. And it does take some time for anyone to truly understand the philosophy and the essence behind your initiative. On top of that, to be able to articulate it well takes its own time and learning curve. So be patient and give chance to a couple of good bloggers. See how your customers and readers are responding. And that will give you an idea.

A great blogger would be able to articulate your thoughts in a way that will not only make it interesting for the readers but also help you become more mature about your space. And that’s the reason most of the times the blogger is not really just a “paid professional” but rather a member of the elite group in the company. He/She works closely with the head of marketing and sales and many times has direct conversations with the founders, board members and the CEO.

And so while choosing a great blogger, keep your mindset open. The person doesn’t always need to be an outside hire. He/She could very well be one of the board members or someone from the management or perhaps an employee within the company who has the gift to articulate things well. Don’t take blogging as a “position” or an “opening” in your company and don’t try to look for a “resource” to “fill in the position”. Instead follow the approach of “identifying” who in the organization could be a right fit.

What blogging approach are you following? What’s working for you? Please feel free to share your thoughts.

After three attempts, and self learning, I seemed to have found the Twitter Recipe that works for me. And I am going to share some of it with you today. I could have shared it all but then, to be frank, most of it is philosophy; and will perhaps take lot of time and wine sessions to fully throw over the table.

Twitter has definitely proven to be a true viral news platform. The 140 characters limitation enforces the originator of the news to be precise and concise. Sharing the information is as simple as a “one click” re-tweet! I don’t think it can get simpler than that! Anyways; This article is not about what Twitter can and cannot do. It’s about the people who use twitter. It’s about the people like you and me who either follow or have followers and are using Twitter mainly as a channel to spread and share knowledge.

One of the main things that I found on Twitter is that many people just blindly follow. Heck, many “people” on Twitter aren’t even “real people”! Many are just apps and bots that are constantly sniffing for material that their “masters” have programmed them for! When you see 10,000 followers in your Twitter profile and realize that 8000 of them are just apps and bots, believe me the “social” angle just goes down the drain.

So I think what matters on Twitter is not how many people are following you, but rather how many people are you following! When you follow someone or some feed, do you follow it because the material amuses you? gives you peace and harmony? makes you laugh? makes you think? I take Twitter just like any other channel of information. Just like today on my TV I have 100s of channels that I am subscribed to and I watch based on what I want to; I think the same philosophy goes for Twitter.

That brings the discussion to the point that when you follow someone on Twitter, are you really following them to increase your user base hoping that bots and other random people would see that and start following you? Or are you following them because you genuinely like what they say? It might not be the matter of whether or not you actually truly “believe” in what they say; However the question is really about the real reason behind your action of following other people on Twitter.

I believe that once you carefully start looking at it and selectively pick the people and feeds that you believe to some extent and think are useful sources of information, Twitter will be more beneficial for you. Twitter is not about increasing number of followers; It’s about enjoying the information that you love and believe in, and sharing that information with others who you think believe in you and love reading your material!

Or is it just the Friday / Weekend Fever kicking in me? What do you think?

Happy Friday!
GT

It has been a few months and I realized that we have gotten into the habit of posting a blog each day. Yesterday we sat back for a while and thought that what are the benefits of posting a blog each day. I know there’s a lot of material out there that talks about the benefits. But we wanted to set that aside and see how much difference has it made to us since we started posting a blog each day. And here’s what we found:

Increased User Base by Exponential Times

Ever since we started blogging on daily basis, we found that our user base started growing up almost exponentially. It was so large in the first few weeks that we had to check server logs, etc. to make sure that users were legitimate. It was amazing to see how people like to come back and even search engine bots start tracking you on daily basis.

Helped us write better blogs!

We found that when we were posting “one of blog” every once in a while, we were really loosing focus and weren’t conveying a focused message in all the blogs. And that’s quite understandable. When you work on something and then leave it for a few days then work again, you tend to loose the grip on the thought. Blogging daily at a certain time becomes pretty much like an ongoing activity, like going to the gym, or meditation, or even like taking a bath each day! You can focus on the thought process and continue on it each day.

Helped us being more aware about our Market!

Believe it or not, blogging each day helps you get more aware about your market! That is only if you are writing good blogs. A good blog is one that is unique, has your personal touch and does not repeat. You don’t want to create 10 versions of the same message and simply bore your readers to death! So then how do you come up with new material every day? You read news and keep up with the latest trends going in your market or topics of interest. You then use them as the basis for your blog. This in turn helps not only write good blogs but also being more aware about your market.

What benefits have your reaped by blogging every day? Share your experience with us!

When using blogging as the medium for marketing over the Internet, there are two very common methods that come to play now-a-days; a) Rapid Blogging and b) Micro Blogging

Rapid Blogging – Past, Present and Future

Traditionally blogging started with an idea for people to keep a web log of what they think and what they do. This was pretty much similar to keeping a log diary but being able to share it with everyone over the Internet. Most of the times blogging was done by people to share some valuable information about some technology or method. For example some of the first blogs that came into the World were related to various computer programming techniques and things like food recipes.

As blogging grew and started becoming one of the key methods for Internet Marketing, people started using it for not just sharing their thoughts and logging about their ideas but rather for promoting their products. The idea here was to create quick impact-full blogs that talk about the company product and entice users to buy the product. However the problem with this approach is that you don’t have new additions to a product line every single day! Since there are literally millions of new pages added to the Internet every day, you need to release something or the other to keep the users logged in to your blog. This requires a technique that combines the concepts of traditional blogging with marketing and is sometimes called rapid blogging.

Rapid blogging is the method of combining various forms of blogging strategies with an aim to write quick and focused blogs. The blogs are released typically on daily basis. They talk about about various topics but all of them are mainly aligned towards one basic aim – marketing a product or a service. Rapid blogging is not only fun to write it also adds lot of value for the readers because it just doesn’t talk about a specific product but also talks about latest things happening in the market.

Micro blogging – Past, Present and Future

One of the main difficulties of blogging is that for being effective it needs to be well written and categorized so that various blog directories can map them correctly. When someone reads a blog he’s looking for some specific information. And so typically a blog is more than 300 words. However many times people just want to talk about what they are doing at real time; for example you might be at a movie or in a carnival and throw out a quick note to your readers how much you are enjoying the event or what’s great about the event. Micro blogs are more about real time current affairs than about what happened say yesterday. Furthermore there’s much less effort involved in micro blogging because most of them are less than 120 characters long!

The trend of micro blogging really started from texting via mobile phones and grew further through social networking sites like twitter and facebook. They are an excellent way to spread some news and providing real time status updates about anything to your readers.

Comparing Rapid Blogging and Micro Blogging

As you can see, it’s really hard to compare both the methods of blogging. Both the methods have a different goal, use totally different technologies and have a totally different approach. Even the readership is different. So when someone asks me “which blogging method works best?”. The answer really is “both!”. You really need rapid blogging so as to be able to provide value added information about latest and current affairs in your field of interest to your readers. At the same time you need to use micro blogging to rapidly spread information. For example if you are a realtor or a car salesman, you can use micro blogging to talk about latest updates about some sales that you’d want to quickly spread and let your readers know. While you can use rapid blogging to talk about normal day to day events and about your products and services.

The best method is really the one that works best for you; which will most certainly be a mix of both the types of blogging methods. What has worked for you?

Blog writing is one of the very important aspects of any Internet Marketing effort. As a blogger one thing that you’ll almost certainly have to keep in mind is that your material must be unique and you must make sure to publish your content consistently at a given time. There are lot of benefits of doing so. By posting consistently at a given time, you help your readers plan their day accordingly. For example if you consistently post your blogs every day at 9AM, your readers would know when the next blog is going to come. If your posts are sporadic, many people would lose the interest and would move on to more regular posts. Keeping the material fresh makes sure that the readers would come back again hoping to see new and fresh material that they possibly wouldn’t have read anywhere else.

While all these are just a glimpse into what all a fresh and regular blog can provide, but what does it take to be able to write a fresh blog every day? After blogging myself for several years, and having gone through the cycle of hiring various bloggers, I learned some of the lessons that helped me a lot to be consistent and write a fresh blog each day. Today I am going to share that knowledge with you.

Read News

One of the best ways to come up with fresh material on daily basis is by being in touch with what’s going on in your field. Internet is arguably the best place to find latest news related to anything. By simply being in touch with the latest happenings in your field you will get lot of material and pointers to write about the same. While talking about a news, be careful to make sure that you don’t just copy paste the news. Instead your intention should be to really absorb the news and understand it from the perspective of how it affects your line of business and more importantly your readers. Write your comments and thoughts about the news instead of just talking about the actual news.

Pay Attention to what others say

A very important aspect of being a good blogger is being able to read through what others are saying and talking about. Read several blogs and always follow other good bloggers who talk and write about the same material that you do. By following other bloggers you will get enormous knowledge about what others have to say about your line of business. This may sometimes give you some good material to talk about your self. But more importantly it will help you add lot of color to your own blog. One of the very key ingredients of a good blog is keeping away from being monotonous and not just follow one style of writing. The best way to keep changing the writing styles is by following other bloggers.

Be Creative

Last but not the least; blogging is not just about shouting about what you have to say. Blogging is about being social and share your thoughts. The more interactive you are able to make your blog the more successful you’ll be in various aspects be it monetizing from the blog, adding value to your readers, marketing your product, etc. Do whatever it would take to make your blog interactive. You may try to run occasional lotteries and surveys or set up webinars. Try to talk about some new technology or simply spend time understanding some new complicated government law that might have been introduced in your line of business and try to cover it in simple words so that others can understand. The idea in the end here is to be creative not just about what you write but how you promote it.

By following these simple principals I am able to easily write new and fresh material every day! What technique has worked for you? Feel free to share it with rest of the thousands of my blog users!

Every startup needs to grow quickly; And one of the proven ways to quickly grow is by advertising and reaching out to targeted audience. There are several ways this can be done; However for a startup, the biggest challenge is to be able to keep advertising expenses low, yet be able to create an impact. Unfortunately this reduces the number of options. In this article we will share a few of these options.

1. Advertising through blogs and forums

First off, you must regularly blog and write fresh and unique content. Writing unique content is not as hard as many people would think. All you have to do is write about your own thoughts. If you can’t write, think about what comes to your mind; Think about how you talk with your friends just about on any topic. Sure all that has been discussed and written before, be it talking about what the President is doing to how good the new movie is, etc. You sure have opinions and you don’t dare to share it with your friends. Blogging is almost the same. All you have to do is be genuine. One thing that you should remember though is that your blogs must be related to your line of business. This will make sure that you are able to attract a very targeted set of people towards your blog; People who would be interested in your thoughts and later in your products. It is very important to keep the blog clean and be consistent about your ideas. Create logical categories so that it’s easier for people to look for information. Take this blog site as an example. Apart from blogging another important thing that you should be doing is talking about your ideas and marketing your blog and your product on other forums. Find ten most active forums related to your line of business. Keep a close eye on the discussions going on those forums. Contribute and participate in the discussions. This is the best way to not only share your ideas and leave a memorable impact in the minds of the readers but also advertise your products. Setting up your own blog and blogging on other forums is free; It just needs time!

2. Publishing White Papers

If you are really good at what you are doing and have something innovative going on then one of the best ways to attract like minded people and grow quickly is to publish white papers about your work. If your idea is patentable and something that you’d rather not share then just make sure not to put too much details around that. However you can always write good white papers talking about the problem you are trying to solve or your analysis about the Industry. People are always looking out for fresh and genuine information and writing a white paper is one of the best ways to really reach out to the most targeted audience. There are lot of university online libraries and forums that allow submitting white papers for free and they have really good reputation. Do make sure to research and find out the libraries that are related to your line of business. You do not want to talk about say a jet ski design on a clothing industry related forum or online library.

3. Posting News Releases

News Release sites are indexed and monitored by all major search engines. And so this is one of the best ways to quickly spread news about your business. There are lot of free news publishing websites. Simply pick top three or five news agencies that publish news related to your line of business and publish anything new. Even if you are a one or a two man company there’s still a lot you can talk about; for example launching a new feature; organizing a local event to gather some traction and so forth. Make a habit of publishing a news release once a month. Be consistent in publishing news releases. Remember that a news release is not a blog; So you shouldn’t use this method to share your thoughts and ideas.

4. Partnering with trusted network of publishers

Using bid based advertising methods like Google Adwords can turn out to be really expensive really quickly. Also there’s a learning curve of a couple of months involved with such systems. A better way is to directly partner up with publishers who publish material related to your line of business. For example if you run a resume writing company, it would make sense for you to advertise on local job forums and websites related to career, etc. Try products like AdNet to connect with a trusted network of publishers.

5. Directory Submissions

Another good way to get traction is submit your business URL to various directories. There are lot of cheap directory submission services available out there. Do not use them! Most of them are either really costly or totally useless. The ones that claim to submit to thousands of directories for pennies are the most useless ones. Spend your own time to finalize on the directories that have good reputation and most importantly are related to your line of business. Do submissions yourself. You will be surprised that it only takes a few days to do this and you can get amazing results very quickly.

So here you have it. Five quick and simple ways to get some good traction for almost no money. Of course this doesn’t mean that companies who spend millions of dollars on advertising are stupid. Sure they get enormous traction with that; But remember that they can afford it. As a startup, the biggest hurdle for you is going to be the money constraint. Don’t give and try out these five techniques and we are sure you’ll see the results that you had been waiting to see!

Every Sales and Marketing manager wants to do more of it. Every CEO wants to make it more effective. And every CFO wants to do it with lesser cost than before year after year. We are talking about Lead Generation. In this article we will discuss some simple techniques that You, the Sales and Marketing Managers of your business can use to generate leads. If done correctly, you will be not only helping lot of people and generating leads but also will be able to build a very good reputation over time.

Join Forums related to your business and Be Active

One of the best ways to be in touch with the latest happenings in your market is to be part of some active forums. Every business and every market has lot of good and active forums – be it on Linked In, Spoke, Twitter, and so forth. Joining most of these forums is free. In fact many forums will help you build “dofollow” links from your profile page on your forums! Once you join these forums, be active and responsive. Feel free to share your ideas, but more than that, be helpful; provide genuine feedback and reviews and helpful comments.

Start Healthy and New Discussions that would Help Others

Read through the discussions going on these forums and try to start new and healthy discussions. Find out topics that would not only help you but help others. For example, find the key pain points of your business and share your ideas with others and ask others how they coped with similar situations. You will be surprised that there are so many people out there who are just waiting to share their thoughts.

Lend a Helping Hand

Lend a helping hand to the moderator. Think like the moderator of the forum or the group. Try to moderate discussions by providing active feedback to people; appreciate good comments that would be helpful for others and provide feedback for improvement to the ones that are not good for the forum. For example if someone posted an Advertisement that’s totally not related to the topic of discussion on the forum, send out a note to the moderator.

The more active you are on various forums, you will realize that more people follow and trust you. However the catch is that you can only create such kind of trust if you are indeed providing a genuine help. If not, then such an act can actually recoil back; and just like in any other medium, as they say “bad news spreads faster”; your name in the industry will spread much faster than you can imagine and you will be barred from many societies and forums. So be genuine and helpful.

If you are not in a position to help, then just take your time; join the forums and read and learn from others and put your thoughts to practice; You won’t realize how soon you’d yourself have a lot to share with others!

Generating traffic is one of the most challenging things that you’d ever face if you are trying to be visible on the Internet. The fact is that there are literally thousands of similar articles written on the Web every single minute. Even with the best search technologies at hand, it’s really hard to find out which content is better, which content is fresh, or for that matter which content is truly unique. There are several ways to tackle this problem. Not all of them seem to work in all scenarios. More than that, not a single one seems to work all the time! In this blog we will share some of our experiences with generating true traffic.

Find the Right Keywords for your business

Finding the right keyword has helped us a lot get the kind of targeted traffic we needed. It’s really easy to find the right keywords. All you have to do is look at your own content. You don’t have to go about searching for the right keywords by trying out 10 different keyword tools. All you have to do is read your own content and pick the words that closely match with the content. For example, if you wrote a blog about “nike shoes”, then the right keywords are “nike”, “shoes” and “nike shoes”; A “horse” is not the right keyword  here! Many people think of keywords based on what they think people would be typing when searching for their business. Which is great! But then they forget that the same keywords MUST be there on their website for any search engine to be able to say “OK, so this page is indeed talking about this keyword”.

Find the Right Forums And blog there

Apart from blogging on your own blog, another important thing to do is to actually blog on other similar forums. Not just blog, but a “contributor”. Contribute your thoughts, help others by giving the right advise. Ask questions that create curiosity and drive discussion. The more people know about you the more they will be inclined to read your own blog and that’s the best way to attract traffic from another blog onto your own! If you just throw in some advertisements on other blogs, you will most probably be black listed as a spammer. So definitely never ever do that. Be a contributor.

Pick Hot Topics closely related to your field

Pick the hot topics of the day and blog about them. Writing about hot topics will increase the chances that people might read about what you have to say about what’s going on. People tend to read multiple articles just to gather other people’s view point, especially when it’s a hot topic. For example, if people are talking about Academy Awards, or some actress’s dress, it might be a good idea to cover a short story about the same, but be original and put your thought. Look around for what people are talking about in your field of interest. The best place would be other forums and blogs. Once you know what’s going on, cover a quick blog and then go and share your thoughts about the same on those blogs. So, this kind of ties up with the previous concept.

Write about Current Affairs

Everyone loves to read about what’s going on in the current world. No one cares about your thoughts if they were an year or even a month old. People like to read fresh material. And the fact that there’s fresh material available on the Internet every minute, that gives every one the reason to filter and look around for the most fresh material on any topic. Your best bet here is to tune into what’s latest going on related to your field of interest and blog about that. The best places to look for current affairs are news channels, blogs that cover news feed about your field of interest, even TV and radio!

Write Fresh Material

Last but not the least; write fresh material. Even if you don’t know how to write good material! You don’t have to be “Book English Correct”. If you can read this article and are from an English Speaking Country, you already have an upper edge; just speak out your mind! That’s the beauty of Internet! You don’t have to go through “editorial”; you don’t have to “fix legal issues”; and you certainly don’t have to worry much about the grammar when it comes to writing on the Web. Yes, all that helps; It helps a lot! But believe me; it will sharpen up by itself as you’ll write more and more material. That’s the beauty of brain! Put it to use and that’s all you have to do to make it sharper!

So here you have it. Our experience generating true traffic on the Internet. It has been a long rough and painfully beautiful ride and we know there’s a hell lot still to cover, but that’s the beauty of it all! Do you want to share your story? Write back and we’ll put it here!

One of the time tested methods of attracting large amount of traffic to your website is reserving a space in high traffic blogs. This  can be done by several ways. There are several ways to do this but not all of them are equally effective. In this blog we will discuss some of the ways you can use to reserve your space in high traffic blogs and really leverage them to generate high volume traffic for your site quickly.

Find a Good Partner / Neutral Party

First off you’ll need to find a neutral party that can help you negotiate with the blog owners. This neutral party should help facilitate the conversation and make sure that both you and the blog owner respect the contractual bindings. This can be an escrow service or a law firm. A better option would be some technology solution that would help you and the blog owner get transparent performance results and makes sure that the contractual obligations are being met at all times.

Check Blog Stats

Once you have picked top five blogs that are related to your field of interest, check the stats on Alexa, Google Page Rank, etc. Make sure the blog has been there for a couple of years and has a good readership. Check what kind of comments people are posting on the blog. Does the blog really inculcate the culture of genuine conversations or not, etc.

Contact the Blog Owner

Contact the blog owner and make sure to involve one neutral party so that they understand the contractual obligations and interests of both parties. Negotiate a good rate for PPC / PPM or a monthly hosting fee. Make sure you get as much information as needed from the blog owner to make you comfortable that the hits the blog is going to provide are genuine and that you are getting a good deal. A normal rule of thumb is to figure out how much an impression or a click is worth to you. The more focused traffic the blog will be able to provide, the more are the chances of converting those visitors into leads and eventually into customers. So weigh all options at hand. If in doubt, ask for help!

Monitor Results and Adjust Strategy

Once your Ad is live on the blog, make sure to monitor the results on weekly or monthly basis and if needed, re-negotiate your contract terms. However, keep in mind that the more frequently you’ll do this, the more harm you are going to make to yourself because no one likes changing contracts every month!

So here you go. By working with bloggers and website owners, you can post advertisements and get much effective results. This is better than just getting a back link because back links often get hidden into hundreds and sometimes thousands of pages of the website. Image or Text Ads are more apparent and the more strategically they are placed the better results you’ll see.

Have questions? Ask us!

Getting traffic on your website can become a really difficult task specially if you are just starting up afresh. Building a good amount of genuine traffic does not just take time and money, it also takes lot of patience and persistence. No one is to blame for this because there are so many millions of web pages and with thousands of new ones publishing on the Internet it’s close to impossible for any Internet Search company to fully index them.

Apart from all the usual techniques of writing good content and blogging on other forums and sites trying to promote your blog or product, another very interesting thing you could is getting reviewed. Getting reviewed means setting up a review with someone who has good Industry knowledge related to the market in which your product belongs. This is often really helpful in not only boosting your product or service value but also get extremely focused and high quality traffic. Remember that the reviewers are generally very well respected people in the Industry. The more famous reviewer you can reach out to, the better are your chances to be able to reach out to the masses. All good reviewers have a huge fan followup because they have a proven track record of genuine and helpful comments. That’s what people are looking for at the end of the day.

One negative impact that getting reviewed can produce is bad vibe. If your product is not ready yet and requires lot of work then avoid getting reviewed. You don’t want to have a bad comment about your product. Especially when you are just starting up and you have a reviewer who has a huge fan base. So make sure you have a fairly good product to start with. A good idea can be to keep the reviewer involved in the early stages of the product development and get active feed backs and keep on improving until the time is right for a real formal review.

Many people think that getting reviewed is only for companies that have huge marketing capabilities and money to spend. That is not entirely true. Look around for friends and friends’ friends and you will for sure find a teacher or a University professor or another entrepreneur who will be more than happy to spend some time with you for a coffee and exchange of ideas about your product. Try to look around for such opportunities. Once you have a formal review done, post it on free news release sites like prlog, etc.

Getting reviewed can help you generate lot of traffic than you can imagine. So give it a shot! And do share your success story here on this blog! Feel free to reach out to me if you need any help!