Traffic - Part 2

Does TRUST Play any Role in SEO ?

I don’t know, whether Trust is one of the factors in getting the results up in the Search Engine Results Page, but I certainly know that Trust will help you get more traffic even from Search Engines.

Benefits of building Trust
Building Trust helps in making people to act. The desired action might be:
1. To subscribe to your blog updates.
2. To subscribe to your News Letter.
3. To purchase your ebook or print book.
4. To make a sales (affiliate link or any other kind of sales).
5. To make them share the article link with their friends and family members.
6. To make them link to your article.
7. To make your brand name stick in their minds.
8. Build authority.
9. Show your passion.
10. Get their feedback and to get their opinion on any issues (make them comment on your blog and to learn from your visitors). Etc etc etc..

So with this Trust factor, you can build readership and you all probably know that, it brings in repeat visitors to our blog. Hence, increase in traffic.
But this Trust can boost Search Engine Traffic too. Its been working all these years, but most of us might not have noticed it. Here is how it works with me:
Google ranks websites based on its algorithm and no one outside Google probably know all about the algorithm.
Google is famous for its testing, like A/B split testing, change of background colour of Sponsored ads, change of width of Search result page and search box etc. And usually Google shares many of the test results with its users, in the form of reports.
And it is known to most of us that, the result shown in the first position of the result page gets more attention and click, than that present in 3rd, 4th, 5th and so on positions. And the results in the latter pages get least clicks.

But if you have seen a blog and Trust that blog, then you are more likely to click on it and go to that blog for information, then that ranking much higher.

Looking at the above image, you may be thinking Sony Ericsson is a bigger brand than fonearena. But if you have been reading fonearena for quite sometime, I bet you would click on it for reading the review before making a purchase.

So branding and Trust can increase the Search Engine visits too. You may be thinking it takes a lot of effort to get a small amount of traffic. Yes, it takes a lot of effort to build such Brand and Trust, but once done, you will get a lot of traffic. Its all about Trust, even if you are not a big brand yet, you can build the brand with the trust factor, which will have a long lasting effect on the minds of internet users.

Do you think, its late to join the bandwagon of building Trust? Might be a little late but better late than never 🙂

TweetMeMe or Tweet Me Not!

First thing first: “TweetMeme is a service that aggregates the most re-tweeted stories on twitter and makes them accessible to people in one central location. The service also includes it’s re-tweet button which helps users quickly engage their readers in re-tweeting interesting and relevant content to their twitter followers. Other offerings around TweetMeme include the Widget and API.” – Sarah, Community Manager, TweetMeme.com.

You probably have see TweetMeme buttons used by many bloggers and even mainstream media websites. It helps in reaching more audience.

There are two options to use the TweetMeme button:
1. On selective posts.
2. On every posts published on the blog.

If you want to insert TweetMeme button to a particular post, then here is the code:
Put this code wherever you want the TweetMeme button to appear:


<script type="text/javascript">
tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_url = 'http://yoururl.com';  
 tweetmeme_source = 'yourTwitterID';  
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js">
</script>

I personally like the compact TweetMeme icon, which shows the number of re-tweets and gives the option to re-tweet. But the large one my help get user attention. To get the compact button, I have used tweetmeme_style = 'compact'; and note that all these

tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
tweetmeme_url = 'http://yoururl.com';  
 tweetmeme_source = 'yourTwitterID';

fields are optional, if not used, default values will be taken. Its a walk in the breeze experience, to install things on a blog/website using WordPress, but not so in many other blogging platforms. So, you can make use of the above code to implement it manually on your blog.
Code Source: TweetMeme Help

You can also know the number of re-tweets a story has got, using this code:


http://api.tweetmeme.com/imagebutton.gif?url=<url>

replace the <url> with the URL of the article.

If you want to show TweetMeme re-tweet button at the end/ beginning of every article on your blog, then its a good idea to make use of tweetmeme plugin.

Another fantastic plugin that I personally like is: Tweetable.
Here is its features:
* Automatically tweet your blog posts when they are published. Optionally add Google Analytics campaign tags to the shortened URLs. You also have your pick of URL shorteners.
* Tweet from within WordPress. The plugin adds a dedicated Twitter page where you can browse your friends timeline and post updates. An optional quick-tweet Dashboard widget is available as well.
* Display your latest tweets in your blog sidebar with a customizable widget. Includes support to display follower count.
* Set the minimum user level to access the Twitter page in the WordPress backend.
* Automatically add a full-size or compact Tweetmeme widget to your posts.
* Track tweets based on keywords of your choice via the Twitter API.

Over all, I think it’s good to use this button at the end of the article, as it will be a good call for action. As per my observation, a story with TweetMeme button get more re-tweets. People can see how many people have already tweeted about the particular article, and it can arise their feeling, to re-tweet.
It is also interesting to see TweetMeme using bit.ly as the default URL shortener. So we can get those extra stats- the number of clicks we got to the re-tweeted article link and the location of the people, who clicked the link etc. You need not even have an account with bit.ly, just append a + sign at the end of the shortned URL and hit the enter key.
Ex:- One of my article URL, shortened using bit.ly is http://bit.ly/mOtWR To see the stats I just need to append a + sign i.e., http://bit.ly/mOtWR+ and hit the enter. So simple.

How often have you tweeted a story that has a re-tweet button and how often have you tweeted about a story that does not have one. Always remember, many people using internet are lazy enough, so you can’t expect many people to phrase the tweet. Only a small percentage of people will take the initiative to form the original tweets, to share the stories that they like and all others re-tweet it. So it would be a good idea to have such links where people can just tweet or re-tweet about it, with 1 or 2 clicks.

Have you used TweetMeme buttons on your website/blog. How is it performing? Do you have it at the bottom or top of the article? Do you prefer using a plugin or manual coding for individual posts.

Technotip.org included in Alltop®

Happy to share a moment of happiness with all the readers, who actually made it happen. With the completion of 1 year, our blog has been included in the Alltop® . Have a look at the end of this page blogging.alltop.com. Its a honor to get included in such reputed sites. We will surely work to provide value to all its users.

For those of you who do not know about Alltop, watch below video for clear explanation:

Here is a quote from their about me page:

The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

If you want to add your blog to Alltop, all you need to do is fill this submission form. And wait for the Alltop staff to approve it manually. As its a manual process, it will take little longer before you hear from them.
If your blog is of good quality and if you are providing RSS feed, then there is high chances that your blog will be included in Alltop.
Till now I haven’t seen significant traffic from Alltop, the reason may be because, its been added recently and that our blog is placed at the dead end of the site. Lets hope for the best in the future. All things apart, inclusion in such websites is really a honor and a motivational factor to keep working.
And a good way to increase traffic to your blog. Remember, every small thing helps in getting good traffic to a blog. So if you have a good blog with RSS feed, then make it a point to apply for Alltop, killerstartups.com and other such sites which will increase your traffic over time.

If you know of any directories or feed aggregator, which can bring significant traffic, then please share it in the comment section. Many people do not have time to submit to directories and aggregtor sites, as they are busy with the content creation of their blog. While content is still King, marketing is the queen, so do not ignore marketing your blog. Whats the use of a valuable content which is not read by any or many. Do not waste your time in submitting to all the directories, instead pick only selected once and invest your time in submitting to them. Make sure you have been blogging consistently for atleast 6 months(this will increase your chances of getting included) and read their rules before submitting.

Digg.com to replace its SHOUT feature

Digg.com has decided to replace its infamous Shout feature with Share the story on Twitter, FaceBook and email. And this feature is expected to be rolled out to all users this weekend.

Its inevitable for Digg to give importance to Twitter and FaceBook which has grown up so fast.

Many bloggers and online marketers feel that this move from Digg will be welcomed happily by its users.

This move has both advantages as well as disadvantages:
Advantages:
1. There will be constant exchange of traffic between twitter, FaceBook and digg. This is advantage for Digg, as people will not forget Digg over time 🙂
2. We feel connecting with people as more fun in Twitter and FaceBook than to be friend in Digg.com, where the main intention to make friendship may be to get more Diggs!
3. This gives more reasons to join Twitter and FaceBook, if you yet don’t have an account.
4. Now we can expect the end of monopoly of Digg power users! Now it may be the turn of Twitter power users 🙂
But we can convince a twitter user to re-tweet our tweets, if the story is really interesting. But in Digg, people will most probably ignore our requests as 90% of them would be spam 🙁
5. Spammers can not easily target Twitter and FaceBook users, as we are more choosy in following someone. And others can’t hurt our privacy.

Disadvantages:
1. We can not connect with like minded people on digg!
2. We need to be popular somewhere else to get our article to the front page of Digg!
3. We may start getting more spam mails than ever before, if not handled properly.
4. Spammers may try more innovative means to spam Twitter and FaceBook.

We can already see the integration of Twitter, FaceBook and EMAIL as means to share the stories in DIGG BAR. But the Digg bar wasn’t received by digg users happily. Only way Digg can improve itself is by constant testing, testing and testing, and implementing things according to user feedback.

What do you feel about this move from DIGG ?.

60+ Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers

It can be easily noticed that most of the people with lot of twitter followers were somehow famous before twitter era! or are popular in some field or the other, at present. They all had one or the other ways to get connected with their customers/readers/followers etc. When twitter was launched and started getting popular, all these customers/readers/followers started following them, as twitter gives an easy medium to follow someones tweets.

Update: We already have more than 60 tips to increase your twitter followers in this article and we will add some more, in the future.
NOTE: Recently Twitter made a change to its system. Where you can not see the conversation of two persons, if you are not following both of them. Ex:- If the tweet starts with “@username” then you will not be able to see it, unless you are following @username as well as the one who is tweeting it.
Disclaimer: I am writing this article to those people who want to know almost all the possible ways to increase their followers. Personally I am not interested in the number, but in the person that I follow, because we get, from whom we follow. Whom others follow is left to them.

Tips, tricks and strategies to get more twitter followers:-

1. Treat your twitter profile as you would treat any other website. Send as much traffic as possible to your twitter profile.

2. Maintain good tweets in the first page of your profile. This seem to be a lot of work in the beginning. But seriously this will help you a lot in gaining followers. If people visiting your profile see only handful of links being tweeted, then they may not follow you, thinking that you are some sort of a automated script or some may think you as spammer. So see to that each time you decide to stop tweeting, make sure to tweet some useful things and minimize links. Because your recent tweets will be displayed in the first page of your profile.

3. Use a “tweet this” button below all your articles or below the articles which you think can go viral in twitter world.

4. Use different other services to know who is following you, and use the suggestion tool to get the suggested twitter users to follow. By this you can connect to relevant people around the world and they are most likely to follow you back, if they find you as relevant.

5. You can conduct twitter contests on your blog. This one strategy will drive a lot of followers in small amount of time. But it highly depends on what you are giving away in the contest. The higher the value of the product/service, higher the chances of getting more followers.

6. Get your twitter profile link featured on any famous website.
Ex:- If you are listed in the top 10 re-tweeters, then you can get still more followers. As people will think that you will re-tweet even their tweets!

7. If you have a website or a blog, display the follow me button at the top or any other highly visible regions.
If you get sudden hike in the traffic, you can’t expect that all those visitors will turn into your blogs subscribers or your loyal readers. But if they like the content of the blog they are most likely to follow you on twitter, as they think that you have the capacity to deliver the value.

8. Participate in twitter contests. By this you will be in a group of people who are into the contest, by this people participating may be willing to follow all other participants. So it is important that you leave a status message of the tweet or the twitter ID that you used to enter the contest, in the comment section, so that other participants can find you on twitter.

9. You can also use your twitter profile URL, while commenting on other blogs.

10. Participate in twitter actively. Re-tweet others useful tweets and get their attention. If they also re-tweet one of your tweets sometime, you will end up getting noticed by their followers, some of them may even follow you.

11. Use twitter ID in your email signature, so that your business partners or others will get to know that you are also using twitter.

12. Print the twitter profile URL on your business card.

13. If you have any other product, then you can get your twitter link printed on it.

14. Use your twitter URL at the end of each SMS(Short Messaging Service) from your phone.

15. Basic thing, but still ignored one: Invite all your friends in your Gmail, Yahoo mail etc, and they are the most potential followers you can ever get.

16. Tweet valuable things. Don’t just try to get traffic to your blog by tweeting only about your articles. You can tweet about what you are presently doing etc, bit personal things, this is what twitter followers like to know. But try to provide some more valuable things. Like tweeting a breaking news, cricket scores, latest happenings at your place etc.

17. Participate in certain groups. Groups can be created using hashtags. And some times if the group message is a hot topic, then your tweets will be listed in “hot trending topics” in search or other famous twitter services.
Ex:- #followfriday

18. Use a custom background for your twitter profile. This will show that you are a professional and chances are there, a visitor to your profile may turn into your follower.

19. Use a good twitter ID. Many people suggest to use their real name and most of the others suggest to use the business name. In case of bloggers, people mostly use their blog name inorder to build their brand recognition. If the twitter ID is somethink special or attractive, many people will endup following you without any reason!

And many such attractive twitter ID’s are auctioned at different marketplaces. It shows the importance of having a good twitter ID. And make sure that your twitter ID is not too long, which will eventually add up to the 140 character of the person who is tweeting you or re-tweeting your tweets!

20. Try to involve in conversation with people having more number of followers. When the famous person reply to your tweet, his followers see your twitter ID, if they find the conversation interesting, they may start following you and the conversation.

21. Use your twitter URL in other social networking, social bookmarking and social media sites profile page and any other online places where you have an account and space to write something. This will help you get interesting and targeted people follow you.

22. Do not use annoying profile picture. Using your real photo or your blog logo/banner is recommended. Many people use the animated images, this is ok as long as its not annoying.

23. Link to your twitter profile often. You can also add a link to your profile at the end of each article on your blog.

24. If you have an online service, then use Twitter as another tool for tech/customer support. This will make the customers to follow you inevitably!

25. Include your twitter ID in forum signature.

26. You can ask other twitterers to recommend you to their followers and you can recommend them to your followers.

27. Some bloggers publish the twitter IDs of some people as: Recommended to follow list. You can participate in such events and if your ID has been listed, you can get a lot of followers.

28. Some bloggers also collect the twitter IDs of their readers and publish on their blog, for mass following. Participate in such events and you will keep getting a lot of followers from that single page over years.

29. Some people mass follow others as they are sure that most of them followback almost all their followers. Once they reach a certain target number, they will start un-following those mass followed people. Thus they will be able to have a high number of followers with a low number of following! This is not a recommended strategy, but its still popular and most effective.

30. Utilize the about me section of twitter properly. Put your blog URL or about your business along with your small description. If you make it interesting, there is a high possibility of getting more conversions(visitors into followers). Remember, your bio is shown in the Suggested Users section, that will highly decide your number!

31. Follow others. If you do not follow anyone and keep expecting lot of people to start following you, this will not work for everyone. If you are following atleast some people, then others will feel that you are open to conversation and that you like to listen to others.

32. Remember you only have 5 to 7 seconds to convert a visitor into follower, so make your profile as good as possible. Tweak all the aspects mentioned above(related to profile page), and you can see a drastic increase in your followers number.

33. Try to pay individual attention as for as possible. Don’t just think of yourself! You can talk to one person at a time. But never isolate yourself after having all these followers. People may find you inactive and may start removing you from their following list.

34. Be helpful to other twitter users, so that they can recommend you to others, without your request.

35. Block spammers and other useless automated boots by using the blocking feature in twitter. By this you will be able to give your attention to only genuine users and will not get distracted and your twitter experience will be good. By this you can give more to twitter and get more followers.

36. If you have some 500+ followers, you can use some service to display it on your blog, as a social proof. This will defiantly attract more people to follow you. Inturn increasing your followers number and inturn attracting even more people to follow you.

37. Ask questions: By asking questions, you can easily start the conversation with any stranger. Make sure that you ask an easy question 🙂 So that many people answer you and you can start the conversation with them. Ask a simple question and also be prepared with some 1 or 2 follow up questions, so as to keep them engaged. By this strategy, you will increase the number of tweets coming your way and many of the followers of your followers will notice your conversations and may follow you. This also helps to grow the number of twitter public timeline(if you have not checked the “protect my updates” option in the settings) messages hence increasing the chances of appearing your tweets in search engines.

38. Use some twitter client or twitter apps or twitter messengers! Because people don’t like to wait for your reply. If you are still using the web page(with no AJAX implemented), then its time to switch to some twitter client and start replying. This saves a lot of time and followers! If you reply to your followers question after 24hrs or even 2 or 4 hrs late, then they probably don’t enjoy your conversation. And eventually may stop following you.

39. Tweeting at the time of US business hours i.e., from morning 9:00 to 5:00 evening would help to grow the twitter followers. I have not tested it extensively though, but still it sounds logical.

40. This tip for people who need to get followers at any cost:
You can use the PPC advertising to get the targeted twitter followers. This may seem very crazy in the beginning. But wait, this idea is better than paying twitter or any other service to feature your twitter ID.
This idea is for people who are running any business and want to get some target audience to follow them, so that they can serve those target audience.

41. If asking question is one strategy to build the followers, answering others question is another way to grab the attention. If you are following a famous person and if he is not following you, then its the right time to start replying/answering to all of his questions, as aptly as possible. By this way you can get his attention. And you can also get his followers attention, if you can make him to reply to you quite often.

42. Similar to the importance of tweeting time, the days that you spend on twitter also matters. On Saturdays and Sundays there will be less people using twitter. As people are free on these days, you may be thinking that they will spend a lot of time in these social sites, but it doesn’t work like that. People want to enjoy their life. They want to spend their valuable time with their family. So most of them or atleast those with success in their business will turn off their internet on these days.
So it will be of more beneficial, if we can follow all the strategies to get more followers, on days other than Saturday’s and Sunday’s.

43. Many of you may not think this as an ideal way to tweet, but this tip has proved to be most effective.
People follow a blog that they are interested in. The more focused a blog is upon a particular niche, more chances of it getting loyal reader base. Similarly, I have seen many people tweeting only about a particular topic, say politics, health and fitness, Google news, gadgets etc, get more number of target followers.
This also helps to get more re-tweets and drives more traffic to a blog post. For example, if you have a popular or even not so popular gadget blog, and if you tweet mostly about interesting and latest gadgets then gadget lovers will surly like, follow and recommend you to their followers.

44. If you are a blogger, then try to follow more people in your niche. Because these people are more likely to follow you back because of the niche that you are in. To help them get to know about your niche and interests, use the about me section effectively.

45. If you can use the twitter SMS feature or if you have internet in your mobile phone, then cover some live events.
Ex:- If you are attending a famous conference/sports…etc and if you can tweet about the happenings live, then more people tend to follow you and re-tweet your tweets. Use hashtags and people will notice you while they are searching for the news of that particular event that you are live tweeting.

46. Using twitter clients can make things easy and fast. But make sure that you do not tweet every second of your online time. This will surly annoy your followers and even twitter!
People will consider you as a spammer or an automated script, if you keep on tweeting, without listening and responding your followers tweets. Minimize your personal tweets. Try to involve in the conversation going on. Provide value.

47. If possible, teach your followers what re-tweeting is. By this, if your followers start re-tweeting your tweets, then your ID will again appear infront of your followers followers, and you will get more exposure and high chances of getting even more followers and even more re-tweets.

48. If you have a podcast service or if you shot a video and upload it to YouTube, then make sure to add your twitter ID in the video/podcast, at the end or in the beginning of the video/podcast. If people like the video/podcast, then they will surly like to get connected with you and start following you on twitter.

49. Follow the top twitter users and watch what they tweet and how they treat their followers. This may not be a huge tip, because those top twitter users are already popular in other fields, so they have lot of followers in twitter. While this is true in most of the cases, but there are some twitter users who have got a lot of followers just due to their tweets. Follow such people and you will learn a lot from them.

Being a celebrity doesn’t hurt.. but just being yourself brings followers that actually care about what you are saying and they are much more valuable.

50. Have your twitter ID on all the guest posts that you write.

51. An effective and worst way to increase your follower base (spammers way to get more followers) is to create an account with a celebrity name and profile pic, and try to pretend like the celebrity. In a very short time, you will get a lot of followers. After you are satisfied with the number of followers, change the profile pic, bio and the twitter ID and behave normally.
This is not a recommended thing to do. But I am writing this article to those people who want to know almost all the possible ways to increase their followers.
Personally I don’t find any useful thing (other than getting traffic) in getting more followers. And I am not interested in the number, but in the person that I follow, because we get, from whom we follow. Whom others follow is left to them.

52. Biggest tip to enjoy twitter is, to tweet just for the sake of tweet. Don’t think of the number of followers. Just try to get involved in the conversation. Have interest to know about other people around the world. Be curious, enthusiastic. And spend some time using twitter each day(if you have time), and eventually you will have a lot of followers who are also interested in you.

53. Following everyone who follows you is also a best way to get more followers. People will follow you atleast because you asure them that you also follow them back.

54. When you tweet something worth Re-tweeting, then use less than 140 Characters. Because, if your twitter ID has 5 characters, then a re-tweet will add a @ symbol and “RT:” thus making a total of 140+1+3+5=149 characters. So use 125 or 130 characters. Tweets which involve breaking news or some offers/discount coupons or anything that you think might go viral in twitter.

55. Tweeting link of some good pictures and breaking news get viral most of the times. You can also tweet about a new job or event.

56. Offer some free stuffs for following you. I have seen some people doing this, and not surprisingly, they have a lot of followers. But once you get people following you, its all about providing value and retaining them as your followers.

57. Write an ebook(of good quality) about Twitter and start distributing it for FREE. You can even upload it to torrent sites etc. If you can make that ebook go viral, then you will surly get a lot of followers, as people who download and read it must be interested in Twitter and if they find the ebook of any use, they will start following you.

58. In the “about me” section of Twitter, there is a place where you can display your website URL. There, you can use a good quality article(better, if you have a good article related to Twitter) link instead of just linking your blogs homepage. By this way, people who check your website before following you, may get interest in you, if they like that article.

59. Write some interesting articles about Twitter on your blog, so that, people searching for Twitter related things find it useful and start following you, expecting more such valuable contents and tweets from you.

60. You can also list your Twitter ID on some Twitter directory services. Make sure that you opt into proper category. Such services will allow you to choose some topics of your interest and place you in those categories and it will show your ID to those who have similar interests to that of yours. So you will get targeted followers.

61. You can also use some services that asure you to increase your twitter followers, by listing your Twitter profile link on their site. Also take care that you do not give your twitter ID along with your passwords to such services. Use only genuine services. Ask people who have already used the service.

62. Try to help people as much as possible. This way, people will surely point some one with similar problem to you and high chances that they will start following you.

63. Run a poll: This actually works if you have high number of followers. But you can make it work the other way too.
Make the poll interesting. And request people to re-tweet about the poll.

64. Use Cross promotion techniques: Explicitly(while chatting in any messengers, talking in phone etc – Out side twitter ) ask a Twitterer to mention about your ID to his followers and in return you do the same for them.

65. If you are crazy enough, you can put your twitter ID on your vehicle. This will work because, people like to get connected with others who are in the same locality. And you can tweet and start conversation about some local events and start sharing your knowledge. Keep your security aspects in mind. Some people may use twitter to get lot of your personal info and may use it to harm you.

[Joke: At the worst, get your twitter ID printed on your wedding card 🙂 ]

The title of the article is 60+, because we would like to hear some more tips form you people. Please share your tips, tricks and different strategies to increase twitter followers. You can even share your twitter ID in the comment section with a small description of why you would like others to follow you or whats in it to follow you.

Many of the points listed above may seem to be similar. But still they differ in some aspects. But their main goal is to bring more traffic to your twitter profile and more number of followers.

Be cautious while tweeting, because it may take years to build a huge list of loyal followers, but it takes 1 or 2 tweets to break the entire thing. Creating controversies and damaging your online (even offline sometimes) reputation.
Be responsible and create a reason to be followed 🙂

Many of you or most of you may not agree with all the strategies mentioned in this article. But remember, we are writing this article only to show different tactics that can be used to increase the follower base in Twitter. Its not that we are recommending all these strategies to be followed. Actually we are against some of the strategies listed above to increase the followers. But still they may help some of you.

You can follow me @technotip.

Thanks for reading..

Simple and effective way to get VOTES for your article: Web Traffic

We have seen many people struggling to get Diggs, Stumbles (or votes in general ), all over the web!
Most of the time its frustrating for both the parties, the one who asks for vote and the one who is been asked to vote. If you start asking for vote continuously 100 times on twitter, then I guess everyone will unfollow you. And if you try in IM quite frequently, then chances are you will be blocked by your friends.

And one more important thing which I have observed is, if you start asking for diggs or stumbles directly on your blog(giving some incentives or otherwise), and if you start getting lot of diggs or stumbles from that page, then there is a high possibility that your blog URL will be blocked by those services.

So the best way to get more votes with less effort is: Make use of RSS Signature plugin. And politely ask for a Digg or stumble.

Why is this effective?
If people have subscribed to your blog, it is most likely that they get some value out of it and they will be more generous to vote for you when compared to search engine visitors or random visitors.
And it does not take a lot of their time. Just click the link and then hit the thumbs up or digg button. But take care that, you ask votes for only those stories which deserves their time and that one click. And ask only when it is needed. Do not always have a message to vote for some story. This will surly make readers blind to that particular message. To avoid this, ask for the votes only when there is a high quality article and which is already getting good response from your readers.

Do you think it works?
Yes. And this works best with Stumbleupon, than with DIGG. If you have 1000 subscribers out of which 100 to 200 people have stumbleupon account and if 30 to 60 people like the article and hit the thumbs up button, then the story will become popular in stumble and many more other stumbleupon users will be presented with the same story. And there is more chances that they will also like it, as almost 30 to 60 people have already liked it, so I guess it would be a good article. So you may get even more thumbs up. Making the story even popular.

Using this technique may help with Digg stories, if you have more followers who are active in Digg.

Why will this footer message work?
If we have the same message in the article, then also it will be read by our regular readers, then whats the need of RSS signature message — This is a good point.
But to get votes of most of the regular readers you need to make the message more clear and personal. Make it clear to the subscribers that you are asking for votes only with subscribers. Make the message as personal as possible and you will get more votes.
If you ask for votes generally in the article, then chances are that it will generally be neglected.

One Silly commonsense tip 🙂
After activating the plugin and composing a good personalized message, just don’t sit and expect hell lot of votes. Instead write an article, so that it gets delivered to their inbox or RSS reader. So that they open your article there and notice your vote request 🙂

Do you think this technique is simple and effective to get votes from your regular readers? Please share your thoughts in the comment section.

Foot Steps of Marketing — Where Do You Stand ?

We have heard a lot about both Online as well as offline marketing.
Marketing strategies have been changing from the day it was invented. Its good to see many new and sophisticated techniques coming every now and then and solving many problems..and creating some!

First thing first..

What is Marketing ?

Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Ethical / Unethical Marketing ?

With increase in the population and user demands, many businesses started appearing and the competition obviously increased among businesses. It increased so much that its now the matter of survival to most companies. So the only way left on their part is aggressive marketing strategies, which brings them large number of conversions.
An example:-
We see in daily commercials showing, women with black colour skin complexion being harassed and the white women being respected, and the next thing is they show their cosmetics product and tell us to use it and to turn white! and to get the respect from the society. These kind of ads work magically and bring about many conversions.
On the other hand if they start showing ads with not so good looking women in the ad, people watching it, will take it easy and are less likely to purchase the product!
I don’t really have to tell you which ads would be more desirable to marketers.
But the question is..Do you think such ads are an ethical marketing?
Playing with the human emotions? Yes…No.
Answer varies from person to person, depending on their perspective.
Some people may say that this kind of marketing is not at all wrong, because we all see it almost daily and are used to it!. We are so used to it that we think that its not a big issue.

While some people say that this kind of marketing is completely unethical, as it plays with the emotions of people for meeting marketers selfish goals. There are many others who defend that this is a ethical marketing and the best way to get a conversion.
Its interesting to hear all your ideas and thoughts. So please please please share your thoughts in the comment section of this article.

Target Audience(Target marketing):-

Marketers target group of people who are more likely to purchase their products, hence making them more profits.

Some examples:-
1. Ads showing more imaginary adventures, cartoon etc may target children.
2. Quick Money making ads may attract more of business people.
3. Cosmetics ads for girls.
4. Body building ads for men.
5. Speaker systems for music lovers. etc.

As all these production industries have a lot of competition, they need to reduce the price inorder to sustain in the growing competition.

Desperate buyers:-
There are products like medicine which will be purchased by people as they are in a situation where they can’t give more importance to money(when compared to their health). They are in a position where purchasing the medicine becomes crucial. In these kind of situations marketers may take advantage of the situation of people and may try to mint more money. Making use of the desperate situation will get them more conversion and hence more money. But again the question arises in our mind..Whether its Ethical or unethical marketing ?

Obviously, I’m not speaking about all emotional marketing. Most of the marketing involves interaction with peoples emotions, but I am talking about the one’s which is too low in its purpose and aims only at the sale of their product(conversion).

Impatient Aspirers

Impatient Aspirers are a group of target customers who have some what same taste and status. Watch the funny video below. Please do not miss watching the video. Its funny as well as insightful, and worth thousand words.

Marketing and Blogging:-

There are many ways of monetizing a blog. One way is to write an ebook and sell it on your blog. This is a popular and proved to be efficient way of making money online. Now to get most money out of the ebook, you need to sell as many copies of ebook as possible. And to do so, you need to Market it properly(if you do not have an already well established blog).
Landing page should be more engaging and trust worthy. When someone lands on your landing page and reads about your product details, you need to arouse their interest first. You might not know every single person who reads your site, but that’s fine. Because you do know what they are generally familiar with. Use those references to bridge the gap and connect. Attention getting strategies and tactics can be helpful if the product, service or information lives up to the promise.

Rather than trying to sell an idea to the masses, you sell something desirable to people who already want and have a need for it. It’s much easier to fulfill a need than to create one.

So there are many many marketing strategies and as far as I know many people are trying and succeeding with newer marketing strategies each day. So, as a marketer we need to be innovative, creative and responsible. As a customer we need to be more cautious and clear about what we want and what we do not want.

Word of Mouth Marketing:-

Over years we have seen many MLM’s(Multi-Level Marketing) or Network Marketing coming, growing, glowing and going!
What makes people join MLM’s ?
Its the money. The easy way to start earning money, by referring other people to join under you.
So, from where do MLM companies get the money from?
Most MLM companies sell products. By purchasing which people become their members. These MLM companies remove the middle man between the product and the customers, hence saving a lot of money.
Another big saving comes from the marketing effort. There is no need to get a VIP or a celebrity to endorse the products. So a lot of money is again saved. These MLM companies then distribute the money saved, to all its members, by following some of their rules/policies.
So, how do these MLM companies do the marketing ?
Its done by the members of MLM. These members do the marketing on behalf of MLM company through WORD OF MOUTH, these products will be sold and new members keep joining(thus products are continuously sold), everybody(most of them) make good income.MLM is just an apt example for the WORD OF MOUTH marketing.

Here is a list of WORD OF MOUTH marketing, that you can choose, test and implement on your blogs, to increase the traffic and conversion rate significantly.

Word of mouth marketing:

* Buzz Marketing: Using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about your brand.

* Viral Marketing: Creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email.

* Community Marketing: Forming or supporting niche communities that are likely to share interests about the brand (such as user groups, fan clubs, and discussion forums); providing tools, content, and information to support those communities.

* Grassroots Marketing: Organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach.

* Evangelist Marketing: Cultivating evangelists, advocates, or volunteers who are encouraged to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on your behalf.

* Product Seeding: Placing the right product into the right hands at the right time, providing information or samples to influential individuals.

* Influence Marketing: Identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinions of others.

* Cause Marketing: Supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the cause.

* Conversation Creation: Interesting or fun advertising, emails, catch phrases, entertainment, or promotions designed to start word of mouth activity.

* Brand Blogging: Creating blogs and participating in the blogosphere, in the spirit of open, transparent communications; sharing information of value that the blog community may talk about.

* Referral Programs: Creating tools that enable satisfied customers to refer their friends, to your product or service.

More on Marketing Strategies(mainly to increase your blog traffic) coming soon..so please subscribe to our free email/rss updates and stay tuned.

Please do not forget to share your thoughts about current marketing trendz. What Marketing strategies you are following? What strategies worked and which did not work for you? Whats Ethical and Unethical about it? Please share your opinions in the comment section below and involve yourself in the conversation going on here.

Get Discount Coupon For Paid Advertising

This strategy involves investment of some money. This method will surly bring in more traffic, if done in a smarter way.
Target the right audience. If your blog is about Gadgets, then advertise on those websites which are popular in that niche. By doing so, you will get some quality traffic and some of the traffic may convert into loyal readers.

Now coming to the point, make use of some discount coupons available all over the internet, to advertise using Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Market, Bidvertiser, Text-Link-Ads etc.
By doing so, you will reduce the cost of advertising to almost 50 – 80%!
Yes you read it right. You can almost reduce the advertising cost by 50 – 80% or even more.
Google Adwords or its power users has previously given 150 to 200$ free advertising coupons. Recently I had found that there was maximum of 50$ off when you signup for adwords for the first time. — Search for the coupon code in Google.
Yahoo Search Market, provides frequent free advertising coupons to its existing customers. And the first time advertiser will get 25$ off[Offer might have expired. Again use search engine and you will most probably get one].
Bidvertiser gives 20$ free advertising for the first time advertiser.
Text-link-ads, has comeup with a new adverting system called InLink advertising, where they place dofollow links on the blogs where you purchase the advertising. As part of their public launch, TLA (InLinks) is offering $100 worth backlinks for just $1, for a limited time.
tla-inlinks-example By utilizing this opportunity you can get good Technorati authority and Google may rank you high!
To grab this big opportunity, signup an account with TLA, and click on the “BUY LINKS” -> InLinks.
Text-link-ads-inlink Now enter “Keyword or phrase” relevant to your blog topic, and pick as many links as you want so that the total adds up to $100.00. Usually PR4 links come at $25 a piece, PR3 at $20, PR2 at $12 and PR1 at $10 etc. Just use your common sense while selecting these links, so that you benefit more out of the deal. After selecting the links worth 100$, click on the add to chart button at the end. Now put the link of your blog which you want to advertise. After checking everything, press “Checkout”. Now you get the option to pay 1$ by using your credit card, after using the coupon code 100free. And a happy thing is, TLA also allow us to pay using paypal.
See for the link to paypal payment at the end of the same page. Click on it and follow the instruction.

Do not fear of penalty, as the link looks very natural and not like paid advertising.
And the links will be placed for 30 days.

Now please read on further without fail..
Many of the above offers are valid only for the first time advertisers. And these offers are given with the intention that you will continue to be their advertiser even after the expiry of the offer.
So most of these companies[This is written in general, and it do not pointout to any particular company] set a “Subscription” to your Credit Card and/or to your paypal account.
So be careful and cancel[if you are not sure to continue advertising for the next month] the authorization of them once you pay them the initial amount for the first time.
For example:-
When you pay for X adNetwork for the first time using paypal, it may set the authorization to X adNetwork for further automatic payment for the coming months.
[ Actually paypal will ask you for confirmation before setting the authorization, but most beginners will skip reading and may click Yes.]
To remove it:- Goto your paypal account, click on the “Transaction Details”(in Recent Transaction Section) and then on “View Billing Agreement Details” link. Now see the “Status:” and click on the Cancel button. Thats all, you will not be billed by X adNetwork without your permission.

So be careful while doing online transaction. And do not waste your money without making proper use of discount coupons!.

Actually many adnetworks provide such discount to attract customers and to make them use their service somehow and to show them that their adnetwork can bring them more benefits. But many people just use these discount coupons and get traffic to their blog and then discontinue using them. But I think, if any of these advertising programs seems to be bringing you high quality traffic, and if you are getting more returns to your investment, then why to stop paid advertising? Use the discount coupons, offers etc and experiment which one suits you the best and continue with them.

This also holds good for any kind of online purchase. You can look for a good discount for your first time hosting.

If its hard earned money, then use it wisely 🙂
Like this, you can do a quick google search before using any ad network for advertising purpose or directly contact the company people and ask them for a discount coupon.