Strategies

If it’s important, you’ll find a way

So often we encounter with situations wherein we don’t find a way to accomplish things.
We find ourselves in blocks! People name it depending on their work – writers block, creativity block, productivity block etc

My Own Story
I was so much pumpedup with the idea of working online and making huge money to live a life with ultimate financial freedom 🙂

Read some success stories, took notes from their success stories: by then I knew, taking action is the key! Couldn’t wait to get started. I had all these wonderful ideas for blog posts. Wrote all those articles one after the other continuously and then started checking the stats and even replied to those spam comments, which said, I’m not able to subscribe to your blog etc 😛

After some days I had no more ideas to write. (I was new to blogging)
Later on switched topics. As human beings, we’ve interests in wide area of topics. So I had knowledge in other areas which I started sharing on my blog. Next again changed topic!

Later on, with experience learnt that sticking on to particular topic with a domain works out better!

Similar things happen in all the fields: Business, Personal life, Relationships etc

We set some expectations, we do something, we fail, and then we learn, next if we don’t quit- we excel.

Now I can almost write endlessly on the topics of my interest. I can see something special in everything I encounter, that I can share with my readers in a relevant manner.

“Once you master a craft you can recognize it in anything you do.”

Then what is this BLOCK people talk about ?
If it’s important to you, you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse.

Possible Solution
Be solution oriented, and not problem oriented.

We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. – Albert Einstein

Find out what you absolutely love doing:

Stop telling stories which support your excuses.
Know that it’s for your goodness that you need to find a way.
If you keep giving excuses you’ll be cheating no one but yourself.
Be conscious of your steps towards your goal: Take the first step first.
Don’t keep postponing things. Have proper strategies and execute your plans.

Interview with Young Entrepreneur: Neil Patel

Today we have a young entrepreneur, who is an inspiration to many people around the world.
Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies: Crazy Egg, and KISSmetrics. Through these 2 companies he has helped large corporations such as AOL, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Viacom make more money from the web. By the age of 21 not only was Neil named a top 100 blogger by Technorati, but he was also one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal.
Neil Patel
Here is the interview:

1. Please introduce yourself and your companies to our readers.

For those of you who don’t know me, I am a entrepreneur, writer, angel investor, and a marketer. Overall, I am just an average Joe. I am currently 24 years old and I am the owner of 2 .com companies: KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg.

2. Why did you choose Online Business?

I got started in the business world when I was 16 and at that time there wasn’t too many businesses I could get into other than on the web businesses. So in some way I didn’t have any other choice but to get into the online business world if I wanted to be an entrepreneur.

3. Your advice for people who want to start a company?

Stop thinking about all the details, just start a business. You are bound to stumble along the way, but you will figure things out as you move along.

4. Risks in starting a company and its remedies.

The biggest risk is that you are going to lose money. There really isn’t any remedies for this. But don’t let this stop you, sometimes you just have to roll the dice and take chances.

5. At an age of 21, how could you manage to get the money and support to start your own company? What was the motivation behind starting the company?

Borrow money from friends and family because it is the easiest way to get it.

6. Your advice for people who want to start a new blog or online business or online company and are still in schools or college (around the age of 20 – 21).

Just start a business. The younger you are when you start a business the better because you don’t have to worry about feeding a family and providing for someone else. Plus the younger you start, the more time you will have to succeed.

7. Your advice for new bloggers.

Write great content. This is the main way you are going to be able to build your readers is through good content. What I mean by this is write content that isn’t short, but instead descriptive. Don’t just write on the news, write on things that provide value to your readers.

8. Some of the strategies that you use to help your clients get more traffic and link baits.

Yes, I did use linkbait. I would write detailed blog posts such as how to guides, submit them to Digg, and push them hard until I got them on the homepage.

9. Order according to your preference – Stumble Upon, Digg,Delicious, reddit, Yahoo Buzz etc.

Digg
Reddit
Del.icio.us
Twitter
StumbleUpon
Yahoo Buzz

I am ranking them in order of link importance. Yahoo Buzz can be great, but most people will never get on the homepage of Yahoo.

10. What is your opinion about Twitter and Facebook, for marketing our blog/business. Which one do you think has more potential to drive more traffic/conversion?

Although Facebook has more users, Twitter has been more effective in driving traffic and conversions. This is mainly because Twitter is public, while on Facebook only your friends can see your profile.

11. I have seen many good articles going nowhere on DIGG. But a small piece of content submitted by a power user has more chances of getting to the front page. Don’t you think its highly unfair part of DIGG? Do you have any solution for this (other then telling us to be power user 🙂 ).

It is fair, it is how Digg is intended to work. If everything got on the homepage of Digg, no one would be using it. As for getting on the homepage a lot of it has to do with the content you are writing. Things like “Top 10 lists” are getting old, you need to be more creative with your content.

12. What are the main requisites for youngsters starting a company?

There is only 1 requirement, they need to have a passion for whatever it is they want to start.

13. How big or small are your companies?

My companies are very small. They make enough money for me to live off of, but none are making large amounts of money.

14. What about the programming aspects of your sites. Do you outsource them or you do it on your own?

I outsource all programming and design on my blog. As for Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics, we do everything in house.

15. What were the major mistakes you did on your blog and business?

I have a lot… you can find them all here:
http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/02/15/15-things-i-wish-i-had-known-when-i-started-my-first-blog/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/01/25/7-reasons-my-first-business-failed/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/01/14/7-business-mistakes-that-nearly-made-me-go-broke/

16. How do you define Success?

If you are happy with your accomplishments, then in my eyes you are successful.

17. How could you manage to get big clients in the beginning days of your company ?

I managed them through project management systems like Liquid Planner. This helped clients see what I was doing and it made communication easier.

Some Personal questions:

18. How you spend your day?

I spend most of my day in meetings, responding to emails, and working on KISSmetrics.

19. Personal hobbies and interests?

I love watching basketball games, movies, and hanging with friends.

20. Some of your life’s ambitions?

I want to become a billionaire one day. I don’t know if I will get there, but I’ll try.

21. How about your contacts with the outside real world (other than blogging life)? Do you meet and talk to people often or will you be busy almost all the time infront of your computer?

I meet people everyday. I try to get to as many networking events as possible. And when I can’t I try to meet new people through the web and my blog.

Hope you all enjoyed the interview.
I would recommend everyone to read all the blogs run by Neil Patel, we follow most of the article each day and all of them keep inspiring us. All his blogs deliver a lot of value to the readers.

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..

Free ebook download -“Tips, Tricks and Strategies to Make Money Online”

The ebook is finally out for Download.

Writing an eBook with collective effort:
Some time back Daniel scocco from DailyBlogTips cameup with an idea of writing an eBook with collective effort. The project was to group together the ideas and tips from different people, in a way that it would benefit both the collaborators and the end user (i.e. the readers).
People participating/contributing to the ebook were supposed to write about “Tips, Tricks and Strategies to Make Money Online” in not more than 200 to 300 words. This is indeed a good idea, which would bring value to the readers as well as to the participants, as we were assured of link backs to our blog.
I always admire Daniel’s work and the community he has build around his blog. I just wanted to be part of the community and wanted to take part in the group work. And ofcourse the traffic and the boost to our brand awareness was an additional reward.

What most of us had expected?
Daniel and most of the participants had expected that this ebook will bring in a lot of traffic, when it is released on DailyBlogTips.com. Thousands of internet users were expected to download it, and hundreds of visitors would be visiting to each blog, if things happen as Daniel had planned.

But what happened?
Fortunately quality of most entries was good, but unfortunately the tips and tricks were too broad to make sense under a single ebook.
And as usual, Daniel did not compromise, and so did not release the ebook on DailyBlogTips. He is committed to provide value to his readers, which is a very good commitment indeed, and very less people can actually deliver this commitment.

What’s the fate of the ebook ?
But as promised, Daniel took the pain with pleasure and spent some time to collect the entries and formatted, styled them under a simple ebook anyway. Now we are free to release the ebook on our(participants) blog.

What I feel is, this ebook gives us a chance to know what other people around the world think about Making Money Online. So I made my mind to give it to our readers.

So how can I download the ebook?
While announcing the ebook writing project it was made clear that the copyrights belong to everyone who participated, and that we can’t give away a direct download link to the ebook, we must require people to subscribe to our RSS feed or email list before they can download it. Its a rule of the project and I must follow it to keep the interest of other participants.
So please take a moment to subscribe to our email or RSS updates to get the download link for this ebook. You can always unsubscribe after downloading(Oops I shoot my own legs 🙂 ).

Finally, I would like to thank Daniel of DailyBlogTips.com for holding such an interesting and valuable project. Atleast the intention was good, outcome is not in anyone’s hand. And thanks to all the participants who have shared their knowledge and experience in the ebook, which may help our readers to gain some knowledge. And last, but not the least(actually the most important), the readers of the ebook, thanks to everyone who invested their time in reading this article and put their effort in downloading the ebook. You can freely distribute it to your friends, friends of friends and friends of friends friends, relatives and to whomever you want. Thanks again.

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.

Traffic strategies: PART 2(Add RSS feed signature to your emails)

We write emails to our friends, relatives, anonymous people around the world etc. Many of the people with whom we communicate may already be knowing about our blog and there is a high chance that they already are our subscribers.
But still adding RSS feed signature or adding the “Headline Animator, which displays rotating headlines” will bring some traffic to our blog, as it shows our old article titles and they might be interested to know more and they may endup clicking on the title and visiting your site. Anyway, adding a small piece of code doesn’t hurt or take a lot of time.

Feedburner has got this feature and you can integrate the small piece of basic HTML code to get the animated banner. But the limitation here is, you can see only five most recent items cycling through your feed’s. To over come this you can use some other RSS widgets, but while selecting see that these widgets are created only using basic HTML(for faster loading and user experience).

To use Feedburner animated banner feed as your email signature in Yahoomail, follow these simple steps:-

1. Log into your Yahoo! mail.
2. Click on Options.
3. In the “Management” section, click on the Signature option.
4. Drag and drop your Feedburner animated banner and click on “SAVE“.

If you want this email signature in Gmail, then you have to take some more steps:-
Gmail currently doesn’t allow us to add HTML codes directly into emails. But there are always some workarounds to get our work done!
Actually, you can over come the Gmail signature limitation by using Gmail’s POP3/SMTP features by making use of standard email program (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), create a signature in that email program that has your Headline Animator in it, and send your emails through your Gmail account. This is an easy task for those who are already using Outlook etc software.

But for people who are not using such email programs and who are not willing to use such things, there are some other solutions:-
To use the animator in Gmail, all you need is the “Better Gmail” Firefox extension. It adds a check box in your gmail account settings to enable HTML. Remember you must be using “Mozilla Firefox” only to get this to work.
I think everyone needs to give this Firefox extension a try. It also adds many cool features to your gmail, like:- Add Google Calendar link, Add Google Reader “Feeds” link, Air Skin, All pages’ mailto: links compose in Gmail, Attachment Icons, Attachment Icons (Bigger!), Conversation Preview, Attachment Reminder(now integrated in Gmail by Google), Date Search, Filter Assistant, Fixed Font, Folders4Gmail(Great isn’t it?), Force encrypted Gmail connection (https), Forward Thread, GrandCentral Voicemail, Integrate Google Reader, Mail.app(Mac-like skin), Show disk usage as progress bar, Signature Settings: Float/HTML/No dashes, Smart Read Button, Super Clean Skins, TinyURL selected link (Cmd+Shift+T), Unlabeled Message Search etc etc etc etc… So here is the link to download “Better Gmail”.

Drag and Drop:-
One more option to use with Gmail, Yahoomail, hotmail or anyother mailing service is, just drag and drop the widget at the bottom of your email and it will be working fine. But it requires you to do it manually all the time you send an email. Many people follow this simple drag and drop work, as this would provide us with the option of when to add and when not to add the email signature(with feed banner).
Copy the HTML codes generated in Feedburner(animated banner creation) and paste it in a notepad and save it on your hard disk with file name ending with .html. Run it(by clicking on the html file) whenever you write an email. Now drag and drop the animated banner into your email. Its that simple..

It seems like- “this method will not bring any traffic”, and its partly true. As you will not get heavy traffic out of this method. To get more traffic, you must be active in mail groups like yahoogroups, gmail groups etc and you should be sending interesting emails to a group with large number of users. This will surly bring some traffic, as people may forward that email to their friends and then their friends may mail it to their friends…like this, your email(along with your email signature) will reach many people and you may get many visitors and they may even signup to your RSS/email feeds and may become your loyal visitors(but please keep your fingers crossed!). Do not expect a heavy traffic from this method, which dries up your blogs bandwidth.

And another thing I want to mention here before ending this article, is, never think that your emails are marked as SPAM because you are using some HTML codes in your email messages. This will not happen, as today’s email systems has gone far from the basic text, to a high multimedia messaging. So no email service provider is going to mark you as a SPAMMER, for using some basic HTML in your email.