Category: Marketing

Most of us think about Google as synonymous with search engines and that is quite true. Google does not really have competitors and it has single handedly catered to users when they look for information. Despite this, Microsoft and Yahoo have tried hard to carve out a niche for themselves. Yahoo has been in the search engine business for a long time and its position was usurped by Google in the early 2000s. That situation is not going to change in 2014. Will Bing and Yahoo be able to carve a niche for themselves in 2014? Google will continue to be the undisputed ruler of search engines and much of the advertisements will be published on Google instead of on Yahoo! Search or on Bing, which belongs to Microsoft. In this article, let us try and understand what Bing and Yahoo may experience in 2014, and how the two search engines may fare in the months to come. One thing is for sure, neither search engine will see a future that is going to be pretty. Bing will suffer the most, whereas Yahoo still has a chance of marginal recovery and some amount of respite. Microsoft’s Bing does not really have the capacity to compete with Google at all and even with Yahoo, it is a questionable case to be made. Microsoft’s Bing will have to struggle to succeed Microsoft has not been willing to let go of its Bing search engine and for very wrong reasons. If Microsoft thinks people will begin to abandon Google and try to use Bing, it is truly mistaken. However, in its favor, Bing has usurped on the shares of even smaller search engines. On the flipside, this has not really helped Bing to gain any position vis-a-vis Google or Yahoo. What one needs to understand from this state of affairs is that Microsoft will not easily give up on Bing and Bing will not be any more successful in 2014 than it was in 2013. Since 2015, Microsoft has lost more than $11 billion, thanks to its Online Services Division. Bing is one of the most expensive mistakes that Microsoft has ever made. While Bing is critical to Microsoft’s ad revenues, its profits are not going to be helpful to Microsoft in the long term. One needs to wait and watch to see if some miracle will help Bing to regain a little bit of composure in the midst of what has been a very disappointing year. Microsoft may not even keep all its online properties to itself. It has already been rumored that it may sell its MSN news portal. Yahoo may have a brighter future in 2014 Yahoo, on the other hand, has different problems to deal with. Ever since Marissa Mayer took on the responsibilities, Yahoo has consistently evolved to be at least slightly respectable. It has begun to understand the importance of mobile computing and it has also understood the importance of a clean interface. Yahoo’s search business is quite disappointing and it will continue to be so in 2014. However, its e-mail business, its ad strategy and other aspects make us respect it a bit more than most would like to. It clearly has a lot of challenges and difficulties ahead but it is not a company that will give up easily. We must also remember that Tumblr was bought by Yahoo and that was a very smart move indeed. Yahoo’s future may actually lie in Tumblr and the fact that it has access to one of the most popular social networking tools in the form of Tumblr will alone help Yahoo to buy time for a couple of more years. How Yahoo will handle this new found social network is something that we all are trying to figure out. It is not going to be easy for either Yahoo or Microsoft to conquer 2014. It will be particularly difficult for Microsoft to keep Bing afloat. Yahoo has the hope of depending on its e-mail service and its search engine. One just needs to wait and watch in order to understand what it is going to be like in the near future. Meanwhile, Google will continue to dominate the search engine realm.

One of the crucial steps to ensure success in online ad campaigns is to track ad performance in recent days. Those who use Google AdWords can make use of AdWords Bid Simulators to check what their ad performance would have been, if the bids had been different. The simulator can prove to be a valuable tool to plan future ad campaigns without having to lurk in the dark. Understanding Google AdWords simulators Google AdWords Bid Simulator is a great way to ensure that you estimate what your advertising results would have been in the last 7 days, if you chose to set different bids. The Campaign Bid Simulator helps you to do that as well. In this article, let us try and understand the bid simulators in a better fashion. These simulators help people who want to increase or decrease their bids but are not sure how it is going to affect their performance. In a controlled and safe environment, you can gauge what effect changing bids will have on your web traffic. This is very important for people who have just begun to use Google AdWords and are trying to understand the way it works. It can help people to write better, make business better and eventually rake in more profits. What exactly do the simulators do? Google AdWords bid simulators work efficiently in order to help you understand and estimate what the effects of changing bids are going to be. The bid simulators make use of data brought in from the search network in the last 7 days. It also considers information such as quality score and analyzes data from ad auctions. Along with these parameters, it also takes into account keyword traffic and other factors such as your competitors’ bids. All these data are then crunched and analyzed to reveal where your ad would have found itself and how frequently people would have clicked on it. What you need to understand is, the bid simulators do not tell you how it is going to be in the future but the simulators use the last seven days’ information and tell you how it could have been in the last seven days. The bid simulators only help you estimate what it could have been and with that information, you can plan for future biddings. If you have reasons to believe that your ad performance will go up or down, then you probably will want to analyze data and then make changes. Bid simulators and campaign bid simulators Now, let us take a look at what a bid simulator is and what a campaign bid simulator is. We shall also try and understand the differences between the two. The bid simulator is a tool that helps you to estimate a number of factors such as conversions, clicks, conversion value, impressions and cost that your ad would have received in the previous 7 days. It estimates what it would have been if you used alternative CPC bid for your ad group or keyword. This tool can be found in the Ad groups and Keywords tabs. Clearly, we must stress again that it does not tell you what your data will look like in the next 7 days. Thus, you must understand that the estimates are for what it could have been in the last 7 days. The Campaigns Bid Simulator, on the other hand, is a little different. It quite works like the bid simulator but it allows the user to model bid changes and even apply them across their accounts. After doing so, one can take a look at details at each campaign level. This tool can be found in the Campaigns tab. You may also choose to have a ‘Limited by Budget’ status so that you receive budget ideas instead of Campaign Bid Simulator. The budget ideas help you to estimate what you should be bidding instead of going ahead and taking a risk. Certain issues that one may need to consider before using the simulators Let us say you would like to know how many conversions your ads might have received if you set different bids. What the simulators do is these tell you exactly this. You must bear in mind that there are sometimes conversion delays. Right now, conversions are reported for a month after the click. The simulators reveal how many conversions would approximately happen in a single day depending on the clicks based on previous seven days. The sparse conversion data also makes calculating a little difficult. However, if you have a long history, it becomes easier for the tool to estimate your data. If you make major changes to your Conversion Tracking code, the simulator will not be able to estimate at all. In fact, the estimates are invalid if you make major changes in 2 weeks before employing the simulators. As a lot of factors like actions that customers may do when they visit your website are taken into consideration, estimates may not be very reliable. One cannot only depend on data revealed through ad clicks. Advantages of using the bid simulator There are several advantages of using the campaign bid simulator. It helps you to take a look at the bid changes. As bid scaling is right there, one can also observe what is going to happen if all the bids are increased or decreased by a certain percentage. Campaign bid alterations can significantly ameliorate traffic. Thus, these emulators will let you know if you should be increasing your budget and what the consequences are going to be. Data can be downloaded and analyzed separately. This tool can be a boon to not only SEO professionals but also marketing and campaign managers who need to know what is going on in their ad campaigns. Problems with the simulators There are certain conditions in which you may not see a bid simulation. If there isn’t enough data, you may not see a proper simulation or worse, no simulation at all. As previously

Twitter’s public life on the Wall Street began when it announced that it filed an initial public offering on the 12th of September, 2013. From then on, Twitter’s moves have been scrutinized to no end and have often been the topic of discussion on most finance websites. Its stocks initially showed a lot of promise but has been on a rollercoaster ride ever since. In a prospectus of 800 pages, it revealed its game plan and how it planned to raise money. With an initial plan of raising $1 billion, Twitter eventually reached a market capitalization of $32.76 billion. In the recent weeks, Twitter’s stock has nosedived mostly because of fears of it not doing well when it comes to advertising. Should technology pundits be worried about Twitter’s market performance? As a technology company, we are more interested in what Twitter can do in terms of technology than what it can do to investors. However, following Twitter’s numbers tells us if we should continue to prefer Twitter over Facebook or other social networks. Right now, we do believe that Twitter is a very important tool that will continue to rise in its importance. There is no point in comparing Twitter with its rival Facebook or even with LinkedIn, as all the 3 sites serve very different purposes. Twitter’s public offering story has been very tumultuous to say the least. People have been buying its shares and selling within a matter of weeks. These short term fluctuations point at a basic insecurity or fear that Twitter will not make the kind of money it expects to make. Why are investors scared of Twitter? The root cause of these fears is its revenue strategy, which is to offer advertisements. Twitter advertisements hold more promise than Facebook simply because people who use Twitter tend to follow celebrities and other authority figures more than people on Facebook. Twitter has an element of social power that Facebook doesn’t. It is very easy to notice that most celebrities are active on Twitter rather than on Facebook. If a certain advertisement makes to the timeline of a celebrity or something is retweeted, chances of that product or service being used is greater than a full-fledged Facebook campaign. This is not to say that one must abandon Facebook ads but what we must understand is that there is no comparison between the two. Comparing Twitter with Facebook Let us try and compare Facebook with Twitter as they are both public companies. We hesitate to do this, but we will still do it because of the enormous queries we receive constantly regarding Facebook and Twitter ads. Here are some of the main reasons why Twitter is one of the most valuable technology companies today and we should continue to prioritize our social media activities on Twitter. Twitter has a better advertising strategy than Facebook Facebook has more than 5 times the number of active users than Twitter and these users share more than 10 times the content that Twitter users share. However, the cost per thousand impressions (CPM) is higher on Twitter than on Facebook. Also, Twitter’s promoted tweets are more favorable to business users than Facebook’s ad products. We may also add that the click-through rates are higher on Twitter than on Facebook. It is also interesting to observe that more people use Twitter from the mobile phones than they use Facebook. Twitter was initially built as a 140-character tool to be used through text messages. Eventually, it reached a stage where it can compete with the big names of the Silicon Valley. Being the superior tool that it is, Twitter may actually trounce Facebook when it comes to advertisements. The celebrity connection Twitter obviously is a better platform when it comes to celebrity engagement. More celebrities on Twitter are active than on Facebook. Politicians, government offices, police, army, psychologists, doctors and every other thought leader uses Twitter. What we can understand is, Twitter tends to attract thought leaders and their followers, whereas, Facebook tends to attract people and their friends. It is easier to monitor Twitter and people’s engagement there than people’s engagement on Facebook because it is a walled garden. Twitter celebrities need not even be actual celebrities. They could be anonymous celebrities made famous just by the content they share. There are several people whose identities we do not know but continue to post amazing content that they, otherwise, wouldn’t on Facebook. This anonymity and privacy sets Twitter apart from Facebook. That is also one of the reasons why advertising on Twitter may be easier, as we will know whose followers like what. Twitter is immediate The way content can spread on Twitter is vastly different from how it can spread on Facebook. On Twitter, all that one needs to do is share content and it can get retweeted and shared by complete strangers. This is because Twitter is a public forum unlike Facebook. On Facebook, sharing depends on known connections and that can take a lot of time. A certain viral content can travel through the world faster on Twitter than on Facebook. Thus, it may be a better option when considering advertisements. There is a larger audience who will be able to spread it across Twitter in a relatively short period of time. This immediacy sets Twitter apart from its competitors. Immediacy is very important when it comes to advertising or marketing. The more quickly a message gets through, the better it is for people to sell their products or services. Twitter is democratic One of the main reasons why we prefer Twitter over Facebook is because of its democratic appeal. Journalists, reporters and just about anyone in the industry prefer Twitter to Facebook. It is a valuable broadcasting tool that can spread information in a democratic way. Facebook on the other hand has certain restrictions and it also depends on people who may choose not to share certain content simply because they do not like the friend that shared it. That

Every business needs to manage its finances effectively. With rising costs and a weak economy in almost every country, entrepreneurs and CEOs just cannot take the risk of over spending. With that in mind, it is becoming increasingly clear that companies must focus on cost reduction and when possible, consider improvisation. Improvisation has always had a negative connotation but when it comes to cost cutting, it can work like a charm. One of the more effective ways of improvising technologies is to customize existing open source technologies and applications. Most companies can make use of the plethora of open source technologies that are available for free, and get a professional to customize it for them for a relatively lower cost. Custom open source technologies are cheap, unique and cost effective. They are also effective from a technological standpoint because even after customization, one can always fall back upon the robust help communities online. Using custom open source applications and technologies is a great way to start and sustain a business which otherwise maybe unsustainable. • No licensing fees When we look at proprietary software programs, we realize that we have to shell out a lot of money just to be able to use it. Customization of licensed software may attract copyright infringement laws and is not advisable unless otherwise specified. If a company specifically allows you to customize their licensed software for an additional cost, it is a different story altogether. However, what we must bear in mind is that it is nearly impossible to use proprietary software programs without paying hefty licensing fees. When we use open source software programs, applications and technologies, we do not have to pay any licensing fees. All that we pay is the professional fees that a developer or web professional charges for customizing the software for you. • Easy to copy and modify Open source technologies can be copied, modified and even used as inspiration for your own proprietary software program. You can run any number of programs on different devices and not be forced to up hefty licensing fees, You could redistribute the source code to your employees and use it as learning and educational material. All this leads us to believe that open source technologies pose less of a headache when it comes to redistributing, copying and modifying. • Enhanced portability When you use an open source application, you will be granted enhanced portability. You can use and install the technologies wherever you want, even if that means, using the software on devices used by your outsourcing partners. The bottom-line is, you will have more freedom over open source software programs than licensed ones. • Easy integration If you already have your own software programs or if you wish to combine two different open source applications, you are very well allowed to do that. In fact, if you end up creating something awesome, you can file for a patent application and charge licensing fees for something that you created from open source technologies. Easy integration and enhanced freedom are some of the most attractive features of open source software programs. • Popular tools Most popular tools and applications are already open source. Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and other content management systems are all open source. You can modify these tools and applications to suit your needs. Likewise, Ruby, PHP, Python and other software programs are open source too and can be altered, modified and customized to suit your needs. Why you must outsource customization of open source technologies With these 5 reasons in mind, you can reduce your costs further if you choose to outsource your customization needs. You will not need to go through lengthy recruitment and hiring processes and you will not need to oversee progress of projects that you may not even understand. When you outsource tasks related to customizing open source software programs, you will end up saving money, time and costs. At the end of the day, you will have more money and time to invest in your core business activities. And that is the focus and goal of every outsourcing venture anyway. Thus, if you are planning to purchase a licensed software, give a second thought. An offshore IT agency may be able to customize an existing open source software for a fraction of the cost.

A business’ reputation depends on the way the people see the company, its products and services. Thankfully, measuring a company’s reputation is quite simple. It must be assumed that every client or consumer is looking up businesses online and all they need to do is go online, open any of the search engines like Google, Yahoo, etc; and conduct a web search for your name, your company’s name, or your product’s name. What are your search results? The feedback is either: • Positive: In this case, one really does not have to do much and can pat oneself on their backs. • Negative: Just like how you searched online about your company for feedback, many other customers would search the web before they buy your product. Do you want them to read negative stories about your company, product or service in the top search results? • Few or no results: If you find no results about your company, it may be an indication that you are not so popular on the Internet or, you are not doing enough to optimise your SEO. Whatever the results are, it is important for every business to build and maintain a good reputation. The process of tracking what people say about you or your company on the internet, and based on the feedback, taking necessary actions to ensure that mostly positive feedback about your business features in the top search results, is called Online Reputation Management. In other words, it is a way of covering up the company’s negative search results by promoting its positive feedback using different Search Engine Optimization tools and techniques. PROCESS OF ONLINE REPUTATION:  Keeping your online reputation spotless and shining can be challenging. There are many ways to manage and monitor your brands online, provided you are ready to invest substantial amount of time and effort and thus, minimize your chances of falling victim to identity theft or cybercrime. • Assessing your online reputation: This is done by browsing through major search engines using key words like the company’s name, product name, brand name and finding out what people are talking  about you or your products. For e.g.  Setting up a Google alert on your brand name. •Identifying the type of reputation problem: What if you find that the results are not favourable for the business? Just like how you did a web-search with your brand name, even a prospective customer or employee could conduct a web search to find out more about your business before they buy your product or accept a job offer. Hence it is important that quick actions are taken. In case you find indifferent results or no results at all, it could be a problem. It suggests that you need to start working on building your online reputation. • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search results are made to look more ‘positive’ by proactively publishing useful and positive information about the company, brand or product. Negative feedback about your company is covered up by adding more pages that highlight honest and positive reviews about your company or its products. Negative reviews and feedback can’t be deleted but they need to be attended to. You can leave a comment under particular posts asking for further information or offer to provide compensation or just apologise. It is not possible to have an entirely positive set of reviews. What matters is, how a company handles its negative reviews and feedbacks. It takes hardly any time to tarnish the reputation and good will of any business. So every business should try and leave no stone unturned to uphold its positive image with the public. WHO NEEDS ORM THE MOST? Types of Business: • Small Business & Mid-sized Business • Large Business Small and mid-sized businesses have a distinctive place in today’s market. They are not exposed to many of the risks that threaten the existence of large business. Most of these small businesses do not exist online, but their limited number of customers do. Large businesses are usually well established and invest a lot of time, effort and money to ensure that all their customers and employees are satisfied. These businesses not only have their own websites, but also provide forums for customers to express their opinions about the firm or its products. Despite all the efforts, there is always a displeased customer, an angry employee or an unhealthy competitor who is ready to do anything to bring the business down. Customers or competitors openly post their positive and negative views on public forums which affect both large and small businesses. It is important that both small and large firms deal with these negative feedbacks. It gets more difficult for the smaller firms because in order to manage their reputation they firstly need to create one. The first step is to create a website and maintain it. It is also a good practice to try and establish yourself on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. HOW DOES ORM HELP YOU? Building credibility Understand and respond to customer complaints Online Insights Recruitment Cover up the negative posts What do you want to do with the insights from the search conducted in ORM? Just cover up the negative reviews? That might not be a good idea because any news spreads like wildfire on the internet, especially the bad ones. Since the Internet has a long living memory, the negative reviews and feedback about the business will continue to stay there forever or atleast for a long time. So most of the businesses believe in addressing the problems faced by their customers. These days even employees do a web search before they accept any job offer. By covering up negative feedback, you make sure that you do not turn away a prospective employee. This further helps in improving your credibility in the market. Online reputation management is more crucial than certain public relation techniques like marketing and advertising. Why is it difficult to handle online reputation management on

We have all heard about how content is king and we must all pay more attention to it. Content map is a relatively lesser known term but equally important. It is an integral part of a company’s content strategy and involves visual techniques that help you to understand and organize the content of your website. A content map basically helps you to visualize and explore content. The idea is to create a content map that closely fits your company’s goals and that of your clients’. It helps you to discover problems, opportunities, how to link to external websites and discover newer ways to revolutionize your content strategy. There are several important factors to consider before we draw a content map: Content map must be simple Content maps can become unnecessarily lengthy and cumbersome. They will only confuse you further and will not bring any fruits of labor anyway. It is important to keep them short, simple and crisp. A content map should contain the skeleton of your content strategy and should be as functional as possible Content map should resemble brainstorming A content map is not the final document about what must be written and published. Instead, it should be looked at as a brainstorming technique that helps you to understand where your content goals are heading and what you must do in order to optimize your content. Content map is not a site map You should think beyond pages, headers, blogs and sub-pages. A content map may need to seek the help of external pages as well and that will require you to look beyond site maps. A site map contains all the information that is on the website or should be on the website. A content map tells you how you should go about creating content in order to optimize your website. Content maps must be simple Do not use jargon to describe simple aspects of content writing like blogs, paragraphs, copy and text. Instead, call them what they are. Write a content map in an informal manner. It should only tell you where you are heading and must not become a stumbling block itself. There are several other reasons why you must consider content mapping. Some of the most important goals other than giving you a direction towards your own content strategy are: • Note taking Note taking can become quite a task when it comes to attending conferences and seminars. With the increase in webinars and online conferences, you can make a content map available just before you hold a webinar so that your audience knows what you are going to talk about, what will be discussed and what the conclusions are going to be. Note taking is one of the most important goals of content mapping. • Creation of new knowledge As discussed earlier, content mapping helps us to discover loopholes, problem areas in content strategy and discover newer ways to optimize content. This helps us to do more research and write better content that will be read by a larger audience. It also helps you to transform tacit knowledge into something that is of organizational value. • Knowledge retention Organizational knowledge can be retained and preserved with the help of content maps. Before your valued employees leave jobs or before they retire, you could get them to write content maps so that their knowledge stays with you even after they leave the organization. • Training There is nothing more important than training and developing your own employees. Content maps help you to train your employees and make sure that they are equipped well to handle your clients. By understanding the different features of a content map and the myriad ways in which it can help a company to stay resourceful, one can make use of them in better ways than just optimizing content marketing. Content maps must be drawn for a number of reasons and one of them is to reduce the burden of information. Content maps are skeletons of wider knowledge and thus reduce distraction but emphasize the most important points. If you are unable to write a content map on your own, try and contact professional content writers who will be able to help you with your content mapping.

Online content is a very important aspect of web marketing. Without content, websites will be blank and there will be nothing to communicate. With that in mind, it is very important to ensure that we have good content calendars that tell us what to publish when and also to organize our own content strategies. Below, we shall discuss what is included in online content and how a content calendar will help us to achieve our goals. Before that, it must be stressed that a well planned content calendar can increase SEO and in order to build reputation, one must have fresh and reliable content. A monthly content calendar will help us to understand how to publish, share and engage with our audience. Before creating a content calendar, there are several things to consider: • Seasonality You need to take a few minutes away from your busy schedule and analyze if seasonality is affecting your business. Seasonality of products, services and even content publishing can affect your business. Based on how seasonality is affecting you, you can draw a customized content map. • Content trends Ensure that you read a lot and also know what is going on in your industry. If there is a major conference coming up, try and write something of value before the conference takes place. That ensures that people looking for information about that conference will visit your website and understand that you are relevant and important. • Product and service launches Content calendars are hugely impacted by how and when services and products are launched. If you have a product or service that is to be launched, create separate content calendars that reflect that phase during which you create interest about the product, announce the product, track its progress and follow its life cycle. When you publish content online, you must ensure that all these aspects of online content are taken care of: • Photos • Videos • Whitepapers • Case studies • eBooks • Blog posts • Articles • Social sharing • Blogs Before you decide to randomly assign the number of blog posts, whitepapers, eBooks or other forms of content that are to be published, understand your audience. A small to medium sized business should post between 12-16 blog posts a month in order to remain relevant. These blog posts may be short (450-600 words) or slightly lengthier. Avoid publishing on weekends and also at odd hours. Try to find out when your readers are online the most, and publish your content at that time. • Heavy content eBooks, whitepapers and case studies should be published every month but their numbers can be limited. You may published 2 of each or if you are not able to do justice to these platforms, publish only 1 of each every month. Each time you publish a white paper, eBook or a case study, you may also write a corresponding blog post in order to optimize your content. • Media Photos and videos add visual depth to your posts. Ensure that you use these media to the fullest. However, use licensed images that are legally purchased, or create your own images. If you can’t do either, images from Creative Commons license on Wiki Images can be used as well. • Social sharing Everything that you publish must be shared online on social networking websites. These include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Pinterest. Ensure that social sharing happens in a timely and engaging manner. If you choose to automate your social posts, also make sure that you take time to engage with your audience often. Do not be a social robot. At the end of the day, make sure that you have a workable plan and a schedule. Ensure that you publish your content in a timely fashion and do not haphazardly post your content whenever you find time. If you are not able to create quality content on your own, you can always hire an experience content writer or editor, who will be able to help you further. Content is still the king, and the more number of Google updates we have seen, the clearer it has become that one must consistently and reliably create content that is of value to your target audience.