Wednesday, June 20, 2012

The Power of Digital Marketing – The Hindu


Tapping the power of digital media

Log on to the web and attractive advertisements scream out at you. Beat the ambush and you are immediately waylaid by more subtle plugs on various online communities, forums, blogs and even social networking sites.
Instead of cribbing at these besieging promotions, why not hop onto the bandwagon of the new-age career of digital marketing.
Given today’s era of increasing web usage, growing internet penetration and social media ubiquity on the one hand and saturation of traditional marketing mediums on the other, digital marketing offers the perfect playground for businesses to reach audiences worldwide.
Digital marketing comprises the internet, email, mobile and other related channels that form the primary way people interact and communicate today. The high-impact, flexible, targeted, measurable and economical power of digital media has big and small companies alike scampering to exploit the novel, attractive and creative features in an attempt to both reach out to the customers and also mine untapped markets. Statistics reveal that companies that use internet marketing get up to 1300% profit as compared with traditional marketing! Little wonder then that digital media forms a lion’s share of most marketing campaigns – be it publicity, sales leads, community relations or customer service.

As a career prospect

The dynamic, upcoming industry of digital marketing is fast-gaining momentum as a promising career choice, especially among the youth. Helping companies stay ahead of the curve by utilising the commercial perspective of modern digital media is taking the world by storm. This massive marketing platform is poised to become the most sought-after profession what with its fascinating, stimulating and rewarding aspects.
As Rachna Gupta, Founder Director, International Institute of Creative Marketing opines, “The industry has already grown over $1 billion worldwide in the last three years and is expected to continue its upward trend. No marketing budget, plan or strategy is now considered complete unless it includes a digital component.”
Yet, it cannot be perceived as simply moving traditional marketing methods to a digital platform.
The work here is two-fold – building an online presence to up the brand awareness quotient as well as monitoring the public image, consumer insight and relationship with customers.
Digital marketers develop fine-tuned strategies for product launch, promotion, brand building, increasing sales or public relations. The tools for spreading the message are varied – targeted advertisements, search engine optimised articles, initiating conversations, participating in discussions, links, comments, polls and so on. They also tactically leverage different social media tools like Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Flickr, etc. for everything from creating a buzz about the product/service, getting people talking about the brand, generating leads/inquiries, powering traffic to websites and building fan loyalty. Digital marketing strategies have to be well-integrated into the overall marketing mix. Measuring the success/reach of digital marketing efforts with metrics like e-mail delivery statistics, search engine results, site visits, users’ clicks on links and related benchmarks is imperative.

Educational qualifications

Traditional marketing education, IT or mass communication background or experience in advertising/ sales/ brand building gives a foothold in the digital marketing industry. Yet, professional certification in digital marketing per se imparts thorough understanding of digital technologies and applications for improving customer engagement. Business schools have also started incorporating digital marketing modules in their marketing programmes.
Again, the field is changing dramatically and quickly. It is essential to keep abreast of constant changes or risk becoming obsolete.

Personal traits

Digital marketing demands tech-savvy individuals who can easily absorb new technology. Basic knowledge of web design, social media and web-related software is requisite. It also calls for a creative streak, analytical bent, good communication skills and willingness to spend long hours glued to the web. The work (completely different from merely browsing the web or connecting with friends) is demanding as it delivers real-time results and is measurable with more ease and accuracy. Being a nascent profession, employers look more for aptitude than experience!

Scope

Exciting job opportunities beckon in digital marketing solutions companies and in-house marketing/ social media departments of big organisations. For instance, HP-India created a job profile just to administer their Twitter and Facebook profiles!
Individuals can even opt to set up their own marketing firms or go the freelance route.
Roles and designations vary from company to company. Interesting positions are cropping up like interactive marketing specialist, social media strategist, audience acquisition manager, communities manager, social media coordinator, SEO strategist, social media web developer, web analytics manager, etc.
Trained and qualified digital marketing experts are in high demand everywhere as more and more companies are shifting their focus to digital marketing strategies. Being a new professional discipline, there is immense scope as well as ample room for everyone. Nidhi Makhija of Experience Commerce says, “The industry is so new and many opportunities lie undiscovered. There’s vast scope to grow either into a digital planner or as a business development executive. These are just stepping stones into higher positions – Account Directors and VPs of Business Development.”
Another plus point is the hefty pay packages as big companies allocate huge budgets for digital marketing. Freshers can easily earn Rs.2 to 3 lakhs per annum with prospects of exponential growth in the future.
To sum up, the future of marketing lies in the digital medium and making technology work for brands will surely rule the virtual world!
Author : Payal Chanania
Source :  The Hindu

Monday, June 18, 2012

Benefit of Writing Good Articles


Another benefit of writing good articles is that it helps build you some credibility. So let’s talk about your credibility and why it is so important to establish credibility with the reader.
After all why should they listen to you, have you had this problem and if so how did it affect you and your business?
When you solved the problem, what benefits did it bring you and how did it make things better?
If you can establish credibility with your reader they will be willing to listen to you and follow your advise. If you lack credibility in their eyes, they may be unwilling to follow your advise and will most likely be uninterested in what you have to offer.

How much traffic can a good article attract?


It was amazed at seeing instances of sometimes as many as 1 million or even a million and a half people flooding into the Web site, whenever an article would be picked up by a major publication.
How did that work? Many publishers will also have huge subscriber lists of 300,000 or even 500,000 readers. If they decide to put your article out to their subscribers, you can see enormous traffic spikes (usually from readers clicking the link in your bio.)
Okay, so what should you include in your opening paragraph?
Your opening paragraph should not only introduce the reader to the subject matter but also give them a reason to continue on reading. It should give them a brief overview of what they can expect to learn from the rest of the article. Remember this is true when writing news also. Most publishers need to quickly understand what your article is about because they go through so many contributions in their work day.
Let them know what problem are you going to help them with. Assure them that you have a solution that will save them time, money or trouble. When you are writing your opening paragraph keep in mind that you have to give them a good reason to keep on reading or they may lose interest and look elsewhere.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

How are articles different than regular content pages?


Strategies involving articles have a much tighter focus and usually are not about trying to sell a product.
Articles, from the search engines point of view are 100% white hat, meaning that they are syndicated and search engines understand that good articles are meant to be published in more than one place at
at time, very similar to news.
Articles can be published to several places at once and even have the search engines blessing so to speak, through places like Yahoo or Google’s Creative Commons. Articles do not need much work in the way of optimization, since the article itself can gain massive distribution through article directories.
Let’s look at a few obvious differences between content pages and articles:
S.No
Articles
Content Pages
1
Should range between 800 to 1200 wordsShould be at least 400-600 words
2
Industry standard for articles is usually 65 characters per line including spaces.Content pages have no limits although it’s best to have some white space for ease of reading.
3
Don’t require much optimizationDo require optimization for traffic
4
Offer expert advice or helpful tips but should not be just a sales pitch.Can offer sales, information or a much wider variety of topical info, catalogs, video etc.
5
Well written articles have the added value of links returning from the bio to the Web site.Content pages are limited to on page influences but will still need off page influences to help compete.
6
Should never be self-promotional but can offer useful, helpful advice.Content pages can be self-promotional such as a sales letter.
7
Traffic generated from articles generally comes from readers who click on the Bio of the author.Traffic to content pages usually come from the search engine results pages initially.
In Summary, is article marketing a good strategy to follow for promoting your Web site?
Absolutely true.
Article marketing allows you to reach enormous groups of readers that you would normally gain exposure to, through SEO only. Article marketing is just like free advertising, if you do it correctly. It does not replace good SEO work, but is something else you can perform in tandem, but won’t require you to pay a dime in ad space.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Google Places - How to Connect The Business With Local Customers


Why every business needs to target local customers, 

1. 97% of consumers search online for local businesses.
2. 20% of business searches on Google are related to location.

Google Places : Connecting with Local Customers 

Google places or Google Maps is a important platform that your business is easily discover and appear in online search.
In Google Places, there is 2 method for listing our business,
1. Create free listing your business
2. Verify the business listing or verify the existing listing already available in Google Places.
It’s the best way that consumers searched on Google, Google Maps, Mobile with keywords related your business. You can learn and understand the Google Places from below video,


Source : www.abdulmalick.com

Sunday, June 10, 2012

32 Google Search Quality Updates and Highlights on May 2012


Google Search Quality Highlights and Updates on May 2012

Google search quality updates on may month that may including the Knowledge Graph, better search for users in mainland China, and an updated Search App for iPhone.

32 search quality highlights and updates in Google on May 2012,

  1. Deeper detection of hacked pages.
  2. Autocomplete predictions used as refinements.
  3. More predictions for Japanese users.
  4. Improvements to autocomplete on Mobile.
  5. Fewer arbitrary predictions.
  6. Improved IME in auto-complete.
  7. New segmenters for Asian languages.
  8. Scoring and infrastructure improvements for Google Books pages in Universal Search.
  9. Unified Soccer feature.
  10. Improvements to NBA search feature.
  11. New Golf search feature.
  12. Improvements to ranking for news results.
  13. Better application of inorganic backlinks signals.
  14. Improvements to Penguin.
  15. Trigger alt title when HTML title is truncated.
  16. Efficiency improvements in alternative title generation.
  17. Better demotion of boilerplate anchors in alternate title generation.
  18. Internationalizing music rich snippets.
  19. Music rich snippets on mobile.
  20. Improvement to SafeSearch goes international.
  21. Simplification of term-scoring algorithms.
  22. Fading results to white for Google Instant.
  23. Better detection of major new events.
  24. Smoother ranking functions for freshness.
  25. Better detection of searches looking for fresh content.
  26. Freshness algorithm simplifications.
  27. Updates to +Pages in right-hand panel.
  28. Performance optimizations in our ranking algorithm.
  29. Simpler logic for serving results from diverse domains.
  30. Precise location option on tablet.
  31. Improvements to local search on tablet.
  32. Internationalization of “recent” search feature on mobile.

Source : abdulmalick.com