247 TopSeller

MissionFish £10,000 Online Business Grants for charities

2011-05-18T04:21:00.000-07:00

MissionFish, (the company recently purchased by eBay which handles eBay for Charity payments), have just announced to charitable grants of up to £10,000 to support charities that want to set up online businesses and need additional funding to get started.

The grants will provide funding for charities to set up an online trading or fund raising business, or grow an existing online trading business, by taking advantage of platforms such as eBay for Charity to raise unrestricted funding for their charity.

During the trial, two grants of up to £10,000 are available, with a view to exploring demand. If more than two sufficiently high quality applications are received, MissionFish may make further funds available to support them.

247 TopSeller, an eBay ecommerce solutions provider, have agreed to support the charitable grants with a year’s ecommerce consultancy and advice, and a high-quality design upgrade and accompanying hosting and support. 247 TopSeller will also offer to develop a Webstore, if required, at a highly subsidised cost.

Whilst £10,000 sounds like a lot of money to set up a new eBay online business if a charity needs to recruit new staff, set up storage or transport for collection of donated goods it will soon be swallowed up. It’s going to be interesting to see how the chosen charities make use of the funds and how the £10,000 assists them in increasing their online fundraising.

Charities interested in starting a new online fundraising venture have until the 31st July to submit their MissionFish Online Business Grant Application Form.

Article Source: TameBay.com

Entrepreneurial Budge..

2011-05-17T01:33:00.000-07:00

When most people take their first plunge into making money online, one of the initial pieces of advice they receive is to gauge their online competition before moving forward with a niche, to make sure it’s not too “competitive” or “saturated” for newcomers entering the market.

I say the more competition, the better. And here’s why…

A niche that has an overwhelming amount of competition tells you two things. First, that it MUST be profitable. Secondly, it means you have a whole slew of websites to potentially leverage off of in the future.It’s important to know that if you’re going to be “ignoring high competition” when choosing a niche, you have to make sure you’re doing at least one thing right. And that is…

Find the Competitions’ Strengths and Weaknesses

When you are researching the competition, don’t just look at their products and prices but look at their entire marketing campaign. For instance, what kind of customer service do they offer? What are their terms and conditions, privacy policy, and return policy? What do you offer in terms of customer satisfaction that they don’t? Look for what your competition is lacking that may give you an edge. For example, if they don’t accept credit cards and you do, you’ve found a way to boost your business’ image by advertising that you accept credit cards. While it may not be this easy to find a weakness within your competition, look for something that they don’t offer that you do offer or will soon offer.

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Online Retailing: "howz that"

2011-04-15T01:51:00.000-07:00

Mr.A : How important is search in driving customers to websites?
Mr B: A search strategy should be integral to a multi-channel approach and some of the big retailers are benefiting from creating a seamless experience between on and offline channels.
Previously, search was seen as a separate marketing tool. Now I think most retailers understand that it is one of many tools that a retailer has at their disposal. But, it should be integrated well to ensure maximum benefit. Competition in the search engines is soaring as retailers vie for the top spot.

Mr.A:   Do you think the large brand retailers face a bigger threat from smaller retailers who now have a platform to compete on?
Mr B:   Everyone now sees the online channel as a must. If they don't provide their customers with the choice they are looking for, their competitors are a click away. Simple as that. But there is still consumer unease around going online and trading with smaller, unknown retailers.
A search for mainstream products such as lawnmowers, pushchairs and high definition TVs is very telling. The big brands you would expect to appear for such products are still not appearing. Instead, online only brands are stealing the show. The high street retailers can rely on brand equity to a large extent, but need to realise this isn't enough by any means.

Mr.A: How well have UK retailers embraced online retail compared to other European markets?
Mr. B:   Serious ecommerce figures on what's happening across Europe are thin on the ground, but the UK definitely leads the way. Closest in terms of penetration is Germany where uptake is steady, but the lack of available payment methods is slowing progress. I think we'll see a wider acceptance of different payment technologies across Europe but until then, UK consumers remain the most savvy and confident of European online shoppers. A trend that retailers here continue to encourage..

Mr. A: Best and worst online buy?
Mr.B: Best buy has to be flowers for my wife (Interflora). Worst - not a single one (the secret is in the research).

Mr.A: A retailer that has taken the online world by storm?
Mr B: Amazon and Lastminute.com have a lot to answer for. They showed the world it could work. The likes of Argos and Comet, from a traditional background with lots brand equity, have really taken it to the masses.

Mr.A: What are the main challenges that online retailers face over the next year?
Mr.B:   Greater competition as more big brands come into the picture. Dixons has just announced their withdrawal from the high street to go online. I think this is more of a brand exercise, but it is another high street brand competing for customers online. This shift in focus will continue to polarise the online retail industry further. Increased competition among the bigger players creates an increased challenge for the mid size retailers. There are many factors that drive customers to a high street store or website, but ultimately they need to look after the customer once there. Customer service is in the spotlight.

The hype of social media

2011-03-25T04:14:00.000-07:00

Just recently one of my friend enlightened me on this social media hype. Truly speaking of, today we all are so addicted to "Google", Facebook, twitter and the list goes on.Every school goer knows it and every senior citizen practices it nonchalantly,not to mention ,my 5 year old nephew asked me if he could have some family photos to upload for his global friends.

Then it hit upon me why not promote a brand and sell things with the help of this social media networking, after all you'd get a global target audience, notwithstanding the geographical and cultural barriers, your product or even your service could reach out to more people .

Well distinctively though it would be more time consuming for services to get any direct sales from the social media unless you are already a known brand known for its deliverables, for product selling there is always a fairer chance of direct marketing from social networking.This is where e-commerce companies come into the picture as I understand from my own example, thought having a Facebook account does give you some followers online but to to actually promote your brand you need more technical tools, an appealing design page and other technical nitti gritties.

“To Sell or Not To Sell,” should not be the Dilemma for eBay Sellers

2011-02-17T06:39:00.000-08:00

I’m well aware of the fact that most of the readers of this article are either established eBay sellers or novices looking for useful tips to improve their sales on eBay. Let me make it clear from the beginning that your familiarity with eBay doesn’t approve that you have mastered the art of selling eBay. There is always more scope for learning and harnessing your selling skills on eBay, because World Wide Web facilitates evolution, continuously. Before discussing eBay selling skills, let’s revisit the recent status of eBay as a selling platform.

The New eBay vs. The Old eBay – a Major Transition

Just two years ago, CEO of eBay Inc. John Donahoe informed Wall Street analysts about massive changes to upgrade the eBay platform. Now the so-called New eBay has come out with loads of fundamental changes to improve both selling and buying experiences of users. Changes the New eBay offers as:

Changes that eBay Reflects:

More relevant search result per every product search
The website is much faster than ever before
New Design format for web stores
New Analytics Tool for Better Understanding of Traffic

Secured and Versatile PayPal

PayPal is getting into mobile and micropayments.

More Localised, More Portable and More Social

With growing numbers of mobile users and profiles on social community websites have offered new opportunities to expand business. eBay well understands this and aptly taken a step ahead to mark its presence. This has really made the New eBay more popular and more profit making platform for sellers. Sellers now can easily pursue their business on these platforms without much worrying about extra service cost or any extra investment in any third party solutions.

With this ever growing eBay as a selling platform, how well you prepared for facing all screamed and demanding buyers from all over the globe. Mind it; your complacency can make your valued investment into buying peanuts. Thus here I can argue that there is still time left to learn new tips and tricks on eBay selling. Here follows the list of some major tips that are considered as building blocks of successful eBay selling.

Managed Storage

Storage is one of the most critical aspects of eBay business. If you are left with complete mess in your storage department, then your business won’t be benefited much. Quick shipping should be followed by an order placement. A delay may earn you a negative feedback on eBay. Properly managed storage keeps your business smooth and helps you shipping items quickly. Thus you can establish a good customer care service and make your business more professional.

Research is Always Welcome

Research is an undeniable unavoidable part of online selling, especially on eBay. The more you research about which item sales more and which are not, who are you competitors and how their items are performing on search results; better will be your understanding the market status. Thus you can improve your inventory details to have leverage on customers against your competitors. Being a successful seller on eBay can be immensely rewarding, but requires lots of research.

An Image can worth 1000 Words

Buyers love to see items before they buy. One single and poorly shot photo on each of your items is not going to help you getting a shooting star beside the feedback numbers. Make sure, ever item you sell on eBay should have multiple professionally taken photographs. This improves buyers’ confidence in making a purchase from you.

Describe your Items

Buyers are pretty these days. A single complacency or negligence of yours can easily be identified and that may help them skipping your items without a second thought. Want to be skipped frequently by buyers on eBay just because you have no item to write decent description or just ignored it? I hope you do not subscribe this idea. Writing a decent description either invokes bidders to get into a bidding war, or lures to make an instant purchase using "Buy it Now" button. A descriptive, informative short description is essential to optimise your listing above your competitors.

Write to your Customers

Customers love to receive. A hearty thank for their purchase doesn’t cost you extra, but it earns you that tiny little trust from buyers. Always communicate with the customers regarding orders. Keep the informing about the status of their order regularly. That makes them feel that you care about them. This helps you getting positive feedbacks. If you do receive some negative feedbacks, remember that you will be judged by how you respond to these negative feedbacks. Some sellers have realised improvement in sales after they responded positively to the negative feedbacks.

If you are really interested to try your luck on eBay, you should follow a strategy. The strategy should be learnt and applied properly. A proper execution of your best strategies would certainly help you bring accolades and your business will surely flourish on eBay. Keep following 247 TopSeller blog for more such useful eBay selling tips and guides.

Till then Good Bye!

Improve your Excel Skills to Excel in SEO

2011-02-10T06:17:00.000-08:00

Having Knowledge and its Application in real life scenario, are two completely distinctive aspects of Professionalism. A skilled execution ensures better manifestation of knowledge. Similar theory applies to Online Marketing aka Search Engine Optimisation. Acquiring knowledge is as easy as it is difficult to implement without proper skill and expertise, which can be acquired by improving soft skills. Now you must be wondering, what kind of soft skills are required for SEO!

SEO is not all about submitting your website details to various web directories, writing creative articles/blogs and sharing on content portals, exchanging links in various possible ways. SEO in its true meaning is about developing a complete marketing strategy tailor-made for online users. Online users are entitled to their unique kind of behaviour. Proper assessment and understanding of this unique behaviour of online users is required to make online marketing strategies. So now you must be wondering how online marketing is more of a challenging task than simply doing some data entry type stuffs! Online marketing without proper understanding of customers’ behaviour online is pretty similar to those data entry type SEO stuffs (mentioned above). You can simply turn your regular data entry SEO type into more result-oriented marketing strategy by acquiring and mastering some soft skills. Soft skills required for SEO is nothing but learning the best reporting tool in the world: Microsoft Excel/Open Office Calc. Both Microsoft Excel and Open Office Calc are similar in look and function except certain typographical alternative that we may be consider later on this article to discuss.

Why Microsoft Excel/Open Office Calc?

Excel/Calc as a reporting tool is quite popular and no business report is complete without an Excel/Calc presentation. Its immense popularity as a reporting tool is because of its flexibility in analysing, processing and presenting data. Online marketing requires a lot of data to be analysed, processed and presented that a better marketing vision can be set in order to realise the optimisation strategies. Though it’s difficult to cover all aspects of SEO reporting through Excel/Calc broadly in this article, I’ll give it a try to discuss some more frequently used reporting techniques.

Excel/Calc Dashboard Reporting

Excel/Calc Dashboard Reporting can be used for a summary of your SEO activities (daily/weekly/monthly). Basically, a dashboard report is a way to visually present critical data in summary form so that you can make quick and effective decisions, in much the same way that a car dashboard works.

How is this Dashboard Made?

The chart showing Keyword Ranking with Improvements and Back Link Details, search engine index details and 2 different charts arranged side by side showing Traffic and Sales Patterns based on data analysed as Previous and Present.
The Keyword Ranking section is reflecting keywords’ ranking with their present and previous positions as well as respective improvements.
I have used Macro with Developer Tool, VLOOKUP formulas to process the data.

Spreadsheet Formula to Count Words in Cell

One of the basic differences between Microsoft Excel and the OpenOffice Calc is in the use of macros and formulas. While Calc is less compatible in the use of the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) language for macros, many problems can be solved by using formulas. On the other hand, Excel is the most efficient application in using both formulas and macros efficiently. You must be wondering, why I’ve chosen this formula for discussion. As an SEO export, you must have felt difficulty in selecting long tail keywords from a gross list of thousands of keywords. This formula ensures that you get the number of words in a list of key phrases in the adjacent cells.

Formula to Count Words in a Cell for Excel or Calc

With a few minor changes, the following will work equally well in either Excel or Calc spreadsheets. Select adjacent cell of a key phrases of which you want to count the words and write the formula defined below. Change the cell number accordingly.

For Microsoft Excel

=IF(LEN(TRIM(A2))=0,0,LEN(TRIM(A2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2," ",""))+1)

For OpenOffice Calc

=IF(LEN(TRIM(A2))=0;0;LEN(TRIM(A2))-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(A2;" ";""))+1)

Formula to Compile Local and Global Search Volume for Keywords

The VLOOKUP formula in MS Excel can be used to look up a table or array, and then return useful data. The function is easy to use, and needs only four items to be entered. The example used here gives a step-by-step explanation, as well as showing how to fix some of the problems often found with VLOOKUP.

Example:

Let’s take three excel files, such as:

Excel File #1 containing keywords list and their local search volumes.
Excel File #2 containing same keywords but arranged differently than Excel File #1 and their global volume.
Excel File #3 is the processed file where you can arrange the final list of keywords and both of their local and global search volumes are compiled.

Now write the following formula on next to the keywords list in the Excel File #3 as =VLOOKUP(A2,Excel File #1.xlsx!$A$2:$B$673,2,FALSE) ^{[for OpenOffice Calc: =VLOOKUP(A2;Excel File #1.xlsx!$A$2:$B$673;2;FALSE)]} to retrieve local search volumes.

Repeat the same formula on next to the local search volume list in the Excel File #3 to retrieve global search volume for the respective keywords from Excel File #2.
=VLOOKUP(A2,Excel File #2.xlsx!$A$2:$B$673,2,FALSE) ^{[for OpenOffice Calc: =VLOOKUP(A2;Excel File #2.xlsx!$A$2:$B$673;2;FALSE)]}

The file would look like this:

I would like to conclude this article with these three basic Excel skills. Hope you apply these excel techniques while preparing SEO reports for your clients or selecting prospective keywords for SEO. Visit 247 TopSeller blog or subscribe to blog feed for more such intuitive pragmatic articles in future.

A big, warm and cuddly thanks to you all for reading this article. Everyday your feedbacks and comments help us devising new tricks on online selling & make us better at what we do. We are sure you feel the same about others comments. Do you like the article? Do you find it insightful? What modifications you would have made to it? Go ahead and share your ideas and tips with us. Please leave a comment.

A Niche That Has Been Carved by Google!

2011-01-31T07:41:00.000-08:00

Business is a mutually inclusive affair and prospering together operational procedure that benefits both sides (i.e. businessman and customer). Google reflects the same idea when it shares “Google generates the majority of our revenue by offering advertisers measurable, cost-effective and highly relevant advertising. Our goal is for the ads you see on Google to be as useful to you as they are to the advertisers—so that they can be a valuable form of information in their own right.” Google has the fortune of owning world’s most advanced search technology and the popularity has earned them more than 70% share of the online search market. Though, other search engines like Bing and Baidu are gaining footholds in the market, yet they are not much of worry for Google right now. So what has exactly made Google so invincible in World Wide Web! It’s the policies, advanced user-friendly applications and profitable solutions for users have made Google, the “STRENGTH” online. Google has been a perfect platform for both businesses (i.e. small as well as large) and potential customers. As shopping has been a growing trend online in recent years, Google too has supported buyers in making right choices through its various search programmes and on the other hand sellers have taken the benefits of Google offered solutions like Google Adwords and Google Merchant Centre. Let’s find out what is new and what is to come for users from Google in near future.

As we have discussed above that Google generates majority of its revenue from its flagship solutions: Google Adwords. Google Adwords offers online advertising solutions to business holders on multiple platforms including search engine result pages as well as its third party partners. This advertising programme helps new businesses to drive search traffic directly from result pages without being ranking higher organically, which is relatively time consuming and hefty task to achieve amidst high millions of competitors online. Such traffic generated through Google’s advertising programmes is popularly known as “Paid Search Traffic”. Paid search is one of the largest traffic drivers to web stores when compared with other online selling channels such as marketplaces and comparison shopping engines. With more sellers accepting this trend and investing diverting more promotional budget into paid search, competition has really shown a sharp rise. Return on investment (ROI) is under pressure from higher cost-per-click (CPC) rates due to heavy competition. Despite such high competition, Google continues to be the dominant search engine with a dynamic e-commerce sector that creates huge opportunities for online sellers. Let’s analyse how Google has sustained and established its advertising solutions in a highly competitive environment so successfully.

New Tweaks in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)

o Site Links

Google Site Links are additional links that appears below top links of both Organic and paid search results. For paid search, the site links can be listed in the top advertiser’s ad under the paid section for a particular keyword, usually brand keywords and for organic results it’s chosen by Google Algorithms automatically. As we are talking about opportunities offered through Google paid search programme, these additional links allow sellers to drive traffic to specific areas of their website, resulting in a higher click-through and conversion rate out of the cost per click amount.

o Product Extensions

Google has always been innovative in presenting solutions to its users. Their applications have always been world class and what the best thing is that all relevant applications can be easily integrated so that users can get the best out of their use. Integration of Google Adwords and Google Merchant Centre is one such highly productive solution for online sellers who use its advertising programme to display ads on search pages. Product Extensions are the latest ad format to be released from beta to all sellers in the UK market. If a seller is sharing product feed on Google Merchant Centre, now (s)he can integrate both Google Adwords account and Google Merchant Centre so that products from Google Merchant Centre can be displayed along with ads on search result pages for relevant keywords. This would surely help improving click-through-rates and return on investment.

o Broad Match Modifier

As Google puts this Broad Match Modifier, “The broad match modifier is a new AdWords targeting feature that lets you create keywords which have greater reach than phrase match and more control than broad match. Adding modified broad match keywords to your campaign can help you get more clicks and conversions at an attractive ROI, especially if you mainly use exact and phrase match keywords today. To implement the modifier; just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word proceeded by a + has to appear in your potential customer's search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemming (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren't considered close variants.” (Courtesy: Google’s Inside Adwords)

o Seller Ratings

Google is currently experimenting with displaying seller ratings from Google Product Search in paid search ads as well as with organic results. Seller ratings are also compiled from multiple sources like comparison shopping engines such as Ciao or Kelkoo, Google Checkout, Bizrate.com, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, ResellerRating.com. Google has categorically mentioned on Inside Adwords blog, “If your online store is rated in Google Product Search, you have 4 or more stars, and you have at least 30 reviews, you’ll automatically get seller ratings with your ads. What’s more, you’ll only be charged if someone clicks on the headline of your ad - clicks on the review link are free. At this time, seller rating extensions will show to English-language users searching on Google.com.”

Benefits of using Google’s various solutions are immense and diverting funds to Google advertising is worthy enough. The reason is that most of the Google solutions are absolutely FREE in comparison to other similar companies that offer paid service. For online seller, it’s Google everywhere from selling to tracking to advertising to generating profit. Google has absolutely carved a niche where every seller (i.e. whether small, medium or large) are considered equal. It’s absolute democracy under Google where every seller and buyer enjoys equality.

Amazon EU Associates Central Notified Changes in Operating Agreement

2010-11-24T01:49:00.000-08:00

Amazon Associates has notified its users about its Operating Agreement as Amazon EU Associates Programme Operating Agreement. The modified operating agreement comes to effect from 1st December, 2010 (“Effective Date”). The operating agreement document can be accessed on Amazon.co.uk website

(https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/promo/novoperatingagreement). All Amazon EU Associates can access the outlined version of the operating agreement at https://affiliate-program.amazon.co.uk/gp/associates/promo/whatschangednov.

Amazon EU Associates can submit their grievances/objection as notice in reply within seven days of the issuance of this mail, but such notice enforces the termination of your participation in the Amazon EU Associates.

SEO is not a Wizard’s Act!

2010-02-22T01:19:00.000-08:00

“Our site is launched and now we will be millionaires!” I can’t remember the exact lines, but I’m sure that a reader had written something like this in response to an SEO article that I had read a month ago. This is what average webmasters think once their web sites go live. I doubt no shop owner anywhere in the world would expect to be successful overnight without promoting his/her business. And everybody knows, Marketing takes time even if you put the best effort behind. In this context I would like to add one more point that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) never target customers directly. SEO is a method of optimising a web page as per the search engine guidelines. Different search engines have varied algorithms which consider distinctive factors of a webpage to present searched results. From time to time, search engines do change their algorithms so that a webmaster/s won’t be able to exploit the technology. As an SEO expert, I would like to advise being unique and genuine is the most significant contribution you can make your website to get the benefits of search engine technology. Very few webmasters understand this fact and in most cases, webmasters do love live in fancy with their prejudiced concepts. The most disheartening fact is that they never give their business an opportunity to perform well on search engines which is absolutely free, instead they prefer to invest huge sum of money on advertising part. No problem with that even!

I won’t blame anybody, if I’m receiving negative replies to a well-written, precise and persuasive SEO proposal letter. Some even complain that I’m charging more for the SEO services which others offer. But in most cases, Price is not an influencing factor. I would it say it is the lack of dedication and adaptation to a change that is brought to you by SEO efforts.

It’s really difficult to find out what exactly the reason behind such failures. May be people have no time to give a thought to SEO of their website during this recession. Whereas, they prefer to ask their existing employees work harder on these issues. Outsourcing SEO is not a bad option either, if it is planned, well-negotiated and properly implemented. Planned, well negotiated and properly implemented SEO means bringing all of our assets together and working towards a common cause. In a simple term, we can say that all SEO strategies: Webpage Copy writing, PR writing, Blogging, Article distribution, eHows, social media optimisation, web design, development and so on should satisfy the common cause, i.e. Better Search Engine Ranking.

Competition and Popularity are two external factors that influence the overall result of your SEO campaign. You can get various combinations of both the above two factors to determine where your business stands. The combination would be like such:

• High Competition and Low Popularity
• Low Competition and High Popularity
• High Competition and High Popularity
• Low Competition and Low Popularity

You can easily recognise in which combination your business falls. Once this is determined, formation, implementation of SEO strategies and getting visible results within stipulated period will be a problem neither for webmaster nor the outsourced SEO Company. Any confusion, argument won’t benefit either business owner or SEO Company. Here an SEO company expects one client to be more co-operative so that deal can be properly made and both can work out all the SEO strategies without any further hassle without any more turbulence.

Third Party Twitter Tools - Make the Best Use of Twitter!

2009-07-14T05:09:00.000-07:00

What Twitter has achieved as a popular blogging platform, no other blogging application can achieve that. Though there is a major shift in the blogging trends after introduction of Twitter like blogging tools, yet the basic remains same as it was previously. The only difference we can find in blogging is Micro Posting and Colloquial Text. Blogging applications like Blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal are still popular among serious bloggers, who prefer writing more elaborately on various topics. Micro Blogging applications like Twitter are for young mass which facilitates short, crispy and informative personalised online briefings. The best aspect micro blogs like Twitter are their Marketing Aspects. It suits the online marketing scenario, where everyone is in hurry. Micro blogging services like Twitter can help your business not only reaching out potential customers, but also help your campaigns more organised and traceable. I’ve personally used, analysed and rated some of the popular Third Party Twitter Applications and here follows the top 5 chronologically:

Twitpic - Twitpic is a Twitter tool that lets twitters sharing pictures on Twitter. Just login to Twitpic with your existing Twitter User ID and password and now you are all set to twit your favourite pictures.

TweetDeck - TweetDeck is your personal browser for staying in touch with what’s happening now, connecting you with your contacts across Twitter, Facebook and more. TweetDeck is a simple and fast way to use Twitter on your desktop. TweetDeck allows users to customise Twitter experience with columns, groups, saved searches and sharing your tweets on Facebook instantly.

Digsby - Digsby is an application that centralizes e-mail, IM and social networking accounts into one desktop program. Digsby is an IM type application where users can maintain one combined buddy list for all your AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts. Users can manage email accounts like Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL/AIM Mail, IMAP, and POP accounts right from Digsby. Users too can get real time updates from Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn like social networking site. What more you can expect from such an application, if you are a social networking buff!

Tweetburner - Twitter just offers 140 characters to tweet. So it’s not possible for its users to give every detail in a single tweet. That’s why, very often Twitters write a brief with a reference link to it. Tweetburner is an online tool that helps you tracking the reference links you tweet.

GroupTweet – If you maintain groups on Twitter and want certain messages to send to a specific group of followers, the GroupTweet is the right tool for you. Register on GroupTweet with a newly created Twitter account for your group. You need to change your Twitter settings in order to make your group a private one. Now you can easily broadcast messages among the members of that group using GroupTweet tool.

Give these Twitter applications (developed by third-parties) a try to help simplify your social networking campaign. These tools certainly help your campaign an easier and traceable one. Reach more people, and stay organized just for free or a marginal payment. In the subsequent posts we will be including more useful Twitter tools to the existing list. Check the post regularly!

Micro Blogging is all about Individuals, Involvements, and Influences!

2009-07-14T03:45:00.000-07:00

Just years back, the concept of Micro Blogging was nowhere in the internet. Now Twitting might have made itself a legitimate lexeme in several mainstream dictionaries. So the fact is what compels Twitter a real hit among online folk! I tried to have a small research on the various aspects of micro blogging and soon got some interesting opinions and facts on micro blogging.

John (requested to be mentioned anonymously) is an active member of aerospace engineering research team at the University of Manchester since 2005. Last summer, I had the opportunity to speak to him while I was on a business tour to Manchester. During this brief conversation, John mentioned that he and his team were using twitter to share their daily research briefs on Twitter. Twitter! Really, I need to have a look at it at least to what it is all about. Since then I’m an ardent fan of Twitter. Since then Twitter, a micro blogging application has achieved a lot and successfully established itself in the mainstream blogging community. The best example would be Barak Osama’s Election Campaign as Obama micro-blogged from his campaign trail using Twitter. This has successfully followed by media giants like The New York Times and BBC to publish headlines and links in micro blog posts.

The initial concept behind Twitter is to promote mobile blogging, especially through SMS. Here we can assume that Mobile Blogging is the base concept from which Micro Blogging has evolved out. In simple words we can sum up Twitter is a micro-blogging application that facilitates its users to connect with people directly on their cell phones or computers in a non-obtrusive way. Twitter is all about speed and participating in the discussion. This concept is so important to your success in Twitter that it bears repeating. Twitter is about individuals, involvements, and influences. Twitter like micro blogging application has really revolutionised the way people share their thoughts, discoveries, questions and happenings. The impact of micro blogging throughout internet is so immense that Twitter like, micro blogging applications have qualified to the discussion as significant as about global recession. A close look all major news headlines would confirm the popularity of Twitter across the globe.

Along with Twitter, there are other big players too that have substantial shares in the micro blogging industry. Here follows some of them: Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku, MySay, Hictu, Moodmill, Frazr and Emotionr.

In the end, we can conclude as Micro Blogging isn't not her online for a day or two - it is here to stay and stay alive forever. The evolution of blogging to micro blogging has spawned this new tiny version of blogging and many sectors like mobile technology, media and other similar sectors are eyeing on its growth minutely. The simplicity and ability to post frequently are basic facets that attract micro blogging the most. I expect a much faster adoption of micro blogging and mainstream penetration than blogging in general is evident in near future.

Best Search Engine Optimisation Tips for E-Commerce Web Shop Owners

2009-04-22T05:17:00.000-07:00

SEO has been a buzzword among online shop owners. The reason behind such hullaballoo is the challenges erupted out of complexities of all existing E-Commerce Applications. It would take hours to place all these complexities in our discussions, so we would limit the discussion to certain points related to SEO. It takes a substantial period of time (even years of R&D) to develop a user-friendly application. During this course of time, it is obvious to expect various complexities creeping into the application. This is one of the established procedures of developing an application. Features those make an application a successful are flexibility, expansibility and usability. There must be scope for up-gradation of an application as it is expected to improve the performance level to deal with the ever changing technological scenario. Let’s find out what are basic complexities of E-Commerce Applications in recent times:

Technical complexities

In comparison to static websites (i.e. .html websites), dynamic websites powered by E-Commerce Applications are large sites and have the capacity to generate up to tens of thousands of web pages. So it is really a tough most task for a single person to understand, implement and manage an e-commerce website. On the other hand, a poor understanding of such an application yields bad ever worse results for both e-commerce store owners as well as store users.

Business Complexities

Lack of technical understanding of an e-commerce application affects the website’s profitability. Person or team that manages the e-commerce website faces really gruesome tasks ahead to meet the business objectives. As we consider communication and sales as two basic strengths of a business are hampered severely.

An e-commerce website should satisfy the above two complexities in order establish itself as a user-friendly one. So far we have discussed the general complexities of an e-commerce application. But Web has its own complications and has been doubled by the growing popularity of search engines. It does not make any sense, whether you have a great looking e-commerce site with thousands of popular products in your inventory. The matter is buyers must find you online easily. So, do potential buyers find your web store easily online? If your reply is affirmative then your business gets a huge boost. But a negative reply can be devastating for your business. Search engines have their own web page standards and strictly follow them. Here follows the Quality Guidelines from Google:

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
Don't send automated queries to Google.
Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.
Don't create multiple pages, subdomains or domains with substantially duplicate content.
Don't create pages with malicious behaviour, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans or other badware.
Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programmes with little or no original content.
If your site participates in an affiliate programme, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

(Courtesy: Google.com)

So far as E-Commerce website is concerned, a lot of things one web store owner can take care of for search engine ranking improvement. Search Engine Ranking (acronym is SER) is very important for those who operate online business through web stores, because more than half of the internet users use search engines for finding information. If your web shop is not available in search engine result pages, then you lose the chunk of traffic from search engines. There are around 101 points can be implemented to make an e-commerce website search engine friendly. Here go some of the most significant points that you must prioritise. I’ve distributed all the points under three broad categories that will give you a better understanding of SEO points: On-Page Optimisation, Site-Wide Optimisation and Off-Site Optimisation.

What you think about your business may not be similar to the users’ views. So consider terminologies that your web store users would type in the search boxes to find web pages similar to your website. Always ensure that your website really consists of those terms within it. So the bottom-line is a good Keyword Analysis required to find out some relevant key phrases to target for the site.

Distinguish between "user end" and "admin end" web pages.
Target one unique key phrase per web page.
You can use the key phrase in your web page's file name, meta-elements (i.e. Meta Title, Meta Description, Headers)
Substitute dashes (-) with underscores (_). You can rewrite the URL Structure Rules in the available .htaccess file in your website root folder.
Try to use the targeted key phrase number of times in the content, reasonably.
Make sure your content is for users, not for search engines.
Key phrase stuffing is a sin in the process of search engine optimisation. Don't stuff the key phrases everywhere on a web page.
The major problem of an E-Commerce web store is that it generates number of duplicate pages with exact content. You can do this away with Canonicalization.
Do not hyperlink action words like Click Here, Enter and so on as these hyperlinks may confuse search engines.
Add a blog tool to your website and regularly update with useful articles, product reviews and HowTos. Some of the popular blogging applications are Wordpress, LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger and so on. Wordpress is a great blogging tool which can be hosted independently.

Follow the above SEO points for your E-Commerce Web Store and adopt best industry SEO practices for quick search engine ranking improvement and targeted traffic with better ROI.

Canonicalization – Make your site more Google friendly

2009-04-05T03:28:00.000-07:00

World Wide Web maintains a standardised web document format to make the most out of this virtual world. There are several technologies also contribute to this Web Standardisation Process. Some of these influential technologies are Browsers, Internet Connectivity and Search Engines. Now-a-days, all available browsers are supporting most of the web document formats. Internet connectivity quality has been substantially improved with the introduction of broadband technology. In comparison to previous two, search engines are a bit slow upgrading their technology. Search engine industry leaders like Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask are investing to cover as much web document formats as they can. This process is an ongoing one and this suits the best to the ever changing web technology sector. One of such recent recommendations has come from Google – Specify your canonical. Let’s learn what a Canonical URL is all about!

Though some months back the concept of “Canonical URL” was no where around WWW. But this has really been a great problem for those who largely depend on the search engines to make business. Search engine is all about a tool that provides relevant web documents when a search is made. Everyday millions of web documents on various niches are generated and search engines too regularly indexes them. But things become worst when a web server provides different version of URLs for a single web document. This results into indexing duplicate copies of single information. To avoid such technical shortcoming, Google introduces Canonical Tag. Google spokesman Matt Cutts informs “Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages.” Here goes the Google defined tag:

So there is a question that how somebody ensures that Google indexes the URL you prefer? First ensure which URL (i.e. http://yourdomain.com/ or http://www.yourdomain.com/) you want to use widely and consistently throughout your website. Once that has been fixed, use that particular URL in Canonical Tag consistently. Don’t make your half of the site URLs without www and half of the URLs with www.
Matt Cutts too suggests some other solutions in his famous article on Canonicalization. Checkout more information on Canonicalization in SEO advice: url canonicalization.

DMOZ – The Open Directory Project Reviewed

2009-04-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

Web Directory is a common term for SEO professionals, webmasters and online advertising experts. A Web Directory is a type of website allows users to browse through links based on relevant categories as well as users can submit links to the relevant categories through a web form or email. The fundamental logic behind web directory development is publishing website links and short descriptions taxonomically. The term Browsing is chiefly associated Web Directories and Searching is associated with Search Engines so far as World Wide Web is concerned. There hundreds of thousand web directories active on internet. DMOZ, Yahoo Web Directory and BUBL are some of the popular web directories.

DMOZ, also otherwise known as The Open Directory Project (ODP), is one of the largest categorized directories of websites and pages, which is maintained by volunteers. Every website and page that is added to the directory is manually reviewed before it is included to the directory. The listing of a website in DMOZ is absolutely FREE. Let’s learn some of the interesting facts about DMOZ.

The ODP (Open Directory Project) is the largest human-edited web directory on internet. Some of the popular web portals and search engines like AOL Search, Netscape Search, Google, Lycos, Alexa and HotBot use DMOZ’s data.

People behind DMOZ

The Open Directory Project is hosted and administered by Netscape Communication Corporation. ODP is primarily a self-governing community of netizens. “Through a system of self-governance, the ODP volunteer editors manage the directory's growth and development, and through a system of checks-and-balances, ensure the directory is of superior quality.” (Courtesy: DMOZ.org)

DMOZ is an acronym for Directory Mozilla. The association of the term “Mozilla” with Directory is a clear indication of its Open Source aspect like the Open Source browser attempt as Mozilla Firefox. The term Mozilla represents the popularity and growth of Open Source projects.

Yahoo Vs DMOZ

Yahoo! Web Directory is developed and managed by small group of paid professionals. But DMOZ exceptionally does well with small staffs and still manages to retain its quality as well as its huge database.

DMOZ is developed and maintained by a continuously growing community of netizens who are highly skilled and well exposed in their respective fields of interest. Such a vast community of volunteers and the global scope of the Directory has been the success secret behind maintaining quality of the directory. “Given this vast community of subject expertise and the global nature of the directory, there is always someone working on the directory: processing submissions, resolving dead links, culling out the bad and keeping only quality information, and discovering new topics to add.” (Courtesy: DMOZ.org)

Unlike Yahoo!, DMOZ editors are core web surfers helping to create a web directory for other Web surfers. Getting your site listed in DMOZ is very difficult and frustrating, too. Everybody (who is more or less associated with SEO/SEM) knows that being listed will probably help website’s Google ranking, but getting listed can take a very long time. But one should not lose faith and keep trying to submit the original website details in reasonably regular intervals to ensure that your site is not out of the queue.

Security and E-Commerce Transactions

2009-04-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

Transaction Security has been a matter of concern while you make purchases Online either for your business or your household. Small-Scale Sellers those heavily depend on internet to operate their business, always neglect security issues. Although, they seem to be ignorant of the fact that this Negligence may cost them dearer in a long run as such security issues lessens the Customer Loyalty. The most significant aspect of operating business online is one does business with strangers. Very often customers have to complete transaction without exchange a single word with the seller before making purchases. So here things can be concluded as “First Impression Lasts Long”. As a seller you must not assume that all your visitors are as loyal as you. Your lapse in security issues may have a devastating impact on your business. So let’s learn some facts related to Online Security in association with E-Commerce Transactions.

People use credit cards or debit cards for purchases in an online store. While making such online transactions, your account information is transferred for transactional approval online. In a usual environment, access to such information is/should be limited to individuals and businesses directly involved. So the involved persons and organizations must ensure the security of such private information. Those who still presume that going offline, is possible alternative to such information theft; later or sooner they have to use internet for such information sharing. This compulsion is inevitable as there is substantial upsurge in use of Internet as a Digital Information Sharing Tool.

Online Payment Transactions can be thoroughly monitored, recorded, and key logged by different hackers and third parties without your knowledge or prior consent. Immediately such private information can be available for other hackers and this would certainly put your business and company reputation in trouble. This information is transmitted across hackers’ networks and opens up the gateway to several types of risks that can be fall into the wrong hands. If you store your user ids and passwords on your computer, they are especially vulnerable to security breaches and easy to steal. A meager computer security loophole can open up the entrance to the password files, and hackers can extract and copy this information without your knowledge.

While dealing with online sellers, the best security option is your common sense. Anyone can launch a professional looking e-commerce website, as it costs some hundred pounds and there are millions of e-commerce solution providers operating online. So make it sure that whenever you are dealing with any online seller, the company must be a reputed one. Here follows some of the fundamental questions, the answers to which can solve your problem:

Is this the e-commerce website of an established retailer?

Does the website have an exact street address, not just a post box number?

Is there any facility to call customer service?

Is a return and refund policy published on the website?

If you’ve got the positive replies to above questions, they I assure you that your transaction would be safe. Now-a-days, most of the online sellers do offer Secured Check Out page. These check-out pages are secured by SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). SSL is a protocol (developed by Netscape) for transmitting private documents and information through the Internet. SSL uses a cryptographic system that uses two types of keys for data encryption − a Public Key known to everyone and a Private or Secret Key known only to the recipient. So before making any such financial transaction over internet with any e-commerce website, make it sure that its check out pages must use SSL or any such similar data encryption software.

E-Commerce – History, Fundamentals and Trends Simplified!

2009-04-02T10:15:00.000-07:00

E-Commerce is the acronym that stands for Electronic Commerce in general. E-Commerce is chiefly facilitated by technologies like; Electronic Data Interchange and Electronic Fund Transfer. Both these two technologies were introduced way back in the late 1970s and a lot has been changed during these four decades. In 1980s, the growing popularity of credit card, automated teller machines and telephonic banking had added one more success-story to the E-Commerce. The concept of online shopping was first invented and introduced in 1979 by UK based Michael Aldrich. Although the early developments in E-Commerce Technology appears to be a fairytale like, yet a lot of research, manpower, experiment have been put into bring the best possible E-Commerce Solutions out. With growing number of hacking attempts, Secure E-Commerce Solution has been an expensive business, yet in comparison to physical business module, E-Commerce is pretty cheaper and secured. E-commerce is simply a virtual version of commerce that operates on the World Wide Web. Some of the best possible examples would be to have a look at online book retailers (Amazon.com), computer retailers (HP), and so on. All of these online sellers own very large e-commerce store fronts. E-commerce is made up of the same factions and components that make up commerce fundamentals; i.e. buyers, sellers, and producers. E-commerce involves all the similar aspects of regular commerce, but the only distinction can be made that it takes place on the Internet. Let’s explore some of the major features of E-Commerce imparted in recent times.

During these days, most of the online sellers prefer to manage their business through various other channels including their own web store. Online market places like eBay, Amazon and Kelkoo; Shopping Search Engines like Google Base, eDirectory, Shop.com; and Comparison Shopping sites like Shopzilla.com and Google Products are some of the most preferred destinations for shoppers to shop at. That’s why online sellers prefer to make their presence felt at these channels as well as their own web stores. This is one of the reasons that has made E-Commerce applications with multi channel selling features are high in demand. There are numerous e-commerce solution providers available online; you can choose any of them as per requirements.

Though it appears pretty easy from customer point of view, yet E-Commerce can be truly a complex technology to develop. To offer a world class customer experience, sellers must incorporate and integrate technologies and functionality that exceeds growing customer expectations.

Your complacency may cost dearer if your website does not meet customer expectations as well as search engine guidelines. If your web store satisfies both the requirements, the conversion average of your website traffic will go up. Here follows some of the insights:

Think Fast

Broadband has made data transfer a quicker business, but quite a number of potential customers still use dial-up connection. So while developing a web store for your business, ensure that page loading time should be within 9 seconds. Your failure may be an advantage for your competitors. Recommended page size should be within 60kb to 70kb. Try to avoid flash. Images are very important and mostly neglected by seller. Product images should be of high resolution and larger with multiple size variants.

Shopping in general is a part of entertainment activity and online shopping carries the similar taste and trend. A customer should not be forced to make transaction as this may affect your business. Your web store should have multiple order facility like; Order through Phone and Checkout as Guest or Registered User.

Blog – New Face of the Changing Web!

2009-04-02T09:44:00.000-07:00

A Weblog can simply be understood as a Digital Diary. A blog is updated on daily basis. But there some bloggers who blog new posts several times a day. Blogs can be found of different types and such types are defined not only in the type of content, but also in the way those contents are written. It is really a very lofty task to put all or most of the blogs in different types, but I’ve still tried to type down some of the popular types of blogs: Personal Blogs, Corporate Blogs, Question Blogs, Media Type Blogs, Device Type Blogs, Genre Type Blogs and so on.

Personal type of blogs is one of the most common blogging forms and the number of personal blogs is pretty healthier than any other form of blogs. Such types of blogs are traditional, maintained on daily basis as a digital diary. Growing popularity of blogs as a medium of communication has opened several other options. Such an example is Corporate Blogs. Corporate blogs are either used internally to improve Communication and Culture within a corporate or externally used to create Brand Awareness and Promotion.

Blogging is one of the popular cultures of growing Social Networking. The collective community of all similar blogs is known as the blogosphere. Such networking has been possible among bloggers through blogrolls, comments, linkbacks and backlinks. Whether it is 9/11 or 26/11, bloggers and blogs are always ahead to share information, ideas, feelings and condolences with each other. Blogs are the forbearers of Personalised Web World. Blogging applications are offered by quite a number of websites; some of them are absolutely free, free with further upgrades and paid. Some of the free hosted blog sites are blogger.com (from Google), WordPress.com (from WordPress.org), LiveJournal.com, Xanga.com and so on.
The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives. Most such writers called themselves diarists, journalists, or journalers. Justin Hall, who began personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College, is generally recognized as one of the earliest bloggers, as is Jerry Pournelle. Dave Winer's Scripting News is also credited with being one of the oldest and longest running weblogs. Another early blog was Wearable Wireless Webcam, an online shared diary of a person's personal life combining text, video, and pictures transmitted live from a wearable computer and EyeTap device to a web site in 1994. This practice of semi-automated blogging with live video together with text was referred to as sousveillance, and such journals were also used as evidence in legal matters. (Courtesy: Wikipedia.org)

Despite a shaky start, blogs finally gained popularity 1999 and there onwards it has further popularized with various first hosted free blogging tools. Blogger.com belongs to such an era. Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan (Pyra Labs) launched blogger.com in August 1999 and it was acquired by Google in February 2003. Blogger.com is one among some popular blogging tool. Blogger is further supported and strengthened by Google Blog Search, FeedBurner.com (Google venture) and some other popular applications. Bloggers do honoured with various blog awards like any other form of art. Among the major blog awards are The Weblog Award, the Bloggies, and the BOBs (Best of Blogs).

Web Design Tactics Explored!

2009-04-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

A Well-Designed Website cannot be possible without correct conceptualization, proper planning and meticulous modelling and execution of all three previous processes. If we closely observe the complete web design process, a Two-Part Process can easily be carved out. Let’s find out how this Two-Part Process works. The first of this process is to analyse the requirements and objectives with the help of your development guys so that a Well Thought-out Plan can be established. The second process is to prepare a Project Specification Document that must define what you plan to do and why, and what external support you may need, how long the process may take, what resources may be spent, and how the efforts can be assessed.

Web design is not as easy as most people assume. Several groups of people meet together, zoom in to the requirements and deliver a well-designed and user-friendly website. But it has been found that very often the web developers approach and accomplish web design project from a technological point of view and web designers are nothing but mere. This never justifies a web design project. One should consider some other groups of people to consult with. You may need the following groups while planning a web design project:

Content Experts,
Writers,
Information Architects, and
Graphic Designers.

All web design projects have a single bottom-line, “have to be genuinely useful to your target audience, meeting their requirements and expectations without being too hard to use.” Here we can infer some of the basic objectives of web design and that are:

A website should be designed and developed for its users.
A website should be user-friendly.

Most of the users of your website are not expected to be technologically savvy. The users always follow the directions that you have shown to them in your website. If your website navigation structure does not provide easy drive experience for the users, then it is obvious for users to hit back button more often. Your website should provide a pleasant experience to each and every visitor it receives. Here follows some guidelines for developers and designers while developing a website:
Online visitors are very volatile, but in general they show a similar pattern in tendencies which govern their behaviour while surfing online. First, most of your website users are expected to scan your web pages in top-to-bottom and left-to-right pattern (this assumption is based on English speaking readers and specific to English websites). Put your navigation menu at the top or on the left of the web page. Users have come to expect this anyway as this pattern is one of the Web Conventional Page Structure.

The navigation menu should explain what the destination page would be and its relationship with the source page. The users should be aware of the outcomes of each and every click on web page. If you are not following this content display policy, then it is nothing rather your design stupidity.

Text Underlining is one of the neglected parts of a website. Underlined text within content very often assumed as hyperlinks. So unnecessary underlying of non-hyperlinked texts for the sake of highlighting texts is not a good idea. You can bold or italicize texts in order to highlight texts.

Creating Mouseovers and Alt-Titles on your graphic links is a very good aspect of a user-friendly website. This makes it pretty easy for a visitor to recognize that the link exists, what it does and where the link is heading.

Mobile Web – Innovative Design and Advanced Development!

2009-04-02T09:34:00.000-07:00

The number of mobile users is growing substantially in comparison to PC users. This growth has led various companies to explore another level of business development. Everyday new technologies are introduced to make Mobile a possible alternative to Personal Computer. Being a leader in Digital Communication industry, mobile phones have opened a new set of standards for digital content providers. Apart from calling, features like SMS, MMS, Email, Mobile Shopping and Money Transfer have made mobile an indispensable gadget of 21st century. With the emergence of high speed wireless network technologies and the growing market penetration of cell phones the global advertising industry’s interest in using this communication platform as a medium of marketing and advertisement is in rise. Though mobile technology has been quite advanced, yet the Web Experience for mobile users is still a matter of concern. The problem is with the new set of web standards for mobile, which are completely different from web experience through PCs and Laptops. You would surprise to know how addictive the world has become from the following statistics:

1996 - GSM phones in 103 countries
2000 - 10 million i-mode users (Japan)
2002 - 1 billion mobile phone users worldwide
2009 - 3 billion mobile phone users worldwide

Another surprising fact is that in the UK, there are more mobile phones than users. As the Mobile Internet continues to grow there is a growing need to provide users with effective Web Browsing Facility. Further we will explore that the standard Web Browsing Trends, Digital Content Standards and the Interface Limitations of mobile devices.

Presently, the most serious problem for mobile web designers is with design and standards issues. This might be the reason behind the delaying adaptation of Mobile as successor to PCs and Laptops. Further, mobile search engines are themselves very new and a lot of technological efforts still need to be put into. But the thing is, developing a great web experience for mobile users is much easier. Here follows seven simple tactics that will help you avoid the early drawbacks that have caused many other mobile sites to fail:

Don't Mix Up Your Markup

Earlier users used to browse only WAP sites. Most of the WAP sites use Wireless Markup Language (WML) as its markup language. WML is an XML markup language. XHTML can too have a very good alternative to XML. Most built-in phone browsers these days can handle XHTML just fine. A mobile phone recognizes two flavors of HTML:

XHTML -- the same, basic XHTML rendered by desktop web browsers
XHTML-MP -- the MP here stands for Mobile Profile

Screen Size and Resolution Issues

A mobile web designer should deal with different screen sizes and resolutions, but also different shapes of mobiles. After closely examining several mobile phones, we have found four basic screen sizes:

128 x 160 pixels
176 x 220 pixels
240 x 320 pixels
320 x 480 pixels

Knowing these screen dimensions helps you optimize some of your web content, however it's advisable to keep the size and style of your site as minimal and linear as you can.

Validate Your Markup

A mobile browser generally won't have the luxury of a 2 GHz processor and 100MB of disk space. So a minor HTML error can make browsing difficult for users. For that reason, you must check, validate, and recheck your markup, time and time again to ensure that your mobile web pages are 100% perfect.

Web 2.0 – What Why and How Explained!

2009-04-02T09:25:00.000-07:00

Web 2.0 is a technological realization of World Wide Web. It describes the evolving trends in the adaptation of World Wide Web Technology (including web development, web design and information management). Some of the best outcomes of Web 2.0 are Social-Networking Sites, Video Sharing Sites, Wikis, Blogs, and Folksonomies. It would be misleading to comprehend Web 2.0 as a Specific Technological Update; but rather a Revolutionary and Evolutionary change in the way we Use and Utilize the Web. Tim O’Reilly defines the Web 2.0 as, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

Let’s make a One-to-One Markup between Web 1.0 (dot-Com) and Web 2.0 through some concrete examples:

Web 1.0 --> Web 2.0: DoubleClick --> Google AdSense; Ofoto --> Flickr; Akamai --> BitTorrent; mp3.com --> Napster; Britannica Online --> Wikipedia; personal websites --> blogging; evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB; domain name speculation --> search engine optimization; page views --> cost per click; screen scraping --> web services; publishing --> participation; content management systems --> wikis; directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy"); and stickiness --> syndication. This list can further be expanded and one can easily draw a comparison between these previous web application combinations. Despite such a wide level of Web 2.0 adaptation, most have missed out the opportunity to understand and implement the Web 2.0 standard. Let’s chalk out the base principles behind Web 2.0:

Strategic Positioning:

The WEB as Platform

User Positioning:

You Control Your Own Data

Core Competencies:

Services, Not Packaged Software;

Architecture of Participation;

Cost-Effective Scalability;

Remixable Data Source and Data Transformations;

Software Above the Level of a Single Device; and

Harnessing Collective Intelligence.

Web 2.0 appears to be Imperative, but how does imperative buy Fortune for you? Let’s precisely make out what's basic distinction about Web 2.0 and how these distinctions can harness your organization’s bottom line. Web 2.0 is an APPROACH that attempts to improve how businesses, customers, and partners interaction runs. it opens up a variety of new business models. Web 2.0 is a kind of business revolution in the IT industry caused by the move to the World Wide Web as a basic platform, and an attempt to comprehend the rules for success on that newly created platform. Significant among those rules is this: Develop applications that strengthen network effects to get better the more users use them. Here follows some basic principles that may help you remodeling and developing your existing business model to Web 2.0 standard:

Don’t consider software as an object, but as a process of engaging users. This can be termed as The Perpetual Beta.

Your data and services should have re-usability. This principle can be defined as Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

Don’t think of applications that reside on either client or server, but build applications that reside in the space between devices.

Remember that in a network environment, open APIs and standard protocols win, but this doesn’t mean that the idea of competitive advantage goes away.

Chief among the future sources of lock in and competitive advantage will be data, whether through increasing returns from user-generated data.

(Courtesy: EDU.ru)

Twitter and Its Marketing Aspect – An Overlook!

2009-04-02T05:00:00.000-07:00

Technology has greatly influenced the overall marketing fundamentals. Every time a new technology has been introduced, marketing gurus start exploiting the technology to reach out customers. Here comes the urgency of ORM (Online Reputation Management). Every individual business must maintain its online reputation. There is greater chance that a potential customer with whom you are about to make a business has surely googled your name or your business name on the Internet. Owning a space in a popular shopping mall gives you good business, but the online reputation of your business can give you better business. Modern day customers are not leaving a single chance to inquiry about your business before making a purchase. With growing popularity of internet, managing your business’s online reputation is must.

There are several ORM tools available to make a foothold in your niche business. One of such recent ORM tools is Twitter.com. From a technical point of view twitter can be defined as a micro-blogging application. In recent times Twitter is emerging as one of the efficient and effective marketing tools. I would like to add some more lines to the efficiency and effectiveness of Twitter. 188 years old The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) has made an announcement on 1st April, 2009 that it will cease its print publication and go Twitter only. This confirms that now people around the world can follow The Guardian reports within 140 characters. The Guardian’s celebrated editor, CP Scott has warmly acclaimed this news reporting medium, “Comment is free but facts are sacred.” The success stories of Twitter are growing everyday and as a serious online business holder you should join the hoard. Let’s discuss how Twitter can help your business grow.

Most of the web stores offer email based subscription service to their customers. Twitter can be a better alternative to your email subscription module. The only difference is that the latter is a third party application and shares your information to a larger audience than your limited email subscribers. In a recent report by TechCrunch, Twitter has almost one million users and three million messages are posted on daily basis. So, don’t you think you, your company and your brand should make a buzz around Twitter? Let’s explore some of the marketing possibilities of Twitter.

Twitter can be a great option to share any updates about your company or new products. But one must not be too promotional while sharing information on Twitter. Twitter is more of a casual conversation and breaking news platform. You should give your messages a personal tone. You can use Twitter as a customer interaction platform, but this needs a lot of customer dealing skills. If you think you are not that competitive, then you should not entertain this aspect of Twitter. It would be a better option to use Twitter for making friends, replying every information scrap that you consider worthy for your business.

Recession – A Double Edged Sword for Online Sellers!

2009-03-26T05:55:00.000-07:00

Recession has hit the World Economy severely. Corporate biggies are crumbling down like a card house; employees are pink slipped; bail outs are declared and every day SENSEX is deepening down by some numbers. Reuters has reported that in “the U.S. recession will probably be the longest since World War Two and could worsen without heavy government spending, according to a closely-watched survey of economists…” Amidst such gloomy global economic scenario, there is still a light of hope is lit up for online sellers. Let’s discover some of such facts that have really inspired more people to join the online selling sector. Before this, a small explanation of Recession would be more helpful for readers in realising SUCCESSES as an online seller.

Wikipedia defines Recession as “In economics, a recession is a general slowdown in economic activity in a country over a sustained period of time, or a business cycle contraction. During recessions, many macroeconomic indicators vary in a similar way. Production as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), employment, investment spending, capacity utilization, household incomes and business profits all fall during recessions. Governments usually respond to recessions by adopting expansionary macroeconomic policies, such as increasing money supply, increasing government spending and decreasing taxation.”

It is obvious that during recession both the Production and Consumption of Products (i.e. including Goods and Services) goes down substantially. So as a seller, it is really hard to push products through possible buyers. That’s why companies and business organisations start giving discounts coupons, free trials, extended warranties to motivate buyers. Here online sellers can see their opportunities to make a good business despite recession. Another source of opportunity is electronic and digital sector, where buyers always look for second had, refurbished and ex demo products. So Product Promotion is one of the major challenges during recession. Just handing over discount coupons won’t help your business glitter; you need a constant effort to take more cost-cutting measures and at the same time make your buyers feel that it is worthy enough to make purchases with you. Here follows some valuable tips that may help your business make the best out of recession:

Give your business a hi-tech shape and invest in skilled people. Technology may be expensive, but it helps you saving more in the long run which would have paid in salary to unskilled employees. A technological alternative of your business is surely a cost-cutting measure. Give it a serious thought, understand your business requirements and look for a company that deals with similar solutions.

Put Sales on Top Priority List. Arrange one hour everyday to train your sales staff on marketing. Analyse daily sales and let them identify the positives, negatives and solutions to boost your sales. Acknowledge, Complement and Award who performs the best in the team.

Introduce the online version of your business. Maximise the number of channels, where you can share your product inventory. Join Affiliate Portals, where you can find experienced people who can sales your products to potential buyers on commission basis.

So why shading tears on recession! Now you can battle out Recession taking advantage of its double-edged sword.

Web 2.0 – What Why and How Explained!

2009-03-26T02:07:00.000-07:00

The WEB as Platform

User Positioning:

You Control Your Own Data

Core Competencies:

Services, Not Packaged Software;

Architecture of Participation;

Cost-Effective Scalability;

Remixable Data Source and Data Transformations;

Software Above the Level of a Single Device; and

Harnessing Collective Intelligence.

Don’t consider software as an object, but as a process of engaging users. This can be termed as The Perpetual Beta.

Your data and services should have re-usability. This principle can be defined as Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

Don’t think of applications that reside on either client or server, but build applications that reside in the space between devices.

Remember that in a network environment, open APIs and standard protocols win, but this doesn’t mean that the idea of competitive advantage goes away.

Chief among the future sources of lock in and competitive advantage will be data, whether through increasing returns from user-generated data.

(Courtesy: EDU.ru)

Make Your Business Count This Year!

2009-03-26T01:58:00.000-07:00

After Year-End Sales closing, the first three months are usually the best time for online merchants to conduct and implement all kinds of Researches, Renovations and Resolutions. After Holiday Sales Bonanza is over, it's the right time to reassess your business.

2009 has brought a lot of changes to eBay's base platform and the growing determination of many online sellers to go Multi-Channel are two major factors in recent times. These two factors have really inspired sellers to work out such experiments with their businesses and these three months are the right time to do so.

I personally have spoken to several of my seller friends (most of them are from eBay background) to find out what exactly they were planning to work out during these three months and to my surprise most of them have complied with me that they wanted to go global with apt technological support for their growing business. Though Recession towards the end of the previous year has marred a lot of such planning, yet sellers have not stopped becoming bold so far as implementing innovative stuffs. After assessing all replies, I discovered Four Decisions that sellers are keen to concentrate during these three months.

Look into the Barrel Down

A proper analysis of the things that worked and did not work for your business over the previous year is one of the best ways to assess your business. EBay is such a platform where you can sell anything to anybody. Some eBay Sellers said they plan to get rid of slow-moving or non-performing inventory to better help them assess and restructure their business.

One of among my eBay seller friends, Tina explained me, "I could see that my performance on eBay was improving, but the major problem is with tax as I feel that my profits were going straight to the Internal Revenue Service."

Mr. Bennet, another eBay seller has decided to liquidate his baby wear inventory as he is finding his electronic shop has performing pretty well. He would put his baby wear products on auction style to finish up the inventory. This will facilitate him analyzing his inventory. "I’ve already decided to make the storage space more organised, and to examine and explore where I can generate maximum profit."

Diversify

Buyers are always active and browsing pages for shopping every moment, and you need to be ready to meet their demand, too. Enlisting your products on multiple channels (i.e. marketplaces), as well as setting up a Web Store is an added advantage for your business. You can get your potential buyers gather through various popular social networking sites. Further these social communities can be utilized for promoting upcoming products and brand awareness. Some of such popular social networking sites are Facebook, My Space, Twitter, Orkut and Hi5.

Professional and Personalised Customer Service

Customers are normal human beings and mostly driven by emotions. Though emotions and feelings do not run a business, yet it can help your business growing immensely. Prepare a list of previous customers as well as their emails and keep in touch with them in regular interval with personalized messages. As an online seller, you should have a system for regular communication with previous customers. The advantage of such a system improves your Customer Retention Average and as per experts Customer Retention costs lesser in comparison to New Customer Acquisition.

Give Coupons

Coupon sites are one of the best ways to promote your inventory. Such coupon sites have really been popular among buyers during past few years. These types of sites have become very popular over the past couple of years, and going to get more popular in such a gloomy global economy scenario. More and more buyers are ensuring for any such discount coupons before checking out on any store. So why not using such coupon sites to give some added exposure for your products!

I hope these valuable tips surely help you and your business grow substantially this year and make 2009, a successful business year for you.

Amazon – A Mystery for Sellers and Buyers!

2009-03-22T06:18:00.000-07:00

Amazon has always a mystery for people who wish to make some extra money selling things online. It’s not the Amazon that only provides the opportunity to sell things to potential buyers, there are other popular marketplaces like eBay are too well-known. We can simply draw a comparison line between Amazon and eBay that they are into the same sector where buyers and seller explore each other for possible transactions. But both are completely different from each other so far as selling and buying methods are concerned. EBay is known for its auction style selling procedure and Amazon is well known for book selling. But both the online marketplaces have come a long way ahead. From Dot-Com to Web 3.0 through Web 2.0, a lot has been changed on World Wide Web and the way internet surfers behave online especially during online purchases.

If anybody asks me which WWW term is the most confusing, I would say “Web 2.0”. According to Wikipedia.org, “Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.” Web 2.0 revolution encourages lightweight, easy-to-use and user centric business models. In other sense we can assume that Web 2.0 ushered the era of Internet Independence. Amazon has rightly supported the Web 2.0 standards and has opened its solutions to other sellers. As a result Amazon sellers now can sell a lot variety of products apart from books.

The best thing about Amazon is that it offers a wide range of individual features to the customer that, when united, offer a very interactive experience. Due to this reason, Amazon successfully retains customers despite heavy competition from other marketplaces so far as price is concerned.

Features like Products Review, Tagging and Categorization, Product Rating, and even Product Review Rating by other customers have made Amazon a reliable source for buying and selling.

Over the course of time, a customer can build a reputation as a reviewer. This facilitates a sense of ownership on the site and encourages customers getting engaged on the site while shopping. Buyers can publish photos of the products they’ve bought. This all serves the customers by providing additional information that plays a major factor while making a purchasing decision.

But this does not stop here. An Amazon Buyer can prepare lists of various relative items that they can be recommended as a group.

This is all Open Data Contribution feature of Amazon. But Amazon also follows its buyers’ behaviour and gathers information from such buyers’ behaviour patterns. If an Amazon buyer looks at one product but ends up buying another, that’s a Data Point that can potentially control a purchasing decision for the next buyer. Amazon gathers this information and prepares a Product Ranking, along with additional information that eventually gets published along with the core product features.