He: Hi Anand
Me: Hi
He: So, what do you do?
Me: I am into Internet Marketing
He: So, you are a liar?

Reminded me of the popular book by Seth Godin and a similarly popular proverb in my home state. In this age where the people have been empowered with search engines, decision engines and more engines than I can think of, do marketers and salesmen have any role to play?

Marketing as any other industry has evolved from the days of the print to the current days of the internet. It is time popular offline marketers and marketing companies sit up on their conference tables and redesign their approach.

From the days where marketing just involved buying adspace on popular newspapers and televisions to the current days of marketing which has branched out into “Relationship Marketing”, “Inbound Marketing” and many much more.

Internet Marketing and my area of interest and specialization, has more to do about engaging with the customers and collecting feedback about the products and services offered by our clients than hard selling. From what I believe, traditional marketing are:

You have a product.
You put a salesman in a busy junction.
He shoves the product into everyones face.
For every 100 people he “attacks”, maybe 2 people will buy. End of cycle.

For every 2 people who might buy, you are:

Pissing off 40 people by interruption marketing
Being ignored by another 40.
Building awareness with the rest.

Is it really worth the 2 sales you might make?

Internet Marketing is more about building a community of those who might be interested in your services sometime in the future. If you sell jewellery, your clients are just about every woman out there! Build a blog, build a fan base around your product and then when they are ready to buy, I am pretty sure your brand will be the first thing on their mind. Be Remarkable.

Talk marketing to the people who are interested in hearing you out. Do you sell you everyone out there?

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Are you a Lair?

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My startup was recently approached by another small business with a very energetic man on top. They wanted to know how they manage their brand online as a company. We decided to go with the Personal Branding route as their CEO was a known personality with the number of conferences he had been to and the number of online relationships he had with his friends and collegues from his previous work experience.

Here are a few tips I provided him to get started with his own personal branding online.

1. Blogging - Goes without saying. A 80/20 rule applys here. 80% of the posts posts will concentrate on his professional expertise and the rest will be your personal posts of vacations or rants about bad service providers.
2. Guest Blogging - This is the best way to approach new communities which will appreciate value and insight and probably hop on to your site to know more about him and his company.
3. Twitter - Another important tool to let people know you more personally and upclose. A twitter account without activity is not going to help. It needs constant interaction with your friends, people in your industry and advice to those looking for help in your area of expertise.
4. Business and Social Media Networking - This advice was a no-brainer and already done well by the client. He was in major networks like LinkedIn and Plaxo. All he needed was a bit of polishing them to display his best to the world. He just had to grab that facebook vanity URL and he was good to go!
5. Presentations and Videos - This is under estimated by a lot of people. If you are the kind of person who goes out on stage and present your knowledge to an audience. Don’t you think you can share it with the whole world with presentations shared online via Slideshare or Scribd? Also, our client was a person with an awesome mobile video camera and he was constantly recording interesting moments in his life. Hence we suggest Youtube and Vimeo where he can put up his videos.

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What is Domain Parking?

Our good friend, Mr. Wikipedia defines Domain Parking as a practice to register good domain names and not using them as a website. There are two types of domain name parking. One like my own Shymz, which has been registered with a plan for future development and is unmonetized. The other is one which is monetized with text links and looks very much like a normal website with a bunch of links and almost nil content.

Monetized Domain Parking

There are many companies which pay you to park your domains including Google as per the number of clicks your site will generate. I am against this type of monetization as it not only reduces the quality of Internet as a whole, but also leads to genuine sites being developed on such good domain names.

Where is the Traffic coming from?

Root of every online monetization strategies is traffic. Without traffic, your site is as good as being dead. So, how do you bring traffic to a bunch of sites? The best part is, you do not even have to try! There are tons of newbies to the internet for whom opening Internet Explorer and typing in “topic.com” is the final authority in the topic they are looking for!

I know a few friends who make money just by registering domains like this or those domains which are typos of popular sites. But it needs to be done in huge numbers to make any serious money and as I said, it will kill the internet. But on the other hand, it makes perfect sense to advertisers to advertise in these sites to get cheap and quick exposure in front of their audience.

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You should have seen this Google adsense heatmap by Google, which according to them should give you the right clicks on your site. But not every site has the same placements and the same audience, so testing and tweaking are the only ways you can increase your adsense revenue.

The Less Is More concept

I don’t know if this concept goes by any other names online, but this is one thing which has helped some of my sites increase their revenues by almost 100%. In my younger days online, I usually slap up as many ad units as Google allows on a page and wait for clicks to drop in. But time has proven that sometimes having a single ad unit will yield you more money than having 3 ad blocks.

I used the most popular ad unit, the 300×250 ad block as a single ad on a page removing all other ads and my revenue shot up by more than 100%! My theory (feel free to disagree) is that by having less adspots, you are telling Google that you are giving them the best spot and therefore be served the most contextual ads for that spot. Another reason could be that it increases the overall usability of your site by increasing time spent on your site, which in Google terms is a “good website”.

Most of the sites have this ad unit blended into the content on the right or left. I was testing a placement where it stands out on top under the title a few weeks back and it was yielding better results than having content blended into the ads.

It is always good to at least review your placements every 6 months ifyou have been getting 10 cents clicks or no clicks at all. Also Google recently released font customization on ad units, have you checked it out? What were your results?

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Adsense Placement Tips - Less for More Concept

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Do remember that this tool, like the Google trends is in beta and can be buggy, so take the data with a pinch of salt. So, how do you use Google Insights?

Step 1: Start I am out looking for a new niche to enter. I visit Google Insights.

Step 2: So, what is on my mind today? I know for a fact that people are spending a lot on their passtimes and recreations. Me for instance, spend quite a bit on fuel when I am out riding my motorbike. But wait, recession? What recession? Lets see what recreations are hot. I normally target the audience in the United States because that is where advertisers are. That is where people are buying online. Hence the right recipe for a internet marketer.

And you get the following result

Step 3: Pick up niche. So you get a list of recreations hot in the United States in the last 12 months. Seems like the recreation industry was down the whole year and has only started to pick up. Hmm, end of recession? So, fishing seems to be a interesting place to be in. Using the Google News for a quick search reveals that fishing season is about to begin with the summer coming. Good place to be!

Step 4: Drilling down. I always loved the Keyword Sniper method by Courtney Tuttle. Too bad most of his resources are no longer available online. I always target micro niches than the whole niche in general. For example, “SEO in Cochin” is better than “SEO”. Using the Insights on our new keyword “fishing” I get the following keywords:

Step 5: Start working! Now I can either create a whole site based on the above keywords further using my keyword tools or find a few products on Amazon and promote it on adwords to make some sales.

But yes, I am yet to do keyword competition research on this list. I am yet to see if there are any advertisers for these keywords, I am yet to see a lot of things which goes into the making of a successful niche site. But if you are stuck about starting off with a niche site, you have these tips to start off!

Do let me know if you have any queires in the comments! I am glad to help out!

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I ask myself this question every once in a while. I remember overhearing in deep sleep in some audiobook  - “Any that requires you to work from morning to evening is not a business, but it is a job.” I am a great fan of this phrase. It is common sense yet when you think about it, it is dangerously powerful.

I am not exactly suggesting that you outsource all your work and sit back home munching chips and drowning cola, but if you have a part of business which is  essential to the business, but not worth your effort, OUTSOURCE. I remember a tweet by Mani Karthik where he said something on the lines which meant Anyone can outsource to anyone, thats the beauty of the internet.

How many hours do you work on your business/job? If you are starting up, you are excused, but if you have been generating an income online or offline, that you need to rethink about what you do.

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Do you run a Business or a Job?

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In Affiliate Marketing, it is easy to get excited to see conversions going up and money coming into your affiliate marketing account. But once you get serious about affiliate marketing, it can get pretty deceptive on your actual profits.

I used go insanely happy whenever I saw a conversion of $0.90 on email submits on my account, not any more. There is so much more involved to a successful affiliate marketer than conversions and money made. Money spent is a important factor too.

For me, money spent used to be on sales page designing, sales copywriting and then mainly in adwords. Is that it? No! I always to forget server expenses, domain name costs, softwares I buy for promoting sites and not to forget the bad habit of buying up half baked scripts from forums.

Over a period of time these expenses add up and boy! They EAT up into your profit margin. But with the help of the best accountant in town (who happens to be my dad too), I was able to get myself a small affiliate marketing excel sheet where my expenses for a site and income it generates are setup so that I know what eats up my margins and how I can reduce it.

If you have not started doing it yet, I suggest that you start with this template that I found online long time back to get organized. This should help you get an idea about how to proceed. Do let me know how you manage your affiliate stats on the comments!

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That is when I found the talent in this awesome designer - Ben Jacob. Of only 18, this barely legal designer has done magic with my concept of a dream home. Now, my homepage and this blog has a single integrated design with all the elements I had wanted.

Now, the only thing that lacks is blog posts. I should get back to more frequent blogging as soon as workload at my 10 member startup - ayruz web holdings starts to come down. In the meantime, if you think you have something interesting for my 3000+ RSS subscribers, send in your guest post and I will put them up.

If you are on a feed reader or on email, hop over to my home and do let me know your comments and let me know if there is something broken on your browser.

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Presenting TheAnand 2009

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I am a internet junkie if not anything else! Spending hours reading blogs (about 250 of them) lurking around forums and not to mention Social Networks and the links shared on Twitter, Facebook and Stumbleupon. This has led to serious time management issues ever since I started working on my startup. I finally decided to fine tune the time spent online and this is my set of times for time management for the social media enthusiast.

Email

The biggest time waster. I started with Gmail, which has somehow managed to become my preferred email client (Yahoo!, Listening this?) and I started off setting up labels, filters and using the stars more efficiently so that things that need attention get it and those which do not get out of my way. (apologies to friends who send a lot of fun forwards, you have been labeled!). And as a final tip, email was initially projected as something which does not having the jarring emergency of a phone call. This led me to decide to check emails once in 2 hours. Tons of time saved!

Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center and Hack Attack: Become a Gmail master helped a lot in this regard.

RSS and Blogs

I have been using Google Reader for sometime now, after checking out some AIR based readers and some desktop based clients I decided that reader is still the leader out there. I have blogs, alerts and some other stuff on the reader. But one tip that  definitly saved a lot of time was the list feature. You do not really have to read every technology news out there, and for that matter, most of the news articles are similar anyways. (Hint: New wordpress version launch). I am now looking for a email client that will sync it to my mobile and read it when I am stuck in traffic.

Social Networks

This was tricky, the idea was to interact with maximum people and not spend the whole day on it. I finally decided on the networks where I want to be active in and updated the information there, set up a few tools to monitor the updates and developments. Not much tips and tricks here because social media is all about engagement and participation for me. I did find a few good tools and got some scripts made to make life easier. More on that later.

Blogging

Those following the blog, will have an idea about this. I slacked off completly in the process an even decided to start off again only after the new design came in(Oops, that was supposed to be a surprise!!) But since thats not happening in another 2-3 weeks time, guess I should find some other sort of inspiration to blog.But hey, I never followed any rules of blogging anyways!

I soon plan to implement something I first heard from BinnyVA, the points system. On searching around, I found another fellow passionate blogger who has this setup in a neat excel file for you to download and use. Passionate Blogger - Blog Points System

Getting Things Done (GTD)

I am a big fan! I finally heard the whole ebook again and customized the concept into my own system and got myself Tudumo, the best GTD software ever. Information is jumping at you at every point, emails, phone calls, at the coffee machine and on the stairs while leaving office. Trick is, to capture those inputs and complete them categorically, not get worried or frustrated thinking about them. It helps a lot in actually getting things done. So, get the book and read it like three times!

Office Space

Having a home office is the new fad, but for me, I like to have a desk to work and a sofa to sleep than do them both from the sofa . If you cannot get an office space, at least have a table assigned to just work. Helps you keep your mind on it and not easily get distracted.

If you do not know it yet, time management is everything. It lets you take on more work, chat with your girlfriend or even tweet more often I really recommend anyone starting off to sit down and plan your time online, not just to get things done, but to be more productive at what you do.

PS: Consider following me on Twitter if you want to know whats happening with my life in between blog posts and have a quick conversation about anything!

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6 Time Management Tips for the Web Enthusiast

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And guess how much this single site been earning?

It was surprising! Its been quietly making this money and I had not even had the mind to optimize it! Guess what? Its not about how much traffic you got, or how much subscribers you got in your niche market that matters. How many of them are sitting with a credit card in their hands, ready to buy what you offer them? Thats where your success as a affiliate marketer is. No one can teach you affiliate marketing, except testing and tweaking I will update you guys on how this site optimization goes in a month or two. It looks like it has the potential of $50 a day.

P.S: Even if you have a blog, check its stats and integrate adsense with your analytics account. Find out the converting pages, study the ad placement and work on creating more content on that topic or gaining more traffic from that source.

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