Social Media ia used by many in many different ways. Some use it for promoting their products, others use it to listen to their customers while others give away tips on using their products on the social media platforms.

Here are a few ways I think you can use Social Media.

1. Listen – You can simply be a good listener! I personally use this on myself, our products and even client brands with our inhouse tool. Few ways you can listen to the crowd are by using WhosTalkin or SocialMention and many others including simple tools like Google Alerts.

2. Customer Service – A lot of startups find Social Media a boon for customer service and to get feedback from users in almost real time. Using the listening tools mentioned above, you can help your users in resolving the customer services issues and monitor product feedback.

3. Data Collection – This is perhaps one of the most important factor of Social Media. Many companies have successfully used engaging applications and short term campaigns to collect data of users and build a list and market further.

These are some of the ways you can use social media in your company. So, how do you use social media?

Applications of Social Media
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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I usually have a select of 10-20 themes which I use on most of my niche websites mostly because I have heavily modified them myself or find them to be perfectly coded for Search Engines. This is my list of 10 Search engine friendly wordpress themes.

1. Green Park 2 -

2. PlainTxt -

3. A Dream to Host -

4. Dateless Sniper 1.0

5. Free web 2.0 Theme

5 SEO Friendly WordPress Themes
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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The first flagship product of ayuz – WordZo is now alive and kicking! If you are the type of person who can find bugs, use a alpha application and help contribute to the future of WordZo, do signup for a invite key! This month we plan to send out about 100 invite keys to select users.

What exactly is WordZo? It was conceived by Kenney Jacob which aids in helping users to enhance their vocabulary. WordZo lets you find out meanings of words as you read it and it remembers the words you learnt and has a nifty way of making sure you learnt it well.

At ayruz, this is one of the first products we have done so far and we are looking forward to a public launch by January. If you would like to peep into the system, leave your comment here and I will hook you up with a beta invite key

Enhance your Vocabulary with WordZo
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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I have been a lazy blogger for most part of this year for some reason. While initially it was due to work and getting the basics up at ayruz, these days its more like a loss of purpose in blogging life. The traffic to this blog has been fairly stable at 40,000 pageviews a month and revenue from adsense being a little over 5$ a day making it the dream no-maintenance blog in my network.

But at TheAnand, I do want to blog! Just that I am lost at about what to blog. As the traffic is stable, I cannot guess which type of posts interest you the regular readers of this blog.

So, Quick Question!

What do you want to see on TheAnand? Videos of a monkey sniffing his own butt? SEO tips? Entrepreneurship? Fun stuff? My life? (ente thala, ente full figure? #mallu)

Do help me out guys!

Quick Question: What do you want to see on TheAnand?
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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Recently I was helping my friends at CSharks, the Indian Game Developers about their sites indexing issues in Bing. Initially I thought it was a flash site based indexing issues which Google had sometime back. Then we found out that BingBot has recently visited the homepage of the site, but failed to see through the redirect they had setup.

Though I knew redirects was tricky, it never occurred it could confuse the BingBot too! To me, it looks like BingBot gets stuck at the page which throws a redirect error and cannot figure out a way to index the new page.

But it seems it is an issue with the redirects. Bing does not know redirects. It seems that a search for Moved Permanently gives out a lot of results. Concerning.

While it is an error which has been on MSN/Live Search for long, it is unlikely to give Bing any discredits as they are not a traditional Search Engine, but a “decision engine”.  But its a bad thing for most website owners as bing is currently the default “search engine” for the Internet Explorer, the most popular browser out there.

Dear Bing,

I know you are trying to do a darn good job, so please fix it asap! Stop the sleepless nights of millions of webmasters!

Bing and 301 Redirects – Moved Permanently Problems
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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The biggest unconference in Kerala is back! The 6th edition of BarCampKerala was announced last week and this time, the event is scheduled in Cochin, Kerala.

Date: 11th October 2009

Venue: Rajagiri College of Engineering, Cochin

The venue is sponsored by the Computer Club of the College. Thanks guys!

Register for the BarCamp | Take a Session | Venue

BarCampKerala 5 was perhaps the biggest of the barcamps we had in Kerala with about 250 people turning up from across the state and this being in the middle of the state will allow for more attendees. The hall is around 170 seats strong, so do register early! Read Shwetanks review of the meetup to get an idea about the event.

I would be talking about “Pooling the CarPool” at the event. So, if you have been reading this blog for sometime and want to put a face to the name, hit me up at the camp!

I look forward to meet all the affliate marketers in the meetup as I have some about another special event for you guys coming up hopefully soon.

So, are you game for the biggest “unconference” in the state?

Join in Google Groups for discussions on BarCampKerala. BarCampKerala tweets too!

BarCampKerala 6
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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I recently put out a tweet about how your blog is in the right track if you get more spammy comments. From what I see, you are seen by the bots, which means search engines and other kinds of bots should see you too. Its a good thing though not many followers agreed with me! What do you say?!

BUT, This post is not about spamming! This is about learning from a annoying marketing technique which has been existent since email came along. Spam emails! Everyone hates those nigerian bankers who want your help or those claiming to make your body organs bigger and even those promising you replicas of popular watch brands.

Companies have spent millions in developing firewalls and software to keep these people out of the system, yet they keep coming into your inbox everyday. Why? Simply because….

IT WORKS!

But as a responsible and ethical marketer, it was a learning experience for me to know what makes these spam messages click. I have been lurking in the depths of gmails spam folder trying to find out and here are some of the things I noticed.

The Headline

Spammers are ingenious copywriters! Each of their subject lines makes you want to open it and read that email.

No Fluff

Have you noticed how small those spam messages are? Most of them provide a problem and a link to the solution. You want this? Do this. Dead simple.

Persistence

I finally gave in a few years ago to a Nigerian Banker who told me that there is this dead guy who has ton of money stashed in an unclaimed account. I did it just for the heck of it, they are just too persistent with their messages!  (No, I was not duped by spam.)

Hit where it hurts

“Be the man she wants you to be…..” or “Get a diploma for a better job” helps the spam receiver to relate to his own fears and insecurities.

Cut the crap.

I have never seen a spam in the past month which starts with “We are so-and-so dealing with products like so-and-so and blah blah…”. The whole email is about me. Do I need a loan, do I need a better job? A bigger body part? or wades of cash? I don’t need to know about sender. In a weird way, it just works better!

Does your landing page have these qualities? By landing pages, I mean, every post in your blog, every marketing email you send out and every written communication you make.

Lets’ Learn from SPAM!
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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Author Avatars List – This plugin makes it easy to display lists of user avatars on your (multiuser) blog. It also allows to insert single avatars for blog users or any email address into a post or page. I was able to hack it with the help of Ben Jacob and Niju Mohan to make it display random users with at least 1 post in rotation in the sidebar.

Capability Manager – Manage user capabilities and roles to allow contributors to upload images and much more.

Co-Authors Plus – Allows multiple authors to be assigned to a post. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. New template tags allow listing of co-authors.

EmailUserX – A very simple plugin to email your users. Useful to contact all your authors with a single email.

Gravatar – This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options. A must-have! Add faces to usernames easily with Globally Recognized Avatars.

New User Email Setup – A Plugin to setup the registration email sent to new users. This is useful for a blog where some of the authors might not be familiar with the wordpress way of life.

Peter’s Collaboration E-mails – Enhance the “Submit for Review” feature for Contributor users. This plugin enables automatic e-mails to the relevant users when posts are pending, when they are approved, and when their statuses are changed from “pending” back to “draft”. Lets your contributors keep track of their submissions.

Photo Dropper – Lets you add Creative commons licensed Photos to Your Posts from Flickr.

Top Wordpress Plugins for a multi-author blog
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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But yes, the quality of the directories you submit to matters. I usually submit to those directories who are doing some sort of SEO for their sites and have decent authority backlinks to themselves. The list of directories will be soon attached to my RSS footer, so if you want a peice of my directory sheet, do subscribe to my RSS or get the updates by email.

I am sure that if you have complete the 5 days of easy backlinks exercises with me, then you will most probably have a ton of backlinks to your websites! Do let me know in the comments if you have any questions, suggestions or feedback on my methods.

Happy LinkBuilding!

Directory Submissions – Day 5 of Easy Link Building
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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A method of creating backlinks from 6 different web 2.0 properties with new accounts and syndicating their RSS is what linkwheel is all about. Personally, concentrating on top sites like Wordpress.com, hubpages and squidoo will give you the results you want, but mix it with a bit of article marketing and you have a powerful way of linkbuilding! If you missed the previous methods, check out the pilot post with the index to the methods of easy link building.

Web2.0 Backlinks: Day 4 of Easy Link Building
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

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