If you want to make money from blogging, then you need to create a blog which worth your visitor’s love and affection. It’s often about traffic but when it comes to clinching deals, it is less about traffic and more about quality traffic. Traffic which is engaging with your blog and visitors who are following you.

The only way you can achieve that is by creating a blog which is able to leave that lasting impact and also, you exploit your blog’s potential to make money.

There are variety of ways of making money from your blog. Two primary methods to make substantial amount of money from your blog is;

• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing which could be later used to promote your or affiliate products
• Social media marketing like connecting to your visitors through your Facebook fan page or twitter which be further engaged to create a community which is ready to trade with you.

In order to do anything mentioned above, you need to present your content in a way which is not only attractive but also non-intrusive.

There are enough studies to suggest that your visitors have gone blind to banners and obstructive pop-ups are more than sufficient to annoy your users. Therefore, don’t depend upon banners in sidebars to get clicks, email subscription and likes for your Facebook fan page.

If you generate anything from that, it is a bonus but if you have been in blogging for some time now, then you know banner ads doesn’t deliver anymore.

One of the best way to display your;

• Affiliate products
• Landing page links to collect email subscription
• Highlight your Facebook fan page

Is stripe ads in the header.

Maxblogpress Stripe Ad Pro Review

Stripe ads are displayed as thin layer at the top of the header.

Stripe ads have proved to be extremely useful in achieving the above mentioned objectives.

As they are thin, they are non-intrusive.

But here is a trick, you just can’t place anything and everything there.

You need to put attractive stripe ads bar and as you need to consistently update it, you will need something which can be used to create and customize awesome stripe ads without putting too much of time and efforts into it.

Maxblogpress Stripe Ad Pro Plugin Review

Maxblogpress Stripe Ad Pro is created by maxblogpress (as name suggest). Maxblogpress is one of the most established house in premium wordpress plugins segment. They continuously update their plugins and add new features. In the past, they have created some of the most successful plugins in the history of wordpress plugins. Plugins created by them are;

Maxblogpress Ninja

MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet

MaxBlogPress Bring My Blog Visitors Back

Max Banner Ads PRO

This Maxblogpress Stripe Ad Pro Review is intended to provide you information about this plugin which I have been using for some time now and you can see a stripe at the top of this blog.

I must share that it has been really helpful in getting email subscribers for my email marketing campaigns.

So let’s review maxblogpress stripe ad pro plugin;

• You can create attractive stripe ads in seconds without any hassle.
• You can format it the way you want.
• You can decide where to show your stripe ad like home page or a particular page or post.
• You get access to analytics which provide insight information about the clicks and other traffic stats.
• You can also schedule your stripe ads like to show it after a n number of visits, all the time, show until browser is closed, show every n number of days, show for first n number of visits. You can replace n with any number of your choice.
• To make your stripe ads more attractive, you can place the button.
• You can beauty links in stripe which is a very good tactic for affiliate marketing.

Now let’s look at the number of ways which maxblogpress stripe ad pro be used;

• You can show affiliate links.
• You can show the links of your landing page with a message.
• You can show links to your internal page with a message.

You can do many more things with this awesome little plugins.

Maxblogpress Stripe Ad Pro Conclusion

It is a beautiful plugin which looks small but can add great value to your blog. Sometime you can say more in lesser words and sometimes, it is best to use lesser words. Promoting your affiliate products and links should be done in a subtle way.

By using these smaller messages, you can communicate to great length with your visitors.

Hope this maxblogpress stripe ad pro review will help in throwing some light on this little mysterious plugin.

In its latest avatar, Google+ looks more eye catching and with its new features & layout, it is bound to help google in strengthening its presence in social space.

Google Plus New Look;

Google plus home screen

Google Plus New Features in this Revamp;

New Home Page – As you can see, Google plus has got new homepage with new live stream which looks more sleek and attractive. Earlier, it was a single column stream but now with two column streams, it come across much better.

Automatic Hashtags – hashtags have become very important in online communication and especially in social networking. With Facebook and Twitter you can use hashtags but you have to use them manually. Now with Google plus revamped, Google will automatically scan your content and place hashtags automatically. It is one of the best new features added in this revamp.

Photos – this is one of the most talked about feature in new Google+. Functionality of photo has been taken to a entirely new level. New photo feature in Google+ gives you enough to play with your photos. You get a new photo editor tool which is really good. You can use it to edit the color, tone, contrast and many other aspects of your photos. Photo highlight is one of the best new feature available. It automatically scans your photo and remove blurry or bad spots. And yes, it’s not over yet. Google plus’s auto enhancement automatically fix your photo to polish them which makes them look best.

New Apps – Google has also released new chat apps for iOS, Android and chrome. They have recently signed up with Microsoft to integrate Google talk with outlook.com but yes, that is just for FYI. With these new messaging apps, google will aiming to grab some share in this growing market of chat apps. It will be competing with whatsapp and newly launched BBM chat app from blackberry.

Google Plus Revamped Overview and Its significance for businesses

Google plus is a growing social networking sites and with these new features, Google has really made an impression. After Twitter & Facebook, Google plus is the best social networking site for businesses and bloggers. In fact, it is considered as one of the best for content marketers and with the help of these new features, one can definitely use it to achieve optimum results.

Google+ has to be a vital player in your social media marketing strategy. And with Google Plus revamp, it will also get all the love which it has been aiming for.

Do you use Google Plus? Please share your comments and feedback on revamped Google Plus.

One of most primary objective behind blogging or setting up a website is business. If you too are looking to make money online through blogging or website then you need tools which can help you in monetizing your blog.

Two most common method of online money making through blogging are;

• Affiliate marketing
• Ad display

In affiliate marketing, it is recommended to use wordpress cloaking plugins to protect your affiliate links and make money. It has been seen that money user tend to remove affiliate id from the link before they make purchase thereby depriving you of a well deserved commission. So you should link cloaking plugins like maxblogpress ninja to protect your affiliate link and monetize your blog.

But this post is not about affiliate marketing, this post is about monetizing through displaying ads. There are three type of ads which you may display on your blog;

1. Adsense ads units
2. Affiliate banner ads
3. Selling ad space on your blog through sites like buysellads

Under all these circumstances, you will need something to display ads. To put simple ad banners in your sidebar, you can simply put the html code in text widget and place it wherever you want but if you want to do more or have better control then you can’t achieve it without using some additional tool.

You may want to show banner in;

• Header
• Footer
• Below title in the post
• In the post
• Below post
• 125×125 squares in the sidebar
• Different ads in different posts

There are varieties of plugins to do that. There are adsense themes for wordpress, but in this post we will focus on plugins because they will suffice for your adsense related requirements also.

Best WordPress Ad Management Plugins

OIO Publisher – it is the most popular wordpress ad management plugin. OIO Publisher is a premium plugin therefore it is only for those bloggers who are ready to invest in their blogs. This plugin help in having full control on ad display and yet monetizing it in a much efficient manner. OIO publisher is used to sell ad space on your blog. So if you are looking sell ad space then it is the perfect plugin for you. You can create ad zones, set pricing and control each & every of ad management. You can also sell digital products using OIO Publisher.

If you decide to purchase OIO publisher, then you can use OIO publisher discount coupon “SPR13-MAY2013 ”.

Adsanity Plugin – this is also one of the best wordpress ad management plugin. Adsanity plugin provide variety of features which are extremely strategic in taking your ad management and monetization to the next level. You can display single ads, multiple rotating ads, schedule ads for specific period and do many unconventional things to accelerate the entire process of ads in wordpress.

Easy adsense – it is one of the best free wordpress ad management plugin to display adsense ads. You can display adsense ad units in the variety of location in post and sidebars.

Ad square widget – if you wanted to display 125×125 ad units in your sidebar then ad square widget is one of the best plugin to do that. I have used it myself and was quite satisfied with it. You can display four pairs of ads. You can configure it lot of things with this wordpress ad management plugin.

Adrotate – it is a free wordpress ad management plugin. You can create groups using adrotate plugin. It is really great plugin for those bloggers who are looking for free ads plugin.

Best WordPress Ad Management Plugins Conclusion

These are some of the finest Best Ad Management Plugin WordPress available to manage ads and make money in a wordpress blog. If you are using any other plugin or have any suggestion, please leave your comments.

And yes, don’t forget to share it.

If not, then you are already making a big mistake. Email marketing is one of the most important pillars of internet marketing. History is the biggest evidence that the real money making opportunities are generated by appropriate email marketing and not so much so, from other sources.

Reason is very simple; your subscribers are your loyal readers. They have already read your content and they understand & trust your command on the niche whereas visitors from other sources are random visitors who may or may not end purchasing from you. Quality of your visitors coming from your email subscriber list is superior to those coming randomly from search engines or social networking sites.

Therefore, it is better to drive your email marketing campaign in that direction.

Now if you have been in email marketing for some time now then you have taken the first step but then you need to ask yourself, is it working?

Are your getting responses in email marketing?

If you are suffering from low open rate or click rate then you need to redesign your email marketing campaign.

Email marketing is all about having good series of follow up mails and then timely newsletters which deliver latest happenings of your blog in their inbox.

So in order to get response in email marketing, you need to target your emails and additional factors which may affect your campaign and its results.

How To Start with Email Marketing?

Collecting emails is the first step in your email marketing campaign. So you need to place opt-in forms at various locations in your blog or website to collect emails. You should also use Facebook fan page to collect emails. If you are using GetResponse or Aweber, then you can use their Facebook Apps to add a tab in your Facebook fan page to collect emails. But putting generic email opt-in forms is not a great idea. In fact, putting form is required where you can’t do much like your posts and sidebars, but ideal way to collect emails is by creating landing pages.

Now there are multiple ways of creating landing which will include;

• WordPress premium plugins like Premise and Instabuilder
• GetResponse’s free landing page creator for GetResponse users.

If you don’t want to put any landing page for your blog then you might contemplate creating squeeze pages for your Facebook fan page. You may use FacebookAppsninja plugin to create Facebook Squeeze page.

So now we are clear with email opt-in forms and landing pages.

You came across GetResponse and Aweber in the above response. They are one of the best email autoresponder services available in the market.

Email autoresponders are the Email Marketing Software which automatically triggers email delivery based upon the parameters and the triggers defined by you.

It works at the backend. So when a user subscribe to your newsletter using a optin form at your blog, email autoresponder will automatically send them a mail asking them to confirm their subscription. Once they confirm, they will redirect them to the page you specify or deliver another mail.

In email marketing, you need to send emails at a regular interval to your subscribers; it is not possible to do it manually using any free email service. So you need to use to email autoresponder.

GetResponse is cheaper and also provide additional features like create surveys and landing page etc. GetResponse is the most advance email autoresponder with its new feature email marketing automated which can deliver emails based upon a particular response of your subscriber to the last email sent to him.

UseFul Reading;

How To create landing pages

GetResponse Review

Best WordPress Email Opt-in form plugins

So now you have your email marketing kit ready and you need to look into the points which are going to dominate the next phase and that is, creating emails and engagement with your subscribers.

Email Marketing Tips to Get Response from your subscribers

• Use attractive and clean layout for your emails.
• Use attractive subjects lines. Make sure you don’t use deceptive subject lines or else your brand will be seriously impacted. So use honest and creative subject lines
• Create a impressive series of follow up mails which are delivered after user has signed up for your newsletters.
• You frequency should be optimum.
• It could be daily or weekly. I think monthly is too long so select between daily or weekly.
• For follow up emails, you should also select interval which doesn’t make it “too much”. So make sure that you don’t end up flooding your subscriber’s email inbox.
• Content is the king and that holds true for emails also.
• You should send emails based upon your user’s response. For example, if a user is not opening your email then you need to send them a different mail whereas those who are opening but not clicking, you need to handle them differently. Primary problem with such scenario was that no autoresponder was capable of making out this difference and marketers were sending out bulk emails expecting subscribers to open and click on them. Thankfully, GetResponse has come up with a solution which is email marketing automated where you can set separate triggers for separate action so it make it completely intuitive and increases your users response by dramatically.
• You should also use segmentation to target your subscribers. If you are in internet marketing then you don’t need that as most of the subscribers are sharing common interest but for other businesses, separate age group may react differently to a common trigger. So in order to capture that, you need to have segmentation for different users. You can do that with modern email autoresponder like GetResponse.
• Use time travel—timing your email delivery is a great ways of optimizing result for your email marketing campaign. GetResponse can deliver mails in same time in different time zone like 10:00 am in all time zones across globe.
• You should use short codes like [firstname] to personalize your emails.

You need to understand that communication through email is communication which is happening among two people, so you need to reach out to your subscribers to make it work for you.

These are some of the most common email marketing tips to enhance your results. There could be other ways to improve your email marketing campaign but everything must be customized to suite your needs. Do share your question or comments and yes, do you mind sharing it?

You can see the kind of people they follow and why they follow. Having a twitter strategy will help you in positioning yourself and your business to extract best out of twitter. Twitter has grown tremendously and it is so active that if you don’t a good strategy then chances are you will not gain anything there.

Average visibility of tweet is not much on twitter and random tweeting and following often doesn’t yield much because of extremely high competition.

Before you begin with implementing your twitter strategy to get traffic for your blog or other form of business, you need to understand your primary requirements and the focus area. Twitter Business Strategy revolves around creating a brand value for yourself.

Twitter strategy: Drive Traffic from Twitter to Your Blog

As mentioned earlier, twitter is highly successful and it has grown tremendously, millions of tweets are done every day. You tweet would be visible for just few seconds and then it is lost in a ocean of tweets where nobody is going to bother to dig for it.

Therefore it is imperative to have a twitter strategy specifically designed for twitter rather than following some generic social media strategy which is applicable for all. In fact, you should have separate strategies for all kind of social networking sites like Facebook, Linkedin and Google+.

I have four twitter accounts and I use them with each other to get the best out of it. I am not saying it is best, but it has done fairly well for me. You have to devise your own strategy but here are some of the points which you can consider while designing your custom made twitter strategy.

Twitter Strategy #1 – Create a Good Profile

You should create a good profile. You can use custom header and background for your profile. So see if you need it and if you are a business, it is a good idea to use something like your logo or business photo use it as header or background. You should carefully enter information in bio. You should also use hashtags in bio so that if people are search for the people hailing a particular niche, they can find you. It will be based upon your niche like SEO, blogging or anything else restaurant, real estate etc.

Twitter Strategy #2 – Use Hashtags

Twitter has changed the way we as a human being used 140 characters in our communication. Other social networking giants like Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin allow you to use enough characters and words’ so putting your keywords in that is fairly easy. In case of Twitter, you are limited to 140 characters therefore it is important to include your keywords in tweets. You should use hashtags with your keywords so that it is easy for people to search for your tweets on twitter.

Using hashtags is quite tricky. You should use them wisely. At times, it is better to use unique hashtags whereas for some niche, it is better to use commonly used hashtags like #SEO, #socialmedia etc.

You should also experiment with the placement of hashtags in your tweets like placing #hashtags in the first part of your tweet or somewhere in middle or at the end of your tweet.

So just experiment and observe what kind of placement deliver best result for you and follow that strategy. Hashtags plays important role in Twitter Search.

Twitter Strategy #3 – Follow Others

You should start with following others from your niche. You should only follow those who are active on twitter and have good presence. You can check their activity by visiting their profile. If someone is not active on twitter then there is no point in following them as they are not going to be responsive to your tweets. Also, make sure that you follow people from relevant niches. This is one of the best method to Grow Twitter Following.

Twitter Strategy #4 – Promote your twitter handler

You can promote your twitter handler by variety of ways,

Place your twitter follow button on your blog so that your visitors and readers can follow you.

Place the twitter follow button in your email signature so that those who receive emails from you can follow you.

You should also promote your twitter id to your subscribers so make sure that you place twitter follow button in your blog broadcast and newsletters which are send out by your email auto responder to your subscribers.

Add your twitter id at other social networking sites like Facebook and Google+ so that your followers on other site can also follow you on twitter.

You should comment on blogs using commentluv premium plugin because it allow you to add your twitter id in the comments. It is a very good technique for bloggers to promote their twitter id and get twitter traffic.

Twitter Strategy #5 – Improve engagement and interaction

Twitter marketing strategy or twitter traffic is not just about tweeting your blog’s or website’s content. It’s more about your interaction on twitter with your peers. In fact, this is a universal truth as far as any kind of interaction on social media sites is concerned. You need to favorite and retweet content of other members on twitter. It will highlight you and they in turn will follow you and retweet your content.

Twitter Traffic- Over To You

These are some of the broad level twitter strategy which can help you in devising your own strategy. There is nothing like “Fit for all” strategy but if you customize them to suite your need, then I am quite sure that it will be helpful for you.

Twitter is not just another social sites, it’s much more. You can also read twitter blog in order to get information on their latest features.

Please share your thoughts and experience on twitter marketing and twitter strategies.

I won’t be surprised if in the years to come hard disk become obsolete. Carrying and maintaining a hard disk is cumbersome and risk of losing all the data in the event of a physical or technical damage may cause huge problems to the users.

One can still manage to carry the hard disk as their size have considerably gone down but then, you have to ensure that you always roam around with it and ensure that it doesn’t get any damage. But in spite of that, chances of your disk getting corrupt due to some virus cannot be ruled out.

Cloud storage or online file storage is one of the best services available in current world. File Sharing Online is a very common practice and Online File Folder help us in doing that easily.

Advantage of online file storage/cloud storage;

• Access your content from anywhere.
• Relatively safer as you don’t have to bother about securing your hard disk.
• Most of the services allow a free space and beyond that, you can pay On-Demand basis.
• No risk of getting virus as most of these services use sophisticated software and services to secure their network.
• Using online file storage is fairly easy and you just have to upload your documents, images and file their using a simple to use interface.
• There are many services which offer additional services to create documents and files along with directly uploading document in them.

Some of the best online file storage/cloud storage services are;

Microsoft skydrive – skydrive is the service which is offered by Microsoft. You can use it to store all kind of documents. You can also create Microsoft word, excel, ppt and other type of documents using Microsoft skydrive. Skydrive allow you to store data upto 7 gb without paying anything. If you want to avail more than 7 gb then you can use their paid services. I have using it for last few years and it is simply awesome. It is extremely helpful if you want to store important documents online so that you can access them anywhere. I mean it’s really hard to cumbersome either to carry your disk all the time or going back to place just to pick your storage device to get few documents. You can also sync your documents from your laptops. You can download skydrive app which will simply create a folder on your desktop. You can simply place your documents there and it will sync them to your online skydrive folders automatically. Skydrive is Microsoft Cloud Storage.

Google Drive – It is another online storage service which offer attractive line of products like ability to create documents within google drive and directly uploading document there. In fact, it is widely used by many to create and share documents. Google drive offers a free space of 5 Gb. Google drive is Google Cloud Storage.

Dropbox – it is one of the most established players in this industry and just like skydrive and google drive, it is also really good for storing and sharing documents. Dropbox offer a free space of 2GB. It is good for businesses if they want to have more space and centralized billing with admin control.

iCloud – as mentioned earlier, icloud is offered by Apple and it comes with free space of 5 GB. Your photos, movies and other files are synced and you can access them anytime.

Mega- it is a new service and promise better technology and services. It comes with a free space of 50GB. It is easy to use and as good as other services.

Over To You

These are some of the best and free Free Online Document Storage services. I have used Microsoft skydrive and Google drive. I think they are really great for average users like me who are looking for some online storage space where they can keep their important files & documents so that they can access them anywhere and anytime. Online Data Storage is a very good way of handling data in current world.

There are many other Online Storage Free services but as we all use microsoft and google in some way or other, i have primarily focused on services which are widely known by common users.

What do you think of these new ages online file storage services and do you any other service which can be used by us?

Please share your feedback and opinion with us and don’t forget to click on share.

Traffic is the key to success in online marketing and blogging business.

Without traffic, irrespective of the quality of your blog, you are not going to make any money from it.

Therefore in order to make money from your blog, it is imperative for you to create a blog which converts and make money.

In order to create a blog which converts, you need to use correct tools.

Best blogging tools are essential and they include every product and service which impact running a successful blogging.

Best Blogging Tools

The list of best blogging tools begin with the first step towards setting up your blog.

Web Hosting

Web hosting is the first service and product which you will use in setting up a blog or website. A good host your blog’s speed and performance. If your blog is not up or slow, then it is going to severely hamper your chances.

Some of the most established and prominent name in web hosting industry are;

• Hostgator
• Godaddy
• Inmotion
• Myhosting
• Dreamhost

All of these web hosts are reliable and affordable. If you decide to host your blog either of them, then you can use web hosting coupons to get discounts.

Visit; web hosting coupons

Content Management System

WordPress is the best content management system and it is free. So you don’t have to think twice. It is one of the most widely used content management system for blogging in entire world. Read; Make a Website with WordPress

Best WordPress Themes

Once you have installed wordpress, you need to customize your blog. Once customization is done, you need to install best wordpress theme for you. I am using eleven 40 theme from studiopress themes.

You get abundance of premium quality, seo compatible and feature rich themes from studiopress. You can select any theme based on your niche and targeted audiences.

You are tight on budget, then you can use elegant themes.

These themes are well coded and help you in giving your blog a unique look and appearance which help your blog in standing out of the crowd.

These themes allow you to customize your SEO settings and many other features like integrating ads in your blog. As these themes are well coded, it further improve your page load speed which enhances your SEO.

Page speed is one of the most crucial factor in SEO, thus you need to focus on it.

Once you have installed your favorite theme, you need to install plugins to provide additional functionality to your blog.

There are hundreds of thousands of plugin available for wordpress but all are not equal. Some are updated regularly and doesn’t interfere with the performance of your blog but there are many wordpress plugins which negatively impact your blog.

You need to avoid those plugins which adversely affect your blog.

Read; Best Plugins for WordPress

Once you have installed these plugins, your blog is ready and you need to move on to another set of blogging tools which are required to promote and market your blog.

If you are thinking that you have already used too many tools, then you need to understand that so far you have used tools which are required to create a good blog which is critical for success in blogging.

Once you are done with the first phase of creating your blog, you need to focus on promotion, marketing and search engine optimization of your blog.

Best Blogging tools for Email marketing

Email marketing is the most important aspect of blog promotion. Google keeps on updating their algorithm and things may take some time to show results. Sometime, you might be ranking well for a keyword but then with the change in Google’s algo, you may find your blog losing it all with its ranking on same search engine for same keyword.

So you need to focus on creating a loyal fan base which is not affected by these factors. In fact, it is known fact that email marketing is the best method to promote your blog and make money out of it.

Key to success in email marketing is setting up good follow up campaigns and using a email autoresponder which delivers where it is required.

You need to create landing pages, surveys, attractive newsletters and deliver emails at a time which is convenient to your users. You can’t deliver emails at one time to all your subscribers sitting in different countries where it may be convenient for your subscribers in one place and inconvenient for subscribers in some other country.

For example, there is huge difference in time zones in India and USA therefore you need to deliver emails at a different time to your subscribers in these countries. Most of the email autoresponder do not provide ability to automate this process but GetResponse does it.

You also need to have a systematic approach towards your subscribers in order to satisfy them and make money from your list.

For example, if your subscribers are not paying attention to your emails and they are opening it, you need to handle them differently than those who are opening and reading your emails. There is no email autoresponder which provide ability to automate your email marketing campaign based upon the earlier response of your subscriber.

GetResponse provide this feature which is called as email autoresponder. They also provide ability to create landing pages and survey along with attractive ready to use newsletters templates with exceptionally delivery rates.

You can read GetResponse Review for details.

GetResponse is the best email autoresponder for bloggers.

SEO Tools

SEO tools are imperative as you can never drop search engine optimization from your task list, even if it is complicated and at times, results are inconsistent.

In order to get consistent results for SEO campaigns, you need to use good SEO Tools.

I have written separate post on Best SEO Tools, please read: Best SEO Tools for Blogs and Websites

Useful Reading: Blog Promotion Tips

Conclusion

No matter what, tools are part of our daily lives today. You have to use tool in doing everything and blogging is not an exception. You can use these tools but end results is more driven by your dedication and intelligence than these tools. If you are planning a Internet Marketing Blogs then using these tools is even more important because if you are not using any good tool then how can you recommend others?

So choose carefully and work smartly.

Please share your comment and concerns on these blogging tools.

Facebook fan page is the must for everyone who is involved in any kind of business activity today. Even if you have a website, you need to have a Facebook page. And the best part about it, it is completely free.

But as it is free there is abundance of all kind of Facebook fan pages and therefore, you are required to create Facebook page which stands out of the crowd.

In this post, you will see how to create Facebook page which is able to create appropriate buzz for your business.

How To Create Best Facebook Fan Page

First you will see how to create a Facebook page and then you will see how it can be improved in its design and layout to make it a perfect fan page.

Step# 1 – login to your Facebook fan page and click on create page at the bottom.

Step# 2 – you will be presented with a page where you have to select a broad category for your page. Based upon nature of your page, you can pick a category for you.

Step# 3 – click on the selected option and enter basic information in order to proceed ahead.

Step# 4 – now you need to set up your Facebook fan page. In this section, you will be entering additional but important information about your page. Enter description of your page in this section, carefully select an appropriate web address. Make sure to use a keyword based on your niche to use it on your URL. This part is essential for search engine optimization. So chances are you may have to use different words in order to find the available word. But as mentioned earlier, use some keyword in that. You can use any keyword research tool like google adwords keyword tool or niche cracker to find an appropriate keyword for your Facebook page’s web addresses. You should also upload a image in this section.

Step# 5 – once you are done with the above mentioned steps, your Facebook fan page is ready. But it will be a very basic Facebook fan page. First thing first, review your settings and permissions and adjust anything which requires your review.

Once your review is complete, you need to share your content on the fan page and like it.

But you also need to ensure that your facebook page is well equipped enough to produce material results for you.

You need to create a attractive design and squeeze page in order to capture emails to boost your email marketing campaign.

Facebook fan page provide a very good opportunity to capture emails but basic email capturing form won’t work.

Either you need to create a squeeze page using plugins like Facebookappsninja or if you are using GetResponse as email autoresponder, then you can use their landing page creator to create a landing page for your blog and Facebook fan page.

For landing page demo, you can visit the “Join Us” tab in the top menu.

FBappsninja is a wordpress plugin which is a comprehensive tool for Facebook marketing. You can use it to create;

• Facebook fan page
• Squeeze pages for Facebook
• IFrame app
• FB Games and Webinar
• FB Games
• FB Voting
• FB quizzes

If you are not going to use this plugin, then also you need to make sure that your page is interactive and engaging. Quizzes and polls are great way of engaging users. Simply sharing content on your fan page won’t create any brand value. You need to create unconventional and creative stuff to increase the level of engagement at your fan page.

Facebook Fan Page Conclusion

These are steps to create fan pages in Facebook. You don’t need to use premium tools like FBappsninja if you are creating fan pages for non-commercial purpose. Facebook page is a extremely useful method of driving traffic to your blog and business if done properly but you need to invest in correct tools and strategy. If you are new to Facebook marketing, then you educate yourself by using programs like FBinfluence.

Sharing is caring, please share it on social sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ if you liked it.

Traditionally, requirement elicitation process was called requirement gathering and is still often addressed as requirement gathering but as a business analyst, you not just gathering requirements, you are eliciting them.

Requirement elicitation forms the backbone of business analysis and it is vital to create systems which satisfy the customer needs.

I have listed here the prescribed requirement elicitation techniques which are either used alone or with other techniques.

Requirement Elicitation Techniques

Brainstorming- in brainstorming requirement elicitation, you need to form a team of the entire stakeholder with at least one representative from each team. This team will brainstorm the new ideas. Ideally business analyst should facilitate these brainstorming session and ensure that brainstorming sessions remain focused and doesn’t lose track. When there are stakeholders from different, they tend to get lost and may suggest things which are outside the purview of your current project. Brainstorming can produce great ideas and suggestion. You should be ready to log these relevant ideas and suggestions.

Document Analysis – document analysis is a very useful requirement elicitation technique which is widely used in information technology. This technique is especially good when you are making change to an existing system like a change request or enhancement. Document analysis involves analyzing all the existing documentation related to a system or process.

Focus group – focus group consist of pre-qualified individuals who represent the concerned stakeholders. This is done when stakeholders may not have enough knowledge/data/information about the expected change in system. But despite that business analyst is required to interview senior members from stakeholder group to get in-depth information related to the system or process.

Interface analysis – interface analysis involve analyzing all kind of interfaces involved in the concern process. Idea behind this analysis is to deconstruct the way a user is going to interact with a system and the way system will interact with linked systems. This provides great information when you are making changes to a existing system. You can use this technique for studying the existing system and to demonstrate to the end users.

Interviews – interviews are great way of requirement elicitation. Interviews help in understanding the requirement given by users and to further enhance the clarity by asking relevant questions in requirement elicitation interviews. It is one of the widely used requirement elicitation technique in business analysis. A business analyst should not only discuss the asked changes but also the related scenarios in order to better understand the change and cover anything which may not be addressed at the broad level requirement description. Interviews are also great way of explaining changes to users because then by the nature of discussion you can inform users about any negative changes or additional change which may impact the overall functionality. It has been observed that end users sometime miss the hind side of the requirement which may produce undesirable effects.

Observation – observation is used in projects which require changes in the current system or process. There are two types of observation requirement gathering techniques. One is passive where business analyst simply watches the end user work and gathers data and the second type is active, where business analyst elicits requirements by asking relevant question while end user works. It helps in better understanding of the current processes.

Prototyping – a picture tells a thousands words. Prototyping work on these principal, End users may not fully understand the technical or business documentation. Diagrams depicting change in user interface or work flow diagram help them in understanding changes which may occur. Prototyping use pictures and diagrams to explain changes. It require walk through of the diagrams and make changes based upon the feedback received from stakeholders.

Requirement workshop – requirement workshop involve team discussion to identity and refine requirements. It includes a group which meet consistently to discuss changes and identity changes which are required to satisfy the business goals. Each activity and input must be recorded during these requirement workshops. You may use some tool to do that logging or simply meeting minutes may help based upon the nature of your requirement workshop.

Survey/Questionnaire – these are used for gathering information from large group of users. There is drawback of no personal interaction but when the size of group is high, surveys or questionnaire are extremely helpful in identifying and eliciting requirements. You may also use this method in initial stage to gather information about a system changes from the entire team of affected users and later on, refine the requirements by using alternative requirement elicitation techniques.

Conclusion

Requirement elicitation is a complex process in the current IT environment. It is often seen that on ground more than one technique are deployed to efficiently process of requirement elicitation or gathering.

Please share your feedback and experience on requirement elicitation with us.

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Charles Mburugu is a professional blogger who likes sharing tips for internet marketers and bloggers. Currently, he is writing for MotoCMS templates.