Are You Making Any Mistake In Your Marketing Strategy?

Probably a million dollar question in today's time "Is your marketing strategy well aligned with the current trend?" or "Are you making any mistake in your marketing strategy?" Let's delve this topic in this Blog.

What is "Marketing"?
To run your business successfully, the first thing you need to understand is to understand the "Actual meaning of marketing". In a simple language, "marketing is the strategized way to reach your targeted audience as and when they are looking for you [your services/ products] and convert them into a lead by explaining how you [your services/products] can make their life better. Once lead is made, the journey continued to maintain and delight your clients."

How marketing was practised?
Previously, marketers were taking help of a few activities, including:

• Print media ads
• Cold calling
• Door knocking
• Email marketing
• Large network

These activities were quite good in 90s and before when people used to entertain such calls,emails and sales people. But, with the revolution in the technology, people changed their approach. They start losing interest in such sales approaches and started finding them irritating, disturbing and interfering. The audience start looking, comparing and reviewing things on the internet. The buying habits are getting changed and so does the marketing activities. It's the time to switch, or start the online marketing practices.

I'm not saying that traditional marketing activities are completely dead, but at certain extent it has lost its original impact. There might be a few industries where people are still getting good business from these activities. But the question is till when?

The world is moving towards the online media and digitization. Your audience is spending majority of their time on search engines, social media, e-commerce sites and similar places. So, don't you think you should target those people, too. Even if, you are getting a great deal of business from the traditional activities, don't you think you should target the other branch of people with various online and digital marketing activities.

If you think why? I suggest to read the failure story of Kodak.It's difficult to cover that story here so giving the reference link of the story http://www.forbes.com/sites/chunkamui/2012/01/18/how-kodak-failed/

No matter how good position you are holding, you have to change with the trend. If you think old practises give you good results, do work on it, but, start making pace with the world by taking online marketing services. Assign a portion of budget to it and don't wait till the time to get completely failed and then starting from a zero.

If you have doubts or finding it risky then allot a fraction of marketing budgets to online marketing. Check the result and then take the next step. This is the right time to think again for the upcoming quarters of this financial year. Are you on right page or not? Don't you want to open the new doors for getting more clients? Don't you want to reach those people spending most of their time on the online world? Think wisely, think now.

If you have any query, you can reach me by commenting on the Blog.

*Image credit goes to omnistudios

Ash Vyas is working in Internet Marketing field for 6+ years. Have experience in handling projects of SEO, SMO, SEM, Content Marketing, Branding etc.
Likes : Blogging, Learning, Networking, Traveling, Photography
Connect with the author via: Twitter | LinkedIn | Google+ | Pinterest

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Posted in: digital marketing,modern marketing,traditional marketing

How Does Google Handle Duplicate Content Answered by Matt Cutts

Duplicate content and SEO

In recent webmasters video Matt Cutts, Google Spam Team Head, has answered the most controversial question of SEO industry since ages.

Question:
How does Google handle the duplicate content and how does it affect negatively to SEO?

According to Matt, the web is full of duplicate content and you can say 25 to 30% content is duplicate. So they handle it very wisely. Usually duplicate content will not lead to any direct penalty, but it might be affected in a way which cause some negative effect. In general language, If two websites or webpages has a similar or duplicate content, Google will compare both the pages for quality assurance and other factors like age of page,backlinks, etc. and will display anyone out of the two. They handle duplicate content site as clusters and decide position depending on other factors.

Does that mean you got a licence to be scrapper? 
Nope, not at all. Because still quality guidelines are there. According to that if you just copy the content and do not add any value to it then it will not perform well in terms of rankings in search engines. Also if you copy someone's content which is copyright protected, your site might get suspended by a hosting company or you have to face the negative consequences according to DMCA [Digital Marketing Copyright Act]. Apart from that Google Panda is still there to fught against low quality content.

Confused? weather to use copy or not?
No, do not copy the content. Whether it affect negatively or not is different case, but it will surely affect your rankings negatively. Add some value to content. Like I got information from Matt's video, but I added more information, details and consequences by my experience which added value to this blog post and prevented it by being copied content ;) You can take idea from others, but you have to create content on your own if you really want to be in market and want to male best out of your content marketing.

Moral:
Create your own content and rule the web securely.

Check the video of Matt:


Ash Vyas is working as an internet Marketing manager at Ecosmob handling digital marketing activities like SEO, SMO, Linkbuilding.
Likes : Blogging, net surfing, networking, travelling, photography
Connect with the author via: Twitter | LinkedIn | Google+ | Pinterest

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Posted in: content marketing,digital marketing,duplicate content handling,google webmasters tips,matts cutt video transcript

SEO Tips for Website Testing for Developers, Designers, Testing Team

SEO Tips for website testing

Hi there,

Today I would like to talk about few tips for testing team that includes developers, testers, beta tester, designer, etc. We SEO people usually face a problem in terms of traffic tracking because of testing team sometimes. Because when developers are trying any new development change or designer is going to change an image, logo or design of a site, they used to follow some bad practise which generates some unnatural stats for traffic, bounce rate, etc. and sometimes. Some traffic tracking sites like Alexa start giving stat like maximum traffic from India Though site is developed for a foriegn client. And then to count real traffic SEO people need to apply filters or block ip range of a company. It also make job of SEO tough to explain the clients that why such stats are there. It also affect in other way by showing downfall in traffic in upcoming months when development and testing part is over and they stopped opening sites. Few search engine also measure it as false or unnatural traffic if repeatedly site open requests are there from the same IP address and it can harm a site's performance in search engines, adwords, affiliate, etc. Of course it's not a fault of people who are testing as they do not now this is affecting the SEO, traffic tracking, etc because they are unaware of world of SEO.

So today I am going to give few tips or standard practise which a developer, designer or tester can follow to avoid condition of unnatural traffic and can help SEO people somehow:

• Don't open and close website again and again just to check a small change of code or design. 
• If you are developing or designing anything new and want to test it then better to test in local system first and then upload it on live site. So it will save lots of open close request of live site for small small changes
• If you know that you are about to work on the website for whole day then let it stay open in one tab of 
• browser so whenever you make any change, you can simply go to website and refresh it to check the change. It will save new site load requests and will continue in one session. 
• If you are doing changes in multiple pages, the rather than opening each page in new tab better to open a website in single tab and the navigate through the website in different pages.
• If you have opened a page of website and the test is successfully done and you think you won't need to open website again still do not close the website right away. just stay on the website for a while and navigate afterwards to 1-2 pages and then close it. 

You might be thinking why to do all these? :) or what if we don't follow this. Explanation could be technical and difficult to understand but I would like to point out the factors of it:

• It will save website from getting unnatural traffic stats.
• Decrease unnatural bounce rate [when you stop opening and closing single page it will decrease bounce rate]
• It will increase user engagement, page views and user loyalty.
• It will make job of SEO bit easier by not spending hours in explaining client or filtering the native traffic.
• It will preserve the bandwidth and will use it for actual clients and never gives "509 bandwidth exceed" error to actual visitor :)

now what is bounce rate and what is traffic stat that needs one more descriptive blog post :) So just start this practice and contribute in your site's SEO :)

Give your feedback and queries in comment. As feedback helps in improvement & queries leads to solutions. I will catch you again in digital marketing world on tis blog next time with other digital marketing topic :)

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Posted in: ashvyasseo,basic seo tips,designers,digital marketing,SEO Tips,seo tips for developers,tester

Personal Branding and Blogging as Personal Branding Tool

Hey there,

Today I am going to talk about personal branding and Blogging as best tool to create strong personal branding. I will try to make it as simpler and short as possible. But bare the length if you find it long because i believe if you give information then give it completely or don't give it because half information is worst than no information. Now coming on the topic,

Recently I have visited few business events related to digital marketing and have also been part of international business event campaigns for vary industries. And what I get to learn from all those exhibitors, speakers and visitors of the event is Personal branding is the most important and mandatory part somehow. Why? how? let's talk on that in detail.

First of all what is the meaning of Personal Branding?
In Simplest words, Be Famous. In simple language with brief I would say, do something unique so people of your community or world start knowing you by your own name. In more simpler world, people start searching for you on search engines rather than on social media sites. And you can set milestone that Google show your knowledge graph in Google search result when people search for you as result of your efforts to build a brand.

For those who are not technical people, knowledge graph is information including your name, detail, pictures, etc Google shows in sidebar. For example when you search for Shakespeare, Google will show you the knowledge graph of him in sidebar, marked in red in below image.

Google Knowledge Graph Example

In more detail, When people start talking about you, start following you and start knowing you by your own name is known as building a personal brand.

Benefits of Building brand:
Finding your own Qualities and enhancement of self-awareness
It will allow you to find your own unique qualities and pitfalls by critics as well. You can take complaints or criticism as feedback and can work on it to improve yourself as a person or professional. As you start getting progress and build your brand you will learn what people like about you and what you should work on to be more better. As you start improving it will also get you tremendous self confidence

Personal or professional network expansion & socialization
As you will start taking interest in particular niche domain & building your brand in it, you will start finding people from your community who belongs to the same nature or profession. Your network of friends or business will start getting expanded. It will make you more socialized in niche work or interest domain.

Be more closer to targeted Audience
As your network starts growing you will get an opportunity to be tightly coupled with the people of your targeted domain or of the same/vary  nature to you which will lead you to learn more from experts and vary nature people of your community and enhance your skills and expertise. It will also allow you to enhance both your professional and personal skills and can also increase your productivity. As you will get constant feedback & opportunity to polish qualities and decrease loopholes or dissatisfaction.

Gain self confidence & your hidden capabilities
Personal branding will make you more closer to yourself  and allow you to know your qualities which you might not find otherwise. As you start exploring yourself you will get to know the uniqueness of yours and hidden capabilities. one by one your internal coating will get uncovered and you will experience the uniqueness and improve own satisfaction ratio.

Standout of the competition
If you are professional and involved in business anyhow weather you are an enterpruner or an employee, you will start leaving mark everywhere. You don't need to be in the rat race or don't need to worry about the sales. As once you start getting famous, your product will start getting sold without any hassle :) If you are one of like me who is not interested in being enterpruner and happy to be an employee, then you don't need to wander for good job and your bosses will do everything to keep you in their firm as you will bring them potential business :) You will feel the empowerment!!

Get support with no Effort
You will start getting support for any of your cause and people will make efforts to get you the necessary support for you. Support could be anything weather it's investors for new business product or donations for charity or something else. People will worry for you, you won't need to :)

Make you stand apart from the crowd
As I already state it will make you known and followed by the people. You will not get lost in crowd of people with having diversified skills and knowledge. In online world, digital branding is also known as creating unique resume where people wont ask you the question tell me something about yourself. In fact, they will start explaining about your self to others.

Easy to Measure Success
You can easily measure your success by watching increase in your followers. You can also work out to improve if you see downfall by working on weakness and boosting your strength by constant efforts. Easiest way is as I mentioned before set a milestone of getting Google Knowledge graph for yourself . :)

Feel Special
Being important to someone make you feel out of the world. As people start following you, as they start adore you. When they come to you and try to prove you that they are your fan. It make you feel awesome. And I am saying this from my own experience. When a girl came to me and said I am your fan and I was looking for you online since 2-3 years but couldn't find you. She was the reader of my previous blog and when I stop writing she missed contact of mine :) I felt awesome when from a crowd of 30-40 people she recognized a silently sitting girl and told her she is fan of her :) which lead me somewhere to write this blog and build my brand too

Coming back to the topic

Now How to do Personal Branding  or how to build personal brand?

There are many ways of building personal brand. Like

• Be a Television or Movie Actor
• Be a politician
• Be a public figure 
• Be an active Social Worker

Sounds crazy or impossible for you? There is one simpler way, Be a blogger or an Author. All the above mentioned ways might failed or may be difficult but being a blogger is very much easy way for anyone. As you know in digital world Blog is a platform which allows you to speak what you feel. You can represent your views, thoughts in simplest way ever and in language you feel most comfortable with and you can be a public figure and build your own brand. I can give you the example of few people who get famous because of their blogging and started a trend somehow who stands out of others were Matt Cutts - Google Web Spam Head, Danny Sullivian - editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. What? do you think they gained it because of their industry? Then what would you say about Malala Yousafzai? A normal Pakistani girl who started a revolution by her blogging.

How to use Blogging as Personal Branding Tool?
Are you confused or thinking that it needs profound technical knowledge of blogging and technology? Neah.. it's not like that, it's damn easy. Here are the simplest steps ever for being blogger:

• First of all select any blogging platform. Some free, easy to use & most popular platforms are wordpress, Blogger, tumblr, etc.
• Think the domain name you would like reserve where you will post your thoughts and knowledge
• Think the subject domain you would like to write on. Not to worry about subject much, it can be mixed like you can write post showing your technology knowledge and your weekend fun at same blog under different category :) Because blog is your own place [My previous blog has that title Ash - It's my place :D where i written whatever I want to & it worked quite well ;) ]
• Start writing in your own language.

Sounds easy? you don't need to worry about grammar or spelling or language as people do overlook small things as they like to read good information. You even don't need to be an experienced writer to becoming a blogger because people appreciate the simple day to day language because there are thousands of professional writers online, you don't need to be one of them running for views. Just be yourself, use your language and people will like it and that's I'm saying by my personal blogging experience. I have never done any marketing or SEO for my previous blog which i used to write anything i like to and it got 1000+ visits from US. I was also surprised when I get to know that figure. Here is the proof

I have stopped writing since long time on it about a year or two on that blog and the image above is the screenshot I took just now. The blog still gets visitors. I used to write that blog at midnight after tiring day so never did proof reading. sometimes me myself don't know what I might written. I just write it with thinking I am writing it for myself  and self satisfaction. So blogging is anyone's cup of tea. Even if you are shy or reserved. Writing a blog is something like talking with ourselves and when we publish it others can read what we think and feel about something or how much sound knowledge we have about some technology or aea. The only thing required is activeness in Blogging. Because if you stop writing blog after few posts you will be lost in the forest of bloggers as you will start loosing your visitors and followers and wont be able to create your brand which is our sole purpose for blogging, right? .

Even if you don't want to build your brand, I suggest you to be a blogger. As it will allow you to meet yourself, increase your self-confidence, allow you to know what is current trend in market, what people like about you and you can find similarly crazy people from the glob :)

So what are you waiting for? Start writing.. start blogging and start building your brand...

If you have any confusion or query, or if you want some help, or if you are looking out for information/knowledge on any specific SEO or digital marketing topic, just put your comment or message, I will surely try to help out in possible ways :)

Feedback are warmly welcome, weather positive or negative :)

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Posted in: ashseo,benefits of personal branding,blogger tips and tricks,Blogging as personal marketing tool,branding,digital marketing,Google knowledge graph,reputation building