I was recently having a conversation with a gentleman in some professional context and while on phone with me, he happened to browse over to my blog and his first reaction was, “all I see is a collection of tweets from Adtech” and from his tone I could make out very clearly he wasn’t impressed at all – in fact it took away his appetite to dig deeper into the blog and explore the really good and useful posts I have done before.

I told him about some of the better posts I did and also guided him to use the search function to find them and his response was “you should have some way to feature the good work, not everyone is going to search”  – “you need to improve your navigation” (probably he overlooked the topic specific navigation provided just below the main nav bar.

What I Learned From This

1. Don’t Make a Blog Post Unless You Are Really Sure of it : Yes, a single non sense post can ruin your reputation. So try to avoid temptations to make easy but useless posts.
2. Cover it up : If at all you are posting any nonsense on your blog for whatever reason, make sure you follow it up with few good posts quickly enough, so they push the bad ones off your blog home page
3. Your Reader Might Not See, What You Can See : The top navigation by category is pretty visible to me, but it seems this reader completely overlooked it. Probably because of the overpowering main navigation on top of it. I have actually made it bold after our conversation.
4. Your Best Posts Demand More Real Estate on Your Home Page : I actually replaced the “Most Commented Posts” ( which was showing some very old posts) Section with “Must Read Posts” section
5. It is a good idea not to display the full posts on your home page but to show only a part of it as it allows the visitors to see more posts o your home page with relatively less scrolling.

While most of the above are generic best practices and are not really new to me, my negligent approach towards the blog was the main reason for such giant loopholes. Thanks to the gentleman and our discussion the other day, I got the motivation to fix at least some of these issues and oh yes, a new post in this one narrating the incident.

The post How a Single Useless Blog Post Can Ruin Your Reputation appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Accept it! No matter how unique your unique selling proposition is, there is always someone who is ready to outsmart, outwit and outrank you. And the way you deal with competition determines how your business stands in the long run. Below are few techniques which when used in a particular way can help you crush your competition, bite a huge chunk of your competitor’s market share and get a kick ass start to your online venture.

Brandjacking

Brandjacking is a technique used to capture people already acquainted with your competitor’s brand.

Technique
If your competitor hasn’t acquired their brand name on all social profiles, it’s time for you to grab your competitor’s un-acquired Twitter, FaceBook and YouTube accounts and build a following. Use namechk to find out your competitor’s unattended social profiles.

How about grabbing your competitor’s “competitor name + customer service” twitter handle and start building a following. You can use this twitter profile to harm your competitor later.

Example
Capture humorous domain names and social profiles of your competitors and build a hate community.
Example: googlesucks.com http://www.truthaboutsixpackabsscam.com/

Caution
Do this with anonymity and extreme caution else you could land up in to legal issues.

Cybersquatting/Typosquatting

Cyber/domain squatting is registering a domain name with bad faith in order to own the trademark of an established brand or product. For example Rediff.net is not owned by Rediff.com. The owner of Rediff.net could be a potential termed as a cyber squatter. I see a plethora of such opportunities still open in the Indian ecommerce space.

Getting your competitor’s domain can help

Over 27000 people mistake Indian ecommerce giant Myntra.com as MYANTRA.COM. But the domain name with the typo is not owned by the company! Instead it is owned by an Indian living in Singapore. Just imagine the bad experience and the negative impression users would have on Myntra when one visits Myantra.com. This is surprising for a company, which burns more than 5 crores of online marketing budget per month.

Same holds true with fashionnyou.com. My Baby Cart Pvt Ltd doesn’t own mybabycart.net I own it.

There is always a low hanging fruit when it comes to domains. Acquire it wisely and you can smartly get a small but valuable chunk of sales from your competitor.

Redirects

Pay a visit to stanfordrejects.com and the site redirects to http://www.berkeley.edu/. Berkeley is smart enough to capture a targeted keyword which captures its competitor’s market. With a keyword rich domain redirect Berkely.edu has also captured some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) value. Capture popular domains (good links and traffic) associated with your competitor brand and redirect it to yours.

Exact match Keyword Rich Micro Niche Domain sites

Domains with keywords have a high ranking value in Google (Even after EMD update). It is easier to rank an exact match domain name in Google/Yahoo/Bing than a bland branded domain without any keywords in root domain.

For instance –

It is easier for you to rank for keyword “Online Shopping in India” if you own domains like onlineshoppinginindia.com or onlineshoppinginindia.in instead of some branded domain name (abc.com).

Pick the most popular/searched product names (Use Adwords Tool) which you and your competitor own. Buy domains whose keyword phrase has high number of searches in Google and launch informative mini sites. Rank these sites high in Google and eat chunk of your competitor’s most popular product sales.

Snoop into your competitors SEO and Adwords Strategy

Yes, there are tools like SEMRush and Spyfu that can tell you everything about your competitior’s search marketing strategy.You can sneak into find what keywords are your competitors using ? what are their hidden landing pages or which ads are working better for them? Where are there links coming from ? and much more. Use the right tools and you can beat them at their own game.

Black Hat Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing a site for the user in a way which will drive organic traffic from search engines like Google/Yahoo/Bing.

Black Hat SEO is a tactic which uses tactics which are otherwise considered spam, manipulative and against Google’s guidelines and also often times labeled as non-user friendly. Black Hat SEO tactics are employed to game the search engines in order to achieve high rankings. If you are an Internet marketer you may shrug this idea off saying Black Hat SEO in 2012? No way…

But the truth is that it still works but only for a limited time. Black hat SEO has got a whey protein retailer to #2 for keyword “best whey protein” and #12 for keyword “Car Insurance Quotes”. This technique will help you capture a large/small share off your competitor’s share depending on the time before Google axes your site.

Caution while using this technique

1. Never use black hat SEO on a branded domain.
2. Use this technique on a throw away domain whose domain owner and server is different from where your other domains are hosted.
3. Hire an expert to get the job done.

Drive huge traffic to bad reviews of your competitors

Driving traffic to your competitors pit falls and their lack of attention to customers can make people shift to an alternative (that will be you). There are many people who are ranting about how pathetic a particular company’s sales person is or how bad is their customer service department. Check how people feel about your competitor and their products. A simple search in Google for “competitor name + reviews” or “product name + reviews” will r

eveal where your competitor is failing. Drive traffic to customer rants and engage (not link dropping) in the community actively. The objective here is not to capture your competitor’s traffic but it is to understand where your competitor lacks and how you can close that gap with your offering of service or product.

Negative Customer Reviews

Expose your competitor paid links/spam SEO to Google

When it comes to SEO, link building is dead. Google is now devaluing and often penalizing sites which buy links and acquire links from spammy link networks. You can report a site to Google Webmaster spam team if you find

1. Your competitors have back links from spam sites?
2. Sites have back links with over optimized anchor texts?
3. Sites have content stuffed with keywords?

Report Spam links through Google Webmaster Tools

Bidding on Competitor Brand Terms and Products

Bidding on competitor’s brand name is one key strategy which business has been using since a long time. Using Google Adwords one can bid on competitor’s keyword. People do search for brand names in Google and making your Ad appear for such names in Google will help you capture attention and a small yet targeted traffic.
Change your Ad copy and text according to your competitor’s name and keyword in order to get optimum results.

Advertising on competitor’s brand terms

Run FaceBook Ads on Competitor’s fans

One great thing I like about FaceBook Ad targeting is its ability to target Ads to a page’s fans. For instance if you are a Facebook Ad manager for “Pepsi” then I can target Ads to fans of “Coke”. FaceBook Ad campaigns targeted at competitors have higher clicks and conversions.

Pay your affiliates unreasonably high

Affiliate marketing is one of most reliable way of generating leads and sales. In affiliate marketing the sale on your site is generated through a special affiliate link which is promoted by an affiliate (blogger/marketer). When an action (sale or sign up) is committed by a user through that link the affiliate gains a commission. An advertiser needs to pay an affiliate only when an action is performed. Paying your affiliates unreasonably high will help you get tons of free traffic, links and branding. It also keeps the top affiliates in your industry busy promoting your products than your competitor. Bigcommerce is one good product based company which pays its affiliates more than 3 times of what its competitors pay its affiliates. This has helped Bigcommerce get maximum number of positive reviews, mentions and signups than any other player in the ecommerce hosting space. Paying affiliates very high makes it easy to get tons of leads, sales and free product reviews from top Internet marketers and affiliates.

Hack customer email ids

One can get their competitor’s customer email IDs by leveraging various customer touch points. For example a customer of FlipKart is likely to search for “Flipkart coupons” / “Flipkart discount coupons” etc in Google. It is during this time you can capture the email addresses of your competitor prospects by running a simple PPC Ad on a simple landing page hosted on different domain name. The same can be done with FaceBook Ads targeted at competitor’s fans. Once you get these email IDs you can promote your products to this list repeatedly with a marketing message which can out smart your competition.

Content Marketing

According to Insideview’s research B2B companies with blogs generate 67% more leads per month on average than non-blogging firms. Yet many online businesses fail to recognize the immense potential of content marketing. Content marketing is a proven way to establish thought leadership, humanize a brand, help your current and prospective customers. Publishing expert level industry/product specific content in the form of presentations, webinars, video tutorials, how to’s, case studies and blog posts will establish your brand as a leader in your niche. People are more inclined to buy a product from a brand they already know and content is one primary touch point which a brand can have with its users.

Content Marketing

Multiple Link Citations

There should be quite a few places on the web where your competitor’s website or contact was listed but your website was not mentioned. You can dig out lists posts in your industry using smart search queries. Suppose your business niche is iphone app development then you can use queries like “iphone developers directory”, “top iphone development companies”, “best iphone developers” in Google. This way one can know what link opportunities are being missed out. Drop a mail to the webmaster or author of the post and request your inclusion.

Eliminate your competitor with constructive comparison

When it comes to B2B products or services, positioning your brand against your competitor as a better problem solver is key. One good way is to create comparative

Competitor Comparison

content which lists all key features of your product or service against your competition. Check how Volusion eliminates BigCommerce with an intuitive chart listing out various features it has and Bigcommerce doesn’t.

Which are the strategies you employ to win over your competition? Please shout it out in the comments section below.

This is a guest post contributed by  Kothapally Arun. Arun is an independent online marketer and a blogger at Ecommerce Yogi .

The post A Dirty Guide to Crush Your Online Competition Silently appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

With the way technology has been evolving and more and more new data sources and marketing channels opening up Internet marketing is going to become a much more interesting mix than it was even a year back. While some of these are very apparent some would still leave many of us speculating, whether or not this is going to happen. Let’s take a look at the following points:

1. Location Based Marketing: Yup!! We have seen Foursquare, Google Places, Tags, Boost, Facebook Places, Gowalla and innumerable more and this definitely going to grow. With increasing number of people using internet from mobile devices, people would get more comfortable checking into places, merchants would work actively in tapping into this audience by offering coupons, discounts and local offers. I would expect search engines would probably also tap into this data and use this for improving their local search results and location based web search results.
2. Search & Social – Search is likely to get more and more dependent on social, in other words, search engine algorithms would factor in social media metrics in much more details and these would become crucial functions for your search rankings. You can read my other detailed article on how Social Media is going to affect Search in 2011.
3. Videos : Videos are going to be one of the most important marketing tools on the web in 2011. We have seen how brands have been increasingly using videos effectively and this is going to get all the more intense. Besides typical video syndication, I would predict live streaming on the web become more frequent and more and more businesses would be using this for effectively reaching out to their target audience. Besides, YouTube, it would be wise to keep our eyes on sites like Daily Motion, Viddler, Vimeo and UStream. Adoption of Universal search has already made videos an easy way to hit the first page of search results for competitive terms and with more brand conscious marketing strategies and the inherent viral nature of videos would make them all the more important in this socially focused web.
4. Social Commerce: This has also taken off already and is going to get bigger by days! The same reason why word of mouth marketing is immensely powerful, social recommendations are going to be big time influencers in purchase decisions.
   Merchants have always set up shop where people are and in 2011 what better place to set up your shop than the social platforms like Facebook ? Facebook already has a full-fledged ecommerce integration option and it would not be surprising to find other social platforms offering similar facilities and even simpler point and click setup for ecommerce stores within social platforms. The ease of setting up such social ecommerce stores would be a big determinant of the growth of social commerce in 2011.
5. More Than Your Website: If we look back a few years, we would remember where businesses were just dying to have a website, anyone who had a website had a clear advantage over the ones who didn’t it. Now in 2011, that almost all businesses have a website, what would make the difference? The differentiator would be whether the businesses are present where their customers are, namely, social platforms. It would be equally important for businesses to establish their presence in Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn FourSquare and similar social platforms – having a website is just not enough anymore.
6. Reputation Management : The wave of reputation management would continue to get bigger. Even smaller businesses would get extremely brand conscious and work actively towards reputation management. This is also likely to give rise to a lot of new businesses who would start offering/ claim specialization in reputation management. From a SEO’s perspective, educated customers are likely to get demanding in ensuring that SEOs are careful about what they do to achieve ranking, so as not to affect the reputation of the brand in any way during the process.
7. Mobile & Smartphones: Most companies would start considering a mobile strategy very soon. A huge number of users are already accessing internet on their mobile devices – the smart phones and tablets are getting increasingly powerful. Businesses would leave no stones unturned to tap into this audience and mobile apps and advertisement would be the two most effective and popular channels adopted by businesses. The war for establishing your apps in the crowded appstores have already started and it is going to get fierce in 2011. There would be a lot more independent agencies and mobile strategy companies that would start offering app marketing as a stand-alone service.

There are definitely more surprises waiting for us in 2011 and one year down the line if we try to do a review of this year has delivered this list would probably get much longer. Feel free to share your thoughts on these predictions and also what are the other possibilities you think 2011 holds for us.

The post 7 Points Internet Marketers Should Consider in 2011 appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

With the increasing number of name searches / ego searches being on, Google sure does receive a lot of requests every day to remove negative content about people and businesses from there index; so they have now tried to address the issue with this article at Managing Your Reputation Through Search Results .

The bottom line for the entire post summarizes to three basic point

a) Be careful about what personal information you put online

b) If a negative content is published somewhere , try to remove it from the source rather than requesting Google to remove it

c) Create positive content about your self on the net to push down negative content in the search results

While point (a) is more of a common sense thing that most savvy net users do have today, point (b) in most cases might be difficult / not applicable. So the only option that you will be left with is point (c) – that is to create positive content about yourself proactively that pushes down any negative information that Google might have for you.

Check out this specific Reputation management tips that tells you the different ways and places where you can create content about yourself to maintain a stellar reputation in the Google search results.

The post Google Recommends Reputation Management appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

Today most of us, whenever we get into anything new or meet someone interesting we would often Google it to find more about the person or the business. What if you see..

1. You are not able to find much information about the person on web
2. Google throws up a list of results including some blogs / review website / other social media pages where someone has talked trash about the company or the person.

In first case it would make your job extremely difficult to find more information about the business or person. Also you will probably give a second thought about doing any business with him given the fact that today most reputable businesses have their online presence.

In the second case you will probably never again think of doing any business with that company or individual in your life.

Truth or otherwise, every business would have some negative thinkers about them but it becomes a real problem when this negative views starts to surface in a Google search for your name. Companies realizing this have been spending tons for reputation management but here we will discuss a few easy and effective ways in which you can saturate search results for your name and do a good job at online search reputation management.

1. Make sure your official website is optimized for your brand name. You would typically like this to be the first result when someone searches for your name
2. If you have a blog – that’s great! Again focus on your brand, and make sure it shows up above the scroll for a brand name search. If your blog is your main website like in my case, make sure it is the first result people see when they search for your name.
3. Twitter – The entire world is going ga-ga over Twitter how can you stay away ? Join the bandwagon, make sure your Twitter profile has your Company name, also from branding perspective it is advisable to have your company name as your Twitter ID. Participate regularly and you will see your Twitter profile shows up for your brand name search ( Twitter has optimized its structure and Title for that – you don’t need to do the hardwork , just participate)
   If you have a really long name like me ( @rishi3211us ), Twitter might truncate it, however, if you can push a few links here and there you will still get it ranked for your name.
4. FaceBook – Another extremely powerful social media platform. The same principle applies as in Twitter, participate more – Google and Facebook would take care of the rest. One thing that you would need to do is go to Settings > Privacy > Search and check the box that says “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing”.Take advantage of Facebook’s vanity URL policy and get a nice URL like http://www.facebook.com/Saptarshi.Roy.Chaudhury
5. Linkedin – A great place to be and definitely a great help if you are planning to display a clean picture of yours in Google. Create a complete profile with all necessary details. Remember it’s a professional networking website, so make sure what you write on your profile and the way you network depicts a professional image about yourself and your company. You just need to create the profile and be active in the network Google would do the rest.
6. YouTube – How about displaying a video commercial about your company in Google first page? Yes you can do that easily these days. With most major search engines adopting Universal Search model and given Google’s preference for YouTube, upload a nice infomercial about your company and put your company name in Video Title and description. Most likely the video would show up for a search on the company name.
7. Press Releases – Send out a few press releases to online PR networks. Make sure you include your company name in Title and the same is sprinkled across the content generously. Once it gets picked up by some good news website, it is likely to get displayed on the first page.
8. If you are an industry expert make a few guest post in some of the authority blogs in your industry. Don’t forget to mention your company name and these are also likely to show up in Google results.
9. Also once you can establish your status as an industry expert and if you are doing at least some bit of networking, you might be getting some offers from other bloggers who might like to interview you. These are golden opportunities to increase your reputation and authoritative value and also when they show up in search results it adds a lot to your credibility.
10. While the above 8 options are pretty helpful you can also get good help from some other websites like Flickr, Plaxo, Naymz, Pipl ( people search). Create a profiles, put in some good info, participate in the community and most likely your profile would hit the first page in Google.

While all the above points can be effective in saturating your search results and helping you to keep away any negative publicity about yourself – one of the key things that you need to keep in mind is what goes on the Internet stays there forever. So be extremely careful about what you post on your profiles or anywhere else about yourself. While it might look fun to post a lucid comment about one of your ex-colleagues, mind it that your present colleagues might not appreciate your thoughts once they find it.It is extremely important to ensure that anything published on the Internet about yourself or that relates to you is something that you really want the world to know.

While I have received a few such requests before and ran a few campaigns successfully, this days there are also niche companies that specializes in this type of online reputation management services. Recently I had a quick chat with Kaurik Raj from http://www.weboostu.com/ whose key offering is Internet reputation management. As Kaurik pointed out, the easiest way to maintain your internet reputation is to create positive content and effectively use them to bury any negative content.

With increasing power of content creation with the people, I am sure negative reputation / reviews would be a part of life for every brand very soon and that would actually create an increasing demand for online reputation management professionals or companies like Weboostu.

The post 10 Ways for Online Search Reputation Management appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

While links are probably one of the best value addition that a website can get through online press release distribution here are few other ways in which a Press release can help.

• Rankings in SERP : A properly optimized press release can actually rank in Google and other search engines for related keywords, reaching a good number of your target audience and resulting in tons of referral traffic that actually converts

• Reputation Management: Businesses are becoming increasingly conscious about their online reputation management particularly in search results. If a search for your brand names show any unfavorable result a few well optimized press releases can do wonders in pushing them off the Google first page

• Additional Credibility for Brand and Product: Many customers would do some online research about the company and product before making purchase. Information about your product holds more credibility when they are passed through press release than through traditional advertisement.

• Additional Reach: Your press release, if well optimized and properly distributed can easily end up on popular news sources like Google News, Yahoo News, Topix etc and draw substantial traffic from such websites if you really have something newsworthy to communicate.

It is true that we can have all these advantages from press releases but for this to happen it is also important that we know how to optimize our press release. The way a PR is distributed also plays a key role in the process. For more on this check out How to Optimize Press Release for Search Engines .

The post Press Releases Can Get Lot More than Links appeared first on Adwords Consultant India : DigitalSRC.

I think I am a bit late on this post ( am a real lazy a** these days) because the rush is full on and if you have not secured your personalized Facebook URL, log on to your Facebook account right away and you will see a notification of the vanity URL on top of your profile page. Just follow the instructions and you should be done in a jiffy.

My relatively long Indian name helped me get some competitive advantage as I guess there are not many Facebookers by my name and now I am at http://www.facebook.com/saptarshi.roy.chaudhury .If you have not yet grabbed your its high time you get one.

However, as per Facebook blog for recent Facebook users who have signed up for an account after May 31st this feature would not be available for now. This has been set up to prevent name squatting on Facebook and I think its a very wise decision that the Facebook guys have taken.

If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a user name immediately because of steps we’ve taken to prevent abuse or “squatting” on names.

Now with this personalized Facebook URL, it would probably be a better tool to use for online search reputation management, and would probably be much more effective if Facebook allows for a little more information on profile pages for users without log ins ( Google bot don’t have a Facebook ID )

Related Posts:
Facebook Song with Lyrics
Facebook Sacrifices Burger King Application

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