On online reputation management

If you want to do well in online business, reputation management is a must. You can not ignore it unless you turn your eyes off the reality – people may search on google (or any other search engine) for your company name to see what people are really saying. And the process starts before they actually buy the product. Don’t you look for the reviews of a product before you swipe your credit card?

It is not just about a product or a company. The same may happen to individuals. These days, many companies do extensive profile search before they hire someone. How you are communicating with your friends or colleagues in Facebook or Orkut may be a decisive point in your hiring.

For a company it is often tough to monitor what people are saying about their company or product even though they understand the importance of business social networking. Some companies hire a digital marketing agency to take care of their digital profile – professionally (by the way, if you are looking for one – join Social Harbor).

Things may seem simple from outside. But managing a company profile where there are so many social networks and forums (where end users can tell whatever they want about your company or product), it is never so simple. Just do a Google search for your product name or company name and you will understand the situation.

Organic Geography based Online Promotion and Link Building

One of the biggest challenge organic marketers face when promoting a website in non-us market is getting links from relevant as well as country specific TLDs. There is no doubt that USA still holds the most amount of online properties.

What are the most important factors that you must consider while link building!

1. TLDs: If you are developing a website for UK market, the most preferable domain name is .co.uk as far as search engines are concerned. However, as far as users are concerned, the consciousness follows .com

2. Relevancy: If you are developing a site on Finance in UK, you should not work to get links from p0ker or p0rn  sites or to link out to them from your main domain. This is a BIG NO NO…

3. Hosting: if you are developing a site for UK, get your site hosted in UK server and also try to get as many links as possible from sites that are hosted in UK. However, there are many countries, who can buy more reliable hosting in USA compared to their own country at a much cheaper price.

4. keywords: This is a very interesting issue. Think about a situation, where you are getting a good link from a USA based website while you are developing the website for UK market! What would you do? In my opinion, add the word UK at the end or beginning of the keyword. for example if “search engine optimisation” is your preferred key phrase, try to get the link as search engine optimisation UK. This is undoubtedly a better option.

5. links from self hosted blogs or free blogs: This is a great dilemma. The biggest problem is most of the blogging platforms offer USA hosting. Thus a lot of webmasters think that, this will add no value. Another silly reason is that the self hosted blog owners are more serious. However, my experience says that, the % of self hosted blogs or websites fading out is much more than free blogs. I good link is a good link – does not matter if from self hosted blog or free blog.

 

Reliable Debt Settlement Companies

Many people understand that for very serious debt problems, debt settlement is often the best solution, but finding reliable debt settlement companies can be quite a problem if you are not sure where to start. The problem is that it is widely known that some debt settlement companies are less than ethical to say the least, and many people have heard of someone who has had a bad experience at the hands of such a company.

Debt settlement is a very effective way to deal with large amounts of debt, but a few organisations and individuals have set out to exploit the desperation of people facing serious debt. There are examples of people who have been asked to pay large up front fees by companies that then fail to deliver on their promise to eliminate their debts. Fortunately such experiences are easy to avoid if you take care to choose from known reputable debt settlement companies.

The best way to avoid making any mistakes over selecting a debt settlement company is to follow recommendations for a range of companies known to be well established and reliable, and then apply to about three different ones. This gives you a way to compare companies against each other and see which gives you the best offer and which you feel most comfortable working with.

In the UK there is no such thing as debt settlement because there is another scheme set up by the government which achieves the same result. A UK IVA, or Individual Voluntary Arrangement, is a formal agreement that allows you to make a contribution towards your debts for a fixed period, after which your remaining debts are written off.

Debt settlement is a process that is usually employed when other systems for tackling debt have either failed or are not appropriate. The most common way to tackle debt is through a debt management plan, known as debt consolidation, but for this to be suitable you need to have an income that leaves you enough money spare to make the monthly payments required by the plan. If your situation is so bad that you could not afford the payments on a debt management plan, that is when debt settlement may be the best option.

When you ask reliable debt settlement companies to solve your debt problems, an experienced negotiator will approach all your creditors and try to reach agreements with them all to settle your debts for an amount that is much less than the original debt. You can typically expect to get about 50-60% of your debt written off.

While the negotiation is going on, you do not pay any money to your creditors, but put a regular amount away each month into a new account instead. This money is saved up while the negotiation is taking place, and is used to make payments to the creditors when settlement amounts are finally agreed.

All debt companies need to charge for their services, but many reliable debt settlement companies will only charge you a proportion of what they manage to get written off your debt. With this type of agreement you therefore cannot end up worse off than you were before. Such promises are a sign of confidence by the company, so it tends to be the more effective and reliable debt settlement companies that will offer such deals.

Which antivirus do you use?

I am sure that at some point of time you had a pathetic situation with your antivirus. Either it would slow down your system or consume huge resources. In some cases, it is almost impossible to remove antivirus software (you know what I am talking about) completely. Once I had to format my system. I hate this like anything. Sometimes antivirus software seems like a necessary evil.

Recently, I had a pathetic situation with my antivirus software. I had been using the free version of well known antivirus software. And it slowed down my system like anything.

I have changed it again to Vipre – Trying the 30 day free trial version of this Antivirus Software. Things look promising and will upgrade to premium if I am happy. Did you use it… Any suggestion?

Think about a visiting card

Are you ready to meet your target market in person?

Great; but how do you introduce yourself? Do you put forward your card? Cool, this is perhaps the best way (traditional too). But have you really ever considered the fact if your visiting card reflects your personality or business?

We often forget to notice these minor details though we often say that the first impression is the most important part for a closed deal.

Some people are very good at that. They carry unique and attractive visiting cards to make a really big first impression.

Here are some of my favorites:

The best thing about these business cards is that they talk for themselves. And they undoubtedly offer a uniuqe perspective to your business.

But again, these cards are not ideal for any business. In some cases a regular business card will serve better than them.

At the same time, if you run a small business or a startup, you must also consider issues like cost per card. As you know, you cannot always get a direct return on investment from those cards.

And to some extent I will always prefer online printers over expansive store front printers. Why would you spend extra and that too as a small business owner when you can have it for less. Isn’t it?

And another important thing is, it is not enough to carry an unorthodox card. You must also live upto the promises made by the unorthodox card. Are you (and your business) ready?

Ten videos on Ideas, Inovation and Marketing

Peter Hirshberg: The Web and TV, a sibling rivalry

Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide?

Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas

Howard Rheingold: Way-new collaboration

William Kamkwamba on building a windmill

Jeff Bezos: After the gold rush, there’s innovation ahead

Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights

Saul Griffith shares some innovative ideas

Ross Lovegrove

Need a Pair of Glasses

pinhole-glasses

You know about pinhole cameras. Now, let me introduce you to pinhole eyeglasses.

If you are suffering from refractive eye disorders, this can be a good solution for you. “The lenses of pinhole glasses are perforated with an array of equally spaced mipinhole glasses

nute holes” and this restricts the light rays from different angles to enter your eyes. You only receive as much light as necessary to get the perfect and clear vision.

Ok, on bright or low lights what do you do to see something clearly? According to your natural instincts, you squint your eyes to see things more clearly. The pinhole glasses follow the same principle to send you the perfect vision.

But I was wondering why someone should wear pinhole glasses rather than the traditional glasses prescribed by the doctors! They have enough reasons to support this alternative: Pinhole Glasses: The Popular Alternative to Prescription Eyeglasses. And if you spend more than 14 hours each day in front of computer like me, you can try it out…

Pushing innovations

What is the best innovation of all time?

You might be thinking of so many things. I think the best invention in human race is the ‘turn off button for washing machine’. But the story is different – we need more turn on buttons to get innovations marked.

There are hundreds of great universities and institutions in this whole world and there are thousands of great scholars and students who work out there. I really mean they work out there rather than saying that they study out there.

But I feel pity when in many cases their innovations are not marked or brought to the market. Most of these great universities are great in making things but I must say, in most of the cases they are not god enough in marketing those products – they are not good at technology transfer services [What is technology transfer?]. At the same time, I would like to say that not ever researchers or developers are good at actual marketing of their product.

It is not their fault; they only need some support, rather a platform to jump. If universities provided some support to these worthy researchers, they could have spent their life in a better way rather than working in some companies to earn their bread. It is too easy for universities than the researchers to develop a platform. Why don’t they come forward?

It is not good enough to develop a good product, it is also important to market them and I must say that I am quite happy to see the website of Yissum – (they work on technology transfer), it is a research development company established by Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU) in 1964. And the best thing about Yissum is that it is an independent subsidiary of the HU.

And just take a look at their university technology transfer projects and their success stories. I was also very impressed to find out the way they supported the product developers.

The story should change faster for a better future of mankind.

Looking to open a Savings Account

I am looking forward to save some money for future (I am too poor at it) because I have no other options. I don’t want to spend my whole life working – there are so many other things to be done. Come on, we have just one life to live.

Its not that I want to retire early; but I want to be financially independent so that I can do whatever I wish (my GF says that I am a workaholic and I know that I cannot live idle) in my own way. I do not want to do a routine 10 to 7 job throughout my life and at the same time I do not want to get into some hardcore business.

I am earning enough to run a good life but if I do not start saving for the future, things will not be as I want. For some period I had been working with an online debt consolidation firm based in USA. I came to know so many things (being with a product based company helps) about saving that I never thought of earlier.

I was looking for some online solutions and opening a Savings Accounts online seemed to be the most important first step to start with. I don’t know, if I would be able to continue with it but there is no point at waiting for something outstanding to happen. WaMu seemed to be a good savings solution for USA, what do we have for India?

I must find out one soon. Any suggestion?

Did you Spock?

Do you sometimes Google to find a person, to know more about him or her, to find someone who can offer certain services? If your answer is yes, try using Spock.com – A Great Place for Search (people) (if you haven’t tried it already).

I just added my name out there along with my location and my company name. The most interesting thing is that, I cannot simply write anything about me (chances of self PR goes down); in fact the “about me” section would be written by others, my friends or colleagues – those who actually know me. Cool huh? That’s not all, people can vote to say if the information I am providing out there (location, company) is right or wrong.

I just felt good about the site at the very first glance. They did not try to make things complicated unnecessarily.

And that’s not all; you can use natural tags to search for people associated with it. For example, I tried to search for SEO and it showed me some people who are somewhat associated with this Tag. Now if you use Google to search for SEO, what do you see?

The difference is very obvious – Spok.com is typically a people search engine where the primary emphasis is on people associated with those key phrases; and we can not expect similar result from Google as the key phrase (SEO) is too generic to offer any human being. So what would you use next time when you would be searching for someone?

Will people start optimizing for Spock too? No problem; to optimize someone for Spock, you would need a good network and a worthy network is possible only when you provide good service or a talk-able product.

And I must say, Spock.com – a Great Place for Search. And I say it without any bias.