Archive for July, 2009
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Most parents are aware that the internet presents new hazards to kids. Here are few tips for parents to make internet safe place for their kids.
Keep computer out of your child’s bedroom - Keep the computer in a common room or any other well used area of the house, where you can easily monitor your child’s activity on consistent basis.
Set boundaries - On most of the sites, children under the age of 14 are not allowed to register. Make this the non-negotiable point.
Set limitation - Limit your child’s Internet usage. Tell them when they can go online, for how much time and what they can do online.
Talk to your kids about Internet safety - Talk to your kids about Internet safety and explain them why you are concerned. Make sure they understand that you will be watching their activities and tell them to follow these instructions
- Do not give personal information like last name, phone number, address etc. to strangers Do not post videos or pictures that could be used to identify you
- Do not meet in person anyone you have met only online
- If anything makes them uncomfortable, they should come and talk to you about it
Create your own profile on same sites as your child’s: Create your own profile on same social networking sites (eg - MySpace, Facebook etc.) as your child’s and add them as friends. On regular basis, check your child’s profile page and see what pictures they have posted and read some of the posts to see what others are saying.
Make sure your child’s profile page is set to private: You can set the profile page either to public or to private. Make sure your child’s profile page is set to private, as private pages can be viewed only by the people the user invites personally whereas public pages can be viewed by anyone.
Ensure that your child keeps all private information off their profile page: Your child’s profile page should not contain information like phone number, home address etc. Also make sure that they do not accept request from strangers.
Know your child’s passwords to all email accounts: Make sure your child keeps a list of password available to you, so that you can monitor & keep track of their online activities.
Monitor child’s search engine activity: Periodically check the history of your computer to view your child’s activities online.
Use parental controls: Parental controls can be set to send all emails going to your child’s account through your account first, enabling you to screen everything your child sees. You can also limit emails according to several criteria, for example, emails with offensive words or which require personal information can be blocked. You can even set it, to receive emails only from the approved addresses.
Install content filtering software: Content filtering software will not allow your child to access inappropriate sites. Most content filtering software has the ability to filter via keywords, like adult, drugs, weapons etc. It will also send you a report with list of sites which user tried to access and was denied.
Posted in General | No Comments »
Friday, July 31st, 2009
Email-Marketing, is a form of direct marketing which uses your mail system to send commercial messages to your customers.
Email-Marketing is popularly used by many companies to:
- Distribute information to a wider range of targeted customers at a low cost
- It is inexpensive
- Delivery Time for any email message is short
- Easily trackable via unsubscription requests,read receipts, click-through etc.
- High Reach for the subscribers who wish to receive the content based on their interests
- Allows to build royalty and acquire new customers
- Higher profits
How to increase your sales via Email-Marketing
Build a relevant mailing list: This is necessary because you must know who would be interested in buying your product. Build a list for your targeted audience because they are the ones who can be converted into your customers.
Appropriate subject-line: One of the important rule to follow is to choose a good subject line. The subject will give the first impression related to your product. Do not make the email-reader feel that it is a same “spam” mail.
Email:Less : Send less number of mails to people as they would not be interested to learn about your new product again and again. Lower the mail delivery and increase the content for that particular mail.
Disadvantages of Email-Marketing:
- Companies send bulk of unsolicited messages, also referred to as “spam” (To prevent this from happening, the subject line and content of your emails should not imply that they are spam. Avoid using words like “Free”, “Discounts”, “Coupon”, etc.)
- Difficulty in sending a mail on different ISPs and firewalls
- Strenuous to keep an email-recipients them engaged via emails
Posted in SMM, General | 2 Comments »
Monday, July 20th, 2009
Twitter is popular with corporations worldwide. Companies are using Twitter to get the word out about their new product(s), blog post etc. Twitter stats says, it gets 60% of web traffic from outside United States.
What is Twitter?
Twitter is micro-blogging platform and social network rolled into one. It allows user to post up to 140 characters long message. In this post, I am going to talk about few brands using Twitter and what they are doing on Twitter.
Dell: Dell has created number of twitter profiles. Dell Outlet (one of Dell profiles) has used Twitter to broadcast sales items and great deals on their products at their online store. One of the Dell tweet stated that they had been able to sell $1 million worth of products using Twitter.
Comcast: Comcast is one of the world’s leading communications company. Comcast uses twitter to provide customer service to their consumers. If you have some complaint, just drop a line to them and surely you will hear from them.
Zappos: Zappos an online store is very active in Twitter. They use twitter to interact with consumers - tell them about the company, listen to their customers, highlight the interesting facts about company etc. Zappos exceptional customer service make them trustworthy with the consumers.
Starbucks: Starbucks keep updating their twitter profile with new offers. And actively participate in threaded discussion related to their offers.
Twitter for recruiting
Some companies are using twitter for recruiting -
| Companies |
Twitter profile |
Country (Headquarters) |
| Wipro |
@WiproCareers |
India |
| Ernst & Young |
@Ernst_and_Young |
US |
| Thomson Reuters |
@TRCareers |
US |
| Accenture |
@Accenture_jobs |
US |
| PepsiCo |
@PepsiCo_UKjobs |
Its clear, Twitter is hot favorite with big brands and marketers. Be part of it and tell the world - What are you doing?
Happy Tweettering!
Posted in SMM | 1 Comment »
Friday, July 17th, 2009
- The web site should load quickly and be easy to scan. These are the essential prerequisites of web designing.
- Pay attention to your homepage. That is what the viewers will first see. The home page should be attractive and provide useful information. If it doesn’t satisfy the mentioned criteria then the readers will move on.
- Logo should be linked with homepage both in front-end and in admin.
- Alert messages should be in red color.
- Help message should be in black or light gray color.
- Within the site, minimum use of icons and maximum use of textual links.
- Avoid Pop-Up in the coding, always open in new window or in new tab or use Ajax functionality. Most of user blocked Pop-up messages in the browser. like in Firefox, IE7.
- All files naming convention should be relevant and consistent. Like as an eg. about-us.htm, product-details.htm
- Call for action should present on every page. It reduces the frequency of exit from the site.
- The site should be W3C certified (http://validator.w3.org/). Validating web pages is an important step, which helps in improving and ensuring the quality of website. The validated web pages are also load fast and quickly indexed by search engines.
- Breadcrumb should be present in inner pages of both front-end and admin site. It is easy to navigate the inter-related interfaces.
- Date format & phone number format should be according to the country.
Example:
Date Format USA: MM/DD/YYYY
Date Format UK : YYYY/MM/DD
Phone number USA: 111-111-1111
- Tabs or links should be highlighted on visiting page.
- Mouse over effect should be there on the buttons. It enhances the look of the site from design perspective.
- Place “Top” icons or links in bottom of the long content pages to go on top of the page in one click. It saves time in scrolling the page.
- Effectively use the page real estate.
- Use Ajax for increasing the interactivity on the site.
- Organize and divide the primary and secondary links and place in correct position, so that visitors will follow right and correct path.
- Avoid broken links. Make sure that they do not occur on your website. Concentrate on the link architecture.
- Don’t repeat your titles and page headings. Page headings are instrumental in focusing viewer’s attention. Using the same headings will make them think that the information being provided is the same. This will decrease viewer retention.
- You should make sure that the content and the page headings are grammatically correct. Incorrect grammar and syntax will reflect badly on the web site.
- User Interface works consistently. Put your buttons in consistent places on all your windows, use the same wording in labels and messages, and use a consistent color scheme throughout. Consistency in your user interface enables your users to build an accurate mental model of the way it works, and accurate mental models lead to lower training and support costs.
- In Admin Area, near the site logo one link should be present i.e. “Preview Site”.
Admin can check the updations by one click only.
- For delete option use trash icon.
To Activate, Deactivate, Delete huge number of items place checkboxes and select all option.
- All the related interfaces should be inter-linked.
Posted in Web Usability | No Comments »
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
As a kid most of us maintained a personal diary which would contain our thoughts,experience,views related to any particular stuff. Similar is the role of a “BLOG”.A blog refers to a website where you can write any stuff of your taste. Blogs can be either personal or general. These days various companies are leveraging blogs to get traffic to their site. So, the main question that arises is: How can a blog be promoted …
The answer is simple if we follow some sincere steps.
Firstly if you wish the online users to spend some time on your blog,then stop compromising with your content. Build a very useful and informative content for your blog so that people wish to learn from your blog post.
Secondly update your content on the blog. The interested users would be coming to your site looking for more information. Unmodified content would make them deviate to different sites. So,always update your content..
Thirdly site examples from your previous experiences in your blog so that it looks genuine to the reader.
Lastly,commenting on different yet related posts also helps boost traffic to your blog. Search out for similar topic discussions and comment on them and post a link back to your website. This will allow blog author of the particular blog to come back to your blog ,in turn heighten,the traffic to your blog.
Posted in SMM | No Comments »
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
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Website Accessibility is an important idea behind many Web standards, especially HTML.
This does not only mean allowing the web to be used by people with disabilities, but also allowing Web pages to be understood by people using browsers other than the usual ones - including screen readers/voice browsers that read Web pages aloud to people with sight impairments, Braille browsers that translate text into Braille, hand-held browsers with very little monitor space, teletext displays, and other unusual output devices like people surfing the web using mobile phones and PDA’s, People using old browsers or old computers, those using slow internet connections, or those who don’t speak or understand English fluently etc.
Different web browsers were developed to understand different sets of rules. This meant a site would work on one browser and not another, causing huge accessibility issues. These days, browser manufactures have started settling on a standard set of rules (called web standards). One of the most basic steps of making a site accessible is to create a site using these rules. By using these web standards you can help ensure your site is accessible by the widest range of browsers available.
The underlined statement is, making your website accessible to as many people as possible which is just sound business sense. Building in accessibility on a new site may cost a wee bit more of the overall budget and time, but the rewards both in terms of PR and ROI can be overwhelming. 
Therefore, consistent use of Web Standards makes the www approachable with files being accessable and read by anyone, regardless of device they are using to access the Internet.
So, ideally a website that has been created using the Standards would be:Usable and up to date
- Less bandwidth intense
- Future-proof!!
- Flexible/ easy to edit
- Easier to maintain
- Fast to Develop/ Fast Download
- Compatible with new browser versions
- Accessible
- Various platforms compativle
Miscellaneous Points to keep in mind:
use the correct doctype
validate your code:
Web Standard Compliant code gives you the opportunity of validating your page with a validation service. Validators process your documents and present you with a list of errors. This makes finding and correcting errors a lot easier, and can save you a lot of time.Compliant documents can easily be converted to other formats, such as databases or Word documents. This allows for more versatile use of the information within documents on the WWW, and simplified migration to new systems - hardware as well as software - including devices such as Cell phones, T.v’s and PDAs.
move presentation tags into CSS
(The ultimate aim for a website is to separate presentation (colours, fonts, layout, positioning) from content. This is achieved using CSS.
Stability:
Most web standards are generally designed with forward- and backward-compatibility in mind - so that data using old versions of the standards will continue to work in latest browsers, and data using new versions of the standards will “gracefully degrade” to produce an acceptable result in older browsers.
Web standards offer a set of rules that every Web developer can follow, understand, and become familiar with: When one developer designs a site to the standards, another will be able to pick up where the former left off. This saves a lot of time and maintains a smooth and systematic workflow.
3 main aspects that a user is affected by:
Legal Issues
being passionate about delivering Quality.
Some advantages of following the rules:
You look professional
If your site is Web Standard Compatible, you certainly have an edge over your competition as Clients and visitors will be able to look at your work and know that you are a company who likes to keep up with technological updations and also that your knowledge base and skillsets are always current. It will help you to look truly Professional.
Clients make a better impression to their target audience
By using web standards and creating highly accessable websites, you help your clients cater to a wider range of people, where everybody can use their services or easily find information about their products. You will also avoid the bad publicity that can be caused by shutting out visitors like disabled people, Mac users, and mobile phone users. (a latest eg. in the news being that of target.com)
Increased potential traffic
Proper use of web standards ensures that your site works with the largest possible number of browsing devices such as Cell phones, T.v’s and PDAs etc.
Quick Download Time & less Bandwidth Intense
Web Standards properly used helps to separate structure and content from design and presentation which makes it more compact. File sizes are reduced as a result visitors can download them faster. This inturn will reduce costs and enhance web experience!
The Accessibility Feature
Your site will be accessible to all people regardless of device they are using to access the Internet and also those with disabilities. Ensuring valid, streamlined, and semantic documents help create an accessible website.
SEO
Rich content delivered through neat, well-structured, and semantic markup is SEO friendly and will increase your SE rankings. Results in increased traffic from potential users!
Easy to maintain
The valuable use of CSS to control site layout makes it much easier to make design changes thru out the website. The Content should be easlily be able to separate fromt he pictures/images and graphical parts of the site. This is useful for instance when u need to view info on a mobile set.
Makes your content Future Proof!
if you separate content from design presentation and use current web standards, the content can still be read even after long time periods and can also be easily edited by any new person working on the project at a later date. Cross browser compatible if all browser also follow stds.
Sound Business Sense
“Creating Standard Compliant websites” can be used as a vital selling point to your potential clients. Afterall who doesnt want Increased Traffic, a faster website, increased SEO rankings, valued good publicity etc.?!!
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Posted in Web Usability | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
An index is a database structure designed to facilitate faster data retrieval Indexes provide a way for SQL Server to organize pointers to the data required An index in a database works the same way as an index in a reference book.
Why Index?
Speed
Without index SQL Server must perform a table scan or read every row in a table
Speed up query joins between tables
Indexing Architecture
SQL Server indexes are stored as B-Tree (Balanced Tree) structures
There are three levels of a B-Tree:
Root Level
Leaf Level
Intermediate Level
A B-Tree structure is built for every index defined in SQL Server
Types of Indexing
There are two types of SQL Server indexes
Clustered
Non-Clustered
Both are built upon B-Tree structures
Clustered Index
The data is physically stored in the sorted order
The leaf pages are the actual data
Only one clustered index is allowed per table
Generally offers better performance than non-clustered index
Non-Clustered Index
Non-clustered indexes create a logical order and therefore, the leaf page merely points to the actual data Create up to 249 Non-clustered indexes per table. Non-clustered index are larger than clustered indexes because of the extra level of leaf pages
Index Creation
CREATE [ UNIQUE ] [ CLUSTERED | NONCLUSTERED ] INDEX index_name
ON { table | view } ( column [ ASC | DESC ] [ ,…n ] )
Indexes can be created at the same time table is created or at a later time
Create clustered first before adding non-clustered indexes.
When to use Clustered vs. Non-Clustered index
Clustered
Columns that are used in range queries
Columns used in ORDER BY or GROUP BY queries
Queries returning large result sets
Static look up tables with large data set
Non-Clustered
Columns used in aggregate functions
Foreign Keys
Queries returning small result sets
Primary keys that are sequential ID keys, such as identity columns
What NOT to index
Tables with a small number of rows
Might be more efficient to do table scan
Columns with small range of values
For example: (yes/no, 0/1, 1,2,3)
Tables with heavy transaction (insert,update,delete) activity but very few select queries run against it
Tables with indexes slow down data modifications
Columns not used in queries
If the column(s) are defined as TEXT, NTEXT, or IMAGE data types
Additional Tips
Try to create indexes on columns that have integer values
Integer values have less overhead than character values
When creating indexes, try to make them unique indexes
Columns used in joins should have an appropriate index
Don’t accidentally add the same index twice on a table
Don’t over index your OLTP tables
Remove unused indexes.
Re-indexing
Periodically (weekly or monthly) perform a database reorganization on all the indexes on all the tables in your database
Frequency depends on transaction activity in database
This will rebuild the indexes so that the data is no longer fragmented
Fragmented data can cause SQL Server to perform unnecessary data reads, slowing down SQL Server’s performance
Use DBCC DBREINDEX(@TableName,’ ‘,90) for specific tables
Use Update Statistics Command
after bulk insert/update to table
Index Tuning Wizard
Powerful tool designed to help you identify existing indexes that aren’t being used
Recommends new indexes that can be used to help speed up queries
Excellent starting point for indexing if you aren’t sure what to index
Index Tuning Wizard
Don’t blindly accept every recommendation made by the wizard
Sometimes the wizard will not recommend an index
Review each recommendation carefully, sometimes rewriting a query will do more good than adding an additional index
Conclusion
Indexing properly can dramatically improve overall query and application performance
There are many factors to consider when deciding to index
Index wisely
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
A cool widget enables your website visitors to get in touch with you in real time, directly on your Instant Messenger (MSN Messenger, GoogleTalk, Yahoo! Messenger, AOL AIM, ICQ, Jabber…). If your messenger status is online, visitors can send you an instant message through the Plugoo Buddy in your messenger buddy list. You can thus chat with them; answer their questions; more over communicate with prospect customer when they need you.
Site visitors need neither to download any software nor create an account before they can contact you. They never have access to your instant messaging information (username). Conversation between a visitor and you is strictly private – other simultaneous visitors on the website don’t see the conversation. You don’t have to change your habits; you keep using your favorite messenger on your desktop or from your mobile phone.
You embed a Plugoo on your web site. Visitors on your website can see the Plugoo and write through it a message for you.
As this Plugoo is directly connected to your Instant Messenger, it forwards you in real time all the messages your website visitors can send to you. You reply to your visitors from your Messenger while they are currently browsing your website.
You can also use myPlugoo, a simple link http://www.myPlugoo.com/… to let your friends IM you from any web site, email or blog. For instance, you can add this link to your email signatures or to your blog/forum comments… This way, your emails recipients or other Net surfer have the opportunity to pop-up your Plugoo Widget with just one click and start a LIVE conversation with you!
For more details, surf http://www.plugoo.com/
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
FFmpeg is a wonderful library for creating video applications or even general purpose utilities. FFmpeg takes care of all the hard work of video processing by doing all the decoding, encoding, muxing and demuxing for you. This can make media applications much simpler to write. It’s simple, written in C, fast, and can decode almost any codec you’ll find in use today, as well as encode several other formats.
FFmpeg is a very fast video and audio converter. It can also grab from a live audio/video source. It can also convert from any sample rate to any other, and resize video on the fly with a high quality polyphase filter. FFmpeg is basically a computer program that can record, convert and stream digital audio and video in numerous formats. It is a command line tool that is composed of a collection of free software / open source libraries. It includes libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, and libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library. The name of the project comes from the MPEG video standards group, together with “FF” for “fast forward”.
An Insight
FFmpeg is developed under Linux, but it can be compiled under most operating systems, including Apple Inc. Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows and AmigaOS. The command line interface is designed to be intuitive, in the sense that FFmpeg tries to figure out all parameters that can possibly be derived automatically. You usually only have to specify the target bitrate you want.
The generic syntax is: ffmpeg [[infile options][`-i’ infile]]… {[outfile options] outfile}…
The project is made of several components:
- ffmpeg is a command line tool to convert one video file format to another. It can also grab and encode in real time from a TV card.
- ffserver is an HTTP and RTSP multimedia streaming server for live broadcasts. It can also time shift live broadcast.
- ffplay is a simple media player based on SDL and on the FFmpeg libraries.
- libavcodec is a library containing all the FFmpeg audio/video encoders and decoders. Most codecs were developed from scratch to ensure best performance and high code reusability.
- libavformat is a library containing demuxers and muxers for audio/video container formats.
- libavutil is a helper library containing routines common to different parts of FFmpeg. This library include adler32, crc, md5, sha1, lzo decompressor, Base64 encoder/decoder, des encrypter/decrypter, rc4 encrypter/decrypter and aes encrypter/decrypter.
- libpostproc is a library containing video postprocessing routines.
- libswscale is a library containing video image scaling routines.
- libavfilter is the substitute for vhook which allows the video to be modified or examined between the decoder and the encoder.
Major use over the Internet:
FFmpeg Hosting or ffmpeg webhosting is special hosting for online video sharing web sites. FFmpeg converts video to .flv format or any other video format. With FFmpeg web hosting you can create powerful online video sharing web sites just like YouTube. FFmpeg is used by many open source projects, including VLC, MPlayer, Handbrake, Google Chrome.
Multimedia frameworks using FFmpeg
- DirectShow/VFW: ffdshow (external project)
- QuickTime: Perian (external project)
- GStreamer: GStreamer FFmpeg plug-in (external project)
Advantages
- Commandline driven
- Many options
- Multi-platform, free, source available
Disadvantages:
- Does not ensure bitrate consistency accross a set of files. So a set of AVI files produced from a set of VOB files cannot be merged into a single AVI.
- The latest version available at Sourceforge (strangely) predates the version bundled with gui4ffmpeg. Currently the version available on Sourceforge does not support the “-vtag xvid” option. So users are stuck with Windows if they want to run the latest.
- According to rumor, the codec does not accurately compress at the bitrate requested by the user.
Posted in Software Concepts | No Comments »
Friday, July 10th, 2009
All of you must have heard about web feeds and RSS but many of you might not aware that exactly what these terms mean. Simply put, a web feed is a data format used to syndicate (or distribute) your website’s content, allowing users to subscribe to these content updates. Web feeds allows subscribers to be aware of any addition/update of content or articles on your website without actually visiting the website check the updates. This is the same concept as subscribing to a newsletter. News websites and blogs are common sources of webfeeds.
Web feeds are often XML based documents and RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is one of the most commonly used formats of web feeds. Another format called Atom format is a bit outdated nowadays. There are three main components involved in web feed subscription mechanism -
Feed: The article or content which has been added on the website
Feed Generator: Software which generates feeds. A typical website needs RSS feed generator software integrated in it where as a Wordpress Blog has a built in RSS feed generator. An Orange web feed icon in the address bar indicates that web feeds are available for subscription.
Feed Reader: Also known Feed Aggregator, this is a program which allows users to view feed. It is the feed reader which checks and ‘pulls’ the feed rather than feed generator ‘pushing’ the feed into the reader.
One of the most common forms of subscribing to RSS feeds is by Live Bookmarks. To use these, just click on the orange feed icon address bar of your browser and choose Live Bookmarks from the drop down menu. This will palce dynamic bookmark in Bookmarks Menu of your web browser, containing links to latest feeds. These links will keep on updating as new posts are added and old links disappear from live bookmarks. If you are using Mozilla Firefox, check ‘Bookmarks Toolbar’ in your bookmarks menu to view the recently subscribed feeds.
Apart from live bookmarks, you can also subscribe to webfeeds by websites such as iGoogle, MyYahoo, Google Reader or Bloglines. All you have to do is select Google (or Yahoo) from the drop down menu after you have clicked on feed button. Then, select Add To Google HomePage or Add To Google Reader. A gadget containing feeds from the website will appear on you iGoogle page if you select the former.
Though web feeds have similarity with email newsletters, they have certain advantages which make them preferred method of subscription. First, you don’t have to share your email id, thus reducing the risk of spam and virus attack. Secondly, rather than sending an “unsubscribe” request, you can simply remove the feed. All these features make RSS and webs feeds most popular technique of syndicating website content. So don’t forget to subscribe to feeds for our RedAlkemi Blogosphere to keep you updated with latest informative articles.
Posted in Software Concepts, SEM | No Comments »
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
Interaction is an important part of human nature. We need to communicate with one another in order to express views, discuss topics and exchange information. Conversations can be either general or controversial. We can hope that some general topics can come to an end but controversial topics sometimes result in heated arguments.
There are some common topics that we generally love to participate in. Most of the people generally prefer talking about following topics in order to keep themselves busy:
One of the usual topic for discussion for instance is “Politics”. Whatever the place or timing be, everyone is interested to criticize the preeminent Government plans. The discussion goes endless with party favorites speaking against each other’s favorite party.
Another major topic which everyone loves to groove about is “Cricket”. “Why did Dhoni opt for batting first”, “Selection team is unjust in choosing players”, “Sachin is old enough to play shots” etc. are some of the common conversations seeded by cricket lovers.
General masses have another interesting topic to discuss about i.e. “Family”- their kids,parents, siblings etc.
Some entertaining topics can include interactions on hobbies, favorite film stars,occupation etc.
Hence, to conclude, always start discussions on something that’s common to talk about rather than interesting or exciting. Pick up the topics from your everyday life because they are the ones that will hook up every individual ideas to you.
What do you think??????
Posted in General | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
Internet forums or online discussion rooms are great place to discuss topics related to your business, get information on specific topic or for seeking help from other online members. These forums have evolved from what used to be ‘Newsgroups’ or ‘Listservers’ in early period of Internet. Nowadays, these discussion forums are all over the Internet covering every niche or market segment. You can post your queries, answer queries, seek opinion of experts or simply chat with your friends through these discussion forums. In last few years, there has been a tremendous growth in online discussion forums and almost every field and topic has got a forum dedicated to it. Some companies even use these forums as channel for online customer care and support.
Discussion Forum as a Traffic Source
People join online forums for varied reasons. Some are looking for help and support, others are willing to share their knowledge and experiences, while some are there to simply chat and learn something new. Apart from these there are another form of participants whose numbers have been increasing in recent past. These are the bands of online marketers and webmasters looking to increase traffic to their website or monetize these forums.
Online discussion forums can prove to be a great source of focused traffic for your website if used properly. They can provide an effective word-of –mouth publicity for your business and website. Though most forums ban any promotional or advertising material but they do allow informative and legitimate discussions which refer to products, services or links to third party website. Forum promotion can be used effectively to advertise your business or derive some focused traffic to your website. You will have to use your wit to promote your website and not to be labeled as a spammer.
Basic Forum Posting Rules
Before your start posting in discussion forums make sure that you have ample knowledge on the subject and ready to take an active role in meaningful discussions. Each forum is monitored by a forum administrator (or owner) and one or more moderators who keep an eye on every post. If you sound like a spammer or break any forum rules, it is highly likely that you will be kicked out. There are some basic rules which must be followed while participating; otherwise you may end up getting yourself banned or derailing your marketing campaign. Some of them are listed below –
- Post on the forum regularly. If you will post frequently on a forum, other members will start recognizing you and will take your posts more seriously.
- Post something meaningful. You should always have something useful to contribute to the forum. Research thoroughly on the subject prior to posting. Make sure you have something valuable and informative to add to the forum.
- Mention your website only in relevant posts. Don’t try to needlessly ‘push’ your website in irrelevant posts that has nothing to do with your product category. This may annoy other participants.
- Don’t always post a question. Also post answers to the queries posted by others. Try to answer honestly, accurately and to the best of your knowledge.
- Always follow the forum guidelines. Every forum has its set of rules and procedures which must be followed by every participant. Read these guidelines thoroughly and always abide by them.
- Try not to sound like an advertiser. The minute you are compromised, people will treat you as an outcast and you may even be shown the exit.
Forum Signatures
Signatures are few lines of text that appear below you every post every time you write something. You can put anything from your products and services to URL of your website. Some forums even allow hyper linking the text. People have made these signatures as most effective and popular form of making money from discussion forums. Many forums don’t allow putting your signatures straight away. Some have a threshold of minimum number of required posts while in others, admin and moderators grant this privilege. There is a limit to the number of characters which can be included, so try to use this real estate efficiently.
Posted in SMM | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
It is seen that ranking in search engines is totally independent of google PR. We can see the pages of low PR raking on first or second place and those of high PR ranking below them. So in order to get your website ranked in major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN), it is must to get one way links from those pages which are highly relevant to your industry irrespective of their PR.
Link Building researches shows that to achieve high rankings it is required to get links in bulk from pages:
- which are indexed by search engines irrespective of their PR.
- and have Content relevant to your theme; e.g your targeted keyword is “send flowers” then the page content should be talking about “flowers delivery” or “flower shops” or “online flowers” and of course about “sending flowers”.
- and are optimized and have Title tag keywords closely related to your targeted keywords.
- and have lesser number of outgoing links.
In addition to this the URL for which link building is to be done should be well optimized for the targeted keyword.
Posted in Link Building | 3 Comments »
Monday, July 6th, 2009
Social Media Marketing is getting very popular among marketers these days. This makes a complete sense to me as it is the best way to ensure your presence to the world. If you check the Alexa of top sites globally (in terms of traffic), you will find many social networking sites are among the top sites list, making them an excellent way to drive traffic to your site. Many companies including some big brands have understood the importance of social media marketing and are using it to their benefit, as these sites are becoming one of the best way to reach large number of potential customers. Examples of social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Mixx, Reddit etc.
Here are some of the big brands using social media marketing -
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Coca Cola
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Blog: Coca-Cola Conversations
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Facebook Application: Sprite Sips and Coke Tag
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Virtual Worlds (Second life): Virtual Thirst
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Dell
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Blog: Direct2Dell, Nine official internal blogs
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Microblogging: Twitter - 22 corporate accounts
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Virtual Worlds: Second Life Island
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KFC
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National Geographic
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Blog: The Green Guide
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Forums: NGC Forums
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Microblogging: Twitter account
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Online Video: YouTube channel, Everyday Explorer
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Social networks: MySpace, Imbee
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Southwest Airlines
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Blog: Nuts About Southwest
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Twitter (Microblogging): Southwest Air
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Online Video: YouTube Channel
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Photo sharing: Flickr group
As you can see that the corporations listed above are the major corporates. We all agree that everyone across globe know about them. These corporations are grabbing every opportunity they can lay their hands on, to make their presence felt globally. Its clear that social media marketing is very powerful tool. All you have to do is – be smart and know how to make it work for you.
Happy Networking!
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Posted in SMM | 2 Comments »
Monday, July 6th, 2009
There are many real world programming models where we must use threads. They are used when we have to do a lot of simultaneous processing, whether it is a web server processing a large number of user requests or a desktop application processing a lot of URLs to fetch and process their content.
In any of the above scenarios, we generally need a thread-per-request model, but the biggest disadvantage of this approach is the overhead of creating and destroying threads and active threads consume system resources. This approach will make a situation where the application would consume more time and system resources in creating and destroying thread objects rather than processing actual tasks.
Thread Pools come to rescue from these situations. While working with thread pools we get the following benefits that solve our problems to a large extent:
1. By reusing threads, the overhead of creating and destroying threads is reduced.
2. Small number of threads consume less amount of system resources especially memory, so JVM will not give frequent out of memory errors.
3. Requests are served faster because the delay caused in creating new threads-per-request is negligible.
4. Huge amount of requests can be processed in less amount of time and by consuming less amount of system resources.
Thread pools help us to process more number of tasks in a parallel way and by using the system resources in controlled manner.
Posted in Software Concepts | No Comments »
