Arvind Chhabra, from India today covered beautifully in the monthly supplement of India Today, Simply Punjabi about the top businesswomen of Punjab.
Arvind interviewed Ms. Anuja Lath, COO, RedAlkemi for the issue and got to know her inside out. He has very well written about Anuja’s perfect balance of work-life culture.
Dell worldwide started a new initiative called WISE… short for Women In Search of Excellence. Our COO, Anuja Lath, was invited to give a brief talk to Dell Women Managers (at their Mohali facility) and share her work/home/ life experiences and balancing acts with them. The brief was to speak about principles she considered good to follow in the workplace and in general, kind of motivational talk.
Followed by a brief history of her own work experience and career span, here’s the gist of what the talk was all about:
1. Set Goals for yourself. Get organized. Discipline your work & personal life. Make your priority list. Live up to your own standards. Address important tasks first before they become urgent. Confront hard realities. Understand and explore your ability to multitask.
2. The only way to progress upwards in your career is to take on more responsibilities & prove to your seniors you are worth more than your current profile. Diligence at work is a very good start. Reliability is a big factor.
3. Have a good and positive attitude. Try and spread your positive attitude. Don’t shy away from hard work or doing things that may not be written in your job profile.
4. Volunteer to take on more. Don’t measure everything in money. There is a price to opportunity also. Often ask your seniors, what more can you do.
5. Do it right the first time. Make work a fun activity. Be driven by yourself. Nothing like self-motivation.
6. If there are things that need to be done more than once, create and then follow a process. If there is no process, invent one and show it to your seniors. Go the extra mile.
7. Ideas alone will not get you far. Get the ability to execute them well and diligently. Contribute in areas where you may not be expected to. Surprise your seniors.
8. Keep professional life and personal lives separate. Women tend to gossip and forget the fine line. Don’t bring personal problems to the office, no one wants to listen to your sob stories.
9. Integrity is something you do when no one is watching. Build a strong sense of integrity and honesty around your character. Your bosses and workforce should be able to confide in you. Maintain very high work ethics. Rest assured, your bosses always know what you are up to. Be true to yourself.
10. Constantly invest in upgrading your skills. In the IT industry, one-year old skills are outdated. Do a SWOT analysis of your skills every 6 months. Take advantage of every training program your company is offering you. Learn other things apart from your professional skills. You’re never too old. Learn how to knit, rollerblade, swim etc.
11. Highest paying job is not always the highest growing job. Spend at least 3-4 years with the company. Frequent job-hopping for extra money rarely lets you learn well. Too many short-lived job stints do not look good on your resume. Try and work out a growth path for yourself and discuss it with your superiors. Most of all Learn, Learn, Learn.
12. Take care to groom your subordinates. They reflect on and add to your own performance. Empty your own chair if you want to move up the ladder. Groom someone who will take your place. Develop their leadership skills. Mark of a good leader is to create more leaders. Share the credit publicly, reprimand in private.
13. Seek out and keep company of positive, inspiring people & mentors. Try and learn something good from the company you keep. Avoid negative people, or those who are “only talk, no walk”.
14. You will not always win or succeed. Sometimes you lose. If & when you lose, don’t lose the lesson. Success is a lousy teacher. Make mistakes, but new ones every time. Don’t make the same mistake twice.
15. Life is fun when it’s filled with challenges. Women have the ability to rise to any challenge. They have all the right ingredients of intelligence, compassion, integrity, stability, multitasking and a lot more.
It gives us immense pleasure to share with you all that our Co-Founder and COO of RedAlkemi, Ms. Anuja Lath has been honored with the Award of Excellence as the “Woman Entrepreneur of the Year” for the year 2008-2009 by Software Technology Parks of India (STPI).
Dr. S.S. Channy, Principal Secretary, Industries and Commerce, Government of Punjab, distributed the STPI Software Exports Awards for 2008-09 at the awards night held as part of the e-Revolution 2009.
People these days share their personal opinions and experiences via blogs. It is also a convenient way to connect with millions of online readers in a jiffy. The main point to consider here is related to business promotion using blogs. It may sound a bit trickier at first instance but it can be simple if we take care of few points.
Now before you start to write a blog, work thoroughly on its content and the target audience. People are driven to your blog only when they find the content educative and informative. Do not ever compromise with the content of your blog.
So, here a few tips that would help your business develop with blogs -
Quick Indexing – Search engines readily index the blogs with a higher frequency that are well written and contain good quality keywords. So, updating your blog frequently and writing high quality post will help boost your rank.
Easy communication - People will pay attention to your posts only if your post contains interesting information. They will subscribe to your posts and everytime you write a new post, it gets pushed out to your readers, giving you the ability to communicate directly with them.
Brand Promotion – It allows you to promote your product and services with millions of online readers who would not have known your presence.
Build Relationships – Build relationship with your readers. Allow them to post comments on your articles such that they get more engaged and involved with you.
Promote via social media – Enhance the popularity of your blog by engaging in social media activities like- bookmarking in sites like – Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc. Also use networking sites like Facebook and twitter to get huge results for the popularity of your blog. You can also use relevant forums to post your content.
Be an expert – Have an in-depth knowledge of what your product says and write the same for it. People will get involved to your posts only if they feel that your posts contain relevant advice and suggestions. Not only this, they would be the ones interested in buying your product.
Cheap configuration – Setting up your blog is easy and maintaining cost is simply low.
By now, you have enough tips to get started on blogging..So, what are you waiting for??
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.
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
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.
“An employee’s motivation is a direct result of the sum of interactions with his or her manager”- Bob Nelson
A company primarily depends on its employees. Their right behavior towards work and the company would build the success story for that organization. Hence, it’s very important for team leads to ensure that their employees are enthusiastic towards work because it’s the employees who have to complete a task. An employee will give his best only if he is motivated, which in turn would enhance his productivity and improve an organization’s survival and success rate.
Penned below are some of the tips that are necessary for an employer to keep his employee motivated:
Be Motivated: An employer cannot motivate his employees unless he himself is not motivated. Remember one golden role ”Never mix professional life with your personal life”. Whatever problem maybe troubling you, never take it out at your employee because it would deteriorate your relationship and hence decrease his competency.
Know the things that motivate your employees: Prepare a list of questionnaire and ask your employees to fill it so that you can know about their likes and interests. Organizing special events like competitions, training programs, picnics etc. will refresh them and would energize them.
Treat the employees equally: Never be biased towards someone. Allow individual ideas to flow and involve your employees in every discussion so that he has an in depth knowledge of the work assigned to him. Creating favoritism will only lead to de-motivation among other employees.
Recognitions and Achievements: Appreciate good work done by your employee. This will not only boost his morale but also encourage him to be more proactive in future.
Remember that good and healthy environment always make its employee more vibrant and motivated and hence enhance success rate of an organization.
Is your website Google Chrome compatible? Do you know Google has launched its brand new browser - Google Chrome and its user base is spreading like wild fire?
Google has jumped in the browser battle going on between MS Internet Explorer & Mozilla Firefox with the launch of Google Chrome. Google Chrome is indeed a wonderful and highly secured browser and gives some advanced functionality to users. I have tried Chrome and I think it’s ideal for people who are basic surfers. It’s free and you can also download it from here -
http://www.google.com/chrome
Checkout this cool article on Search Engine Land that compares Google Chrome with IE & Firefox: http://searchengineland.com/080903-130137.php
No doubt, Chrome is hot and comes with some really cool new features but sadly it doesn’t yet supports my favorite plugins. So guess I’ll wait till Chrome grows up and till then I would continue firefoxing…!!
As the day went by into nite,
The voice of India faded into eternal light.
Leaving so many eyes teary and moist,
Hearts crying for more, souls so frost.
Ishmeet left us a treasure of his voice,
Resounding his youth n nature so alive,
Making a place in million hearts n fans,
He became a star in heavens lands.
Shine wherever you are, dear one
You are eternal, you are our icon.
As I sign off for an extended festive weekend(friday being an off for us ), I would like to write this post to tell every one what makes this weekend so special. Offcourse its Holi, but what makes this weekend most special is the fact that its not every year when you have four blockbuster days on the religious calendar - Chhoti Holi for Hindus, the Prophet’s birthday and death anniversary for Muslims, Good Friday for Christians (followed by Easter on Sunday) and Navroz for Iranis and Parsis - have converged on March 21.
In India, Holi is one of the most popular festival; It is a festival of colors and bliss celebrated on Phalgun Purnima. Holi festival has an ancient origin and celebrates the triumph of ‘good’ over ‘bad’. The colorful festival bridges the social gap and renews sweet relationships. On this day, people hug and wish each other ‘Happy Holi’ to their egos and enmity.
RedAlkemi wishes you all a very Happy Holi, Easter, Good Fridar & Navroz. Cheers !
Image: MSN
In the dynamic world of SEO, where there are so many small and big things that contribute to your website’s Search Engine friendliness, it is so easy for even professional SEOs to miss out on few of the factors. So as to make sure that there is less SEO skipping and your website is fulfilling Search Engine’s basic requirements, I have compiled a really simple and most basic SEO checklist that will help you to be a little more confident about your SEO campaign. This post is a little long, so to make it more interesting, we are also serving some mouth watering snacks like - beer, chocolate, Energy drinks and what not. Relax and enjoy the feast:
If you haven’t booked a domain name yet, make sure you have your main keyword in it; people will link to you using your domain name as anchor text and hence giving a boost to your ranking for that particular keyword.
To begin with, make sure that you run a Google Adword Campaign to know the most convertible keyword theme for your website.
After the final keyword research, use this data to write unique and click-enticing title and meta description tag for each page. 65 characters in title tag is the maximum amount that will display in the search results but a little longer won’t hurt either. Keyword in the title tag is one most important factor you can’t afford to ignore.
Make sure that you haven’t overused keywords on the body copy; keyword density is a thing of past, Search Engines now use Latent Semantic Indexing instead.
Use keywords in alt and title tag of every image on your site (without making it look spammy).
Use H1, H2, H3 tags in your keyword headings. Use only one H1 tag per page with the most important keyword in it but you can use as many h2, h3 tags.
Use bold or strong tags to highlight the most important keyword.
Make sure all the internal and external navigational links have keywords in the anchor text and not just ‘click here’ and ‘learn more’. It gives a boost to the internal linking. You may even consider using tag clouds on your website for better Internal linking.
Make sure you have a customized 404 error page. To make this task more interesting for you, check out these cool 404 error pages. (But please don’t forget to put a static sitemap or site search on your error page).
Make sure that there are no broken links. Use Xenu.
Every time you add a new blog or article (auto) ping atleast Google, Yahoo, MSN and technorati.
Keep your website and page URLs as simple as possible. Search Engines hate non-sense dynamically generated URLs like http://www.crapurl/114/cat223 or http://www.crapurl/view_item.php?listing_id=477443&pic_id=2. Use URL masking.
Domain age matters a lot. You can’t do any thing about it but you have to be patient. (I wish there was some aging formula for websites like anti-aging cream for women)
Additionally, use misspelled keywords in the keyword meta tags. It certainly helps.
You don’t want to waste your link equity/link juice to get wasted on ranking pages like ‘request for proposal’ , ‘privacy policy’, ’shipping policy’. It’s better to use no-follow tags on such pages.
Make sure you update your website content as often as possible. This improves your website bot-crawl frequency.
Have your website W3C compliant, it will give your website some definite future benefits.
PS: These are the most basic SEO factors that I can recall at the moment according to current Big3 Search Engine algos. If you think I have missed out on any of the important factors, please feel free to add them as comments on this post. PSS: Images courtesy: gsinc.co.uk. I hope you enjoyed the feast and don’t be surprised if you find any of these products being sold at your nearest grocery store. Cheers !!
It’s friday again, and looking back at my previous posts, I realize that there is some thing seriously missing on our RedAlkemi blog – yeah…’No Fun stuff‘. So I just thought of sharing some cool things, I came across this week on Internet. Yes, its funny but still there is a lot you can learn from each. Sit back and enjoy !
The No.1 spot is occupied by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and his estranged girlfriend Rachel Marsden who has been auctioning off clothing belonging to Jimmy on eBay. Jimmy is facing public humiliation after he apparently used his website Wikipedia to break-up with his girlfriend and Canadian TV personality Rachel Marsden.
I call it nothing but a terrible ‘Reputation Management Error’. Ain’t it funny?
The No.2 spot goes to this cool comic representation of Yahoo rejecting MSN’s rescue offer. I know it has been quite a while now but I still found it worth sharing. Have a look at the lighter side of e-visibility (I just loved that Goooogle airplane).
The No.3 spot is taken by this cool link strategy chart I stumbled on. Even though not so hilarious, but it’s a fun representation of a very effective and an updated link building strategy. Although I found it really cool, but the designer of this pdf chart deserves my thumb down (some text there is little hard to read). Download the pdf, it’s still worth paining your eyes.
So with this fun post I wish you all a rocking weekend ahead! I hope you enjoyed the stuff as much as I did. Cheers !
While most of us are very much aware what wordpress is (it makes it easy for us to write, publish, edit and organise our blogs), but very few know that wordpress is capable of performing much more than just publishing blogs. So with this post, I would like to highlight some not so popular (yet so useful) features of a wordpress, which will be really handy for guys who are new to Internet and can’t afford to experiment with paid designers and programmers.
Wordpress as a CMS
In the world of the modern Content Management Systems like Drupal (I find it really complex though), and other specialized CMS(news website) like Vivvo and WSN gallery (media related website), Wordpress is the most conventional, free and easy CMS to implement and maintain overtime.
Use Wordpress to build a portfolio site or gallery
In order to use wordpress to manage your portfolio website, instead of posting simple blog posts in reverse chronological order, you’d want to feature your projects along with a thumbnail. Eric-powell and nathanielstern are two wonderful examples of a wordpress portfolio websites. Simple yet so attractive.
Use wordpress to build a gallery or photoblog
Similarly you can use wordpress as an image gallery as well but you have to enable comments and rating on the products so that the highest rated graphics are sorted to the top. This is a list of some very useful wordpress pluggins to manage comments and ratings on your blog.
Use wordpress to build an ecommerce website
Thanks to the wordpress compatibility to paypal that you can even sell products on your wordpress blog. All you have to do is to put thumbnails of your products, put some description & price tag and integrate it with Paypal. You are all set to run an ecommerce website built totally on wordpress. filipinoartisans and crafty-designs are two rocking e-commerce blogs built on wordpress CMS. I’d be mean if I don’t tell you how to do it. It’s simple, just read these twoblogs and you will be able to do it yourself.
Use wordpress to build news website
Now that sounds interesting. But let me tell you this is the most easiest thing that you can do with wordpress. That’s primarily because news related websites usually need to have feature articles kept on the front page, thanks to wordpress’s default reverse chronological display format. Now since such blogs usually attract huge traffics, you can expect a decent affiliate revenue coming your way ( but only if you can put up every thing right). Do you hear the sound of Ka-ching ! BTW living.cebunetwork & xxlmag are two awesome news/magazine blogs that seem to be minting decent revenue at the moment.
I know there is so much more that you can do with wordpress, but with this post I hope I’d be atleast able to make you start seeing wordpress as more than just a content publishing platform. The best thing about wordpress is that you don’t have to be a master coder to implement new functionalities. Just a basic HTML here n there does the trick (most of the time) and with new pluggins evolving every day, sky is the limit with future wordpress possibilities.
As we stand at the threshold of the last quarter of the year, it’s a perfect time to focus on your “Imperative Flags” as i call it. These signify the most crucial one-two goals which you need to achieve by the end of the year to take your work, your life a rung higher on the ladder of success. And, the 90days left in the year is an excellent time frame for goal-setting. Its a short and sweet span of time, easy to manage and achieve results!Target just one or two Imperative Flags, not more, otherwise you will be diffusing your focus from your top priorities. If there are too many things to do in your basket, you’ll end up not achieving any. Fix your gaze on The most important goal, and with utmost commitment strive towards achieving the bull’s eye, and you will.
Be priority driven. Zoom in to what matters most and ensure your schedule is woven around it in order to have enough time to work on making a positive difference in your life and at your work. Mark your Imperative Flags well - they should be deeply relevant and take your life to the next level of Magnifique!
As I sign off for an extended festive weekend(friday being an off for us 
