Earth Hour: Are you voting for Earth today?

Mar 28, 2009 Comments

People all over the world will be participating in the Earth Hour today by switching off their lights and doing their bid in trying to stop global warming? Can this really stop global warming? The act in itself may not, but the awareness created in the process certainly will. Do show that you support earth, and you care for your children and their children.

Why it pays to have your own business

Mar 22, 2009 Comments

The more I read about the economy the more relieved I feel for having my own business. Hasn’t the economic downturn affected my online writing business? Sure it has, but I’m not worried about losing my job. I just need to market more, I just need to put more relevant content on my website, and I’m already doing this and it is already showing positive results. In fact, although I won’t say it’s good that it happened, the economic downturn has been a blessing in disguise. I realized it was not possible to survive within the current format of my work. I needed to expand.

A good thing about doing business online is that if your business is low, have more traffic to your website. Does more traffic mean more business? Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t; it depends on the type of traffic you are able to generate. Even if you are getting one query per week (actually, this happened 4-5 months ago), it shows there’s some business out there you can get. For instance, if 30 unique visitors per day get you one query per week, 60 unique visitors surely must get more, and so should 90 or 100 visitors per day. What about 200 visitors per day? Am I building castles in the wind? I certainly am if I’m generating random traffic for my website. I have to increase targeted traffic, not just any traffic.

My website’s conversion rate is quite good, for me, as an individual freelance content writer. Even with 30 unique visitors per day I was managing (still do sometimes) 1 query per day. Agreed, not every query turns into business, but for me, even if 2 queries turn into business every week, I was quite happy and satisfied. Of course these days I’ve managed to generate more queries because I’m regularly outsourcing my work. I’m getting more queries because I’m increasing my traffic.

In order to survive in tough economic condition, I had to rethink the way I was promoting my business, turning in the assignments, and taking care of the generic infrastructure. I was already spending good 10-12 hours on my business, and just couldn’t afford to put in more hours given my singing practice and the needs of my family. Whatever I had to do, I had to do within these hours. In order to maximize my potential I had to do more of what I was good at and do less of what I was taking longer to finish.

Ironically, the biggest hurdle on my way to increasing my business was my work. What the heck are you talking about? you must be thinking, aren’t you here to do work? Sure I am and I definitely want more work. But the problem was, I was doing work almost all the time and there was no time left for promotion, marketing, brand building and networking: all these activities are needed to not only increase your business, but also to get more decent, high-paying projects.

Although I’m a good writer, I’m also good at getting work, at convincing people to give me work. As I mentioned above, I’ve been making a decent living by just getting 30 unique visitors to my website every day. But this is not a good way of working. I’ve been active on the Internet, first as a web designer and developer and then as a content writer and copywriter for almost 9 years now and people hardly know me. I haven’t able to create even one marginally successful blog, and I started blogging when people used to manually add pages to their manually-managed blogs and hardly 200 people knew what the strange-sounding word meant. In order to increase my workflow, and change my freelance work into a proper business, I decided to change all this.

These days I’m focusing more on getting work. I’m increasing my search engine traffic, I’m adding content to my website with greater speed and regularity, I’m trying to improve the quality of content on my website and I’m becoming more socially active on the Internet by interacting on social networking websites and blogs. And the work? Fortunately, I’ve found some really good writers; in fact, some of them write better than me. I’m not outsourcing 100% work yet, but if they continue to write high-quality stuff I might soon. Getting other writers has also given me an opportunity to take on assignments I wouldn’t touch previously: lesser paying assignments from Asia, especially from India.

All this happened because I owned my work, my business and I was free to make changes my business needed first, to survive the economic downturn, and second, to grow. I’ve achieved the first thing – surviving – and now I’m focusing on the second. What are you doing to survive and thrive?

Writing for traffic or for the right audience?

Mar 21, 2009 Comments

You many often come across blogs and articles telling you how to get spikes of traffic by writing content that pulls people towards your website or blog. They advise you to use “highly compelling” titles and submitting your link to social networking and social bookmarking websites such as FaceBook, Twitter, Digg and Delicious. I wonder how much this sort of traffic helps your business. Mind you I’m not questioning the process and I’m not even suggesting you not to indulge in such activities, I’m just thinking about it.

For instance I provide online writing services, so I would, ideally, like to draw traffic that can fetch me more business. This doesn’t mean I don’t want other people to visit my website. After all I share my thoughts on various subjects on this blog for instance, and I’d love it if people from all over the world access my blog and participate in various conversations. I feel good when all of a sudden 200 extra visitors come to my website and 5 among them subscribe to my RSS feeds or my e-mail updates. Even if they never do business with me, it is exhilarating to see the number rising day bay day. The good doesn’t always come from prospective clients.

When more people, let’s say 2000 in a day, visit your website and read your blog post or article, all of a sudden so many people are made aware of your existence and what you do. If you somehow keep on generating such spikes this number keeps on increasing. Get 4-5 traffic spikes every month and you can easily become a known person.

Does becoming known get you more business? It certainly does. As they say, success begets success. Similarly, traffic begets traffic, popularity begets popularity and trustworthiness begets trustworthiness, and all this is needed to generate more business.

When people know you, they eagerly link to you. I’ve seen even dumbest posts by popular bloggers getting popular. They bookmark you, they forward your links, they follow you on Twitter (want to follow me? It’s @amrithallan) and they add you as a friend in FaceBook. All of a sudden, heavy traffic becomes a regular affair because even the search engines begin sending you 1000s of visitors every day. All this helps you build your brand.

Having said that, slow and steady wins the race. You don’t have to prove anything as long as you meeting your business goals. Just be regular and share your experiences sincerely. The traffic will magically pick up.

Writing an effective press release

Mar 20, 2009 Comments

Effective Internet press release copywriting can generate lots of traffic and leads for your business. You can distribute your press release through websites or through e-mail. The formats for press releases for websites and for e-mails will be slightly different. You can have a longer press release on a webpage but when it comes to writing a press release for e-mail it needs to be quite catchy and succinct since these days anything related to promotion and business can easily be taken as spam and hence ignored.

The purpose of a press release

A press release is needed to disseminate information regarding a product, a service, an organization or a policy change. Suppose you have just launched a new product in the market. How do you let people know about your new product? In case your visitors have allowed you to send them e-mail notifications you can use their e-mail addresses to send the news. This can be either termed as a newsletter issue or an e-mail press release. You may also have an e-mail list of various journalists covering your area and you can send the press release to them too.

In case you don’t have a big database of e-mail addresses, or you have very few e-mail addresses, the best thing to do is utilize the services of a press release websites such as PRWeb.com. You can even use the various social networking and social bookmarking websites to distribute your press release but a formal agency that specifically handles this task is better suited for this.

Writing an effective press release

It matters a lot how you write your press release. Press release, as the name suggests is a piece of information that you release the news distribution websites and newspapers so that they can feature it under appropriate sections. Online press releases are distributed for raising awareness as well as improving search engine rankings because incoming links from reputed press release websites draw lots of relevance from search engines. Here are a few things that can help you write an effective press release.

• Beginning with an introduction. People immediately want to know what you’re talking about; what company is being represented and what product or service is being talked about. In a press release you don’t beat around the bush.
• Keep your language straight. When you’re writing a press release there is no scope for being “creative” in the sense that you have to straightaway mention what’s the big deal about the company, the website, the service or the product being covered in the press release. Don’t be vague because when people read a press release they are simply looking for factual information they can use. They don’t want to see your vocabulary and they don’t want to experience your literary depth. Say what needs to be said and be done with that, in as simple words as possible.
• Talk to the target audience. A press release is as targeted as it gets. If it is being published in a technology publication you have to keep in mind that people reading your press release will easily understand the jargons and the expressions used while writing literature on technology and technology related affairs. Even if your present unease is going to be published on a generic press release website than too your press release will be published under the most appropriate category. In fact there is a chance that people will be accessing your press release through the RSS reader if they have subscribed to a particular category feed.
• Quote an important person. People are reassured if somebody important from the organization about whom the press release is being written is quoted. For instance what does the product development manager have to say about the new features being introduced, and how they are at adhering to the quality standards why lowering their prices?
• Include proper contact information. Most probably people will be interested in the product or the service (well, that is the purpose of the press release), or at least they would like to know some more. Include your website address, the e-mail and if possible, the contact person’s name and phone number along with the timings.

Please remember that a press release is not a sales copy. Wear the hat of a journalist while preparing the press release. Even a small hint of hard selling or a tone of partiality can put your readers off. Simply report, and include all the relevant information that can help the readers decide on their own.

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In Gmail now you can undo a message you’ve just sent

Mar 20, 2009 Comments

Ever regretted sending that message?  Sometimes you send a message to a wrong person and sometimes in the heat of the moment you say something that you regret immediately after clicking “send”. There was a time when a message sent via Gmail (or rather any other web based email service) was like a bullet you’ve just fired; just like you cannot stop the bullet you’ve fired, you couldn’t stop the message you had sent.

Well, if the divine realization of “this shouldn’t have been sent” hits you within 5 seconds, in Gmail now you can undo a message that you have just sent. This may save you a lot of heartache (or broken bones for those who prefer to live on the edge) in the long as as well as short term.

If you activate a feature in Gmail, Gmail will hold your e-mail (this sounds like a rhyming poem) for 5 seconds so that you get enough chance to stop it. Just go to Settings and then the Labs tab. Scroll down until you come to this section:

 

 

 

Simply click Enable and save the setting. From now onwards, whenever the message “Your message has been sent” appears, you will also notice an Indo button.