Power Ideaz

To set up the office you do not need much space. It can be at one part of your home. The basic necessities are –

1.   A computer/laptop with an internet connection.

2.    A telephone.
3.    A table with notebooks and pen (and other necessary stationary).
4.    A ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ board for your family.
5.    Enough space to store your products.

DO NOT HESITATE TO ASK QUESTIONS & TO CLEAR DOUBTS.

My first office was my home. My son Rishav would play around me and I would give him company or tell him stories during breaks. Now after many years I have 3 offices in Kolkata and Mumbai with one more opening up in New York within months.

My offices are furnished and well equipped like any regular office. Only difference is that there is no boss over me.

Now get going on your own business

•    Give out your business card to ten new people everyday.
•    Ask prospective clients if they can spare some time for you.
•    Learn about and use your own products.
•    Learn more everyday.
•    Be positive and enthusiastic about your own business all the time.
•    Talk about your product and your business

•    Make phone calls everyday.

•    NEVER GIVE UP

Ask yourself

Wake up every morning. Think of the bright future ahead. And ask yourself –

• Am I going to get more disciplined?
• Am I putting effort to learn more?
• What do I need to change in myself?
• How do I gather more knowledge?
• What do I need to do to be a leader?
• Do I need to change my life and be richer?

YES. YES. And Yes. You are the boss. Have a great career ahead! Wish you all the best.

By Pinaki Ghosh
The Blackhat SEOs are the search engine optimizers who repel the illegal means and practices in order to encourage and boost the website rankings in the search engines. It involves methods that break the TOS of all reputed search engines. Cloaking, spamming, keyword & link stuffing, using doorway pages and site hijacking are some of the methods used by black hat SEOs.
The term black hat SEO is exactly the opposite of the White hat SEOs, who then use legal, ethical means for the search optimization. These terms have evolved from the classic western movies, where the cowboy hero is seen wearing a white hat, and the villains, wear on the black hat. Most take the witches from the tales wearing a tall, wide brimmed black hat. Thus, the black hat symbolizes the evil.
To save money employs the Blackhat SEO’s which are also economical. Most take their help to pull them out from some sort of trouble they have stepped into. Blackhat SEOs are known to solve some of the toughest problems with ease. But still, the Blackhat SEOs are never employed by any famous organizations. Blackhat SEOs do not believe in ethics and follow no ethical guidelines. They will give a high rank to a site by methods that are fair or foul. It is however debated that many SEOs who pose to be white hats, are really black hats in disguise. This theory differentiates that the black hats and the white hats live in the same body. Some white hat SEOs who copy paste content of one site into another, and thus create 50 or 100sites, are really Blackhat SEOs; lacking in ethics. A true writer white hat will never create a second site with content of another site.
The sufferers are the search engines, who are deceived and made to list bogus sites above good sites. Next to suffer are the surfers, who have to make up to choose the better sites from the list containing the bad, ugly and the spammer sites.

Pinaki Ghosh

When one adds the website to any of the search engine, it automatically uses a scanning software called ‘spider’ to go through the content of web pages. The so called spider then adds the links to the other pages to read all information on the different pages and join them in a larger database of the search engine. If then there is any need of the information on certain keywords from the search engine, it would help in searching its database and look out for sites offering information on the keywords that are needed. Most search engine have there own crawlers which vary in code from each other, but at the same time, have a similar set of rules which one can then apply to look on the web.
The simplest forms that are used by these crawlers are the HTML codes that are used by the sites and come free from errors. Why make a face if one does not find his site cached by the search engines; the mistake lies in the poor coding of that particular site. It also can mean that the menu system design restricts the technological spiders to follow it. In such a case your site will not be indexed by the search engines.

You can correct by following the ways given below:

(a) Change the menu system to CSS type, text based menu system.
(b) Add a text menu below the web page (as a second menu system).
(c) Update the latest code to a search engine friendly version.
You can also optimize your web page by keeping the following advices in mind:
(i) When it comes to understanding pictures the search engines are useless. They really understand nothing much but only the text names of the pictures. Thus, using the ‘alt tags’ which are text equivalent of the pictures on the site helps.
(ii) Try and make up a site map away connecting from the main page, to let the search engines find out the other pages of your site.
(iii) Never use the same kind of color of the text and background. Also, making the text appear transparent can get you penalized by any of the search engines for using irrelevant ways.
(iv) Try not to use the ‘hidden text’ in your CSS files.
Make use of the traditional techniques like the title, description, metatags, and at the same time some good content in your site; and then be convinced that your page will be cached.

By Pinaki Ghosh 

In internet marketing, a ‘link’ has a lot of weightage. The successful links can make a site rise high to unbelievable popularity. Most importantly you need to know about the Links which are the other sites pointing to your site and the Back-links which is your site pointing to other sites.

1. Good content earns natural links
A site can get linked if it serves good content. Just like visitors, the search engines love good content. It may be slow but is an effective way of link-baiting.

2. Make directory submissions
The directories are mere sites which give you the names and links of hundreds of sites categorically arranged.
There are 4 types of directories:
• Pay-for-inclusion directories,
• Reciprocal required directories,
• Free directories,
• Niche directories
Give in your site to the most popular directories or just hire a professional SEO to complete the job with a professional attitude. To get the names of hundreds of directories you can refer to the following site:
• Strongest Links, http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php
• SEOCompany,http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/web-directories.html

3. Link exchange
Exchange links with other webmasters works in your favor too. Your sites will back-link to their sites, and their sites in exchange will link to your sites. If you have some 25 sites it will work even better.

4. Interlink your own sites
To make your less popular sites prosper with the help of your popular sites you should not link up all your sites, especially the ones that have no relevance.

5. Go slow with adding links in the beginning
Google can ban your site if you rapidly place hundreds and thousands of links to your site within the first few days of starting. Add the links after starting your site. It also includes the links which you place in the forum-posts, bulletin forums, or social networking sites like Orkut.

6. Avoid links from gambling or adult sites
The gambling sites, poker sites, or adult sites are banned on Google. Hence, Google will ban your site if it is linked with gambling or adult sites. Also, these sites are known to send harmful viruses, adware and spam.

7. Mix and match
Google prefers that your links come from absolutely different sites (different C class IPs). A good advice is, mix up links from trusted, old sites as well as new sites. Not more than 15% - 20% of your back-links to a site should be from PR 5+ pages.

Your site will get additional importance with Google and other search engines, if links to your site come of sites with related or similar content. Besides you should also remember to link not only the home page, but other pages as well. With these tips in mind going wrong is next to impossible.

 By Pinaki Ghosh

After MySpace, Orkut (www.orkut.com) has gained immense popularity! Orkut, till Feb 07 had 44 million people who had signed in and the figure is growing every day. People from the USA, Brazil and India are in majority on Orkut. It’s not only for meeting friends, and discovering lost friends, but a very powerful tool for making your site popular as well.

The first three steps are similar to that with MySpace:

1. Start blogging: Become a blogger

2. Signup with a PPC (pay per click) advertisement distribution program like Google AdSense (http://google.com/adsense), and start your account. To know more you can refer to some of the earlier pages.

3. Signup with some affiliate program like Commission Junction (http://cj.com) or Clickbank (http://clickbank.com) and become an affiliate. You can carry advertisements of other companies and earn your commission.

4. Join Orkut (http://orkut.com). Earlier, to join Orkut, one had to accept an invitation which could be sent only by someone who already was a part of the community. But now, anyone who has a Google account can be a part of the community. Like people know, Orkut is a part of Google. You can use the same password and username. You can start adding friends in large numbers. The more friends you add, the better is your prospect of informing more people about your site/blog.

5. Join the ‘communities’ of Orkut. There are innumerable communities on Orkut; where you can find a lot of interested members. This will widen your access to a larger number of people. You can get in touch with these people at one click!

6. Post messages to the members of large communities. Write interesting messages with a link to your site/blog. Describe the purpose of your blog, and its utility; and send them to hundreds of members of various communities.

7. Send messages to all your Orkut friends and update them about your blog. At a single click of your mouse you can select all friends and reach them and also pass on your message. Try not to appear like a spamster. Your message should appear like an interesting story, or as if you are trying to pass some helpful advice to your friends; which has also benefited you. Add the link to your site/blog.

8. Make forum postings. Some of the communities do not allow messaging. Use forum postings in those communities. Orkut communities have forums where you can post your message, so that the members can see and if interested can email you.

If this is successfully carried out from time to time, the traffic is bound to increase!

By Pinaki Ghosh

One can never sell a car at the original price that he got, but in the case e-books, one can benefit over the same. E-books have a re sale value also, there aren’t any chances that anyone would sue you for doing that as you aren’t breaking the law. Although you must change the information like the name of the publisher and the writer etc i.e., you must customize them.  Most of the e-books come with the master resell rights which means after the resale you are permitted to keep the full profits. You do not have to share the royalty with anyone. Ebooks on success, stress-management, travel and leisure, understanding human psychology, relationship development sell extremely well on eBay. Prices of books range from $9.95 (books on magic tricks or cooking recipes) to $79.95 (real good books on making huge money). The prices of most e-books are around $29.95 (travel, success formula, stress management, relationship-development, understanding human psychology and technical).

To find out a better way to keep your profits high on eBay, read on: 

1. Do your research before you start selling
Even before you become an eBay seller, do some amount of research about eBay, and how things go about on eBay. In a matter of days you will be able to identify your potential competitors and at what cost they are offering their e-books. There are 2 ways to sell:
(a) Selling to the highest bidder
(b) fixed price selling (advisable for selling e-books).  

2. Write a strong sales copy
The second step would be to write a strong, creative sales copy which can be used for eBay listings and that would work. If you are not very good with copywriting, hire a freelancer for this purpose, because, you will constantly need the help of this person for various e-books that you would work on. A convincing copy will always attract your potential buyers’ attention towards your product. Not only should the sales copy be attractive, but it should be SEO friendly; which means that it should be rich in keywords. That will also make your product search-engine-friendly.

3. Invest on a good e-book cover
If you want to step into business, why hamper the quality by not working or spending too much on the e-book cover! Experts like Brent Turner (CEO of eCover Frog, http://ecoverfrog.com) say that almost 40% buyers are attracted towards e-books by the image i.e. the e-book cover. Place an order with a professional designer to get a first grade e-book cover design. You can use this image (or images) in the eBay listings of your e-book.

4. Offer multiple payment options
Give the buyers as well as the bidders multiple options to clear the payments. In fact, offer them as many options as possible. This will also increase your chances of selling more.

5. Add shipping costs
Shipping costs do not come into consideration if you offer an option of direct download on payment, but if you opt to send your e-books in compact discs by snail mail; you must calculate and include the shipping cost which would be fair enough.

6. Maintain professionalism
Keeping the attitude and the relation completely professional right from the start, would help in the future. You must be extremely prompt and at the same time provide good service; you can change the taxes wherever necessary, and also register the business with the government.

7. Feedback
The system of the exchange of feedback with the buyer on eBay is extremely good. This helps in building a good relation with the buyer. There’s a lot of comfort in the picture. The feedback is you certificate which will motivate the other buyers. There are namely 3 types of feedback that can be given: (a) positive (b) neutral, and (c) negative. You must stay in the good books of your buyer! Just be frank, if the buyer has been rather nasty, give him the same kind of feedback. It is advisable sometimes not to leave a feedback at all, instead of leaving a neutral feedback for your buyer, as that can attract a negative for you.
Ultimately, you must be wondering how good is business on eBay? Effortless and slow in the beginning, picks up gradually and finally shoots up like a rocket. In a matter of days or weeks you can regain the money you invested on the e-book and for selling on eBay.

    ByPinaki Ghosh 

Step 1: How to register, who can register
By logging on to www.ebaystores.com you can easily start your very own Ebay store! All you have to do is click on ‘Open Your Store Now’ tab and go on to the form that is to be filled in. To open up your store, you must be a registered eBay user with a seller’s account. You must also meet any one of the following requirements:
  Feedback score of 20 or higher, or
  ID Verified ($5 charge), or 
  Pay Pal account in good standing
The rules are pretty simple. For example, your store name must be up to 35 characters. So, if a store name like ‘Jerry Christopher’s Candies, Gifts and Goodies’ is in your mind, I think you drop that plan and think for a smaller and smarter name. 

 Step 2: Subscription options

You can choose from three subscription options:

1. Basic @ $15.95/month
To experiment this is the best and the smallest account. It gives you a store platform which you can easily customize, access reports, brand your business on eBay, get free phone support, access the Selling Manager which also is an online sales management tool.

2. Featured @ $49.95/month
If the volume of your sales is expected to be medium, this is a better option for you. Additionally you also get the benefits of reporting and marketing choices.
3. Anchor @ $499.95/month
This is the most expensive but at the same time the best plan for large, hardcore business houses that needs maximum opening. It can be easily located while searching a certain category. It’s more like setting up a huge store at a prime location on a main street.
Besides the monthly subscription charges, at a price of only $0.02 per listing per month, you can gain access to the store inventory listing too. Ebay charges a very small commission on every sale which is a percentage on the price of every item sold.
How to list items
Once you open your store, you are automatically allowed to add store items to be listed for 30 days, or till they are sold out. All you have to do is mention that you want the items to stay enlisted for 30 days, or ‘Till Cancelled’, which means, that they can be kept till they are sold out. But the older items will keep showing in the list until you edit your list and delete them.
Ebay and Ebay Store: the difference
The buyers have blind trust on Ebay stores compared to Ebay. They expect more skill and professionalism from those selling in the Ebay stores. Thus, the buyers do not mind paying a little extra at Ebay stores. Setting up your eBay store can open a new horizon for you in internet marketing, and you can even expect to get better prices than normal from online sales. According to most internet marketing gurus, “Even slow moving items move fast here!”

 By Pinaki Ghosh

 Viral Marketing was the first which was used by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, the venture capitalist behind Hotmail, before it was sold to MSN in 1997 while describing Hotmail’s email practice of attaching their own advertisements with outgoing mail from their users. The infamous media critic Douglas Rushkoff wrote about Viral marketing in his book named Media Virus (1994); and that was the very first article on this special way of marketing.

In this book he wrote that Viral Marketing works. Even if we presume that many people who receive your free gifts will not share with others, still there will be 80% others who will share, and go ahead to pass them down to friends and acquaintances. He has written, that this network continues to seven or eight levels before the campaign fades out.

World famous examples of Viral Marketing 

   • Hotmail promotion campaign
• Gmail promotion campaign
• Microsoft’s Origami Project campaign
• Tupperware popularization
• Popularization of text massaging
• Popularization of chat
• BMW’s Mini Cooper campaign
• Ford Motor’s Evil Twin campaign
• Jami Kane game (BBC sponsored)
 

By Pinaki Ghosh

What is an auto responder?
Does the swiftness of the other companies to revert your mails impress you? Does it make you feel that the customer care agent is the one who responds? On the other hand, there are chances that you are answered by their auto responder. It is software that responds to your mail instantly. This software plays a major role in carrying out an email campaign. These auto responders are divided into two main categories.

i. Outsourced auto responders:
The auto responders operate on the provider’s infrastructure and are usually configurable via a web-based control panel. The customer pays a monthly usage fee which is easy to implement for the end-user.

ii. Server-side auto responder:
This server enables users to install the auto responder system on their own server which also requires technical skills.

What is the need for one?

• Helps you save your time. The pain of replying all the mails that you receive is not necessary.
• It looks extremely professional. All the visitors and clients receive a reply immediately.
• In sending newsletters and running email campaigns, this technique works miracles.

By Pinaki Ghosh

First used in 1992, the web banners have evolved rapidly in the most innovative ways as a form of advertising since then. They come in several sizes and forms, like static banner, and flash banner which is animated. Banners serve much the same purpose as print ads with the added advantage of being linked to the advertiser’s site.
Banners are the main form of advertising for click ads, and affiliate programs.

Text links are not renowned but related to the banner ads, with no graphics, and serving pretty much the same purpose such as the banners.
A typical banner ad

Common sizes for banner ads are:

i. Full Banner: 468 by 60
ii. Half Banner: 234 by 60
iii. Micro Button: 80 by 15
iv. Micro Bar: 88 by 31
v. Button 1: 120 by 90
vi. Button 2: 120 by 60
vii. Vertical Banner: 120 by 240
viii. Square Button: 125 square
ix. Leader board: 728 by 90
x. Wide Skyscraper: 160 by 600
xi. Skyscraper: 120 by 600
xii. Half Page Ad: 300 by 600

By Pinaki Ghosh

1. Give away freebies: The most common methods that work is to forcefully make people sign up and give their details so as to give out free gifts. These free gifts should preferably be digitally downloadable. It should be automatically downloadable, to cut off any hassle.

Such free gifts are generally:
E-books on subjects like:
o Self help
o ‘How to’ topics
o ‘7 Secret tips’ type topics
o Business/career tips
o Internet business related
o Stress management
o Relationship development
o Health/fitness
o Travel
o Child care

• Software products of small niche utility, like mail management.
• Games
• Video
• Music

2. Disable some features for non members: While making your website, make an option for signing in. This means visitors have to become members to use all the features i.e. they will have to sign in to use the features. Non members should be allowed to see everything, but should not be allowed to use all features. If your website has appealing material, visitors will view everything and ultimately sign up.
This way you can get paid members too!

3. Allow a trial, create an addiction: Most of the times give a 30 day trial period to your users. After 30 days if they want to use all the features, or the software, they will have to sign up, may it be with payment. This will definitely work.

4. Offer discounts to members: You must showcase two types of rates for your products and services. One should be for the members; and the other for non members. This difference of rate will automatically make your visitors sign up.

NEW DELHI: Not just the economy even the US newspaper industry is going through tough times these days. Shrinking circulation, dwindling

advertising revenues, growth of the internet edition and rising newsprint prices have together put pressure on their margins. Even the best and most established US newspapers are feeling the heat.

To cope with the pressure, most newspapers have adopted various cost cutting measures. From reducing global coverage, cutting down the number of pages, streamlining resources and cutting excess jobs, they are trying out all kind of combinations to stay ahead. Now, the industry is also contemplating outsourcing some work outside the country to reduce costs.
The trend started a few years ago, as some US-based newspapers offshored their editorial work to India. In the next five years, offshoring is expected to gain traction.

According to a study done by Pune-based research firm ValueNotes, the offshore opportunity from newspaper publishers (including both the US and UK) is estimated to be around $3.5 billion.

It’s expected to reach $12 billion by 2012. The number of people employed in this industry is also likely to cross 5,500. Interestingly, the overall publishing outsourcing industry too has been growing fast in India for some years now.

There are over 100 vendors in this space. What’s more, revenues from Indian publishing offshoring is slated to grow from $444 million in 2006 to reach $1.46 billion in 2010. An estimated 26,000 people work in this space and the number is likely to grow to 74,000 by 2010. Most (96%) of the India-based vendors have capabilities to service the academic publishing segment. But newspaper outsourcing is different. And its this space that’s gaining ground now. As of now, only the top Tier 1 newspapers from the US are offshoring. Their work is largely limited to ad production services.

However, as the space matures, Tier 2 and Tier 3 publishers too are expected send a wide range of work to India. Since its still in the early stages, only a few service providers are active in India. According to ValueNotes research, the total number of people employed in the newspaper outsourcing industry is around 2,300, as of July 2008. However, there is a scarcity of ‘end-to-end’ service providers. And as the space grows vendors are expected to build complementary capabilities to achieve this objective.

However, as the space matures, Tier 2 and Tier 3 publishers too are expected send a wide range of work to India. Since its still in the early stages, only a few service providers are active in India. According to ValueNotes research, the total number of people employed in the newspaper outsourcing industry is around 2,300, as of July 2008. However, there is a scarcity of ‘end-to-end’ service providers. And as the space grows vendors are expected to build complementary capabilities to achieve this objective.

Source: Times of India News, 23 Sept, 2008