Archive for the 'Business' Category

5 ways to Increase Engagement on Social Media

Social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Orkut are easy-to-use, fun to connect and effective in terms of promoting your business. You get different sets of audience for your business and utility platforms to get connected to. These websites can help in increasing brand visibility, spreading your brand name, gain direct feedback from your audience and can help in getting good organic growth to your website traffic.

But the challenging part is that how to connect with them? How to engage them?

Here we are adding some possible ways to enhance your engagement with your target audience.

social-networking

Connect right

‘Being social’ is one of essential criteria for successfully increasing the engagement with your connection on social media websites. Your first goal should be connecting with right set of customers and contribute to their ongoing conversations.  Try to find out what discussions are taking place that relate to your objective? Once you find those discussions, connect liberally, comment on their threads, read their blogs/ articles, retweet interesting postings, and reach out to large number if targets while sharing/collaborating on content creation.

Create a valuable content

Before interacting with your prospective customers, it is important to think what content they are looking for. In order to engage with your connections you must have something interesting to say. You can provide user benefit updates including general news/events related to your objective as this will increase your updates importance and credibility in the reader’s eye. Write content which is easy to understand and useful so that people can share it with others.

Encourage feedback and work on it

You may want thousands of followers on twitter or hundreds of unique visitors a day, but in reality only a few of them will really comment and share your information with others. So make sure your interactions are meaningful. Respond to comments, updates, messages and retweets.  Keep a note of what types of content people respond to and focus on developing it more.  Try some fun content for your readers, start a contest, feature one of them, or just ask for their feedback/ suggestions.

Use applications

All social media websites offer a huge number of applications to connect with your followers. Research and make use of these applications to increase connections, send updates, know what people are talking about,  latest buzz, market trends etc. You can easily use their open source application matching your requirement.

Have patience

Engaging with the customers and building a Community doesn’t happen in a day. Don’t get scared if its taking time, keep interacting and set realistic goals for your organization based on others experiences. It takes time to develop your online community!

We hope you would try these simple and useful ways to engage with your customers and build a successful community through these platforms. Please share with us your suggestions and experiences on the same.

5 ways to Increase Engagement on Social Media

Social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Orkut are easy-to-use, fun to connect and effective in terms of promoting the business. You get different sets of target customers for your business and utility platforms providing useful tools and features to attract them. Utilizing these websites intelligently can help in increasing sales, building your brand, and working as a centerstage to help get your word out.

But the challenging part is that how to connect with them? How to engage them? What business strategy you should apply?

Here we are adding some possible ways to enhance your engagement with prospective customers and also enhance the credibility in the community.

1. Connect right – ‘Being socialis one of essential criteria for successfully increasing the engagement with your connection on social media websites. Your first goal should be connecting with right set of customers and contribute to their ongoing conversations. Try to find out what discussions are taking place that relate to your objective? Once you find those discussions, connect liberally, comment on their threads, read their blogs/ articles, retweet interesting postings, and reach out to others about sharing/collaborating on content creation.

2. Creating a valuable content – Before interacting with your prospective customers, it is important to think what content they are looking for. In order to engage your connections you must have something interesting to say. You can provide user benefit updates including general news/events related to your objective as this will increase your updates importance and credibility in the user’s eye. Write content which is easy to understand and useful so that people can share with others.

  1. Encourage feedback and work on it – You may want 1,500 followers on twitter or hundreds of unique hits a day, but in reality only a handful will really comment and share your information. So make sure your interactions are meaningful. Respond to comments and retweets; take note of what kinds of content people respond to and focus on developing it more; do something fun for your readers, start a contest, feature one of them, or just ask to meet them! You can also ask for their feedbacks on your latest event or updates and take their feedback seriously and work on them

4. Use applications – All social media websites offer a huge number of applications to connect with your targets. Research and make use of these applications to increase connections, send updates, know what people are talking about, latest buzz, market trends etc. You can easily use their free open source application matching your requirement.

5. Have patience- Engaging with the customers and building a Community doesn’t happen in a day. Don’t get scared if its taking time, keep interacting and set realistic goals for your organization based on other people’s experiences and the time you have to commit to developing your online community.

We hope you would try these simple and useful ways to engage with your customers and build a successful community through these platforms. Please share with us your suggestions and experiences on the same.

Useful Logo Designing Tools

There are lot of factors that strengthen a brand and can contribute to increasing the perceived value of it. It can be visual as well as non visuals. Among the visual ones, probably, Logo is one of the strongest elements that contribute in increasing the brand value as well as brand recall.

If you have an idea and looking to design logo for your brand, try some of these online logo designing tools. These are really helpful. Listing here some of the useful online logo designing tools in no particular order:

Logo Maker

logomaker

It is a custom-built design tool for entrepreneurs to design a creative log in just three simple steps. It lets you choose the image from icon gallery, color tools, add text and design in your own logo for free. They offer more than 10,000 images for you to use as a base in your logo.

CoolText

cooltext

This is a free graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you need an impressive logo without a lot of design work.  They offer over 300 million free images, logo style and button designs to choose for your logo.

Logoworks

logoworks

Another logo designing tool which helps in producing original, custom logos you can afford for free.  It provides Professional logo designers in-house and freelancers to create a successful logo for you. It also lets you design brochures, websites, and more with your logo.

LogoYes

logoyes

It is the leading tool for creating a logo and other premium design products for small businesses around the world. It lets you customize you own design by choosing your area of work, symbol of your choice, adding your name and creating a logo design complementing your field of business.

Logodesignengine

logodesign-engine

This logo design tool allows you to select  matching logo template, select fonts, colors  and create your company logo instantly. All you have to do is to select your preferred Logo Design from our logo template collection, submit your company details, select fonts and colors and save your company logo.

Businesslogos

business-logo

It provides a comprehensive database of expert designers to create the best logo for your business.  Also  check out some additional logo design portals, including various informative articles, tips and other information.

thelogoloft

logoloft

This tool will deliver anywhere from one to six design concepts, and you’re allowed an unlimited number of revisions. Concepts arrive within three to four business days, and final designs are handed over once you’re satisfied with the revisions.

thelogocreator

logocreator

With more than 300 logo elements and 50 built-in fonts, you can create logos in just a few steps. The Logo Creator software also includes 75 logo templates and can import your personal fonts and images.

Logoease

logoease

This free logo design tool offers intuitive and simple design interface that lests you create your own free business logo designs easily. You will receive various electronic files for both web and print use including the vector source files. File formats include eps, png, jpg and tiff.  It enables you to save and download as many as 10 free logo designs at once.

logosmartz

logosmartz

It is a desktop logo creation software that can turn out high-quality corporate business logos and emblems instantly. It offers over 700 pre defined logo templates for your logo.  it aloows you to play with the color, fonts and symbols according to preference. Over 4000 high quality graphic symbols and over a 300 fonts. System fonts can also be imported.

Hope these tools will help you develop an effective logo for your business. Please share with us your comments and suggestions on the same.

10 Web Analytic Tools to Track Traffic Trends

There are plenty of web analytics applications including some big guns like Google Analytics, Statcounter and remote-site services such as Alexa, Compete and Quantcast. These analytics applications and tools really help us extract some meaningful information to understand traffic trends, demographics, user behavior, etc. on our site.

We are presenting here some of the lesser known 10 web analytics tools for tracking visitors trends and behavior.

Clicky

clicky

According to the data shown on the homepage around 176,313 websites depend on this tool for monitoring, analyzing, and check the reaction of their visitors. It is specially created for small medium business and blog websites. It lets you view data to help you react to changes in your traffic as they occur. You can view history for an individual page, search term, referring domain, etc.

Review- Clicky is simply fantastic at monitoring key website statistics and displaying them in easy to read format. Feature-for-feature it surpasses the competition and continues to surpass expectations. SimplyStamps.com

Woopra

woopra

It is a comprehensive, information rich, easy to use, real-time Web tracking and analysis application. It offers excellent features that allow you to perform Live Tracking and Web Statistics, Real-Time Analytics, Manage Multiple Blogs and Websites, Deep Analytic and Search Capabilities, Live Chat etc.

Review- It is similar to Google Analytics but provides real time stats and a number of additional features, such as the ability to chat real time with visitors to the site. CrunchBase

HitTail

hittail

This tool is designed for improving search campaign, and is ideal for e-commerce sites, small business sites, and blogs that are generating revenue through advertising. It lets bloggers view traffic result, suggestions for improvement, and enable you to blog directly from keyword tool interface. Publishers can easily generate Google and Yahoo site maps and marketers can manage log SEO & SEM keyword campaigns.

Review – Analyzes blog traffic and search patterns to spit out future post suggestions for bloggers eager to stay ahead of emerging trends and spike their rankings. BusinessWeek

Crazy Egg

crazyegg

It enables you to track, evaluate, and optimize your website based on where your visitors click. You can check Heatmaps, which tells you which part of the page is popular. It also provides you details on top 15 referrers, search terms, operating system, browser, etc. Overlay is another interesting feature as it lets you see each element on your page.

Review – The guys at Crazy Egg have taken a different approach where you can measure and actually see what your users are doing when they visit your site, and from these results you can immediately optimize your site based on your visitors usage patterns. TechCruch

Piwik

piwik

This provides you with detailed real time reports on your website visitors, search engines and keywords, language, popular pages and much more. It is a PHP MySQL software program that you download and install on your own webserver.

Review- Piwik is really a Google Analytics alternative, even if they will see few firms switching from GA initially. ReadWriteWeb

Coremetrics

core-metrics

It is a digital marketing optimization solution and web analytics. Its products help businesses relentlessly optimize their marketing programs to make the best offer, every time, anywhere, automatically.

Review – The Coremetrics website offers tons of information and provides case studies for a variety of industries. Top Ten reviews

Radian6

radian-6

The scalable analysis solutions offered help you to set up specific keywords for monitoring purpose on a dashboard, automatically monitor the keywords on varied microblogging & image sharing sites.

Review- Gathers real-time-as-discovered information from across the social web, including blogs, video sharing sites etc. TechLifePost

MyBlogLog

mybloglog

It is basically a social networking platform for bloggers. It lets you check who is checking out your blog. It let you check the blog statistics including onsite clicking habits and referral information.

Review-Take advantage of your existing presence on the Web and ties it into communities of like-minded readers and authors to add context to the conversations in which you take part. CNET

Whos.amung.us

whos-amung-us

Another interesting web anaytic tool to check the  real-time visitor on your website/blog. It allows you to check the  total number of visitors on your website at any given moment. It is easy-to-install widget and requires no registration.

Review- Whos.amung.us makes some good sense to share the stats with your visitors. TechBuzz

Enquisite

enquisite

This tool  allows you to keep a track of incoming search engine and PPC traffic on your website.  You can view an in-depth statistics report including page position, landing pages, and specific geographic data.

Review- The service lays claim to a robust tool set and their reports are presented in a clear and easy to understand manner so you won’t get overwhelmed by tech speak. Killerstartups

We hope these tools will help you anlayzing the performance of your website and guide you in making appropriate changes to get better results. Please share your views and feedback as always.

Freelancing Tips for 2010

The New Year begins with new thoughts, aspirations and expectations. We plan new things and strategies for personal and professional life to achieve success in all spheres of life. Freelancers also look for new opportunities and plans for the coming year. So, now before you set a plan for this year we would like to suggest you some tips which might help in making 2010 a year of success.new year

Profile completeness

An online profile is the one of the most important aspect for winning a freelance project successfully. Profile Completeness, is a must for all service providers to acquire more freelance jobs and to become an established workforce at LimeExchange. Since there is no physical contact between you and the buyer, it is your profile that speaks for you. Your profile is the essential information, which a buyer would be interested in knowing before considering you for his project. Information about company, skill set, education and work experience of your outstanding employees are the key elements to acquire good projects. Hence the more detailed information you will provide, the better will be the understanding of your skills.

Online skill tests

There are hundreds of skill tests available online across a wide range of categories. Online Skill Test results, which are publicly visible, validate your credibility online manifold. When a buyer would take a tour of your profile, he would be impressed if it is validated with Online Skill Test Certification. So to win over the attention of buyers, the service providers as well as small medium need to take the online skill test in their area of expertise as certified service providers manage to get access to some real good projects faster.

Education & credentials verified

Verified educational credentials have an edge over unverified credentials. Buyers these days look for genuine providers through an authentic source to avoid fraud and get their requirements completed successfully. Having a profile containing a verification seal brighten the chances of winning a freelance job simply and immediately.

Participate in Q&A

Share, learn and ask questions to build a network with the people from same field of work. You can raise a query, answer questions, and share knowledge with people from across the globe. Sharing knowledge will not only help you in enhancing your skill sets but also in connecting with people from similar of different areas of freelancing business.

Promote your profile

One more suggestion for this year is to promote your profile using your affiliate id. Join the affiliation program, refer friends and earn through activity they would perform on the platform. Not only this you can also earn money while showcasing your profile link on different websites. You just have to simply create a Text/Anchor link to showcase your LimeExchange Profile, Portfolio, Certifications and Earnings.

Hope you would take these suggestions into consideration before setting an agenda for 2010. Please share with us your feedback and comments as always.