The Click Depot Blog

Archive for March, 2009

The online community is getting wiser by the day, but uncompromising. That makes a difficult target group to cater to. Users demand a higher level of information deliverance. In these challenging times, surviving and winning the competitions of SERPs’ has become crucial. Somewhere down the line, the haste of becoming the front runners is eating away the charm of internet marketing or is that what internet marketing all about? Is it just a crazy game of gathering clicks? For Black Hats yes for white hats no! And White Hat practices need to be redefined too. It’s not just about having all search engine rules right, internet marketing Business needs you to go overboard. It demands more creativity.

As a Site Owner or Manager, there are some things that you need to understand and keep in mind throughout your online presence. These would be clarity about the purpose of the website, quality of content of the website, accessibility and the visual appeal. If you can explain why you wouldn’t read a book which is irrelevant to the title it mentions and is filled with substandard content, you would very well understand why a user would never come back to an inferior website. White hat isn’t hard to do. What it takes is just planning the marketing activities ahead of time and making changes to the plan as the statistics change and to keep in mind that the website is for users and not the search engines.

For the play safe people, the rules are simple. Be absolutely to the point and honest and smart. Even a half brained would know that a “Make your way to the top in 7 day in $$$$ “is just an earning tactic and there is no white hue to these marketing activities. But if you are an offensive player, the scope is beyond imagination. Where’s the room for creativity when you have these keywords to stuff and who has the time anyway is the attitude which gives an impression that you have got it all wrong. Internet marketing is all about how creative you can get with your content. It takes patience and planning for a successful marketer. Its really best advised you don’t blow your budget by paying for links and affiliate marketing. It’s a fair game and the fair player always has an advantage. “The Advantage of never getting banned”. There is a chance to make million bucks if you play fair or lose it all if you cant wait. Choice is yours.

Its high time people realize there’s no quick way to the top. If you have a viable product, you would eventually get to the top. SEO is a vital component of a successful Internet Marketing Campaign but if gone wrong, it can do more damage than good. Website promotion is changing definition with time, and the challenge just got trickier. Now you have to strive harder to get to the top.  Search Engines endeavor to make useful information come on the top and to do that they got to be highly quality conscious about what appears on the search results. If you are somebody willing to rank among the top sites in your business and survive the online market, befriend the search engines and say good bye to black hat activities, because this space just got more ethical.

Image Courtesy Of http://www.watblog.com/2007/11/20/now-comes-white-hat-viruses/

I really fancy the convenience and usability the real time web conferencing tools offer. Its a lot more economical to have a web conference than to fly down all the key persons from all over the country for an in-person meeting. I think web conferencing tools have brought a  higher level of efficiency to the businesses.I saw a whole generation of  web conferencing tools developing into products that got sold like crazy, and now there are tools which are even free.But do they match up to the front runners in this business or in the other case is the so called QOS worth the bucks we spend on them.

I tried a couple of services, to start with, I used dim-dim, which claims to be world’s first free web meeting service based on the open source platform. It is a browser based web 2..0 app which also got nominated for webware 100, which emphasizes on simplicity and ease of use.It was very easy to set up an account and to start and join a meeting were a breeze.You can have up to 20 people in the room with the free version which is almost good enough even to have a webinar. The only drawback is the fact that the free integrated teleconferencing service uses a US telephone number. So the choices get down to using skype or some other VoIP application.Other than that the free version offers recording sessions, meeting reviews, whiteboard, powerpoint sharing and a big screen sharing window, private chat facility etc. I would rate it 6/10. But its a great tool to get acquainted to web conferencing and e-learning .

I knew I would settle down with a time tested and credible service, before that I wanted to test new players which offer lower cost. Next up was WebHuddle, which is a cross platform web conferencing tool that requires no installation. With WebHuddle, meetings can be conducted either in conjunction with an existing teleconferencing service, or utilizing WebHuddle’s optional VoIP. WebHuddle offers recording of meeting sessions, presentations and performs consistently over different web browsers. The advantage with web huddle lies with the linux users, but I couldnt see any new versions and it wasnt inexpensive, so had to turn it down. Yugma was the next service I was eyeing but turned out that the free version allows only 10 users and does not allow the presenter to transfer control to the viewers. What had got me to Yugma though was the integration with skype which must have made things smoother.

I was next experimenting with Webex Meetmenow. I thought that it was suitable for small-business collaborative meetings. Prices are lower than Pay-Per-Use Meeting and Meeting center versions of web-ex. Meetings take place online immediately after you sign up, and you need to download the WebEx MeetMeNow software to schedule and start a meeting. The download process doesn’t take more than 2 minutes. The person designated as the Presenter can share documents within the meeting space. The meeting initiator can transfer the presentation control to any of the meeting participants and anyone can share documents. Sharing supports documents, presentation, and full-motion video files. Also, with the PC user’s permission, an attendee can remotely control that person’s computer. I feel that this is good value for the money. But the search is still on…I really have high hopes from dimdim.

Image Courtesy Of http://www.advancedmeetings.com/web.html

Theclickdepot.com is a growing online marketing firm. And as much as it’s a whole bunch of fun growing an online marketing company, it also has its fair share of challenges. One of them is to keep things organized! Online marketing is a large field. We often deal with customers from markets as varied as limousine rentals to jewelry manufacturers to large public corporations - all looking for the same thing. The coveted attention of their target online community. But with variety comes complexity. We deal with tasks ranging from SEO strategy consulting, pay per click campaign management, Google Adwords, Link Building, Blog Marketing, Email Marketing, Etc. We deal with several vendors and internal staff. All this can often get pretty challenging to manage, especially since there is no real way to know what orders we are going to get next month!
Given all that, it’s truly important for us and any business really, to keep tasks managed well. There are several ways that we’ve run into over time and we want to share our experiences about them here.

1. Outlook: This is probably the most popular task management approach.

Pros - If you and all your staff have Outlook already, then this is great way to manage tasks.

Cons -

This is good only to manage tasks with internal staff. It’s hard to do this with vendors even though its not impossible. Online task management is the easier way to manage vendor tasks and freelancer/consultants.

Outlook is expensive!

Outlook is not online. So if you are traveling or on the road, you can’t look at your tasks unless you have an exchange server or access to one and your mobile phone is synced from your exchange server. We don’t have that internally and most small businesses that we know don’t.

2. HiTask

This is my favorite. Check them out at hitask.com - online task management.

Pros - One of the best implementations of Ajax that I’ve seen out there. ULTRA easy to use. You can assign tasks to your team with drag and drop features on the website itself.

Cons - Costs money and is subscription based. If you have more than 2 people that want to look at each others’ tasks, then you really have to get the Business account to make it meaningful and that costs $15/month or $90/year. Yet, its worth the money in my opinion. I’ve tried this for over a month and I love it! I haven’t signed up for the business version yet because I am still testing out other services.

3. Task2Gather.com

This one looks similar to Hitask but free. My experience is that free tools like that just don’t cut it. You do get what you pay for and that’s why I am a bit worried whether this will compare with hitask as far as ease of use, functionality and support is concerned. But I am going to give it a try anyway.

Conclusion: Give online task management a try if you are working with multiple staff/vendors/freelancers, etc. and struggling to stay on top of their tasks. Hitask is our favorite so far and you can sign up for their business account for $90/year.
FYI - we are not affiliated with hitask in any way and no, they or anyone else are not paying us to write this post :).

Image Courtesy Of http://www.videinfra.com/hitask

Link building is a reality today. All websites need links to rank higher on search engines. There are over a 100 ways to gather links online ranging from the “cleanest” which is “just post your content or services online and let people link to you” to buying links and everything in between. As you may imagine, where you draw the line is what separates SEO’s. We tend to stay very close to the clean techniques but at the same time, do get involved in what we believe are fine link building techniques - when done right.

Buying blog reviews is one such hotly debated topic. You will see on this post about buying blog reviews that the author talks about several ways to get them and also talks about the pros and cons of these methods. Also check out the comments, especially the first one. That’s an angry man out there! And really, he just doesn’t get it. There is a right way and a wrong way to do blog reviews.

The wrong way -

ay for reviews from Reviews-only sites that just post reviews without any regard to the product.

Get reviews from irrelevant blogs

Get reviews that are fake or crafted.

The right way -

DON’T GET REVIEWS. Just get informational posts written. If your blogger has not used your product, in our opinion it is not right to pay them to write a review. However, we feel that its OK to pay them to write about our site or our product on their site. They don’t have to endorse it. Just talk about it and share their genuine thoughts about it based on just reviewing your site and comparing with competitors.

Make sure they posts are genuine. Only go with bloggers that take the time to research and write good honest useful content.

Get reviews only from relevant blogs that are established in your area. Make sure the blogger knows your market well and that the blog post.

Make the blogger include in CAPS and bold, clearly, in the blog post that “THIS IS A PAID POST. MY OPINIONS ARE BASED SOLELY ON ONLINE RESEARCH AND NOT ON PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THIS PRODUCT OR COMPANY”.

It’s not always easy but the cleaner your link building, the more you’ll benefit in the long run. That’s our strong belief.

Image Courtesy Of http://www.buyblogreviews.com/