Who? Me??

Aside from being Pristine’s CTO, I also happen to be my company’s webmaster. I really do not mind this task, in fact I think its one of the under-rated jobs out there in the market.

The cool part about this role is how closely you have to work with the Google ecosystem of Analytics, Adwords and Webmaster tools. The thing about Google products is that many people might know about them, but how many of them use it the way they are intended to be?

In my quest to find the right person I have interviewed so many professionals, that its not funny. Almost all of them put everything but the kitchen sink on their resumes. That might be a good idea, but they all of them come down crashing in the interview. A royal waste of time.

In case if you want to differentiate yourself from the horde of wannabes out there, this is one of the things that you have to know!!

URL Builder Tool

Here’s the link to the tool.

* Ta-da! and all the fanfare *

What this tool allows you to do is allow you to track a segment of the visits which are generated on the provided link to be tracked as an individual campaign! The reason why anyone should be excited, is that now you can slice and dice all incoming links to your website (provided you can alter the incoming links).

Some of the ways in which it can be used is -

• Tracking a segment of your traffic which is coming via an online-ad – For example, I could put a banner ad on Timesjob, or some site. I could also have posted a job posting there with my website’s URL in the job description. Now instead of relying on the simply the data from Referral traffic to measure the ROI of this ad campaign, I can give them a generated URL and track it without worrying about any other source of traffic
• Email Campaigns clicks can now be tracked as a segment. With a little help of Goals and Conversions, I can calculate the ROI on a per email basis
• You can even measure the effectiveness of traffic being generated from different properties on your website

Well, this is just the start, you can go pretty much wild with this tool. Just remember folks! Slice and Dice data for better control and tracking.

Back in 2000, the dot com market in India was booming. Every company who wanted to have it’s presence online was scrambling to find domain names, hosting, email solutions, etc. Companies such as Net4India sprung up and came up with offerings with ridiculous prices (some of these offerings still exist to date!). Executives bought these websites thinking that somehow building a website would translate into revenues. In fact even today, the average “Indian IT company” continues to dole out development costs of websites propelled by content management systems (CMS) to be around 5-6 lakhs. If you are lucky, then that figure can go as high as 14-15 lakhs !!

What was the mistake then?

The single minded assumption that building a website will translate into revenues.

I still see folks who nurture this piece of ticking bomb waiting to explode and set their businesses to ruins. As a result, all derived-demand business also went bustville. It took a fair amount of years to clear the damage, and come back on track.

So why bring this up Now?

These days, whomsoever that I am talking (and you can include me in this list as well!!), is thinking about having an online enterprise. A sweet setup, where the person can run a business irrespective of where this aforesaid individual is. There are more than a fair share of success stories around, and these people have become heralded role models.

Yes, the online dream can become true. Yes.

Feels good to hear these words, don’t they? These days I am seeing a lot more structured approach, newsletters, opt-in forms, CRM systems, mass emailing systems, affiliate management systems, advertising networks, etc … the systems are all there. People just need to start using them and start churning the proverbial money mill.

But …

Back then it was IT firms, now I am seeing a large growth of Digital Marketing firms. It’s the same plot, just the players are different now. Organizations are again back to setting up websites, now with complex marketing and sales systems. But how are you doing in terms of sales? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

If you do own a website, could you share with me what are the plans that you are thinking of to generate sales? Are you creating value to generate those sales?

The internet is virtually an infinite source of inspiration, great news, stupidity and entertainment. I thought that I might share some gems which are either relevant to me, or which I think you might find interesting.

• It’s been a month that I have been a father of two, oh, we are going to name him Malhar!
• Hilarious sledging of Delhi boys, by a Madrasan (damn, that post has generated 2.3k comments in a week!)
• My organization got funded last week, by the very firm which funded some awesome products such as Facebook, Bittorrent, etc.
• The Big K from CrazyEngineers embarks on a Journey of a Lifetime

Oh, in case you are wondering what the heck is Blue Nothing, it’s a term I read in one interesting novel on Social Engineering (and it’s evils). The internet is the Blue Nothing!

I was checking on my list of target keywords on Google for both SEO and SEM, when I chanced upon “CFA Hyderabad” where we are doing good on both the paid rankings as well as the organic rankings. When I was checking the ad, I noticed that one of the ads was by olx (in case you do not know about this site, do not bother to find out!).

They have recently started advertising in a heavy way (even on TV as well).

Buying advertisements so you could sell your advertising platform? Really? Is that how effective your platform is, that you have to pay to get traffic?

Or are you just trying to siphon off traffic from one of the market leaders?

In fact not quite sure whether they are directly in the advertising space, somewhere between Craigslist and e-Bay. I still wonder, why will anyone pay good money to put advertisements on this site?

People who are in Social Media would already know of influence monitoring tools such as Klout, Peerindex, and Rapportive.

I started using Klout the minute I discovered it using the Rapportive add-on for Firefox. Measuring and monitoring your klout score seemed cool. Soon after that I chanced on Peerindex as well.

The approaches employed by Klout and Peerindex are slightly different. Whereas Peerindex considered the reach of your tweets and conversations, Klout seemed to focus on the richness. Both the web-apps seemed cool, since both of them gave you an indication of what and how to increase your respective scores. So I managed to hike up my Klout score from the low 40s to the low 60s. I was happy with what I had achieved, until one conversation with Sushrut at a Tweet-up made me realize, that a high Klout score or a high Peerindex score is not really the outcome.

The business model that both these web-apps adopt to monetize their influence measuring algorithms is pretty much the same. Organizations that need to reach out to the influencers and decision-makers in their particular niches can now do so … at a price of course. Peerindex for example, charges 50 GBP for identifying a single influencer in the topic of your choosing. Of course there are people who are willing to pay, but the question I want to raise is till when?

I recently read this article on the openview blog, and found this great directory of twitterati – Twellow. One simple search confirmed this, the application is a directory of topic-wise experts, whereas this might seem commonplace, what this means for Klout and Peerindex is that their premium services now seem overpriced. Why would an organization pay a premium for the same information which is available for free?

Agreed, that Klout and Peerindex do provide “perks” for influencers, but at the end of the day, the deliverable for which the organization is paying up good money is to get twitter handles of influencers to start engaging with them. Perhaps, if the engagement can be somehow integrated into these perks … but till then I am firmly sticking to Twellow!

First came Best Buy.

People were happy, they got good deals, saved some money. Good … but meh! Perhaps their launch was before time. Avante Garde.

Then came Groupon.

A multi-billion dollar valuation, e-commerce 2.0 buzz, social media tongues wagging about. It was the next big thing since the Internet.

I guess over a period of time, folks soon realized that the business model was pretty simple really. Get bulk, negotiate with vendors and give back a small share back to the users. That was also the eYantra model. I hear its gotten its second round of funding as well.

Followed by a slew of Groupon clones … there are too many of them really to name a few. The unfortunate thing is that not one of them is willing to call themselves a Groupon mee-to. We are different is what they all say.

Everybody on this planet is unique, just like 7 billion other people.

If you thought that I would be writing another nerdy review of Star Wars, you are mistaken, Ser.

With Groupon clones sprouting everywhere on the Indian e-commerce scene, its going to be a war out there. The war is going to be played out in our inboxes, on our cellphones, on our social media pages and in our tweets. Our credit cards will be the trophies, each transaction a battle on who will get us the cheapest deal. If you thought that it would make me happy, its not.

All the discounts in the world are not worth the beauty of a spam free life. It’s been ages since I have seen an empty inbox, gotten no sms-es. The Clone Wars are on, and you are the next battle!

If you have worked in a start-up and have been a part of the core team in any start-up, you would be familiar with and know the importance of venture capital; and their steep terms and targets

If you want a higher funding in the next round, give me more revenues.

How many of us have heard this line? In fact, it’s interesting to note that VC’s are not looking at higher bottomline, they are looking at increasing the topline. I am not complaining, it is a good perspective to hold if you want to keep an eye on the big picture.

This stand is also helping the slew of applications which are being launched as Softwares-as-a-Service (SaaS). Why? Read on.

As a business owner, one of the major targets dictated by a VC would be revenue targets. Not profitability. So I, as a business owner, will be willing to try out different new services in order to increase my offering. If a service exists which otherwise will take me ages to build or acquire, I am now more than willing to try it out on a month-on-month basis.

The overall cost of a SaaS pricing would be more, but the brunt of it on a monthly basis would be less. This impacts my profitability, but these days I am not looking at profits as much as I am looking at revenues. If I able to increase the reach or richness of my service offering using SaaS, then so be it. I will go ahead for the same at the cost of profitability.

Your thoughts?

Dear Channel providers,

I am sure that all of you are complaining about piracy of your shows and content over the internet. In fact I won’t be surprised if you think the bit torrent technology is the scourge of all paid content models. Here is a suggestions -

If you can’t beat them, join them

Why don’t you start providing your premium content for download over the internet? Go ahead put your advertisements in them as well. Not only are you increasing your advertisement exposure, but also you are making money off the very thing which was a threat to you earlier.

The cool part is that even if your content then gets pirated, you are still getting the advertisement exposure. Isn’t that what you wanted?

So I was checking out bit.ly, and I noticed that the bit.ly Pro is free for individual users. Turns out you can have your own short url running with bit.ly’s engine.

Out came my credit card and kdkk.in was bought. Now all the urls that I shorten using bit.ly will be on this domain. The configuration is through your bit.ly account and could not be simpler. All you have to do is verify that you own both the domains and point your main domain to the shortened domain.

A simple two step process and voila, my own url shortener, powered by the good folks at bit.ly!!

After power leveling my first level 85 Dranei Hunter on World of Warcraft, I kind of realized that I need to slow down on the WoW front. Not only was it eating a significant amount of my free time, but I had gotten a bit jaded by it.

So after staying away from it for half a week, I tried to give this a whirl. FortuneOnline is a free MMORPG which has the look and feel of Diablo 2 … took me back to my days of engineering … bunking lectures so that I could stay back and slay Diablo/Baal or his uber-minions. I think that game is the only game I played to its fullest (for a full 6-7 years).

Pros:

• Interesting power-ups and skill trees for different classes
• It’s a browser based game – no pesky bulky client downloads
• Platform dependant as long as you can install Adobe Flash
• Diablo clone MMORPG (I can’t get enough of this)
• Good controls and game controls are extremely responsive
• Game is divided into different sections very nicely
• It’s free

Cons:

• Not many players online who seem to be active on the general chat
• The consumable items do not work sometimes (I hope the developers sort this glitch out)
• Game can get a bit repetitive after some time
• The item drops in the game suggest presence of more classes that the player can have, however when I was in character creation, I did not see those classes (don’t know if there is a premium mode)
• The plot is not riveting, or perhaps I am still too jaded for really engaging into the game plot.
• The graphics are meh! … however, even Diablo was not that awesome (remember it was 1999), now our expectations have gone up

All in all, a good whirl and you can idle by a few boring hours with this game. I do hope that the Torchlight folks can turn out a better MMORPG