Ideas to retain business brand name

It is really difficult to retain brand name after a great downfall in the market. It sometimes takes long time to earn trust from your present and past customers.  Customers believe teams who are responsible. So it is not so easy to please your customers.

Some ideas which help in retaining loyal past customers back are,

• Website look and feel: Start building your success from scratch.  Make small changes in website design changing the banners, content, etc..
• Blog for business: Blog is an incredible opportunity to attract clients and promote your business. Start writing a blog benefiting your business audience.
• Positive reviews: Request clients to write reviews, testimonials and feedback in niche forums, review sites and your website.
• Everyone is watching you: Don’t expect immediate results and start writing fake reviews. It wastes a lot of time and does not make any sense.This in turn irritates the users and spoils your reputation badly.
• Enroll yourself:  Workshops, conferences, trade shows are great players to shake up the landscape. Never miss to enroll in events, webinars and discussions.
• Video testimonials: One of the powerful way of marketing your product or service is video testimonials. Users can see and hear the voice of satisfied customers, more about the product/services and their experience. Add customer videos in your websites.
• Spread the news: Publish positive feedback, recommendations, and ratings in Facebook pages, twitter and linkedin. Use sentiment analysis and social media tools to verify the traffic, insights and effect of your tweets. This analysis can be done for your blog posts too.
• Give respect and earn profit: Some people respond only to customers who are profitable and ignore small companies .Sometimes small percent of customers make more money. So don’t lose any customer.
• Act fast: Accept and respond to negative comments as well. Communicate with the customers, learn what they want and fix the problems soon. Delay in replies in forums, chat, voice or mails create problems. Come forward and explain them.
• PPC: There will be no gain in spending on ppc immediately. Let your business grow and proceed further to improve your business through other marketing strategies.

It is difficult to get conversions all of a sudden and you need patience to wait for results. Expose yourself social media marketing is the key for a business from negative to positive searches. All these helps encourage the business to grow up and build trust. 

Blogging tips for beginners

Blog helps to indirectly promote products/services improving visiblity and branding. Here is a quick checklist to write an effective blog post.

• Write meaningful content relevant to your market and target audience. Blog posts must be updated regularly.
• Are you confused on what to blog about? There are about more articles providing 100+ topics/ suggestions. Example your blog can be "how to" ," problems to solutions", "interviews", "events", "product features and reviews" etc..Check out Ann Smarty post on "Blog on trending topics". 
• Link keywords in blog to your services page or products page.
• Images are a great way to illustrate the information. Present your blog with visuals.
• Spread your writing through social media sites like twitter, linkedin, social bookmarking sites. 
• Respond and thank users for their feedback and comments for your blog posts.
• Finally your blog can be valued analysing the visitor traffic and conversions.

Segmenting HTML sitemaps for large websites

HTML sitemaps help user to easily navigate across a page with many URLs. They are easily created for smaller websites and serves usability as well. But imagine a website with more number of pages. Here let us take an example of ecommerce website which has 25 categories and each category has 400 pages.

So how can you segment for crawlers and visitors?

Here I have listed some methods below,

• Organize the categories as sub-domains. This may be the case for more number of pages in an ecommerce website structured in categories. Break down the categories and give links to sub-domain alone.

Create category (top-level category) specific sitemaps with all its siblings and include the sitemap sections to mother of all sitemaps.

• Links can be given only to main category. It is similar to the above but there is no need to create separate category specific sitemaps.

• Product offers, discounts can be used in a separate sitemap. This sitemap assist users to identify all the product offers, coupons and discounts easily instead of dumping everything in a single sitemap.

Besides Google webmaster guidelines there are still many websites that lists more than 100 links in a page (HTML sitemap). A HTML sitemap lacking a definite structure causes discomfort to the user. So I suggest making it simple. A perfect architecture makes users easy to navigate through the page.

Google rolls out new recipe search tool feature

I found some interesting results with Google's new 'recipe' tool. Many food lovers and people interested in cooking may find it hepful. Try searching for recipes by clicking the 'recipes' on left-side of the page and Google list outs recipes for the given query. With this search feature you can further refine your search by selecting required 'ingredients', changing 'cook time' and by selecting the 'calories'. Time to cook, receipe reviews, images makes user select easily from the recipes list.

How to track clicks to outbound links?

I am a new blogger and just launched my blog. Here i am starting my first post on event tracking feature in Google analytics. I am sharing this post on how to track the user interaction with social media links like twitter, linkedin and facebook. So after some research, trial and error methods finally got my reports.

What you need?

To start with, install analytics code properly in your website. Check tracking code you have used(traditional or asyn script). Here i have used asynchronous tracking script in my website.

Event tracking basics:

For setting up event tracking the syntax/format  of '_trackEvent' method is.

('_trackEvent', category, action, label, value)

Category - specifies the name of the event. It might be a video, pdf, flash or any object.
Action - specifies the action the user does. Either click, play etc..
Label - specify label for the interaction.
Value - specify value for the event. Use integer values for "value" parameter.

Category and Action are required parameters to be used. Label and Value fields are optional and you can use it if you need.

How to track?

So to track the clicks/visits to social media profiles(twitter and facebook) add the following code:

<a href="http://twitter.com/xyz" onClick="_gaq.push('_trackEvent', 'twitter', 'click');>

Here I have added only the necessary fields here "Category" (twitter) and "Action" (click).

You're done. Wait for results to be shown in  Content report > Event tracking.