Bharatmalik.com

For an online marketer or affiliate marketer, understanding this concept is very inportant.

ROI- Return On Investment, in other words, “what we give and what we get“. There are some associated financial terms that one needs to know as well:

Pay Back Period- Amount of Time required for the benefits to pay back the cost of the project

Net Present Value- The value of Future benefits restated in terms of today’s money.

Internal Rate of Return- Benefits restated as Interest Rate.

Going forward will touch upon various other aspects important to understand online world

One day sitting at the dawn of another sun set, i don’t know what prompted me express my thoughts and here I am. What encourages me to write was, I have a friend who herself was a good writer and asked me to write as well. I don’t know why she insisted me  to write. I must thank for finding this hidden treasure in me.

I dedicate this poem and my hidden treasure to her-

The Sun, The Moon, The Star

See the Sun So very Bright………

Making our lives so full of light

Feel the calmness in the Moon………….

That will make our wish Soon

See the Twinkle in the Star…………….

Work Hard to Shine like a Star

Today Sachin Tendulkar became the highest run getter in the cricket’s history. What a legend in its own regard. He is Sir Sachin Tendulkar for every cricket fan, I watched one of his interview to a tv channel saying I only play to enjoy the game and records came my way of their own. He hasn’t worked intentionally to achieve them.

So here I am, believing in what I do and do it passionately. Guys, trust me if you love what you do, everything just falls in to place. You just have to work hard, play hard, and party hard. Talent can only be challenged by a sustained effort and hard work.

Believe in what you do, and put your heart and soul to it. Trust me, you will not have to bother about the results, rather results will follow you.

Sachin Tendulkar Record breaking Moments

Often we come across online marketers talking about customer behavior. How it can be influenced to drive repeat traffic and Business eventually.

Three basic elements can make a repeat visit to your portal and that are:

Simplicity- Let your website speaks what its main objective without jazzy and swanky colors on it. If i have to give an example of a simple website in a travel space, the cleartrip wins the battle. And Makemytrip is far from matching that. Yatra comes in the middle.

Speed- Your website should open up quickly even on dial up. It should not take ages to download. Again use of heavy images, configuration codes etc should not slow down the website download speed. Worst site i have seen in terms of download speed is Travelguru.

Structure: How have you structured products on your website? Too much information kills user’s interest and make him early exit from a website. I would not take a breath and mention Moneycontrol’s name. Gush, what a website. I am defintely not a target audience for such banner filled website.

When we were working on our website Yatra.com, we wanted literally everything to be there. Be it a new product for indian online consumer, to a new feature probably not seen so far, so on and so forth.

We just wanted everything to be perfect from the day one. Hence taking some time in changing layouts, adding functionality, testing etc.

Then one day, Ex Indiatimes.com e commerce head Mr. Rajesh Sahni came and saw us. I listened him carefully and his words gave me a lesson to keep in mind for my future endeavors:

“Perfection is a Dream, Keeping Chasing it but do not hold things to make them perfect“

Little that i knew that this rule will become a working lifestyle for everything I handled thereafter. We keep on working on single product and literally waste our time without seeking customer’s opinion to improve upon it.

Google has a simple philosophy of paying less attention to UI and instead let users to decide what they need. We know how Gmail has evolved strating from Beta to making it a full fledged email application.

I still wonder if online marketing piece could have been strategised in excel sheets then many online  marketers would have made their money by just sitting and working out numbers.

Let me tell you, if you are the one then you are highly mistaken. I am not saying stop planing, instead practice what it takes to achieve your goals. Ask these questions before you plunge into Online Marketing-

• Do you understand Online Business or you just want to enter because everyone is entering in that stream for the heck of it
• Do you posses product development knowledge
• Have you ever explored Web Analytic
• Customer behavior understanding
• Knack of finding new things in ever changing internet industry
• How to build organic growth of your online biz
• Spending money is easy, but what will happen to ROI

Well, one thing learned over a period of time is “do not hesitate to test to find the best“. One has to be there and be part of the execution cycle to work out any online marketing plan in this world.  And learn to spend every penny as if its your last.

Impact of US downturn is visible now in India, companies across the board focussing on cutting cost and  becoming cash flow as soon as possible. In fact everyone is trying to follow these steps. How is it different from Dot com bubble burst happened in Y2K.

That was the time when everyone was saying, this is the end of online era and no one was ready to invest money in internet biz. Well, here comes the quote, “challenges come with an opportunity“. Some of the international online companies indeed survived that with smart investment, outsourced model and focus on profitability.

Few key points that become the focal point in going thru these times:

1. Perseverance
2. Check on Expenses
3. Profit
4. Eyes wide open for New Areas of Growth

Short term or long term, this downturn will remain for a while. Lets hope everyone comes out of this with blazing guns…

I used to write poems many years back and thought of sharing one of my all time favourite poem that won some accolades between friends and family

One soul wants to fly……….
Never know where to head…
To acheive what it perceive……….
Break all the rules that deceive…
wants to fly above the mountains………
to feel the solitude of those terrains..
wants to float with the stars………..
to feel what it takes to reach that Far…
wants to circle around the moon……
to know why it is sooo Doon….
Wants to fly Day n Night ………….
to know why people fight……
Wants to end its JOURNEY in LIGHT……..
With loooooots of Flowers inside……
One soul just waanna fly …….

I always wanted to be part of a start up. Seeing a company growing from scratch gives a thrilling experience and keeps your adrenaline moving. When an opportunity came, I jumped at it and became part of Yatra on 13th March 2006. What a day to start some may say, but so far its been a learning experience and no one can steal that from me. We started from a small conference room with just 10 people in all, from doing data capturing, to study international competition, drawing few sketches of prototype, debating, arguing, and finally making consensus as to how our home page looks like. It was all chaos with little clue, a journey began. A grueling, yet enjoying Yatra is still part of my life.