Bharatmalik.com

Bombay blast left me shattered completely and i really don’t know why humans are killing humans. Why can’t they live and let live.  I pay my tribute to all those who became victim of this indiscriminate firing and condolence to grief stricken parents, brothers, wives, and sisters. A tribute from bottom of my heart:

Jindagi ki chand ghadiyon mein………….
Khusiyon ko dhundti unn ghadiyon mein………
jaane kab hui “Jameer” ki maut………..

Kya nahin dekh paayi unn bebas ankho  mein……….
vo sapne jo sanjayo the apno ki rah mein………
sukhe paton ki tarah bikherenge rah mein……..

“Jameer ki maut” hui he aaj……….

iss kadar ki… khuda bhi khauf karta he aaj……

ki insaan baana janwar he aaj………

dua he rab se itni……….
JIndagi chahe ho insaan se juda………
par jameer ho sab ka khuda…..

Hui he Jameer ki Maut aaj…
Khuda bhi khauf karta he aaj………

Affiliate marketing is a concept of revenue sharing between online advertisers/merchants and online publishers/salespeople, whereby compensation is based on performance measures, typically in the form of sales, clicks, or registrations.

The translation of the revenue share principles to mainstream e-commerce happened almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web in November 1994.

Cybererotica was amongst the early innovators in affiliate marketing with a cost per click program. During November 1994, CDNOW launched its BuyWeb program. With this program CDNOW was the first non-adult website to introduce the concept of an affiliate or associate program with its idea of click-through purchasing.

Benefits of affiliate marketing include the potential for automating much of the advertising process (accepting & approving applications, generating unique sales links, tracking & reporting of results) and payment only for desired results (sales, registrations, clicks).

Paying only for performance shifts much of the advertising risk from the merchants to the affiliates, although merchants still assume some risk of fraud from partner sites.

Affiliate marketing has contributed to the rise of many leading online companies. Amazon.com, one of the first significant adopters, now has hundreds of thousands of affiliate relationships.

There are two ways to approach affiliate marketing: You can offer an affiliate program to others or you can sign up to be another business’s affiliate. As the business driving an affiliate program, you’ll pay your affiliates a commission fee for every lead or sale they drive to your website.

And what about joining another company’s affiliate program? It’s all about extra revenue. Think about your customers’ needs: What other products or services would interest your site visitors? Join those affiliate programs. Affiliate programs can increase your sales with no upfront cost to you. It just takes a little time to plan your strategy and select the partners that will have the greatest impact on your business.

You must be wondering what made me write this post, well sometimes your most trustworthy seniors or juniors for that matter try to take piss out of you by back stabbing and showing their diplomatic face in front you as if they are the next best thing happen to you.

I really dont know whom to trust or whom one shouldn’t but one thing is clear no matter what ever it takes one has to have his vision and focus clear and dont let these things overcome your bigger goals in life.

This goes without saying that politics is short lived but dreams are yet to be achieved. I admire Steve Jobs, Apple CEO once quoted: “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish”

Increase your knowledge to next level and let everyone do what ever they want to, you will definitely win this race and outrun your counterparts by some margin.

Google's Search behavior

Recently, i have come across Google’s search behavior evolution from what it was in 2005 and what is now. I guess picture speaks lot than words so i would leave up to the folks to interpret how important is to appear on top search search results.

Even harder to get that postition and hence it is becoming even challenging to crack your best keywords to drive traffic to your website.

Internet market world is full of surprises. Whether it relates to best UI design of a website, functional flow of e commerce website, technology or even designing your marketing plans both online and offline.

What i have seen and learn t that what works today will become obselute tomorrow, and things that doesn’t work or look like they wont work suddenly gain traction.

Every time there is new promotion going live or new web page design, or even new online campaign we test something new and see what works the best and carry on in evolving it until we reach to an optimized level.

Take an example of GMAIL, where everything in beginning was Beta and now they have launched some fantastic features and far ahead of their competitors. This is all based on user’s feedback, testing and building it what users want rather than what internal project teams wants.

Would recommend this approach of “Test To Find The Best“

Like i mentioned in my previous post on display advertisement. Its time to share feedback on it.

We went ahead and did a deal with one of the most traffic generating websites like Yahoo, AOL etc. And found out that we were getting clicks (mind you at some cost per click) but not the return in terms of sales. Reasons could be following:

• Since these websites have huge amount of page views. Unless you cover 360 degree space on these sites, it would just burn your money and nothing else as you will appear very few times out of large publishers waiting to show for the same space.
• CPC and CPM is too high to justify the return

Having said that, it has advantage of brand reinforcement and build recall.

Overall, i would say display advertisement on big portals like Yahoo, AOL wont be cost effective and be clear about the objective of your activity. If it is brand penetration then worth spending but if it is about advertisement versus sales ratio then be ready to spend extravagant amount with no return.

Hope this will clear hoopla about Yahoo, AOL or Rediff display advertisement.

Two days back, Google has removed one of our website from organic results. Later when we checked sitemap and cached results in web master tool, we found that Google crawler was not been able to reach our website.

Reason were:

Google’s crawler IP has been blocked at the ISP level

Website was unreachable when Google crawler was trying to visit the website

And indeed, we have blocked certain IPs in order to prevent to spoofing on our website and in that spree we have blocked certain Google’s data center IPs.

What impact does it make is, we have unblocked all IPs, Google crawler came and crawled our website within 1 hour but unfortunately impact was such that website is still not showing on keywords we were appearing on top position. Not even on domain name search.

Quantifiable loss, 5% traffic that comes on brand.

Gain- Our niche website strategy to capture brand search traffic showed up on top and hence we saved traffic and Business.

So Guys, please be careful while blocking any IP to prevent spoofing attack at the firewall end, make sure that we should not block the search engine IPs by any means.

Recently we have tried a slight different way of getting demand thru ad copies. We have started mentioning our call center sales number along with the best offer so that while cost of click may increase or decrease, we have managed some customers to call us after seeing the offer.

Goa Hotels at Rs. 999

Lowest Price in Last Ten Years!
Book Online or Call 0124 304 0777.
www.Yatra.com/Goa_Hotels_Offers

While this approach has its advantages, this will surely reduce CTR and quality score of the whole campaign.

One has to balance such acts and drive efficiency while focussing on demand generation in online marketing.

One of the key element in today’s online marketing scenario and has always been is what is your ATS ratio. That means Advertising to Sales Ratio.

Let me explain this in bit detail as this useful while an online marketer tries to drive online traffic to his website.

Lets start with an example: I have spend close to 10000 in Google adwords and generated an affiliate sale of one million. This means my ATS ration will  be become:

ATS=(10000/1000000)*100= 1%

This means so far my marketing spend is 1% of the total sale. This ratio differ from product to product and Business to Business.

For any Business or product, an ideal ATS ratio should be 2-3% . Later in the post, i will touch what is see page ratio.

Summary: Its all about what people wish in a moment win the slight ray of hope. I titled it as “Wings of Wishes”. means “Ichaon Ke Pankh”:

I wrote this poem on 27th June 2004 at 13:17 PM, yes i noted the time when i finished this.

                       Pankh laga udti he ichaye......
			pal mein he aasman cchu jaye......
		Na jaane kisko bana le ye apna......
			purra karti pal mein ye sapna.....

		Roz ek aashiyana he bunti......
			pyar ke phool unme he chunti.......
		chandani ki roshni se karti he ujyala......
			taron ne dekho purre ghar ko sajadala.....		

		Ichaye to he maan ke hi saaye ......
			begano ko bhi apna sa banaye......

		Na jeevan ke gamon se ghabraye.......
			Ichayon ke pankhon se udate hi jaye.....

		Pankh laga udti he Ichaye ....
			pal mein he aasman cchu jaye....

Hope you guys will understand this as one can go on n on thinking wild and why not. Keep you dreams alive and shoot the moon so that atleast you will end up with Stars.