Bharatmalik.com

In an endeavor to get NRI traffic on our website, we have done a deal with display advertisers to see if we can actually get positive response.

Going by the text book, this display advertisement on big brands would help us in two things primarily:

1. Brand reinforcement & Reach
2. Demand Generation

Interesting to see outcome of this activity in coming days as to whether display advertisement would really help us in building just the Brand or can actually make some Business.

Will share my learning in few days, so just keep watching this space…..

I think, every kid or a teenager in their growing years heard this quote from their parents “Time is Money” so that we don’t waste it in unnecessary things. And when i was doing my Data Mining projects, i learnt that “Data Is Money” and indeed we were making good monies by analyzing data.

Without any doubts, both the above mentioned quotes were right on those times and hold so true in regards to the context.

But today, “Traffic Is Money” and just work towards building it on your website. More traffic you have, more money you can earn by monetizing it thru different channels. Just mentioning few to take notes-

1. Affiliate Marketing
2. Lead based model
3. Google Ad sense
4. Ad revenue from third party banners

Would love to know from readers of this post various means to monetize web traffic and ways of making money thru it.

While optimizing your site for keywords, one aspect that is highly under rated is “how competition is doing the same thing“. Every SEO guy goes to pre defined tools like Google Keyword Tool, Overture Tool, some paid tool to identify short and long tails of his category. But just overlook what their couterparts are doing actually.

So the key step in optimizing is-

1. Identify all your competitive websites in your category
2. Check their home page meta tags and description
3. Check footer of those websites /* Because every SEO guy play his strategy from the footer*/
4. Identify which keywords are used to link internal landing page
5. & bang, see how much traffic those keywords would generate.

” Why to reinvent the whole wheel and waste time”,

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.