3 Simple rules for creating effective email copy

June 28th, 2010 by riteshtanu No comments »

Show the Benefits

What is in there for your customers? Saving, freebies, reward or any other benefits. Show it upfront. Your cusemail copytomer doesn’t care about how amazing your business is? All they are interested in is the benefit they get in associating with your products/services. How does it help them in solving their need/want?

Talk to them

Avoid using I, me, and we and start using you and your. Your prospects are more interested in themselves. Using you and your works better.

Use Active voice

Merely putting CTAs (call to action) like Call now, Click Now, Buy Now, Get Started, Register or something like these will not yield any result unless, your copy is persuasive . Avoid phrases like “This deal will help you save $50” instead rephrase it to “This deal Saves $50 “.

Firefox Addons for Privacy and Security

June 24th, 2010 by riteshtanu 1 comment »

Adblock Plus

Tired of pop ups, pop- unders, images, banners or other ads? ? Install Adblock Plus now to regain control of the internet and change the way that you view the web.
Adblock Plus allows you to regain control of the internet and view the web the way you want to.

Lazarus: Form Recovery

You are about to completely fill a long form but suddenly your browser crashes. You might feel frustrated as you need to retype the whole info again. Install Lazarus, it never lose anything you type into a web form again. It securely auto-saves all forms as you type, so after a crash, server timeout, or whatever, you can go back to the form, right click, “recover form”, and breathe a sigh of relief.

BetterPrivacy

Do you want sites you visit to track and monitor your browsing behavior through not deletable long-term cookies, a new generation of ‘Super-Cookie’, which silently conquered the internet ?
BetterPrivacy is a safeguard which protects from usually not deletable LSO’s on Google, YouTube, Ebay.

wgen – Password Generator

It often happens that we have to think twice before setting a new password. With the installation of pwgen or password generator, password cane be created at One click on the icon that is “p”and a password is instantly generated, shown and copied into your clipboard
Really helpful for Sysadmins / Network Engineers who need to create multiple passwords everyday.

RequestPolicy

Be in control of which cross-site requests are allowed. Cross-site requests are requests that your browser is told to make by a website you are visiting to a completely different website.
Improve the privacy of your browsing by not letting other sites know your browsing habits. Secure yourself from Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and other attacks.

buySAFE Shopping Advisor

The buySAFE Shopping Advisor is a free tool that makes online shopping safer and more secure. Shopping Advisor provides exclusive access to the Safe Shopping Portal where purchases are automatically protected with a bond guarantee of up to $25,000 as well as identity theft insurance – for free. Shopping Advisor also provides Safe Shopping Ratings on more than 320,000 eCommerce sites in the search results of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and eBay.

Unhide Passwords

Type your passwords in clear texts instead of asterisks. Just be careful that while you are typing your 30 charcter secret password someone is not looking over your shoulder.

Long URL Please

You might want to know the exact site which you are visiting, especially when you are on Twitter or any other social media sites.
Short urls (eg http://tinyurl.com/123) simply redirect to some other page on the internet – you can’t tell what website they link to by looking at the link. This plugin fixes this by transparently replacing any of these links when every web page loads.

Uses the api provided by http://www.longurlplease.com to determine where short urls actually link to.

No Script

For full control of Javascript, Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, and other plug-ins, look no further than NoScript, an extremely powerful and customizable Firefox extension that can block pretty much every kind of script.
When you navigate to a page such as the Apple iPhone 3G QuickTime demo, NoScript blocks the demo initially. Just click the NoScript icon at bottom right of the browser window to unblock scripts on that site temporarily or permanently.

Cleanzer

We often visits some sites/forums where we are actually reluctant providing personal email addresses.. Get a new Cleanzer email address every time you register for a new site – on the spot with one click.

Find trusted sites, see Spam Free ratings as you browse.
- Get a permanent and secure alternative email address on the spot with one click
- Register for as many sites as you like and check emails whenever you want
- Forward emails you need to your own email address – leave the spam behind
- Unsubscribe with one click and never see unwanted emails again
- See Spam Free Site ratings as you surf the internet – find websites you can trust and avoid spam

 

Firefox Addons for Privacy and Security

June 24th, 2010 by riteshtanu No comments »

Adblock Plus

Tired of pop ups, pop- unders, images, banners or other ads? ? Install Adblock Plus now to regain control of the internet and change the way that you view the web.
Adblock Plus allows you to regain control of the internet and view the web the way you want to.

Lazarus: Form Recovery

You are about to completely fill a long form but suddenly your browser crashes. You might feel frustrated as you need to retype the whole info again. Install Lazarus, it never lose anything you type into a web form again. It securely auto-saves all forms as you type, so after a crash, server timeout, or whatever, you can go back to the form, right click, “recover form”, and breathe a sigh of relief.

BetterPrivacy

Do you want sites you visit to track and monitor your browsing behavior through not deletable long-term cookies, a new generation of ‘Super-Cookie’, which silently conquered the internet ?
BetterPrivacy is a safeguard which protects from usually not deletable LSO’s on Google, YouTube, Ebay.

wgen – Password Generator

It often happens that we have to think twice before setting a new password. With the installation of pwgen or password generator, password cane be created at One click on the icon that is “p”and a password is instantly generated, shown and copied into your clipboard
Really helpful for Sysadmins / Network Engineers who need to create multiple passwords everyday.

RequestPolicy

Be in control of which cross-site requests are allowed. Cross-site requests are requests that your browser is told to make by a website you are visiting to a completely different website.
Improve the privacy of your browsing by not letting other sites know your browsing habits. Secure yourself from Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and other attacks.

buySAFE Shopping Advisor

The buySAFE Shopping Advisor is a free tool that makes online shopping safer and more secure. Shopping Advisor provides exclusive access to the Safe Shopping Portal where purchases are automatically protected with a bond guarantee of up to $25,000 as well as identity theft insurance – for free. Shopping Advisor also provides Safe Shopping Ratings on more than 320,000 eCommerce sites in the search results of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and eBay.

Unhide Passwords

Type your passwords in clear texts instead of asterisks. Just be careful that while you are typing your 30 charcter secret password someone is not looking over your shoulder.

Long URL Please

You might want to know the exact site which you are visiting, especially when you are on Twitter or any other social media sites.
Short urls (eg http://tinyurl.com/123) simply redirect to some other page on the internet – you can’t tell what website they link to by looking at the link. This plugin fixes this by transparently replacing any of these links when every web page loads.

Uses the api provided by http://www.longurlplease.com to determine where short urls actually link to.

No Script

For full control of Javascript, Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, and other plug-ins, look no further than NoScript, an extremely powerful and customizable Firefox extension that can block pretty much every kind of script.
When you navigate to a page such as the Apple iPhone 3G QuickTime demo, NoScript blocks the demo initially. Just click the NoScript icon at bottom right of the browser window to unblock scripts on that site temporarily or permanently.

Cleanzer

We often visits some sites/forums where we are actually reluctant providing personal email addresses.. Get a new Cleanzer email address every time you register for a new site – on the spot with one click.

Find trusted sites, see Spam Free ratings as you browse.
- Get a permanent and secure alternative email address on the spot with one click
- Register for as many sites as you like and check emails whenever you want
- Forward emails you need to your own email address – leave the spam behind
- Unsubscribe with one click and never see unwanted emails again
- See Spam Free Site ratings as you surf the internet – find websites you can trust and avoid spam

Use Open Source Application to Flaunt Your Design Portfolio

June 16th, 2010 by riteshtanu No comments »

If you are a web or graphic designer using image galleries application to showcase your design portfolio would be an excellent idea. The open source image galleries empower you to not only showcase but also share your creative design with your clients, friends or family.

Adding intuitive image editing and gallery management tools to your web site is a quick and easy process. Build user retention and drive traffic with easy to edit and manage image libraries

What can you do with Image gallery applications?

•    Showcase your design portfolio
•    Share photos images/albums  with your friends families
•    Manage image libraries and edit photos quickly and easily

Which open source application you can use to build your own image gallery?

Gallery

As the name suggests, this is very slick and intuitive web based photo gallery application very easy to install and manage.  The key feature of this application is automatic thumbnails, resizing & rotation,   Ability to authenticate users and customize albums make this great for communities

Coppermine

Coppermine is an easy to use, multi-lingual web-picture gallery with a host of features. Full multimedia support and handy features like thumbnail creation make it a powerful and a multi-purpose application. The powerful privacy control feature with aility to manage user group makes it a perfect choice.

Zenphoto

This is one of the most popular online image gallery solutions.  Its features include, dynamic image processing foldeer based albums, editable titles and descriptions powered by AJAX, comments, themes, online uploads and simple image management.

Google Search on SSL will it make a difference?

May 29th, 2010 by riteshtanu No comments »

Last week Google launched https://google.com, note the “S” in” https”.  With this additional “s” Google has made searches private and secure.  SSL or Secure Socket Layer connection works as safe bunker containing your browser and Google, not letting any third party sniff.  If you are surfing net at any public place usingoogle search SSLg Wi-Fi access, you might not want interlopers to have the ability to discover what you are searching for.  This indeed is a great move by Google by placing this protects as now the information you transmit to Google search is completely protected from people or bots that may be monitoring traffic on your network.
SSL is common for eCommerce or email providing sites but this seems to be a unique step integrating SSL into Google Search.   A few points worth mentioning here is that the SSL will not reduce the data sent to Google , it only hides the data from the third parties such as bots or ISPs.  This protection will work till the time you are on Google search and Google search result pages. The moment you click and visit any of the links on the Search result page, your information becomes open to all.

How to Optimize Your Keyword Search

May 25th, 2010 by riteshtanu No comments »

Whether optimizing your website organically or looking for paid traffic for your site, in both the cases you would require doing an extensive keyword research.  An effective Keyword research goes beyond looking for search terms. Smarter approach would be to delve deeper into the search trends, competitors’ analysis and look for popular queries in different geography. The last one in particular applies to those targeting traffic from multiple region/countries.

Sharing here are a few tools you can use to make your keyword search smarter

Google Trends

- For a broad look at search query data, enter up to five search terms to see relative popularity over time.

google trends

Trends for Websites

Google Trends for website traffic data. Type in a website address to see visitors by region and related sites visited.

Insights for Search

A deeper dive into search query data for marketers and power users. Create your own lists of “most popular” and “fastest rising” queries for different geographic regions over time and by topic.

Hot Trends

The top 100 fastest-rising search queries right now (U.S. only). Updates throughout the day.

Email Marketing Rocks If You Plan it Right?

May 21st, 2010 by riteshtanu No comments »

Marketing needs a lot of budget. If you wanna reach out to large audience you really need to invest, a lot on adverting, hiring a renowned marketing agency or in recruitment and maintaining a pool of qualified and experienced resources. If you believe in the above mentioned resources blindly, you need to try email marketing. Believe me – do it right and it will be the least expensive marketing campaign yielding a substantial revenue.

Here are 5 important steps to get started with your email marketing campaign.

Build Your Own List

This is one of the most important tasks that one needs to get right before launching a campaign. The email Ids in your list should only be of people interested in your business and have agreed to receive promotional mailers from you. It is NOT advisable to purchase email IDs for email blast.

Have Unsubscribe Links

Give your audience option to unsubscribe in case they no more wanted to subscribe to your mailers. There can be a few requests to unsubscribe every time you blast a mass mailer, but that’s alright. It is more important to do it right else you will be considered a spammer.

Test Your Email

Gmail, Yahoo, Homail, AOL, Outlook and many more try at least on all the major ones to check if they appear as you have designed it. Each email client can display it in different format, make sure you have tested it across. It is also essential to have a web version of your email so that if it is not correctly displayed in inbox, your audience can see the mail as webpage.

Cleanup Your Email List

Make sure to clean your list before the blast. The cleanup process would include removing bounce back mail Ids, failure deliveries, unsubscribe request, bad email Ids, etc. Most of the online tools help you to clean up automatically but in case of Desktoptions applica, you might require to do it manually.

Use Mass Mailing Tool

If you are planning to do an email blast, you would require a mass mailing tool to execute your campaign. I use Mach5 desktop application and Constant Contact as online application but there are many others you can use one as per your needs.

5 Highly Useful WordPress Plugins

May 2nd, 2010 by riteshtanu No comments »

One of the major reasons that make WordPress a top blogging platfrom is the availability of mammoth list of useful plugins. These plugins really makes some of our tasks much easier which otherwise would have required a lot of time and efforts. Here is my list of 5 highly useful plugins.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Once installed and activated, this plugin will help in getting the list of similar posts from your blog. You can edit settings and suggest a number of similar posts to be reflected whenever you publish a new blog. This plugin can really help in decreasing the bounce rate and increase the average time spent by visitors on your site by displaying other similar posts right in front of your blog readers.

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. This really helps in improving internal linking on your blog.

All in one SEO Packs

This plugin takes care of all your on page SEO requirements. Be it Advanced Canonical URLs issue or about fine tune Page Navigational Links or any other, this plugin takes care of all on page SEO requirements in totality. All you need to do is to write great post and you are all set to get visibility in major SERPs.

Redirection Plugin

You logged in to your Webmaster account and found some of “not found” errors on your site. You understand the problem but you don’t know how to create .htaccess file to solve this problem. Install and activate redirection plugin and you will realize managing redirects is much easier task now.

Pc Robots.txt

This is yet another plugin designed for people like me who don’t want to mess around with files and permissions. Just install and activate and you will see a list of spam-bots disallowed by default . You can edit and add your own if you wish to.

5 Highly Useful WordPress Plugins

May 2nd, 2010 by riteshtanu No comments »

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Once installed and activated, this plugin will help in getting the list of similar posts from your blog. You can edit settings and suggest a number of similar posts to be reflected whenever you publish a new blog. This plugin can really help in decreasing the bounce rate and increase the average time spent by visitors on your site by displaying other similar posts right in front of your blog readers.

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. This really helps in improving internal linking on your blog.

All in one SEO Packs

This plugin takes care of all your on page SEO requirements. Be it Advanced Canonical URLs issue or about fine tune Page Navigational Links or any other, this plugin takes care of all on page SEO requirements in totality. All you need to do is to write great post and you are all set to get visibility in major SERPs.

Redirection Plugin

You logged in to your Webmaster account and found some of “not found” errors on your site. You understand the problem but you don’t know how to create .htaccess file to solve this problem. Install and activate redirection plugin and you will realize managing redirects is much easier task now.

Pc Robots.txt

This is yet another plugin designed for people like me who don’t want to mess around with files and permissions. Just install and activate and you will see a list of spam-bots disallowed by default . You can edit and add your own if you wish to.

5 Hard to Die SEO Myths

April 26th, 2010 by riteshtanu No comments »

Domain Age Affects Search Engine Ranking of your Page

It’s good to secure your domain for longer period if you have found your desired domain name. But this is purely to keep your domain reserved and not out of any SEO requirements. It’s the quality of your site and its content that affects search engine ranking and not the domain age.

It’s Necessary to Maintain an Ideal Keyword Density on Your Page

Keywords in your page copy helps search engines to understand what your site is all about and when someone types similar or same key phrases, search engine may show your site in SERP. But there is nothing which is ideal keyword density. All those formulas on Keyword Density are just crap. Forget them all. Do not overstuff your content with any particular keyword or phrase. Using it 2-3 times is sufficient.

Submit your site to Multiple Search Engines

If your SEO team is spending time on submitting your site’s URL to to multiple Search Engines, it’s just a waste of time and nothing else. 5-6 years back it may hold some truth but it’s useless now.

Having Google Sitemap Ensures High Rank

This is good practice to have .XML or .txt sitemap but this simply helps search engine in understanding your site structure and find out the pages on your site. This can never ensure better ranking. Breaking the myth further, just having links on sitemap can never guarantee that it will be indexed by search engine.

It is important to update your pages frequently to ensure better ranking

Frequent updates ensure frequent crawling and not better ranking. If you are updating your pages just for the search engines, please don’t waste any more time on it. If you need to update for your visitors, go ahead and do it.