I believe that perceived value, rather than price is what drives sales of most products and service.

When we first started sending out proposals and financials for our services to clients at ayruz web holdings, our financials were fairly straight forward. In most cased, financials were sent through single line emails such as

SEO: Rs. X / Month (Suggested campaign for 6 months)

But these days, when you ask for a financial from my firm, you will most probably receive a document attachment with detailed information on the work and its cost. such as

SEO

• Keyword Research
• Conversion Optimization
• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• Reporting and Analysis, etc. etc.

But then work we do is still the same as previous email, but we just realized that perception changes with the second style and it helps clients know the work put into their website.

Perception of value is a funny business. If I showed you two developers who charge $15 / hour and $50 / hour, you would most likely assume that the the second developer charging $50 /  hour offers a higher quality of service. They maybe not be providing a better service, but since they charger higher, it is perceived that they do a better job.

Perceived value can best be explained by the Prussian King who facelifted the value of humble potato. Check this video for more on that

But ultimately, if you cannot match your end product or service to the value perception you provide your prospective clients, you are looking for trouble

Talking about “Value”
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

So, time to get the “blogger” words out of my resume/linkedin/twitter (*breathes) facebook/websites and business cards!

Are you a blogger by definition? What keeps you inspired? Where do you draw inspiration to keep your readers entertained?

Let me know your  thoughts in the comments section and don’t forget to leave your URL

Define: Blog
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

A really simple yoga for computer professionals is the cat pose that is also known as the Bidalasana. Kneel down with your four limbs on the floor. Look down at the floor with your back flat and horizontal. Form an arch with the back while inhaling and sag your shoulder in and then come back to original extension while exhaling. If you find it difficult to perform this, place a mat under your knees. This asana will keep your energies in balance and align your body from the center. Perform this exercise about 15 times and you will be relieved of overall body pain.

Another important yoga for computer professionals is the bow pose or the dhanurasana. Lie on your stomach on the floor. Next you will have to bend your knees and bring the heels near your back. Then you will have to reach back with your hands and grasp the ankles. Hold the position as long as you can breathe normally. This position will aid in opening up your chest and taking fuller breathes. Full breaths deliver more oxygen to the body cells and this will make the cells healthier and capable of fighting off body pain.

Modern day living can cause a number of problems like the power yoga exercises and a stressed up life. In case you had to go for a regular health check up or a Nuclear Stress Test you would find that your heart has really been adversely affected due to the health issues.

IT professionals and body pain
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

A lot is being said and written about IT professionals and yoga. All IT professionals do their work from desktops and laptops and this sedentary lifestyle has given rise to a whole lot of health issues. And one of the most common heath issues that is plaguing these computer professionals is backache and neck ache. Are you someone who has to spent long hours in front of the computer at your workplace? If you are then you need to take care of your back and neck before things get out of hand. And it is the yoga positions that will help you to tackle the pain.

Talking about IT professionals and yoga, the first yoga position that comes to mind is the Diamond posture that is known as Vajrasana. Lay a carpet on the floor and kneel on it with your knees close together. Next you will need to sit back on the heels and stretch up from the hips. Make sure you balance your head well and the line through your ear, shoulder, elbow and the hip is straight. Sit in this posture for some time. This posture has great benefits and will provide relief from stiff neck and back.

Another yoga position that comes to mind when thinking of IT professionals and yoga is the Dog Stretch. It is also known as the Adho Mukha Svanasana. Lie with your face down and stretch back your legs. Pull back your knees and tighten the buttocks. Place your hands below the shoulder and exhale. While exhaling lift your head and then the chest, shoulder and the torso pushing down from the pelvis and straighten your arms. Right from the back of the head to the tailbone, your body needs to be curved back.  Push your shoulder down and back. Push back your head. Stay in this position as long as you can breathe normally. Then come down gradually and relax.

This is a guest post written by Sarah Catherine. who writes about the dos and don’t s’ of healthy living and fitness related topics . Some of her popular and interesting posts include  Yoga for weight loss and dealing with Stress Symptoms.

Exercises for Computer Professionals
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Being the Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of ayruz web holdings for the past year and a half has made me realize a lot of things. Amongst those is the realization that digital or Internet Marketing is only catching up in India when compared to United States or Europe. Social Media and Search Engine Marketing is a relatively a new medium that has cropped up and many of our clients need extensive education to persuade them to invest in this new medium for advertising and optimization.

Recently we were looking to hire a Search Engine Optimization specialist for our firm to manage the work and partially to take load off from my shoulders. It was hard work to find a good guy for the job!

Search Engine Optimization, which is the work done to optimize websites to attain top rankings for keywords which are searched by potential buyers/visitors. We usually optimize for Google and Bing  – because Google is the market leader and Bing is default search engine on thousands of Internet Explorers out there!

SEO as a industry is scaling new heights everyday and being on the forefront of that run, I cannot stress enough on how important a career SEO will be in the next few months or years. Unfortunately, there is not a formal degree which deals with this subject in colleges and schools. If you want to pursue a career in SEO, you are better off dropping out of college or taking up a bachelors in Computers or English both of which are required for a successful SEO specialist.

SEO Payscale

In some of the job portals I checked through, the base salary for a SEO guy is usually about $30,000 USD a year who will usually be the link builder, copywriter, SEO Researcher or a client relations manager.

With a bit more if experience, the salary levels shoot up to $ 50,000 USD a year and your experience gets more in-depth, some companies even offer a $ 100,000 USD + levels of salaries which would mean that you would head a team of SEO specialists, devising strategies and managing campaigns.

These are extreme salaries considering that the education requirements of a SEO consultant is pretty lax. Why? They do not teach you these stuff in school! So you have a career in great demand which requires you to be self-made. .  that is something I would kill for! (which is the reason I am an SEO consultant too! )

How to learn SEO

Dropout of college if you are really into SEO, that place can teach you nothing! Trust me. Next, since there is no formal “School Of SEO”, subscribe to some of the top bloggers in the SEO industry and read every post in their archives over and again till you get a whole lot of conflicting advice.

Then  either get yourself a bunch of domains and optimize them for some keywords using different strategies for different domains. If you find this a bit too hard, join up as an intern in some SEO company near you for peanuts and learn from them! They will usually have standard processes, client websites to optimize for.

Practice. Read. Experiment. – Three words that will help you get to those six figure incomes in the coming years.Though the SEO industry is still in its infancy in India, I am willing to bet all my horses that this will soon be the golden career for everyone out there. Start early,  climb up to the top of the wave.

Are you someone interested in SEO? Hit me up and I can help you get a base up or even offer you an internship at ayruz. We need some good guys to train!

SEO as a Career in India
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

When I watched this, I was immediatly able to relate to some of those days in my life! What about you?

“Procrastination” Tales Of Mere Existence
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Kerala Tourism’s international campaign, Your Moment Is Waiting is a film that goes far beyond the realm of a commercial, to capture the soul of Kerala like no destination hitherto has. Stark Communications, which has been handling the Kerala Tourism brand for almost two decades, conceived, scripted and then assigned the task of creating this film to the renowned ad film maker Prakash Varma.

View the complete video here:

So, what do you think about the ad campaign? Planning a visit to Kerala soon?

Your moment is waiting – Ad Campaign by Kerala Tourism
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Brilliant man the person was…the person above – Mr. Albert Einstein.

The theory of relativity is something I always found fascinating. It is deep when you think about it in your life. It is used by everyone when every they are expressing something.

I very recently got introduced to a person via a common friend as a “Successful Entrepreneur”. I was flattered obviously, but beyond that I was thinking about relativity at that point. This person who has introduced me is not an entrepreneur and does not know even the specifics of my business, but he considered me successful (flattery or real).

But when I ask myself, am I successful? I think not. Why? Because I like to compare myself with entrepreneurs like the Ambanis, the Tatas or even Mr. Gates! They are successful in my eyes.

The same goes with pretty much everything you talk about. Everything big, small, fast or slow is relative to something or someone which the person talking about it has previously experienced or seen.

When someone says Life is hard, I am tempted to ask “Compared to what?” -  Unknown

Beautiful!

Next time, someone says something is easy or difficult, understand what they are comparing it to to get a better clarity of stuff!

Using the Theory of Relativity
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Recently I came across a in-your-face dead simple way to manage your todo using Excel and boy was it excellent!

The idea was simple. Have columns of various projects and write down the todo under them. Then record a simple macro that will strike off and give a color to the cells once the thing is done. And have a todo that reverts the process so that you can mark a todo as not done after marking it as done.

I have columns for different divisions as shown in the screenshot like ayruz, metrogeometry, amvizone and then I columns for departments such as finance, administration, business development etc. I also create columns for our clients which will enable me to focus on them specifically to meet their goals and ensure that work gets done on time.

To delegate work, I use a different color code so that I can concentrate on the work I have to do and periodically follow up on the work delegated to my team. It works awesome for me!

Some of the things I keep in mind while doing this is

• Always have the Todo on your desktop or somewhere you can reach quickly and if possible have it open all the time.
• Everything goes into the todo so that you do not have to remember to do it later.  Open your todo and you have everything right in front of you.
• Another advantage of having everything in your todo list is the pleasure you get while marking something as done!
• Projects are different from todo tasks. Todo is the next step in the project. Its better to have multiple todo things like “Keyword Research for Client 1″, “On-page optimization for Client 1″, “Report for Client 1″ than have a single todo that says “SEO for Client 1″. It helps reduce procrastination by making tasks simpler and gives the whole project a clarity.

Click here if you want to download my Excel 2010 template for a todo. It has macros recorded for “mark as done” (CTRL+D ) and “undo mark as done” (CTRL+U). Alternatively you can also have it up on your Google Docs to enable collaborative todo while working with partners who are always travelling!

How do you manage your work flow? Do you have a todo software or a nifty tool that helps you? Looking forward to hear from you in the comments

Personal Todo on Microsoft Excel
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Believe it or not, I never relied extensively on my browsers’ dictionary to spell the word – entrepreneurship until recently when I started to fill up my profiles on the web. As with everyone, with frequent usage I learnt the word without having to wait for the wavy red underline.

Someday is not a day of the week.

I have been meaning to update this blog “someday soon”. “Procrastination”  is the word I learnt. It was true. “Someday” never came over the past few months and this blog sat around ignored by its own author. While there are stats about how many blogs are started every hour, there has to be a similarly surprising numbers of blogs which just hang around stagnant.

Writing is hard work enough, but writing frequently is harder! Discipline is something I never had in my daily routine, so its difficult to be a disciplined blogger! Once my own frequent commitment to the blog died, procrastination has been keeping me away from even logging into my WordPress dashboard to approve a few comments!

So, here goes, a post which is probably pointless to most of you, but makes a point to my own soul that procrastination will not stop me from putting away my blogging priorities any more!

If you are were a blogger, let me know why you quit and what is that one thing that will get you back to blogging?

Someday is not a day of the week
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.