After almost 3+ years of solid rankings and earnings, the sudden drop on the website was a surprise. The website in question was very genuine, with original content, optimized and valuable content for many keywords. Initially it was curiosity, to know why PANDA update caught my website in its filters and kicked it out of top spots.

After a lot of time spent talking to fellow friends in the industry and reading up as much as I could in the forums, I was even more confused than I ever was. I could not find a single reason why this has happened apart from the fact that the website has not been updated frequently.

Most SEO specialists I talked to are confused about the new ranking factors that has come up with the PANDA update of google and a select smart marketers are using this opportunities to use their own imagination to come up with new “ranking factors” (in finger quotes).

In short, something is changing with the way Google analyzes and ranks website. I am no longer sure about what works and what does not. Websites created in the same way for two different niches with the same quality standards, one ranks well and the other gets the boot. :-X

Today I was talking to one of my friends about his latest venture which was about selling tour and travel packages across India. He had dropped by to know how SEO and SEM can help his business. One led to another and I was soon able to help him out with a lot of marketing options on a low budget which was not rocket science and I was surprised at myself for finding so many ways to market his company without using Google at all!!

After the brainstorming, I was surprised about the world of traffic which exists without Google! Personally, over the last decade, I had been dead straight on with SEO alone so much that I did not bother about anything else other than Google to pull traffic to websites.

In this new marketing which I’d like to call “Marketing to the Islands” is about getting in touch with these small islands of targeted users and promoting your products/services to them. The reach will be much smaller in numbers, but conversions should work better than mass general marketing. It is nothing new, but if you are devastated about being given the boot or do not have enough budget for a SEO campaign here are your choices -

• Guest Blogging – There are many blogs which are maintained by travel bloggers and most of these blogs have a community of readers following updates from the blogger. I am not considering the SEO advantage here in anyway, I am talking about bloggers who have friends following them on facebook, subscribed through RSS, email and any other way. Contacting these bloggers and having a post on their website about destinations along with a link to your website or a phone number should instigate interested travelers to get in touch with you.
• Forums – There are a lot of travel related forums where frequent travellers hang out such as “India Mike” and others where there are frequently questions on planning itineraries and requests for help on choosing the right accommodation. By genuinely helping (not spamming) these travelers, there is a huge potential in revenue generation. Also, think about forums which are specific to your geography. For example, we own a forum called MyTechnopark which attracts over 100,000 pageviews a month and guess where the major traffic is from? Nope,  Not Google.
• Group Buying – I don’t know about you, but I keep a tab on almost all the major group buying sites around my location to spot and grab good deals. By giving away your best deal on these websites, you stand to gain a lot of new clients. You can use these websites in the off-season when the rates will be lower and use the collective power of recommendations to build your business.
• Social Networks – How much ever Google Plus tries to capture my time spent online, I am comfortable with Facebook for now.  I might soon be one of those people who stood out while everyone was busy building “authority” with Google Plus, but I am willing to take that chance for now.
• Video Networks – I am not referring to YouTube here. I am talking about networks like Tripfilms which many travellers frequent to see places they want to visit, shot by camera wielding travelers is truly a great place to decide your next trip.
• Other modes of Search – There is a lot of searching that goes on beyond Google, places like Just Dial have a huge number of  local lead generated every day and most of them are hot leads with genuine people looking to purchase your product or service. Thats’ valuable than a “click” from Google Adwords.

You do not really need Google to get your business off the ground. Think it is too much work? Yeah, it is, but with frequent changes in SEO these days and not everyone being sure about what works anymore, I would say “Marketing to the Islands” has a better chance of ROI than SEO at this point of time. Do let me know your thoughts on this regard and contact me if you want to share your experience with Google Algo changes.

As for me and my niche blogging, its another story blog post.

How to survive in a Post-Google World
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

What is conversion optimization?

Its a fairly straight forward deal. Optimize your website for conversions! Want your visitors to signup to your newsletter? Want your visitor to send you their contact information? Want your visitors to click on your ads?

Simple things to optimize your website to your goal can go a long way in gaining more business leads, more earnings,more list members and anything else you want your visitors to do. “Conversion Optimization”  is a term mostly associated with the search marketing activity as money being spent needed to achieve the maximum ROI for clients.

In SEO, the conversion optimization aspect is hugely ignored and the effort spent on rankings, traffic does not always convert into business, which does not give enough incentive for a client to continue in the longer run.

The amount of business that could be lost just because your website is not optimized for conversion is insane. At ayruz web holdings, I mainly concentrate on the SEO front and my partner – Kenney Jacob takes care of the Search Marketing aspect for our clients. But both of us ensure that there is enough optimization done on the client website and landings to help with conversion.

Does your internet marketing agency do “Conversion Optimization”?

If not, I would strongly recommend that you contact them regarding this and see if there is anything they can do to help.

The changes required are usually simple and just about any web design/development company can do it. But you need to define the term “conversion” as applicable for your website. It can be leads, social media sharing, newsletter signups or  even clicks on ads (if you do niche marketing). If you run a ecommerce website, the importance of  “Conversion Optimizaton” is more urgent as people looking to buy your product might visit your website and then ultimately buy from another website!

To know your goal to set, take a look at your digital strategy and decide what you want your visitors to do the most. In niche marketing,  your goal would be more clicks on your ads. In real estate, it might be to capture leads of interested customers and so forth.

Do feel free to ping me up in the comments section or contact me in person to know if you need any advice on how to further optimize your website for conversion.

PS: When thinking conversions in the offline world done perfectly, all that you can think of are religious conversions and Multi-Level Marketing Programs!

Conversion Optimization: Are you losing out?
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

What happened with the Internet in 2009?

Even though I suck at my math paper in college, I love numbers! I got this newsletter today morning and found an exciting coverage of Internet 2009 in numbers. Here goes!

Email

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

• 62.7% – Internet Explorer
• 24.6% – Firefox
• 4.6% – Chrome
• 4.5% – Safari
• 2.4% – Opera
• 1.2% – Other

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Entireweb Newsletter. Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

Which are your favourite stats? I found the 81% spam stat to be the most fascinating. Is spamming that lucrative?!

Internet 2009 in numbers
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

What do you do?

I am an Internet Marketing Consultant.

Usually the conversation thread stops right there because most of the time the person asking has no idea what the hell my job profile is! While its amusing to see that priceless expression, I decided to answer it on my blog anyway

Define: The Internet Marketer

An internet marketer to me is someone who

1. can drive traffic using the internet and digital means. Search Engines, paid ads or Social Media, its all about the traffic.
2. ability to convert that traffic into leads. By leads, it can be a sale, a newsletter signup or even a click on your Adsense.

That’s pretty much what I mean when I say “I am an Internet Marketing Consultant“. If you are into the internet commerce like me, what do you tell your family about your job profile?

Who is a Internet Marketer?
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Social Media ia used by many in many different ways. Some use it for promoting their products, others use it to listen to their customers while others give away tips on using their products on the social media platforms.

Here are a few ways I think you can use Social Media.

1. Listen – You can simply be a good listener! I personally use this on myself, our products and even client brands with our inhouse tool. Few ways you can listen to the crowd are by using WhosTalkin or SocialMention and many others including simple tools like Google Alerts.

2. Customer Service – A lot of startups find Social Media a boon for customer service and to get feedback from users in almost real time. Using the listening tools mentioned above, you can help your users in resolving the customer services issues and monitor product feedback.

3. Data Collection – This is perhaps one of the most important factor of Social Media. Many companies have successfully used engaging applications and short term campaigns to collect data of users and build a list and market further.

These are some of the ways you can use social media in your company. So, how do you use social media?

Applications of Social Media
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

I recently put out a tweet about how your blog is in the right track if you get more spammy comments. From what I see, you are seen by the bots, which means search engines and other kinds of bots should see you too. Its a good thing though not many followers agreed with me! What do you say?!

BUT, This post is not about spamming! This is about learning from a annoying marketing technique which has been existent since email came along. Spam emails! Everyone hates those nigerian bankers who want your help or those claiming to make your body organs bigger and even those promising you replicas of popular watch brands.

Companies have spent millions in developing firewalls and software to keep these people out of the system, yet they keep coming into your inbox everyday. Why? Simply because….

IT WORKS!

But as a responsible and ethical marketer, it was a learning experience for me to know what makes these spam messages click. I have been lurking in the depths of gmails spam folder trying to find out and here are some of the things I noticed.

The Headline

Spammers are ingenious copywriters! Each of their subject lines makes you want to open it and read that email.

No Fluff

Have you noticed how small those spam messages are? Most of them provide a problem and a link to the solution. You want this? Do this. Dead simple.

Persistence

I finally gave in a few years ago to a Nigerian Banker who told me that there is this dead guy who has ton of money stashed in an unclaimed account. I did it just for the heck of it, they are just too persistent with their messages!  (No, I was not duped by spam.)

Hit where it hurts

“Be the man she wants you to be…..” or “Get a diploma for a better job” helps the spam receiver to relate to his own fears and insecurities.

Cut the crap.

I have never seen a spam in the past month which starts with “We are so-and-so dealing with products like so-and-so and blah blah…”. The whole email is about me. Do I need a loan, do I need a better job? A bigger body part? or wades of cash? I don’t need to know about sender. In a weird way, it just works better!

Does your landing page have these qualities? By landing pages, I mean, every post in your blog, every marketing email you send out and every written communication you make.

Lets’ Learn from SPAM!
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

If you do a custom search based on your product/service, you will most probably find a bunch of “credit-card on hand” , “will buy now” and “help me purchase” hot leads on these Web 2.0 3.0? (or 3.5??) properties.

Wish you were there now?? Get your business a Social Media consultant

Social Media and Recommendation Marketing
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

If you are a Social Media Consultant in a country like mine, you would have probably heard this one a lot.

What is the ROI I can expect from this campaign?

Will having a Facebook community help my business?

This post is in a lot of ways the expression of my inner feelings to my wannabe clients and would-have-been clients about the ROI in Social Media.

If you are someone who already has a business, you might have gone to a lot of meetings and conferences where literlly nothing was discussed. You had a secret agenda, you wanted to meet people, tell them about your company and keep your face alive in their minds so that the first things that comes into their mind when they think about your business will be your smiling face.

It is pretty much the same thing you do online with your business. According to recent statistics by some reputed agencies peg that 4% of the Indian population is online. Doesn’t make sense to sell to just 4% eh? Imagine being the first person to sell Aspirin. How easy was his job? He just had to go out there and say “Headache? Here we have this…” and the deal was probably closed. These days is selling a particular brand of Aspirin easy?

By the time you wait for the market to mature and for the mass population to get online. Guess what? You missed the train. You will be this person who came out of the closet in 2009 and said “Hey, I found this thing which can keep your food items cool. . . .”

Social Media is as simple as it gets. In a perfect world, it would be something like this:

• Listen
• Engage

And Social Media Marketing ROI….well, how do you judge ROI from a casual conversation over tea with someone? I plan to cover some more topics of Social Media and ROI in my upcoming posts to not only increase awareness amongst offline businesses but also to give myself a vent from being not able to engage in such long conversations offline

Social Media and ROI
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

There are a ton of advantages to go online with your press meets and Press releases. I have been a part of at least 5 press meets this year and personally, I think its a waste of time for everyone involved. We see a turn-up of around 10-15 people who do not interact with us or have any interest in what we publish and in the end, only 2-3 companies cover it online with the usual spelling mistakes and factual mistakes.
I am all game to take these Press Releases online and it is virtually used and abused to a great extent by smart marketers who use it to constantly generate buzz around their own websites.

So you ask,  what are the advantages of taking your Press Releases Online?

• Increase your visibility Online – Get picked up by the top new traffic sources like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. Use it to get keywords and source credits from those who reuse the news.
• Build Brand visibility and Buzz – Increase your visibility online by embedding graphics like photos and videos and even RSS to make your press release worthy and informative.
• Drive Qualified and targeted Traffic to your site - Build on your buzz generation abilities and bring in targeted audience who are searching for your services and products and are generally interested in your industry.
• Track-bility and and Measurability – How can I put this in the end?! This is like the root of all operations online. You can carefully analyze what your industry wants and this is great invisible feedback that most companies miss out by a mile.

Have you ever done a online press release? Do let me know your input in the comments!

Advantages of Online Press Releases
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

This is a very absurd. Google seems to be very aggressive or is stuck in its cashflow that it is approaching clients directly for managing their PPC campaigns at pretty much no expense at all. I was kinda confused to learn that one of our clients was approached by Google themselves to manage their PPC campaigns online.

Though, the initial reaction was to scream “Fake!!”, seeing the documents and other information they had sent to my client, I was kind of speechless. Is Google really trying that hard? Tough times eh Big G? But in the process a lot of small Internet Marketing Consultants like me are getting bitten in the backside.

Is Google right in bypassing us consultants who have been working so hard to approach clients, convince them about advertising online and making them understand the ROI involved, design a campaign only to have Google approach them in the last minute and with their brand name (which we helped create) and take away the client?

I would really love to hear your thoughts on this and your experience in anything similar.

Google getting Aggresive with Adwords Marketing?
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.