KEY SECRETS FOR SUCCESS IN ONLINE MARKETING

Online marketing is sometimes known as web-marketing, internet marketing or e-marketing. All these are basically methods to market the products and services of a company over the internet.

Editor's Note: This article is a guest post written by Maria Jones. Check her details at the end of this post.

TYPES OF ONLINE MARKETING

•  Advertisements: to increase traffic on your company websites you can make use of banner ads to be placed on a third party site 
• Search engine marketing: the site is being promoted though paid for advertising on a search engine
• Search engine optimization: this helps in improving the visibility of your web page to achieve higher visibility on the results page of a search engine 
• Social media: grab the attention of various people across the world by adding advertisements on social networking sites 
• Video marketing: this is a process to promote your ideas and guidelines through videos 

TIPS TO ATTAIN SUCCESS IN THE ONLINE MARKET

•  Web page: Initially look for the landing page. These are not developed for selling but are designed to post your companies perspective or objectives. It generally deals with your company name, address, and email. It should be creative and efficient in providing your present outlook. 
• Content: As content is the king for any website to reach its full potential. Make a point to produce an article which is simple and relevant to your product. Videos will also play a good role in reaching the customers minds. The communication in videos should appear as though you’re directly talking to the customer and explaining your views in an understandable language. Make sure the content across your site is easy to read and relevant. Keep it concise as people will generally skim read online. Highlight important points in a bolder typeface to grab the user’s attention. 
• Social networking sites: Marketing through networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube provides you with a way to reach your target customers in a faster and easier way. On developing a business; create an account in such sites and get interacted with different friends and followers to promote your business perspectives. 
• Finance: For any business to run successfully it will require initial working capital. This capital can be gained by applying for a angel investments or venture capital loans. For a small scale business one can enhance initial investments with short term loans or long term loans business loans. If incurred with sudden emergencies for instant cash you can make use of a payday loan. These payday loans provide you with instant cash which can be used in an emergency. They have a very short application process and the money usually available to you in 24 hours. 

Author Bio: I am Maria Jones from USA. I'm into Finance and Online Marketing who had experience in writing quality guest posts. Catch me twitter.com/financeport

Internet in One Minute - Intel Perspective

Every day, billions of people around the world heavily rely on the internet for varied reasons: connect, share, email, watch, learn, search, chat, etc. From ordinary consumers at home to the government offices, schools, hotels, restaurants, banks, hospitals, publishing agencies and other private companies as well as business establishments, there is always an increasing demand for world wide web connectivity. With such demand billions of intelligent connected systems that make up the internet are also demanding for higher bandwidth to be able to cope up with this ever growing need.

With this billions (and counting) internet users, I can stand on the fact that there are also billions of things happening around the web but the question is “What exactly is happening?” Luckily, I found an answer that comes from a professional perspective through this interesting video which was published by Intel just a month ago. It highlights some significant activities that people used to do when they go online and start engaging and interacting with the rest of the world!

According to Intel, the things that are happening around the internet each minute include:

• 30 hours of videos posted in YouTube;
• 100,000 tweets;
• 6,000,000 page views on Facebook;
• 20,000,000 photo views on Flickr;
• 47,000 app downloads on iTunes and
• 45 new malicious websites launched

All the sites and services (except the last one) mentioned above didn't exist until 2004. The global traffic during that minute would fill up to 230, 000 DVDs and the amount of data stored would exceed 18,000 HD movies!

Watch the whole video below to know the rest of the information about the internet in a minute.

[Infographic] Facebook Reaches 488 Million Mobile Users

About fifty percent (50%) of the total Facebook users have the Facebook mobile app installed in their phones according to the recent IPO (Initial Public Offering) filing of Facebook company, showing that their mobile application has reached an outstanding 488 million users across the globe, with United States recorded to be the top country of the mobile app and Nigeria recorded to have the highest Facebook mobile penetration at 81.2%. 

The infographic below courtesy of SocialBakers show the current statistics of the facebook mobile application across all platforms, the top 10 countries with the highest Facebook mobile app users and the top countries with highest penetration of the said mobile app based on the recently submitted IPO of Facebook.

LinkedIn Acquires SlideShare for $119 Million in Cash and Stock

Professional content sharing platform, SlideShare, has been acquired by the social networking company, LinkedIn, for $119 Million in cash and stock.

The strategic acquisition of the said platform will help LinkedIn  gather more momentum in the social media space and help the company establish a stronger network for professionals since SlideShare provides services that are business-related and intended for professionals.

"Now that content can be shared, uploaded, viewed amongst liked minded individuals, LinkedIn will be the strongest social media network for professionals," said Audrey William, Head of ICT Research for Frost & Sullivan Australia & New Zealand.

LinkedIn has doubled its shares since initial public offering on May 2011 with site members also dramatically increased from 150 million in Q4 to 160 million. The company is even more striving to maintain such a unique position as not all companies has the same business model as LinkedIn.

Related: LINKEDIN REACHED 1 MILLION FILIPINO USERS

Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn CEO,  is pushing mobile technology to seek professionals stay in-touch with their subscription services and attract advertisers who want to reach their growing user base.

"The company has in recent years done quite a few amazing things to its portal including allowing for twitter feeds to be sent via LinkedIn and that itself has brought about a lot of discussion amongst professionals," said William. Further, LinkedIn "will become an attractive platform for advertising and recruitment and will be the ‘Facebook’ of the professional networking world," she said.

LinkedIn as a business-related social networking platform offers services where the company is effectively getting revenues such as premium membership, advertising and recruitment fees.

Rocket Internet to Launch PricePanda in Southeast Asia

Rocket Internet seize an opportunity and is on its way to launching an e-commerce service across southeast Asian countries including Philippines in the form of a site called PricePanda.

PricePanda will be a price-comparison platform that will allow customers view products or items and prices from different e-commerce services and compare them- or later on take them to that partner sites to place their orders and make payments. 

Rocket Internet, a company that invests in the development of innovative companies in the internet industry since 2007, has already reserved domain names for Singapore, Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam. It will also- later on- include other countries that has significant markets such as Thailand, Indonesia and Taiwan.

As of today, the company is on force of seeking partners that will provide contents in the site by approaching retailers and companies throughout the region, asking them to join the price comparison site to give it a large inventory of products.

Aside from PricePanda, Rocket Internet is relentless in expanding their services by launching different "clone" platforms for e-commerce. Among services in southeast Asia that they have launched include Zalora, Lazada FoodPanda and PinSpire (a Pinterest rip-off).

Links to Price Panda Sites in Southeast Asia:

• PricePanda Malaysia
• PricePanda Singapore

Source

Three Forms of Your Facebook Password

If you haven't knew about this yet, your Facebook password has 3 variations which will still log you on to the site whichever variation you use: your original password, your original password with the first letter in CAPS LOCK, and your original password in all CAPS LOCK.

In an article update at ZDNet written by Emil Protalinski, He described how he was still able to log on to Facebook, one morning, with his keyboard caps lock button on. Upon his "accidental discovery" he then conducted a little research through a series of communication with Facebook which clarified the issue.

The three variations has its own reason why Facebook decided to allow them during sign in. The first password is the password you provided during sign up and you're expected to enter this information by default. However, since there are cases that you might also be logging in without noticing the caps lock keys on, Facebook realized to accept 2 additional variations for your convenience. The second password as shown above is for the case when you're logging in using a mobile phone wherein the first letter is always set to be capital when entering information. While the third password variation is for the case when you just forgot to off the caps lock button when logging in using your computer.

His second update in the article reads:

“Nothing is more important to us than the security of our users and their information,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. “Our passwords are not case insensitive. We accept three forms of the user’s password to help overcome the most common reasons that authentic logins are rejected. In addition to the original password, we also accept the password if a user inadvertently has caps lock enabled or their mobile device automatically capitalizes the first character of the password. We feel this does not significantly impact the security of the user’s password or their account. Additionally, we do not store our passwords in plain text we use several encryption technologies and techniques to maintain the security of our information.”

So don't be confused when you accidentally log in to Facebook with your password reversed.  the toggled password would still work on it.

Startup Weekend Manila 2012 - Updates, Schedules and Other Info

There are only 25 tickets (17 tickets for Designers and 8 tickets for Angel/Venture Capital) left and today is the last day to get yours for the Manila Startup Weekend which kick-starts tomorrow, April 27, 2012 in Taguig City.
Startup weekend is a 3 day (equivalent to 54 hours) experiential training for novice and professional entrepreneurs and developers who want to learn, develop and as well as share their knowledge and skills in effective business planning through hands-on group activities.

The first day of activity, Friday, starts with pitching where everyone is involved in raising creative ideas and recruiting members to join their team. It is also an introductory activity where everyone will be able to get to know each other and start building relationship in the team.

On the beginning of weekend, Saturday, each team will be focusing on the development of business prototype which involves brainstorming, business plan development, and basic prototype creation. This is also where the teams focus on customer development, validating their ideas, practicing LEAN Startup Methodologies and building a minimal viable product.

On the last day of activity, Sunday, each team will present their accomplished prototype and will be able to receive valuable comments from the legal panel of experts.

Here are the sets of schedules for startup weekend activities:

Friday: 

• 5:00 pm – Registration starts & Mingle @ Mint College 
• 7:00 pm – Dinner & Networking 
• 7:20 pm – Welcome & Speakers 
• 7:30 pm – Pitches Start 
• 9:00 pm – Attendees vote for the top ideas 
• 9:15 pm – Teams start forming and discussing ideas 
• 10:00 pm – Start to formalize teams and take an inventory of skills. Be honest, and direct about what resources and skills are needed for the weekend. You may stay and work as late as the venue will allow. 
• 2:00 am – Finished for the day (Doors close)

Saturday 

• 9:00 am – Arrive, breakfast & coffee 
• 9:30 am – Teams formed and setting up workspace for the weekend 
• 12:00 pm – Lunch 
• 1:00 pm – Call for needs & skills 
• 2:00 pm – Mentors help teams one-on-one. They are here to help! 
• 7:00 pm – Dinner 
• 7:30 pm – Mid weekend check-in, status reports, call for help
• 12:00 am – Finished for the day. (Doors close)

Sunday 

• 9:00 am – Arrive, simple breakfast & coffee
• 10:00 am – Call for help (this is self motivated, so don’t be shy)
• 12:00 pm – Lunch 
• 12:30 pm – Mentors arrive… ASK QUESTIONS 
• 3:00 pm – Gut check. Start prepping for presentations 
• 4:00 pm – Dinner 
• 5:00 pm – FINAL PRESENTATIONS 
• 7:30 pm – Judging & awards 
• 8:30 pm – Wrap up and head to the after-party

Just in case you won’t make it this weekend, don’t worry as the second Startup weekend event in the Philippines is already set on May 11-13 in Cebu City. You can come back later to this site for updates.

10 Most Influential People in the Tech World - The 2012 TIME 100

(Continuation)

#41 Marc Andreessen (Kingmaker)

Better known as the co-author of the popular web browser, Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape Communications Coproration, Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American multi-millionaire engineer, entrepreneur and investor.

Graduate of BS Computer Science in  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he worked at the university's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he became familiar with Tim Berners-Lee's open standards for the World Wide Web. Andreessen and a full-time salaried co-worker Eric Bina worked on creating a user-friendly browser with integrated graphics that would work on a wide range of computers. The resulting code was the Mosaic web browser.

He co-founded the Netscape Communications (formerly Mosiac Communications Corporation) with Jim Clark in 1993 and Netscape Navigator became its flagship internet browser. On 2001, Andreessen left Netscape and founded Loudcloud, a services-based web hosting company. It was later sold to EDS company in 2003 where Loudcloud was changed its name to Opsware. Opsware was sold in September  2007 to Hewlett-Packard for approximately $1.6 billion.

Andreessen remained influential because of his different ventures and investments in different web companies including Ning, Digg. Plazes, Netvibes, CastTV and Twitter. Moreover, He serves on the board of Facebook, eBay, Kno, Hewlett-Packard, Bump, TinyCo, and Mixed Media Labs.

#55 Sheryl Sandberg (Chief Operating Officer)

Nevertheless, the highest-paid employee in Facebook company is also one of the most influential individual in the world. Sheryl Sandberg indeed is such a big inspiration to every aspiring women in this digital era.

As a Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, Sandberg was able to lead the company in times of obstacles and company's greatest struggles and pursuit for fame and survival. Being in the second highest position in the company, she is in-charge of everything except the product. And as the social networking giant reaches the peak of its success in terms of population, fame and wealth, she continued to help people make the most of a more open, more transparent world, as Facebook creates dynamic new connections between individuals, organizations and causes-connections with the power to brighten our shared future, one click at a time.

#57 Tim Cook (CEO)

When the former legendary CEO and visionary, Steve Jobs formally resigned Apple company on August 24, 2011, Cook immediately took the huge responsibility of driving the company into its impeccable journey and keeping the velocity high towards providing and maintaining innovative, high-quality products which the company has been widely appreciated and become known. It wasn't easy that time as the world was in very high expectations about what the company has yet to offer - there was also tension and fear among investors that the company's standing might go at some point lower than expected.

Despite all the challenges and expectations, Cook fiercely protected Job's legacy and lead Apple company to new heights while implementing major policy changes smoothly and brilliantly. He has indelibly imprinted his leadership on all areas of Apple- from managing its complex inner workings to identifying and shepherding new "insanely great" technology and design breakthroughs into the product pipeline.

#59 Daniel Ek (Music Man)

Daniel Ek is the brain behind the music streaming site Spotify. An entrepreneur and technologist, he founded the company in 1997 at age 14.

Prior to Spotify,  he became a CTO of Jajja Communications  and Stardoll and CEO of µTorrent, the world's most popular BitTorrent client with more than 100 million downloads.

Despite stern criticisms about the integrity of Spotify as a profitable platform for various music labels, Daniel's efforts to revolutionize the music   business and creating a good team in tech have helped him bring his company to new heights making Spotify a successful business until today.

#60 Virginia Rometty (Top Techie)

Better known for her nickname "Ginni", Virginia Marie Rometty is the current and the first woman CEO of the top computer firm IBM. On her appointment on January 2012, Ginni began to face new and bigger challenges in the company. 

Her 30 years of experience, efforts and dedication to IBM  made her credited for spearheading IBM's growth strategy by getting the company into the cloud computing and analytics businesses. She was also at the helm of readying Watson, the Jeopardy! playing computer, for commercial use.

In her new role, her impact will only be amplified. IBM spends a whopping $6 billion a year on R&D. With that investment and platform, Rometty will undoubtedly bring to bear innumerable technological breakthroughs — a big reason IBM's stock trades at record highs.

10 Most Influential People in the Tech World - The 2012 TIME 100

As soon as the Time Magazine revealed its annual TIME 100 which lists the most influential people in the world, I got the curiosity about who among of them are in the world of tech. While hearing or saying the word "influential" makes me think of Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates who are not just influential but also among the richest in their own generation, I was a little bit surprised to find out that most them who made it in the top list are completely unknown to me . But I feel happy now as my little research helped me to learn more information  about them and so they are just no more a "somebody".

We may haven't noticed them but the passion, efforts and contributions they have given to their works have amplified productivity in the field of technology and helped and also inspired many people around and beyond them. And just as Jeremy Lin who was named the most influential people this year at the deserved number 1 spot, these people in the world of tech are all well-deserved to be part of the prestigious list.

#4 SALMAN KHAN (Educator) 

The man behind khanacademy.org, a free online education platform and non-profit organization, Salman Khan is an educator by profession who, through his Academy, wants to give every kid a free, world-class education. The khanacademy.org has over 3,000 short lessons that allow kids to learn at their own pace. Students can practice exercises and allow them to go back to the pertinent video when they're having trouble. The site has a detailed dashboard for teachers who use Khan Academy in their classrooms.

His Khan Academy channel on Youtube has attracted 321,388  subscribers and has an outstanding 144, 016,152 views as of this April. 

He has been previously featured and recognized in numerous online publications including The Colbert Report, PBS NewsHour, CNN and  National Public Radio. He also received the prestigious Microsoft Tech Award for Education on 2009 and became part of Fortune's annual "40 under 40" list on 2010.

#15 BEN RATTRAY (Organizer) 

Founder and CEO of change.org, Ben Rattray continues to change the world and influence more people through his petition platform. His disclaimer on his profile page in the site reads:

"I started this journey because I had little way of translating my passion for a cause into effective action, and I hope we can deepen engagement in social issues and empower people to make a difference in their communities and the world around them."

Moreover, the goal of Change.org according to him is to "change the balance of power between individuals and large organizations."

From a social networking site for activists to a blogging platform then transforming to a petition platform, Change.org is eyeing for a widely group of audience by expanding into other countries making its website available for different languages.

#24 Henrik Schärfe (Inventor)

A Professor, PhD and Director of Center for Computer-mediated Epistemology in Aalborg University, Henrik Schärfe became an inspiration and influenced many of his co-inventors when his Geminoid-DK named Doppelgänger start appearing on youtube and during the TED conference.

His cool but creepy android was formed from his creative point of view that will make people uneasy enough to think about the role of technology in their lives and the boundaries between humans and machines.

#36 Anonymous (Hackers)

The next influential figure who made it in the list is not a 'person' in particular but a name that represents a group of  fearless hacktivist which has been very controversial recently because of their widely-publicized protests including The Pirate Bay, Megaupload and SOPA to name a few, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. Anonymous is indeed, the world's most famous hackers and definitely one of the most influential figure in the web. 

As described by Chris Landers through the Baltimore City Paper, "Anonymous is the first Internet-based superconsciousness. Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they're a group? Because they're traveling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely."

Anonymous, due to their brave protests, has been included in numerous enemies list including Arab dictatorships, the Vatican, banking and entertainment firms, the FBI and CIA, the security firm Stratfor and even San Francisco's BART transport system.

#37 Pete Cashmore (Social News Guru)

In his very young age, 19, Pete Cashmore created his blog, Mashable way back in 2005 at Aberdeen Scotland. Today, the Scottish-American news website and Internet news blog is already one of the primary sources of timely and relevant news and information about the latest around the web primarily in social media, developments in mobile, entertainment, online video, business, web development, technology, memes and gadgets.

Mashable's immense popularity allowed Pete to achieve greater achievements that made him extremely influential in and out of the web. He was one of the Inc's "30 under 30" and Forbe's "Top 25 Web Celebs" and was also included in The Huffington Post's Top 10 Game Changer, all these recognition was achieved on 2009.

The goal behind Mashable is that Pete wanted to be part of the conversation about technological change and  Mashable gave him a voice. Today, it gives voice to millions who are trying to make their lives better through digital innovation.

Next 5 Most Influential People in Tech World

Philippines as Second Among Countries With Slowest Internet

What lies in front of the biggest telecommunications and internet service providers in the Philippines right now is a challenge as to how they will improve their services in providing a reliable and literally fast internet connection after the country has been listed 2nd in the world with slowest web page loading according to a study conducted by Google. 

Slovak Republic top the world’s list with fastest desktop internet speed at 3.3 (seconds) followed by South Korea and Czech Republic with 3.5 and 3.7 seconds web page loading speeds respectively. Completing the top 10 list include Netherlands (3.9), Japan (4), Denmark (4.3), Switzerland (4.3), Sweden (4.5) Belgium (4.6) and Norway (4.8). 

On the other side of the list are the 10 countries with slowest average of page loading speed including Philippines with 15.4 seconds at the bottom 2 before Indonesia which got the slowest average at 20.3 seconds. 

In terms of mobile web page loading, South Korea got the fastest speed with 4.8 seconds followed by Denmark (5.2) and Hong Kong (5.9) while the two countries that have the lowest speeds belong to Saudi Arabia (21.2) and United Arab Emirates (26.7). 

Refer to the graphs below to see the complete list of countries that have the highest and lowest web page loading speed.

Top 10 in Desktop Speeds (in seconds)

Bottom 10 in Desktop Speeds (in seconds)

Top 10 in Mobile Speeds (in seconds)

Bottom 10 in Mobile Speeds (in seconds)

[Infographic] How the Internet is Killing the Planet - Earth Day Special

Tomorrow, April 24, 2012 is the celebration of one of the most important campaigns in the world- the Earth Day! As we head to the celebration of this global awareness about the appreciation and preservation of our mother Earth, let us take a look at this infographic courtesy of wordstream on how the internet is affecting or killing at its worst, our dear planet.

PLDT myDSL & Nuffnang Bring you The Avengers!

As a programmer, blogger/web content writer and social media addict, it is important for me to have a fast internet connection. One major reason is because I have to get information in the fastest way possible so I can also write about them concurrently or when I encounter source code that is strange to me, I have to look for them in the internet. With a fast internet connection, I have no hassle to chase valuable information from different sites - imagine the scenario when your browser has 10 tabs (or more) open at the same time- that frequently happens to me. When I heard about the Great Payday Sale of PLDT myDSL, I finally feel that this is the best opportunity for me to get even faster internet connection.

PLDT myDSL Great Payday Sale

This summer is the perfect time to enjoy the strongest connections at home with PLDT myDSL’s Great Payday Sale happening on April 27-29, 2012. If you’re interested too in getting fast internet connection from our country’s prime internet service provider, all you have to do is register at the nearest PLDT Home booth or malls nationwide on April 27-29, 2012 with 1 valid ID, no cash out or you can also apply online at www.pldtmydsl.com! If you’re an existing subscriber, you can also upgrade your internet with PLDT myDSL! 

Don’t miss this biggest internet sale ever from PLDT myDSL! Freebies like a WiFi + Modem with free installation and 1 month DSL are also to be given away. That’s as much as P 5,000 savings!

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