Today was an interesting day at the NASSCOM HR Summit 2008 in Chennai.

There was a session on HR Leadership: Paradigm shift from process recruiters to business leaders. When the Chairperson of the panel, Mr. Pratik Kumar (EVP HR, Wipro) asked the speakers as what would they like to request from their business leaders, we had some *really cool* answers (read: CEO bashing)!

Nandita Gurjar (VP & Group Head, Infosys) would like to see a recession, so that things cool-off a little bit, giving her the most deserved respite from managing change and pushing growth initiative at the same time - definitely not an easy job by any standards. I understand that she said it on a lighter note, but if you have a serious thought on this issue, it is actually not a bad idea!

Elango R (Chief HR Officer, Mphasis) in his witty style wants CEOs to stop reading books and attending conferences. He feels that there is a new "clone it" idea brought in by the CEO everyday, which makes life really difficult for the guy. I know he does not mean it. But does it really matter. It is not going to change anytime soon.

CEO’s: Are you listening?
It just resonated in my own ears! After all, I am also one of the culprits.

Just wanted to share some light moments (read: CEO bashing).

I found this very interesting quote in someone’s signature whom I met on a business networking website:

"If you want to go fast, travel alone; but if you want to go far, travel together."
- African Proverb

How true - specially for software programming teams, which are so vulnerable due to individualistic goals. As if there is no tomorrow!

Guys,

Recently some of my employees got unsolicited call from a gentleman called Manish Gupta, who wants to woo them away from my company to his startup. Of course like every normal human being, my colleagues also need a reason to go and work for a relatively unknown and small company.  So they need convincing. And he did put up an argument to convince them…

And then came the bummer!

He thinks that my colleagues should work for his company because he has a bigger vision and everyone has a bright future with him. But how do people believe him? Simple - His was the runner-up of the Business Baazigar contest of Zee TV.

:D

I could not stop myself from laughing out at this humbleness.

Then I thought of doing some research on the business model and modus-operandi of his company. I found out that there was no innovation and no marketing strategy (mind you, he must have spent time in sales, but definitely not in marketing). He is selling the same old wine in the same old bottle with no value addition. There is no investment in human resource development, since the human resource policy is absolutely based on poaching.

Is this the vision, he is selling to my employees?

I wish him best of luck!

BTW, in all my humbleness, I will like to get my message across to Mr. Gupta that I have been on the jury panel of nationwide business plan contest (organized by one of the most reputed management institution in India), giving my inputs to several business baazigars who are working hard to build their dream company!

And yes, it does not hurt me anywhere. But it is sad to see this approach to business after getting the said recognition.

I hope he learn to differenciate, innovate and deliver!

And yes, I am fast losing faith in TV programs like Business Baazigar if this is the talent they have identified

 

I came across this rocking website called EasyBM (www.easybm.com), a FREE online service, which can help you in boosting your online productivity to new levels. I generally do not get excited about something so quickly. My exposure to new ideas and business plans make me immune to general ideas. But I got excited by the simplicity of the idea and how it can make life simpler for everyone.

Enough of social bookmarks, lets get personal!

This is a personal bookmarking website which gives you a 1-click access to your favorite websites, thus acting as your portal to Internet in the true sense. (If you don’t believe me, check out the definition of portal). When you note a site URL on your private bookmarks page, only you can to access that shortcut. Your favorite sites appear on a password protected page and a result, only you (or someone you allow access to) can see which sites you have bookmarked. So these bookmarks become your personal bookmarks!

Social bookmarking is a great way to find and recommend interesting sites. But let us face the fact - You don’t want to share all the information with everyone out there on the web. Let us consider some scenarios:

• Access your Internet banking account
• Research about a top-secret project which you cannot share with anyone
• A valuable list of resources which you only want to share with *yourself* which helps you to be more effective in your job that your competitor

I am sure you will not like to share these website links with everyone out there! But, you do access them everyday - every time. So what do you do? The answer is simple - Personal Bookmarking.

Don’t we have personal bookmarking in our browsers?

Now, you might think - Every web browser has personal bookmarking feature built in - then why do I need a service like EasyBM. Let me tell you - you still do need them for these simple reasons:

• Your personal bookmarks are not available to you when you are not accessing Internet from your regular PC
• You may lose those bookmarks when your PC catches virus
• You cannot open "first bunch of sites" with 1-click. With EasyBM, you can!
• You cannot make an organization-wide internal bookmarking system to collect knowledge at a central place using your browser bookmarks

And above all, you still need to click on "Favorites" and scroll down to the right site and click on that when you use a browser bookmark. So it is good for things that you do not need every-now-and-then! But EasyBM (once set as your homepage) opens with those selected bookmarks every time you open a new browser and is simply a click away!

I wish easyBM all the best and I am sure this nice little idea can make positive change to the way people use Internet.

P.S.: BTW, this is not a paid review. I don’t do them. I only write about something when I really like it.

<META DESCRIPTION> tag lost its shine after the emergence of off-page factors (like link popularity) for rankings in SERPS. In fact it lost its purpose to a great extent when Google started using contextual content from within the page as the description of the URL in its SERPS.

However in an interesting turn of events, <META DESCRIPTION> is back in business!

Most search engines, including Google are now using the <META DESCRIPTION> content as the description of the URL in their SERPS. The page <TITLE> is now being shown as the listing title with <META DESCRIPTION> as the description of the URL. If you compare it with Google AdWords, you can consider the <TITLE> as the Headline and <META DESCRIPTION> as the Description. Therefore, you must use it to outline your strength, your unique selling proposition and if possible your offer.

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal mentioned cited this interesting Meta Description used by NextStudent.com in his article,

Looking for federal or private student loans for School? Get up to 40k Fast: Call 877-680-9879. Student loan consolidation? Call 800-299-4639. NextStudent- College Funding Made Simple.

You can also include your phone number (as cited in the above advertisement - description) for the prospect who is in a hurry! May be you will end up prospecting without having the visitor hit your website! In fact, with the latest version of IE and the FireFox plugins, the phone numbers listed in this description become hot-links, which a visitor can simply click and get connected on a voice call through Skype. And you can close a sale!

And yes, many SEO specialists believe that higher CTR on your SERPS listing (due to improved <TITLE> and <META DESCRIPTION>) can help you further improve your rankings.

BTW, I forgot to mention that some expert copywriters may like to even put in their headlines and teasers to pre-sell the product / services!

Lisa Ditlefsen says:

Basically if you think about it the meta description tag is your FREE ad! If you have experience in running a pay per click campaign I’m sure you have put a lot of thought into what the PPC ad says. The ad is what distinguish you from all the other PPC ads right? So why should it be any different in the organic SERPs? The title tag is your free headline and the meta description tag is your FREE ad, this is where you have a chance to ad hook someone in. How many times have you searched for something, got to the results and been put off by the description, it can’t possibly be what you were looking for!!?

May be people do not give so much importance to this FREE ad, because it is FREE! It is never late. Give proper attention to your website <META DESCRIPTION> tags and turn your organic traffic to a highly targeted FREE traffic.

 

Just a random thought:

Programmers are supposed to use their programming skills to automate business process for their clients. Therefore, a good programmer should be one, who takes an initiative of automating his own work and never repeats the line of code he has written once Charity begins at home!

Unfortunately I have hardly seen many such souls.

What do you think?

 

When creating an exhaustive keyword list for your AdWords / PPC campaigns, you might face a tedious job of creating all possible combinations by joining two words / phrases to cover the keyword that your prospect might key in. This can be a very frustrating experience.

Recently, I sumbled upon this website: http://www.imscripts.com/keywords

It can generate these keyword combinations in less than a second.

So if the keywords are:

• web design
• web design company

And the cities are:

• kolkata
• chennai
• delhi

This tool will create these keywords:
 
web design kolkata
kolkata web design
web design company kolkata
kolkata web design company
web design chennai
chennai web design
web design company chennai
chennai web design company
web design chennai
chennai web design
web design company chennai
chennai web design company
 
So you could get valid and useful combinations!

Now think how much time this tool can save when you have to make a combination of 100s of keywords with 10-20 different "add on words" or "cities". So use this tool whenever you need to create the combinations!
 
This tool can also help by adding the {} and " " operators of Google Adwords if you want.

Attractive designs do get attention. It can also get good visitor-customer conversion if some best-practices are followed. But the question is - how can attractive designs get traffic to your website?

They can! or,
They can at least help your site in getting good traffic.

Here is a simple technique posted by Daniel on his blog.

• Design an attractive web site. Or get it designed through one of the many web design agencies around. Make sure that the site is coded in XHMTL/CSS2.
• Now, submit these websites to several CSS galleries which has sprung all over the Internet. If your design is decent enough, you will surely get accepted. However, if your design is outstanding, you may get featured sending in hundreds of visitors!
• Now, design enthusiasts may not be your target audience (BTW, if they are, then you have struck a goldmine). Still, you get multiple listings and they link to your website, which ultimately helps you in getting better link-popularity and therefore higher rankings in search engines. In my opinion, you should not miss any opportunity to improve your link-popularity.
• Here are some links to the "List of CSS galleries"

• http://www.themoleskin.com/archives/the-definitive-css-galleries-list/
• http://www.virtualhosting.com/blog/2008/inspiration-overload-100-css-galleries-you-need-to-check-out/
• http://css-tricks.com/examples/WebsiteGalleryRoundup/
• http://www.nuff-respec.com/technology/css-gallery-roundup
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2006/12/21/creme-de-la-creme-of-css-list-of-css-galleries/

Now, if it looks like a daunting task (frankly speaking, it is!), do not give up.

Indus Net Technologies has a special service to help you focus on your core business and take care of different kind of manual submission (including CSS gallery submission) for a small fees. It is called Submit2Please.

Contact one of our sales representative / your account manager at Indus Net Technologies to get started. Or drop us a line at info@submit2please.com

 

I have recently revamped my five year old venture TemplateKingdom, which has till date sold 5000+ original template designs to companies and various template sites around the world.

And so TemplateKingdom 2.0 is right here.

Come, buy the ready-made web site template that best suit your next project.

All our templates are quality checked and are designed by top-quality creative professionals (including 100+ in-house designers). You can use every template for your projects as many times as you wish. We have given special attention to make the designs user-friendly so that they can be used for practical projects.

Salient features of Template Kingdom 2.0

• Lower prices
• You can discuss specific templates and design
• Members area to download free templates as we make them available
• 80% of our template collection can be downloaded instantly (remaining 20% within 24 hours)

Many more exciting features are coming up soon:

• Tagging for ease of search
• Reseller license (so that you can resell the templates and make money). Normal licenses can be upgraded later by paying the difference.
• Active Blog with tips / resources on using the templates
• Several new types & categories of templates

So keep tuned in and if you want to join hands with TemplateKingdom, feel free to write back to me! I will love to work out JVs with enterprising entrepreneurs. I are open to ideas - so write to me.

P.S.: The site is in its BETA version, but it can take orders. If you encounter a problem, please feel free to write to us. We will be obliged.

 

In recent times, I have seen a growth in marketplaces which help website owners to buy/sell websites.

It looks like a good idea, as it allows website owners to reshuffle their portfolio of websites and offer services / products which are more aligned towards to their largest consumer segment (read traffic on their most popular website). Besides this, it also helps new companies to get into the business by making quick buy-outs!

I saw how I-Net Interactive bought WebhostingTalk, HotScripts, DBForums, ProgrammingTalk and several other sites to create a niche network. They further added websites on similar themes and made smaller buyouts to add value to the whole network with several relatively new sites. This does make a lot of business sense and I am sure new entrants into Internet media / technology business can learn from this.

However, I do not see any value in turnkey (me too) websites which is basically a smart design coupled with a free / low cost script being sold as a "ready to operate" business. Unless a website stands out (need not be ranked 1-2-3 in their category) with proper traffic, business model, earnings (not necessary) and a sustainable vision, one should not invest in it.

There are several parameters on which a site can be valued.

I feel the (1) profitability or potential of monetization and (2) sustainability of the revenue stream are primary ones.

I will not consider (3) existing traffic, (4) pagerank (as an extreme case), (5) branding, (6) exclusivity and/or quality of content  / service / product or (7) subscriber base to be a factor for judging the price of a website. These secondary factors can help in making a site success, but as usual the most important factor is the end result - i.e. the profitability. The secondary factors must be considered in the due diligence process to ensure that the result i.e. profitability (or potential) of the website is not fake and is based on firm grounds.

Now, the money part!

Every transaction has to be closed at a price which makes both buyer and seller win. There are several experts who recommend a 10x monthly profit factor. In my opinion it depends on a specific transaction and its strategic importance to the buyer.

Where to buy / sell?

These are some of the sites where you can buy/sell a website. I will look out for more and if I get one, I will add it to the list.

• http://www.sitepointforums.com
• http://www.websitebroker.com
• http://www.sedo.com
• http://www.dnforum.com
• http://www.daniweb.com

So happy trading websites