From last few days the thought of why I write a blog has kept me thinking. When I first started this blog I was never serious to write so much personal stuff, I thought to write about technology & some other things. But fortunately or unfortunately this blog has turned into a personal dairy in my life. A dairy which can be read by many & yet personal to me where I pour my thoughts, feelings, ideas etc. I gained a lot of loyal readers & supporters through this blog. I must say this first reader is my Dad, my aunt Meena, my sister sirisha & a lot of others.

Did I ever think to share so much about my self with any one was the thought which worried me for a while in last few days’? I never wanted to share my personal life with any one, but when I started this blog I became more social & interactive than before. Now I talk about my problems to people without hesitation & prefer being in the group. The transformation just happened, I did not even realize that I was changing & especially my blog is changing me constantly. In fact it is making my thoughts evolve & created a whole new personality of me.

When people meet me in events or family functions they say that we follow your blog & you inspire us a lot, I always ask this question to me why I inspire them? I still did not figure out, but I know that this blog has helped me personally a lot to be a better person & motivated me to push the boundaries, explore the new lands in life.
I blog & write because I want to do it because it eases me out of my frustrations, anger, loneliness & give me that stimulation to my thoughts, creativity & makes me feel that I am talking to a person who doesn’t interrupt me, judge me or give any free advise. no it is not a one way conversation that I have with my blog, I revisit my articles & read them again & again sometimes to get sense of what I have written. Some times I can feel that this blog is talking to me & there are my readers who comment, tweet or share my blog posts which create a conversation. I thank all my readers for the encouragement which is shown in one or the other way & I encourage you do keep your conversations alive.

What do you think about blogging & how did your blogging experience change you? Share in the comments section.

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I don’t know why I am not able to concentrate on my writings these day’s. Any how with out any cheesy sales or promotion letter I would like to introduce Soch.la the world’s first social cricketing platform. Worldcup 2011 is here and excitement is building as India has made it’s way to Semi finals and I don’t think people would like to watch and talk about cricket world cup 2011 with in their group of friends or with in their circle. We all want to share, cheer, chat about our favorite teams and Soch.la makes it very simple where ever you are in this world.

World’s 1st Social Cricket Platform.

Rather than just ‘watching’ cricket, Soch.la offers you to ‘enjoy’ cricket with your friends. We have already experienced the platform in couple of earlier matches in this World Cup with a group of 500 people and it was real fun. Interestingly, the speed at which they are publishing score is ahead of most other online portals.

I invite you to join me in today’s BIG match between IND & SA to experience it yourself. How? It’s simple!

1. Visit http://soch.la
2. Login using Facebook (Press” Allow” if prompted from Facebook)
3. Chose today’s match btw IND & SA (starting 2:30 PM)
4. Connect, Comment, Share, Like, Invite Friends, Poll… and much more!

See you on Soch.la!

I personally loved the platform because it stores my conversations and I can make a whole new group of friends.

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I always wanted to keep a good looking theme for my blog’s and due to my visual challenges i was unable to stick to any one theme. I moved to couple of themes and finally settled on Inove word press theme till yesterday. couple of day’s back i landed on some random blog through twitter and came to know about Graphene theme. with help of my low vision and my big monitor i found that this theme is very impressive and has got all that features that i require. First i thought to purchase either studiopress or any other paid theme, but this free theme gave all the features that i require.

I immediately plugged the theme yesterday and started to play around with it’s built in features. With out much of effort i was able to integrate my Google adsense between posts and all the options of Grapheme WP theme are outstanding. i don’t know if there is any other theme which can offer so many features, simple to use with clean usuability which is free.. i haven’t really done much research on themes but this one caught my eye and i feel graphene will be used widely.

A special thanks to khairul-syahir, developer of this theme and this theme is accessible for screen reader’s too. Accessibility is one of the main concerns with which I am stuck when I thought to move to life style or any other theme.

If you all know any other theme which has got awesome features and is free to use do let me know here in the comments area. I am going to come up with couple of more blogs soon and I would love to try them out.

Download Graphene Theme for wordpress

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Non-Profit Marketing is one of those wrongly understood concepts in the online marketing space. Generally, more often than not,we tend to neglect people working for non-profit organizations and regard them without respect or dignity. This might be due to the misconception that non profits are money making machines and are formed to gain donations and to ‘enjoy’ that money; in other words, use the money obtained from donors for other expenses or entertainment rather than the purpose for which it is intended and for which reason the NGO was formed. But this is not the real situation at a lot of non profits. They do a lot of credible work and unfortunately, that work is not projected properly due to lack of resources or understanding.Clearly, I am speaking about countries such as India where social stigma is attached to NGO’s and people are more often valued by the salaries they draw rather than the value addition they impart to the society.

However, situation is changing rapidly and this is one area which is a niche market and is not explored by many marketers.
During 2010 February, I heard about Beth Kanter who visited India and was amazed about how she is using social media and technology to evangelize non profits in the West, in turn giving them a media outreach. Her web log bethkanter.org is a resource hub for any one who wants to step into non profit marketing transform the society with technology as powerful weapon.

I strongly felt that this is the arena I would like to grow in and I am in the process of finally getting things done. With in few days, I will be launching my new blog digitalchallenger.com which is hugely concentrated on the non profit marketing and also about my agenda of the projects/ workshops which I will be conducting in the next few months.

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First “online marketing enthusiast” was named after OME Bangalore. But when organizer’s started to roll out the events and sharing the knowledge of online marketing the community started growing. Lot of people wanted to join from other cities and personally requested us to conduct such events in their cities too. Soon after couple of events we strongly felt that we need to evolve as people are serious of Online Marketing and wanted to join the community.

Suresh who is the key planner and the front end of the community brain stormed with a lot of names and finally came up with OME Community. We are trying to put all our expertise and make OME Community a better place than what it is today. We got support from IIM Bangalore who is giving the venue to host the event and we are trying to make “OME” the one source destination for the Indian Online Marketing Industry.

The event is a community driven conference where people come and share their expertise. We rolled out something called power tips where the members will share some simple and powerful tips which will help the members a lot and easy to implement. The best power tip will be awarded with a gift and soon we realized that people who are very new to online marketing need some fuel to get started in this industry. So we are starting off with power challenge which is to educate newbie’s in basics of online marketing.

Till date OME Community has helped more than 300 members who are from diverse backgrounds like entrepreneurs, financial analysts, ppc managers, social media enthusiasts etc and we are hoping to evolve more in this space with all the support from members, volunteers, sponsors etc.

P.S.. Get the minutes of meeting along with pictures and videos of the OME Community meet here..

http://searchenginedetails.com/2010/11/seo-case-study-in-iim-bangalore-by.html

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Few months back I wrote a blog post about the online marketing
enthusiast group which is very active, as I told in that post I really
became a part of that family. Yes now this community is another family
for me in Bangalore. I never thought that we will grow at a rapid pace
and today we got support and mentoring from IIM Bangalore NSRCEL which
is a kind of stepping stone for success of the community.
In last 3 months we are continuously getting new unique registrations
and continuously people are conversing with us on linkedin group or by
E-mails. We are trying to grow the community and bring all the Digital
Marketer’s less than one platform in India.

Since our efforts are showing results we took a special interest and
trying to take this community to next level. We are trying to engage
with our registered users, take their inputs and trying to setup some
standards. We meet every week in order to plan, brain storm ideas and
do the analysis of where we are, what we want to do this month,
identifying the speakers etc. the good sign for me and the community
is getting support from IIM Bangalore NSRCEL which gave an immense
strength to us.

We are being mentored by MR. Surya of NSRCEL and under
his guidance we are taking the community to next level.
This month the event is focused on the subject of Best Practices of
Digital Marketing where Jayashree will share her knowledge with
community. IIM Bangalore is generous to offer their premises for the
event and I request all to register for the event as soon as possible.

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Hi folks after a great week end I am back here to share my insides of what happened during the week end and what is going happen…….As I told in my earlier posts that I am going to start off with podcasting and video casting, I think the time has come that I must kick off and start some where. So I am starting my podcasting and I would like all of my readers to be a part of this.

There are couple of changes going on the blog design too. One of my friend from tqphosting is working on the blog theme and design. I replaced my earlier theme with cool looking light weight theme for now , which helps my readers to read the posts more conveniently than before. I am working towards my logo and integration of social platforms too.

The first podcast is going to be all about me, what I do and how you all can be part of my future podcasting shows. there is a lot of activity which I would like to share……….but in my nexts posts.

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Being a visually impaired and user of a screen reader I always point the websites, blogs and web 2.0 pages which are not accessible to screen reader. From last couple of months after I started my blog I am taking a special interest in the area of accessibility. I am trying to learn and understand the web accessibility and thinking to move to all areas of accessibility, as they are going to play a major role in my career. Being a web marketing consultant it is always to have hands on knowledge on web accessibility and according to me an accessible website make a lot of difference in the areas of SEO and user experience.

Web accessibility refers to making the website comply with the web standard guidelines given by the w3schools.org. Some websites follow these guidelines and some doesn’t, late recently Google started ranking websites which load faster. In this scenario site which has flash and whose code is not clean dropped their rankings as they are not complying with web accessible standard guidelines. In India web accessibility is not taken very seriously, but websites who are the big players like yahoo, Google, Amazon etc started to concentrate. On account of this job opportunities opened in the area of web accessibility for visually impaired.

Currently my blog is not fully accessible as there are no heading tags and according to me there are some more areas which must be tested and rectified. I am in the process of getting my site accessible and trying to provide the best user experience for all targeted visitors. I want my visitors to list their concerns with my blog in the comments section, so that I can take necessary steps.

People who would like to talk to me on the subject of accessibility please feel free to comment and I will get back to you all.

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There is lot of hype in the market that social media is ruling the marketing world. In fact people do not understand the power of social media marketing and how they can use it for optimum profits. There are big corporates and small business owners who are using social media to generate more leads and sales, but some of them are doing it correctly and some are being pulled into the death hole of it. Social media means having social conversations with other individuals, groups who are having similar thoughts, tastes or ideas etc. but most of the marketers are not able to understand the ladder of intimacy and why they must have a close relation before they sell any product or service.

For example there is a boy who is meeting women in a restaurant. He cannot expect to take a ring and say I would like to marry you in his first interaction; the output of such action is the girl running away. This is similar in the virtual world of internet or social media. The first thumb rule of any social conversation is to build trust and authority. The first mistake any marketer does is to push the product or service when people start interacting with him. He is not aware that “customers don’t like to be sold, they love to buy”. Trust and authority are the two elements which are hard to establish, but will generate revenue, sales, leads etc in the long term if established properly.

Some people ask how can I build trust and authority in the market which I do business. Now that internet is available in each and every part of the world this can be done in many ways. The four tools which I use to do this are
1. twitter
2. linkedin
3. facebook
4. blog

Twitter is a micro blogging platform and this has just turned the world of social media and how people see it. It is a place where the message is delivered in 140 characters and if used properly this 140 characters of message is a secret weapon.

Linkedin.com a place where all the professionals meet virtually. Linkedin has got more than 60 million professionals registered with them and this is growing day by day. Linkedin has got groups and answers section which can be used to build trust and authority.

Facebook the largest social networking which has got more than 500 million users and overtook the Google traffic in USA on March 13 2010. If people know how to use facebook properly they can generate more leads and sales solely from this source.

Having an official blog creates more trust in the customers mind and creates brand value. Business owners must regularly update the blog about the market/industry in which they are experts. Regular blogging about your industry give the feeling that you are an expert in your field/area of subject.

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After lot of effort and help from friends and family I got my blog up and running it for a while. Last week some thing happened which screwed my blog totally. I was trying to put one of my pod cast and updated the post. Some thing happened which shocked me, all my posts, comments are not visible. I thought for a minute that my blog was hacked and the hacker deleted the content. I got some help from Mohan and he suggested talking to my hosting provider. As he suggested I had a live chat with them, they asked to repair the database and if the problem still persists they asked to get in touch with security team.

Magically the repair option got back all my content, but even before I enquired the technical team for solution I tried my own methods like deleting plug-in, deactivating and reinstalling word press. During this move some errors took place which might be or might not be rectified. Now I found that my threaded comment plug-in is giving trouble by showing some error and stopped functioning. I am not able to reply to comments and interact with my users. I cannot effort to change the theme. I am trying to test all possibilities and looking at all options.

One thing I learned from this is I must have lots of patience and energy to deal with these kinds of small problems. Ok now I am off to rectify my comments system plug-in.

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