Author: Rob Boirun

Rob's Author Bio: An avid burner of DVD and Blu-Ray masterpieces. My main hobby is to create movie discs of my video and photos.

Getting Started With Social Media

4 Replies Rob Boirun

When trying to promote your business on social media websites, there are a few basic tips that should always be followed. Using these tips will allow for a smooth entry into the world of social media, and make your efforts more successful. In this article, we will discuss those basics and help you to develop a “getting started” plan for your social media efforts. Read on to learn more.

Social MediaWhatever your choice is for social media marketing, make sure that you use correct grammar. Meanwhile it is tempting to use abbreviations such as LOL or LMAO, remember that you are trying to come across as a professional who knows a lot about his or her company. Do your best to spell everything correctly and use punctuation where it is needed.

Network With Others

Try to collaborate with other people and companies when using social media. When they link to your content or share your content, you are being exposed to a brand new group of fans and followers. Return the favor and link to their content as well. The more people who link to your content and social media posts, the better off you are.

To make sure your social media page appeals to your target audience, research books, magazines, and other things you believe they’d enjoy. Try to match the tone of the content you see in your research, and incorporate popular phrases. Doing this will help your target market to trust you and will make them interested in what you have to say.

Understand that technology is driving social media and vice versa. Every day that social media becomes more popular, technology races to catch up, which prompts social media to become more popular. Know what the technology is offering your customers in their social needs so that you can take part in talking WITH them, as opposed to talking AT them.

Never spam when posting on social media. Posting spam is the quickest way to lose followers and damage you and you companies reputation. Spam posts on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites make any legitimate marketing difficult. If your posts are just a few words and a link to a product, you are posting spam. Give relevant content or reviews along with any links you post. The holidays may be a big time of the year, but don’t use the opportunity in the wrong way. It isn’t the best phase to test out new theories or gamble with a big risk. Stick to your proven guns and utilize them in a more customer-friendly manner. You will have all year to plan out a strategy for the next holiday season.

Use Local Media Sites

To successfully market your business on social media, you should take advantage of Yelp. Yelp is an online community where real people review local businesses. Yelp carefully filters its reviews to protect against scammers, and the Yelp community of reviewers is very close-knit. Positive reviews on yelp can bring your business legitimacy and help attract new customers. Make sure to monitor yelp for people’s ideas and suggestions about how to improve your business and help yourself achieve the best rating possible on the website. You also may want to look for outside help utilizing best SEO companies recommendations.

Find The Influencers

Find some influential bloggers that are out there in your niche and offer to be a guest poster on their blog. This would then allow you to have a link back to your blog. It may also attract people to follow you on the various social media sites that you are on.

You can get your followers’ attention by posting something in a format that makes reading easier. For instance, try coming with a list of top 10 tips or writing questions and answers. The visual aspect of your article will make it more appealing and your readers will be more likely to share it.

Develop quality content targeted for social media. If you are just haphazardly flinging words, advertising or any number of mundane snippets at your customers, then you are wasting your time and losing their business. Be as concerned about your social content offerings as you are for the content on your business site.

The world of social media offers tremendous advertising potential, with huge numbers of users being added every day. Every business wants to take advantage of this platform, including yours. Getting your business marketing efforts started the right way will increase your social media following, and increase profits too. In this article, we have provided some basic information which, when implemented correctly, can make your marketing plan a successful one.

Jump Start Your Revenue Generation In The Cloud

1 Reply Rob Boirun

Independent software vendors (ISVs) need to constantly release new products, upgrade features to existing products and maintain market share in an era defined by shifting tastes and a quickly evolving consumer base. Cloud based solutions can facilitate this process and help to jump-start your revenue.

According to Jiten Patil, cloud expert and senior technology consultant at Persistent Systems, customer “stickiness” is never guaranteed and poses a challenge to the ISV revenue cycle. But take heart, there are a few simple solutions to address these challenges and none will require shifting resources away from your core business.

Computing from the cloudPatil breaks the large ISV landscape into two general categories. The first are ISVs that are introducing a brand-new product, whether they are a startup or an established firm releasing a renascent offering. The second are ISVs retooling existing solutions to take advantage of customers’ new interest in cloud-computing technology. Regardless, nearly all ISVs can boost revenue generation by following a few simple steps.

1. Refine Your Strategy and Accelerate Your Go-To-Market Process

ISVs must develop new methodologies to bring products to market quickly. This means that you must make sure that the product design facilitates fast product delivery. According to Patil, it should be a priority to accelerate the marketing, promotion and sales process so that the all-important order-to-cash process can begin.

It’s important to hire talent with skill sets that support your product deployment strategy. You will want to complement your engineering talent with employees with strong skills in sales, marketing and cloud based product delivery.

2. Identify Your Unique Cloud Roadmap, and Build In End-to-End Revenue Generation

Patil said companies must first identify a unique cloud roadmap. This roadmap may deviate from traditional cloud-based solutions, or it may imitate a go-to-market strategy that’s already proven successful. Whichever route your company chooses, make sure that you’re working toward creating an end-to-end revenue generation process throughout the duration of the promotion, marketing and sales cycles. ISVs should employ strategies like continuous delivery of promotional content, new product trial offers and value-added features, Patil said, to keep clients engaged.

Of course, the cloud can facilitate product updates on-demand to quickly address software problems. However, according to Patel, ISVs should also use the cloud to keep customers apprised of new products, solutions, updates, and other information in real time. Together, these processes can build brand awareness and expedite the go-to-market process.

3. Use Cloud Solutions for Continuous Packaging and Distribution

ISVs should consider how cloud based technologies can be used for packaging and distribution of their applications. The cloud can also provide an extended development and testing platform for your products. This can streamline and speed up your product development and quality assurance process and enable you to begin generating revenue more quickly.

By following these guidelines, ISVs can use the cloud to accelerate the revenue generation cycle. ISVs ultimately need to plan for continual growth by embracing the new business strategies engendered by cloud computing. Doing so will ensure your business will remain competitive for years to come. Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud operating system. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers and partners, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing.

Tips on website design

22 Replies Rob Boirun

A notepad and a pencilWeb redesigns can be a huge undertaking. There are many things to keep in mind as you approach redesigning your or another website. Here are some of the basics of good web design to help keep your focus where it belongs.

User Experience

At the forefront of any web redesign should be the overall user experience desired. How do you want people to interact with your website? What do you want them to take away from your website? These are just a few starter questions to ask yourself as you go about planning the redesign. The easiest thing to do in order to answer these questions is to think about what you like about your favourite websites and what you dislike.

Design Aesthetics

The best designs are often the simplest designs, and keeping things clean is more inviting than a cluttered page. Cohesiveness in design throughout the site is key here. The content delineates one page from the next; not a whole new pallet of colours. Clean, modern designs are also easier for the user, making them more likely to interact with information you have posted, whether through a blog post or messaging forums.

Ditch the Gimmicks

This is not the time to go overboard and incorporate everything you have learned in your experience with web design and cram it all into one page. Ditch the shadow boxes and the splash pages, and make your page more inviting by making it easy for users to use and interact with the site.

SEO Friendliness

Incorporating aspects of SEO into your site’s design and content is very easy to do, but it has to be done right. Everyone wants their web page to ping higher on search engine results, which is easily achievable. Just make sure you are not taking away from the site content at the same time.

Check the Coding

Finally launching the web page after a redesign can be both an exciting and nerve-racking experience. After all the work that was put in to choosing the colours and overall aesthetic look, as well as the content, you want the launch to go off without a hitch. Nothing dashes the excitement of a site launch than to spend most of launch day fixing broken codes. Before you make it public, check your coding. Then double check it just to be sure.

User experience, above all, is the most important element. Having a website that users can easily use will keep users visiting your site regularly and will keep new traffic flowing in regularly. Keep the user experience in mind, and all the other necessary elements for good web design will fall easily into place.

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