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|In: Blogging|Last Updated:

Audiomatic is a podcast network focused on building a flourishing community of like-minded, mindful, discerning listeners by providing a wide variety of unique and exciting digital audio content. Started by media professionals with a background in print and radio, Rajesh Tahil & Tariq Ansari bring their considerable experience to Audiomatic. The shows package entertainment, knowledge and insights across genres to create memorable pod-casts that are an inimitable listening experience.

audiomatic

Launched on April 8, the podcast network attracted over 100,000 listeners in its first month with its initial line-up of unique, genre-defining audio shows.

Audiomatic is the only place where a stand-up comedian and writer, a food writer, an actor and a journalist, all unite with one objective – to revive the old art of telling stories using new digital platforms and technology to reach a million ears.

Drawing on radio’s ability to be the theatre of the mind, Audiomatic’s portfolio has something for every listener. Ask Aakar Anything, features senior journalist and columnist Aakar Patel, who answers questions on just about everything from Apple to Air India, India’s corruption to PM Modi’s vision & Chetan Bhagat on TV to Twinkle Khanna in the newspapers.

Audiomatic podcast Our Last Week features the two funny men Anuvab Pal & Kunaal Roy Kapur and their candid conversations. They catch up on their personal and worldly encounters in the last week and ensure an audio experience as striking as their trademark logical reasoning.

Food writer Vikram Doctor with his life-size appetite for stories presents The Real Food Podcast, a fortnightly feast for the food-lovers.

Duo of Padmaparna Ghosh & Samanth Subramanian duo narrates stories that meld science, culture and history in India, in their signature ‘all pun intended’ ways on The Intersection every fortnight.

The podcasts, timed well within a modern day listener’s attention span, are uploaded weekly or fortnightly on Audiomatic, Apple iTunes as well as Android apps such as Stitcher, Podcast Addict etc.

Whether it is food [The Real Food Podcast], current affairs [Ask Aakar Anything] or Science [The Intersection], Audiomatic’s edge lies in its ability to tell compelling stories and be every listener’s ‘go-to’ destination for engaging, authentic & outstanding content.

[Image Credit – Audiomatic]

|In: Blogging|Last Updated: | 1 Comment

Subject lines are incredibly influential in deciding the course of your email campaigns. After all they ensure whether someone even opens the campaign; your first step towards engagement. If it weren’t for a convincing subject line no would even bother to open your campaigns. Thus, Subject lines play a very pivotal role in getting the first step towards engagement.

But are subject lines that critical? Yes! Consider a normal advertisement you saw off Facebook or your TV. How long does the ad stay relevant? Only for a few moments. Now consider the fact that the inbox won’t throw out emails if they remain unopened.

Emails linger in the inbox long after they get placed. As one can never truly predict when a campaign connects with a subscriber; a strong and influential subject line can drive opens even if it takes the subscriber a few days.

A subject line is the first impression of your email marketing campaign. And as they say “first impression last”, your subject lines carry more weight-age than you would think.

subject-line-image

Are there any rules to Subject Line creation?

Yes! And No!

This might seem slightly confusing but there are no hard & fast rules to designing a good and effective subject line. Subject lines can be interpreted in various manners, so one subject line might not suit all groups within your audience. Nevertheless, there are some elements you should steer away from when designing your subject lines.

Long and boring!

Studies conducted across various demographics depict a clear correlation between opens and length of subject lines. Ideally and statistically shorter subject lines are better at prompting opens. This is primarily because no one has got the time to read big sentences when only a few words can convey the intention of the campaign. Consider another factor; typically you can see up to 40 -60 characters on your subject line, when using a computer.

On smartphones your subject line are bound to get truncated when casually viewing the inbox. Having short subject lines that give clear and concise intentions connect better with all groups. It’s all about being visible.

It’s all psychological!

In truest essence, subject lines deal with the psyche of the individual and certain words can push the subject line further. Having subject lines designed around particular words can greatly influence a subscriber. Appropriate phrasing plays significant role in determining the effectiveness of subject lines. Here’s a compilation of various categories of keywords that can be deployed in subject lines:

  1. Benefit – If your subject line conveys the benefits of opening the campaign certain words out perform others. For example the word “cheapest” has a negative influence in read rates as opposed to “fastest” or “quickest”
  2. Clickbait – If you’ve been thinking that clickbait keywords still work their magic, you’re wrong. Clickbait words no longer influence opens, in fact they are counter-productive
  3. Commanding words – Commanding words are quite tricky, because no one likes to be bossed around. Words like “register”, “add” or “try” influence opens far more than “buy”, “call” or “click”
  4. Discount and price oriented keywords – A majority of e-commerce brands heavily rely on phrases like “2 for 1”, “clearance sale”, “half off” or mention price drops in the subject lines. The only way these subject lines works are when the discount offered is significantly large. Such words are way too common in the email ecosystem, hence it easy to look past such routine subject lines
  5. Urgency – Subject lines that indicate urgency generate high open rates. However phrasing still acts as an influencer. Consider two subject lines; “30% Off on Shoes, Limited time only” and “30% Off on Shoes, Expiring soon”. The former will pay better results.

Subject lines are quite a tricky affair, but one cannot undermine their worth. It’s vital to devise clever and original subject lines to get audience to open campaigns. One can truly say that Subject lines are skillful art; you have to be expressive and clever, while maintain brevity and clarity.

And as all email strategies of email marketing service provider go; you need to test, test and test some more. A/B split testing with different subject lines can give insight on which work and which don’t. Analysis of these results should aid in developing a psychological angle to identify how different groups respond to different subject lines.

Once you’re clear of varying inclinations of segments in the audience, subject line creation would be a piece of cake. But don’t stick to the same practices for every campaign; innovate to improve efficiency.

About the author

Shantam Dubey is Assistant SEO manager at iCubes.in. You can have a look at his complete profile here

Image Credit* – thephorest

|In: Blogging|Last Updated:

Blogs can be a very gainful tool if utilized appropriately. Benefiting from blogs is simply a matter of grabbing the awareness of an audience and not accomplishing any sort of selling. You should start your blog with any blog hosting service. A free blog hosting service permits you to initiate blogging straight away without needing any acquaintance of hosting, or programming.

Successful-Blogging-2

 

In this article you will come across 8 topmost ways to successful blogging.

How to begin

The best way to begin is starting with a free service. In case, your blog doesn’t yield any positive results, eventually you are not going to lose any money. A blog is always structured in chronological order, and your newest entry is exhibited first.

If your blog traffic develops greatly, you can upgrade it and make the most recent blog entry the message of your progress. Simply you can type the new blog URL address. It will direct visitors to the new blog site, and continue you following, without difficulty to anybody.

Niche selection

A niche is an aimed product or service. You should make a decision on a product or service offered by you.  Prefer an area which you can passionately write about, and you can use keyword research engines to find well-liked searched topics.

As long as there are viewers for your topic, your blog should be doing well. Any topic can be measured a niche, and it doesn’t matter how large or small the audience is. If there are people who are fascinated in hearing about your topic, you can pick to build your particular audience.

Update on a regular basis

Updating your blog on a regular [if not daily] basis keeps it more appealing to readers, and also it generates fresh content making it more tempting to search engines. In order to retain your blog traffic, it is a necessity to update your blog regularly with manifold entries.

You should attempt to update your blog daily with a minimum of three entries. The best way to achieve this is to plan a set time that you will contribute to your blog every day.

Track your blog

How you’re going to know your blog has traffic or not? It doesn’t mean your blog isn’t growing as no one is leaving comments. Many visitors do not comment their first time, but are lively daily visitors.

Blog tracking does not have to be complicated, and typically an Site Meter or Stat Counter will accomplish the job. It would be much better to utilize a service that provides advanced traffic analysis, like search engine information, keyword tracking and referral information.

Always listen to your audience

With the aid of proper page counter, you will observe how others are getting your blog and which keywords are being utilized to locate your blog. In the event, your blog is being located by one or more keywords, then try to focus your blog around these popular keywords to make it more dominant.

Always incorporate these keywords when writing entry titles and maintain the blog more interesting.

Short and brief

The blog entries should be concise and brief. The lengthy articles should be avoided, and you should endeavor to submit blog entries so as to become hours of reading. Many visitors are fond of reading interesting information, and it is good to make available constructive information. Never include any useless information, as visitors will flee sentences that turn away from your theme.

Digital art

Make an effort to incorporate pictures, photos, non-advertising graphics and art in your blog entries. Graphics can give you blog more life, and evidently, the content is the most important aspect and never try to surpass your content with graphics. Be particular about your graphics and ensure they fit the entry topic. Original photos, pictures, graphics and art is greatly recommended.

Be more professional

As a professional blogger, make your own team with one or more other bloggers. This will help create an appealing blog, and more authors signify more coverage since each author will have a particular interest in the blog. The proposal of a team blog is to make it more gratifying for all authors, and maintaining the blog exciting for visitors.

About the author

Lisa Coffey is an expert SEO consultant. She has years of SEO related experience. Her enthusiasm and dedication for internet marketing, technology and writing has made her a colossal symbol on the World Wide Web. Presently she is working with FourQuadrant and you can contact at lissa.coffey@outlook.com

*Image Credit – HopScotchTheGlobe

|In: Blogging|Last Updated:

Selling cars from a manufacturer’s point of view, was a challenge during the olden days [1900 period] until an extra-ordinary salesman & entrepreneur William Billy Durant, founder of General Motors introduced the concept of “Automobile Financing”. Automobile loans were not very common during that period in India & were only restricted to certain standard of society. All that has changed post the liberalization era.

The old Indian mindset

During the 1980’s, people were keen on taking only government jobs since they were secure & also helped them earn good reputation in the society. This also proved the point that there was hesitation to “change” & to bring any drastic change was a huge challenge.

People were keen on buying flat for their future but owning up any vehicle, be it a 2-wheeler or a 4-wheeler was a “big status symbol” 🙂 One of the main reasons could be that the income at disposal was less & expenses were more.

With the changes in the overall landscape in economy & with the Privatization wave during the 1990’s; many things changed for the country.

Changing consumer mindset

In the era of 1990’s, though there was an increase in disposable income largely due to the increase in the number of jobs; “cars” were still a distant dream. I remember during those days, as kids we did not even dream about them.

Also, it was the time when the only medium to talk to people were “phones” [land-line or cord-less]. With the advent of the mobile phone, things started changing & fast-forward to 2000; “mobile” proved to be a massive game changer !!!

With the “Internet Era”, things changed massively and that brought huge “winds of change”.

The internet Era – Winds of Change

With growing mobile subscriber-base, falling rates of data & growing trendy-urban population, companies came up with interesting business-models!!! There are huge number of consumers who want to buy a car but instead of buying “1st hand car” they do not mind buying an “old/used car” & “used car segment” became a huge hit among people. What if we find pre-owned cars in Bangalore from many car-manufacturers under one roof 🙂

With “car financing” becoming much easier than before, it only added an “icing on the cake”!!! The used-car segment is an instant hit among the learner(s) or drivers having the ‘L’ board; we do not want our new car to be damaged; so better learn on “used car” & than move to new car [if budget permits].

Used-Car market segment

Few years back, the used car market in India was dominated by the unorganized players such as street level and self-appointed used car dealers, road side mechanics who were not certified by the Government of India and by the car owners themselves.

There were word-of mouth advertisements which handled most of the industry. In addition to this, there were not many major brands entering the used car market until recently. The organized used car sellers offer exchange and finance schemes in order to attract a large number of buyers into the used car business.

The used car sales in this market has picked up and has been growing at a CAGR of nearly 21.1% (in revenue terms) during FY’2008-FY’2014 and is expected to grow even further as more carmakers are entering in the used car market.

The segment is more competitive & internet is one of major factors for it. Now consumers, can get used car prices in Bangalore [and vis-a-vis for other cities] right from the comfort of their home(s).

If we talk of buyers than we also cannot forget the other side of the coin: Sellers. Sellers are the car-owners who are looking for prospective buyers for their cars & they are very critical resource in this entire “buyer-seller” eco-system. However, if you are a seller; it becomes important that you get the right prize for your car. Since, we are living in an internet era,  which is the IT hub, selling a car in Bangalore becomes much more easier 🙂 Being a car-owner, you would always want that your product goes in the right hands so that (s)he can make the best use of it 🙂

Conclusion

The automobile market in India is growing at a very rapid pace & with the recent “Make In India” movement, many companies are keen to setup their “manufacturing plants” in India. This is already happening & it would not only affect the country’s GDP but also prove to be a boon to the consumers & young Indians aspiring to enter the automobile industry

For online-consumers, “Sell Smart & Buy Smart” 🙂

|In: Blogging|Last Updated: | 3 Comments

Few years back, I wrote an article on Why you should work in a startup and working in two startups was the best thing that has happened so far in my life. I learnt lot of things right from Technology to Business & helped me to understand myself better [I failed at many places but that was all a learning in itself].

[Today we have a guest article from Darren Foong who works in an Israeli startup Startcut.com. In this article, Darren shares his top three learnings while working in the startup]

Many are interested in startups lately; and why not? With Facebook’s highly publicized IPO and recent billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram, startups are the darlings of the media, the next big thing & a great way to make a killing.

It could well be a good way to make a living too; if you have the necessary skills, experiences and contacts to be in demand, why work for an unappreciative boss? Why not make money for yourself? For some, starting their business is a viable – even profitable – career choice, and there’s nothing quite like being your own boss and working for yourself.

But life is remarkably different in a start-up & it may not be for everybody. You should try it out, and decide for yourself if you enjoy it. But here are three of the most important lessons I’ve learnt from having working in a start-up.

You don’t know what you don’t know.

What’s the best way to promote your company? Unless you’re a marketing professional, chances are you only have a vague clue.
In most companies, roles are compartmentalized, and you can focus on doing what you’re best at. No such luck in a start-up, you and your team have to wear all the hats and play all the roles, and that includes doing the marketing/promotion for the company. And you don’t know it, you have to learn it.

Nobody on our team really had any experience with SEO, branding or online marketing; so for much of the time we had to figure things out for ourselves. This meant reading an inordinately large quantity of blogs and online guides, and sitting together pouring over Google AdWords & other PPC sites.

Even if you are an experienced marketer, the resources you have are limited – you can’t rely on media outlets giving you space or engaging the services of a PR/Ad agency. Even Google Ads may be an unqualified expenditure, depending on the life-stage of your startup.

Building a brand from zero is singularly unique & different from anything else, and you need to try and figure things out. We found countless social sharing sites & professional discussion forums which provided lots of useful eyeballs, but we also found plenty of pyramid schemes and snake-oil salesmen – none of which we’d known about (or how important they were, or how to utilize them).
You don’t realize what you don’t know until you realize you don’t know them – and it’s important to realize that that’s okay, because…

Patience is a Virtue.

Things will be hard. In the best case scenario, you strike gold and have to work extra hard to keep up with orders – in the worst case, you work hard but still languish in obscurity. You’ll stay late, for long hours, put in extra shifts, but realize things aren’t quite moving, you aren’t quite seeing the results of your day-to-day work, things aren’t taking off quite as fast as you’d like them to.

And that’s okay.

Things happen at a different pace in start-ups, and you can get frustrated or burnt out if you expect things to take off and fly immediately, or even within a year. (Incidentally, since a significant proportion of startups fail in a year – congratulations! You made one year!)

Patience is a virtue. It’s important to recognize the dangers of burning out and putting too much into a week, especially if it hurts the next week. You’re in this for the long haul – no need to kill yourself in the first mile. Hard work is important, but pacing is equally so. Especially since…

Everything.

You need to do everything.

The lack of a boss means no control, nobody looking over your shoulder checking your work and micro-managing. The lack of a boss also means you are now responsible for everything you do, including managing your own time-schedule and ensuring quality in your work.

But, more importantly, it means you have to decide and prioritize on the things that should be done. You’ll find a lot of things that will need to be accomplished, and the list will get longer and bigger every day. Going through it alphabetically won’t cut it – you need to prioritize, and only later will you find out if you’re right.

In a sense, being in a start-up means freedom: you can focus on what you want to, and deal with the aspects you want to – first. Eventually, though, you’ll need to do everything, and this freedom can sometimes be crippling, if you have too many decisions to make about what to prioritize, or if you keep doing what’s easy and put things off.

You need to do everything; one-by one, prioritized and patiently. And then maybe, you’ll survive.

I am sure there are many.. many more learnings, if you have any learning to share please leave them in the comments section.

About the author

Darren does marketing, blogging, and works at an Israeli startup at Startcut.com, where really he spends most of his time on Quora. He just started writing darrenblogs.tumblr.com StartCut helps you by distributing your videos to over 25 websites and 3 billion viewers. Visit StartCut today, or inquire at blog@startcut.com for more information.

|In: Blogging|Last Updated: | 14 Comments

It has been almost a month since I moved my blog to HostGator(India)  [henceforth referred as HGI] hence, I thought it would be interesting to write a review about my experience(s) so far with the leading web hosting provider [at least in US].

Plan to suit different needs

HGI offers an interesting set of plans namely,

  • Hatchling Plan– It starts at Rs 155/month and offers you Single Domain, Unlimited Disk Space,Unlimited Bandwidth & Shared SSL Cretificate.
  • Baby Plan – It starts at Rs 251/month and offers you Unlimited Domains,Unlimited Disk Space,Unlimited Bandwidth & Shared SSL Certificate
  • Business Plan – It starts at Rs 380/month and offers you Unlimited Domains,Unlimited Disk Space,Unlimited Bandwidth & Free Private SSL and IP.

This blog is current in the “Hatchling Plan” and it is very easy to upgrade/downgrade to any plan. You can find more details about the plans here

Growing Competition [read GoDaddy]

With the advent of GoDaddy in India, HGI would face a tough competition from another monster which means that if the “good service”  is not maintained, than HGI customers have a better option in their hands !!! Hopefully, competition would bring the better off HGI.

LOCAL Support, much more than EMAIL

When I had to move my domain & content from my previous registrar to HGI, I ended up into many issues & questions mostly related to the Content. What if I screw-up something in the process of movement, what happens to my data etc. etc. Fortunately this guide came to my rescue for solving most of my issues but without HGI’s excellent support the migration would not have been smooth.

Their support system is excellent and their support executives are there REALLY to solve your issue be it phone [Toll Free – 1800-209-8833, Tolled – 253 6641555] or over chat. When they say support is 24/7, they are delivering what they have promised. Sometimes, I used to call them at weird times i.e. at 3:00 AM in the night and they gave the best possible support.

So if you are tired with bad support from your domain company than HGI is the right place to move your domain to !!!

Almost Zero Downtime

In almost a month’s time, I have seen that my site was down only for a couple of times and that too only for a few minutes.  The main reason for the downtime was that the HGI engineers were doing some optimization on the MySQL database & the best part is that they informed me in advance about the “expected downtime” 🙂

If you have any questions about HGI or if you are an existing HGI customer then do share your views by leaving a comment .

|In: Bangalore|Last Updated: | 17 Comments

It has almost been around a month since my last article and it was time to get along with my blogging and here [Courtesy- Indiblogger] is the “appealing” reason which motivated me to get back to it !!! So, as you might have already guessed, I also thought of giving a shot to the “Samsung Blogger’s Contest”  & if this entry wins, it would be a privilege to be one of their “Mobilers” 🙂

Before, we get into the review; I want to share that my first brush with Samsung Galaxy Tab 750 [henceforth referred as “Galaxy Tab 750”] which happened at the Best Buy store during my Visit to US in June,2011. Though, I had already purchased the killer beast Apple iPod Touch but Galaxy Tab 750’s amazing experience left me aghast and wanting for more [Unfortunately, I could not purchase it due to budget constraints]. So, here comes my hands-on review [which I had for half an hour] with this amazing piece of beauty named “Samsung Galaxy Tab 750“

Android 3.1 [Honeycomb]

As we know that Android 3.1 is the tablet optimized version of the open source operating system – Android. Though there were several enhancements made for tablets, the top one on my list is definitely the “UI Enhancements“. Below is a comprehensive Google IO presentation which touches every nook & corner of Honeycomb [Slides:17-22*] over it’s predecessors.

Now the question which arises is that the “Samsung Galaxy Tab 750” is not the ONLY tablet with Honeycomb, there are many other alternatives like the XOOM, Asus Transformer, Acer’s Iconia etc but the points below would prove that “Samsung Tab” is a clear winner …… so read on ……

Impressive Specs

IMHO, any “Embedded” device is nothing but a “Board with components like registers, capacitors etc” if it’s processor [CPU] cannot handle enough load. After looking at the Galaxy Tab 750’s specifications, the only thing that would come out of your mouth is WOW !!!

The Galaxy Tab 750 is powered by the Nvidia Tegra-2 1GHz processor which runs on the “Dual Core ARM A9”, and even when I launched multiple applications;there was not much change in the performance. As you read-on, you would realize it is not second generation TAB from Samsung but a new avatar of it’s predecessor “Samsung Galaxy Tab 7“

The complete specs can be found here but here are my favorite picks –

Weight – 595 grams.

Display– Size : 10.1 inches

Color & Resolution : 16 Mn & 1280×800 Pixels

Faster Processor – Nvidia Tegra 2 Dual-Core 1GHz Processor

Expandable Memory – micro-SD card slot expandable upto 32 GB [though the USB adapter has to be bought separately 🙁 ]

Browsing – Flash support

Image Courtesy Gadget Technology News

Design, Design & Design [all the way]

Design is the key to anything, be it website or consumer product like a tablet & this time around, Samsung has definitely gone head-to-head with Apple[termed Design Guru] and won us over with Galaxy Tab’s sleek design.

As specified above, the Tab weighs just 595g and it is just 8.6mm thick which makes it a easy & lighter device to carry when we are on the go!!! It has become a routine that whenever a tablet is released [be it the bottom of the Pyramid tablets like latest Reliance 3G Tab or the most popular one in the higher range Apple iPad2], it is always compared to the iPad2 … so here we go with our comparison…

Samsung Galaxy Tab 750 with iPad2

Image Courtesy PC World

Here goes my feature list on where Galaxy Tab 750 wins over iPad2

Samsung Galaxy Tab 750 Apple iPad2 [Wifi Only]
Operating System Android Honeycomb 3.1 [Ideal for Google User’s] iOS 4.3.3
Processor 1GHz dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 with ARM Cortex 9 CPUs 1GHz dual-core Apple A5
Internal Memory 1GB RAM; 16GB flash storage 500MB RAM; 16GB flash storage
Display 10.1” (diag); 1280×800; 149 ppi 9.7”(diag); 1024×768; 132 ppi
Battery 7000mAH 3.7V Li-polymer [Bigger Battery, more life] 6930mAH 3.8V Li-polymer

In a nutshell, for any heavy duty user of Google Services like Gmail, Reader etc., the Galaxy Tab 750 is definitely a better pick as it comes bundled with all of those services !!!

IMPROVED TouchWiz UX [for TABLETS]

Samsung has always been using it’s proprietary “TouchWiz Interface” for phones like Samsung Galaxy S2 & it’s other Android phones. But like many others, I did not like the TouchWiz experience on my S2.

However,  Samsung has made an extra-ordinary effort and customized it’s TouchWiz interface for tablets… and boy, it looks quite amazing & intriguing on the Samsung Tab 750.

Below is a short video from our friends at GadgetExperts reviewing the new TouchWiz UX

There are many enhancements made, but here are my favorite picks :

Mini Apps Tray – There are six tools on top of any running application namely Task Manager, Music Player, Calendar, World Clock, Pen Memo and Calculator. The tray would fade out once when you are using the main application and would again re-appear when you tap on it.

The list of apps however is customizable and I am sure this change would definitely be there in Samsung’s To-Do list…

Motion Control Zooming – This feature is more of fun and a very nice alternative to Pinch & Zoom [Video: 5.15 – 5:45]. Just click a photograph and move your Galaxy Tab 750 back & forth to experience this feature 🙂

I am sure that apart from the features which I liked the most, the Galaxy Tab 750 would definitely provide me with BETTER:

  1. Web Browsing
  2. Speed
  3. Reading
  4. Music
  5. Communication
  6. Office
  7. Multimedia
  8. Imaging
  9. Accessories
  10. MUCH BETTER ME …..

I would like to share the Galaxy Tab 750 India’s launch video, enjoy it 🙂

Thanks for reading the review & making it this far 🙂 I hope you liked the review and had a “TAB”bing experience just as I had writing the same…