AfterTheDotNet

Commenting on blogs for online marketing.

Commenting on popular blog’s posts is increasingly being used as a online marketing tool. If you leave a comment on a popular blog post it would be read by many people and what’s more it will remain there till the blog post is online giving you exposure on a long term basis. Blog readers see comments as a good representation of the commenter or their business.

Doshdosh blog has a post (Rethinking Blog Comments: Much More Than Just A Quick Way to Get Web Traffic) on comments where he advises blog readers to comment on posts on popular blogs to build a network. He also points out that one should not comment for the sake of link building because it might serve a short term benefit of increasing your website’s page rank but in the long term it would not be an advantage.

Comments and links in the comments should be relevant to the content of the post to generate more click throughs. Bloggers and blog readers usually do read comments and if your comments are relevant more readers are likely to follow the links, if there are any, in your comments. All bloggers would tell you that they like comments on their posts as the main purpose of posting on a blog is to generate a discussion amongst it’s readers. What’s more developing a network with people of similar interest will be beneficial in the long run.

Doshdosh mentions in his post how he caught a known Internet marketer leaving same comments on number of blogs and posts! Doshdosh promptly marked his comments as spam. The loss for the marketer was that he lost an opportunity to build a network. This is a great example how commenting for the sake of commenting might not be beneficial or might lead to negative publicity.

Therefore, one should comment on blogs for developing relationships and one’s network and not to reap short term benefits.

Update (June 2, 2008)

Since I posted here I was confused about whether one should insert a link to one’s website or blog in the main comments itself because I had seen some of the commentators doing that. I found the answer at a post on Search Engine Journal blog in the post named SEO & Link Building Via Blog Comments. In this post it is clearly mentioned NOT to add links in the comment body unless required. To quote “But do not place a signature link in the comment body itself except for critical circumstances. Linking to your own site in the comment body is not only spammy in nature, but can also get your name, site, email and IP flagged by ’social’ blog spam software like SpamKarma, and get your comments automatically deleted from dozens of blogs which use the application.” Since the author of the blog is Loren Baker who is the editor of the blog and also an authority in the arena of Search Engine Marketing I believe what he says is correct.

DMiracle has a post which discusses the advantages of branding your blog comments. You can get it here Do You Brand Yourself in Your Blog Comments?

Saas in 2008 and beyond

Though Phil Wainewright predicted last year (2007) that 2007 would be year for SaaS. Though SaaS did gain momentum but it did not penetrate enough so that one could say that there has been a major shift. At the start of this year (2800) Phil Wainewright predicted a huge surge in the SaaS industry. I agree with him.

Phil observes that the main reasons for the surge are

1. SaaS is a service based industry. SaaS makes it easy for teams that are spread apart to work together without huge setup costs as web allows you to do that. Over the years the SaaS detractors have decreased because SaaS model is making sense.
2. Software vendors are shifting to SaaS. Software vendors are adopting SaaS. SAP and Oracle are one of the few software vendors who have shown keen interest in the SaaS model.
3. Economic conditions. With the fears of recession plaguing the world organizations are switching are looking for cheaper options for the expensive software they use. Since SaaS is a pay as you go model it seems like a good alternative as long as ISV’s can deliver.
4. Growth of SaaS platforms. There is a race for SaaS platforms. Earlier this year Genesis was launched as a platform for SaaS at the SaaS week. Companies like Oracle and Microsoft are in the process of making their products SaaS compatible which suggests that they also see a growth potential in this field.
5. Growth of virtual working. Increasingly people are working from different locations which will help boost SaaS development as it provides a cheap way to work from different locations.

Phil Wainewright’s article which has greater detail can be found at http://blogs.zdnet.com/SAAS/wp-trackback.php?p=432. Another respected commentator on IT trends Jeff Kaplan has another post which outlines the reasons why SaaS can be successful which makes interesting reading.

Development platforms for SaaS (Software as a Service)

Force.com has been marketed as a platform for services for those who want to provide software as a solution. With the backing and experience of Salesforce.com, force.com is attracting a lot of attention.

The question as to why people believe that force.com has the probability of success as a development platform for SaaS as compared to others? Industry experts believe that force.com will succeed as a lot of internal team is big organizations and corporates are using Salesforce.com which is a CRM solution built by force.com. Over the years Salesforce has evolved into a trusted CRM solution specially for small and medium businesses because of its ease to user, scale and monitoring ability. The Salesforce.com development has also managed to build addons for different businesses which has kept the interest alive.

Success of Salesforce.com has ensured that SaaS based CRM’s for different verticals are likely to use Force.com as a development platform. This has been proven by launch of  VBioPharma Primary Care Edition CRM application which is targeted at the Life Sciences organizations. Every SaaS based CRM developers dream is to replicate Salesforce.com’s success even though it might be unintentional. 

There are others who have a different view on this. Renee Boucher Ferguson who is a senior writer at Ziff Davis Media, reports that ISV’s (independent Software Vendors) have snubbed Salesforce as a development platform. She refers to a situation which developed after the Open Source SaaS summit 2008 when Znet’s SaaS blogger Phil Wainewright conducted an impromptu poll where 250 ISV’s respondents were asked the following questions

1. How many people were considering building a SaaS offering using their own development tools and having it hosted by a 3rd party?

2. How many people were looking at a software+services approach?

3. How many people were considering Salesforce’s Force.com (this is the fun one)?

The results were surprising. Only 2 respondents said that they are looking at force.com. 40 respondents said that they would develop their own development platform and 10 respondents were thinking about using another developer platform. This is not good news for force.com given the fact that this poll was conducted by someone who is a known person in the SaaS vertical and the fact that it has been reported across the Internet does not help force.com. The main reasons why people do not use force.com is that it is expensive, not a true platform and the vendor lock in.

In the end one can say that there is great potential in development platform services as the development platforms would be used by SaaS developers based on the functions of the service.

Recession Proof Jobs

In the last little while there has been a recession across the world and people have been fearing pay cuts or loss of jobs. However, some parts of the world like China and India, though these countries have more than half of the manpower of the world, have not been hit by a recession that badly. One thought that comes to mind is “are there any jobs which are not effected by recession?” as is the case with some businesses where some businesses are less effected if a recession is on. Some of the examples of businesses which are less effected by recession are healthcare, the federal government, technology, information technology and sales and marketing (to some extent).

While looking for answers on the Internet (my favorite hunting ground) I came across this article on the Payscale web site. Payscale is a website which provides information on salary trends across industries and it was reviewed earlier on the AfterTheDotNet blog. A study done by Kristina Cowan has tried to identify recession proof jobs and businesses. In another post Kristina Cowan discusses how to recession proof your present job.

While conducting research on jobs not effected by recession Jon Bender, managing partner with PrincetonOne, a New Jersey-based recruiting firm observes that recession proof jobs are there where people require goods and services regardless, like healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Therefore anyone who makes or saves money for the company is safe in a recession.

Federal jobs though not easy to get are usually safe as usually an employee is transferred if the services that he is giving are not required during a recession. Moreover, the add-ons of Federal jobs are tremendous. However, one should try and look for federal jobs when the recession is not there since the chances of getting a job during a recession are tougher.

During a recession one should concentrate on the job work harder and take less risks and not make any drastic decisions. One needs to ensure that his contribution is noticed by the seniors during the meetings and the monthly, quarterly and yearly reports. When meeting the seniors or managers you should say where you are doing good, where you can improve. All these practices should be put in practice in the good times for if your attitude changes during a recession it will not have the desired effect as someone might construe that you are insecure about your job.

Experts believe that to identify recession proof jobs or industries is more difficult than it was 15 years ago. The best way to recession proof your job is to ensure that the management sees value being added because of you in the organization. Sometimes you have to be proactive to ensure that the management sees value in your job. If you have not been doing it in the past start practicing it right now and in a couple of years you will feel that your job is recession proof. How recession proof your job is directly proportional to the ability to multi task. The more ability you have to multi task the more recession proof your job is.

The lesson in the end is that ensure everyone sees value of your work in the organization and everyone recognizes your ability to multi task. So get working on these values before the recession really sets in.

Suggested readings

1. An excellent article on how to make yourself and your job recession proof
2. A article by AOL jobs team on how to prepare yourself in case of a recession
3. This post on the Babalu blog argues that we are not headed for a recession
4. More articles and white papers by Kristna Cowan

My favorite and top blogs

I’m sure a lot of you do follow some blogs regularly. I must admit it has become addiction. Though I can survive a couple of days without reading the RSS feeds but after that I will get the withdrawal symptoms and the first indication is when I start feeling that the world is whizzing past me. Some blogs do outgrow me (though I would like to believe that I outgrew them) and after some time I have to go hunting around for more. This time I thought I will share them with my readers (even though they are imaginary but you know every now and then I have to feel that I’m the God’s gift to mankind ). I have been using Google Reader to subscribe to the RSS feeds of the blogs and I have no complaints except that once in a while you do need to read the feeds offline and that does not work very well for me with Google Reader (though they have built a feature for offline reading of posts but it takes ages for the reader to sync with the Google Reader. So here is the list I have created recently.

1. Angryblackbitch
2. Becker-Posner Blog
3. Click Opera
4. Cosmic Variance
5. Diary of Samuel Pepys
6. El Guapo in DC
7. Eurotrash
8. Go Fug Yourself
9. 1000 Difficult Lessons
10. In the Middle
11. Ironic Sans
12. Johnny I Hardly Knew You
13. Julia (Here be Hippogriffs)
14. Language Log
15. Matthew Yglesias
16. Midnight in Iraq
17. Ninapaley.com
18. Old Hag
19. Radio.Uruguay
20. Rootless Cosmopolitan
21. The Rest is Noise
22. The Smoking Gun
23. Under Odysseus

How about you guys letting me know your favorite blogs by commenting on this post

Manage your online MS Office documents at Google docs

Till Google docs came by it was not convenient to create, edit and store your office 2007 documents online. With a  reliable company backing Google docs (Google bashers please excuse) the security risk is considerably less. The good thing with Google docs is that development has not stopped. Upgrades and additional features are being added by the development team which makes the service more usable and also keeps people interested in the service since there is something new after a few days. Some of the new features are

• Google had added a presentation tool to the Google docs service. Now you can store the slides as PDF’s which can be used to recreate the presentation quickly later if needed online or offline! If you want to do a presentation offline you can do it by using the PDF’s saved in the presentation
• Deeper directory structure can be built. Earlier users were restricted as far as creating sub folders. This restriction has been removed (source Google docs blog).
• Renaming of folders and documents is possible now from the toolbar itself is a great improvement from earlier method where one had to go to the folder or the document to edit it.

• Forms is another feature which is very usable. Now you can create forms within Google docs and send it via an email to anyone. They won’t need to sign in, and they can respond directly from the email message or from an automatically generated web page. The responses are added to the spreadsheet automatically. In fact using Google gadgets one can put this on any website as well and maintain the form from there.

• DocSyncer is another tool which is a very usable and beneficial. Once you have a Google Docs account and you install DocSyncer after downloading it from here, DocSyncer searches your documents and desktop folder for office documents and automatically uploads them to your Google Docs account. In fact later it keeps syncing the desktop and ‘my documents’ folder so that you have the latest versions online. You can also choose which documents to sync and you can also add other directories and folders to the syncing queue. The tool is free to use. Similar tools can be found at OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension and OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs extension.

• Google has released a simple one-purpose application called Google Uploader that lets you upload multiple documents at once to a Google Docs account, as well as add right-click uploading options for all the document types accepted by the free online office suit. Earlier the same could be done by sending emails to your Google Docs account but restriction on size and types of file was there. Google Uploader is a simpler , effective tool, and it seems to work pretty quickly. Google Docs Uploader is a free download for Windows only and requires .NET Framework 2.0.

With these additional features Google Docs is good system to store files which you might need to access away from your computer. I’m certainly going to start using Google Docs as a backup for my MS Office files.

Blogging - An emerging (or emerged!) trend.

Blogging is an emerging career for a lot of people who are interested in exploring the world and the knowledge through their writings.  Through blogging we all are trying to explore the writer of our inner selves.  Blogs, or web logs, are one of the fastest-growing means of mass communication now days. Anybody who wants to utilize their skills can just start blogging as a freelancer and can earn handsome money. It is a good way to create and maintain public relations… Now let’s explore some thing more about this field.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

There are wide array of blogs featuring art, photographs videos etc etc ……. Blogs which consists of short blogs are termed as micro blogging.  .There is various types of blogs, and each differs in the way content is delivered or written.

There are various search engines which help in searching content and the online communities’ helps in connecting the bloggers to the world.

There are various definitions of blogs. For me it is a chronological publication of personal thoughts often bedecked or ornamented by a text, images, objects or photographs depending on one’s own creativity.

The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”‘

With the advent and awareness of technology, people are trying to use the Internet beyond email, surfing and chatting. Therefore people have started blogging from around the world.

Blogs are usually (but not always) written by one person and are updated pretty regularly. Blogs are often (but not always) written on a particular topic - there are blogs on virtually any topic you can think of. From photography, to spirituality, to recipes, to personal diaries to hobbies - blogging has as many applications and varieties as you can imagine. Blogs usually have a few features that are useful to know about if you want to get the most out of them as a reader.

Its not just something for young people, or geeks, or cool folk, or Westerners, or even for people with their own computers - instead its virtually for anyone who has an access to the Internet and wants to connect with the world.

Best web applications of 2007

As the year comes to an end one is tempted to find out the top web apps for the year. This is not easy to do so because of the number of applications that are being released every day. Once you have your list of top web apps then you want to compare the results what others are saying.

I decided to list the top 5-8 web applications which have been the most useful to me in 2007. I knew that the biggest problem was that there were web applications which are great but I have not tried them even though I signed up for them but never got to test them for the want of time. Nevertheless here is my list

1. Google apps for your domain and Google web apps
   I have been using Google for your domain for my office and it has been a big time saver and has made management of email accounts, documents, chat and scheduling much easier. Google apps include Google docs, Gmail, start page for your domain, Google calendar and the API’s of Google for your domain include Gmail, start page, The biggest advantage is there is a small learning curve as the Google web applications work similar to the offline applications.
2. Opera for my Mobile
   I have a Sony Erricson W700i and the web browser Opera has been a boon for me as now I can check emails, information and also chat using Opera on my mobile. The interface of Opera is very easy to use and their latest version is a big improvement.
3. Delicious
   I started using Del.icio.us at the end of 2006 though I was not using (or abusing it!) till February 2007 because that was the time I discovered the extensions for Firefox. Bookmarking has become interesting and doable because delicious stores the bookmarks online. The fact that everyone shares the bookmarks helps in finding useful sites which you might not find otherwise through regular search engines or browsing. At times instead of searching on the search engines I conduct searches on delicious and invariabily, though the results are far less, the results have some good and interesting links.
4. Wordpress and blogging 
   Wordpress exposed me to the world of blogging and I find sharing of thoughts on a blog very satisfying and fun. Now I’m not restricted to wordpress as now I have 5 regular blogs - one of them on Tumblr (http://www.palimadra.tunblr.com), two of them on blogger, then my personal journal at http://www.afterthe.net/journal and the last one on my business’s official site. While blogging one learns a lot about the nuances of web designing and how the Internet works while keeping in touch with your points of Interest. Once you have the blog up and running one has understand how to market it and that exposes you to the real time challenges of Internet marketing.
5. Lifehacker and Personal Productivity
   Lifehacker (http://www.lifehacker.com and http://lifehack.org) has enabled me to see personal productivity from a different perspective. It is satisfying to know that other people in the world have similar problems as you and some of them are able to tackle it. Lifehacker has helped me understand myself better and also has assisted in developing different perspectives to everything in life and I’m sure would continue to do so for the rest of my life.
6. Box
   Online backup of documents had a new meaning for me. Thanks to the team at Box.net for giving me  a free account on their site where I could store my documents online. With the improved integration with Microsoft Office storing documents has become easier and the obvious thing to do.
7. Youtube
   I know a lot of people would frown on inclusion of YouTube to my list of favorites. I feel the vertical has not developed fully and it is still evolving. However, I’m sure in the years to come this would take the shape of TV on demand. Everyone, I feel, would agree changed the way video was used in one’s life and has made video format more shareable.
8. Google Analytics
   Though I’m still learning the tricks of the trade Google Analytics has added a whole new dimension  to  the areas of SEO, SEM and Internet marketing and exciting as one can measure the results from the intuitive interface of Google Analytics.

Once I had prepared a list of my best web applications I looked up to see what others were saying. There were analysis done by some of the industry observers and authorities in certain verticals. As I had expected they were very different from those on my list. Some of the links I studied were

1. http://lifehacker.com/software/lifehacker-top-10/top-10-new-and-improved-apps-of-2007-332617.php
2. http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/11-top-new-web-apps-of-2007.html
3. http://www.investintech.com/resources/blog/archives/78-Popular-Desktop-Apps-And-Their-Online-Alternatives.html : A must read for those who have not viewed the post. Some great alternatives to offline applications.
4. http://socialmediatrader.com/115-social-news-and-bookmark-sites-rated-by-page-rank-inbound-links-and-value/

Please share your list and help people to discover services or web applications you use as this would be a good reward to those who have developed them.