Media Search Group

All web browsers come almost always come equipped with bookmarks that allow you to save links that you would like to later revisit. At one point of time people did actually bookmark sites and pages that they found interesting and wanted to keep for future reference. Those were the days when search engines were not really prevalent and people had to trawl through tonnes of data to get the desired information. Bookmarks allowed them to store the link for easy reference as and when required. But it did just that, it allowed users to bookmark the links they wanted to revisit at a later date. The emergence of search engines corresponded with the decline in bookmark usage as all information became readily available at the click of a button. Moreover data stored today might become obsolete tomorrow and hence bookmarking became obsolete so to say. Not really, it appears as per Google, which has been testing a new feature called Star that aims to make bookmarking a comprehensive feature allowing users to organize all their data, both on the net and on their devices into searchable folders. Google is testing Stars; an idea to save bookmarks from becoming extinct. It is supposed to have features much more advanced than bookmarks. You can create folders of your bookmarks, which will then be shown in a network of thumbnails. "More beautiful than bookmarks," the source code says, with Google Stars you will be allowed to add notes to your bookmarks. This feature might prove useful as we tend to forget why we actually bookmarked it. All your bookmarks will be searchable. And spammed pages will automatically be detected and removed. Your bookmarks will by default be private but it will be possible to make a folder labeled public to share them. You could ‘star’ webpages and emails. As also Youtube videos or even personal contacts. Google Stars was recently leaked by German student and Google+ expert Florian Kiersch. According to Kiersch, “Google Star is a

beautiful mix of the best of Pinterest, Dropbox, and Del.icio.us, displayed in an image-rich grid.”Google has already provided the ability to add stars to existing services like GoogleMap, Google Drive and Gmail, the same will now get extended to videos, websites and images as well with the result that all data will now be organized and easily available under one Google Star umbrella. Kiersch firmly believes that the Star feature is likely to be launched by Google at the I/O developer conference in June.

Google Stars Branding

Google Stars was originally called Google Collections, Kiersch writes. "Thank you for dogfooding Google Stars!" reads one output in the code, suggesting that Google employees are testing the feature now. "We are working hard to make Google Stars a product you love."

Marketers would not stop at anything to have their presence felt. They always strive hard to achieve the right marketing mix to communicate with their customers. But, most advertisements tend to shout at customers and intrude their privacy. E-mail marketing is a non-intrusive way of communicating with your customers and captures their attention. Many people believe that the golden period for e-mail marketing is over and it has lost its effectiveness. But, a staggering 144 billion e-mails are sent across every day that speaks volumes about the popularity of this channel. The trick lies in doing it correctly.

Finding the right method

The success of e-mail marketing is determined in various ways. The most reliable one is the CTR (Click through Rate) that measures the number of people who clicked on a particular link. A high CTR improves the prospects of conversion and translates into more business for your company. But, companies get carried away in the pursuit for higher CTR and often resort to steps like including swanky images or glorifying their products. But, they miss one of the simplest and most essential features of e-mail marketing; a good subject line.

Back to the basics

An e-mail without a good subject line is like a desolate child searching for his destination. Subject lends a personality to your e-mail and captures the attention of your readers. It gives them an idea about the content of your e-mail. An impressive subject line creates a first impression and encourages your customers to click on the mail. There is no dearth of ways in which you can make your subject line more potent. Let us look at a few things to do and not to do in a subject line.

The art and science of a good subject line

Make your subject line responsive to your reader needs: An e-mail that addresses the problems of your readers and offers them solutions is more likely to get a click. Demographics and buying habits of your clients will help you in customizing your e-mails and offering solutions to them. An interesting way to do it is by including special symbols that add to your message. For instance, having a Yacht symbol for e-mails pertaining to yacht holidays.

  Keep it short and simple: Don’t be superfluous with word while writing subject lines for youre-mail. It is advisable to keep the length of your subject line within 50 words to make it easier for the clients to read them. Verbosity in subject lines often fails to produce the desired results. For instance, a good subject line for a low-fat diet supplement would be “A delicious and healthy way to reach your ideal weight”

  Personalization may not be a good idea: Adding the name of your recipient in the subject of your e-mail may seem to be the right thing to do, but it might work against you. As recent research has shown that personalized mails trigger spam filter and may not reach your clients at all. If you still want to use names, make sure you do it creatively. An innovative way of personalizing your e-mails is by including customer preferences. For instance, an online book retailer can send this mail “Dear John, your wish list item ‘The Seven Habits of highly effective people’ is now available.”

  Don’t make your subject line look like a sales pitch:  An overt sales language can put-off your clients and fail to even achieve a click for your e-mails. The purpose of e-mail marketing is to kindle the interest of your readers and not to close a deal immediately. An understanding of this basic fact will help you to construct better subject lines. Refrain from writing mails like “The Abs crunch machine will help you to lose 30 pounds in a month!”

After facing so many Google updates, SEO is now limited to Social Media, Content Marketing and technical fitness of websites.  First I’ll discuss about the technical SEO. If your website have the simple navigation, using the simple queries to reduce the load time, best possible uses of CSS and have the meta tags for human you are almost done with the on page. Once you finished with the on page improvements you could now able to create your promotional strategies. Before Google penguin updates People consider building backlinks through directories or article submission or through blog commenting and they were getting the ranking. But these tactics doesn’t work for now. If you don’t want to be panelized in search engines you should be careful about the promotions you are doing.  What I recommend is to forget about the search engines and care your visitors.  You need to interact with your visitors through social media in return you will get the favor of your visitors as social signals. Search Engines would consider social signals as the relevancy so it might helps you achieving the good ranking. How to Do Content Marketing in 2014-

I believe that just writing any piece of content and sharing it, is not the content marketing. Content marketing is all about caring your customers’ emotions and addressing about their problems via content (or blog). But to do that we need to analyze our customer better, we need to peer into the mind of the customer to know what they are struggling with? What they want to know? What their queries are? Remember no one is going to read all the stuffs you are writing, people select some specific information they wanted to know. And it’s never an easy task to predict the customer. Here I’m mentioning some points which you could consider in your analysis. 1 – Use Google trends to know what the trending topic is. I always recommend being with the trends. 2 – Conduct the emotion analysis. It will tell about the topics which is getting the best attention on social media. You could use EaseSocial tool for that. 3 - Analyze your market issues to know what your customers might be facing? 4- Consider the controversial issues. If you can give a contrary hook to any issue you should go for that but you must be clear with your approach. Once you analyzed the market as well as some other basic factors, you are now able to create a good quality content. Always remember there are many type of engagement your content may have but you must make it vertical to extract the maximum benefit of your content. 3 Simple Steps to Drive Traffic from Social Media: Social Media is the best way to drive traffic and acquire new customers. It is necessary to connect with the customers on social media in 2014. If you want to leverage the full potential of your blog post which you have just written after the analysis, you should focus on these points- 1 – Join some relevant communities on Google+ and address the community with your findings. Some communities have millions of members so if your post is useful and informative you can not only get traffic to your website but also you could find the new customers. 2 – If you have taken any idea regarding your content from any well known influencer, tell the on twitter by @username. I have seen many time when they like your blog post they share it among their followers. You could get some extra traffic. 3 - You can ask suggestion from the influencers in LinkedIn groups. You just need to post your article in the discussing and could ask if they have any suggestions?

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Blogging is for serious writers. Contrary to the popular belief, blogging is not just about scribbling a few notes on your laptop. It is serious work that demands advanced writing skills and a detailed knowledge of the Internet domain. Good writing skills may not be enough for a successful career in blogging as you have to tailor your skills to match the demands of an online reader. Let us look at a few tips that will help you to become a good blogger and garners more readers for your blogs.

1)      Quality rules

Is quality really important in blogging? After all you are not writing research papers. Well, search engines like Google attach a lot of importance to quality and give higher rankings to well researched articles. Google even comes with regular updates to reinforce its focus on quality.

 2)      Acknowledge Google updates

Google comes up with regular updates like ‘Hummingbird’ and ‘Panda’ that lay down quality parameters for content. A careful analysis of these updates will enable you to modify your content as per the quality parameters of Google.

 3)      Set up Google Authorship

Google Authorship allows you to personalize your blogs. Your articles will appear with your name and photographs in search results. It will also help you to increase the number of readers for your blogs.

 4)      Contribute to Guest Blogs

Guest blogs offer you a great chance to reach out to a wider audience base. You can contribute on a few sites that are related to your field of interest and write guest blogs for them. These sites will also provide you with back links for your blogs.

 5)      Lend a personality to your blogs

Make your blogs unique by adding a distinct personality to them. Let your blogs reflect your distinct voice. Your blogs should be a unique representation of your own ideas to help you connect with the audience.

 6)      Communicate with your audience

Try to establish a dialogue with your clients with the help of your blogs. Address their problems and offer a solution through your writing.

 7)      Motivate your readers to contribute

Make your readers contribute to your blogs by asking them to post comments on your blogs. Have a strong call-to-action in place to engage your readers.

 8)      Maintain consistency in your blogs

Maintain a uniform tone in your blogs without deviating too far from your topic. Have a strategy in place before you start writing and zero down on the topics you want to write on.

 9)      Have an e-mail list in place

Reach out to your readers with an exhaustive e-mail list of your readers. Make sure to e-mail your blogs to your readers on a regular basis.

 10)   Be patient

Patience is very important for long term success in blogging. Invest time in your blogs and don’t worry if the results are slow. Quality cannot be kept under the wraps for long and soon you will find your worth

1- Set Goals 2- Get Focused 3- Set a Schedule 4- Planning Your Social Media Content 5- Promoting Your Brand on Social Media 6- Engagement 7- Analyze your Social Media Audience 8- Help Your Audience through Social Media.

The most effective method for brand discovery remains articles published in mainstream media outlets, according to a recent report by GlobalWebIndex.

However, consumers are increasingly engaging with this content in digital form, rather than finding it in print.

Asked how they discover new brands, products, or services, 47% of 16-24 year-olds and 45% of 55-65 year-olds cited articles posted on the websites of newspapers and magazines. That's nearly double the number (20% and 27%, respectively) who discover brands via articles published in the print versions of newspapers and magazines.

After newspaper and magazine articles published on the Web, the next most common method for discovering new brands is recommendations from real-life friends. Consumer comments on message boards is third, and results from search engines is fourth. Advertisements and celebrity endorsements land in the middle of the pack, as do recommendations from digital friends and blogger reviews. The least common method for finding new brands is via deals on group buying websites, such as Groupon.

Do you understand the new Google algorithm updates? Google has noticed the increase in bribed bloggers posting paid content.

Every year brings a whirl of updates from #Google - most focused around #linkbuilding. The process is renamed, re-strategized, and seemingly more laser target focused.  Links becoming entities  Businesses will have to focus on developing #content that will reach consumers by understanding their intent and using linked open data optimized for search engine bots to read. In addition to entity search optimization, businesses will have to look for opportunities to engage with users through social media and provide blogs that are written by expert or recognized authors as tools like Google #Authorship become another measure of how authoritative your content is. Ultimately, businesses will have to find a deeper meaning to their advertising campaigns and avoid the #SEO tactics of old that focused solely on link building strategies.  #Hummingbird and Semantic Search

Easily check Google Calendar and add new events from websites you visit.

Three ways we have been growing our Google+ profile using striking images. #Google+ is a visually engaging platform, and using images that are beautiful, humorous, or otherwise eye-catching can help your posts stand out from the crowd and get noticed. We are trying to use that concept to grow our profile in three ways: 1. People like inspiring, helpful, or humorous quotes. The number of communities that highlight such quotes is testament to this. By joining such communities we have been able to share such quotes, using images of the author of the quote, or by putting the quotes on an attractive background to make them more appealing. 2. Beautiful photos of people, nature, and travels always attract attention. By joining groups centered around such imagery we have been able to share photos from our travels (we have travelled extensively in India) and the photos have helped us share our experiences. 3. It is an over-used saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it is true none-the-less. By using an engaging image in connection with whatever we post on our profile, whether it is a link, a comment, or anything else, we have helped make the posts more engaging. With all of these methods, the more your posts are seen through the judicious use of attractive imagery, the more likely it is that your profile will be noticed, that you will attract followers, and that your Google+ profile (and hopefully your website) will grow and prosper. All this is preaching to the choir. I would greatly appreciate comments and suggestions to help further grow our profile.