5 Steps to Monetise Your Blog: For Newbies

Blogging or webloging is a way to express your thoughts in public. You want others to know about your ideas. Blogging has many advantages, it can establish you as a thought leader, can get you a job, conference invitations & can even make money for you. There are some people who start blogging only to make money which is absolutely right while others have no such intention, it is only there for their intellectual development. Making money through blogging is an art and even i am trying to learn this art. Yes, this art can be learned by reading the posts of fellow bloggers who have created great content on this topic.

Best Practices for Newbies

#1. Blog Design

Don't create very shiny & cluttered blog. Simplicity is best. Even if you have a clean white background & few colorful icons & widgets it looks better than fully filled magazine style blog.

#2. Frequency of Posts

Spend at least initial four months creating some interesting and relevant content related to your niche. Ideally you should have at least 16 posts in the first 4 months i.e. 1 post every week. Then you can increase your blogging frequency by publishing 2 posts every week.

#3. Building Relationship

It is important for a newbie to build relationship with the fellow bloggers. You can create a blogroll of interesting bloggers in your niche and display the blogroll widget on your blog home page. Also, link to their relevant posts in your blog posts in the right context. Don't forget to read and leave relevant comments on their posts. This way they will notice you & even link back to your posts bringing in more traffic to your blog.

#4. Ads Management

I would recommend starting with google adsense as it is time tested & easy to begin with. Also, google doesn't allow more than 3 ads per page and 3 ads per post as per their current policies. It's a good idea to start with ads with size of 468x60 as they are not intrusive and they should be placed at the bottom of the post. This prevents your blog to look cluttered & gives importance to the content too.


#5. Tracking Performance

A newbie should make it a regular practice to track the performance of his ads on the daily basis. It gives a fair amount of idea which posts are working, what kind of content draws more traffic and thus vital clicks. You can go on improving your blog based upon on your learning.

What do you think of these steps? Do you have more ideas? Please share in the comment box below.

Analysis of Volkswagen India's Social Media Practice: Case Study

India is a very important market for various automobile manufacturers whether Indian or foreign. According to a study by Booz & Company, the Indian Automobile industry will overtake the European market and is slated to become the world’s fourth largest by 2015 and will be selling almost 6 million units annually by 2020. This speaks of the interest shown by International brands in the Indian market as they are struggling in mature markets to sell their automobiles. Here, i am going to take up the case of Volkswagen India regarding their social media practice, what they are doing right or wrong.

Right now, Volkswagen India mainly has a presence across four social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Youtube & LinkedIn. Apart from that they have dedicated sites for their 'Innovations for Everyone' and 'Think Blue campaign' campaigns. The important aspect of Volkswagen India's strategy is a long term approach to build loyal community and the use of all the marketing channels: TV, Radio, Print, Outdoor & Online to leverage their promotional campaigns. There are two other brands of Volkswagen in India: Audi & Skoda, but i'll stick to the analysis of their social media practice.

Facebook

Volkswagen has grown its facebook fan page organically to a community nearing the count of 25,000. As far as wall communication is concerned, they are engaging with their fans in a responsible manner by replying to their queries, appreciating the feedback, running the contests etc.

Surprisingly they are missing the welcome tab as in the case of Volkswagen International! They have a twitter stream as a landing tab which looks very cluttered although they may be trying to portray a human image with this to show how do they interact with their followers on twitter. But they should get a well designed welcome tab with a introductory video & some crucial information for a homely feel to a new fan.

Another weakness i found was on their feedback tab where most of the feedback by customers is negative & astonishingly there is no participation by the brand to handle this negative criticism! Also some people are spamming their feedback tab with the repetition of the same problem and there is no moderation of such feedback. Either don't keep such a tab or if you have to keep then solve the problems of your customers.

Twitter

Volkswagen's twitter presence is not that great as compared to its facebook page but still they are doing commendable job over there by being highly interactive with their followers and retweeting the positive tweets. They also try to solve the problems faced by their followers related to the vehicles owned by them, which is a good practice.

Another good practice i noticed is that they have identified the owners of Volkswagen vehicles on twitter & have added them to the respective lists of different vehicles. They use these lists to keep a track of their customers & occasionally inform them about any new initiatives or offers.

But what i found missing on their twitter profile is that they don't favorite any positive tweets. In fact they haven't favorited even a single tweet! They should immediately start doing this because it serves as a real time repository of real testimonials made by people on twitter in public. The stream of such favorited tweets can then be integrated on their site.

Youtube

As far as Youtube efforts of Volkswagen India are concerned, i would rate it 50-50 because as far as the distribution of videos among influential bloggers and other news media channels is concerned they have done it well and these videos have admirable number of views but they lack as far as leveraging their dedicated Youtube channel is concerned.

They should take a cue from Youtube channel of Volkswagen International who have total views of more than 57 million till date!. They should cross promote the videos of their dedicated channel on other online platforms and should provide some incentives for people to subscribe to their channel.

LinkedIn

I was highly impressed upon seeing the way Volkswagen India has utilised LinkedIn company page. Since company pages is a new feature from the stable of LinkedIn, very few companies have actually have taken advantage of it & Volkswagen is one of those. They have listed 7 of their vehicles on LinkedIn so far & have got staggering 2772 recommendations till the time of writing this post!

This is a powerful area where it can get a lot of benefit due to such a large number of recommendations. You never know when some executive on LinkedIn sees a recommendation by a person who happens to be his LinkedIn connection & he makes the decision to buy that car! Or there can be bulk orders too.

Special Campaigns

Volkswagen also started two campaigns at different times in India. 'Innovations for Everyone' was launched in 2010 while another campaign 'Think Blue' was launched recently in 2011. Both these campaigns were launched with much fanfare as an integrated marketing campaign across all the online & offline channels which created a lot of buzz for them.

People submit their ideas on the dedicated sites of these campaigns & they get voted for their innovation by other participants and the person with highest number of votes is declared the winner. Some of these ideas are passed on to the product team to study their feasibility of being introduced among the upcoming vehicles.

This shows the crowd-sourcing capability of Volkswagen India. I would rate these campaigns as highly successful and there is lot to learn from their success for marketers. Here's the highest viewed video on their dedicated channel so far regarding the innovation for everyone campaign.

What do you think of Volkswagen's social media practice? Share your ideas in the comment box below.

Social Media is Not FREE!

Usually many social media agencies have trouble convincing their clients on a very basic point that social media is not free. Yes, it is true. Social media is not free and i'll explain why. Clients usually have an opinion that social media is a totally free domain which doesn't require much marketing budget. Hire few interns & the matter is resolved, or hire some mom & pop agency and pay them some fix amount every month to manage your accounts. But this is a totally wrong approach.

Tremendous amount of information is being generated online by millions of users worldwide. A large brand can have millions of mentions around the world while a smaller brand can have few thousands. In that scenario, larger brands have no escape from using some high end analytics tools to listen about their brand & thus act upon the information in a timely fashion. While smaller brands can use some free tools to listen like Google Alerts or Twitter Search but investment is still required in terms of skilled social media marketers, salaries and time. Apart from that advertisements on social networks like Facebook & LinkedIn is a big plus looking at the way specific targeting can be done which is not possible in other mediums.

Social media networks are free to join because they will not expand without being freely available. And they earn money using customer or brand driven advertisements. Now, all kinds of brands can start their official accounts on these different social networks free of cost but as mentioned before, to manage those online properties one requires skilled manpower (who need industry standard salaries/perks) and an ongoing investment of time. For instance, Ching's Secret has a team of over 30 people managing their twitter & facebook accounts and at the same time they have integrated social media with ORM & CRM with nearly 65% of the marketing budget allocated for social media marketing.

So, in a nutshell, social media cost involves:
a) Cost of social media analytics tools like Radian6 or upgrading to premium version of free tools.
b) Cost of social media marketers.
c) Investment of time.
d) Cost of advertisements on social platforms like facebook, twitter etc.

What's your opinion about cost of social media? Share in the comment box below.

Social Media ROI: The Right Approach & Ways to Track It

In any kind of business, ROI (Return On Investment) is a must. And it is a common sense that whatever you invest in your business, you must get better return for it. And social media is no different. Social media marketers have found it tough to measure the ROI in the traditional sense (X-Y/Y, where X is gross profit & Y is marketing investment) but it is actually possible to measure the ROI of social media campaigns. But one additional aspect to ROI of social media apart from the financial aspect is that there is tremendous number of customer insights, brand building & other non-financial but very important aspects which are gained through social media.

The Right Approach

Brands should not approach social media just from the financial ROI perspective, it is absolutely correct to expect increase in sales from social media campaigns but this is only a one side of the coin. The other side of the coin i.e. non-financial aspect is also very crucial. So, they should include both these aspects in their social media ROI framework. This is the right way to look into social media returns.

What to Track in Financial ROI:

#1. Increase in sales

One of the best ways to track the sales is to use the combination of URL shortener and some form of a “cookie” to attach a campaign to a lead. Hootsuite can be used to integrate Google Analytics into their URL shortener for a seamless transition & tracking of sales. Also customised proprietary URL shorteners can be used which is helpful for branding purpose. The most reliable way to do this is to place a “cookie” on the user’s machine with the campaign name for the social media channel that generated the click. Dell has done this in a beautiful way and have generated sales worth millions of dollars on twitter. Another worthy mention here is Blendtec whose sales quintupled due to their highly successful “Will It Blend” Youtube videos.

#2. Reduction in cost

Brands can start with creating a report of their existing expenses for customer relationship management (CRM), recruitment of potential candidates, marketing/advertising/PR, market research & product design. Earned media is another aspect which can be worth millions of dollars of free promotion for a brand. Now compare this with the report you prepare after integrating social media into your marketing mix. You will be surprised to see the reduction in cost in all these aspects. Social media is not free but certainly it reduces the cost to a large extent. Asian Pacific Breweries did a great job on social media while launching their Guinness brand in Singapore which resulted in 21% surge in their sales and USD$ 220,000 worth of earned media!

#3. Increase in Loyalty of Customer

Loyalty is all about emotional connect of customers with the brand. And emotional connect can be built very easily on social media as compared to other mediums. The direct impact of Loyalty is on the customer's lifetime value. Deeper the loyalty, longer will be the lifetime value of the customer and hence the increase in sales. Loyalty can be created by building a community around your brand. Castrol India has created a community called 'Castrol Cricket' to engage their customers around cricket & castrol experience. Similarly Sunsilk has done a very good job of creating a 'Sunsilk Gang of Girls' community for young girls who happen to be their largest chunk of customers. The calculation of customer lifetime value can be done in the traditional way

What to Track in Non-financial ROI:

#1. Word of mouth for your Brand

It has been proved in various surveys & research reports that people don't trust the direct advertisements from brands as much as they trust in advocacy by their friends or testimonials by consumers available online. So tracking the WOM becomes very important as effort should be made to nullify the negative & amplify the positive WOM. This can be done by listening on paid tools like Radian6 and Alterian SM2 or by using free tools like Google Alerts to notify you of new mentions online, and searching on Twitter for key terms to see who's tweeting about you. Also features like 'Tell a Friend' should be introduced on your site that tracks who's referring your product to others. Social networking buttons like Facebook Like/Share, Retweet, Google +1 & LinkedIn etc should also be integrated on your websites & blogs which makes it easier for your users to share and also gives a fair amount of idea what is being shared about you online & how much.

#2. Sentiment of your brand

Sentiment analysis of a brand should be done on the regular basis to know whether the brand mentions are positive, negative or neutral. This provides insights to brands regarding any shortcomings for which they are being bashed upon on social media, which they need to overcome. This can be done using free tools like Social Mention and Twitter Sentiment or paid tools like Alterian SM2 & Radian6. Here's a very good piece on sentiment analysis. If the positive sentiment increases over time, consider it as a positive return on investment.

#3. Customer Insights

Social media provides a very good opportunity to do market research directly where the customers are. By running a survey or asking relevant questions on social platforms, brands can get really valuable insights about their customer demography, interests, wants, lifestyle etc. Even crowdsourcing can be used to create/change your brand logos or asking your customers what new products/services they would like to avail etc. This also brings in a sense of ownership among the customers. On Fastrack's Facebook page users comment on the merchandise and the company tweaks it accordingly. This saves it the money, engages the users as well as provides interesting insights in a quick time. Using Facebook insights, running poll on Facebook questions, asking your customers on Twitter or Facebook pages etc are some ways to start garnering customer insights.

As per experts like David Armano ROI is separate from Metrics! And i certainly agree with him. He shared a real life example of raising money online for some cause and according to him, Metrics included his number of twitter followers and the amount of re-tweets as well as blog views & ROI was the dollar amount raised via paypal divided by his time spent in activity.

What would you add to the list? Let me know in the comment box below.

10 Ways to Crack Facebook Edge Rank

Facebook edge rank has catched the fascination of social media marketer since past few months. Lot of discussions have happened & numerous blog posts written on how to optimize your facebook page wall posts to ensure it reaches to as wider audience as possible. For those who are not aware, your posts on facebook fan page are not displayed to all of your fans even if all of them are live on facebook at the moment of posting the content. How many of your total fans will actually see your post in their 'Top News' tab is determined by an algorithm known as facebook edge rank which mainly consists of 3 components: Affinity (Does the user interact with you often?), Weight (How interactive are the engagements with the post?) & Time decay (How long ago was the post done?).

Image Credit: Likeable.com

Here i will discuss 10 ways using which one can crack facebook edge rank:

AFFINITY

#1. Ongoing Engagement

There are many facebook page managers who wonder why the engagement on their pages is so less. Why only a small percentage of total fans is actually liking or replying to the posts. In some cases it is even less than 0.001%! The reason is many companies run initial contests or offers to seduce the users to like their facebook page but eventually stop engaging them expecting that they will keep on liking & commenting on their posts. The reality is majority of those fans become fan only to enter the contest or get some freebies but if you can keep them engaged with timely contests & interesting posts they will be hooked with your brand.

#2. User Generated Content

One very good way to keep the affinity level high of your fans high is to allow & encourage them to upload their pictures. Also encourage them to tag those pictures with their facebook friends and get them liked & commented upon by them. Occasional contests can be launched around this aspect where the fans who get maximum likes or comments on their uploaded pictures are declared the winners.



WEIGHT

#3. Post Interesting & Relevant Content

It is important to generate original content related to your domain which can be in the form of blogs. Content from your blogs can be posted about twice a week as more than that your fans can get overwhelmed & may unlike your page. Also plan your content in advance. It can be a mix of Poll, Quiz, Humor, Debate, Case Study and News/Interesting Article etc each on different days. Better the content, higher will be the participation & thus it will enhance the edge rank.

#4. Ask Thought Provoking Questions

It is very important to ask thought provoking questions to your page audience as this is one aspect which brings in participation from the audience mainly in the form of 'comments' & of course 'likes' (Comments have the higher weight than likes) which goes on increasing the edge rank. At the same time, it is important to avoid questions asking for simple Yes/No answers which may increase edge rank for the time being but put off your audience in the long run.

#5. Use Rich Media

Every action by the fans on your facebook page has its own weight. For instance Comment has higher weightage than a like as mentioned in the above point. Similarly, pictures have higher weight than videos or links. That is why it is important to use rich media like interesting & relevant images, videos & links in your posts. This increases the edge rank of your posts.



TIME DECAY

#6. Timing It Right

Usually most of the brands post content during the office hours i.e. 9-5. But the truth is maximum number of fans log on or check their facebook accounts when they are away from office or are at home, which are off hours. So, plan & schedule your content for posting during outside work hours. It has been found in a recent research that brands which post content outside of normal business hours have 20% higher engagement rates on their posts! And naturally higher engagement will push up the edge rank of your posts.

#7. Keep The Discussions Alive

In most of the cases once the post has been done on their fan pages, brands don't care with the what their fans are responding. All they care about is the number of likes & comments, which is a wrong approach. Although number of likes & comments are important but it is not the primary agenda. It is the outcome of the right approach, which is engagement & benefiting your fans. Ching's Secret is a very good example of how to pursue the fans' discussion and to participate & engage with them in a constructive way to the very end till the discussion dies on its own. More the life of some post, higher will be its edge rank.

#8. Cover Current Events

One of the ways to increase the edge rank in terms of time decay is to post around some interesting current affairs. Amul does it very well in India but they primarily do it on offline media. Still there is a community driven Amul facebook fan page which updates the community about the latest creatives of Amul. MTV India is also known to create interesting posts on their facebook page around current affairs.

METRICS

#9. Use Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights provide interesting data related to your users and the content which you post. This gives you a tremendous amount of opportunity to know about your user demographics as well as which content is working, when it is working and so on. There is no limit to the improvements which can brought upon by acting upon the facebook insights of your page.

#10. Use Edgerank Checker

Brands can also use absolutely free tool Edgerank Checker which gives a fair amount of Idea as in what is your page's edge rank in a certain period. It also suggests which are the days when you have the best or the worst edge rank and on which days you get the maximum or least new fans on your page. It also grades pages based upon edge rank as follows:
0-6 is below average.
7-13 is average.
14-19 is above average.
Scores above 20 are excellent.

So, what do you think of these 10 ways? Can you suggest any more ways to leverage facebook edge rank?

Why HDFC is No.1 Among Indian Banks for Social Media Practice

Indian banking industry is booming & is on expansion spree. Indian banks contributed 1.7 per cent to the total global brand value at US$ 14.74 billion and grew by 19 per cent in 2011 as per the annual international ranking conducted by UK-based Brand Finance Plc. According to a recent study done by Buzzom.com, Indian banks whether government or private have started using social media to stay in touch with their customers but HDFC stands out as far as leveraging social media is concerned both in terms of number of channels being used as well as engaging with their customers.

As per the graph above HDFC Bank has presence across 8 social media channels out of which the prominent presence is on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Youtube & their official blog. Important aspect is the engagement which they do on all these channels.

Facebook

HDFC's page on facebook generates admirable feedback from users which serves as a ground for them to understand their fans as well as promote their banking products. They have a money matters section where they provide interesting recent financial news of interest to their fans. Also they keep on engaging the users with interesting puzzles/jigsaws based upon financial terms.

Twitter

HDFC's twitter approach is build upon again like their facebook approach on sharing interesting & relevant information with their followers, asking them interesting puzzles, sharing new products & deals from their stable and so on. No wonder that they have a healthy follower count of 1300+ which is growing on the daily basis.

Youtube

HDFC lacks on its Youtube marketing aspect and needs to learn from other banks like ICICI which is the second most active bank on social media in India. Although HDFC has created some great commercials for their television audience which have found their way on Youtube also and these commercials have large viewership on Youtube too but they need to leverage Youtube by posting such videos regularly on their channel & promoting it further. Here is one such video with almost half a million views so far:

LinkedIn

HDFC Bank's company page on LinkedIn has more than 13,000 followers. They haven't leveraged this platform to its full potential yet like they can display their products on their page on which they can get recommendation from the users which will serve as a live testimonial but still having a presence on LinkedIn is being helpful to them as the company stats & employees list can be browsed through to get interesting information about them.

Here's a very good graph showing the comparison of different Indian banks on social media which clearly out states the leadership of HDFC bank in this domain:

What do you think of HDFC's approach on social media?

The Google +1 Button and What It Means to Social Engagement

Recently Google launched its much awaited feature called +1 (Plus One) Button which is intended to integrate social with search. Google has been struggling a lot in the social space since a long time whether it be Orkut, Wave or Buzz. But it seems to be that Google has now arrived in the social space with this new arm in their kitty. Here's the official introductory video of +1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAyUNI3_V2c&feature=player_embedded

At its core +1 is meant to counter facebook like button which has engulfed the web like a wildfire. Now the beauty of +1 is say one person +1s ('Plus Ones': my verb for pressing +1 button) a certain blog post or content on some website, other persons who are connected to him/her on gmail will see that content among the top organic google search results on front page while searching for a related keyword. One necessity for +1ing is to be logged into your gmail account & your friends will see the relevant results when there are also logged into their respective gmail accounts.

So, in a nutshell, +1 is a feature which is not intrusive like buzz and at the same time it is highly beneficial by providing relevant searches to information seekers all around the world. Google is a Big Daddy of search business & now by introducing this social feature into search it has made it more enjoyable & worthy.

What do you think of +1 button? How can it change the search business?